Lisa D‘Amour‘s play “Detroit” is a dark metaphor for the disintegration of American society. The acting is very good, and Annie Kauffman‘s direction is sharp and gritty, but this script sometimes appears almost like a TV melodrama. It‘s as if a “big idea” was slapped on top of a roiling personal and social drama.
The irony is that what has been described as the theater of the absurd is so real. Eugène Ionesco‘s “Rhinocéros” is a brilliant description of how people succumb to and collaborate with authoritarian regimes. In his art, there is a numbing truth.
French director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who runs the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, has given a dazzlingly staging at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Romanian playwright Ionesco‘s 1959 masterpiece about how ordinary people let themselves be led and manipulated till they turn into thugs and fascists. And how the most ordinary among them can shed his humanity and intellect — or find solitary courage.
It‘s the late 1930s, in Charleston, South Carolina‘s Catfish Row where the poverty of the Depression seems permanent. Clara (Nikki Renée Daniels) cradling her infant, and her husband Jake the fisherman (the charming Joshua A. Henry) thrill you to the bones with “Summertime.”
The poor black residents eke out a living fishing, picking cotton and hawking goods to housewives. They go to church a lot. Sometimes they have a lively good time at picnics. The men, looking for excitement and quick riches, gamble on dice. Their wives struggle to keep them responsible.
Horton Foote‘s “Blind Date,” set in 1928 in the imaginary Harrison, Texas, was written in 1985 and examines the southern marriage mart of the earlier years through the prism of feminism. The first and best of three one-act plays by Foote being presented by Primary Stages, it pits a bright young woman, who likes books and Rudy Vallée songs, against boring gentlemen callers, in this case one who, as a conversation gambit, recites all the books of the Bible in a minute. She (smartly) disappears upstairs.
It‘s always good timing for a play about ruthlessness and skullduggery in politics, but none better than this year when the Romney campaign has raised it to outsized proportions. The essence of Gore Vidal‘s riveting political satire, which premiered in March 1960, is the corruption of the system. Vidal ran for Congress in Westchester County, NY, (alas, he didn‘t win), so he got closer to politics than other playwrights. He also nails the mainstream press for its gullibility and stupidity.
If Clifford Odets had written a musical for the Group Theater, it would have been “Newsies.” The author of the militant “Waiting for Lefty,” with its moving chorus of “Strike, Strike!,” lives in spirit in Harvey Fierstein‘s play about young exploited workers who rebel against the corporate boss.
At a time when trade unions are beaten down by the big-money people who run our country, it is thrilling to see a play that celebrates the struggle of worker to get decent pay. And especially a reminder of how corporate magnates would and did exploit children if they could. So, cheers to Fierstein for writing the book of this play. At the performance I attended, the enthusiastic reaction of the middle class audience (who could afford the tickets) shows that his message is well received. That is a story that hasn‘t been reported.
He‘s silly, he‘s clever, he‘s outrageous, and James Corden dominates the stage as the sometimes bumbling Brit who ends up working for a criminal and a thug, neither of whom must meet each other or know of his connection to them. And neither of whom are quite what they seem. One, Roscoe Crabb, the gumshoe, turns out to be his sister (Jemima Rooper), as Roscoe has been murdered by the other, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).
Delightfully clever and funny, the musical lark “Sister Act” is feminist as well. It revolves around the tribulations of Deloris Van Cartier (a smashing Patina Miller when I saw it, now Raven-Symoné), who does a raunchy, gyrating “Take Me to Heaven” number in a nightclub run by her hoodlum boyfriend Curtis Jackson (Kingsley Leggs). But after she decides to leave him, she sees him shoot a suspected informer. Fearful of what he might do to her, she races away to the police. Indeed, the gangster orders his men to find and kill her. But the cop (Chester Gregory), who turns out to be an old school chum, hides her out at a convent.
“Harvey” is a cute fantasy for adults produced in 1944, a difficult era when some Americans were perhaps considering the meaning of life in the wake of the horrors of war. It was a time when a sermon of how to live the right life, proposing simple goodness against social climbing, could win a Pulitzer Prize for its author Mary Chase. That wouldn‘t happen today: there are no hard edges even in the work‘s social criticism.The play lacks bite.
This witty, pointed, clever play, which opened on Broadway in 1947, was written by Martha Gellhorn, ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway, and by Virginia Cowles. Both were journalists who had met covering the Spanish Civil War and then chronicled the Nazi assaults in Europe and North Africa. Their alter-egos, Jane Mason (Angela Pierce) and Annabelle Jones (Heidi Armbruster) have arrived at an Allied press camp near Naples in February 1944 to cover the campaign against German forces in Italy.
The original title of this play was to be “Sleeping Demon.” In the script, a preacher (Ron Cephas Jones) says, “Conscience is a sleeping demon.” In this third of John Patrick Shanley‘s trilogy called Church and State, which began with “Doubt” and “Defiance” about tough moral choices, he deals with the bankers who foreclose on mortgages and a local politician whose attempt to save a constituent‘s home is compromised by the fact his mother co-signed the mortgage and the bank CEO wants his approval for a $300-million shopping mall.
Kenneth Lonergan‘s spoof historical drama is a weird, funny, outrageous cartoon commentary on the bloody cruelty and crudeness of the 14th century, with subtle suggestions that “plus Òa change….” The language of the characters – mercenaries, nobles, high-ranking clerics – shifts between the “thee, thou” we expect medievals to talk, to pretentious academic locutions to the modern vernacular, including teen-speak, and the vocabulary of beer-drinking men, except that the women use as many four-letter words.
Curious how the sounds and sights of Elizabethan madrigals and forests of the turn of the 17th century work just fine with a country bluegrass touch. The rough and tumble of courtly wrestling is transplanted easily to a timbered stockade, and men chasing women in the woods exhibit quite the raw way to romance. Nor are family feuds unknown in either place.
Maybe it’s because I expect religious music to be, well, religious that I enjoyed the moralistic, be a good person “Godspell,” loved the lively, jivey singing and dancing, and didn’t seriously notice till the final crucifixion scene that the parables belong to the Christian God story. Appealing Hunter Parrish, who plays Jesus with a cowlick, looks like one of the Beach Boys, and the motley crew he interacts with, representing ordinary folks, look like, well, ordinary folks, in all shapes, colors and sizes.
Amy Herzog‘s play is a moody piece about connections between generations that sometimes has broken synapses but also lights up pathways that remind us of the value of family links. Of the sort you can depend on when everything else disintegrates.
For Leo (Gabriel Ebert), 21, most of his emotional connections are broken. He is estranged from his parents and his girlfriend. He‘s just been on a cross country bike trip where, we learn mid-way through, his biking buddy has died in a freak road accident. So apparently, faute de mieux, with nowhere else to turn, he ends up late one night at the West Village apartment of his grandmother, Vera Joseph (Mary Louise Wilson), an 80-something left-winger (pro-Cuba and pro-peace), whose sharp intelligence only occasionally runs into the potholes of the ravages of age.
It‘s agitprop, and it‘s powerful. In Athol Fugard‘s tradition of very political plays, this theatrical metaphor about South African racism is first didactic, but then it takes off so that you think, well, yes, this is a rather obvious political statement, but it‘s also a dramatic truth.
John Lithgow is perfectly cast as Joseph Alsop, the venomous, fanatically anti-communist newspaper columnist who built a career off his access and influence with U.S. presidents and politicians. But as David Auburn’s play shows, he was not a garden variety right-winger. Auburn (Proof) adds depth and subtlety to the character by highlighting his contradictions. He had the courage to oppose the vicious Senator Joseph McCarthy, though it’s not clear here why.
The house in Brooklyn seems ramshackle. Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) enters it slowly, wearily, pushing through the dreary light, carrying two leather cases that seem weighted down more with his angst than with anything he could be carrying. It is Hoffman‘s best moment in the play. For the rest, he portrays Loman too much on one note, in a voice too raucous that doesn‘t quite give us the sense of tragedy Arthur Miller intended. Or maybe I‘m remembering the superb Brian Dennehy in the role in 1999. And director Mike Nichols has put together a cast that doesn’t quite come together.
A luscious feast for the soul, “The Big Meal” by Dan Le Franc is a simple but charming, sometimes lighthearted, sometimes serious family drama with four pairs of males and females playing characters as they age through 80 years and four generations. The notion is simple and might be a bit schmaltzy, but under Sam Gold‘s crisp direction, it is smart and sensitive.
It‘s the American frontier in the late 1800s. The wood cabin set is probably too burnished to resemble the shabbier wood of the time, but you get the idea. What is surprising is that setting Shakespeare‘s play in a time and place when women were extremely independent and self-reliant, director Arin Arbus – a woman – has given it an egregiously sexist staging.
The Signature Theater Company revival of Edward Albee‘s 1977 play is subtle and biting at the same time, an allegory wrapped in what could have been a dark neighbors sitcom.
The party Sam (a sensitive Michael Hayden) and Jo (a tough and powerful Laila Robins) are hosting in their suburban house for some friends seems pretty deadly. How can they be having a party when Jo, curled up in an easy chair, is dying of a cancer which occasionally sets her to writhing in pain. She sets it out pretty clear, pretty early: “I am your wife and I am dying.”
Monica Bauer‘s play about jazz and race, presented by Urban Stages, is a finely polished gem. Inspired by the playwright‘s youth in Omaha, Nebraska, it is a love song to jazz and its ability to unite people across color lines and also a sorrowful memoir of the time in the sixties when racism erupted into riotous violence. Director Frances Hill uses frequent jazz passages and projections (by Kevin R. Frech) to create mood and reality in an intimate space.
In almost a chamber concert of a play, memory and fantasy intrude in Tina Howe‘s drama of a family in which the parents are in decline from their artistically productive years and the daughter is moving up. Her feelings for them are part love and part resentment at what she sees as their self-centered interference with her own artistic development and triumphs.
Annabella (Lydia Wilson), a young woman in black leggings, puts on rock music and dances to it. Wilson plays her as she might an insouciant high-fashion model. Men in suits come on the stage prancing, knees jutting up to the disco beat.
This is Parma and a bloody story of incest and revenge will be told, though not exactly as 17th-century author John Ford had in mind. It‘s a stunning campy melodrama by Britain‘s inimitable Cheek by Jowl company.
For me the most shocking moment in Katori Hall’s play, Hurt Village, was when two grungy teens amuse themselves with a nasty rap in which they cruelly and crudely insult each other and their families. In this down-at-the-heels housing project in Memphis, even these kids’ amusement is mean and self-destructive. Forget about normal civility. The people we meet address each other as nigger, bitch, and mother fucker.
