The Big Picture and the Closeup

For a weightless and elegant good time, it would be hard to beat The Full Catastrophe, by Michael Weller, at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. There is not one thing in the story to tether it to reality, or trouble us with any true sense of its characters being in any kind of jeopardy, and the presentation of the whole farrago, under Ed Herendeen’s direction, is smooth and amiable. This play is best consumed at the end of one’s visit to this year’s Festival, after sampling the weightier and more nutritional fare.

The overall effect is a bit like a fireworks display, with loud fun things happening more or less continually. It is not profound, a quality seldom looked for in shaggy dog stories, but the tale at its heart, a whimsical family drama, is sturdy enough, and perhaps the place where a more genuine feminism is lurking than may be found in the odd evocation of fashion.

The action, from the shadowy world of religious cults and deprogrammers, takes place in the ruins of a derelict motel, where distraught mother Kate (Tasha Lawrence) has been brought by Stine (Lee Sellars), a supposed specialist in reuniting abandoned parents with cult-brainwashed youngsters. Stine intends (so he says) to abduct Kate’s daughter from the cult’s commune and work with her here. The shockingly scuzzy room tells us immediately is that something is terribly wrong with Kate and Stine’s scheme. So does a financial fact revealed in the early going. In the course of the play, we find out what that something and several other somethings are.

The success of PUSSY RIOT rests upon what author Barbara Hammond gets right. This includes a recreation of an actual Pussy Riot provocation/performance; excerpts from the Russian government’s show trial which rely largely on the actual words of the defendants, lawyers, and judge; and the language and attitudes of the authorities, especially the police and the judiciary, which are notorious. And overarching these, the show nails the crisis of authority and legitimacy for the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church a crisis the Pussy Riot protestors helped exacerbate for a while to an acuteness sharper than even the play conveys.

Whitney and Max have been compelled by their mental disorders to turn their backs on the real world, and on the actual human connections available to them with friends and family, to obsess instead about imaginary worlds of their own making. But for each of them, their world, however artistic and creative, is also of a place of some danger. When medicine begins to cure them, they must compare the value of a sane life with love but without creativity and an insane life with creativity but without love.

The Pillow Book takes off from the current vogue of non-consecutive story-telling; everyone wants to emulate the mystification of Pulp Fiction, with its sudden reveals of not only what will happen, but of what did happen. And recently there has been an additional vogue, which I call Cubistic story-telling, in which the characters and their lives turn out multiple ways, without an authoritative single story line. The approaches can also be combined. Such works always make the viewer struggle to follow the conflicting and shuffled storylines, but seldom leave the viewer in the dust. The dust, however, is where Anna Moench’s The Pillow Book will leave you. The more is the pity. Anna Moench writes beautifully, and the acting and directing in this collaboration of two interesting fringe companies is uniformly good. But the conflicting storylines shred each other.

There is a kind of magic which will exorcise the problems of Blithe Spirit, and let us not notice them. This production cruises and coasts on the farcical elements and the bickering and Mme. Arcati’s eccentricities, and in so doing it certainly keeps the audience laughing. But it does not dispel the sour taste engendered by Coward’s acerbic view of genteel British marriage lingering at the end.

There are times it’s hard to credit that 1776 is even a musical. In this retelling of the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, there is some singing and some dancing, and even some laughs, but little effort to follow the tried-and-true path to rousing musical success. This is fundamentally a tale of a group of men sitting in a room debating, and Peter Stone, author of the book, gives us – a group of men sitting in a room debating. And yet the work has considerable power and appeal, and it is not strange either that it won the Tony for Best Musical in 1969, or that Toby’s has revived it.

Even though the historical Marley was probably mainly thinking about apartheid when he sang these words, you could not possibly sing them on a Baltimore stage these days without making the audience think of events closer to home. Bob Marley, very self-consciously a prophet, sang for his moment, but he sang as well for the ages, which includes our own. Center Stage could not have bought Bob Marley’s topicality, but it could earn it, and did. One could believe it really was Marley up there, singing right to us.

In the end, Lorca’s rebellion against an ethos which says no to so much human feeling and sexual passion, which gives such veto power to unthinking conventionality and religious diktat, states a timeless theme. That does not mean that every aspect of Lorca’s articulation of that rebelliousness is equally timeless He may have had one foot in Brechtian agitprop, according to the conventions of which Bernarda could be a two-dimensional villain, Cruella de Vil in a mantilla. That dated kind of oversimplification is the most important thing a modern production must rescue Lorca and the play from. Bernarda too is a victim, whether Lorca fully understood it or not himself.