Tuning Into "ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll"

Maybe it’s because I live with a musician but ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll, the new play with music by Eisa Davis that opened this week at the Vineyard Theatre, struck a deeper chord with me than have most of the now seemingly endless stream of plays centered around the coming of age of a group of precocious young women.

The four teens in ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll (and no, I don’t know how to say the title out loud either) are participants in a summer music program in Berkeley, just as Davis herself was as a kid (click here to read more about the real program). 

Here all the girls are gifted but as is customary with fictional quartets ranging from Dorothy and her three pals in “The Wizard of Oz” to Sarah Jessica Parker and her trio of besties in “Sex and the City,” each of these girls represents a different approach to music—and to life.  

Fax is a classicist, literally: she’s training to be an opera singer and is determined to perform all the notes exactly as they’re written. Margot is a free-spirited drummer who loves to improvise and has an almost mystical relationship with music. Rile is an ambitious pianist and eager to do whatever it takes to succeed. Meanwhile, Clementine, the most musically ambidextrous of the group who plays a variety of instruments, just enjoys playing. 

But because they are caught in that confusing middle ground between girlhood and full womanhood, each of them is also dealing with other issues that include eating disorders, sexual identity, suicidal ideation and in one case the search for a birth father.  

Although we don’t see their parents, it's clear that they run the gamut from warm and supportive to careless and even remote, and that all are affecting how their children define themselves. As the play unfolds over an intermission-less 1 hour and 45 minutes, the girls come together in various constellations to help one another, to challenge one another, to undermine one another and ultimately to change one another.

Davis and her director Pam MacKinnon set themselves (and their casting director) a big challenge in finding four actors who could really play their instruments and convincingly play youngsters probably a decade younger than they actually are. And they somehow pulled it off.  

The entire cast is fantastic—they particularly shine in an improvised jam session about halfway through the show—but I found myself unable to take my eyes off Hillary Fisher, who has the same kind of gawky charm and clarion voice that has endeared Sutton Foster to so many fans.

The creative team is pitch perfect too. Particularly the gorgeous lighting by Russell H. Champa and the all-important sound design by Fan Zhang.

Not everything works. The girls are dealing with so many issues that too many of them get short shrift and it can seem as though Davis, who is currently working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the upcoming Warriors which is scheduled to debut next spring, forgot to delete unnecessary storylines as she revised drafts of the script. 

Still, the central point remains that one of the hardest lessons we can learn when we're young is that there are many ways to define success. And as I’ve learned from my husband and his musician friends, the trick is finding your own rhythm and then marching—or even stumbling through—to the beat of your own drum.

 

 

 

"The Receptionist" Revival Misses Its Call

 

Shows get revived for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they were under appreciated in the past. Or they may have something particularly relevant to say about current events. A director may have come up with an innovative way to tell the old story. Or a producer may believe that a familiar comfort-food title will sell tickets. And sometimes a star wants to take a crack at an iconic role, to give a boost to a favorite one or just to try something different from what they've done before.

As its name suggests, the Second Stage theater company was created to do revivals that would give living American playwrights a second chance to get their work onto a New York stage. And right now 2ndStage, as it likes to bill itself, is having a terrific success with a star-studded revival of Becky Shaw, Gina Gionfriddo’s 2009 Pulitzer finalist centered around a bad blind date and the interlocking network of unhappy people connected to it. I had a terrific time at this dark comedy, liking it even more than I did when I first saw it back in 2008 (click here to read my earlier review).  

And it isn't just me who's feeling that way either. This new Becky Shaw has picked up nominations for Best Revival from the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle and the Tony nominators. The New York Drama Critics Circle gave its Best Individual Performance award to the production’s star Alden Ehrenreich.

Meanwhile, I was looking forward to seeing what the company would do with The Receptionist, a cautionary tale by Adam Bock that shook me when I saw it in 2007 with Jayne Houdyshell in the title role and that is now being revived with the two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran. You wouldn’t normally expect to see the easy-going Houdyshell and the high-spirited Finneran going up for the same role but I figured it would be fun to see what different choices such very different actors might make.  

The Receptionist, which opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center this week, is set in the kind of brightly-lit and blandly decorated office that might serve as the gathering spot in a TV sitcom. Its titular character, a woman named Beverly, would fit right into that kind of show too. She’s the office busybody, nudge, and self-appointed social activities organizer. 

When the play opens her boss is unusually late but that means that Beverly and her co-worker Lorraine have more time to gossip. When a man from the central office arrives, Beverly tries to cover for the boss’ absence. Lorraine flirts with the guy. So far, so sitcom. But then about a third of the way into this tight 80-minute play one of them makes a casual comment about a recent meeting that sends the whole thing careening into the kind of storyline that might turn up on an episode of the sci-fi series “Black Mirror.”

The two things I remember most from seeing The Receptionist in 2007 was how knocked out I was by Houdyshell’s performance and how shaken I was by the growing sense of unease as it became clearer to me what the business of the office was and how easy it can be for nice, likeable people to do really horrible things. Alas, I didn’t feel any of that while watching this revival. 

Finneran is a very gifted comedienne and director Sarah Benson gives the actress plenty of room to do what she does best, which means lots of little bits of comic business that drew big laughs from the audience at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended (click here to read an interview with the actress). But Finneran seemed a lot less sure of herself as the tone shifted into more serious territory and our view of Beverly becomes more complicated. And that unbalanced the whole evening for me.

The play itself is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago when the recent wounds of 9/11 had the country debating how far the government should go to keep Americans safe, what the definition of safety should be and how much responsibility each of us should bear for the actions taken to secure it. With its emphasis on the humor that admittedly was always there, this production makes it OK to smile and then look away, to pretend that things may not be as bad as they seem. It’s taken the cautionary out of the tale.