Turning on the Ghost Light

This is one of the busiest fall theater seasons in years and I’m way behind in writing about many of the shows I’ve already seen.  But this is my husband K’s birthday weekend and we take these kinds of celebrations very seriously in our family.  So there will be no post today and instead, just as theaters do when they're temporarily vacant, I’m turning on the ghost light. But I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday and I hope you will be too.  In the meantime, go see a play!

"In the Wake" Has a Bad Case of ADD

Plays dealing with current events and major political issues come few and far between these days and so I’m usually delighted to see one.  But Lisa Kron’s new play In the Wake pissed me off.  

The Bush-Gore election mess (complete with its infamous hanging chads), the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the debate over same-six marriage all show up in this play which opened at the Public Theater on Monday night (and I mean "show up" literally as well as figuratively; Alexander V. Nichols' video projections self-consciously flash images of those events on a screen that borders the proscenium).  But In the Wake's politics are little more than window dressing for a relationship drama about a woman who finds herself in love with two people.  

The really funny thing is that the love stories, stripped of all the folderol, might have made a damn good play. As is, Kron, who has previously written autobiographical works in which she’s taken on the main role, devotes so much time to writing numbing political speeches for In the Wake that she apparently ran out of energy before she could create characters who feel like real people or to make what they do seem dramatic.  Like a kid with attention-deficit  disorder, her play hops all over the place but can't focus on what's important.

What further annoyed me is that director Leigh Silverman has assembled—but misused—a cast that includes some of the best actors working in the city.  I’m holding both her and Kron responsible for the fact that none of them perform up to their usual stellar standard.

Marin Ireland is a certified New York theater MVP who could play a paper bag and make it seem interesting but even her considerable talents are challenged here. She plays Ellen, a motor-mouth writer and activist who lives in cozy domesticity with her laid-back schoolteacher boyfriend Danny until she meets and falls for a filmmaker named Amy.  Both lovers adore Ellen and she doesn't want to give up either of them.  There’s inherent drama in that situation but it gets lost in all the superfluous rhetoric about what a bad guy George Bush is.

Ireland usually plays dour types and so she probably welcomed the chance to play the voluble Ellen (click here to read a piece about her in the Arts section of the Wall Street Journal).  But the character is so shallow and self-absorbed that I never got why either Amy or Danny would want to spend more than five minutes in the same room with her.

Michael Chernus, on whom I confess I have an inexplicable crush that grows each time I see him on stage, manages to bring a few moments of emotional truth to Danny. But Deidre O’Connell, the buoyant heart of one of last season’s best plays, circle mirror transformation, is condemned to one-note grimness as an even more ardent activist. 

I get that Kron is attempting to draw an analogy between Ellen’s myopia and that of the country as a whole (click here to read an interview she gave Time Out New York). It’s hard to miss that point since in one soliloquy after another, Ellen stands center stage and tells the audience that she has blind spots. That's obvous.  But I would have preferred a little less tell and a lot more show. 

"After the Revolution" Wins My Allegiance

The folks who stayed for the talkback following the performance of After the Revolution that my husband K and I attended were intense.  They wanted to know whether playwright Amy Herzog’s family had been active Communists.  They wanted to know if young people today knew that the Russians had been U.S. allies during World War II.  They wanted to know how close she was to her mother and father.  One or two confided stories about their own families.

The questions—and even the confessions—will all make sense if you see Herzog’s wonderfully layered play about three generations of Upper Westside lefties that is playing through the end of November at Playwrights Horizons. The play centers around the family’s varied reactions to a revelation about the recently deceased patriarch, a committed Communist who became a hero to the Left when took the Fifth and refused to name names during the McCarthy era (click here to see a video trailer). 

I knew I wanted to see After the Revolution from the minute I read the names of its cast members, who include Peter Friedman, David Margulies, Mare Winningham and Lois Smith.  Under the spot-on director of Carolyn Cantor, they make the characters seem so textured and true-to-life that I keep expecting to run into one of them (the characters not the actors) on the subway or while shopping at my neighborhood Whole Food. 

It’s great to see top-shelf actors play complicated people.  But scenic designer Clint Ramos, costume designer Kaye Voyce and, especially, lighting designer Ben Stanton all deserve shout-outs too for giving the world that the play inhabits a convincing verisimilitude.

But the real triumph is Herzog’s.  She takes on a full agenda of topics that range from the guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the legacy of the blacklist to sibling rivalries and modern romance to the meaning of truth and the power of forgiveness. And she handles them all with intelligence and wit, and only occasionally succumbs to preachiness.  

This fall’s theater season is unusually busy and so I’ve been seeing a lot of shows.  And, as regular readers know, I’ve been sitting through far too many of them with my teeth gritted.  So I can give After the Revolution no higher praise than to say that as I watched it, I felt  my clenched jaws relax and a smile of satisfaction spread across my face. As far as I can tell, this is the first play of Herzog’s to be produced in New York.  I'm hoping it won’t be the last.

"Through the Night" is a Show with a Mission

Good roles are hard to come by.  And so over the years, more and more actors have started creating their own.  Their one-person shows are supposed to showcase what they do best. Daniel Beaty, the writer and star of Through the Night, the one-man show currently playing at the Union Square Theatre, does a lot of things well.  And that may be part of the reason that his one-man show is actually a multi-man show.

Through the Night tells the interconnected stories of six black men. At first glance, you might think they’re the usual suspects who so often turn up to represent contemporary black manhood—there’s a preacher, an ex-con and, this being the Age of Obama, an Ivy League grad.

But Beaty sidesteps the old stereotypes and puts his characters through a refreshingly different set of paces. The preacher’s vice isn’t lechery or larceny but overeating.  The ex-con has a steady job and is eager to marry his pregnant girlfriend.  The Ivy Leaguer isn’t a snooty elitist but a supportive Big Brother to an inner-city teen.

Rounding out the group is the teen, the hardworking owner of a local health food store and a precocious 10 year-old.  The men grapple with the full menu of issues confronting the African-American community—hypertension, homophobia, low expectations—and, even when they don’t triumph, they remain positive and determined to do the right thing.  

Through the Night was originally produced at The Riverside Church and it maintains the air of a sermon, right down to the spirituals that Beaty sings.  Bill Cosby, Ruby Dee, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have publicly endorsed the show’s uplifting message.  Still, there are times during its 80-minute running time when its exhortations can seem excessively preachy. 

What pulls the show back onto the entertainment track are Beaty’s infectious charm and sincerity. He manages to give each of his characters—not only the men but the supportive women in their lives—a distinct personality and voice. (Click here to read an essay he wrote about bringing them all to life). And he's gotten strong off-stage support from director Charles Randolph-Wright, video and lighting designer Alexander V. Nichols and sound designer Lindsay Jones.

What appeared to be a black church group took up several rows of seats at the performance I attended and they were obviously delighted by all of it.  But the show seems to be an equal opportunity-pleaser because the Asian couple sitting in front of me looked pretty satisfied too.

I tend to like a bit more edge to my shows but even a curmudgeon like me finds it difficult to naysay one that so unabashedly wears its heart on its sleeve. After taking his bows, Beaty hushed the applause and asked the audience to spread the word about the show.  So that’s what I’m doing here.

"The Pumpkin Pie Show" is a Serious Treat

The name (and the drawing at the right) is a misnomer.  The Pumpkin Pie Show has nothing to do with desserts, Halloween or Thanksgiving.  Instead, this annual downtown event, is a collection of sensationally performed stories by the playwright and actor Clay McLeod Chapman. It would be too tricky for me to review the show because Clay and his wife Indrani Sen are friends but I just had to tell you that seeing the current installment, "Amber Alert," is a serious treat. You can find out more about the show, which ends its run next weekend, by clicking here.

"Lombardi" Acts As Its Own Cheerleader

The producers of the new play Lombardi have done everything they can to reach out to their target audience.  And it may be working.  “She really wants to see this play,” the woman sitting next to me told her husband, referring, I assumed, to a friend. “You know, she’s from Green Bay. 

Lombardi, just 95 minutes without intermission, as the ushers tell each audience member they show to a seat, is a panegyric to the legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. The list of its producers include the CEO of a sports marketing firm, a group called the Friends of Lombardi and The National Football League, which apparently hasn’t put up any money but is throwing its considerable marketing muscle behind the show. 

In the weeks leading up to Thursday night’s opening, Lombardi has gotten air time on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Fox TV’s “Sports Extra,” and NPR’s “Only a Game.”  Theater traditionalists can turn up their noses if they like but the strategy seems to be having the desired effect.  I saw at least two men dressed in Packers jerseys at the performance I attended.

The video projections of old Packers games that scroll across the big screens hanging on two sides of the stage area help set the mood. The stadium-like seating at Circle in the Square, whose lobby has been decorated with poster-size photos of Lombardi and players, adds to the feeling that this isn’t your typical show queen fare.

Of course, the only thing most people under-40 probably know about Lombardi is that the Super Bowl trophy is named after him.  But baby boomers will remember his glory days and, as an added inducement to draw them out, the show has cast ‘80s-era TV stars Dan Lauria (“the father on ‘The Wonder Years,’” the woman next to me reminded her husband) as Lombardi and Judith Light, who is probably best known as Tony Danza’s love interest on the old sitcom “Who’s the Boss,” as the coach’s wife Marie.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to the show itself.  Playwright Eric Simonson employs the hoary device of  inventing a young journalist who interviews Lombardi, his wife and star players for a Look magazine profile.  Their answers to his questions supply the exposition and the reporter periodically spiels of the kinds of stats that sports fanatics love.

The actors are all fine. Luria looks a lot like the real Lombardi.  Light brings a wry crispness to Marie.  But the characters they’ve been given to play are wafer-thin.  Basically, Lombardi shouts a lot.  While Marie drinks a lot.  The players are based on real Packers but their personalities have been reduced to the randy one, the slow-talking one and the black one. Jokes are predictable and there’s no tension at all. Everyone just loves Lombardi cause, hell, he may be gruff but he’s a great guy.

O.K. I’m sounding snide and more than a little condescending, aren’t I?  Well, in some ways who cares what I think about this show. I’m not its target audience.  The guys wearing the Packers jerseys and a lot of other folks in the audience looked to be having a great time.  Some traditionalists are bound to argue that a show like this has no right taking up space in a Broadway theater.  But who cares what they think. Not every show can have, or needs, a touchdown to score. 

"Gatz" vs. the Greatness of The Great Gatsby

Getting ready to see a theatrical marathon can be like preparing for battle.  People gulp cups of coffee.  They anxiously line up at restrooms to empty their bladders.  They exchange gallows humor about whether they can survive what’s to come over the next few hours.  Or at least those are some of the things I saw people doing in the lobby of The Public Theater this past Saturday just before the start of the eight-and-a-half hour marathon performance of Gatz, a complete, word-for-word reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby.” 

Gatz is a creation of Elevator Repair Service, a downtown company that has specialized in turning literary works into theater (click here to read a New Yorker profile about them). I hadn’t seen any of ERS's work before but I’ve become a theatrical-marathon addict and so I bought tickets as soon as I heard that the show, which has toured around the country and abroad for the past five years, was coming to New York. And when my husband K, who loves the Fitzgerald novel, said he had no interest in watching someone else read the book, I persuaded my theatergoing buddy Bill to see the show with me. 

The play opens in a sad looking office. One of the employees comes in and when he can’t get his computer—by the looks of it, an ‘80s-era Mac—to turn on, he picks up a copy of a book that turns out to be “Gatsby” and starts reading it aloud.  Nearly half an hour passes before any of the other people who have entered the office and begun their day’s work speaks a word.  When one of them does, it’s a line of dialog from the book.   

And that’s the conceit of the show.  Like Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, the play's reader is our primary storyteller and we see the action unfold through his eyes. In essence, the reader becomes Nick and his fellow office workers assume the character and lines of the others in "Gatsby’s" story.

It’s an interesting idea. But it didn’t work for me. During the two 15-minute intermissions and the longer 75-minute dinner break (the Public has set up a dining area in the lobby and Indochine across the street, where we ate, has a prixe fixe $28 Gatz menu) Bill and I tried to figure out why the show had been set in an office.  And why one that seemed to be in the ‘80s, instead of the Jazz Age ‘20s, the time when Fitzgerald set his morality tale about the rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby who yearns for the all-American, but married, beauty named Daisy.

We also wondered why director John Collins, who founded ERS (click here to read an interview with him), hadn’t established distinct personalities for the office workers so that we could more easily see the parallels between them and the characters in the book whose lines they speak and lives they assume. And while we were at it, we wondered why the sound designer spends nearly the entire show sitting silently behind a desk on the right-hand side of the stage tapping away on his obviously up-to-the-minute MacBook.

There are some clever touches in the show. But in an effort to keep the audience entertained, Collins resorts to the kind of anything-for-a-laugh shenanigans that the old “Carol Burnett Show” used to do when it parodied movies like “Gone With The Wind.”

Gatz's 13-member cast (some of whom list their day jobs in the Playbill—one teaches second grade at a private school in Brooklyn, another is, remarkably, the chief of staff for the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C.) isn’t as adroit as Burnett, Harvey Korman and the rest of their gang but they’re still amusing. Yet, when the same joke is repeated over and over again over the course of eight hours, the novelty wears off.  And because so much attention is paid to getting those laughs (when the woman playing Daisy starts to cry, a co-worker spritzes her face with water to simulate the tears) the deeper emotions of Gatsby’s story get lost. 

It made me wonder if we’ve gotten to the point where we can no longer deal with classic stories and their sincere emotions in a straightforward manner.  Instead, we deconstruct them the way Flemish director Ivo van Hoven has done with the current production of The Little Foxes that’s playing at New York Theatre Workshop through the end of the month or we bubble wrap them in irony as does Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath, the new one-woman show about the poet now playing at 59E59 Theaters.  

Do we really need to cut the culture of the past down to post-modern size before we can enjoy it? “This is awesome.  This is awesome,” the twentysomething young man sitting next to me kept exclaiming when the actors made some ironic joke.  But he fidgeted during the play's more serious moments. And his girlfriend used those quieter times to check for messages on her iPhone.

Others, however, have been swept up by the play (click here to read the reviews that earned it a top ranking on StageGrade, although the folks there seem to have ranked this one on a curve). It was only in the final hour, when the other actors receded and the reader sat alone, reciting the final chapter of the novel, that I felt the power of Fitzgerald’s work. 

Unlike my husband K, and generations of Literature majors, I’ve never quite gotten why “The Great Gatsby” is considered to be the great American novel. But as I listened to the actor Scott Shepherd, who posses a deceptively seductive voice and amazing stamina, speak Fitzgerald’s lyrical passages, I began to get a glimpse of “Gatsby’s” greatness in a way that neither reading the book several times over the years or watching the 1974 movie (with Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy) or seeing the 1999 opera (with Jerry Hadley and Dawn Upshaw in the roles) had ever revealed for me.  I would have been content to listen—just listen—to Shepherd read the book to me for hours.