ROAD SHOW by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman - New York City - December 6th, 2008

Images: Production photos from the Public Theater's Road Show featuring Alexander Gemignani (L, above) as Addison Mizner and Michael Cerveris (R, above) as Wilson Mizner. Credits: www.daylife.com

Like many avid theatregoers, I'd walk a mile or two on my knees to see a Sondheim show, so it wasn't much to ask for me to catch a cheap bus ride down to NYC last weekend to see his newest creation, Road Show. Formerly, called Bounce, this show has had a troubled history, having been played out of town but undergoing major rewrites over a period of many years. This most recent and quite stripped-down version of the musical is debuting for a short run at the Public. Directed by John Doyle, who has previously directed remounts of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and Company that won critical acclaim and new audiences for those older works, we are given what I can only describe as a chamber musical from Sondheim, in contrast to his grand orchestral works of the past. But a smaller Sondheim show still has his music and its moments, both in evidence here.

Sondheim and his collaborator John Weidman (who has worked with the maestro on another chamber musical with a difficult history, Assassins) are interested in telling us the true tale of two brothers, the Mizners, who represent the highs and lows of American capitalism in their wheeling and dealing across the country in the early part of the twentieth century. The show begins and ends with them speaking to each other from beyond the grave, trying to assign blame and vent bitterness about everything that went wrong in their lives. From this opening, we travel back to their youth, as they head off to the Yukon gold rush, world travels, high society, architecture, the development of Palm Beach and Boca Raton and other adventures along the way. All throughout the brothers are fierce rivals who fall-out often, only to be drawn back into each other's lives due to an irresistible connection, even love. And all throughout their tale is told with a full chorus onstage who take on multiple roles (including their mother and father always looking on, even beyond their deaths) as they weave in and out of the Mizners' triumphs and disasters.

The show is under two hours long, without an intermission, so sets off like a freight train and never lets up, more and more paper money thrown up by the fistfuls as the brothers Mizner gamble, cheat, lie, con, and create the lives that mirror in a funhouse version of the American Dream; distorted and deceptive, now fat now thin, now you see it, now you don't. Doyle has designed the set as well as directed, and it is most effective...a stacking of boxes, crates, file drawers that open and close for actors to reach into and pull out props and to climb over and position themselves on. Costumes are suitably muted with the womens' dresses printed with newspaper headlines, but there are plenty of fun add-ons such as hats, coats and boas. The musicians are offstage, unlike Doyle's other Sondheim revivals, where the actors played the score as they sang it.

Speaking of the score, Sondheim offers some small gems here, often reminiscent of older songs in their melodies and phrasing, but that seems a slightly unfair criticism of a composer so well-known and now in his late 70's. Of course there will be echoes heard by any listener reasonably familiar with his canon of works. All the full company numbers in the show were very enjoyable, marking key points in the Mizners' life journey; "Waste", "Gold!", Addison's Trip", "That Was a Year", "You" and "Boca Raton". There is little dance in the show, but lots of action and movement that provide an effective staging of each song. Other highlights are Alma Cuervo as Mama Mizner singing "Isn't He Something" about her neglectful son Willie, who has become a New York society member through marriage to a wealthy widow, while her dutiful and loving son Addison listens on in anger and hopelessness. Addison falls in love with a young man, Hollis Bessemer, whose contacts help Addison become a successful architect to the Palm Beach elite. He and Hollis song the most moving song in the show "The Best Thing That Has Happened".

The show features a strong company, all of whom sing beautifully and can act as well (as would be expected!) But the leads carry the show and both Cerveris and Gemignani do excellent work. Cerveris has the showier of the two brother roles, as Willie is the "bad" brother who manipulates everything and everyone around him, caring little for who gets hurt or what gets lost along the way. Cerveris gives a star performance in the role, eating it up with a very large spoon, with relish. But Gemignani wins our hearts as the more nuanced and empathetic Addison, who can't escape his two-timing brother, and in the end can't even deny he loves him.

All in all a satisfying show, despite troubles with the book that doesn't offer us a more complex rendering of the Mizners or other characters in their lives. It may not rank with Sondheim's greatest achievements, but Road Show still offers us a music-filled story worth the telling...and the hearing.

THE SEAFARER by Conor McPherson - November 16th, 2008

Images: New York poster, production photos of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer. Credits: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/07/theater/Sea1450.jpg, http://images.broadwayworld.com/columnpic/TheSeaFarerLogo.jpg,

It's been nearly a month since I saw this show at Boston's SpeakEasy Stage Company, housed in the multi-stage Boston Center for the Arts. It is the third McPherson play I've seen (following his The Weir (1999) and Shining City (2006)), and the third Irish play thus far in Boston this fall. McPherson is closer to Brian Friel than Martin McDonagh in his love of storytelling, even of the supernatural, but allies with McDonagh in this play populated as it is by the Irish underclass. Set on Xmas Eve in a rundown basement apartment in a dodgy part of Dublin, the all-male cast of characters feature brothers James "Sharky" Harkin and his older brother Richard, recently blinded after a dumpster-diving mishap. A dedicated boozer and welfare bum, Richard tries to get his brother to join in the holiday festivities with his other layabout friends Ivan Curry (a doltish sidekick who'd rather drink with Richard than face his wife and kids at home) and Nicky Giblin (a handsome fun-seeker who's taken up with Sharky's ex-girlfriend). Sharky has returned from working down south and is trying to change his ways, including swearing off the drink, when Nicky brings over a new friend for a night of drinking and cards; Mr. Lockhart.

We soon realize, after establishing the characters and their histories quite effectively (including the requisite McPherson touch of telling a ghost story), that Mr. Lockhart is the Devil and Sharky is his Daniel Webster. Lockhart tells him he will play poker with him for his soul, bargained away in desparation many years before after a bar-room beating gone wrong. Act Two continues on through the night with plenty of humor and dramatic tension as we wonder who will prevail in this ultimate game of chance and fate. Of course, being set on Xmas Eve and ending on Xmas morning is a bit of a giveaway that a happy ending for Sharky is in store, so it's not too much of a spoiler to say that Sharky and Richard head off to early Mass and Mr. Lockhart heads back to Hades without his catch.

The plot seems slight, but the craft that McPherson brings to his dialogue amongst these five characters is never less than taut, revealing and often laugh-out-loud funny. And Sharky, who has clearly had a rough past filled with many mistakes along the way, wins us over as a protagonist who wants to reform and then is faced with a fight for his life when Satan shows up to collect his soul. Much of the humor in the play lies in the fact that only Sharky and Mr. Lockhart know what's really going on, while the other three men get progressively drunker and rowdier over their cards. And we find ourselves caught up in the classic Faustian struggle for more life, always more life.

SpeakEasy's production is finely directed by Carmel O'Reilly, Artistic Director of a local Irish theatre company called Sugan Theatre. She has cast some of her favorite actors, it seems, as three out of the five actors in the company have appeared in Sugan shows. These three actors (Billy Meleady as Sharky, Derry Woodhouse as Mr. Lockhart and Ciaran Crawford as Nicky Giblin) fully inhabit their respective roles. Woodhouse in particular plays the Devil with such cool assurance that the temperature in the theatre appears to drop when he enters. A monologue he gives at one point to Sharky is masterful as he describes his loathing for the "insect-like" human body he must inhabit to stalk the earth in Xmas Eve, collecting debtors' souls. Meleady gives us a fine Sharky, striking a clear balance between the troubled and hot-tempered man he has been and the better man he wants to be. Larry Coen does a nice job with the slightly slow but essentially nice Ivan and Bob Colonna plays Richard with the blustery bravado of a man who has lost his way in the world, but is determined to survive, if only to drink himself to death. Colonna was still struggling with some lines when I saw an early performance in this run, and I imagine McPherson's quick and sharp text must offer a major memorization challenge to actors. The rewards, however, are great; McPherson continues to write plays that impress me with their inherent love of story and storytelling that is so much part of the Irish culture he wants to transmit on stage.

ROCK 'N' ROLL and FAITH HEALER - November 7th and 12th, 2008

Top to Bottom: NY production of Faith Healer by Brian Friel [http://www.monstersandcritics.com/arts/news/article_1159604.php]; Publick Theatre's production poster [http://www.publicktheatre.org/08season/season.html]; Rene Augesen as Esme and Manoel Felciano as Jan in Huntington Theatre's Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard; Rene Augesen as Esme and Jack Willis as Max in same; Broadway poster for Rock 'n' Roll blogs.villagevoice.com]

Two solid productions by two fine playwrights this last week in Boston. Tom Stoppard has had a long career dating back to the early 1960's and his plays deserve their reputation for both content and wit. His earlier works eschewed political content, but Stoppard became involved in human rights organizations such as Amnesty Inernational and his later plays have directly addressed a number of socio-political issues. His plays also do not tend to lack in scope nor ambition, such as his trilogy The Coast of Utopia which examines the development of radicalism in 19th century Russia. So it is in his most recent play Rock 'n' Roll, which covers a time period from 1968 to 1990 and follows the lives of Max Morrow, a communist Cambridge political science professor, his wife Eleanor and daughter Esme, and his Czechoslovakian student Jan.

The play begins in the heady days of 1968 in Cambridge, when Jan is deciding to return to Prague in the wake of the Velvet Revolution that promises more freedom to his people. He has fallen in love with Western rock 'n' roll and wants to bring the music of the Velvet Underground, Zappa and the Stones back with him. He also has eyes for his prof's pretty 16 year-old daughter Esme, hippy love-child incarnate. Max disapproves of Jan's desertion, but sends him on his way. From here we move back and forth between Cambridge and Prague over the years and witness many major events, both emotional and political: Max's beloved wife Eleanor succumbing to cancer; Jan being watched, threatened and eventually arrested and imprisoned for his political resistance; Max visiting Prague and Jan from time to time, often delivering a hot new record from Esme; Esme becoming a young single mother raising her daughter Alice; Gorbachev, perestroika, glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rise of Vaclev Havel and Jan's return to academia at the end of the play.

A lot of territory for one play, but we are in the hands of a masterful playwright and our interest in these characters and their development over such a long time period never flags. Each scene is mostly held in tight focus, often between two or three characters (aside from one large luncheon in Cambridge late in the play...the only time the stage feels really populated). So it is the conversations that take place between these characters over this 22 year period that engage us. Ideas and philosophies are spun out, for certain, but they are always rooted in real lived experience. If Jan strikes us as somewhat naive and idealistic after his return to Prague, it is not too long before events move him into a painful awareness that freedom has a long road ahead before finding its way into Czechoslovakia. If Max strikes us as a bit pompous and absurd, a bit of an oxymoron, the end of the Cold War tests him to the core and he finds a persistent belief in communism that sustains him, even in his bitterness at the compromises made by so many. If Esme begins the play as a flighty flowerchild, she ends it as a mature woman who has successfully raised a talented and caring daughter, who has cared for her aging father and who is finding her way to happiness. And only Stoppard can get away with pulling the rug out from under his audience in the final moments of the play in revealing that all along we've been witnessing a love story that has taken 22 years to come into being. Happy endings all around...Surprise!

The Huntington Theatre production is directed by Carey Perloff of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Perloff has directed many Stoppard US debuts and she does a fine job here, with an excellent cast in-hand. The three leads (see photos above) are all seasoned actors who immerse themselves in their characters and the quick, sharp dialogue that is Stoppard's trademark. I especially liked Augusen's doubled roles as Eleanor (Max's wife) and Esme (as an adult). She is a fine actress, reminds me somewhat of Laura Linney, who reaches the emotional depths and heights of her roles with great facility. Felciano and Willis are fine as Jan and Max and their scenes crackle with mentor/student (read: Father/Son) tension. These three leads are ably supported by the rest of the ensemble and an effective and impressive set design by Douglas W. Schmidt and lighting by Robert Wierzel. My only minor complaint was the volume of the rock 'n' roll songs used throughout as transitions. Okay, we may be a graying audience who are filled with nostalgia for the music of our youth, but that's no excuse not to turn up the volume! The Stones must be heard at 11, not 10 or 9 or 8, on the dial. Start me up, indeed!

Last night saw me as one of a tiny audience of 8 souls at the tiny Black Box Theatre in the Boston Centre for the Arts complex on Tremont Street in South Boston. We eight hardy ones were treated to a gem of a play by yet another very significant living playwright, Ireland's Brian Friel. I was in his Dancing at Lughnasa a few years back (2002) and was delighted to have the opportunity to embody one of his characters and live in the world he creates in his work. Faith Healer is an earlier play of Friel's, written in 1979, although it has been revived recently, most significantly in the Dublin/NY production with Ralph Fiennes (see image above).

The play is made up of four monologues delivered by three characters: Frank Hardy, a 'faith healer' who has spent over 20 years travelling from town to town 'performing' his acts of healing for those in enough despair to attend his shows; his wife Grace, who has left a comfortable upper middle-class Irish family and run off with Frank, condemning herself to a hard love and an equally hard life; and Teddy, the Hardys' faithful cockney manager who is with them every step of the way and who reflects back on this time with the audience, eventually revealing the truth of the deaths of both Frank and Grace, and his grieving for them. We are not given a clear timeframe for the play, but it feels like it may fall somewhere between the 1940s and the 60s.

Hardy's opening monologue gives us his point of view on his life and the mixed curse/blessing of a gift that only occasionally works. So he is mostly a charming charlatan who can under certain circumstances cause a miracle cure or two (or in one case, 10). He describes his wife as his mistress and is somewhat dismissive of her, although we get hints of deeper feelings, and he satirizes his manager Teddy, yet we see how much he depends upon him. Friel then shifts time and location to a flat in London where we meet Grace, widowed and deeply depressed. She gives us a very different take on Frank, who she absolutely loved despite their frequent battles and his infuriating behaviour (drinking, disconnecting), even after the stillbirth of their baby and Frank's appalling refusal to be there for her during this trauma.

The second act gives us Teddy's perspective on events, his devotion to Frank and unspoken passion for Grace. He is the one who is always there, through thin and thinner, and he tells us of the miraculous night when Frank cured all 10 people in the audience and of another night when it seemed Frank knew the crowd was out to get him...and eventually did. He also tells us of Grace's sad end and his lonely task of identifying her body. Frank returns for a final monologue that relives his final night on earth, and gives us a brief glimpse of the fleeting yet precious gift he may (or may not) have possessed.

So Friel is experimenting Rashomon-like in this play, presenting the same story through the eyes of three protagonists and letting us come to our own judgments about where the truth may lie. He is also drawing on some very primal Christ-like metaphors for Frank, Mary/Mary Magdalene for Grace and the Disciples for Teddy. We humans always want to sacrifice our prophets, right? It is a quiet but powerful piece, terribly demanding on both actors (who use direct address throughout) and audiences (who are challenged by the lack of dialogue and the intimacies of direct address). It demands excellence.

The Publick Theatre production may not give us James Mason (who first played Frank), or even Ralph Fiennes (who I imagine was excellent in the role), but does a fine job nonetheless. The company's Artistic Director Diego Arciniegas plays Frank and has a strong handle on his character, delivering his lines with simplicity and honesty, sometimes letting us see the charisma that must have swayed his audiences in the past. I liked the physicality he brought to the role, and the sense of both sadness and acceptance of fate that seemed to underpin his monologues. Susanne Nitter played Grace with a quiet ferocity, a woman who is so wrapped up in her memories of loss and regret that it must make sense to us later on that she has killed herself; a tough order for an actor who has about half an hour on stage! Yet Nitter drew me in and when she tells us of the birth of her stillborn son, on the side of the road outside a desolate Scottish highland village, we feel her desolation, her abandonment by her beloved Frank, who so often rejected and enraged her, yet who she clearly cannot live without. Gabriel Kuttner is a bit young for the role of Teddy, but he does a masterful job of it. It is probably Teddy who wins most of our empathy in this play, as (like us) he is the watcher, the enabler, the outsider. The love he feels for both Frank (a tough love indeed) and Grace (an even tougher one) is undeniable, although presented in an almost entirely unsentimental way. He only cracks when he tells us about having to identify Grace's dead body...then he goes back to his drinking...alone.

I was very moved by this play, and director Nora Hussey has clearly spent the necessary time with each actor so that the arcs of their interlocking stories and diverse viewpoints are complementary. She even asks each actor to remain onstage throughout another character's monologue, an act of selfless generosity that seems to reflect the deeper themes at work in this sad yet memorable piece; theatre at its most simple and most potent.

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.