THEATER: Luther

The very funny concept behind Luther, the second of three plays running as part of Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks festival, is that Walter (Gibson Frazier) and Marjorie (Kelly Mares) have adopted a shell-shocked veteran, Luther (Bobby Moreno), whom they treat as a cross between a teenager and a dog -- an animal who doesn't know better and therefore can't be held responsible for his actions. Ethan Lipton wants you to laugh, sure, but he's got a serious end in mind, one that's well-directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, who amps up the pathos so as to make the savagery more shocking. On the one hand, the show is fixated on the artificiality of a callous business class; on the other, it's remarking on the very real difficulty in reintegrating soldiers that we've conditioned to be killers into society. By merging the two worlds at a corporate party -- which are about as far as they can get from one another -- Luther makes some salient points on inhumanity in general, and the ways in which we're desperate to connect.

Photo/Heather Phelps-Lipton

The script, however, could serve from some thematic tightening: Marjorie is having trouble fitting in, too, but her story is overpowered by that of a socially awkward technician, Morris (the excellent John Ellison Conlee), who serves as a cross between the two worlds. (To be fair, he's infectious; I can understand getting swept away by this particular creation.) Moreover, by focusing on Morris, he steps back from the extremes -- illustrated to a certain degree by the sock-people that puppeteer Crystal Finn is parading about -- and too often uses him to directly comment on themes that may more effectively be left unspoken. (Again, Conlee absolutely nails his heartfelt speech about animals, bullies, and forgiveness, as does Moreno, given his own opportunity; it just feels too direct.) Some jokes, too, are a little hard to puzzle out: what to make of Captain James (Pete Simpson) and his arbitrator, Fran Leibowitz (Finn)? There's not much of a conclusion, either: Luther voluntarily goes to prison (after maiming or murdering two people), where he's apparently having a fine time, but what's Lipton trying to convey? That we should lock up former soldiers? That, unlike Marjorie and Walter, we shouldn't ignore the psychic baggage of our wards, trusting that love alone can set it right? 

Luther is asking the right questions, then; it's just not really answering them -- just entertaining them (and us). 

THEATER: Takarazuka!!!

Photo/Heather Phelps Lipton

Japan's Takarazuka Review appears to be such a glorious contradiction of ideals that it seems almost impossible that it's never been the subject of a play before. Consider: it's a school of theater in which young girls (and girls only) are trained, almost militarily, to play both the male and female roles in soap-opera-like adaptations of Western musicals (and the occasional cultural folktale). That is, a rigidly controlled zone of utter freedom and expression; a place where the poor daughter of a fisherman, Yuko (Jennifer Ikeda), can become a James Dean-level "top star" of the company -- but only for two years, before she's replaced (as is tradition).

Playwright Susan Soon He Stanton can be forgiven, then, for gushing a bit enthusiastically through Takarazuka!!! (look at those exclamation points!), choosing an overtly expository device for her entree -- Nigel (Paul Juhn) is a half-Japanese British filmmaker, here to observe Yuko's 1975 "swan song" and subsequent replacement by Rui (Angela Lin) -- and inserting some jarringly artificial explanations of Japanese concepts of truth and identity into her scenes, most notably one in which a random old man on a train (Glenn Kubota) demonstrates the difference between tataemae (the facade) and honne (the truth). Moreover, by pairing her physical plotting -- Yuko's mental breakdown, Nigel's besotted behavior, the fine line between the obsession and escapism of a fan, Junko, or the closeted feelings of a fellow Takarisian (a well double-cast Brooke Ishibashi) -- with a metaphysical ghost story involving a "cursed" and suicidal former star, Akane (Lin), whose path mirrors Yuko's, Stanton is stylistically excuse some of the rougher patches. (To say nothing of the appropriate use of melodrama and song in the piece: there's a terrifically unsettling rendition of Tom Jones's "Delilah.) It says a lot -- credit surely due in part to the visually gifted director Lear deBessonet -- that the repeating motif of tataemae/honne manages to sneak under the audience's skin, despite being so baldly presented.

All that acknowledged, Takarazuka!!! would do well to ease back and stop rushing -- perhaps to split over two acts that do more to parallel the shifts between Yuko's on-stage control and off-stage collapse. We learn, toward the end of the play, that Nigel's mother was a Takarisian; it'd be nice if this detail appeared to inform more of his actions or to drive his (perhaps Oedipal) desires. And while deBessonet adroitly stages the supernatural occurrences (a red scarf falling from the sky; candles/lives snuffed in the darkness; the eerie echoing between Akane and Yuko), the show's depictions of actual sequences from Takarazuka could stand more rehearsal: the songs, dances, and performances from the play-within-the-play are not dissimilar enough from Takarazuka!!! to sustain the desired illusion.

To be fair, this production is a part of Clubbed Thumb's always ambitious Summerworks series, and there's more than enough meat here to merit further productions. It's only that, having caught a glimpse of real magic and powerful insights into the psyche, it's impossible not to ask for more.

Amazons and Their Men

Photo/Carl Skutsch

Jordan Harrison's new play, Amazons and Their Men, is a clever work of fiction that investigates the escapism of film during a time in which the world was being plunged into darkness. Loosely following the real-life attempts of Leni Riefenstahl to film herself as and in Penthesilea, Harrison writes with a director's fluid grace, connects scenes with an editor's masterfully sudden sequencing, contrasts characters in the film with those in the play like a verbal cinematographer, and ultimately comes away with an elegant piece.

Amazons opens with a literal direction, as the Frau (a fantastic and commanding Rebecca Wisocky) describes the scene from the darkness: "Interior. Night." It's a common device of Harrison's to have the characters narrate their own lives, but here, under the context of filmmaking, it seems perfectly natural -- especially for Riefenstahl. As the lights rise, she speaks the poetics of the film, "The camera first sees her reflected in a lion's eye," which enables the play, text spooling through the projectors of our mind, to take on a cinematic layer. We are soon joined by the Man (Brian Sgambati), a "dark-eyed man from the Ghetto" whom she'd like to more than just cast as her lover, Achilles, and The Extra (Heidi Schreck), who has a talent not just for dying, but for dying "inconspicuously," the faithful shadow for her dominating sister. The tale takes on another dimension when a messenger, The Boy (Gio Perez) is cast as Achilles' best friend, Patroclus, especially as the sliver of eroticism between them on camera translates to a world that cannot see such acts as normal, let alone full of art.

As the Frau says, "the real world chatters on," a point driven by the insistent narration of the characters within it (poetically, too, what with descriptions of things like the "incense censing"). And though she tries to build a new one in her film ("Where else will we go when this one ends?"), she is trapped by the further chatter of telegrams, her sister's morality, and the unfolding war, a war which remains always just slightly out of frame (outsiders are always far upstage, shrouded in darkness). Best still, because Harrison's narrative is able to cut easily between time, character, and thought (and better still, to blend them), he is able to control the pace at which that war advances, but without being predictable.

What works best in Amazons and Their Men is the way in which Harrison contrasts scenes from the film with slices from the Frau's real world, a world that -- try as she might -- she cannot control. This effect is bolstered by Ken Rus Schmoll's direction, which clearly cuts between the film's Amazon battles and the play's Nazi shadow, as well as by Sue Rees's rolling platform of a set, a piece that, like the cavernous Ohio Theater, leaves much to our imagination. The contrast is also strengthened by Kirche Leigh Zeile's costumes, which are the bright imaginative fancies of the film world (white Amazonian garb, solid breastplates and red capes), showing directly the way in which the idealisms of the film die when viewed by those who are repressed.

Few plays connect manage to connect theme, plot, and character, but Jordan Harrison, along with the fantastically creative Clubbed Thumb company, has managed it with Amazons and Their Men.