Some "Q-Reviews" of Theatre in Boston

The Adding Machine -- Done by The Theatre Cooperative, they actually dare in 2001 to do a play that questions the benignity of corporate capitalism and technology.  A good production for such a modest budget.

The Beckett Project -- The estate of SB would have done well to come down hard on this unimaginative composite of Becket's plays and life, re-woven in the "imaginative interpretations" of the ensemble.

The Belle of Amherst -- When in need of fortune and men's eyes, bring out the theatrical chestnuts.  Julie Harris does a fine job with William Luce's play, perhaps the best in his one-man cottage industry of one-person historico-dramas.  (The swoon factor about Harris was pretty high, though, with puff profiles and interviews outpacing reviews by multiple factors of 10.)

The Doctor's Dilemma -- Done at the American Repertory Company.  To be sure, much of Shaw loses its sting over time -- there just aren't that many Fabians and anti-Fabians around any more to give bite to the debate, and there are all those words. But A.R.T. managed to get out of its own way and create a production that was clean, articulated, and engaging.

The Family of Mann -- Theresa Rebeck's play about the machinations in the writers' room of a bland TV sit-com may have been Rebeck's way of exorcising the demons of her success on the Left Coast as a writer of NYPD Blue and other shows, but the parody is tepid and ultimately unfocused. The demons remain.

Floyd Collins -- I pitied the poor performers who sung their lungs out and handled Adam Guettel's tricky music with panache because it was all in service to a book by Tina Landau as inert the real Floyd Collins trapped underground. Fine work for no real pay-off.

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) -- A nebbishy kind of play by Ann-Marie MacDonald about a drab female Shakespeare scholar who finds herself transported into two of Shakespeare's plays in order to save the heroines, all in service of a "voyage of personal discovery." Not much wit and not much discovery.

In The Blood -- A reading of Susan-Lori Parks' loose riff on The Scarlet Letter with a little Mother Courage thrown in. It's a tricky script, bordering always on stereotype and vicitmization.

Mother Courage -- A.R.T.'s second play, in rep with The Doctor's Dilemma. To give one a taste: Mother Courage's wagon is a string of white baby carriages of various vintages and conditions.  The stage is dominated by an enormous movable steel wall upon which people climb and bang and which always seems to be just about to knock someone off the stage.  The front section of seats is bisected by a section of railroad track that the actors stumble across but which adds nothing material to the action. (I kept fearing for torn ankles.)  And the soldiers, in choreographed battle scenes that looked woefully under-rehearsed, manage to make a G.I. Joe doll look far more fearsome. The cost of the steel wall alone would fund a small company for a year -- and that's the problem: too much money, time, and ideas on their hands to do the play honestly.

No Way To Treat A Lady -- A musical about a serial killer obsessed about getting his face on the front page of the Times, the detective who chases him, and their mothers.  Capably done -- but why?

The Piano Lesson -- Up to Trinity Repertory's usual standards, but the script, like much of what August Wilson writes, has about equal parts sharp observation sharply rendered and bloat. The play often drifts, but the performances are all well done.

Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll -- The embarrassment factor is high here, not because of the Stanley B. Theatre Company, but because of Eric Bogosian. Whatever cachet he once had is gone (as his recently released novel shows), and he has nothing left to say to anyone. (A recent Boston-area performance by Mr. Bogosian, titled The Worse of Eric Bogosian, says it all.)  Mr. Bogosian should be carted off the Smithsonian, having fulfilled his purpose on earth.

The Taming of the Shrew -- An all-female cast directed by Lisa Wolpe and produced by the Boston Theatre Works. Capably done -- the same-gender cast did not help or hurt the play.  However, the director should have been better versed in commedia, since much of the shtick smacked of vaudeville routines that were trying a touch too hard to be funny.

The Lime Tree Bower -- Yet another Conor McPherson gab fest.  Someday he may write a play where the actors actually have to move and occupy stage space. In the meantime, a pleasant listen-to, though doing it on the radio would be much more effective.

JANUARY

The highlight of the January theatre scene was a woefully under-attended "conversation" at Northeastern University on February 2 between Tony Kushner and the poet (and former Poet Laureate) Robert Pinsky. I had never heard Kushner speak; I'd only read his essays and plays and seen superb productions of Angels and Slavs! He is a gracious, charming, self-deprecating man, and the evening flew by far too fast.

He read a monologue from a new play of about Afghanistan, a place in which he has had a self-professed interest for 2 or 3 decades. He spoke about the morality of taking political stands, but to do so with an eye on the dramatic possibilities (which are not hard, he contended, because politics and morality are inherently dramatic). He explained the power of the dialectic in his writing, how the power of oppositions powers the drama, and in turn teaches the audience a kind of ragged criticial consciousness.  (He felt theatre was a "less effective dream" than cinema, and therefore theatre had a more open architecture in which people could build their perceptions and understandings.) He added how the audience, "the animal in the dark," also becomes part of this dialectic, exerting force by it presence and reactions.  He narrated the story of a new piece he is working on, about the escaped slave Henry Box Brown, who got the name "box" from the story of his shipping himself off in a crate of tobacco to Philiadelphia to find freedom.  (Brown had a long life in England, where he was a galvanizer of working class resistance to capitalism through his speeches about the immorality of making profits off slave-grown cotton, and Kushner tells how Samuel Fielding, one of the Haymarket anarchists who had had his sentence commuted by the governor, remembered one of Brown's speeches, which started him off on his study of and belief in anarchism.)

The final question from the audience prompted Kushner to his best eloquence. The questioner asked him what it is was like to consider himself a socialist in today's America. His response was the most cogent explanation of socialist beliefts I had ever heard, and he ended by simply saying that the free market is a myth and is not the best that human beings can do. There are alternatives, and people can be better than what the market offers.  It echoed the end of Slavs!, where the final question, "What is to be done?", becomes a thrilling offer to dream about possibilities. That is what Kushner left the audience that night.

© 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

An Editor’s Note

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