Pig
Farm by Greg Kotis
A Stone Carver by William
Mastrosimone
Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise
The Water's Edge by Theresa
Rebeck
The Busy World is Hushed by
Keith Bunin
The House in Town by
Richard Greenberg
Satellites by Diana Son
School of the Americas by
Jose Rivera
While Aisle Say was temporarily inactive, I personally was not,
and amassed a backlog of events to report on. So here they are: the ones still
running, for dwellers in NYC and environs; and the ones just closed, for the
record and for the regionals to consider.
Still Running
Pig Farm by Urinetown co-author Greg Kotis at the Roundabout's Laura Pels space is, it seems, a spoof on
latter-day Tennessee Williams -- taking Southern characters trapped by
livelihood, culture and circumstance in a locale where nature is unforgiving
and pent-up sexual energy is likely to explode. In this case, the title
describes the setting.
Either
the Roundabout reserved a guaranteed slot for "the new Greg Kotis
play" in progress or Pig Farm's familiar comic tropes (characters whose one-syllable
names all start with the same letter, death scenes that stretch out forever as
"corpses" come back for one more "final" word, Grand
Guignol excess for the sake of shock) were way funnier on paper than they are in
the playing. And the players are John Ellison Conlee, Katie Finneran, Denis O'Hare and Logan Marshall Green, under the direction of John
Rando. All
people who understand funny, and key into the genre being satirized -- yet
despite their best efforts, the play remains spectacularly unfunny. And I think
that's because the tropes are familiar -- they're sketch comedy stuff, the vocabulary
of compactness, and the attenuation of the premise into two acts dilutes the
irreverent naughtiness; and with the characters being caricatures, we don't
invest all that much in their humanity or their crises, as they only exist to
perpetuate the next joke. Pig Farm is a conspicuous and tiring misfire.
A Stone Carver is a 10-year old play by William
Mastrosimone,
but it's new to NYC, and terribly welcome. Set in the 1970s, it focuses on
Augustino (Dan Lauria), the title character, a crusty old first-generation
Italian-American who refuses to leave his home despite an order of eminent
domain by the town, which wants to build a highway off-ramp. His son (Jim
Lorio) comes to
visit after a long estrangement, his fiancˇ (Elisabeth Rossa) in tow, hoping to finesse him
into seeing reason. But Augustino doesn't finesse so easy.
Though
not a perfect play, it's nonetheless a lovely comedy-drama about a seemingly
impossible family rift trying to heal. The role of Augustino demands a
charismatic, virtuoso performance, and Dan Lauria gives that in spades. The
roles played by Mr. Lorio and Ms. Rossa are less memorable (they're a little
more nakedly functional, foils for the star) but they acquit themselves nicely
under the direction of Robert Kalfin. Thus far, A Stone Carver is the best "general
audience" bet of the summer.
A cast
who grew up in South Africa during the years of apartheid tell stories of their
youth: stories of hunger, prejudice, family dysfunction, street violence -- yet
in such a way as to find a way toward healing through re-enactment and
understanding. This is the concept fueling Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise currently at The Culture Project. It's not a perfect evening: it
takes a while to get past the feeling of being schematic -- each cast member
has a story and they're told one at a time -- and not all stories are written
equally well. But the gestalt here is more important and powerful than fine
detail of that nature. Relying on minimal props, mime, word and suggestion to
create its complex world, Amajuba will have appeal for all who seek insight into other
cultures and/or thrive on theatre that engages your imagination as an active
collaborator. The piece is created and directed by Yael Farber and written in collaboration
with the cast members, Tshallo Chokwe, Roelf Matlala, Bongeka Mpongwana, Phillip Tindisa and Jabulile Tshabalala.
Closed
The Water's Edge by Theresa Rebeck at Second Stage was far better than it was
reputed to be, but its tarnished rep is no surprise: Ms. Rebeck did the one
thing playwrights do only at their peril: she shifted gears in the "last
reel." The play told the tale of a divorced, and long estranged, couple
(after a devastating family tragedy that split them apart) on the day when the
ex-husband (Tony Goldwyn) shows up unannounced at the country house where his ex-wife (Kate
Burton) and
grown kids (Mamie Gummer and Austin Lysy) live. He has his new, young girlfriend (Katherine
Powell) in tow.
He says he wants the house back (it was his parents' and legally it is still
his), but really it's a pretext to try starting afresh with those he left
behind. To move on past grief.
Depending
upon how it's delivered, it's a rockin' premise, and Ms. Rebeck dealt it out
with idiosyncratic, interesting characters and events. Had she let it be what
the audience expected -- a family drama like The Subject Was Roses or Long Day's Journey Into
Night or The
Retreat from Moscow or
you-name-it, one that ended happily or sadly but finished as an examination of
recognizeable dynamics -- she might have had a winner, possibly even a hit. But
imagine watching an episode of Gilmore Girls or Seventh Heaven that, in Act Four, suddenly
becomes a dark episode of Night Gallery. Ironically it's not as if she didn't properly
plant her seeds along the way: the shift into the macabre wasn't as jarring as
profoundly disappointing, because something much more interesting had been
happening before the denouement, and there were far more satisfying seeds to
water. Here's hoping she does, in a rewrite for the regionals. The play
deserves it.
The cast
was fine under the direction of Will Frears.
At Playwrights Horizons, The Busy World is Hushed, by Keith Bunin, was a milder disappointment,
but also a milder play. As described in a press release: "Hannah (Jill
Clayburgh), a
minister and bible scholar, finds her faith at odds with that of Thomas (Luke
MacFarlane), her
estranged, wayward son. But when an inquisitive young writer (Hamish
Linklater) hired
to assist Hannah with her latest publication learns painful secrets from
Hannah's past, she spies a risky, unconventional opportunity for
reconciliation." Said opportunity is fixing up the two boys, who are
clearly attracted to one another.
The disappointment came from the
numbing realization that -- and I don't mean this quite the way it sounds --
that this was just another gay play, i.e. another play in which homosexuality
is taken for granted. I don't think we should return to the days of The Boys
in the Band by
any means, nor do I think homosexuality doesn't deserve to be portrayed in a
context of everyday life...but by the same token, it's a thing, it's like ethnicity, if you're going to dramatize it pointedly,
it should be for
a reason that has some universal significance, especially in a play that deals with the
attitude of organized religion. (Showing us the possibility of a liberal-minded
pastor is fine, but that too needs to exist for a reason.)
That aside, it was hard to buy
into. Mom was too liberal
and not quite so selfish as described; and her son a much more unreasoning pain
in the ass than Mr. Bunin meant to portray. So while well acted (under the
direction of Mark Brokaw) it all felt kind of half-baked, beneath its inviting shell.
Richard Greenberg too fell into a similar trap with
his The House in Town at Lincoln Center's Mitzy Newhouse Theatre, set in NYC early in the 20th
Century; but the suggested homosexual relationship that seems to be pursued by a
successful businessman (Mark Harelik) with a young employee (Dan Bittner) is really something quite
different. And when it is finally revealed, his wife (Jessica Hecht) has a reaction that seems
completely out of proportion to her prior behavior in the play. (Say what one
may about Theresa Rebeck's The Water's Edge, at least she did plant her seeds properly, so her
character aberrations were a believable outgrowth of what came before. And I
have to say it, the precise same turnaround Mr. Greenberg employed -- you think
it's this
kind of relationship, but it's that kind -- was delivered to better purpose and more
effectively by the one script Peter Falk actually wrote for the TV series in which
he starred as the sly detective in the rumpled raincoat, Columbo. Called It's All in the Game, its red-herring relationship went
to its female guest stars, Faye Dunaway and Claudia Christian.) Speaking of
Christians, The House in Town delved into matters of anti-Semitism too: the businessman
was Jewish, his wife not. Nicely acted, competently directed (Doug Hughes) this was a fine playwright's
less-than-finest hour. And I wonder if it wasn't an older, heretofore
unproduced work, or idea.
Satellites by Diana Son was a pleasant surprise. About
the challenges faced by an interracial couple who move into a Brooklyn
browstone with their infant child, it could have been melodramatic or cruel or
hopelessly dark, but with all those possibilities hovering, Ms. Son subtly kept
alive threads of reason, humor, love and hope -- so that in the end, it was a
quite optimistic play about -- well let's just use the old clichˇ -- the
triumph of the human spirit. As I think of it now, Satellites managed to balance a number of
related themes, issues and characters representing different points of view in
much the same way as Lorraine Hansberry's not-dissimilar The Sign in Sidney
Brustein's Window did
in the 60s. But that play wore its liberal agenda too much on its sleeve (it
achieved a cult notoriety, but nothing like the success of her first, A
Raisin in the Sun).
But Ms. Son, several decades later, seems to have found the right balance. And
perhaps it doesn't hurt that times have changed and the basic issues are more complex.
Michael Grief directed
a fine cast headed by Sandra Oh and Kevin Carroll as the couple.
School of the Americas by Jose Rivera, a little more recently at the
Public Theatre, is set in Bolivia, postulates an encounter between a young,
idealistic teacher (Patricia Velasquez) and a captured Che Guavera (John Ortiz) who is being held in an
abandoned schoolhouse while the powers of the world negotiate to decide his
fate. An unbalanced mix of melodrama (the teacher at home with her handicapped
older sister, the teacher outside the schoolhouse dealing with the soldiers)
and passionate, Latin-accented, but nonetheless Shavian-style dialectic (the
encounter -- actually two, one in each act), School of the Americas was nonetheless unromanticized
and interesting as a vehicle for ideas about how world politics affect the
seemingly "powerless" individual. Mark Wing-Davey directed.
And that's the round-up.
And there's lots of summer
left...