Tag: Play

The title character of Mary Page Marlowe is an unremarkable woman in many respects.  She may also represent every woman.  Or someone well known by Tracy Letts, the terrific playwright of the Pulitzer Prize winning August: Osage County.  Mary Page is played by six different actresses at various ages:  Blair Brown, Emma Geer, Mia Sinclair Jenness, Tatiana Maslany, Kellie Overbey and Susan Pourfar.  This play explores a life imperfectly lived, filled with regrets about decisions made along the way.

The play opens as Mary Page is informing her two children that she and her husband are divorcing.  She is moving to Lexington, Kentucky where she has a new job.  The scene is tense, tight and believably traumatic for the three of them.  Pivotal life moments are considered throughout this somewhat absorbing piece.  The scenes that are excellent are moving studies of this woman and her evolution.

Other scenes are less successful such as the one between young Mary Page and her mother Roberta.  Her daughter is rehearsing a song and mom is bitter and just plain mean to her.  The tone felt oddly out of place with the rest of the play.  Yes, the mother has had a hard life and wants Mary Page to have a thicker skin to survive.  But the characterization of Roberta (Grace Gummer) is played harsher than perhaps intended as written.

This relatively short play starts meandering about halfway through and then abruptly concludes in a very unsatisfying finish.  A new character is introduced in the final scene that adds nothing to what came before.  I’m guessing the that the play ends unremarkably to underscore an unremarkable, unsatisfying life.  Mary Page Marlowe is an interesting life study which feels unevenly observed.

 

If you want to see what outstanding direction of a play means, get yourself to the Mint Theater’s production of Conflict.  Jenn Thompson has orchestrated a masterful revival of this superb 1925 story by Miles Malleson.  The Mint Theater’s mission is to rediscover lost or neglected works and has been on an impressive tear of truly outstanding productions lately.  That list includes last year’s Yours Unfaithfully by the same playwright.  Conflict is near the top of anything they have ever staged.

Within the scope of an off-Broadway budget, Ms. Thompson has managed to present a gorgeous to look at physical production inhabited by a stellar cast.  It certainly helps that the play is excellent and politically topical (conservatives versus liberals).  But this drama has been elevated by some of the finest pacing I can remember.  The silent pauses are as extraordinarily tense and as important as the spoken words.  When all of these elements come together as richly as in this production, that is directorial genius.  Bravo.

Conflict is billed as a love story.  The Lady Dare Bellington is a wealthy young woman (Jessie Shelton) involved with Major Sir Ronald Clive (Henry Clarke).  The time is early 1920’s London at the time when the Labour Party was becoming the primary challengers to the Conservatives.  In this play, personal relationships, political persuasions, women’s attitudes and her place in society all converge.  When you throw in the down-on-his-luck character of Tom Smith (Jeremy Beck), the tinder sets fire and never diminishes.

Act III, Scene 1 takes place in a bed-sitting room in some London lodgings.  Amelia White expertly portrays Mrs. Robinson, the owner, who has rented a room to Mr. Smith.   This scene between Tom and the Lady Dare is one of the finest pieces of acting and directing I expect to be fortunate enough to see this year.  The chemistry between them is, incredibly, both seismic and restrained.  Ms. Shelton and Mr. Beck are superb, as is the entire cast.

Additive to this playgoing experience is the Mint’s typically excellent set design by John McDermott.  All of the creative contributions are memorable.  The costumes by Martha Hally are ideal.  The production is bathed in great lighting by Mary Louise Geiger.  This is top notch theater.

The ending lines of Conflict are urgently important to be heard in today’s America.  Yes, Conflict is about opposing political views.  The play is also about family, love, personal growth, apathy, birthright and beliefs.  Undoubtedly one of this year’s great productions, the Mint Theater’s Conflict, directed by Jenn Thompson, is not to be missed.  I sincerely hope that regional theaters everywhere grab this one now that it has been rediscovered.

www.minttheater.org

Basketball is the subject from which we explore the evolution of China from 1971 until the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.  A foul-mouthed, hyperaggressive basketball coach from the University of San Francisco travels to Beijing during the reign of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976.  In 1972, President Nixon was welcomed which signaled the opening of China to the world.  Right before that moment in history, The Great Leap invents a meeting between the American coach and a Chinese one.

What advice is given?  An important one is to get taller players (a tongue in cheek joke).  In 1989, these coaches will meet again in a game to take place in China during the protests.  The play’s structure goes back and forth in time to accommodate the seemingly never ending clichés.  Playwright Lauren Yee combines a sports story, a soap opera and a commentary on the changes in China during that period.  We see them manifest themselves in its dutiful servant, Wen Chang, the coach played by BD Wong (M. Butterfly).  His performance is interesting considering the character has far too many connect-the-dots contrivances to convey.

For me, the most successful portrayal was the American coach Saul played by Ned Eisenberg (Six Degrees of Separation, Rocky, Golden Boy).  As written, the character is far from fully developed (and also a hoary cliché) but the swagger and obnoxiousness of Saul butting against the repressive nature of a Communist culture seemed steeped in realism.  The Great Leap was directed by Taibi Magar who has been brilliantly creative recently in such productions such as Ars Nova’s Underground Railroad Game (currently on a national tour).  I’m not sure this overwrought piece was salvageable.

www.atlantictheater.org

Lois Smith is an 87 year old actress who always seems to be working.  In recent seasons I’ve seen her in Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime and Annie Baker’s John, both excellent plays.  (Marjorie Prime was also made into a movie last year.)  In Peace For Mary Frances, she plays a widow who is hooked up to an oxygen tank nearing the end of her days.  Presumably the peace that Mary Frances wants is death because the family members and assorted caregivers here are more than slightly annoying.  The peace that the audience wants is for this overlong drama to finally end.

This play was written by Lily Thorne and it’s her professional playwriting debut.  There are so many issues thrown in to the theatrical blender that the situation is beyond even remotely believable.  Squabbling sisters, one with a drug addiction, the other struggling to make ends meet.  That’s ok I guess but since her daughter is a television star, the poor storyline is bizarre.  Our starlet has a sister with a newborn that gets carried around the stage for more scenes than is advisable or even reasonably probable.  Caregivers offer advice while trying to pretend this family isn’t totally crackers.  After the terrible (and also boring) Good For Otto, The New Group’s season – with the exception of Jerry Springer, the Musical – is hugely disappointing.

The pace of direction here by Lila Neugebauer (The Wolves) is glacial.  The scenic design by Dane Laffrey is too large for the stage and results in clumsy movement, notably in the bedroom.  The actors try hard but there are too many plot contrivances and far too many scenes to make this drama effective in any way.  We do get to see Lois Smith talk to her dead husband near the end of Peace For Mary Frances in yet another revelation from the family’s seemingly unendless catalog of mini-dramas.  Ms. Smith’s character received extra morphine to help her ease her struggles toward the end.  The audience, however, just remained numb, physically squirming in their seats while hoping that this really bad production would end.

www.thenewgroup.org

www.theaterreviewsfrommyseat/goodforotto

www.theaterreviewsfrommyseat/jerryspringer

www.theaterreviewsfrommyseat/downtownraceriot

Stage Life is a play that is described as “a rousing celebration of lives well-lived in and about the theater.”  I can confidently state that rousing is not achieved.  Conceived and adapted by Martin Tackel, this piece takes quotes, short stories, letters and reminiscences to attempt to convey the spirit of those who create live theater.  Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Shelly Winters and Thornton Wilder all make five second appearances.  In between there are scenes such as the Class where we watch actors in training.  Are you hearing the car as yourself or as a character?  The first time it is asked, it’s sort of mildly amusing.  After that, it is just tedious.

Six actors play all of the parts here.  The most interesting section was The Macbeth Murder Mystery adapted from a James Thurber story.  Unfortunately, the evening as a whole is a fairly directionless hodgepodge.  More tellingly, the audience was clearly not responding to the material.  There is an idea here to celebrate the creative process and the myriad of interesting characters both on-stage and off.  I’m not exactly sure who this show is for but it is not me.  Stage Life is inside baseball.  So far inside that it is hard to see anything at all.  A swing and a miss.

www.stagelifetheplay.com

A comedy by the Greek playwright Aristophanes, The Birds was first performed in 414 BC.  The play begins with two middle-aged men stumbling across a hillside wilderness.  They are in search of the  legendary Thracian king Tereus who once was metamorphosed into a hoopoe bird.  Both are fed up with Athens, its law courts, politics, false oracles and military antics.  A brilliant idea is born.  The birds should stop flying about and build a grand city in the sky.  Not only would they be able to lord over men, they could also blockade the Olympian gods.  No sacrifices from humans means the gods would starve into submission, much like the Greeks had recently done to the island of Melos.

Staged in the large St. Ann’s Warehouse, this production has been co-produced by the Onassis Cultural Centre-Athens.  With the exception of bird caws, the entire play is performed in Greek with English subtitles.  There is a band on stage for the semi-successful yet indulgent musical interludes.  The original also had a Chorus and songs.  Scholars have debated whether this piece was a political allegory or simply escapist entertainment.  Characters who are fed up with law courts, politics, false oracles and military antics?  2500 years later and thrust into cray cray America, The Birds feels like both.

How to describe this production?  We begin with the two men cluelessly wandering around as if this were a Greek production of Waiting For Godoh.  (Except it should been renamed Waiting For Dodo.)  Toss in bizarre visuals which would be completely at home in any episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.  Add a dash of silent movie realness and a little French-inspired surrealism.  Wrap all of this in a very modestly budgeted but cleverly executed Cirque de Soleil environment.

The Birds is the longest of Aristophanes’ surviving plays.  Parts of this exercise are fun to watch.  Other sections drag on and on.  While The Birds is creative, amusing and historically interesting, it is also just too long.  Might this artistic Greek cassoulet be best appreciated by elite intellectuals?  Like the man sitting next to me repeatedly checking his phone throughout the performance?  When it was over he leapt to his feet loudly shouting “bravo, bravo.”  I sensed a false oracle in our midst.

www.stannswarehouse.org