Circle Mirror Transformation (Playwrights Horizons)

Circle Mirror

  Transformation

Playwrights Horizons

October 10, 2009

Annie Baker

   (writer)

Sam Gold (director)

Who knows what to expect, with a mystical title like Circle Mirror Transformation? But on the other hand, there's the realistic set—a generic rehearsal room, a mirror along one wall—doesn't inspire flights of imagination. Somewhere between the title's fancy and the set's mundanity is the show itself: an quirky bit of meta-theater.

Circle tidily takes place within a six-week community center acting class. The set-up offers room for the gentle mockery of acting exercises, especially when performed by a set of four over-earnest adults (the lone teen sulks, “Are we gonna do any 'real' acting?”). It also doubles as a clever device to open up the five characters. Though it initially sketches in broad strokes, the silly exercises slowly fill in the characters' vulnerabilities and aspirations. What's more, the script manages to suggest that there's a larger story to these befuddled adults and their sardonic voyeur, but that we're only getting the in-room snippets of it.

Annie Baker's script benefits from several extremely talented Off-B'way mainstays like Reed Birney (who plays a vulnerable middle-aged divorcé with gusto). But the standout is newcomer Tracee Chimo as that solo teen. Though Chimo initially plays the clown, goggling at the ludicrous behavior of the adults, she slowly emerges from her shell to display her new confidence and self-understanding.

With its simple scenario, there are short stretches of Circle that frankly are a little dull, a fact that Sam Gold's direction can't overcome. And non-theater types may resent the knowing chuckles that the in-crowd delivers every few minutes. Circle doesn't bowl you over with pyrotechnics or boggle you with plot turns. It's a cameo, yet with its small but satisfying catharsis, it's quite lovely.


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Circle Mirror Transformation plays at Playwrights Horizons (416 42nd Street, betw. Ninth & Tenth Ave.), closing on November 1. Tickets?

Photo credit: Joan Marcus

The Night Watcher (Primary Stages)

The Night Watcher
Primary Stages at 59E59
October 3, 2009
Charlayne Woodard (writer)
Daniel Sullivan (director)

If you enjoy watching a charming performer confide in an audience like you're his or her oldest friend, you can stop reading now: head over to The Night Watcher for a pleasantly diverting evening. And if you like sentimental stories about children, you'll get your fill. But if you get impatient listening to self-serving monologues, or if you cringe when an adult imitates children by adopting wide eyes and a lisp, then skip Charlayne Woodard's one-woman show.

In between her acting gigs, she explains, she's an active godmother to several friends' children. But at every moment, Woodard is a consummate actress. That's great when she stretches onstage like a cat in sunlight, offering warm stories of surrogate parenting with expertly-timed quips and snatches of Sly and the Family Stone; not so much when she's casting herself as the heroine in harrowing melodramas that resemble after-school specials.

The evening's climactic anecdote is particularly telling. In it, Woodard doesn't comfort a child, she confronts a bullish subway rider who condemns her lack of children. She shreds this straw man with a sermon of self-justification. The final beat of self-deprecation—her monologue has caused her to miss her stop—disguises the fact that her catharsis belongs only to her.

Still, courtesy of Geoff Korf's subtle lighting and Obadiah Eaves' warm blanket of music, The Night Watcher looks and sounds lovely. The total effect, thanks to Daniel Sullivan, is that of a bedtime story. But I'm suspicious of any work that's as anodyne as Watcher: in this case, Woodard and her team uses their talent to mask her narcissism.

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The Night Watcher plays at 59E59 (59 East 59th St., betw. Park and Madison Ave.), closing on October 31. Tickets?

Photo credit: James Leynse

Killers & Other Family (Rattlestick)

Killers & Other Family
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
September 21, 2009

Lucy Thurber (writer)
Caitriona McLaughlin (director)

I'm thrilled to hear that Killers & Other Family, Lucy Thurber's fever-dream of a drama, has extended its run. It may not be perfect, but it's such an intense 80 minutes that my critical faculties are overwhelmed by its ambition. If you love modern American theater, you must see Killers. Got it?

The show's depiction of savagery invites comparisons with Sam Shepard or Adam Rapp, but the dark sociopathy at the play's heart reminds me most of Jim Thompson, the '50s crime novelist nicknamed the Dimestore Dostoyevsky. Partly, it's the set-up, pulp-simple yet stagy enough to power a one-set/two-scene drama: Lizzie's past catches up when her on-the-lam brother hides out at her NYC apartment with her murderous ex-boyfriend Danny. But Thurber invests her scenario with metaphoric weight, showing how the repression of childhood trauma rips apart the illusion of adult safety.

Much of the credit for the Rattlestick's stupendous production goes to Samantha Soule's fearless performance as Lizzie. Soule throws herself into whatever the script (and her nightmarish ex) demand, but ties everything together with conviction—it's all in her reading of the line “I never did change, I just moved the pieces around.” She's partnered expertly by Shane McRae as Danny: you can see the neural misfires in that sicko's brain.

After my friend and I saw Killers, we wondered if the tonal instability (seesawing from fine-grained naturalism to lyric surreality and absurdist violence) was a problem. But I think Killers has the dream-logic of a fairy tale, one aimed at 21st-century urbanites. If McLaughlin can't quite sustain a sense of imminent danger, or if Aya Cash, as Lizzie's wholesome roommate, breaks the tension a little too jarringly, it's all outweighed by the way Thurber depicts violence as a real threat and not as a plot crutch. Killers is raw, wild theater for our time, a drama that's bracingly alive.

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Killers & Other Family plays at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (224 Waverly Place), closing on October 17. Tickets?

Photo: Sandra Coudert

In the Daylight (Vital Theatre)

In the Daylight
Vital Theatre Company
September 17, 2009
Tony Glazer (writer)
John Gould Rubin (director)

From the audience, the vertiginous angle of the stark white set looks like the a film-noir still in negative. Christopher Barreca's design is one of the coolest in town. Too bad In the Daylight, the show it sets the stage for, doesn't measure up. Playwright Tony Glazer tries on styles, tones, and genres like clothes, but he can't find the look he's going for.

Daylight starts out as a vicious modern drama that echoes Greek tragedy. Think Orestes: a louche son returns to his family estate (here a Jersey McMansion) where his mom and sis bicker over a terrible secret. Ashley Austin Morris, as a bumpkin with her own secret, applies lessons learned from Charles Busch to create a surreal intrusion into the realistic drama. But the show scuds sideways under John Gould Rubin's direction: halfway in, who knows what the play's really about? That fact plus the show's brevity equal valid reasons to cut the intermission.

The second-act twists work their own satisfaction, in the boulevard tradition of Agatha Christie stage adaptations. But I'd guess that Glazer had hoped to write a modern noir: his spiffy dialogue, femmes fatale, and late-inning twists suggest savage and cynical pleasure. Still, if that's the case, why does so much of Daylight follow Aunt Agatha's pattern—including a storm cutting the power and an exposition-laden climax? Glazer over-reaches by adding a sense of fatalism, when he's simply written a potboiler. In the Daylight is passably entertaining, but it's also pretty silly.

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In the Daylight plays at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre (2162 Broadway, betw. 76th and 77th), closing on October 5. Tickets?

photo: Gili Getz

The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side (Theater 80)

The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side
Theater 80
September 13, 2009
Derek Ahonen (writer/director)

One of the many surprises about Derek Ahonen's Pied Pipers is how traditional it is. Artists generally design a work's structure to mirror its content. But this tale of tribalist radicals is a shaggy melodrama that your grandmother could follow happily, as long as she's okay with a splash of youthful nudity. But what makes Pied Pipers a true pleasure is how its characters are radicals, its structure is conservative, and its moral substance is liberal—that is, non-judgmental.

This open-minded approach to character is Ahonen's strength (not incidentally, it's also the mission of his company, The Amoralists). His script's an actor's dream: all six roles mingle good and bad attributes, which get displayed through their actions and interactions. The quartet of titular hippies are lovely goofballs: idealistic but sanctimonious, they'd be parodies of knee-jerk radicals if they weren't so lovingly portrayed. Tastes probably vary, but I especially enjoyed Sarah Lemp's understated perf as the most mature (relatively) of the Pipers.

Like most melodrama, Pied Pipers' plot could be tighter. The second act starts to drift till a new character arrives to raise the stakes. And an out-of-nowhere epiphany helps to resolve one Piper's loss of faith. These flaws do feel a little cheap, but only in retrospect. In the moment, they're all part of a lovely, bittersweet play. Ahonen's clearly fond of his little tribe, and so, it seems, is everyone who sees this show. The Amoralists aren't just a company worth following (and I definitely will). They've created a play that deserves revivals in dozens of small theaters in hip neighborhoods across the country.

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The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side plays at Theater 80 (80 St. Mark's Place., betw. First and Second), closing on October 5. Tickets?

Oohrah! (Atlantic Stage 2)

Oohrah!
Atlantic Stage 2
September 11, 2009
Bekah Brunstetter (writer)
Evan Cabnet (director)

I'm thrilled to see a new playwright's work onstage. The play, by new (to me) playwright Bekah Brunstetter, has a naturalistic, Chekhovian dramaturgy that demonstrates compassion and objectivity. Her dialogue is specific to place, time, milieu and personality, an invisible style that's a rare and valuable talent. And she gets structure: she's got a subplot that's as substantial as the main plot without overwhelming it.

Brunstetter uses that craft to depict the homefront during the Bush Wars: an officer's return to civvies and a handsome young man's hunger to join up despite his asthma. A ode to work, Oohrah! shows how service gives these men purpose. The actors in the Atlantic's production grab the opportunity to play such rich characters. Darren Goldstein, as the demobbed captain, stands out in a uniformly good company, showing the quiet physical confidence of a career soldier and the inadmissible anxiety of a warrior during peacetime.

But the play's ragged thread is that it doesn't portray women's sacrifice with the same keenness. It suggests that their dutiful sacrifice doesn't carry the same sense of fulfillment that the men's does. But the final scene, which brings together the play's three female characters, lacks the power of the previous two scenes of masculine fortitude. This scene peters out, and so does the play. This production is also hampered by merely-serviceable direction from Evan Cabnet, who overindulges in Brunstetter's only substantial flaw, a generic fondness for Southern eccentricity.

Still, Oohrah!'s value is its honesty in approaching a question that too many dismiss out-of-hand: why men (and women) serve in the military, especially right now. Brunstetter, in possession of intelligence and craft, offers an answer.

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Oohrah! plays at Atlantic Stage 2 (330 West 16th St., betw. Eighth & Ninth), closing on September 27. Tickets?

The Bereaved (The Wild Project)

The Bereaved
The Wild Project
September 3, 2009
Thomas Bradshaw (writer)
May Adrales (director)

Thomas Bradshaw has established bona fides as an anarchist pitted against liberal shibboleths, and his latest piece happily continues the savagery. The middle-class family of The Bereaved may have bleeding hearts, but they pump hot blood, not milk. The play's engine revs up when a coke-related incident hospitalizes the matriarch: from her deathbed, she insists her husband marry her best friend, lest her death leave the family destitute. This wish frees his and his son's most reckless impulses and leads to deeply kinky sex and drug dealing to students (among other transgressive pleasures).

It's hard to tell whether Bradshaw celebrates this emancipation from convention or condemns it, but he definitely enjoys it. A “proper” play would see the mother recover and work to re-impose order (successfully or not). But this isn't a proper play. It's great that the show moves forward, but it pretty obviously doesn't have a destination in mind. Instead, Bradshaw improvises plot twists until he ends the show more or less arbitrarily. Nobody learns anything—that's for squares—or has any other arc of development.

But this dramaturgical flaw is covered by director May Adrales by keeping the momentum at full throttle. Gutsy performances by the actors help too: nearly everyone gets naked at some point, and they simulate sex with special enthusiasm—whereas drug use is wickedly performed with all the mundanity of drinking water. Bradshaw and company offer a grand, cathartic release by setting free the perversity of modern American liberals.

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The Bereaved plays at the Wild Project (195 E. Third St., betw. A & B), closing on September 26. Tickets?