THE HYSTERIA OF DR FAUSTUS: Gutsy, Small Theater Company Takes the Next Leap with This Original Work Based on the Faust Legend

Brandon Walker (right) as Dr. Faust solidifies a pact
 to sell his soul to Mephistopheles (Eric Cronican)
in exchange for a life of pleasure, fame and fortune.
Photo by Russ Rowland

The Seeing Place Theater is unique among the treasure trove of (sadly) underfunded small companies that occupy various corners of New York City, making theatrical magic out of sheer willpower, talent, and bottomless imagination. Where others come together, sometimes just for a single production, The Seeing Place is now entering its ninth season, bravely taking on everything from Shakespeare to Martin McDonaugh, to John Osborne, to Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill.  

What makes The Seeing Place well worth keeping an eye on is not just that they go out of their way to select challenging works, and not even that they always strive to place a new spin on them. It's that they keep challenging themselves to avoid repetition or predictability, while keeping true to their mission of offering visceral, intimate, and honest productions that carry with them the edginess of actor-driven improvisation. This is not something you can fake, and it is the reason I make room on my calendar to check them out as often as I can.  

So what do you do after eight seasons of classics, contemporary, and experimental works?  In this case, what you do is come up with an original play, an adaptation of the oft-told tale of Faust, a man who sells his soul in exchange for experiencing the pleasures that have eluded him for his entire life: money, power, fame, and sex. 

Titled The Hysteria of Dr Faustus, the play, in performance at the Paradise Factory through October 21, was written by The Seeing Place's producing artistic director Brandon Walker. In it, Walker examines the famous story through contemporary eyes, while staying true to its origins and various interpretations by, among others, Goethe, Marlowe, and Gounod.  

In this iteration, Walker plays both the elderly Heinrich Faustus, a physics professor fed up with having to deal with bored, self-absorbed and disaffected students, and the younger, transformed "Henry Faust," who has happily signed away his soul to Mephistopheles. The latter is played by Erin Cronican, the company's executive artistic director, who also directs the production. 

The plot follows the traditional Faust storyline, from the title character's initial unhappiness, self-loathing and attempted suicide; through his pact with the Devil's minion; the wooing and seduction of Gretchen, the innocent woman (Broghanne Jessamine) whose life he will ruin; and his own final downfall.     Walker places a modern spin on things, not just by setting it in today's world, but by emphasizing the #MeToo elements within the story.  

Faust  is readily caught up in the power that seems to come with the territory of being an attractive and wealthy young man. Supported by the overseeing Mephistopheles, Faust blithely shatters the lives of the play's female characters, the virginal and pious Gretchen, her aunt (Candice Oden), and his own loyal assistant (also played by Ms. Cronican). More pointedly, no matter how much harm he does, he denies culpability at every turn, a familiar trope to anyone who has followed the drama surrounding the likes of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Brett Kavanaugh. 

Broghanne Jessamine and Candice Oden
Photo by Russ Rowland

Brandon Walker as Faust
Photo by Russ Rowland

The Hysteria of Dr Faustus works best when it focuses on this major theme, in which the Faust character becomes more and more like Robert Louis Stevenson's "Mr. Hyde," or  the kind of predatory, self-important, entitled man of wealth and power whose misdeeds have been subjected to much public scrutiny of late. 

Truthfully, there are a few tangential plot elements that pull the play in too many directions and weaken its overall impact.  A tour of hell and an overlong seduction scene, for example, weigh down the first Act. A twenty-minute trim would sharpen things significantly.  Still and all, The Seeing Place Theater is to be commended for its continuing efforts at exploring new territory. This play is well-worth seeing, and, more importantly, it represents the next great leap forward for this always-exciting company.  

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CLOUD 9: Caryl Churchill's Gender-And-Genre-Bending Comedy Performed with an Improv Vibe

British playwright Caryl Churchill's magnificently complicated comedy, which flouts theatrical conventions as it skewers our perceptions of gender, race, time, and even logic, is being given an  edgy, seat-of-the-pants production by the always-risk-taking Seeing Place Theater company at the Access Theater.  

Churchill herself has dictated that the performers cross genders (and, in at least one case, race) in taking on some of the roles, and that the same actors play different characters in each of the two acts, which are (sort of) separated by 100 years. Even the stage directions are read aloud (in this instance, by Clinton Powell and Mariel Reyes) so that we get the sense we are watching a rehearsal or backer's audition instead of a full-fledged theatrical production. Anything, in fact, to keep us focused less on the characters than on the ideas of sexuality, gender, power, and social pressure that are the underlying drivers of the play. 

Act I takes place in a British colony somewhere in Africa in 1880, a place where, as one character puts it, "the climate is very confusing." That's as good an explanation as any for the goings-on. 

To begin with, we have Clive (Brandon Walker), for whom duty and country and propriety are of foremost importance, except, of course, when he is diving under the dress of the neighboring widow, Mrs. Saunders (Jane Kahler). Then there is Clive's wife Betty (Ari Veach), who really does do her utmost to be the perfect Victorian spouse but who is equally eager to bed their friend, the explorer Harry Bagley (Robin Friend Stift)

For his part, Bagley is horny for any male who comes within reach, including Clive and Betty's loyal-ish servant Joshua (Michael Stephen Clay), a black African who is always played by a white actor; and the couple's young son, Edward (Erin Cronican), who'd much rather play with dolls than learn to play cricket, as his father wishes. And, oh yes, there is Edward's governess Ellen (Ms. Kahler again), who is rather partial to Betty.  

And so, Act I devolves into a rather raunchy version of a French sex farce, but with racial, gender, and social undertones. Only Betty's mother Maude (Sabrina Schlegel-Majia) manages to cling to her old-school values, the very model of Mother England.  

After the break, Act II takes us to 1980 London, with a set of characters living in an age of supposed sexual freedom and women's liberation. Some of the characters are newly introduced, while others seem to be the same ones left over from Act I (we're told by Ms. Churchill that, for the characters, only 25 years have passed). Again, bed swapping is de rigueur, and even more accepted and out in the open - but no less confusing and complicated to the participants.  

No one truly knows how they are supposed to act with all of this new freedom. There is a wonderful moment here, for example, where one of the male characters, proclaiming himself to be a stalwart women's libber, practically bullies his wife into taking a job opportunity away from home when she doesn't want to do so. "God knows," he says, "I do everything I can to make you stand on your own two feet. Just be yourself. You don't seem to realize how insulting it is to me that you can't get yourself together.

Cast Photo by Russ Roland

It's all marvelous stuff, even if it is at times quite head-spinning. But as much as anything, Cloud 9 is an actors' play, with wonderfully juicy roles to sink their teeth into. To a person, the cast embraces its barely tamed wildness with all the gusto they can muster, giving the whole an exhilarating improvisational vibe. 

Over the years, this still-organically-growing company has brought in some outstanding actors by living up to its mission of being actor-driven. While artistic director Brandon Walker and managing director Erin Cronican co-direct and perform in this production, they do not dominate the stage, which is shared by a uniformly strong cast, especially as they are required to leap across roles between acts. Rather than single out any individuals, kudos and applause to every last gender-race-age-and-sexually-fluid one of them!


Cloud 9 is scheduled to run through July 16 at the Access Theater, 380 Broadway. Be aware that the theatre's name is misleading, as it is located at the top of four flights of stairs.  Check ahead if you need use of the freight elevator.  

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Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

MACBETH: The Seeing Place Offers A Gritty Production in Tune With the Mood of the Country

 Brandon Walker and Erin Cronican
Photo by Russ Rowland

The Seeing Place's rapid-paced production of Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Paradise Factory in the East Village is a flaming roller coaster plunge that engulfs the power-grubbing pair at its center, along with anyone else who has the misfortunate of being in the path of their callous ascent or their inexorable free-fall to doom. 

There is a distinctly nihilistic tone to this gritty production, one that by sheer happenstance permeates another Shakespeare work right across the street at the New York Theatre Workshop, the star-powered Othello that likewise concerns itself with the "collateral damage" wrought by a calculating sociopath. A sign of our times?  

More than is true with most presentations, the characters of Macbeth (Brandon Walker) and his lady (Erin Cronican) come off as minor and ill-prepared members of the aristocracy who are suddenly presented with the opportunity to rise to the highest ranks. All (!) they have to do is murder the sitting King Duncan (G. W. Reed), who conveniently is spending the night with them under light guard.    

As portrayed by Mr. Walker, Macbeth may be a worthy soldier, honored in the opening scene for his valor on the battlefield, but he makes for a lousy civilian leader. He is an out-of-control child whose toy gun has been replaced by a loaded one, and his milk-and-cookies with a flask of artificial courage. Egged on by his glory-seeking wife and by the prophesies of the three witches (Jane Kahler, Lisa-Marie Newton, and Candice Oden), Macbeth does the deed and sets into motion the crumbling of the kingdom and the destruction of any who stand in his way, including women and children and imagined enemies. 

There is no point in blaming things on fate. To pull in a line from another of Shakespeare's plays, "the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." Here, for instance, the witches come off not so much as key players bent on bringing Macbeth to his knees for their own cackling pleasure, but as passers-by whom Macbeth happens to run into. He is the "something wicked" who enters their world, and not the other way around. All that unfolds lies within Macbeth's capacity to control.     

While keeping up the relentless pacing of the production, the company has avoided any trimming of the play, bringing it in at just under two hours without intermission. Even at that pace, one thing that is nicely highlighted is the sad story of the murders of Lady Macduff and her children, and the later reaction of her husband to the news. These are touching moments that underscore the truly horrific damage that Macbeth has wrought, so that we are complicit in wanting to see his downfall.  

As an actor, Brandon Walker is perfectly suited to this role. Walker is never one to stand still, which fits the anxious, pacing, and often out-of-control Macbeth. By way of contrast, Erin Cronican gives us a quieter, more naturalistic Lady Macbeth, the woman-behind-the-man who whispers him into action. While they manage to hold it together, they come off as the perfect power couple. 

The rest of the cast, a mix of Equity and non-Equity actors, does not always mesh in tone, and sometimes the speed of the line readings results in a lack of clarity, but overall this is a strikingly contemporary take on "the Scottish play" that  captures the mood of the country right now and proves once again that Shakespeare's voice is one to be reckoned with for all times.

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  







  

RHINOCEROS: Antic Production of Classic Absurdist Play by The Seeing Place Theater

Brandon Walker and Logan Keeler
Photo by Justin Hoch

It takes a brave theater company to tackle Eugène Ionesco, that great and unruly master of the absurd whose plays soar with brilliant flights of imagination but also have a propensity for plunging into long expanses of rambling philosophy. That’s Ionesco: the theatrical manifestation of Icarus.

This was true of the 2009 Broadway production of Exit the King that featured a mesmerizing performance by Geoffrey Rush, a confusing one by Susan Sarandon, and, yes, transcendent feats of poetic aerialism coupled with lengthy sections of stultifying earthbound prose. It also was true of the 2014 Theatre for a New Audience production of The Killer that offered a gripping performance by Michael Shannon, a marvelously quirky one by Kristine Nielsen, and – here it comes again – an interminable monolog that brought the entire enterprise to a crashing halt during its final thirty minutes. 

Dauntless and surely aware of the built-in pitfalls, the independent theater company known as The Seeing Place has taken on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in performance through the end of this week at the Lynn Redgrave Theater, in rep with Marsha Norman’s Getting Out (reviewed here).

If you are unfamiliar with Rhinoceros, its title says it all; this is a play in which, over the course of the evening, all but one of the inhabitants of a town in France turn into rhinoceroses. First produced in 1959, the play can be viewed as a satire about the rise of fascism, a dig at bureaucratic dehumanization, or a screed against mindless conformity. More in keeping with today’s global political climate, arguments the townspeople have over the apparent invasion by African and Asian rhinos may remind you of the scarily xenophobic anti-immigrant uproar abroad and at home. 

While this production cannot avoid all of the digressive traps (which mostly occur in the second half), the good news is that it’s directed with a great antic hand by the company’s founding artistic director Brandon Walker, who nimbly keeps things bouncily aloft through most of the evening and even manages to get us past the talky bits to regroup for a reanimated airborne ending.     

Walker also stars as Ionesco’s ubiquitous Everyman character, Bérenger.  Here he manifests as a nebbishy, heavy-drinking, day-late-and-a-dollar-short sort of guy who would kinda like to conform to social norms but never seems to get around to following the “how to” advice of his would-be mentor and friend Jean (Logan Keeler). The play’s most famous scene involves the two of them. Bérenger visits Jean’s apartment in order to apologize for a falling out they’d had. During the scene (one that helped clinch a Tony Award for Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production), Jean gradually transforms into a rhinoceros. Mr. Keeler does an excellent job of portraying the metamorphosis through body language, a hoarsening of his voice, and some smears of makeup.  

The entire first half of the play is filled with great comic moments, such as when the character of Mrs. Boeuf (Lisa-Marie Newton) discovers that her husband has turned into a rhino. Instead of accepting the suggestion that she assuredly has legitimate grounds for divorce, she goes running after him, determined to stand by her beast no matter what. 

There is also some wackily overlapping dialog involving two separate conversations at a café. Jean and Bérenger are at one table discussing Jean's plan for straightening out his friend's life, while at the adjacent table, a conversation is taking place about the paradoxes involved in logical syllogisms. The two discussions cleverly collide when the same words and phrases are used in both. 

Periodically, all action is interrupted by the thundering sounds of rampaging rhinos, leading not to general panic, but to arguments over whether the animals have one or two horns. Everything is conducted at a brisk pace, with solid comic timing displayed by the entire cast. 

The second half (the play is written in three acts, but here it is split into two) opens cleverly with a motif borrowed from Night of the Living Dead and other zombie tales. Bérenger is holed up in his apartment trying to avoid contact with the rhinos that surround him. In the production, the cast members who have already transformed mill around and through the audience and help distract from an extended philosophic dialog by holding up signs representing the rhinos’ thoughts. “I was told there would be cake,” reads one, while another declares “this beats working for a living.” 

The play itself ends on a high note with Bérenger’s great declaration of self-determination: “I will not capitulate!” And if you decline to capitulate to Ionesco’s sometimes tangential meanderings, you’ll have a fine time immersing yourself in the fascinatingly absurd ridiculousness of it all.    

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

GETTING OUT: A Tough Row to Hoe For An Ex-Con in The Seeing Place's Provocative Production of an Early Play by Marsha Norman

Candice Oden and Erin Cronican

As much as anything, Marsha Norman’s 1978 play Getting Out – about a woman trying to pull her life together after serving an eight-year prison term – is a feminist cry for selfhood from someone who has very nearly lost hers. This lesser known work by the playwright who five years later would receive the Pulitzer Prize for ‘night, Mother is being given a richly layered production at the Lynn Redgrave Theater by The Seeing Place, a gutsy independent theater company that strives always to dig deeply into psychologically complex works.

Erin Cronican both directs and stars as Arlene, so tightly wound and passive in the early scenes that you might think she is trying to disappear altogether. As the play opens, she is getting settled into a dumpy apartment in Kentucky, far from the prison where she was incarcerated following a conviction for second degree murder. We learn very quickly that the irritatingly unassertive Arlene we meet is what remains of the enraged and rebellious Arlie, her younger self, played in parallel, sometimes overlapping scenes by Candice Oden. 

The playwright does not make it easy to sympathize with either Arlene (who has a penchant for falling into every trap laid out before her) or for Arlie, with her vicious and explosive temperament. Can Arlene truly believe that Bennie (Leo Goodman), the prison guard who quit his job and drove her 500 miles to her new home, is just being a Good Samaritan and doesn’t want anything else of her?  Can she be sucker enough to return to her former boyfriend and pimp Carl (Steve Carrieri), who fathered the child she gave up to foster care? And can she honestly imagine that after all this time she will be able to be reunited with that child?   

As for Arlie, we can easily see why she winds up in solitary confinement at the prison. She is a caged tiger, a danger to anyone with whom she comes into contact. And even as we get to know something of her background – victimized by a physically and sexually abusive father and the other men in her life, and rejected by her embittered mother (Carla Brandberg) – she is still someone with whom we would not want to spend much time.  We can be sympathetic in theory, but please don’t force us to deal with her. 

Arlene’s only lifeline is an upstairs neighbor, Ruby (Jane Kahler), herself an ex-con. Unlike Arlene, Ruby understands the reality of her situation, the necessity of managing on a low-paying dead-end job as a restaurant worker, and doing the best she can to make herself as comfortable as possible by passing the time playing cards and watching television. She reaches out a hand of friendship to Arlene, who has been so battered by life she doesn’t even know what a no-strings friendship can possibly mean. Arlene also does not comprehend what a terrible mistake she has made by completely turning her back on the rebel-with-a-cause Arlie, her discarded self whom she literally attempted to sever from her personality. (For this, she has to thank yet another man, the well-meaning but damaging prison chaplain.)  

Now in its seventh season, The Seeing Place is able to draw on a pool of talented New York actors. The cast as a whole is very good, with standouts being Ms. Brandberg as Arlene’s mother, showing us both her bitterness and her grudging effort to be supportive; and Mr. Carrieri as Carl, embodying both threat and sexual allure, so that we can see why Arlene is tempted to take up with him again.

Neither the playwright nor this production offers easy solutions, only reminding us that as a society we are perfectly willing to toss our ex-cons – even those like Arlene who are deemed to be "completely rehabilitated" – back into the same environment that led to their downfall in the first place. We all know about the high rate of recidivism for such as Arlie/Arlene, especially when they are left adrift with few prospects upon release, so her future is unpredictable at best. Only the tiniest shred of hope remains.

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

 

'Hamlet' and 'Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern' in Rep: Gutsy Productions by The Seeing Place

Voyeurism, simplified.

That is the motto of The Seeing Place, one of those amazing up-and-coming shoestring-budget theater companies that manage to pull off compelling and gutsy productions of challenging plays in various pockets of the city.

I first encountered The Seeing Place, now completing its fourth year of inventive work, when it mounted a thoroughly engaging and insightful production of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger—much more engaging and insightful, I might add, than the more recent Roundabout rage fest starring Matthew Rhys. 

Now the gang at The Seeing Place have taken on the daunting task of performing, in rotating rep, a pair of theatrical masterworks:  Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Tom Stoppard’s absurdist take on Hamlet, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.   

Same actors taking on the same roles in both plays, with at least some performances of both plays being presented on the same day.  Not unprecedented (Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests comes to mind), but still—what a tour-de-stamina for the actors. 

I thought of this while sitting in the stifling heat of the Sargent Theater on the fourth floor of the American Theatre of Actors on West 54^th Street this past weekend, while watching an undoubtedly sweltering troupe of dedicated performers act their hearts out.  (By now, a promised new air conditioning unit will have been installed, and last week’s heat wave dissipated, so both performers and audiences should be having a better time of it.) 

Of the two plays, it is Hamlet that fares better.  And given The Seeing Place’s emphasis on collaborative actor-driven productions, it makes sense that this would be the case.  Hamlet is an actor’s play, with each iconic role open to and able to support a wide range of interpretations.  

The production is dominated, as it should be, by the title character, here played with Ethan Hawke-like gusto by The Seeing Place’s founding artistic director Brandon Walker.  Mr. Walker brings out all of Hamlet’s neurotic indecision and pretty much erases the distinction between the character’s feigned madness and actual madness.  He is a charismatic and compelling actor, who brings to fruition the company’s motto (voyeurism, simplified) and draws the audience into his world. 

Of the rest of the cast, standouts include the company’s managing director Erin Cronican as an overprotected and vulnerable Ophelia; Jason Wilson and Janice Hall as the self-deluding and, apparently, quite-fond-of-drink King Claudius and Queen Gertrude; and David Arthur Bachrach, who nicely shows off his classical acting chops in the roles of the Ghost, the Player King, and Gravedigger I. 

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a far more difficult play to pull off.  It really does call for a strong directorial hand from someone with a real understanding of the requirements of Theater of the Absurd, which too often falls into the mode of theater of the “absurd” (not the same thing.) When done well, the results can be nothing short of a breathtaking journey into a surrealistic world.  For example, quite possibly the best production of any play I have ever seen was that of Ionesco’s The Chairs, as it was done to utter perfection and with great attention to detail by the Théâtre de Complicité in London about 15 years ago. 

But this is not generally the norm with productions of absurdist plays.  At last weekend’s performance of the Stoppard play, The Seeing Place company appeared to still be working through its approach, and there was rather too much of the absurd (as in silliness) and not enough of the Absurd's alternative reality for my taste.  Since the company puts a premium on allowing its actors “the freedom to discover the story with the audience,” it is likely they will find a stronger footing before the run is through. 

Meanwhile, if you agree with Shakespeare that “the play’s the thing,” I’d recommend an evening with Hamlet.  (Just check ahead of time to make sure the air conditioning is working!)

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