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Women Have Always Been Criminals, But it's the Laws that Need to Change

Gabrielle Segal — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 23:14:58 +0000

Women Have Always Been Criminals, But it's the Laws that Need to Change Gabrielle Segal November 13, 2021 - 18:14

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Photo credit: Jodi Christopherson

No Pants in Tucson is a comedic, rebellious study of the outrageous bigoted state laws aimed at constricting what women could wear in the 19th, 20th, and even 21st centuries. Such laws barred, you guessed it, women from wearing pants in Tucson, and in general around the US as well as other archaic laws whose ramifications are still felt today. What’s just as impressive as the mix of comedy and drama in a simple stage setting that truly made the audience laugh, scoff at perplexing rules, and feel for the very real characters on stage, is the historical accuracy of the show. The production team of women, non-binary, and transgender artists at The Anthropologists' have crafted a stunning portrayal of those lost to history, buried under laws that made them illegal for simply trying to be free, like men.

No Pants in Tucson grabs you by the seat of your .... well, you know what -- and I mean that in a good way. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when, on a brisk Wednesday evening, I walked into The Anthropologists' latest production dreamed up by Melissa Moschitto, the group's Founding Artistic Director, and performer Mariah Freda.

Pre-show, Moschitto eloquently reminded the audience that The Anthropologists' company has, for thirteen years, worked tirelessly to be as inclusive and anti-racist as possible. Mistakes will be made along the way, and important lessons will be learned . This candor was refreshing.

Clearly, The Anthropologists' mission is to "create dynamic plays rooted in social inquiry," centering stories around those that have been intentionally erased from history books. Here is a theater for all -- seriously, all. (There were, in fact, two ASL interpreters present.) The theater promises a safe, equitable space for their performers and audience alike,one that acknowledges and embraces all of our differences (from sex/gender expression to race and class). At least for 65 minutes...

This passion project started in 2018, lived through the pandemic, and was finally given life on stage at the A.R.T Theater in Manhattan. Zeal flowed from Moschitto's opening statement (in which she also acknowledged whose land we were sitting on -- the Lenape and Canarsie peoples), throughout the entire show.

Photo credit: Jodi Christopherson

No Pants in Tucson opens with an androgenous actor sitting alone on stage, save for a colorfully lit backdrop, who addresses the audience, daring you to guess "who is the woman, who is the woman dressed as a man, or the man dressed as a woman." There are a total of four actors in the show. The actors take turns playing women from the past looking for "freer, happier lives" -- many through wearing pants -- but all face the same scorn and harassment for not succumbing to oppressive, gender-centric laws. We see the violence and silencing power of the patriarchy through the vivacity of the actors on stage. And while the themes are serious, the tone is often humorous.

The stage actors succeed in enraging the audience with baseless rules that control(ed) women, giving them no opportunity for freedom. They use absurd displays of movement in a circle shaped skirt, yelp and guffaw at one another, and recite ordinances like "no pants in Tucson!" with precise accuracy while squishing their noses in ridicule. You can't help but burst into laughter as Civil War Era cartoon-like "reporters" chase Dr. Mary Edwards Walker as she tends to the wounded at battle, all the while calling her a nurse and asking: "Have you had sex with a man?" She implores them to report that she was the only woman to graduate from Syracuse Medical College, with honors as well, or that she had been arrested 13 times for wearing pants. But the press wanted what they want today: a sensationalized story that will sell. The stories of these women from the past are eerily reminiscent of today's laws and media. Just look at the latest headline about musical powerhouse Billie Eilish (TLDR: it's about her body, not her talent or success). "Paper’s gotta sell," as one actor boasts on stage... sounds familiar in the 21st century.

No Pants in Tucson doesn't shy away from the harsh, racist, and homophobic reality of the past or the present. Yes, white women have historically been repressed, but their stories are more well known than uber-repressed black women and trans people. This becomes apparent when Maude Allen, a black woman posing as James Allen for eight years to earn a living, takes the stage.

"I know a woman of my race has not much chance. The thought occurred to me that I might make success as a man… so with due thought, I shaved my head and bought an entire outfit of men's clothes."

Yet she fell ill and was found out to not be a man. She was illegal and forced to pay a fine and dress as a woman. But what happened to her? Was she treated for her illness? Was she allowed to teach Sunday school at Church? All we know is that she broke the law by dressing like a man to try to get ahead in life.

Then there's Harry Allen who, as one reporter notes, is "confusing." Harry, born Nell Pickerell, dressed like a man, acted like a man, sounded like a man -- so the logical conclusion was to place Harry in a psych ward. I mean, which bathroom does Harry belong in? That's a question still asked, and even brought to the Supreme Court who we watch quarrel on trans rights with a focus on bathroom-speak, and the court's general inadequacy when it comes to women's freedom. What's with America's obsession about who uses which toilet?

Halfway through the show I had a thought: I love these actors; each and everyone one of them. They are charismatic, endearing, and raw. They are powerful and won't let their bodies be controlled by the patriarchy. And they have a wicked sense of humor. The experience is a doozy but the message is loud and clear: Why can't we be left alone? Why are men and lawmakers so obsessed with our bodies? The ramifications of past laws are still glaringly evident today.

No Pants in Tucson is silly and ridiculous, but not nearly as silly and ridiculous as the bigoted state laws from the 19th and 20th centuries that made it illegal for women to wear pants in public -- and all other laws controlling women, trans, and non-binary people's bodies. It/s all just so confusing, right Chief Justice Roberts?

Hurry and get your tickets. There are only two shows left: Sat. Nov 13th 2021, 7:30 pm. And Sunday, Nov 14th 2021, 5:00 pm. See more information here.

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A Stormy Meditation

Leah Richards — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:04:33 +0000

A Stormy Meditation Leah Richards April 27, 2021 - 20:04

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Photo by juliette rowland

Low Skies Divine

Created by Samantha Shay and Áslaug Magnúsdóttir

Presented by Source Material via livestreaming

April 23-May 9, 2021

With its newest production, Low Skies Divine, Source Material Collective pares back theatrical experience to an auditory core. Based on the the company's Monument (or, King Lear), presented in 2019 at the Bootleg Theatre in L.A. and the HERE Arts Center in NYC, Low Skies Divine, an abstract sound-based performance piece created by Source Material's Artistic Director Samantha Shay and composer and performer Áslaug Magnúsdóttir, draws both on Shakespeare's work and on Shay's life experience and memories. In its audio-only form, this work creates an affinity with a Shakespearean theater whose audiences wrote of going to hear a play, while its atmospheric soundscapes and bricolage of voices are as (post)modern as they come.

It is fitting that a piece inspired in part by memory works in intertextual concert with King Lear, a play that itself intermingles England's mythic past with its then-present concerns, not to mention one that confronts some of the less savory aspects of aging (primarily through Lear himself but also in his man Kent and the Earl of Gloucester). All three suffer betrayal, two die, and the third declares that there remains for him but a short journey to his own death; so it is not surprising that Low Skies Divine quotes from Shakespeare's sonnet 107, which revolves, as do many of the poems in his sonnet sequence, around love, time, and death, as a sort of prologue or place-setting. Sonnet 65 makes an appearance as well, and while in Lear some of the bleakness of aging and death is counterbalanced by the loyalty and love of those cast off, in these sonnets it is art that provides proof against death for the memory of the beloved (and, of course, for the writer). This dynamic maps well onto Low Skies Divine itself, the title of which bears a tension between high and low, threat and salvation—In Gloucester's formulation, after all, there may be gods, but for them, human death is mere sport.

The work sometimes suggests similar tensions as well in its sonic juxtapositions, such as when the lines from sonnet 107 begin to become interwoven, or interrupted, depending on how one chooses to perceive it, with sounds — some like static, some electronic, some almost breathy — or in instances of overlapping voices or the troubling of otherwise serene soundscapes. The musical elements encompass ambient drones, melancholy violin, swelling keys, electronica, reverb-soaked singing, and more. Together, they build long, sweeping arcs of ebb and flow, climax and release.

Almost all of the recitation is delivered in a relatively calm female voice, which becomes more overtly emotional at a few key points. The exception (which, as an exception, draws attention to itself) juxtaposes this voice, speaking lines from the scene in which the despairing Gloucester's son Edgar, disguised as a madman, leads him to an imaginary cliff, with a male voice speaking modern, non-Shakespearean lines that also uses the idea of imagined height as a way to overlook and to gain a different perspective on one's life. Gloucester has had his eyes put out by this point, and with this alongside the inclusion of the admonition to Lear to "see better," Low Skies Divine playfully engages the play's themes of blindness as a refraction of its own aural focus. Having a single female narrative voice also creates an intriguing consolidation, allowing the audience to hear the reassembled words from King Lear as simultaneously an entirely new narrative for an entirely new character.

Low Skies Divine enfolds audiences for an often meditative, intermittently stormy journey. Lend it your ears. - Leah Richards & John R. Ziegler

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An Artistic Game of Telephone

Leah Richards — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 23:42:09 +0000

An Artistic Game of Telephone Leah Richards March 13, 2021 - 18:42

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Christina Liang in In One Ear, Photo by Philip Estrera

In One Ear

Comprising: Hairy Black Hole, written by Christina Liang, directed by Philip Estrera; All Men Are Clowns, written and directed by C. Bain; Ricki Martin, written and directed by Ashley Grombol; and I Had a Dream, composed by Naeemah Maddox, directed by Philip Estrera

Presented by Hunger and Thirst Theatre via www.hungerandthirsttheatre.com

March 9-21, 2021

As the theater community continues to seek ways to create and share new work during the pandemic, Hunger and Thirst Theatre has debuted its free digital project In One Ear, which describes itself as an artistic game of Telephone. In One Ear was created by four artists from four different disciplines. The first artist was given the quote “For silence is a sounding thing, / To one who listens hungrily," from a poem by writer, artist, and teacher Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981), for inspiration and allotted two weeks for composition. The second artist then received the first's script as his inspiration and another two weeks to create, and so on, culminating in all four pieces being filmed at the West End Theater. The project's page on Hunger and Thirst's website includes a brief video describing this process along with the short works themselves (ranging from seven and a half to thirteen and a half minutes), information about the artists, production credits, and behind the scenes content. Varied in their genres and tone but united in showcasing these artists' skill and creativity, the works that this artistic experiment conjures forth from the sounding silence are well worth checking out.

The first piece, Hairy Black Hole, written and performed by actress and writer Christina Liang, is the most traditionally theatrical piece, a monologue delivered by a bride to a silent videographer on her wedding day. The bride's anxiety on her big day doesn't improve as her fiancé, Harry, fails to text her back, leading to some soul searching and some questioning of the whole institution. Liang's performance invites both pathos and laughs and includes such ironic details as pointing out that white is the color of mourning in many cultures while in full bridal attire and talking about the paper anniversary while holding some toilet paper. Viewers of the next segment, All Men Are Clowns, are free to identify its mute male figure, played by multidisciplinary artist and the piece's writer and director C. Bain, with Harry, or with people like him, or with, as suggested by the title, all men, or none of the above. This man starts out appearing upset himself, but the clown nose that appears after the title sequence signals a shift away from realism (and puts a different spin on the formal wear that we later see is paired with black shorts). From the character's reacting to audio of a pickup artist channel to a phallic balloon to an impressive animated sequence, All Men's imagery constellates masculinity, fertility, and death, and does so with humor fitting C. Bain's channeling of a melancholy silent film clown.

The third segment, Ricki Martin, moves us even further into surreality. Created entirely in stop motion animation by actor, creator, and baking blogger Ashley Grombol, Ricki features a pair of protagonists, Ricki and Martin, who resemble red balls (or clown noises?) with feet and eyes (judging by Wikipedia, a "weepul" may be a point of comparison). Starting out on some benches watching a girl and a fluffy dog go by, these two creatures, who "speak" in chiming thought bubbles, soon set to what one might see as their version of making lemonade from lemons. Their transformative powers set in motion a weird, whimsical series of events that climaxes in the visually clever assembly of a layered (wedding?) cake and ends on a slightly darker but amiably humorous joke. Bringing In One Ear to a strong conclusion is I Had a Dream, a musical performance by singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Naeemah Z. Maddox. Sung over a lone Stratocaster and accompanied by occasional video effects and cuts that change both points of view and clothing, the song features an embattled speaker who refuses to forget her dream despite the past tense of the song's title.

All four of the works that make up In One Ear could satisfyingly be watched in isolation, but together, they invite viewers individually to fill in connections and resonances (one might, for example, follow the thread of "dreams" through all four pieces), which renders these interpretations further links on the artistic telephone chain, as it were. As a kind of touchstone, the segments return the camera's gaze to the distinctive light fixture suspended from the West End Theater's ceiling, evoking the in-person theater whose absence has generated these virtual performances. While a return to such in-person performance spaces may be at least on the horizon, until then, In One Ear joins the inventive, innovative, entertaining work that continues to be produced within the world of theater. - Leah Richards and John R. Ziegler

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Story Telling During Covid!

Leah Richards — Sun, 03 May 2020 15:13:42 +0000

Story Telling During Covid! Leah Richards May 3, 2020 - 11:13

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Virtual Storyslam!

Presented by Art House Productions and No Dominion Theatre Co.

Weekly, Thursdays at 7pm EST, online via Zoom

Right now, it's pretty hard to imagine sitting arm-to-arm with other audience members in a packed theater any time soon. But theaters and arts organizations have been implementing creative ways to bring their work into virtual spaces during this period of enforced isolation. Jersey City-based Art House Productions is one of these organizations, offering a selection of online events, including Drag Bingo on Fridays, live virtual stand-up on Saturdays, and, our subject here, storytelling slams on Thursdays, all presented via Zoom. Each edition of Virtual Storyslam!, co-hosted by Art House Productions and No Dominion Theatre Co., also based in Jersey City, and sponsored by real estate company Silverman, presents five storytellers who share personal stories related in some way to that week's theme. Each story is approximately 5-8 minutes, making the whole show around an hour, and the only criteria are that stories must be true and cannot feature crude language or be stand-up (Art House's website has submission guidelines for prospective storytellers, who do not need to have experience). The shows are free, but a $5 donation is suggested (and of course, you can always give more).

We logged on to the April 30th edition, the theme of which was the storyteller's "Achilles' Heel," which the participants interpreted in varying ways. Audience members have the option to be unmuted as long as there is not a lot of background noise in their space so that the storytellers get a sense of audience reactions in real-time, but having the camera and/or mic on is not required. After a musical intro while waiting for things to get started, host Courtney Little, Producing Director of Art House, welcomed everyone and explained the house rules. She then turned the proceedings over to Michael Joel and Kaitlin Overton, Artistic Director and Executive Director of No Dominion, respectively, who alternated introducing the individual storytellers for the evening.

First up was Mark from Massachusetts, whose tale included the most literal connection to the Achilles' heel theme as it recounted an unlucky period of injuries, drug side-effects, surgery, and almost getting squashed by his own car. Next came Ken from New Jersey, a retired public school teacher whose former student turned out by chance to be in the audience. Ken's Achilles' heel was his love of motorcycles (expressed these days through bicycling), and he narrated the less than thrilled reaction of his parents (and his priest) to his 17 year-old self buying a Honda S90. His bike took him, in pre-helmet-law 1967, to an uncle's farm in upstate New York and, ultimately, to an encounter, while flying along with his cousin onboard, with a trio of dogs and the surprising reaction of their owner.

Third was Andrew, also from Massachusetts, who decided in his late 30s that he wanted to be able to say that he was a triathlete and so signed up for an event and started training. While Andrew felt good about the training, when it came to the event itself, facing, among other obstacles, the chaos of hundreds of swimmers in the open water of a river, the excruciating transition from biking to running, and the competition of a 10 year-old boy, he realized that he hadn't counted on just how humbling an experience this would be (his story though, did end on a positive note, with his figuring out that a volunteer was encouraging him and not pointing out that he was in last place).

The penultimate story came from Erica from Los Angeles. Erica described herself as a former die-hard New Yorker and detailed the slide from her initial infatuation with the city (or, The City, in the parlance of locals) and its theater, music, and bar scenes to the disenchantment after a decade with a changed, more exclusive and sanitized New York and with how her life there had progressed. Luckily, finding kinship with a depressed polar bear named Gus in the Central Park Zoo, another typical neurotic New Yorker, helped her to feel the confidence to set out again and go west.

Rounding out the evening was Julia from Hollywood, who graduated from summer camp kid to summer camp counselor in South Jersey (ironically, both West Coast storytellers' yarns took place on the East Coast). Julia's strategy for tiring out her charges as much as possible before lights out led her to take 25 seven year-old girls on a hike in the Pine Barrens, based on her co-counselor's insistence that she knew the trails. It would be a less entertaining story had that been true, of course, and, in the end, having been found by telling everyone to sing The Black Eyed Peas as loudly as possible as "a game," she found out that it really is true that as long as a counselor doesn't lose or kill a kid, parents are just happy to have them off their hands for the day.

At the end, Meredith returned to thank everyone, invite a final round of applause, provide a link for donations, and announce the next theme, the great outdoors, concluding what was an entertaining and often funny hour. The experience reminded us in some ways of Wil Petre's A Cocktail Party Social Experiment, which generates rounds of conversation among eight volunteers at each event, and, although these stories are more prepared than what would come out at those events, there is a similar sense of generating connection among a group of people who are mostly strangers, as well as of the acceptance of vulnerability needed to share oneself with strangers in this way. (Then and again, that is part of what "theater" in all its forms involves.) The potential to bring together people from otherwise far-flung locations is a perk of the virtual space, something less likely on your typical night in a black-box theater. The experience of Virtual Storyslam! is engaging and enjoyable; it brings a batch of new stories with new surprises each week -- and the drinks are cheap! - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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Take The Plunge

Leah Richards — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 16:22:00 +0000

Take The Plunge Leah Richards February 10, 2020 - 11:22

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Photo Credit: Matt Wells

Chasing the River

Written by Jean Dobie Giebel

Directed by Ella Jane New

Presented at the Chain Theatre

February 7-29, 2020

The title of Jean Dobie Giebel's play Chasing the River, making its world premiere as a production of the Chain Theatre, alludes to the act in poker of staying in the game against the odds until the final card is dealt in hopes of hitting a hand such as a flush or straight. However, given the play's concern with the past, and especially its traumas, the title also evokes the fruitlessness of trying to capture, or recapture, something that is always changing and always moving forward. How, the play asks, does one chase that winning hand when the effects of abuse make it a struggle to simply stay in the game?

Chasing the River introduces us to Kat (Christina Elise Perry). Most recently, Kat has been living in Philadelphia. Prior to Philadelphia, Kat was living in prison. And before prison, Kat lived in the small Pennsylvania town to which she has just returned when the play opens, a return occasioned by the need to deal with her family home now that her aunt, poker-aficionado Adelaide (Sara Thigpen), is no longer living. Kat's return brings her face to face with her high-school boyfriend, Sam (David Rey), who has remained in the town and taken over his father's small business, and her mother, Maggie (Robyne Parrish), who took Kat's younger sister, Beth (Caroline Orlando), but not Kat with her when she left their father and with whom Kat's relationship remains strained. Aside from these flesh-and-blood figures of bygone days, however, Kat is also confronted with the memories that are inextricable from the place, both of her beloved aunt Addie and, more painfully, those involving her abusive, alcoholic father, Nate (David Wenzel). In this unenviable position, the central question is whether Kat can -- or even wants to -- fashion from her fraught homecoming a true second chance in order not to be borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The play interweaves Kat's memories with the present action not only through flashback scenes but also through the occasional ghost-like intrusion of characters or recorded voices into scenes set in the present. The non-linear progress of the narrative thought-provokingly evolves and complicates the audience's perspectives on characters and events. For example, Kat making the varsity high-school basketball squad as a freshman takes on slightly different cast when we learn later of her father's deep disappointment that neither of his children was a son. (A potential parallel also emerges between the way that the other players dislike Kat for being so good and the animosity that greets abuse or assault survivors who come forward.) Similarly, a scene of genuine happiness, brilliantly performed by Perry and Wenzel, in which Kat's face shines with love as she looks on a father who, overflowing with excitement, completely and sincerely believes, in the moment, his own promises of the most fun summer ever, cannot help but be heartbreaking because of everything else that we know. The characters themselves have clashing perspectives regarding both the events of the past and the shape of the future, on who was protecting whom, on what help looks like and on how and when one asks for it. The play highlights the guilt and misplaced blame that often accompany abuse and assault, the lack of understanding why someone didn't speak up or "just" leave, the way that abuse becomes a pattern passed from one generation to the next, and the way that suffering abuse leads women to prison -- a site of punishment rather than healing -- instead of to aid.

The production is staged on and around a minimalist front porch with a couple of weathered metal chairs, a window, and a screen door in a mix of verisimilitude and suggestion that pairs well with the play's mix of memory and presence. While the entire cast brings an affecting emotional heft to their performances, Perry is particularly powerful, communicating so much with just Kat's body language: her closed-off wariness, for instance, is expressed in how much time she spends with her hands jammed in her hoodie pockets or pulling its sleeves down over her hands, or how she zips back into it like armor after one particular disappointment. Rey and Orlando both render relationships with Kat that feel authentically lived-in, and Rey not only lends Sam a sometimes thorny complexity but is also responsible for some of the funniest of the play's flashes of levity (although Orlando's small-child imitation is also pretty hilariously spot-on).

Kat's very name functions as a symbol of potential self-determination. Others variously call her Katie, Katydid, and Chickadee, but Kat is the only name that she chose for herself (albeit when she went to prison). With the struggles of Kat and those around her, Chasing the River takes a plunge into the legacy of trauma and the possibilities that exist as long as one has, to paraphrase Adelaide, a single chip and a seat at the table. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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Fuhgeddaboutit

Mark Weston — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 16:07:43 +0000

Fuhgeddaboutit Mark Weston February 8, 2020 - 11:07

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Off Broadway theater is a medium where creative people devote their time, talents and passion, often with little or no recompense. It's a great disappointment when creative people with talent in abundance devote themselves to a show that is undeserving. If only that were the case of the show Romeo & Bernadette produced lavishly and professionally by AMAS Musical Theatre and Eric Krebs.

Romeo & Bernadette isn't just undeserving of the production it is currently receiving, it calls into question why it was chosen for development over what must be dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of more deserving shows.

Romeo & Bernadette is a musical comedy of little substance and few laughs. It's premise seems to be to take music from Italian songs and light opera and graft "modern" lyrics on to them. By modern I don't mean anything close to contemporary. The putative setting is Brooklyn, 1960. We know this because the word fuhgeddaboutit is a prime source of the show's humor.

You've probably already guessed that this tale places Shakespeare's Romeo in Bensonhurst where he pursues -- not Juliet, but Bernadette. If that premise makes you double up with laughter, than this is the show for you. To say the show's genre is cartoonish is to unfairly impugn cartoons. Instead of Montagues and Capulets there are two warring "mafia" families. Romeo speaks in a stilted version of flowery Elizabethan-speak but soon learns to speak as crudely as everyone else in the show, including the aforementioned

fuhgeddaboutit -- a joke that the show's writer never gets tired of repeating... and repeating. The frame of the show's premise (i.e. how does Romeo wind up in 1960 Brooklyn?) revolves around a Brooklyn "Guido's" attempt to get into his girlfriend's pants. Why? Don't ask.

And that's the biggest puzzlement here: Why? To create a new musical around old Italian melodies is, by definition, a study in being old-fashioned. Layering in unfunny Italian-American stereotypes with a third-grader's idea of Shakespeare's romantic tragedy and then playing it all for giggles (except for the songs which are floridly "romantic") is head-shaking.

To its credit AMAS has assembled a great deal of talent on the ART NY stage. The young lovers Romeo (Nikita Burshteyn) and Bernadette (Anna Kostakis) are making appealing NY stage debuts. They are winningly supported by their friends Dino (Michael Notardonato) and Donna (Ari Raskin). Much of the rest of the cast is made up of Broadway veterans including Carlos Lopez as crime boss Al Penza and the Drama Desk nominated Judy McLane who's Broadway credits include over 4000 performances of Momma Mia. The director Justin Ross Cohen has a raft of Broadway credits as a performer including the original Pippin and A Chorus Line. He has assembled a stellar design team including Tony Award winner Ken Billington (lights) and Broadway veteran Walt Spangler (scenery).

If only their talents were in service to something more deserving.

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A Very Wet Utopia

Leah Richards — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 23:56:42 +0000

A Very Wet Utopia Leah Richards January 26, 2020 - 18:56

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Photo by Mari Uchida

Really Really Gorgeous

Written by Nick Mecikalski

Directed by Miranda Haymon

Presented by The Tank in association with Lucy Powis and the Hodgepodge Group

at The Tank, NYC

January 23-February 9, 2020

In Nick Mecikalski's Really Really Gorgeous, the United States is really, really wet. And by wet, we mean that there remains a single oasis of dry land to which the government has relocated, along with some surviving citizens privileged enough to be permitted inside its walls. Mecikalski's play approaches this continent-spanning catastrophe from a personal perspective, focusing, with a healthy dash of absurdism, on a single couple within this watery new world order to examine the clash between principles and self-preservation in the face of environmental apocalypse.

When we meet protagonists Pen (Sophie Becker) and Mar (Amber Jaunai), the United States is into its fifth year of being flooded. The two of them, both poets, live in a shack where the television seems to be their primary connection to the outside world and where they subsist on deliveries of rations in whose composition they have no input. It tidily sums up their circumstances that the two women pine for the luxury of green beans. Meanwhile, it eventually becomes clear that the aggressively cheery (and sometimes just aggressive) Announcer (Giselle LeBleu Gant) dominates the television airwaves to the extent that she serves as a one-woman choke point of information. Early on, Becker and Jaunai effectively establish Pen and Mar's supportive and affectionate romantic relationship, and this foundation becomes quickly important when a government-sponsored talent contest that promises bring the winners to dry land threatens to drive a wedge between them (the name Mar, of course, has meanings other than "sea"). To say much more would be a disservice to the pleasures of watching this unpredictable production unfold.

Among other concerns, Really Really Gorgeous explores how authoritarianism works, including its attractiveness during times of crisis or insecurity. The play highlights how, in the right situation, something as simple as a dry room can take on a corrupting allure. If one replaced "climate change" with "totalitarian dictatorship," the mechanics would look much the same. The world that Pen and Mar find themselves caught up in foregrounds that destructive feedback loop of environmental and political problems, a cycle in which the media is at best tacitly complicit. At worst, media outlets actively abet an unsustainable and oppressive status quo, as The Announcer demonstrates in referring to the many on the wrong side of the wall with the usefully dehumanizing term "intruders" (some of this should sound familiar from current U.S. politics). The sharp division between the privileged few and the sopping, struggling masses is starkly reflected in the set design, by Crushed Red, as well: Pen and Mar's living space, centered on a tv and couch, strewn with garbage, and stacked with cans of SpaghettiOs, is juxtaposed with a bright, neat, and tasteful space, standing in for several dry locations, that resembles a display in a furniture showroom.

Right up until the production's final moments, it keeps just the right amount of ambiguity as to the characters' true plans and motivations, which ethical choices they will make, and just what exactly is up with that finger gun, an engaging uncertainty helped enormously by a great cast. The good-heartedness of Becker's Pen is bound up with an iron determination. Juanai (who was also excellent as Jesus in racist small-town American in last year's production of Mac Wellman's Sincerity Forever at The Flea) shows a Mar who is herself increasingly performing while also making it easy to, like Pen, give her the benefit of the doubt. And while Gant gets a lot of the funniest moments as The Announcer, she also effortlessly pivots on a dime from, for example, stereotypically exuberant tv host to ominously businesslike power player.

Really Really Gorgeous invests audience members in the fate of a relationship alongside the fate of the nation but also leaves them questioning the trade-offs involved in both. Its off-kilter dystopia mixes humor and authenticity. We can only hope that it is more timely than prophetic. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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Can Anyone Hear Me?

Leah Richards — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 17:11:17 +0000

Can Anyone Hear Me? Leah Richards December 2, 2019 - 12:11

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Photo credit: Al Foote III

The Listening Room

Written by Michaela Jeffery

Directed by Ivette Dumeng and Lori Kee

Presented by Nylon Fusion Theatre Company at The New Ohio Theatre, NYC

November 30-December 21, 2019

Characters in the work of Samuel Beckett often tell their stories as a way of proving or leaving a record that they existed. Michaela Jeffery's The Listening Room expands such concerns to an entire civilization, limning dystopia on an epic scale through the intense interactions of a handful of characters who occupy the titular, bunker-like room. Making its New York premiere in repertory with another science-fiction play, Steven Mark Tenney's ray gun sayOnara, at The New Ohio Theatre, The Listening Room explores the weaponization of information, history, narrative, and memory alongside the potentiality of dissent, resistance, and revolution, resonating, as much good speculative fiction does, both with and beyond our present moment.

Civilization in The Listening Room is concentrated in the Earie -- originally founded, according to its own origin myths and prior to "the Collapse," as a better alternative to a self-destructive society -- is surrounded by nothing but desert for, as one character claims, thousands of miles and is ruled by the Council. The Listening Room is located miles from the Earie, and the teenaged Listeners who live there are tasked with listening to and sending written reports to the Council on fragments of transmissions picked up by large dishes called "ears." While the Council no longer authorizes new Listeners, a young blind girl named Isobel (Sara Rahman) arrives at the Listening Room from the Earie, where she is discovered by Fayette (Matthew Carrasco), who tries to force her to leave. She claims to have been invited to become a Listener by Marcus (Tim Palmer), the most vocal anti-Council advocate among the group, which also includes Rouke (Taylor Petracek) and Lanolin (Alex Chernin), who acts as the Recorder (much of the population of the Earie is illiterate, the better, as Marcus tells it, to keep them subjugated). There is skepticism among the Listeners (and would-be Listener Isobel) that they are indeed living in an era of unprecedented freedom, as their government asserts. When Marcus is summoned to answer an accusation of criminality, it forces this group of young people into an accelerated decision about whether they will take action.

The Listeners' conflicts, which occasionally turn physical in well-choreographed fights that also underscore the characters' youth, weave together a range of thematic considerations, from choice and self-determination (including the dispensation granted to Listeners to choose new names for themselves) to the manipulation of public perception and, thus, behavior, including in legal matters (exiling a minor, for instance, is more palatable than executing one) and particularly through the use of fear and the foregrounding of nebulous threats (this should all sound very familiar), as well as the preservation and significance of individual, social, and even cosmic histories. The set design, by Raye Lavine, is fantastic, with its ladder to the surface, wall of cubbies, and jumble of electronic equipment; and its atmosphere is augmented by excellent lighting that makes use of blues, oranges, and reds and sound design that includes a constant low background hum. Palmer and Chernin stand out among a strong cast, with Carrasco and Petracek providing contrasting foils to Palmer's cocky, idealistic Marcus and Rahman doing convincing work with both Isobel's visual impairment and her quietly fiery determination.

The Listening Room depicts a world in which a person's value corresponds to their contribution and their conformity, and in which an omnipresent sense of threat hinders mobilization for change. While Rouke may have a point when he argues that while anyone can smash things, it's also necessary to have a plan for what comes next, Marcus makes the equally valid point that it is far too easy to justify continued inaction, that masses of individuals going about their daily routines merely reinforces stasis in the end. In the play, stories are records of the past that can point the way to the future, and what we listen for and how we interpret and (re)present what we hear determines what kind of future that will be. The Listening Room itself is one such story, and it is well worth lending it your ears (and eyes). - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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Set design

Thank you for the review !! Pls credit only myself - raye levine - for set! Lili Jaxon did the props :) thank you!

Set Design

Thanks, Raye. Noted and fixed.

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Food For Thought

Leah Richards — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 13:28:00 +0000

Food For Thought Leah Richards September 12, 2019 - 09:28

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off broadway

Photo Credit: Kate Gaffney

Dining With Ploetz

Written by Richard Ploetz

Directed by Richard Ploetz and Steven Hauck

Presented by Theater for the New City and Nedworks, Inc.

at Theater for the New City, NYC

September 5-22, 2019

Aside from some connection to food, the trio of one-act plays that comprise Dining With Ploetz all feature people coming together around some significant milestone: a birthday, an (almost) anniversary, and the hashing out of plans for an unusual dinner party that will fulfill one man's intensely desired dream. From the pen of Richard Ploetz, a multidisciplinary author, voiceover artist, director, and professor who has written for the page, stage, and screen, Dining With Ploetz serves up three courses of comedy spiced with "food for thought," to borrow a description from the program, and garnished with delectable performances. To top things off, five percent of net profits from the show will be donated to World Central Kitchen, a not-for-profit NGO founded by chef José Andrés to function as "Food First Responders" for communities affected by disasters.

Goldfish, the first of the triad and directed by Ploetz, has some of the feel of a grittier, more eclectic New York City that is increasingly vanishing today (and, relatedly, some of the feel too of a strain of NYC plays represented by playwrights such as Edward Albee). When the play opens, following a piano rendition of "Happy Birthday" merged with Beethoven's "Für Elise," only a single guest has shown up for the birthday party held for six year-old Sabrina (Claudia Fabella) by her parents George (Christopher Borg) and Cindy (Elizabeth A. Bell). The fête is in what they call their loft (reasonable rent; no heat on nights or weekends), located in the rug district and containing an amalgamation of painting supplies, rolled-up rugs, mismatched furniture, a piano, the titular goldfish, and other heterogeneous items. The single guest is Cindy's former coworker turned business partner, Beth (Wynne Anders). Just when it seems that they will have to declare the night finished, however, a stone sails neatly through the glass-less window, announcing the arrival of Rick (Steven Hauck) and Susan (Jamie Heinlein), both invited by Beth, both dressed for a cocktail party (George, in contrast, is sporting a track suit, partly unzipped to reveal his white undershirt; and Cindy is still wearing her waitressing uniform), and trailing an impressively bearded, overalls-and-bandanna-wearing poet, Bill (Ryan Hilliard), whom they met on a street corner on the way over. What follows includes some relatively inappropriate flirting, questionable table manners, and class-inflected masculine posturing—this last allowing Hauck, whose Rick once upon a time fenced, to render the words "thrust and parry" much funnier than they have any right to be. Fabella, even with almost no dialogue, gets a few big laughs herself, including one involving a toy truck and some bones (bones, come to think of it, are another motif uniting all three plays in Dining, even if they only enter the second play through a waiter's enthusiastic mispronunciation). Intermingled with all of the strangeness and even silliness are unrealized ambitions and unfinished thoughts and sentences, an underlying lack of fulfillment such that Susan gives unexpectedly serious consideration to a proposal from George just because, she says, it would be something different.

After a brief intermission, the strong second half of Dining starts with Memory Like a Pale Green Clock, directed by Hauck, which takes us to a different kind of fishbowl, an upscale restaurant, and offers a different take on not remembering. Memory sees Christopher Borg and Jamie Heinlein as English professor Robert and his wife, Louise. Louise is suspicious of the roses that she was sent and this fancy night out, but Robert assures her that, thanks to a little inspiration from James Joyce's "The Dead," he has just decided to celebrate their sixteenth anniversary a little early. "The Dead" is a story, ultimately, of personal and national paralysis, which should perhaps worry Louise a bit, but the meal is going well and plans for later seduction are being described, until, when a woman in dark glasses (Elizabeth A. Bell, who also does some great work in Goldfish) sits at a nearby table, Robert's conviction that he knows her derails the evening. It leads, for example, Louise to question why he always "inspects" other women and Robert to ask why she doesn't look at men, and, while there are some highs and lows for the couple, the questions don't get any less fraught from there. Borg and Heinlein, both excellent in Goldfish, here create a terrific portrayal of the teasing, charged, intimate dynamics of long-term couples. We discover that the couple completely misreads Helen, as they do the waiter, Walter (a very funny Ryan Hilliard, trading in poet Bill's free spirit for reserve and exasperation), in a moment that occasions a breathtaking shift in tone. These misunderstandings speak to our tendency to empty out or project onto others, since others effectively cease to exist for us when we aren't with them. Further, as Louise says, we even create a nostalgia for what never was, so that when our sense of our own memory is disrupted, we feel betrayed, reminded, unwished-for, of our mortality.

The plays that make up Dining with Ploetz are successively more stripped down—leaner, if you prefer—and Bone Appetite, the final play, directed again by Ploetz and loosely based on events that took place between Bernd Brandes and Rotenburg resident Armin Meiwes, features just two chairs and a pair of men meeting for the first time. These men are Arny (Christopher Borg), an enthusiastically salt-of-the-earth guitarist for a band called The Cruds, who were involved in a Great White-style nightclub fire; and Matthew (Steven Hauck), a rather more refined man with a particular culinary predilection. Arny dreams of being an orgasmically spectacular roast. In pursuit of this dream, Arny has answered Matthew's ad. When someone responds to one of his ads, Matthew likes to get to know the whole person, and the conversation between this odd couple touches on pleasure, acceptance, and, again, memory. Borg is superb as the kind of guy you might run into in a dive bar with unsigned bands playing in the back room, and Hauck plays off him in terrific fashion, as Matthew's cultured exterior is penetrated by Arny's weirdly pure ardor.

Juxtaposing the three plays of Dining With Ploetz allows them to speak to one another in interesting ways, much as the melancholy notes in all three stand out the more for being set against the predominant comedy. Entertainingly executed by a splendid ensemble, Dining With Ploetz is worth making a reservation for. - Leah Richards & John Ziegler

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A Simpler Fiddler

Mark Weston — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 13:52:04 +0000

A Simpler Fiddler Mark Weston September 3, 2019 - 09:52

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Fiddler on the Roof

National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, NYC

After months of resistance, my wife finally wore me down and I got us last minute tickets to see the "Yiddish" Fiddler On The Roof over Labor Day weekend. I've seen Fiddler so many times I figured was it really THAT important that I see it once more.

In a word -- yes. It is unlike any production of Fiddler I've ever seen and as though I've seen it for the very first time. And not because it is all in Yiddish with (projected) English subtitles. In fact, this essay will largely ignore the fact that this production is in Yiddish.

It is the most simple of stagings on a bare stage with a few pieces of wooden furniture, but blessed with a gorgeous ensemble that feels more like a true tight-knit community than a collection of Broadway actors. For instance, the cast completely lacks the polish of trained Broadway dancers -- but looks and feels like the family and friends dancing at my wife's son's Modern Orthodox wedding last December.

And it is in those moments and virtually every other that this Fiddler captures an authenticity that had me weeping from the very first thrilling moment. Because authenticity is what is lacking in every other stage production I've seen (and so beautifully captured in the sweeping Norman Jewison film).

Fiddler On The Roof says it is about "tradition" but it is also about family -- immediate family, extended family and community family. I'm not sure whether this production's sense of family on stage stems from the fact that the Folksbiene Theatre is a tightly knit ensemble that has been performing "in Yiddish" plays for decades, from Joel Grey's astute and sensitive direction or - most likely - both. But it is this sense of family that permeates every moment of the story - to deeply comic, joyous and, ultimately, heart-breaking affect. And by eschewing "Broadway" stagecraft for this authenticity of family, the musical achieves a universality that goes well beyond the confines of Anatevka or the Jewish experience.

Alongside Topol, Steven Skybell is the best Tevye I've ever seen, a human, decent Everyman that is never flashy, never showy, never a "star." When he dances the signature arms above his head it is not a gym exercise, it is an ebullient joy that is half ecstasy and half knocking on heaven's door.

I've heard that he has grown into his performance and I think I was lucky enough to see the most mature result of his long run. His Tevye fairly easily relents to the choices of Tzeitel and Hodel. He puts up minor resistance to their falling in love with Motel the Tailor and Perchik the Revolutionary. A smile crosses his face that is the akin to a shrug. Not joyful, but more of a "what can I do about it." So his moment with Chava -- a bridge too far in her love for a non-Jewish Russian -- is more wrenching and more real and -- yes -- authentic than I've ever seen. That moment will stay with me for a long time.

The last production of Fiddler I saw on Broadway was visually sumptuous -- a Chagall painting come to life. It was gorgeous to look at, but life in Anatevka wasn't gorgeous, was it? What it gained in Broadway stagecraft it lost in credibility.

Go and see this Yiddish Fiddler. Revel in it. It is not to be missed.