Fringe/Powerhouse

Why are they called Sinking Ship Productions? Their latest show, Powerhouse, is absolutely buoyant--in fact, it's a downright elastic twist on the biographical drama. It's what Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention would have been if set to music: thrilling. Rather than give us an exacting recreation of "the brilliant but forgotten composer Raymond Scott," they recompose his life in the same way that his catalog of music was used when sold to Warner Brothers. The play opens with Scott (the excellent straight-man, Erik Lochtefeld) addressing the audience, explaining his interests, but what we're drawn to is the cast, which is briskly assembling a many-drawered set behind him--in time to one of Scott's songs. It's the first of many overlaps or exaggerated scenes that spring Powerhouse forward, all larger-than-life.

There are a lot of congratulations in order, here. Josh Luxenberg and Joshua Morris have written a wonderfully creative play, which neatly bounces from narration to scenes, often doing both at the same time, so as to remind us how much Scott remained in his own world. A perfect example--and one that also illustrates Jon Levin's distinctive direction--is Scott's first wedding, in which he is suddenly whisked up in his chair, spun around on a desk, and still trying to conduct (and conduct interviews) as his wife looks for him. Given the span of the show, it's necessary to compress events into montages like this; it's impressive that these montages are so expressive.

Another of the nice balances in the show is between the slowed-down quieter moments--for instance, when Scott teaches Dorothy (Hanley Smith), his future second wife, to sing--and the quick and noisy ones, in which members of the ensemble each grab a limb of their cartoon puppets and cohere to perform slapstick shorts. (Eric Wright does a terrific job as the voice of both the egotistical blue-footed booby and the suave otter he's in competition with.) In truth, everything comes together: Carolyn Mraz has festooned the desks with drawers for every occasion, from the magical televisions within (each with their own mini-puppet shows) to a cache of clothing buried within Scott's time-consuming invention, the Electronium, which is used to great effect when Scott's second wife walks out on him.

This isn't just an ambitious show for the Fringe festival: it's the creative standard to which companies should be pushing themselves. There's no need for a scale of 1 to 5 on this review: Powerhouse is back for the Fringe Encores series, and it should go on to an extended run.

metaDRAMA: Congratulations

I don't normally post press releases, but I'm a huge fan of good news, so allow me to paraphrase a few of them.

The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, which I called "honestly terrific" is moving from it's extended off-off-Broadway run at PS122 to the off-Broadway theater down the street, you know, the one that used to be the Pearl, and is now just "Theater 80 St. Marks." (Which is an appropriate venue for their subject matter, given that a large chunk of it is about preserving the essential but perhaps not maximally profitable pieces of a neighborhood.) They'll be there from September 10th to October 5th, and while the tickets are now $40, the show is roughly three solid hours long, so it's still worth it.

The Fringe Encores were announced, and three of the six shows I recommended pre-Fringe made it. To Viral, Powerhouse, and His Greatness, congratulations--I'll have reviews up as I get over this stomach bug and can think straight. As for my other picks, they all won Overall Excellence Awards: Remission and The Event for best solo show, and Ether Steeds, for best ensemble. (Powerhouse also got best ensemble, and Viral picked one up for best play.)

And last, but certainly not least, the New York Innovative Theater awards, which I was delighted to participate in this year, just released the list of honorary recipients. Congratulations to Maria Irene Fornes, for the Artistic Achievement Award; to Materials for the Arts for the Stewardship Award; and to the Brick Theater for the Caffe Cino Fellowship. Click here to get your tickets, and click here to see their 2009 nominees, a list which turned me on to quite a few companies I didn't know before--a list that includes, to come full circle, the Amoralists (Amerissiah)--currently doing The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side.

PLAY: "OEDIrx"

OEDIrx is a rock concert, an online version of American Idol (performed live), and a trippy multimedia show all rolled into one. It's also a more-or-less faithful adaptation of Oedipus Rex, only instead of a pestilence ruling the land, it's the government's team of dedicated hackers, erasing members of the clandestine and rebellious group, The Best, and instead of a wise and prediction-fearing king, there is their Organically Enhanced Digital Inference, OEDI ("Eddy"). Eamonn Farrell is an insane man to think up such an eccentric adaptation, one that fuses punk rock with burlesque dancing (not too far a stretch) and stilt-walking emcees with online nerds. The show is enthusiastic and energetic with all that crazy power, and the combination of digitally enhanced projections of the show along with the real dancing, singing, and acting is proof that insanity is such a relative word.

Farrell also steps on board for the direction, and this is where OEDIrx gets hard to judge. Andrea Davey has carefully choreographed the production, but the hectic combination of film and movement, and the use of superimposed characters over live feeds (the way in which characters speak with OEDI, say) seems more random than planned. However, this chaos is in tune with the dystopia of the near-future the production takes place in, and there's something to be said for allowing a show's unique momentum to make the visuals anew each night. The only problem I have is that the timelapsed footage runs out of synch with the audio, and for the big rock numbers (each of the four characters has one, plus a group number and a surprise solo), it's occasionally hard to make out the vocals over the slamming sound. But just as the plot rises from the chaos of the insiderish first fifteen minutes, the emotional themes and performances bolster the coherence to the text.

The plot revolves around the secret society of The Best, an online network whose mission, summed up in five words or less, is to "make music, fight government, superlatively." To protect the security of its members, recruits are given the opportunity to move up through the ranks from the lowest level, Gate 1, to the highest, Gate 7. Those at the top filter live performance feeds down through their profiles in order to increase their own Icon status, but also to accumulate Hype for the network. As rebellion often goes, these performances are punk songs (written by Jim Iseman III and Masi Asare), the style of which changes to suit the four leads: Anne (Janelle M. Lannan), the technochic with the full-body voice; Amy (Mikey McCue), the sultry diva of the group; Melissa (Liz Davito), the polite powerhouse; and Ethan (Eirik Gislason), the sensitive shouter.

If punk isn't exactly to your liking, and the idea of seeing visually creative (but digital) images doesn't impress you, there's also a solid background of character development created by the joint investigation of these characters by Hilda (Jessica Weinstein) and OEDI (Nick Jaeger), one who is a boisterous, Indian-sounding, mustached lurker, and the other of whom is a sardonic computer program that likes to engage in facial puppetry.

The combination of all these elements makes OEDIrx one of the most curious things you can see on the New York circuit: a bold, boundary pushing work that is as joyously far from Broadway as it gets (while still being theater). Don't let the chaos fool you: this is professional theater, and I hope to see Anonymous Ensemble top The Oedi Cycle with whatever they take on next.

[First posted to New Theater Corps, 3/22]

THEATER: Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Farewell Speech

Photo/Julie Lemberger

Presented by the Chelfitsch Theater Company as a co-production of the Japan Society and Under the Radar Festival.

I first encountered the work of Toshiki Okada in the Play Company's 2010 production of Enjoy; the result, deftly translated down to the last tic by Aya Ogawa and finely directed by Dan Rothenberg, was a powerful and universal study of the lost twentysomething generation. This revival of his less mature and more stylized Air Conditioner, now part of a loosely connected triptych along with Hot Pepper and The Farewell Speech, which Okada directs (with English subtitles provided by Ogawa), comes across as a more indulgent affair. The plays are not without their power -- they're timely and perfect in capturing the helplessness of temps -- but their emphatic choreography overwhelms any sense of these being actual, empathetic characters: it's as if Pinter's pregnant pauses, Beckett's dry and hopeless repetitions, and Brecht's pointed alienation have all collided to much diminished effect.

For instance: one ends up asking why the Man in Air Conditioner is the only character to introduce his scene directly to the audience, rather than questioning the significance of his anecdote (how politicians tend to talk over people) and how it relates to his own casually brutal dismissals of the Woman who is increasingly flirty as she describes the frigidity of the office's air. It's not that there isn't a valid point being made by the three temps in Hot Pepper, who have been tasked with organizing the farewell party for their co-worker, Erika, so much as it is that the way this reflects upon their own eventual firings is overshadowed by their (I want to say Kabuki-like) overwrought movements. Congratulations: you've externalized their internal insecurities . . . then again, there's a reason they're usually internalized. Moreover, we don't really need three twenty minute plays illustrating the same thing; I was personally exhausted by the time The Farewell Speech -- a powerhouse monologue -- began.

This program claims that the pieces represent "the tension or gap between . . . gestures as acting . . . and physical movements that transpire in response to the background music." On some level, I can agree, in the sense that the text/choreography matches the jazz in its scatting, improvisational qualities. But it's meaningless  to the majority of American audiences: their concentration will be too divided between the subtitles and the actors to pick up on much else . . . assuming it's even there.

THEATER: The Invested

As we've seen over the last few years, greed may not actually be all that good for the economy, but when it comes to the theater, the bubble on Wall Street dramas hasn't even come close to bursting. Sharyn Rothstein's The Invested won't be the play that pops it, but neither is it a play that particularly pops. While there are some sure-fire zingers, most delivered by Bill Enoch (Thomas Hildreth), the shady new CEO of "MetroBank" (see if you can figure out which institution this represents), Ron Canada's presentation and Rothstein's plotting is fairly tame, yoked to a sexism-related subplot that never makes it off the back-burner.

Some key research seems to be missing, which leads the play to rely so heavily on the emotional reactions of the passed-over, would-be-CEO Catherine Murdock (Christina Haag) that it never adequately explains what this fund has actually done, nor what its massive downgrade and the subsequent internecine conflict between Bill and Catherine means. We're told that investments are "iffy," just as board member Jane Griffin (the fabulous Judith Hawking) only ever tells us that she's fighting for Catherine. As for stakes, long-time client Sid Simon (Bill Cwikowski, turning a stereotype into a down-to-earth hoot) puts such a human face on them that Murdock is driven (by her heart and the scale model of the Code of Hammurabi on her desk) to reimburse Sid's losses out of the bank's own pocket. That problem solved, the play spends the rest of its time worrying only about Murdock's job, and frankly, that's an uninteresting one, given her multimillion-dollar status.

What one looks for in a bank is akin to what one looks for in a show: a strong identity, a great deal of focus, and a high return on investment (time, money, etc.). What The Invested delivers is a potent premise; a wandering plot that lingers on Catherine's adorably naive new assistant, Madeline (Turna Mete, who is likeable enough to merit her own play), and her improbable involvement with the married, annoying, office clown Henry (Michael Daniel Anderson); and an only somewhat fulfilling return. (This return stems almost entirely from the dialogue, not the characters: "If my panties got damp every time I met a snake charmer, I'd have died of thirst by now." "Sexism is dead, the only -ism left is capital, and you're fucking with it.") Strip out the assistants, focus on the alliance of women between Catherine and Jane, turn Bill into a more understandable villain, and you'd have a one-act powerhouse: the relationships are there, our interest is piqued. (Rothstein's Neglect is still one of the better two-person plays I've seen -- perhaps her scope is too large here.)
 
Instead of being this year's Microcrisis (a fiercely satirical piece about the next big bubble), The Invested is merely a safe way to spend two hours -- you'll laugh, a little -- which is ironic given the show's own tag-line: "The bigger the risk, the bigger the return." 

metaDRAMA: Theater in 2009

How Soon Is Now
This play was so good, I actually offered to pay for people's tickets; the gimmick to this modern "Peter and the Wolf" involved getting the audience physically involved and invested in the process. The show begins as a lantern-lit walk through the pitch-dark second floor of a being-renovated church, with ambient sounds and shapes wafting up from the stage; it then builds as the Wolf runs through the audience, forcing members of the audience to help the cast pin him down. Thus involved--and pulse-poundingly kept there by the live band and the potent choreography--we are implicated as judge, jury, and executioner, forced to consider our own morality (and perhaps mortality) long after the show is done.

Call Cutta in a Box
I have already forgotten the name of the representative from India who guided me through this one-audience show, but I will never forget the experience, and all that's sort of the point. Who stops to consider the outsourced labor on a tech support call? Or bothers to empathize with the employee who may be just as frustrated as you? There are whole lives and worlds out there, beyond the ones we encounter each day, and both technology and theater have the ability to make us more aware and open to that--so both should.

Aftermath
Also raising awareness--and the bar--was Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's collage of interviews with ordinary Iraqi citizens, a reminder of the human costs of war. We tend to generalize, but this show, thanks to its exceptional cast, reminded us that there are individuals everywhere you go, from smug dermatologists to scrappy artists, from married chefs trying to make due to imams who cannot simply be stereotyped, or who may have reasons--like being unjustly tortured--for their anger. It's powerful stuff.

The Pride of Parnell Street
Equally powerful is this slow yet richly paced play from Sebastian Barry, an intimate look into the lives of two people who are struggling--on account of their shared past--to get past their shared past. Despite being so soaked in memories--or perhaps because of it--the show remains very much grounded in the forward momentum of the present; that is, that we can only go forward. Barry's honesty reminds us how to do so; at a time when America prides itself in the smug, self-absorbed, misanthropic anti-hero Who Nonetheless Gets Things Done (how Objectivist), it is terrific to see Aidan Kelly and Mary Murry, in the true Irish style, reminding us of the importance of the flawed hero.

Krapp, 39
Speaking of flaws, Michael Laurence managed to get rid of all of his by embracing them. His goal--to record the thirty-nine-year-old portion of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the age of 39, and to then use it to fuel his performance in thirty years--not only revealed a lot about the sort of investment it takes to be an actor, but about how important the minutiae are; blink and you've missed your entire life. Fail to properly record a memory, and perhaps its gone forever. It was a meta-existential crisis, and all the better for its honesty and grace.

circle mirror transformation
Of course, no show was better at being honest this year than Annie Baker's new play. There was no exposition, no real "plot," and the pacing--six theater classes--was intentionally slow, to "mirror," if you will, what those classes are all about. (Self-discovery, learning to really listen, and more importantly, to really communicate.) And yet, through that, each character still grows--drastically--by actually doing what the play, and the class-within-a-play, demonstrate. It was the highlight of the year, for me.

Striking!

• Clay MacLeod Chapman's Pumpkin Pie Show is still going strong, with his eerie monologues once again turning to huge disasters: in the case of Commencement, it's a school shooting, and Hannah Cheek's portrayal of three forever-affected bystanders will stick with you.
  
  
• On a lighter note, Matthew A. J. Gregory and his company managed to produce a contemporary farce, The Hypochondriac, by working off Moliere's classic (The Imaginary Invalid); their intimate space--an actually posh two-floor apartment--sold the conceit, but the actors, who had nowhere to hide, are the ones who really sold the reality of the comedy. It's best when actors don't play for laughs, after all.
  
  
• On the flip-side, selling the authenticity of this socioeconomic play, was the cast and crew of The Thickness of Skin, which actually managed to be frightening on a physical level, thanks to Michael Chenevert's desperate, uninhibited performance.

Beautiful!

• Granted, Qui Nguyen's Soul Samurai was derivative of a half-dozen film genres, and yet, as a work of theater blending all of those together, it wound up being its own animal, and being the most effective of Nguyen's plays yet. Polished, engaging, and with terrific performances (including the rising Paco Tolson), you couldn't ask for much more.
  
  
• Company XIV's Austin McCormick is also openly derivative--except that most audiences don't know what baroque dance is. Gaudy, but not tacky; burlesque, but not sloppy; picturesque, but not static, all three parts of his ambitious, genre-spanning Apple Trilogy were terrific, though a special shout out to Le Serpent Rouge!
  
  
• And don't forget August Schulenberg's great ensemble piece, The Lesser Seductions of History, which pilfered an entire decade of United States history, processed it with the once-removed eyes of Our Town, and then truly made us feel the significance of big moments via the small, individual moments that are constantly shaping us (even as we otherwise miss them).

Original!

• I can't leave out Josh Conkel's absurdly effective MilkMilkLemonade, in which talking chickens, terrified narrators, evil twins, and gender-reversed casting drive home the point that everything we do in life is the fulfillment of one role or another. Why not, then, choose the ones that make us happy, even if that involves becoming the next Andrew Dice Clay?
  
  
• Likewise, Young Jean Lee's tricksy The Shipment, which used exaggerated vignettes to demonstrate the ways in which--whether we play to type or against it--we are still just playing, and should never be dismissed or simply taken at face value. Depth, people, depth.
  
  
• And then, nailing the allegorical warnings of science-fiction, there was Ashlin Halfnight's Artifacts of Consequence, which explores what (of art) is truly important, and worth preserving, once everything else has vanished. What--in other words--is the point of living in a world in which only Twinkies have lasted? Thankfully, this production was nowhere near as blunt as this encapsulation.

Honorable Mentions!
Jailbait was a witty, villain-less play about growing up; Powerhouse was an inventive bio-drama that presented itself in the style of its subject; Electric Pear's Synesthesia '09 was an interpretive masterwork of collaboration; and Daniel Robert's Haunted House was an ode to the simpler, perhaps happier, days of childhood, before technology turned us all into smug, cynical, know-it-alls.

Clarification!
Yes, I saw Broadway shows this year. They're not up in the list above because they didn't stay with me. And of the shows that are on my list, none of them would work on Broadway (some of them don't even work in a theater). Which is sort of the point I'm making. With the exception of Sarah Ruhl's In The Next Room...or, the Vibrator Play, which had lively subject material, terrific acting, and a fabulously directed ending, most of what I saw was being played to such a big audience that it couldn't help but be a bit "broad." (I'm looking at you, Superior Donuts.) What's effective from a technical standpoint--like the television segments of Memphis--isn't as emotionally affective as it should be.

And though there were outstanding performances, like Christopher Fitzgerald's leprechaun in Finian's Rainbow, it was rare that the whole show fit together. To be fair, off-off and off-Broadway had more than their share of outright flops and follies--percent-wise, Broadway's probably doing better, even if their shows are still losing money--but at least many of those failures come from taking big risks--risks that have, for some of these companies, now started to really reward their audiences.

2009 wasn't a bad year for theater. It was a bad year for Broadway. I'm hoping everyone steps their game up in 2010; I'm looking forward to it either way. I'll see you all again on January 6th, 2010, to kick off coverage of the Under the Radar Festival. Happy New Year!