FringeNYC 2005 Reviews - Page 8

Emily DickinsongS
reviewed by Martin Denton

The brAdS Company comes to FringeNYC from Prato, Italy to present their 30-minute dance theatre work Emily DickinsongS. This by itself should be enough to make you excited to see their show: the "International" in the New York International Fringe Festival gets taken for granted all too often, I think. But it's one of the truly invaluable aspects of FringeNYC, allowing a cross-cultural sharing that begins with performance and ends, if things go the way they should, with discussions afterward and at the formal public forums of FringeU and the informal ones at FringeCLUB and elsewhere.

Regular readers of nytheatre.com know that dance is not my "beat"; I just don't have the vocabulary to adequately conjure this kind of theatre in print. But I'm glad to have seen Emily DickinsongS and I will give it my best shot.

It is, as the title suggests, a work wrapped up in the poetical wanderings of the great American writer Emily Dickinson. Fragments of her verse are heard (or nearly heard) among the electronic/international music, Italian dialogue, and deliberate noise that serve as the show's soundtrack. But her persona is invoked visually more than aurally here; what I finally decided about Emily DickinsongS, with its disturbing and brutal choreographed depictions of rape and abuse and its dark evocations of bitter lonely spaces, is that it's a journey through the terrors of this insular poet's imagination—a nightmarish vision of the ugly side of humanity that Dickinson shut herself off from.

Much of the show, which is directed by Monica Bucciantini and performed by a company of seven that includes Giulia Bini, Giulia Mannelli, Carlo Marsili, Lisa Santi, Armando Tarantino, Giovanni Villari, and Buccantini herself, happens in the dimmest of light, leaving us to view the action in silhouette; occasional flashes of very bright light punctuate the twilight. (Lighting and sound are by Michele Ciappi.)

After an initial segment in which the company executes disparate, almost anarchic movements all around the space, come three danced almost-narratives. The first depicts an assault on a lonely, delicate woman; the second is a night out at the movies; and the third is what I took to be a kind of revenge fantasy featuring the dancer from the first piece. In between there's an eye-filling processional featuring the dancers alone and in various groupings, interacting with a seemingly endless film of silky white cloth.

I couldn't assign literal meaning to most of what occurred here, which goes against my grain; and I can't say that I found it beautiful. But the images have proven resilient and memorable, and the feelings they inspired at the performance and thereafter really do jive with what the company says about its work in the program: "it's the violence that turns us into our own sacrificial victims."

FringeNYC is about, above all else, stretching ourselves as theatregoers and artists to experience something unique and enlarging. Emily DickinsongS epitomizes this ideal. Don't get bogged down in the familiar: welcome these visitors from Italy with open arms and heart.

Sitchaassdown
reviewed by Yuval Boim

In an impromptu talkback session after the performance I saw at Dixon Place, Kanene Holder recounted the inspiration for the title of her one-woman show. While walking down the street, Holder encountered a woman attempting to get her resisting son into a car; flustered with his insolence and her inability to control him, the woman yelled, “SITCHAASDOWN!”. In an effort to portray her version of the urban African American experience, Holder presents Sitchaasdown, a collection of colorful characters who speak through poetry that she has written over the past few years.

Though not a seasoned performer, Holder is a natural player who has the ability to plunge with ease into the skin of her characters, merging their physicality, voice, and state of being into homogenous theatrical personae. When successful, a haunting quality arrives as these pedestrian characters speak in the contemporary and idiosyncratic meters of Holder’s verse. In one instance, a character—a young woman adorned in clothes from famous fashion labels—explains “Why I am a Ghetto-Bourgeois-Girl.” Because the transition into the poetry (which is at times specific and effective and at times overly effusive) is managed with subtlety, we become aware of a bizarre and striking juxtaposition between this believable character and the language she is speaking. We briefly enter into a world where a drugged-up prostitute, a homeless woman, and Condoleezza Rice rhyme and alliterate.

However, the production itself lacks craft. Holder’s enthusiasm and generosity throw her off balance. Lack of clarity in how to convey her ideas to her spectators tempts her to throws too many ingredients into the pot. She and her director, Nyaae, have not sufficiently structured the playing space. Holder spends most of her time on stage within a few feet of the first row of the audience in this already intimate space. She is so eager to share her vision that she anxiously hurls it into her audience’s lap, literally. The challenge of transitioning between characters, often embraced and celebrated with virtuosity in most one-person shows, is here entirely ignored. Holder retreats into a visible corner of the stage to perform quite elaborate and untheatrical costume changes that curtail whatever energy and focus she works so hard to build. The uneven lighting and sound become distracting, and I felt bad for Holder who, at the end of the show I saw, wound up bowing in the dark because of a technical glitch. While the overall effect of the piece is that of an informal living-room performance, it looks as if Holder, who has a good eye and ear and a lot to say about the world around her, possesses a spirit, that when combined with maturity in skill, will one day allow her to reach and entertain her audience in an accessible way.

Layla's Sahra
reviewed by Stan Richardson

What keeps the delightful Layla’s Sahra from becoming "My Big Fat [Insert Ethnicity Here] Wedding" is a healthy self-awareness and lack of sentimentality. A sahra, the useful program note explains, is the Arabic version of the tamer “rehearsal dinner” most Anglo Americans enjoy on the night before a wedding. But at a sahra, no thoughts are put towards place settings or even cost: it is a raucous party where one gorges, dances, and, in the groom’s case, gets a haircut. This latter ceremony is the focal event of Lena Rizkallah’s play-skit currently in performances at the Linhart Theatre.

Layla learns that her husband-to-be must participate in said ceremony—sitting in a chair in the midst of drummers, belly dancers, and plates of hummus—or else she will have to undergo an even more archaic tradition of having her privates waxed in front of all of her female relatives. She spends the next hour fretting over whether the fiancé in question—one Paul DeLucio (who saw his own stylist that morning)—will be able to tolerate this particular culture clash.

But Rizkallah has created some great opportunities for performers (not least of all for herself, playing Layla’s ultra-casual older sister Tata), and director Waleed F. Zuaiter (who also appears as Tata’s hairdresser husband, Samir) keeps the silliness sharply focused. Indeed, Rizkallah and Zuaiter stand out in this very funny ensemble, which also showcases the talents of Laith Nakhli and Ryan Shrime as a couple of “assimilated Arabs” who enjoy dancing in clubs, picking up women, and wearing the kind of jewelry commonly called “bling bling.” Tamar Verizian and Michael Keith Davis are a sweet couple in the less crazy roles of Laylah and Paul, while Lameece Isaaq and Najla Said nicely round out the terrific ensemble as, respectively, Laylah’s Mother whose worries include in which of the five freezers she should store the legs of lamb, and her grandmother, who is entirely unperturbed by the perpetual epiphany that she keeps eating Tic-Tacs rather than taking her memory medication.

Go see this one.

The Cross
reviewed by David Hilder

In his solo piece The Cross, Toby Wherry plays a man whose job it will be to walk from one point on the stage to another. For nearly an hour, he explores why he would make such a move—what is either compelling him toward point B, or driving him away from point A. This is a long-form exploration of an actor’s motivation, but unfortunately it adds up to little more than navel-gazing.

Beginning with a banjo setting of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (though that choice, specific as it is, is never clearly integrated into the play itself), The Cross becomes almost entirely an exploration of this man’s relationships with various women—all imaginary—he might be going to meet, and who seem to cause him a fair amount of angst. But the women, the crucial other characters in the play, never hold interest, despite some nicely detailed descriptive writing. In fact, The Cross only really comes to life when Wherry talks about two men: the man one of his ex-girlfriends ends up with, and the man who gives him his driving test. Otherwise, without any actual investment in the choices he’s making (because, after all, we’re ultimately examining an actor’s choice to make sense of taking five steps), the audience is left with no reason to care.

Laura Strausfeld’s direction is vague. Wherry has a tendency to lose breath before the ends of some of his longer phrases. And so The Cross adds up to less than the sum of its evanescent parts.

The Comedy of Terrors
reviewed by Alexander Zalben

The Comedy of Terrors by Larry Brenner is a spectacularly unfunny modern morality play, clearly meant to be deliciously ribald and naughty, but instead falling well short of its intended goal.

The plot, as it were, concerns a naïve young man who is sent to Hell to either be tempted by sin, or learn that Hell is bad. While there, the demons in charge learn that Satan has been gone from Hell for over a year, which leads to all… Hell… breaking loose. Each of the demons tries to wrest control of Hell for themselves, leading to five or six different intersecting plots of farcical mix-ups. In the end, Satan returns, sets everything right, and the young man learns that sinning is bad.

I really don’t want to focus too much on the negative aspects of this production, as it is part of a very nice program called “Big Break,” which allows local college students the chance to perform in a professional level production. For that, the show should be commended.

Additionally, there is some nice acting work from Mark Metivier as Satan, who brings a low-key intensity to his role, and actually ekes out a laugh or two. Gil Parkin and Bridget Burke, as demons, also bring a laudable amount of commitment to their work, and should go on to perform in bigger and better shows.

The standout, though, is Mary Elizabeth MiCari’s costume design, which manages to vary from Elizabethan to Dominatrix without missing a beat. McCari has created a cohesive vision of a Hell from many different styles and eras, even when the script clearly does not.

One last little note, and this is a personal one. For some unknown reason, the curtain call is taken over the cheese-classic song “Monster Mash.” Why? Absolutely none of the elements of the play has anything to do with the song. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say it’s totally inappropriate, as the song is all about every kind of monster that demons are NOT. And this is exemplary of the amount this show just gets wrong.

Byuioo
reviewed by Ross Peabody

Byuioo, a strong new play by Nate Weida, is a gibberish musical, performed entirely in a gibberish language akin to English, via Portuguese, via your one-year-old niece. This play confuses me a bit, but not for the obvious reasons. Indeed, the language barrier is far from an impediment to the understanding of the play. It is a simple story, simply told. It is never difficult to follow, which is a tribute to everyone involved in the show.

I should back up here. Byiuoo (bee-you-you) means "beauty" in the language of the play. The story itself is a fable. Based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, it is the story of Mogo, whose loving mother dies in childbirth and is left with a hateful father. He is very quickly spirited off to be put in the charge of Kip, the narrator, and his partner, Raksha. They are the head of the pack of monkeys and other animals (Baloo, Basheera, Akela, Rikki Tikki Tavi, etc.), and also a group of street urchins who simultaneously act out the roles of the animals, and tell the story of Mogo, or really, of Byuioo. Mogo is raised lovingly by this happy family (and worshipped, in a way, for his beauty and purity of soul) until he is kidnapped by the circus (apparently to be tormented and to do interpretive dances for money), freed by Baloo and Bashira, and kidnapped again at gunpoint. The story itself is a lament to what the world can do to a pure soul and a paean to the power inherent in that purity to affect those that it comes in contact with.

Despite the clarity of tale, and the surprising clarity of the language, I still don't know what this ambitious show is. I do know that this is a collaboration by a phenomenally talented 24-person cast, crew, and band (I must, though, single out Zachary Mordechai as the Tom Waits- and Dizzy Gillespie-infused Akela, who shines bright in a sea of bright stars). The tribal, funky, percussive, and essentially easy-going music is finely crafted by Weida and his band. The sets, costumes, and lights by Steven T. Royal, Jr. infuse the play with a vivid life, and David Jefferson Sorrell's direction (he also plays the evil Khan) is generally flawless and taut with a very professional and satisfying sheen.

It is this very commercially professional sheen that leaves me with something of a quandary. This play is a fable about the perfection of beauty and love, and the experience of losing that and learning from it. It has all the makings of a theatrical feast of emotional catharsis. However, we never experience the highs that are described to us that can be found in purity, nor do we ever experience the terror of that purity being ripped away. This play is so by-the-book well-made that it has abandoned a sense of beauty for a palatable accessibility. It is very good, but it's not compelling.

The choice of gibberish as the native language of the piece is particularly curious. This choice, in this play, leaves me with the belief that Byuioo can only be one of two things: either a fantastic audience-pleasing play that is hindered by misplaced '60s avant-gardist sensibilities, or, more likely, a stunningly executed and wonderfully produced acting class workshop that ultimately uses gibberish to show off the great talents of the cast at illustrating big ideas through other-verbal performance tools instead of using it to actually examine those ideas.

The Irish Curse
reviewed by Timothy Fannon

Have you heard the joke about the bald guy, the short guy, the gay guy, the priest, and the Irishman all sitting around talking about the size of their schlongs? Actually, this is no joke—it is the primary concern of Martin Casella’s witty and poignant new play, The Irish Curse, performing with the New York International Fringe Festival at the Linhart Theatre.

Four New Yorkers meet weekly in a church basement in Brooklyn Heights looking for therapeutic release from their shared malign—the “Irish curse.” A young Irishman joins the group and immediately begins to challenge their own insecurities and hopes. Each man finds some salvation over the course of the meeting—strengthening his own sense of self as well as the bond shared by the group as a whole.

The acting ensemble is phenomenal—Brian Leahy, Eddie Korbich, Howard Kaye, William McCauley, and Roderick Hill give true definition to the five struggling men and are completely engaged in each other’s work. The humor, emotion, and total presence expelled by the actors is palpable to the audience.

I was thoroughly taken by the show. Maybe its because I’m a guy, maybe its because I’m Irish, maybe its because I’ve sat around with my buddies talking about the size of our dicks. But I don’t think so. I attribute my response to the well-crafted and fully engaging language, the simplicity, economy, and groundedness of Matt Lenz’s direction, and the committed and genuine performances. All of the artists involved should be commended for their thoroughness, presence, and vulnerability.

Yes, the play is about five men talking the entire time about the size of their dicks. But in a perversion of our “big-dick”-centric culture, they are busy discussing how little their dicks are. Over the course of the play their conversation unmasks truthful questions of identity, masculinity, relationships, social status, and sex in a compelling and comic way.

What is most effective about the work is that the playwright is not simply writing comedy or endowing his characters with the desire to merely find an outlet to complain or grumble about their conditions. The play is ultimately about hope and perseverance, about the camaraderie necessary to get through difficult times and the joy and release of human expression. I highly recommend the experience.

Pierrot le Quin
reviewed by Josh Chambers

Pierrot le Quin is a charming one-act by Sylvia Manning, based on the story “Pierrot” by Guy de Maupassant. It is co-directed and co-produced by Leecia Manning and Joseph Franchini. The play, set in Normandy in the 1800s, tells the story of Madam Lafevre (Michele Tauber), Rose (Dawn McGee), and their pilfered onion garden. Heeding the advice of a neighbor (billed as The Artist, and played by Franchini), Lafevre decides to acquire a guard dog to protect the imperiled patch. After an attempt to acquire a costly canine fails, The Baker (also Franchini) delivers an abandoned pooch to their doorstep free of charge.

The dog in question is the titular Pierrot (played energetically by David Carta). Things go swimmingly until the arrival of a government man (again, Franchini) who demands a dog tax. Pierrot is then quarantined to a hole in the ground, and destined to co-exist with a menagerie of orphaned mutts whose owners can’t swing the levy. When Rose and Lafevre continue to feed Pierrot through the hole, they realize that his share is being taken by the bigger dogs, and the play ends with the bittersweet assertion that they can’t feed all abandoned animals and must let Pierrot perish. The final image of the production is of the Artist pulling a pen from his coat to record the tale of Pierrot and the women.

The tone of this production is one that delights in unabashed fakery. It exalts artifice at every turn, and finds heart in a riot of hand fans, hats, purses, and faux moustachery. The sets (brilliantly conceived by Michael Wehner) are a collection of gingerbread house flats, papier-mâché onions, and windows and gift boxes that reveal severed heads and rabid dogs in the play’s more nightmarish sequences. The direction is smart throughout—most of the play’s transactions are in the medium of the Dumb Show, where plot points are traversed using no dialogue and a highly illustrative physical acting style, all to the accompaniment of a crack band of musicians, (Jeremy Lang, harmonica; Scott Neagle, clarinet; and Lars Potteiger, accordion). Some of the finest moments in this production are when the band, lights (moodily designed by Ethan Kaplan), actors, and text conspire to deliver moments of dramatic collision, as when the silent screams of Tauber are subversively carried by Neagle’s wailing clarinet.

The play traffics in the emotional shorthand of fairy tales, where plot is inherently arousing and the audience is required to fill in characterization with archetypes acquired through memory and direct experience with tragedy. I found moments of revelation in the juxtaposition of the fake and visceral, such as when Franchini is crying tears over the fate of Pierrot at the end of the play. The tears are very real and yet he is spilling them over the drapery of a very large and very obviously pasted on moustache. Incongruities such as this elevate Pierrot le Quin from a quaint crowd-pleaser to a more expansive piece of theatrical commentary.

David Carta has the hardest acting job, and his characterization of the dog Pierrot is the play’s only true directorial misstep. It is my belief that he should have been allowed to flourish in the realm of the false, or in the crammed iconography of the rest of the play, rather than be asked to laboriously mimic the specific physicality of an actual canine. The dog in the first transaction between Rose, Leferve, and the Artist is represented by a stuffed Coney Island-type prize, which to me, sings beautifully in the appropriate key of this touching and accomplished production.

Surviving David
reviewed by Margie Stokley

Surviving David, written and performed by Kathy Graf, is the true story of a widow's journey back to life and an actress's journey into the spotlight after the sudden and tragic death of her husband. After 20 years of marriage, 51-year-old David Graf (known to us for his role as Tackleberry in the Police Academy films) suffers a heart attack that leaves Kathy single, the sole parent of two sons, and in the shadow of David's larger-than-life legacy. Graf takes us through the day prior, the wedding where the heart attack occurred, the hospital, and the many months of grief and longing that followed.

The reality that she has not seen her husband since April 2001 is a current that runs throughout this very intimate solo show. Her unabashed sexuality is hard to watch, not because it seems untrue, but because you wish David were there to witness it instead of you.

Graf wrote and developed this piece with Michael Raynor, and it is directed beautifully by Tony Sears. In the play, Graf plays herself, the doctor, her own father, David himself, a medium she meets while hiking and hitting on an ex-boyfriend in the Hollywood Hills, and most impressively her two sons. The reality of her loss grounds all her jokes, gestures, and shifts of character. She flirtatiously gives you time to breathe, and can take your breath away just as easily. For me, the most heart-wrenching shift is in an episode where she is bent over, looking for her shoes at the wedding, while simultaneously portraying a stranger screaming "Your husband!"

Graf gives us a landscape of loss, sometimes hard to watch, but full of humor and bravely told.

Jesus in Montana
reviewed by Eric Michael Kochmer

Jesus in Montana is about one man’s journey from growing up in Mississippi, making home movies to the chagrin of his grandmother, and living with his right-wing aunt and uncle who inform him on a regular basis that indeed he will be go to hell; to going to college, dropping out, and then finding his destiny—which happens to be, of course, a branch of Christianity that believes that Christ has been resurrected in Missoula, Montana as an 80-year-old man. Through a vast array of cleverly conceived visual aids, writer-performer Barry Smith tells us tales of hitchhiking, right-wing ideology, and the dream of the sweet apocalypse in this clever one-man show.

Smith guides us through his story of discovery and growth, his humorist's voice mixed with paranoia and warmth that makes most in the audience fall into a laughing state. It is a tale of fall, redemption, fall, and awakening. Happily the awakening comes when Smith finally realizes that he has been worshiping a Jesus-wannabe who has been (most likely rightfully) convicted of child molestation, and that he has lost all of his worldly possessions in the process.

Smith, is most definitely a traditional humorist in the same vein as David Sedaris or Garrison Keillor. Theirs is most assuredly not an easy task: they must go out there each night bearing their souls while seeming calm and relaxed about it, ready to poke fun at what is most embarrassing about themselves; but I believe that it is a certain therapy for them.

I think that not only is this piece hilarious and a must-see piece of work, but I think that it is incredibly socially relevant to our political times. This piece depicts a man who is really trying to be passionate about something, finds his religion to be passionate about, and then blinds himself to the reality around him. He comes out of his trance and is able to laugh at himself and the Bible. If only we could be so lucky with the rest of this country.

Jesus in Montana is directed by Lynn Aliya.

The Silent Concerto
reviewed by Joe LaRue

Alejandro Morales’s The Silent Concerto is an incredibly ambitious play, which has received a lovely production expertly staged by Scott Ebersold.

"This is a play he begins again and again," says Naldo, the central character in a two-man, one-woman love triangle between tortured twenty-somethings in the mid '90s. Naldo is an aspiring playwright, desperately trying to write the perfect play, a play that will make his struggling actress / roommate / best friend, Mallory, a star. The trouble begins when Benny—who is gorgeous, flip, and mysterious enough to attract both of them—moves into their small apartment. It’s a setup that has the characters running in a circle: Mallory wants Naldo, who wants Benny, who wants... both of them? Neither?

As the drama unfolds, we are treated to a series of highly inventive staging and story-telling techniques, jumping back and forth between fantasy and reality, the past and the present—jumps which are kept very clear through lighting, sound, and staging. The technical accomplishments are effective and admirable.

The big standout here is Susan O’Connor as Mallory, who is always so nuanced and engaging—a razor sharp presence on stage. She infuses Mallory with an honest yearning for artistic greatness that, even when failing miserably, never once becomes whiny or self-pitying. Greg Marcel and Ivan Quintanilla have many nice moments, but their performances are not as finely drawn, and are overshadowed by O’Connor’s presence. I longed for the play to focus more on Mallory.

The first two “movements,” as Morales calls them (rather than acts) are filled with witty repartee, imagination, and enough specificity to make us forget that we are watching another love triangle story. It’s only in the play’s final scenes that it loses momentum and focus. It seems as though every young writer has a "post-college angst" play collecting dust in a drawer somewhere. What’s refreshing about The Silent Concerto is that Morales has taken his out, brushed it off, and looked at it again with wiser eyes.

Yes, We Have No Bananas!
reviewed by Kelly McAllister

Yes, We Have No Bananas! is everything a Fringe show should be—adventurous, silly, and experimental. It’s refreshingly original and fun. I don’t mean fun like a few smiles here and there fun, I mean fun like you remember how joyous theatre can and should be. It’s hard to pigeonhole this show, which is written, directed, choreographed, and performed by Charlotte Schiøler (assisted by Marianne Ilum Sørensen and David Trétiakoff Ghéron), into any one category—which I always think is a good sign—but I guess you could call it an experimental drama/dance piece with elements of absurdism, performance art, and Dadaism.

But none of those words give the right amount of credence to this smart, funny show. The plot, which I quote here from the press release, goes like this: “A woman dances to Nordic songs, gets hungry, eats her skirt and gets into a fight with her piano. She cries out for help, but all she gets is whipped cream, and too much of it, so…she takes a bath in a tub on wheels, changes skin color, and develops an enormous brain with which she gets stuck in a doorway. Decides this is too much, and that she just wants to be a housewife in Alabama.” And that’s not all of it, but you get the idea.

This is an absurd tale about our modern world, told through dance, song, a vaudevillian type of stand-up comedy, and pure inspiration. There’s also audience interaction—which I recommend. On the day I saw the show, both of my companions and myself enjoyed bananas covered in whipped cream given to us by Schiøler.

Schiøler is a force of life on stage. She captures the attention and imagination of the audience immediately, and keeps them for the entire hour of the show. She is backed up by two silent dancers, Johanne Chasle and Mimi Seear, who act at times as comic relief, scenery movers, commentators, and more. Both Chasle and Seear are excellent in their roles. The entire show is underscored by percussionist Renato Tonini, whose music is the perfect complement to the show. So, if you’re looking for a smart, brief (just under an hour) show that pushes boundaries, Yes, We Have No Bananas! is for you.