The Big Picture and the Closeup

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

August Wilson Ending on a High Note: RADIO GOLF at Everyman

August Wilson’s Radio Golf, the last play of his Century Cycle and his life, is a smartly-organized triumph, a tight knot of well-developed plot and themes. The play has always had its naysayers, but my take is that Wilson had much to show and much to say, and (it is reported) he knew this was his last shot, and so he absolutely took it. Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre does a fine job conveying Wilson’s broad vision.

If I had to sum it up – and with such a thematically rich play that is a presumptuous undertaking – I’d say Wilson was trying to convey the urgency at that moment (the play was finished in 2004) and this moment too in the African American experience of staying true to tradition, to family in the broad sense, to old senses of meaning, even when they seem to be called in question by newer and (arguably) whiter ways of thinking and dealing. The thing that calls out for fidelity most of all, the sum and symbol of everything else, is a house we never see in this show itself, but Wilson’s audience will know from other plays in the Cycle, 1839 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. In real life, there is no house at that address, but playgoers will know it as Aunt Ester’s home, a sanctuary of sorts as early as the first play in the Cycle, Gem of the Ocean, where marginalized blacks could look for some protection from the country’s oppressive ways and reconnect via mystical ritual with their African roots and souls. Threatening that house, in Radio Golf as in Gem of the Ocean, is not merely the might of the white power structure but also collaborationism by African Americans who have appropriated small bits of that power for themselves.

In Radio Golf, that threatening power is federally-funded redevelopment, ca. 1997. Under it, a grandiose development with apartments and a Starbucks and a Whole Foods and a Barnes & Noble is slated to consume the entire block of which Aunt Ester’s plot constitutes a part. Critical to the redevelopment funding is the statutorily-mandated participation of black-owned management, which is supplied by the duo of Harmond Wilks (Jamil A. C. Mangan) and Roosevelt Hicks (Jason B. McIntosh), d/b/a the Bedford Hills Redevelopment Corporation. Wilks and Hicks look upon this joint venture as a springboard both for their neighborhood and themselves. Wilks expects to use the development as the centerpiece of his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first black mayor, masterminded by his smart, ambitious and politically-connected wife Mame (Dawn Ursula, pictured above with Mr. Mangan). Hicks sees the development as a route to his becoming a major player in Pittsburgh’s business scene, as well as a way to expand his planned radio station holding company and immerse himself in the world of golf, particularly as the game is played by the wealthy business-people whose company Roosevelt craves. As the play begins, all bodes well for all these plans.

But of course there will be a hitch. Onto the scene burst two slightly crazed ghosts of eras past. The first is Sterling Johnson (Anton Floyd), a handyman who had been Wilks’ schoolmate, and not a great fan (having punched him in the mouth in some schoolyard dispute), and who has subsequently done time for a petty offense. He is loud and unpolished, the very opposite of the urbane, easy-to-get-along-with Wilks, and he is engaged in painting the Aunt Ester house, first oblivious to and then unconcerned by the aim of the Redevelopment Corporation to demolish it within a few days. He puts the partners on notice that something is amiss with their plans. Next comes Elder Joseph Barlow (Charles Dumas), an old man with a definitely crazy affect, a documentably shady past, and an absurd-sounding claim: that he remains the owner of the house, and will not sell it.

Initially, Barlow’s claim seems to be the stuff of airy fantasy. The Corporation has acquired the house indirectly via a tax sale, and Barlow acknowledges having never paid taxes on the house. So the tax sale’s validity sounds plausible enough. But it turns out there is an explanation for Barlow’s failure to pay taxes, and that there was a technical problem with the sale, and therefore it is Barlow’s claim, not the tax sale, that’s valid.

And thus the struggle over ways of thinking and dealing commences. For Hicks, the past that Sterling and Barlow are protecting has no value, and the validity of Barlow’s legal claim is irrelevant. From his standpoint, when the powers that be have firmed up their plans to a certain point, mere legality must step aside. For Wilks, abandoning the rule of law leads to chaos, even if following that principle leads to results that disappoint the oligarchs. I’ll leave it to audiences to discover how the clash of perspectives works out, but it is clear that, regardless of what becomes of Aunt Ester’s home, Wilks’ choice to adhere to the rule of law and to honor his roots and ancestors would destroy his great plans, his business partnership, and probably his marriage. Though, of course, regardless of the outcome, such a choice would also make him a hero.

By contrast, Hicks’ anticipatory move to distance himself from Wilks will drive him into the embrace of the white business establishment, making his ownership of the “minority-owned business” purely a pro forma thing. He will be financially rewarded, but will be cut off from his community. In an angry speech studded with language a white critic cannot comfortably use even in a quote, Johnson makes clear that from this point, Hicks is black in name only.

What Wilks fights against and for is largely implicit and tied up in family history from Gem of the Ocean, which it really helps to have seen first. Wilks, who says in 1997, the year of Radio Golf, that he is resisting the example of and life plans for him made by his father, is the grandson of Caesar Wilks, a black man who in 1904, the year of the action in Gem, oppressed other blacks on the basis of borrowed white authority; in other words he engaged in activities that bear a spiritual resemblance to those of Hicks, activities with which Wilks will not allow himself to become complicit. And Barlow is the child of Citizen Barlow, a young man on the run from the racial violence of the post-Reconstruction South in Gem. Citizen Barlow benefited greatly from the sanctuary and the magic offered by Aunt Ester and her house. Moreover, it emerges in Radio Golf that the old Wilkses and the Barlows had some kinship ties their present-day descendants need to rediscover. In sum, Wilks is challenged to embrace his debt and even kinship to the world of Aunt Ester.

This is an unusual production for Everyman, in that only one member of the cast (Ursula) is a regular member of the company. There’s a correspondingly unfamiliar credit line on the program for “New York Casting.” Obviously, the big reason for these changes is that the cast is all-black, while Everyman’s resident company is not. While one can only applaud the choice of play, and while the casting and performances are impeccable, one hopes that Everyman will not abandon its usual practice of relying largely on its resident company; this virtue is what distinguishes it most from Baltimore Center Stage, the majority of whose performers for many years have come from through New York and have zero local ties. (Instead, perhaps, to avoid the issues which led to New York casting, the Everyman company might further diversify.)

I have in earlier reviews voiced some skepticism about August Wilson‘s reputation; I had not then seen Radio Golf, which, partly because it bookends so comprehensively with Gem of the Ocean, has prompted me to reevaluate everything in the Cycle with a view to its overarching design. I seem to be taking a contrarian view to the bulk of critical opinion, which gives higher marks to Wilson’s entire oeuvre but lower ones to this particular play than I do. So be it; to me this play is an absolute masterwork, a fitting high note on which to end an acclaimed career.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Theresa Castracane Photography

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Forbidden Love and Royalty: Dueling Themes in E2 at REP Stage

It’s easy to empathize with the impulse that apparently gave rise to the creation of Bob Bartlett‘s play E2, now receiving its world premiere at Columbia’s REP Stage. That company’s Producing Artistic Director and the director of E2, Joseph W. Ritsch, recounts in a program note that the production found its genesis in discussions he and Bartlett had concerning “the possibilities of his re-imagining of [Christopher] Marlowe’s historic play.” As Ritsch points out, that story of the suppression of an English king’s homosexual love affair “resonated in these modern times. We find ourselves in a country, a world, that historically threatens the rights of LGBTQ+ people.” He noted that marriage equality is under constant legal threat. And while Ritsch can marry another man and has done so, “I still worry about he and I walking down the street hand in hand.” He writes of wanting both to be seen and to be safe, and about how these two aspirations conflict in the world we inhabit. Ritsch is right, it’s a real concern, and Ritsch is again right, it cries out for dramatic treatment.

And clearly, the story of a king who would, legally speaking, seem like the safest person in the land, but who nonetheless is slain, as is his lover, because their relationship is considered taboo, seems facially like a perfect vehicle to provide that treatment. But it simply isn’t, or at least not without more work. There are too many complications unique to a royal situation, as this play cannot help showing. E2 exists in a kind of neverland, though the setting is described as “A Kingdom” and the time is denominated “The Present.” For sure this is not the world of the historical 14th-century English King Edward II, but neither is it exactly the present, littered though it be with video games, cellphones, Twitter, and discos. This neverland is eternal and generic, and here, as in real life, monarchs who are seen to challenge conventionality may find themselves fatally insecure.

Royal powerlessness is hardly news, theatrically speaking. In fact it’s so commonplace, it amounts to a trope. Whether we’re talking the princess portrayed by Audrey Hepburn giving up the commoner portrayed by Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday or Princess Margaret being blocked from marrying Peter Townsend in The Crown, the talk that brings the royal up short always is delivered with a dose of realpolitik, and it always informs the royal listener that there are freedoms subjects may enjoy but monarchs or royals may not. We encounter a couple of such speeches in E2. And yes, the conventional thinking about love that necessitates these admonitions to lovesick royals is usually oppressive and wrong, but it intersects with ideas about monarchy that may not be so off-the-mark. To do their job well, monarchs must usually at least appear to live conventionally. And the state depends on monarchs to do their job well.

So in a play that its creators may perhaps have wanted to be about one issue, there are at least two. And as to the second issue, the slippery and paradoxical nature of monarchy, there are additional aspects. This is a play with a five-person cast, and, after we account for Edward (Zack Powell) and his “favorite,” Piers de Gaveston (Alejandro Ruiz), we have three others who in varied ways raise the messiness of the cluttered concerns around royalty. There is Queen Isabella (Dane Figueroa Edidi) who is effectively estranged from her husband, but who at least claims she longs to be reconciled, something Edward has no interest in doing. For her pains, she receives the same lecture: you may wish you had a more fulfilling marriage, but since your marriage is a royal one, you have to suck it up. (Though you can have a discreetly independent love life if you wish.) There is a teenaged son also named Edward (Zach Rakotomaniraka) who considers the wreckage of his parents’ marriage and seems to be considering not only where his sympathies should lie, but also whether he should be making a move to depose his father – not the kind of dilemma that crops up in commoners’ families. And there is Sir Roger Mortimer, the prime minister (Robby Gay), whose game is often inscrutable, even in retrospect, but seems to consist of telling off Edward and Gaveston more in sorrow than in anger, sleeping with the Queen, and paving the way for the young prince to steal his dad’s crown. More royal stuff than gay stuff in all of that. In short, the special circumstances of royalty are outshouting the tale of a love that needs to speak its name.

Which is not to say that there isn’t lots of the forbidden love, starting with the tableau the audience will confront as it files in at the beginning, reproduced above: a blown-up portrait of the lovers confronting each other, while the crown glints on a pedestal before them, a perfect summary of the two different subjects the show actually is about. There are a lot of other such pictures in rear projection throughout the show, and this is a good moment to pay particular credit to Nathaniel Sinnott, the scenic designer, Conor Mulligan, the lighting designer, and Sarah Tundermann, the multimedia designer, whom I take to be jointly behind capturing and displaying these striking and provocative images. I was likewise dazzled by a fall of what seemed like blue rain around the lovers at one ecstatic moment. And on the score of visually ravishing spectacle, I should add that there is a scene in which fencing practice and training takes one’s breath away, no doubt thanks to intimacy and fight director Jenny Male.

But the other comment I have to make about that fencing scene goes to what I ultimately found so frustrating about this show: I just could not discern the dramatic subtext. People besting each other with dangerous-looking implements and showing off is dramatic, but it’s not engaging at a deeper level unless you understand what it means, and I didn’t. I had that same problem almost from the beginning to the end with the characterization of the Queen. She must deal with her husband’s increasingly publicly-known infidelities and his lack of sexual feeling for her, and with being pawed by a prime minister whom she does not appear to love, and being required to remain loyal to her faithless husband and loyal to her son (two possibly opposed allegiances). I would imagine that in real life a person in her situation could plausibly be numbed by what she has gone through, or could plausibly be withholding emotional displays lest she explode, or lest she betray her plans. But for much of the show the Queen gives too few reliable clues to provide us a working understanding of her inner emotional life. And this I don’t think is a problem with the performer, but instead with the script. And to a lesser degree I’d say the same things about the characterization of Prince Edward; young Mr. Rakotomaniraka shows enormous promise as an actor, but I could not assemble a consistently working hypothesis about his character from the information the script provided.

Moreover, while we know from history, from Marlowe, and from the play itself what the ultimate fate of Edward and Gaveston will be, the how and the whodunnit are never very clear.

This is a world premiere, which reasonably can be construed as a statement that the play remains in development. I would urge playwright Bartlett to take advantage of that status to tighten the work, to make sure that at E2‘s next outing there will be no unintentional ambiguities and no wasted space. There looks to be a terrific play not too deeply buried in there, but it still needs some quarrying. The process will not be complete until the audience can look back at the end and discern in detail how these five characters interacted to reach the ends of their respective journeys.

Even in its current shape, this play demands an audience’s attention, and certainly did receive it at the performance I attended. Even unrefined, it makes us care about what is happening, and about the characters – and I’m sure, about what their fates tell us about the problem that bothered Ritsch at the play’s conception. That said, I think that in future development the play should embrace its unavoidable additional focus on the demands of monarchy. Properly managed, that focus can be exploited without losing the initial concern over the safety and security of unconventional love in a still-repressive age. Though the vantage-point of a story about royalty cannot provide a full overview of that concern, it can at least open up to audiences a useful and exemplary special case. (Most of us aren’t royal like King Lear either, but his story serves, among much else, as an important cautionary tale about rashness.) As it develops, therefore, E2‘s future course should be most interesting to watch.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Katie Simmons-Barth

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

An Old But Surprisingly Modern Comic Treasure: THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE at Baltimore Shakespeare Factory

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com November 3, 2019

The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Francis Beaumont‘s rarely-produced 1607 comedy, is receiving its all-time Baltimore premiere courtesy of Baltimore Shakespeare Factory, a high-spirited troupe who revel in slapdash performances laced with contemporary pop song at the interludes and sometimes in the performances. The slapdash notwithstanding, a serious dedication not just to the Bard but also to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama also animates them. The company’s performances, then, are an odd hybrid of serious and silly. But there could never be much doubt which part of the genome would predominate when it came to a play like this.

Consider the show’s emblem, the humble pestle, pictured – well, pixelated anyway (and for cause) – in the attached publicity photo. Usually accompanied in everyday usage by the prefatory words “mortar and,” the pestle is an instrument for crushing and mixing herbs or chemicals or pharmaceuticals, and bears some resemblance to engorged male genitalia. We can be sure that Beaumont chose the object with a clear understanding of that resemblance, but with an eye to making it symbolic in a way that included the vulgarity but incorporated much more.

The word first appears in the script of the play in a speech by Nell (Kerry Brady), the wife of a grocer called George, aka The Citizen (David Forrer). And what are the two of them doing in the play? One may well ask. They appear initially as the all-time least cooperative audience-members ever, and insist on coming up on the stage, and both talking over and taking over the entertainment, a play called The London Merchant, evidently feeling that they know more about London commerce than the actors. Yet they are not looking for greater realism, as one might expect; they want instead to glorify the London mercantile class and the London citizenry by endowing their avatar with gaudier adventures than The London Merchant‘s inhabitants would ever have encountered. Nell is keen on giving the couple’s apprentice, a young man named Rafe (Warren Harris), a big role, and it is as part of Nell’s aspiration toward outsized heroism that she suggests: “Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband; let him kill a lion with a pestle.” (Perhaps pestles figured in some way in the 17th century grocer’s trade?) The next thing we know, Rafe appears decked out as a knight brandishing the pestle, now morphed into what amounts to a sex toy, at the end of a pike as his heraldic emblem, an in-your-face way of puncturing the pretensions of the more conventional entertainment and of the class of spectators who would have come to the theater to see it. (That supposedly more conventional entertainment is itself, incidentally, a parodic send-up of a bona fide conventional entertainment, a play by Thomas Heywood called The Four Prentices of London (1600).)

It works particularly well in this production that Rafe and the character he portrays, the Knight of the Burning Pestle, are never in on the joke, any more than Don Quixote, the obvious model for Knight, is in on Cervantes’ joke. (Don Quixote, the Spanish classic, was just out and not yet published in English translation, but the resemblances are so strong it is inescapable that Beaumont was familiar with its hero.) Instead, Rafe, as portrayed by Harris (pictured above with cast-member Sarah Robinson), is a wide-eyed would-be knight errant, fearlessly and unironically roaming Waltham Forest (north of London), which he insists on viewing as Waltham Desert, protecting damsels and others in distress. One can see the dramatic effect Nell is aiming for with her casting of Rafe, who never breaks character while portraying the knight. In a different play, Harris could play an admirable and brave hero straight. Here, of course, the concept of a grocer’s apprentice playing knight errant can only be ridiculous, particularly when he is liberating the “captives” in the “cave” of the “giant” Barbaro, more commonly known as customers of a barbershop. In 1607, of course, barbers were also what we know today as health care providers, so there is a lot of low humor in showing the “captives” as patients for the treatment of venereal diseases. But Harris goes through all the bawdy misapprehensions with a straight face and a heroic line delivery.

While all this tomfoolery is happening, the players are still gamely trying to put on The London Merchant, a more routine tale of young lovers Jasper (Adam Henricksen) and Luce (Jackie Madejski), Luce’s father Venturewell, the eponymous London merchant (Jim Knost) and Humphrey (Katie Rey Bogdan), the prosperous suitor for Luce’s hand favored by Venturewell. Somehow, in preposterous and melodramatic fashion, the lovers must succeed despite her father being a stereotypical senex iratus, an angry old man whose sole dramatic function is to unsuccessfully impede the lovers. But here the London Merchant cast will not only need to fight their way through melodramatic claptrap – but also through the additional traffic on the stage created by the constant incursions of the Burning Pestle tale and through some effort on the part of the Knight to intervene in the Jasper-and-Luce story and through the constant intrusions of Nell and George, whose antics make one long for the far less intrusive disruptions of simple cellphones amongst most modern audiences.

From this account it is self-evident that The Knight of the Burning Pestle, even if four centuries old, is quite modern in the way it courts fourth-wall violations and meta-narratives. In fact the whole play is a giant, continuing fourth wall violation with attitude, and the performance by BSF only makes it more so. The text has been modernized to bring the once-topical jokes up to date. For instance, a joke about (I think) London mayor Dick Whittington is swapped out for a jibe at Sheila Dixon. And the copious songs Beaumont wrote, especially for Jasper’s dad, the roisterer Merrythought (Cheryl J. Campo) (Merrythought breaks into song 31 times in the original script), have all been scrapped and lost, in favor of repeated raids on the modern pop and rap songbook. (Though, to be fair, Beaumont was just as assiduously raiding and adopting from the pop songbook of his own day.) And this process intensifies in the pre-performance and intermission singing, which aggressively courts the audience not to be mere spectators but to engage in a singalong. The distinction between audience and performers is thus continually assaulted throughout the evening. We are being bullied not to play the role of a 21st Century audience watching performers stage a 17th Century play, but instead to join a group experience that takes place in an undefined common time. There are those who adore this sort of thing; if you don’t, the experience of not being left alone and protected by the fourth wall will grate.

My own take is that this approach is founded on a degree of distrust of the audience – that there is a fear that if the audience were confronted with the difficulty of a text filled with in-jokes that are no longer topical and songs its members have not heard before, and without a spoonful of modern sugar to help the ancient medicine go down, the audience could not handle it. I’m not convinced; I think dramaturgy could be deployed to combat most of these problems. But that approach is enshrined in BSF’s ethos, and it seems pointless to argue – and it should be mentioned as well that at the same time as it engages in these efforts to make Shakespearean-era drama more accessible, BSF is the only local company that frequently takes on Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation. I guess each company driving in this theatrical lane chooses its own compromises with modernity.

Meanwhile, we are left to judge this production on its own terms. And perhaps the first thing to do is utter thanks that the play is being revived at all. As I stated at the outset, it’s rarely produced, and it certainly deserves the occasional outing, if only as a reminder that our forbears were just as interested in trying experiments with theatrical genre and form as we are. And yes, let’s acknowledge that Shakespeare among others allowed little, somewhat ceremonious, fourth wall violations, for instance with prologues and epilogues that directly addressed the audience. But Knight is a series of big departures that makes anything comparable I can think of in Shakespeare or Jonson seem tame. It’s impossible not to be intrigued by Knight‘s originality, and amused by its contrived chaos.

As to the performances, if one accepts the desirability of genderless casting (I remain unenthused most of the time) and the undoubted necessity of doubling, the cast members seem well-selected for their tasks. I’ve already expressed my admiration for Warren Harris. To name a few of the other standouts, Cheryl Campo’s unabashedly unhinged portrayal of Old Merrythought kept me smiling; Jackie Madejski’s game turns as the put-upon Luce and the supposedly villainous Barber were hilarious, and Kerry Brady and David Forrer made hay out of annoying, interfering, ill-bred, and uninformed characters redeemed by their enthusiasm, their partisanship for their hometown, and their delight at Rafe.

If you aren’t put off by the honestly debatable choices I’ve mentioned, you’ll have a great time rediscovering an old but surprisingly modern comic treasure.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Will Kirk

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Cold-Hearted But Great Fun: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER at Dundalk Community Theatre

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com October 26, 2019

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Broadway 2014, now being revived by the Dundalk Community Theatre) resides in that small category of shows cold-hearted enough to get away with encouraging audiences to laugh as characters die. (Chicago, Heathers and Blithe Spirit belong here too.) It’s a neat trick even for a short time, inducing audiences to dissociate from their normal moral reactions. It helps if the victims are contemptible in some way or if the method of decease is comically stereotyped and overplayed or if there is an element of farce in the luring of the victim to his doom, and all these methods are employed here, especially the contemptibility tactic.

Significantly, there seems to have been no London production of the show, perhaps because the victims (like the killers) are British. But getting Americans in a frame of mind where they’ll despise British aristocrats is like shooting fish in a barrel (unless they’re Americans who happen to be still in a daze from a viewing of Downton Abbey). And here the setup provides all the inducement we Yanks need to salivate for Limey blue blood: a highborn family, the D’Ysquiths, disowning a daughter because she eloped with a lowborn foreigner, and (most of them) behaving in impeccably beastly ways towards her son Monty (Rob Tucker).

And there’s a neat twist as well: almost all the D’Ysquiths, those whose blue blood will in fact be spilled in the course of the festivities, are played by a single actor, in this case the extraordinarily versatile Patrick Martyn. He is spot on as Asquith D’Ysquith, Jr. (a snobbish and contemptuous young aristocrat), Lord Adalbert D’Ysquith, (a snobbish and contemptuous old aristocrat), Reverend Lord Ezekial D’Ysquith (a drunken clergyman with a sense for architecture that outpaces his sense of balance), Henry D’Ysquith (of doubtful sexual orientation and cursed with a disastrous hobby), Lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith (a faddish and self-serving proponent of high-profile charities), Major Lord Bartholomew D’Ysquith (a bodybuilder who unfortunately overestimates both his prowess and Monty’s probity), Lady Salome D’Ysquith Pumphrey (an actress in need of a better props mistress), and Asquith D’Ysquith, Sr. (a thoroughly decent paterfamilias who is still, alas, doomed by the plot).

There is more at stake for Monty than revenge; he would like to inherit the family fortune and castle. He would also like to marry Phoebe D’Ysquith (Marina Yiannouris), a member of the family who (fortunately for her) is not ahead of Monty in the line of succession – though his heart probably belongs more to the fickle and materialistic Sibella (Alison Comotto). The audience is indeed fortunate that Monty’s affections are divided, because Yiannouris and Comotto are both blessed with extraordinary voices, and given numerous opportunities to show them off, frequently at the same time. In the same vein the ensemble (Alyssa Bell, Casey Lane, Jane E. Brown, Jim Baxter, Ken Ewing, and Joey Hellman, pictured above) sings with beautiful precision, an absolute requirement in a score with the plethora of patter songs and numbers designed to poke fun at the British stiff upper lip by calling on the singers to hit notes and syllables with identical timing and intonation – not to mention composer Steven Lutvak‘s piquant harmonies. And speaking of patter songs, Rob Tucker delivers a handful of them with aplomb. I don’t think Jefferson Mays, who held down the role of Monty throughout the show’s Broadway run, handled them any better.

Yes, as I have said, the show has a cold, cold heart, but it is great fun, and Dundalk Community Theatre has giving it a rousing staging. Recommended.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Personality Verging on Personhood: PROXY at Rapid Lemon

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com October 12, 2019

Full disclosure up front: This last spring, Rapid Lemon Productions produced and director T.P. Huth directed a short play written by this reviewer.

Cheating mortality is an old human preoccupation; robotics and Artificial Intelligence are more recent ones. They are mingled and reconsidered in Alex Reeves’ and Nell Quinn-Gibney’s Proxy, receiving a world premiere production at the Theatre Project courtesy of Baltimore’s Rapid Lemon Productions. The premise is simple: As the play starts, Kassa (Autumn Koehnlein) is dying of cancer, leaving her guy Rennek (Noah Silas) and her teenaged sister Kai (Ruth Elizabeth Diaz) prospectively bereft. To ease the impending bereavement for Kai, Kassa has arranged to be replaced by a robot who will resemble Kassa in more than body; while the bodily replacement is being fabricated, Kassa’s mind and manners are being gradually uploaded into another, more generic robot, Again (Rose Hahn, pictured above), who will eventually transfer what she has learned into the proxy Kassa. In order to help the learning process, Again stands 24/7 watch over Kassa, often trying to mimic precisely what Kassa does or says.

This premise of course lands the narrative in the realm of science fiction, since these technologies don’t yet exist, or at least not in the depicted stage of development. And science fiction, a genre with deep roots in the superficially sensational pulp magazines of the middle of the last century, has traditionally been looked down upon by some for skimping on character and psychology in favor of gimmickry. As such, science fiction would also not be replete with what theatergoers traditionally seek in drama. But even back in the pulp era, the British novelist Kingsley Amis led the charge of those who rejected this kind of condescension. “[F]irst place literary quality,” he wrote in 1960, is to be found in science fiction if readers “take the trouble to look for it.” Rewards are there “from any old point of view, whether literary, sociological, psychological, political or what you will.” Proxy, which arguably embraces all those points of view and is presented with some dramatic grace, stands as testimony to Amis’ comment. As noted, the technologies that drive Proxy are not fully implemented yet, but we’re obviously headed in their general direction, and it would be contrary to common sense and to our nature as a species not to consider their implications. And for delving into those implications, science fiction is a fine tool, and so is drama.

As the play progresses, two of the biggest questions of robotics and AI come to the fore.

There is the Turing Test question, which considers non-biological humanity from the viewpoint of us biological humans: at what point does a native human observer lose the ability or the need to distinguish between biological and non-biological intelligence? (Alan Turing thought the points were identical, i.e. that once we couldn’t distinguish, we did not need to either.) As presented in Proxy, once Kassa has been replaced by a robot who looks just like her, are Kai (the intended beneficiary of the substitution) or Rennek (who was never on board with the swap but now finds himself attracted to the proxy Kassa) required or ethically permitted to deal with her as if she were another human? The dramatic potential of this question is undeniable.

And the even more interesting question is internal to the robots, although it has implications for the other characters as well. If you will, it is the Turing Test viewed from the inside: at what point does a robot become a person to herself, and if that occurs, what rights does that artificial humanity have? Reese and Quinn-Gibney have done an interesting job unpacking this issue. At its heart it is about the mysterious thing religions have called soul and science has often referred to as consciousness. We humans have knowledge of ourselves, and respond to the world around us with emotions. The best computer programmers, so far as I know, have not been able to create either self-knowledge or emotions; the best we can do is make machines act as if they possessed these things. Perhaps we can fabricate simulacra of humans we cannot distinguish from biological humans; but if the simulacra do not objectively possess self-knowledge and emotions, we might very well continue to consider them so different from the rest of us that they are not to be treated as our equivalents socially or in law. From the time of the Declaration of Independence, we have held that “all men … are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.” If robots are not exactly men or women, are they covered by that holding? In dramatic terms, both Again, who continues in her career of uploading people’s personalities and memories after the swapping of the robot Kassa for the original one, and the substitute Kassa acquire senses of identity and emotion. And on that basis they want, indeed insist upon, one of the rights that the Declaration recognized that “men” inalienably possess: the right to pursue happiness. How will the native-born humans respond?

Let me add that there is more to the play than the dramatization of Big Questions. And while it’s no doubt evident from what I’ve already said that I think Reese and Quinn-Gibney have done an admirable job handling those, I’m less satisfied with their treatment of the human family unit (Kassa, Kai and Rennek) around whom the Big Questions swirl. For whatever reason, Kassa and Kai do not come across as real sisters, and Kassa and Rennek do not come across as real lovers. And yes, we know that when a family member is dying, the pain of it can drive others who love them to treat them distantly and to act out. But we got so much distant treatment and acting out from these characters that the asserted bonds between them and Kassa became dramatically unconvincing. For instance, Kai’s insistent brattiness and sarcasm toward Kassa left me unpersuaded that any big sister treated that way would spring for a replacement robot – or that Kai deserved one. And Rennek’s discomfort with Again’s presence in the room so continually led him to brush off Kassa’s efforts at tenderness and connection that at some point I could no longer credit their supposed relationship. Surely a guy genuinely invested in the happiness of a dying lover would grant her a little more indulgence and deal a little more effectively with his counterproductive annoyance?

No, it was the stuff with the robots that was dramatically interesting – and often moving. I particularly liked the robotic mannerisms, including Max Headroom-like stutters when something in their heads wasn’t computing smoothly, and the human-but-not-quite movements that Rose Hahn brings to the character of Again. And the genuine pathos in the reactions of a robot who wants to inhabit more deeply the persona of a human loved and lost. And the confusion experienced by a robot dealing with the superposition of multiple uploaded and incompletely wiped characters in her head. All of this was also aided by the evocation of virtual reality via the projections (courtesy of Judson Ridings), which included lakes, mountains, and digital data streams. And in any show that involves futuristic high tech, the sound design (here by Rapid Lemon founder Max Garner) is important; there were various nifty and, more importantly, convincing noises spread throughout the show. One can’t speak entirely meaningfully of a sense of accuracy and getting it right when the subject is the future, but my sense nonetheless is that getting it right is what the show as a whole, and this production in particular, were doing.

One of the things drama does so well is to make us think and feel about the vectors a society is following. And one of the things happening in our society that drama needs to address is our headlong rush into technology with a personality verging on personhood. Proxy is a thoughtful and perceptive consideration of that rush. It deserves an audience.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Rapid Lemon Productions

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Making Deportation Politics Personal: MISS YOU LIKE HELL at Baltimore Center Stage

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com September 21, 2019

All politics is personal, as the saying goes. Seldom is this point made with greater dramatic clarity than in Miss You Like Hell (La Jolla 2016, New York 2018), now opening Baltimore Center Stage’s new season, the first season with Stephanie Ybarra unambiguously in place as Artistic Director. It is evident that the selection of this play is a statement by Ybarra, who in a program note describes herself at 16, the same age as Olivia, the show’s point-of-view character, as “a half-Mexican, self-identified-tomboy-bookworm-mouthy nerd with a penchant for oversized flannels,” a description that accurately captures Olivia as well. The tale of Olivia (Stephanie Gomérez) and her cross-country journey with her unconventional mother Beatriz (Lorraine Velez) is the kind of story that probably would not have been told in earlier days at Center Stage, especially before the tenure of Ybarra’s predecessor, Kwame Kwei-Armah, who did a lot to shake up the repertoire in his six seasons at the helm. (Or perhaps seven; there is some lack of clarity about who deserves Artistic Director credit for the 2018-19 season; the Center Stage website attributes that season to Ybarra, but in the program Ybarra herself calls the present show “my first production as an artistic director.”) In any event, there is now a new sheriff in town, and the choice of this show is how she tells us that.

And the show in question, a musical, with book and lyrics by Quiara Alegría Hudes, with music and lyrics by Erin McKeown, explores the way in which policy, in this case the Obama administration’s push to deport then-unprecedented numbers of Central American immigrants, personally impacts the immigrants, their families, and the world. Beatriz, we discover, is a Mexican immigrant with an old marijuana conviction, which is enough in the light of harsh Obama-era policies to warrant her removal back to whence she came. Olivia, her daughter, carries half her genes, but also half those of a white American father, and is protected by citizenship and the non-deportability that goes with it. The union between Olivia’s parents having sundered earlier, when Olivia was younger, and Olivia having perhaps cracked under the tensions of shared custody, she had pushed her somewhat unreliable mother out of her life, which the mother then ratified by leaving the family’s hometown, Philadelphia, and moving to California and out of Olivia’s life.

The musical begins at the moment Beatriz unexpectedly reappears, seeking to reclaim a place in her child’s life, imploring her to come along on a road trip in a beat-up borrowed Datsun truck. The invitation is accurately described by Olivia as “half kidnapping,” but she reluctantly goes. Of course, as quickly becomes clear, Beatriz has a larger agenda than merely rebonding with her daughter. In a week’s time she must face a deportation hearing in Los Angeles, meaning that: a) she needs a daughter in the hearing room, to establish the potential hardship for an American citizen (Olivia) that might constitute legal grounds for suspending deportation of a Mexican (Beatriz); and b) if the ploy of getting Olivia to plead Beatriz’s case turns out to fail, and they must spend the rest of their lives in separate countries, the week spent with her daughter will likely prove to have been the last chance Beatriz will ever receive to mend the rift between them. Whichever outcome the trip is building towards, it is now or never to act on the opportunities presented.

This setup could have led to breakneck buddy comedy with a bittersweet ending, and we do inevitably get the bittersweet part, and even the buddy part, but the breakneck has been swapped out in favor of a kind of picaresque idyll. We’re all going to look for America here, in divey motels and local court clerks’ offices, and along roadsides, where acquaintances of some consequence may spring up almost at random. Among those acquaintances are an old gay couple, Mo (Michael Medeiros) and Higgins (Raphael Nash Thompson), who are finishing off the unlikely stunt of getting married to each other in all fifty states, and Manuel (Ceasar F. Barajas), a tamale vendor who seems willing to join the expedition at the drop of a hat. I liked this choice of approach. It turns out you can repair frayed family bonds just as well in idyllic circumstances as in frantic ones.

That said, I did not entirely buy the way the fruits of that repair are presented in Olivia’s inevitable speech to the (unseen) immigration judge. She calls Beatriz “my history, my recipe, my family,” all claims that Beatriz’s conduct has made implausible. From the evidence presented by the show, it seems that Olivia has actually been thriving during Beatriz’s absence. Olivia has initiated, in an intelligent way, her own youthful sexual explorations, and she’s developed an online support community through a well-followed blog, and in neither of these pursuits has her mother furnished a recipe. There is no evidence that her relationship with her father is bad, either. And since, whatever Olivia may be telling the judge, her mom has simply not been “a family,” Beatriz is no longer necessary to Olivia the way a more ordinary mother would be. The fact that Beatriz brings out the dancer in her daughter (Dance With Me), though it’s a positive, hardly fills that void. The other plausible claim of Beatriz to matter in Olivia’s life is simply the example provided in what Hudes, in a program note, calls “Beatriz’s celebration in the face of hardship,” that she is what the lyrics call a “lioness.”

Show business people seem to believe more than we ordinary mortals do in the curative powers of female indomitability. Show them an Auntie Mame or a Dolly Levi or a Momma Rose or a Roxie Hart or an unsinkable Molly Brown and they feel invigorated. Most of us would be exhausted (or worse) at having any of these characters as a mother. In order for us to respond to the ending the way Hudes wants us to, however, we have to sign onto that notion. But Olivia has already shown herself too astute for that. Has the road trip revived her love for her mother? Yes, and plausibly so. But has it restored Beatriz to the central position in Olivia’s life Olivia wants to convince the judge of? Not at all. And Beatriz hasn’t made Olivia a “lioness” because she was already well on the path to becoming one. (In a sour adolescent way, of course, but it’s still hard to miss.)

By any reasonable yardstick, then, Olivia’s testimony ought to be a lie. A well-intentioned lie, a lie of which most of us would approve, but a lie nonetheless. It is not true to the facts of the drama, or even, really, to the deeper points Miss You Like Hell has been making. Yet, while it is hard to be certain, it appears Hudes wants us to believe Olivia’s testimony is emotionally true. I know I am not the only member of the audience who cannot follow Hudes that far.

Which is far from saying that all is lost. Without going into spoiler-level detail, let me concede that the ultimate ending, what comes after the hearing, remains powerful, but more because of the politics of it than the personal aspects. You do not need a normally-intense mother-daughter bond to make the threat of stretching any family bond over an impermeable border an unspeakable attack on the dignity of the family involved. National boundaries should not be permissible or acceptable ways of excluding those who have a need to come into a country or who have established ties in its communities. National sovereignty is never a valid excuse for marginalizing people like Beatriz, or for forcing them to live without a driver’s license or legitimate ways of working, or for making their families live under the threat of removal. Miss You Like Hell illustrates, in a very personal and detailed way, how these policies do damage and destroy lives and families, even away from the border, and this has little to do with what we’ve seen of the Beatriz/Olivia relationship. You have a right not to be touched by such hateful policies even if you can’t fully reclaim the place you abandoned in your daughter’s life. And conversely, you can be a human dynamo with a thirst for all that life has to offer, and all these hateful policies may still be more indomitable than you, particularly in the short run. (Though, as the finale, Epilogue, makes convincingly clear, where there is hope and faith in the long run, and an expansive sense of community, everything good remains possible.)

On balance, then, even if one does not fully believe in the evolution of the depicted family along the lines that Hudes would apparently wish, this is an enjoyable and uplifting evening of theater. The performances are Center Stage quality, which is to say stellar, and well-directed by Rebecca Martínez. Velez and Gomérez make a marvelous mother/daughter team. I loved Rachel Stern in a short but memorable turn as a court clerk and Jaela Cheeks-Lomax as Pearl, one of Olivia’s blog supporters out in the ether. McKeown’s music is always agreeable and occasionally inspiring, and well-performed by a tight band under music director Tiffany Underwood Holmes.

So Ms. Ybarra has made an auspicious beginning. We shall watch with great interest to see how she follows up.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

Photo credit: Bill Geenen

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

BRIGHT HALF LIFE at Strand Theater Company

Posted on BroadwayWorld September 14, 2019

The Strand Theater Company is an impressive troupe. Working in what the marketplace would treat as a niche, women’s theater, and performing on a small stage in a neighborhood far from Baltimore’s commercial and artistic heart, Strand has survived for ten seasons, passing through at least three artistic directorships and a change of venue. Its shows give the appearance of being produced on a shoestring. And these adversities notwithstanding, based on Paula Vogel‘s And Baby Makes Seven (reviewed here in April) and now Tanya Barfield‘s Bright Half Life (premiered 2015), it’s clear the company is doing outstanding work.

Bright Half Life might be characterized as a love story (director Tony Korol-Evans calls it that, in her note in the program), though that label has its limitations, for reasons I won’t go into here for fear of uttering spoilers. It follows the relationship of Vicky (Ayesis Clay) and Erica (Katharine Vary) through 45 years, from their first encounter, when Erica applies for a job entering data in Vicky’s department of a financial sector company, through courtship, marriage and parenthood. Along the way, they (and hence we in the audience) must grapple with issues that come with those common human experiences plus additional ones raised by the fact that Erica is white and Vicky black, by the fact that Vicky is Erica’s work supervisor, by the fact that, both being women of their time, they are immediately confronting prejudice and only later in the relationship are legally able to marry – and in addition issues raised by the particularities of their personalities, like Erica’s acrophobia and Vicky’s somewhat undefined sexual orientation.

If this weren’t enough for the audience to chew on, the tale is presented in a totally nonsequential fashion, and at nearly breakneck speed much of the time. We are left to piece together the whole story from dozens of fragments that appear and pass quickly, which can be both exhausting and exhilarating. And not just for us in the audience; this calls for enormous flexibility on the part of the performers too. Moments of ecstasy are juxtaposed with moments of terror, joy and sadness arrive cheek-by-jowl, and certain incidents are repeatedly revisited. The two performers must be emotional quick-change artists, and I found myself amazed watching as Clay and Vary worked their way intrepidly through those changes. Blackout followed blackout, and after each one, the characters might be in a totally different time and place in their relationship from the one previously explored. And Clay and Vary were unfailingly right there. Highlights for me included Erica’s hilarious panic in a stopped Ferris wheel gondola (Vary’s delivery is priceless, and, fortunately for the audience, this scene is repeatedly returned to), and Vicky’s complicated and very human reaction at learning that Erica has received a job offer that carries the potential of upsetting the couple’s lives. All hail K. Tony Korol-Evans, as well, for direction that must have been intimately bound up with these tour-de-force performances.

My applause for how the play is performed does not quite dispose of the question of how important the play actually is. That something this exciting deserves to be performed goes without saying. (And it is performed; a brief internet search will reveal reviews of plenty of different stagings.) But is it more than exciting? I’m of two minds. Simply as a witness, as a representation of kinds of lives that have historically not been presented much on the stage, it arguably has considerable value. But, again avoiding spoilers, all it really says about these lives is that, like everyone else’s lives, they consist of good things and bad ones, and that, in a mortal world, there is a sadness that will follow all happiness. Is that enough? I don’t know.

What I do know is, this is a gem of an evening of theater, and should not be missed. Strand is to be commended for sticking to its guns and its mission (this season it is expanding its repertoire from four to six plays). And audiences should support it.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Shaelynn Jae Photography

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

From Farcical to Sombre in PERFECT ARRANGEMENT at Fells Point Corner Theatre

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com September 3, 2019

Being the age I am, I might well be the only person in the audience of the production of Topher Payne‘s Perfect Arrangement, now gracing the stage at Fells Point Corner Theatre, who can personally recall one of the historical events that inform the play. Though the play’s focus is on the “Lavender Scare,” which resulted in the purging of hundreds of State Department employees on suspicion of homosexuality, that scare was a companion to the “Red Scare,” which led to the purging of hundreds of State Department employees on suspicions of “disloyalty.” And indeed the play depicts the same people as implementing both scares, Lavender and Red. In 1953, my father, a senior diplomat administering the Marshall Plan, whose loyalty would in any rational world have been unquestionable, was let go in the Red Scare. And so the play resonated some for me. I can recall that as I came to understand what had become of our family, the thing that most struck me was the due process-deprived irrationality of it all. And for the characters in the play caught up in the toils of the Lavender Scare, that is the nub as well, the irrationality.

It’s no wonder the topic appealed to Payne, a prolific Atlanta-based playwright whose work largely focuses on gay themes. Dramatists have always put irrationality to good use. It can for instance serve as the mainspring of farce, as it certainly does here, particularly in the first act. The title Perfect Arrangement refers to the compact of a male gay couple and a lesbian couple to hide in plain view from the disapproval of the world in 1950 by posing as two straight couples living in adjoining halves of a Georgetown duplex. The two halves are secretly connected through the residences’ respective front closets, a passage that enables each real couple to reunite at night, unnoticed by the world outside. Such a setup is custom-made for farce. So there is plenty of dashing into and out of the closet or hiding under furniture, of excuses ginned up on the fly to explain when one or other of the “neighbors” is in the “wrong” house while the people expected to be there are elsewhere. To add to the comic as well as the ideological tension, one of the “husbands” and one of the “wives” are together placed in charge of implementing the State Department’s purges, paradoxically opening themselves up to retaliatory revelations by their victims. Farce (of a grim sort).

In most farces, though, at the end, after the audience’s tension has been ratcheted up by the accumulating lies and cascading improbabilities, all the impostures must come tumbling down. Shams will be unmasked, and the world will readjust. And that convention, the unmasking, is observed in Perfect Arrangement as well. Except that there’s nothing funny or farcical about what happened to “unmasked” employees of the State Department in 1950. (The first U.S. diplomat to have exited the closet and kept his career seems to have come out in 1975.) As a result, both history and the dynamics of farce compel a shift in tone between the first and the second acts of the play.

To be candid, I could not entirely follow what does and doesn’t happen after the unmasking moment in the play, but it is clear that one of the central characters decides to burrow deeper into the (metaphorical, not the literal) closet while the others make a choice to be truer to themselves and resolve to agitate publicly for change.

I don’t think the majority choice was actually available in 1950. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, in Out for Good, their authoritative history of “the struggle to build a gay rights movement in America,” begin in 1969 with Stonewall, although they note in passing that there had been demonstrations throughout the 60s, which had been “small, rare, respectful, even timid, with the men wearing ties and jackets and the women in skirts.” But the events of the play take place at the dawn of the 50s, not even the 60s.

A choice to exit the closet in official Washington of the 50s or 60s would likewise have been career suicide; the actual suicide of Senator Lester Hunt in 1954 when Hunt was threatened with being outed (which inspired the fictional suicide of a senator in the sensational book Advise and Consent (1959) and movie made of it (1962)) gives a more accurate picture of the unendurable fearfulness of the condemnation characters would have had to expect had they come out.

But whatever the historical accuracy of depicting people of that place and time choosing to be publicly and unapologetically explicit about who they were, it works dramatically – as does the related exploration of complicity and self-hatred of gay public servants who participated in gay witch-hunts. The change in tone of the play’s second act makes this thoughtful and dramatically challenging exploration possible. That said, one can be grateful to have had the laughs of Act One first.

FPCT gives the resulting show, both funny and thoughtful, a rousing production. As the two queer characters in charge of purging queer characters, Nate Krimmel and Holly Gibbs are portraits in dismay, and between them they credibly explore the range of emotional development likely for people in their situation. And Ari Eckley and Gabe Fremuth, as their spouses, are good with the comedy and, particularly in Eckley’s case, good at the more sensitive stuff, for instance conveying the emotional groundwork on which a character in those circumstances might build the decision to come out. Ebony N. Jackson and Shamire Casselle portray two very different intruders on the seclusion crucial to the Perfect Arrangement. Jackson’s character, deep into the kind of housewifery promoted by the postwar media, is anxious to drag the other women along into a life focused on maternity and consumption, her form of sisterhood obliviously threatening the women’s lesbian lives. Jackson imparts just the right kind of insistent cluelessness into the role. Casselle’s character is more complicated; of uncertain sexual orientation but apparently prodigious sexual appetite, and unburdened by shame, she turns out to be both prey and predator to the witch-hunters and their mates. Casselle wrings a lot of laughs out of a part which remains in large measure mysterious and unknown. While, for reasons I’ve already given and others, I’m not convinced that this is truly a story of the middle of the last century, any suspension of disbelief I managed was largely due to David Forrer’s turn as a senior State Department official in charge of wrangling the witch hunters. He effortlessly evoked the WASPy and patrician State Department I remember around my parents. And the rest of the suspension of disbelief would be owing to Bruce Kapplin’s set, a terrific evocation of Mad Men era decorative values.

To paraphrase John Lennon, an amusing and thought-provoking time is guaranteed for all.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Shaelynn Jae Photography

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

CABARET at Olney Theatre Center Keeps Us Gasping

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com September 3, 2019

Because Cabaret is a true classic of the American musical stage, it’s a safe bet that most of the audience at any contemporary production of Cabaret, including the one which has just opened at the Olney Theatre Center, and most of the readers of this review will have seen the show before and be familiar with it. But for those few who may be unfamiliar with it, a summary: Cabaret follows the adventure of Cliff (Gregory Maheu), a young writer who ventures into Berlin on New Year’s Eve, 1931, and is immediately drawn into two worlds. The first is his lodging house, presided over by Fräulein Schneider (Donna Migliacco), an elderly landlady of dubious standards, whose rental demand for Cliff’s room quickly wilts in the face of Cliff’s financial limits. Among the tenants are Fräulein Kost (Jessica Lauren Ball), a prostitute who seems to have a clientele mainly composed of sailors, and Herr Schultz (Mitchell Hébert), an elderly Jewish fruiterer determinedly optimistic about the existential threat that the rising Nazis pose to him and to his budding romance with Fräulein Schneider. The second world Cliff discovers is the Kit Kat Club, a cabaret in which, from a certain point of view, the entire musical takes place (it’s complicated). (If “life is a cabaret, old chum,” as the title song informs us, then the concept of life taking place within a cabaret is not much of a stretch.) This environment is presided over by the multilingual and perverse Emcee (Mason Alexander Park), and features a cast of dancing girls and boys, and a star billed as “the toast of Mayfair”: British, broke, improvident Sally Bowles (Alexandra Silber). Sally and Cliff will have a romance of a sort before everything is swept away by the Nazi tsunami overtaking Germany.

I’ve deliberately left out some important plot details subject to change from version to version of the show, even from production to production. The long, long history of the gradual progression of this tale from Christopher Isherwood‘s collection of short stories about the decline and fall of Weimar Germany between the wars, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), through a stage play, I Am a Camera (1951), a 1966 musical, Cabaret, a movie made of the musical, and two landmark stage revisions of the musical (all three versions are still being separately licensed), is almost too tortuous to contemplate. It’s a safe bet that any performance one sees today will draw elements from more than one staging.

The Olney production is no exception. According to the program, it pledges its fealty to the 1998 Roundabout Theatre “co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall,” based on the 1993 Sam Mendes revision. Marshall did take some liberties with the Mendes version. But if my own recollection of the Marshall version is correct, director Alan Paul and choreographer Katie Spelman, at the helm of this production, are taking liberties with Roundabout, and reintroducing things Roundabout eliminated. Is all that clear?

Well, let me give a couple of specifics. In the latest iteration, cabaret singer Sally Bowles has reacquired musical talent. Isherwood was clear that she’s not a great singer. When the spellbinding singer Liza Minelli in the movie put her imprint on the role, however, that approach necessarily became toast. But then, when Mendes put Natasha Richardson into Sally’s silk stockings, Sally’s lack of talent was restored as an important element of the characterization. Now, though, in a swing back to the movie, Alexandra Silber‘s Sally sings a lot like Liza, requiring some plot readjustment.

And then there’s the matter of Cliff’s sexual orientation. In the first Cabaret, unlike Isherwood, for whom Cliff was a stand-in, Cliff was straight. In Mendes’ version he’s apparently a closet case. Here, the evidence suggests he’s bisexual. What these permutations say about his relationship with Sally necessarily varies in consequence.

Then, moving on from sexual orientation to gender identity, what’s happened to the Emcee? Mendes dressed his Emcee (Alan Cumming) in a bare chest and suspenders, coming across as distinctly gay but also distinctly male. Park, however, who has been described as having “a penchant for drag roles,” spends every moment onstage in one degree of drag or another, of which the photo above gives a representative view. And indeed, in keeping with that change, the distinction between the chorines (collectively in the program “The Kit Kat Girls”) and the choristers (collectively “The Kit Kat Boys”) often disappears; frequently one has to look very closely to determine which platoon any dancer belongs to. This Kit Kat Club is trying much harder to cultivate an air of what in the Thirties was taken to be decadence.

So it’s not accurate to describe this rendering as simply the Mendes/Marshall version. It is trying to go further. It is trying to punch harder. And I’d have to say that it succeeds. The erotic anger that comes boiling up from this ensemble is hotter than I’ve seen before. It raises the stakes in the clash between the collective id of the Kit Kat crew and the destructive malice of the Nazis that forms the main backbone of the plot. The Kit Kat performers may be going down, but until they do, they will push all limits and let nothing stop them. They will enjoy their freedom until (as the conclusion makes plain will occur) that freedom is literally gassed out of their bodies.

Olney’s Artistic Director Jason Loewth writes of a paradox I’ve felt: that though, in his words “Cabaret is one of those ‘evergreen titles’, a classic suitable for just about any moment,” nonetheless “somehow this moment feels particularly apt for Kander and Ebb’s story of the rise of Nazism, and the people who turned a blind eye as entire populations were victimized and ultimately killed. At this moment, with a new kind of tribalism in vogue, and governments across the globe minting new ways to label some tribes as outcasts …, this musical takes on more and more complex layers of meaning.” Exactly correct. Most of us may not be defying this horrifying turn of world events by embracing performative “decadence,” but nonetheless Kit Kat speaks for us and to us.

It is in light of this newfound relevance that we must assess the actions of the characters, most especially Sally. Cliff, who in his naïve project of coming to Berlin to write a novel demonstrated a lack of sophistication, “gets it” by the end, and draws a beating in consequence from Nazi thugs before he leaves. Whatever his state of mind, he’s at least morally okay. Sally, on the other hand, refuses to view matters through a political lens when that is the only lens that will render an accurate view. Is she a naif or merely too frightened to look closely for fear of what she might see? Either way, I think Mendes was correct in restoring to Sally the lack of talent Isherwood gave her; hence current director Alan Paul is in error for revising Mendes. Of course it is fun to have songs like Mein Herr and Cabaret performed in bravura fashion by a singer who can belt like Liza (which is a fair tribute to Alexandra Silber), but it is better to show mediocre life choices as the product of mediocrity. Sally should not be choosing to stay in Germany because of her artistic success; she should be staying there because only there can she succeed (for a while at least) at being second-rate. The staging of the conclusion in some versions suggests that Sally will not be exterminated with most of the other Kit Kat performers; I looked in vain for something similar in the somewhat confusing equivalent moments of this rendering. It would have rung true; Sally may be free with her favors, but she does not associate sexual liberty with defiance of authoritarianism the way her fellow-performers implicitly do; rather she canoodles with Nazis indiscriminately. That kind of choice might explain her being spared.

As it is, theatergoers will have to take this production with these choices baked in, but fortunately they leave ample scope for the show to dazzle. From the moment one walks into the Mainstage auditorium, one will be aware of Wilson Chin‘s imposing set, featuring Cabaret‘s traditional mirror facing the audience, in this case fan-shaped with an etched-in deco design, in front of which the musicians sit, in a room decked with crystal chandeliers and a staircase that will be illuminated when the dancers arrive leading down from the orchestra podium to the audience, and it is clear we are in for a superbly-presented spectacle. And as soon as the Emcee comes in with a distinctive take on Wilkommen,the grand introduction of the dancers and orchestra, presented with a delivery that frequently lands Park half-a-beat behind the other Emcees we may hear in our mind’s ear and shifts the emphases, and changes the lyrics slightly, we know we are set for an experience that will not just be thrilling but distinctive as well.

Owing, I think, to things I’ve already mentioned, the topicality of the show at this particular moment and the anger I sense just below the eroticism of the show-within-the-show, I found the arrival of the Nazis in the action more shocking than usual. The first reveal of a swastika, though we know exactly when and where it’s coming, gave me chills which just got worse with the reprise of Tomorrow Belongs to Me, a patriotic song that turns into a fascistic one. As the story devolved into a nightmare, and the bullies took over, and the swastikas multiplied, I kept gasping. It all feels too close to home.

And keeping us gasping is what Cabaret in all of its incarnations has always been about. Gasping at the opulence, gasping at the decadence, gasping at the heedlessness and the horror. It is intentionally strong stuff, and if it delivers, then it succeeds. And by that yardstick, this version, whatever it may or may not owe to its predecessors, is a smashing success.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Photo credit: Jack L. B. Gohn

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

The Guys Are Alright: SUPPORT GROUP FOR MEN at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 12, 2019

If you’re taking in more than one of the shows at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, and you can arrange to see Ellen Fairey‘s Support Group for Men last, you should do so. It will send you away happy. There is nothing profound or challenging in this show: just a well-crafted and very funny comedy of manners, specifically the manners of the male of Species Homo Americanus, youthful to mid-life, as observed in a middle-class Chicago habitat.

On Thursday evenings, four specimens of the species gather in the apartment of one of them, Brian (Chris Thorn), to engage in rituals and bear witness to each other’s testimonies. The rituals center around a faux-Native American “talking stick” (pictured above), which entitles its holder to the floor. When the holder announces his intent to speak, the others respond “We are here to listen.” And at the conclusion of the testimony, the hearers respond with a “slap/clap/chest thump/grunt” signifying that the speaker has been heard. (Trust me, you’ll see this several times in the course of the show, and it will keep cracking you up.) Yet for all the ceremony surrounding the testimonies, they tend, by design, to be the least important or interesting parts of the show. Most of the real business of the gathering happens in those moments between – and in dealing with what bubbles up from the alleyway below.

The Chicago neighborhood where all this happens is filled with bars, hence with people being raucous and obnoxious, people having sex, people spray-painting the walls – and in various ways being so loud the members of the group find themselves leaning out the window to trade insults and (occasionally) drop wine and even vegetables on them. But the alley can send things back up. It sends Alex (Rolando Chusan), a cross-dresser with a truly horrible red wig and a concussion, fleeing violence and police attention below. And it sends two cops (Julia Coffey and Tom Coiner) who come to investigate and then don’t exactly leave, at least not in a conclusive way. In the midst of all this, Brian and his compatriots Roger (Scott Aiello), Delano (Ken Robinson), and Kevin (Juan Arturo) get on each other’s cases, provide feedback, help each other out with their respective lives – and (once some rare super-powerful Mexican weed is introduced into the proceedings) go on an epic trip. (The stage effects accompanying that trip, care of scenic and projection designer David Barber, are on beyond magnificent, a trip in themselves.)

In a coda on a Thursday evening four months later, we are shown how everyone’s life has moved on, influenced in one way or another by that somewhat pivotal night, and mostly for the better. The audience will have seen from the first that for all the bluff talk and the hijinks, these guys really do look out for each other. Fairey has commented that some audience-members are perturbed that the portraits of the men are positive, “feel[ing] like men don’t deserve a warm-hearted story.” And indeed, anyone looking for a negative take on these characters is simply going to be disappointed. (They may find A Welcome Guest, also playing at the Festival, a pretty thorough takedown of patriarchal attitudes, more to their liking.)

My take is that the disappointment behind that criticism is more a matter of feeling that Fairey, a female playwright, has abandoned her post at a time when women are doing so much work to interrogate the ways and roles of men, particularly (as here) straight, cis-gender men, who have always had playwrights willing to reinforce their sense of self-worth, whether earned or not. I’m thinking of Neil Simon, for example, and The Odd Couple, a play that bears some resemblances to this one – although I’d argue that the contrasts in attitude between that play and Support Group outweigh the similarities. The biggest contrast may be the characters’ openness here to hold their own views up to scrutiny when Alex turns up with his dress and his wig. Every member of the group ends up trying the wig on, and not in a derisive way. Roger, in particular, probably the grouchiest of the group, who is played here with a beard, starts admiring himself in the mirror, and does not take the wig off for a while. And even the character one would consider least likely to deviate from the old macho ways, Officer Nowak, whose initial mind-set seems, let us say, old-school, displays some of the same kind of openness as the others do before all is said and done. Though it may pain some theatergoers to see a female playwright bestowing approval on a considerable number of heterosexual male characters, at least these characters do something to earn it.

This is definitely the feelgood play of this year’s Festival. The laughs are nearly constant, everyone is affirmed, frequently with a “slap/clap/chest thump/grunt,” and there are happy endings for all, including the audience. So see it last.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

Photo credit: Seth Freeman

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review