nytheatre Archive
FringeNYC 2001

SHOW REVIEWS ON THIS PAGE: One Drives While the Other Screams, An Apology ..., Si La Gente Quiere Comer Carne, Le Damos Carne, Bad-Ass and the Devil, Circus of Infinite Attractions, Chocolate in Heat, Halo

ONE DRIVES WHILE THE OTHER SCREAMS by Martin Denton
One Drives While the Other Screams, the spare and often oblique new play by David Todd, includes one terrific story idea and two gripping, well-realized performances. The great idea is of a reality TV show called "1 in 6" where contestants play Russian Roulette for a million dollars. This notion is so obviously the next step beyond "Fear Factor" and other current Signposts of Our Times that Todd should copyright it, or patent it, or whatever you do with this sort of thing before some network executive steals it from him. It’s also brutally revelatory of the short-term, celebrity-obsessed culture that ours seems, sometimes, to be turning into. Todd uses his fictional TV show both as stand-in for the pot of gold at the end of his sad sack characters’ metaphorical rainbow, and as the literalization of that "shot at redemption" that Paul Simon sang about in "You Can Call Me Al." Which brings me to those two terrific acting turns. Jeslyn Kelly plays Paula Johnson, a 25-year-old waitress who is convinced that a stint on "1 in 6" will launch her on a one-way trip to super-stardom. She has latched onto a fellow named Loren (Joshua Spafford) whose only attractions are two tickets to the game show’s studio audience and a car headed toward Los Angeles. Kelly and Spafford are consistently watchable throughout, as they negotiate weird psychological (maybe even metaphysical) terrain in a series of scenes set in same-but-different motel rooms during Paula and Loren’s cross-country journey. Todd’s drama offers occasional surprises but it’s mostly arresting talk that goes nowhere. Paula’s fixation on celebrity mirrors Loren’s phone fetish, but neither finally adds up to as much as Todd probably intends. Nevertheless, Kelly and Spafford create interesting characters and keep us engaged—and guessing—as One Drives While the Other Screams moves toward its Twilight Zone-y finish.
AN APOLOGY FOR THE COURSE AND OUTCOME OF CERTAIN EVENTS AS DELIVERED BY DOCTOR JOHN FAUSTUS ON THIS HIS FINAL EVENING by Eric Winick
A one-man show "about nothing in particular," the latest entry from Chicago’s Theater Oobleck (purveyors of last year’s Fringe hit The Lost Works of Samuel Beckett…) bravely takes on the age-old story of Faustus, who (as the story goes) sold his soul to Mephistopheles for eternal wisdom. And while An Apology… does manage to provoke a few Deep Thoughts on the subject of How Things Turned Out, without a credited director (the program only lists several names as "outside eyes"), the presentation is so drearily lackluster that one has to wonder just how it came together in the first place. Wisely, Oobleck has chosen to transform the Theatorium’s Downtown Variety Lounge into an environmental nightscape, placing the audience on the stage, and on almost every conceivable patch of bare floor, and allowing its Faustus (Ben Schneider) to roam between and behind banks of seats. Alas, unless I was the butt of some kind of cosmic joke, the performance I attended was beset with technical problems, as several key lights blew out within minutes of each other. To his credit, the resourceful Schneider fielded each glitch like a master technician, snatching a flashlight from an audience member and using it to spotlight himself. Later, when he tired of this, he handed it back to the audience and let us spotlight him – an intimate bond that could only be forged, I am convinced, within the context of a Fringe production. By now you’re wondering just what the show is about. Frankly, aside from its famous source material, I’d be hard-pressed to decipher its rantings and ravings. Essentially a mystery, with Faustus attempting to determine just why his omnipresent "servant" Mephistopheles (a mute Colm O’Reilly) would want to peruse his diary, a book full of "twenty-four years of meaningless hatch-marks," and to further explain how these marks came to appear, An Apology... is undoubtedly a terrific showcase for a single actor. Unfortunately, while Mr. Schneider has the stamina and comic timing down, he doesn’t quite have the range to pull off a show of this length (it runs just about an hour) in the stifling heat of the DVL. When, towards the end of the play, he breaks out liquid refreshment for the audience, it’s a welcome, unexpected relief, but one that comes far too late to resuscitate the explication of nothingness that’s preceded it.
SI LA GENTE QUIERE COMER CARNE, LE DAMOS CARNE by Martin Denton
The title of Antonio Sacre’s new one-man show means "If the people want to eat meat, let them eat meat"; it is, we are told, one of Castro’s slogans from the time of the Cuban Revolution. It’s also a private joke between Sacre and his younger brother, who liked to imitate the dictator during liberating bouts of all-night drinking. And it is, too, just one remembered detail among many of that brother’s life, recounted here with compassion but without sentiment in an extraordinary new theatre piece by one of FringeNYC’s most reliably remarkable participants. Sacre is making his fifth festival appearance with this show, and he’s as watchable and compelling as ever. Si La Gente… tracks Sacre’s brother’s amazing life story, from an overweight juvenile delinquent who is thrown out of school after school, through young adulthood as a bookie and would-be gangster, to the cleaned-up grown-up who runs triathlons. It’s a story of family pride, of courage, of terrible missteps, and of enormous sacrifices. And it is also, I think, a tribute to the person whom Sacre prizes as a hero above all others. The narrative is riveting, at times straining credulity yet spectacularly honest. Sacre himself tells us that people who knew his brother at one stage of his life can’t recognize him in the person he was or became at other stages; this man’s will to overcome circumstance and adversity is the stuff of legend. Which may be why Sacre has chosen to tell his story in the form of a documentary movie, or at least the closest thing to it, absent camera or screen. Sacre evokes his protagonist using more than a dozen voices—family members, mostly, plus a couple of characters from his drug trial. We get to know our hero by way of the impressions he made on these people: it’s a vivid, robust portrait of a man that Sacre knows so well and yet can never really know at all: he’s at once too near and too far from his brother to achieve anything like objectivity. It’s thrillingly theatrical, though; kin to the work of Anna Deavere Smith but with less artifice and more naked immediacy than her brand of documentary play. Sacre the writer has provided plenty of grand opportunities for Sacre the actor, who plays a varied batch of characters, from grandmother Mimi and Uncle Tito (who translates her Spanish for us in heavily accented, wryly idiomatic English), to his other brother Robbie and their Irish-American mother and his Cuban-American father. The characterizations are loving but balanced: all exist to create the vibrant prism through which Sacre’s subject will be viewed and, yes, immortalized. Director Brian Mendes has done a fine job staging the play, especially at the climactic moments near the end of the piece, when Sacre takes off at warp speed, playing numerous roles and re-enacting scenes far-removed from each other in time and space, more or less at the same breathtaking moment. Si La Gente… is my first FringeNYC show this year, and it’s certainly a propitious start to my festival-going. Whether you’re a returning Sacre fan or a newcomer to the work of this masterful theatre artist, I highly recommend that you take this show in.
BAD-ASS AND THE DEVIL by Eva van Dok
So after we hear a radio announcement about 17 bodies being found at a rest-stop on a Texas highway, lights come up on Bill (Gary Sugarman), an extremely disturbed looking man driving a car on the same highway, of course, that he’s just been told to stay off of. He looks to be hell-bent on a nihilistic mission of some sort, and our minds naturally assume that he’s the one that’s done the dirty deeds. The aforementioned announcement also told him NOT to pick up hitchhikers. So, next vignette, Bill, who says he’s a doctor with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, picks one up. His name is Drake (John Wilson) and he seems nice enough. He just wants to get to El Diablo, and Bill says he’ll take him there. Drake is covered with blood. He says he just hit a deer. We smell something funny here, even if Drake looks like an innocent frat boy from Northwestern. Bill overlooks the blood thing—his only concern is that Drake understands that under no circumstances are they to stop. Not to pee, not to stretch, not to call home. I’m of course supposed to be guessing who’s the bad-ass and who’s the devil in this whodunit by Chicago’s Half Cocked Productions. The effective stage footlight shines dramatic colors onto Bill’s face as he verbally terrorizes Drake. Finally, Bill stabs the frat boy with a screwdriver and the 6 quarts of stage blood that’s been guaranteed begins pouring out of Drake’s gut. Now we’re in business. Drake is in a lot of pain and asks Bill why he stabbed him. Bill says that he wants to study Drake and ask him some questions (like a "deranged Barbara Walters," Drake says). He also says that he’s protecting himself against the possibility of Drake trying to kill him. I look at Drake, who doesn’t look like the highway killer. So Bill must be the killer. But maybe it is Drake or the cop that stops them or maybe it’s Bill or…..I won’t give away the ending, but I’ll give you a hint: the highway butcher is one of the three of the actors listed in the program. The piece is fun enough, I suppose, but I got the feeling that it took itself a bit too seriously, or maybe not quite seriously enough. I can’t really decide. Gary Sugarman, the actor playing the deranged doctor Bill gives a beautifully complicated, near comically flawless performance. John Wilson’s Drake, however, failed to help form the tense relationship between the two drifters we needed from the first moment of their meeting, and his constant post-stabbing screams of pain were equally painful for us to endure. This seemed to be not as much of a fault of Wilson’s—he was simply miscast. Bad Ass’s... stark language and overall ghostly and effective noir mood (as well as the REALLY fake blood that constantly poured forth like a champagne fountain) should have made for a comically darker evening. I kept wishing I was having as much fun as they were. For what its worth, they did end up delivering on the blood, graphic violence and loud gunfire that they proudly promised. Even though the piece wasn’t my cup of tea, I’d probably recommend it for a fun late-night FringeNYC outing if you’ve had a couple of drinks and are in the neighborhood. Sugarman’s performance alone is worth the price of the ticket.
CIRCUS OF INFINITE ATTRACTIONS by Eva van Dok
Circus of Infinite Attractions is a performance piece that tells the story of a troupe of misfit circus and sideshow performers through a collection of poetry by writer Julia Bolus. Early on, the troupe (New York-based Actors Stock Company) lets us know that we are not there to see the mystery and illusion that often accompanies a sideshow event. The stage is set up in front of us, and the characters never leave the space. Most initially dwell within their own isolated world while they discuss what brought them to their particular lifestyle, and begin to interact with one another more frequently as the play progresses. We find out that, for example, Iris, the bearded lady (Jane Titus), is in love with Nina, the trapeze artist (Naomi Barr). Iris’s family is embarrassed about her physical appearance, and she has found a place of solitude and acceptance within the circus world. Nina’s painful childhood led her to the trapeze, and Eno, the illusionist (beautifully played by Mark Brey), tells us that (no big surprise here) he loved to play charades as a child. If it sounds a little ludicrous on the page, not to worry too much: Bolus’s poetry takes us out of the realm of naturalism. Sometimes compelling, sometimes predictable, the stories are handed directly to the audience through shadow puppetry, music, dance and monologues. Particularly effective is the company’s innovative use of the scrim--through this, we see the distant, haunting outline of a few circus troupe members as we hear their story and how it connects to the others on stage. Many ensemble members play dual roles, and it often felt like the two characters each actor embodied were two sides of the same dreamy soul. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite decide whether the ensemble was invested in the story they were telling or whether they were simply the facilitators of it. As an audience member, I kept wishing for a slightly clearer choice—that either the actors would slip fully into the shoes of the storyteller and tell us about the isolation, loneliness, and hardships of the life that a circus performer has chosen (or, perhaps more accurately, the life that has chosen them); or that they would utilize the poetic text to create broader, more inviting characters that really give us an idea of why they themselves are creating a life within these circumstances. As a result, I left with a feeling of not having a clear enough sense of the story and not caring quite enough about the characters that told me about it. It is possible that the unbelievable opening-night heat they were combating (as well as a mid-show power outage) might have been the reason for some of their unfilled pauses and problems with moving the piece forward. That being said, Director Keith Oncale’s gorgeous stage picture-often invoking a constantly shifting multi-ring spectacle- is both surreal and specific. His world never lets our eyes rest. As one character speaks to us, another is practicing for the evening’s event, while another is slowly shifting clothes and inevitably identities. The circa 1910 costumes and rich scenic elements add to Oncale’s beautiful transformation of the space. The piece holds infinite possibilities, and its magic is well-worth checking out.
CHOCOLATE IN HEAT by Tim Cusack
Chocolate. Shoes. Breasts. Sand. Out of these elements Betty Shamieh weaves her multi-layered prose poem of one Palestinian girl growing up poor in Spanish Harlem. But the scope of her vision encompasses the privileged children of the white ruling class, African-American dance instructors, Jordanian princes and Latina prostitutes. Structured as three monologues performed by Shamieh alternating with two others performed by the amazing Piter Fatouche, the fragments of her narrative slowly assemble themselves into the story of a smart, driven, college-aged woman’s Pyrrhic victory over the rich boy who sexually assaults her on a beach—and the steps over her lifetime that lead to that beach and her ankles jammed up over her ears. Described in the Fringe Guide as an "irreverent solo...about...the problems of growing up in between two cultures," the piece is neither irreverent nor a solo, as Shamieh pushes past a simple articulation of her outsider-ness to engage in a rigorous interrogation of the ways in which barriers of class, race, gender, language and politics intersect to create so much misery both here and in the Middle East. Starting with the night a very drunken Aiesha stabs the scion of a wealthy family (and her classmate at the elite college she attends) in the eye with her red stiletto as he tries to rape her, Shamieh reverses the flow of her heroine’s history, bringing us next the teenage Aiesha’s complicated relationship with her middle-aged dance mentor, Red, and then finally her childhood self’s fruitless gesture of rage against the neighborhood shopkeeper who violates her innocence. Although just how innocent Aiesha is, or to put it another way how complicit she is, in any of these encounters is left uncomfortably unresolved. This is to Shamieh’s credit, as is her determination to show her character always fighting back against the men who try to colonize her body, either physically or emotionally. The irony is that every time she fights back, she harms herself as much as them in the process, or perhaps worse still, the man in question isn’t even aware that she’s resisted. The result is a woman who is on the edge of becoming unhinged because of a world determined to marginalize her at every turn. Interspersed with Aiesha’s first-person accounts are two outside witnesses to her story: the king’s son who attends the same American university as this daughter of peasants and whose own Palestinian mother may or may not have been assassinated by his father; and the shopkeeper’s nephew who is writing a book on women’s oppression at the hands of men and who hires prostitutes to tell him the gory details of the frontline battles in the war between the sexes. Fatouche magically embodies all of these characters, equally believable as both the heir to the Jordanian throne and, hilariously, as Liza, the prostitute who wants to write a book about men, which will consist in its entirety of the single word "bastard" printed on every page. Racially, her characters inhabit an indeterminate place in the ethnic pecking order of America. Called "sand nigger" by whites and "towel heads" by blacks, these Arabs are not above playing the race card themselves when push comes to shove. Aiesha insults her black teacher’s lack of education, and the author of the book about women’s oppression has an almost pathological need to psychologically dominate and control the Latina working girls whom he interviews. What turns up the heat on these political ideas is that Shamieh fuels them with the passions, needs and vulnerabilities of her characters. Prejudice and oppression are manifest in the ugly things otherwise fine people do to each other. Like melted chocolate scorched from exposure to too much heat, her characters’ basic sweetness has turned acrid from the cruelties of the world. For these people, chocolate is not just a description of their skin tone. The substance itself becomes in their hands a tool of seduction; a token of romantic love; a forbidden desire; a sweet reward; an instrument of revenge—and a symbol of the innocence they’ve stripped from each other.
HALO by Martin Denton
For me, FringeNYC is all about discovering the work of young and relatively untested theatre artists. Even though it may be raw or a little rough around the edges, this is the stuff that is most invigorating and exciting: plays that are packed with their creators’ ideas and talent and possibilities, heralding—indeed, guaranteeing—vigorous life for the theatre in years to come. Halo, by Ken Urban, is just such a play. It’s ambitious, intelligent, and endlessly intriguing; it also contains some gorgeous writing and some formidable notions about theatre that mark Urban as a playwright to watch. Halo is characterized by its author as a "pageant," though that may not be the best way to describe it. The simplest way to explain this complicated work, which is at once sprawlingly epic and achingly intimate, is to tell you that it’s a meditation on the nature of faith: a probing examination of the intangible stuff supplied to us by institutions—the Church, mainly—to get us through our daily lives. Halo offers no answers—how could it?; but it raises important questions that quite clearly trouble its author’s soul. You also need to know that Halo tells three stories at the same time, in three very distinct styles. The first is a solemn (though occasionally explosive) study of a woman looking backward and forward at her life. She’s portrayed by four actresses who represent her at different ages; together they try to understand the choices this woman has made, choices that ultimately alienate her from her husband, son, and daughter. The technique is clearly reminiscent of Albee’s Three Tall Women but the insights are Urban’s own, expressed in a poetically spare language that brings to mind the later work of Tennessee Williams. The second story concerns a young man and woman who, Rope-like, kill a delivery man for the thrill of it. Staged more naturalistically, this part of Halo is gratuitously coarse, a rough and ugly counterpoint to the more cerebral first story. Grafted on and around these two is the third part of Halo, which is a retelling of the medieval mystery play Everyman, now relocated to contemporary New Jersey and spun with a punk sensibility, but still recounting the journey of an ordinary soul toward redemption. All three are cut-up and juxtaposed, so that we see them as if we were watching TV, clicking back and forth among them on the remote control. Urban is determined to let us draw our own conclusions about what these stories, singly and together, might signify. The production from Screaming Venus is exemplary; I attended the first performance, and what these folks have accomplished in bringing this complex play to life under festival conditions is near-miraculous. The cast of ten is notably strong; worthy of special mention are Marilyn Beck, Deborah Carlson, Monica Sirignano, and Leigh Williams, who collectively play the woman at the center of this triptych’s first "panel." Justin Yorio (as the homicidal young man) and Taylor Ruckel (in several roles) also turn in particularly outstanding work. Work as challenging and eclectic as this seldom gets done except in a festival; anyone interested in what’s on the minds and in the hearts of our next generation of playwrights needs to see Halo at FringeNYC. I’d be remiss, by the way, not to mention that Ken Urban is a regular contributor to nytheatre.com; I think I’m being strictly objective here, nonetheless.