Recent Theater

A Boy and His Soul
Autobiographical theater—an author/performer telling an audience the story of her/his life—is challenging. Very often, these shows are about the artist's journey: growing up, finding an artistic voice or vision, discovering racial or sexual identity, overcoming adversity, or some other form of self-realization/actualization. Since the story is usually intensely personal, I think it's difficult for it to transcend the individual and become universal: it's important to the artist but not as vital to the rest of us. I've had the good fortune to seem some exceptional autobiographical works by Peggy Shaw, Lorenzo Pisoni and several others; one of the best in recent years was Stew's Passing Strange (soon to be a major motion picture, as they say).

Colman Domingo has followed up his excellent performance in that play on Broadway with his own, A Boy and His Soul, now at the Vineyard Theater. In this one-person show, Domingo chronicles his life growing up in Philadelphia and how particular songs, albums and singers impacted key moments for him. He is assisted in this with several crates of classic soul LPs that he plays on a '70s hi-fi console in a facsimile of his parents' basement (which has quite a few nice surprises hidden in its upstage wall). While his story is not entirely unusual—a black man coming-of-age and coming to terms with his homosexuality—I was struck by how much love plays a part in it all: his love for his family and theirs for him. That's not to say that there isn't tension or heartache between him, his siblings, his mother and stepfather—there is; but even their significant differences are tempered with a genuine affection for one another.

Domingo demonstrates that he is not only a gifted singer and actor but a strong writer, too: his script is well-structured and his language has a gentle poetry that still manages to feel entirely conversational. Director Tony Kelly has done a good job shaping the production simply in a manner that supports the actor and his text well—the performance feels fresh and natural even though it's clearly been meticulously planned and rehearsed. The music—well, it's the greatest soul hits of the '70s: of course it's fantastic and it's been incredibly well-designed and integrated by Tom Morse.

It's an odd choice for the Vineyard—I've heard rumors that they were hoping for another Wig Out—and the night we saw the show, the majority of the audience was several years older than us and significantly squarer (it's a rare thing, indeed, when I'm among the hipper people in an NYC crowd). I'm not sure what the subscribers (and they were so definitely subscribers) made of the show—they certainly didn't laugh as much as we did and I'm pretty sure they had almost no frame of reference for the inspired recreation of an Earth, Wind and Fire concert. But even if I can imagine other venues that might seem more appropriate—HERE, PS 122, and the Public Theater immediately come to mind—the Vineyard is giving the show a first-rate production and it's been extended through November 1. When other companies are playing it safe, they took a risk; I respect that and I'm glad that it paid off.

Killers and Other Family
As well-written, well-directed and well-acted as the production of Lucy Thurber's Killers and Other Family is at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, it's still a difficult play to watch. Within a few minutes after the play begins, Lizzie (Samantha Soule) is already in trouble when her brother, Jeff (Dashielle Eaves), and his friend, Danny (Shane McRae), drop in—unannounced and uninvited—from their hometown in Western Massachusetts. While Jeff pathetically pleads for her help to escape the serious trouble he's in, Danny launches into a charming but menacing seduction that ends with her eagerly surrendering to his horrible sexual violation—a sort of consensual rape.

End of scene one.

Ironically, for a play in which the tension mounts so swiftly and each act of violence is followed almost immediately by another, Thurber unfolds the characters' histories very slowly and carefully. It's a halfway through the play before we know the truth about Jeff's trouble (although there are hints earlier). The details of the twisted bond between Danny and Lizzie are revealed slowly, in brief flashes, over the course of the 90 minutes. And even after Lizzie's unwitting girlfriend, Claire (Aya Cash), arrives—the perfect device for dialogue full of back story since she doesn't know the other two at all—Thurber continues to very deliberately dole out information. It's effective because it balances our intellectual desire to understand these people with our revulsion at their animalistic behavior: as they are to one another, we're drawn to and repulsed by them.

The actors are all exceptional, especially McRae: his Danny is rawly sensual but emotionally damaged, deeply misogynistic and yet capable of offering Lizzie a perverse tenderness—it's easy to see why she can't entirely escape him. Director Caitriona McLaughlin has staged the piece effectively, like a good roller coaster: the slower-paced moments give the audience just enough time to catch their breaths before they crest the next hill and begin the frenetic race downward all over again. It's a finely-crafted, if deeply disturbing, production; Rattlestick picked the perfect piece to start their 15th season with a bang.

The Royal Family
George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's 1927 roman à clef about the Barrymores, The Royal Family, is a damned funny play; I mean, I was actually surprised at how laugh-out-loud funny it is. It helps that Doug Hughes has crafted a production for Manhattan Theater Club that is swift, manic and sharply focused: with three full acts and running just under three hours, it has to be. It's also the most sumptuous production I've seen in a very long time—I detest entrance applause but even I was tempted to put 'em together with everyone when the enormous red drape revealed John Lee Beatty's remarkable recreation of the Cavendish's two-story Upper East Side apartment. The cast is phenomenal with impeccable comic timing: Rosemary Harris as the ancient matriarch of the clan, who is making plans for her comeback tour; John Glover as her vapid brother, Herbert Dean, pestering everyone to help him find the vehicle that will resuscitate his foundering career; Tony Roberts as a faithful, long-suffering manager to the clan; Kelli Barrett as the youngest member of the family, about to make her Broadway debut; and the wildly flamboyant Reg Rogers as the prodigal son, Tony, who has escaped Hollywood just steps ahead of a breach of promise suit. The key to the show and by far the strongest performance in the production is Jan Maxwell as Julie Cavendish—the steady and (by the standards of this family) stable professional, the glue that binds them all to one another; her gradual meltdown and eventual explosion at the end of Act II is a joy to behold.

John Barrymore, the Playbill states, quite enjoyed the way he was portrayed in the play; Ethel was not amused and Lionel was silent on the subject. I think they'd all approve of how they come off in this production. Kaufman and Ferber may have originally intended audience to think of the Deans and Cavendishes as "those wacky artist-types" but Hughes is able to show us that there is an overwhelming passion for craft and art that makes the family seem crazy to the outside observer. In one scene, near the end of the evening, Tony regales the family with the blueprints for a little play he bought in Europe which uses constructivist scenery and contemporary performance style ("You don't enter or exit in the ordinary sense—you just slide, or else let down by wires"); it may have originally been mocking but here the family's enthusiasm reveals their complete and utter love for their profession—it's one of my favorite moments in a play filled with wonderful moments.

The day after we saw The Royal Family, Tony Roberts had a seizure just as the play was beginning and the matinee had to be canceled. He appears to be recovering now and I hope he'll be able to return to the show: Catherine and I both agreed that he was fantastic in the role of the successful personal manager who still relies heavily on his street-wise, kid-from-the-Bronx instincts. It's a very nuanced performance and one that should be seen again.

BTW: it's actually just a remarkable coincidence that all three of the plays we saw this past weekend were all about families.

Next Fall

Having grown up Southern Baptist, I know a little about the concept of "once saved, always saved." Contrary to how it may sound, it's not a license to kill: a Christian who has accepted Christ doesn't get a free ride to Heaven, regardless of the heinous deeds committed on Earth. If this nefarious individual is truly repentant and asks for forgiveness, the belief is that he/she will receive it; but there are Christians who unrepentantly commit such horrendously un-Christian crimes that I feel certain can, if Hell exists, look forward to an eternity consigned to it. As I understand it, "once saved, always saved" assumes that the "Christian" is actually striving to follow the teachings of Christ, so a mere public profession of faith is not enough: if Christ is truly in one's heart, that person will resist temptation and evil desires.*

In his play, Next Fall, Geoffrey Nauffts has given the defense of "once saved, always saved" to Luke, a young gay actor who is in a long-term relationship with an older writer/teacher, Adam. Adam has no religious beliefs while Luke is a conservative Christian who considers their relationship to be a sin that must be forgiven by God; this causes a fair amount of tension between them. Unfortunately, Luke is unequal to the challenge of actually defending his faith: when asked why a gay non-Christian would go to Hell while the murderers of Matthew Shepard, should they be Christian, would go to Heaven, his response is, essentially, "That's just the way it works." Of course, this is unacceptable to Adam (in addition to being wrong): who would worship a God as unjust as this? I had a momentary impulse at this point to stand up and politely disagree (fortunately, I was able to suppress the impulse).

As the play opens, Luke has been critically injured in an accident; his divorced parents have flown to New York from Florida, his friends have gathered at the hospital and Adam has quickly returned from a high school reunion. Luke's parents don't know that he is gay, let alone that he and Adam have been partners for five years. The lines of tension in this situation—who is considered family for visitation, who will make the life-and-death decisions, who knows best Luke's wishes—are immediately apparent. It will come as no surprise to anyone in the audience that this story cannot end happily.

The Naked Angels production is well-acted, capably directed and has a cleverly designed set by Wilson Chin that allows for the play's multiple locations to be revealed from within a single hospital waiting room. The script has loads of funny lines, most of them smartly delivered by Patrick Breen as the sardonic Adam; I'm actually, though, getting a little tired of the character who uses a wicked sense of humor to avoid coming to terms with love, death, relationships, sexuality, religion or any of the other realities of life—it's in danger of becoming a cliché. Nauffts has, for the most part, sidestepped the potentially deadly melodrama inherent in his script; even the inevitable hospital room confrontation between Adam and Luke's father, Butch—while highly charged, emotionally—is relatively restrained.

Ultimately, I found Next Fall to be engaging but not satisfying. Luke (Patrick Heusinger) isn't given the ability to maintain his side of the dialectic with Adam; Butch (Cotter Smith) isn't given the opportunity (in fact, any credibility Butch might have in the play is completely undercut by his homophobia and his racism—a superfluous addition, in my opinion: we already get that he's narrow-minded and hypocritical). The one other person of deep faith, a long-time friend of Luke's who is also gay, suffers from a more extreme version of Luke's self-loathing: he doesn't provide any new perspective on homosexuality and Christianity, so his big scene in Act II isn't really necessary (the actor, Seth Dugan, however, does a good job with this slim role). And because Adam is always the one to bring up the issue of faith and is able to present his side of the argument so much more adeptly, his continuous revisiting of the topic makes him seem to be the source of most of the tension in their relationship, not Luke. It's unfortunate that Nauffts chose not to explore in this direction: it might have made a much stronger piece.

*I found an excellent article on this website that discusses whether or not "once saved, always saved" is actually a cornerstone of the Baptist faith. The author makes an excellent argument that it isn't but that many Baptists believe that it is.

This Beautiful City

It’s possible that Steve Cosson and The Civilians are just incredibly lucky. They could not have known, of course, when they went to conduct interviews in Colorado Springs, CO in the weeks before and after the 2006 mid-term elections the enormous surprise the future held for them. They chose Colorado Springs because, before the conservative cultural revolutions of the ‘80s and ‘90s, it had merely been a home for hippies, ski bums and NORAD. In more recent years, it has been transfigured into the sort of place that would house the headquarters for 81 different religious organizations—among them James Dobson’s Focus on the Family group and Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, a mega-church with 10,000 members—making it, unofficially, the most evangelical city in the U.S.

And, lo, the gods of irony looked down upon The Civilians and they did bless them, for their visit to Colorado Springs coincided exactly with the explosive revelation that Reverend Ted had been having a sexual relationship with a male prostitute for three years.

I found it interesting that this bombshell is not actually the focus of This Beautiful City, the resulting docu-theater performance now playing at The Vineyard: it isn't even revealed until just before the end of Act I. Since we all know it's coming, of course, it does add incredible irony to every line uttered by every member of the Colorado Springs community—believers and non-believers alike. The script that has resulted from The Civilians' interviews is a lot more even-handed than I expected and it effectively illustrates the complicated situation we face in the U.S. with regard to individual beliefs and individual liberties. The play does not demonize the believers—although, by keeping some of the interviewees' more inarticulate or just plain-ignorant statements, the authors have allowed them to demonize themselves—and there are several characters who make persuasive arguments for how discovering their faith has dramatically changed their lives.

The production is engagingly and intelligently directed by Steve Cosson. There's a filmic quality to the way he has intercut the different subject interviews that succeeds because he has created this style using innately theatrical devices: simultaneous dialogue, musical numbers, direct address to the audience (which I don't usually like but it works here). The very talented cast of six actors—Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Brandon Miller, Stephen Plunkett and Alison Weller—all play several characters with little more than costume pieces to distinguish each one and yet their performances are so distinct and clear that I had no trouble recognizing New Life's Associate Minister (Heberlee) each time he reappeared—before the actor even spoke a word. Michael Friedman's original songs are almost all in the soft-rock/pop musical style that all these suburban churches have adopted; it's about my least favorite kind of music but entirely appropriate for this piece.

It appears that Ted Haggard himself has been to see the production; I'd love to hear what he thinks of it all. I was concerned that This Beautiful City would be annoying: whichever side of the dialogue you prefer, the other side has enormous potential to annoy. Instead, I was completely entertained and captivated by it all and still felt that I'd been given a thorough and balanced view of the issues involved. Which say to me that The Civilians are most definitely not lucky: they're just good.

Last Weekend On Stage

There are differences between "uptown" theater (Broadway, most Off Broadway and the wannabe showcases) and "downtown" theater (a few Off Broadway companies and most of the resident companies whose work I regularly enjoy) that have little to do with geography. I usually label something as uptown when I mean commercial—big budgets, big names, big ticket prices—while downtown for me covers... well, pretty much everything else, really. The work downtown might be experimental but it might not be; it could be presented in a theater below 14th Street in Manhattan or it could be in Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx; there could be a star actor in the cast but not very often (unless it's a downtown star like David Greenspan); there might be a big budget... well, if it's The Wooster Group, there's almost certainly at least a decent-sized budget—the rest of us, not so much. I prefer going to work performed below 14th, of course, but that probably has as much to do with my own innate laziness as with anything else: those productions are within walking distance of home. This weekend, I got to sample a little bit of both worlds.

The uptown production was Craig Lucas' A Prayer for My Enemy at Playwrights Horizon. I have to say that my expectations were not high: my impression of Lucas is that he writes fairly conventional plays about upper middle-class white people. I know that my belief is unfair: Prelude to a Kiss is the only full-length play of his that I have actually seen, and I attended a Naked Angels benefit for Amnesty International in 1991 in which he had a short play (which did nothing to change my opinion). In Prayer, Lucas attempts to break free of his self-imposed confines: it's a fairly conventional play about working-class white people. Actually, it's a decent enough play that interweaves the stories of an upstate New York family whose eldest son has enlisted to serve in Iraq with a woman approaching middle age who returns home from Manhattan to care for her elderly mother. The intersection of these two stories is intriguing and emotionally-charged but not the surprise that I think Lucas intended; with more commercial works, while I may not anticipate every detail of the plot, I spend a good portion of the play awaiting the inevitable bombshell that changes the characters and their worlds irrevocably. That said, I was never bored during the play—even through the characters' frequent direct-address interruptions, so that we'd know "what they really think"—and the actors all do an excellent job, especially Victoria Clark as the dutiful daughter. Director Bartlett Sher keeps everything moving at a nice pace and the minimal design elements keep the focus where it should be for this play: on the stories we're watching. If there are few revelations in this production, there are also few disappointments (other than the subtextual direct-address—please stop doing that and let the actors do their jobs).

Even though Catherine is the Dixon Place development director and even though Ellie, Leslie and the gang have been have been programming performances at 161 Chrystie Street for a few weeks now, Sunday was my first real opportunity to see the new theater (I'd been there numerous times during various construction stages). Unfinished though it is—they're still waiting for the sound system and audience risers that the City of New York bought for them to be delivered, the offices and cabaret space are pretty bare, and there are no couches or armchairs in the theater yet (and we all know that no location will ever be Dixon Place without them)—it's an amazing performance space (and quite possibly the most comfortable audience chairs below 14th Street). The occasion for my visit was Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, the anti-consumerism movement's equivalent of a tent revival. Like any good revival, much of the show is devoted to ministering through music—and the songs here are just as fervently felt and the performers just as skillful as their spiritual counterparts, while the lyrics replace Satan with Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Disney. During the 90-minute service, individuals share their personal testimonies, they celebrate the triumphs and bemoan the setbacks for the faithful in current events (the senseless death of Jdimytai Damour at a Wal-Mart on Black Friday, in particular), and Billy preaches a brief sermon.

I've seen Bill many times over the past 10 years but apart from last year's documentary, What Would Jesus Buy?, it had been a while since I'd seen him live. The thing that stands out most to me about the Church of Stop Shopping is that it's incredibly smart and it assumes that the audience is equally smart. We know that Bill is being funny but we also know that he's absolutely serious: consumerism is not the way to happiness and, in fact, has been a major contributor to the financial problems we now face in the United States. He knows that we want to be entertained but that we are also just as passionate about (or at least more than a little interested in) how we as individuals can make a difference. Bill is taking a break for the holidays but will be back at Dixon Place in January and performing around the country in 2009; if you can't get to a performance, I highly recommend the film (available on Netflix) and guarantee it will affect, if not out-and-out change, the way you think about shopping.

Prayer for My Enemy photo by Joan Marcus; Reverend Billy photo from revbilly.com.

The Tempest

My friend ModFab told me this last weekend that I'm extremely generous in my theater reviews because I've found good things to say about plays that he didn't feel were all that deserving. This is, of course, intentional on my part: I've tried very hard to be fair in my written assessments of a production. Get me into a bar after a theatrical travesty and I'll wail on it like nobody's business. And on more than a few occasions, I've sat in a theater and understood completely why some animals will gnaw off their own feet when caught in a trap. But when I'm writing a review, I hope that my words will be out in the world for some time to come and I want them to be considered and, if nothing else, polite.

Bear that in mind as I tell you now about The Tempest.

Two actors who appear regularly in more experimental downtown productions, Steven Rattazzi and Tony Torn, did a wonderful job with the language and I could understand every word they said. As they played the clowns, Stephano and Trinculo—who spend the vast majority of the play drunk—this does not say much for the diction of their fellow actors. Stark Sands did a good job as Ferdinand, the young hero, but I was a little distracted by his student council president haircut: did this strike no one as being at odds with Elizabethan costumes? Worse still, most of the other actors just glommed onto one facet of their character and played that throughout the evening: Mandy Patinkin as Prospero was extremely irritable; Yusef Bulos as Gonzalo was kindly but confused; Michael Potts' Alonso was depressed (he believes that he lost his son in the titular event, so that's a little understandable); and as Prospero's daughter, Miranda, Elizabeth Waterson was always—and I do mean always—on the virge of tears... I almost laughed when, after she and Ferdinand profess their love for one another, he asked "Wherefore weep you?" because I'd been wondering that from the beginning of the play.

I wasn't sure exactly what to make of Brian Kulick's direction: I didn't see where he had a point to make about the play and yet it was a somewhat stylized production. CSC's theater—a flexible performance space, usually with audience seating on three sides—is one of my favorites in the city: it always feels intimate to me and yet it's got a surprisingly large playing area. For The Tempest, the room was painted completely blue with a square playing area of sand in the center. Above the actors' heads there was a photo-realistic painting of storm clouds that was raised and lowered by four costumed stagehands, usually to indicate a new location on the island (which, in my opinion, is completely unnecessary in Shakespeare); its reverse was painted blue with a ship model attached to the center that could only be used in the opening scene (in case we couldn't tell from the dialogue that the action takes place on a ship during a storm). As an environment, I was intrigued by it for a few minutes before the play began, but other than establishing that they've all been shipwrecked on an island due to the storm, it doesn't add much to the play; then, during the intermission, the sand got all swept away and remained in a pile along the upstage wall for no reason that was apparent to me. I understand that sometimes a director makes choices for practical reasons: perhaps events or actions occur in Act II that would make working in sand difficult (I didn't see anything, but we'll assume that's the reason); it's important then to find creative ways of making the necessity seem like a choice to audience instead of just hoping we'll ignore it.

Of course, Mandy Patinkin is the reason most people will come to see this Tempest. I found it sad that his dialogue in The Princess Bride was more coherent than anything he spoke here. His performance reminded me of the recordings I've heard of the great 19th century actors like Herbert Beerbom Tree, except for some reason Patinkin chose not to employ consonants very often (which are kind of important if you want people to know what you're saying) so that even the famous speeches tended to sound like vocal warm-ups. It felt more than a little ironic when, in Prospero's "farewell to art" epilogue, he begs the audience to "let your indulgence set me free."

Indulgence indeed.

Fifty Words and Three Changes

It's unusual to see two new plays by the same playwright within the span of two weeks; even more unusual is for them to be two so very different plays. Michael Weller's genre mash-up Beast is one those plays that, even though it doesn't quite work, has really stayed with me since I saw it: some of the images and ideas are extremely memorable. His Fifty Words is a more traditional play, story- and structure-wise—a married couple enjoying their first night completely alone when their 9-year-old son goes to a sleep-over. And, like Beast, it's not completely successful: as a "well-made-play," the incredible number of revelations and life-altering events that occur in the span of a few hours seem highly improbable. It was like looking at a series of snapshots of a marriage rather than a full portrait: each moment, in and of itself, was very nicely created and gave us a little more insight into these people; ultimately, they added up to an intriguingly fragmented picture in which the audience was able to fill in the blanks with our preconceived notions about sex, marriage, parenthood and trust. Perhaps if Weller had highlighted that fragmentation in a less naturalistic fashion—emphasized how every small tidbit of personal information we gain from someone slowly changes our image of that person over a period of time instead of trying to have his characters accomplish it all in one night—it might have worked better for me. That said, I was completely drawn into the play the entire time and there many powerful moments that, as in Beast, are unforgettable. Much of the credit for this must definitely go to actors Elizabeth Marvel and Norbert Leo Butz—as Catherine said, Marvel is amazingly fierce in this role—and to director Austin Pendleton. Finally, it's a small quibble, but I would argue that all writers need to agree to a moratorium on the "Eskimos have many words for snow" metaphor, from which the title is derived: it's a cliché and it's not really true.

I connected with Nicky Silver's dark comedy, Three Changes, much better. The piece is also a fragmented look at a family life: here, a burned out Hollywood writer returns to New York after many years away and moves in with his married younger brother. The play is not without it's problems: in particular, the results of some of the key events in the story strain credibility, as when the older brother attacks his sibling and completely (and rather quickly) destroys the younger man's confidence. There are hints as to how this might have happened later in the play but they feel a little like after-the-fact explanations. I may have responded more strongly to the characters' self-deceptions that Silver has woven throughout the play—even in the characters' monologues, addressed directly to the audience. I generally dislike this device because it often feels like a cop-out by the author: instead of allowing information about the characters to come out in action, the characters just tell us (I suspect because that's faster and much easier). In this case, however, their frequent unawareness of themselves in the context of the story, when the truth is obvious to to the audience, worked for me: it allowed these explanatory asides to function more like soliloquies (which, as an acting teacher once pointed out to me, can be seen not as speeches but as a dialogue with the audience in which—one hopes—the audience remains silent). The performances are all strong—Dylan McDermott and Maura Tierney, as the married couple, are both very good but I especially liked Scott Cohen as the prodigal—and director Wilson Milam's production moves briskly. It's a nasty little journey—the ending is especially surreal and a little twisted—but I enjoyed the trip, bumps and all.

This Weekend On Stage

How often do you get to see a Korean B-Boy extreme dance vaudeville onstage? And how surprising is that you enjoy it? Don't get me wrong—there's nothing at all of substance in Break Out: it's stupid-dumb-fun, theatrical junk food: Doritos and bean dip have more nutritional value. But who goes to see a Korean B-Boy extreme dance vaudeville searching for enlightenment? You want to see acrobats flying through the air, dancers spinning on the ground, and lots of G-rated testosterone (PG, for some, I guess: they did sneak a couple of penis jokes into the evening)! The plot (sure, we'll call it that) involves a group of escaped convicts on the run from the law but in reality it's just a bunch of site gags (there's almost no dialogue in the evening) and traditional vaudeville skits (they eventually wind up in a hospital where Hilarity Ensues) between the dance breaks. Fortunately, the dancers are fantastic, the pace is quick, the shtick is amusing: it's really a lot more fun than I would ever have expected.

In Conflict, by contrast, is an intense evening. The script is adapted from interviews that Yvonne Latty conducted with Iraqi War veterans for her 2006 book of the same title. Each of the stories on their own are heart-breaking; taken as a whole, they are almost overwhelming. Regardless of whether their wounds are physical or psychological, it's abundantly clear that our society has much to do to truly support our troops. The production is absolutely engaging and absolutely irritating at the same time: while the stories themselves are riveting, Douglas C. Wager's direction is heavy-handed and undercut some of the power of the words. The script, also by Wager and Latty, does a good job of distilling the interviews down to well-structured five-minute monologues but there are too many of them and the evening becomes a little numbing in the second act: it would have made an excellent 90-minute one-act. The playwrights' choice to include occasional commentary from Latty on video was also unsuccessful: it took me out of the play and attempted to contextualize stories that actually stood on their own very well. The actors do a decent job with the material: they give very naturalistic and, for the most part, understated performances. After the show, it felt odd walking out of the Barrow Street Theater and into the throngs of young partiers in Greenwich Village; as Catherine said, "How must it make these young veterans feel to return home and encounter all of this?"

We ended our weekend with Irena's Vow by Dan Gordon, based on the true story of Irena Gut Opdyke, a Polish Catholic who was forced to work for a high-ranking German officer during the occupation of Poland. While serving as his housekeeper, Irena hid twelve Jewish Poles in the basement of the German officer's villa for about two years and saved them from certain death in the concentration camps. After marrying and emigrating to the U.S., she told no one about her wartime experiences until many years later when she received a telephone call as part of survey about holocaust denial; as a result, she began going to schools and sharing her story with the students. The play is a fairly straightforward, chronological presentation of her life story: Tovah Feldshuh, as Irena, narrates as though addressing one of those school groups and key scenes are re-enacted by the cast. It's not an especially inspired approach to the material but the story alone certainly sustains this tightly-paced 90-minute piece. The acting is uniformly strong: Feldshuh is quite a presence onstage and does a good job of shifting back and forth between the monlogues and the flashback scenes. It's also a very well-designed show—our friend, David Castaneda, did a great job with the lighting and he had high words of praise for the video design by Alex Koch and I have to agree: both the content and the execution of the projections were exceptional.

Beast

Michael Weller's new play at New York Theater Workshop starts well and has an intriguing idea: it's basically a political horror thriller. Two Iraq war vets—one with facial scarring and a missing left arm; the other with a missing right arm (they joke that together they're a single person), a horribly disfigured face and the hint of something much worse—return to the U.S. and embark on a cross-country journey in order to avoid going back to their homes. At intermission, Catherine and I both agreed that we found the premise intriguing and were curious to see where the piece would go.

Act Two, unfortunately, did not live up to promise of the first half for me. There are some plot twists that I won't divulge here, but the ending left me feeling that a liberal artist had indulged in a bit of wish fulfillment; frankly, I was disappointed. There's a lot more dark humor in the second part (although I thought the ubiquitous stereotype of the ignorant Southern truck driver was a cheap target) and the metaphor that Weller creates—that the members of this Administration have become monsters by pursuing the war in Iraq and that the soldiers who are paying the real price are their "portraits of Dorian Gray"—resonates, but the resolution of the play feels ham-handed.

The production, directed by Jo Bonney, is well-crafted and the actors all do a very good job. I liked the idea of Eugene Lee's simple set design, which utilized crates painted to look flag-draped to create many of the set pieces, but I felt the rearranging of them at the scene changes interrupted the flow of the play too much. Fortunately, the video by Tal Yarden and sound design by David Van Tieghem go along way toward mitigating this: they don't entirely compensate, but they help.

All in all, there are moments in Beast that are disturbing, compelling and completely unforgettable; I wish I liked the whole that contains them more.

Fela! A New Musical

In spite of having an uninspiring title (does anyone put an exclamation point in a title anymore without intending it to be a joke?), Fela! is quite probably the best production I've seen onstage this year. It's absolutely beautiful in every way, with fantastic music, an amazing performance by Sahr Ngaujah in the title role, a creatively designed environment and incredible dance numbers from an extremely talented ensemble.

I was not familiar with Fela Kuti, the Nigerian-born musician and composer who pioneered Afrobeat, but within moments of entering the theater (the house opened with the band already playing onstage and they continue right up until the lights change for the top of the show), I recognized his influence on Western popular music, especially some of the more recent work by David Byrne and Paul Simon. The context for the piece is a final concert at the Shrine, a nightclub Fela created, before he leaves Nigeria; this allows the creators, Jim Lewis and director/choreographer Bill T. Jones, to make Fela's music the driving force of the evening. This conceit works so well because his compositions were so often a direct response to events in Fela's life and the world in which he lived—a world that we watch grow increasingly more violent and more oppressive over the course of the evening. It's powerful music that drives home its message without every sacrificing its artfulness.

The design for the production is exceptionally rich: it's total theater, with every possible wall and surface in the theater covered with graffiti and used for projections throughout the performance. It evokes the Shrine nightclub and the streets of Nigeria (as well as a 300-seat theater in NYC can), and even manages to cleverly reveal a few secrets during the evening. The video projections are very well done and effectively used to augment information that emerges during the play and the costumes are fun, sexy and brilliantly colorful.

The dance is, of course, phenomenal: athletic, sensuous and wonderfully executed. Jones' choreography is intensely physical—Fela! is easily the sweatiest show I'll see this year—and the dancers here are all marvelous. Abena Koomson, as Fela's mother, has a beautiful, clear voice and brings great passion to the songs she sings. And, of course, Ngaujah is the key to the success of this show: as Fela, he sings, dances, jokes with and cajoles the audience, and plays both saxophone and trumpet—all masterfully and with a natural effortlessness (or at least the appeance of it) that is truly awe-inspiring. It's certainly the most impressive performance by an actor I've seen in recent years.

In a season that promises only more revivals and empty-headed retreads (9 to 5: The Musical?), Fela! is that rare original work that is not only an exceptional theatrical experience: it's an immensely enjoyable evening out. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Buffalo Gal

When I was in college, I directed a production of A.R. Gurney's The Golden Fleece with Catherine and our friend, Danny Tamez. The one-act is the story of Medea as told by a very WASPy couple who have invited their friends, Jason and Medea, to come in and show this audience the Golden Fleece; its basically as though the messengers from a Greek play are getting showcased in a play of their own... but still having to tell the audience about all of the things that aren't happening on stage. It's a slight piece but perfect for a student-directed production: no set, no costumes, no props (that I remember), and even though you know where the play is going pretty quickly (because most theater students know Medea well enough to get it pretty quickly), it's fun to see how the playwright is going to get you to the end.

Over the years, I've seen other Gurney plays: The Dining Room (which is a series of vignettes all created around the title location, most of which involve WASPy families interacting with one another); Love Letters (a WASPy couple reading their correspondences directly to the audience to illustrate the disentigration of their relationship from love in bloom to the unhappy ending); and The Cocktail Hour (a WASPy family interacting with one another just before dinner time over—are you ready for this?—cocktails). Gurney is a talented writer and I liked all three plays fine but I didn't seen anything else by him for a while because... well, let's just say that I've got nothing against Wonder bread, but I prefer something with a little more fiber.

Setting my snarkiness aside for a moment, there's actually a lot to recommend Buffalo Gal. The writing is strong and even though the main character is yet another WASPy lady, Gurney has also made Amanda an aging, insecure Hollywood star returning to her hometown (Buffalo, of course) to do a production of The Cherry Orchard. The juxtaposition of these two... I hesitate to say characatures, but they are very familiar... this smash-up offers some interesting opportunities for the actor, Susan Sullivan—the WASPy mother on tv's Dharma & Greg—and she does a good job of showing us the character's struggle to embrace her better angels.

The play takes place on the stage of the theater the day before rehearsals are to begin, the star having asked the director to arrive a day early to assuage her fears about returning to live performance after many years' absence. The plot has quite a few twists—some of which are moderately surprising—but I had little doubt where the story was ultimately going: of course there's going to be a competing offer for a television series. Along the way, however, Gurney provided some interesting sidebar questions: about the definition of success, about expectations in the theater, familial obligations, the role of personal integrity in our day-to-day realities. I thought it interesting that one plot point hinged on inclusive casting—over a decade after the practice has become pretty much the norm in non-commercial productions (i.e., not Broadway, film or television)—but it's handled well and is fun moment.

I could see this play doing very well in the regional theaters—and I don't mean that nastily. It's a fun backstage story that explains itself for the uninitiated as it goes along. It's familiar without being incredibly predictable. And it offers character actors several really great characters to play. It's about choosing to live outside the megalopolis and still recognizing that there are opportunities that exist only there. If I was selecting a new play to mount in a regional theater, Buffalo Gal would definitely be near the top of that list.

My own sidebar: my first job in New York was a tour that took me all over the country. During our time in Buffalo, I had the opportunity to see a production of Twelfth Night at the Studio Arena Theater and it was one of the best productions I've ever seen of that play. I hoped then that I'd get to come do a production there someday. Sadly, there's a possibility that that day may never come now.

Some Americans Abroad

It's not uncommon for Catherine and I to see a play that's truly cringe-inducing: the kind of play where we're just shaking our heads in disbelief at the events onstage, where we cover our eyes in the hope that these people before us will just go away. What's rare is for the author to have intended for us to feel that way. And rarer still is to have that intention be so beautifully realized in an exceptional production.

The central character in Richard Nelson's Some Americans Abroad is Joe, the newly installed chairman of an Ivy League literature department who is leading a group of students and faculty on an annual theater tour of England. As the first scene began and I listened to the academics argue literary theory over dinner in Covent Garden, I thought, "Oh, it's going to be one of those plays: all talk, no action." And, in a way, I wasn't completely wrong: the action in this piece is Joe's unwillingness to act, and the lengths to which he will go to avoid taking action. Nelson offers us a hero who is a nice guy—a little stuffy and pedantic, perhaps, but likable—placed in a position of leadership without any of the skills he needs to lead. Over the course of the play, we are forced to endure his painful attempts to avoid conflict and direct action in order to preserve his perception of civility among the group.

I've always been resistant to the adage that comedy is tragedy that happens to someone else: the suffering of others is, by and large, not very funny to me, even when it's of their own making. I generally prefer humor that values cleverness over stupidity: the Marx Brothers, Noël Coward, the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. In Some Americans, although the characters are undeniably intellectual and the dialogue occasionally sparkling, the humor more often comes in the silences, the hesitations, the avoided questions, the uncomfortable changing of a subject. It's the humor of smart people overthinking simple situations and, with the possible exception of the significant plot point in Act II, I thought it worked well here.

That this kind of humor succeeded for me is, I think, a testament to the exceptional work by director Gordon Edelstein and his phenomenal cast. It's performed on an essentially bare stage with only the set pieces required for each scene used—various tables and chairs, for the most part. As each scene finishes, the actors move the set pieces to different locations agains the upstage wall, leaving us by the play's end with a physical monument to the detritus of the characters' journey. The actors all give wonderful performances but I especially liked Tom Cavanaugh as the unfortunate Joe: he humanized what may be the most irritating character in recent memory and allowed me to keep holding out some hope that this guy would eventually find some backbone.

There were a few times in Some Americans where I came very close to shouting at the characters onstage, "Stop it! You're just making everything worse!" I don't get that caught up in a play very often; it was nice to know that theater, when it's done well, can still get under my skin that way.

A Brush with Georgia O'Keeffe

The title of this play would seem to indicate a brief encounter. And compared to the 98 years she lived, 2 hours is relatively short. Why then did the time just seem to drag by?

It can't be because of the subject. By anyone's standard, Georgia O'Keeffe lived an amazing life—just exploring her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz could easily fill an evening. If only the playwright, Natalie Mosco, had tried to create some context for O'Keeffe's life; instead, we're treated to very earnest "here's what happened to me in pretty much the order that it happened" direct address storytelling by Mosco as O'Keeffe. There are a few scenes with other characters (all played by Virginia Roncetti and David Lloyd Walters) that Mosco has scattered through the play, and snippets from letters, reviews and other writings that are used to illustrate points in O'Keeffe's story. But for the most part, it's a one-woman show that feels like an unimpressive Theater for Young Audiences production.

For instance, we find out during the play that O'Keeffe was, in her youth, briefly struck blind when she contracted the measles. Later, near the end of the play, we learn that a macular degeneration left her incapable of painting in her last years. Who could ask for a better set of bookends for the story of one of the most important painters of the 20th century? Instead, they are relegated to the list of "Sad, Isn't It?" moments, along with all the "Because She was a Brilliant Artist" moments and the "Sucks Being a Woman in a Man's World" moments that make up this play.

I was being glib with the "woman in a man's world" remark but, actually, if I was going to write a play about O'Keeffe, that would be my focus. She was independent almost from the time she left her parents home at age 18... in 1905! Within the next 10 years, she lived in Chicago, New York (several times), Texas (twice), Virginia and South Carolina—all as a single woman, making her way in the world, beginning a career in art. By taking the overview approach to O'Keeffe's life, Brush alludes to but never actually allows us to see how monumental (and, in many ways, improbable) an achievement her success in art was, especially in the early decades of the 20th century.

Of the mechanics of the production, I will say that I was interested in Marilys Ernst's video projections—animations of O'Keeffe's paintings, Stieglitz's photos and "Who are the Other Two Actors Playing Now?" illustrations—although I wish that they might have found a way for the square projections to better fill the flower-shaped (of course) projection surface. Robert Kalfin's direction was uninspired—the pace of the show was remarkably regular and monotonous, which underscored the weaknesses in the script. While Walters, as Stieglitz and every other man, was adequate to the task, Roncetti gave my favorite performance of the evening: the different minor characters she creates are by far the most interesting on this stage.