Suffering and Creativity at the Peabody

The Peabody Institute has provided many splendid concerts and symposia for the Baltimore public.  One of the apexes of that splendor occurred last Friday.  In conjunction with the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, the Peabody sponsored a panel exploring the link between mental illness and artistic creativity.  The focus was the poetry of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), a national poet laureate and a leader of the confessional school of poetry in mid-twentieth century.  The centerpiece was the lecture by Kay Redfield Jamison, a medical school faculty member (specialist in mood disorders) and the author of a recent biography of Lowell, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (Knopf, 2017).  She explored how Lowell's bipolar illness, especially the phases of mania when he ranted, sang, rhymed, and rapidly explored words, informed his brilliant but terrifying verse.

Later in the evening The Flux String Quarter performed Images from A Closed Ward (2010), a thirteen part musical composition by Peabody faculty composer Michael Hersch.  Austere and slow-moving, the work evokes the various seasons of mental illness.  Often atonal, this is painful music to hear, but as the work progresses, rays of hope and normalcy seem to penetrate the muted sounds of bewilderment and despair.  The slow, repetitive movements gradually take form into something more sun-streaked and harmonious.  Renowned for its championship of contemporary serious music, the Flux String Quartet brilliantly performed this demanding piece, with its arctically slow tempos, and turned its painful emotional impulses into alternately muffled and soaring plaints.

During the performance stark passages from Lowell appeared on the screen--"And the laugh of Death is hacked in sandstone"---as did slowly dissolving black-and-white photographs of old, abandoned mental institutions.  Both visually and audially, the weight and lacerating power of mental suffering undulated from the stage.   In this work and performance of genius, the unbearable could be heard and seen, indeed almost touched.

This is very difficult music.  As the composer lamented in his introductory remarks before the concert, serious contemporary music has difficulty finding an attentive public.  The modest crowd on Friday night was far smaller than the usual crowds for Mozart or Brahms.  At the end of the first movements some of the concertgoers made clear their displeasure as they slammed the theater doors and exited.  For those of us who remained, we not only heard a lecture about the link between mental suffering and creativity; we witnessed its embodiment in something sublime.

The Marseillaise goes agitprop

Lauren Gunderson's quirky The Revolutionists is a play trying very hard not to be the play it is: a didactic political tract sternly teaching the audience its feminist lessons.  Everyman Theatre is currently giving the recent play a dazzling East Coast premiere, with florid costumes, brilliant special effects (that guillotine!), and Edith Piaf singing us into our seats to the strains of the Marseillaise.  But despite the many efforts at humor and the energetic performances by a wired cast, the play is a stern warning that we have unjustly forgotten the women at the center of history's big events.  And that we must atone for this forgetting.

The play brings together four women who lived at the time of the French Revolution: Queen Marie-Antoinette (Beth Hylton); Charlotte Corday, the assassin of revolutionary leader Marat (Emily Kester); Marianne Angelle, a Caribbean anti-slavery activist ( Dawn Ursula); and the playwright Olympe de Gouges (Megan Anderson).  These four historical women never met in real life.  Gunderson's strategy is to gather them all into De Gouges's study as they ask the playwright's assistance in various literary projects of their own.  The cast members deliver fine performances, with Hylton and Kester giving sympathetic treatment to two controversial characters whom textbooks and films have long reduced to caricatures.   Casey Stange's energetic direction moves the cast quickly through the more languorous stretches of dialogue and very effectively incorporates brassy sound and sight effects to recreate the revolutionary atmosphere of the period and the play's action.

Despite some humorous lines and many absurdist twists in plot and the play's internal timeline, the play can never shake its moralizing purpose.  We are repeatedly reminded that women did important things in past and that history has unfairly forgotten them.  It's all true but the repetitive lesson grows thin before the end of the first act.  In the second act, Olympe de Gouge's all too serious musings on the vocation of a woman playwright have the solemnity of a sermon for an obligatory catechism class.  Even the attempt to unmask misogyny gets tangled up in its own misogyny.  The play's Marie Antoinette is a reprise of the old misogynist caricature of her: a greedy, callous numskull who cares only for her jewelry and cosmetic appearance.  This is one area where the script could use a revisionist tune-up.

One of the real injustices facing the theater at the moment (and certainly in its past) is the small number of women playwrights whose works enter into full production.  Everyamn's first-rate production of Gunderson's drama is part of its admirable effort to rectify this gender balance.  Especially ambitious is Everyman's spring season, where it will offer staged readings of five plays by contemporary women playwrights.  

Shaking the Foundations with O'Neill

Spotlighters Theatre's new production of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape is a courageous, risky project.  An early expressionist play by O'Neill (1922), the piece is full of long, dark, brooding monologues that can easily produce acedia in the audience.  One is far from the complex inter-familial dialogue found in his later, more popular works like Long Day's Journey Into Night.  The play's closing scene, where the protagonist befriends and is then killed by an ape at the zoo, has every potential to turn into farce if not carefully handled.

Directed by Sherrione Brown, this production of the play is a triumph.  She has not only directed this play; with the assistance of Rebecca Clendaniel and Nancy Flores, she has choreographed it.  Standout scenes are the end of act one, where a defiant Yank in a jumble of bodies swears vengeance against an upper-class woman, a terrific scene of snobbish wealthy churchgoers parading down Fifth Avenue, and the climactic scene where Yank confronts the ape in the zoo cage.  (Brown wisely takes a minimalist approach to the scene.  The actor playing the gorilla remains in shadow, wears a dark full-body stocking, and uses dark make-up on his face.  His gestures and grunts are restrained, brief, and periodic.  The ending is heartbreaking without a trace of the comic.)

At the center of the production is the mesmerizing performance of Michael Leicht as Yank.  A physically domineering fireman who spends his day shoveling coal in the furnace room of an ocean liner, Yank deteriorates into "the hairy ape" as his anger explodes.  In the first scene he affirms his worth as a manual laborer who makes the ship run in an otherwise bleak universe marked by alcoholism, brutal crew members, and exploitative bosses.  He mocks the efforts of Paddy (Thom Eric Sinn) and  Long (Phil Gallagher) to find some broader meaning for their lives in nostalgia and Marxist politics respectively.  The consolations of religion are also bitterly pushed aside.  He explodes into vengeful anger when a wealthy woman, daughter of a steel magnate (Karen Starliper), calls him "a filthy beast" when she spots him cursing and disheveled in the furnace room.  His fellow crew members turn the sobriquet into the taunting "hairy ape." His subsequent efforts to express his rage by joining Manhattan socialites and labor activists only land him chained in the cage of jail. Bereft of any place in human society, Yank desperately recognizes his solidarity with the hairy ape at the zoo, who promptly kills him.  Leicht brings out the muscular strength, naive pride, and cascading anger in the character but he also brings out the pathos.  The fall of Yank here is immensely moving even if the ambient nihilism remains terrifying.

Not to be missed.

Lear, Big Bird, and the Kardashians

Single Carrot Theatre's production of Lear tackles an unwieldy property---to put it lightly.  Young Jean Lee's avant-garde play loosely borrows from Shakespeare's King Lear.  The three Lear daughters (Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril) and the two Gloucester sons (Edgar and Edmund) are still intact but they have changed.  Their self-absorbed speeches sound more like the Kardsashians trying to pick out another bauble for their ungainly wigs.  Their non-sequiturs sound more like Gracie Allen on speed.  The fun is complicated as the vaguely Tudor romp turns into a visit from Big Bird facing the fact of death of his father-figure in the beloved PBS series.  The wheel turns again as the play closes with a tear-stained monologue from a mysterious, contemporary everyman lamenting the death of his own father.

Despite the absurdity of the rhetoric and the action, the play maintains a surprising unity.  It's all about the death of the father, whether it's the heroic ancient father (Lear), the comforting surrogate television father, or the deeply missed actual father who will never return.

Director Andrew Peters expertly manages the play's abrupt changes in tone and plot.  The script's sudden swerves in mood from burlesque to elegy could easily result in breakdown.  The cast (Surasree Das, Paul Diem, Tim German, Chloe Mikala, Elizabeth Ling) also makes convincing transitions from the opening satirical cartoon of self-absorbed adolescents fresh from a series of murders to decent, everyday neighbors ready to show compassion for the bereaved Big Bird and the grief-stricken guy next door.  The extraordinary scenic design (Allison Campbell), costume design (Nicki Seibert), and sound design (Connor Ciesil) give the entire playing area an ominous, dream-like aura perfectly suited to this exercise in the surreal.

 

 

Irish Absurdism at the Motor House

Rapid Lemon Productions is currently presenting a double bill of Irish dramas at the Motor House, the sleekly remodeled successor to the old Load of Fun at the art hub of North Avenue and Howard.  Ably directed by Lance Bankerd, the program matches Samuel Beckett's nihilist classic Endgame with the recently written (American premiere) Voices in the Rubble by the emerging Irish playwright Darren Donohue.  The result is an intense and oddly entertaining foray into the absurd.

Donohue's opener plunges us into the surreal cocktail hour of middle-class Avril (Lee Condracci) and Tony (Zack Jackson).  In their chit-chat Tony calmly reveals that his boss just showed a ninety minute tape of Zack sexually assaulting the office secretary to the rest of the employees gathered in the boardroom.  Just as calmly Avril reveals that her day consisted in killing the postman---or was it Tony's brother?---and stuffing him into the refrigerator.  An intense young man (Matthew Lindsay Payne) suddenly springing from the refrigerator begs the couple to kill him but the incompetent duo can't figure out the right means.  A mysterious commanding gentleman who enters via the couch adds to the fun---or is he just an elder version of Tony?

Condracci and Jackson give riveting performances as the embroiled couple.  Their waltz-like movements as they dart off to Paris, Sweden, or China are highlights of carefully choreographed performances.  Unfortunately, Donohue's script is weakened at key points by puerile sexual chatter.

Endgame takes us back to Beckett's apocalyptic space in nowhere.  We are in a dark speck of a place beyond meaning and redemption.  There is only command and obedience, but the repetitious gestures lead nowhere.  Commanding is the crippled Hamm (Zack Jackson) and obeying is the limping Clov (Matthew Lindsay Payne).  Jackson and Payne marvelously complement each other.  The mindless, arbitrary joy of Jackson bounces off the angry, frustrated huffing and puffing of Payne.  Bankerd's direction brings out the vaudeville implicit in the duo.  Uproarious notes of humor suddenly erupt from a universe Hamm correctly describes as godless and pointless.

    

Richard III on the Marne

Modern Shakespeare productions suffer a predictable temptation.  Solid Shakespeare productions can be grounded in three settings: neo-Elizabethan (with actors in tights and codpieces running through Tudor decor); historical (the setting referred to in the script, such as classical arches where actors in togas roam in Julius Caesar); contemporary (where actors in street clothes use two plain benches in a minimalist set).  But directors are often tempted to concoct a snazzy setting from another period having nothing to do with the script.  The result is a gimmick that tears against the action of the drama and the very words of the Bard.  I have sat through a Comedy of Errors set in 1930s Fascist Italy (with platoons of nuns marching in Art Deco squares), a Tempest placed during spring break in 1950s Fort Lauderdale (Miranda was an Annette Funicello knockoff), and a mysterious Merry Wives of Windsor set in a Wild West show in 1890s Montana (the dog act was the best part).

Alas, in the otherwise excellent Chesapeake Shakespeare Company production of Richard III, director Ian Gallanar has let his vandalizing inner child mangle the script.  He has set the production in World War I.  Singers regale us with "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and soldiers run around the stage with rifles and gas masks.  Photographers snap the picture of royal family members.  But the script keeps reminding us that this is all about the War of the Roses, that we are in medieval Catholic England, and that the harried Richard wants a horse, not a taxi to the Marne, as his final military campaign collapses.  The incongruity of the juxtaposition of script and setting reaches a climax at the production's conclusion.  Just after Henry Tudor delivers his eloquent speech celebrating the reconciliation of the warring houses of York and Lancaster in his own now-royal person, the entire cast appears on stage to serenade us with "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag."

Despite the tiresome gimmickry, Gallanar's direction is often a tour de force.  He brings out the stakes in the play's bravura scenes, such as the seduction of Lady Anne, the curses by Queen Elizabeth, and the tragicomic killing of Clarence, Richard III's brother.  His staging of the nightmare/ghost scene, where Richard confronts the spirits of all those he has murdered on his trip to the throne, is one of the finest one will see in any theater.  The sound design and audial design brilliantly highlight the dramatic action.  Chesapeake's magnificent multi-level playing space permits the perambulating acting corps to draw the audience into the play's action.

Vince Eisenson gives a bravura performance as Richard III.  This part can easily bring out the ham in an actor as Richard rejoices in his villainy and his successive conquests of his victims.  Actors often chew the scenery and wink at the audience as Richard bags one royal personage after another.  Eisenson is more restrained and businesslike in his campaign.  He brings out the real charm of Richard as he seduces lady Anne, the daughter of one of his victims, and the "good uncle" benevolent concern as he creates a sanctuary for  the nephews he will murder.  We always knew he was a villain.  Now we know why he was such a convincing salesman.

The fine supporting cast gives excellent support to Eisenson and acts as convincing foils.  They maintain an admirably clear diction throughout the performance and very much cohere as a single ensemble caught mob-like in the dark ascension of Richard.  Especially fine are the performances by two children actors (Mia Boydston, Gareth Swing) as the doomed children of Edward IV.

     

Surrogacy as Satire

With its usual predilection for the avant-garde and the challenging, Single Carrot Theatre has opened its production of Samsara.  Written by the contemporary Asian-American playwright Lauren Yee, the play---or, rather, dramatic fantasy---studies a middle class couple's adventures in infertility and surrogate motherhood.  Through its wild humor, featuring a talking-and-dancing fetus and a Maurice Chevalier imitator, the play develops a pointed critique of our new, wilful way of reproduction and its exploitation of the poor women and the children they bear in their wombs for a price.

The relationship between the couple desiring to have a child, Craig (Paul Diem) and Kate (Alix Fenhagen), begins in farce but gradually becomes more serious as the strains in their marriage, their mixed motives for resorting to surrogacy, and their painful personal histories come to the fore.  Economics---and a dose of colonial imperialism---complicates the picture.  For reasons of cost, the couple decides to use an Indian woman as a surrogate mother in an inexpensive but reputedly safe clinic in India.  The clinic turns out to be anything but safe; the presiding physician oversees prenatal care and births on a not very sanitary assembly line.  The surrogate mother Suraiya (Saraniya Tharmarajah) is not exactly a volunteer.  The money she receives from the surrogacy is necessary to fund her studies in medical school and fulfill her dream of becoming a doctor.  All these factors collide in producing the play's tragic outcome.

The fantasy figures deepen the plot.  In the night's strongest performance,  the fetus Amit (Utkarsh Rajawat) not only bonds with the mother bearing him; he wittily interacts with Suraiya as he questions what life beyond the womb might be like.  Calling his mother "Microwave," since she has been hired to give him warmth and nurture, Amit brings out the impossibility for the surrogate simply to act as the passive, indifferent partner in a business deal.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, Kate deals with her own fantasy partner, a mysterious Frenchman (Dustin C.T. Morris) who is a stand-in for the anonymous French donor of the sperm used to create the couple's developing child.  Full of music, champagne, and overly Frenched accents from the old MGM movies Gigi, Morris's exuberant performance boosts the farcical joy of the production but also reveals even further the odd cultural prejudices that have marked this misguided adventure in procreation.

For all its vibrancy and imagination, the play does not completely work.  The effort to portray culture shock as Craig experiences provincial India in a visit to the surrogate on the eve of birth is full of its own cultural cliches about India and East/West differences.  Diem's brilliant, dynamic performance as the husband who moves from culture shock to bewilderment to outrage does not quite overcome the cultural wallpaper.  Some of the advice offered by the surrogate mother to her bouncy fetus sounds like an after-school special.  The sudden happy ending as the quarreling couple is reconciled seems forced and abrupt.  One senses a fascinating and highly imaginative tragicomedy that could use further work along the path to becoming more incisive.

A great assist in the production is the support provided by the mobile setting (Jason Randolph), the shifting lighting (Thomas P. Gardner), and the witty sound design (Steven Kriegel), where classical Indian music crashes into "thousand strings" versions of the old MGM musicals.  The Carrots' signature drive and vitality are permanently on display.

 

Sparkling Desires

Single Carrot Theatre is in fine form with its opening production of the season: Savage/Love by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin.  The play is a loose mosaic of monologues and sketches dealing with the irrational impulses propelling human passion.  Ascetically dressed in white, the cast begins by making short speeches incorporating many of the cliches concerning love which pepper our everyday speech and the bits and pieces of unrequited love affairs.  The play then moves into a series of two-person dialogues, athletically performed, fleshing out the various opening maxims.  At the conclusion the cast becomes a chorus line reminding the audience that they are part and parcel of the lunacies just enacted on the stage.  The play itself has the feel of a plate of tantalizing hors d'oeuvres but the main course seems to be missing.  The barbed sharpness of the writing partially compensates for the thin structure.

The direction by Jen Spieler is brilliance incarnate.  The quick changes in location, posture, mood, and even props prevent this simply structured and mono-themed piece from receding into predictability. The production suddenly turns musical (with banjo) and then athletic (with energetic leaps over platforms) and then wistful (with exhausted lovers under the covers) and then farcical (as we suddenly do the laundry).  The scenic design (Edward Victor), lighting design (Ryan Johnson), and sound design (Meghan Stanton) keep the cascade of visual and audial images flowing without overwhelming the straightforward poetry and humor of the script.

The cast demonstrates the ensemble cohesion and energy which is Single Carrot's forte.  All six actors are supple and convincing as they quickly change genres, characters, and situations.  One standout moment involves Paul Diem and Genevieve de Mahy in an offbeat musical interlude.

Savage/Love has the typical Shepard note of danger and menace.  But the tone here, especially at the conclusion, is more mellow.  The lunacy, fear, and desire are part of the simple, awkward human desire to love and be loved.

 

Gorgeous Anne

Chesapeake Shakespeare Company is currently offering a rarity: Maxwell Anderson's Anne of the Thousand Days.  Originally produced on Broadway in 1948, this drama about the stormy relationship between King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn became a popular, opulent 1969 film starring Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold.  But to accommodate the tastes of film-going audiences, the movie script dropped most of the blank-verse passages in the original script.  (Along with T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, Anderson was an architect of the short-lived revival of neo-Shakespearean verse drama in the mid twentieth century.)  It is a delight to see and especially to hear Anderson's lush poetry, which climaxes in a series of monologues and verbal duels at the play's conclusion, as the royal marriage collapses and Anne marches to the scaffold.

A stylized version of the Globe, Chesapeake's theater provides a splendor neo-Tudor frame for the production.  The three-story tall background set of Tudor arches and the dazzling, rustling costumes add to the jewel-box glow.  The period vocal groups and the expertly choreographed dances enhance the professional polish of the production.

The greatest achievement of Kasi Campbell's direction is bringing out the humor in what is otherwise a tragic tale of political intrigue.  The comedy behind Henry's awkward attempts at seducing Anne and Anne's stratagems to yield to Henry only at a high political price is repeatedly on display.  One of the comic highlights of the production is the witty negotiating banter of the dueling couple as they dance and leap through the convoluted turns of a Tudor saraband.

The effort to bring out the tragic complexities of the lead characters is less successful.  Lizzi Albert (Anne) and Ron Heneghan (Henry) bring a certain stature and ardor to their respective roles.  But they tend to deliver their lines in a monotonous, declamatory manner.  They rarely explore the rich emotional palette of Anderson's verse.  The soaring monologues and duels of the last act require an emotional range and tonal variation which the lead actors have yet to master.  One has the impression of an unfinished interpretation.  Much of the supporting cast is excellent, with Yury Lomakin's Cromwell and Molly Moores's Elizabeth Boleyn (Anne's mother) as standouts.  Campbell's meticulous direction of the many group scenes (concerts, dances, card games, trials, processions) enhances the production's pictorial quality. 

   

Confusion in the Dark

To open its new season Everyman Theatre has chosen to revive Frederick Knott's hardy perennial, Wait Until Dark.  The thriller pits a gang of smugglers (Roat, Carlino, Mike) against a blind housewife (Susan), trapped in her basement Greenwich Village apartment.  Roat and his associates are attempting to retrieve a doll that has accidentally fallen into the possession of Susan, her husband (Sam), and a pesky upstairs teenage neighbor (Gloria).  The opening effort of the gang members to deceive Susan through a series of elaborate ruses---including the suggestion that her husband was having an affair with the gang member (Lisa) who inadvertently gave him the doll---turns into physical violence in the second act.  In the celebrated climactic scene out of Grand Guignol, Susan turns the entire stage pitch black as she breaks the fuses on all the apartment's lights to create an even playing field with Roat, now determined to rape and kill her.

Unfortunately, the director Donald Hicken has chosen to use Jeffrey Hatcher's 2013 "adaptation" of Knott's play rather than the original 1966 Knott script.  Originally set in 1960s New York, the action is now transplanted to 1944.  Why?  In a program note, the dramaturg Johanna Gruenhut argues that this new setting gives the play a film noir feel.  Everyone is now bathed in a dark undercurrent of criminality and vice.  "As they negotiate the tribulations, blame is hard to ascribe, no one---not even a young neighbor---is truly innocent, and it is unclear who is more capable of protecting whom, and who really needs protection."  Really?  The blind Susan, the heroine of the piece, is perfectly innocent: Roat is the violent aggressor and she has done nothing to provoke him.  Her husband Sam, falsely accused of adultery in order to get Susan to relinquish the doll, is innocent as well.  Gloria is a disturbed, obnoxious girl in teenage rebellion mode but she courageously helps Susan to fend off the trio of aggressors.   No criminal she.  Knott's moral universe starkly pits the good against the evil; it's three against three and there's no ambiguity as to who is the assailant and who is the victim.

Another bit of Hatcher's tampering has to do with the smuggled contents in the doll.  In the original script it was heroin; now, it is diamonds.  But the violent Roat and his dime-store henchmen are clearly low-life petty criminals, more typical of the drug trade than an elegant heist from Tiffany's.  The script is full of the anxiety typical of 1960s New York: a burgeoning drug trade, rising crime rates, middle-class flight to the suburbs, growing insecurity in those who remain in the city.  Even Gloria's violent tantrums have a 1960s youth rebellion air to them.  The newly concocted references to World War II do nothing to advance the action.

The sound design also bears traces of directorial malfeasance.  The play is punctuated by the loud sound of a clock ticking and eerie music that sounds like the old Twilight Zone.  It weakens rather than enhances the tension of the play.  Susan's anxiety in her silent, isolated little universe is undercut.

The cast delivers a solid performance.  A standout was Shannon Hutchinson as Gloria, the awkward, disturbed, but ultimately heroic teenager.  Megan Anderson is completely credible as Susan, alternating confusion, terror, and courage as she slowly deciphers the conspiracy tightening around her.   As Roat, Bruce Randolph Nelson captures the sadist's dark humor but is not as menacing as Roat might be.

      

Election 2016 at Kennedy Center

One of the central theatrical events of the DC region is the annual Page-to-Stage Festival held on the Labor Day Weekend at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.  The Festival's committee invites theater groups from the District, Maryland, and Virginia to give a preview of the new dramatic season through readings, rehearsals, and panels tied to their current works-in-progress.  Numerous Baltimore groups presented programs at this year's Festival.  One of the more intriguing entries came from the Playwrights Group of Baltimore, who presented an anthology of short plays, USA 2017, which focused on everyone's favorite topic of conversation these days: the presidential election in November.

A mixture of comic and tragic pieces explored the election's outcome from different perspectives.  As one might expect, Donald Trump was the arch-villain of the evening.

Rich Espey's sober dialogue What a Year probed the ways in which "white privilege" is more than a slogan and how even mildly racially tinged language can hurt and distort reality.  More bombastic, Paddy Carroll's satirical My Fabulous Trumpettes imagines how the famous Trumpian wall backfires as the Donald takes over the White House with the comic assist of Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, and Vladimir Putin.  The wall returns in Amy Bernstein's elegiac The Wall, in which a Mexican-American mother and daughter find themselves separated from and invisible to each other because of the new wall on the Mexican border.  Political corruption is the object of criticism in Joe Osborne's No Contest, set in a decrepit Philadelphia precinct.  The most poetic piece of the evening, Cheryl Williams's Ford's Place gently depicts three older women dealing with the grief-tinged comic soap opera of their small neighborhood.

Allegory takes over in Susan Middaugh's Heavy Weights, where Hillary and Donald become boxers in the ring.  Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty make guest appearances to deliver patriotic speeches on the real meaning of America.  In Kevin Kostic's The Political Roundup dueling Democratic and Republican television commentators, using the foulest rhetoric to destroy the positions of the other side, suddenly discover they are long-lost siblings and the children of the unsuspecting host.  A political farce, John Conley's Adele and Lancelot Bake a Cake features two White House chefs, adamantly opposed to Hillary and Donald, who bake an unusual dessert for the unexpected new President and Vice President.  An elegiac note returns with Dwight Cook's C in C's Last Walk, depicting Obama's bittersweet day of departure from the White House.

Shirley Basfield Dunlap, Menchu Esteban, Alex Hewett, Richard Keller, Alina Collins Maldonado, and Erica Poe joined the playwrights as the cast for USA 2017.  The result was a clear, passionate, creative---but far from nuanced---take on our bizarre electoral season.

   

Organ Donation: The Comedy

Everyman Theatre's production of Michael Hollinger's Under the Skin smoothly presents a comic melodrama about an unlikely subject: organ donation.  This is only the second production of Hollinger's play (it premiered last year at Philadelphia's Arden Theatre) and confirms Hollinger's status as an emerging playwright to be taken seriously.  Energetically directed by Vincent Lancisi, the sleek production brings out the humor as well as the pathos of a dysfunctional family suddenly brought together by a health crisis.

The crisis is middle-aged Lou's collapsing kidneys.  Needing a transplant, he turns to his estranged daughter Raina, torn between filial duty and resentment of her father's longstanding abandonment of her.  As the plot thickens, Raina meets the mistress of her father, Marlene, and the son from the adulterous affair, Jarrell.  The many references to American pop culture keep the audience laughing as the play's many plot twists and revelations of family secrets lead the play to a dramatic if somewhat strained conclusion.

The cast works smoothly as an ensemble.  Megan Anderson (Raina), Mitchell Herbert (Lou), Alice Gatling (Marlene), and Keith Royal Smith (Jarrell) bring a convincing emotional anguish to their roles.  The omnipresent humor and improbable plot reversals do not overwhelm the internal conflict within each of the characters.  The set design of Brandon McNell and the lighting design of Jay Herzog place the characters within the steely, antiseptic, analytic world of the medical establishment. The sterile material environment is an effective counterpoint to the volcanic emotions of the characters as they confront each other's deceptions and their own fears.

As entertaining as the play is, it has the feel of a dramatic work which has not quite matured.  With its cascading pop references, the script often has the sound of a television situation comedy.  There is further work required to reveal the characters and the conflict in depth. The ending is also problematic.  The lights come up on the audience as Raina reminds us that we all part of one big family and that we should all be willing to donate organs, even to strangers.  I expected the ushers to confront us with organ donation cards as we left the theater.  This public service announcement may have been well-intentioned but it is a shrill piece of agitprop which only weakens the play as a dramatic exercise.

    

Families Sweet And Sour

The Variations project has become one of Baltimore's most creative theatrical traditions.  Now in its eleventh season, the project is a year-round collaborative event.  The audience from one year's production votes on the theme for the next year's.  After a brain-storming party on the chosen theme, area playwrights submit short plays on the theme.  (This year's competition garnered eighty different scripts.)  A selection committee culls the strongest plays for a staged reading with a q&a with the selected playwrights.  A final group of plays---this year an octet---is chosen for a full production.

The result this year is Variations on Family, an exceptionally polished anthology of plays produced by Rapid Lemon Productions under the tutelage of Max Garner.  Directed by Rosalind Cauthen, the evening features eight plays focused on the family, understood both as comedy and tragedy.  Despite the different genres, many of the plays focus on race and ethnicity, perhaps not surprising in a city roiling with racial conflict.  The evening is also unified by Cauthen's vigorous direction, which inserts athletic movement even into the most solemn of the constituent pieces.

Among the lighter pieces, Kimberley Lynne's "The Same Story" provides a comic slice-of-life as family members at a family reunion start to tell---you did read the title, didn't you?  This time it's about that really big insect that invaded an old road trip.  The sharp timing keeps the energetic cast (Tyrone Requer, Josh Thomas, Valerie Lewis, Sarah, Jacklin, Bob Singer, Kristina Szilagyi) moving.  Archie Williams and Tyrone Chapman's "FTP" manages to bring humor out of a most un-humorous political movement: Black Lives Matter. Tyrone Requer lends a bewildered, comic touch to the role of the demonstrator Dayshawn. Once again, the tight ensemble direction gives this piece its energy.   Larry Malkus's "Walter's Claw Hammer" provides the opportunity for Samy Hayder to give a bravura performance as the precocious child Andy, ready to snitch on anyone and anything.

The darker pieces alternate between tragedy and melodrama.  Kathleen Barber's "Myths And Other Truths" puts the finger on race and class as an African-American family (Tyrone Requer, Adrienne Knight, Samy Hader) invites a reluctant Russian-American (Kristina Szilagyi) for a meeting concerning a claim that both families have a common ancestry.  The Russian is reluctant because she proudly descends from the Romanov family---or does she?  D Carter's "Brother's Keeper" brings sibling rivalry to a boil as Josh Thomas, in a terrific performance, plays an angry homeless man who refuses to return home despite the pleas of his very proper younger brother.  The evening's darkest drama, John Conley's "The Dissertation," starkly depicts the Armenian genocide of the 1910s as an increasingly angered graduate student (Sarah Jacklin) confronts her martyred Armenian ancestors (powerfully played by Bob Singer and Kristina Szilagyi) in an explosion of grief and faith.  Jacklin brings an intense emotional energy to the once-staid student who is overwhelmed by the horrors she discovers.  Adrienne Knight and Valerie Lewis give moving performances in Shelbi Nelson's "Like Mother Like Daughter" as an adult child suddenly meets the mother who had abandoned her in childhood.

Appropriately placed as the evening's closing piece, Alice Stanley's "Welcome Baby Anderson" mixes humor and pathos in this tale of a couple awaiting the delivery of a baby they are about to adopt.  As they shoot a video as a keepsake for their child, the mother (Sarah Jacklin) becomes the comically passionate helicopter mom even before the baby arrives.  The mood suddenly turns serious when alone before the camera, the father (Josh Thomas) reveals the emotional pain which has made the couple so grateful for the child.

All of the technical support for the anthology is professional and helps give the production its polished, consistent feel.  A special standout is Casey Dutt's set design.  The backdrop of floating, empty picture frames permits the transitions between the plays to freeze in a series of haunting family portraits.

       

Two Cheers For Democracy

Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday has not aged well.  Originally produced in 1946, the comedy has all the political fervor of the victors in the immediate afterglow of World War II.  Democracy will rule the world, corruption is on the way out.  Defeated fascists are everywhere, but communism might not be such a bad idea after all.  The closing civics lesson about our changing world weighs a ton.

Still, Vagabond Players has come up with a remarkably stylish production of this political satire.  The handsome scenic design (Roy Steinman, Maurice Conn), a one-set posh Washington hotel apartment, sets the high professional standard for the production from the beginning.  The plot revolves around a triangle of characters caught in a comedy of political corruption and redemption.  Billie Dawn (Anne Shoemaker)  is the mistress of a corrupt businessman, Harry Brock (Steven Shriner).  A violent thug lobbying venal politicians, Brock uses Billie as a dummy partner in his seamy deals.  She just has to sign on the dotted line.  Matters are complicated when a progressive journalist, Paul Verall (Torberg Tonnessen), is hired by Brock to give Billie some cultural seasoning.  (Her appearances on the Washington social circuit so far have been an embarrassment.)  In a bit of Pygmalion-like metamorphosis, Paul transforms Billie into an erudite defender of the American Constitution.  She also ends up his wife and they bring down Harry's corrupt empire.  George Bernard Shaw need not fear the competition.  Billie's sudden change from an ignoramus (who has no idea what the Supreme Court is) to a textual critic of Tom Paine defies belief.  The improbable romance between Billie and Paul also strains belief.

The casting of the play is excellent.  As Billie, Shoemaker delivers a dazzling performance.  Her voice, posture, and movements perfectly embody the ditzy mistress who slowly awakens to the corrupt scheme of which she is an unwitting part.  She makes her transformation into a crusading citizen as convincing as this implausible transformation could be.  Tonnessen's Paul captures all the earnestness of the reform-minded journalist, although there is little chemistry in his romance with Billie.  Shriner brings out the violence and egotism of Brock, but the occasional declarations of love for Billie fall hollow.  As fine as the lead performances are, the play is stolen by Carol Conley Evans as Helen, the perky maid with acerbic political commentary on the goings-on in the apartment and with perfect comic timing.

Steve Goldklang's direction effectively brings out the comedy of the piece.  Billie's sentimental education at the hands of Paul has many hilarious moments.  The director manages to bring out all the charm in a rather heavyweight political pamphlet.

 

Bland From Here

Single Carrot's Theatre current play, Blind From Here, presents a rarity (for them): a dull production.

A home-cooked creation, the rock musical features a book and lyrics written by troupe member Alix Fenhagen.  Paul Diem, Stephen Nunns, Jack Sossman, and Michael Kerr have written the score.  The result is a loud but long evening in the theater.

Brett Olsen-Ecker stars as Elsa, the lead singer of a rock group making a trip across America.  The adventures end when Elsa is involved in an accident and ends up---you did  read the title, didn't you?  We begin with jokes about the limited cultural horizons of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but the script and score become more of the same as one podunk Midwestern town after another passes into view.  The cast is energetic but Ms. Olsen-Ecker is not the world's greatest singer and the male band members (Paul Diem, Andrew Porter) do not elicit much sympathy in their Halloweenish costumes and wigs.  Caitlin Weaver and Holly Gibbs provide solid vocal backups, but their earnest support does nothing to enliven a monotonous score or add interest to a routine the-summer-when-I-crossed-the-country road story.

This bland production reveals once again the Achilles heel of Single Carrot, an otherwise superb company.  The Carrots have many fine actors, directors, designers, and technical engineers.  But playwriting is not their forte.

Wildly on the Parkway

An evening with the Single Carrot Theatre company is always a wild one.  The wildness is not imited to their choice of difficult, avant-garde, often obscure dramatic fare.  It also involves unorthodox stage configurations, lighting, and sound engineering, unusual sets and costumes, and an energetic physicality that seems to be preparing some of the troupe members for the Olympic Decathalon.

Theatergoers will not be disappointed in their new production of Charles Mee's Utopia Parkway, one of the troupe's most creative endeavors.

Mee's script transposes an ancient Chinese folktale into an absurdist allegory and satire about the strange moral values of contemporary urban America.  The tale is a simple morality parable.  One upon a time, a poor man loses his wife to illness and gives up his daughter beause he can no longer afford to raise her.  Indentured as a servant to a wealthy widow, the daughter becomes beloved by her mistress, who soon treats her as her own daughter.  The widow is saved from robbers one evening by a father-and-son duo.  When the widow offers her saviors anything they want as a reward, they ask for the hand of the widow and her adopted daughter in marriage.  Greed is the motive.  The widow goes through with her promise but the daughter, egged on by the widow, delays a marriage she despises.  The outraged son tries to poison the grandmother-in-law but ends up inadvertantly poisoning his father instead.  The son manages to frame the innocent daughter for the murder.  But a Chinese tale always has a resourceful ghost.  After her execution, the wronged daughter's spirit returns to kill all those responsible for her trial and death.

Mee poetically transfers the tale to Utopia Parkway, an ethnically diverse community in Queens.  The Chinese roots of the play become marginal embelishments.  The Widow (Tracey Farrar) is now of African descent.  The Girl has now splintered into three characters of different ethnic backgrounds (Amanda Campbell, Camirin Farmer, Lien Le).  The Old Man (Paul Diem) and the Boy (Elliot Rauh) represent venal white males, a fop and a bully respectively, who specialize in avarice, blackmail, and assault.  The play also manages to satrize contemporary America, from its bizarre wedding-reception rituals to its sentimental romantic songs to its idolatry of a college education.  Seated arena-style on the four sides of the blackbox space, the audience looks down on the wrestling-like action, energetically choreographed by director Genevieve de Mahy, who gives the ritual of crime, romance, and revenge a dynamic sheen of visual and audial spectacle.

The hero of the evening is the remarkable score composed by Peabody student Faye Chiao.  The settings for Mee's offbeat poetic monologues and choruses vary in style from the camp song to the romantic lyric to echoes of Cole Porter to anthems to the family and to self-esteem on "What I like."  For all the range in style and very American bits of pastiche, the score never abandons its neo-Chinese frame.  The instruments played by cast members---gong, drum, cymbal, bell---and the cliches from Chinese martial arts intermittently revive the Chinese roots of what has become a very American satire of a society that has lost its moral compass  ("There was a time when we always knew what it was we had to do") and has fixated on the most trivial tokens of status.  The score acquires a ritualized ecstacy in several of the numbers staged in the center stage around a suspended tire that acts as a sacred candelabra for the evening's events.

Run, do not walk, to the box office for this dazzling walk on the wild side.  

 

 

 

  

Intriguing Interlock

Vagabond Players' new production of Interlock is an authentic Baltimore theater event.  This is the city's premiere production of Ira Levin's psychological thriller.  First produced on Broadway in 1958, the play did not even survive a week, despite a stellar cast (Rosemary Harris, Celeste Holm).  Ably directed by Roy Hammond, the Vagabond production makes a compelling case that this psychological puzzle of a drawing-room play deserves a second look.

The personal link of the director to the writer also makes a fascinating background story.  Years ago, Hammond became an ardent fan of Ira Levin, the author of numerous thriller novels and plays.  Deathtrap, Rosemary's Baby, and The Boys From Brazil are the most famous.  Becoming a personal friend of Levin, who died in 2007, Hammond set himself the task of reviving all of Levin's plays, most of which had long since fallen into desuetude.  His production of Veronica's Room in Los Angeles in 1997 brought the director new theatrical awards and stimulated a new interest in Levin's neglected canon.

Set in the music room of a mansion in tony Gramercy Park in Manhattan shortly after World War II, Interlock pivots around the stormy relationship between the mansion's owner, Mrs. Price (Laura Gifford), her German-immigrant companion, Hilde (Karina Ferry), and Hilde's German-immigrant fiance and budding musician, Paul (Rick Lyon-Vaiden).  Effectively playing the manipulative grande dame confined to a wheelchair, Gifford uses measured doses of intimidation, rage, graciousness, and self-pity to force Paul into a relationship and Hilde into an abandonment which neither could envision at the play's formal high-society opening.  Family secrets, venal ambitions, sexual desires, and class distinctions are gradually unmasked with growing brutality as the original quest to find good rehearsal space for Paul deteriorates into something more sinister.  Ferry and Lyon-Vaiden match Gifford's performance in their convincing expression of the confusion and rage which accompany their descent into Mrs. Price's well-heeled version of domination and submission.

Not everything in the script works.  The opening twenty minutes provide a leaden account of the background of the three main characters.  The closing scene between Price and Paul is overwrought melodrama.  But the shifting emotions of the play's central triangle of characters and the increasing cruelty of the matron's manipulation have a riveting Strindbergesque steeliness.  Interlock is even worth a third look.     

Queering Marlowe

There's good news and bad news about Spotlighters Theatre's new production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II.  The good news is the very fact that this Elizabethan tragedy, often read in college English courses but rarely produced, is on the stage in Baltimore.  Furthermore, Jonas David Grey's riveting performance as the doomed English king is one of the finest performances one will see in the local or any theater.

 

The bad news is the "adaptation" of the play by the same Mister Grey and the eccentric direction by Brad Norris.  Marlowe's play centers around the conflict between Edward and his courtiers, outraged that Edward has given too much power and too many privileges to his favorite, Gaveston.  Edward's alleged dereliction of duty and favoritism lead to his violent downfall.  Marlowe's script keeps the nature of this doting friendship ambiguous.  No such ambiguity in this adaptation, where the reign of Edward apparently consisted of nothing other than heavy petting with Gaveston in the throne room. 

Even odder is the decision to set the play in 1930's England, complete with little nightclub acts wherein formally costumed singers offer shaky renditions of 1930s pop hits before, during the intermission, and after the show.  The director argues in the program notes that this transition was perfectly justified by the parallel between Edward II's fall for reasons of love and the Duke of Windsor's fall because of "the woman I love."  But why in the 1930s do we keep hearing about English military campaigns in France?  In this historical drama we are obviously in the midst of the Hundred Years War and not in the midst of Neville Chamberlain bargaining away the Sudetenland.

Back to the good news: James David Grey's superb performance as the hapless king.  Edward II presents a challenge to any actor since this feckless, corrupt, and slothful monarch presents little that is attractive in his character.  His courtier opponents may be manipulating popular opposition and his eventual downfall out of their own violent ambitions, but his moral mediocrity is all his own.  Grey brings out the anguish of Edward as he loses his grip on power.  His riveting final scenes underscore the emotional complexity of a man who on the surface appears to be just another colorless politician undone by his own venality.  Grey miraculously manages to bring a certain regal grandeur to the disgraced king in his final moments of pathos.

The supporting cast is mixed in quality.  Standouts are Daniel Douek as Warwick and Madeline Long as Queen Isabella, steely opponents of the king who gladly bring Edward down with a dash of sadism.

Sympathetic Tribes

With its production of Nina Raine's Tribes, Everyman Theatre ventures into one of the least explored terrains of diversity: the world of people with disabilites.  Raine's play concerns the family conflict swirling over a deaf son who after a life of quiet resignation suddenly becomes a militant member of the deaf sign-language community and denounces his family for the infantilization to which they have---lovingly and unknowingly---subjected him.  Directed by Vincent Lancisi, the handsome production brings out the emotional depth of the family conflict and the political fractures within the deaf community.

At the center of the production is John Mc Ginty's dazzling performance as Billy, the deaf son who finally declares independence as he conducts his first romance and is introduced to the broader deaf community with its divisions between those who prefer to sign (considering it their own native language) and those ---like Billy---who have long survived on lip-reading and learning how to speak audially.  Lancisi's direction is especially adroit at evoking the internal world of the deaf through the use of unusual lighting effects to suggest internal states of mind.  Daniel Conway's set design and Ja Herzog's lighting design masterfully externalize the shifting mental moods of the protagonist.

The limits of the production are the limits of the play.  In its study of the isolation and anger of the deaf, the script at times sounds like an after-school special.  There is more than a bit of whimpering self-pity clogging the action.  The closing scene, where Billy's brother assures him that love conquers all, packs an emotional wallop---audience members were audibly weeping---but it feels meretricious.

Tribes is a moving exploration of a world and an anguish unknown to most of us.  It is another fine example of the extraordinary ensemble work of which Everyman has been capable this season in its new home.