I’m happily facing a summer in which I’m multitasking several theatre writing contracts and deadlines, so I have to be short and sweet (or not-so-sweet as appropriate) reviewing; so forgive me taking the round up route.
The Elaborate Entrance of
Chad Deity by Kristoffer
Diaz, set in the world of pro wrestling,
is a great and glorious multi-media roller coaster ride with a hip sense of
humor, an equally sharp sense of irony, an excellently told story, crisp
direction and a fine cast. It’s the tale of Macedonia Guerra, aka “Mace” (Desmon
Borges), a young Hispanic wrestler who’s
an old hand at the staged fight game (it’s all showbiz in which no one’s
supposed to actually get hurt) but whose career is ever to be The
Guy The Champion Beats Up. In this case, the Champion is African American Chad
Deity (Terence Archie), who has
physique, charisma and high octane celebrity skills but can’t actually wrestle
worth a damn. But Mace meets Vingeshwar Paduar (Usman Ally),
a young Indian street athlete with an interesting
energy and persona to inject into the game, and sees a way to up the
status of them both. Mace introduces Vingeshwar to Everett K. Olsen (Michael T.
Weiss) his sly, unctious wheeler dealer
boss—both creator and host of a hit TV show called THE Wrestling—and
after selling the
idea, against all odds, of them as a team being the next challengers
for Chad's title, finds he has a tiger by the tail when Vingeshwar
starts
thinking for himself.
Caveats
about the play? Only one, really. The ending seems a little more downbeat than
warranted by the giddy exuberance of the rest of the evening; I think the
author could have made his point as well from another angle. But this is a
nonetheless swell play, with exhilarating direction by Edward Torres, that deserves a Broadway transfer.
Restoration,
by and starring Claudia Shear, at the New
York Theatre Workshop,
is a dandy little
romantic comedy in which the romance is primarily platonic but no less
heartfelt for all that. It's about New Yorker Giulia, a plain-looking
woman whose profession is restoring antiques—via meticulous,
non-invasive cleaning—to their original beauty; and who, thanks to a
forgotten proposal, finds herself up for the high
profile job of restoring Michaelangelo's David at the Academia Gallery
in
Florence, Italy. She is not at first a slam dunk for the gig; within
her
profession she is as famously abrasive as her cleaning solutions are
famously not, and this job in particular requires a
diplomatic touch, not only among museum personnel, but in front of the
press. But of course she does get the job, and of course her personality becomes a
factor, and of course, over the year in which the play takes place, the ice
between her and her colleagues thaws and they all learn a thing or three about
each other. However standard the old trope is, though, it's sturdy too,
delivered with humanity, warmth and wit. That it's all under the direction of Christopher
Ashley seems to attest further (along with
the current Broadway hit Memphis) that he has turned a corner
with regard to his capacity for delivering on a deeper level, adding
subtler, naturalistic colors to his palatte. He has guided Ms. Shear and her co-stars (Tina
Benko, Alan Mandell, Natalija Nogulich and especially Jonathan Cake as a dashing, secretly sensitive security
staffer)—or perhaps simply let them find their way, which is as good in
the directing game—toward highly affecting, nicely nuanced performances.
This one too might well be a credible candidate for Broadway transfer.
That Face written a few years ago by British playwright Polly
Stenham when she was a mere 19, to become
a significant West End hit, has been imported to New York care of The
Manhattan Theatre Club, where it’s
currently in residence. It’s a dysfunctional family play—the members
being a substance-abusing divorced mother (Laila Robins), her too-devoted teenage son (Christopher
Abbott) (the playwright keeps vague
whether or not the relationship has actually ever veered into incest), his
younger teenage sister who “acts out” her rage at school (Cristin
Miloti)…and the estranged father (Victor
Slezak). There have been so many bleak
plays recently where what seems a random collision of pathologies is packaged
as entertainment that That Face runs the risk of being lumped in
with them. It’s not an easy two hours to sit through. And the fact that it is a
compelling two hours (under the direction of Sarah Benson) is not necessarily an inducement, because
depraved, deranged behavior can be compelling even in a bad play—human
nature is to find it so. But in the end, That Face is about broken characters trying to
struggle toward some kind of light, and that’s the redemptive factor; that and
the playwright having unusually mature control and insight for her then-age.
Happily too, the unhappiness of That Face is well acted and
directed. As to whether or not you want to spend time in the company of its
troubled clan—I must leave that up to you.
Playwright-director Adam Rapp is no stranger to pathology (or depravity)—I mean as a storyteller—and both hover about The Metal Children, at the Vineyard. It’s about the famous author of what has become an iconic book for young readers—and terribly controversial, as it ends with the young girl who is its main character giving herself an abortion and dying at the feet of someone judgmental and uncaring. And in a Southern town, a cult has formed around this book, leading to the similar death of a real child. In Mr. Rapp’s play, the author (Billy Crudup) travels from NYC to discuss the book with members of the community, which he does in his hotel room and at a town meeting.
It’s difficult to know what to make of this play. While Mr. Rapp has himself has authored a few YA books, and was inspired by a controversy in which one of his own was banned in a Southern community, his main character’s description of the YA publishing game doesn’t jibe with that of any YA scribe I’ve ever known (and I know more than a fair share), nor is the book that’s described one that would find a place in any YA publishing program I’ve ever heard of. (If Mr. Rapp’s own YA books are indeed as dark and heedless of marketplace realities as those of his stand-in hero, then their publication circumstances have to be so idiosyncratic as to throw the verisimilitude of the play into question.) Even on its own terms, the play is an odd intertwining of threads: some follow pathological angst—which includes a pig-masked, author-stalking, knife-wielding assailant—and a very familiar template: the superior-minded Outsider who comes to understand the Real Folk a little better; as they in turn—variously—see different sides to him.
So
while there’s a convincing verité to the acting and dialogue, and while the
goings-on are compelling and at times unsettlingly hypnotic—as usual in a
Rapp play—somehow, as an exploration of interesting issues, The Metal
Children doesn’t feel like the real deal.
An adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, that
has very successfully played NYC before in various venues (as well
as regionally), is making a renewed appearance at the Westside Theatre
on 43rd
Street; but for all the accolades it has received, I find it a
disquieting
entry. Lewis, arguably the most influential Christian writer of the
20th
Century, conceived the original short book as a treatise on the nature
of sin and
redemption, in the form of letters from an executive demon, Screwtape,
to one
of a lower order, his nephew Wormwood, who has been assigned to bring a
particular “patient” into the fold of Hell, away from Christianity and
morality—with severe consequences to Wormwood should he fail. The
wordplay is witty in a Shavian/Wilde-like manner, as Screwtape’s
upside down view of the universe is used to ironic effect, and pithy
observations are made—for example: if you get the patient to take pride
in a selfless act, you mitigate the selflessness with the sin of
self-satisfaction—but in the end, The Screwtape Letters is still a Christian tract, meant to sermonize and proselytize (however ironically), if not overtly to recruit and convert;
and once its premise is established, and the first few letters “delivered” (in
all senses of the word), it can only spin variations on a repetitive theme.
The
saturnine, dinner-jacketed grandeur of star co-adapter/co-director Max
McLean—who puts one in mind of the
British actor and voice-over man Tony Jay (he perhaps most visible in the
States for the role of the similarly malevolent Paracelsus in the ‘80s romantic
fantasy TV series Beauty and the Beast)—certainly commands
stage impressively, as he prowls and paces and ponders; with feral “commentary”
(vocalized but non-verbal) from his imp assistant Toadpipe (the adorably spiky-tempered and
gremlin-like Karen Eleanor Wight,
replete with full-body fur); but there comes a point where, no matter what your belief system, you may tire of the
ideological game and its agenda of bringing you into
the fold of He that Screwtape calls “the enemy.” My companion of the
evening suggested that the show might be better suited to the Christian
theatre circuit, and I agree it's well suited; but with C.S. Lewis
you're dealing with world literature, not merely popular evangelical
fiction, like the Left Behind series…so lines of demarcation are hard to define—and probably very personal. Co-direction and co-adaptation are by Jeffrey
Fiske.