Category: Off-Off Broadway Reviews

The sound of rain accompanies Tom Petty’s song “You Got Lucky” at the start of Barefoot.  “Good love is hard to find” informs the spirit of this comedy which describes itself as a “daring new sexual escapade.”  The door opens to a West Village townhouse and Sylvia (Kate T. Billingsley) enters.  Obviously wet and with her mascara smearing, she flicks off her shoes.  After all, the sign by the door says this is a Barefoot House.  Sylvia make a beeline for the Grey Goose bottle and chugs.  She’s seemingly very upset and screams into the couch pillow.  A knock at the door follows.

Ms. Billingsley is both the star and co-author of this wildly raucous, 21st century drawing room comedy.  She seems to be channeling a spoiled, ill-tempered, boozy, foul-mouthed Katherine Hepburn.  There’s more than a whiff of “it’s going to be a bumpy night” Bette Davis feel to this set-up.  When Sylvia answers the door, her soon-to-be husband’s mistress Teddy (Elissa Klie) enters.  Also wet, she’s apologizing for, essentially, being a slut.  Sylvia gives her silk pajamas to wear while drying off which enables Teddy to open her bra announcing “here’s my tits.”  The reply?  “They’re big.”  Eventually Teddy becomes uncomfortable with all the intimate details being discussed.  Sylvia’s quip:  “We already share a penis.  What’s the problem?”

This is the sort of farce that requires a complete suspension of disbelief.  After a far too long scene between these two, the fiancé and Teddy’s boyfriend (Will Rosenfelt) arrive.  Now the sparks are set to fly.  Why all the heightened tensions?  The wedding between Sylvia and Robert (Judah Tobias) is only two weeks away and the gifts are already piled high.  In a drawing room comedy a century ago perhaps the story would involve flirting or a stolen kiss.  Updated for the much franker sexual politics of 2019, Sylvia describes her beau Robert as “a man with homosexual tendencies and tiny calves.”

In the intimate off-off Broadway Gene Frankel Theatre, there are many laughs to be had in this play which has been directed and co-written by Thomas G. Waites.  The four principle characters poke at each other and when there is a direct hit, the humor is very funny indeed.  Another door knock occurs. The Pizza Man arrives (a very amusing Trent Cox) and this farce nears its peak.  If every performance landed on broader caricatures, the result might further amplify the lunacy.

Barefoot came into this intimate theater produced by Black Rose Productions as a late replacement for another play.  With another swig or two of vodka, these actors might chew the scenery even louder.  This brassy comedy might then be able to turn the corner from chuckle-inducing to hilarious.

www.genefrankeltheatre.com

I received a tip about Slash and decided to do a little research.  I quickly learned that Vogue wrote a story about this play and its audience.  Brilliantly, not only are boldface names showing up but also “a few adorably sulky teenage hipsters, a clutch of serious New York theater impresarios, and a number of confused millennials.”  Bingo!

Off I go to the fifth floor Chinatown walkup MX Gallery for a piece described online as “scavenged from the fandoms of Star Trek, Sherlock, The Beatles and beyond, Slash guides the audience through an infernal fantasia of perverted intertextuality.”  Essentially this piece is derived from the slash subgenre of fanfiction where characters are appropriated and written by fans for fans into other stories.  Slash fiction, hugely popular in China, depicts male romantic pairings ranging from bromances to more highly sexualized relationships.  This subgenre is primarily written and consumed by young women.

Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey are the creators and stars of this play.  This is their first full length production and the room was full with about one hundred people the evening I attended.  As “The Dark Haired One,” Ms. Hennessey begins the performance brushing her wig and repeating these lines as if into a mirror:  “I am beautiful.  I am sexy.  I am fashionable.  I am a brunette.”  Eventually “The Blond” comes in and she’s in a funk.  Riverdale High has gone on too long and both Betty and Veronica are tired of fighting over Archie.  They decide to do some cosplay featuring homoerotic straight men, their favorite game.

A scene with Dr. Spock and Captain Kirk culminates into the following exchange: “Would it be insane if I kissed you?  Yes… to anyone except you.”  Other less well known couplings follow including Morrissey and Johnny Marr.  One of the funniest reimaginations involves Sherlock Holmes, a young wizard who is a highly functional, drug addicted sociopath.  In this show, skits also feature female pairings from Wonder Woman and Catwoman to a riff on a 1992 CNBC Talk Live conversation between Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia.

Musical interludes are also thrown into the blender including “Communist Do,” a song snippet performed by Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin to the tune of “Jellicle Cats” from the musical, Cats.   An incestuous Ivanka Trump arrives with her porn star sister Tiffany and screams at the top of her lungs:  “DAD KNOWS I’M NOW A BIG FUCKING JEW.”  If slash fiction is generally all over the map, then this might be a faithful roasting of the genre.

Since fanfiction is about fans writing for fans, what happens when you don’t know who certain people are?  In variety show style, the creators cover a wide assortment of, mostly, much older celebrities.  I know who Brian Eno is but will everyone?  I guess it really doesn’t matter because that section with David Bowie was boring even if familiar.  Admittedly, I did laugh a few times and the conceit for Slash is promising if currently overstuffed.

This show has been selected for the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in January 2020.  My suggestions:  further sharpening the characterizations, rethinking or reworking the musical interludes and perhaps adding a hilarious speech or two about the subgenre from a fan or psychologist’s perspective.  As of now, this show does not generate enough laughs to sustain ninety minutes of satire that a larger audience may or may not really know or care about.

I know Vogue said “it’s fast and campy, and as clever as anything the New York stage has seen in some time.”  Don’t believe them.  There was not nearly enough laughter coming from the often stone-faced, sitting very still audience.  In a world with no men, this show asked about a kiss, “what does safe taste like?”  More of that wit would be most welcome.

www.mxgallery.com

Two stories emerge in Real, a terrific and ambitious new play by the Brazilian playwright Rodrigo Nogueira.  One takes place in the present with Dominique, her husband and two friends chatting during a dinner party celebrating an award she received from her law firm.  The other plot concerns Dominic, a young boy at a conservatory who is busy composing a fugue.  In music, a fugue is a composition where a short melody is introduced by one part and is successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.

Dominique (Rebecca Gibel, outstanding) played the piano when she was young but hasn’t done so in years.  She is now a mother and successful lawyer.  She becomes obsessed with a play she is reading as she also begins to question her sexuality and purpose in life.  A fugue writes itself in her dreams and she begins playing again.  Her conservatively pompous husband believes “realism is the strongest poison against dreams.”  The plotline of the play and the related fugue is the one being written by Dominic.

Both Mexican by descent, Dominic and a maid at the conservatory worry about being deported.  Between 1929 and 1936, the Mexican Repatriation was a mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.  An estimated sixty percent were United States citizens.  As this movement was based on race and not citizenship, the process meets the modern definition of ethnic cleansing.  While this largely untaught historical crime is only a small part of Dominic’s story, it remains apropos now.

A musical genius, Dominic (Darwin Del Fabro, perfect) is beginning to feel trapped in the body of a male.  His sympathetic professor encourages him to finish the fugue which is already so brilliant.  In a bizarre line, he says, “I’m so impressed it’s as if a cherry tree grew from my left nipple.”

Back and forth these scenes flow, intertwining the passions and dreams of Dominic and Dominique while those around them struggle to comprehend what is going on.  The language is highly memorable:  “truth is the antidote for hope” and “artists undermining the pillars of a sane society.”  Here, these two musicians are clearly attempting to get in touch with their inner personas.  Dominique’s reading of the play and dreaming of the music while Dominic is dreaming of the future and becoming Dominique while composing.  All of this meshes together to create a final scene where both stories are combined into a playwriting fugue.

Erin Ortman’s superb direction of this play and a fine cast created a mysterious mood as this story unwrapped.  The Lighting Design by Kia Rodgers perfectly framed this dreamscape’s the two divergent and combining plotlines.  A few jokes felt a bit forced (the repeated sex and riding a bicycle one as an example).  However, the overall quality of the mesmerizing storytelling and the clarity in presentation made this play great theater.

In this particular artistic period, many try to spotlight the internal difficulties for people with gender confusion.  We now know that perhaps the best way to understand them is to realize it’s all a fugue.  After all, the psychiatric definition of a fugue is a loss of awareness of one’s identity.  At off-off-Broadway’s The Tank, Real is sure to be one of the most creatively successful productions I will have the opportunity to witness in 2019.

www.thetanknyc.org

I love to head downtown to Dixon Place and see a performance with a subject that catches my eye.  This location is home to a great deal of theatrical experimentation at wallet friendly prices.  Gotta love an artistic director who encourages the audience to grab a drink before or after the show as the proceeds help them continue to support artists in development.  This week I saw Space Race by writer and director Nicholas Gentile.

In this broad comedy, the Starship Apollo is traveling in low earth orbit as a vacation cruise liner.  The period is the 1960’s when the United States and Russia were in the midst of their heated quest to be the first one to land on the moon.  Neil Armstrong (David Malinsky) is the captain of this ship and he’s not the brightest.  There is a spy onboard.  His communications person is Olga, a woman with a thick Russian accent, hilariously embodied by Danielle Shimshoni.  She avoids his repeated sexual overtures while he flails about attempting to be a leader.

The promise of Space Race reminded me of silly SNL skits from the 1970’s like Land Shark or the Coneheads.  When everyone is committed, the goofiness can be truly memorable.  Not all of the thruster rockets were fully operating in this piece.  When the Americans accidentally crash land on the Starship Apollo, three iconic astronauts come aboard.  Jaques Duvoisin was a solidly pompous Chuck Yaeger, the man who was first to exceed the speed of sound in flight.  The caricature was dead on serious and very good.  He was accompanied by Buzz (Michael Caizzi) and Collins (Patrick Harvey), one sporting a broque and the other a wide-eyed enthusiastic twinkle toes.  All three were fun to watch.

There is an evil Senator (Terrence Montgomery) on this journey and also a German named Adolf (Victor Hazan) and his “feral South American mistress” Cutinga.  Sarah Galvin was hilarious as this half-animal woman but she did not really have enough to do in the plot other than give us feral realness.  For Space Race to soar higher, the level of these side characters have to be equalled within the main storyline which is lightly amusing but not inspired lunacy.  Americans and Russians up to no good is prime fodder for our entertainment right now, especially in a light comedic package.  A shirtless Russian, the mention of collusion and perhaps a send-up of the Trump/Putin Helsinki press conference might be worth a try.

www.dixonplace.org

From the title of Katelynn Kenney’s play Wendell & Pan, the reference is clear.  J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Would Wouldn’t Grow Up has provided inspiration for many theatrical productions.  The most recent ones I recall are Bedlam Theatre’s dreadful retelling and the underwhelming Broadway musical Finding Neverland.  At the arts incubator The Tank, this version takes place in “a one level, two bedroom house in some tiny town.”

Wendell (Nick Ong) is a book reading nerd whose best friend is Pan (Shavana Clarke).  Is she imaginary or not?  She certainly is fun and they have adventures such as pretending to play pirates.  He also confides his thoughts and secrets to Pan seeking advice.  His grandfather is very ill and has asked Wendell to kill him.  His parents are visibly going through some marital issues and the family environment is chilly.  His sister Kayla is busy on her cellphone leaving voice mail messages which embarrass her.  From this beginning, a psychologically complex story unfolds.  A question is asked:  “how come saying one thing can change everything?”

There is an interesting story line in Wendell & Pan but at this stage of its development, the tone is wildly inconsistent.  The abrupt shifts from dramatic tension to throwaway comedic one-liners is jarring and undercuts the lurking moodiness which tries to emerge.  As directed, the play is also paced too slowly and feels overlong.  There was a moment when I thought it had ended.  What seemed like a nice finish left some mysteries for the audience to consider.  Unfortunately, the exposition continued on, was rather tedious and somewhat repetitive.

On the very positive side, the set design by Caitlyn Barrett was quite impressive and cleverly laid out.  In the small downstairs space at The Tank, the family and Pan were inside and outside the home, up in a treehouse or on a roof.  I’ve seen plays with enormous budgets unable to produce this level of quality and clarity, not to mention that Wendell & Pan has quite a few fantastical elements stuffed into its plot.  In addition, Nya Noemi’s confident portrayal as sister Kayla was the standout performance for me.

This play wants to embrace the challenges of growing up as in Peter Pan.  As the work develops further and the audience reacts (or does not react) to certain lines and scenes, a better, more focused character study may emerge.  For now, this interesting multi-generational tale of decisions and ramifications needs a sprinkle of pixie dust to fly.

www.thetanknyc.org