FringeNYC 2005 Reviews - Page 5

The Bangers' Flopera
reviewed by Martin Denton

The Banger's Flopera by Kirk Wood Bromley and John Gideon, billed as "a musical perversion," is surely one of the most overtly raunchy, in-your-face-assailing shows ever put up at FringeNYC. This is by design: the program carries a "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" warning label and I'm sure I heard someone from the production announce beforehand that if the show doesn't offend you then it's not working. (There is, additionally, a full page of explanatory warnings by Bromley and director Ben Yalom in the program.)

But when I left The Banger's Flopera, I was neither shocked nor offended.

There's greatness in this piece, which "perverts" John Gay's The Beggar's Opera but mostly by way of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill adaptation of same called The Threepenny Opera. How audacious is it to begin an American musical in 2005 with a challenge to Weill's classic "Moritat," signifying that yes, we know there's already a song about "Mack the Knife" that's phenomenally famous but we don't give a #&!%? What's cool is that the opening really works: über-mobster Macheath massacres the patrons in a swanky NYC supper club with utterly affectless precision: nobody tries to stop them, nobody (killers included) cares about or seems moved by what's occurred; and when the scene is over, the victims pick themselves up like the zombies that they already were and go on to Scene Two.

Elsewhere in Banger's we catch glimpses of the brilliant update to Threepenny that this show is poised to be. This speech, for example, delivered by one of Macheath's henchman (a transvestite), pretty much floored me:

I’d like to exchange my most precious
Commodity—“free time”—for seven things
I don't need that were made by people
I don't know who engage in activities
I don't approve of so they can create
A society that doesn't include me.

But a great deal of Banger's feels designed merely to gross us out rather than make us think. Bromley has made the prostitutes of Threepenny into porn stars, for example, and there are several numbers about the sex trade and sexual abuse (not too mention a character wielding an oversized but more-or-less realistic-looking penis, utilized in a scene about making a porn flick). This stuff may jolt, at first, but there's so much of it that after a while I just started to feel numb—the exact opposite, I think, of what the creators intend. A ruthless editor needs to cut a lot of this 2-hour-45-minute show to get to the meaty ideas that will make it not just sensational but urgent. And those ideas need focusing: where Brecht's message was essentially that economics is at the root of society's ills, Bromley ranges much farther, and the results are sometimes confusing and/or muddy.

Gideon's music is, appropriately, loud punk, rock, gangsta rap, and (occasionally) commercial-sounding pop. The 17-member ensemble is strikingly committed to the material, with the standout April Vidal as Polly, who is given the score's most arresting number, "Gangstas Make a Girl Gush," and delivers it with show-stopping panache.

Much more can and will be said about this show. Hardy FringeNYC-goers should consider taking it in; this could be Something once the creators do more work on it. Threepenny held up a mirror to its complacent German audience and the ugliness it reflected back at them stung. I can't wait for The Banger's Flopera to do exactly the same for Bush-Era America.

Shutter
reviewed by Matt Freeman

Shawn Fagan is a fantastic performer, and his truthfulness is outmatched only by his precise physical work. As the sole on-stage performer in Lightbox’s Shutter, that would obviously bode well. But the material to which he brings his considerable talents is beautifully adapted and dovetailed expertly by director Ellen Beckerman. It’s a tour de force: poetic, funny, and challenging.

The piece itself speaks to the concept of observation, and weaves the stories of Shawn himself (one can only assume), photographer Peter Beard, and Andy Warhol. It takes us from hospital rooms to Kenya to New York City. The script was forged from a variety of disparate elements, including quotes from the Bible and excerpts from the journals of Beard and Warhol. The effect is a whirlwind of language and imagery, all contained within a single performer and a few deft music cues.

Peter Beard’s travels to Kenya have produced photographic monuments to the brutality and beauty found therein. Andy Warhol is, of course, one of the seminal American artists of the 20th century. Beard’s images of endangered elephants (splattered with newspaper and dried blood) and Warhol’s famous Campbell's Soup Cans seem as far apart in form and content as the visual arts can be. It’s the genius of Shutter to find their commonality, their acute sense of wonder, their love affair with the “image.”

The piece has three sections, all framed by Fagan’s repeated confessional about the experience of being self-consciously photographed. Between these bookends, the audience is given a kaleidoscope of scenes and commentaries through the mouths and bodies of Beard and Warhol that slowly move toward their other commonality: a near death experience.

We hear about Beard’s early life, we watch him muse about what brought him to photography (“I couldn’t draw, so what could be easier?”). While Fagan’s Beard is imbued with both humor and authority, it’s Warhol who steals the show, with his sudden and exposed blank stare, his naive genius, and his odd-bird stance. It’s not just how Fagan portrays him physically, it’s the mildly childlike observations and snippets of language that create this hilarious and touching portrait. Beard, though, is the lifeblood of the piece and is just as specific and candid. His slow crawl towards an elusive shot is one of the highlights of the performance.

Fagan’s own skill, though, is what makes this all come together. It’s rare to see a performer get a laugh from simply wiping “paint” out of his eye, or turn a pack of Warhol tics into a dance. It’s moments like these that elevate the piece from biography, and into high theatrics.

I will say, as this is a piece that seems in the midst of development, that the ending of the piece felt a little too literary. I won’t spoil it, and it doesn’t actually fail, it just left me a little less sure of what I’d seen than when I watched Warhol’s near death experience or Beard’s work behind the lens, hunting his quarry. That minor quibble aside, Shutter is a powerful success, and it begs to be seen.

God's Waiting Room
reviewed by Michael Criscuolo

Ashlin Halfnight’s terrific new play, God’s Waiting Room, tells the story of four people languishing in Purgatory and re-living their collective downfall: Drummond, a drug dealer who hides his vocation from his dry-cleaner wife, Indira; Saskia, Drummond’s rich artist girlfriend; and Bordo, Indira’s deeply religious hired hand. Bordo believes that if they all re-enact the moment of their death—something no one else is particularly keen on doing—she will finally be able to pass into Heaven. Naturally, getting the others—who are all going through various permutations of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) even though they’re already dead—will take some doing.

Halfnight’s script (which is inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic novel The Master and Margarita) makes expert use of foreshadowing and fractured narrative, and unfolds like a richly textured novel. The scenes detailing Drummond and Saskia’s heated courtship, Indira’s desperation to mend a marriage on the rocks, and the moments leading up to their collective demise are all evocative and telling. Halfnight knows exactly when to start and end each scene, including just enough information to make the audience fill in the blanks on their own.

Director Alexis Poledouris and designer Shaun Rance create an equally evocative Purgatory for God’s Waiting Room: the actors are placed on either side of a large patch of grass that dominates the stage. The grass is the foursome’s own stage, in a sense, since it is the only place where they can replay the scenes of their lives. (The grass is a hint as to where they bite the dust, FYI.) Otherwise, the characters remain in their not-so-neutral corners.

The entire cast is excellent. Rebecca Lingafelter’s Indira burns with the manic desire of a suburban housewife fighting to keep tight control of her life. Elena Mulroney infuses Bordo with believable religious conviction and righteousness. Shelley Gershoni’s Saskia is an emotional risk-taker, a convincing blend of maneater and sensitive artiste. And Jeffrey Clarke has a firm handle on Drummond’s indifference and duplicity.

God’s Waiting Room is presented by Performance Lab 115, a company worth keeping an eye on in the future, and is a great start (at least, for me) to this year’s Fringe Festival.

The Lives of Young Black Folk
reviewed by Thomas Weitz

The Lives of Young Black Folk, Juneteenth Legacy Theatre’s premiere New York production, is a collection of two one-act plays about some of the challenges that face black youth growing up in America today.

In the first play, Young Sistas, we are given access to a meeting of the “all black, all female, and over 21 club,” a group of three friends who meet to share and compare. Each woman in the play represents a different relationship to men: January is a bride-to-be, Crystal a recent divorcee, and Sandy is single. The relationship among the women unfolds as they discuss their pasts and what they hope for in the future. January wants to marry her boyfriend because she knows he is too incompetent to take care of his son. Crystal wrestles with January’s impending marriage the way she wrestles with the memory of her ex-husband. She was so beaten and bruised by her marriage that the only place she feels comfortable going out to at night is a lesbian bar. And Sandy is in the middle of all of it trying to determine the best path for herself. This is not just a sob story about three women struggling with a cycle of poverty and abuse. This play is full of humor and what the writing lacks in refinement the actresses Charita A. Armstrong, Tamara Green, and Daphne Crosby make up for in the dignity they bring to their characters.

If Young Sistas is about finding dignity, Bang! Bang! Bang!, the second play in The Lives of Young Black Folk, is a story of losing it. Bang! Bang! Bang! starts off with a shot as a young black kid named Newboy (played by Christopher Burris) is gunned down in the street. For the next fifteen minutes, Newboy lies paralyzed on the ground as he describes the excruciating pain of a gunshot wound and the frustration and embarrassment of being powerless to prevent being robbed. To the credit of the director, Sue Lawless, the character of Newboy barely moves the entire time, allowing the audience to focus their imagination on both the literal and metaphorical experience of paralysis. Eventually, the police show up and handcuff Newboy for having run away from an undercover police officer, the same officer who had shot him in the back three times at the top of the play, thus stripping Newboy of any chance at redemption. Had it not been for a final scene where the spirit of the boy rises up to further drum in the deplorable circumstances of the crime, this would have been a fantastic play. Regardless, the concept is wholly original and Lorna Littleway, the author of both plays, should be praised.

No Return
reviewed by Judith Jarosz

In this feisty performance piece of rapid-fire monologues, poetry, and raps, we are introduced to three lesbian women with three very distinctive connections to a common bond. Each person has her own unique story, and there are some pretty intense tales to tell.

The piece opens with “Love Letter to New York City,” in which the three women reveal where they come from, what they are, and why they came to or stayed in the Big Apple.

Laura Renyna is a Mormon-raised Latina dyke from Texas. Carolyn Connelly is a lanky 6’2” Irish-Italian Brooklyn-born transsexual woman. And Heather Daniels, a curvy platinum blonde with attitude to spare, is a flashy femme from West Virginia. Each performer takes turns giving us individual stories about her life.

All three performers have illuminating and revealing moments. We join Connelly as a young child in Brooklyn dealing with her mother’s alcoholism, and see her fears of facing that demon within herself. At one point, while she rubs her body all over seductively, she addresses the issue of what people think she may or may not be, and what they might expect from her if they get intimate. We all face this in one way or another, but with the added “layers” of Connelly’s situation, it is especially unsettling to contemplate.

Daniels gives us detailed accounts of what it’s like to work in a peep show, as a dominatrix, and as a dancer in a lesbian bar (where she is on more than one occasion treated just as rudely and objectified as in any “straight” bar). She discusses the fact that she likes to dress sexy because it’s who she is and not just to titillate others. One should never assume that it’s an invitation to touch. Okay, a therapist might have a field day with this, but I find the attitude refreshing.

Renya is touching and sincere, and has some truly heart-wrenching moments. She angrily raps about Latino stereotypes in “Fuck the Taco Bell Dog,” and I love her piece titled “Intellectual Intercourse,” which very poetically states the need to make love with the mind and intellect, as well as the body.

One angry monologue after another would be tedious indeed, but all three ladies manage to make their points while still injecting flashes of humor throughout. I am struck by the universality of this piece. No matter what choices you make in life, everyone worries about, longs for, and rejoices in, the same things. At the end of the evening, some points that stay with you are the idiotic prejudices that exist not only between, but within all types of groups, and the overall need to just be loved for who you are. And that is, after all, always a worthy message.

Elements of Style
reviewed by Joe LaRue

One of many priceless moments in Wendy Weiner's new one-woman show Elements of Style comes when, as uptight copy editor Winnifred, she receives an email riddled with text message shorthand. Her reaction to the use of the letter "U" in place of "you" is akin to being stabbed in the heart. The missive ends with the grandest of all punctuation sins: the emoticon. Winnifred practically spits her denouncement of it as "a vile misuse of the colon and closed parenthesis." She asks, "did Shakespeare need to end his monologues with a smiley face so we would know what he was thinking?"

Elements of Style is filled with this type of Eats, Shoots and Leaves punctuation humor, while mixing in themes of office politics and mother-daughter relationships. Weiner embodies several nicely drawn characters that populate the offices of Conde-Nast's "Glamorous Magazine." In a frenzy, the main character, Winnifred, has fired her entire copy-editing staff and we, the audience, are interviewees to be replacements. She shows us the magazine's "free table," overflowing with products that various companies have sent, desperate to receive press coverage. Winnifred looks at us squarely and in a dreadfully serious tone informs us that, "if hired, you may never have to buy shampoo again."

One of my favorite parts of the "interview" process includes calling a hapless audience member up to the stage to correct the punctuation of several sentences on a white board. Winnifred stands directly behind the poor woman, barely able to contain her horror at misplaced commas.

Weiner's performance is relaxed and nuanced—especially when playing the part of Winnifred's younger daughter, who has rebelled against her mother by becoming a spoken word poet. As the daughter, she stands on a stack of her mother's magazines and delivers her poem, “I am not your hyphen,” lashing out against her mother in a perfect parody of heightened “def poet” voice and gesture.

The writing is especially strong, (who could expect less from Weiner, who worked as a copy editor for 10 years?) and coupled with such an engaging performance, Elements of Style is the perfect show not only for copy editors, but for anyone who has ever confused “its” with “it’s,” so, just about everyone.

Help!
reviewed by Margie Stokley

Out of Hand Theater Company, an Atlanta troupe, takes on the FringeNYC festival and infuses the usual stoic NYC crowd with heart and humor; a true commitment to their material and honest direct eye contact make this interactive show a treat to see.  HELP! is a spoof of motivational speakers (i.e., Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, etc.) and self-help seminars. When you pick up your tickets you are greeted by four “life coaches,” whose smiles and easygoing eyes usher you to seats which are separated into four sections: Drunk, Poor, Sad, and Just Fine.

I opted for Drunk because I knew this was interactive theatre and my gut told me the Just Fines were going to get the most abuse. I was right.

HELP! has a richer arc than most sketch comedy pieces but less character development and/or drama than your average play. Usually, I detest actors nudging me or having to feel a part of someone else’s inside joke, but with these life coaches there was no downtime to think twice about it. No one actor pushes for the spotlight, each has his or her own charm, and all four are likable and engaging.  The show takes you through Healing, Elevation, Love, and Perfection.  Each stage is spelled out by a different coach and every so often there is a confessional moment where we hear about the dark and dreary pasts that lead them to discovery and recovery through HELP!’s program. I particularly liked these passages because the actors put nothing on top of their text. They delivered these intimate addresses without a punch line, and for me more moments like these would have benefited this production.

HELP! is performed and conceived by Ariel de Man, Adam Fristoe, Maia Knispel, and Justin Welborn, with playwright Steve Yockey; no director is credited.  They take you on an extremely high energy ride and work seamlessly as an ensemble to keep you on your path to HELP! As I left the theatre, I can’t say the program changed my life, but the production changed my opinion of interactive theater, and it was obvious that the actors had charmed all who witnessed their performance.

Finger Love
reviewed by Kyle Ancowitz

Finger Love is a puppet show about women masturbating. Make no mistake, it’s not for everyone. Having said that, let me tell you that I laughed till I cried. I shook with laughter. I laughed so hard, I couldn’t tell if anyone was laughing with me. I was careful to laugh very knowledgeably—what choice did I have?—but I basically died laughing.

The show runs a half-hour long, and while some may argue that this belies the real complexity of the female orgasm, writer/creator Anna Sobel has instead chosen a lighthearted approach that depends on songs, puns, gags, and, yeah, puppets to trace gently over the surface of dilemmas that keep other folks up at night. In fact, as she explains in the program notes, Sobel uses puppets “to say what might be taboo for people to say,” and bless her for it, because this means a lot of smut-talking puppets.

Sobel and her co-puppeteer Kirsten Kammermeyer manipulate a puppet troupe that includes a sage but sassy Bay Area lesbian, her orgasmically-stymied married pal, a variety of singing vegetables that are longer than they are wide, a trio of vagina beauty contestants, all ten fingers, and a back massager with a familiar Austrian accent. We also get a special guest appearance from an exceptionally flamboyant, singing, satin-and-leopard-print-velour vulva puppet from House O’Chicks, a San Francisco sex-ed outfit that doesn’t seem to want my business.

Finger Love functions more as a public service announcement than a legitimate drama, but this seems to suit Sobel’s purposes precisely. The mass of public knowledge on the subject is somewhat slender. For instance, recent research published in the New York Times has put the female orgasm’s evolutionary function into question, while others have speculated that the phenomenon doesn’t belong to women at all, but merely a genetically distinct subset of the gender. Some deeper understanding is warranted and if the puppets want to take us there, then I say we go with them. If they’ll let me go. I may not be invited.

In conclusion, I thought Finger Love was a hoot. Sobel’s piece is vulgar, filthy, profane, and delightful. If your strongly-held religious convictions won’t hold you back and you can stand blushing for a full thirty minutes, you just might enjoy yourself.

The Kimono Loosened
reviewed by Kyle Ancowitz

Yuki Kawahisa has accomplished something remarkable in her solo show, The Kimono Loosened. It won’t surprise anyone who hears her heavily Japanese-accented English to know that it is not her mother tongue. (She claims, in the program notes, to have hated studying English grammar at her ESL school in Vancouver.) Still, her skillful performance in a foreign language is eclipsed only by the play itself, which is a subtle and unnerving puzzle that amounts to genuine poetry.

Kimono tells the story of Tsukiko, a young Japanese girl who is sold to a Geisha house by her father—to say more would spoil the surprises. Kawahisa, with the cooperation of director/dramaturge Maureen Robinson, doesn’t linger on the exoticism of the Geisha figure; there is remarkably little that’s sentimental or romantic in this piece. Through the scenes of Tsukiko’s unhappy childhood, which are interspersed with dreams, layers of narrative gently peel away to reveal a lurid gothic thriller that recalls Edgar Allen Poe. Tsukiko’s doll, Sakura, who according to the Japanese tradition has a living spirit, becomes Tsukiko’s sole confidant and avenging angel. The proposition that Tsukiko’s doll lives seems terrifyingly plausible by the end of the play.

I was impressed with Kawahisa’s determination to create stillness and silence within her performance. Less confident performers lack the patience that she has to generate the atmosphere of mystery and menace that pervades the play, but she is saving the best for last. The intensity and detail of the characterizations deepen significantly as the play progresses. Kawahisa performs all the roles herself, dressed in sumptuous traditional Japanese garments and attended only by masked silhouettes that represent her mother and father. Grandmother, the Geisha house owner, memorably appears halfway through the piece to score some unexpected laughs. Late in the play, Kawahisa becomes mesmerizing as the vividly sensual older Tsukiko. The sexuality in the play is unabashedly unhealthy and never divorced from the sense of subjugation that tattoos Tsukiko’s life, but it still smuggles a lip-curling thrill.

The real success is the play itself. The language is disarmingly simple and unmannered, but Kawahisa gingerly layers fiction, fable, and the mystique of a faraway place in another era into an entrancing creation sweetly poisoned with the taboo. If the final sequence of dreams and fantasies confuse the storytelling somewhat, it doesn’t diminish the final moment, when we sense that the enchained crimes of the mother, the daughter, the enchanted doll, the possessors and the possessed, the punished and the punishers have all blended together until their separate identities are lost and forgotten. The performance ends with a crisp final tableau in which the doll, the mother’s mask, and Tsukiko’s living face are briefly, but startlingly, indistinguishable.

Trash
reviewed by Richard Hinojosa

I have an almost unavoidable attraction to trash. Not the stinky kind, but the little treasures that people kick to the curb thinking the stuff worthless. The thing that’s so great about trash is that, as playwright David M. White accurately points out, “you never know what you might find.” That said, the producers of the FringeNYC have found a little nugget of gold in White’s one-act comedy Trash.

Set in southwestern Missouri, Trash is at its heart a love story. Bob is the proprietor of a junk yard who has been going steady with Melissa, a convenience store clerk, for seven years. We find out that Bob has contracted HIV in a manner that is one in a million (though exactly how was not altogether clear to me). Their relationship is pushed over the edge when Melissa announces that she is going away for about a year to help open some new stores. This sends Bob into a tailspin of depression. Meanwhile, Bob’s best friend, a kinetic artist named Winter, is building a giant trebuchet that will have the ability to launch large pieces of junk great distances for the sake of art (I suppose).

What appeals to me the most about Trash is its characters. White never falls into the trappings of writing stereotypical “hick” or “white trash” characters which can be so easy to do, especially when writing comedy; instead he creates characters that are at any given moment as funny as they are vulnerable. This creates a wonderful balance. Bob spends as much time taking action to get what he wants as he does trying to take his mind off things with beer and pot. Distraction seems to be an underlying theme in Trash. Whether it’s weed, going away, or launching refrigerators they all seek a distraction from the realities of their lives (as do we all).

Director Doc Love has an excellent eye for staging comedy. He keeps both a snappy pace and his actors on the same page stylistically. My favorite feature of his direction is his staging of the stage crew (Bill Kennedy and Jeff Lange) who provide not only set changes but all the homemade sound effects as well. For some reason only Winter can see the stage crew. This makes for a surreal injection into this already strange world.

The cast is a power trio led by Will Manning as Bob. Manning excels at endearing his character to us without stepping across the line into sappy. Katie Gilchrist makes Melissa so likeable and yet unattainable that we feel Bob’s plight even more. Finally, Joseph Langham steps in as Winter and works comic magic with just a simple expression or gesture.

So if you’re looking at a great comedy that never scoffs at its characters, then Trash is your bag.

Pride and Soul
reviewed by Stan Richardson

In the basement of their Staten Island apartment, Pride Jones airs her eponymous public access show, assisted by her lover, co-writer and drummer, the monosyllabic Papa Soul. "The Pride Jones Show" is a hodgepodge of live music, d-list celebrity interviews, and reality-TV competitions, and Pride’s dream is to have it aired on Manhattan Cable Access, in addition to Staten Island. In fact, during the hour long “telecast” (the show within the FringeNYC show Pride and Soul), she is waiting anxiously for the cable company to call with a yea or nay.

Though promising, Pride and Soul, which was created by its performers Stephanie Marshall (as Pride Jones and others) and Keith “Wild Child” Middleton (as Papa Soul and others), suffers from many of the same problems that plague its fictional counterpart: a wishy-washy identity. The duo clumsily borrow rather than steal (i.e., digest and transform) the conceits and comic techniques of their pop-culture ancestry—from SNL’s “Wayne’s World” to the films of Christopher Guest to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. There is all the attendant making-do of broadcasting from one’s basement; there are the perils of being unable to properly manage one’s image when a camera is recording everything documentary/reality-style; and there is the downtrodden sense of the musician/personality who feels destined for something larger than… Staten Island.

The show’s greatest assets right now are the songwriting and performing—fresher and more substantive than most of the other bits (with the possible exception of the televised interview with a neo-Blacksploitation action film diva, which is quite funny). Still there are a number of poor choices and cheap jokes that undercut the audience’s sympathetic response (desperately needed in this kind of show): harassing and hateful phone calls from Pride’s mother and grandmother, signifying nothing useful; some improbable miscommunications between the pair which “result in” some predictable predicaments; and a general (if unspoken) sense that Papa Soul feels trapped and unhappy with Pride, who obviously adores him.

Marshall and Middleton are smart and witty actor/writers, but in order for us to care, they must make stronger decisions about the satiric focus of Pride and Soul, and consider lowlighting some of their characters’ failures. Like it or not, in the creation of art, failure is built-in.

Magician
reviewed by Judith Jarosz

I have a fondness for magic and illusion. For most of us, as children, from the first moment some relative pulls a quarter from behind our ear at a family gathering, we are hooked to some degree. In Magician, an eerie play for two women written by Katherine Knowles, we are treated to various enjoyable illusions throughout (nicely coached by Illusion Design & Magic Coach Nelson Lugo), but the point of the piece is confusing.

Although in general magicians are typically thought of as male, the lead in this play is a female named simply The Magician. As portrayed by Amy Landecker, The Magician slinks around the stage with a sensual confidence while performing magic and tells us a story of hiring three successive assistants, all female. Landecker’s character relays how empowering magic is for her, and how she hopes to help other females find that empowerment. But with each assistant something eventually goes wrong in the magician / assistant relationship.

Jenn Remke is versatile and believable as three very different assistants. The first two—Jennifer, a groupie, who is obsessed not only with magic, but with The Magician herself; and Jayne, the dowdy librarian, who blossoms into a extravert of frightening proportions—have both been hurt by men in their lives. The Magician feels she can help them with their confidence, but in both cases, it backfires. The third assistant, Morgana, claims never to have been hurt by a man. With Morgana, The Magician seems to have finally found a well-adjusted, focused professional who should work out wonderfully. But, as with the others, something changes, and another power struggle ensues. Without giving too much away, The Magician manages to remove the first two assistants from her life, but hits a roadblock with the third.

Landecker has some nice moments as an actor (there is a disturbing flashback in a deserted amusement park that is very intense) but other than that scene, I find it hard to have much sympathy for this somewhat ruthless character. While the piece seems to want to support powerful women, it also seems to say that powerful women cannot find enough common ground to function effectively together.

The simple set by Seth Easter works effectively, and there are some very nice lighting and sound effects by Joel E. Silver and Jeffrey Scott Benish. The costumes by Robert Strong Miller are attractive and well thought out, and director Todd Lundquist keeps the action flowing smoothly. Although the production is interesting to watch, in the end I am left feeling that Magician is not empowering for men or women.