Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away!

Angela Lewis, Nikiya Mathis, and Cherise Boothe in 'Milk Like Sugar'

Depending on your point of view, Milk Like Sugar, the gritty and engrossing new play by Kirsten Greenidge now in previews at Playwrights Horizons, is either an inspirational tale of potential and hope, or a cautionary tale warning us what the expression "impossible odds" really means.

Poised on a pinpoint midway between the two possibilities is Annie (Angela Lewis), an African-American teenager living in the inner city and surrounded at home, in school, and through her circle of friends by an unspoken conspiracy aimed at keeping her mired in place.

As the play opens, we encounter Annie and her friends Margie and Talisha (call her “T,” she insists) hanging out at what at first sight appears to be a hair salon, but is, in actuality, a tattoo parlor.  Annie, whose sixteenth birthday is being celebrated during a night out with the girls, has decided (or has been peer pressured) into getting her first ink.

Margie (Nikiya Mathis) and T (Cherise Boothe) sport rather large images of roses, but Annie, still clinging to her innocence, wants only a tiny ladybug, a reminder of the nickname her mother used to call her.     

While they are waiting for the tattoo artist (LeRoy McClain) to show up, the girls start talking, sipping “water” (a bottle of one of those sweet pastel-colored “alcopops” for whom teenage girls are the target consumers), and texting on their cell phones.  

For a while, it all seems lightweight and relatively harmless (depending on how you feel about the combination of teenage girls, alcoholic beverages, and tattoos).  Even as Margie and T are texting their boyfriends, the clean-cut, pony-tailed Annie is mostly waiting for her neglectful mother (Tonya Pinkins) to call from work to wish her a happy birthday.

But don’t be taken in by the lighthearted tone, for there is some serious stuff going on.  The texting, we come to realize, is more along the lines of “sexting” with various boyfriends and male acquaintances, and the girl talk turns to a pledge that all three will become pregnant at the same time—it hardly matters by whom.  For Margie, who is already “pg,” as she puts it, and for T, who is working on it, this is no joke.  They both are convinced that having a baby will give them someone cute, sweet, and cuddly to love, and raising their children together will solidify their bond.

They have already picked out a match for Annie in Malik (J. Mallory-McCree), a senior at the high school they all attend. Malik is clear-eyed enough to have a vision of himself finishing high school and getting into college, and he has no intention of getting caught in a trap that would lock him into the kind of life he has grown up in. 

He befriends Annie, though, and tries to get her to consider her own potential—something she has never really thought about before.  Annie also gets advice from a misfit classmate, Keera (Adrienne C. Moore), who is branded a loser—especially by the increasingly hardened T—but who offers Annie a vision of domesticity and inner peace through the church, another avenue Annie has never explored.

So Annie stands at a major threshold, pondering her future for perhaps the first time in her life.  How can I think of having a baby, she says, “if all I know is what I see and can touch?” 

This is an exquisitely delicate moment, one that can either open doors or slam them shut.   The tipping point is finally reached  through Annie's mother, who herself was a teenage parent with her own unfulfilled dreams, and who is now finding that the walls are closing in on her.

Milk Like Sugar  (the title refers to sweet powered milk, ubiquitous in the inner city) is a provocative play that raises many issues, and not only about the difficulties of “bootstrapping” one’s way out of a world where children like Annie are confined from birth. When the only available advice, mentoring, and support come from peers who are in the same boat, what chance does any of them have? 

The play is not without its flaws.The actresses playing the teenager girls look considerably older than their roles call for, and Kirsten Greenidge, the playwright, has tacked on an ending that attempts to maintain the tension between hope and capitulation but that truly does not fit well with all she has so carefully laid out. 

The plot also incorporates a number of clichés about urban life, but Annie’s story is so significant, and the playwright’s ability to capture the language, tone, and attitude of her characters is so spot-on, that Milk Like Sugar deserves to be seen by a wide audience. 

  

Discount tickets Milk Like Sugar are available for readers of this blog.

Order by October 25 and use the code MILKGR
$35 (reg. $55) for Fri, Sat, and Sun evenings, Oct 21-23
$40 (reg. $55) for all other performances through Nov 20

Online: www.TicketCentral.com.
Call: (212) 279-4200, noon to 8 pm daily

In Person: Ticket Central Box Office, 416 W. 42nd Street

Milk Like Sugar is a co-production of Playwrights Horizons, Women's Project, and La Jolla Playhouse, and is directed by Rebecca Taichman.

 

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

'Lemon Sky,' Early Lanford Wilson Play, Gets A Mixed Production

 A Sour Reunion:  Keith Nobbs and Kevin Kilner

Playwright Lanford Wilson, who recently passed away after a most distinguished career, was considered by many to be the theatrical heir of Tennessee Williams. 

I can’t say that I fully buy into that premise. 

Wilson did have a Williams-like way of creating vulnerable characters who are filled with emotional longing. But when it comes to capturing the poetic beauty of the English language—as Williams was able to do in his masterworks from the 1940s, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—other names come to mind ahead of Mr. Wilson's.

  

One is Robert Anderson, whose play about father-son warfare, I Never Sang For My Father, was given a splendid production last year by the Keen Company, under the direction of Jonathan Silverman, who wisely allowed Anderson's marvelously-crafted words to take center stage.  It didn't hurt that the production featured multi-layered performances by veteran actors Keir Dullea and Marsha Mason. 

The Keen Company identifies its mission as one of producing “sincere plays” that are “generous in spirit and provoke identification.”  With I Never Sang For My Father, that mission was fully and most satisfactorily realized. 

Now the company and director Silverman are back with another “sincere play,” an early work by Lanford Wilson called Lemon Sky.   Unfortunately, the results are not quite so sublime, despite some standout performances, most notably from Keith Nobbs who carries the lion’s share of the play on his shoulders as Wilson’s stand-in, Alan, and Kellie Overbey as Ronnie, Alan’s stepmother.

The play presents us with Alan’s recollections of a summer-long reunion with the father who abandoned him and his mother when Alan was only five years old.  Dad had fled from the family home in Nebraska to Southern California, where he now lives with Ronnie, their two sons, and two teenage foster girls.  Still, no hard feelings, until what begins as a relatively pleasant attempt to reconnect gradually grows disturbing and ugly as secrets and lies reveal themselves.

Lemon Sky is a difficult play to bring to fruition on the stage.  For one thing, it constantly breaks the fourth wall as characters stop what they are doing in order to address the audience.  It also jumps back and forth across time between the late 1950s, when most of the action takes place, and 1970, where Alan serves as narrator of his memories of that earlier period in his life.

To hark back to the Tennessee Williams model, Lemon Sky is a “memory play.”   

When I previously wrote about last year's Roundabout Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie, I argued that what we were presented with represented Williams' memories only as these were carefully filtered through many drafts and rewrites.  We were allowed to see only what Williams wanted us to see, and not what he truly remembered.  

In a sense, Lemon Sky is more realistically memory-like; it depicts both the playwright’s recollections of a particular time in his life and the messy act of trying to recall and sort through past events.  Wilson gives us memory as it actually occurs, in a non-linear fashion with many asides and tangents.  

That’s all well and good, but it might have helped if some effort had been made to separate the time periods.   It took me a long while to figure out we were  leapfrogging across time, since nothing about the staging or lighting hinted at what was going on, and 17-year-old Alan and 30-year-old Alan looked and acted exactly the same.  

The difficulties with the storytelling are not helped by the set that is clumsily spread out across the stage of the Clurman Theatre  and a mixed bag of acting, with an unfortunate weak link in Kevin Kilner as Alan’s father, Doug, who should give us the creeps but who seems, at most, annoying. 

The most interesting character is the cheery, chirpy Ronnie (well played by Ms. Overbey), who seems to be a stereotypical Southern California ditz until we begin to see the consequences of the poor yet entrapping bargain she made for herself when she ran off with Doug. 

This production of Lemon Sky is worth the visit only if you are a Lanford Wilson fan and want to catch one of his early efforts.  I can’t fault the sincerity, but I wonder if perhaps the Keen Company and its director might do better with something more straightforward.   Another Robert Anderson play, perhaps?

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

Frank Langella Gives A Mesmerizing Performance in 'Man And Boy'

It’s not hard to see what drew the folks at Roundabout to mount a production of Terrence Rattigan’s 1963 drama Man and Boy, now in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. 

For one thing, they had a story that could have popped out of today’s headlines.  Think of Bernie Madoff or the gang of thieves at Enron, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of the central character, Gregor Antonescu, a flim-flam artist extraordinaire who has lied, cheated, and stolen millions of dollars by out-Ponzi-ing Ponzi throughout Europe and the United States at the height of the Great Depression.

The second thing going for Man and Boy, which takes place in a Greenwich Village apartment on a single evening in 1934, is that Gregor Antonescu is played by Frank Langella, at the height of his powers as a stage actor and for whom this is another Tony-worthy performance.

Despite the fact that his character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, you cannot take your eyes off Langella.  Almost against your will, you even root for him as he uses his undeniable gifts of charm, gab, and rock-steady nerve to manipulate people in order to keep his empire from crumbling under its own weight.   Antonescu is the Devil incarnate, and Langella instills every moment with his own devilish gusto. 

Before you run to pick up a ticket, let me advise you that outside of the central character, the play is a bit of a mess, and it is also not hard to see why it lasted for all of 54 performances on Broadway in its initial run and has not been revised until now. 

One of the biggest problems with the production lies with the second key character, Antonescu’s estranged son Basil, in whose apartment the play takes place. Rattigan has given us, at least on paper, a complicated relationship between a totally selfish and self-absorbed father and his damaged, needy son, who left home five years earlier with the intention of never seeing his father again. 

There are lots of ways to play this relationship, but what we are given, at least as performed by Adam Driver, is a son who is almost devoid of personality—as if the father had drained all  the life out of him years ago.  Driver, who has shown himself to be a terrific young actor on the New York theater scene over the past several years, either does not know what to do with the role, or he has been miserably directed by Maria Aitken to mope around and accept the abuse his father still heaps upon him. 

There are other characters, not all of whom serve much of a purpose, including Basil’s girlfriend and Gregor’s wife, played respectively by Virginia Kull and Francesca Faridany.  The women do a good job with their roles, such as they are, but both characters could be excised from the script without harming it one iota. 

The others--Gregor’s right-hand man (Michael Siberry), an American businessman whom Gregor nastily manipulates (Zach Grenier), and an accountant who has uncovered a $6 million fraud (Brian Hutchison)--are needed to move the plot forward, and the actors do well by their roles.

The set design by Derek McLane makes good use of the cavernous space of the stage, though the separateness between the living area and the bedroom is not clearly delineated.  Perhaps some changes in the lighting design (Kevin Adams) could help.  It might also help alleviate the confusion that occurs when Mr. Siberry first appears on the scene to a smattering of entrance applause by those who believe it is Mr. Langella.

To be fair, this is early in the preview period.  Maybe it will improve.  But for now, if you can ignore what needs to be ignored,  and you can appreciate a top-notch, often mesmerizing performance by Mr. Langella, by all means head on out to the American Airlines Theatre and this production of Man and Boy. 

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

'Follies' Is Back on Broadway for a Limited Run: Do Not Miss!

Here’s a bit of advice.

If you’ve never seen Follies, James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s magnum opus of a musical, get ye hence to the revival now in previews at the Marquis Theater.  And thank your lucky stars that you have been given this opportunity to see a full-blown production with a cast of 41 accompanied by a 28-piece orchestra performing Jonathan Tunick’s wonderful orchestrations. 

And, you know what, even if you’ve seen it before, get ye hence to the Marquis Theater.  If nothing else, you’ll love debating the casting and directing decisions, for Follies will forever stand beside Leonard Bernstein’s Candide in never offering up the complete and definitive version.  How could it, when every audience member knows with ego-centric certainty who should play each role and how each song should be performed?

That may be Follies’ greatest strength, the fact that it can be interpreted and reinterpreted from production to production.  Even this one, which comes to New York after a successful and well-received run at Washington’s D. C.’s Kennedy Center, made the transfer having undergone a good deal of tinkering on its way up I-95.    

Back in 1971, when Follies opened on Broadway, The New York Times critic Clive Barnes gave it a mixed and somewhat smarmy review, but he provided a succinct plot summary that I could not hope to match, so I will quote him:  “Years ago, in 1941, Buddy loved Sally, Sally loved Ben, Phyllis loved Ben, and Ben loved Ben.  Buddy married Sally, Ben married Phyllis, but their marriages are not working out.”

The various meltdowns occur before our eyes during a one-time reunion of performers from “Weismann’s Follies,” who have come together 30 years later at the theater where they once shared the spotlight.  The theater, which is about to be torn down to make way for a parking lot, is haunted both by memories and by the ghosts of their former youthful selves, who sometimes lurk in the background, sometimes interact with the living, and sometimes compete directly for the audience’s attention.

This all may sound rather soap opera-ish, but it’s certainly real enough to Buddy, Ben, Phyllis, and, especially, to Sally, who has carried an unrequited torch for Ben for so long she can barely distinguish reality from fantasy.

As the four lost middle-aged souls struggle to exorcise their various demons, the rest of the cast members wander in and out, stopping to perform songs from their heyday, including such showstoppers as “Broadway Baby” and “I’m Still Here,” both of which have been performed and recorded by so many singers that it’s the rare audience member who hasn’t heard them before.  

Indeed, Follies could be considered to be a mini-version of Sondheim’s Greatest Hits.  In addition to these two powerhouse numbers, usually reserved for singers in late career, there are Sally’s songs, the romantic yet ironic “In Buddy’s Eyes” and the wrenching “Losing My Mind;” Ben and Sally’s soaring duet “Too Many Mornings;” and Phyllis’s scathing ”Could I Leave You?” all of which have established lives of their own beyond the stage.

OK.  Now comes the part where I get to discuss my own likes and dislikes about the production.   Know, however, that nothing I say is intended to keep you away from the Marquis.  Follies is a must-see show that serves as a touchstone between the musical theater history it tapped into and  the next generation of musicals that it influenced, including A Chorus Line just five years later.  (Michael Bennett co-directed, with Hal Prince, the original Follies before coming up with A Chorus Line).

Let me begin with some comments about casting.  The roles of Ben, Buddy, Phyllis, and Sally are played, respectively, by Ron Raines, Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell, and Bernadette Peters.  I thought the gentlemen were fine, both strong singers and performers and both good fits for their characters.  Each does splendidly with his personal psychological breakdown number in the section of the show known as “Loveland,” a surrealistic re-creation of songs from the imagined Follies of long ago.


If I have any doubts, it is about the leading women.  I have come to envision a Phyllis as a goddess of shattering rage, especially with the delivery of her tour de force song, “Could I Leave You?” I have, for example, seen Donna Murphy perform this number with such toxic fury that I wanted to cringe beneath my seat and call 911. 


Jan Maxwell is a terrific actress, and she can sing well enough and dance (sort of), so that she can get by.  But she is not the Phyllis of my imagination.  Rather, she gives us a more complex characterization, one that lets us see her self-doubt and the last glimmer of love for her supercilious husband, who has kept her at arms-length for many years.  

There surely is room for such an interpretation; I just need to mull this one over a little more.

Then there is Bernadette Peters as Sally, a character who is emotionally complicated and who may be suffering from bipolar disorder.  We need to see Sally as someone whom Buddy has loved all of these years while being thoroughly frustrated by her obsession with Ben.

Sally is supposed to be unglamorous, a bit of a frump, someone who does not wish to stand out in a crowd despite her earlier career.  That’s a pretty tall order for Ms. Peters—not  because she is incapable of meeting the acting challenge, but because she is uniquely Bernadette Peters no matter what role she plays.  


In watching her perform, it seemed to me that she is still struggling to find the right mannerisms and tone for Sally.  And I am not entirely certain she is comfortable with the specific musical range required for Sally’s numbers. I know precious little about vocal technique, but in the performance I saw, she appeared to be reaching mightily for notes that were below her comfort zone, and there was altogether too much vibrato in her singing.  

By way of comparison, consider the incomparable Barbara Cook, who, in her 80s, can still perform “In Buddy’s Eyes” and “Losing My Mind” like no other.   So, here’s something else I need to reconcile in my mind. 

Of the rest of the cast, I liked the younger versions of the four leads, as played by Lora Lee Gayer (Sally), Kirsten Scott (Phyllis), Christian Delcroix (Buddy), and Nick Verina (Ben).  They did a credible job of “ghosting” their older counterparts, and of performing their numbers in the “Loveland” sequence—“You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” and “Love Will See Us Through.”

Those playing the former Weismann Follies performers also did well as they took turns center stage offering up their featured numbers, but only one stood out as being a flesh-and-blood character. That was Susan Watson as Emily.  Ms. Watson still has the gamine looks and the lithe moves of a dancer that made her seem genuine.  With the little she was given to do, she imbued her character with a poignant touch of age-borne forgetfulness and confusion that left a real impression that here was a true veteran of the long departed Follies.   

I'll tip my hat as well to Elaine Paige, who was apparently having trouble earlier on remembering the lyrics to “I’m Still Here.” In the performance I attended, she nailed it, sold it, and made it her own, leading to waves of sustained applause.  I also liked Jayne Houdyshell (“Broadway Baby”), largely because she seemed to be having such great fun just being there. 

I’ve got to say, I wasn’t overly thrilled with the costumes, wigs, and makeup—especially for the older women.  Surely former Follies performers would know how to dress, fix their hair, and have their makeup done for a reunion of this nature without looking like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

In any event, my quibbles are my own.  I encourage you to go see Follies and form your own judgment. This is being touted as a limited engagement, with tickets on sale only through January 1. Whatever its flaws, given the economics of Broadway, you're not likely to have the opportunity to see a large-scale production of Follies any time in the near future.  Next time might be with a cast of four playing all of the roles as well as the musical instruments. 

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

Modern Love Among the Scientific Set

Aubrey Dollar and Karl Miller "meet cute" in grad school

Relationships are complicated.

This is true whether the relationships are between two yeast molecules or two human beings. 

That’s sort of the message of Completeness, Itamar Moses’s new play that is alternately romantic, comic, intellectually intriguing, and, occasionally, too clever for its own good. 

Completeness, now on view at Playwrights Horizons, begins as two attractive and bright graduate students—she a molecular biologist, he a computer scientist—meet cute in a computer lab on campus and begin a hot romance that mirrors the work they are doing both individually and collectively.

Karl Miller, a fine young actor full of goofy charm, is Elliot, the computer scientist whose short-term goal is to crack the “Traveling Salesman Problem,” the elusive holy grail of his field.  (It’s real; look it up and you’ll learn, among other things, that it is “an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization.”) 

As soon as he eyes Molly, winningly played by Aubrey Dollar, you can almost hear Elliot’s heart (among other parts of his anatomy) go “boing,” In order to hook up with her, Elliot gladly sets aside his maybe-not-so-urgent-after-all work and offers to help her devise a shortcut to study potentially significant interactions among yeast molecules.  For her, he will develop an algorithm or computer model that will save her the trouble of examining each and every interaction, by identifying those that are likely to produce the kinds of results worthy of her efforts.

As you can see, neither Elliot nor Molly considers the old painstaking methods of their fields to be worth their time.  “Life is short” is their credo, which they apply equally to scientific studies and to personal matters.

Because Elliot and Molly make such a lovely couple, in the way that we have come to expect from exposure to too many on-screen romantic comedies, we do expect them to somehow evolve into some modern day version of Marie and Pierre Curie.  But life rarely imitates the movies, and we learn quickly enough to set aside such fantasies for the reality of modern romance, consisting of speed dating and short-term relationships. 

Thus it is with Elliot and Molly.   They are like the fruit flies that geneticists like to study because they play out their lives in about a month.   On human terms it looks like this:  meet someone, take up with them, edge toward the possibility of something more permanent, and then end it—and begin again. 

In between, we learn an awful lot about both computer science and molecular biology.  The playwright has done a masterful job of explaining the science (data mining and derivation errors, anyone?), and the actors have done a terrific job of learning to spout the complicated lingo so that it sounds second nature to them. 

If the juxtapositioning of conceptual science and human foibles reminds you of something Tom Stoppard might have cooked up, it’s not a coincidence.  Itamar Moses and Mr. Stoppard have a bit of a mutual admiration society going, and the latter even wrote the preface for the published edition of Moses’s earlier Bach at Leipzig.  The scientific conversations in Completeness are very reminiscent of the discussions about mathematics in Stoppard’s Arcadia and about quantum physics in Hapgood.   There are worse role models for Mr. Moses to have, though one hopes he will eventually find his own unique voice. 

Lest I leave you with the impression that Completeness is a two-character play, I hasten to add that there are actually several others, various former or waiting-in-the-wings partners of Molly and Elliot, all portrayed by Brian Avers and Meredith Forlenza.  Whether it is the fault of the playwright or of the director, Pam MacKinnon (she has directed a production of Bach at Leipzig, so Moses is not new to her), it is very difficult to differentiate among the other characters who flit in and out—though perhaps they are intentionally non-distinguishable. 

There is also a bit of breaking of the fourth wall that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose, except, possibly, to remind us that science allows us to control things just so much, but that life is ultimately unpredictable in its variability.

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

For Theatergoers, New York Is A Summer Festival

Broadway or Off-Broadway:  The Theater Capital of the World!

Summertime is supposed to be a down time for New York theater-going, but this summer has been offering up a lot of unexpected treats.  Certainly, there has been plenty to keep me busy so that it doesn’t feel like the doldrums at all.   

Two of this summer’s big openers on Broadway are the excellent revival of Master Class, starring Tyne Daley in what is likely to be a Tony-nominated performance as opera diva Maria Callas, and the upcoming revival of Follies, with a cast that includes Bernadette Peters, Elaine Paige, and Jan Maxwell.  Not so shabby!  I’ve already seen (and written about) Master Class, and I’ve got my Follies ticket for a couple of weeks from now. 

There’s also the opportunity to partake of the “summer of love” that is Hair, making a short return to Broadway following a 20-city tour.  If you failed to catch Diane Paulus’ Tony-winning revival, now would be the time to do so.  I speak as one who saw the original Broadway company in1968, and found the current production to be as energetic, exciting, and fun, with a great ensemble cast.   I’m seeing it again next week, as it happens.  Who knows?  Maybe this time I’ll join the end-of-show onstage dance party! 

If you want to see a Broadway show but don’t want to pay full Broadway prices for your tickets, I have noticed that the August heat and humidity have been accompanied by shorter lines at the Times Square TKTS discount tickets booth. 


Yesterday (for a Saturday matinee), I walked right up to the window and snagged a half-price ticket to Anything Goes, splendidly directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall.  The Tony-winning production boasts a top-notch cast and a truckload of marvelous Cole Porter tunes.  Even if you feel you are overly familiar with the show and the score, there are surprises and delights to be found in the de-lovely dance numbers and in the comic timing displayed by John McMartin, Adam Godley, and Jessica Stone in supporting roles. 


The names over the title, Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, are no slouches either.  She is a dynamo, and he is teddy bear adorable, and the newly refurbished and renamed Stephen Sondheim Theatre (formerly Henry Miller’s Theatre) is an inviting and comfortable venue, with good sight lines throughout.  

Moving to Off-Broadway, I’m looking forward to seeing Elysian Fields, set for a short run at the Kraine Theater in the East Village (August 22-26) as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The playwright, Chris Phillips, has come up with an intriguing concept, to create a play around characters who are discussed but not seen in three Tennessee Williams plays:  Allen from A Streetcar Named Desire, Sebastian from Suddenly Last Summer, and Skipper from Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.   


This being the centenary year of Tennessee Williams' birth, there have been quite a few opportunities to see revivals of both his well-known and lesser-known plays. Elysian Fields sounds like an interesting addition and tribute to the mix, which has included the recent One Arm (an unproduced screenplay written by Willams and adapted for the stage by Moisés Kaufman) and the current production of The Pretty Trap, an early one-act version of The Glass Menagerie at Theatre Row’s Acorn Theatre, starring Katharine Houghton in the pivotal role of Amanda Wingfield. 

And as long as we are taking a stroll along West 42^nd Street, I look forward to paying a visit to Playwrights Horizons and its latest production, Completeness, a new comedy about romance and sexual politics written by Itamar Moses and directed by Pam MacKinnon.   Playwrights Horizons continues its policy of offering discounted tickets through this blog.  Regular priced tickets are $70, but discounts are available for $40 for performances from August 19-September 4, and then for $50 through September 25.  For more information, go to www.playwrightshorizons.org or call 212-279-4200.  When ordering, use the discount code COMPBLOG. 


I've got my summer tickets lined up.  What are you waiting for? 

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

Gay History Becomes Visible At Last, And the Theater Leads the Way

Unnatural Acts -- Photo by Joan Marcus

Nothing has been more ignored in the teaching of history than the history of gay and lesbian individuals. As far as US public schools are concerned, a policy of “don’t ask; don’t tell” remains pretty much intact.

This may start to change, however, with the enactment last month of a California state law requiring public schools to teach gay and lesbian history. California is a big state, and its public schools spend a lot of money on textbooks and other educational materials. It will be interesting to watch as the curriculum unfolds.

In support of this effort, educators might do well to turn to the recent spate of plays steeped in various aspects of gay history—among them, The Temperamentals, The Pride, and the revivals of The Normal Heart and Angels in America, not to mention older plays such as The Laramie Project (first produced in 2000) and Bent (1979).

All of these plays have something of significance to say, and collectively they have the power to shed light on what has been covered by an invisibility cloak for far too long.

Two additions to the growing list are Unnatural Acts, based on the true story of a group of gay students who were driven out of Harvard University back in 1920, and A Strange and Separate People, about the crossed paths of homosexuality and Orthodox Judaism.

Both of these have just ended short runs, Unnatural Acts at the Classic Stage Company and A Strange and Separate People at Theatre Row’s Studio Theatre. Chances are, however, that both will see additional productions around the country, given their compelling topics.

Unnatural Acts is actually the second version of the story of Harvard’s “secret court,” convened following the suicide of one of the gay students. The first to hit the boards was Veritas, written by Stan Richardson, with a first production in 2007. I’m not sure of the details, but it seems that Mr. Richardson and Tony Speciale, the director of Unnatural Acts, were working together on the project but at some point decided to go their separate ways. In any event, the authorship of Unnatural Acts is credited to “members of the Plastic Theatre,” a loose-knit collaborative of artists headed up by Mr. Speciale. In the theater program, however, two individuals, Heather Denyer and Nick Norman (she is a dramturg, he an established playwright) are singled out as co-authors. (As it happens, I sat next to Mr. Norman’s father at the performance I attended, and he filled me in on some of the convoluted background.)

Surprisingly, for a play with a collective authorship, Unnatural Acts is quite cohesive and well-structured. If it is a tad melodramatic and “collegiate,” as The New York Times critic Ben Brantley put it in his review, it is appropriately so, for the play is both a theatrical retelling of a long-quashed historic event and the kind of cautionary tale that is likely to be performed in college towns across the country and perhaps read and studied in classes. There is no doubt where the play’s sympathies lie, but the fact is, the socio-political context would make for some serious analytic discussions in a political science class, a law class, a drama class, or a queer studies class.

The group of students who gathered in the rooms of one of their more flamboyant brethren were not terribly discrete in their behavior and, being mostly children of privilege, they took it for granted that Harvard would turn a blind eye at their lack of attention to their studies, their frequent and loud parties, and their illegal drinking (this was during Prohibition, after all). We learn, in passing, that at least some of the students were attending Harvard after leaving other colleges, under circumstances that we are left to surmise.

In point of fact, Harvard officials may very well have stayed out of it had it not been for the pressure put upon them by the brother of the young man who committed suicide. That the students were interrogated in secret is hardly a surprise; what would the wealthy alumni donors think if this “dirty laundry” were to be aired in public?

If there are truly shocking moments in the play, these occur through the depictions of the interrogations, in which the students were brought individually before a group of deans and pressed to answer the most intrusive of questions about their sexual practices. It is here where all of the other issues—academics, partying, drinking—become non-issues, and the focus is on the one thing that sets these students apart. The resulting denials, confessions, and betrayals, and the subsequent expulsion of most of the students involved, caused permanent damage, as we learn in an affecting epilogue based on research into the lives of those involved.

Any “docudrama” of this sort has the difficult task of balancing historic truth with dramatic truth. For the most part, Unnatural Acts succeeds quite well and leaves us much to ponder in both arenas. 

*          *          *          *          *          *

'A Strange and Separate People' -- Photo by Michael Portantiere

Turning next to a more contemporary work, we have the less successful but potentially powerful drama, A Strange and Separate People, written by Jon Marans, who gave us the multi-award-winning The Temperamentals and who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Old Wicked Songs. It is because Marans is such a gifted playwright that I am hopeful he will come back to A Strange and Separate People and flesh it out.

As it stands, this is a two-character drama with three characters and a muddied script that takes on too many issues. Focus, Jon, focus!

Still, at its heart, it tells a most interesting story by crossing two lives—those of Jay, a closeted gay man who is an Orthodox Jew, and Stuart, an “out” gay man who is transitioning from being a casual Jew to Orthodoxy. In telling their story, Marans raises many intriguing questions about the intersection of faith and sexuality, a subject that previously saw the theatrical light of day last year with Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts, who juxtaposed homosexuality with conservative Christianity.

Marans sets A Strange and Separate People around religious rituals, Sabbath prayers at the home of Jay and his wife Phyllis, and services in the Orthodox Upper West Side synagogue that all three attend.

As the play currently stands, Phyllis has little to do beyond reacting to learning about her husband’s sexuality—so in order to build up her role, Marans has given the couple a child with autism, whose presence is heard and felt, if not seen. It’s too much for the play to work with; it either needs to be cut to a one-act or expanded into a deeper two-act.

I support the latter. I want to know more about Phyllis, the couple’s son, his caregiver, the unseen but noisy neighbor, the president of the congregation, and others whose presence could only serve to enrich the plot. I think of the wonderful ensemble piece that was The Temperamentals and can envision this play transforming into something of that ilk. Until that happens, however, I can only recommend A Strange and Separate People as an interesting work-in-progress.

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

Never Trust A Character Called 'Death'

-->

Don’t be taken in by the alluring advertising art for Death Takes A Holiday, now playing at the Laura Pels Theatre.  By the looks of it—a beautiful couple dressed to the nines and elegantly waltzing on air (literally)—you could be forgiven for expecting that you are about the see a classic romantic musical comedy à la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

If you do have Fred and Ginger on your mind when you take your seat, however, you will soon be dispelled of that notion.  Death Takes A Holiday is romantic the way that Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is romantic, and it is a comedy the way that Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well is a comedy.  Both terms, “romantic” and “comedy,” tap into their older meanings rather than the ones we’ve come to know from watching those charming movies of a bygone era.  Expect something other than smiles and sighs.

Come to think of it, pretty much everything about Death Takes A Holiday takes on multiple meanings, and unless you parse the words and enjoy a certain bitter irony, you may end up confused and disappointed.  Even the term “holiday”  (Philip Barry wrote a light and airy play with that title; perhaps you remember the film with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn) here means nothing more than a short suspension of business-as-usual, an interlude, like a bank holiday in which debts are not forgiven, just briefly uncollected.   

Adapted by Thomas Meehan and the late Peter Stone from a 1924 Italian play by Alberto Casella, and filled with soaring music and unfortunately moribund lyrics by Maury Yeston, Death Takes A Holiday is mostly about what takes place during that interlude.

Death has decided to suspend his normal routine of collecting souls in order to adopt the persona of a Russian prince so that he may satisfy his curiosity about what it feels like to be human.  (If this sounds a tad familiar, perhaps you have seen the movie Meet Joe Black, yet another version of Casella’s play, starring Brad Pitt in the central role).

During the course of the play, in which “Prince Nikolai” joins the family of Duke Vittorio Lamberti at their villa, Death learns paradoxically to embrace both life and the duke’s lovely daughter Grazia.  For her part, Grazia is totally smitten and immediately breaks off her engagement in order to take up with the interloper. Only the duke knows of his guest’s true identity, and he is sworn to secrecy—though, at least in this version, secrets and promises are quickly and easily set aside by both the quick and the dead whenever it suits them.   

Actually, this is not the first time Death has come calling.  The family is still mourning the loss of Grazia’s brother Roberto, a World War I fighter pilot who was killed when his  plane was shot down. The few truly poignant moments in Death Takes A Holiday are those in which Roberto’s mother (the ever wonderful Rebecca Luker, here given too few opportunities to shine) and Roberto’s pal Major Eric Fenton (well played by Matt Cavenaugh), sing separate numbers about him.  In “Losing Roberto,” his mother, the duchess, steps into his bedroom and sings of her loss and grief, and in “Roberto’s Eyes,” the one number that made me sit up and take notice, Eric sings of seeing death reflected in Roberto’s eyes just as his plane went down. 

For me at least, this is where the musical falls apart.  There is nothing romantic about Roberto’s death and the obvious pain it has caused; to have another death waiting in the wings is just too much weight for this musical to carry. 

As the pair of oddly matched lovers, Jill Paice as Grazia and Julian Ovenden as “Prince Nikolai,” give strong performances and sing beautifully.  But all in all, there are just too many elements that simply do not work, including a plot that does not know what to do with this most strange and altogether disturbing of stories.  In the end, any remaining shred of hope—has death learned nothing?—is dashed; the clock strikes midnight and the “holiday” is over. 

                                  *                                    *                                    *

Another play in which Death hovers over the proceedings is the two-hander, Tryst, playing at the Irish Rep. Playwright Karoline Leach, in her first full-length outing, has given us a piece that draws from George Bernard Shaw, along with perhaps a dash of August Strindberg and any number of period melodramas (the play takes place in 1910 in London and at a seaside resort town).

Mark Shanahan plays a con man who calls himself “George Love,” a sort of Harold Hill without the musical instruments.   It is George’s mission in life to woo spinster women, pretend to wed them, give them one night of connubial bliss, and then abscond with their money. 

When George sets his sights on Adelaide Pinchin (Andrea Maulella), a shy, timid, and self-effacing hat maker, you watch as the two of them play off each other.  It isn’t long before both Adelaide and George start to show they have unexpected depths, and, in the course of things, she softens him up, while he gives her some confidence in herself.

Predictable enough, and perhaps there might have been a sufficiency of charm on display to end the play right there. 

However, the playwright has rather more to say, and so, after Adelaide has figured out exactly what George has been up to, she turns into one of Shaw’s highly independent modern women and decides that they should stay together—married or not—and set up shop, where she can manage the business and he can charm the lady customers.   Ending Number Two, perhaps. 

But, no. There’s more.  The pair continues to circle one another, dark secrets come to the fore, and it becomes evident that neither really has the upper hand (think of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, with the seesawing power struggle that spins out of control).

Shanahan and Maulella do their best with the material, but the problem is the obvious one. The playwright is neither Shaw nor Strindberg, and ultimately, it is the tone of melodrama that wins out.  In the end, the lesson is:  never trust a sociopath.

And Death once again takes the final bow. 

  

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