Category: Off-Broadway Reviews

Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth are two early plays by Tom Stoppard which were written to be performed together.  Both use Shakespearean text to overtly entertain while being subtly subversive.  Presented by the Potomac Theater Project this summer, the double bill is enormously entertaining.

In Dogg’s Hamlet, the actors speak in Dogg.  This is a language which uses English words with completely different meanings.  When three school mates sit down for lunch, one asks, “Undertake sun pelican crash frankly sun mousehole?”  From the actions on stage, you know they are trading sandwiches.  Mr. Stoppard is teasing us with learning a new language and, in this very short play, some of the words actually will stick.

A delivery man named Easy arrives.  He speaks regular English and cannot understand Dogg.  Blocks are being delivered and the assembly is a confusion of miscommunication.  They are arranged and rearranged, eventually to form a stage.  A very edited version of Hamlet will then be performed.  The riff here is that Shakespeare’s language is unintelligible to students.  A fifteen minute farce is then presented with some famous lines intact.

The second short play is Cahoot’s Macbeth.  Czechoslovakian by birth, Stoppard met playwright Pavel Kohout who had been banned by authorities from working.  In 1978 he created LRT – living room theater.  They opened with Macbeth with five performers and one suitcase.  Stoppard pointed out this inspiration.   His recreation, however, is semi-serious and comedic, not “a fair representation of Kohout’s elegant seventy-five minute version.”

Set in the late 1970’s, this Macbeth is staged in an apartment in Prague.  An inspector from the government will interrupt the show to sniff out illegal activities, namely any unauthorized (and therefore, subversive) productions.  Easy shows up in this play to delivers blocks again, only now he only speaks Dogg.  The homeowner notes “we’re not sure if it’s a language or a clinical condition.”

That character crosses the two plays and Stoppard’s point is clear.  Dogg is a form of Resistance.  In front of the totalitarian regime, a secret coded language could be used to inspire and oppose suppression.  The play was intended as a tribute to Kohout and others forced to endure such conditions.  The backstory is essential to a deeper appreciation of these plays but they are certainly fun in their own right.

Fans of Shakespeare will certainly delight in the liberties taken with the original text.  Fans of well-directed, strongly acted plays will find this funhouse immensely satisfying.  Director Cheryl Faraone has assembled an excellent cast who pop in and out of every conceivable entrance and exit.  The pendulum swung between tragedy and ridicule is remarkably effective.

Now is a very good time to experience this playfully experimental work.  Our current political climate more than hints toward authoritarian and dictatorial behavior.  Words are used as powerful weapons.  It’s quite comforting to be reassured that words can also be manipulated for good.  I plan to use “vanilla squirrel” every time I mean “rotten bastard.”  Thanks for the text translations, Mr. Stoppard!

www.ptpnyc.org

Toni Stone was the first female professional baseball player.  I did not know her story.  Lydia R. Diamond’s play illuminates this groundbreaking woman now largely forgotten to history.  She joined the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953 as part of the Negro League.  Ms. Stone took over second base from Hank Aaron the year earlier.

In a series of time shifting and narrative storytelling, this fascinating tale unfolds.  Born Marcenia Lyle Stone in Bluefield, West Virginia, Toni Stone knew early on she wasn’t boy crazy.  She was ball crazy.  “It is round and small and fits right in your hand.”  In April Matthis’ exceptional portrayal, there is no shred of doubt about her commitment to the sport.

Appropriately nine actors will form the onstage team and play all of the characters in her orbit.  Other than Ms. Matthis, they are all African American men.  You should expect gender bias.  The underhanded wheeling and dealing of professional sports will be chronicled.  There will be racial problems when the squad ignores the prearranged plan.  After beating a white team they run for the bus to get out of town fast.  The simulated insults hurled at the players from the stands is rough terrain indeed.  That’s because you’ve unfortunately heard most of them before.

You get more than what’s expected in this play.  That’s good and bad.  There is the interesting courtship between her and future husband Alberga (Harvy Blanks, excellent).  We meet the Irish priest who convinced her parents to let her play with the boys early on.  We also spend a considerable amount of time with a brothel madam who is apparently her best girlfriend.  There is plenty of sexual innuendo.  And when plot ideas run thin in Act II, there is a barrage of can-you-top-this “yo momma is so fat” jokes.

There are, however, some memorable lines in this play.  One of my favorites concerned the inevitable aromas which Ms. Stone had to face traveling in buses during hot summers playing ball around the country.  “Nothing is more foul than the sweat of a man you are annoyed with.”  I loved that Toni Stone was extremely literal.  This character trait fueled many jokes.  When told she would not be thrown out of bed for eating crackers, she replies, “why would anyone eat crackers in bed?  They’re too messy.”

Pam McKinnon’s direction keeps all of this moving along but is not able to hide that there is not enough story to fill two hours.  The longer the play went on, the less engaging it was.  I appreciated learning about and respecting this fascinating pioneer.  The acting from the entire ensemble lead by April Matthis’ central performance was never less than stellar.  From my seat, the play itself was just okay.  I predict a movie will be made based on this rich historical material.  With actual ball playing footage, Toni Stone might again get a hugely deserved moment in the spotlight of female heroes.

www.roundabouttheatre.org

Sitting in the lobby at intermission for Nomad Motel, a woman and her companion were waiting for the elevator.  They were leaving (and maybe a dozen more followed).  She turned to him and said, “this isn’t just bad.  This is phenomenally bad.”  I was in agreement at that point.  What did she miss?  The second act was worse.

Carla Ching’s play is a cliche ridden amalgam of awkwardly unnatural dialogue.  Towards the end of the play, the obviously bored audience seemed to bond while laughing at the play and rolling their eyes.  Ed Sylvanus Isklander’s direction dragged on and on.  The last twenty minutes feel like hours.

Yu-Hsuan Chen’s set attempted to provide a generic space to represent the various locations.  Like the play, the design grabbed an idea and abandoned it quickly.  Manually operated curtains were used to change scenes in the beginning.  Throughout much of the play afterward, cast members sort of clean up the scattered props when scenes are finished.  When Mom is leaving her daughter once again, she’s taking crates to a car.  In this staging, she’s not really doing that.  Instead, she’s handing them through a door to someone offstage.

Believable details are not a strong suit in the direction of this play.  Two young people have no money and are squatting in a former store.  They can make grilled cheese with an electric sandwich press.  He prepares one and splits it with his ex-girlfriend.  They engage in dialogue.  Neither finishes their portion of food despite not having eaten all day.  We watch him clean up and throw the remaining sandwiches in the trash.  Is there any acting – or direction – going on?  Why is there electricity in an abandoned store?  Nothing which occurs on this stage is remotely worthy of your time.

A mother and her daughter are living with her unseen brothers in a motel having lost their house.  The mom (Samantha Mathis) is a train wreck.  Daughter Alix (Molly Griggs) is a good student with dreams of college.  Struggling with poverty and having to work as a waitress to support deadbeat Mom, she inexplicably also has so much street smarts that she can fence anything for cash.  The role is an impossible ask for any actress.  Ms. Griggs is not believable in the role and adds no layers to horrifically banal lines.

A nerdy kid lives nearby in a big house but there are also money problems.  His largely absent father calls him from Hong Kong to maintain control.  Dad disappears for long stretches.  He has a dangerous job, likely criminal.  Mason (Christopher Larkin) finds a bird and is nursing it to health.  The relationship is domineering Asian father and sensitive musician son.  They clash.  Dad (Andrew Pang) alternates between mean alcoholic thug and wisecracking droll comedian.  He wants to toughen his son up “so he’s not a runt sucking on my teat when he’s thirty.”  The son’s view is “I don’t want to spend my life moving money around.”  When the fight finally happens, it is preposterous.  If you left early, you will have missed that!

There’s another friend Oscar (Ian Duff) who has been tossed on the streets again from a never ending series of foster homes.  He is aggressively jealous of the largely studious relationship between Alix and Mason.  At no point does any of this artificial tension make any sense.  When staying with Oscar in the rundown storefront, Alix lights luminaria to photograph her next new home with more aesthetically pleasing lighting.

Points are made about bad parenting and children’s survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.  “Maybe some people were never designed to have children.”  The cliches in the script are too voluminous to make you care about themes.  When the Guns and Roses song “Sweet Child O’ Mine” started playing, I laughed.  Was that the intention?  If the moment was meant to be serious, it was an epic fail.

Nomad Motel is probably closer to an independent film than a play. Long music interludes are added to the overly precious visual moments.  When Alix and Mason are running from their past (with their parents still awkwardly onstage), you are watching an unfunded movie not an intelligently staged play.  When you see a lot of theater, there are some clunkers experienced along the way.  This one, from the Atlantic Theater Company, is beyond awful.  The lady who exited early didn’t need to see the second act to make the correct call.

www.atlantictheater.org

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/thesecretlifeofbees/atlantictheater

Micheál mac Liammóir is the Irish author of many plays and books.  In 1928, he co-founded the Gate Theater with his partner Hilton Edwards.  He once gave an acting break to Orson Welles and later appeared as Iago in his film version of Othello.  In a 1990 biography, this playwright’s background was corrected to reveal that he was an Englishman who expertly crafted an Irish persona.  Pretending to be someone else is at the center of The Mountains Look Different.

Written in 1948, this revival at the Mint Theater Company is the play’s American premiere.  Mr. mac Liammóir performed as the son Tom in the original.  The play was inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie in which a former prostitute falls in love but has difficulty turning her life around.  The Mountains Look Different is an imagining of what might have happened after O’Neill’s play ended.

Midsummer Eve, June 23, is Bonfire Night; a pre-Christian celebration rebranded by the church as St. John’s Eve.  The program has an informative dramaturgical note to explain the event and its traditions.  Like many ancient holidays, this one is a petition for a bountiful harvest and good luck.  Animal bones are thrown into a fire which gave its name from the term bonefires.  Long held superstitions in a rural landscape dotted with mountains are still followed by these farmers.

Martin Grealish’s acreage has no electricity, running water or farm equipment.  His son Tom returns from London with Bairbre whom he intends to marry.  She does not come with any dowry but her Uncle might be able to help.  Bairbre’s got a complicated backstory and is desperate to become an ordinary wife and live happily on this farm.  The playwright peels the opaque onion back in a series of scenes culminating in one involving multiple slugs of whiskey.

Confidently paced by Director Aidan Redmond (Mint’s The Suitcase Under the Bed), the complexities and internal negotiations of remaking oneself are explored through rich dialogue and body language.  Act I of this play gets the plot machinations underway.  In Act II, the family and some neighbors return from the bonfire for all-night party.  The easy camaraderie between these characters and the actors portraying them lends an nice touch of authenticity to this melodrama.

The acting is solid across the board.  As the straightforward, hard widowed father, Con Horgan never shies away from letting everyone know who is in charge.  Jesse Pennington’s son Tom is aggressively presented as a tightly wound man.  A romantic dreamer, he returns from London with the woman he loves.  His discomforts are raw in this very interesting performance.  As Bairbre, Brenda Meaney beautifully establishes the rough, experienced Barbara Stanwyck barely hidden underneath an ineffective and fragile Donna Reed shell.  The three roles are critical to the success of this play.  That these actors are all up to the challenge as equals makes this chestnut hum with life and wail with regret.

Moodiness peppers this play.  “It’s a good thing to be lonesome sometimes.”  “The Lord strengthen her.  I don’t think she has long to live at all.”  The mountains look different after a stay in the big city.  People look different as the age, mature and evolve.  Or do they really morph?  Is turning over a new leaf possible?

As is typical for the Mint Theater, the creative elements excel.  Vicki R. Davis’ set design seems to merge realism with a fable-like atmosphere that feels appropriate for this morality play.  The action begins outside the front of the farmhouse which will later crack open to reveal the inner home and, by extension, Bairbre’s past.

When this play first opened, the Legion of Mary in heavily Catholic Ireland asserted that “there were no Irish prostitutes in London.”  Also, “no Irish Catholic would have anything to do with” them.  Despite the protests, the play was successful with Dublin audiences likely because the theme of morality was candidly and thoughtfully addressed.  The Mountains Look Different is recommended for fans of well written period pieces given fine productions.

www.minttheater.org

theaterreviewfrommyseat/thepriceofthomasscott/minttheater

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/thesuitcaseunderthebed/minttheater

The Irish Rep is devoting a season to three of Sean O’Casey’s plays as part of its 30th Anniversary season.  The Shadow of a Gunman was written in 1923 and is the first play of his “Dublin Trilogy.”  The other two plays are Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).  All three are being performed in repertory this spring.

Set during the Irish War of Independence, the scenes in The Shadow of a Gunman take place in a tenement room in a poor Dublin slum.  Donal Davoren (James Russell) is a poet who has come to live with Seumus Shields (Michael Mellamphy).  Other residents misstake Donal for an IRA gunman who is on the run.  He doesn’t object to the notoriety it brings, especially when Minnie Powell (Meg Hennessy) takes an interest in him.  The play begins with a heavy dose of comedy before turning tragic.

A business partner leaves a bag in Seumus’ room which he wrongly believes contains household items for resale.  An ambush goes bad and the man who dropped the bag off is killed.  The city is put on curfew.  The Black and Tans are patrolling and raid the tenement.  The play turns from a comedy into a tragedy.  In this vivid retelling, the tension is riveting.

As is often the case at the Irish Rep, the cast is exemplary in creating fully fleshed out characters filled with life and the enjoyable foibles of human beings.  Ciarán O’Reilly firmly directed this piece to be faithful to the play as written.  The language is thick Irish brogue.  There is a welcoming rhythm to the actors which somehow allows the abrupt change in tone to be convincing and harrowing.  For those interested in exploring Mr. O’Casey’s work, The Shadow of a Gunman is a fine place to start.  With a detailed and realistic set design by Charlie Corcoran, this is a fairly perfect production of this particular play.

The other two plays in the Dublin trilogy deal with the Easter Rising (1916) and the Irish Civil War (1922-23).  Along with the Irish War of Independence which is depicted in The Shadow of a Gunman, the three major events mark the beginning of the nation of Ireland as we know it today.

What’s also noteworthy is that there is another superb play about the Irish on Broadway right now.  Set during the Troubles in the 1980s, The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth is even grander in scope with a cast of two dozen full blooded characters.  These stories are rich, filled with difficult politics and themes for an inexhaustibly resilient people.  The Ferryman is the front runner for this year’s Best Play Tony.  Now is exactly the right time to take in one of these masterpieces filled with colorful Irish men and women, all wrestling with the conflicts of the period in which they live.

www.irishrep.org

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/theferryman

In May 2014, three Wisconsin girls walked into the woods.  Twelve years old, they went out for a walk after a sleepover.  When they reached the woods, the birthday girl stabbed her best friend nineteen times.  They intended the murder to be a blood sacrifice to a fictional internet character known as Slender Man.  This macabre tale is one of the inspirations for Director Erica Schmidt’s unforgettable version of Macbeth.

In another notorious murder, two teenage girls who had dreamed up an elaborate fantasy world were about to become separated.  They beat one of their mothers to death during a walk in the woods.  Preteen girls emerged from the woods in Salem back in 1692 having seen witches and devils.  One of the Slender Man girls was eventually diagnosed with a psychological disorder called “shared delusional belief.”  An obsession with the occult coupled with the strong bonds of fantasy and isolation shared by teenage girls has resulted in unspeakable horrors.

That shared charge between these awful teenage girls and the witches in Macbeth stoked the imagination of Ms. Schmidt.  Shakespeare’s witches have occult visions in the wilderness.  What if seven teenage girls meet up after school and find themselves carried away by Shakespeare’s words?

From the program notes, the director even heard echoes between the bard’s fictional words and frighteningly real language.  Lady Macbeth has a line, “one, two, why then, ’tis time to do’t.”  A West Virginia girl posted on Twitter that “we really did go on three” after she and another girl stabbed their friend in 2012.

Dressed in school uniforms, this Macbeth is both extraordinarily violent and bizarrely hilarious.  The girls are partying in the woods with wine in their red solo cups.  The language is updated:  “bow down, bitches.”  School references are thrown in:  “thou art the best of the cutthroats” and “where did you get that, the science lab?”  Malcolm says “Your matrons, and your maids could not fill up/ The cistern of my lust, and my desire.”  Our young lady adds in her droll editorial, “it is too much.”

The audience reactions are varied to this vividly realized nightmare.  Some seemed repulsed by the gleeful gore.  Some found the proceedings shockingly hilarious.  I landed in both camps.  Ms. Schmidt accomplished her mission.  Her Macbeth is all the more gruesome and disturbing when filtered through the exaggerated lens of real events.  Stabbings as fun (or what you will).

The seven young actresses are incredibly effective and fully committed to this mad vision.  This is clearly a Macbeth for those who know the play.  Clocking in at just over ninety minutes (and perhaps appropriate for a generation raised on Spark Notes), the words fly out with extreme speed.  Much of the time they feel rushed on the way to the next grotesquerie.  In between some of those moments, I was slightly bored.  This version exists for its outrageous style not its nuanced storytelling.

Featuring the famous line “out, damned spot,” Macbeth is considered a tragedy.  When put through the sinister lens of mean girls gone bloody, this production amps up the tragic to cataclysmic levels.  Savagery is everywhere.  Even delusional schoolgirls are susceptible to our species most detestable impulses.  Our entertainments keep getting more and more violent.  All the world’s a stage, I guess.

www.redbulltheater.com