Either Stop the Milk Train Forever, or Find Its Poetic Soul

Someday, someone may be able to bring out whatever poetry lies hidden in Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.   But that’s unfortunately not true of those who have mounted the current production at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre.

Milk Train, which notably died in back-to-back short-lived productions on Broadway in the early 1960s, has stubbornly defied the best efforts of such skilled actresses as Hermione Baddeley, Tallulah Bankhead, and Elizabeth Ashley.

Now it has claimed its latest victim, Olympia Dukakis, who cannot tame the lead role of Flora “Sissy” Goforth despite a totally out-there performance that embodies the likes of Mae West, Norma Desmond, King Lear, and Kabuki drag queen. 

It’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with the play itself.   The general outline is this:  Mrs. Goforth, the wealthy, aging self-proclaimed “old swamp bitch from Georgia,” has holed up on a cliff-top villa along Italy’s Amalfi Coast in order to dictate her memoirs.  She has hired the recently widowed and much younger Frances Black, whom she dubs “Blackie,” to be at her beck and call 24/7—whenever she feels inspired to give a bit of rambling discourse about her life and loves.    

Into their lives comes Chris, a no-longer-young beach bum/artist/gigolo, who has picked up the nickname of “Angel of Death” for his reputation of latching onto dying rich widows. Although, if his intent is larcenous, he doesn’t seem to have prospered much through his efforts, and he enters the scene bedraggled, starving, and exhausted.

There is much that could be done with this combination of characters, a triangle involving some combination of love, lust, greed, and self-delusion--especially the latter.

Think of Norma Desmond, that most memorable of characters in Billy Wilder’s classic darkly comic film, Sunset Boulevard.  What makes the role of Norma so effective is the character’s absolute belief in herself.  That’s precisely what we should see in Mrs. Goforth and in Chris—two lost souls caught up on some gothic dreamscape of their own making.

But it just doesn’t work.  Williams’s gift as a writer was always in his poetic use of language and imagery.  Sadly, there is precious little of that gift to be found in this most prosaic of plays.  Every line is leaden and lands with a thud, and what should be ethereal is clunky and inane.

As to the production, only Maggie Lacey as Blackie comes off as appropriately cast and has a real handle on her role. 

If we are going to believe that Chris, even as a fading pretty boy, still holds some allure for young widows and women of a certain age—and, in this particular production, for flamboyant, bitchy gay men—then he should at least look like a fading pretty boy, and a very underfed one that that.  For example, Tab Hunter was well-cast to play against Tallulah Bankhead’s Mrs. Goforth in the play’s very brief run early in 1964.  Here Darren Pettie neither looks the part nor brings out any of the personality of a successful gigolo or beach boy or artist. 

As for Olympia Dukakis, while she certainly is a formidable actress, she loses the battle for any sort of believability every time she opens her mouth to speak.  Swamp bitch from Georgia? I don’t think so.  South Boston, maybe, but not Tennessee Williams’s South.  Wearing a Harpo Marx wig and channeling Mae West as Cho-Cho-San in drag doesn’t exactly help sell the image.   

Credit sound designer John Gromada, who has managed to give us a real sense of the sea tide and waves roughly smashing into the rocks at the base of the cliff.  Not sure of the intended imagery, but it gives the play the thrum of inevitability and the relentlessness of nature that is otherwise missing.  Despite the failures of the play itself, surely director Michael Wilson, who was not averse to changing the gender of one of the characters, could have done a little more bending in order to find a better balance between reality and delusion.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Scratching My Head

One real advantage of living in New York is that I am able to indulge my affinity for the theater five to ten times a month. But even at that, I have no desire to see everything. I pick and choose shows that I believe I will find compelling and that will allow me to willingly suspend my disbelief for a period of time. With every performance I attend, I go in the hope of being caught up in some combination of the playwright’s way with words, the individual and collective performances of the actors, the vision of the director, the way the set design contributes to the overall production, and, of course, if it’s a musical, the music, lyrics, singing, choreography, and the interplay between the musicians and the singers and dancers.

Rarely does everything fall into place, but I am not a demanding perfectionist as a theatergoer. What I do expect is professionalism from a professional theater company; not to be condescended to as a member of the audience; and not to be treated to smoke and mirrors in lieu of a good script.

Since New Year’s Day is meant for reflection, I have decided to take this opportunity to look back over the first half of the 2010-2011 theater season and the two dozen shows I have seen on and off Broadway. I have to say that more than a few of these have left me scratching my head for one reason or another, so rather than a play-by-play overview, I thought I might share a few of my moments of puzzlement before we plunge into the second half of the season.

Let me start with the one show that left me puzzled not over its conception or execution, but over its failure to connect with a larger audience. That would be John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical, The Scottsboro Boys. I am as confused by the early demise of this Tony-worthy show as I was about last year’s puzzling failure, the excellent revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, attracted no audience whatsoever.

The Scottsboro Boys provided originality, strong performances by a very talented and energetic cast, a top-notch score, and fine directing and choreography by Susan Stroman. The show aroused some controversy because of its use of the minstrel show format to tell the real-life story of a group of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in deeply segregated Alabama in the early 1930s. I can understand the discomfort associated with the nature of the plot device, although anyone seeing the show would, I should hope, recognize its use as a means of satirizing and skewering racism and bigotry.

Previously, The Scottsboro Boys had done well at Off Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre and spent additional time polishing itself up in a production at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater before heading uptown, where it landed in fine form—or so I thought when I saw it. And yet it is gone, with just a small possibility of renewal through a drive to bring the show back to Broadway for at least another short run prior to the Tony Awards. For information and to participate in that effort, I direct you to the website http://scottsboromusical.com.

Now, however, let’s turn our attention to some different kinds of head-scratchers I encountered in the last several months. And I promise, not one word about Spider-Man.

A trio of esteemed veteran playwrights with long and successful careers and a not insubstantial pile of awards all came up short with new or newish plays that left me thinking of unhappy metaphors like that of wells running dry. I speak of Edward Albee, John Guare, and Peter Nichols, who gave us, respectively, Me, Myself, & I; A Free Man of Color; and Lingua Franca.

None of these plays was a total failure by any means, but none approached the level of expectations for work from such original and skilled playwrights. The first of these was an absurdist comedy at heart but came off as pretty inane; the second was a confusing mind-trip of a history pageant; the third harked back—perhaps intentionally, but not very interestingly—to the “angry young man” post World War II era of playwriting by the likes of John Osborne. I do have to wonder if any of these plays would have been produced had they not carried the by-lines of their well-respected authors.

Another puzzler was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which, despite some A-List casting and its well-regarded director, never seemed to jell. What Woman on the Verge needed most, in my view, was some serious editing, including the elimination of several roles and recasting of some of the others. The standouts were the set design and projections (by Michael Yeargan and Sven Ortel, respectively), and the ditzy comic performance of Laura Benanti. Therefore, despite the show’s weaknesses, I do expect to see a couple of Tony nominations.

Also on my list is Elling, an adaptation of a quirky movie of the same title and a trilogy of novels by the Norwegian writer Ingvar Ambjørnsen. The play, about two unlikely roommates trying to survive in the world upon being released from a mental institution, starred Denis O’Hare and Brandan Fraser, both of whom tried their utmost to create real characters out of these two oddball personalities. But Elling was a head-scratcher from the outset, and other than a couple of bright moments by the leads and a few seconds of inspired wackiness by a game Jennifer Coolidge, I can’t begin to guess why anyone thought this might work on Broadway.

There are other shows I could talk about, including the clunky and amateurish production of Dracula, now in previews at the Little Shubert Theatre, but I wanted to focus here on major Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, where the effort was made to present something original and different, and that represented work by well-established theater professionals. While I have found the shows I have discussed to be puzzling, none was a total artistic failure, and one, The Scottsboro Boys, met pretty much all of my criteria for a top-notch show.

It just goes to show, theater is like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get!

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

A Small Fire: A Lesson in Loss and Gain

Michele Pawk and Reed Birney

It’s unsettling to be a woman on Broadway these days.

No, I’m not referring to the announcement that Natalie Mendoza, a lead actress in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, is leaving the show after suffering a concussion during the troubled musical’s first preview performance.

Rather, I am thinking of the spate of current shows, both on and off Broadway, depicting women suffering from any number of mental and physical illnesses. To name a few that come to mind, there’s treatment-resistant bipolar disorder in Next to Normal; post-coma trauma in A Kind of Alaska; Valium addiction and loss of self in Angels in America, and a lengthy stint in a mental institution in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Now we have a new play to add to the list—A Small Fire, written by Adam Bock, and directed by Trip Cullman, currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons.

Michele Pawk, a versatile musical and dramatic actress, gives a sharp-elbowed yet ultimately moving performance as Emily Bridges, a fiercely independent tough-as-nails building contractor who is stricken by a cascading series of physical losses that force her into what she considers to be a most humiliating position of having to depend on others.

The first sign of trouble occurs when Emily is unable to smell the smoke from a burning napkin that has caught fire after she has accidentally left the stove on. Emily’s long-suffering husband John (well-acted by the estimable Reed Birney) teases her about her absent-mindedness, until they both find out that Emily has a very real disease, of unknown origin or treatment, that quickly spreads from the loss of smell to a loss of taste, and later, of sight and of hearing.

The core of the plot focuses on Emily’s reaction to these losses, and the extent to which she is able or unable to accept them as her world closes in on her.

All of this would be merely an intellectual exercise if the playwright hadn’t been able to find the emotional core as well, and, compellingly and winningly, A Small Fire is as much about personal relationships as it is a medical mystery.

More specifically, it is about a marriage that has held together through many years, however mismatched the couple may seem to the outside world. Emily and John clearly have a history that binds them together, even if their daughter Jenny (played with just the right amount of twenty-something ego-centrism by Celia Keenan-Bolger) finds her mother to be difficult, rude, and distant, and frequently wonders aloud why her gentle father stays with Emily.

The cast is rounded out by Victor Williams as Billy, Emily’s right-hand man in her construction business. Emily and Billy share an ease of familiarity as well as their own history—strictly platonic, in case you were wondering—that she does not have with her own family. Their friendship, while perhaps a little shoehorned into the play as a whole, allows us to see another side of Emily.

All told, Adam Bock has shaped a solid play about a woman and a family in crisis. We do worry about Emily as she faces an inner struggle about her own future—a struggle that, to Mr. Bock’s credit and in keeping with Emily’s reticence, is never spoken of directly but which we nevertheless understand she is going through until the very end.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Spider-Man: Nobody Knows What You Are

Despite the fact that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark does not officially open until February 7—the exact date being a moveable feast that should be written lightly in pencil on the calendar—the schadenfreude crowd has been circling Broadway’s Foxwoods Theater like a flock of ravenous vultures. The New York Post’s Michael Riedel has been especially vitriolic, predicting the show will be an “epic flop.”

Is it any good? Can it be saved? What about all of those delays, canceled performances, technical glitches, and injuries to cast members? And what on earth has Julie Taymor, the show’s co-writer and its director, done with the $65 million said to be the cost of mounting Spider-Man?

To judge by her interviews, Ms. Taymor appears to be quite unperturbed by the gathering of those eager to feast on the carcass of her show. She could be faking it and actually may be quite concerned about the possibility of Spider-Man’s sinking into oblivion under the weight of its own hubris. Or she may simply believe that she and her creative team will be able to make sufficient adjustments to the show so that when it finally has its formal opening, it will be quite ready for prime time.

But I would like to propose another explanation for Ms. Taymor’s sanguinity. Perhaps, as far as Spider-Man is concerned, success on Broadway is largely irrelevant.

I recently attended a performance. Here is my take on things.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was never conceived as a Broadway show in the first place—at least not in the traditional sense of offering a compelling story, plot-related songs, and theatrical acting. It was always planned as an “arena show,” to be performed in the U. S. and abroad before audiences numbering in the thousands, a majority of whom would be sitting a great distance from the stage.

The script does a minimal job of retelling the familiar Spider-Man story and does so only in Act I. The dialog is perfunctory. The performances are “large” and loudly amplified so as to strip the sketchy characters of any humanity or intimacy. In short, Spider-Man has been designed from the outset with the purpose of showcasing the visual effects and the accompanying score by rock superstars Bono and The Edge of the band U2.

Much of the criticism to date has been aimed at Taymor's chutzpah for failing to work on Spider-Man out of town, so that it might arrive on Broadway in fairly good shape. But here’s a thought: what if Broadway itself is the tryout town, where Spider-Man is being readied as an event to take on the road? Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if were announced that U2 will be performing the music live against the backdrop of Spider-Man as it travels the globe.

If you think of Spider-Man in these terms, the cursory stab at story-telling that eats up the overly long Act I is almost irrelevant, and the nightmarish imagery of Act II—which has been attacked by many as a confusing and disconnected mess—offers up a visual and auditory extravaganza that works just fine. Think of Spider-Man as being divided not into two acts, but two variations on a theme. Act I takes its inspiration from the well-known story of Peter Parker, the teenager who is transformed by the bite of a genetically altered spider; Act II is like a jazz riff on the theme of Spider-Man. If you need to find a theatrical logic to Act II, think of it is a fever dream brought on by the bite from a toxic arachnid.

The sets, by George Tsypin, are quite good, by the way. Act I has the appearance of a comic book; Act II, with its hallucinogenic quality, has the look of a graphic novel. There are also very compelling digital projections by Kyle Cooper, colorful costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and lots of aerial maneuvers, designed by Scott Rogers. All of these will serve nicely as Spider-Man hits the road.

As for being an “epic flop,” I don’t think it matters much what happens to the initial $65 million outlay. Spider-Man has a real shot at finding its financial success around the country and around the world—and the heck with Broadway.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Hope Springs Eternal!

All right. So the fall theater season was rather on the tepid side.  Still, ever searching for a grand and glorious evening of theater-going, I am looking forward to seeing a number of promising new productions in the coming months.

Let’s begin, shall we, with the coming week and three new productions on my schedule.

First off, there’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, now in previews at the Foxwoods Theater.  What can I say? I cannot resist going to see what $65 million buys these days.  If there is no such thing as bad publicity, then Julie Taymor, Bono and The Edge, and the rest of the creative team should be thrilled by the buzz generated by stories of major technical difficulties, numerous injuries, questionable artistic choices, multiple delays, canceled performances, and predictions of financial doom that seem to have made Spider-Man a must-see.  If they can pull this off, it will be a major triumph of willpower and determination as much as anything.  For a cute spoof of the woes plaguing Spider-Man, you might wish to view Conan O’Brien’s skit at http://www.tbs.com/video/index.jsp?oid=237070.

The second show I will be seeing in the days ahead is one I hope will be a stylish and funny production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest, presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theater.  Certainly the cast is a strong one, including, among others, veterans Dana Ivey, Paxton Whitehead, and the indomitable Brian Bedford as the equally indomitable Lady Bracknell. Let’s see how Mr. Bedford compares with my thus-far-unchallenged memory of Dame Edith Evans when he utters one my favorite lines from any play:  “Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture; it is most indecorous.”

I plan to wrap up my theater-going week by attending a preview of the world premiere of a new play by Adam Bock, who snagged an Obie Award in 2007 for The Thugs.  When it was reviewed The New York Times, critic Jason Zinoman called The Thugs (which I did not see) “chillingly realistic and pointedly absurd.”  Sounds like an intriguing mix, so I look forward to seeing Bock’s new play, which is launching previews at the Playwright’s Horizons.  It is called A Small Fire, and is described thusly: “When a tough-as-nails contractor finds her senses slipping on the brink of her daughter’s wedding, the impact on her family is nothing less than seismic.”   
Playwright’s Horizons is offering discounted tickets, information for which I am happy to pass along.

Order by December 31 with code SMGR and tickets are only: 

$40* (reg. $70) for all performances December 16-30, 2010 

$55 (reg. $70) for all performances January 1-23, 2011

HOW TO ORDER: 

Order online at www.playwrightshorizons.org. Use code SMGR. 

Or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily) 

Or present a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 W 42^nd Street (Noon-8pm daily).

*A limited number of $40 discounted tickets will be available for purchase. Subject to availability. Valid only in select rows.

Further along in the season, some I the shows for which I carry the torch of hope are War Horse, coming to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater from across the Pond; The People in the Picture, a new musical starring Donna Murphy; the final two installments of Signature Theater Company’s season devoted to works by Tony Kushner (The Illusion, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures), and revivals of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves, Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, and Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig.   

I see lots of potential in these upcoming shows, so let me just end by wishing us all—as my friend Bill would say—Happy New Season!

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

The Coward: Like Gilbert and Sullivan, But Without the Songs

Apart from the blood and guts (literally) that spew across the stage of the Duke Theater, playwright Nick Jones has given us a clever, often laugh-out-loud romp of a tale in The Coward, now previewing as part of Lincoln Center’s LCT3 productions of new works by up-and-coming playwrights.

Part Monty Python, part W. S. Gilbert (i. e. Gilbert and Sullivan without Mr. Sullivan's music), part Saturday Night Live, The Coward tells the tale of one Lucidus Culling, the scaredy-cat scion of an 18^th century English nobleman whose sole aim in life is to see to it that the family’s honor is upheld through a never-ending round of duels—which explains why Lucidus is the family’s only-surviving son, a status he longs to preserve.

Picture Pee-wee Herman without his confident self-assuredness, or the Cowardly Lion as he quivers before the throne of the Wizard of Oz, and you will get a sense of how Lucidus (performed with great timid flair by Jeremy Strong) faces the world. 

Poor Lucidus.  All he wants is to be left alone to contemplate the beauty of butterflies or to join in tart-tasting picnics with his foppish friends Robert and Gavin (well acted by Steven Boyer and Stephen Ellis), who seem like he-men in comparison, or to pine over the distant but beautiful and wealthy Isabelle Dupree.   He also knows what he most definitely does not want, and that is to die in a duel.

That Lucidus is a disappointment to his father (a blustery Richard Poe) is an epic understatement.  So, with great reluctance, and in order to get into Daddy’s good graces, Lucidus agrees to fight a duel with the next person who manages to offend.  Not surprisingly, he targets a decrepit, blind old man—failing to understand that the rules of nobility allow for the old man to appoint his own strong and skilled son to stand in for him.

How Lucidus deals with this unexpected turn of events makes up the rest of Act I.  Suffice it to say, by Act II he has acquired a new reputation that has pleased his father to no end and has caught the amorous attention of Isabelle (played in grand Gilbert and Sullivan mode by Kristen Schaal).  

The play is aided to no small end by Gabriel Berry's dandified costumes, including some gloriously over-the-top hats.  Between Berry's work here, and the costumes created by Ann Hould-Ward for A Free Man of Color, theatrical closets are now bursting with 18th century fashion. 

If I were to make one suggestion, that would be to trim some of Act II, where the high comic style wanders into the world of too-much, including an abundance of blood, gore, and mean-spirited dialog.  The playwright seems to want to add some, in my view, unnecessary satiric bite to what had been a more subtle but still clear message underpinning the silliness. 

Still, Nick Jones is a smart and witty writer who has given us an original and clever play.  And mark The Coward as another feather in the cap of director Sam Gold, who is making quite a name for himself heading up such productions as last year’s Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens (both by Annie Baker), and the current sold-out production of Tigers Be Still (by Kim Rosenstock), and who has been appointed as the youngest associate artist of the Roundabout Theater Company.  Mr. Gold and the three playwrights mentioned here are in their 20s and 30s and represent a wave of wonderful young creative artists that are keeping the theater world moving gloriously into the future. 

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

A Free Man of Color Brings Back Memories of the Psychedelic '60s

So…do you remember The Firesign Theater? Does the name ring a distant bell of recognition? If so, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how you might prepare yourself for a visit to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, where A Free Man of Color, a new play by John Guare, is now in previews.

For those of you who don’t know—or can’t quite recall—Firesign Theater was a comedy troupe that performed on radio during the height of the 1960s psychedelic era and produced record albums with such titles as Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers. The group’s modus operandi was surrealistic, stream-of-conscious wordplay, best appreciated in a state of heightened awareness induced by any number of medicinal herbs.

Or so I'm told.

In any event, A Free Man of Color, with its cast of 26 spinning under the whirlwind direction of George C. Wolfe, is an eyeful of something-or-other that is difficult to fathom in a state of cold sobriety.

Let me take a stab at explaining. Remember, though, that we are now entering the realm of speculation.

Act I takes place in the wild and woolly New Orleans of 1801. The lead performer is the title character, who goes by the name of Jacques Cornet, played with wild abandon by Jeffrey Wright. Cornet is a man of property who considers himself to be an influential member of the upper class, an intellectual, and an unparalleled womanizer. That he is the mulatto offspring of his white plantation owner father and his black slave mother is irrelevant—at least in his eyes.

Aided and abetted by his own slave, Murmur (played with great élan by Mos, the actor formerly known as Mos Def), Cornet offers up what I take to be a play he himself has written, in a style that co-opts William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife, along with odd bits of Moliere and Shakespeare—filtered through a manic New Orleans Mardi Gras sensibility. There is something very off-kilter, though, so that the only way I could make sense of it was to think of Cornet as pretty much unschooled as well as self-important and delusional–kin perhaps, to the bipolar young hustler who calls himself "Paul Poitier" in Guare's Six Degrees of Separation.

With Act II, reality starts to intrude, and Guare switches gears by providing us with a history lesson on the unfolding of the early phase of what would later be referred to as “Manifest Destiny,” the expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea. New Orleans has been swept up in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and it is no longer a place of unbridled freedom.

The scenes flash by like an out-of-control carousel, featuring—among others--Thomas Jefferson (John McMartin, how nice it is to see ya), Meriwether Lewis (an enthusiastic Paul Dano), James Monroe (Arnie Burton), Walter Reed (Brian Reddy), and Napoleon Bonaparte (performed with scene-stealing hilarity by Triney Sandoval). It’s not for nothing that there are over two dozen performers, several of whom—like veteran actress Veanne Cox—play multiple roles.

In all of this mayhem, Cornet is caught up in the riptide of history.  When he is finally washed up on shore, he finds himself in a much different world than the one he inhabited just a few years earlier.

John Guare is definitely an important playwright, having given us such indelible works as the aforementioned Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves (set to be revived in the spring). Thus, I am loath to dismiss A Free Man of Color as merely a spaced-out opium pipe dream of a play.

So, I’ll just say that if you should go, do not expect to fully understand what is taking place before you. I’m not even certain that Mr. Guare or Mr. Wolfe fully understands what they have unleashed.

But both the director and the actors have leaped aboard in a great act of blind faith and are giving it their all. The same is true of Ann Hould-Ward, who has created an exploding rainbow of colorful costumes, and of David Rockwell, whose sets are both eye-catching and designed in such as way so that they fly on and off as quickly as the performances.

You may leave the theater scratching your head, but you may also be surprised to find that the visceral images linger. If so, you might just want to pull out your old copy of Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and give it a whirl.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

After the Revolution Comes the Revelation: Then What Do We Do?

More than 50 years after his death, Joseph McCarthy, the late and little-lamented “junior Senator from Wisconsin,” has taken to haunting the New York theater scene.

The malignant spirit of the one-time powerful Senator, who ruined lives and careers by leveling charges of espionage and subversive activities during a reign of anti-Communist fervor in the 1950s, is evoked in no fewer than four current productions: Zero Hour, the one-man show about actor Zero Mostel; the revival of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, Angels in America; a production of Personal Enemy, an early play by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton, and the New York premiere of a play by Amy Herzog, called After the Revolution.

Herzog is one of the young playwrights I have written about, like Annie Baker, Ellen Fairey, and Kristoffer Diaz, who are bringing original voices and ideas to the theater scene and whose work speaks to a broad audience beyond their own same-age peers. After the Revolution, a play about three generations of American leftists, is being given a stellar production at the Playwrights Horizons, thanks in large part to a strong ensemble of actors, including the always-marvelous Lois Smith, who celebrated her “big eight-o” earlier this month, as the matriarch of the clan, and the always-marvelous David Margulies as an old family friend. It is worth the price of admission just to be able to watch these two veterans remind us what stage acting is all about.

In After the Revolution, the central character is Emma (Katharine Powell), who, in her mid-twenties, represents the third generation in her family of proud Marxist-inspired Americans. As “keeper of the flame” and head of a foundation named for her much-revered grandfather—iconicized as one of McCarthy’s targets—Emma is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about the past and come to terms with her loving but manipulative father (Peter Friedman).

Emma is dedicated, like the rest of her family (save for some for some sneered-upon cousins), to supporting leftist causes. Indeed, the foundation she helms is engaged in a campaign on behalf of a very real death-row inmate, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains at the center of an ongoing debate over the fairness of his trial and of the death penalty itself.

Unfortunately, Emma’s personal angst as she strives to find her own place in the grand scheme of things tends to overwhelm what could be a very interesting debate on politics and social justice—something that would surely resonate in today’s political climate. It’s not that the family drama isn’t interesting; it is. I just longed for more of that good old radical, progressive, leftist talk, most of which is left up to Ms. Smith’s character to espouse; for instance, I found her unchallenged take on Stalin to be one of the most telling moments in the play.

Still there is much to commend. Director Carolyn Cantor has shaped the company into a cohesive and believable family unit. In addition to the fine performances by the actors identified above, Mare Winningham, as Emma’s stepmother, does an excellent job treading the line as mediator between the stubborn father-daughter pair.

Seeing After the Revolution, which Herzog has said was inspired by events in her own family, makes me hope that she will come back to this story one day and examine more deeply the complexities of the era that allowed for Joseph McCarthy to shake up so many lives, so that we are still feeling the impact today.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Free and Discounted Tickets and a Call for Submissions

Free Theater Tickets

Theaters around the country are currently participating in an event in which they are giving away free tickets--no catch.

If you are interested, check out www.freenightoftheater.net. If you don't see anything you want--or if what you want is already sold out--check again later, tomorrow, or over the next couple of weeks. New performances are added pretty much daily.

Or take a chance on a less familiar play or venue. It's got to be worth at least the price of admission!

Discounted Tickets

Websites like Playbill.com, Theatermania.com and Broadwaybox.com offer access to discounted New York theater tickets to the general public—no membership fees involved.

Sometimes theaters themselves provide these discounts directly through last-minute “rush” sales to students or to the general public, through lotteries, or during previews while a show is still working out the kinks.

Case in point: Playwrights Horizons, in its fifth decade as “home to new American theater,” currently is offering discounted tickets for the New York premiere of After The Revolution, a new play about a family confronting secrets of the past, written by Amy Herzog. You can read more about the play at the Playwrights Horizons website: www.playwrightshorizons.org.

If you are intrigued, Playwrights Horizons has approached me about letting readers know about its discounted ticket policy, and, as a fan of the organization’s work, I am happy to oblige.

Order by November 9 with code ARGR and tickets are only:

$40* (reg. $55) for the first week of performances Oct. 21 – Oct. 28

$45 (reg. $55) for all performances Oct. 29 – Nov. 28

HOW TO ORDER:

Order online at www.playwrightshorizons.org. Use code APGR.

Call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily)

Present a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 West 42nd Street (Noon-8pm daily).

*A limited number of $40 discounted tickets will be available for purchase. Subject to availability. Valid only in select rows.

Open Submissions for 10-minute Plays

Here is an exciting opportunity for aspiring or active playwrights.

Red Bull Theater has announced that it is seeking new 10-minute plays for its spring short play reading day.

New plays of no more than 10 pages, written in heightened language, in verse, with classic themes, adaptations of classics, or that otherwise fit the company’s mission and history are welcome.

Visit www.redbulltheater.com/Collaborate for details.

I'll post progress reports on my own efforts as we approach the deadline in December.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Hosannah for Angels in America!

Let me be unequivocal. The Signature Theatre Company’s production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork Angels in America is astounding.

“Astounding” is not a term I use loosely or often, so let me provide some context.

Let me begin by saying that I am unencumbered by memories of the legendary original Broadway production from 1993. I did not see it and had to settle for reading the published script and then, later, watching the HBO film version. Neither of these experiences prepared me the play’s sheer theatricality.

I do not have a clue as to how Kushner pulled off such an astonishing juggling act, brilliantly weaving together so many complex ideas: the AIDS crisis, sexual identity, gender roles, the nature of God, U. S. history in the second half of the twentieth century, legal ethics, Judaism, Mormonism, race relations, the healthcare industry, medical ethics, damage to the ozone layer, prescription drug abuse, mental instability, co-dependent behaviors, marriage, loyalty, friendship, and others I am sure I am leaving out. Somehow, all of these come together within a rich tapestry of reality and fantasy, punctured clichés, surprising turns, unexpected humor, and deep, raw, and keenly felt emotions.

This is especially true in Part I of the two-part play, Millennium Approaches. In it, Kushner manages to pull everything into breathtakingly perfect balance and offers a most extraordinary yin and yang of intellectual content and human heart, comparable, in my view, only to Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Arcadia, which debuted in London, interestingly enough, the same year as Angels in America made it to Broadway.

Given the play’s many intertwined themes, it would be difficult to parse the plot. Angels in America takes place mostly in New York City in 1986-1987. The central characters are Prior Walter, a thirty-year-old gay New Yorker who has just learned he has full-blown AIDS; Roy Cohn, the real-life right-wing attorney best known as Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, who also has gotten AIDS through sexual contact with men but who adamantly eschews the “homosexual” label; and Harper Pitt, whose mental stability is collapsing along with her marriage to a closeted gay Mormon.

Now would probably be a good time to declare that Christian Borle as Prior Walter, Frank Wood as Roy Cohn, and Zachary Quinto as Prior’s conflicted boyfriend Louis give three truly indelible performances. This is a play that portrays ragged emotions at their most heightened and unvarnished, and one can only imagine the great sense of trust that had to have developed among the actors, and between the actors and director Michael Greif. There is not a false note to be found.

Zoe Kazan seems to me to have been miscast as Harper—looking too young and sounding more like a ditzy California blonde than a Salt Lake City Mormon---but she and all of the rest of the cast perform with all the love and attention and mutual respect anyone could ever hope to see on stage. The rest of this wonderful company is made up of Robin Bartlett, whom I loved as Harper’s mother-in-law Hannah and as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who has come for a deathwatch over her prosecutor, Roy Cohn; Bill Heck as Harper’s lost soul of a husband, trying and failing to keep himself and Harper on what he believes to be the “straight” and narrow path; Billy Porter as Belize, gay friend to both Prior and Louis and a nurse working with AIDS patients; and Robin Weigert as The Angel.

Without the budget of a major Broadway production, the Signature Theatre Company has done some wonderful work through the use of movable sets, projections, and black-clad stagehands. It is only in Part II of Angels in America, Perestroika, that things get a little muddy, especially with the introduction of a new plot element about heaven and the struggle of the angels to keep things together after God has taken off for parts unknown. For me, this is where the juggling fails to keep all of the balls in the air, and the connections are unclear. Still, Part II has some of the play’s most transcendent scenes, focusing as it does on love, forgiveness, and acceptance. Robin Bartlett shines in several of these scenes, and I wish we could have had more of her and fewer angels in Perestroika.

Still, Tony Kushner and all involved with the Signature Theatre Company have given us a wonderful gift with this production of Angels in America.

Did I mention that it is astounding?

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Bloody Bloody What??? When Sexypants Ain't Enuf!

Gotta say, they’ve come up with a brilliant promotional scheme for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the emo-rock musical that has just transferred from off-Broadway’s Public Theater to Broadway’s Bernard Jacobs Theatre: “History just got all sexypants!”

The posters and the other advertising materials carry that slogan and display the rear end of a dude in tight black jeans, with an American flag handkerchief sticking out of the left pocket and a holstered pistol on the right hip.

That the dude is a rock star version of the seventh president of the United States, the populist Andrew Jackson of the title, makes for an intriguing and imaginative image.

Unfortunately, from my perspective at least, that’s as good as it gets, despite energetic performances by the members of the cast, headed up by Benjamin Walker in the title role. The show, heavily dependent on fratboy humor and vaguely homophobic burlesque-y comedy—think Saturday Night Live on a particularly bad Saturday night—is just not terribly successful in pulling together style and substance to sell itself as the political satire that lies underneath the layers of inanity.

If watching Andrew Jackson pandering to the people and playing to their xenophobic views of the native American Indian population reminds you of the shenanigans of the Tea Party crowd, that may say more about what you bring to the show than what it brings to you.

In all fairness, I will say that many in the 20-to-30-something crowd that filled the theater during the preview performance I attended laughed heartily at every gag and pretty much every time a cast member uttered the “F” word or its well-known variation, the “MF” word. Since that pretty much included every other word, at least some in the theater had a good time.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

Mrs. Warren's Secret Is Out of the Bag

Remember those old movies—the ones in which Olivia de Havilland or Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck played a mother who gives up everything for her child? Generally these characters had been born on the wrong side of the tracks yet were determined that their own child would grow up “respectable,” with a “proper education” and social standing. Typically, these women’s sacrifices would be unappreciated, and their offspring would wind up being so respectable that they would ultimately turn their backs on their uncouth moms.

These films make a good lens through which to watch George Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a revival of which is now in preview at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre.

One of Shaw’s early plays (1893), Mrs. Warren’s Profession brings out two of the playwright’s favorite themes: the plight of women who had to rely on men for their financial support, and the evils of capitalism.

Like filmdom’s sacrificing mothers, Kitty Warren (Cherry Jones) has made sure that her daughter Vivie (Sally Hawkins in her Broadway debut) has had every advantage back home in England, while she, Kitty, has generally stayed away, ostensibly leading the glamorous life in the great cities of Europe.

The play opens as Vivie and Mum are about to have one of their rare reunions, and it doesn’t take long for Vivie to realize that her mother's profession is the world’s oldest one.

Like the children in those old movies, Vivie is put off by the revelation, but Shaw has a way of putting his own twist to things. He has written a deeply touching scene at the end of Act I, in which Vivie comes to understand the dire straits that led her mother into the profession as a young woman. This is the story behind the story that you never heard from Bette Davis’s lips, and it is a compelling one. This scene is beautifully played out by Ms. Jones and Ms. Hawkins, alone on the too-huge stage of the American Airlines Theatre. It’s a powerful moment, one that is likely to leave the audience with moist eyes.

Unfortunately, Act I is followed by Act II, which sadly unravels the good feelings between the two women. Vivie learns far more about her mother’s life than she would have wanted to know, while Shaw gets to inveigh against the greed-inducing influence of capitalism.

With Shaw, the women’s roles are generally more complex and well-developed than those of the male characters, and that is certainly true with Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

The men in the play are all just types: the cynical businessman, Sir George Crofts (Mark Harelik); the effete family friend Mr. Praed (Edward Hibbert); the young and charming ne’er-do-well, Frank Gardener (Adam Driver); and Frank's father, Reverend Samuel Gardner (Michael Siberry), the crotchety old preacher-with-his-own-little-secret. Young Frank and Sir George, who is Kitty Warren’s business partner, are vying for Vivie’s hand in marriage. The former wants to marry her for her mother’s money; the latter wants to buy her outright. The goings-on take place under the direction of Doug Hughes, who has given us a steadfast if unexciting production. The sets, quite elaborate for a Roundabout production, were designed by Scott Pask, who has won a number of Tonys and other awards for his set work. Credit Pask for making the best possible use of the cavernous stage.

The performances by the women, Cherry Jones and Sally Hawkins, are the production’s real strengths, and—as this was an early preview that I saw—they are likely to get better over time. Of the men, I’d like to give a nod to Adam Driver, who has been proving himself to be quite a strong and interesting young actor in such diverse recent Off Broadway productions as The Forest at the Classic Stage Company and Little Doc at the Rattlestick. Keep an eye out for Mr. Driver; his career is definitely on the ascendant.

As for Mrs. Warren’s Profession, I would recommend seeing it if you are interested in Shaw and haven’t seen the play before. There is enough wit and intelligence in the writing itself to make the visit worthwhile.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.