Broadway & Me

A "Richard III" That Just Limps Along

2012-01-28T08:59:00.000-05:00

People have been going to the theater to see stars since Thespis broke out of the chorus in the 6th century, barnstormed the cities of ancient Greece and gave his name to the acting profession that he is credited with creating. And I’m just as eager to see a star onstage as generations of theater lovers have been ever since.

So, despite having seen Richard III more than a half dozen times over the last 10 years, I signed up for the entire season at BAM just to make sure I didn’t miss out on getting a ticket to see Kevin Spacey put his trademark sardonic spin on the most wicked—and most wickedly entertaining—of Shakespeare’s villains.

The production that opened at the Harvey Theater last week marks a reunion between Spacey and the director Sam Mendes, who not only worked with the star on the 1999 Oscar-winning movie "American Beauty" but is the guiding force behind The Bridge Project, the transatlantic partnership that has brought British and American actors together to perform classic works.

Richard III is the final of the Bridge productions and the Spacey-Mendes take on the tale of the hunchbacked miscreant who manipulates the deaths of his brother, nephews and wife to gain the throne of England has drawn raves in London and here (click here to see some of those reviews).

But, as was the case with the initial Bridge production The Cherry Orchard back in 2009 (click here to see my review) the show failed to work for me.

It gets off to a good start with the sight of Spacey sprawled on a throne. Clearly pissed off by the celebration going on around him as his elder brother gets the crown (or, to be more accurate, the celebration that is being projected on the screen above him) Spacey's Richard snarls out the play’s famous opening line, “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York..”

Spacey never loses his prodigious intensity but the energy around him quickly dissipates and although, as I’ve said, I’ve seen the play a lot, it was hard to follow what was going on.

Mendes clearly means to comment on the nefarious ways in which political leaders use the media to manipulate the masses but, ironically, he seems to have put more thought into coming up with ways to use video projections than in developing his theme.

His other choices are just as off the mark. It’s become uncool to do Shakespeare in period dress and so he has designer Catherine Zuber put all the men in chic Mad Men-era suits and contemporary military garb.

They look great but they also all look alike. So, despite the decision to project the names of the major characters on a screen as they appear onstage, it’s hard to tell who is whom or on whose side.

Paul Pyant’s lighting doesn’t help either. I thought he and Mendes might have been making a point when the spotlight failed to illuminate an actor until he was almost finished speaking but after it happened a few more times, I decided that even if the choice had been intentional, it was annoying, particularly in such a large house.

The sound design went in the opposite—and more emphatic—direction. Two percussionists played big Japanese taiko-like drums to punctuate the action and at various times, the actors strapped on drums and beat along (John Doyle-style) with them.

This, too, is stylish—and it helps to keep the audience awake—but it also drowns out the dialog, which is already compromised in the acoustics-challenged space of the Harvey.

But, I hear you thinking, isn’t it worth it to put up with all of that just for the chance to see Spacey in the flesh? Well, I’m not sure it is. He certainly goes all out, which, with Spacey, is saying something.

The brace he wears and the limp he affects as the crippled Richard made me worry about his future orthopedic health. But the inner life of the character isn't as sharply delineated and it was never clear why anyone would believe or trust this twisted Richard.

Besides, even a star of Spacey’s magnitude needs some help, particularly in a production that runs three-and-a half hours. Back in 1955 when Laurence Oliver, filmed my all-time favorite version of Richard III, he was wise enough to recruit a supporting cast that included John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Claire Bloom.

Of course, you don’t always have to have big names to make a good production. When Classic Stage Company did Richard III five years ago, Michael Cumpsty lead a cast filled with CSC regulars and that production was funny, moving and memorable (click here to read my review).

None of which, alas, I can say about the current one. In fact, I was so disappointed by it, that for the first time I can remember, I left my Playbill at the theater.

"Untitled Feminist Show" Offers Naked Truths

2012-01-25T07:59:00.000-05:00

Every once in awhile, I like to venture outside my theatergoing comfort zone. One of the surest ways for me to do that is to see a play by the comfort-be-damned playwright Young Jean Lee. And Lee’s latest, Untitled Feminist Show, which opened at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week as part of PS 122’s COIL Festival, certainly fits the bill.

Untitled Feminist Show is a series of silent vignettes about women’s lives that are performed by six women, each as naked as the day she was born. There’s no narrative, no dialog, no scenery and, of course, no costumes, except for some tiny pink parasols.

The mise-en-scène is generated by Raquel Davis’ subtle lighting design, some mystifying projections by Leah Gelpe and, most notably, by the excellent sound design of Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney which features music that ranges from genteel Baroque to head-banging heavy metal. As Lee explains in a program note, the show is intentionally designed to “resist categorization.”

Defying categories is Lee’s specialty. Her big breakthrough was the 2009 production of The Shipment, a satirical look at stereotypes about African-Americans that drew attention, in part, because it was written by a Korean-American woman.

I couldn’t get a ticket to the limited run of The Shipment but I did catch Lee’s next show, a perplexing retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear in which the mad monarch never appears (click here to read my review).

Untitled Feminist Show is equally demanding. In the program note, Lee explains that she likes to cast “my shows before I write them and then write them based on conversations with my cast.”

This time, she has recruited performers from the worlds of dance, burlesque and the downtown theater scene and then challenged them with the following question: “What would it look like if people with female bodies enjoyed unlimited possibilities for transformation?”

The bodies of her performers run the gamut from petite to near-obese, creating kind of a raunchier version of those old Dove ads that always seemed to be smugly patting themselves on the back for showing women of varying body types. But the nudity quickly ceased to be a distraction over the course of the one-hour show. The emphasis switched to what the women did instead of how they looked.

Some of the answers that the performers and Lee devised to answer her transformation question are witty (little girls outfoxing a wicked witch) others are moving (two women meeting and falling in love in a lovely pas de deux) but at least one (a mime sequence detailing one woman's experience of giving men oral sex) suggested a misandry that made me far more uncomfortable than being flashed repeatedly.

The hipster audience the night my friend Priscilla and I saw the show seemed delighted with all of it—and, I suspect, with themselves for being there to see it. And, despite my reservations, I have to say that when I woke up the next morning and walked past the mirror in my bedroom, I felt a comfort with my own body that I haven’t felt for a longtime.

"The Road to Mecca" is a Long, Slow Trip

2012-01-21T08:59:00.000-05:00

There are some plays that you out-and-out love. And then there are others that you feel you ought to admire. The latter is the way I feel about Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, which opened this week at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre.

I mean how can you not admire Fugard? The white South African playwright founded a multiracial theater in his homeland back in 1958 right as the country's racially segregationist policies were solidifying.

Over the years he’s written more than two dozen plays, including such acclaimed works about the cruelties of the apartheid system as Master Harold…and the Boys, Boesman and Lena and Blood Knot, which will kick off the season-long retrospective that Signature Theatre is doing to celebrate Fugard’s 80th birthday this year.

And who doesn’t admire Rosemary Harris? Over the past seven decades (she’s currently celebrating the 60th anniversary of her Broadway debut) Harris has appeared in, and won raves for, her work including nine Tony nominations (she won for the original 1966 production of The Lion in Winter) and five Drama Desk Awards. And now, at 84, she is giving as present and luminous a performance as she ever did (click here to read a profile about her).

And yet, I had to fight to keep from falling asleep during the first act of The Road to Mecca, which, at least as directed by Gordon Edelstein, moves at as deliberate and solemn a pace as a State of the Union speech: there may be good and important stuff in it and maybe even some flights of poetic language but you can’t wait for the thing to end (click here to read the director’s take on the show).

A three-hander in which all the characters are white, The Road to Mecca deals less overtly with race than some of Fugard’s other plays. But its subject is still the cost of being different in an intolerant society.

Fugard based the play on the real-life story of Helen Martins, an Afrikaner woman who, in middle-age, alienated her rural churchgoing neighbors when she began to create a garden full of whimsical glass and concrete sculptures that she called her Mecca (click here to read more about her).

Harris plays Miss Helen, as the character is called, and Carla Gugino, another gifted actress, plays her only friend Elsa, a liberal young school teacher who lives 12 hours away in Cape Town. The play opens as Elsa arrives for a surprise visit in response to a letter she’s received from her friend, who is aging, despondent and fearing an approaching darkness.

But not much happens until Jim Dale arrives as the town’s minister. His appeal to Helen to give up her art and return to the church sets off a battle for her soul. That perks things up a bit but it all involves a lot of talk (the play runs two-and-a-half hours) as each character lays out his or her case. And the talk seemed to go on and on and on. Judging from the light snoring I heard the night my friend Ann and I saw the show, I wasn't the only one dozing off.

Maybe attention spans have simply grown shorter over the past 24 years since The Road to Mecca first played off-Broadway, with Fugard himself in the role of the minister. Or maybe we just think less reverently about artists now that their success is toted up more in dollars and sense than in dedication and an independent spirit.

It’s no spoiler to say that art triumphs in The Road to Mecca. But the ending of the real-life Miss Helen’s story may be more telling. She committed suicide by swallowing a mixture of caustic soda and crushed glass. Her home is now a major tourist attraction.

Why "Seminar" Gets a Failing Grade From Me

2012-01-18T07:59:00.000-05:00

My good friend Andrea recently came to New York for the first time in four years and, of course, she wanted to see a Broadway show. After some research— reading the Times and talking to me—she settled on Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy Seminar, largely because she’s such a big fan of its star Alan Rickman. Alas, while she did enjoy seeing him, Andrea ended up disappointed with the play. Ditto for me.

Seminar, which is playing at the Golden Theatre thru March 18, stars Rickman as an erstwhile literary lion who is running a private master class for four young writers. Each has paid $5,000 for the privilege but his pedagogical approach is mostly dismissive put-downs.

It’s a perfect role for Rickman’s trademark acerbity and he tosses off the one liners with the same hard-hearted ease that the Republicans have been using to discard frontrunners. He gets able support from his co-stars: Hamish Linklater, Jerry O’Connell, Hettienne Park and Lily Rabe, who just seems to get more and more impressive each time she walks on a stage.

Sam Gold, the deservedly hot director of the moment, applies his usual verve to the proceedings. And the entire design team steps up as well, particularly David Zinn, who’s created two very different New York apartments, both of which I wanted to move into immediately.

So what, you may be asking, made Andrea and me unhappy? Well, the only thing left is the play itself. And I'm sorry to have to say that Seminar is the latest in a long string of disappointments by the prolific Rebeck, who comes up with appealing scenarios for her plays and then fails to develop them fully enough.

The set-up for Seminar is similar to the one that Terrence McNally used for Master Class, his play about the opera diva Maria Callas: genius teacher amusingly humiliates and then satisfyingly uplifts talented students.

But while McNally provided glimpses into Callas’ life that allowed the audience to understand what drove her, Rebeck stays on the surface. Her characters do things because the play needs them to, not because the characters need to do them.

Some feminists have gotten particularly pissed off with Rebeck because of the way the play treats its female characters. And, indeed, there is one bit of business early in the play that makes no sense, other than to get a smutty laugh. (Click here to read one complaint and here to read another).

The critical response to the show has been mixed but it’s still managed to get a B+ on StageGrade, the site that aggregates the reviews of the top New York critics (click here to read some what some of them have to say).

But Andrea’s experience reminded me that those of lucky enough to see lots of shows (professional critics average well over 200 a year) can afford to be more forgiving. Or maybe writers just like shows about writers.

So, if you’re not a writer or a really rabid Rickman fan, and are coming to town with just enough time to see one or two shows, this probably shouldn’t be one of them.

"Outside People" Tackles a Very "In" Topic

2012-01-11T09:59:00.000-05:00

The Soviet Union was the bogeyman that threatened what Superman used to call “The American way” when I was a kid. It lost the gig when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Since then, Iraq, Iran and North Korea have been auditioned for the role. But increasingly China has become the hands-down favorite to play the part. Which may explain why this season has already brought us two plays about the culture clash between the U.S. and China.

The first was David Henry Hwang’s Ch’ing•lish (click here to read my review) which is limping along on Broadway with houses that are barely a third full. The latest arrival is the Naked Angels production of Outside People, which opened last night at the Vineyard Theatre.

Outside People is like the friskier younger sister of Ch’ing•lish. It’s sexier and more fun and it deserves to do better business.

In both plays, guileless white guys travel to China, seeking to reset lives that have veered off the track. There they meet and fall in love with beautiful and (old stereotypes die hard) inscrutable Chinese women.

The guy in Outside People is Malcolm, a nebbishy twentysomething who’s kicked around aimlessly in the years since graduating from Stanford and so gratefully accepts an offer from his far slicker former Chinese roommate David, or Da Wei, to take a job as “The Token White Guy” with a company in Beijing (click here to read a piece about that real-world practice).

The play opens in a trendy club where the friends have gone to celebrate Malcolm’s first night in town with Da Wei’s girlfriend Samanya, the daughter of a Cameroonian diplomat who grew up in China and feels more Chinese than African, and Xiao Mei, a Chinese woman who hooks up with Malcolm suspiciously quickly.

Like Ch’ing•lish, parts of Outside People are performed in Mandarin but, unlike the Broadway production, there are no projected translations here. And somehow the dislocation that produces feels right as the audience struggles to figure out what’s going on just as Malcolm does.

Alas, playwright Zayd Dohrn soft pedals the conflict and refuses to draw conclusions. It’s a trend that’s become annoyingly popular and not just in theater (click here to see an L.A. Times piece on its use in the movies).

Here, the ending is left hanging in the air to the point that the audience the night my theatergoing buddy Bill and I saw the show didn’t realize the play was over and was clearly waiting for more to happen when the actors appeared onstage to take their curtain-call bows.

All four actors are excellent under Evan Cabnet’s sure-handed direction. Although Li Jun Li may have the heaviest lifting to do as Xiao Mei since Dohrn gives her such inconsistent stuff to play: one minute, the character’s English is supposedly so weak that she can barely order a drink but then, the next minute, she’s delineating the difference between freedom in the two countries. Somehow, Li, who played Liat in the recent revival of South Pacific, manages to make nearly all the moments believable.

The technical aspects of the show are equally nimble. The women look so fabulous in the form-fitting outfits costume designer Jessica Wegener Shay has put them in that you’ll want to sign up for Pilates as soon as you leave the theater.

The fluid set by Takeshi Kata and cinematic lighting by Ben Stanton are spot on too. And the music—a playlist that roams from American pop to movie-score Chinoiserie, to Mandarin hip-hop—slyly underscores the changing dynamics.

Outside People may be an imperfect play but it’s still an enjoyable way to start off the year. May a thousand similar theatrical flowers bloom.

"Lysistrata Jones" Fails to Score on Broadway

2012-01-07T08:59:00.000-05:00

Despite recent balmy temperatures, the winter frost is beginning to settle in. The new year isn't even a week old and two shows have already announced that they’re folding their tents because they’re not strong enough to withstand the cold box-office months of January and February when the holiday tourists have gone home and New Yorkers customarily hibernate in theirs or only venture out for exotic fare, like the Public Theater's Under the Radar festival (click here to find out more about it).

The first Broadway show to go is Lysistrata Jones, the updated spin on Aristophanes' 5th century comedy about a group of women who decide to deny their men sex until they end The Peloponnesian War. Only in this musical version—with a book by Douglas Carter Beane and music and lyrics by his husband Lewis Flinn—the women are co-eds who, in the lyrics of one song, are “giving up giving it up” until their basketball player boyfriends break a years-long loosing streak and win a game.

Lysistrata Jones was a surprise hit when the Transport Group presented it, appropriately enough, in The Gym at Judson Memorial Church last spring and it made a relatively quick leap to the Walter Kerr Theatre last month—and brought along some fans with it.

Chief among the cheerleaders was the New York Times’ Ben Brantley who proclaimed it an “endearingly escapist show” (click here to read his entire review.) My blogger buddy The Mick over at The Craptacular loved it too (click here to read her rave). I didn’t see the downtown production but the Broadway transfer was a low scorer for me.

Flinn’s tunes are suitably peppy and Dan Knechtges, who directed and choreographed the show, gives the young energetic cast a real workout. Patti Murin, who plays the title character is particularly perky (click here to read a piece about her).

And the show’s be-the-best-that-you-can-be motivational message comes through loud and clear. But it's all been done before—and better—in Disney’s “High School Musical” series.

Most of the technical fouls are committed by Beane. He can be sharp and witty as he was in As Bees in Honey Drown and The Little Dog Laughed or comically indolent as he was in Mr. & Mrs. Fitch and is, alas, here. The laughs in Lysistrata Jones rely far too much on the scatological (or as The Mick says, dick jokes) campy pop-cultural references and a cheap use of cultural stereotypes.

Lysistrata Jones gets points for having one of the most diverse casts I’ve seen on Broadway in a long time (even if the cute blonde is inevitably the main character) but it undermines the good deed by doing things like having the Latino characters mangle their English. Beane uses the same tired trope for one of the characters in his book for Sister Act. This hasn't been fresh since Ricky Ricardo's day.

The show also makes the narrator a big finger-waggling-neck-swiveling black woman. Liz Mikel is very good in the role (the audience loved her the night my theatergoing buddy Bill and I saw the show) and I’m sure she's grateful for the job but I couldn’t help feeling badly that someone as talented as she is was reduced to this modern-day version of hambone.

Beane obviously gets a kick out of mixing it up with the Greeks. He (and a lot of people, although, again, not me) had a lot of fun with his update of the toga-heavy Xanadu, which played over 500 performances four seasons ago (click here to read what I thought of that one) and he was, no doubt, hoping for a repeat of that success.

But the Fates had other plans. When it closes tomorrow, Lysistrata Jones will have played just 30 performances.

"Close-Up Space" is Too All Over the Place

2012-01-04T07:59:00.000-05:00

What are they teaching in drama schools and playwriting workshops?
I ask because so many playwrights today seem to think all they need is snappy dialog and then voilà, they have a play. It’s like they all graduated from the Henny Youngman School of Dramaturgy. What happened to full-bodied characters, compelling situations, challenging ideas?

I found myself thinking about these questions and other similar ones as I tried to keep my mind from wandering while watching Close Up Space, the new play by Molly Smith Metzler that is running at Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center Stage through Jan. 29.

Metzler, whose bio lists degrees from both The Juilliard School and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, isn't untalented. In fact, she's one of the up-and-coming playwrights who has been given all kinds of fellowships and residencies to develop her work. Her play Elemeno Pea was a hit at the 2011 Humana Festival of New American Plays (click here to read a Q&A with her).

But Metzler has had the misfortune to come along at a time when the term “well made play” seems to be regarded as a malady. Metzler, who's 33, cites Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang as role models but her play lacks the kind of solid scaffolding on which those older playwrights drape even the wildest flights of fancy.

Close Up Space—the title is a play on the proofreading symbol that means one should get rid of an unnecessary space and bring the things on either side of the gap together—is a basic dysfunctional-family play, gussied up with some overly eccentric characters and a few faux-absurdist touches.

The main-protagonist is Paul, a senior editor at a publishing house and the widowed father of a teenage daughter. The play opens as he’s training a new intern by taking a critical red pencil to the letters the headmaster of his daughter’s school has sent explaining why the girl is being expelled.

Even critics who didn’t like the rest of the play loved this scene, which is supposed to set up what a perfectionist Paul is in everything except fatherhood. But I didn't buy a bit of it.

First off, Paul edits the letters on an overhead projector. There’s no inherent reason for him to do that since he has a computer on his desk. The only possible reason he’s using the outdated machine is that it allows the audience to see the changes he’s making and be amused by them.

Second, and more importantly, it’s unlikely that even the most uninvolved dad would be more concerned with syntax than the fact that his kid is being thrown out of school. And the play goes downhill from there.

Subplots involve the publishing house’s most successful author who has the hots for Paul and his assistant, a slacker who has literally moved into the office following a falling out with his dog (no, that’s not a typo). And, of course, there’s the daughter. She's so angry with her father that she will only speak to him in Russian, which he doesn’t understand.

What I don’t understand is what the actors—so many of them fine comedians—saw in Close Up Space when they signed on to do it. David Hyde Pierce plays Paul and he summons all his prodigious gifts and personal likeability to lift that opening scene and the play as a whole. But there’s only so much he can do. By the end he looks as embarrassingly bewildered as everyone else onstage.

Rosie Perez is miscast as the demanding author but she still gets some big laughs, largely because she’s Rosie Perez and is basically incapable of not being funny. Michael Chernus, one of my favorite young actors, is given little but whimsy to work with.

Even the production's few bright spots are sabotaged. Set designer Todd Rosenthal has created a beautiful and minutely detailed office for Paul but both he and director Leigh Silverman stumble big time when, later in the play, a dramatic change is required.

I saw Close Up Space with a holiday matinee audience that was full of AARP types, out for a good time and eager to see Hyde Pierce. But you could feel the goodwill leaching out of them over the course of the play’s 90-minute running time.

“I can’t understand a word she’s saying,” the woman across the aisle from me whispered, not quietly, to her girlfriend. “That’s because they’re all overacting,” said the friend. I glared at them. They ignored me.

“Is it over yet?” the first woman asked a few short minutes later. “I hope so, this is terrible,” came the response. I was certain that the actors could hear them and I was annoyed by the women’s rudeness but I have to say that everything they said was true.

The Best Theater of 2011

2011-12-31T10:32:00.000-05:00

If you read as many “10 Bests” lists as I do around this time each year, it quickly becomes obvious that the lists say a whole lot more about the people making them than they do about any empirical merits (whatever those are with one woman's meat being another woman's poison) of the subject being graded. And, of course, it’s no different with me and my list.

Regular readers will know that I’m a pushover for shows that take on big subjects like politics, class, race and religion, that I love bravura acting and sensational stagecraft and that I’m always happy to see shows reaching out to new audiences. So, while I'm not claiming that these were the best shows to hit the boards in 2011, it probably won’t be surprising to see that the 10 shows I most admired this year are, in alphabetical order:

BLOOD & GIFTS: Unlike so many contemporary American playwrights, J.T. Rogers refuses to navel gaze and instead writes plays that wrestle with big issues. It’s hard to find one bigger than the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan. But Rogers doesn’t settle for dry polemics. On the contrary, aided by Bart Sher’s superb staging, Blood & Gifts is a totally involving—and thoroughly entertaining—evening of theater.

THE BOOK OF MORMON: I had some problems with this musical by the creators of South Park but even I appreciate the fact that it’s an original musical that isn’t based on a movie or TV show. And that despite, its potty mouth-humor and non-p.c. sensibility, it’s a well-made show that deserved its Tony for Best Musical and is also making look Broadway cool to young and hetero-male audiences.

DIARY OF A MADMAN: Geoffrey Rush used all of his considerable gifts—his majestic voice, knack for physical comedy and ability to excavate pathos from even the simplest sentence—to create the hapless and eventually mad government clerk in this virtually one-man adaptation of a short story by Nikolai Gogol that had a short run at BAM early in the year. It was a textbook example of bravura acting.

GOOD PEOPLE: Maybe it’s the economy but serious plays about the class divide have begun popping up recently and David Lindsay-Abaire’s drama about the uneasy reunion between two people who grew up together in a working-class neighborhood but went on to very different lives is the best so far. And the Manhattan Theatre Club gave it a beautiful—and beautifully acted—production that should have run longer.

JERUSALEM: People will be talking for years about the performance Mark Rylance gave as the mythic Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s marvelous lament about the decline of Britain and of the independent characters who made it what it once was. But the rest of the cast and the production as a whole were just as extraordinary.

THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT: Stephen Adly Guirgis’s off-beat romantic comedy about a recovering drug addict and his less-than-faithful girlfriend was, hands-down, the most entertaining play of the entire season: simultaneously funny and touching and the kind of show that can be appreciated by both hardcore theater lovers and those who might previously have thought theater wasn’t for them.

QUEEN OF THE MIST: Yes, I do know Michael John LaChiusa but that’s not why I’m putting his latest musical on my list. It’s because the songs from this show about the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel still haunt me and because the show gave perennial sidekick Mary Testa the opportunity to shine in a leading role—and she glows.

THE NORMAL HEART: The revival of a play about the AIDS crisis could have been totally outdated but this production, directed by George Wolfe and anchored by a powerhouse performance by Joe Mantello, made history contemporary, the political personal and created one of the most affecting evenings of the entire season

OTHER DESERT CITIES: Dysfunctional family plays are the bread and butter of the theater but Jon Robin Baitz added a new spin that goes right to the core of the right-left divide that has defined the Baby Boom generation, while refusing to take sides. The play moved to Broadway this fall and is still good but the cast that debuted when it played off-Broadway was agonizingly sublime.

WAR HORSE: You can’t beat this play about a boy and his horse caught up in the horrors of World War I for sheer theatricality. The horses are all incredible life-size puppets but their performances are surprisingly moving. The Steven Spielberg movie version that just opened is quite good but it lacks the wonder of what happens each night on the stage at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. It’s what the magic of theater is all about.

And so now on to the new year, in which I wish you peace, prosperity, the love and company of good friends and, of course, oodles of good theater.

"Bonnie & Clyde" Got Gunned Down Too Early

2011-12-28T11:59:00.000-05:00

Let’s be honest: what I think about Bonnie & Clyde isn’t going to matter one bit because the show has already posted its closing notice and will be moving out of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre before the end of this year, which, of course, is just three days away.

Still, I can’t help throwing in my two cents because (1) I’ve been a sucker for the Bonnie and Clyde story ever since I saw Warren Beatty’s 1967 movie and (2) I don’t think this musical version is half as bad as nearly all the big critics have been braying that it is. In fact, I enjoyed the show and a lot more than some others that have recently drawn raves. And I suspect a lot of people might like it too if they were given the chance to see it.

The reason they won’t be is Frank Wildhorn. He’s the show’s composer and the guy that the Broadway snoberati love to hate. Wildhorn has a fondness for melodramatic stories, a way with big power ballads and a knack for getting producers to back his shows. He’s had six on Broadway since his biggest hit, Jekyll & Hyde (1,543 performances) open in 1997 and the critics have hated every one of them (click here to read a NYTimes story about that).

I’m no Wildhorn fan myself. I wasn’t crazy about Jekyll & Hyde, was only mildly amused by The Scarlet Pimpernel (which actually closed down for revisions twice in attempts to make itself more popular) and thought Wonderland, which opened last spring and overstayed its welcome at just 33 performances, was one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen (click here to read my review).

But just cause you don’t like what someone has done in the past doesn’t mean that you should automatically dismiss what he comes up with next. And Wildhorn seems to have really tried to please this time out.

Instead of choosing a Classic Comics approach, he’s taken an edgier route and built his musical around the Depression-era gangster couple who gunned down a dozen men before they themselves where ambushed and killed.

His collaborator, first-time book writer Ivan Menchell, has varied the tale the movie told and attempts to give his story contemporary resonance by emphasizing how an obsession with celebrity and a frustration with poverty caused by heartless banks led the couple astray.

And Wildhorn has teamed up with the Tony-winning lyricist Don Black (click here to read a Q&A with him). Black's lyrics this time out could probably stand one more run through the word processor and Wildhorn's music is still more pop than traditional Broadway but it’s catchy.

There’s a country twang to the Bonnie & Clyde score that nicely captures the show’s Dust Bowl-era setting. And the resulting songs aren’t bad at all. Which you’ll be able to judge for yourself since a cast album is being recorded next week.

But the smartest move Wildhorn made was hooking up with director and choreographer Jeff Calhoun, an up-from-the-ranks Broadway vet who has put together a top-flight production that you won't be able to see unless you hurry (click here to read a piece about how he did it).

Calhoun gets outstanding support from Tobin Ost, who designed the simple but effective set and the period costumes; and Aaron Rhyne whose video productions make affecting use of iconic images by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and other Depression-era photographers.

And even the most negative naysayers have praised the casting of Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan as the title characters. This is the fourth in a string of performances Osnes has given since 2007 that almost make you forget she got her start by winning the reality TV show “Grease: You’re The One That I Want" (click here to read a profile of her).

For his part, Jordan justifies all the buzz about his performance in the recent Paper Mill Playhouse production of Newsies. So much so that I can't help wondering if an eagerness to get him into that more family-friendly show, which is scheduled to open on Broadway in March, may have contributed to the premature death of this one.

Yet as terrific as Jordan and Osnes are—sexy, charming, blessed with great voices—the supporting players are just as good. Claybourne Elder gives a goofy sweetness to Clyde’s brother Buck that is almost the complete opposite from his equally effective turn as a sullen male hustler in One Arm, the Tennessee Williams drama that had a brief run in June (click here to read my review of that).

And Melissa van der Schyff virtually steals the show as Buck’s wife Blanche, not least because she sings the hell out of every song she’s given. If she isn’t on the award ballots next spring, I’m writing her in.

But since there are only four performances left, you’re unlikely to see any of this. I do hear, however, that another musical about Bonnie and Clyde is in the works. Here’s hoping that it’s at least as good and won’t be gunned down as quickly.

Christmas Wishes

2011-12-24T12:55:00.000-05:00

No post today but, instead, heartfelt wishes that you and yours have a holiday filled with love, laughter, the company of good friends... and, maybe, some good theater too.

Will "Stick Fly" Have Sticking Power?

2011-12-21T12:39:00.000-05:00

Somewhere Lorraine Hansberry must be smiling. When A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1959 on, she was the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. There haven’t been many others in the five decades since then. The only ones I can think of are Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf in 1976, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog in 2002 and Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow in 2004.

But this season has been a good one, in the words of a posthumous Hansberry show, to be young, gifted and black. For it has brought Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (click here to see my review) Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly and, coming in January, Park’s revisal of Porgy and Bess and a revival of Margaret Edson’s Wit, which won the Pulitzer Prize when it ran off-Broadway in 1998.

But even more noteworthy is the fact that none of these plays (with the exception of Porgy) fits into what is euphemistically called the “urban drama” genre. That usually means the play deals with the problems and, more often, pathologies of poor black people. But that is particularly not the case with Stick Fly, now playing at the Cort Theatre.

Stick Fly is a flawed play. It boasts enough coincidences and melodrama to fill a couple of seasons of a show like “Desperate Housewives.” But it’s also a thought-provoking play and a highly enjoyable one.

The story centers around the affluent LeVay family. Mom is a progeny of the light-skinned black aristocracy, dad is an accomplished neurosurgeon, their oldest son is an Ivy League-trained plastic surgeon and the youngest, the underachiever in the family, has three graduate degrees and is about to publish his first novel. In short, they make the Huxtables on the old TV show “The Cosby Show” look like sluggards.

The play opens as the LeVays are gathering for a summer weekend at their grand country home on Martha’s Vineyard (stage directions make a point of saying that the house in not in the heavily-black section of Oak Bluffs). Both sons are bringing home women to meet the family but mom is slow in arriving and the family’s longtime housekeeper is ill and so has sent her teenage daughter to fill in.

As you might expect, the normal social unease is exacerbated by surprise discoveries and suddenly revealed secrets. Luckily, Diamond has a gift for natural and often humorous dialog.

Yet, underneath it all she also makes some trenchant observations about class that seem to transcend race. Even if the metaphor she uses for her title (one character is an entomologist who studies houseflies) is never fully explained and she can't resist wrapping things up a little too tidily at the end (click here to read the playwright's thoughts about the show).

In an apparent attempt to draw audiences, the cast has been filled with familiar TV faces. Mekhi Phifer (from “ER” and “Lie to Me”) and Dulé Hill (“Psych” and "The West Wing”) play the brothers, Tracie Thoms (“Cold Case”) is the fiancée of the youngest brother and Ruben Santiago-Hudson (a stage vet who until last year was the captain on ABC’s cop show “Castle”) plays the dad. They’re all fine, with the exception of Hill who’s somewhat wooden as the younger sibling.

Ironically, it’s the lesser-known Condola Rashad who turns in the most supple performance of the evening. Rashad, the daughter of Phylicia Rashad and the niece of Debbie Allen, was lovely in Ruined a few seasons ago but she’s matured as an actor and gives a performance so honest and detailed that I wish the play had focused on her character.

If only the rest of the production were as elegant. Director Kenny Leon, the go-to-guy for black shows on Broadway (he did August Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf, the revival of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, last season’s Tony-winning revival of Fences and this season’s The Mountaintop) keeps things moving on stage but he should have taken a firmer hand with the design team.

David Gallo’s set looks too ponderous and might have worked better on a turntable than with the awkward half walls that cut a hole in the living room so that the audience can see into the kitchen. Beverly Emmons’ lighting works hard to direct the eye where it should go but is too often defeated.

Of course even if he’d wanted to, Leon probably couldn’t have done a thing about the incidental music, which was composed by the R&B singer Alicia Keys, who is also the show’s marquee-name producer.

One of Keys’ tunes opens the show and then plays on and on and on before any of the cast members appears. I’d hoped that Leon was just trying to get the obligation to Keys out of the way but other tunes kept popping up and overstaying their welcome during the long scene changes that pushed the running time to an unnecessary 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Straight plays are having a tough time on Broadway this season and Stick Fly is no exception. It sold only 56% of its seats last week. Which is too bad. Judging from the whoops and "uh-huhs" in the audience, Stick Fly has the potential to be a crowd pleaser.

And not just for black crowds. In fact, whites in the audience at the performance my friend Joy and I attended were laughing and uh-huhing just as enthusiastically as the blacks were. As the spread of the Occupy Movement has shown, class warfare is something almost everybody can identify with.

"On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" Sounds a Lot Better Than It Looks

2011-12-17T08:59:00.000-05:00

The shrinks who psychoanalyzed Broadway’s best back in the early ‘60s must have been doozies. How else to explain the fact that two of the most high-profile flops from that period are about psychiatrists who come up with inappropriately wacky ways to screw with their patients?

I’m speaking, of course, about Anyone Can Whistle (book by Arthur Laurents; music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) and On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (music by Burton Lane and book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner). I don’t know what it says about the sanity of our times but after 40-year absences both have recently been brought back—Whistle in a spiffed-up Encores! production last year (click here to read my review) and On a Clear Day in a totally remade and less successful incarnation that opened at the St. James Theatre this week.

The main chatter this season has been about the changes made to the new production of Porgy and Bess, which begins previews tonight in advance of a Jan. 12 opening (click here to refresh your memory of the flap over that). And so the extensive reworking of On A Clear Day hasn’t received as much attention, despite major changes that if the equivalent were done to Porgy and Bess would populate Catfish Row with Swedes.

On Clear Day originally told the then-contemporary story of Daisy, a woman with self-esteem issues, a major smoking habit and a remarkable susceptibility to hypnosis. During sessions with her psychiatrist Mark Bruckner, it’s revealed that she had a previous life as a glamorous 18th century woman named Melinda. Complications ensue as Bruckner gradually falls in love with the alter-ego.

If only things were that simple in the new version that book writer Peter Parnell has cobbled together with considerable input from director Michael Mayer. Daisy is now Davey, a gay guy in the psychedelic ‘70s.

Davey’s remarkable susceptibility to hypnosis is discovered when he visits a gal pal’s psychiatry class. The intrigued doctor asks to see him again and is then beguiled by the alter-ego who emerges during their sessions.

The inner-woman is still a woman but this time she’s a ‘40s-era big-band singer. Complications still ensue, albeit not necessarily for the better. It might have helped if Mayer and Parnell had gone all the way with the gay angle and allowed the doctor to wrestle with his feelings about falling in love with someone who is actually a man.

There are a couple of moments when they flirt with that idea but they drop it fast as though worried that it might prevent the show from being considered family friendly.

Instead, the big draw is supposed to be Connick. He was terrific in the 2006 revival of Pajama Game, so vibrant and sexy in the role that I thought he might be having an affair with his co-star Kelli O’Hara and then chided myself for underestimating his performing chops.

Now, I’m back to my affair fantasy because without O’Hara, or someone like her, to play off, Connick is Al Gore-stiff in this role or, as he admitted to he New York Times, totally out of his comfort zone (click here to read the whole piece).

The legendarily gifted Barbara Harris starred as both Daisy and Melinda in the original 1965 production of A Clear Day, with John Cullum as the besotted doctor. This time out, the part is split and Davey is played by David Turner, a journeyman actor who, according to the Playbill, has had several smaller roles on Broadway, while Melinda is played by Broadway newcomer Jessie Mueller.

Turner is appropriately quirky as Davey but he doesn’t have the pipes for the glorious Lane and Lerner songs. Luckily, Mueller does. She is, in fact, a knockout singer in the Garland/Streisand tradition and she almost stops the show with a bluesy number in the second act.

Her performance had me fantasizing again, this time about how Mueller might do as Funny Girl’s Fanny Brice. Although if they couldn’t raise money for the production that was to have starred TV’s Lauren Ambrose, it’s unlikely that they can raise money for one starring Mueller.

Speaking of money, this show seems to have been done without much of it. The skimpy sets by Christine Jones hit too hard on the psychedelic and often looks like a leftover from the old TV show "Laugh-In." Kevin Adams tries to compensate by working the lighting hard but the effect comes across as overly explicit.

Similarly, the usually great Catherine Zuber does what she can with the costumes but it’s hard to be subtle with ‘70s stuff. Ditto the ‘70s-style choreography by Joann M. Hunter.

Fortunately, there’s no stinting when it comes to the music. An 18-piece orchestra under the baton of conductor and arranger Lawrence Yurman does the score proud. And what a luscious score it is.

This version of the show has interpolated some songs from Lane and Lerner's 1951 movie “The Royal Wedding” and the 1970 movie version of On A Clear Day with Barbra Streisand as Daisy/Melinda. A few numbers from the original stage production have also been cut. But the big hits—“What Did I Have That I Don't Have?” “Come Back to Me,” and of course the title song—are still there and still thrilling to hear.

In fact, if you ignore the inane plot, close your eyes and just listen to the music, you can have a swell time at On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Although you can do the same thing by throwing on a CD at home—and for a fraction of the price.

"Ch’ing•lish" Has Some Serious Things to Say

2011-12-14T18:13:00.000-05:00

The first thing I noticed when my husband K and I walked into the Longacre Theatre to see David Henry Hwang’s new play Ch’ing•lish was the unusually large number of Asian faces in the audience. I wasn’t surprised to see them. Hwang’s play not only deals with the miscommunication between the U.S. and its latest frenemy, China, but is performed partly in Mandarin.

Don’t worry. Translated supertitles are projected on screens above the stage so you won’t miss a word. And a good number of them are worth hearing—or reading, as the case might be.

Hwang is, of course, still best known as the author of M. Butterfly, the Tony-winning play about a French diplomat who carries on a 20-year love affair with a Chinese opera star without knowing that the singer is not only a spy but a man. But Hwang is also known for being quite a funny guy and Ch’ing•lish shows off his sitcomy side.

Here’s the situation: a Midwestern businessman goes to a similarly midland Chinese city where he hopes to get a contract to make English-language signs for its new cultural center and finds a surprising ally in a beautiful lady minister.

The clash between East and West is obviously still on Hwang’s mind and his new cross-cultural couple grapples with bureaucratic red tape, illicit romance and rudimentary knowledge of one another’s customs and language. The latter is mined for much comic effect.

Jennifer Lim has been drawing great reviews for her portrayal of the lady minister (click here to read a profile of her). I thought she was good too, but not quite enough to write home about. Same goes for Gary Wilmes as the not-so-ugly American.

Leigh Silverman’s direction is fine and snappy, although I don’t know why she felt the need to have actors doing unrelated and distracting business in the background of so many scenes.

But for my money the MVP honors should go to scenic designer David Korins who has constructed nimble sets that smoothly transform into a variety of settings from a mid-level bureaucrat’s office to a four-star hotel lobby. They’re smartly lit by Brian MacDevitt and the jaunty incidental music by sound designer Darron L West adds to the fun.

In some ways, though, Ch’ing•lish is a one-joke play. Hwang has a good time with the way literal translations of even the simplest statement can mean something entirely different than its speaker intended. When, for instance, the businessman describes his company as a “small family firm” it’s mistranslated as “his business is insignificant.”

But in another way, particularly in the second act, Ch’ing•lish has something more serious to say about how much the West still has to learn about the nuances of Chinese culture, a worthwhile topic at a time when the Chinese hold the mortgage on America’s financial future.

In between, Hwang flirts with so many stereotypes that I thought the Asian audience members might be offended. But they didn’t seem to be.

Instead, they—including the chic woman seated next to me—seemed to get a kick out of it all, particularly hearing the Mandarin dialog. There were several times when my seatmate chuckled so deeply that I was convinced the translations of the translations must have been missing something.

But what’s really missing are enough people to fill up the seats at the Longacre. Despite largely positive reviews (click here to check some of them out) the play doesn’t seem to be crossing over to non-Mandarin speakers. It played to just under 40 percent of capacity last week and that was down from the week before.

That's too bad because Ch’ing•lish gives smart theater lovers something to chew on and you don't have to be Asian to savor it .

Turning on the Ghost Light

2011-12-10T08:57:00.000-05:00

No post today. My husband K and I are having our apartment painted. The painters arrive early on Monday morning and so we've spent the last few days packing up things (it's amazing how much stuff one accumulates over the years!!!) and getting the place ready for them. So, since I haven't had time to put a post together, I'm turning on the ghost light that theaters turn on when they're temporarily empty. But I will be back with a full post on Wednesday and I hope you'll come back then too.

This "Cherry Orchard" Needs Some Weeding

2011-12-07T06:59:00.000-05:00

Repertory companies were once mainstays of the theater but, with rare exceptions like Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, they’re become rarities nowadays. It’s just too expensive for most theaters to maintain a resident crew of actors. And it’s too much of a sacrifice for most actors to give up the chance to do more lucrative work elsewhere.

So it’s nice to see the same familiar faces turning up in Classic Stage Company productions with such constancy that they’ve come to constitute an unofficial rep company. I just wish I had been as happy seeing what director Andrei Belgrader has done with them in the new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard that opened on Sunday night.

The production is the final installment of the company’s “Chekhov Initiative,” which has presented the father of modern theater’s four major country-estate plays beginning with The Seagull in 2008. I've seen all four and I’ve been up and down about them (click here to read what I thought of The Seagull and here of Uncle Vanya and here of Three Sisters but I found this one to be the most disappointing. Although the New York Times’ Ben Brantley and others have raved (click here to see some of those reviews).

The Cherry Orchard, which famously ends with the sale of an aristocratic but improvident family’s country home and the sound of an ax chopping down their beloved orchard, is the most elegiac of Chekhov’s final quartet not only because it’s the last, completed the year before his premature death at 44, but because it echoes his boyhood experience when financial problems caused his own family to lose its home.

But Chekhov being Chekhov, comedy sits right beside the family's tragedy in The Cherry Orchard (he told his wife that he was writing a “a four-act farce”) and as always, the challenge for a director is finding the right balance between the two.

Belgrader tips his production way towards the comedic and, despite a new flamboyantly colloquial translation (characters call one another “jerk”) by the actor John Christopher Jones, it also strives to be enigmatic.

For the first time I can remember in all the years I’ve seen shows at CSC, curtains were drawn around the three-quarter playing area. It’s already a tight space with audience members sitting just inches away from the performers and the curtains were placed in a manner that made it difficult for people to get to their seats. The reveal when they were drawn hardly seemed worth the trouble. Santo Loquasto’s set is just a minimalist spin on the same old nursery room that always opens the play.

Things don’t pick up once the show gets under way either, although there’s a lot going on. Costume designer Marco Piemontese has done up some characters in funny top hats and mismatched socks. A couple sport Brechtian-style whiteface makeup. And several address their speeches directly to the audience.

One, Roberta Maxwell as the eccentric governess Charlotta, even breaks the fourth wall Pirandello-style and actually asks an audience member to move to another seat so that she can sit in his place and observe her fellow players. She also reaches into her pocket for a pickle, bites into it and then gives the remainder to the person sitting next to her. The man who got the leftover at the performance my friend Mary Anne and I attended was game and munched on the other end of the pickle.

Mary Anne and I got caught up in a milder form of audience participation when a pillow was cut open and thrown up into the air: the feathers settled over those of us in the rows nearest the stage and stuck. I was still pulling these unsolicited souvenirs off my clothes on the subway ride home.

All that funny business earns chuckles but I’m not sure what other purpose it serves. Shouldn’t the humor come from the characters and the situations they’ve created for themselves—falling in love with the wrong people, spending so much that they can’t hold on to the family patrimony, blindly ignoring the changing times—than from sticking on extraneous stuff?

Now, this is the point in the post where I usually praise the actors (New York is chock full of

so many awesome actors) regardless of what I’ve thought of the play. The cast here is lead by Dianne Wiest and John Turturro, both formidable actors and CSC vets (click here to read a Q&A with him).

They’re backed up by such CSC stalwarts as Maxwell and Alvin Epstein and CSC newcomer Daniel Davis (giving one of most subtle but effective performances). Plus there are a bunch of younger talents including Josh Hamilton, Juliet Rylance, Michael Urie (click here to read an interview with him) and the Waterston sisters, Elisabeth and Katherine.

Actors of this caliber are seldom bad and they aren’t here either. But none of them wowed me this time out. Luckily, most are part of the CSC rep and so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll be back soon in other productions that will.

"Private Lives" is Just Lively Enough

2011-12-03T11:59:00.000-05:00

Like every exclusive society, the world of theater lovers has its unspoken rules. For starters, we’re all supposed to genuflect to everything by Shakespeare, mostly everything by Chekhov, musicals by Stephen Sondheim and comedies by Noël Coward.

Well, don’t tell anyone but I'm just not that crazy about Coward's arch comedies. Which means I wasn’t sure what kind of time I was going to have at the latest revival of Coward’s Private Lives, which is now playing at the venerable Music Box theater (acknowledging fondness for it is another one of the rules).

So like most Coward philistines, my chief interest in this production was the chance to see Kim Cattrall, who, of course, is best known as Samantha Jones, the most-lascivious of the women in “Sex and the City.”

Cattrall, who was born in Liverpool and grew up in Canada, trained at both the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. But the revival’s producers have shrewdly played up the question of whether “Samantha” would be believable as Amanda, the sophisticated divorcee who discovers that she’s still in love with her first husband Elyot while both he and she are on honeymoons with their new spouses.

Coward wrote the play for himself and his good buddy Gertrude Lawrence and over the years, Amanda has been played by such divas as Tallulah Bankhead, Tammy Grimes, Elizabeth Taylor, Maggie Smith and, in a much acclaimed 2002 production, Lindsay Duncan. I don’t if Samantha Jones would fit on that list but Cattrall seems quite comfortable there (click here to read a profile of her).

The success of the play hinges on the connection between the two former-now-back-in-love spouses. And both the comic and sexual energy are entirely believable between Cattrall and her co-star Paul Gross, whom the most devoted of theater lovers will know as Geoffrey Tenant, the perpetually frazzled director of a theater repertory company on the Canadian-produced TV series “Slings and Arrows” (click here to read my review of the series and here to read about him.)

Catrall’s Amanda provides the effervescent gin to their cocktail; Gross’ Elyot is the debonair vermouth. The mix is tasty and satisfying. Cattrall is 55 and Gross is 52, which makes them both a generation older than the characters are supposed to be but they used the extra mileage to give the characters a little extra emotional depth that appealed to folks like me for whom the jokes wear a thin after a while.

I suspect that a large part of the credit for that goes to director Richard Eyre (to whom I will always be grateful for “Changing Stages”, the wonderful history of English theater that ran on PBS a few years ago and that was also turned into a terrific book). (Click here to read about him.)

The only off-note is the set for Amanda’s apartment in the second act. I’m guessing that designer Rob Howell thought his idiosyncratic set would show what a free spirit Amanda is but—not quite deco, not quite modernist—it’s just bizarre.

Still, I had a good enough time. My theatergoing buddy Bill, a Coward fan and a member in better standing in the world of theater lovers, had an even better one. And besides, who, in these dismal days, doesn’t need a laugh, even if it’s only an old-fashioned chuckle.

"Maple and Vine" Needs Some Pruning

2011-11-30T10:59:00.000-05:00

photo by Joan Marcus

Everybody knows that theater is a collaborative art, with its elements—the acting, the directing, the design, lighting and the play itself—all leaning on one another. But we sometimes forget how a misstep by just one of them can tip the whole ship.

I was reminded of that when I saw Maple and Vine, the new play by Jordan Harrison that is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons. Its ship tipper is an unnecessarily clunky set but the ship itself was already wobbly.

This is the first play by Harrison that I’ve seen but from everything I’ve read (click here to see a profile in his alumni magazine from Stanford University) Harrison likes to set his characters in worlds that are slightly askew from reality. This time out he’s come up with the idea of a modern-day Arcadia where people fed up with our fast-paced, hyper-socially connected world retreat into a separate community that has chosen to live every day as though it were 1955.

That means bouncy petticoats for the women, boxy suits for the men, high balls for everyone and evenings spent playing charades instead of watching TV or surfing the Internet. But I hope it’s no spoiler to say that life there turns out to be less than ideal.

Maple and Vine seems to have been a big hit at last spring’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, which takes place every year in Louisville. But I’ve got to say it’s hard to tell why based on this production.

I’ll admit that there are things to admire in Harrison’s work. His willingness to explore unconventional worlds is a welcomed change from the usual navel gazing. His tendency to include parts for non-white actors is admirable. And, like so many playwrights who grew up in the Seinfeld era, he’s a master of droll dialog.

But writing a play that juxtaposes life today against that in the ‘50s isn’t a new idea. The movies "Pleasantville" and "Far From Heaven" took that on a decade ago. And TV’s "Mad Men" has been scratching a similar itch for the last four years.

Of course it would be fine for Harrison to have his say on this period if he had something distinctive to add to the conversation. But after he sets up his version of the situation, he doesn’t seem sure of what do do with it.

I’m willing to let a playwright take me to a strange place. I've ventured into some weird territory with Albee, Durang and Rapp, all of whom have no doubt inspired Harrison. But Maple and Vine spoils the mood by breaking its own rules: community residents aren’t supposed to do anything that happens after 1955 and yet one character conspicuously reads “Peyton Place,” which didn’t come out until 1956.

And if you think that’s nitpicky, it's even more dislocating when a guy who makes boxes on a production line in 1955 is able to afford a split level home, complete with upscale mid-century furniture and a bar stocked with premium labels.

What’s worse, however, is that Harrison has succumbed to a naive romanticizing of the past. The play acknowledges that McCarthyism, overt racism and sexism, and socially-sanctioned discrimination against gays existed in the ‘50s but it conjectures that oppression is a good thing because it gives people something to struggle against.

Hmmmm. Well, tell that to the thousands of people in that era who were hounded out of their jobs on charges of being communist or gay and to the millions who had to take jobs beneath their ability because their skins were dark or they were born female.

The actors do what they can with the roles. Trent Dawson and Jeanine Serralles are appropriately faux-upbeat as the leaders of the community and Pedro Pascal is a brooding malcontent who has secret reasons for his unhappiness. Both Pascal and Serralles do double duty in a couple of minor roles as well.

Playing the central couple who decide to join the society after suffering a tragedy are Marin Ireland and Peter Kim. As always, it’s a treat to see what spin Ireland will put on a line reading. And Kim, who originated the role of the Asian-American husband in Louisville last spring, is clearly delighted to have the part since meaty roles for Asian actors are almost as rare as meat dishes at a vegan picnic.

But then there’s the set. I don’t know if the blame for it rests with Harrison, director Anne Kauffman or set designer Alexander Dodge. There are over 30 scenes in Maple and Vine and Dodge vainly tries to recreate each one in naturalistic detail.

That means dark-clad stagehands are constantly dragging on sets or clearing the way for others to pop up through the trap door in the stage floor. In their desperation to keep the action flowing, some of the grips started moving things before scenes were finished at the performance my best friend Phil and I attended.

Of course, the scene changes may get smoother but that doesn’t mean that the scenery will be better. Or, alas, that the show will be either.

Why "Blood and Gifts" Is a Sure-Fire Keeper

2011-11-26T08:59:00.000-05:00

You gotta love the folks at Lincoln Center Theater. Or at least I do. Artistic director André Bishop and executive producer Bernard Gersten do what too few of their not-for-profit brethren do. Instead of just yakking about the need for big ambitious plays that tell big complex stories, Lincoln Center actually puts on shows like Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and John Guare’s A Free Man of Color, which—be they hits or misses—do what art should do: take risks.

The latest example of this—the company’s 145th production, according to the Playbill—is Blood and Gifts, the potent new play by J.T. Rogers that opened this week at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. And it’s a winner.

In fact, Rogers is a playwright after my own heart. Unlike so many contemporary American playwrights, he refuses to navel gaze and instead writes pieces that wrestle with the major political and global issues of our time or, as he called it in a now famous speech a couple of years ago, “theater that engages the public realm.” (Click here to read a recent NYTimes profile of him).

Rogers’ last play The Overwhelming, dealt with the genocide in Rwanda. While I appreciated the effort, I felt that it came across as more didactic than dramatic (click here to see my review). But the playwright has deepened his craft since then and Blood and Gifts offers a more satisfyingly visceral experience.

The idea for the play came to Rogers when he was the only American asked to contribute to The Great Game: Afghanistan, the 12-play cycle that London’s Tricycle Theatre produced about Afghanistan's troubled relationship with the West over the past three centuries.

Rogers focused on the CIA’s support of the mujahideen who were fighting against the Soviet Union in the ‘80s but who later morphed into the Taliban that we’re still fighting today. The story he ended up wanting to tell was longer and more involved than the cycle’s one-act would allow and so he later expanded it into a full-length play.

The one-act version of the play was withdrawn from The Great Game before the Public Theater presented a limited run last December (click here to see my review of that) so I can’t compare the two. But the one now at the Mitzi moves with the deftness and depth of a Graham Greene novel.

Blood and Gifts starts in 1981 when CIA agent James Warnock arrives in Pakistan to direct the agency’s supposedly covert support for the Afghan freedom fighters. It ends a decade later, shortly before the downfall of the Soviet puppet Mohammad Najibullah and the eventual takeover of Afghanistan by Islamic fundamentalists.

In between, the play follows the volatile political and personal alliances among the tribal leaders on the battlefront, their American, British, and Russian handlers just across the border in Pakistan and the politicians and agency bureaucrats pulling the strings back in Washington.

Viewers should be advised that parts of the first act play like an eat-your-spinach "Frontline" documentary and so it can be hard to keep track of all the names and allegiances. But the main characters eventually emerge—each a believably human mix of good and bad impulses and actions. And it isn’t all grim. Rogers has great fun with the Afghans’ fondness for ‘80s pop culture.

The acting is excellent almost across the board. Jeremy Davidson is a little stiff as Warnock but it works for the role. And there is nimble work by Jefferson Mays as a wryly frustrated MI5 agent (click here to read an interview with him) and Bernard White as an heroic warlord. In a smaller role, John Procaccino is so right-on as a CIA official back in Washington that it felt as though he’d just taken the Acela up from Langley.

The entire 14-member cast is well guided by director Bartlett Sher who refuses to give into the temptation to imitate a movie (it would make a good one) and keeps the show a truly theatrical experience. The main players never truly leave the stage but sit on benches along its sides, looming presences in the scenes in which they don’t appear.

Set designer Michael Yeargan’s mix of new stagecraft (the subtle use of video projections) and old (the draping of a large American flag) expertly signal the location of the action. As do the very good sound effects by Peter John Still and lighting by Donald Holder.

I saw Blood and Gifts on the night before Thanksgiving and there were a good number of empty seats. I’m hoping that’s just a reflection of the holiday. Because everyone who loves meaningful theater ought to do what Lincoln Center does: put their money where their mouth is and go see this show.

Is "Wild Animals You Should Know" Too Tame?

2011-11-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Theater doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A show like The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs took on a different meaning after the Apple co-founder’s death. And Wild Animals You Should Know, the new play that MCC Theater opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Sunday, felt different, at least to me, in the wake of the recent pedophile scandal at Penn State.

Playwright Thomas Higgins centers the action around a Boy Scouts camping trip.

A few days before that weekend, a teen scout named Matthew, the alpha male of the troop, discovers that the scout master is gay and decides to use that information to his advantage. The way he does it made me squirm.

But that’s not the only thing going on in this play. The closeted scout master is wrestling with some other secrets. Matthew’s best friend Jacob is also gay and desperate to hold on to their friendship. Matthew’s dad has just lost his job and is now dependent on his frustrated wife’s income. And the family’s neighbor is a macho beer-swiller who is more complex than he appears to be.

Higgins, who just got his M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2008, clearly wants to examine how masculinity and the relationships between men are defined today but he doesn’t yet have the dexterity to keep all those, ahem, balls up in the air.

His dialog is snappy, the scenarios intriguing and the questions he raises are worthwhile but the characters aren’t drawn clearly enough and the actions they take aren’t fully realized or rationalized. Higgins is still sorting things out and I wish he had taken this play on later in his career.

Still, director Trip Cullman has put together an engaging production, even if some of the parts seem miscast. John Behlmann is appropriately sturdy as the scout master and Daniel Stewart Sherman goes enjoyably heavy on the comic relief as the neighbor. But the usually good Patrick Breen, who's made a specialty of playing milquetoasts, seems too fey here.

Breen works hard but you can’t imagine that his version of the dad ever felt secure in himself and so the new doubts that the play gives him just get lost amidst the already existing ones. Meanwhile, Alice Ripley, dynamic and moving in her Tony-winning performance in Next to Normal, is almost unrecognizable and ultimately unmemorable as the mom.

The boys come off better. Jay Armstrong Johnson has the looks and the bravado to play Matthew but, like the play as a whole, seems held back by Higgins’ inability or unwillingness to make the character’s motivations and goals less fuzzy. Gideon Glick pretty much nails Jacob but he has the advantage of having played a similar role in Stephen Karam’s Speech and Debate a few years back (click here to read an interview with both actors).

I know this isn’t sounding like much of a recommendation. And most of the critics and my theatergoing buddy Bill were pretty much underwhelmed by Wild Animals You Should Know. So maybe it’s because the state of the economy and the Penn State mess already had me thinking about some of the issues the play raises but its 100 minutes went by swiftly for me and the questions Higgins raises have stayed with me.

A Love Affair with "Venus in Fur"

2011-11-19T12:59:00.000-05:00

My husband K is in love with the actress Nina Arianda. Which is OK with me because—like every other true theater lover in New York right now—I, too, am in love with Arianda, the star of Venus in Fur, which is playing a limited run at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through Dec. 18.

Arianda, who is only 27 and got her masters from NYU just two years ago, first created a sensation when she originated the role of Vanda, a young actress who undertakes an unusual audition in the Classic Stage Company production of Venus in Fur last year. The critics went mad for her and nearly exhausted the synonyms for great.

Eager to see what all the fuss was about, I managed to get into one of the final performances of that run. I didn’t write about it but I was gobsmacked by Arianda too, and was even more so when she starred in last spring’s too-short-lived revival of Born Yesterday.

Arianda is the whole package—a dramatic actress who can pack a scene’s worth of emotions into a single-word, a physical comedienne who knows how to get the most out of her long, loose limbs and rubbery kewpie doll face (although she does need to learn how to pause until the laughter dies down) and a sexy woman who can turn up the heat with a glance (click here to read John Lahr’s profile of her in The New Yorker).

I have to be honest. I’m not as crazy about the play that David Ives has adapted from the kinky 19th century novella “Venus im Pelz” or “Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose surname and sexual predilections have been immortalized in the word masochism.

Ives’ two-hander, which has added an additional 15 minutes to the 90 minute running time at CSC, dances back and forth between the modern day rehearsal room where Vanda arrives late to audition for Thomas, the writer-director of a play based on Sacher-Masoch’s tale of a dominatrix and slave relationship, and scenes from Thomas’ play-within-a-play.

It’s all too meta and smugly clever for me and not half as much fun as Ives’ School for Lies which played at CSC in May (click here to read my review of it). But Walter Bobbie’s sharp direction makes it easy to follow the transitions in Venus in Fur, except when they’re supposed to be fuzzy. He gets excellent support from Peter Kaczorowski’s lighting and the sound design by ACME Sound Partners.

But this is an actors’ showcase. I already knew what Arianda was capable of doing. And so I looked forward to seeing how the British actor Hugh Dancy would play off her as Thomas.

Wes Bentley, the young actor who almost stole the 1999 movie “American Beauty” away from Kevin Spacey, made his New York stage debut in the role downtown. Arianda’s high-voltage performance seemed to blow him off the stage and I thought a more experienced stage actor might stand his ground better.

There’s no question that Dancy has the acting chops (click here to read an interview he did with Out Magazine) and he’s great in the early scenes but, to my surprise, I ended up preferring Bentley’s more vulnerable performance, which provided a story arc for the character that Dancy doesn’t quite deliver for me.

In the end, though, it’s still Arianda’s show. And if you love theater or just love to be able to brag about being in the know, you should see it because she’s the real deal.

"The Mountaintop" is More of a Molehill

2011-11-16T10:59:00.000-05:00

Katori Hall became the first African-American woman to win the Olivier Award for Best New Play when The Mountaintop, her meditation on the last night in Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, played in London in 2009. That was impressive enough but what really got my attention is that the plays she beat out were the heavyweights Enron, Jerusalem and Red.

The fact that Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett signed onto the Broadway production to play King and a mysterious maid at the hotel where he stayed that night before he was killed made Hall’s show one of the must-see events of the fall season. Vogue did a fashion shoot with the stars. The New York Times scheduled one of its TimesTalks with Jackson. The New Yorker ran a profile of Hall (click here to see it).

But now that the show is running at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, I suspect that nearly everyone, including me, is scratching their heads and trying to figure out exactly what the fuss was all about.

Hall, who trained as an actor as well as a playwright, has an ear for dialog and, judging from interviews, a whole lot of moxie (click here to read another interview she did with The Guardian in London). She’s said repeatedly that she wanted to show King as a man and not an icon.

The trouble is that like so many young playwrights whose works have been showcased this fall, she relies too much on snappy dialog. And like so many young people, she thinks that the insights she makes are the first time anyone has ever thought of them.

To hammer home the fact that King is just a regular guy, the play opens with his entering his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and immediately heading to an offstage bathroom, where he relieves himself loudly enough for the audience to hear. It’s supposed to be a signal that King is human just like you and me it but comes off more like one of those potty scenes that now pass for humor in Judd Apatow comedies—hey, isn’t it funny that we can see the character piss, shit or barf?

Hall's other attempts to show the civil rights leader as a real person are cobbled together from a hodgepodge of other influences: King’s now-well-known eye for a pretty girl, Michelle Obama’s comments during the 2008 campaign about her husband’s “stinky feet,” the stress-relieving pillow fight between King and his aides that Taylor Branch describes in "At Canaan's Edge," the final installment of his masterful biography of King.

There’s nothing wrong with Hall’s borrowing those things. Alchemizing the minutiae of everyday life into art is what artists do. But she falls short of that goal because she isn’t able to reveal anything about King that we don’t already know or to show him in a way we haven’t yet seen.

In some interviews, Hall, who just turned 30 in May, has said that older people won’t get The Mountaintop because they don’t want to see King as a man with feet of clay. But his human frailties are hardly news after all the FBI revelations about his infidelities and use of profanity or the tales about his insecurities and other weaknesses that can be found in histories of the civil movement and memoirs by some of its other leaders.

Maybe the audience for this play is younger people who haven’t taken the time to read any of that. The thirtysomething woman sitting behind my friend Joy and me whooped with delight each time Camae, the maid whose name is a tribute to the playwright’s mother Carrie Mae, said something to put King in his place.

But maybe the whooping woman was just tickled because Bassett, under Kenny Leon’s direction, takes such a you-go-girl approach to the role that includes all the neck swiveling, eye rolling and hip thrusting that have come to define the type. I’ve been a Bassett fan since she played Tina Turner in the biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It” but this performance was too over the top for me.

Jackson, however, fares much better. Make-up and prosthetics do a good enough job of helping him resemble King but it’s Jackson's unforced performance that makes the actor seem so convincing in the role. This is his Broadway debut but I hope it won’t be the last time we see him on the boards (click here to read an interview with him).

Kudos must also go to David Gallo, who not only faithfully recreates the room where King spent his final night but has concocted a coup d’theatre that may be the best moment in the show.

I haven’t given up on Hall, though. Young talent needs time to mature. Like President Obama's Nobel Prize, her Olivier may be premature but that doesn't mean that the ability isn't there. Hall's new play Hurt Village about the residents in a housing project is scheduled to open at Signature Theater Company in February and I’m ordering my tickets right after I post this entry.

This "King Lear" is Listless

2011-11-12T09:52:00.005-05:00

There’s not much scenery on the stage at The Public Theater’s Newman theater space where a new production of King Lear opened this week but that doesn’t stop nearly everyone on stage from chewing on it. Including an actor in one scene who literally gnaws on a glove while he takes his time dying.

This is the third major Lear this year (click here to read my review of Derek Jacobi's turn in the role) but it’s always intriguing to see how actors at the top of their power will play the vain king who impetuously divides his kingdom between his two older daughters but banishes the third when she refuses to flatter him, setting off one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. This, however, may be the most hapless King Lear I’ve ever seen.

The production has been nominally directed by James Macdonald but he doesn’t seem to have been able to get anyone to agree on how they should all approach the piece. Instead, each actor just does his or her own thing. The result is akin to what the Tower of Babel must have been.

It’s not that the actors aren’t talented. Frank Wood, John Douglas Thompson, Kelli O’Hara, Arian Moayed, Michael McKean and Bill Irwin have all been justly acclaimed for their work in other productions. But only Thompson, as the loyal Kent, manages to keep his footing in this one.

Even an elegant actor like Moayed, who brought such understated poignancy to the role of the Iraqi interpreter in last season’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, flails about here, particularly in the scenes in which his character Edgar masquerades as the madman Tom.

McKean keeps his dignity as Edgar’s father Gloucester but at the price of being dull (click here to read a livelier interview he gave). O’Hara is equally bland as Lear’s second daughter Regan. Wood plays Regan’s husband Cornwall as though he’s trying out for the role of a capo in a mobster movie. And then there’s Irwin.

It seemed an inspired idea to have Lear’s Fool played by Irwin, a professionally-trained clown who can also be dramatically affecting as he showed in the 2005 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. But Irwin, dressed in a costume of fluorescent yellow that looks as though it were borrowed from a Teletubbie, cuts up and shows off and throws an already wobbly production even further off-kilter. (Click here to read an interview with him.)

Of course it is Lear’s play and so all of the above would matter less if the title character were well played. But Sam Waterston lost me almost from hello. Waterston is now best known for his long-running role as Jack McCoy on “Law & Order” but he got his start as a stage actor and has played a dozen Shakespearean roles at the Public, including, most notably, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet.

Waterston's take on Lear seems to be that the king is suffering from some form of early onset senility or maybe Parkinson’s Disease. Waterston’s voice shakes and his hands tremble so much in the first scene that I wondered if the actor might actually be ill.

I suppose you could call that good acting but because his Lear seems so far gone right from the start, there isn’t really anyplace for him to go as madness descends. So, Waterston overacts, throwing out his arms like some hammy 19th century actor when he speaks and stomping his foot when he wants to be emphatic. He's too good and experienced an actor for such shenanigans.

The creative team has lost its way too. The centerpiece of Miriam Buether’s set is an annoying chain curtain that clangs and drowns out the dialog anytime someone touches it. Which is often since it’s the main way the actors enter and exit the action.

Costume designer Gabriel Berry apparently couldn’t make up her mind about which era to invoke and so takes a grab bag approach—some characters wear traditional 16th century garb, others look as though they’re in a movie from the ‘30s, a few sport contemporary looks and, of course, there’s Irwin.

Meanwhile, sound designer Darron L. West has too grand a time booming out the noise of the thunder from the storm in which Lear has his famous mad scene and the bombs and machine guns that are used in the civil war that eventually breaks out after Lear’s abdication.

To paraphrase a line from another Shakespearean tragedy, the whole thing adds up to a lot of sound and fury signifying very little.

"Queen of the Mist" Has Moments of Greatness

2011-11-09T08:59:00.001-05:00

No matter how talented they are, ample-bodied and strong-featured actresses like Mary Testa usually play the funny best friend or the sassy sidekick instead of the leading lady. And so I can imagine how wonderful it must be for Testa, who is very talented indeed, to have the chance to be the star in Queen of the Mist, the new Michael John LaChiusa musical that the Transport Group Theatre Company just opened at The Gym at Judson Memorial Church.

LaChiusa, who does both the book and music for all his shows, loves to write big, complex pieces about strong, complicated women and he’s come up with a doozy this time. His subject is Annie Edson Taylor, who, at the age of 63, became the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

It’s a quirky tale but its swirling mixture of obsession, fame and a Greek-like fall from grace is right up LaChiusa’s alley (among my favorite of his shows is Marie Christine, his reworking of Medea). So I can imagine how wonderful it must be for him to see Testa throw everything she has into the role.

It will come as no surprise to regular theatergoers that Testa limns the considerable humor in the play with just a pause between words or the rise of an eyebrow. But she’s just as adept at portraying the desperate yearning to be more than ordinary that pushes Annie to undertake her dramatic act.

“There is Greatness in Me,” Annie sings repeatedly through the show. Testa is in marvelous voice and the song becomes an anthem for the foolishness and indomitability that allows all artists to take the plunge.

Critics run very hot or very cold on LaChiusa but his music almost always makes me swoon and that’s totally the case with this production. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that LaChiusa and my husband have worked together and so I’ve met Michael John several times.)

Edson took her leap in 1901 and LaChiusa’s score evokes all the sounds of the turn of the 20th century from Victor Herbertish ballads to Scott Joplinesque rags (click here for a YouTube preview of the score). The songs in Queen of the Mist are accessible and catchy. I overheard my theatergoing buddy Bill humming some of the tunes as we left the theater.

The lyrics aren’t always as clever as they might be (LaChiusa joins the growing number of songwriters who can’t seem to resist the gratuitous shock value of the c-word) but the lovely melodies have been gorgeously orchestrated by Michael Starobin and they’re well played by a tight six-piece band.

The show has been beautifully directed too. The space at Judson is literally a gym, with bleachers on both long sides of the playing space but Jack Cummings III makes smart use of it and the narrowness of the space does double duty as a metaphor for both the confined space in which Annie realized her triumph and the constraints that society placed on women at the time.

LaChiusa places Annie’s ascent to celebrity in the first act and her descent into ignominy in the second, which drags a bit. But the seven-member cast is game throughout. Aside from Testa and Andrew Samonsky, who turns in a nimble performance as Annie’s shady manager (click here to read an interview with him) the actors all play multiple roles. The women shine.

Theresa McCarthy shares a lovely duet with Testa as Annie’s sister and Julia Murney delighted the audience at the performance Bill and I attended as the hatchet-wielding temperance advocate Carrie Nation who snootily condescends towards Annie when they share the bill on the Chautauqua lecture circuit.

But, in the end, it is Testa’s show and there are truly moments of greatness in her—and in it.

"Asuncion" Offers Too Many Glib Assumptions

2011-11-05T07:59:00.000-05:00

Maybe I’m the wrong demographic for Asuncion, the new play by Jesse Eisenberg that just opened in a Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production at the venerable Cherry Lane Theatre. Or maybe even people born after 1980 will find this show as tiresome as I did. The 28-year old star of the movie “The Social Network” is a smart and oddly charming guy and he’s emerged as an avatar for the geek-chic that defines his generation but the plot of his play is sheer nonsense.

Vinny, a cool white guy who’s working on a Ph.D. in Black Studies, is letting Edgar, a totally uncool white guy with delusions of being a modern-day muckraker, crash in his grungy apartment. Their Oscar-Felix domesticity is interrupted when Edgar’s wealthy older brother shows up with his new bride, a beautiful young Filipina named Asuncion, and asks the guys to let her stay with them for a few days.

Predictably, Asuncion’s presence upends the bromance between Edgar and Vinny. Edgar imagines that she’s a prostitute or a mail-order bride purchased by his brother and in need of being rescued. Vinny thinks she’s just a fun chick to flirt with. At one point, the three of them suddenly decide to drop acid, which, of course, causes them to reveal their true selves.

Oh please. As if a rich guy would want his wife to stay in a dump with two horny and hygienically-challenged dudes. As if any woman would agree to doing that. As if there’s no other way to reveal character than to insert a dope scene so people can just spill out their feelings.

Eisenberg clearly wants to say profound things about male bonding, cultural myopia and political correctness. But his observations are all shallow: liberals can be condescending about race, people from different cultures can misunderstand one another, homosexual tensions can exist in male friendships.

Director Kip Fagan, who inexplicably gets the second bio in the Playbill, has clearly worked hard to keep the action popping. And the design team has done its part too. John McDermott’s set is so spot-on that its squalor made me itchy. But the play’s true saving grace is Justin Bartha’s performance as Vinny.

Bartha is probably best known for his role in “The Hangover” movies but in the past year, he has been building up a nice and varied body of theater work with appearances in the recent revival of Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, where he held his own against such heavyweights as Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shalhoub, and in All New People by Zach Braff (yet another Hollywood actor moonlighting as a playwright) and he brings a lovely laidback charm to Vinny (click here to read a Q&A with Bartha).

I get why producers want movie and TV stars to appear in their plays and now increasingly to write them. Those names draw attention. Eisenberg, who not only wrote Asuncion but plays Edgar, got to go on Letterman to hawk his play, which isn’t the usual stomping ground for young playwrights (click here to see a clip).

And, of course, when the Hollywood names are young ones and have been attached to hits like “The Social Network,” they also tend to draw young audiences that can be so difficult to get into the theater. The audience at the Asuncion performance I attended was filled with twentysomethings clearly excited about seeing Eisenberg and Bartha in the flesh.

So, as I said, I get it. And I want to get more young people into theater seats too. But there’s a difference between bringing movie stars into act in a play and producing the plays they wrote. Some shows simply won’t get done without a name star and so that celebrity’s presence can mean jobs for other actors, even if not in the choicest roles. But when a theater company does the work of a celebrity playwright that means some other playwright—perhaps a talented young one whose work might even appeal to a broad demographic—is out of a job.

"Relatively Speaking" Has Nothing New to Say

2011-11-02T05:59:00.004-05:00

Lots of people seem almost angry that they don’t like Relatively Speaking, the trio of one-act comedies now playing at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It averaged a
D+ on StageGrade, which aggregates the reviews of the top New York critics. Six of the 22 scored it an F. “Relatively disgusting,” declared one.

I suspect the umbrage is a reflection of the high expectations that everyone had for the show. For its authors are the comic heavyweights Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen. (Click here to see a photo piece Vanity Fair did on them before previews started).

Those names, in turn, attracted a bunch of actors who specialize in belly laughs, including Steve Guttenberg, Mark Linn-Baker, Marlo Thomas and Julie Kavner, the voice of Marge Simpson on the long-running TV show. So the prospects seemed high for a really fun evening and people got really pissed when it turned out to be something less.

I’d been dubious all along (it seemed too many cooks in the kitchen for me) and so I’m not as put out as some of the critics. But I can’t say that I enjoyed myself much more than the others did.

As the title vaguely suggests, the theme of this theatrical triptych is the way that families can drive one another crazy. Coen interprets this literally in the first play, Talking Cure, which opens in a mental hospital where a menacing patient is bullying his meek therapist; a movie-style flashback shows us how the patient’s parents made him the way he is.

The actor originally cast to play the father in that scene left the show during previews. "We kind of weren't together on the character,” he told The New York Times. “There were things Ethan wanted that I didn’t like, that seemed to take the character in a direction that felt artificial. Stuff I couldn’t really make sense of.” (Click here to read the entire piece.)

I know what he means. The only good thing I can say about Talking Cure is that I’m glad I saw it before buying a ticket to the all-Coen bill of one acts that is scheduled to open at the Atlantic Theater in December.

Meanwhile, Allen has been riding a wave of goodwill since his latest movie “Midnight in Paris” opened in June. But his contribution Honeymoon Hotel could cause people to feel about him the way they did in the ‘90s when he dumped his longtime love Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. Allen may even have written Honeymoon Hotel back then because it has several stale jokes about Lorena Bobbitt who infamously bobbed her husband’s penis in 1993.

The family tie in his short play is between a May-December couple who flee a wedding and escape to a tacky motel, where they’re eventually followed by the entire bridal party, including the rabbi. A shrink shows up too. So Allen gets to make hoary jokes on all his favorite tropes—religion, psychology, sex and younger women besotted with much older men. There are a few chuckles but they were fresher and funnier years ago.

May’s George is Dead, which is sandwiched between the other two, comes off best. That's largely because Thomas gives a fully-realized and affecting performance as a narcissistic socialite who has no one to turn to when her husband dies in a freak accident and so seeks comfort from the daughter of her old nanny. (Click here to read an interview with Thomas.)

But all three plays hearken back, in one way or another, to the time when Borscht Belt comics got big laughs by portraying Jewish women as nagging mothers, whiny wives and selfish young twits. Neil Simon refined the genre and made a mint off it in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Most of us have moved on.

Except it seems Allen, Coen and May. They bare the bulk of the blame for this dispiriting return to those times. But they aren’t helped by director John Turturro, who exhibits as deft a touch for comedy as Lady Gaga does for sober attire.

Turturro, an idiosyncratic but fine actor, should keep his day job. And even he seems to realize that he may have bit off more than he could chew by trying to direct the work of not one but three people who are comedy directors themselves. (Click here to listen to an NPR interview he did.)

Still, people around me laughed a lot. So maybe we haven’t made as much progress as I thought. Or maybe we're just desperate for the chance to laugh at anything in these difficult times.