Coraline (or, A Theatrical Concept Album)

All season, I'd been anticipating MCC's Coraline. It's got some top-notch artists: a novel by Neil Gaiman adapted by Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields) and David Greenspan (of some truly mesmerizing perfs off-B'way). Director Leigh Silverman brought out some of Off-B'way's most interesting talents, starting with an imaginative flair by casting middle-aged Jayne Houdyshell as a nine-year-old.

The story (if you missed the quite good animated movie) sees the bored titular kid exploring her new suburban home. She's especially curious about a bricked-off door which, at night, becomes a portal to a mirror universe. There she finds her Other Mother, who showers her with love and attention. But a hep stray cat advises Coraline that she escape before she's eaten by the Other Mother, who's actually a witchy monster.

Silverman isn't a flashy director, but generally she's clear and uncluttered; here she's downright reserved. She dispatches Gaiman's most ominous visual -- denizens of the mirror world have buttons rather than eyes -- with a dull gesture instead of a flourish. As the Other Mother, Greenspan's unconventional presence is also muffled, despite the diabolical treat of a role. His adaptation is also bland (a word I never thought I'd apply to Greenspan) but at least it defers to Merritt's work.

Because Coraline may be dull to watch but it's worth listening to. The performances have more substance aurally than physically. Merritt, fashioning a modern style on grand, toy, & prepared pianos, provides a sonic canvas that's far richer than the show's visual one. His work, played superbly by Phyllis Chen, is probably enough of a draw; the virtue of lackluster staging is that it's unobtrusive.

Recently I've been listening to a pair of narrative rock albums: the Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine & the Decemberists' Hazards of Love. Merritt's work on Coraline is just as musically strong as these, but it's ahead of them story-wise due to Gaiman's craftsmanship. I'd suggest Merritt & the cast book time at Electric Ladyland Studios a few blocks away & record the show. Coraline is a much stronger concept album than it is a work of theater.

Into the Hazard (or, Henry by Another Name)

The title Into the Hazard may be snazzier than Henry V, but the show itself is a standard production of Shakespeare's history. It's a lean & brisk two hours (and change), performed by 6 actors. Director/adaptor Jessica Bauman depicts Henry as a dirty, violent, bully who treats his subjects as cannon-fodder for his glory. Bauman offers a few bits of fine theater, like a pair of soldiers who chat while stacking empty boots after the battle. Lead Nick Dillenberg plays King Harry as a hard-boiled warrior who, in his scene with the French Princess, treats her like another plot of France soil that he's won. So far so simple.

In a bid for 21st-century relevance, Bauman cast a flatscreen TV as the play's chorus. Her videos are clever pastiches of modern televisual styles: the play's description of the English encampment, with its mellow voiceover and slow pans of still photos, burlesques a PBS documentary. Bauman would probably justify her TV as a 21st-century reflection of the play's meta-theatrical theme. And, since she seems like an intelligent director, she'd also probably say that the TV shows the disconnect between the reality of our current wars and the sanitized perspective we see in the media.

It's a sophisticated idea but it's not great theater. Having Harry deliver “Once more unto the breach” as if he's reading from a TelePrompTer is clever in concept, but it's dull to watch. Use of the TV slows the pace and distracts from the clear, smart version of Henry that's onstage. I also wish Bauman had edited the script more willfully: the subplot involving the Welsh soldier Fluellen may be part of Shakespeare's play, but it's neither funny nor relevant to her concept. This is a simple, clear production muddled by a few over-clever ideas.

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Into the Hazard plays at Walkerspace thru June 20. Tickets are $15 (a steal!).
Photo: Lisa Dozier

MN visit: Kushner at the Guthrie

While in the Twin Cities to celebrate our upcoming wedding, Lady Hotspur & I saw Tony Kushner's new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide*, at the Guthrie. Lady H. noted that the show could lose 45 minutes. Of course, a 105-minute Kushner play is farfetched. But we did see a work-in-progress, so please read my notes accordingly.

The basic conflict is a clever irony: a family of Marxists gather to decide who'll inherit their home. Or that's the pretext, anyway: the patriarch, Gus (Michael Cristofer), has called a vote (w/ a consensus rule) on whether to kill himself. Gus is a zesty role: a Brooklyn-bred Italian-American, a former dockworker & union leader, and an overbearing father who, ironically, is closer to his daughter than to his two sons.

The family's architecture is solid, rooted in their shared history but living in a dramatic present. But it's also where the script needs work. Of the three children, Kushner focuses mostly on a queer love triangle between the elder son, his husband and a hustler. This subplot loops, drifts, & sometimes just kills time, but it never quite justifies itself. And it's at the expense of the younger son, who fades away in the third act and takes other minor roles with him. I'd like Kushner to pare the romantic subplot (maybe resolve it earlier, in Act 2?) and add substance to the youngest son.

Probably the show's great strength isn't the script, or Michael Greif's direction (which is inversely related to the number of actors onstage -- the more there are, the less sure he is). It's the cast. Linda Emond (as Gus's daughter) and Kathleen Chalfant (as his serene, gnomic sister) again prove they're perfect vessels for Kushner's characters. Cristofer matches them, esp. in a final speech where Gus describes an earlier suicide attempt, conflating sex with death in an almost mystical way. But the youngest son and the hustler both need actors with more presence.

It's odd to see radical Kushner try on the most traditional American genre, domestic realism. All that family resentment, the threats of suicide and revelations of quasi-incest, and a juvenile rage at the American way of life! It's not a dialectic, it's a cacophany. The genre's thrills & twists suit him well, but he's still learning how to deploy them. Something to look forward to!

I also can't wait to catch the play in its final iteration: comparing the '01 draft of Homebody/Kabul with the '04 version was a rare dramaturgical experience. Meanwhile, my MN pals should catch it now.


* full title: The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures

Black History, Black Citizenry

Strictly speaking, Pure Confidence (at 59E59) is “pre-Obama”: its first major production was at the 2005 Humana Festival. But Carlyle Brown's play about Emancipation gains a length in historical perspective with a black man in the White House. Using an athletic footnote (most jockeys in the antebellum South were slaves), Brown takes us back to the original sea-change in the African-American's status as a US citizen.

The show's essentially a four-hander involving a jockey, his owner, and their wives, focusing with varying degrees of concentration on how the Civil War altered the relationship between (former) masters and their slaves. It's surprisingly uncynical--maybe it prefigures the optimism that Obama's election brings to Black America?--without being Pollyanna-ish about the shortcomings of Emancipation.

As entertainment, however, the show's uneven: when director Marion McClinton had worked on August Wilson's plays, he'd balanced the historical sweep with the intimate human stories. But this play, with its tricky shifts of pace and tone, rides him instead of vise-versa. At least McClinton gets fine perfs from the cast, tho' Chris Mulkey's slaveowner is mannered and dull.

Between acts, Brown and McClinton trade a sloppy, episodic verve for a more nuanced realism that's offset by a deflation of energy. It clumsily marks the play's jump from antebellum to post-Reconstruction America. It's too bad: the play's great strength is its vivid evocation of the periods (especially by set designer Joseph Stanley) is what I like most about Pure Confidence. In the middle of a seismic advance in Black American citizenship, Brown's show reminds you that the stakes of history are human beings rather than grand ideals.

What B'way doesn't Desire

Partly because I'm planning my wedding & covering the awards season for Metromix, I've been lazy about blogging. Which is too bad: I've seen some great shows. Generally I'm bored by plays about suburbia, but Next to Normal hit me hard. I'm a sucker for stories about mental illness, & this one didn't compromise with a happy ending (unlike Distracted, whose flip finale undermined a funny look at ADHD). Normal also left Lady Hotspur in tears, & she's not easily moved.

But I especially want to take note of Desire Under the Elms, which closes this weekend. I'm not surprised at this news (Lady H. called it “the worst play I've ever seen on Broadway”), but I am disappointed. It's not arid or anodyne like most legit drama. Director Robert Falls has cut away about half of Eugene O'Neill's script & replaced it with bold theatrical gestures. It stumbles and it misfires, but it's not boring.

This show fits on a Broadway stage, which I can't say about most modern drama. A good show is conceived to a specific type of space, & O'Neill belongs on a huge stage like the St. James. Desire is bold melodrama: its personalities are fervent and its emotions are grandiose. Desire gets a lot of its energy from an Oedipal triangle, with a Yankee kid stealing the farm and third wife from his father. That young wife is a gorgon of sexual desire (thus the title--O'Neill, like Strindberg, finds women horrifying).

Desire is bizarre, which Falls accepts. That's why I like the show, and probably why it couldn't find an audience. Falls replaces O'Neill's elaborate & over-explicit dialogue with expressionistic dialogue-free scenes backed by raggedy Bob Dylan. Stars Pablo Schreiber and Carla Gugino, accustomed to realistic emotional arcs, look skittish or dumbstruck. Yeah, Falls should've coached them better, but they just don't have the acting skill set. And a Broadway crowd has the same problem: they don't know how to interpret such a strange, unconventional show.

O'Neill's lurid tale of adultery and infanticide sounds like he based it on a 19th-century newspaper clipping. It's from the era when rural folks visited the circus tent on Saturday and the revival tent Sunday, and the railroad line led straight to damnation. Robert Falls' Desire is set in that folktale America, a long ways from the clean crossroads of Times Square. I can't imagine a Broadway where this show could be a blockbuster, but it's a more interesting one than ours.

Pretty Theft / Desire Under the Elms

I've been pushing my writing by conducting more interviews recently. Last week, Metromix published my best so far, a phone conversation with Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, who's writing music for a stage adaptation of Coraline. My piece turned out well, mainly because Merritt's so charming & articulate but also I'm finally figuring out how to interview. I also caught a pair of shows last week: Desire Under the Elms on Broadway and Pretty Theft off-off. I'd like to write Desire up for Metromix, but here's a quickie for you:

I loved Desire, but Lady Hotspur called it “the worst show I've ever seen on Broadway.” Director Bob Falls takes a big risk by editing a Eugene O'Neill drama down to 100 minutes. It interferes with the natural narrative flow, which turns the play's arc into a series of weird, almost expressionistic events. Carla Gugino & Pablo Schreiber, trying to play it realistic, couldn't find a through-line, but Brian Dennehy nailed his role. Add a crazy set (boulders & a 19th c. farmhouse hanging above the stage) & you've got the weirdest show I've ever seen on B'way. I loved it, but I can see why it's not for most tastes.

After the grandiosity of Desire, I found Pretty Theft refreshing. I'm only 34, but I'm probably older than anyone in the show. Generally when that happens, I figure (rightly or not) that the young company is just damned hungry to do theater wherever & however they can. That the show's on the 4th floor of a Chinatown walk-up only reinforces that impression. The Flux Theatre Ensemble has created one of those no-budget productions where the artistic director tears your ticket & the lighting is mostly on an overhead track. Pretty Theft has a few bum notes, but its mistakes are those of youth -- which I easily forgive.

The play involves an autistic ward, a father's death, the kind of friend your mother warned you about, and the kind of stranger your mother *really* warned you about. But playwright Adam Szymkowicz balances those heavy elements with a zany tone and oddball characters. His protagonist is Allegra, a nice-looking naïf who's spending the summer before college volunteering at a hospice. Possessing a warmth way beyond her years (a trait matched superbly by Marnie Schulenburg), she makes a connection with an autistic man.

However, the show (& Allegra's boyfriend) are stolen by the sidekick, a bad girl named Suzy. Both in Szymkowicz's writing and in Maria Portman Kelly's performance, Suzy is the type of girl who compensates for low self-esteem by throwing herself at boys & stealing lipstick from drugstores. Both Suzy and Allegra are warm, vital characters; that Szymkowicz mines laughs from their neuroses suggests he'd be great at sex comedy. The show's high point, where Suzy seduces Allegra's moronic boyfriend at the movie theater, had me hoping Pretty Theft would be a teenaged screwball comedy. No such luck, but the direction it takes is so different and unexpected, I didn't mind. The girls go on the run, Thelma-and-Louise style, eventually meeting that dark stranger in one of the more chilling scenes I've seen recently.

But there's those problems I mentioned come up. Director Angela Astle gets good perfs from her actors, but she doesn't have a good eye for stage composition (yet). I found my eye focusing on the “wrong” spot: the heroines often get upstaged by secondary or tertiary characters. Astle and Szymkowicz also indulge in not one but two expressionist scenes to illustrate the autistic man's mental collapse. On their own, they're effective enough. But they steal narrative focus away from Allegra & Suzy, & slow the show down when it should be ramping up (whereas a scene depicting Allegra's dream builds her psyche while offering a break from the play's realism).

Structure is one of the hardest devices to master, & anyway I believe we live in an era of sloppy construction. But in the future, Szymkowicz should be cunning and vicious with his editing, and Astle should be confident, even merciless with her playwrights. They, and the entire company, have got enough vim & talent that they can afford to take the collaborative risk. Pretty Theft runs for two more weeks.

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photo credits: (1) Liz Lauren (2) Isaiah Tanenbaum

On the Eve of the Pulitzer

(FYI, I'm trying a different format, to see how it affects my voice.)

(Update: the news from Columbia University, around the corner from my place: Ruined won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But my assessment stands: it deserves a Broadway run, & a Tony, but it's not a play for the ages. - A)

1.
I've never heard so much talk about the Pulitzer for Drama before -- at least, not before it's awarded. Most folks favor Lynn Nottage's Ruined to win. Also in the running are: Becky Shaw (Gina Gionfriddo), Our Enemies (Yussef el Guindi), The Good Negro (Tracey Scott Wilson), & fading fast, Reasons to Be Pretty (Neil LaBute).

2.
What kind of shows usually win the Pulitzer? Epics like Angels in America are rarer than you'd expect. For every thrilling piece of funky experimental drama like Topdog/Underdog, there are five works of realism seasoned with a touch of neurosis, academia, or morality (Rabbit Hole, Proof, Doubt).

3.
Pulitzer-winners are solid and heavy, like sturdy furniture made of walnut or oak. When they're adapted into prestige films, they're a little too stagy to sit quite right onscreen. They're almost invariably set in the US, & address grand themes like death and illness, American history, race or sex.

4.
So what about Ruined? I finally caught it at MTC last week. It's satisfying to see a show about Africa that avoids tourism & impotent hand-wringing. Unlike most critics, I find its universal themes more compelling than specifics like its African setting. It's undeniably strong & affecting.

5.
Ruined is a war story. Mama Nadi runs her bar/brothel as a DMZ in the Congolese civil war: all are welcome, leave guns & politics at the door. The war tests her philosophy, but so does her relationship to two young women she buys in the opening scene: Sophie, a victim of rape & mutilation, & Salima.

6.
Because of Sophie's mutilation, she's useless to Mama as a good-time girl, but, resourceful & literate, she balances the books and gains Mama's trust & sympathy. Salima, meanwhile, deals with pregnancy till she's tracked down by her one-time husband, now a soldier. All three roles are phenomenal.

7.
But if I hadn't heard the rumors, I wouldn't put Ruined in the running for a Pulitzer. For one thing, it doesn't fit the formula. Its subject is international, with no mention of how America fits into African civil war. But it also lacks the solid craftsmanship that a great realistic drama should have.

8.
This is a play that moves in jerks. The main characters have holes & caesuras in their arcs -- Sophie herself doesn't do much except work as a catalyst for Mama. Supporting characters, especially the men, tend to disappear for stretches & then return, as if out of a hat, to serve a plot function.

9.
Nottage relies on the machinery of old-fashioned melodrama: stupendous revelations of buried secrets, tragic coincidences of timing, a literal storm gathering as the war approaches Mama's bar. Rather than relying on complex psychology & social insight, Nottage falls back on manipulative sentiment.

10.
As a cynical operator, Mama N. is supposed to evoke Brecht's Mother Courage. But in spirit she's closer to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (“I stick my neck out for nobody.”). The problem is, her cynicism's all talk: from adopting Sophie forward, her every decision stems from sentiment, not pragmatism.

11.
So do I think Ruined will win the Pulitzer? Probably. It's realistic, it's noble-minded, it's international at a cultural moment that's repudiating US isolationism. And I think Nottage's Intimate Apparel deserved the award over Anna in the Tropics in 2003. But it's not the best American script of 2008.

12.
For all my quibbles, however, I echo the wish that MTC had placed Ruined on their Broadway stage. It's also a sad irony that the Goodman brought Ruined to MTC's City Center site but will move their starry Desire Under the Elms to the St. James. A Pulitzer for Ruined? Naw. But a Tony? Most def.