Category: Off-Off Broadway Reviews

A mixture of Zoom live action, audience interaction and an old school video game, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’ Black Feminist Video Game is overfilled with levels.  There’s light comedy, melodrama, politics, silliness, boldly underscored learnings and, yes, a two dimensional video game to conquer.  “True men are feminists” is the mantra that concludes this journey.

Jonas (Christon Andell)  is biracial and autistic.  After an awkward introductory chat with the audience, he is on a Zoom date with Nicole (Starr Kirkland).  Unfortunately he is replaying close ups of Kate Uptons’ breasts on a beach.  Nicole, unsurprisingly, finds this behavior rude.  Things break off between the two of them.  Jonas laments “try dating on the spectrum and also being black.”

He wants to get Nicole back.  Audience interaction continues with the question “Are you with me?”  The answers available are Yes and No.  The audience types in their choice.  Yes is chosen.  Jonas remarks “now let’s go get my woman.”  That is the set-up.

On the way to the video game, Jonas will converse with various people including his mother (Constance Fields) and best online video game friend Sabine (Kyla Jeanne Butts, nicely grounded and realistic).  She is the Death Trap Underworld Champion!  She has some ideas about how Jonas can get Nicole back.

His mother is a nurse.  She has to leave teenager Jonas home alone due to her nursing job.  How’s the job today?  “The ER is overflowing with protestors injured by the police.”  That is a throwaway line.  The play quickly moves on to spout comments like “I love ramen noodles” and showcase cartoon character imitations (which were fun).

Sabine decides to assist Jonas win the old video game his mom gave to him.  Twentieth century American writer Audre Lorde is on hand to impart feminist wisdom.  The game has four levels which indicate the teachings to follow:  the Forest of Feminist Angst, the Coven of Many-Faced Mirrors, the Realm of Colorism and Peak Patriarchy.  In that final level, Jonas must defeat “the Chauvinist Monster.”

Under Victoria Collado’s uneven direction, the video game portion begins as nostalgic and promises clever visuals.  Like the rest of the play, however, things drag on and the heavy handed messaging uncomfortably coexists with humor.  The technical elements are well executed, however.

In the end, Black Feminist Video Game swings at too many targets in obvious observations to be enlightening.  There is never really meaningful dialogue with the live audience which makes these particular segments unimportant.  The video game premise remains an interesting one and the one reason to take a peek and see if you can defeat the Chauvinist Monster.

Black Feminist Video Game is being performed live through May 2, 2021 and will be available on demand from May 3 through May 9th.

www.thecivilians.org

No rehearsals, no director, a sealed script and a different performer each night.  That’s the promise made for this production of White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour.  Since its premiere in 2011 this play has been translated into 25 languages and performed over 1,000 times.  Whoopi Goldberg, Nathan Lane and John Hurt are some of the many luminaries who have tackled this unique theatrical event.

Drawing attention to a year long international theater shutdown due to the pandemic, this play marks the anniversary with a global performance of this piece.  In every time zone throughout the world the play was performed and live streamed on the same day at 8:00 pm.  Twenty four hours in row.  Et Alia Theater in New York City represented the United States.

Giorgia Valenti takes the stage.  She is handed an envelop and opens it.  A script she has never seen before.  The set is a desk, a chair, two glasses of water, a vial and a ladder.  There are thirteen audience members wearing masks.  The playwright is playful from the start.  “I don’t know what the actor is doing,” he writes.  In his mind, this is not a play.  Rather it is an experiment.

The audience is called on in the script to jump on stage and fill roles such as the white rabbit.  Can I have a volunteer bear?  A story about a rabbit wanting to go to the circus begins.  Trouble ensues for the long-eared creature.  No one seems to be acting as who they are supposed to be.  Mr. Soleimanpour always has had “a dream of writing a play that makes one free.”

The piece jumps in and out of its story.  The tale of the rabbit going to the circus is followed by an exquisitely rendered and disturbing bunny version of Pavlov’s dogs.  Audience participation keeps the mood light but the themes hit the bullseye.  This play examines how the past makes the future and how the future is the past.  In our world dominated by racial, societal, political and religious hatred for “the other,” humankind’s collective evolution as to how we got here is beautifully abstract and entertainingly realized.

White Rabbit Red Rabbit is, however, imminently approachable.  The play often takes time to be in the moment with the audience.  When Mr. Soleimanpour seems to be getting serious, he abruptly changes the storyline.  “OK, enough fun… on to suicide!”  What follows is a deeply thought provoking meditation on all of our individual life decisions.  This would include those of us who choose living.  Life, in his words, is “the longest solution for dying.”

This play is nothing if not meta.  The playwright even gives out his email address for post-show conversation.  Given the state of the theater industry over the past year, this exercise came across as a giant group psychological therapy session.  The playwright’s voice is clear, engaging, quirky and very fun.  The play’s construction demands attention.  He wants to know who is watching.  We want to experience the words and take in this very distinct and intense voice.

For our socially distanced pandemic times, this live stream connection was a vivid reminder of the void left by our inability to be a community and share in the celebration of the creative process and what it says to us as individuals and as a society.  I’m going to send a copy of this published blog post to Mr. Soleimanpour.  He describes himself as a very hairy man.  How hairy?  “Like chewing gum stuck on the floor of a barbershop.”  I’m certain everyone around the world laughed as hard as I did.  We are, after all, more similar than different.  We’ve just not been trained that way.

Et Alia Theater presented White Rabbit Red Rabbit in association with Berlin’s Aurora Nova.

www.etaliatheater.com

www.auroranova.org

At some point during the outstanding live stream performance of Franz Kafka’s Letter To My Father, yet another reference began swirling in my mind.  Lyrics from an old song from the late 1970’s band Split Enz bizarrely came into focus.  “History never repeats / I tell myself before I go to sleep / There’s a light shining in the dark / Leading me on towards a change of heart, ah.”  Both that song and Kafka’s writing explore an anguished mental condition as a result of bitter relationships.

“Don’t say the words you might regret / I lost before, you know I can’t forget.”  Why did this song pull from the filing cabinet of memory?  Kafka’s gut wrenching analysis of his relationship with his father and his obsession with the details from their past seem like thematic cousins.  Early on in this story things are obviously tense as “we are both much too old there could yet be a sort of peace, not an end to your unrelenting reproaches, but at least a mitigation of them.”  If history never repeats then why have generations upon generations of experiential patriarchal repressiveness informed the creative mind to spectacularly effect?

Kafka attempts to gut punch in this letter he wrote to his father but was never received.  With such a wonderful writer, the excoriation is both complex and vividly written.  Through this work a man is conjured back to life.  “The rhetorical devices you used in bringing me up, which were extremely effective, and at least in my case never failed, included:  insults, threats, irony, spiteful laughter and – strangely -self-pity.”  The fact that this type of father-ruler still exists today makes the work relevant and perhaps even oddly therapeutic.

Personal references continued to stream into my mind.  There is a section where Kafka writes that his father’s behavior is enigmatic like all tyrants.  You will be hard pressed not to think of Donald Trump while absorbing those descriptors.  The piece also works as a metaphor for business relationships.  Different people respond to different motivators.  Some thrive under dictators, others wither and their desire for success and happiness remains unfilled.  In the hands of an uber talented and contemplative writer, the result can be quite dazzlingly dark.

There is a reason some boys gravitate to football and others to Ru Paul’s Drag Race.  What Kafka is positing is that his existence would be far less tormented had he not been who he was, a “heady” child with an ability to store a vast amount of data in his mind.  His grievances are numerous and, brilliantly, even pointed inward.  I absolutely loved this letter.

The setting (Oona Curley and Stacey DeRosier) nominally appears to be a storage area in an office-like environment filled with boxes and boxes of filed documents.  The room really functioned as the inside brain apparatus of Kafka himself.  (Another reference came to mind:  Matt Ruff’s novel Set This House on Fire.)  When narrator Michael Guagno walks over to a shelf, you know he’s reaching in to pull out another memory, yet another trauma safely stored, sadly protected and never forgotten.

Mr. Guagno’s reading is akin to an excellent audiobook performance.  Being able to be claustrophobic in this space with him adds to the entire experience.  James Rutherford’s direction nicely varies the camera angles and provides for movement, emphasis and, especially, periods of quiet.  I sat enraptured by the storytelling and frankly amazed what it produced in my own mind.

Technically, this live stream succeeds on all creative levels including lighting, sound and music.  The audience has the ability to change views throughout.  I found the one I preferred early on and stuck with it.  I wanted to concentrate on the words and hear the brutal, guttural angst.  Frank Kafka’s Letter To My Father is unforgettably raw and riveting.  Watch this version alone and see what history your mind repeats.

M-34’s live streaming of Franz Kafka’s Letter To My Father is running on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons through March 28, 2021.

www.m-34.org

“Now is the winter of our discontent” begins Shakespeare’s Richard III.  In an adaptation by Norman Briski, all of the dark moodiness and paranoia remain intact.  As in the original, most of the violence remains off-stage but is central to the plot.  RIIICHARD is a short film which captures a portion of this version of the story.

Riiichard tells us early on that he is “an honest murderer.”  The spirit of this piece is both an artistic interpretation of the excessively violent title character as well as a commentary on society in general.  Bruno Giraldi plays Riiichard with verve.  By the time he barks “let’s have fun with death,” you know he’s not kidding.

The strength of this work is in its mood setting and scene changes.  A tortured monologue is followed by two soldiers presumably in combat training.  Rock, paper, scissors is the battle of choice here.  Josefna Lausrica and Vanna Frezza are the ensemble cast who alternate from lightening the mood to ritualistic dancing.  Why did Riiichard become a soldier?  “To get rid of my tenderness.”

My favorite scene involved a harsh conversation with his mother (Jane Ives).  Her seething anger and contempt for a son who grew into a monster is on full display.  As Riiichard descends further and further into his violent escapades, moments like these fuel the increasing paranoia and bloodlust in his brain.

The film is only twenty minutes long yet abounds with variety and creativity.  Storytelling is secondary to artistic flourishes.  Knowing Shakespeare’s play helps understand the context and its influence on this interpretation.  Anyone, however, will recognize the heinous evilness of a tyrannical maniac.

This relatively low budget film is especially notable for the lighting design by Solangue Falla Crespo.  Shadows are meaningful.  Colors change moods.  Spotlights frame the action.  RIIICHARD is always interesting to watch.  The drumbeats of war ensure that violence is never too far away.

The play is multilingual with Riiichard flowing freely between Spanish and English.  What could be a distraction is instead additive to understanding this character.  The words are important but the actions even more so.  You don’t need to speak the language to know there is a madman in your presence.

Presented by Teatro LATEA, RIIICHARD is the first of a planned three part trilogy of this play.  This filming can be accessed via their website.  It’s a dark twenty minutes but it does not fail to have “fun with death.”

RIIICHARD will begin ongoing streaming on the Teatro LATEA home page.  The second part in this series is in rehearsals and is expected to stream later this year.

www.teatrolatea.org

The kitchen is often referred to as the heart of a home.  The pandemic of the past year has perhaps made this room more frequented than ever.  The Eden Theater Company is presenting three short one act plays collectively themed as The Kitchen Plays.  In these works, the idea of nourishment, or a lack thereof, contemplates all kinds of hunger.

The Passion Project takes place in the cramped kitchen of a dive bar.  Larry is working in “this dump” to make ends meet.  There are little to no acting gigs in a pandemic. His cat is not doing well either.  He’s taken two extra shifts to pay for the cat’s medication.  Cass has stopped by for help on an audition.  In between work dramas both big and small, they read lines, or try to.

There is a richly developed comparison between these two differently aged souls.  Larry’s cat is his companion.  He fears what will happen as “loneliness is a tricky bitch at my age.”  In this era of isolation and quarantine, Larry says what many of us think:  “I’m wasn’t ready for this kind of alone.”  Cass is there ostensibly for help but rather functions as the beacon of light leading this weathered man safely to shore.

The realism in the performances from Larry Fleischman and playwright Cassandra Paras were perfectly suited to this material.  The claustrophobia of the tight space and the oppressiveness of a hostile work environment were effectively realized through Byron Anthony’s direction.  This play was my favorite of the three with its deft balancing of despair and hope, of loneliness and connectivity, and for its honesty in addressing the urgent needs of the human psyche.

Ginger Bug self-describes itself as “Bob Fosse meets The Great British Baking Show meets Upright Citizen’s Brigade.”  That is certainly an apt description for the start of Jake Brasch’s play.  For nine months, Perry (Mr. Brasch) and Janine (Madeleine Barr) have performed “The Great Tuesday Cook-off” on Zoom from their separate kitchens.  The opening theme song is a silly hoot memorably rhyming Mary Berry with Guy Fieri.

The food is not basic like simple crostini.  It’s much more involved than that.  Perry has made “garlic red pepper bruschetti fermented for three weeks before placed on top of sourdough crostini and drizzled with an eight year old balsamic reduction.”  From the tone of the two friends, you can tell there is an easy relatability between them.

A short rib dish will not go as planned, however.  As a result of this particular shoe leather, the play takes a hard turn.  These two friends are coping with social distancing with varying levels of success.  Nine months of cooking show feel differently depending on your perspective.  You relate to one chef whose relishes this weekly highlight.  You relate to the other chef who is exhausted from the expectations of five course meals.

The drama explored in Ginger Bug felt a bit heavy handed to me but the concept was intriguing.  Hard not to feel sorry for the guy who names his sourdough starter Marvin.  And also, in equal measurements, laugh with him.

Tara (Owen Alleyne) has invited his estranged parents over for dinner in the last play in this trilogy titled For the Family.  They reached out after not having spoken for more than three years.  While too casual a dish, baked ziti appears to be what’s for dinner.  Madison Harrison’s play investigates the minds of younger individuals than in the previous two segments.

A roommate (Danielle Kogan) slugs some liquor before heading out to a gathering without wearing a mask.  Tara laments the decision made to host the parents for dinner.  An unsurprising plot twist follows.  Tara realizes, “I never should have called.”  This final play certainly puts a mirror to current times.  These characters, however, did not come across as three dimensional so I found myself uninvolved with and unmoved by their story.

The Kitchen Plays continues performances live via Zoom on February 11, 12, 19 and 20, 2021.

www.edentheater.org

Prolific French playwright Molière wrote The School for Wives in 1662.  This comedy was controversial at the time.  A man is so intimidated by women and the idea of marriage that he decides to raise a perfect wife.  It’s a centuries old variation of The Stepford Wives but told mostly from the male point of view.  From the perspective of today and one hundred years after the 19th amendment was passed, this amusing story remains a relevant piece of theater.

Arnolphe (Tonya Pinkins) and his friend Chrysalde (Christina Pitter) begin the play in a conversation about women and their “long suffering husbands.”  Arnolphe boasts about the type of wife he wants.  “So simple is the girl I’m going to wed / I’ve no fear for horns upon my head.”  The rhyme schemes are very entertaining in Richard Wilbur’s translation, a version which appeared on Broadway in 1971.

He continues his rumination against the “smart ones,” notably “women who versify too much.”  His plan is nearly complete.  A young lady was reared in a convent from the age of four under his careful control.  Her “good and modest ignorance” was honed as he wished.  Now she resides in one of his homes with two servants as naive as she.  The marriage will commence and he will have a young wife who will not challenge him or his male superiority.

On his way to the house, Arnolphe runs into a friend’s son, Horace (Kaliswa Brewster).  He confides his covert love story with a young lady.  Apparently, a “blind fool” has sequestered her.  Horace does not know he is divulging his secret to the fool himself.  A series of increasingly cunning scenes follow.

Agnes (Mirirai Sithole) is so incapable of dishonesty that she vapidly discloses her innocently amorous suitor.  She has no idea about the wedding plans.  Arnolphe gives her a book about the maxims of marriage which list out the duties of a woman which was, of course, written by a man.  The first maxim is to love, honor and obey.  Those words were still in marriage vows three centuries after this play was written.

All of that makes The School for Wives an interesting historical artifact which highlights how far we have come in our thinking.  It also highlights the continuing chasm between equality.  The eighth maxim involves a woman being “veiled when she leaves the house.”  That male domination is still practiced today in certain cultures.

There are laughs in this play for sure.  The bumbling servants and Arnolphe’s increasing frustrations keep the kettle boiling on the stove.  In order for this play to shine, however, the comedy has to be front and center.  A live streamed format with no audience laughter was a deterrent to enjoying the comings and goings.  Pauses did not happen when an audience might burst into a howl.  The situations just kept rolling along.

This production also suffered in comparison to other multi-location streams presented in the last month, including the very clever Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy.  There were interesting backdrops and some fun imagery in this show but there were also clunky line readings and some obvious confusion as to who was supposed to be speaking.  The effect came across as a tad under-rehearsed.

Directed by Lucie Tiberghien, the play was cast with all women, most of whom are Black actresses.  That added another interesting layer to consider on top of the domination and subjugation between white women and white men four hundred years ago.  Equality remains elusive.  Artists must continue to point that out no matter how much progress or how many centuries have passed.

This production can be recommended for those who may not know this play as it does entertain and feels important to consider as our culture hurtles further toward conservatism.  The show also features a very memorable performance by Carolyn Michelle Smith in the dual roles of Notary and Oronte.  The screen came to life with her extraordinary facial expressions.

Moliére in the Park will replay The School for Wives through October 28, 2020.

www.moliereinthepark.org

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