LT. OF INISHMORE and COMMUNIST DRACULA PAGEANT - October 30 and November 2, 2008

Top to Bottom: Colin Hamell as Padraic and Lynn R. Guerra as Mairead in NRT's Lt. of Inishmore (http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/10/31/seeing_red_in_inishmore/);Poster design for American Repertory Theatre's The Communist Dracula Pageant (October 18 to November 9, 2008); Photo from 2006 NY production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore (http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/theater/reviews/28inis.html?pagewanted=all) featuring David Wilmot and Kerry Condon; New Repertory Theatre's poster (October 26 to November 16)

Well, it was a hit and a miss in my theatre-going adventures this past week. I made my way out to the somewhat bleak suburb of Watertown last Thursday night (its saving grace a discount mall with Filene's Basement, Marshall's etc.!) to the lovely and quite new Arsenal Center for the Arts, home of the New Repertory Theatre, now in its 25th anniversary season. I have a hate-love relationship with bad boy of Irish playwrights Martin McDonagh...I hate that I love his work. The over-the-top violence in his plays, the often sick levels of psychopathology of his characters, the bleak worldview...if only he wasn't so damned smart and funny to boot. This play, one of his entire oeuvre written in a nine month stint in the early 90s when he was in his early 20s (enough to make him well-hated right there!), is one of the Aran Islands Trilogy. I saw another one, The Cripple of Inishmaan, at Victoria's Belfry Theatre a few years back, and although I felt it was overwritten, I enjoyed it. Inishmore brings new meaning to the term 'black comedy' as McDonagh skewers Irish terrorism in a satirical story of a cat, his IRA splinter group sicko owner Padraic and the small Aran island community he comes from, off the coast of Ireland.

Padraic has left the IRA as it's not militant enough for him and when we meet him first, he's quite cheerily torturing a pot dealer who sells to school kids. The scene is both horrifying and funny as Padraic prepares to slice off the dealer's nipple (of his choice) after already having taken off two of his toenails. This jollity is interrupted by a phone call from Padraic's father Donny, who has been caring for his son's beloved cat Wee Thomas. Wee Thomas, we know, has been killed in an unfortunate accident and panic is spreading through the village as everyone knows what Padraic is capable of when he is seeking justice and revenge. Sure enough, Padraic returns home in haste and is met at the ferry dock by young Mairead, who fancies herself a rebel-in-training and idolizes Padraic, and the two of them fall instantly into passionate love. As Padraic tries to find out what has happened to Wee Thomas (and is preparing to execute his father and Mairead's layabout hippie brother Davey on suspicions of a cover-up), the tables are turned when he himself is taken by the splinter group he has splintered off from. His crime? He is too radical and too violent even for this ultra-radical and ultra-violent terrorist branch of the IRA! So he is marched out to be shot, but his love Mairead comes to the rescue (we've already learned she's blinded a herd of cows with her air rifle, so it's not too much of a spoiler to find out that she can do the same with wanna-be executioners). There follows from here a climactic scene of unending gore as Padraic and Mairead take out the now-blinded trio of assassins and then force Donny and Davey into cutting up their bodies for disposal. One final twist, which I won't divulge, leads to a new Lieutenant of Inishmore taking over from Padraic, Wee Thomas arriving home safe and sound after all the bloody mayhem, and drunken losers Donny and Davey wondering where it will end.

There are morals beneath the surface in McDonagh's plays, to be sure (although this play is lighter-handed than the real downer of The Pillowman), but he is also out to entertain...and he succeeds. His ear for dialogue is terrific and the characters come off the stage as fully rounded and yet completely uncliched...all of them are originals, even the smaller roles. And the New Rep impressed me mightily in my first visit by offering a production that was flawless. A top-notch acting ensemble with fine performances from everyone, Irish accents and all. A lovely set design by Janie E. Howland (who also designed the recent Follies I saw at Lyric Stage), nice lighting and sound (some great musical choices for scene transitions) and some effectively gory stage blood and body parts props. But my highest praise goes to the director David R. Gammons; he has steered this production with a clear hand throughout. Every scene has its beats presented with clarity, the show has a constant rhythm and pace and his staging of the climax where Padraic and Mairead perform a pas de deux of murder was inspired. The strongest direction I've seen so far this season.

One additional thought on violence onstage: I've written about this before (see my review of Rage on my Victoria theatre blog at http://www.vicreviews.blogspot.com/ ) and generally speaking I'm not into graphic depictions of violence on stage or screen, although I admit to enjoying a good action flick from time to time...which makes me a hypocrite I guess. And as I watched Donny and Davey chatting away as they slice off fingers and heads of dead bodies at the end of this play, I wondered how an audience would respond to a film version of this play, where these actions would be depicted as much more real than is ever possible on stage. Stage props of bodies never look real, and when guns go off and actors burst blood caps in their mouths and SMs set off explosions that cover people with blood, we laugh (in this play anyway), partly because of the fakery. One of the scene transitions late in this show has two murdered characters carry their own dissected corpses back on stage, place them carefully, then squirt the other actors and each other with bottles of stage blood...now that's funny! Theatre can hold its own to film anyday at the level of psychological or emotional violence, but at the level of physical and visceral violence, the sense of fakery is what protects us. And in McDonagh's way off-kilter world, it also gives us a chance to laugh our way through the actual memory of the deaths of thousands in the struggles to free Ireland, oftentimes Irish killing Irish, as is always the sad case in a civil war. I recently saw Ken Loach's powerful film The Wind that Shakes the Barley about this very thing, and it comes down to brother killing brother. Believe me, it is no laughing matter. Thank goodness for the theatre and for playwrights like McDonagh who insist on entertaining us as they press our faces into the endless muck of humanity.

Speaking of muck of humanity, the next show I saw features two of the biggest mucks in the endless row of assholes who ran countries and murdered their countrymen (and often beyond) in the twentieth century, a cheery little theatrical revue about Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of Romania called The Communist Dracula Pageant by Americans for Americans with Hallucinations, Phosphorescence and Bears (the title alone sets off alarms doesn't it?). The Ceausescus ruled Romania and engendered a brutal cult of the personality for over two decades, repressing their people and driving the country back to the middle ages. When there was a revolt in December 1989, mostly as a result of the perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union that spelled the end of European communism, not too much fuss was made worldwide at the news that the tyrant couple had been arrested, put on trial, found guilty of genocide and summarily executed.

This seems a somewhat strange subject for theatrical investigation, but I was game to see what playwright Anne Washburn and the ensemble company of ART would come up with. What I saw, unfortunately, was a hodgepodge of a docudrama that feels unfocussed and unfinished, performed with professional bravado by a company that must shake their heads in the dressing room after every show and then head off to the nearest bar. The 105 minute show starts off quite well, framing the play as a pageant performed for the Ceaucescus to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of their infamous ancestral countryman, Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Dracula. The intertwining of Dracula's tale with the Ceaucescu's seems promising, but things quickly devolve. What we then see is a mishmash of scenes and monologues that purport to take us through the last days of the dictatorship, up to their execution. But there is no throughline to the play, nothing for the audience to hang onto, or quite frankly, to even care much about. The Ceausescus are hardly worth our empathy, nor is Dracula, so we could engage with the Romanian people who won back their country. But no one is presented to us in any depth, actors keep turning out to us and telling us this scene is as transcribed from trial transcripts or videotapes (Why tell us this? Can we not read program notes? Are we not literate and educated audience members? Please don't talk down to me...I hate that). To add to the lacklustredness and so-whatedness of it all, the production is poorly directed by Annie Kauffman (how sad is it to slam a show directed and written by two women...sigh). She has a clearly talented group of 16 actors (16!!), including lead actors Thomas Derrah (Nicolae), Karen MacDonald (Elena) and Will LeBow (Dracula/Functionary) whose resumes include dozens of ART past productions and clutches of awards for their work (I saw LeBow in Huntington's season-opener How Shakespeare Won the West). Clearly, she doesn't know what to do with them. Scene transitions and the internal staging of scenes feels clunky, there's way too much dead air, and she hasn't found an effective way to make the randomness of the script (po-mo anyone?) theatrically engaging. Sure, there are projected scene titles and even some videotaped scenes...what there isn't is excitement, innovation or even very much energy. The actors do their best with what little has been given them, but I felt for them at curtain call, bowing to a "smattering of polite applause" (one of the projected surtitles referring to the reception of Ceaucescu's final public speech). My collective creation bent would have tossed both the playwright and the director out of the rehearsal room and let the actors have at it (with open-minded designers and maybe an excellent dramaturg)...chances are they could have come up with a show ten times more thrilling than this somewhat limp fish...too bad.

CINDERELLA and SEASCAPE October 22nd and 25th

Photos: Top- Playbill of original 1975 Broadway production of Edward Albee's Seascape (check out the cast!) No remaining performances of Zeitgeist Theatre's production in Boston.

Bottom- Production shots of Boston Ballet's Cinderella with choreography by James Kudelka. October 16 - 26, 2008. No remaining performances.

I have little to say about Boston Ballet's remount of the National Ballet of Canada's version of Cinderella of a critical nature. Suffice it to say that it was akin to eating a box of chocolates, calories be damned. Tons of fun for both dancers and audiences with a delicious 1920's set and costume design and the music of Prokofiev, the show sweeps you along with sheer delight. I was taken aback by the large numbers of very small girls attending with their parents last Wednesday night (in the magnificent CitiWang Theatre, featuring one of the most splendid lobbies I've ever encountered, where they serve pretzels and beer at intermission!). How would these teeny-tinies in their Disney Princess dresses make it through a two and a half hour long classical ballet? The answer is, quite well in fact. I saw only a couple of hollering ankle-biters (yes, yes, I had a couple of them myself at one time...) being escorted out by frazzled parents. All the rest were as enchanted as I by this ever-popular fairy tale danced before us with style and energy by the Boston Ballet. Highlights for me were the two stepsisters who created clear characters and got to ham it up mightily (Megan Gray and Tempe Ostergren on 10/22) as a starlet wanna-be and a clumsy glasses-wearing geek. My other favorite bit was Cinderella's solo back in her kitchen after the ball, dancing with one sparkling toe show and one bare foot...inspired (Lorna Feijoo on 10/22). Kudelka's choreography doesn't break much new ground--I found his Cinderella and her Prince duets a bit ho-hum--but does create a high energy and colorful romp that cannot, and does not, fail to entertain. And the show features one theatrically transcendent moment, when Cinderella arrives at the ball pulled down to earth by her garden fairy attendants with huge red ribbons attached to her floating pumpkin carriage. Gorgeous and just so right.

Edward Albee's Seascape is an early play by this most important of living American playwrights and I was very curious about seeing it. Small theatre company Zeitgeist has made some commendable artistic choices in its short tenure in Boston (housed in the Boston Centre of the Arts), as is clear in this current production. The company's Artistic Director David J. Miller directs the full-length version of Albee's play...all three hours of it. Perhaps this daunting length explains in part why I was one of a very small house of about 20 on Saturday afternoon last weekend (a number that shrank a little by the curtain call). Too bad, as this is a play and production well worth taking in. Albee has never needed aesthetic educational philosopher Maxine Greene's advice to "release the imagination". His imagination has led him in more recent years to write a play about a marriage dissolving due to the husband's love affair...with a goat (The Goat, or Who is Sylvia [2000], Tony award for Best Play in 2002). Seascape was honored with the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, so clearly is considered to be a major Albee work. Interestingly, the original Broadway production directed by Albee himself cut the second of three acts, so at Zeitgeist we have the rare opportunity to view the play in its entirety.

The play is set on a location-less beach, somewhere on the American coast. An older couple, Nancy and Charlie, spend most of the first act talking to each other the way long-married couples often do; of their complaints and regrets, as well of their abiding love and hopes for the future. Nancy wants more from the rest of her life, now that the children are grown and they are grandparents. She fantasizes about drifting happily from beach to beach around the world. Charlie seems more set on a peaceful and quiet end-of-days and has no wish to embrace change or exploration, in himself or anywhere else.

Into this quite realistic setting and dialogue at the end of Act One enter two very large lizards who push the terrified couple into the sea. Act Two takes place under the sea where our heroes try to decide if they have died or not (Charlie blames the liver paste sandwiches for lunch that day) and why they seem to be able to both breathe and talk underwater. Soon the lizards reappear and introduce themselves to the uneasy humans as Leslie and Sarah. These lizards are going through the painful process of evolution and want to know everything they can about humanity. Nancy is immediately caught up in the excitement of this adventure while Charlie is far more reticent. Act Two ends with the humans convincing the lizards that they must move out of the sea and onto land...the evolutionary tide is pulling them there in an inevitable fashion.

Act Three continues the lizard couple's education on land and builds toward a climax when they wish to learn about emotions and Charlie manages to elicit painful tears from the lizard-wife Sarah by asking her how she'd feel if she never saw Leslie, her lizard-husband, ever again. This revelation eventually send the lizards back into the safer confines of the sea, where their biggest problems are stupid fish and obnoxious eels, leaving Charlie to comfort a distraught Nancy who mourns their departure.

One of the more surreal play synopses I've ever written and you've likely ever read, right? But Albee is a masterful playwright, deserving of all the accolades and awards he has won over his fifty years of playwriting (he turned 80 this year). The dialogue he writes is always crisp, intelligent and full of rich undercurrents of subtext and complexity. The key themes of the play--marriage and love (and their consonant themes of communication and understanding), evolution, progress and alienation (the scariest thing for the lizards on land are jet planes flying overhead)--are ingeniously woven into a play that keeps moving its audience to unexpected places, all the richer from visiting them.

Zietgeist's production does quite well with the huge challenges this text presents. Michelle Dowd as Nancy and Peter Brown as Charlie are a bit young for their roles, but play them with clarity and sensitivity. Brown perhaps makes Charlie a bit too much of a sad-sack and Dowd has to compensate by playing Nancy at times a bit over the top, but all in all I enjoyed their work, especially in Act One and at the end of the play. Claude Del and Emma Goodman as the lizard couple Leslie and Sarah have a major physical as well as acting challenge and they both did some very nice work here. Del occasionally felt a little more snippy than truly threatening (remember these are human-sized lizards!), but he was convincing in his mix of curiosity and caution in dealing with these mysterious humans. Goodman was quite lovely as Sarah, very feminine even in her lizard get-up and with a genuinely sweet quality as an actor that shone through.

Director Miller does well with keeping everything moving forward, although there were a few long-ish pauses in Act Three that signalled the need for more rehearsal time was probably needed to do full justice to this long and complex play. T'was ever thus in the theatre...Set and lighting design were serviceable but not inspired and my one design complaint was the complete lack of a sound design beyond endless waves crashing on the beach and the occasional jet plane. It felt to me like some judicious use of music, especially in key transitions, would have added another level to the production. But overall it was a treat to see this little-produced and difficult Albee and I hope more theatregoers filled the seats in Zeitgeist's small theatre at the BCA at the show's closing on Saturday night.

August: Osage County in New York City September 27, 2008

Images: Cast of August: Osage County and production poster [www.time.com, http://www.playbill.com/, http://www.verbosecoma.com/]

After a good friend saw this show in June and had the unbelievable chance to go backstage and meet star Estelle Parsons, I knew I had to put it on my must-see list (nevermind it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama!) It did not disappoint, providing me with over 3 hours of pure dramatic fun in the form of a black comedy about one of the more dysfunctional families ever to grace the American stage. The Weston family of Osage County, Oklahoma live in a large three story old-fashioned wooden farmhouse outside of Tulsa, where patriarch Beverly has had a so-so career as an English professor at the university. We meet him in a long opening monologue about his life, his drunkeness, his wife and daughters, to a mostly silent native-American young woman named Johnna, whom he is hiring as a housekeeper and cook. Johnna will have her work cut out for her, as Beverly promptly goes missing and turns up dead...a planned suicide. We soon meet the three daughters, two sons-in-law and one grand-daughter, and an aunt, uncle and cousin, who return home for their father/brother-in-law/uncle's funeral and to comfort their difficult mother/sister/aunt Violet. Violet, a formidable pill-popper (echoes of the mother in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey), is both unbelievably vicious and unspeakably pathetic as she sets out to attack each of her three daughters and other assorted characters throughout the play. This culminates in a funeral dinner scene that must be seen to be believed, where Violet manages to reduce all of her daughters either to tears or rage (or both), even to physical assault.

At the heart of the play is the Westons' oldest daughter Barbara, a strong and intelligent woman who watches and does her best to intervene as her life falls apart around her. Her husband is screwing a student, her daughter is 14 and up to no good, her beloved father has offed himself and her mother infuriates and sucks the life out of her. Her sisters don't fare much better: Ivy is the only one who's stayed nearby and her life has been a lonely disappointment (until she falls for her sweet but ineffectual cousin Little Charles); Karen has moved to Florida and become a real estate agent whose desperate search for love has led her to a very suspect choice. The play ends with each and every character finally finding the strength to walk away from this toxic place, with Barbara being the very last one to leave her mother, without a word. The play's final moments show a bewildered and frightened Violet searching the house for her absent family, ending up comforted in the arms of Johnna, the caregiver Beverly hired for this very purpose.

Playwright Tracy Letts and this production from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre--without a doubt one of the very best theatre companies in America--have crafted a wonderful piece of theatre. There is never a dull moment throughout this long play, and each scene crackles along with the energy emanated by all these spectactularly unhappy people. Revelations appear, confessions are offered, recriminations are fired and this cast and their director Anna D. Shapiro are up to all of them. I was surprised by how funny the play is, how often I found myself laughing and being appalled at the same moment. Is it a great play? I think not: the cast is too large and unwieldy for us to really dive deeply into individual psychologies and some plot turns seem added in by the playwright simply for the shock/fun factor (potential incest and underage sexual assault being the most egregious examples). If the play was stripped down a bit and the more Gothic elements excised, we might then have something to hold up against far greater American plays about unhappy families: Long Day's Journey, Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman or All My Sons (the latter is in previews on Broadway), Buried Child, not to mention Chekov and Ibsen. I saw Pinter's The Birthday Party in its Broadway revival production last December; now there's a play about a dysfunctional family for you!

It is difficult to mention stand-out performances as this is such an ensemble piece, but the trio of daughters are all Steppenwolf ensemble members and it shows. What a treat to be a long-term member of such a strong company, where the quality of acting is so high. Amy Morton as Barbara carries off a gruelling role with a blend of fury, grief and vulnerability. Estelle Parsons plays Violet as seemingly mild, but with a serpent's tongue, plus she has comic physicality and timing that make the most of her role. The men have smaller roles in this female-dominated play (a rarity!), but I really enjoyed the work of Robert Foxworth as Uncle Charlie, Frank Wood as Barbara's straying spouse, Brian Kerwin as Karen's creepy fiance and Jim True-Frost as the damaged but hopeful cousin Little Charlie. The openwork set design by Todd Rosenthal is both attractive and effective.

Estelle Parsons stepped forward during our ovation at curtain call to tell us that Paul Newman had died that morning at his home in Connecticut at the age of 83. He met his future wife Joanne Woodward onstage in the very theatre we were in---Broadway's Music Box Theatre---in the premiere production of William Inge's Picnic in 1951. She told us that the cast had agreed to dedicate their performances that day to his memory. No doubt the great Newman would have enjoyed (as much as I did) every minute.

Let Me Down Easy with Anna Deavere Smith at ART September 23, 2008

Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy at the American Repertory Theatre

September 12 - October 11, 2008.

Photos credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/theater/reviews/22easy.html

What a pleasure and a privilege to see this wonderful artist-ethnographer in action in her latest play. Deavere Smith has made a career out of conducting hundreds of interviews on a particular topic or in a particular location. She then painstakingly recreates the physical and vocal qualities and mannerisims of her interviewees into one-woman productions that offer 25 or more characters apiece. She is best-known for her shows Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror, both of which dealt head-on with racial unrest and injustice in American society.

This new play is somewhat of a departure for Deavere Smith as she set out to question more philosophical questions around mortality, embodiment and a concept that became central to this self-described "play in evolution"; the concept of grace. What is it? Where does it come from? How do we experience it? These are the questions that drove Deavere Smith's 300 (!)interviews with a wide range of subjects: priests, rabbis, Buddhist monks and imams (not surprisingly); a jockey and horse trainer (more surprisingly); survivors of the Rwandan genocide; musicians; scholars and philosophers; great opera diva Jessye Norman; former Texan governor and cancer patient Ann Richards. All are fully rendered in monologues that circle around her key theme, offering a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives and stories.

Deavere Smith has a powerful stage presence that commands an unwavering attention over the two and a half hour show. She speaks directly to the audience (sometimes, briefly, as herself) as she portrays each interview subject, backed by an effective set design of a rough and uneven corrugated iron wall that opens onto a screen featuring images and an occasional video to support the action or establish a setting. Stage hands bring on and take off costume pieces and props for Deavere Smith, but this is never an attempt to 'fool' the audience; everything happens in full view. And, unless she puts on shoes to help her establish a character more fully, Deavere Smith is barefoot, an aesthetic choice that resonated with me around the choruses of ancient Greece bearing witness to great events as they dance barefoot in a circle together. There is that deep sense of participating in a more ritual-ized form of theatre when watching Deavere Smith at work.

She is a fascinating actor, and not because she is that good a one. She has a powerful voice and all the technical skills necessary, but I did not experience her work as that of an actor with the capability to seemingly morph into other people. For me, there was always something of the actor in every character, as accurate and most often believable I found each incarnation to be. Is this a conscious Brechtian alienation effect that Deavere Smith is employing, reminding her audience that everything is constructed, false, that the truth of this experience really lay in her original encounters with these participants, that anything else is a mere representation? Perhaps, and that is one way to read her work. However, as a researcher myself, I read a sister-researcher at work here, using her art form of theatre to best represent the lived experiences of her interviewees. The fine attention to detail I saw in her representations tells me she studied the interview tapes in depth, and called upon the actor's skill of memory-recall, in order to include each person's vocal mannerisms, their hesitations, tics, pauses, laughs, silences. In this way, her ethnographic portraits are far more accurate and convincing than a researcher limited to written forms is able to be. Any graduate student in the social sciences or humanities should see a Deavere Smith show, preferably live, but her earlier shows are readily available on DVD. She has a lot to teach about the fine art of researching other people.

As for the show itself? It definitely is "a play in evolution" as I felt the first act was outstanding and the second somewhat of a letdown. Deavere Smith appears to have fallen into the easy research trap of trying to cram too much data into the final report! Although she has limited her selection to 30 of the 300 interviews, she still seems to be trying to make all the pieces 'fit' together. The problem I saw in Act Two lies in a section that deals with the medical system and features interviews with doctors and patients around what's both right and wrong with the ways we care for our own and other peoples' bodies in crisis. While I enjoyed this section of the show, I did feel that we began to move somewhat farther away from the central theme of grace that was so well established and explored in Act One. It felt to me that this section might be the beginning of another show on this topic, but where it sits right now it leads me away from a topic with which I was fully engaged and wanted more.

Interestingly, in a post-show panel featuring Deavere Smith, chaired by Harvard's Homi Babha, one panelist mentioned (quite rightly) that if she wanted to keep centred on the theme of grace while looking at the medical system, Deavere Smith would do well to interview nurses. And hospice workers, I might add! So maybe that is how this play will keep evolving, maybe not.

The memories I will carry with me as my archive of this performance (a concept from performance theorist Herbert Blau in his book The Audience) is of her recreating testimony from African subjects, particularly those who lived through the Rwandan genocide, survivors and perpetrators both. When a young girl, now a college student in the US, speaks through Deavere Smith about her ability to forgive those who murdered her family to "let them go", I am given the gift of understanding grace in a whole new way. For this and many other dramatic insights along the way--the death of a horse, the beauty of a garden, the power of art to lift and transform suffering--I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have been graced for a short time in the presence of a great American artist.

WE WON'T PAY, WE WON'T PAY! at Nora Theatre September 20, 2008

From L to R: Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, Scott H. Severance, Stephanie Clayman, Elise Audrey Manning. [http://www.thenora.org/]

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo is a rare treat to see produced in a professional theatre, especially given his radical revolutionary politics in the Age of Bush. I was thrilled to see this early play of Fo's (1974) for the first time, as I used a monologue from the play's opening many years ago as a young actress. Ironically, I performed my first and only Fo play this past year, his 2005 one-woman play Peace Mom (co-written with his wife Franca Rame) about US peace activist Cindy Sheehan. That more recent play is, of course, decidely NOT a comedy, which is Fo's stock-in-trade and very much in evidence in We Won't Pay, We Won't Pay! , one of his most popular shows.

The play takes us through a whirlwind day or so with two working class couples; an older couple , Antonia and Giovanni, and their younger neighbors and friends Margherita and Luigi. Antonia drags her girlfriend into her apartment one morning to help her stash bags of groceries she, along with dozens of other down-at-the-heel women, stole from their local grocery store as a response to an endless series of inflationary price hikes. Chanting together the play's title, Antonia's euphoria is broken by the realization that her letter-of -the-law husband will kill her if he finds out. So she plots with Margherita to hide the goodies from her husband and the local police, who soon come calling to investigate. From this premise, the play moves quickly into the comedic domains of sympathetically weepy police officers, both women faking pregnancies to hide their booty and the two men eating pet food and bird seed soup to abate their hunger. Much physical comedy and hilarity ensues, with plenty of direct address to the audience, so we are made complicit in everything that happens.

This Nora Theatre production does the play great justice and features strong performances from its company of five. Stephanie Clayman and Scott Severance boast lengthy acting bios in the program, and their experience shows. Clayman's Antonia is tough-as-nails and smart as a whip, never at a loss for words or an idea. Her easy manipulation of her supposedly macho domineering husband is a hoot, as is her dragging of her friend Margherita into the chaos. Severance plays Giovanni as Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners reborn, although with even more physical comedy! For a large actor he takes an impressive number of falls and shows an endless amount of energy. I also really enjoyed Elise Audrey Manning's work as Margherita as she brought a lovely clown-like quality to the role. Margherita doesn't say a lot, but she must play along with all of Antonia's plotting and con games, and Manning plays her as the childlike innocent who wishes to help her friend but is only barely keeping up with events at hand. She's a delight to watch. The two other male actors, Antonio Ocampo-Guzman (in a number of roles) and Robert Najarian (as Luigi), also fare well here, although they are somewhat overshadowed by the other three.

Director Daniel Gidron keeps everything moving well and makes good use of the black box space in the brand-new Central Square Theatre. The set is simple, as are the costumes and props, but I found the lighting very well-done by long-time Nora designer Scott Pinkney.

When Giovanni speaks to us at the conclusion of the play, as their community moves into resistant action against joblessness, eviction and endless cycles of poverty, he challenges us with the truthful observation that "It's easy to laugh at other people's desperation", a truth that Fo has always known and mined theatrically to his own socio-political ends. However, it is hard to forget that we are a mostly white, middle-aged and middle class audience being preached to in this particular setting. The educator and activist in me wishes this show were made available to young people, high school or middle school age, as it is in them that our revolutionary hopes for the future lie. We oldsters have settled for our creature comforts and are not planning to take to the streets (Obama notwithstanding) anytime too soon. Viva la Revolucion!

FOLLIES at the Lyric Stage Company September 17, 2008

Poster for FOLLIES at Lyric Stage Company [http://lyricstage.com/]. Show runs until October 11, 2008.

Well, if there was even a shade of doubt in my mind that 78 year-old Stephen Sondheim is not a certifiable genius of the American musical, that doubt evaporated forever after seeing his 1971 show Follies at the Lyric Stage Company. I grew up on Sondheim's later shows, from Sweeney Todd (1979) on to Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987) and Passion (1994). But just last fall I saw a wonderful production of his 1970 show Company and was blown away with how great it was. And the same holds true for Follies.

The show is a loving tribute to the great ladies of the musical stage and offers wonderful roles for older women, especially in the lead roles of Sally and Phyllis, two women who, as young girls in the 1940s, were chorus girls in the Weismann Follies (with more than a nod to the Ziegfeld Follies!). They and their husbands Ben and Buddy (who courted the girls at the same time, and were themselves best friends), are re-united 30 years later in a big party to mark the next day's demolition of the rundown theatre that used to be the stage for their glory days. Mirroring this action in the present day, we see the shadows of these characters in their youth, along with the younger versions of other chorus girls, in a very clever and effective book by James Goldman. The dramatic tension that runs throughout is the unhappiness of the long-married (a common Sondheim theme) who look to find freedom in either past longings (Sally's longlost love is Phyllis' husband Ben) or future dreams (Ben and Phyllis claim to want to divorce and Buddy has a younger woman he claims loves him more than Sally). That these two couples end up back in the arms of their spouses at the end of their mutual 'follies' is a foregone conclusion. However, along the way we see each of them reveal their inner turmoil in typically Sondheim-ian deep psychological songs like "The Road You Didn't Take", "Could I Leave You?", "The Right Girl" and "Losing My Mind". Interwoven with this romantic drama are show tunes from other characters, both past and present, including the showstopper favorite "I'm Still Here".

The Artistic Director of the Lyric Stage Spiro Veloudos welcomed the audience on Wednesday night (always a class act for an AD to do so) and let us know that this was the biggest show ever produced iin the 35 year history of the company. And the theatre space is a very small one in the Hotel Clarendon! But I was consistently impressed with the levels achieved in this production, especially in the tight and effective choreography, including an almost full-cast tapdance number. The set is simple but makes maximum use of the space, the costumes work well and the 9 piece orchestra sounds fine.

Standout performances were Leigh Barrett as Sally, who found all the levels of vulnerability and sorrow in this woman who has felt she married the wrong man for so long and then finds out how wrong she has been. Barrett also has a lovely singing voice and performs "Losing My Mind" with great strength. Another standout was Maryann Zchau as Phyllis who is sharp and angry throughout, pulling her man back to her through the sheer force of her indomitable will. Her singing of "Could I Leave You?" (in which one hears the dissonant foreshadows of Sondheim's later works) is fantastic. The men do well in their roles as well, and Peter Carey proves himself an able dancer in "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues". Other strong turns come from Bobbie Steinbach in the plum role of Carlotta and Kathy St. George as the French songstress Solange. I also enjoyed much of the work in the young company, many of whom are currently in musical theatre degree programs throughout the city.

Follies has had an interesting critical history (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follies) with lots of split response. Sondheim suffered early on for being way ahead of his time, but recent reviews have come to recognize what I saw in this show...what Ben Brantley called "a landmark musical and a work of art". Amen to that.

How Shakespeare Won the West - September 14, 2008

Poster for Huntington Theatre's production of How Shakespeare Won the West [www.huntingtontheatre.org] on from September 5 - October 5, 2008

This was my second visit to Huntington Theatre's space at Boston University, a lovely old theatre with a carved Shakespearean quotation "To hold as t'were the mirror up to nature" over the proscenium arch. This quote has a cameo in the season premiere production of prolific and successful American playwright Richard Nelson's latest comedy, How Shakespeare Won the West.

The play and its production are delightful, carried off with great energy and exuberance by its large cast of 11 actors who storytell their way though the journey of a ragtag theatre troupe from New York to California in 1848. They are trying to make it to the frontier goldmining towns where, so they believe, miners are starved for culture and will throw sacks of gold dust onto the stage for a good production of the Bard. On the simple but effective wooden set (designed by Anje Ellerman), the company uses a combination of action and narration---in the style of story theatre---to introduce us to the tavern-owning and theatre-loving Calhoun family and their dream of creating a theatre company. In New York of the 1840s the plays of Shakespeare are popular, Edwin Booth is a big star (as also, apparently, are two sisters aged 9 and 11 who played scenes from Shakespeare's plays to much acclaim and we are treated to a snippet of their show!), and the Calhoun's spy an opportunity to reclaim the stage out in California. They gather together a mixed-bag of actors who are willing to make the journey and off they go.

From this point on the play becomes a theatrical variation on the classic American Dream, striking out for unknown territories with the hope of striking it rich. However, the Calhoun Theatre Company is both ill-suited and ill-prepared for the arduous journey ahead and much of the play is taken up with the many challenges they face along the way. These challenges include disease and death, winter cold, hostile natives, kidnapping and near-starvation. Not the expected ingredients of a comedy! But the sheer energy and unstoppable optimism of this misfit group keeps us with them throughout this long trip, even meeting a young and theatre-loving Abe Lincoln along the way, until they reach their destination. There, they find that the miners are an uncouth lot and are facing destitution (luckily, one of the troupe is a former prostitute who is not above returning to her trade to help out) until a benefactor appears to save the day. The play ends with a bowdlerized version of Hamlet (historically accurate and very popular in its day!) that features a happy ending where the poisons are innocuous and Ophelia was just pretending to kill herself.

Playwright Nelson clearly knows how to write a play, and director Jonothan Moscone has gathered together a highly-skilled company to perform it. Most characters take on multiple roles and Moscone keeps the action moving at a good clip throughout this 110 minute one-act play. Standout performances for me were Will LeBow and Mary Beth Fisher as Tom and Alice Calhoun, Chris Henry Coffey as the dissolute star of the troupe Hank Daley (charming but hopeless, as with many a leading man!) and Susannah Schulman as his wife Kate Denim, the too-good-to-be-true ingenue who suffers a sad fate. But honestly, there's not a weak link in this company, and they also look pretty fabulous in the array of period costumes designed by Laura Churba Kohn.

If I have any quibbles at all, they are with the play itself. I know it's a comedy, but there are plenty of contemporary and historic comedies to be found that also take on a level of pointed satire, or political provocation, that is entirely absent in Nelson's play. It seems to me, as a Canadian abroad in the US at a time where the country is literally deciding upon its future identity in the world, that Nelson opted out of using this engaging story of the pioneering and entrepreneurial American spirit to remind us of the cultural cost of keeping our eyes firmly set on the money prize of the winner-takes-all American capitalist dream. The cultural cost in the US has resulted in a wholly dominant Hollywood and TV dramatic landscape that is very profitable, yes, but also almost entirely vapid. When the troupe performs their "Americanized" version of Hamlet it is funny, yes, but also struck me as very sad, especially in comparison to the rendering of King Lear they give to an Indian chief (as his captives) that moves him to tears, beyond language, beyond cultural boundaries and differences. That's the inexhaustible power of Shakespeare, and I couldn't help leaving the theatre wondering what it would be like to see this gifted company performing Hamlet or Lear themselves.