PLAY: "Tall Grass"

The promotional poster for Tall Grass features a lawn gnome holding a cute, miniature ax. No gnomes are actually used, discussed, or harmed in the making of Brian Harris's slipshod collection of dark comedies, and that ax, replete with a Photoshopped gleam from the sun, cuts deeper than anything found in any of these three one-acts. This choice of mascot--lawn gnomes have long been suspected of the sinister sides lurking beneath their cute porcelain facades--is unfortunately the only good choice made in the production. Nick Corley's direction is as jumbled and vague as Cameron Anderson's set design (he suspends a couch five feet off the ground--which, to be fair, is about how high your disbelief needs to hang), and the acting isn't just over-the-top, it's over-the-Big-Top: we're talking a three-ring circus.

Forgive the snarkiness, but there's nothing worse than sitting through a bad dark comedy. In the case of Tall Grass, it happens three times: after watching characters die in absurd last-minute plot twists in "The Business Proposal," they get back on their feet, change costumes (fully), change scripts (barely), change character (hardly), and repeat. "The Gerbil" isn't interested in characters--everything the delusional, impotent homeowner says to the incompetent silver thief is a lie--and thankfully the play ends before the plot holes have a chance to really accumulate. At least the final scene, "Tall Grass," gives Edward O'Blenis and Marla Schaffel a rather convincing do-over as a suspicious elderly couple--and I mean that in both senses. Not only don't they trust the outside world (they are shut-ins), but their existence in a Brian Harris play makes them suspicious as well. The comedy of Tall Grass is not the reveal that this elderly couple is actually a serial-killing pair of cannibals, subsiding on a diet of salesmen and con artists, but that there was a production company somewhere that thought this was a clever concept.

I am rarely this unkind, but I felt it necessary to be unhelpfully critical to this piece: audiences will not laugh at the pedantic lines ("The cod is very...cod-like...and the lemon sauce is very...lemon-y"), and they will not appreciate the shallow obviousness of Tall Grass; they might as well laugh at my comments. How ironic that Brian Harris was a stock analyst: this collection of dark comedies isn't a poor-man's Christopher Durang, it's a bankrupted man's.

CD: The Broken West, "I Can't Go On, I'll Go On"

The Broken West's debut album, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, is a sign of artists being trapped by culture. The opening of "Baby on My Arm" is pulled from Coldplay's "Yellow" (the whole track has a creeping ambiance that eventually engulfs the guitar) and "Hale Sunset" is filled with dub. The first half, including the bland "So It Goes" and the catchier "On The Bubble," is full of throwaway power-pop "hits" stuck in a tambourine-heavy past (grainy production values on "Down in the Valley" further age the track). Tracks like "Shiftee" and "Big City" show nice range and color; like the Beckett play they've ripped their title from, maybe they'll find a way to survive mediocrity.

[First posted to Silent Uproar, 3/5]

CD: The Curtains, "Calamity"

Chris Cohen grew up singing as much as he did playing; thank goodness for it. His three-piece band, The Curtains, benefits from the quiet precociousness of his early dabbling; their new album, Calamity is delightfully experimental lo-fi. A less-than-whiny falsetto and a syncopated chorus dress up the playfulness of the songs; the guitar can throttle notes on "Green Water," it can pluck notes like chicken feathers on "Wysteria," and it can also indulge in rockabilly-lite on the instrumental "Brunswick Stew." On some tracks, like "World's Most Dangerous Woman," Cohen can even pass as a small-scale Sufjan Stevens. "Calamity" molds a disastrous series of notes into the melody, and while some people will inevitably ask what Chris is doing, the answer is clear. He's making music; the hell with rules.

[First posted to Silent Uproar, 3/6]

PLAY: "Los Angeles"

Photo/Joan Marcus

Julian Sheppard, in the program notes of his new play Los Angeles, asks: "In the end, in L.A., is there really anything more than sex, drugs, and swimming pools?" Although there is plenty of that in his somewhat flimsy series of vignettes, there are a few moments in the overall production (well directed by Adam Rapp) where there's the sensation of striking something more fathomable than nihilism.

The show opens with an innocent but already damaged Audrey being led by her boyfriend, from the Midwest to L.A. The subsequent scenes, always jumping an unidentified period of time forward in Audrey's downward spiral of a life, take her from party to party and man to man (to woman). Despite the cliched encounters (a drug dealer, a married man, a high-powered agent, a model/actress), Sheppard's writing is fairly clever. It also offers a neat turnabout: the majority of people Audrey encounters actually want to help her, and the first few scenes end on upbeats -- the tragedy is that after the scene change, things are always worse than they were before. The intimate space under The Flea abets the character acting; the scenes are already familiar to the audience, but the close proximity of it makes us feel like the bystander at a really hot party where someone is being slowly stabbed to death for our amusement.

Audrey spends most of the play in a "comfortable fuckedupness," -- perhaps too much for us to care about the pain she keeps trying to drown out -- but the play itself, with the moody lighting of neon-stripped bars and dim, coffin-sized apartments, shows the squalor for what it is. The transitions between scenes are handled by Amelia Zirin-Brown's lovely voice (Life is a cabaret, my friends) and Audrey is shuffled from set piece to set piece like a prop herself (which, to be fair, is what she becomes). The inevitable overdose scene is handled well, with a chorus of spectral scene-partners; the only off-kilter choice is the tenth scene, which serves more as a confusing "lost episode" than an epilogue. (Other choices, like coloring all the drinks and money blue, are odd, not distracting.)

Over the course of the play, Katherine Waterson, who plays Audrey, is given plenty of time to shine, and there are a few scenes where she bravely succeeds at seeming like a stranger to her own body. The problem with a play like Los Angeles is that Audrey does not change, and each scene is just more of the same. The cast, made up of The Bats (The Flea's young repertory company), has the same dilemma, each being called upon to play a caricature that only a few of them manage to deepen (Ben Beckley and Emily Hyberger) or fully inhabit (Tanya Fischer).

A play like Los Angeles doesn't need to be written -- it's enough in our pop culture already -- but it has been, and it's enjoyable even if it's not brilliant. I hope Julian Sheppard will focus on actually developing a story in his next play, rather than just telling it; it's really the only thing holding his writing back.

[First posted to New Theater Corps, 3/7]

PLAY: "it is said the men are over in The Steel Tower"

"How can you be a good performer?" asks Jonouchi, an AWOL soldier, of Sasakura, one of four frightened, mediocre vaudeville actors who have fled a relief show to hide from War in a giant steel tower. "Just take a deep breath and say whatever comes to mind," he replies. This philosophy is the heart and undercurrent of it is said the men are over in The Steel Tower, a play by the prolific Japanese playwright Hideo Tsuchida, now in production at TBG Theatre.

Something has been lost in translation; Tsuchida's parallel about trivial bickering in the light of an overshadowing war is clear enough, but the endless, repetitive chatter used to get there isn't entertaining (especially when it goes on for almost two hours straight). Given an American adaptation (Matthew Paul Olmos) of an English translation (M. Cody Poulton), not to mention director Ronit Muszkatblit's interpretation of the final text, how much of the original still exists? Coupled with the lethargic blocking of the action and the unusually low energy of the performers: Not enough.

The play succeeds in frustrating the audience, but that only allows us to sympathize with how the characters in this play feel stuck. One of the "shticks" performed involves a pantomime of how different types of people walk up and down stairs; that subtlety is called out as markedly unfunny in the play, but it's the same device the play uses. The common, ordinary dialogue (which sounds improvised, even with a script in front of me) leaves profundity to the subtext; unfortunately, this cast allows for only the mundanity of the text. The ensemble is so locked into the passive-aggressive that their range is limited, and the few scenes that would show us another side are set at night, on a dark stage lit by flailing flashlights.

There are some good sequences: at one point the act of creation is compared to giving birth (to triplets), and later on, the joke is carried on when one of the troupe offers to help the rehearsal process along by being a Lamaze coach. Running jokes, even those about overused metaphors, are a window into seeing the history of this troupe, pre-war, and the rare moments when we see the characters vulnerable (Christopher Loar, as Jonouchi, has a sweet innocence) give heart to an otherwise dispassionate, Seinfeld-ish play.

it is said the men are over in The Steel Tower tries to mix subtext and symbolism, but you can't hide allegory in a message that is already hidden. This adaptation is simply too subtle for its own good: the play we wind up seeing is the opposite of the play we want to watch.