Category: Off-Off Broadway Reviews

The fifth and final play presented as part of the WP Theater’s Pipeline Festival was written by Leah Nanako Winkler, “a mixed-race Asian Southerner from Japan and Kentucky.”  Two Mile Hollow is the Hampton-like residence of a wealthy white family.  The play’s inspiration came from a NYC theater company whose season consisted solely of what she and her colleagues deemed “white people by the water” plays.  What is that?  In the program notes, Ms. Winkler tells us that this familiar genre concerns rich white people sitting in big houses by the water complaining about their mundane problems while spilling family secrets over white wine.

Blythe Donnelly is the matriarch of the family and her step-daughter is Mary.  In your mind, conjure a “white people by the water” scenario and cast Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow in the parts.  You will instantly get the gist of this satire.  Two Mile Hollow is flat out hilarious.  Naturally the family is in decline.  The patriarch is a dead Oscar winner whose television actor son  brings his Asian personal assistant to the mansion.  Another son is a Yale graduate without a job or purpose in life.  Both want Daddy’s motorcycle.  Mother is a beast in the grandest tradition.  The step-daughter likes to imagine life as a bird, instead of a twice divorced failure.

Adding to this flavorful stew is the casting of all non-white actors in the roles.  Comedy this broad requires great talent to pull it off.  With only two weeks to rehearse, Director Morgan Gould has staged a solidly paced piece filled with plenty of nice touches.  As the daughter Mary, Keren Lugo was uproarious, skewering every spoiled, semi-doltish debutante gone sour ever written.  The self-loathing son and Yale graduate was played by Sathya Sridharan with screamingly hilarious awkwardness and unforgettable physicality.

This play is having a few premieres around the country this spring.  I look forward to a big full production in the future.  Two Mile Hollow is a winner.

www.wptheater.org

During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Celtic Revival bloomed in Ireland.  National activists began to incorporate historically Irish themes into contemporary art and life.  The Irish Literary Renaissance was one of the major facets of this movement.  Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats felt it essential to build an Irish theater with Irish actors performing Irish plays rather than imported English dramas.  Together with other playwrights, he co-founded the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 (becoming the Abbey Theatre in 1904).  Three Small Irish Masterpieces are from this period.

Irish Rep is performing these short plays which masterfully illuminate this era.  The first piece is The Pot of Broth by Yeats (in collaboration with Lady Gregory) from 1903.  In this peasant farce, a hungry trickster scamp invades a home and convinces the gullible lady of the house that a stone will make a wonderful soup.  Mythology, folklore and the gift of storytelling  infuse all of the plays presented here.

The second play, The Rising of the Moon, is a political play which examines the uneasy relationship between England and Ireland.  Lady Gregory wrote this play in 1907.  Three Irish policemen in the service of the occupying English government put up a wanted poster for an escaped political rebel.  Capture comes with a 100 pound reward.  Down by the wharf, one of the policemen and the targeted criminal meet.  Is one’s loyalty to the overseers to whom you now report or to your native lands and its peoples?

Riders to the Sea (1904) by John Millington Synge is the third and final play.  This tragedy takes place on the remote Aran Islands where the cruel, unrelenting sea brings both livelihood and danger to the people living there.  A mother and her daughters await the fate of son Michael who is now missing.  Having lost a husband and other sons to the sea, she grieves and worries and prays.  Man’s mortality and his inevitable death are themes woven throughout this piece.

Three Small Irish Masterpieces are given an excellent staging in the small basement space of the Irish Rep.  The overall impact is satisfying: full of Irish flavor, well acted, realistic set and costume designs, and historically interesting.  Are all three plays masterpieces?  Probably not.  But these playwrights and their contribution to the history of theater makes this collection very rewarding viewing.

www.irishrep.org

The Syrian civil war informs the fourth of five entries into this year’s Pipeline Festival.   Over five consecutive weeks, the WP Theater presents new works in varying stages of development.  Power Strip was written by Sylvia Khoury.  This piece was performed as a reading.  The producer noted that the work continues to evolve and the cast had been handed new pages up until 30 minutes before this performance.

Power Strip is set in a refugee camp in Greece in 2015.  Yasmin’s place in the center is located by a power strip on the floor.  The play opens with Yasmin collecting money from a man.  She has turned to prostitution because she needs money.  Life is hard and she and other family members are trying to escape to Germany. She meets a newcomer, Abdullah, who is looking to use the power strip to plug in his electric shaver.  Yasmin’s struggles come to life over this one hour play.  Struggles in relationships, in trying to preserve her dignity, in survival and in desperately hoping for escape and a life with her fiancé.

May Calamawy is a fine Yasmin, full of bravado and despair.  A young woman trapped in a world and a society where #metoo has no relevance.  This refugee camp is isolated.  In one interesting moment, there is a conversation about whether they would even know if war finally ended the world.  How would they find out?  The bread would no longer arrive.  Power Strip attempts to break the overwhelmingly large Syrian refugee crisis down into an intimate, heartbreaking yet hopeful story.  A nice draft of a play about a very difficult subject, focusing particularly on the plight of young women.  Eight years have now passed and sadly this humanitarian crisis remains tragic.

www.wptheater.org

Dear Jinkx Monsoon,

Last night I attended a new play by Charles Busch called The Confession of Lily Dare.  Yes, THAT Charles Busch, the one who grew from downtown drag phenom in theater successes such as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom to movies including Die Mommie Die! before the Tony Award nomination for writing The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.  Last night I was at the Theater for the New City and caught his latest blend of imaginatively recreated classic movie magic and catnip camp.  Jinkx, I thought of you and wished you were here.

This play is right up your alley, an homage to tearjerker films of early 1930’s pre-code Hollywood such as The Sin of Madame Claudet and Madame X.  This play is set “against the gaudy tapestry of turn of the century California’s notorious Barbary Coast.”  (For the young’uns, that’s a turn at 1900 not 2000.)  Lily Dare, raised in a convent, becomes a famous chanteuse and later runs a string of brothels.  Her troublesome secret is the daughter she was forced to abandon after her husband was killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.  Melodrama primed for hilarity.

This is high octane off-off Broadway with very talented actors and fabulous costumes by Rachel Townsend.  While the set design was fairytale-like and fun, all of the steps proved to be a large distraction as Mr. Busch nervously traversed them in heels.  He appeared inconsistently committed to the character of Lily.  Of course he writes funny lines and can carry a comedy but this performance felt low on energy.  Perhaps the superb cast around him shined so brightly, it was hard to compete?

Jinkx, why am I telling you all this?  I believe Lily Dare is your next triumph.  Yes, you are a famous singing drag performer and winner of season five of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.  But it’s your performance as Kitty Witless in The Vaudevillians that came to mind here.  Along with Dr. Dan Von Dandy, you were a famous vaudevillian couple frozen in an avalanche in the 1920s but were able to thaw out thanks to global warming.  And make us laugh, a lot, you did.

The Confession of Lily Dare has some fun material and Mr. Busch knows his way around campy melodrama.  Your acerbic wit could help elevate the uneven proceedings here.  You’ve already proven you are an old-time chanteuse.  Jinkx, if you choose this assignment, and you should, please keep the rest of the cast intact.  Nancy Anderson, Christopher Borg, Howard McGillin, Kendal Sparks and Jennifer Van Dyck were all outstanding.

www.theaterforthenewcity.net

www.jinkxmonsoon.com

The second entry into WP Theater’s Pipeline Festival is The Review or How To Eat Your Opposition by Donnetta Lavinia Grays.  From the program notes, this play was written back in 2011 and has been now reworked during this collaborative developmental process.  While four actors performed with scripts in hand, the piece was given a solid staging so the author and director could assess their work in front of a live audience.

An known artist (January LaVoy) has done an installation in a football stadium which is described briefly.  The seats are covered with beer cans that have all the labels facing forward.  There are female blow up dolls in the aisles.  On the television screens, hardcore pornography is playing which is interspersed with Hooters ads.  At the beginning of this play, a blogger (Chalia La Tour) is typing up her negative review while her wife (Tia James) watches her beloved Giants on the television.  The review gets read by the artist.  When she and the blogger finally meet, sparks fly.

Revenge as a dish best served cold is the backbone of this play but this work is multi-limbed.  Relationships and betrayals percolate.  This playwright dives into many issues ranging from 9/11 to football/violence/war to the objectification of women to love, deceit and money in the art world.  All four actresses did a nice job delivering this material.  Tia James’ performance as the football-watching wife was particularly memorable.  Overall, there may be too many topical themes and plot advances covered by this earnest effort.  A little more backstory might help to flesh out these characters and their motivations to pull us in even more.

www.wptheater.org

For five weeks WP Theater will present its Pipeline Festival featuring five new plays which have been in development during a collaborative two year lab residency.  The first effort this spring is Galatea or Whatever You Be.  Why the Shakespearean title?  This new play has been loosely adapted by MJ Kaufman from John Lily’s Elizabethan era Gallathea, written in 1585.

Remarkably still relevant, the subject matter concerns gender identification.  Every five years, a small village sacrifices the prettiest virgin to the god Neptune to protect themselves from ocean flooding.  (Also remarkably, climate issues figure into the plot.)  Two fathers worry that their daughters are likely candidates for this ritual.  Dressed as boys, they are sent to the woods until the sacrifice is over.  The two fall in love not knowing that they are girls.  Adding to the gender-bending merriment is the presence of Diana and her nymphs in the woods.  Cupid and Neptune get involved as well.  Back in the day, the boy actors playing girls who are pretending to be boys must have been quite the gag.

Galatea is a fun piece of work in its current form.  There could be more laughs with such an over-the-top story.  I would add that my first instinct leaving the theater is that this is prime material for a musical comedy.  The dance of the nymphs, for example.  Diana, nicely played by Eve Lindley, could definitely handle a show-stopping number, or three.  Bailey Roper’s portrayal of one of the two young lovers was my favorite performance.  Overall, a nice idea to adapt this great find.  I’m still thinking about Neptune’s entrance music though.

www.wptheater.org