March Madness is the term used to describe this time of the
year when college basketball teams compete for their national championship. But for me, it means the time when the spring theater season kicks into overdrive. This year it's been further complicated by the obligations that have kept me
from posting for the last couple of weeks. But I've still managed to see shows
and here is one of my highlights and lowlights looks at some of what I've been
seeing, listed in order of how much time you have to catch up with them before
they close.
THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN: Dan O'Brien's meta memoir about his
relationship with the photojournalist Paul Watson was the co-winner of the
inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History three
years ago (it shared the honor with All the Way, Robert Schenkkan's play about the first months of LBJ's presidency) and I've been dying for it to come to New
York. Now it has in a Primary Stages production at the Cherry Lane
Theatre playing through March 20 but, alas, I can't say I found it worth the
wait.
Highlight: One of my favorite actors Michael Cumpsty brings
his trademark blend of sensitivity and integrity to the role of Watson, who is
haunted by having taken the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a dead American
soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993.
Lowlight: The 90-minute two-hander devotes so much of its energy
to showy techniques like jumping back and forth in time and having both actors
(Michael Crane portrays O'Brien) play other characters and sometimes exchange their main roles as well, that, despite director Jo Bonney's best efforts, the show ultimately failed
to make me care about the connection between the men.
SMOKEFALL: A line from a T.S. Eliot poem inspired the title
of this absurdist family drama that MCC Theater has extended at the Lucille
Lortel Theatre through March 20. And in many ways it is just as maddeningly
mystifying as the poet could be—but nowhere near as deep.
Highlight: It's great to see that despite all his movie and
TV work, Zachary Quinto continues to make time for the stage. Here he nimbly takes on several characters, including one named Footnote, who narrates the action; and
another named Fetus Two, whom we meet in the show's best scene, dressed as a
vaudevillian and trading one-liners with his twin (the equally
delightful Brian Hutchison) about whether it's worth it for them to leave the womb.
Lowlight: The grim daily lives and poor choices that playwright
Noah Haidle has given four generations of this family, including a mute girl
named Beauty who literally eats garbage, strains for the profundity of Our Town
but ends up in the shallow end of the pool.
NICE FISH: Most of us first became aware of the poet Louis Jenkins when
we learned that the whimsical things Mark Rylance was saying during his Tony
acceptance speeches were actually lines from the Minnesota poet's work. Now
Rylance, who grew up in the Great Lakes region while his British parents
were teaching school there, has collaborated with Jenkins and Rylance's wife-director
Claire van Kampen to convert some of Jenkins' poems into this surprisingly
charming play about two friends who go ice fishing and the other sad-sacks they encounter. It's running at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn through March 27 and you should
get your butt out there to see it (two friends of mine actually made the trip
up from Virginia to do that and went home totally satisfied).
Highlight: Rylance,
of course. If I hadn't seen his Tony-winning turn as Olivia in Twelfth Night
and his Oscar-winning turn as a Russian agent in "Bridge of Spies," I
would have thought that Rylance had devoted his entire career to honing the superb comedic chops he displays here. The rest of the cast ain't bad either and special kudos have to go to Todd Rosenthal for the wittiest set design I've
seen in a long time,
Lowlight: I'm going
to have to be really picky to find one. But here goes: Jenkins is listed as playing one of the
characters and he didn't do it the night my theatergoing buddy Bill and I saw
the show. But the understudy Raye Birk was so damn good that we didn't mind one bit.
BOY: The old nature versus nurture debate is put to the test
when parents make the decision to raise the titular character as a girl
following a botched circumcision in this based-on-a-true story drama that Keen
Company is presenting in The Clurman theater at Theater Row through April 9.
Highlight: Without makeup or costume changes, Bobby Steggert
glides back and forth between genders and ages, all the while quietly conveying
the anguish that the title character is experiencing. It's a lovely
performance.
Lowlight: Playwright Anna Ziegler has experience with
scientific subjects and Linsay Firman directs with unaffected sensitivity but
the play, which was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's initiative to
advance an understanding of science through the arts, is unable to shake the
earnestness of an after-school special, which undermines some of its dramatic
impact.
SENSE & SENSIBILITY: Nearly everyone I know loves Jane
Austen (and it's not just them judging by all the movie adaptations of her novels). I don't usually count myself among the Austen lovers but the Bedlam
theater company's delightfully inventive production of her first published novel about
love among the 18th century English gentry that is now playing at The Gym
at Judson through April 17 may make a convert out of me.
Highlight: I'd never
seen the Bedlam company before but now their playful and yet utterly serious
approach to their work makes me want to see their versions of practically
everything. The entire 10-member cast is terrific and yet first among equals in
this production, adapted by Kate Hamill and directed by artistic director Eric
Tucker, were Andrus Nichols as the most responsible of the husband-seeking Dashwood sisters and Jason
O'Connell as the object of her desire. I want to see them in whatever they
want to do.
Lowlight: None worth mentioning.
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