A Terrific Fire: New Work at 95 Empire

Aram Aghazian as Dr. Wishniak in A Terrific Fire. Photo by Flordelino Lagundino.

A Terrific Fire, the new play written, produced, and performed by Strange Attractor Theatre Co., at 95 Empire (the former Perishable Theatre), is irreverent, high-spirited, elusive, and frustrating. It is about a Victorian doctor named Wishniak who, if I understand correctly, summons, confronts, and destroys two embodiments of his opposing impulses: audacity, represented by an indefatigable mountain climber (Jed Hancock-Brainerd) whose motto is “Press on,” and indolence, personified in a sailor (Roblin Davis) who drifts happily where the tide takes him. There’s more to it than that, including an awkward but not unpleasant tea party, which the audience is invited backstage to enjoy, and a vivid attack on Wishniak and his wife (Rebecca Noon) by two wild animals (Davis and Hancock-Brainerd), which the audience is invited to intensify, but these events are better witnessed than read about. Put simply, there is nothing like Strange Attractor's work on any other stage in Providence, which may be reason enough to go see it – to experience performances of an utterly unique timbre, and to support artists committed to realizing a fervent and vital theatre.

Still, the show left me feeling strangely unmoved – cold, even. It is full of action – the play reaches manic peaks, the highest and most precarious being the climactic animal attack – but though it encourages the audience to move and even participate, it makes no such appeal to the heart, which remains inert and uninvolved. It eschews character, which means that there is no desire; without desire there is no conflict, which means that we, the audience, are compelled to make no moral commitment; so we neither suffer disappointment nor relish victory, which means that the events onstage unfold like weather observed through a window. Can the play be enjoyed similarly – as spectacle? (By which I mean not high drama but a morally neutral though nonetheless captivating depiction of movement.) I think so; that may be how my fellow audience-members enjoyed it and, to judge by their enthusiastic responses, they enjoyed it very much.
And, moment to moment, the show captivates; but its project is, ultimately, terminal. In one scene, Dr. Wishniak demonstrates the many luxury qualities of his custom briefcase while a bear and a moose harass and taunt him. It’s a fantastical moment – bizarre, funny, nervy. But it seems to come from nothing, and it goes nowhere; there is neither motivation nor destination. Why is Dr. Wishniak so infatuated with his briefcase that he insists on describing it despite the danger he’s in? How are the moose and bear in his study anyway? As Wishniak, Aram Aghazarian is a pleasure to watch, but his performance is so understated that it can appear indifferent and tentative. Here, hemmed in by his attackers, he looks perturbed rather than terrified, and his voice hovers in a barely audible and unmodulating register. Perhaps this is meant to be absurdly funny; but to me, the arbitrary can only ever be so amusing. In this aura of anarchy there’s no exhilarating inversion of expectation – because the play establishes no expectation in the first place. Weirdness conjures only weirdness; nothing, as the philosophers say, comes from nothing.

Allegedly inspired by themes from the Henrik Ibsen epic Brand, A Terrific Fire averts its eyes from metaphysical landscapes to revel instead in colorful but barren silliness – a silliness that, though agitated, is never really troubling. It should be noted, however, that the plastic trees that comprise part of the set do evoke a kind of mysterious and melancholy forest primeval. Indeed, the set is the most finely realized aspect of the play. Dr. Wishniak’s study, decorated with bear skins and deer antlers, as well as an old radio, feels inhabited and inviting; it is also erected oppressively close to the audience, so that there is no escape: we in the audience feel as closely observed by the actors as they are by us. When the action takes the characters outside, the back wall of Wishniak’s study is swung back on hinges, revealing a dark expanse of snowy forest. One only wishes that the play itself were structured this way: a detailed and overbearing foreground, too close for comfort, occasionally giving way to an unfathomable and menacing subtext.

"Paul" at the Gamm Theatre

“Paul,” the 2005 play by Howard Brenton about the conversion, missionary work, and final days of the early Christian apostle of the play’s title, is enjoying a spirited but specious North American premier at the Gamm Theatre. The play radically revises the story of Saul of Tarsus, the infamous persecutor of Jesus’ early followers who converted to Christianity and changed his name on the road to Damascus after he was blinded by a miraculous vision of the resurrected Jesus. Brenton undermines this foundational legend – in a way that would be unprofessional to reveal, except perhaps by noting that fans of “Scooby Doo” should be thrilled – to challenge the basis of spiritual identity and religious authority. The show is representative of the contemporary “atheist chic,” which is a sort of reverse loom that spins faith into straw. So the play clatters furiously and in the end we find ourselves amid a scattering of dried-out debris. Think about this for a moment. The author and countless well-meaning and under-compensated theatre professionals have sweated over a work that leaves the audience considering nothing more than a pile of psychological and spiritual detritus. One can almost picture Brenton slinking away from the mess he’s made, whistling through a prankster’s smirk. But the audience has paid, with currency and emotional involvement, for something more rigorous and complex than “Punk’d.” So much for putting an end to childish ways.

The play begins with Paul (Alexander Platt) in a Roman prison, and shows, in flashback, his conversion and his wide travels around the Middle East, often accompanied by his close friend Barnabas (the affable Anthony Goes). He meets James (Marc Dante Mancini), Jesus’ jealous brother; Peter (Jim O’Brien), the ambivalent disciple; and Mary (Karen Carpenter), Jesus’ wife, a diseased and disillusioned prostitute. Paul wants to disseminate the story of Jesus’ life and death; they want to guard and control it. In the end, imprisoned for their evangelism and interrogated by no less an authority than the emperor, Nero (the terrifically lascivious Kelby T. Akin), Peter and Paul are forced to reckon with the squalid and all-too-human circumstances of Paul’s conversion and fervor.

The play ends here, exactly where it should begin – his miraculous encounter exposed as a fraud, Paul starts life anew. But Brenton is too committed to his ironic deconstruction of the Paul conversion story to chart anything original in the terror of self-discovery. That Paul’s understanding dawns only in his last day is evidence that Brenton is unsure of its real consequences. The play is just a mischievous and self-fascinated hypothetical - a diverting parlor game.

It is hard to distinguish the qualities of this production from the shortcomings of the written work. Alexander Platt, who was so vivid as Hedwig in last spring’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at Perishable Theatre, is an engaging Paul, but not dangerous. His performance is more gestural than internal, more mannered than felt. Indeed, this same criticism could apply to nearly all the actors, who seem to think that the somnambulant script might be awakened by very loud shouting. Only Anthony Goes, whose Barnabas is well-meaning but limited, and Kelby Akin, powdered and eerily prescient as Nero, modulate the stage volume and action. Cedric Lilly makes a fine Jesus, but the character is such a cipher. That's the problem with Brenton’s characters, who have no inner worlds to access. Brenton’s writing lacks poetry, spark, and fear – “Brentonion” will never join “Pauline” as a literary adjective of distinction – so his characters are taxidermic: dead on the stage, they move only when pushed. If we learn nothing else from “Paul,” it’s that the dead never walk on their own.

The Gamm Theatre: "A Night at the Fights"

The tagline for the new show mounted by the Gamm Theatre in the vast, ark-like space in the Pawtucket Armory Drill Hall and featuring three experts in on-stage physicality is "Tricks of the trade revealed!" but don't let this spoiler alert dissuade you: some revelations ruin things; others enrich them. The few tricks that are really revealed in this snappy, and, ultimately, secretive show about the tools and techniques of stage combat will give you a new appreciation for the role of physicality in stage productions: for the thought that goes into its development and the energy and precision that go into its execution. Starting with fist-fights, and moving on to sword, staff, gun, and dagger fights, professional fight master Normand Beauregard and his colleagues Jim Beauregard and Paul Kochanek lead us on a sort of aerial tour of the stage-fight landscape. The audience sees a lot, and much of what we see is dazzling, but there seem to be plenty of unexplored depths left at show's end. As Norman Beauregard explains at the beginning of the show, there's more to stage physicality than can be taught over a four-year college course, let along a two-hour introduction. But, through demonstration and elucidation, he gets pretty far.

The show has enough slapstick to enthrall very young children - a couple of five- or six-year- olds at the performance I saw were doubled over with manic glee during some of the fights - and, I suspect, enough seductive theatre talk to engage curious adolescents. The audience ought to hearten even the most stolid cynic; those who weren't actually children certainly felt like them by show's end. I was hypnotized. The fights are fascinating, and no amount of explanatory talk can diminish their magic, which doesn't emanate from the weapons selected or the specific punch chosen for just that angle to the audience, but from the inches of air between the fist and the face. Still, for all the virtuosity on display here, I left hoping that if the Gamm makes a series of the "tricks of the trade" imprint, the next show is even more elemental: How do actors take the written word and make it song? Less explosive than a punch, that's still the real mystery of the theatre.

*** "A Night at the Fights" is, well, all about fighting. There are goofy flips and punches, but there are also slightly scary swordfights and a gunshot (though no victim). It's all in good fun, but it might also be upsetting to some viewers.

"The Crucible" at Trinity Rep

One desperately wishes that the current production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at Trinity Rep had not been given such royal treatment. The play is stooped and abashed under the heavy crown – and the errant expectations – placed on it by director Brian McEleney and his cast. Certainly, “The Crucible” is no model of modesty: it is full of declamation and self-righteousness. But it should be allowed to retain its rusticity, its squalor, and its urgency – the elements that make it a human tragedy and not a mere metaphor. McEleney sets it on a throne, from which it issues a series of ungrounded and untestable edicts, before which the audience is cowed like subjects or students. When the audience stands wearily at show’s end, it is as if to acknowledge Miller’s perceived prophetic infallibility rather than the production’s ingenuity. This reflexive display is, of course, anathema to the play’s celebration of the individual.

The premise of this production is that Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, which he wrote as a way to understand and illuminate the farcical anti-communist hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is relevant today because of our own febrile and delusional political discourse. It is a metaphor twice removed and, as such, it makes a better thought experiment than theatre experience. But the first proposition of the Theatre of the Sincere is that even the least articulated thought experiment makes a good play. This is a diminishment of theatre and should be a disappointment to audiences. It suggests that the best that plays can do is edify, and that the most audiences can hope for from a night at the theatre is a sound education, or at least an equivalency certificate. It seems as though Trinity has ceded terror to other media, which is as much to give up on theatre, because it is also a surrender of pleasure. Terror is not merely horror – although in a play about witches in an encroaching geographical and spiritual wilderness, horror ought to loom. (It doesn’t, here.) It is also an aspect of empathy: the fear, aroused through the use of sound, space, and performance, that the fate of the characters onstage is as real, consequential, and undetermined as one’s own. The current Trinity production does not work for this feeling of disorientation; instead, it meets us on our terms, as though only our story mattered. The play itself can practically be discarded as long as its relevance is asserted and our own contemporary condition is spelled out.

Crudely put, “The Crucible” does not tell our story but the story of the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which nineteen women and men were hanged because of the wild accusations of pre-adolescent girls. Or, rather, it tells the part of the story that involves the flawed hero-figure John Proctor, a paragon of masculinity and morality whose lone slip is a doozy: while his wife was sick, he had an affair with his teenaged servant, Abigail. From Abigail, Proctor learns that the girls’ accusations are baseless charges issued out of spite, vengeance, and fear – but in order to expose their fraudulence he has to publicly admit to his indiscretion with her. There are at least three stories entwined here: the hysteria of power enjoyed by the accusing girls; the angry convulsions of the besieged moral authority in Salem; and the degradation of John Proctor, who is not a witch but who, to survive this ordeal as the man he thought he was, must confess to some other transgression. We can’t forget that Miller’s work is not a general indictment of society but a sensitive scanning of community dynamics.

The text takes place in 1692; the action in McEleney’s production is set on the recreated steps of Providence City Hall, built in 1878. The house and stage lights are barely differentiated, so the drama appears to play out in the glare of the light of day. In an interview with Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, McEleney said the production was meant to conjure “guerilla street theater,” immediate and confrontational, but what it conjures instead is community theater, earnest and reassuring. Sure, the production is dyspeptic, but in utterly predictable and uncontroversial ways. The actors, looking adrift on the vast set and, occasionally, along the house aisles, recite their lines as though into a strong wind. They are serious and determined, but their performances feel projected rather than inhabited. The show has all the spontaneity and humor of a Puritan sermon; indeed, it is as dull and deliberate as an exegesis. It cries out for the fury and fervor of a revival.

This is not to say that the production lacks all feeling. The long second scene (the second act in Miller’s script) between John Proctor (Stephen Thorne) and his wife, Elizabeth (Angela Brazil), runs hot with the fuel of feeling: Proctor’s guilt, for having betrayed his wife with their young servant, mixed in equal parts with Elizabeth’s insecurity in her husband’s affection. Both know that Proctor must denounce Abigail, and both realize that he will have to confess his transgression to the community to be credible. Their relationship is real – it is no symbol – and McEleney gives it room to expand. Thorne trembles with troubled conscience and slowly budding resolve, while Brazil coolly controls her feelings. “Cool” and “control” are not qualities I have ever ascribed to Ms. Brazil’s acting, but they are apt descriptors here; she is the wonderful surprise of this show.

Other performances don’t fare as well. Reverend Samuel Parris is played by Bob Berky, who, the night I saw the show, was as rigid as a Puritan pew; his cadence was wooden, his posture uncomfortable. Fred Sullivan, Jr., as Thomas Putnam and, even more as Deputy Governor Danforth, was enigmatic. True to form, he has followed his authentic and awesome performance in “Absurd Person Singular” with a performance of exactly equal indifference. (I have only been watching for four years, but I wonder if one might follow this sinusoidal phenomenon throughout his career.) In “The Crucible,” he is fierce and inexplicable, like a summer squall. His instrument, his wonderful voice, is as sure and seductive as ever, but it is really just spit and wind. His Danforth is not fearful or paranoid or vulnerable or vengeful: he is just loud. Olivia D’Ambrosio plays Abigail; and I think “plays” is the right word for what she does with the role. She seems nearly to toy with it, an approach that usually pays off because, of course, Abigail herself is a kind of player. One senses her mastery, and, with her high cheekbones, vulpine eyes, and confident contralto, one can also understand John Proctor’s error. But the role calls for helplessness too, and D’Ambrosio is reluctant to surrender her power. When Abigail must pretend to be possessed by Mary Warren (Rachael Warren) in court in order to sustain the girls’ charade, D’Ambrosio can’t quite summon the necessary girlishness. It is an unconvincing performance within a performance.

D’Ambrosio, of course, is not to blame for the play’s failure, but her inability to access the spiritual anarchy of that historical moment is emblematic of the entire production, which is too measured and controlled. McEleney presents the play as a conclusion rather than an exploration, draining it of contingency and excitement: since we all know what it's about, anyway, there's no reason to evoke a specific time, place, or mood. He leans heavily on the play’s stature and keeps the audience at a long arm’s length. It is an allegory, too refined and remote to be mistaken for a yarn. McEleney has a mission, and “The Crucible” serves his ends. “You will not use me!” John Proctor shouts, in the play’s climactic scene. In this production, at least, his insistence goes unheeded.

Final Weekend: "Absurd Person Singular" at Trinity Rep

Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is unmistakably a comedy, but it is suffused with a Chekhovian melancholy, a sensitivity, as the title suggests, to the world’s absurdity, and a yearning for its elusive satisfactions. The same inarticulate want that simultaneously energizes and oppresses the characters in Uncle Vanya or The Three Sisters exercises its insidious control on Ayckbourn’s bankers, builders, and buffoons. For them, the party is, quite literally, always in the other room – but they’re stuck in the kitchen.

Absurd Person Singular follows three couples in three separate kitchens on three consecutive Christmas Eves in the early 1970s. I have tried several times to summarize the play, which is episodic and elliptical, and have found the results messy and unrevealing; so I won’t confuse or bore you with any of those details here. The first act concerns a social-climber’s attempt to host a party for a banker and an architect he hopes to impress; in the second act, the architect’s wife tries repeatedly to kill herself but is foiled by her obtuse and oblivious house-guests; and in the third act, the banker and his wife have fallen on hard times, but the morbidity of their lives is relieved – even as it is thrown into relief – by an unexpected visit from the social-climbing couple from the first act. The comedy is as often fast-paced and frenetic as it is verbal and a little cruel. Ayckbourn is an equal-opportunity satirist: he ridicules with equivalent relish the obnoxious social climber in the first act and the crestfallen banker in the third. To Ayckbourn, these characters are more alike than they are different. They are all, in the end, materialists: questions of the soul stump them, when they choose to even acknowledge them.

The performances are all lively, though some burn more brightly and more vividly than others - in particular, Phyllis Kaye’s as the architect’s suicidal wife. She is marvelously acidic as a contemptuous party guest in the first act; almost entirely mute as she contemplates her suicide throughout the second; and chastened but resolved in the third. Kaye, so vulnerable in last year’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone and so vicious in The Secret Rapture, is on a roll. Fred Sullivan, Jr., who plays her husband, is also a treat – though one would not confuse his performance for a full meal. Sullivan has a long bravura moment in the second act, and is floppy and funny elsewhere, but his acting, I think, elicits more admiration than emotion in the audience. His phrasing and diction are so precise, one wishes they were employed in the service of more generous feeling. Nevertheless, one can’t help being awed by his prowess and control. And Timothy Crowe gives another in a string of memorable and moving performances, this time as the banker who ends the play too poor to heat his own home. More conspicuously than the other actors, Crowe gives the play its Chekhovian dissipation; he embodies its sense of squandered spirit and baffled protest.

Perishable Theatre: "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"

For all of its cultish qualities and contemporary concerns, the rock monologue Hedwig and the Angry Inch (now playing at Perishable Theatre) has a simple, almost archetypal, agenda. It is an inquiry into origins. What has so galvanized audiences over the years, one realizes, is not its radicalism but its urgency; the quest of self-discovery and re-creation has rarely felt so perilous. Sure, the story is about an East German boy who has sexual reassignment surgery in order to marry an American G.I. and escape from his stifling life, only to find that the surgery has been sloppily performed - she is left with a closed incision instead of a vagina, and an "angry inch" of flesh - and that the liberated life to which she has fled is in a Junction City, Kansas trailer park. But the show, structured around a series of divisions and reunions, is about the possibility of transcendence rather than the thrust of transgression. Abandoned by her G.I., unsatisfied in her new life, a mere spectator to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hedwig forms a rock band of (presumably disaffected) Korean army wives: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She falls in love with an earnest Christian teenager, Tommy Speck, and cultivates his blossoming religiosity and his musical talent. But when Tommy discovers Hedwig's unassigned sexuality, he leaves her and takes the songs they co-wrote on the road. Hedwig follows him, playing the dumpy dives in the shadows of his sold-out arenas - hence her performance at Perishable, a stone's throw from the Dunk. The show ends with a suggestion of reconciliation - not of Hedwig with Tommy, exactly, but of Hedwig with herself.

Perishable's production, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian in a creatively reconfigured space and on a spare set by Sara Ossana, is unforgivingly immediate. From the moment Alexander Platt makes his gloriously androgynous entrance as Hedwig, to well after he takes his even more ambivalent and triumphant exit, the audience is in a state of alert excitement. Platt's charged performance - erotic, self-effacing, spontaneous, and utterly compelling - is every match for the script's ebullient lyricism; his voice, incredibly, is very nearly a match for the songs' extravagant dynamism; his wanton physicality is certainly a match for Hedwig's desperation and ambivalence. He is, in short, fearless. He is buffeted and buttressed by a volcanic back-up band and, in Elizabeth Gotauco, who plays Hedwig's long-suffering transvestite husband Yitzhak, a superb co-star and scintillating singer. Her top-range vocalizations - all "ooohs" and "aaaahs" of thrilling clarity - are so perfectly tuned and adroitly performed they stun the heart. Somehow, in the sonic mass of guitars and drums and keyboards and voices, she finds her note each time and draws it out like a silver thread.

Trinity Rep: An Unbalanced "Odd Couple"

The first act of The Odd Couple, showing at Trinity Rep through May 9, is the funniest show that I have seen at any theatre this season. Until this past week, during which Perishable opened Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the Brown/Trinity Consortium put on Uncle Vanya, competitors for the title included Elemental Theatre’s Amadeus, the Gamm Theatre’s 4:48 Psychosis, and Trinity’s own crepuscular Cabaret, but this is not meant as faint praise. (To be fair, all of our local theatres have essayed other comic plays, but the ones I have seen were empurpled with mordancy or melancholy; The Odd Couple is the only unmitigated comedy I’ve been to.) It is a pleasure to laugh at Neil Simon’s jokes because they are funny and not merely because they are certified with an appropriately goofy cadence or broad gesture. Actually, the first act of the show is too funny; it is as tightly acted and well staged as the second act should be. The second act is markedly less amusing; having established Simon’s dynamic early on, the cast have left nowhere for themselves to go. This is not to say that the performers lose energy, but rather that they work furiously for diminishing – or, at the very least, familiar – returns. This is comedy as gold-mining: it’s easy to get started, nearly impossible to sustain.

Of course, Oscar Madison’s slovenly shoulders and Felix Unger’s fastidious fury have kept the show popular and profitable for four and a half decades. A certain type of comedy – brusque but affectionate; masculine but not macho – is realized in this play. Simon’s vision, x-ray but not x-rated, revealed to audiences the stunted stubbornness of the male psyche. There is nothing romantic – or Romantic – about these men. Indeed, their feelings about marriage are pragmatic rather than poetic: it may not be a lot of fun, but, hey, everyone needs a companion.

The play has a shallow enough plot and a deep enough penetration into our culture to obviate summary. Still. Disheveled bachelor Oscar Madison (Fred Sullivan, Jr.), a sportswriter and poker-night host, takes his thoroughly domesticated friend Felix Unger (Brian McEleney) into his home when Felix’s wife leaves him. It turns out that they are completely incompatible: camaraderie recapitulates matrimony. Oscar sullies reflexively; Felix tidies (and cooks, and carps) obsessively. After three weeks of this antagonistic arrangement, Oscar plans a double date for Felix and himself with the Pigeon sisters (Phyllis Kaye and Nance Williamson), two English divorcées from upstairs. Felix eventually relents, but commits to having a miserable time. During the course of the evening, Felix has a guilty, gaudy breakdown about his ex-wife and children, and the Pigeons, as pigeons will, eat it up. Consoling him with coos and caresses, they forget all about Oscar, frustrating his hopes for a lascivious – pardon the pun – lark. The tenuous relationship permanently fractured by this betrayal, Oscar sends Felix packing, but we don’t worry about him: when we see him last, he is heading up to the Pigeons’ place, where we are certain he will be taken under wing.

Director Curt Columbus handles the script and the staging deftly. The actors’ timing is perfect – Joe Wilson, Jr., playing against type as a meekly uxorious pal of Oscar’s, is especially funny, even in a minor role – and their movement around Eugene Lee’s large stage is purposeful and precise. What the play doesn’t convey is a sense of deepening crisis: the actors, like the poker players they depict, seem to be playing for small stakes. The screws of comic dread are never tightened, and the problems of the play’s second act are those of its first. Fred Sullivan, Jr., a wily and winning actor, doesn’t depict Oscar’s affection for Felix curdling into aggression; instead, he begins the show aggressively, his gruffness not merely skin-deep but intrinsic. The comic payoff is immediate and gratifying, but it doesn’t accrue. Brian McEleney plays Felix Ungar as the direct descendant of his Malvolio from Twelfth Night – impacted and imperious – but he seems not to trust Ungar’s innocent energy, and so hangs his characterization on strings: he performs with all the spontaneity and selflessness of a marionette. His work is always either reactive or provocative; it is, either way, over-executed. Ungar does not need to be nuanced or internal, but he ought to be oblivious. McEleney is too clued-in to the comic potential of his cluelessness, so his performance is asphyxiated by self-awareness. The same reflexivity that made his Richard III (way back in 2008) so menacing inhibits his comic characterization.

As the bird-brained and like-minded Pigeon sisters, Phyllis Kaye and Nance Williamson are both wonderfully animated. But the Pigeons aren’t really characters; they’re more like holograms of women, transparent and distorted, projected from a skewed imagination –whether that imagination is Simon’s or his male characters’, I’m not sure – so even as we laugh at Kaye’s and Williamson’s portrayals, we puzzle over their purpose in the play. Are we meant to be laughing at them for their giggling disregard for social convention or at Oscar for his bald lust? That this question remains unanswered is, perhaps, the disappointment of the entire second act. The play’s comic potential has already been mined, its gold revealed. What’s left but to sift through the loose dirt of goofy cadence and broad gesture?

The Gamm Theatre: "The Glass Menagerie"

My review of Tennessee Williams's breakthrough family drama, The Glass Menagerie (at the Gamm Theatre through April 4), is in this week's Motif (available in cafés around town and as a downloadable PDF at http://motifmagazine.net). Critical sentiment around this show is pretty much uniform: it's terrific (here, here, here, and here).

Amanda Wingfield, played by Wendy Overly at her most solicitous, flutters and fusses around the stage, forcing on her children the regurgitated detritus of her unmetabolized past. But they see her stories for what they are: pablum. Laura, crippled and shy, retreats from her mother's exhortations into a world of make-believe. Tom, the sympathetic center of the show, is graced with more resource: he turns his visions of escape into reality and joins the Merchant Marines. Of course, running away and breaking free are different things, and it is clear from the play - which is narrated by a much older Tom, who is played with well-lubricated charm by Sam Babbitt - that, as far as Tom has traveled, he has not managed to rid himself of his past. The play is a gesture of reconciliation for him (and, we imagine, for Williams himself): with his sister, his mother, and his younger, more impulsive, self.

Laura is played by Diana Biurski, who has proved her talent on the local stage in her performances with the Brown/Trinity Consortium and with the Gamm. With her wide eyes and long limbs, she is naturally expressive. She comes into her own in this play in the second act, when Laura enjoys the attention and encouragement of Jim O'Connor (the compelling and charismatic Kelby T. Akin), a go-getter whom Tom has brought home from his work at the shoe warehouse to satisfy his mother's dreams of gentleman callers for her lonely daughter. During this extended scene, which ripens and swells with feeling, Laura's eyes glow with admiration, and her body shakes with anxiety and anticipation. It is a long moment of suspense: like Laura, our bodies bend - achingly, warily, perilously - towards the suggestion of a fuller future. As Jim urges Laura to step beyond her perceived limits, so does Williams demand the audience do the same; he enlists our empathy in a wonderful and foolhardy enterprise. Biurski makes this a risk worth taking.

Oskar Eustis Profiled in the New Yorker

Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of Trinity Rep from 1994 to 2005 and currently Artistic Director of New York's Public Theatre, is profiled in this week's New Yorker by staff writer Rebecca Mead (abstract here.) Searching for "Oskar Eustis" on the magazine's website turns up a list of references, including to John Lahr's review of the Public Theatre's Hamlet from the summer of 2008, which is summarized thus: "Under the unfortunate direction of Oskar Eustis, Hamlet is currently presiding over the Public Theatre as a melodramatic fool." Lahr's scalding review expresses the paradox of Eustis's career suggested in Mead's profile: he's done great stuff for Theatre over the years, but, it would seem, little great work at any single theater. Mead quotes Rocco Landeman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, on the Public Theatre: "'It is always a mix of the compelling, the interesting, and the dreadful. And you have to be willing to do the dreadful.'" As an artistic director, he appears to understand his role as more organizer than aesthete: his vision, one feels, is for what a theatre can do, not just each production. Mead really has composed a wonderful profile. Although she is curiously indifferent towards the texture and temperature of his productions, she does capture Eustis's incorrigible energy - his vitality, brio, and fervor. Eustis comes across like a saint of lost causes: to Communism and to contemporary, serious New York theatre. Two more doomed, disappointed allegiances would be hard to imagine.

(I would love to hear about Eustis's years at Trinity. If you remember a particularly challenging, confrontational, or tendentious show of his, please don't hesitate to describe it in the comments section.)

"Dead Man's Cell Phone" at Trinity Rep

Despite the morbidity of its premise, which is tidily summed up in its title, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl (showing at Trinity Rep through March 28), is essentially comic. At the beginning of the play, a woman, Jean, is writing notes at a small café table, when she is disturbed by the incessant ringing of a nearby cell phone. Exasperated, she confronts the negligent owner of the phone, but he is strangely unresponsive. She answers his phone and conducts a conversation with someone who clearly assumes she is the man’s mistress. She prods the man, whose name she now knows is Gordon, and discovers the reason for his inaction: he is dead. The phone rings again. She answers it.

This impulsive impropriety changes everything in her life, deepening, stretching, and, ultimately, enriching her. She keeps the phone and continues to answer it on Gordon’s behalf, eventually fleshing out a saintly version of the dead man that reassures the grieving and consoles the lovelorn. Because of the phone, she meets Gordon’s family and falls in love with Gordon’s recessive brother, Dwight. But she also meets Gordon himself, and confronts her irrational love for him. The show, putatively plaintive, is actually resolutely playful: it literally flirts with death. This mixing of moods—the comic with the tragic, the cynical with the ingenuous, the mundane with the sublime—is the play’s alchemical act; but one senses that Ruhl is not as interested in gold as she is in weirdly-shaped gold things. She is as much a curator as a chemist.

It is her curiosity and obsession that give the play its distinctive energy. Dead Man’s Cell Phone is wildly far-ranging, exuberantly excursive. Jean travels to South Africa to meet with a sinister organ-trader (a former colleague of Gordon’s) and to a strangely banal heaven after a bizarre airport brawl. The show is about cellular technology, but the title, as obvious as Shakespeare naming Hamlet “Yorick’s Skull” instead, is a kind of red herring. The dead man’s cell phone is both synecdochal – it stands in for Gordon and for the world of which Gordon was a part and from which Jean feels fundamentally estranged – and talismanic: it possesses magical capabilities. The phone gives Jean the opportunity to conjure a man, to speak him into existence in the idealized image of the people who loved him. Like Prospero’s staff in The Tempest, the cell phone bestows a power too great to endure; and Jean, like Prospero, frees herself from the imperatives of that power by destroying their agent. One wonders if Jean – again, like Prospero – is meant as an authorial stand-in: her power to create mimics and amplifies Ruhl’s.

But if the script is full of adventure and allusion, it is also marked by certain trivializing preoccupations: like a traveler unable to shake her home country’s customs, Ruhl visits places and ideas with one foot in her own living room. She is as avid and sincere, and as transient, as a tourist. In retrospect, the show feels like an armchair anecdote, an embellished recounting of a pleasant visit to a faraway place. Ruhl is not inattentive to cruelty and venality there, but she remarks on it with a detachment that belies its urgency. The play’s tone – its moon-bounce mood – precludes any moral seriousness. Mrs. Gottlieb, eulogizing her son at his funeral service, is interrupted by a ringing cell phone and asks, testily, “Could someone please turn their fucking cell phone off. There are only one or two sacred places left in the world today. Where there is no ringing. The theater, the church, and the toilet.” Surely, Ruhl has seen the ample evidence in the news that the theater and the church are no longer considered sacred, unassailable places; that evidence sounds a hell of a lot louder, and has more terrible consequences, than the ringing of a cell phone. Yet the play never reproaches Mrs. Gottlieb for her parochialism – for her meanness, yes, but not for her privileged isolation. Later, Gordon, during his tour-de-force monologue that opens the second act of the show, opines, “Airports and subway stations are very similar to hell. People are vulnerable – disembodied – they’re looking around for their souls while they’re getting their shoes shined. That’s when you bomb them. In transit.” This glancing reference to the world of violence and consequence is disorienting. Not only is it utterly sophistic – Is Gordon suggesting that people in airports are so busy looking for their souls they forget to watch out for terrorists? Or that terrorists only bomb people without souls? – but it is also inane. The show has nothing to say about brutality. Even Gordon’s vocation is treated as a quirk of character: he sells organs, but he is never held to account for it. “Is he punished?” Mrs. Gottlieb asks Jean after she returns from Gordon’s afterlife. “Not really,” Jean replies.

Of course, Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a fantasy; but what is its relationship with the real world beyond the stage? Ruhl is concerned with talk, but not with the possibility that the government might overhear your talk, or that the international community might not hear your talk. Talk in Dead Man’s Cell Phone is intimate and private, not agitated and public. It is not a weapon, just a nuisance; it doesn’t shake us from our foundational beliefs, but only interrupts our reverie, our precious quiet. Talk is an assault not on our politics but only on our ears. Indeed, there are no politics in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, though there are contesting ethics. Mostly what there are in the play are dozens of different ideas, zipping brightly and briefly across the stage. The show is constantly disappearing in the bright glare of the ever-new moment onstage. Janice Duclos is a dazzled and naïve Jean; her innocence is matched by Richard Donnelly’s oily charisma as the sophisticated but solipsistic Gordon. Donnelly also plays Dwight, the meek paper-store owner who falls in love with Jean. As Gordon’s wounded wife, Hermia (more Shakespeare!) Phyllis Kay is mesmerizing; in a long, drunken scene with Jean, Kay is both despairing and defiant. And Rachael Warren plays Gordon’s unnamed colleague and lover with a fantastic sneer, a gelatinous accent – now Scottish, now Ukrainian – and an ungraspable physicality.

In a way, she is the perfect emblem of the show: protean and evasive; funny and just a little sinister; familiar, at times, but also completely foreign. Welcome to the world according to Sarah Ruhl.

There's Something About Olivia

Trinity Rep's Twelfth Night is set at the end of the festival of Epiphany, but its real dispensation is pagan, not Christian. Its spirit predates Christianity and rebels against its manichaeism, offering, instead of a linear model of conflict and consummation, a cyclical reenactment of release and renewal. Beginning with death and dolor, it concludes with matrimony and the promise of regeneration - neither of which could have occurred without the frenzy of mischief and misinterpretation in between. Still, we end the play with an unmistakable feeling of stasis: despite all the action, nothing seems to have changed for its characters. This is exactly the point. All the disguises, schemes, plots, and ploys unreeled in Illyria are meant to preclude rupture and transformation. What looks like mayhem, then, is actually a calibrated practice of purification. When all is done, and the thirteenth day dawns, it is not just the idea of order that has been restored, as in all Shakespeare comedies: it is the exact same order that prevailed before the action of the play began. In Twelfth Night, role-play does not lead to revelation or self-discovery (as it does in Much Ado About Nothing, for example) but to a hardening of assigned social roles.

When the play begins, Orsino, Duke of Illyria (Joe Wilson Jr.), is lamenting his unrequited love for Olivia (Anne Worden), a countess in grieving for her dead father and brother. Even as he laments, however, Orsino revels: his unsatisfied desire gives him direction and distinction. It is performative rather than productive. His fanciful affections, and Olivia's indifference to them (which Shakespeare scholar Jean Howard calls "the real threat to the hierarchical gender system" established in the play, as opposed to the putative threat of cross-dressing), represent a seam in the fabric of Illyrian society. Onto this compromised surface stumbles the shipwrecked Viola (Cherie Corinne Rice), only briefly disquieted by the loss of her twin brother to the storm that nearly killed her; disguised as a young man named Cesario, she gains employment as Orsino's attendant. She falls in love with Orsino but spends her days delivering his entreaties to the implacable Olivia, who herself falls in love with Cesario/Viola the first time they meet. Her mourning is as meretricious and mercurial as Orsino's love. Meanwhile, Olivia's drunken uncle, Toby Belch (Fred Sullivan Jr.), is hosting the wealthy but witless Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Stephen Thorne), who ineptly woos Olivia as well, while joining Sir Toby in a vindictive reprisal against Olivia's Puritanical attendant Malvolio (director Brian McEleney), who - oh, yes - also loves Olivia. One might wonder what Olivia has done to inspire such fervor in the men around her; the only celibate is Feste (Stephen Berenson), Olivia's fool, who is too smart to be ensnared.

This show is epitomized, anyway, not by intelligence but by the eruptive energy of Belch. Played with dizzying vigor by Fred Sullivan Jr., Sir Toby is an ebullient figure of inversion and destruction: for him, boundaries of class and etiquette aren't merely to be ignored, but gleefully obliterated. His anarchism is an affront to Malvolio, who runs Olivia's house with humorless tyranny; they are mirrored images of each other, even to the end of the play, when Malvolio, "much abused," leaves town in pouting disgrace, and Toby, bloodied in misapprehended battle, takes comfort in the companionship of the hapless Aguecheek. In Twelfth Night, the blurring - the eradication - of difference is not a symptom of disorder but a strategy of restoration: the extreme opposites of Belch and Malvolio confront each other, and each leaves the stage in shame; Viola models herself after her brother, presumed dead, and is later, and confusingly, reunited with him; a countess comes out of mourning to woo a woman dressed as a man and ends up engaged to a man who is the woman's twin. This extreme confusion is inherently terminal; it cannot hold. The force that tightens the knot of absurdity is lust; it is the mirrored image of hysteria, which simultaneously unravels.

The production at Trinity Rep, directed by Brian McEleney and starring half of the actors in Providence, is like a bottle of Dionysian vitality: shaken, agitated, and opened, finally, with a gratifying fizz. McEleney has captured the play's sense of controlled anarchy; the show is effervescent, and gently intoxicating. But something has escaped from his alembic: the play's connection to itself. The show seems timeless and placeless. It has plenty of movement, but too little choreography; speed, but no rhythm. It forgoes the deep emotional for the high fantastical. Still, where it succeeds - in antic, ataxic comedy - it succeeds thrillingly. Anne Worden, a third-year in the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, is a terrific Olivia, swinging wickedly between lust and self-possession. As Aguecheek, Stephen Thorne is agile and perfectly pitiful. Joe Wilson Jr.'s orotund Orisno is a little forceful - his humor gets lost in his dire elocution - but Cherie Corinne Rice nearly floats as Viola (and is a spry and convincing Sebastian, to boot).

What this production lacks is coherence, or completion. The play seems to be set (by master designer Eugene Lee) in Victorian sumptuousness - far stage left is a cluttered library, with more books than shelves and more picture frames than pictures; at stage right is a dry fountain, littered with dried branches and leaves - but, for all of its fastidiousness, the set feels like a prop and never a place. It is not lived in, just tripped over. The library is unvisited - like most of us today, nobody in Illyria has the time or inclination to read - and the fountain is as redolent as a husk. McEleney's production does not suggest a life - or death - outside of the script. For all of its impudence and irreverence, the show is literal rather than metaphysical. It has a wonderful spirit of playfulness, but no sense of purpose. What is the life from which the excitements of Twelfth Night are a reprieve? Who are the books for? How does the fountain sound when it is on? McEleney marvelously exposes the urgent ritualism of the play but leaves us with a disconcerting question: Who are all these people behind their masks?

Elemental Theatre and the Holy Go.Go

I cannot say enough about the Elemental Theatre Company, whose "Father, Son, and the Holy Go.Go," the most recent iteration of their extremely popular, annual "Go-Go" plays, is showing at Perishable Theatre for one more weekend. Their work brings a rich humanity to the stage; a fineness of vision; and terrific sense of humor. I can't review the plays - there are three; like the trinity from which the work borrows its name, they somehow cohere in a single entity - but I can strongly urge you to see them. They will reassure you that people of great heart, dedication, and talent are still writing for the stage.

Catch them tonight at 8:00 and tomorrow, Sunday, at 2:00.

"4:48 Psychosis" Review Round-Up

The reviews of Gamm Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's "4:48 Psychosis" are in, and they are, superficially at least, unanimously positive; but they are also, it appears, deeply ambivalent.

My own review, in Motif, is short and timid. I acknowledged Kane's sense of purpose and the performers' persuasive powers, but I did not ask, "To what end?" What does "4:48 Psychosis" try to do? It has tremendous intensity (you'll see that word a lot in discussion of Kane's work) but little direction; it feels furtive. And of what do the performers intend to persuade us? That depression is a terrifying tribulation? After seeing the play, I believed it - but I didn't feel it. I had been persuaded, not convinced.

Channing Gray, in the ProJo, serves up a backhanded assessment of the script - "It reads as a long rambling poem" - before concluding that the show itself is "likely to linger in the memory for a long time." I agree, but I also wonder what sort of appraisal that is. It's safe, in that it's value-free; a lot of things linger in the memory for a long time. The comment's neutrality makes me think that Gray had reservations about the production that he didn't explore.

Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, calls it "so intense. Strident." He goes on

Drama is about maintaining the tension of conflicting needs or desires. And what could be more fraught than the either-or, no-middle-ground question of suicide? Yet, by all rights audiences could be expected to withdraw from empathy soon after entering this woman's ranting display of pain and suffering. Compassion fatigue is not a challenge dramatists often face. But thanks to the playwright's canny structure, director Tony Estrella's well-timed easing of the anguish, and Kim's every-moment focus, the center does hold, at least for us as witnesses, as the terrified woman's internal anarchy is loosed upon her world.

What does this mean? Rodriguez's frayed and tangled language seems borne of uncertainty: he doesn't know himself what he's trying to say.

The standard that Susan McDonald of the Attleboro Sun-Chronicle invokes to gauge the experience of watching "4:48 Psychosis" is comfort:

To say it pushes past the comfortable boundaries of the modern theater is an understatement. It obliterates them. It is not a comfortable show to watch but it is a compelling show, an educational show, an absolutely breath-taking hour and 12 minutes.

One wonders if the boundary through which Kane bursts isn't just comfort but pleasantness. A lot of modern theatre is intimate and cathartic; but not all modern theatre so strains the sympathy of its audience.

Dan Aucoin, in the Boston Globe, has the guts to note the clumsiness of Kane's script; "It should be said that there are some stretches of bad writing in '4:48 Psychosis,' wince-inducing lines like 'love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears,' when Kane was clearly straining to poeticize her suffering." He credits Casey Seymour Kim's performance with "astonishing intensity" and authenticity.

But he also reveals the submissiveness only euphemistically expressed by the other reviewers: he describes the audience leaving the theatre "after watching - or should that be surviving? - '4:48 Psychosis,'" as though endurance in the face of aggressive art - no matter how middling - were something to be proud of. A Theatre of Cruelty needs an Audience of Masochists. Tony Estrella, the Artistic Director of the Gamm, should be heartened to know that the audience is out there, demanding to be educated through punishment. Art about suffering does not have to make its audience suffer, too; but these practical times call for educational theatre, and there is not better educator than experience. So we suffer, but only for the sake of accuracy - or so we're brazenly told. Through her main character, Woman, Kane observes, "Some will call this self-indulgence (they are lucky not to know its truth)." What is most true, of course, may not be what makes good art; any of us can tell the truth, but the artist tells the most truthful lies. For Kane, in her last play, the truth was enough. When we are convinced that accuracy is the sole measure of artistic accomplishment, we get the theatre we deserve: authentic, I suppose, but dull.

Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium's "Woyzeck"

Last year Christopher Windom, now a third-year MFA candidate in directing at the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, staged a powerful production of The Tempest at the Pell Chaffee Theatre. That show was about growing up and growing old; its characters left behind the realm of desire—a hermetic, if comfortable, place—to join the world of experience. Windom returns this year with Georg Büchner’s 19^th-century proto-naturalistic Woyzeck; its cruel determinism would be enough to send Miranda back to her father and Ariel back into spritely servitude. Two more different plays would be hard to imagine. But if Windom’s range is admirable, his accuracy is imperfect. While The Tempest was a great swirl of language, movement, and music, his Woyzeck is strangely inert. Aiming, I think, for a kind of pointed social commentary, Windom has just missed his mark—the play is an elusive target—and presents instead an amusing but toothless satire.

Woyzeck is a study in degradation; its voice is, sometimes maddeningly, the passive. Franz Woyzeck, a low-ranking soldier in the army, is being cheated on by his wife, experimented on by his doctor, bossed around by his superiors, and pissed on by his peers. He hears voices in his head and has apocalyptic visions. And in this version, which is set in America after World War II, he has the most damning affliction of them all: he is black. All of this amounts to a lot for the audience to take in; the unarticulated wave of abuses visited on Woyzeck swamps us, too. When Windom tries to differentiate among Woyzeck’s torturers, as he must to give the show texture and substance, he resorts to caricature rather than nuance.

Caricature, despite its boardwalk connotations, is not necessarily a clumsy or anti-dramatic technique; it can be used skillfully to represent the extreme range of characters’ subjective experiences. Here, however, it depicts only the director’s biases. In Woyzeck, the doctor, known as The Doctor, is manic and self-infatuated; the army captain, called The Captain, bloviates tirelessly in reflective sunglasses; Woyzeck’s wife’s lover, the Drum Major, is gigantic without being threatening; and Woyzeck’s peers are lecherous hicks. These exaggerations tell us more about Windom’s sense of stagecraft than Woyzeck’s sense of terror. In this Woyzeck, the forces that loom over Woyzeck are laughable—The Doctor is a klutz, The Captain a self-parody—so his desperate response to them is inexplicable. His dread, obviated by Windom’s goofy representations of his oppressors, is preposterous. By revealing these authorities as frauds—by shining a light through the veil of power—Windom reduces Woyzeck to a comic punchline: only a rube would let himself be dominated by such transparent impostors. For the play to be tragic, power must remain opaque. We must be able to see both the banal ferocity and inscrutable fakery of the society that crushes Woyzeck. Caricature is an apt tool for this task if it is used ironically to depict Woyzeck’s distorted perspective; as it is, his mounting madness has no traction. He is reacting to characters that exist only as semaphore from director to audience.

Will Shaw, who plays the hapless Woyzeck, does his best, but he seems to be in a different play than the actors around him. He has a rich, stentorian voice that is a good match for his feelings of estrangement and doom, though it does not seem to be the voice of someone beaten by authority: it is sometimes prophetic, but it is never persecuted. Shaw’s physical mannerisms are reactive. His default posture is a sort of electro-shocked tautness, his face pulled back in a wide-eyed grimace, his arms stiff down to his fingertips. Shaw has improved immeasurably in his time in the Consortium—he is not only more confident onstage, he is also more compelling—but we still get the sense, when watching him, of an actor hard at work. Rebecca Gibel as his wife, Marie, is tender and troubled; she defends Woyzeck in public but betrays him privately. It’s a wonderful and challenging role, and Gibel revels in drawing out its unresolved ambivalence. Karl Gregory, whose sustained and controlled hysteria as the self-justifying writer Heiner Muller in Charles Mees’s Full Circle was one of the real pleasures of last year’s theater season, is hysterical again here as The Doctor. He has the unfortunate condition of being extremely likeable onstage; projecting menace will, one suspects, be an enduring difficulty for him. But his natural charm and physical fluidity, when soundly harnessed to subsumed sinister intentions, will make his evil that much more grotesque. He need only look to Patrick Mulryan’s performance as the amber-voiced Nazi Youth from Trinity Rep’s recent Cabaret for an example of dewy duplicity. In Woyzeck, Mulryan plays The Captain, whose gnomic pronouncements on virtue, issued in a clipped bark, both puzzle and diminish Woyzeck. Mulryan is enjoyable in the role, but his characterization seems twice removed from its source: it is a play on a parody.

At least he appears to be having fun in a production that feels cautious, even dutiful. Windom, I think, is still searching for meaning in the play. It was his directorial confidence that buoyed The Tempest last year and that was missing in the performance of Woyzeck that I saw last week. His choices feel explanatory, as though compensating for the show’s difficulty. One wants to encourage him, to say, there is nothing to explain; just a story to unfold.

A Christmas Carol at Trinity Rep

A Christmas Carol, now at Trinity Rep, begins with a solitary chair onstage and ends with an ensemble easily outnumbering the available seats and, anyway, too boisterous to even think about sitting down. One would feel like--well, like a Scrooge, for not joining them in smiles and song. But this holiday cheer, like much holiday cheer, feels clinical: it is just as carefully calculated as any of mean old Scrooge's accounting sheets. Is ersatz magnanimity really any better than genuine irascibility? As silly and dispensable as this Christmas tradition might feel, it can still summon our deeper, richer feelings if it aspires to any sort of authenticity--that is, if its own feeling is deep and rich. But this production shows Scrooge transforming from sourpuss, right past sweetheart, to pure sap. Scrooge, in his final, viscous incarnation, is cloying and unpalatable. This is a real shame. As played by Timothy Crowe (whom we last saw onstage swaying like a deeply rooted but fatally weakened tree as the lone character of conscience in The Receptionist), the Scrooge of the first quarter of the play is a virtuosic misanthrope, bilious and bullying. His mastery of mockery makes him a pleasure to watch: we can't wait to hear what outrageous affront he'll come up with next. As the show moves along, however, we begin to lose him. Crowe concedes too much. Instead of insisting on Scrooge's reprehensibility, he relents. His Scrooge is not such a tough guy, after all. He is neither, it turns out, such a nice guy, even after his putative transformation. Doubtless he has been transformed, but the process has been more chemical than spiritual, and he spends the last quarter of the play oozing around the stage like a sugary paste. This caricature of sweetness is almost horrifying; it is certainly less recognizably human than the earlier caricature of bitterness.

The Baltimore writer Stephen Dixon has a story, "Change," in which a man resolves to end his cynicism and condescension and open himself up to possibility in the world. He goes too far, of course, and one of the strangers on the street whom he accosts with kindness challenges him: "'People hear you like this they won't take to it. I don't know what you conceive of as new changes, but if this is supposed to be one for the better, I hate to think of what you were like before.'" If only Scrooge were offered such objective criticism.

Fear and Loathing in "Amadeus"

To judge by the plays now showing on Rhode Island stages, all we need is love. The Gamm Theatre is presenting a romantic doubleheader, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet (love splits the series), while Providence College has just finished its own Romeo and Juliet and Trinity Rep gives us the midlife melancholy of Shooting Star. Each of these plays is fine in its own right, and some are even excellent, but, en masse, they suggest a stolid, sincere uniformity of theatrical subject. In the Age of Aquarius, each new loving couple has all the sparkle of a much-handled coin. Thank goodness, then, for the fear and loathing of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which is being staged with fervid feeling and sharp, dark humor by the Elemental Theatre Collective in Beneficent Church. By producing the play in a church, director Alexander Platt has embraced certain aspects of the show—its awe before genius and its terror before God—while downplaying others, especially its heavily psychologized second act. He is also suggesting that the story of Salieri and Mozart has the moral universality and narrative elegance to compete, as it were, with the ritual played out in church every week. I think he gives the play too much credit; but, in doing so, he gives the audience a vigorous and satisfying theatre. There may be a generally applicable lesson here: that, in theatre at least, it is best to overshoot your mark. We leave the church pale from the show’s moral chill; it is a response, if not quite a rebuke, to the warm-heartedness prevailing on our local proscenia.

Amadeus tells the story of Antonio Salieri, the Kappellmeister of the Austrian empire, whose mediocrity is revealed and envy aroused when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, having toured Europe and dazzled audiences as a young prodigy under his father’s oppressive influence, arrives in Vienna and aspires to a position at the court himself. I should say, rather, that Salieri tells the story of Salieri: the play’s galvanizing emotion is jealousy; its preferred medium, alloquy. There is no Amadeus without Salieri’s hypnotic narration. Indeed, he is one of the great storytellers in theatre: utterly honest and completely untrustworthy. When we first see him, he is an old man, crumpled and obscure, his only claim to distinction the rumors whispered in town that he is Mozart’s murderer—rumors that he is more than happy to confirm. Thus the play, which takes the form of a confession, begins.

Salieri starts with his conversion, which is not so much religious as musical. As a young boy in church, Salieri observes the power, the near-divinity, of the choirmaster, and is weakened by the sound issuing like unction from the choir. He resolves, in a fit of fresh conviction, to abjure earthly pursuits if God will grant him this one desire: to become a renowned composer. At first, Salieri believes that God has committed to this exchange; his musical gifts impress Emperor Joseph II, and he is advanced to the top of the musical hierarchy at the court. But when he meets Mozart, and hears his extraordinary compositions, the mere adequacy of his own talents is harshly exposed. As if Mozart’s genius were not dispiriting enough, his vulgarity and impiety are an actual affront to Salieri, whose life has been a symphony of self-abnegation. With the same determination that he had once applied to his devotion to God, Salieri turns to the destruction of Mozart. He attempts to seduce Mozart’s wife, Constanze; he bedevils Mozart with specious encouragement, which he directly contravenes to court officials; and, finally, as the young composer withers in illness and isolation, he terrorizes him by impersonating a black-clad figure from Mozart’s nightmares and nightly demanding a requiem mass. Detached but demanding, Salieri reenacts Mozart’s father’s imperiousness. In this disguise, Salieri transgresses the limits of human power: he is not only Mozart’s father, but also his God, and his death.

Shaffer, on the other hand, violates only the rules of compelling drama; the overt psychologizing of Salieri’s revenge against God is drama’s antithesis. For Shaffer, both Salieri and Mozart are products of exacting and implacable fathers whose deeply imprinted influence must be exorcised. Salieri completes his renunciation of God by assuming His power; he simultaneously completes his destruction of Mozart. We last see Mozart, reduced to mewling dependence, in his wife’s arms. But she has been transformed into his mother; the scene is a pieta. This Oedipal twist represents a contraction, rather than an expansion, of the first act’s premise. Salieri begins as a dervish of despair and ends as a methodological proto-Freudian. The energy and urgency of the show follows this narrative diminishment.

It is up to the actors to enliven the show’s second act, but it is clear that they are more at home with anguish—the dominant tone of the first act—than with evil. The play makes special demands on the actor who plays Salieri and who must sustain the story. Max Vogler is a credit to the role. His performance, part leer and part lecture, is sinister and dangerously seductive. However, though he demonstrates something like virtuosity in the first act, he can’t summon a necessary vengeful vitality later in the show. He has Salieri’s apologetic bewilderment down, but not the malevolence that would warrant it. Salieri’s conversion from victim to agent—from servant to executor—might be more powerful if it were more stark, but Vogler and Platt are sympathetic rather than judgmental. Even as he persecutes Mozart with an alienated indifferent, he retains his humanity. Their interpretation is intelligent and compassionate, but it dulls the sharp edge of Salieri's madness. Bryan Kimmelman is given the thankless task of playing Mozart, who was portrayed with famous impertinence by Tom Hulce in the 1984 movie version of the play. Kimmelman’s vocal characterization is fine, but his body is disengaged. He looks a little scrawled, like shorthand, so we can never quite make out what he’s trying to depict. Worse, his abstracted representation of conducting, composing, and performing is distractingly silly; Mozart himself is silly, of course, but when he is robed in his music he should, I think, achieve a certain heightened dignity. D’Arcy Dersham plays Constanze Mozart with terrific poise, capturing her toughness and fragility with equal credibility, and Tanya Anderson is frequently hilarious as the curt and condescending Emperor Joseph.

For sheer spectacle, nothing I have seen on stage this year matches Amadeus. The production is intimate, the subject terrible, and the performers full of passion and belief. We might wish that Shaffer had given them something more to believe in, but in these parsimonious times, we should take what we can get. Alex Platt and the ensemble have spun something fine from the sometimes rough fibers of Shaffer’s play. Their next challenge will be to perform a sublime version of a Salieri opera; I don't doubt that they could do it.

Shooting Star at Trinity Rep

It is a shame, or a terrific irony, that a play as imaginative and credible as Shooting Star should have such an inane and insistent title. Indeed, the title is one of the few missteps in this modest and graceful show. The story of two former lovers who reunite serendipitously in a snowed-in airport, it seems, at first, to be a non-threatening riff on the contemporary fantasy of "closure." But over the short course of the play, skepticism gives way to recognition and, finally, to admiration. Author Steven Dietz has crafted a work both archetypal and specific; he grounds the yearning of our lives in the particular experiences of his characters'. Dietz knows that as characters come into focus--as they acquire histories and secrets and desires--they become more, not less, familiar to the audience. Our imaginations are nourished with detail. The show begins in the thin atmosphere of cliché--Reed McAllister is a frustrated husband and father whose job in sales is on the line; Elena Carson does yoga, listens to NPR, and has dated a string of drummers--before descending to a more salubrious altitude. That light-headed feeling you have early on in the play, caused by a surfeit of jokes about Canada, "red" and "blue" politics, and cell phones, is replaced by a piercing clarity of feeling. Kurt Rhoads gives Reed a weatherman's smugness, leavened by a dose of quiet desperation; Nance Williamson, as Elena, is vulnerable but resilient. The script is too scripty--it is contained and centered: we never feel the rush of risk as characters edge out to some new, untested perspective or proposition--but its emotions are just right. The show is pregnant with an exquisite ache.

Trinity Rep's "Cabaret"

Cabaret, now showing at Trinity Rep, takes place at the sobering close of the dizzy, dithyrambic decade following World War I. The show, set in Berlin, begins as the 20s give way to the 30s and the extravagance of the Weimar Republic recedes before the moral stringency of the National Socialists—the Nazis. The party is still raging—its epicenter is the Kit Kat Club, its avatar the dissipated singer Sally Bowles—even as the clean-up crew starts to sweep in from the edges. Written in 1966 and based on the play I Am a Camera, itself based on Goodbye to Berlin, a collection of short stories by Christopher Isherwood published in 1939, Cabaret leans heavily on the audience's knowledge of what happened next: in 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, a position he quickly leveraged to realize the totalitarian vision he had articulated in Mein Kampf. For the characters in the show, then, time is short. If our familiarity with history tightens the show’s tension, it also cheapens its achievement: we leave the theater not so much grieving a paradise lost as pitying the characters who have so underestimated the hell to come. The prelapsarian context charges Cabaret with moral seriousness while absolving its authors of the rigors of narrative, character, and setting. A story that ends in genocide has built-in pathos; what, besides music, can Cabaret contribute to it?

The answer to this is short and simple: Sally Bowles. Bowles is an English ex-pat who has become a star attraction at the Kit Kat Club, a bastion of frivolity in a city increasingly consumed by angst. As portrayed by Trinity firecracker Rachael Warren, Bowles is a marvel of a character, a cataclysm of opposing, or complementary, impulses: to babble and to obfuscate; to perform and to conceal; to connect and to go it alone. On stage she’s plucky and inscrutable; off, she’s fidgety and vulnerable. The central question around Sally Bowles is whether she is indomitable or merely elusive: is her power to captivate or to ingratiate? In a scene that culminates with Nazi Youth breaking into a triumphant performance of the patriotic anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” our eyes turn to Sally, who is watching them with rapt fascination: their politics may be ugly, but their music is terrific. For the deracinated Sally Bowles, whose only home is in a song, this may be too much to resist. By the end of the show, when Germany’s grim future has been amply foreshadowed, Bowles has returned to the Kit Kat Club. She has lost a lover, aborted her pregnancy, and resolved to live in a doomed country; her final song, “Life is a Cabaret,” is a surrender phrased in the language of defiance. Warren, her voice loud, lusty, and lovely, achingly expresses this ambivalence. It is a thrilling moment of theater because it is a perfect crystallization of a complex character.

If only anything else in the show were as refractive as Sally Bowles; instead, we get dull-edged characterization and rubbed-smooth sentiment. The show is about Clifford Bradshaw (Mauro Hantman), an American writer who comes to Berlin for inspiration but who ends up, prosaically, giving English lessons instead. (Writers tend to make bad main characters: as stand-ins for the authors of shows, who wish to be neither self-aggrandizing nor self-incriminating, they are usually saddled with insipid goodness and passive natures. So it is with Bradshaw: he is a blank, but crisp, sheet of paper.) His lover is (inexplicably) Sally Bowles; his pupil is a Nazi named Ernst (Stephen Thorne); his landlady, the starchy Fraulein Schneider (Phyllis Kay), has a soft spot for his neighbor, a timid Jewish grocer named Herr Shultz (Stephen Berenson); another neighbor, Fraulein Kost (Janice DeClos), entertains young sailors in her apartment. It is not clear what world these characters are supposed to represent, except that of the Musical. Certainly there is nothing in this production to evoke the cultural schizophrenia of the era, the competing voices of trauma and arousal, the physical and spiritual disfigurement that made places like the Kit Kat Club necessary palliatives.

Berlin, I imagine, was a seething, pustular city—hence the makeup and make-believe at the cabaret. But Trinity’s Berlin has been treated with an antiseptic: sure, it’s a little wan, but you’d never know how sick it really was. Only Sally Bowles has the desperate vitality of the plague victim. Without a clearer picture of the city’s disease, the Kit Kat Club is just another saloon, its Emcee just another cross-dresser (although, to be fair, Joe Wilson, Jr. makes a hell of a cross-dresser). Director Curt Columbus has brought a cottony humanism to all of this work with Trinity, but that might not be the right texture for Cabaret, which cries out for a telling less merciful. The show is not without its delights; what it needs is more degradation.

Cool Nights; Drying Leaves; Theater Resumes...

...it's Fall in Providence.

I didn't see much theater this summer--just Hugging the Shoulder (presented by Theater of Thought) and Noises Off (present by Contemporary Theater Company). As I wrote in Motif, Hugging the Shoulder is a crude show, both vulgar and unsophisticated, though not, by extension, unenjoyable. The performance by ToT, in a crumbling parking lot behind Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket, treated the subject of infection and decay with a violent current, a sort of moral cautery. But the show, and our reaction to it, was all reflex and no reflection. Theater of Thought should be commended for bringing contemporary and unsettling theater to Providence and for keeping audiences on their toes through strident staging. They have great energy (which is not meant to be euphemistic: energy matters); now they need great scripts.

Striving for a completely different breed of theater experience, the Contemporary Theater Company brought Nosies Off, the riotous farce about theater, to URI's Kingston campus in late July. The show is not particularly contemporary (certainly not compared with Hugging the Shoulder, which was first produced at the NYC Fringe Festival in 2006) but the performance was immediate and gratifying.

This weekend brings previews to both Trinity Rep and Gamm Theatre. Trinity is showing Cabaret; Gamm is starting its season with Much Ado About Nothing, which they will perform in repertory with another play you may have heard of, Romeo and Juliet (opening September 22). Second Story begins its season later this month with the one-man show I Am My Own Wife. And Elemental Theatre Collective opens Amadeus on November 5.

Final Weekend at Trinity Rep: Shapeshifter

With the world premiere of Shapeshifter, Trinity Rep’s 2008-2009 season comes to an end. Actually, one feels on leaving the theatre that it has come to the edge of a bending horizon and disappeared only from sight: the play, and the season, end wistfully, with the promise of further adventures bunched and blurred like a distant and indistinct silhouette. But the prospect of a fulfilling future is no match, as drama at least, for the realization of something meaningful and passionate now, and what Shapeshifter lacks is a moment, a present, in which life is frozen and shown in exultant detail. This is not to say that there are no great moments in the play—there are—but that the play itself only describes, and does not evoke, a long moment of crisis, and so the decision with which it ends is noisy but spurious. More interested in surfaces than depths, in action than in introspection, the show has a shape but no spirit.

It is not for lack of trying. Laura Schellhardt wrote her play around the perplexing and life-long question of identity—which, really, is what most art is about—and she has set it in a magical milieu: the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, which are nestled in mist and enthralled by the inscrutable behavior of shapeshifters, supernatural beings who can assume animal and human form. Midge, a young girl whose erratic behavior since her mother’s death worries her father (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) and her caretakers, the loving and gently teasing Fierson (Brian McEleney) and Maude (Anne Scurria), has a strong connection to the water and its spirits—and, somehow, we know, to the shapeshifters as well. She senses her difference from the others in her small fishing village but cannot express it. Fierson nurtures her incipient awareness of who she is in the dark loam of the stories he tells her about shapeshifters and transformation and love and sacrifice; to Maude, however, these tales are just arid fantasy: life is a series of practical challenges, like keeping one’s house clean and family fed.

But Midge is not the only one in the village transfixed by the power of the shapeshifters: her caretakers’ son, Tom (Stephen Thorne), rescues one from the ocean, falls in love with her, and marries her—all this in spite of her inability to speak English, though her whale is quite good—while other villagers have their own encounters with members of this mystical species. (Rachael Warren plays all of the shapeshifters, finding distinguishing physical mannerisms in each.) These scenes, episodic and elliptical, are animated not by the breath of character but by the machinery of caricature. Douglas (Joe Wilson, Jr.), for example, captures a shapeshifter, imprisons her, and tries to force her to marry him. What accounts for his ugly rapacity we never learn; his prehensile lust is merely a cynical contrast to Tom’s innocent affection. It’s not that the story needs more exposition or supposed psychological realism, but that its emotions need more mass. They are colorful and large, but they are hollow. Douglas is not a compelling character if he simply hates shapeshifters: what is his real quarrel with himself or with the world? What wrong does he mean to avenge, what imbalance does he mean to right, by dominating and demoralizing this shapeshifter? The audience learns as much about him as we might about a neighbor whose windows we walk past in the evening.

The play’s perfunctory characterization may be a function of its debt to the oral storytelling tradition. Plaited through the show is a fantastical story that Midge co-authors with Fierson and that changes direction as Midge herself changes. To reinforce this connection between Midge and the story she tells, Schellhardt has her watching action onstage even when she is not a part of it. These scenes, unfortunately, replicate the play’s problem: it all feels diffused and distorted, as though observed through the murky medium of a child’s avid and unrefined curiosity. There’s nothing recognizable in any of the characters—except for what we recognize from other plays and movies we’ve seen. Like Midge, who thinks that she can find the perfect name for someone by asking what he loves and what he hates, Schellhardt seems to believe that personality can be determined by two-question survey. So: Fierson is sweet-natured and imaginative but casually dismissive of his wife. Maude seems at first merely long-suffering and hard-headed, until she shows Midge a box containing artifacts from her youth—the skin she changed out of, but could not discard, when she married Fierson. Tom is love-struck and naïve, and Douglas is an unrepentant brute. Even Midge, the sympathetic center of the show, is a cipher, although she is rendered excitedly by Miriam Silverman.

Schellhardt thinks that shapeshifters can act as an illuminating metaphor for the story of any person’s maturation, which is a process of expansion and compromise, of fluidity and assertion, but she has worked backwards from this thesis to a play. As evidentiary drama, as Theatre of the Sincere, Shapeshifter is perfectly crafted; it presents its ideas efficiently, persuasively, even attractively. But it should not be mistaken for a show about actual people.