metaDRAMA: Best Theater of 2010

It's great when critics agree that a show is terrific, as with The Aliens, Clybourne Park, and In the Footprint, but it's perhaps better when critics disagree, as with The Little Foxes, Lear, and Lascivious Something, because then you end up with passionate defenses. It's nice to have some diversity, too; those who fear "off-off-Broadway" missed out on the braveness of The Soup Show and the tenacity of Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War. Doing away with expectations helps, too, because then you can shamelessly include shows like The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik Deep Sea Explorer, a bit of incandescent pleasure, and L'Effet De Serge, which has no comparison, i.e., is a delight all on its own. If I had to pull a set of biases out of the crucible called list-making, it'd be that I like cerebral and low-key (i.e., not a "spectacle") work, but above all, honesty.

1. Young Jean Lee's Lear
Paul Lazar, tired of playing at "Edgar," pulls off his facial hair, turns the house lights on, and recommends that those in the theater who feel that they're wasting their time should leave. The play resumes with a recreation of a Very Special Episode of Sesame Street and ends with a raw reverberation on the essence of mortality: "I'll miss you." All those rough spots in the play? We'll call them the facets of a diamond in the rough.

2. The Civilians's In the Footprint
Objects transcend their location not just because they're sung ("The ghetto home depot, Park Slope Co-op, the Target, Cellar's Bar, Marcy Projects, the shootings, the hipsters, Spike Lee, Jay Z, the Time Out article the day the rents doubled..."), but because Steve Cosson has defined and given them significance, quoting verbatim from the residents as a means of rebutting all those (like politicians) who would use them merely as words. How often do lyrics and actors have the opportunity to do that?

3. The New York New Futurists's The Soup Show
Talk about some indelible images. Desiree Burch, Cara Francis, and Erica Livingston reclaim all the "mysteries" of womanhood by refusing to hide any of them; moreover, by upending our expectations (of hygiene, humor, history), they succeed in ensuring that we actually recognize how stupid assumptions are in the first place. And, in handing out so-called "elixirs" to the audience, the ensemble succeeds in making us question what exactly we want, and what we're willing to do to get it.

4. Ivo van Hove's The Little Foxes
How heartless to just lean there, against that dark and purpled wall, watching your husband -- in the throes of a heart attack -- attempt to crawl up the stairs (located the aortal center of the stage)? Watch Ivo van Hove's production of Lillian Hellman's 1939 play and you'll understand: he fills the production with bleak family interactions, violent histrionics, and bloodless forms of assault and battery. In such a world are we reflected (talk about an effective pseudo-modernization); do we want our finances and lives run so calculatingly?

5. Philippe Quesne's Le Effet d'Serge
It takes only the briefest flash of a second, and then the spark is gone. Gaëtan Vourc’h's guests applaud the performance, then leave. Time passes, time passes, new guests arrive, a new show is performed -- a home-made laser-light-show, jury-rigged automobile headlights, whatever -- and all of a sudden, the ordinary has become a wonderland full of transcendent surprises. Putting the play back into play, Quesne's largely silent work is a small but significant wonder. 

6. Sheila Callaghan's Lascivious Something is an aptly named romance, an frisson-filled look at both  positive and negative actions at once, illustrated by a time-reversing device that leads us on with alternatives and crushes us with realities -- or vice-versa. Roads taken, not taken, dreamed about, fantasized about, all with a economic and political subtext just waiting to haunt us beneath the eroticism of the moment. I can still feel the passion of these performers; that's a rare thing.

7. Annie Baker's The Aliens is more specific than her previous Circle Mirror Transformation, so there seem, at first, to be fewer ways to connect to all that space between her sparse text and stoner characters; the trick of her work is realizing -- with the cut of an abrupt loss, or a sudden coming-of-age -- just how little it takes to connect after all, if we just listen.

8. Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park two-part generational structure makes us laugh and think at the same time about what constitutes racism and what constitutes community.

9. Tim Watts's The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik Deep Sea Explorer ditches all that high-concept nonsense in order to get to the essence of life after heartbreak, using nothing more than a few puppets and a Wiimote-controlled series of animations to explore the unfathomable fathoms of the ocean.

10. The Mad Ones's Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War appropriately uses a radio-theater format in order to tap into the nostalgia of its narrators, three Russian broadcasters who, on the verge of alien-driven extinction, venture into the heart of an American love story. Form, content, energy =  recipe for success?


Honorable mentions: Michael Shannon's performance in Craig Lucas's Mistakes Were Made, the quiet introspection of religion in Samuel D. Hunter's A Bright New Boise, the elegance (even in translation) of Toshiki Okada's Enjoy, the participatory delights of Rotozaza's GuruGuru, the clownishly beautiful imagination of Legs and All, and the return-to-form of Company XIV's scintillating Nutcracker Rouge.

Overrated, but in a good way: Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, because maybe it's time for playwrights to stop being subtle about racism in America.

Underrated, but in a good way: Polly Stenham's That Face, because a young writer should have an unpolished voice, especially when dealing with internal horrors . . . but it's still an unpolished voice.

Short-a-Day: Jonathan Lethem's "The Night They First Played Monster Eyes"

Originally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 82.

In the same issue that brought us a story hidden in what is essentially the pure description of a (now empty) house, we also get this lovely twist on a fictional narrative: a story hidden within coverage of a live (fictitious) band. That's less new, but Lethem, no stranger to writing fiction about music (or marching to the beat of his own drum), handles it well, moving from a journalist's observations ("It's what makes this band sound alike to any other that makes them intriguing, at this distance: they could be the Beatles, heard from the street")to the inception of an audience to the transcendence of a band ("It's the moment when they realize that rather than being as good as they'd always hoped, or even better than they hoped, they're simply as good as they are, no hope required").

This isn't a story about characters, or plot, it's about the rhythms of life, the moments that either define us or which we choose to use to define us. After all, what are we if not the sum of our memories, right? This is the moment where, with "a blobby series of wide purplish spots from a track of lights mounted behind the band" pique the curiosity of the masses, where the drummer and bassist are suddenly transformed through the opportunity of the performance into "two women [who] look fresh and alive, a thousand percent less ordinary than at the retail outlets or previous social gatherings from which these men are fairly certain they recognize them." Lethem even goes so far as to tackle the question of ultimate authorship: when you're really locked onto a song, when the lyrics seem to describe just you, only "dangerous" you, then isn't the band just a mouthpiece with which to unlock your own feelings? The story's a thoughtful, successful meditation in that regard, and though these ideas might just as easily have been raised in an essay, it feels better tackled as fiction.

Short-a-Day: Jose de Pierola's "In the Belly of the Night"

Originally published in A Public Space 03, Winter 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 68.
[Part of the FOCUS: Peru series.]

The only thing missing from this story, about a Peruvian soldier preparing to execute an Indian scholar, is the context for such an action. But even without that, de Pierola's writing is effective enough in conveying the fast-motion replay sort of stream-of-consciousness that tends to run through our minds as we wait and prepare to take a final action. The "How did we get here" and "How can we make sure we never end up here again" sorts. As the Indian attempts, quietly, to convey his own humanity (even as he digs his own grave), Ubilluz thinks of his wife, his son (the "little midget"), his own father (the reason for him joining the military), and his commanding officer. It reads like this:

Wouldn't it be nice if they never sent you on another of those missions that scare me so much? Yeah, it'd be nice, real nice, really, really nice. Ubilluz lit his cigarette. The sweet, heavy smoke warmed his throat. The Indian with someone else's voice was smoking leisurely, the asshole, as if he were waiting for the bus. The red ember of his cigarette, like a little piece of charcoal, turned yellow, lit up his cheekbones, then turned red again. It was only then, maybe because of the contrast, that Ubilluz could smell the wet earth permeating his whole body. Mmm, so good, it smells like wet earth, daddykins. That's what it's like in the mountains, brown sugar: fresh air, sweet water, everything so, so damn good."

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Short-a-Day: Mark Slouka's "The Hare's Mask"

Originally published in Harper's Magazine, January 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 25.

I'm going to call this story "specifically generic," for while Slouka adds plenty of details about a dead father -- his penchant for hand-crafting his own trout flies, his love of Krazy Kat, the brave face he puts on for his son despite his awful near-escape from the Holocaust (the narrator's grandparents were not so lucky), these could just as easily be happening to anybody, could be about anything. The few bits that land cleanly -- the father's grief at having to kill and eat the rabbits he had raised and named, or the image of his smile ("as if, having long ago given up expecting anything from the world, he continually found himself mugged by its beauty") -- come across as anecdotes, nestled into a story-within-a-story. And Slouka's grand attempt to mesh the two stories together -- the son remembers himself at nine years old, remembering his father at nine years old -- seems forced, especially the tantrum the boy throws when he learns that his sister wants a rabbit (she, of course, unaware of the significance this might have for her father).

Plenty of lines, of course, simply fall flat: "My father stood to the right, an awkward eight-year-old in a high-necked shirt and tie, a ghost from the future." Thoughts go unfinished, too: the father appears to be teaching the son (via their ritual of making trout-flies) that "Some things you can finish," but that's not the direction the story goes; likewise, the flashback memory of the father's childhood among the rabbits is complicated by the inclusion of a man -- possibly Milos Werfel, though why does that matter? -- who is hiding out in a narrow trench behind the rabbit hutch. This may clarify the relative levels of ease between generations -- the hiding Jew, the escaped father, the now relatively well-off American son -- and it may help to connect the image of caged rabbits to the horrors of the caged Jews, but if this is the feeling that is suddenly overcoming the son, it's leaning too hard on the tropes of collected Holocaust fiction and, as I said earlier, adding very little that's specific on its own. At once both too clever then, and not clever enough, depending on what you're reading this sort of story for.

Short-a-Day: Don DeLillo's "Hammer and Sickle"

Originally published in Harper's Magazine, December 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): x.

I'd like to give Harper's and DeLilo the benefit of the doubt and say that this story was simply too intellectual for me, but I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Jerold Bradway, lightweight criminal in a minimum security prison that's built around an abandoned soccer field (near a supposedly haunted school), spends his days ruminating about how best to become a phantasm, "someone who slips in and out of physical reality," a creature that, like the news, can be depended on to disappear. Certainly Jerold doesn't think much of himself or his circumstances; he is simply a man in the midst of free enterprise, whatever that means.

Also occurring in the story: the prisoners are currently watching a program in which two children read complex financial reports that have been broken down, by their mother, into a sort of half-ironic half-serious singsong:

"Greece is ready to restore trust."
"Aid package of 40 billion dollars."
"How do they say thank-you in Greek?"
"Efharisto."
"Say it again, slowly."
"F. Harry Stowe."
"F. Harry Stowe."
They exchanged a fist bump, deadpan, without looking at each other.

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