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). 

PLAY: "Goodbye April, Hello May"

Ethan Lipton's new play, Goodbye April, Hello May, too closely resembles the lives of its characters. These five roommates live in a city kept awake only by the constant sound of bombs breaking over Coney Island; their lives are awkward fumblings for security and companionship. The show lives on a stage kept awake only by the steady stream of Lipton's satirical 22nd century; once the shock value of those ideas fade, all that's left are the awkward stagings of director Patrick McNulty, fumbling for something deeper than the jokey surface.

Truth be told, the play is far too subtle to be properly satirical (unlike Pig Farm), and not thematically distinct enough to support itself on language (as with God's Ear). Lipton slips in references to the now-literal prostitution of PR work and McNulty swaddles Frank in a different gauze to demonstrate the dangers of teaching kindergarten, but the sections that truly work have Frank explicitly describing how he had to shoot a seven-year-old student: "Give me a fucking star, Frank," he says, describing the girl: "The animal." I use the two plays above as examples because the cast features Bill Coelius and Gibson Frazier, both of whom are restrained here, plodding around a dimly lit kitchen in their underwear or pessimistically talking about the idea of painting with gray. The mood is as cold as Eben Levy's accompanying techno music, which is why even a ridiculous wedding dance ends up looking more uncomfortably epileptic than hysterically spastic.

While the flaws above are due to direction, Lipton's main concern should be the lack of conflict. Goodbye April, Hello May is about alienation--of sisters, of the fifth wheel, of couples--but that doesn't give the production carte blanche to stay distanced. The text is just maddeningly casual: Frank is passive about his girlfriend Paula's late hours at a hospital, nobody seems upset when Paula is horribly burned by a firebomb (she recovers after a few jokes at her expense), and while Kelly Mares' perkiness as Irene is a nice balance for Coelius' Eeyore-like Tom, their love-at-first-desperation doesn't have much of an opportunity to develop. The one choking moment in the show comes from Albert Aeed, who plays the lonely ex-drug-dealer Harry; as he recounts the various jobs he's settled into--a list that just keeps going--he suddenly cracks with the realization of how little it all means.

Lipton's ideas are solid, but the story doesn't drive anywhere, which may be why the play idles out into an intermission despite being only ninety minutes long. After catching a breath, it feebly tries to make a point about the outdoors as opposed to the city. Unfortunately, McNulty's blocking makes the opposite point: by juxtaposing both lifestyles atop one another (hard to do otherwise when the stage is encircled by the audience), it just looks like life is alienating, period.