theater review

Junk Shot

Leah Richards — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Junk Shot Leah Richards July 28, 2018 - 10:00

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Photo Credit: Jody Christopherson

Dick Pix

Written by Daniel McCoy

Directed by Heidi Handelsman

Presented by Richard Pictures Presents at Theaterlab, NYC

July 19-August 11, 2018

As Scarlett Johansson steps back from an announced role as a trans man, and the #metoo movement continues to demonstrate its staying power, Dick Pix, a new play by Daniel McCoy, jumps gleefully into the current conversations surrounding gender. Running in rotation with Perfect Teeth (a "sibling play," also by McCoy), Dick Pix's witty, self-aware comedy lets audiences have a wonderfully fun time interrogating the entire system of gender.

The first character whom we meet, Mrs. Marbleblatt (June Ballinger) is stepping down as headmistress of a private girls' school due to a scandal whose particulars we won't spoil here. Her introduction -- laugh-out-loud funny sprinkled with social critique and unexpected turns -- immediately sets the tone for the rest of the production, and Mrs. Marbleblatt's decision, as a newly wealthy widow, to become a patron of the arts will eventually bring her to cross paths with middling (straight, white, cisgender male) artist Calvin (David Gelles), who begins the play under pressure to come up with a show for his friend Fyn (Bruce Jones). Fyn, a gender-fluid African American, owns a gallery on New York City's Lower East Side, for which they hire two new art "handlers" (Lynne Marie Rosenberg and Erinn Holmes) to take care of the hanging, positioning, and other manual labor involved in exhibitions. When Calvin tells Grace (Kate Abbruzzese), his publicist and romantic partner, about his plan to make his own penis the subject of his show, she is less than impressed, but an incident involving her smartphone will ironically change her perspective, as well as her, Fyn, and Calvin's lives.

As one might expect, Dick Pix makes some fun of the conventions and self-seriousness of the art world, including some NYC-arts-and-culture-scene-specific jibes and some meta jokes aimed at theater; it also, in connection, critiques our social media age as one in which, for example, our smartphones paradoxically consume all of our minute-by-minute attention at the same time that nothing that we encounter through them can hold that attention for more than a day or two. The central focus of McCoy's satire, though, is gender norms. In order to highlight and denaturalize gendered behaviors and dynamics, Dick Pix brings about a sort of alienation effect by swapping the expected genders in certain situations. Grace, for example, becomes a stiletto-heeled sexual aggressor around the male art handlers, harassing them while they are just trying to work or to enjoy a drink at a bar. The handlers also endure a very accurate, albeit gender-swapped, presentation of street harassment, and Rosenberg's handler -- on the whole, a sensitive, unguarded man for whom classic Disney movies can trigger existential despair over the many injustices in the world -- plays out the scenario of a woman stranded alone at night, while Calvin himself is objectified through his art in direct contradiction to the artistic statement that he claimed to be making. An uproarious Aztec-sacrifice nightmare sequence positions gender as a performance within defined roles, breaking the fourth wall at the sequence's end to further emphasize gender's theatricality. A similar and very effective analogy is introduced through having women play the male art handlers, who are also former construction workers: it is not that they are playing gender-fluid people or trans men; it is just that in theater, if characters are identified as male or female, we as the audience accept that, no matter the gender of the performer, underlining gender's socially constructed performativity and, consequently, the exaggerated importance attached to its so-called natural or proper expression.

Most of the characters in Dick Pix have more than one side: Calvin can be a little obnoxious and self-interested, but he is also a good friend to Fyn; Grace undergoes some important growth but also, as mentioned, serially sexually harasses the handlers; and our sympathy for the sensitive, woke handler is complicated by one of the flashbacks that, along with scattered confessions to the audience, provide additional insight into these people. Gelles and Abbruzzese give effortlessly excellent performances, including in a clever device in which each essentially plays the other while recounting their conversations and which takes a pointed symbolic turn late in the show. Rosenberg's deadpan earnestness garners lots of laughs on its own and works as half of a well-balanced comedic pairing with Holmes. Jones is charming and assured but also vulnerable as Fyn, and Ballinger flat out steals scenes as Mrs. Marbleblatt embraces her freedom from the bonds of upper-middle class womanhood (but still doesn't own a computer).

Dick Pix shines in the execution of its combination of winning silliness and social satire. Don't miss your chance to experience it in the flesh. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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Fly On, Dutchman!

Leah Richards — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 15:28:40 +0000

Fly On, Dutchman! Leah Richards February 13, 2018 - 10:28

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{Flying} Dutchman

Written by Amiri Baraka, Directed by Christopher-Rashee Stevenson

Presented by Theatre of War at The Tank, NYC

February 9-25, 2018

The 1964 play Dutchman was born from the pen of the prolific, impassioned, and often controversial Amiri Baraka, who died in 2014 after a nearly 50-year career as a playwright, poet, essayist, and activist. When Baraka wrote the play, he was still known as LeRoi Jones, but he would later change his name, hardening his commitment to revolutionary black nationalism. The 1970s would see his politics shift again, this time to Marxism, and he made forays into academia beginning in the 1980s and continued to publish new work right up until his death. Dutchman won an Obie award the year that it premiered, at New York City's Cherry Lane Theatre, and Theatre of War has revived this militant classic at the relocated and expanded The Tank, which serves emerging artists. This version incorporates some text from Jean Genet's Les Nègres, clownerie (The Blacks: A Clown Show), the 1,408-performance NYC run of which from 1961-1964 overlapped with Dutchman's original run, and which also deals with racial identity and anger in blunt, provocative terms. The result, re-christened {Flying} Dutchman, is a taut 45-minute explosion of a play.

{Flying} Dutchman unfolds at and around a single table with a chair and a tabletop microphone at either end, lending to the proceedings the incongruous air of a hearing or deposition. The set-up is simple, though what arises from it is anything but: a white woman, Lula (Jonathan Schenk), strikes up a conversation with Clay (Malcolm B. Hines), a black man, whom Lula asserts has been staring at her through a window. She interrupts Clay in the midst of a sort of poetic monologue, a situation that is repeated in inverted form later in the play. Prone to unpredictable outbursts, Lula openly identifies herself as a liar, and some of both the tension and the comedy in the first half of the production come from the juxtaposition of this erratic, barefoot woman's proddings and pronouncements with the calm, suit-wearing Clay's even-keeled reactions. The aggressor in these interactions, she impels Clay to invite her to the party that he is headed to and describes the trajectory that their evening will take in increasingly heated terms. An Eve-figure in a red dress, she offers him an apple, which he accepts (he refuses, for what it is worth, another). Eventually, Lula pushes Clay far enough that it completely upends the dynamic to that point. There is a heavy strain of self-as-performance in this play, and both characters ultimately abandon that public-facing performativity (perhaps ironically making them more alike). One of the producers of Dutchman's initial run was Edward Albee, and there is something of Jerry and Peter's encounter in The Zoo Story in {Flying} Dutchman, their stripping away of the veneer habitually presented to society. What Lula and Clay uncover is deep-seated rage and the constant immanence of betrayal.

{Flying} Dutchman effectively keeps the audience unsure and off-balance. Even the sound design employs abrupt changes and plays with overtaxing the mics into which the characters sometimes speak; a surprise shift into choreography at one point similarly contributes to the feeling of instability. Schenk's performance as Lula openly and appropriately signals its own performativity, heightened almost from the first. Hines is remarkable, navigating a characterological about-face that unleashes a powerful intensity.

Theatre of War makes a few updates to Baraka's text, such as substituting Jordan Peele for Charlie Parker, as well as lightly streamlining some elements. These adaptations include cutting the original's ending, which suggests that what the audience has just seen is one revolution through an ongoing cycle, and replacing it with an incredibly effective staging decision. If Clay's derisively calling Lula Caitlyn Jenner means that Lula is indeed a trans woman, then {Flying} Dutchman also adds a bleak contemporary commentary on the hierarchy that exists even among marginalized groups and the fragility or even disingenuousness of allyship. {Flying} Dutchman preserves the incendiary, confrontational fury of the original, intensifies it with smart choices, and offers a discomfiting experience that denies closure. It may not be the typical experience for most NYC theater audiences, but that is perhaps to our detriment. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

The Love that Keeps on Taking...

C. Jefferson Thom — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 22:22:50 +0000

The Love that Keeps on Taking... C. Jefferson Thom February 13, 2017 - 17:22

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Photo credit: Lawrence Peart

Let The Right One In

Moore Theatre, Seattle

Dripping from the Swedish page and screen onto American stages, The National Theatre of Scotland has adapted the celebrated horror film and novel Let The Right One In for theatrical production with an eerie success that echoes the story's previous manifestations. Wrapping up its run at Seattle's Moore Theatre before moving on to Houston, Texas, this production is spreading its paradoxically beautiful and yet starkly nihilistic brand of love story.

Though not uncommon in recent years, adapting from film to the stage seems like a backwards proposition, particularly when a stage production lamely tries to merely relive the film version preceeding it, milking its signature moments for an audience nodding at what they already know. However, this production defies those pitfalls, succeeding in making its own explorations of expression while maintaining the essential themes and uniquely bleak qualities.

Leading this unlikely adaptive victory is director John Tiffany. Tiffany's keen vision embraces theatricallity, showcasing Christine Jones's snow-driven and haunting wooded set design, bringing furniture out into the elements to play out interior scenes, bravely fostering the audience's suspension of disblief instead of weighing the piece down with more literal locations. While this is often a more mechanical aspect of modern theatre, Tiffany digs into more traditional roots of weaving set changes into the thread of the story, even making the occasional comic wink at the pragmatics of their actions. The continous flow of the piece is also aided and enhanced by the efforts of Movement Director, Steven Hoggett. Utilizing modern dance, the cast button-hooks scenes and emotional transitions through choreographed movement executed with a not-quite-syncroated uniformity, offering a beautifully personal emotive quality from each individual actor.

Navigating a script which is relatively sparse with the content of its dialgoue, the cast manages to provide depth between the lines through their deeply rooted inflections and expressions. Lucy Mangan, in the uncanny leading female role of "Eli", captures a being trapped in a brand of limbo more ambigious than most traditional depictions of this horror archetype. Mangan's reactions possess the quirky honesty of a child while, at the same time, belying the wisdom of a darker truth tied to her more eternal experience. Cristian Ortega offers an innocent contrast as "Oskar", the young boy faced with the deceptively opptomistic option of "letting Eli in", deepening the tragic elements of the story with his emotive face and honest protrayal of this flawed and complicated kid who is more sinned against than sinning. Ewan Stewart's "Hakan" takes a diversion from previously depicted pedophile of the novel and film, instead seeing him as an earlier version of Oskar and tragically implying the fate that waits for anyone who embraces Eli. Shadowing any genuine feelings that may inspire their initial union is the more primitive power of time which promises to consume any love with its insatiable hunger. Stephen McCole gives a stand-out perfomance as "Mr. Avila", a traditional coach character who displays an unstereotypicaj sensitivity to Oskar's needs while maintaining a more traditional interpriation of masculinity.

There is an overall ominious nature to this production, which is properly in keeping with the versions proceeding it, and deeply enhaced by a powerful use of lights and sound. Olafur Arnalds's original music pulses like an underlying heartbeat which rises to intimating volumes and intensities in moments which organically inspire such elevations as masterfully conducted by Gareth Fry's sound design. This is complimented by Chahine Yavroyan's lighting design which properly matches the seething tensions punctuated with sudden and violent peaks.  

There are some aspects of this story that lend themselves better to film, partially due to the visually inclined elements of horror, but the play does work well to expose the story's undeniably desolate take on love. No matter how deeply felt and fervently desired, Eli's love is fettered by a kind of curse which will eventually destory those who are compelled to take her hand as a partner. While there is a breath of beauty in this doomed darkness, it is also ultimately weighed down by a slow-choking inevitability. These themes and motifs are heavy, unyielding, and aptly captured in this strange and touching stage version.

Laughing at Mental Illness

C. Jefferson Thom — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 16:31:09 +0000

Laughing at Mental Illness C. Jefferson Thom October 10, 2016 - 12:31

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Photo by Natalie Bransington

Maria Bamford

Moore Theatre, Seattle, WA

September 16, 2016

The last decade and a half has seen an interesting shift in popular stand up comedy styles. While all styles of stand up offer at least some representatives every decade, even the unfortunate genres of prop and insult comedy, there are particularly popular styles and tones that can define a generation. All through the nineteen seventies almost up to the end of the last millennium, many of our legendary comics like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, & Bill Hicks were filled with righteous indignation, poignantly attacking society's ills in an aggressive, outward manner from their own personal perspectives. Many of today's popular comics continue to speak out against those same human and societal flaws, but the manner of attack has shifted: instead of pointing the finger of blame outward, they partially point it at themselves.

They have been labeled Alternative Comedians but are so popular and prominent on today's stages and films that it's hard not to see them as potentially establishing a new normal. Comedians like Patton Oswald, Mike Birbiglia, and Brian Posehn are quick to include themselves as being part of the problem and have a far more inward-aimed anger with comic shades of self-loathing mixed in with their frustrations with the world at large. Even Louis CK has a foot in this world while maintaining the other in the outward anger of decades past, but comedian Maria Bamford is firmly rooted with booth feet in the style of today and her comedy is fueled largely by her own flaws.

Maria Bamford recently became more of a household name due to her original Netflix series, Lady Dynamite, which first aired this year, but she has been making her mark on comedy for close to twenty years. She first came to the attention of this reviewer in the 2005 Comedy Central series Comedians of Comedy where she showcased her innovative, theatrical style in indie rock venues across the U.S. But if you haven't caught that show then you may still know her by her voice acting through which she has made regular appearances on such cartoon classics as Hey Arnold! and Adventure Time and this many faceted career has always been punctuated with the live stand up performances that make up the core of her art.

Presently still on tour, Bamford made a stop in Seattle on September 17th at the Moore Theater. After an entertaining and very appropriately paired opening performance from Jackie Kashian, Bamford made a characteristically casual entrance, devoid of pomp and pretension, though it still took over a couple minutes for the crowd to calm and for her set to begin.

Bamford has one of the most unique and idiosyncratic stand up acts out there today. With a strong resemblance to performance art, Bamford doesn't follow many traditional formulas and has a well defined style all her own. Peppering her act with the voices of people and types of people from her life she structures her performance with a series of vignettes, like plays within her overlapping play. Shamelessly making reference to her struggles with mental illness and the ensuing socially awkward interactions, Bamford successfully executes the duties of a true comic by transmuting tragedies and suffering into things that can be laughed at. Her stage presence is relaxed to an uncanny degree, exuding the atmosphere of being in a friends cozy living room as she imparts a funny thing that recently happened to her rather than the formal division that usually exists between audience and actor. She doesn't tell jokes, she tells stories and cleverly allows the humor to reveal itself and she is brilliantly funny in the process.

Bamford rounded off her performance at the Moore by commenting on her present station in life and how arrived at this position of success, which she humbly chalked up to luck and an initial financing from her parents. This sort of non self-aggrandizing acknowledgment has become more common over the image of the strutting, self-confident comic that we have become used to and Bamford is yet another master in the continuous comic quest to chisel away at whatever truths lie at the core of humanity.

Two-Dimensional Characters on Three-Dimensional Horses

C. Jefferson Thom — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:56:05 +0000

Two-Dimensional Characters on Three-Dimensional Horses C. Jefferson Thom February 20, 2012 - 09:56

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Last year, James Miller reviewed War Horse for CultureCatch. Now, with interest in the show growing after the recent release of the movie, which is up for six Oscars, C. Jefferson Thom weighs in with a dissenting opinion.

What is it about animals that pulls on our sense of compassion? An invading alien army can spend the better part of a disaster film evaporating countless numbers of people, but as long as a single dog escapes its death rays there’s a collective sign of relief. Are animals somehow easier to love and care for? War Horse would certainly suggest that this is the case.

Letting it all ride on its horses, the creators of War Horse have underestimated the importance of a good story and solid characters, transfusing every ounce of development and significance from the speaking Homo sapiens to their silent equine counterparts. This gamble seems inspired by the amazing work of Handspring Puppet Company, but even their unprecedented skills of magical animation are unable to leap the barbed wire of a weak script and its muddled message.

Andrew Durand does a serviceable job in the role of Albert Narracott, trudging through a minefield of agonizing dialog and paper-thin foils to recover his horse in this role-reversal telling of The Incredible Journey. There are several other actors in the play and a number of criticisms to be made about poor accents, mugging, and lackluster performances, but as the piece does not seem to concern itself much with these players’ existences, it seems appropriate that neither should we. Instead, these complaints should be filed fairly.

Writer Nick Stafford’s awareness of the play’s intended focus on its breathtaking puppetry seems readily apparent, and if there were any moving human stories or profundities in Michael Morpurgo’s original story, then they were most certainly lost in Stafford’s hasty translation. Too many characters are introduced only to then exit, serving little purpose other than giving the horses someone to interact with. With the slight exception of Albert there are no human characters to care about in the piece because they simply don’t exist. Human moments are pushed through in hopes of moving quickly to the more engaging steed-related visuals. Cheap jokes and other abysmal attempts at humor try to compensate, but the lame language-barrier gags don’t hold up well in the trenches. Directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris do nothing to curb these unfortunate qualities, but rather compound them with uneven directing as well as allowing for a schizophrenic score which can’t decide whether it’s being written for a play or a movie soundtrack.

Handspring Puppet Company, its puppets and their technicians, who would be more justly termed artists, are the only clear prizewinners in this pony show. From the thrill of a thundering gallop to the subtle twitch of an attentive ear, these puppeteers bring a living, breathing horse in abstraction to the stage and, despite the lack of flesh and hide, leave little doubt that there is a heart pumping blood inside of this magnificent beast. As performance art, these horses could stand on their own without a half-baked play getting in the way, and it can only be hoped that Handspring will land work more worthy of their awe-inspiring abilities in the future.

Whatever it is that emotionally draws us to other animals is a beautiful thing, but if it takes sympathy for the plight of a horse to open our eyes to the horrors of war and the pain and suffering that we cause one another as human beings, then the word "humanity" might not be something to get too excited about.