nytheatre Archive
FringeNYC 2000

SHOW REVIEWS ON THIS PAGE: SEE BOB RUN, CUBAN OPERATOR PLEASE..., GABRIEL, YO-LAND, AMERICAN SLAVE CODE, WHITE TRASH/WHYWORK.COM, THE COMPLETE LOST WORKS..., SOOLA (A MYSTERY)

SEE BOB RUN by Eric Winick · August 18, 2000
In Daniel MacIvor’s gripping one-woman play See Bob Run, it’s clear from the onset that something has happened. The nature of this something is not made clear until the end, but with each seed sown, a terrible tragedy takes shape. Along the way, we are treated to moments, snapshots of a life, as a young woman (Sophia Martin) named Roberta (Bob for short) takes to the road, unspooling her wretched tale to any driver who’ll listen. Bob is on the run from a severely dysfunctional family, a bitch of a best girlfriend, and a rock-n-roll beau who’s apparently a pretty bad songwriter. Framing the story is a fairy tale, in which Bob casts herself as a poor, misunderstood princess beset by forces beyond her control, longing for comfort of her father’s touch. That her father’s touch is revealed to be, well, beyond fatherly is but one of the revelations in See Bob Run that contribute to its growing sense of menace and despair. While Bob is able to develop a seemingly healthy sexual appetite in the wake of her father’s meddling, the scars run deep: her first relationship (with a young man tellingly identified as “Timmy Prince”) turns quickly sour, the sex a nightmare of pain and torment. Solace can only be found in the “ideal” memories of her childhood, into which Bob escapes repeatedly. Although these scenes hint at the revulsion with which those around her came to view Bob’s relationship with her father, Bob is unable to fathom this revulsion. Given the powerhouse nature of MacIvor’s script, it’s a shame that Dreamtime Productions’ presentation can’t match its intensity. Not yet, anyway. Ms. Martin, an Australian actress with plenty of raw talent, has one hell of a workout playing Bob. The pain’s there, in her eyes, and if on the night I caught the show she wasn’t quite capturing the fury raging within her character’s battered psyche, it was evident that with time, she’d get there. Performance issues aside, attention should be paid to this frightfully compelling play. By the time See Bob Run reaches its shocking conclusion, you’re on the edge of your seat – angry and frustrated, yet thoroughly bewitched.
CUBAN OPERATOR PLEASE... by Martin Denton · August 18, 2000
Cuban Operator Please... is an exquisite work of theatre: it's incontestably the finest show I've seen thus far at Fringe NYC, and undoubtedly will rank among the best of the Festival when all is said and done. This bilingual (English and Spanish) one-act memory play about a young man dealing with the imminent death of his father is profoundly wise and moving, and it's written with poetic economy by first-time playwright Adrian Rodriguez. There are just three characters: Abel, a young Cuban-American living in Union City, New Jersey; and--in Abel's memory--his father and mother. He recalls his mother as she was when he was a boy, struggling with her English as she attempts to make a long-distance call to relatives back in Cuba (a problematic task, he explains, with both third-world economics and cold world politics conspiring against its easy accomplishment). And he recalls his father, who at this moment lays in a hospital bed dying; and he tries to understand what happened to this man: driven by politics from his homeland, his family, and his dreams; his vitality and pride slowly eaten away by the cold Union City climate and thirty bitter years in a low-paying job in an embroidery factory. Cuban Operator Please... is a tale about understanding, with Abel coming to terms with his father's immigrant past. But it contains other riches in its honest and unsentimental depiction of that immigrant life: for this child of third-generation Americans, Rodriguez's portrayal of the lives of these more recent arrivals to America is both instructive and deeply resonant. Arian Blanco has staged the show beautifully, and all three actors are exceptional. I'll not soon forget Omar Hernandez (Abel) leafing silently through old photo albums; or Jose Antonio (Father) animatedly recollecting his days in Cuba as a young baseball player; or Mercy Valladares (Mother) summoning up all the courage and conviction in the world to try to make that overseas call: "Cuban Operator Please..."
GABRIEL by Martin Denton · August 17, 2000
The story that Gabriel has to tell is a worthy one, indeed; I wish it told it better. Playwright-director Sandra Stockley has reached back to a forgotten episode of American history that took place almost exactly two hundred years ago. Gabriel Prosser, a 24-year-old slave on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, led a thousand-man uprising against the White population, only to have it end in ruins amid a horrendous rain storm. There was also treachery in the ranks: betrayal by a fellow slave named Pharoah led to the capture of Gabriel's brother and then his own arrest. As I said, there's an exciting and interesting tale here. Yet Gabriel feels both heavier and tamer than its subject matter might suggest: serious to the point of reverence, the production never lets us forget the deep and unfathomable ugliness of slavery, but at the same time it never shows us the humanity of its hero, apart from some justified but overstated righteous anger. Gabriel is structured as a long monologue delivered by the title character (well-played by Shawn Shepard), with occasional interruptions for choral commentary and movement by two women in white (Vanessa Turrisi and Sandra Stockley). It's earnest and it's unsettling, but it's relentlessly dark and, alas, finally uninvolving. Even at 40 minutues, this is a difficult sit.
YO-LAND by Tim Cusack · August 16, 2000
Mummy doesn’t get home from work for hours, and Dad hasn’t been home for years. You and your best bloke have the run of the council flat in those dreary hours around tea time. What to do as you wait for your life to really begin? Maybe steal some of the old slag’s syrupy wine and stuff yourselves full of yummy jellies. Go play in the nursery that she’s keeping stocked with baby toys for when the cute chap round the corner knocks you up. This at least is what I imagine about the lives of the two girls in Yo-Land, a dance theatre piece by the London-based Kunstwerk-Blend company. Bewigged in identical shag haircuts, wearing thrift-store Cyndi Lauper finery, Viv Dogan Corringham and Sophia Lycouris are teenagers who haven’t given up the punk. The Dadaist manifesto that greets us as we enter suggests this after-school scenario. Don’t forget, the boys at Café Voltaire were the first adolescents to make chaos and call it art. These girls, too, just want to have fun—but there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Somehow these two have gotten their hands on a machine that goofs with the voice—delaying it, deepening it, creating loops, making music out of nothing at all. While one (I think it’s Corringham) lies on the floor creating a soundscape from her own vocalizing, Lycouris crouches, folds in on herself, skims/jumps on her hands and knees. The comfort of infant floor play is hard to resist. Gradually she finds her feet. Legs flung up into the air suggest ballet classes dragged to as a child, and tiny gestures seem to trace half-remembered dance combinations in the air as she balances on toes. She loses interest in dancing; plays with her hair which obscures most of her face, the way pubescent girls like it; points an accusing finger. Who did this to her, suspended her between the freedom of a girl child and the burdensome knowledge of an adult woman? When she drags out a ridiculous pink dress, it is the party dress of a little girl; the prom dress of the teenager. She fights with it, then once she submits to wearing it, aggressively flirts with us. The dress is both the oppression of sex and its power. The game of dress-up gets out of control as her friend pulls out more and more tacky gowns and forces them onto her, until she is like some monster made out of taffeta. She counts out loud. Her passing birthdays, perhaps? How long until she turns into Mum?
AMERICAN SLAVE CODE by Tim Cusack · August 17, 2000
I am sure, dear reader, that you are acquainted with the famous expression about the road to Hell. Many of its paving stones are currently on exhibit at the Collective Unconscious. It’s not that the white men in American Slave Code don’t mean well, it’s just that the relentlessly single-minded way in which they show us the history of racism only serves to reveal their own anxieties of inadequacy and fantasies of what authentic “blackness” represents. The more earnest the effort, the less actual discourse on race relations occurs. It’s a tautological tail-chase from which this production offers no escape. The structure of the show is straightforward—the first half consists of a re- created minstrel show complete with jokes and songs; the second half, a Meeting of the Urban Plantation Anti-Abolitionist Society, whose dramatic function is to reveal the ugly subtext lurking under the high spirits and frolic of the minstrelsy. The only problem is the planned bait and switch never comes off, because the bait is not all that enticing. The material itself is too patently offensive to work on its own, and the cast simply isn’t up to the task of making us like it against our better judgment. With the exception of George McGrath, who nails the demands of the performance style in “Massa’s In the Cold, Cold Ground” to chilling effect, the cast seems smothered under their blackface, unable to carry a tune or execute a dance step. It’s creepy, like spying on a bunch of drunk, slightly self-conscious Rotarians egging each other on to increasingly ugly displays of racialist spewing. At least the minstrel show is perversely fascinating to watch. The Meeting section, on the other hand, quickly bogs down into a tedious series of orations, Biblical quotations and anecdotes supporting responsible human husbandry. There is not one iota of real conflict anywhere. If the point is to create a definition of human bondage from the owner’s point of view, it’s certainly a valid idea to explore.
WHITE TRASH/WHYWORK.COM by Martin Denton · August 18, 2000
Talented young playwright Marc Meyers demonstrates his versatility with this pairing of two short plays that couldn't be more different from one another. White Trash is a dark, somewhat bitter look at a life gone sour: Mattie, the protagonist, sits helpless on the living room couch while his nymphomaniac wife Gina has sex with his buddies in the kitchen. Notwithstanding the title (which is not particularly supported by the way these characters speak or behave, by the way), this play feels like a serious examination of an ordinary guy whose life has been temporarily derailed. Indeed, the scene where Mattie tries to get even with Gina by engaging a prostitute--the best in the play--veers closer to tragedy than to ironic satire. The prostitute is played with great skill by Inna Krieger; Edwin Sean Patterson and Melissa Bacelar seem less assured as Mattie and Gina (though, to be fair, the performance reviewed was their first before an audience). The real find here is Whywork.com, an ultra-contemporary drama that starts out as a hip comedy of manners but then shifts into unexpected and dangerous territory. It's actually structured something like Psycho, starting out with a leisurely introduction to its set of twenty-something characters, recognizable types like stressed-out ad exec Marisa, who likes to flirt in chat rooms; her geeky neighbor Ned, a film buff; and Kasdan, a retired (sic) 23-year-old computer nerd who has come to fix Marisa's virus-ridden laptop. And that's all I can tell you: you'll have to see Whywork.com for yourself to find out what happens to them. Expect witty and astute observations about the state of the world circa 2000; and some scary ones as well: this is a cautionary tale that pulls no punches and really works. Josephine Cashman is excellent as Marisa; likewise Richard Scudney as nerdy Kasdan. Direction by Blake Strasser is well-paced but perhaps not as imaginative as the material deserves.
THE COMPLETE LOST WORKS... by Tim Cusack · August 17, 2000
The dead hand of the poet is everywhere, dare we say omnipresent, in The Complete Lost Works Of Samuel Beckett As Found In An Envelope (partially burned) In A Dustbin In Paris Labeled “Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I’ll Sue! I’LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!”, the show with probably the funniest title in Fringe NYC. Ever. As much a control freak with his characters as with the performance rights to his shows, the Neo-Futurists make the point in numerous hilarious ways that the master’s much-vaunted minimalism was often only one or two degrees shy of the kind of obsessive strictures anal neurotics create for themselves to cope with a bewildering world. It’s no accident then that the Nobel laureate’s greatest pleasure at the end of his life, as revealed in a posthumous letter sent to these Chicago salvagers, was one of release: defecating. Yes, you read correctly, posthumous. The evening is salted with missives, purportedly from the Beckett estate, demanding an immediate halt to this travesty. These letters, which the cast periodically reads to the audience, start out reasonable—the lawyers want to know if any actual Beckett material is being used, where it was found, etc.—then become more and more bizarre until we realize that it’s the dead man himself who is sending the correspondence. While this metatheatrical game begins to wear a bit thin, it does link the writer who created some of the most excruciating spiritual tortures ever inflicted on creations of his with the writer who sent spies to other director’s productions to ensure the torture was being meted out to specification. The two funniest plays in the evening illustrate both the playwright as anal compulsive and sadist: Table Talk, in which a pickled brain (Beckett’s?) barks orders at a trapped Ben Schneider and Happy Happy Bunny Visits Sad Sad Owl, SBB’s earliest play, written at age seven. In Bunny/Owl, Danny Thompson recreates the original puppet show in which young Sammy first wrestles with the existential dilemma of eating one’s cupcake and having it, too. While in Talk, the curtain-raiser, rubber-faced Schneider has been put into one of those extreme physical situations Beckett liked to inflict on his characters. The play unequivocally answers once and for all the burning dramaturgical question, “Just what did Winnie do in that mound when nature called?”
SOOLA (A MYSTERY) reviewed by Martin Denton · August 16, 2000
Neal Wilkinson's hour-long multimedia play Soola (a mystery) is filled with striking poetic speech and unnerving abstract imagery, which combine to create a stark, noir-ish portrait of obsession. At its center is The Investigator--a man who may or may not be a private detective--who, after coming upon a mysterious letter, finds himself immersed in the world of a mysterious woman named Soola. The Investigator witnesses Soola's interactions with two of the men in her life, her boss Rosham and her lover Nedjum; and fancies--or fashions--these as crimes. Or perhaps they really are crimes; or perhaps the criminal is The Investigator himself. All is shrouded in thick, enigmatic obscurity, which is precisely what Wilkinson intends, I think. Information slips past so slyly that you're constantly off-guard; all that you can really grab hold of is the sexy, murky, vaguely eerie atmosphere, grittily conveyed by Elyse Seiden, Andy Waldschmidt, and Gerald Bunsen (as Soola and her men), and by the stark, brooding soundscape and video backdrop. (Unfortunately, the Henry Street Experimental Theatre, where Soola is being presented, is rather two small and echo-y to handle the sound system: dialog, in particular, is often muffled and hard to make out.) But the language is beautiful and the images are memorable: Soola (a mystery) is definitely worth exploring.