Scene4 Magazine | Qreviews

COBU is all female Japanese dance ensemble, founded by STOMP veteran Yako Miyamoto, that mashes together traditional Japanese taiko drumming, American funk tap dance, and martial arts along with African djembe drums, samisens (Japanese banjos), shime-daikos (small drums), and narukos (wooden clappers).  (COBU reportedly translates as "Dance Like Drumming, Drumming Like Dance.") Anything percussive, like drumming and tap, suckers me right in, and COBU's combination of all-things-percussive constitutes my perfect storm.  The eighty-minute performance never flags in energy and enjoyment, though it has its higher points, such as in "Dope," a tap duo with Miyamoto and Hana Ogata done in a circle of downlight that perfectly melds hip-hop moves and rhythms with tap, creating something vibrant and new.  And when all the company members are waling away on the taiko drums, the bass waves resonate in the sternum and power surges through the whole skeleton. While the individual numbers were all well-choreographed and executed, they often ended in a way that didn't immediately signal the piece was done, and by the time audience applauded, the performers were already into getting the next piece set.  Sharper "buttons" would help.  Also, the transitions from one to the next needed more clarity and crispness so that the generated energy didn't have time to dissipate.  The whole performance just needs to be a bit tighter and seamless. But this is a small quibble.  COBU's EN, which means "perfect combustion," is exactly that: fiery, fierce, and fun, a combustion of delight.

Michael Bettencourt

Performers: Joshua Dean, Michelle Dortignac, Angela Jones, and Kris Olness. Photography: Kenneth Feldman (KPF Digital)

URBANOPOLIS, created by Suspended Cirque, follows a young man as he (in the words of their press release) "falls into a futuristic urban labyrinth where sirens crawl along steel girders, a dying phoenix plays her violin as women float in chains, a mechanical doll comes to life and everything spins out of control. With the help of a mischievous pan-like creature, our young man tries to find his way back home."
The performance plays out in four acts, each about 20 minutes long (with ten-minute intermissions for selling drinks in the cabaret-style seating at Galapagos). In each of the acts, members of the troupe contort themselves for the young traveler in the most amazing ways upon a variety of aerial devices comprised of ropes, bars, strips of colored cloth, and rotating metal wheels as well as their acrobatics on the metal railings and walls that surround the seating areas. The characterizations are broad and mythic -- Man, Pan, Serpents, Sirens, Phoenix -- and the story fabulistic.
Through these incredible skilled presentations a story of tale of sorts does unfold as the journeyer moves through what Suspended Cirque calls "this urban jungle," a story about being lost, beguiled, tempted, and eventually redeemed. Pan and a trio of Sirens, who also play the Serpents, appear to lead the traveler astray while a violin-playing Phoenix, Orpheus-like, reclaims his soul. The piece ends with a jaw-droppingly beautiful display by the troupe members using double lengths of colored cloth that they twine around their bodies in intricate wraps that allow them to do aerial splits, hanging crosses, falls, and spins.
All of this is great fun. Suspended Cirque is inventive in its choreography, clever in its staging, and cheeky in its performance (Act 2 contains a wonderful comic trio of two Sirens and the Man playing the Habanera from Bizet's "Carmen," they on clarinet and piano, he on alto sax). The classic tale of descent and ascent, interspersed with temptation and redemption, is just an excuse for these lithe and impressive performers to show off their skills and creativity, which is the real show worth watching.

Michael Bettencourt

(L-R): Muffin Character Hanshake and General Molar, the dog. Photo by Sue Kessler

The troupe that comprises Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant provides a three-hour performance interspersed with the serving of food: soup, salad, sandwich, and dessert, washed down with pitchers of sangria. The performance, made up of songs, dance routines, stand-up patter, and audience participation, roughly follows the story of aging diva Muffin Character Hanshake's struggle with the decision whether to have a child ("roughly" because coherent narrative is hardly the goal of the evening). It's all a lot of fun, and the food and performances are top-notch.
The name comes from the group's discovery, while in Maine, of an abandoned restaurant with the moniker they now use, which prompted them to begin a journey of providing dinner with theatre without becoming a dinner theatre. They bill themselves as "avant garde," but they are much more musical hall than "avant," and they're committed to providing an entertaining evening that is a bit bawdy, a bit cheeky, a bit risky, but with none of these qualities pushed hard enough to make anyone uncomfortable or even meditative.
What else is left to say? Everyone had a good time and left the theatre well-nourished. Of how many evenings of theatre can that be said these days?

Michael Bettencourt

(L-R): David Greenspan as the Widow Piper and Michael Levinton as Barnaby. Photo by Yi Zhao

The prime, if not sole, goal of a comedy is to be funny, and by this simple clear standard, the Little Lord Fauntleroys' re-production of Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough's 1903 operetta "Babes in Toyland," fails to deliver.

Billed as a "recession spectacular" designed to "recall the happy days of childhood for all who are facing the stern realities of life," Levinton riffs off the Herbert/MacDonough work (itself a riff on/rip-off of "The Wizard of Oz," which opened in 1903 on Broadway, with MacDonough's assistance, and was extraordinarily successful) to create a two-hour dollop filled with Mother Goose characters, a couple of evil men (Uncle Barnaby, played by Levinton, and The Master Toymaker), marching toys, a scary forest full of spiders and demons, and a happy resolution of all outstanding conflicts.

But it's not very funny, for three reasons.

First, everyone tries too hard. Mugging (facial and bodily) substitutes for timing, stage "business" substitutes for narrative action. Such over-exertion might be funny to six-year olds, but to the rest of us, it's a lot of sweating with no comic pay-off. Part of this has to be laid at the feet of the directors, who rarely, if ever, set a "button" on scenes and in general moved people about with little regard for timing or pace. (Note the double prologue, with first a slideshow and then a set-up by Mother Goose -- one would have been quite enough, given that neither were very funny and often repeated each other.)

Second, the narrative pace is too slow. It may be a thin truism to say that if you want something to be funny, do it faster, and if you want tragedy, do it slower, but there are grains of truth in it, and "Babes," in part because of its sweaty efforts to be funny, doesn't settle into a satisfying rhythm of set-up and pay-off. If the action is meant to be mad-cap, then mad-cap it must be, with the attitude and pacing of "well, if you didn't like that joke, then just wait because we got a million of 'em." "Babes" never nears this kind of velocity.

Third, the writing. To re-create an old work without re-describing the material for the time and place in which you're performing it is to do theatre without a purpose, a variant of the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney "Babes in Arms" shtick of "I have a barn -- let's put on a show!" The barn can't be the "reason" for the show, and if it is, the work will lack heart and focus, which is exactly what happens with "Babes in Toyland."

Not all is lost here. David Greenspan's turn as The Master Toymaker who hates children and wants to create zombie-toys that will kill them all on Christmas morning is wry and nasty at the same time (and, strangely enough, is part of the MacDonough book in 1903). All the actors perform with verve and dedication, and the set, costuming, lighting, sound, choreography, and musical direction all show a sure professional touch (including the inventive use of cardboard for both set and costume design).

And I did like Uncle Barnaby's cosmetic moustache. Barnaby will do anything to marry Contrary Mary (including prepare the death by drowning of his nephew, Alan, who is his rival for Mary's hand). In one scene Barnaby walks on with a moustache penciled in short straight lines to the edges of his mouth; in another, the moustache now has fanciful curlicues that reach across his cheeks; in yet another, one side curls upward, the other curls downward, like a snarl. No one ever mentions it or points it out -- it's just there if you notice it, and if you notice it, brings on a smile. The sight gag had just the right mix of humor and subtlety, and should have been the touchstone for the piece because its comedy was unforced, exerting just enough pressure to make its point without over-stating the case.

Michael Bettencourt

Scott Janes as Laurent and Lily Balsen as Therese Raquin. Photography by Stan Barouh.

The Potomac Theatre Project's production of Neal Bell's 1991 theatrical reconstruction of Émile Zola's novel is considered and competent, and therein lies its strength and its weakness.
First published as a novel in 1867, and then adapted by Zola himself into a play in 1873, "Thérèse Raquin" became the opening assault by a generation of European artists against what they considered the encrusted art forms of their day: against pretension and social irrelevance they would bring to bear the power of scientific observation of real life, grounded (more often than not) in the life of the lower orders. Zola used the preface to the second edition of "Thérèse Raquin" to post the argument that his art would examine "temperaments, not characters," and how the interactions of these temperaments would inevitably lead, as in a scientific experiment, to the tragic conclusions of the novel.
The core story of "Thérèse Raquin" is age-old and simple: Thérèse, in a loveless marriage to her spoiled and sickly cousin, Camille, more or less engineered by the cousin's mother, meets Laurent, a handsome young painter, and engages in an affair that leads to the murder of the husband, a wave of remorse, and their mutual suicide to escape the guilt. Director Jim Petosa stages everything simply: two wooden chairs (along with a few other props) serve to create time and place; scenes are short and crisply choreographed, efficiently piling evidence upon evidence, buoyed by a (sometimes) lachrymose score; and the primary actors (Helen-Jean Arthur as the mother, Lily Balsen as Thérèse, Willie Orbison as Camille, and Scott Janes as Laurent) command the stage, especially Arthur and Balsen. All the elements conspire to create an evening of unified and proficient theatre.
A certain dullness does creep in as we watch the unfolding of this experiment because we know, right from get-go, that this will not end well for anyone, and no degree of theatrical competence can overcome the fact that the audience is ahead of story almost all the way through. And I wish Petosa and PTP/NYC had delved a little into what it means to produce a play like "Thérèse Raquin" in 2009 in a culture besotted with misdeeds every bit as lurid and lascivious as the crime perpetrated by Thérèse and Laurent. Why do this play now? What does it have to say to a contemporary audience long tutored in irony and self-reference?
But this is really a quibble. With its smooth flow, erotic energy, and artful elements, "Thérèse Raquin" will please if not excite, and these days, given what passes for artistic fare, such competence and clarity of vision is a welcome offering.

Michael Bettencourt

Valerie Leonard as The Second Mother, Antoinette Lavecchia as The Empress and Robert Emmet Lunney as Starhemberg. Photography by Stan Barouh.

The Potomac Theatre Project, now known as PTP/NYC, had great success last year with another of British playwright Howard Barker's plays, "Scenes From An Execution," which garnered a Drama Desk Award for Best Leading Actress for Jan Maxwell. And the year before that, Barker's "No End Of Blame" had multiple nominations by the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. So, Howard Barker has been good for PTP/NYC.
This year, the company has decided to do the American premiere of "The Europeans," a play more opaque and furtive than the other two in both its intentions and obsessions, and for the most part, except for a few scenes with dramatic impact, director Richard Romagnoli and his cast did not manage to make Barker's meditations and investigations about war, freedom, morality, history, and power (and its attendant eroticism) take on dramatic life.
Barker locates the play in an actual event: the aftermath of the 1683 siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks which is repelled by General Ernst Rüdiger Von Starhemberg (who appears in Barker's play, along with another actual historical figure of that event, Emperor Leopold -- the rest of the characters are Barker's inventions). Barker focuses on the aftermath because it gives him a forum for speculating about the possible liberations that wholesale destruction can bring -- from sclerotic moralities, imperial follies, shallow art, even accepted norms of sanity.
Each character populating this flattened Vienna is now without a compass, except, perhaps, for the most basic (and base) impulses. For some, like Orphuls (Robert Zuckerman), a gluttonous priest who murders his mother to gain a proper knowledge of evil, becoming unhinged from the past gives him license to indulge his every human appetite without restraint or judgment, whatever the consequence and without remorse. For others, like Emperor Leopold (Brent Langdon) and Empress Elizabeth (Antoinette LaVecchia), the direction is retrograde, a return to the verities that established their power and kept them at the top of the heap. Others have urgencies more mixed and porous. Starhemberg (Robert Emmet Lunney), the successful general, shuns all official accolades and seeks, among the human refuse of Vienna and especially in the raped, mutilated, and Turk-impregnated body of Katrin (Aidan Sullivan), some path that will not lead to an "official" morality that cements injustice in place and honors the impostors. Katrin, for her part, wants to make her suffering a public spectacle, even a public art: she insists that 10,000 pictures of her breastless torso be distributed throughout the city and stages the birth of her half-Turkish child outdoors in the city's center for all to witness. In Starhemberg she finds a companion who will love her in the way she demands: without pity, without concern for beauty, attracted to her by her defaults and absences.
And elsewhere in this urban chaos, sex is exchanged for food and vice versa, a severed head is cradled like a baby, intellectuals discuss art while people starve -- the world off-kilter and thus (at least to Barker) ripe for amendment.
In short, in "The Europeans," consistent with his formulation of a Theatre of Catastrophe, Barker presents his audience with the obverse of what he thinks are their settled beliefs so that they have the chance to question themselves and, in that questioning, come to know what they did not know they knew. At least, that's the theory.
In practice? In this play, more so than in the other two Barker plays PTP/NYC has produced, the theatrical world is more hermetic and arid. I would even go so far to say that Barker, despite his intention to get his audiences to reëxamine in themselves what does not get examined often enough, is not particularly concerned if an audience is in attendance here. The debates, badinage, aperçus, sermons, renditions all come out of the characters' mouths as what they are and very little more. Occasionally, Barker jobs in what an audience might recognize as dialogue or subtext or narrative forward-motion (there is an actual story being told here, mostly focused on Starhemberg and Katrin), but for the most part Barker has his characters deliver his/their words and then move on to the next oration.
That being said, Romagnoli doesn't help the situation as much as he could have because he chooses to stage the play with his characters in "period" costume (i.e., tightly cinched gowns for the court ladies, rough-wool pants and heavy boots for Starhemberg, etc.) and uses projections on hung cloth to set literal places for the action -- in other words, trying to find some "naturalistic" vernacular to frame Barker's quite non-natural and abstracted theatrical world. I kept wondering if a different sort of staging might have helped sharpen the focus on Barker's intentions here, something less ornamental and more "estranging," to use Victor Shklovsky's critical term. As it is, while at times the production has undeniable dramatic power (as in Katrin's narrative of her despoilment and the handing back of Katrin's child to the Turks at the end of the play), it fails to catch fire overall.
This is not entirely the production's fault. Barker's play, even though supposedly an outwardly aimed meditation upon what makes Europe Europe (written, as it was, in 1990, when Europe debated this question itself in relation to forming the EU), is insular and self-indulgent, and much of the "obverse morality" he posits as the antidote to our aesthetic prejudices, such as the equation of beauty and cruelty, is a morality best left for the actors on a stage or, like the intellectuals in Leopold's court, bandied about by people who have no power to put it into effect -- it is not useable in the real life most of us have to lead.
So kudos to PTP/NYC for bringing more of Barker to the United States, and for participating in the international celebration in October that will honor his work and the theatre created to stage it, The Wrestling School. I look forward to their next Barker project.

Michael Bettencourt

Michael Mason, Cole Wimpee and Adam Belvo. Photography by Kalli Newman.

Buried inside the spew of words of Casey Wimpee's text, there is an actual story in "Lavaman," dealing with the way sons who have lost their mother deal with that tragedy. Arnie (Michael Mason), twin brother of Archie, creates a character in a never-written graphic novel called Lavaman, born in the fire of a volcano in Iceland and which harbors fire in his belly and anger in his heart. Archie, for his part, seems to have consumed, and been consumed by, the anarchic energies of punk rock -- by the time the play starts, Archie has died a burnt-out death, and our only knowledge of him is through his friends Gill (Cole Wimpee) and Dino (Adam Belvo).
More tragedy floods in. Dino is stabbed to death by a deer antler wielded by Arnie, now channeling the explosive spirit of Archie (though Gill might also have been the one to stab Dino) as the three of them, fueled by a stew of pharmaceuticals, attempt to rescue Erica, Gill's former girlfriend, from a gang of vegan bike dykes affiliated with the Hell's Angels. (Where the deer antler comes from and why Dino convinces the hapless pair to go through with this harebrained scheme are story elements I will leave to the discovery of the audience.)
But the story itself seems less important to writer Casey Wimpee than the way the story gets told: he fragments the tale so that the audience is fooled, at least for a time, into thinking it is watching something that is, in fact, not happening the way audience thinks it is. And what passes for dialogue between the characters tries to mimic the blasting sonic torrent of early punk -- Dino and Gill are motor-mouths supreme, and kudos to them for making Wimpee's riff upon riff upon riff upon riff articulate and (mostly) coherent.
Director Matthew Hancock sets the action in Gill's apartment (inherited from his dead mother -- dead mothers seems to abound in this play), suitably garbaged to fit the life of a ne'er-do-well who will never ever do well. Hancock's design team (lights by Jake Platt, sounds by Ryan Dorin, visual editing by Sean Berman, and projection consulting by Cameron Yeary) provide a driving punk soundtrack and projection drawings of Lavaman that are scatalogically funny and expressive of Arnie's inner torment.
Though I think that Wimpee wants the play's propulsive drive and high-decibel anxiety to be like a fist in the solar plexus, I found that these elements produced the opposite effect in me, a dissipation of my attention-span and a fatigue with/loss of interest in the characters' struggles. Less could be more here -- less indulgent language traded in for more self-reflection in the characters, less admiration for pure energy and more attention given to sharpening the dramatic conflicts. The show runs 105 minutes and could easily be tightened to 90 minutes with judicious editing, without any loss of emotional appeal or comic apocalypse.
That being said, praise for the three actors for their total commitment to what is happening on the stage and for a production that, in its trading of bodily fluids and its admiration for the dead art of punk, channels some much needed transgressive energy out into the boutiqued and malled environs of Soho.

Michael Bettencourt

Janelle Lannan (center) as Alice and the cast of A Wonderland - Photographer: Eamonn Farrell

The musically induced "A Wonderland" takes Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" as its founding text, sending Alice, a failed actor and chanteuse relegated to the dreary life of a 34-year-old administrative assistant, on a druggy trip into the psyche of her failed dreams. "A Wonderland" is over-long and under-focused, but it has many many wonderful elements in it that, even though they don't add up to a satisfying whole, give a great deal of theatrical pleasure.
Anonymous Ensemble, which produced the work, is known for its "pan-medium projects," and "A Wonderland" mixes in live-camera feeds and pre-recorded video with Vegas-style ensemble dancing (sharply choreographed by David Scotchford) and a tight three-piece band (Sasha Brown, Shoheen Owhady, Raky Sastri), all supported by a tech crew that turns the boxy environs of the Ohio Theatre into an appropriate dreamscape (Lucrecia Briceno, lighting; Kumi Ishizawa and Ken Travis, sound).
But even "pan-medium projects" need a good hook, and this is where "A Wonderland" doesn't deliver. One problem, at least for me, is that Farrell and Antoniou make the songs carry the narrative burden, and while all the singers were articulate and crisp in their deliveries, it was impossible to catch all of what one needed to catch to make sense of the story's progression. This also made the songs seem to go on far longer than needed, which stopped narrative forward-motion cold.
As a piece of musical theatre, "A Wonderland" wants to have the same campiness as "Hedwig," but the characters come off more like the poseurs in "Hair" -- the Mad Hatter (Josh Hoglund) as a floppy-hatted motor-mouthed drug dealer had "dated" stamped all over it, as did his "tribe" of March Hare (Cory Antiel), Dormouse (Liz Davito), and The Duchess (Meghan Williams), and the notion of drugs inducing spiritual revelation died a well-deserved death long ago. The reason it doesn't have "Hedwig's" coolness is that "A Wonderland" tries too hard -- it foregoes the light touch that camp requires for the over-gestured mannerism and the over-decibeled in-your-face. And, most important, "Hedwig" had a heart in the character of Hedwig, who gave an emotional anchor to all the outrageousness. There is no matching character in "A Wonderland."
The creators of "A Wonderland," though, have come up with some really inventive and clever theatricalities that inject some effervescence into the proceedings: the Red Queen (Jessica Weinstein), comes in on stilts, a tall crown making her even more elongated and imperial; the Caterpillar is five glow-in-the-dark Hoberman spheres, expanded and contracted by five performers in black clothes as it wriggles across the stage; and the Cheshire Cat is Kiebpoli Calnek doing aerial corde lisse as she floats above the questioning and questing Alice.
Janelle Lannan, playing Alice, has a supple and vibrant voice and a self-assured presence that is just a pure pleasure to listen to and watch, especially in what is probably the best song in the whole show, "The One." Matt Mager, as Blanche duBunny, struts his transvestite self across the stage with a cocksure half-smile, and Liz Davito, as the loopy and possibly perpetually drunk/stoned Dormouse, not only plays a mean guitar and violin but keeps the comic temperature rising with her excellent timing. And watch for the dancers, who manage to live large within their tight muscled choreography: Theresa Coombe-Mannino, Simone De La Rue, JD Smith, and Billy Tighe.

Michael Bettencourt

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune at the Exit Theatre in San Francisco.
A strong choice for a small theater space--one set (Frankie's bedroom) and two characters plus a radio voice. Director Michael Haven stages the two acts of this "search for connection against a world of loss and longing" with tight, spare movement--no wasted motion, no attempt to "open" the space or make the action or characters appear larger than they are. True to Terrence McNally's script, it leaves the exchanges between the would-be lovers, as they strive to find a way to make their one night stand into something more, the single focus.
At times I closed my eyes and let the voices do the work. Ben Ortega as the emotional Johnny and Cheryl Smith as the stolid Frankie had the edgy swirling confrontations just right. Their shifts to more intimate, easier interchanges were, perhaps, not as smooth, but overall the performances were vibrant and engaging making this production of a solid play into a exciting evening of theater.

Rich Yurman

Julian Rozzell, Jr. as Macbeth and (L-R) Rachel Tiemann, Amelia Workman and Bryn Boice as the Weird Sisters. Photo courtesy of Pharah Jean-Philippe

The challenge to producing a play by Shakespeare is always how to make the familiar fresh, to re-imagine what has been already been re-(and re-)imagined, and Hipgnosis Theatre Company has tried to do this with its current production of "Macbeth." The company stages the piece on a fully lit playing area without any lighting effects other than lights-on/lights-off because it wants the ensemble (in the words of its press release) to "evoke the darkness of the setting (and of the plot) with their language and action, rather than with technical effects." To create what the company calls "a harsh, unforgiving and clinical atomsphere," the floor is layered in featureless white vinyl, and overhead three banks of fluorescent lights buzz away. Actors sit in view of the audience and enter and exit as needed. The approach produces what the company wants: a concentration on Shakespeare's action and text, stripped of superfluous effects. However, such a gambit requires that the actors speak the text superbly and the direction do more than move people around the space. This is where the company's reach exceeds its grasp. Julian Rozzell, who plays Macbeth, toils mightily at the language, but his gangly frame makes it difficult to believe he is "Bellona's bridegroom," and he's been directed to make every conspicuous choice in gesture and intonation suggested by the language -- his obvious emotions, thus being so obvious, are high in melodrama and short on subtlety. The other major characters also work hard but come up short: Elizabeth Mirachi portrays the tortured (and torturing) Lady Macbeth without much variation between the queen's molten ambition and icy dementia, Richard Ugino does a competent but mostly monochromatic Banquo, and Douglas Scott Streater (Malcolm) and Nick Brooks (Macduff) sport the required soldierly manliness but do so at such a high decibel level that at times, such as in IV, iii, when Malcolm tests Macduff's loyalty, they compete to see who can bellow the loudest. The sound design by Demetrios Bonaros is mostly illustrative (i.e., a bell rings when a bell is called for) and does little to create a world to match the production's "clinical" concept. Krista Thomas-Scott's mish-moshed costume design uses suit-jackets with cut-off sleeves to represent breastplates and Wellingtons as stand-ins for leather boots -- its slapdash look lacks a unifying through-line. (Though Thomas-Scott's dressing the three witches in swaths of Tyvek, with gauze across their eyes, marries well the weirdness of the Weird Sisters to the company's conceit of a fully lit horror-fest.) All in all, this is just another production of a Shakespeare play -- the direction seems mostly aimed at what a director friend of mine calls "crowd control," its design elements do not match and reinforce one another, and the actors' performances do not (in the words of another Shakespeare character) come "trippingly on the tongue." In other words, nothing about this production makes the familiar words and themes fresh and memorable -- and that is the real tragedy of this otherwise energetic "Macbeth."

Michael Bettencourt

According to the dramaturg's notes in the program, Leslie Lee composed "The Book of Lambert" some 30 years ago and over the past several years has workshopped the play extensively. But despite the evident attention that Lee has given to his "child" to contemporize and re-fashion it, it still feels like the script of a younger writer, and the better part of valor may have been to let the three-decade-old unproduced script stay tucked away. Without a strong directorial hand by Cindy Marion, "Lambert" is, by turns, an inert, bombastic, banal, and repetitive story about a young African-American man, Lambert (Clinton Faulkner), who, rejected by by his white lover Virginia (Heather Massie), hides out in an abandoned part of the subway system inhabited by five other escapees from the upper world: child-abused and pregnant Bonnie (Joresa Blount), nymphomaniacal Priscilla (Sadrina Johnson), the elderly couple Zinth and blind Otto (Gloria Sauvé and Arthur French), and Clancy, a white Irish-American cop (Howard Wieder). Each has his or her own tale of woe, and Lee sets up the situation so that Lambert ends up using their travails as a way to work through the pain of Virgina's rejection -- in other words, "The Book of Lambert" becomes the book of the play we're watching. But for two-and-a-half hours this "book" moves without sure-footedness among the several elements that make up its chapters: echoes of Beckett as well as Gorky's "The Lower Depths, confessional monologue, racial stereotyping, and philosophizing about the purgative power of pain and the destructive pleasures of love. Some of the performances are worth the watching, especially by Johnson and Sauvé, but by the end, when Lambert decides to surface and face the rest of his life, the only thing I could feel was relief at being able to escape the theatre. Now that Lee has gotten "Lambert" its first full production and added that to his resume, it may be time to reshelve the "Book" and move on to other projects.

Michael Bettencourt

Austin McCormick, the founder of Company XIV, has chosen to re-tell the story of how the Trojan prince Paris gained access to, and then the body of, Helen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus (thus kicking off the Trojan War and Homer's career as a poet) by setting it on the bodies (both zaftig and slender) of blonde-wigged, corseted cancan dancers (one of whom is a tall thin man in drag [?]) led by a Johnny Deppish host/narrator/sometime player in the action. Why he does any of this is not clear; what doing this adds to a fable about desire and destruction is also not clear. What is clear is that his dancers can do a mean cancan, including the skirt-flipping, crotch- and derriere-peeping, and spirited whooping -- though this does get old quickly, as do the attempts of the dancers to come off as bawdy and salacious, which cause more embarrassment than seduction. Buried in all of this Baz Lurhmann-styled "Moulin Rouge" hoopla is a commentary about the (ab)use of women by both men (Paris, Menelaus) and women (Aphrodite as a bordello madam selling off the disgraced Helena to the highest bidder), as well as something about the horrible exhilaration of war, but these only barely manage to break through the collaged and pastiched surface that McCormick trowels onto the original story. Leigh Allen's lighting design manages to hold its own against the production's busy-ness, as do Olivera Gajic's costumes, but the sound design by McCormick is the aural equivalent of his visual mulligan stew, bumping Cole Porter up against Arvo Pärt, Lionel Newman against Benjamin Britten, without anything artistically compelling coming out of the collision. I can applaud McCormick's desire to applique all these various elements onto the founding myth in an attempt to find a new way to refresh an old story, but the old story gets lost as McCormick uses its meat and bones to structure the production and forgets to work in the spice and flavor of its cautionary message. The Judgment of Paris may be, as one review put it, "a rousing spectacle," but, in the end, unfortunately, that's all it is.

Michael Bettencourt

Matt Huffman as Henry Stuart Matis - Photo courtesy of Graham T. Posner

"Missa Solemnis" (the title comes from Beethoven's orchestral work of the same name) is, indeed, a solemn play. Playwright Roman Feeser (who is not Mormon) focuses on the homophobia in the Mormon Church that eventually makes Henry Matis, a gay Mormon (and the "Henry" of the title, played well by Matt Huffman), take his own life, compelled by religious doubt and self-loathing. Feeser dutifully takes the audience through the conditions that led to this tragedy, placing the blame for Henry's death on an institution where devotion to an exclusively heterosexual definition of "family" dismisses, with savage denunciation, all those who do not fit that category. Director Linda Nelson has done her best to extract and shape whatever dramatic tension exists in the play, but she is often stymied by the undramatic structure of the script itself, which begins, in the first scene, with Henry committing his suicide, and then gives the audience what amounts to a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation of how Henry came to his end. Several moments do stand out: Henry's relationship with Todd Elliot (Jai Catalano), a lover he meets in New York, full of tenderness and humor; Henry's discussion with Bishop Rhodes (Warren Katz), where the Mormon leader shows an unexpected sympathy for Henry's plight; and, perhaps the most affecting because the most simple and wordless (in a play overstuffed with talk), the long drawn-out keening of Henry's mother Marilyn (Gail Winar) by his graveside. Lighting (Graham Posner), set (Marisa Merrigan), sound (Justin Utley), and costume (David Thompson) serve Nelson's directorial vision adequately, though Beethoven's music sounded under-volumed whenever it was used (thus losing a chance to fill the air and audience with its power) and went missing completely at the end of the play, a point when it would seem appropriate to let the music sweep the audience up in its redemptive embrace and reinforce Henry's message of tolerance. "Missa Solemnis" sits squarely in the genre of "journalistic theatre," which uses theatrical devices to teach a story that, while compelling and laudable, is not necessarily dramatic, and whose purpose, as Feeser says in an interview, is to get people to stand up and "do something" (in this case, about homophobia), an intention which often disallows saying anything ambiguous about the motives and reasons of the characters. Henry's story can move us, as it did Feeser when he first read about it, but "The Play About Henry," as a kind of "theatre of correction," is less successful in transferring to the audience the emotional punch of the original Newsweek article that inspired Feeser to write the play.

Michael Bettencourt

Paul Schnabel as James Mann and Stephanie Viola as K Mann - Photo by Abigail Feldman

The Riot Group, using a script by co-founder Adriano Shaplin (who also performs along with Riot Group company members Paul Schnabel, Stephanie Viola, and Drew Friedman), sets many targets in its sights in this sharply drawn, occasionally tedious 90-minute piece. The story, such as it is, follows the rise and fall of broadcast news rivals James and K. Mann, father and daughter (the "K" stands for Katherine, but she never refers to herself by that name). Their head-to-head battle for ratings supremacy is also a stand-in for the passion play of a bitter father/daughter battle, with K. accusing James of his loving her "like cancer loves cells." During K.'s premiere broadcast, terrorists attack the United States, cutting off all electrical power. Within the space of ten minutes the US declares war, then wins the war it has declared, and, as power is restored, K. beats James to the usual insipid end-of-broadcast eulogy/paean delivered by news anchors about victory and heroism. The overnight ratings declare K. the winner, and James resigns (to be replaced by his assistant Andrew). But Andrew, not content with his victory, brings down K. by exposing photographs of K. in a leather S&M mask, photographs taken by K.'s assistant Spence (who is also K.'s sex partner), who is angling for his own rise up the corporate food chain. The play ends with Andrew and Spence co-anchoring the nightly newscast that James had run for 30 years, while a chastened K. and James (now doing the weather report) work for a local TV station somewhere in America's heartland. Each has his or her own "victory at the dirt palace," the lowest kind of victory, as K. points out. Shaplin's satiric dissection of celebrity culture, the vapidity of the news media ("all news is jokes," James says at one point), and the operatics of family dysfunction are all intelligent and presented with humor and flair (thanks to Whit MacLaughlin's tight direction). Yet Shaplin also has a love of his own voice and pours out metaphor-laden word-streams that often strain too hard for significance and delay or divert the story's unfolding. And the choice to have the actors direct almost all their lines to the audience and the air (only rarely do the characters interact with each other) in essence makes the play a monologue and denies it the opportunity to build the kind of gravitational attraction among characters that creates dramatic tension. "Victory at the Dirt Palace" is cerebrally interesting and sometimes culturally provoking, but it never goes beyond its own cleverness and bombast, in the end not looking or sounding very different from the celebratized superficial culture which it aims to demolish by parody.

Michael Bettencourt

Photo: Bill Connington as Quentin P., serial killer, with his favorite ice pick (photographer Tony David)

What are we to make of "Zombie," a one-actor piece about Quentin P., the queer sadistic sexual-psychopathic murderer who yearned to create a zombie who would obey him without question by performing home-made lobotomies with an icepick rammed up through his victims' eye-sockets? "Zombie" is in that genre of theatre that uses the stage for the case-study of a psychological/psychotic condition (think "Equus"), in the hope of (in this order) titillating the audience through voyeurism and, perhaps, shedding some explanatory light on the "abnormal" (i.e., people not like the audience members). But a script is not a case-study, imagination is not the same as the DSM-IV, and two-hours-with-intermission does not substitute for therapy. Inevitably the interpretive effort must always deliver less than it promises because, one, the audience is always more interested in titillation than explanation and, two, explanation can never be dramatic (think of how all those CSI shows try to tart up the lab tests with music and camera-work so that people won't switch the channel). Well, then, if by the end of "Zombie" Quentin P. is still an unsolved riddle, what about the quality of the performance itself? Again, "Zombie" delivers less than it promises. Directed by "Mamma Mia!" resident director Thomas Caruso, with set by Josh Zangen, lighting by Joel Silver, and sound by Deidre Broderick, Connington chooses to present Quentin as a sort of button-down nerd, with owl-eye-styled brown-rim glasses, slicked down combover, chinos, and a short-sleeve shirt who speaks in slow, upper-Midwest-themed accent. All this is meant to contrast with the viciousness of his anecdotes about using the trash of society as his experiments in zombie-making. Connington does well enough, though several line-flubs and Caruso's advice to play Quentin with only the slightest hint of animation drain off most of the story's vigor and danger. But the choice to adapt this as a monologue is also partly to blame for the slightly soporific quality of the production. No matter if the actor is talking to a stuffed dummy (the only "zombie" Quentin is able to create) or to the audience or to the air, the stage lacks a second center of gravity around which the dramatic action can orbit. In addition, almost all the "action" in the piece is told in retrospect, not shown in the present tense, and so the piece becomes something more for the ear than the eye. Finally, Connington just does not offer the kind of performance that turns the dialectic between the outward dweeb and the inner monster into a memorable hour upon the stage. "Zombie" unfortunately feels too much like its title.

Michael Bettencourt

Photo: Steven Rattazzi as the Heistman - Photographer: Brian McDermott

In "Heistman," Heistman, played by Steve Ratazzi, and his two cohorts (a man and a woman) have just taken over a bank and secured two female hostages when they are surrounded by the police and commanded to give themselves up by a police officer (Matt Oberg) barking through a megaphone. However, instead of surrendering, Heistman proceeds to deliver the first third of "The Heist Man Manifesto" (the complete text of which, running for three double-sided single-spaced pages, is stuffed into the program). The Manifesto begins with Personal Happiness and ends with The Fear, which he defines as "the fear that your life is a waste"; according to Heistman, it is The Fear which drives most people to do desperate things (such as robbing banks) to make their lives have meaning. At this point, about 20 minutes into the 45-minute production, Heistman, driven by his own capital-F "Fear," is saved by the two hostages, who have somehow freed themselves from being tied up and who lead him and his two "associates" on a dance of self-peace. This is all sort of a metaphoric and mildly interesting silliness, with ideas like "heist" and "hostage" and "giving up" laden with double and triple layers of "meaning," underscored by an eclectic sound design by Marcelo Añez, choreography by Barnstone (which is excellently performed by Ratazzi and Molly Lieber, Eleanor Smith, Carolton Ward, and Barnstone herself), and Paul Douglas Olmer's and Garin Marschall's effective set and lighting. Ratazzi's performance is what gives the piece any intellectual heft that it has: by turns flippant, fear-laden, comic, and dangerous, Ratazzi turns the commonplaces of the Manifesto, which are a dull read on the page, into words with edges and possibilities.

Michael Bettencourt

(L-R) Amelie Lyons, Joanne Jacobson and Lenora Champagne - Photographer: Gary Breckheimer

TRACES/fades runs about 75 minutes and is Ms. Champagne's "meditation on Alzheimer's and our national inability to remember history." Therein lies the challenge with this sometimes affecting but often off-putting production: a mixture of themes and devices that have not been blended dramatically. The script's constant references to wars and bumbling presidents and amnesiac societies is butted up against the central story of a memory-losing Ann (Joanne Jacobson) who, packed away in a nursing home, is beloved by her granddaughter (Amelie Champagne Lyons) and only marginally attended to by her daughter (played by Ms. Champagne). Naturally, the old woman's story steals center stage because it is immediate and visceral as opposed to the more abstract commentaries on big-picture politics. The play's structure mimics this uneasy link of part-to-part, with presentational elements morphing into song-singing to prettyish tunes by Daniel Levy and Lisa Dove to some very wry and wrenching interactions among the denizens of Ann's nursing home (Mary Fogarty, Matthew Lewis, and Judith Greentree) as they spar with their well-meaning but overwhelmed care-giver Nettie (Quanda Johnson) -- all of which are individually interesting but which are also not quilted into a dramatic whole. (Not to mention the video projections by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty of purling water under ice, snowstorms, hands that write then un-write what they've just written, and so on, which are more distracting than illuminating.) The moments I found most touching were the ones ungussied by "theatrical device" and "author's message," such as when Nettie complains to Delores about how her getting-older body is thickening in the middle, and Delores responds, straight and acerbic, with "That's nothing. Just wait. Everything hurts." Truth plain and unadorned in those words, and the audience, understandably, laughed in both recognition and commiseration. Or when Nettie muses, "If we are what we remember, then who are we when we forget?" Moments like those are what makes seeing TRACES/fades worth the effort.

Michael Bettencourt

It is well-nigh impossible to hear Sarah Kane's aching meditation on the cravings for love, connection, and understanding minus the static bred by her suicide several months after the piece was written. But it is important to do so in order to judge the work as theatre. Four voices, labeled A, M, B, and C (Adam Ludwig, Stephanie Janssen, Rishabh Kashyap, and Stephanie Strohm), sit in four chairs under occasionally shifted lighting and, in choral concert, interweave tales of yearnings for linkage, as if the default state of life is sadness and disconnect. But "Crave" is not really a play, if by "play" is meant a narrative of change, revelation, reversal, conflict, "high stakes," and so on, and because of its non-play structure, all is told, not shown, over a hour's time, which makes "Crave" a presentation more for the ear than the eye. As a consequence, its poetic earnestness, despite the talented efforts of director Cheryl Faraone and cast, becomes tedious and, in its tediousness, ironically reinforces the disconnect that A, M, B, and C (and Kane) struggle to nullify through their sad and lonely chorus.

Michael Bettencourt

"Do Not Do This Ever Again" is a 90-minute intermissionless journey into "a landscape of lost love and modern loneliness," though the multi-media'd journey feels so much longer because about halfway through writer Keithley and director Goyanes decided to drop humor and cheek and instead go portentious and sober. Broken into 3½ parts (the half-part is called "inter-part"), the talented eight-member crew of "Do Not..." drapes long swags of faux-meaningful text over the audience in order to decrease their oxygen supply and slip them into a hypnotic state where they will believe they are being shown something significant and insightful, when, in fact, they're only experiencing a low-grade delirium induced by the performance and a stuffy theatre. Keithley and Goyanes also cram in some projections, movement, and music (both instrumental and vocal -- Katy Pyle's voice is actually the best thing in the show), but very little of it adds yeast to the unleavened core of Keithley's play.

Michael Bettencourt

(L-R): Peter Schmitz as Prodo and Jan Maxwell as Galactia - Photographer Stan Barouh

Howard Barker is a hard playwright to feel warm about -- his primary characters make no concession to sentiment, and all of them, to one degree or another, are fascinating monsters, driven by a complicated choreography with power that causes pain and dislocation as they cut their way through the world. In "Scenes," Galactia, an unmatched painter with an unruly desire to tell the truth, is commissioned by the city-state of Venice to memorialize its greatest military triumph, the battle of Lepanto. In the course of covering 3000 square feet of canvas, she manages to offend everyone from the Doge on down by choosing to portray slaughter rather than triumph. But lest we take the the default liberal position of championing the artist over the state, Barker gives the state some pretty strong arguments about why we shouldn't trust artists to tell the truth, and in the end Galactia comes off both as a hero and a fool. For the most part, director Richard Romagnoli has crafted a balanced and energized production, and Jan Maxwell has created a Galactia who may be impossible to love but who demands that we pay attention -- and we do, to our delighted agitation..

Michael Bettencourt