Time-Tossed Lovers

Review of Constellations, TheaterWorks

What can be less remarkable than a love story as a two-hander play? The premise that, after a meeting in some context or other, two people will create a satisfying narrative arc as we follow the fortunes of their romance is on pretty solid ground. Mostly, the comedy and/or drama comes from the context, which might provide obstacles, or other incentives. “The course of true love never did run smooth” and therein lies the two-hours or less traffic of our stage. The trick, of course, is in making us care about the two, both separately and as a couple. And that can be easier said than done, sometimes.

Roland (M. Scott McLean), Marianne (Allison Pistorius) (photos: TheaterWorks)

In Constellations, Nick Payne does something very clever with the context, yet not so clever as to be a mere gimmick. His lovers, Marianne (Allison Pistorius) and Roland (M. Scott McLean), live not only in the world, governed by linear temporality, of all biological beings, they also live (as do we all, somehow) in the world of subatomic particles where time is not linear and where the unity we find in the notion of “universe” becomes the multiplicity of the “multiverse.” “The game is the same it’s just up on a different level,” as our nation’s most recent Nobel laureate puts it.

But what a difference that makes! As depicted in Constellations, Marianne and Roland’s lives are patterned with non sequitur, where that necessary first meeting—guests at a rainy barbecue—could go any number of ways, and does. Each time, we jump back to the “medias res” of the same conversation. The start, stop, start again rhythm is something we’re all familiar with from instant replay. Here, the fun is seeing how easy it is to bollocks the badinage. One wrong word or a fake laugh or a dropped detail and either person might be on to the next appealing stranger. There is one path at least that will lead to a satisfying night together, but how soon, and on what terms? And, once that happens, there are various paths that fork from that event, including a cute re-meet at a ballroom dance class.

Marianne (Allison Pistorius), Roland (M. Scott McLean)

How momentous intimacy can be in certain lives, and how casual are most interactions is certainly the main social context here. Both Marianne and Roland are kind of “nerdy”—a word which has gone from a complete put-down (like “dork”) to denoting, in the age of technology über alles, a kind of sexy regard for things once thought abstruse. Here, it’s Roland’s status as a bee-keeper, and Marianne’s as a researcher in theoretical cosmology. It’s a cute meet, alright: biology and quantum physics. The man—biology—is the more romantic and takes his bearings from—and even proposes in the terms of—creatures that serve a “queen.” The woman—physics—is more elusive because too brainy for the tedium of linearity. Grand irony (and spoiler) alert: she will come to suffer from biology, soon enough.

Stated like that, it may seem a bit pat, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And Pistorius and McLean, directed—with a sure hand that trusts the audience and doesn’t overplay anything—by Rob Ruggiero, are a treat indeed. They play as Brits and that gives a breeziness to their interactions that helps greatly, particularly as their backgrounds don’t quite jell. It’s a romance that works—in the versions of it that do—because Roland likes being a bit out of his depth and because Marianne is always pleasantly surprised by his efforts. We see how easily either or both might go astray—each gets a jealous scene—and how hard it is to remain together for the long haul.

Roland (M. Scott McLean), Marianne (Allison Pistorius)

The popularity of the play, one suspects, derives from its swiftly delineated scenes and for letting us enjoy the sensation of “let’s try that again” or “Take 2.” And the TheaterWorks production, held over to the 22nd, is handsomely mounted by Jean Kim in a surrounded stage that looks more than a little like a planetarium. In its circle, these two orbit while, in an alcove nearby, Billy Bivona plays live the music of the spheres, so to speak, and the lights overhead work within the rhythms the duo provide. It’s subtle and very satisfying, even when the play has to go for big emotion over romantic comedy.

Roland (M. Scott McLean), Marianne (Allison Pistorius)

One of the things quantum physics tells us, of course, is that time is an illusion and, therefore, there is no real beginning or end. Nice to know, and yet the parts of us that become used to certain relatively stable, long-term molecular arrangements aren’t apt to be so nimble as equations would have us be. Marianne, played with glowing charm and a very deft grasp of several realities by Allison Pistorius, eventually must come to grips with a difficult condition, while Roland is always confronted with having to convince Marianne with his low-key but heartfelt attraction to her. M. Scott McClean makes the most of an average guy-ness that is anything but average. They are well-met as characters and support each other quite well as actors.

In the end, Constellations is a great “date play.” To see it, there’s no time like the present, illusory or not.

Constellations
By Nick Payne
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set Design: Jean Kim; Lighting Design: Philip S. Rosenberg; Sound Design: Michael Miceli; Casting: McCorkle Casting: Assistant Director: Taneisha Duggan; Production Manager: Bridget Sullivan; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth; Sign Language Coach: Laurel Whitsett

Composer/Musician: Billy Bivona

Cast: M. Scott McLean, Allison Pistorius

TheaterWorks
January 18-February 18, 2018, extended to February 22

Glum Waiters

Review of The Dumb Waiter, New Haven Theater Company

Meet Gus (Erich Greene) and Ben (Trevor Williams), two guys hanging out in a basement room, bare but for two cots, that looks like a holding tank. There is a door to a kitchen, and sometimes Gus meanders down the hall to confront the not-quite-adequate range and the task of making tea. Meanwhile, Ben, rather truculent, reads the newspaper, his eye caught by any gory story he can share as an outrage to all good sense. They are waiting for their orders sort of the way that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot. Eventually we catch on: they are flunky hit-men and their next target should be arriving any time now.

Harold Pinter’s early career abounded in testy confrontations that are funny, in a deadpan, absurdist, almost realist way. Remember the chitchat of the hit-men (played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the kinds of critical praise it earned? That kind of thing is a page out of Pinter’s playbook. Except that, in The Dumb Waiter, directed by New Haven Theater Company’s John Watson, we’re not in a work of “pulp,” per se. Nor Pop. We’re in a theatrical tradition that goes back to vaudeville and the English music hall, pitting feckless Anymen, somewhat down but not out, against the affronts to dignity that every clown who ever trod the boards has had to endure (think: Laurel and Hardy). But Ben and Gus also inhabit a recent tradition—Godot was only two years old, in English, when The Dumb Waiter appeared—of dark absurdism and the sense that any system—even one that is violent and pointless and tedious and dumb—is better than nothing. Gus and Ben aren’t exactly “stiff upper lip” material, though they do take pride in their efficiency, and that’s something.

With a playing time of under an hour, Pinter’s script lets its cast take its time. The pacing by Watson and company has a respect for the calculated pauses, drops, and musing boredom that comprises most of this duo’s time on the job. The junior partner though he appears older, Gus is played by Erich Greene as a kind of annoying little brother. Having him on hand means putting up with a ponderous case of the fidgets, emblematized by his first actions: putting on his shoes, laboriously, only to find, repeatedly, that something has gotten into one or the other and must be removed. The sequence sets the tone. These two aren’t too swift, but, after their fashion, they are thorough.

This becomes more and more oddly the case as we see them wrack their brains to deal with a series of messages—orders for food—that get delivered by the play’s titular device. The dumb waiter’s presence makes Ben—who likes to speak with authority whether or not he knows what he’s talking about—assert that this locale was once some sort of café and someone upstairs still thinks it is active. The range of foods requested—Greek dishes, noodles and water chestnuts, Scampi—could almost be seen as cryptic messages, but the pair simply offer what Gus has got in his sack. Their servile aim to please is endearing, and yet there’s a keen menace behind it all—at least, we’re not sure there’s not, and so tension mixes with the silliness.

And that’s the key note of the show. Laughs are always a little uneasy when there are guns on hand. Both Gus and Ben, we see early on, have revolvers and stand ready to use them. Meanwhile there’s the question of how to kill time and what to do with the food orders and, in a mysterious segment, how to react to an envelope of matches that gets slid under the door. The obvious meaning in the packet’s arrival is that it has been supplied by their unseen boss, Wilson, and that the matches are for lighting the range to make tea, but the fact that the gas isn’t working makes the gesture pointless if not a deliberate joke on the hapless duo.

The jokes we’re sure of here are like that, basking in a rich sense of how “things in general” play tricks on us, sometimes quite awful ones, like the newspaper story of a gent who took shelter under a lorry only to have it run over him. We might suspect that there’s a lurking lorry here somewhere, ready to take our heroes unawares—whether in the form of the target, or the boss, or the gas range, or, maybe, Ben’s temper as he berates Gus about the aptness of the expressions “light the gas” and “light the kettle.” It’s enough to make a cat laugh, as Gus says at one point.

In any case, here is a nice kettle of fish to be pickled in. In Gus, Greene has a character that lets him exploit a sad-sack resilience; ill-kempt and beleaguered, his Gus might be more sympathetic if he weren’t so dim. Meanwhile, Williams’ Ben maintains a slow-burn testiness that always threatens to explode, like Abbott at Costello. It's good to see NHTC tackle something dialogue-driven but without the manic tempo of Mamet. The best thing about Pinter’s dialogue is how artfully artless it is, and Greene and Williams deliver it in an invented accent that fluctuates but keeps up the necessary estrangement. These two mates seem mated, for better or worse, and till death do they part.

The Dumb Waiter
By Harold Pinter
Directed by John Watson

Stage Manager/Assistant Director: Margaret Mann; Lights: Peter Chenot; Sound: Drew Gray; Board Op: Ian Dunn

Cast: Erich Greene, Trevor Williams

New Haven Theater Company
839 Chapel Street
February 1-3 & 8-10, 2018

Those Crazy Karamazovs

Review of Field Guide, Yale Repertory Theatre

Are you tired of plays that purport to enact a slice-of-life—a family gathering, two twenty-somethings finding love or not, the hi-jinx that ensue when a mix-matched foursome get together? If “yes,” treat yourself to a viewing of Field Guide by the Austin-based exploratory theater troupe Rude Mechs (short for “rude mechanicals”’—you know, Puck’s epithet for the crew that tries to put on a play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Rude Mechs, in their world premiere show at Yale Repertory Theatre, live up to their name: they deliberately eschew polish for the sake of provocation, creating their own theatrical world with its own rules and its own rewards.

Alyosha (Mari Akita), Dmitri (Lana Lesley), Ivan (Thomas Graves) (photos by Joan Marcus)

And if you’re of a mind to see plays that purport to revisit classics with a contemporary sensibility, you might find Field Guide just your thing or a step beyond. Consider the entertaining hash that Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals” made of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and you’ll be prepared—somewhat—for what the Rude Mechs do to Dostoevsky’s duly celebrated quintessential Russian novel The Brothers Karamazov.

A classic page turner involving patricide, a father-son rivalry over a much admired coquette, a brother-brother rivalry over a rich, prim bourgeois woman, the jaundiced view of a bastard son, and the “spiritual yearning” of a son become religious acolyte, together with a troubled atheist’s parable about how a returned Jesus would be bad for the Church, The Brothers K. is a tour de force of existential quandaries before the “e word” was invented. Rude Mechs keep the unease of Dostoevsky’s work and contribute an off-hand humor by which most elements of the story become excuses for theatrical asides. We’re sort of in the story but also waiting for the story to start even if—as is always the case with novels—it already happened and never happened.

Lowell Bartholomee

The show starts when the troupe—clad in snow parkas—walk into the theater through an exit door. As the Mechs get into preparations behind a curtain, Hannah Kenah, as Hannah, entertains us with the first of several stand-up routines—a later one featured Lowell Bartholomee in a hell of a bear costume. The use of the device not only keeps us at a remove from the “action,” it also creates a loosely confessional atmosphere as the person at the mic indulges in those little moments of truth/fiction that drive the form: “I get my possessiveness and my lack of generosity from my mother. I have my father’s calves.” The themes of family, inheritance, and, particularly, fathers runs through the show.

Smerdyakov (Robert S. Fisher), Fyodor (Lowell Bartholomee)

The main lines of the book are there, snipped up to become routines in a general questioning of life. The sensualist, the intellectual, the religious, the resentful one, the unlovable father, all offer a perspective, and all, like Grushenka, hope they’re not as bad as they seem to be. As with a Chekhov play, everyone has something to add to the picture of dysfunction, though here the characters are apt to be very aware of their theatrical effects.

Fyodor (Lowell Bartholomee), Grigory (Hannah Kenah), Alyosha (Mari Akita), Smerdyakov (Robert S. Fisher), Ivan (Thomas Graves)

This is a Brothers K. in which Alyosha (Mari Akita), the would-be monk, levitates and does an interpretive dance that is spellbinding. This is a Brothers K., in which Smerdyakov (Robert S. Fisher), the bastard, fondles a cat and offers his half-brother Ivan a glass of water, repeatedly. This is a Brothers K. where Ivan (Thomas Graves) hangs out in a hot tub and pontificates about humanity. A Brothers K. in which Dmitri (Lana Lesley), as the voice of Dostoevsky’s belief in the moral value of suffering, attains a surly conscience, and in which Katya (Kenah) is a joke and Grushenka (Kenah) too slight, in which the father, Fyodor (Bartholomee), lacks debauched grandeur and is more testy than overbearing. This is a Brothers K. in which a horned goat-man (Bartholomee) craps on the stage and an ironic bounce castle is an epic fulfillment of impossible longing.

Dmitri (Lana Lesley)

Hannah, back again at the mic late in the play, remarks, “the premise of this joke is that nobody is watching,” and proceeds to elicit the sense of how readers participate in the scenes of the novel in an intrinsic way. It’s an interesting moment that asks us to ask what our watching contributes. What “coming out tonight” to see the show means. In part, it means being witness to much lovely stage business, including choreographed boxes and a quietly evocative lighting design by Brian H. Scott, with rich costumes by Sarah Woodham, and striking tableaux.

Lana Lesley (kneeling), Lowell Bartholomee, Mari Akita, Hannah Kenah, Robert S. Fisher, Thomas Graves

But it also means joining the team for a kind of chastened comedy that at times felt a bit low energy, and musing about what we get from our parents and what we don’t get, and what we owe them and ourselves—keeping in mind that, for some, “our father” might be God. The play takes the condition of those crazy Karamazovs and makes it general, like how frightening the existential dread of the human condition would be if we couldn’t say stupid things about it. And sometimes, as in Hannah Kenah’s text, we get to say quite beautiful and poetic things about it. The universe may not care, but at least we got out of the house.

Dmitri: Maybe life is a long search for meaning that ends in a joke.
Grushenka: And we fall for it every time.

Field Guide
Created by Rude Mechs
Inspired by The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Text: Hannah Kenah; Direction: Shawn Sides; Scenic Design: Eric Dyer: Sound Design: Robert S. Fisher; Original Music: Graham Reynolds; Lighting Design: Brian H. Scott; Costume Design: Sarah Woodham; Production Dramaturgy: Amy Boratko; Stage Management: Bianca A. Hooi; Fight Direction: Rick Sordelet; Technical Direction: Steph Waaser

Cast: Mari Akita, Lowell Barholomee, Robert S. Fisher, Thomas Graves, Hannah Kenah, Lana Lesley

Yale Repertory Theatre
January 26-February 17, 2018

Teacher's Threat

Review of Office Hour, Long Wharf Theatre

With every new mass shooting in the U.S., the media explodes with rhetoric aimed at the problem: gun control, mental health initiatives, the anomie of the modern world, the glorification of violence and the fixation on “the lone gunman,” the purview of hatred toward certain groups or toward “the public” in general, the loss of some basic human decency that formerly kept all but the most psychotic under wraps. Clearly, there’s no single solution to apply in each case—and law works on a case-by-case basis—and legislation, whatever it may achieve as deterrent, can’t address the underlying sickness that, it seems, our culture is unable to cure.

In her brave and provocative play Office Hour, Julia Cho aims to put her audience in the crucible. We will spend an hour, or so, with a well-meaning writing adjunct Gina (Jackie Chung) and a troubled student, Dennis (Daniel Chung), who may be at a crisis point. Time was, we might assume little enough drama happens when a teacher calls a student in for a conference,  now, we may fear the worst.

Gina (Jackie Chung), Dennis (Daniel Chung) (photos: T. Charles Erickson)

In the Long Wharf production, directed by Lisa Peterson, the play’s initial tone—as a trio of adjuncts, Genevieve (Kerry Warren), David (Jeremy Kahn), and Gina, discuss Dennis—establishes a certain sympathy toward the student, if only because we hear two of the three ganging up on him. What’s more, one of the lines Dennis wrote in a poem, quoted by Genevieve, is a scurrilous parody of an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle, far too often used in writing classes. We might suspect that Dennis is a darkly humored misfit his professors don’t appreciate. That view becomes a bit more problematic when David, who teaches screenwriting and is used to violent movie scenarios and who has worked with convicts in writing groups, insists that Dennis is scarier and less engaging than any prisoner he has ever met.

Thereafter comes our—and Gina’s—meeting with Dennis, a second-generation Asian-American in a hoodie with a baseball cap, dark sunglasses, and a stoical silence. Gina, appalled by the screeds of bitterness, violence, rape, and death that Dennis seems to pump out with little concern for his readers in the classes he takes, tries to fling verbal coins into the silence, hoping for an echo.

David (Jeremy Kahn), Genevieve (Kerry Warren), Gina (Jackie Chung)

After some dead-ends she finds a path, and we start off on what seems to be a journey through a minefield in search of rapprochement. Almost. Cho employs a theatrical device that keeps us from getting comfortable, maintaining the tension that any loaded firearm in a room should manifest. Here, the gun is in Dennis’ backpack, and that fact might mean the adjuncts’ worse fears could come true.

One of the strengths of this production is the lightning-fast nature of the blackouts and tableaux that escalate later in the play. We glimpse, with each new flash, the differing climaxes, all violent, of various scenarios, each a kind of remix of the ingredients in the crucible, but each tending to that moment when firearms become “the answer.” As theater, the brief “clips” demonstrate a tremendous shift to action and staging over dialogue. Elsewhere in the play, dialogue is all we get, and, it should be clear enough, it’s all we have to delay or deter the moment when swift and destructive action holds sway.

Another strength of this production is Jackie Chung’s Gina. She uses the full arsenal a teacher has at her disposal: empathy, imagination, challenge, sharing to elicit sharing, command, threat, and even an unforced vulnerability that Chung is able to display without seeming at all premeditated or manipulative. On the other side of spectrum, she tries to face her fears and the kind of knee-jerk biases that—displayed amply by David—only derail any hope of conversation with recalcitrant students.

Gina (Jackie Chung), Dennis (Daniel Chung)

As Dennis, Daniel Chung has a gripping slouch and pout. For quite a while Dennis maintains the terse tone of someone who is wary of any and all efforts to break his shell. Whether or not he’s a threat to himself or others, he has worked hard to create an antisocial persona, and Cho’s script is equal to the task of making the chip on Dennis’ shoulder feel tangible. Dennis is too smart to wallow in his misery, and, whether talented or not, he uses writing to “take it out” on the world. The gun, which he claims is for protection against the racists he fears (not without reason), speaks of his acceptance of scenarios of violence with which we are all-too-familiar. At times, Chung’s passionate outbursts feel a bit out of character, but it seems that Peterson and company want us to see Dennis as the type of person—an outsider through the happenstance of birth—set at white heat in our social crucible.

Office Hour treats with seriousness the kinds of topics that might come up in any writing course—the issues of racial and gender identity, the problems immigrant populations face, the conditions for which violence and depression and anger are the fraught symptoms, and of course the questions of how to reach an audience and what kind of language and depictions are appropriate or questionable. We might say that the faith implicit in American talk—in no matter what venue—is that seeing and hearing someone who sees it and says it like we would is the thread that keeps the social fabric together. Letting a democracy air its griefs in public is what makes the public forum worthwhile.

Perhaps we used to assume that homicidal sociopaths don’t sign up for writing courses or maintain a GPA in college. These days, there are no such certainties, but what Gina and Dennis also face in Julia Cho’s aware play is the great uncertainties that have always faced the writer: is anyone listening, does anyone care, and does anyone see things the way I do?

Office Hour
By Julia Cho
Directed by Lisa Peterson

Set Design: Matt Saunders; Costume Design: Maggie Morgan; Lighting Design: Scott Zielinski; Original Music and Sound Design: Robert Kaplowitz; Production Stage Manager: Chris Waters; Fight Director: Thomas Schall

Cast: Daniel Chung, Jackie Chung, Jeremy Kahn, Kerry Warren

A Co-Production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Long Wharf Theatre
January 17-February 11, 2018

By One's Lights

Review of the light is…, Yale Cabaret

Movement pieces often present a conundrum. We see bodies in a variety of choreographed routines, we hear music that finds itself embodied in those movements, with costumes, lighting and set contributing to our immersion in the event. How we interpret what we see is where the uncertainty lies.

In the case of the light is…, conceived and directed by third-year Yale School of Drama actor Jake Ryan Lozano, there are also words—words of unusual lyrical polish spoken with a trippy delight by Curtis Williams—that shape our attention more than they provide definite context.

An atmospheric tree of lights stands at one end of the playing space, and the actors/dancers clad in black, with eyes ringed black, move like a group of bodies controlled by a shared impulse. To find the light? To overcome the darkness? Williams, in a boss coat, is a kind of controlling presence, a commentator, a poetic voice above the proceedings. His vocal rhythms and rhyming diction add to the aura.

The five figures—Seta Wainiqolo, Marié Botha, Shadi Ghaheri, Louisa Jacobson, James Udom—move sometimes robotically, sometimes with a kind of desperate yearning or pantomimed fear. It’s fascinating because there’s a distinct feel of a kind of limbo space and we’re wondering what will break them out of the trance. Meanwhile, the trance becomes contagious.

At some point, I have to admit, I stopped trying to piece together a prevailing direction for the show. I started to zone out and think about how great it was to see these six working together. Udom and Wainiqolo worked together in the hypnotic drama The Slow Sound of Snow and in the highly stylized Death of Yadzgerd, which also featured Williams, two shows directed by Ghaheri; Botha and Udom were paired as lovers/antagonists in last year’s Summer Cabaret in a scorching Mies Julie; Jacobson was recently seen as a loose bourgeois in Native Son at the Yale Rep, and a daughter with a mission in Re:Union at the Cab, and Wainiqolo as a stalwart captain in An Enemy of the People, at Yale Rep. The vagaries of the season at the Rep and YSD determines, often, who is available for shows at the Cab, and here six impressive performers (Ghaheri, a third-year director, has appeared in several challenging Cab shows, including Boris Yeltsin, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., and Adam Geist) work within arms’ reach, far gone in the throes of a shared crisis condition.

The willingness to explore areas that expand one’s repertoire is what keeps the Cabaret alive, and it’s also a key opportunity for YSDers to take on work that stretches our sense of their capabilities. Lozano, as an actor, has developed a unique command of movement—as seen notably in Titus Andronicus, directed by Ghaheri, and memorably featuring Wainiqolo, as Titus, and Botha, as Tamora. With the light is…, Lozano shows his unique command of poetic language, with touches of Shakespeare, rap, and a musing free association merging to form a mythic invocation of light and our desire for the clarity of paradise.

Moments that stand out to me, in recollection: Udom standing right before my face with a look of deep, permeating sadness, during a sequence when the five, in a ring, seemed to have lost all hope; Wainiqolo leading the five into the ring, all in slow motion, and pantomiming being dragged against their will, his face a mask of fear; the five entering one by one the ring another time with each displaying a comical facial expression and a mechanical tremor as they cross the border; the five reaching up for the source of light, with Jacobsen’s face, in a mute longing, the best illuminated.

And through it all, there’s Williams, in his Cab debut, making us take in the spectacle as an allegory of a world in desperate need of illumination.

the light is…
By Jake Ryan Lozano

Set Design: Alex McNamara; Costume Design: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Design: Dakota Stipp; Projection Design: Erin Sullivan; Stage Manager: Zachary Rosen; Technical Director: Elsa Gibson Braden, Lily Guerin; Producer: Armando Huipe

Ensemble: Marié Botha, Shadi Ghaheri, Louisa Jacobson, James Udom, Seta Wainiqolo, Curtis Williams

Yale Cabaret
January 25-27, 2018

Yale Cabaret goes dark for the next two weekends, then returns February 15th-17th with its annual, not-to-be-missed Drag Show extravaganza.

Stories of Home

Review of Feeding the Dragon, Hartford Stage

Sharon Washington’s charming memoir, Feeding the Dragon, now playing at Hartford Stage, directed by Maria Mileaf, features Washington, an actress, recounting stories of her upbringing. The truly distinctive element of her childhood, Washington tells us, is that her family lived inside a library, literally. Her father’s job was tending the furnace in the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library, and so the family—father, mother, Sharon, her grandmother, and their dog—lived in a custodial apartment within the library.

That fact might open upon a vista of imaginative possibility. For some, it would be like living in a castle, or in an infinite storyland, and Washington does play to the romance element, as her childhood might make the basis of a great children’s story or the setting for a tale as perennially interesting as books or movies about hiding out in museums or other places of childhood fascination. That shared thrill at access beyond the norm is our entrée into Washington’s tale, as she stands on a handsome set comprised of stairs that double as bookshelves, buttressed by card catalogs, and backed by an array of glass panes that change color magically.

Sharon Washington (photos: T. Charles Erickson)

And the books aren’t only for décor, as Washington now and then plucks one up and reads a passage—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin—like an enthralling English teacher or a library’s “story lady.” And yet the power of books isn’t really the driving passion of Feeding the Dragon, whose title flirts with the kind of fable that a child’s mind makes of the beast in the basement her hardworking father must feed. The real passion here is a grown woman’s love for her family, now mostly gone.

Washington does well by the commandment to honor one’s father and mother. Both appear in her account—as she changes into convincing portraits of both, along with several other characters, by altering her voice and manner—as vividly quirky. Her father, from South Carolina, liked to enact the ‘quitting-time’ scene from Gone with the Wind; her mother, a born New Yorker, speaks like one and has the kind of savvy generally associated with the type. The alterations in accent and manner—particularly when father and Sharon take a trip to the south to meet his folks—help tell the story, as Washington lets characterization aid our imagination.

Sharon Washington

There are difficulties—like the father’s alcoholism, another kind of “dragon” to feed—and other interesting characters, such as a rather reclusive uncle who paints for his own sake, and there are glimpses of the times, such as the uneasy race relations of the 1970s, the neighborhood feel of a bygone Manhattan, and, in one of the more detailed sequences, an account of her grandmother’s “good hair,” and the ubiquitous claim among African Americans of having Native American blood.

Washington is a consummate story-teller, engaging, lively, warm and confiding. Her story, however, doesn’t always feel distinctive enough for a full-scale theatrical treatment, nor quite funny or dramatic enough as anecdote. Feeding the Dragon opens up the question of what we want from memoir—revelations or simply a compelling command of the teller’s story. Washington has all the command one could wish for, what’s less certain is if she has much to say.

As theater, the show becomes weakest as it searches for a note to end on. As Washington stands before us, there is clearly no “end” to her story yet, but one senses that how the story of a girl living in a library became a solo performance piece might be as interesting as the story of what the woman telling her life story remembers fondly of her forebears. Were Feeding the Dragon a book, we might simply call for another chapter, in which “the dragon” becomes the theater, and meeting its demands became this actress’s and playwright’s job.

Sharon Washington

Feeding the Dragon
By Sharon Washington
Directed by Maria Mileaf

Scenic Designer: Tony Ferrieri; Costume Designer: Toni-Leslie James; Lighting Designer: Ann G. Wrightson; Sound Designer: Lindsay Jones; Production Stage Manager: Lloyd Davis, Jr.; Assistant Stage Manager: Robyn Zalewski

Cast: Sharon Washington

Hartford Stage
January 11-Feburary 4, 2018

When P.K. Met Glory

Review of Enter Your Sleep, Yale Cabaret

Some friendships are amorphous. In Christina Quintana’s Enter Your Sleep, directed by Rachel Shuey at Yale Cabaret, two friends play out configurations of their relationship within a dream-world, where coping with being apart becomes tinged with wish-fulfillment fantasy and brooding nightmare.

P.K. Whylde (JJ McGlone), Glory "Z" Zico (Ciara McMillian) (photos: Brittany Bland)

Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s well-known “getting to know you” film When Harry Met Sally… gets deliberately invoked when we hear the famous clip in which Billy Crystal, as Harry, opines that men and women can never be “just friends” because sexual desire inevitably makes itself felt. In the play, P.K. Whylde (JJ McGlone) is a man and Glory “Z” Zico (Ciara McMillian) is a woman who identifies as a lesbian. Does that change the dynamic of Harry’s truism? It’s hard to say for sure, and that’s the point of us seeing “what dreams may come” as the two negotiate a separation that may spell the end of their friendship.

P.K. (JJ McGlone), "Z" (Ciara McMillian)

Z. has made the break with Tulsa, the duo’s hometown, and gone off to seek a path to selfhood in New York. P.K. stays behind, but eventually moves to Austin. That signals that he’s not the homebody Z. took him for, and his decision not to go to New York with her is either a rejection of the Big Apple, or of her, or of both. In the mix of her present anxieties we see how the question of what the two actually are to each other (once they no longer need each other to endure Tulsa) plays out. Protagonists and antagonists in dreams are not fixed and that leads to sequences in which P.K. acts Z.’s mother or Z. plays a gruff father to P.K. Other episodes show how dreams embellish reality with fabulistic colorings, as for instance when P.K. becomes a rather sympathetic version of the gingerbread-housed witch of the Hansel and Gretel story, or when Z. interacts with a P.K. become alarmingly robotic.

For McMillian and McGlone, the play becomes a wonderland of character-actor turns, as they assume differing demeanors and voices and accents. At one point, in another Harry met Sally moment, they reminisce as an aging Jewish couple. The extent to which the play’s dream world is influenced by the film might be a little over-determined, except that one accepts that much of what our unconscious gets up to derives from roles we yearn for or wish would suit us. P.K. and Z. are a contemporary “odd couple,” with a level of co-dependent interaction that seems to fuel their fantasies of being a couple, which they are in a way that they have still to understand.

Much of the dialogue is sweetly childlike, such as recreating story-time in kindergarten or what seems to be the pair’s first playground encounter, but there is also a fun sequence where—again like the archetypal Harry and Sally—they “do it” against their better judgment. Director Shuey has the two actors run in place with a mounting fervor that speaks volumes about the nature of underage sex—all physical exertion with little emotional resonance.

"Z" (Ciara McMillian), P.K. (JJ McGlone)

In as much as they are supposedly in their mid-twenties, the characters’ self-conceptions seem at times anachronistically adolescent, but that also helps to sustain the Harry and Sally parallel. In the film, the couple know each other for years before they—ill-advisedly, seemingly—become lovers. For Z. and P.K., a similar stretch of time finds them each beginning an infatuated curiosity with one another as children. Thus the events of later years can be seen through the perspective of childhood, and vice versa. There’s also a convincing sense of how aping one another’s parents is a way of trying on the guise of maturity without committing to being “grown up.”

Two-handers can sometimes be a little too static, but that's not the case here. Quick-change artists throughout, McGlone and McMillian, both in Cab debuts, tour this actor’s dream of a show, letting us follow the twists and turns of coming-of-age for two characters who desperately want a certain someone along for the ride.

Enter Your Sleep
By Christina Quintana
Directed by Rachel Shuey

Dramaturg: Leandro A. Zaneti; Producer: Melissa Rose; Set Designer: Emona Stoykova; Costume Designer: Sophia Choi; Lighting Designer: Daphne Agosin; Sound Designer: Kathryn Ruvuna; Stage Manager: Fabiola Feliciano Batista; Technical Director: Jessica Hernandez

Cast: JJ McGlone, Ciara McMillian

Yale Cabaret
January 18-20, 2018

Town Talk

Review of Steel Magnolias, Playhouse on Park

Bonds form between people, sometimes, because of where they’re from, who they know, what they do for a living. And, of course, where they hang out. In Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, now playing at Playhouse on Park, directed by Susan Haefner, Truvy Jones’ beauty shop brings together several women who treat the place almost as a social club, a getaway space where their husbands and families and the town’s demands can be kept at a distance. Camaraderie in a public space able to keep the world at bay sustains the play’s light comedy, while the shock of unpleasant reality, when it intrudes, is met with the ties of friendship. Because it doesn’t change, the beauty shop acts effectively as the stage upon which the day-to-day ups and downs of these women get aired and discussed and dealt with.

The play consists of four discrete scenes that take place over a span of just over two and a half years. In that time, much stays the same, but major changes take place for several characters, and minor but telling changes for others. The play’s dramatic arc follows the fortunes of Shelby Eatenton-Latcherie (Susan Slotoroff), beginning on her wedding day, and introducing, early, the diabetic condition from which she suffers.

Clairee (Dorothy Stanley), Shelby (Susan Slotoroff) (photos: Meredith Atkinson)

We meet all the characters in medias res, fully involved in their individual interests. A new-comer, Annelle (Lisa Couser), a recent hire to the shop, is an excuse for introductions as the women arrive one by one. First, there’s Truvy (Jill Taylor Anthony), a nurturing, down-to-earth figure who tends to wear updated—it’s the 1980s—hippie-threads; then there’s Annelle, a teenaged girl who, the older women are surprised to learn, already has a bit of “a past,” and who evolves in different directions as the play goes on, finding a home among these women while also remaining a little separate; Clairee Belcher (Dorothy Stanley) is the closest the town has to a grande dame—she was married to the late mayor—and she tends to enjoy getting up the bristles of her foil, Ousier Boudreaux (Peggy Cosgrave), the town’s prickly “character.” The mother-daughter duo, M’Lynn Eatenton (Jeannie Hines) and Shelby are distinctive if only because they represent two generations in the town.

Truvy (Jill Taylor Anthony), Ousier (Peggy Cosgrave), Shelby (Susan Slotoroff), Annelle (Liza Couser), Clairee (Dorothy Stanley)

The action of the play aims for a verisimilitude toward work-place friendships. Truvy and Annelle are often engaged in hair-styling, while the real action is what the women choose to talk about. There are offstage events that are comic—such as M’Lynn’s husband firing guns to scare away birds—and others that are more tense, such as relations with other townies or Annelle’s marital status. Jill Taylor Anthony handles Truvy with the requisite self-effacing, accommodating manner, though her charm is more southern folksy than southern genteel. All the other women have more issues, or more pride, or more definite intentions. Truvy just keeps things rolling along.

As the sparring elders, Peggy Cosgrave and Dorothy Stanley add a few sparks, but many of the one-liners are just smart-alecky without much behind them. The cast has a lot of space to work with and the best parts are when all are present and moving about almost independently, creating rhythms in which some comments are more overheard than directed. Not all the southern accents are as flawless as a good permanent, and even when inflections are right, the diction can sometimes suffer, making lines fall by the wayside. Steel Magnolias could be called dialogue-driven but it’s more like chat-friendly. We get the main issues even when some of the asides get lost.

The main dramatic issue—the fate of Shelby—doesn’t hit as hard as it might, but Act II, in which revelations come to light somewhat casually, plays much better than the at-times discursive Act I. Harling has a knack for how people who know each other well can intrude humor or drama into a conversation with very little fuss, and that helps to keep things buzzing.

M'Lynn (Jeannie Hines), Annelle (Liza Couser)

As M’Lynn, Jeannie Hines is convincing as a worrying mother learning to back-off and, in her big outburst, she comes across as someone who can’t leave her feelings unsaid any longer. Watching her is often the most rewarding aspect of the show. As her daughter, Susan Slotoroff lets us see Shelby’s cheerful strength but we don’t ever seem to get at her heart, as niceness tends to be her only note.

As a play about inter-generational friendship, with enough nods to prayer and gay rights to make everyone feel welcome, Steel Magnolias is only as winning as its cast. At Playhouse on Park, the ladies are at their best after they’ve warmed to our presence a little.

Steel Magnolias
By Robert Harling
Directed by Susan Haefner

Scenic Designer: David Lewis; Lighting Designer: Christopher Bell; Sound Designer: Rider Q. Stanton; Costume Designer: Kate Bunce; Properties & Set Dressing: Pamela Lang; Stage Manager: Mollie Cook

Cast: Jill Taylor Anthony, Peggy Cosgrave, Liza Couser, Jeannie Hines, Susan Slotoroff, Dorothy Stanley

Playhouse on Park
January 10-28, 2018

Show and Tell

Review of For Your Eyes Only, Yale Cabaret

“What was great about the scene was that people’s curiosity seemed stronger than their fear.”—Legs McNeil

Legs McNeil was talking about the punk rock scene in the East Village around CBGB’s in the late 1970s, but his comment could be extended to the “scene” of theater in the late 2010s. As performed, presented and commented upon by Alex Vermillion, as Ladie Lilith, in For Your Eyes Only, a two-person theater piece with Chelsea Siren, sex-work comprises everything from burlesque to drag shows to sex-cams to strippers to porn to hookers. The concept aspect of Vermillion’s show has to do with the tension between theater and sex-work, in terms of their ends and means. But the piece also invites its audience to let its curiosity overcome its fear—of all those “judgmental eyes,” if nothing else.

Chelsea Siren, Ladie Lilith (photos: Johnny Moreno)

Theater can simulate sex for the sake of storytelling; pornography performs sex as the whole story. Vermillion’s show trusts in theatricality as the glue that holds both theater and porn together. Both are about seeing, showing, performing, with most sex acts following a tried and true narrative arc. And therein lies analogy enough for a performance piece.

Forget the sleazy sex clubs of the old Times Square. Ladie Lilith, like a madam with a brand, is all about making happen whatever the client is comfortable with or curious about. Lilith, sometimes wearing only a G-string, is working a room rather than a one-on-one for hire situation—making the ‘your’ in the show’s title ironically plural. Thus, she risks arousing some, turning off others, and generally making her audience witness the sorts of things that sex-work might entail, depending on whose tastes it is catering to. That might mean a slink and pout routine (formerly bump and grind), or a charming Little Mermaid, à la Disney, singing of a panoply of sex toys and lingerie, or simulated copulation between a top and a bottom, or, in a very inventive staging, a “golden shower” routine in which audience members are asked to shoot squirt guns into Lilith’s mouth to the tune of David Bowie’s “Golden Years”—“Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere, angel.”

Ladie Lilith (Alex Vermillion)

Through it all, Vermillion and Siren keep a firm grasp on (or is that labile tongue inserted in) their sense of burlesque. And yet, because this is Yale Cabaret, it isn’t real burlesque, and that adds a dimension to the proceedings that makes it analytic. That element becomes all too clear when, during a time-consuming onstage number that entails an intricate BDSM device, actors in voice-over speak the words of actual sex-workers interviewed as background. Acts of “bondage” and “submission” as elements of sexual fantasy and sex-work meet the fact of sex-work as a kind of sadomasochistic other of “straight” theater. Vermillion’s show never lets us forget that bodies are on the line in theater, no matter how we label it, but the voices let us know that there is still a fine line between “a show” and “a trick.”

Burlesque, of course, was the theatrical form that made a show of sexuality, lampooning the tropes of dress-up and role play and tease and release for the sake of entertainment. How comfortable an audience is with laughing about the sexual underside of daily life makes for burlesque's risqué element. The difference with sex-work is that working for actual arousal and orgasm can be many things—sordid, suggestive, salacious, stimulating—but what it can’t be is “just a show” (it’s not called a “money shot” for nothing). By Vermillion’s own admission—in the “talk back” portion of the show—one-on-one cam-work stymies her. She wants a live audience. Certainly, because that’s where burlesque and theater both thrive. The nature of cam-work, like phone-sex or cyber, is the promise of a fantasized intimacy that might make costuming and nudity incidental.

Ladie Lilith (Alex Vermillion)

Here, the show aspects are key: the costumes, props, music, movement, lighting and stage management are there to be appreciated. The show feels at times like a classroom intro—“kinky sex 101”—and at other times feels like an empowerment seminar about being oneself, owning one’s body, and having fun with whatever you’ve got to work with. That’s the progressive element of the show, and it asks us to countenance a world in which “doing it for money” isn’t stigmatized and where degradation and humiliation are just a state of mind. There’s also, perhaps, a certain nagging question hovering: you can put sex in show-biz and show-biz in sex, but when having sex is a show, is it real?

At the end of the show, Lilith, on cam, asks the audience how it feels. It’s a good question, and she throws some possible answers at us, multiple-choice style. As a meta-moment, the question of affect become a survey topic. And that’s one of the more interesting aspects of the show: however collective an audience may be, the eyes and ears and minds in attendance will be experiencing different aspects of that continuum between sex for show and show as sex as individuals. Ultimately, For Your Eyes Only is in service to what seems a very humane curiosity about what turns people on, what turns people off, what gets us off, what makes the show go on—and how all that plays into what “makes the world go ‘round.”

For Your Eyes Only
By Alex Vermilion
Directed by Alex Vermillion

Producers: Laurie Ortega-Murphy, Laura Cornwall; Dramaturg, Advisor: Evan Hill; Sound Designer & Composer: Dakota Stipp; Lighting Designer: Daniela Fresard-Montero; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Set Designer: Amanda Creech; Technical Director: Alex McNamara; Stage Manager: Samantha Tirrell; Videographer: Amauta Marston-Firmino; Commissioned Choreographer & Movement Specialist: Yasin (Ya-Ya) Fairley; Projection Designer: Ben Jones

Performers: Chelsea Siren, Alex Vermillion

Yale Cabaret
January 11-13, 2018