Theater Review

Trigger Happy!, storytelling performance artist Dandy Darkly’s newest work, is a mesmerizingly entertaining, dark-toned foray into social criticism, a post-mortem on a still-living patient: America. The themes Mr. Darkly selected for his autopsy are in the media on a daily basis. The opinion page in The New York Times, Salon, and the Huffington Post supply daily missives about damaged U.S. soldiers returning from perversely unfocused wars, our cult of celebrity, gentrification neutering a once vibrantly inclusive social scene, and how political correctness police act to straightjacket open social discourse. Mr. Darkly's richly detailed, outrageous, and metaphoric tales examine these themes with an exactitude whose impact leaves our conventional media eating dust -- and his audience breathless with both awe and laughter.

God is a Verb

Gavin Broady and the Hook and Eye Theater company’s outstanding new play God is a Verb invites audiences to step out of the box and into the geodesic dome. This bold, visually and intellectually exciting production revolves around quirky theorist, designer, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), but it is assertively not, as the program reminds us, a biographical piece. Instead, billed as an absurdist comedy, it takes place within its subject's mind, focusing on his decades-long World Game Project but skillfully interweaving the personal and the political, the individual and the global, throughout its 100 compelling minutes.

Because Me

After last spring's excellent Live from the Surface of the Moon, writer-director Max Baker returns to The Wild Project in the East Village with his new play, Because Me. Live from the Surface of the Moon focused on a small group of friends navigating America’' transition from the '60s into the '70s, and Because Me similarly examines a small network of individuals in the context of their historical moment; but here that moment is our present. Whereas Baker's previous play included a significant New Year's Eve, its counterpart threshold here is more personal: protagonist Else's looming 30th birthday.

Macbeth (of the Oppressed)

Shakespeare is one of the most frequently adapted playwrights in the English language, to the point that Shakespearean adaptation studies has become its own academic sub-field, and Macbeth, with its gothic elements and relatively streamlined tragedy of ambition, is a strong contender for his most frequently adapted play. Aside from more straightforward versions like the upcoming Michael Fassbender movie, the film Scotland PA, for instance, reimagined it as the story of a ruthless fast-food entrepreneur, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood transposed it into feudal Japan, Mickey B filtered it through the experiences and language of Northern Irish inmates, and no fewer than two heavy metal bands have turned it into concept albums. Tom Slot’s adaptation, Macbeth (of the Oppressed) is less radical in its changes than some of these, but the changes it does make produce some radical effects.

The Gray Man

Andrew Farmer's The Gray Man sets the pre-show mood with the sound of a desolate wind, which is eventually broken by a child's voice singing about a "poor babe" stolen away and killed in the woods. Creepy little girls singing creepy songs may not be a new element of horror, but here, as throughout The Gray Man, it feels fresh and immediate. Like much good horror, Farmer's play roots itself in the familiar -- the fairy tale, the ghost story, the bedtime story -- and renders it strange and estranging. As two of the characters say, "It's many, many stories," "But it’s all one story in the end." The story of the Gray Man is framed as a story of good mothers and bad mothers, of the dangers of the world beyond a mother’s immediate reach, of the illusion of safety. It is also, to an extent, a story about storytelling, stories of and by good and bad mothers and of and by children, obedient and disobedient, safe and not so safe.

The Quare Land 

Our final review from this year's 1st Irish Festival in New York City brings us another strong production: The Quare Land, by County Cavan playwright John McManus. McManus’s two-man comedy takes place entirely within the upstairs room of Hugh Pugh's rural Cavan farmhouse (a superb set by Charlie Corcoran). The room's single naked lightbulb illuminates a chimney, record player, toilet, and, most importantly, a clawfoot bathtub. Under a thick layer of bubbles in that tub, 90 year-old bachelor and Enya fan Hugh (actor and writer Peter Maloney) is taking his first bath in 4 years in anticipation of a visit by his alcoholic brother when receives an unexpected visit from Rob McNulty (Rufus Collins). Hugh checks his mail far less often than he bathes, so hotel and construction company owner Rob has had to seek out Hugh in person to propose purchasing one of Hugh's fields. Unfortunately for Rob -- but very fortunately for the audience -- this conversation turns out to be more complicated than he expected.

The Black Book

As part of Bronx Community College's opening convocation this year, school officials commemorated the death in June of 22-year-old student Kalief Browder, who had enrolled after spending 3 years in Riker's without being convicted, a period that included beatings and hundreds of days of solitary confinement. Though Browder's situation may appear extreme, its eventual outcome is not unusual. The playbill for Phil Blechman's The Black Book notes that eleven percent of all deaths of persons between the ages of 15 and 24 are suicides, which works out to one suicide just under every two hours. Blechman began working on the play, which debuted professionally in New York City in 2012, in response to a college classmate's suicide in 2007 and with the aim of finding reason within the experience.

Hotsy Totsy Burlesque Tribute: Doctor Who

Despite Doctor Who's history of using its Time Lord protagonist's companions to double as viewer eye candy, it still seems difficult to think that anyone would have guessed that over fifty years after its 1963 debut, an entire burlesque production would pay tribute to a children’s sci-fi show. However, Hotsy Totsy Burlesque's Tribute: Doctor Who, presented by Cherry Pitz and Joe the Shark (dressed for the night as Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor) does seem perfectly of a piece with the era of internet fan-fiction and character "shipping," and the new BBC series (beginning from its 2005 revival) has, to greater and lesser degrees, acknowledged and even encouraged the interest of its fandom in its characters’ sexualities.

Pondling

Of all the chores on her grandfather's farm, Madeleine particularly loves crushing cans. She especially enjoys those cans that put up a bit of resistance right at the end, admiring how they fight the inevitable. Her satisfaction in dispatching cans contrasts with those times when she must hold the flashlight while her brother and grandfather feed the cows: at these times, she knows that her task is essentially a ploy to keep her from feeling useless, an insight that speaks to her relative isolation in Genevieve Hulme-Beaman's Pondling, part of New York City's annual 1st Irish Festival.

Little Thing, Big Thing

A thief and a nun duck into a closet under the stairs: this is not the setup for a joke but for Little Thing, Big Thing, the newest work from award-winning playwright and performer Donal O’Kelly, having made its way to the United States as part of New York City’s annual 1st Irish Festival. Ex-con Larry O’Donnell ends up in that closet with Sister Martha McCann, who is returning from Nigeria to oversee the sale of the thematically evocative Lazarus Convent, when their paths cross by chance in the midst of his pulling off one last job. Larry’s final heist, a valuable statue of the Virgin, is interrupted because Martha has a second task in Ireland: to fulfil a death-bed request to hand-deliver a mysterious roll of film, one of the titular little things, to the Nigerian Henry Barr; but Barr is far from the only person who wants to get his hands what it contains. As in so many mismatched-buddy narratives, they head off on a cross-country road trip, but the unexpected and compelling discoveries that they make about themselves and their mission along the way resurrect a sense of moral purpose for both characters.