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Dysfunctional (def.): Malfunctioning, behavior patterns that undermine the stability of a social system.
To see outstanding talents struggling with a flawed script, head up to Off-Tryon Theater in NoDa and you'll find a powerfully acted production of a dubious comedy, Wendy MacLeod's The House of Yes. Meghan Lowther stars as Jackie-O, prime nutball in a radically dysfunctional household. MacLeod's weird walpurgisnacht on the 25th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination is lashed by incest, infidelity and a hurricane. Glenn Griffin directs grimly, so the eccentrics onstage never strike us as witty or goofy.
Within an environment of autos, their parts, and everything `60s that can be associated with them, in pastels scratched out from beneath an inky surface, we witness Li'l Bit's ride down her life's highway. Born to a family that assigned nicknames on the basis of genitalia, Bit boasts an outstanding bosom, whose most ardent admirer is Uncle Peck, a pedophile who'll co-map her journey.
Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, which has won a slew of prestigious drama awards including a l998 Pulitzer, explores the causes and effects of an incestuous relationship on the lives of a young girl (Li'l Bit) and her Uncle (Peck). Narrated by the l8-year-old Li'l Bit, the play presents multiple perspectives through a series of flashbacks spanning the 60s and 70s, which allow the viewer to construct their own understanding of what occurred.
Long before her bra cup size reaches full flower, the well-endowed Li'l Bit is persistently pursued by her Uncle Peck, and moderately -- but not brutally -- violated. Peck pounces during the climactic driving lesson while Li'l Bit's hands are holding on tight to the steering wheel of a moving car. It's a strange, eerie little scene, queasily staged by director Steve Umberger. The lasting effect of this backroad groping is memorably articulated by Li'l Bit in her narration: "That was the last day I lived in my own body." But Vogel short circuits a fierce visceral response.
During the powerful last scene of Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage, Rhea Seehorn astounds as the Teenage Greek Chorus playing the heroine as a child. Although in her twenties, she looks preadolescent as she stares out wide-eyed at the audience, wearing a smocked dress and bobby socks. A few feet away, her adult alter ego, Li'l Bit (Deidre Lovejoy), reenacts her molestation at the age of eleven by Uncle Peck (Kurt Rhoads) during her first "driving lesson," which marked the last day she remembers inhabiting her body.
Paula Vogel's difficult-to-watch, Pulitzerwinning How I Learned to Drive, is the current offering of On Stage Playhouse. The piece is not recommended for the under-17 crowd for good reason; Vogel explores pedophilia in depth.
In comedy, timing is everything. Of course, it also helps to have a brilliantly written script, crisp, properly-paced direction and a cast totally into their roles. PowPAC's production of Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves meets all of this criteria. The script calls for the living areas of two families with action in both areas at the same time. Both areas occupy the same space -- the breadth and depth of PowPAC's stage. James Caputo's set accomplishes absolute separation of living spaces, as realized by Rosemary King's excellent crafting of the walls.
I visited an old friend last night, born 36 years ago, sired by Alan Ayckbourn. This friend, currently at the Sunshine Brooks Theater in Oceanside, is How the Other Half Loves. I usually fret over shows repeated ad nauseam, year after year. This show, last seen six years ago at PowPAC, is a welcome, if belated, repeat.
Despite the tackiness of their respective yellow and purple living areas, wealthy Frank and Fiona are upscale, while recent parents Bob and Teresa are on the way up in the same business. On the sly, Fiona and Bob have been up to some monkey business. To excuse their dalliance, they tell their respective spouses that they've been out late with a different couple in marital difficulties. As farcical luck would have it, the latter get drawn into the former couples' duplicities when invited to their homes for dinner.
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Golden Apple takes a period musical with book and score as fresh as today and demonstrates How to Succeed in (Show) Business -- with an exclamation point! Seldom have a cast been so uniformly right for their "jobs," led by appealing comer Finch (Larry Raben, like his role, a star at whatever he does). You agree as he sings to himself, "I Believe in You." What fun to watch Finch climb the corporate ladder, while nepotistic nemesis Bud Frump keeps sawing away at the rungs.
In the canon of Hollywood-is-full-of-greedheads plays, David Rabe's 1984 excoriation of tinseltown decadence ranks as one of the most potentially tedious, its boys-will-be-pigs antics nowadays almost as quaint as those of Sinatra and his frat buddies.
Having been asked by Florida Studio Theater not to reveal the identity of the character who gets the action going in Hysteria, as well as not to talk about the play's surreal elements, what's a critic to do? Well, I can tell you that it imagines how, in Sigmund Freud's last days living in London, while suffering from cancer of the jaw, he deals with visits from his doctor, a mysterious woman, and Salvador Dali.
You are in my study, not some boulevard farce! protests the Father Of Modern Psychology, but nowadays, the mere mention of Sigmund Freud's name constitutes a joke, and so a certain vaudeville atmosphere is unavoidable.
This story within a story in I Am My Own Wife is of the playwright discovering Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, whose story he dramatizes both directly and through an intermediary. As a boy named Lothar, Charlotte donned his lesbian aunt's clothes and felt, with her encouragement, the woman he really was and would be. Eventually as Charlotte, he spent a life in drag. And what a life!
Lothar Berfelde, the German boy who reinvented himself as transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, managed the astounding feat of living openly as a cross-dresser through two of the world's most repressive regimes -- the Nazis and the Communists. "It seems to me you're an impossibility. You shouldn't even exist," playwright Doug Wright wrote her in seeking her cooperation for doing a play about her. That now-famous play, I Am My Own Wife, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the 2004 Tony Award, is receiving an arresting production at Actors Theater of Louisville.
I Am My Own Wife is a one-man tour-de-force covering the life of East German transvestite, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (nee Luther Berfelde.) It is superbly enacted by up-and-coming Canadian actor, Damien Atkins, who plays 35 different roles. Atkins is an incredible mimic and turns in a highly nuanced performance.
First there was The Fourposter, then along came I Do! I Do!, and now it's I Did! I Did! In the last year the singing/acting couple, Cheryl and Sam Warner, have performed the last two shows -- earlier, the always-popular I Do! I Do! at Patio Playhouse and currently, I Did! I Did! at Theatrx.
I Do! I Do! is, like Love Letters, a very personal experience. Each production takes on much of the personality, and interpretation, of the players and director. Patio Playhouse's current production is under the directorial leadership of Jay Mower and stars recent newlyweds Cheryl and Sam Warner. Add choreographer Kathleen "Kat" Perhach, music director Marianne Kripps, and the talents of accompanist Dylan Snodgrass, and Patio has a winner.
Thanksgiving came early to the Dallas Summer Musicals on October 28, 2003 in the form of a turkey called "I Got Merman". The loosely-woven framework masquerading as a book is one of the worse attempts at a book musical I have ever encountered. A more apt title for this show would be "Four Very Talented Singers in Search of a Musical." The premise is three female singers (Becca Ayers, Cindy Marchionda, and Carol Swarbrick) channeling Ethel Merman during a rehearsal for a show about her career. Mr. Fisk (Jeffrey Biering) is their accompanist.
Since closing in New York amid extracurricular scandal, I Hate Hamlet has played all over the country, even in theaters that haven't yet done Lend Me A Tenor. And why not? Paul Rudnick's satire-and-sentiment play pokes fun at crass Hollywood commercialism and pretentious New York artsiness. It promises fulfilling sex to the young and old, the chaste and unchaste, the living and the dead.
I Hate Hamlet is a sitcom with a gimmick: the ghost of great American actor John Barrymore. As long as Barrymore's on stage, flamboyantly declaiming, the show has some entertainment value. Otherwise, Paul Rudnick's sometimes funny and literate comedy, is safe, routine stuff. The new occupant of an apartment once owned by the Great Profile is Andrew, a young TV star. Andrew is now fearfully preparing to play Hamlet in a theatre-in-the-park revival. During a seance conducted by Andrew's real estate agent, Barrymore emerges from his full-length portrait over the fireplace.
What could have turned into a logistical nightmare - culling just the right songs out of 1500 devoted to or mentioning New York City - has become a dream for those who love that "Wonderful Town." Of course that song's included in this revue centered on the area extolled in another hit tune: "Manhattan." Two vibrant couples trip the light fantastic not only on the "Sidewalks of New York" but also in "The Bowery," on "42nd Street," right on through "East Side, West Side."
Reportedly, this pleasant but innocuous compilation of skits and musical numbers is tops among nonprofit shows nationwide this season. A company of four portray twosomes, with the unifying theme being heterosexual(!) relationships from dating through marriage to geriatric widowhood.
At Friday's opening of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change at Theater Three, when musical director Terry Dobson asked the capacity audience in T3s 90-seat downstairs theatre, how many people had never seen this play, only about 20 raised their hands. This attests to the popularity of this humorous musical revue about the relationships between the sexes. First produced at Theater Three in 2000, it ran continuously for three years. Each year, T3 artistic director Jac Alder reprises it for a limited run.
Last summer the Egyptian Theater Company got a great idea: Why not stage a couple of musicals in repertory throughout the summer? That way, short-term visitors would get to enjoy one show, and residents or those who were around longer could see a couple of them. They called the program Summer TheatreFest, and the idea was so popular, this season it returns with two new, quite diverse musicals.
Neil Simon usually reveals our foibles, while making us laugh. I Ought To Be In Pictures explores the relationship between a father and his daughter, whom he hadn't seen in 16 years. Herb (David Gallagher) left his family in Brooklyn for the fast lane of motion pictures in Hollywood. Unannounced daughter Libby (Michelle DeFrancesco) enters his life. Herb, a writer with massive writer's block, is facing problems in his relationship with Steffy (Connie Terwilliger).
After you see (and you should) School for Scandal, Sheridan's delicious expose of gossip and malicious behavior in 18th century London, at the McCarter, it would be remiss of you if you did not venture up to the Paper Mill Playhouse to see An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde's equally nasty comedy of blackmail and scandal in 19th century London. It is rare to see these two perfectly suited sex and schemes-driven gems performed at the same time and so smartly.
I can see it now. Dana Vermette, Matt Chiorini and Matt Thompson are sitting over a few brews. "Hey, let's write a comedy murder-mystery about a shoe salesman." As the beers are consumed, the ideas flow, and If the Shoe Fits is born. It opened on April 2, 2004 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
If the Shrew Fits Wear It parodies Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew done in mime and set to an excellent selection of music. Alas, nary a word of Shakespeare, that master of playful English, is heard. However, every emotion, every action is properly staged, with never a question as to what's going on. Though every element seems well choreographed, it's obvious the players are adding their own flourishes from time-to-time.
The Dallas Children's Theater production of If You Give a Pig a Party is a sure-fire hit for the three-to-eight year-old crowd. Based on Laura Numeroff's book and adapted for the stage by DCTs Nancy Schaeffer, it relates the story of an impish Pig (Beth Albright) dressed in a pink sweatsuit and pink sneakers and sporting a curly white tail and early Sally Struthers hair-do. Then a Girl (Rebecca Paige) decides to throw a party for the Pig for no special reason, but alas, nobody is home when Pig calls her friends to invite them. What to do?
Theater Three opened a rarely produced Noel Coward play, I'll Leave It To You, on October 17, 2005. Coward's first play, penned when he was 20, it was produced on July 21, 1920 at the New Theatre in London. Bobbie, the aspiring writer/musician, was played by Coward in a part he wrote for himself.
Although Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) is credited with writing the first important French tragedy (The Cid), the poet-playwright was destined to be replaced as the premiere French dramatist by Racine and virtually eclipsed a few years later by Moliere. It is a shame we don't see more of his work being produced, but comfort may be taken in that at least one of Corneille's plays, out of a considerable canon of comedies and tragedies, has been deemed worthy of resurrection.
The art of illusion is the art of love, and the art of love is the blood-red heart of the world, philosophizes the magician Alcandre at the end of Tony Kushner's post-modern adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 17th-century L'illusion Comique. Kushner's The Illusion is a curious blend of Shakespearean comedy, Pirandellian theatrics and Buddhist philosophy which exposes love as the dangerous and mercurial force driving the human comedy.
Asolo Theater Company knows it doesn't hurt to center on characters close to an audience. Though set in New York City's Central Park, I'm Not Rappaport could be any should-be-peaceful public place where two old people can share a seat. In Florida, it might well be a shelter at a beach or a spot near the fountain in a mall. Here it's a park bench slightly out from under a bridge, where retiree Nat tells tales of his radical lifetime to another octogenarian, Midge.
(see Criticopia Regional review(s) under "Margaret Cho")
As You Like It, as staged by New Theater, probably deserved more laughs than it received at Sunday matinee in September. Its fundamental are sound, and it gets a big assist from small touches and tech work. This is the play that gives us the Seven Ages of Man speech. It's the comedy in which all sorts of people are drawn to the Forest of Arden.
Schoolchildren today probably aren't made to memorize the list of Presidents, from George Washington to current occupant, as was the case in times gone by. For those who can still reel off those names at the slightest prompting, the Chicago-based Neo-Futurists compilation called 43 Plays For 43 Presidents, now at Actors Theater of Louisville, is an offbeat refresher course that lurches from absurd vaudeville clowning to somber interludes packed with pathos.
(see Criticopia review(s) under "43 Plays for 43 Presidents")
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