Dance Sampler

Baltimore offers endless selections of drama and music. But dance events are unfortunately rare.

Currently playing at Theatre Project, Shorts offers sixteen brief dance numbers by various regional dance companies and dancers. This varied anthology does not disappoint. A comic delight, Triplets features Sara Few, Martha Johnston, and Jennifer Seye in a vignette of quarreling triplets choreographed by Jennifer Seye. Choreographed by Cait Moler and performed by Marilyn Mullen and Adriana Saldana, These Walls have Windows is the evening's most sophisticated piece. The dancers elegantly negotiate textile bonds through geometric turns until they become engulfed in them. Accompanied by an ear-piercing rock duet, Adrienne Latanishen delivers some of the evening's most athletic and accomplished dancing in eclat. Several pieces explore the border between dance and non-dance. Prepare ascend fly ties dance to repetitive body movements and insect-like hums; #boildedrabbits adds a dose of improv theater to the proceedings.

Not everything in the anthology succeeds. Some bodies are less than lithe; some dancers exhibit little technique or discipline. A few of the routines come perilously close to what one expects on Dance Moms. It is unclear why no male dancers were present in the performance. But the flaws detract little from an exuberant sampler of dance trends in Charm City.

Barnyards and Bullies

Joshua Conkel's Milk Milk Lemonade features an absurdist slice of America.

Energetically performed by Single Carrot Theatre, the black comedy features a perplexed middle-school student Emory (played by Aldo Pantoja), tormented by his Wagnerian grandmother Nanna (Elliott Rauh) and by the brutal kid-down-the-block Elliott (Giti Jabailly). To find solace on his lonely chicken farm, Emory befriends the uber-chicken Linda (Jessica Garrett), whom he attempts to save from the farm's lethal processing machine. A lyotard-clad narrator (Genevieve de Mahy) gaily directs the play's action, provides a voice for the clucking Linda, and wears the evening's best costume as a spider who attacks the hapless Linda under the porch.

The dreams of the play's characters are pop Americana. Emory would like to win stardom on a knockoff of American Idol with his disco ribbon dance; Elliott wants nothing more than the perfect prom date. Amid hilarious dance routines and eccentric jokes, the play deals with the serious issue of social roles and stereotypes. Nanna hectors the effeminate Emory and drags his doll aways from him; Elliott bullies Emory to the point of violence. In Nanna's world, everyone has a distinct role: men are brawny and aggressive, chickens are meant to end up fried on the plate. For the ever-sensitive Emory, even chickens (and moths) have souls and the equally sensitive Linda must be saved from the death machine's blades. Although the admonitions against bullying push the play beyond a pop cartoon, the audience may want to come up for air when the preaching becomes overheated.

At the center of the action is Aldo Pantoja's exuberant performance as Emery. His lythe dances and sentimental protests capture adolescent angst in a boy who is simply different from the others and who sympathizes with similarly misshapen others. The rest of the cast is similarly energetic; director Nathan Cooper continues Single Carrot's brand of athletic, mobile performance. But these performances have a one-note montony. Nanna is all bark with little humanity in her devotion to her farm and grandson; Linda is vaguely pleasant rather than endearing. One of the heroes of the evening is Melanie Lester and her team of designers from the Maryland Institute College of Art; their colorful and witty costumes light up Conkel's pop fantasy of fame and fulfillment.

Darkling Texture

Frederick Knott happily admitted that he wrote plays for only one reason: money. He succeeded. His thrillers Dial M for Murder (1952) and Wait until Dark (1966) have delighted audiences for decades. Countless regional, collegiate, and community theaters have staged these gems of suspense, even if critics have sniffed at their highly contrived plots.

Vagabond Players' revival of Wait Until Dark maintains all the chills of the thriller. The climax of the play is still the end of the second act, when the blind housewife Susy (April Rejman) confronts the drug criminal Roat (Christopher Cahill) in an apartment where all sources of light have been extinguished. Even when we've seen the play (or the classy Audrey Hepburn film version) a hundred times before, we anxiously follow the pitch dark fight ingeniously tilted in favor of the blind housewife. The gripping climax is only the most exciting moment in Allan Herlinger's surefooted direction of the piece, in which the atmosphere of menace is carefully intensified as the action progresses.

The Vagabond's production offers more than the predictable thrills. The director and cast have drawn out the dark humor of the piece. This is especially striking in Cahill's performance as Roat, the murderous drug dealer. There is more than a touch of Richard III in Cahill savoring every violent moment as he kills his two criminal colleagues (played by Leonard Gilbert and Torbeg Tonnessen) and launches his assault on Susy.

The direction also brings out the psychological darkness of the characters. For all the fun-and-games of the climactic struggle in the dark---Did she just throw acid in his face? Will someone please shut that refrigerator door!---the most impressive part of the scene is its treatment of Roat's sadism. Wanting more than the heroin stuffed into a doll hidden in the apartment, Roat's humiliation of Suzy digs deeply into the theater of cruelty. The direction also effectively evokes the violence in the tense relationship between Suzy and the disturbed girl Gloria (Isabelle Anna Herlinger), a pesky neighbor. Suzy's reliance on the mercurial Gloria to help save her becomes a stark act of faith in an unpromising savior.

Enhancing the psychological darkness of the piece is the claustrophobic set designed by Bill Price. Painted in various tones of gray and black, the apartment and its furniture signal the threats, depression, and despair hovering over the play's action. Even before curtain rise (in a theater without curtains), the menacing mood of the evening is established.

Vagabond's production of Wait Until Dark provides all the thrills one could expect in this warhorse thriller. Its acidic wit and nocturnal psychology add something more.

On the Beach

The inaugural production of Seymoure Theater Company, Joe
Dennison's Muldoon is a gripping meditation on writing and violence.

Set at a Yucatan resort during the Zapatista uprisings in 1996, the play features three American exiles who confront their own violence in the isolation of a dingy hotel. A college professor, King (Stephen Deininger), his graduate assistant, Polly (Megan Rippey), and an alcoholic beachcomber, Pickle (Lynda McClary) are entangled in their own flights from something more than their native land. King is fighting his decline as a writer and his slavery to the bottle; Polly is confronting her diagnosis of terminal cancer; the uproarious Pickle is reeling from the death of her draft-dodging boyfriend (the mysterious Muldoon of the title) who fled to Mexico in the 1960s.

All three actors powerfully evoke the despair and violence-just-beneath-the-surface of their respective characters. McClary seems to be having the time of her life as the outrageous earth mother Pickle. She recites her stream-of-consciousness monologues, her obscure prophecies, and her poetic puns with alternating humor and intimidation. The second act provides the opportunity for several scorching confrontations as the more conventional masks of the characters fall on the shell-strewn beach.

As the action unfolds, the play explores how the growing violence of the characters turns into the narrative of the book King is desperately attempting to write. By the end of the play, it appears that the book (or the long-lost Muldoon) is actually authoring their destructive actions. While such meta-drama provides a challenging frame for the action, it occasionally becomes too didactic, as in the overly chatty ending of the first act.

Chip Chiperson's direction keeps an empathetic focus on the humanity of the characters, who could easily deteriorate into starchy literary theorists or cartoonish thugs. Even in the more academic passages, the pathos never disappears. The spare seaside set (designed by Joe Dennison, Alec Lawson, and Kendra Richard) and the ensemble of seaside sounds (designed by Dave Kiefaber) create a fitting atmosphere for the action. They reinforce the magical realism of the script.

Running this weekend and next at Mobtown Theater, Muldoon provides a challenge to thought and emotion in an exotic setting.

Obscure Questions

A new entry in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Nancy Murray's Asking Questions studies the collapse of a lie. With a deft mixture of comedy and tragedy, the play probes the tormented relationship between a mother and daughter entangled in a deception over the fate of the daughter's father. But the eccentric direction of the drama at Fells Point Corner Theatre raises its own questions.

In Murray's drama, Meg (Shanna Babbidge) has long told her teenaged daughter Mandi (Julia Pickens) that her father had died in an automobile accident. As the play progresses, the lie unravels, with Mandi increasingly insistent on discovering the true identity of her father. Through a series of plot twists, the long-lost father Mark (Kevin Griffin Moreno) reappears. The play ends with the daughter finally meeting her father, who may or may not have conceived Mandi through an act of date rape. Enhancing the play's structure is the use of two shadow characters. Mandi's friend Jen (Erin Boots) entices Mandi into dangerous pub crawls that reproduce Meg's destructive behavior as a teenager herself. A flamboyant gay friend of Meg, Doug (Andrew Syropolous) provides comic relief to the play's dark action. A gifted comedian, Syropolous lights up the drama's funniest scene, Doug's encounter with Mark as a bogus census-taker.

Peter Davis's opaque direction of the work does little to evoke the emotional depths in this piece of psychological realism. At key moments in the play, starting with an obscure mime at the very beginning, Meg seems to preside over the action from a velvety throne. Why this tormented woman is presented as such a regal figure remains unclear. In early scenes, the actors' words are punctuated by sitcom laugh tracks. Why? Throughout the play, the action is suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of chirping birds. Why? The one successful surreal touch of the evening are the Dali-esque flats designed by Heather Joi. The direction itself feels gratuitously surreal and some of the basic work of the director (such as getting actors to speak slowly enough for their lines to be heard by the audience) remains undone.

Avenging Angels

Entries in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival rarely burn with poetic intensity. Produced by Theatrical Mining Company and playing at Notre Dame College's Copeland Theater, Abraham and Isaac does. That is its strength but in its more static patches also its weakness.

Written by Stephen Schulze, this drama features a Columbine-like mass shooting at a school. The father of one of the victims, Charlie Barrow (Howard Berkowitz) tracks down one of the assailants, Ethan Brody (Daniel Sakamoto-Wengel). A military veteran and experienced hunter, Barrow's long monologues recount the killing of his daughter Vicki (Annie Unger) and the ensuing hunt. Richly metaphorical, the narratives evoke the shock of the bereaved father and the author's carefully observed love of nature. The grief of Charlie's estranged wife Anne (Raina Dewald) and the shame of Ethan's parents (masterfully played by Paul Ballard and Anne Marie Feild) enhance the pathos of the piece. A clever memorial service, in which the entire audience becomes the congregation of the bereaved, deepens the emotional pitch of the work by rooting it in the biblical suffering of Job and Christ crucified. (Tiffani Bliss Brown's delivery of the stirring sermon, however, is oddly muted.) Ably assisted by choreographer Nancy Flores, director Barry Feinstein's use of mime to evoke the violence and anguish of the characters underscores the play's poetic air.

At times, however, the poetic reminiscences freeze the work's action. The long narratives of the past become cumbersome; the too frequent strolls through nature exude a faded romantic perfume. The second act is overwhelmed by long patches of philosophical speculation. The vaguely Nietzschean theorizing by Charlie, Ethan, and Sheriff Watt (Steve Lichtenstein) on the enigma of evil rarely rises above cliche.

An emerging playwright---this is his first produced play---Schulze powerfully evokes the nihilism, grief, and bewilderment at the heart of our violence-soaked society. Abraham and Isaac is well worth the visit to Notre Dame. But the author has not quite made the transition from the poetic monologue and the philosophical treatise to the act-centered (rather than word or concept centered) world of drama.

Lyrical Gravel

Unraveled on the Gravel is a novelty for the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Curently running at Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, Kevin Kostic's play is the first musical in BPF's long history. The work studies the tormented relationship between Ray (Josh Kemper) and his fiancee Amber (Sarah Jachelski). Moving backward in time, the drama unveils the sources of the couple's emotional conflicts through their college years and through their fluctuating friendship with fellow students Marlon (Nick Huber) and Wayne (Michael Milillo). An odd ghost/alter ego/ friend Wricks (Christopher Jones) provides provocative commentary on the doomed relationship.

Carrying a perfume of 1950s existentialism, the play convincingly unpeels the layers of Ray's self-hating anguish, which manifests itself as an eerie addiction to hitchhiking. The actors provide a solid ensemble portrayal of a tormented network of friendship and hostility, ably directed by Michael Tan. The closing "secret" of the play is too pat and sudden, but gusts of humor soften this somewhat psychoanalytic exploration of self-destruction and misplaced guilt.

Capably accompanied by an acoustic-rock trio (Brennan Kuhns, Christopher Marino, Elliott Peeples), the score permits Ray to reveal his inner demons and desires. The score is not exactly memorable (you won't be humming the tunes on your way out to Saint Paul Street), but the earnest expression of raw emotions through music effectively underscores the self-revelation at the core of the piece. Unfortunately, most of the cast cannot sing. (The two exceptions are Huber and Jones.) The offkey notes---more than a few---constitute the performance's most excruciating moments.

This musical drama represents one of BPF's most ambitious works. Despite the lyrical flaws, the complex web of psychological anguish in the play's soul glows.