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Five by Three
reviewed by Debbie Hoodiman Beaudin
The tag line in the press release of Five by Three, is "Finally, short plays that don't suck!" The tone of this line captures the contemporary, irreverent style of these five short comedic plays co-written by Nicole Greevy, Uma Incrocci, and Erica Jensen. Two plays are directed by Greevy and three by Jensen.
The plays use a cast of 13 actors, some of whom play multiple roles, to tell five stories about characters in their late 20s/early 30s. Some of the plays, like Impulsivity, a comedic piece about the consequences of socially unacceptable behavior, tend toward the absurd. Others, like Friendsters and Moving Day, use absurdity, surprise, and comedy to touch upon real, often difficult life events or relationships. The Other Side, a philosophical, Waiting for Godot-type play, imagines two characters' pre-birth misgivings and fears.
My favorite play of the bunch, the witty 28 Years Later, portrays a young woman's pain and misgivings about getting older and feeling increasingly isolated from her younger, raver friends. Nicole Greevy, as the main character Nina, is sincere and hilarious; her comedic timing is perfect. Mike Caban, playing Nina's boyfriend Marcus, and Melanie Wehrmacher, as Nina's friend, seem appropriately clueless and frustrated by just not understanding what she's talking about anymore. Ninon Rogers also stands out as Julia—the one who avoids aging at all costs! I loved Kirk McGee, Alison Satz, Dan Truman, Andi Teran, and William Franke as the zombies who so desperately want to wish Nina a happy birthday.
As if the plays themselves were not entertaining enough, one element that adds to the success of the program is the transitions between the plays. During set changes (or often while actors execute the scene changes), audience members get to enjoy a song about the sex appeal of doing house work, a monologue, dancing zombies, and other skits. I was (pleasantly) surprised by these creative transitions, and I found myself looking forward to them and anticipating what would come next.
A good short play is like a good short story or a short poem: focused, quick, dramatic, truthful. Sometimes, short plays lack an important element and they...well...suck. These five short plays are well-executed and immensely enjoyable to watch. In other words, they live up to their tag line and more!
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The Purpose of Matter in the Universe
reviewed by Allison Taylor
Solo performance is hard. You have to singlehandedly maintain your audience's attention, lacking any lazy co-stars to blame for wayward yawns. For that matter, you have to play all the parts and develop unique attributes for each character. And for God's sake, you have to memorize all those lines. Solo performance is often entertaining due to the sheer virtuosity of the actor.
Certainly Joe Hutcheson, whose one-man show The Purpose of Matter in the Universe is playing in the Midtown International Theatre Festival, is a performer of considerable dexterity. And thus, it's with much respect and regret that I report how disappointing Purpose is.
Hutcheson centers this autobiographical tale around his cross-country car trip from his home in California, where all his family and friends live, to Florida, where he plans to settle permanently. However, the move is not an easy one. Along the way, Hutcheson repeatedly suffers panic attacks, as he agonizes over his life, fears his death, and questions his purpose in the universe. In between emotional meltdowns and at pit-stops during the car trip, he's accompanied by a host of colorful characters.
Director DB Levin and Hutcheson successfully devise charismatic voices and mannerisms to distinguish the varying personalities. Embodying his best friend, a brazen lesbian, Hutcheson's walk morphs into a no-nonsense swagger and his voice growls with a tough Southern lilt. When playing his pill-popping stepmother, who joins him for a leg of the journey, Hutcheson lovingly shows her eccentricity without spiraling into caricature. Particularly comical is his reenactment of her absent-minded effort to speed down the highway in the five-gear car while forgetting to shift out of third gear.
A "multi-media event," Purpose uses slideshow projections to add to the atmosphere and to symbolically represent the locations on the journey. Although the photographs are aesthetically very nice, they quite often distracted me from the performer. More fully integrated are the lighting design (by Ellen Rosenberg) and the sound design. When Hutcheson goes to a gay club, colored lights flash frantically about the theater and techno music reverberates off of the walls.
Where Purpose seems to drive off its course is in its actual story. The writing itself is very good, full of pretty descriptions and pleasant metaphors. But Purpose is merely a series of anecdotes, seemingly arranged in the order in which the actual events happened to Hutcheson. There is no overarching desire, no external conflict, no tangible obstacle in the way of his happiness. The only thing connecting the various vignettes are his fears, as manifested in the self- (or marijuana- or cocaine-) induced panic attacks.
The problem is, the character's personal neuroses are neither unique nor worldly. Even though his friends and family make various appearance, there's no context, no background, no event to shed light on his characterization, his fears, his choices—or even the reason for his car trip. (I kept wondering, why are you going to Florida?) The whole journey takes place in a giant, 5-geared vacuum.
And perhaps that's because it's on a stage. Ironically, even though Hutcheson is a versatile actor and the show's technical attributes are undeniably theatrical, Purpose doesn't feel like a play—it feels like a memoir being acted out. Perhaps it's just as hard to write a one-man show as it is to perform it. Hutcheson is clearly a storyteller, with the energy capable of captivating an audience and a pen ready to write lyrical prose. Now all he needs is a real story.
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Fix-it
reviewed by Shelley Molad
Fix-it is Megan Griswold's solo piece that chronicles her many unsuccessful yet enlightening attempts towards self-help, alternative therapies, and remedies she endures after she is betrayed by the man she loves.
The Zen-like music that fills the room prior to Griswold's entrance helps create the mood for this piece. Appearing on stage in a pink ballerina-like dress that flatters her petite frame, Griswold looks great for a middle-aged woman who has undergone more than 10,000 hours of therapy. With her peppy voice and charged energy, this woman doesn't look like she even needs it. Does this mean her commitment to therapy has proved successful?
As someone who has not spent her life on the stage, Griswold is brave to have conjured a one-woman piece, including a song she wrote that certainly showcases her flair. Fix-it contains a number of moments that render amusement, moments that some or all of us can relate to having been in doubt about what it is we actually hope to gain from seeking help. Some of Griswold's alternative therapies are surely zanier than the average shrink session, and there may be no one who can top her endless list of practices which she shares with us on stage in a delightfully comical way.
Griswold begins by recalling bits and pieces of her past involving a relationship with a man named Tim. We are given little information, and then the stage suddenly goes black. The audience experiences an awkward moment, for it is unclear whether this is a mistake of the light board operator or part of the show. When the lights come back up, Griswold is standing in a different place on stage sharing bits and pieces of another story from her seemingly disjointed past. And so the rest of the show continues in this way, with abrupt blackouts serving as transitions between each story.
Throughout the show, Griswold talks; in fact, she never stops talking. It almost feels as though we are sitting in on one of her therapy sessions (she does in fact recreate some of them for us). There is little use of the space, save for a white bed that Griswold utilizes when recreating psychic therapy. When Griswold acts out the scene rather than telling us about it, the show becomes interesting and more engaging. As an audience, we enjoy seeing an actor play an action rather than tell us about it.
You may find yourself wondering, "What are Griswold's problems?" When she finally reveals Tim's shocking past, it becomes clear why Griswold felt the need to seek help, though it seems as though it is Tim who really needed the help. Aside from having to deal with the consequences of Tim's situation, contemplate it, and accept it, Griswold herself seems pretty stable other than being a victim of someone else's crime. Sure, Griswold tends to analyze every situation, but when did rationalization become a setback?
Because of her intent to make light of every situation, it is difficult to feel or understand any of the pain Griswold experienced. She is such a likeable character that the audience wants to empathize with her. We want to feel her pain and her struggle, so that in the end the path towards self-discovery is rewarding both to her and to us.
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The Speed Queen
reviewed by Josh Sherman
The first thing that you notice when you walk into the WorkShop Theater's Jewel Box space is the tightness of the quarters. This kind of setting should be ideal to experience the insane highs and lows of Marjorie Standiford, the fictional protagonist of the novel The Speed Queen by Stewart O'Nan. But this one-woman dramatic adaptation by Anne Stockton, who also portrays Marjorie, somehow manages to lack the electric connection that the space should help to provide the audience with, and turns what should be a rollicking excursion into something that feels a lot blander than it should, given the "sex, drugs, rock & roll" subject matter.
Stockton certainly looks the part of a world-weary Oklahoman on death row. The entire piece is a narrative confessional told to a tape recorder, ostensibly to set the record straight on her story. She has the accent down pat, and captures the essence of a cocaine user with her spitfire delivery about five minutes after she finishes snorting it. (How she is able to sneak coke into her cell on death row is never adequately explained.) The plot itself is interesting: her lover LaMont, a car enthusiast, leads her astray into a world of drug use and abuse, and eventually gets her arrested. She is thrown into a motel-turned-jailhouse where she meets Natalie, who becomes her lesbian love partner until they both get out and move back in with LaMont, who shacks up with Natalie as well. But, because this is a one-woman show, the narrative is limited to a past-tense monologue that works to varying degrees of success in engaging the viewer, and it's always in a didactic, presentational style. The story of the fast-food stick-up gone wrong, at the show's climax, could be terrific if told in a Tarantino-esque way (be it on film or stage) because the audience could engage in it. But this style of narration needs much more rise and fall from the performer, and Stockton's choices remain far too even-keeled for far too long for us to feel either sympathy for Marjorie or true shock.
Director Austin Pendleton tries within the constraints of the space to make some adjustments. He successfully crescendos the music cue "Radar Love" by Golden Earring when Marjorie is in the biggest throes of her drug rush. Festival limitations may have kept both performer and director from adding lighting effects, but it doesn't explain the lack of either rage or despair from Marjorie about the injustices inflicted upon her. At the final tableau there is finally a sense of rage that erupts, but without spoiling the twist I will tell you that it just made me question the wisdom of building an entire show around one axis, only to see that axis destroyed just before curtain.
This adaptation of The Speed Queen feels like a bit of a misfire, simply because the plot itself is so riveting. The most engaging parts of the monologue are when those plot points tumble upon each other, as a rapidly unfolding hold-up goes horribly awry. It is at those moments that you can see why Stockton was so attracted to tell this story in the first place. If framed in a less presentational manner, and in a more forgiving theater space, I could see a completely different version of The Speed Queen being an immensely satisfying experience.
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The Street
reviewed by Nancy Kim
Although the two industries share New York City as their capital, the financial and theatre worlds rarely cross paths. That is until you visit The Street, where smart female characters talk about stock options one moment and break out into song in the next moment. In this musical comedy, Ronnie Cohen gives us a slight glimpse of career women working on Wall Street.
In the first of many risks that are posed to the characters of The Street, Whitney urges Tiki to set up their own investment firm. While they strike out on their own, Jill is, in contrast, a highly successful and highly temperamental skin care CEO. All the women here are thrown into high stakes situations when Jill seals the fate of her company with one risky move and Whitney makes a bold prediction that can make or break her start-up firm. Though much of the show has a comic and silly tone, the economic theories and finance terms peppered throughout it are surprisingly compelling as they give these characters moments to display their smarts and gutsy attitudes.
Not only driven by profits and delivering product, these characters are also faced with personal and moral risks. Though able to readily call up numbers and stocks, the cautious Tiki weighs in on the risks of romance with Nick, the neighborhood restaurateur. Meanwhile Jill sees an opportunity to take advantage of an admirer. These subplots fit in with the comic elements and provide the material for the expected love songs in a musical, but they are treacly as well as distractions from the sharper satire of the women working in the financial world. When there are as many scenes taking place in the love interest's restaurant as there are in the women's new firm, the focus seems less to be on how they work and navigate in this high-pressured world than it is on who these women will end up with romantically.
Leslie Anne Friedman and Theresa Rose do good work as Whitney and Jill. As the story's center, Friedman's Whitney is played with a mix of earnestness and sass, Rose has much fun as the villainess Jill, though her character verges on extreme caricature. Spouting Chinese aphorisms and being a rather timid character, Fiona Choi is able to be winsome as Tiki, despite what could have been a cringe-inducing stereotype. Jason Adamo, Ryan Hilliard, and Jonathan Whitton also take strong turns in key roles.
In addition to co-writing the book, Ronnie Cohen is responsible for the catchy songs. With the musical direction of Daniel Cataneo and some fun choreography by director Heidi Lauren Duke, the cast and ensemble are given ample opportunity to shine.
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