Tag: Play

Happily, I’m having some difficulty deciding the right words to describe Yerma.  Magnificently theatrical?  Ferociously intense?  Unforgettably riveting?  Perfection?  All these hosannas and many more apply to this fantastic play and this extraordinary production.

Yerma is based on a 1934 play written by Frederico Garcia Lorca.  It tells a tragic story of a woman living in rural Spain who is desperate to have children but is infertile in an age where she is expected to procreate.  Simon Stone has adapted this story, moved the characters to modern London and turned Yerma into a journalist.  As a character named Her, she is in her thirties.  Early on we learn that she now wants to have a child.  With brilliantly realistic yet highly dramatic words, the characters, their situations and interactions are fascinatingly complex.  Mr. Stone is also the Director of this masterpiece.

You walk into the theater and the audience is split into two sides.  Both face a wide rectangular glass box which is carpeted inside.  As the play unfolds, screens above announce a chapter and describe what’s to follow, such as “deception.”  Scene changes include a complete blackout and dissonant singing or music.  The scene changes are their own fascinating element.  Not only do they appear complicated to execute but the pauses add tension to the ever increasing levels of intensity in this story.  Lizzie Clachan did the ingenious, jaw-dropping set design.

Yerma had its world premiere at the Young Vic in London in 2016.  Playing Her, Billie Piper won every award available and she does not disappoint.  In Yerma, she has the role of her life in a performance of incalculable emotional depth and range.   For a month, this production has been mounted at the Park Avenue Armory.  Every actor on the stage is astonishingly superb, especially Brendan Cowell’s performance as John.

When Ms. Piper came out for her curtain call, she looked understandably exhausted.  The audience was so overwhelmed that it took a few moments for clapping to start.  At that moment, you realize your great fortune.   You were lucky enough to see one of the great ones.  Of this year and this decade, for sure.  One of the greats of the century?  A safe bet.  Of my lifetime?  Definitely.

www.armoryonpark.org

After having just endured The Low Road at the Public Theater, could another play assault me with a thematic bludgeon so soon again?  The answer, thanks to The Stone Witch, is an unqualified yes.  This play was written by Shem Bitterman.  We are a cabin in the woods where revered children’s author Simon Grindberg lives.  The handsome set promises Maurice Sendak.  That is exactly where this play goes, from the Hans Christian Andersen award hanging on the wall to the death of family members during the Holocaust.  Even the young naked boy from the controversial In The Night Kitchen is referenced.

Dan Lauria (Lombardi, The Wonder Years) plays the fictional author who is in a major writing slump, not having written a book in twelve years.  His agent, described multiple times as a barracuda, hires an aspiring writer to help coax another book out of him.  Into the woods and off to the cabin we go.  Naturally our genius is an irascible fellow and drawn with every mood that could possibly fit into a long ninety minutes.  The result is that the promising idea of this play is not achieved.

Rupak Ginn plays Peter Chandler, the young man who arrives with his newly minted manuscript of The Stone Witch.  The two men start down an interesting, albeit very brief path of collaboration.  Why is she made of stone?   Unfortunately the play takes a quick turn to crazy town and plants it flag down firmly.  If you miss any of the plot points, don’t worry.  They are all repeated.  On the plus side, I did leave the theater wanting to read the fictional children’s book.

www.westsidetheatre.com

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/thelowroad

In one scene of The Low Road, a character is rambling while another punctuates his speech with individual words as commentary.  When he shouts “mellifluous” my eyes roll back into my head.  Unfortunately I am not the three-eyed raven in Game of Thrones and I was unable to transport myself to another time and place.  This ambitious comedy was written by Bruce Norris who authored the multi-award winning Clybourne Park.  Both plays concern themselves with race and injustice, with The Low Road also questioning the validity of capitalism.  A bludgeon is the weapon of thematic choice.

Adam Smith, the man who laid down the foundation for classical free market economic theory, narrates this tale set in the early stages of America’s founding.  It’s a big, bold new country and history is happening!  A young bastard named Jim Trewitt is raised in a brothel, winds up stealing his mother’s money, buys a slave and heads down the low road of capitalism.  During his journey, he gets to stand naked, stripped of his clothes.  He is shackled to his slave.  He is just another bad boy capitalist destroying wealth with lousy investments.  He is well played by Chris Perfetti.

Less aggressively highbrow plays might be crucified for slathering on the racial, economic and religious stereotypes that are in full bloom here.  I found this pretentious drivel repulsive.  The opening time shifting perspective which begins the second act is particularly sophomoric. All of this self-important farcical babble is given a big budget and highly stylized staging by Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, Next to Normal, Grey Gardens, Rent).  The costumes by Emily Rebholz are quite good.

If you bother to attend this play, stay until the end so you can experience the wildly ridiculous conclusion which bellows CAPITALISM IS BAD!  Maybe then you can explain to me the purpose of the mockingly disabled character who was kicked while in his mother’s pregnant belly and now repeats what other characters say.  Oh, and you could also decode why he wore a Hannibal Lector-like face mask for part of the proceedings.  If you need your fix of early American history, go uptown and see Hamilton.  The Low Road made me regret being in the room where it happened.

www.publictheater.org

At some very early point in the exhausting three hour marathon entitled Good For Otto, a young girl began crying.  Apparently inconsolable, she was taken out of the theater by her mother.  Why was she at a David Rabe play?  I’ve only previously seen two of his plays, Hurlyburly and Sticks and Bones, one of the trilogy of Vietnam plays from the 1970s.  I enjoyed them both but neither are in the elementary school curriculum for Intro to Dramatic Theater.

Good For Otto concerns itself with mental illness.  Two therapists (Ed Harris and Amy Madigan) work in a mental health center near the Berkshires and do their heroic best to help their patients.  A who’s who of calamities are thrust upon us:  dead mothers, cutting, suicide, child abuse, hoarding, gay acceptance and hamster love, namely the Otto of the title.  Therapy sessions happen around and around, and back and forth, bizarrely interrupted by musical interludes of old songs.  These group character sing-a-longs are played at the piano by the hoarder when his story ended abruptly and for no apparent reason.  Music as healing power, bluntly and repeatedly themed, both in words and song.

About thirty minutes in, frankly, I was hating this play.  Then I started enjoying some sections.  Then super boredom set it.  Plus eye-rolling.  Then internal groaning as this play churned on and on, consuming the audience with its simplistic preachiness.  The director, Scott Elliott, made a critically bad decision to seat audience members on the stage.  During the second, less attended act, a man sitting center stage was holding up his head up while balancing his elbow on his knee, slumped over and visibly suffering.  Was this intentional or unintentional meta?

The cast was filled with veteran talents including F. Murray Abraham and, perhaps my favorite performer here, Mark-Linn Baker.  Overacting was the chosen route which admittedly made some of this watchable.  Long, insufferably overbaked storylines, particularly Mr. Abraham’s, were so very dull.  When this play finally ended a woman next to me said, “I need a pencil for editing.”  Kind words indeed as I’m not sure the interminable, unnecessary length is even the biggest problem.

www.thenewgroup.org