nytheatre Archive
FringeNYC 2001

An Evening with Harburg Harrisbrandt is the happiest surprise of this year’s FringeNYC thus far. This 45-minute solo show by Joseph Langham is funny, wise, touching, and enormously entertaining. It’s about a budding singer-songwriter named Harburg Harrisbrandt who is trying to do a set of his own original songs in a low-rent New York club very much like the Present Company’s Downtown Variety Lounge, which is the one we’re actually in. The trouble is, Harburg has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and as a result he’s unable to focus long enough to get through even one song.

Now this might sound like an obviously low comic ploy to get some cheap laughs; or like a disrespectful and mean-spirited joke at the expense of the disabled. The wonderful thing about Harburg is that it’s neither. Langham embraces his character’s condition and humanizes it and him; he also uses it to canny advantage, turning a would-be cabaret turn into a riveting and revealing look inside a loving, sad, sensitive and troubled soul with gratifying naturalness, compassion, and good humor.

We learn a fair amount of Harburg’s biography as his mind races from topic to topic. He tells us often about his mother, a frustrated singer who moved herself and her young son from Texas to New York after her husband (as she put it) ran away from home. Harburg’s recollections of his mother contain a painful mixture of love and anger: he acknowledges that he was a difficult kid to raise, but shrinks at the memories of his mother, ill-equipped to deal with a hyperactive child, locking him in a closet or ridiculing him by calling him Har Har.

He tells us, too, about his best friend at school, a tough kid named Billy whose sensitive side is only hinted at; and about his buddy from work, a fellow named John with whom he eats dinner at McDonald’s. (John and Harburg work the night shift as data entry clerks; Harburg can type an amazing 110 words per minute.) Most importantly, he speaks of Amy, with whom he is clearly and unrequitedly in love; much of the emotion that fuels An Evening with Harburg Harrisbrandt stems from his disappointment that she hasn’t come down to the theatre to watch his show.

So Langham and his director, Richard Hinojosa, give us not just the expected comic monologue but a real one-act play, filled with wit, poignancy, and humanity. Langham the actor is every bit as skillful as Langham the writer, creating a character marked by intelligence and profound sadness who is nevertheless engaging, optimistic, and enormously appealing; Harburg’s a survivor, and he’s also a fun guy, not least because of the un-self-conscious yet self-deprecating way that he treats his ADD. Langham’s also a fine guitar player and his theatre sense is terrific: the performance I attended was interrupted several times, by some sort of mini-commotion in the lobby and then by a very noisy neighboring show. Langham masterfully used whatever was happening in his show, making these real disruptions into just so many more distractions for his endlessly distracted character.

An Evening with Harburg Harrisbrandt is a show to get excited about; it deserves a life after FringeNYC and I hope it has one. Langham, who is also the creator of Gilligan Stump! And Tha Perfesser, is an extraordinary talent, and I’ll be eager to see what he comes up with next.

For those of you who hate the rain, the humidity, and the F train as much as I do, you should know that Michael Gilpin’s charming and funny new one-act,
T & T Music Factory, is worth braving all of those to go see. The first two made me grumpy and aggravated me throughout my journey to the theater. The third made me exceptionally late, and even grumpier, and forced me to contemplate turning around and going home. Alas, I had a job to do, and I was going to do it. Entering the Present Company’s Downtown Variety Lounge as stealthily as I could, I took a seat in the back, and very quickly (and surprisingly) found myself enjoying the show. By the time this 35-minute play had ended, my frown had turned upside down, and I was very happy that I had made it after all.

T & T Music Factory chronicles one man’s effort to overcome his insecurities and get a date. Tom (playwright Gilpin) is plagued by self-doubt and low self-esteem. His best friend, Tony (Michael Baugh), however, is comfortably self-confident, and never has a problem getting a date. Convinced that Tony has the solution to his loneliness and confusion, Tom asks his friend to teach him how to get a date. Tony does so, and launches Tom on a zen-like, and very funny, regimen of self-discovery.

Both actors are terrific. Baugh makes Tony’s self-confidence real without making it smug or condescending. His Tony is a very charming, freewheeling character, and it is very easy to see why women like him, and why Tom asks him for help. Anyone who has ever suffered from hang-ups similar to Tom’s will find Gilpin’s performance uncannily familiar. From your seat, you can almost see Tom’s fears eating him inside out. They are that palpable. And, Baugh and Gilpin’s onstage teamwork is excellent. They have an obviously good off-stage connection with each other, which they effortlessly (and thankfully) bring on stage with them. Watching their interplay is fun.

In his double-duty as playwright, Gilpin does very well, taking potentially familiar material—two guys sitting around, gabbing about chicks—and giving it a fresh perspective. His dialogue, which sometimes threatens to turn into a Meisner repetition exercise, is nevertheless clean, clear, and economical. He knows how to turn a simple conversation into active and engaging theater. Together with director Jesse Bush (whose staging is perfectly unobtrusive and invisible), Gilpin effortlessly makes Tom’s angst, which is very real to him, hilarious to the audience without commenting negatively on it.

All in all, T & T Music Factory is a very pleasant surprise, and one well worth checking out.

About halfway through Mel England’s solo performance Najavo Memoirs: How Uncle Sam Incested Me (and then I got to meet Mary-Louise Parker), the old MGM logo shot is suddenly projected on to the screen that serves as backdrop for much of the piece. In the stentorian voice of a Fifties movie preview narrator, complete with tom-tom drum sound effects, England launches into the absurdly encapsulated story of a Navajo princess (played by Elizabeth Taylor, of course; this is MGM) and her love for a handsome American officer (played by Montgomery Clift). But this romantic Western is also a sweeping, time-traveling historical epic, encompassing everything from the Conquistadors to Manifest Destiny. With an all-star supporting cast, including Bette Davis as Isabella of Spain and Orson Welles as the Pope, and a juicy plot integrating the tangled family trees of European royalty, religious conversions and one Native girl’s search for love and protection, this picture’s got Oscar written all over it. But England's satire of Hollywood’s version of the birth of a nation is, as we learn over the course of the piece, also an elaborate metaphor for his own nativity. He, too, is the product of the wrenching, at times violent, collision of two cultures and of a woman addicted to Tinsel Town dreams who embodied all of the cultural confusions of the original melting pot meltdown.

Here’s where I’d like to make a full disclosure and a confession: I’ve known Mel for almost 14 years; we went to college together. And I’ve always been a little intrigued by his name. First, of all he’s got a country for a last name. I always appreciate people who have countries for last names because they’re easy to remember. Secondly, as long as I’ve known him, he was always "Mel," no full name, just the abbreviation. So I’ve always assumed his given name was "Melvin" or something like that, some name slightly embarrassing for someone from our generation to carry. I always pictured him coming from an old-line Texas family, a descendant of one of the original white settlers who cleared the land of Injuns; confidant in his WASP pedigree and named for that same distinguished ancestor.

Boy, was I wrong. England is in fact the name of the white father/master; but the only thing his father was ever master of was a Dallas Pizza Hut, which he managed and where he met Mel’s mother. Mel isn’t short for Melvin; it’s short for Mellow Moonshine, the sort of misguided hippie mimicking of a Native name en vogue in the Sixties. Only in this case, the woman naming him was authentically part Native American and therefore presumably should have known better. Which begs the question: What kind of woman would saddle her only son with a name like that? It’s the search for the answer to this question which launches her Mellow Moonshine on his vision quest.

It turns out she was a woman ravishingly beautiful (the many photos of her projected behind him are testament to this), obsessed with glamour and stardom, simultaneously emotionally overwhelming and withdrawn. Her story is a series of marriages, custody battles, financial machinations, mental breakdowns and substance abuse. The final photo of her, taken within the last few years, shows the cost of all this—the woman with movie-star looks is but a grotesque caricature of her former self. It almost feels like a violation of her personhood to look at it. Which begs the question: What kind of son would expose his mother in this way?

England relates all of this in a disarmingly direct conversational style that does much to diffuse the discomfort we may feel being made privy to such awful family history. At times it’s a little too raw, and I found myself wishing for a little more of the distancing humor of the very funny movie sequence. Intercut into the narrative are songs written by England in an earnest, Frank Wildhorn-esque key that do little to advance the story and constantly threaten to tip the hour-long piece into an indulgent college-dorm parody of performance art. But the heartfelt complexities of his tale and the artful use of projections save the evening time and again. Kind of like Monty Clift riding to Liz’s rescue. But what Mary-Louise Parker has to do with any of this is beyond me

In A Little Piece of the Sun, writer-director Daniel Kleinfeld takes two interesting subjects—the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the killing spree of Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo—and makes them thoroughly uninteresting.

In the program notes, Kleinfeld writes, "This is not a play. It is a documentary for the stage." Fine. But, that is no excuse to lift one’s text straight from various "primary sources," and not dramatize it. As a result, the majority of the script sounds like impersonal third person news copy. Kleinfeld plays both the Chernobyl and the Chikatilo stories on stage simultaneously for much of the show. Dialogue overlaps constantly. Actors compete with music, sound effects, and each other to be heard. In the rare moments when an actor’s voice is the only sound in the theater, Kleinfeld inexplicably faces his cast upstage, and we once again lose what is being said. Kleinfeld also tends to place his actors near light sources that are shining right into the audience, making it impossible to even watch what is happening.

His justification for all of this? "When confronted by multiple simultaneous events, the viewer must decide which is to be watched and how. This is how history is written—deciding what events are the main attraction, and what is a sideshow." Fine. But, if Kleinfeld is going to let the audience decide what show they’re watching, then he ought to give them a recognizable protagonist and a clear line of dramatic action to latch on to and invest in. By not doing so, he only points out larger flaws in the play—like, the Chernobyl and Chikatilo stories have nothing to do with each other, and that he has nothing to say by juxtaposing them. His decision to tell both stories, instead of just one, and then not take a point of view on either of them feels lazy and indulgent. Consequently, A Little Piece of the Sun winds up being exhausting instead of enlightening or entertaining.

Rosalie Purvis seems like a really nice person, at least if the eight short dance pieces she is presenting under the title Tales of Seasoned Love are any indication. In the world onstage the bright, cheery space of University Settlement, the colors are pastels; love conquers all; and humanity’s basic goodness and capacity for understanding are affirmed. The dancers often break out into big, warmhearted grins. The preferred form here consists of a short sketch, containing one or two arresting images, often involving fantastical situations with inanimate objects come to life, angels and mythological heroines. The effect, charming at first, quickly becomes cloying, like spending too much time in a Hallmark store. Even the darker aspects of some of these tales that by necessity admit to mortality’s presence, such as her retelling of the Persephone myth, too often remain at the generic level of a mass-produced sympathy card.

Part of the problem is that none of the pieces on the program feel fully formed. Interesting conflicts are set up which either aren’t explored to some dramatic effect or are too easily resolved by the combatants melting into an embrace. Things stop just as they start to get going. It’s like having an absent-minded professor as a kindergarten teacher—she may pick out the best stories but never seems to get around to finishing them.

This structural tease mars even the two most successful works on the program. "Birth of Athena," danced by Alexis Wickwire, is the story of one woman’s emergence, literally, out from under patriarchal domination. (Athena blasts her way out of Zeus’s skull, after hammering together her own armor, giving him the migraine to end all migraines in the process.) Starting on the floor, the powerful Wickwire rolls into spine bending shapes and isolates each joint, as if testing the suppleness of her muscles. She sinks into deep lunges reminiscent of yoga’s warrior poses, appropriate for a goddess who was the patroness of Greece’s greatest fighters. She frequently rests from her efforts, only to resume them with renewed determination. I can do without the Marcel Marceau miming of walls or the all-too real hammer she produces from her costume. Her chaîne turns also seem superfluous, too much girly ballerina, not enough kick-butt battle maiden. When she comes downstage at the end of her ordeal and confronts us with a big triumphant smile, as if to say, "I made it. Now love me," the implicit neediness in this gesture seems unbecoming in a deity.

In the program finale, "Spring: of a Man and an Angel," the entire company huddles under four bright umbrellas far upstage. Purvis finds inventive compositions as her community fights for space under the miniscule shelters, each seeking the ideal umbrella with the perfect companion. They doze off, push one another out of the way, nuzzle, slap their feet against the floor. Here her light touch sparkles with true wit. Duos turn into trios and then just as suddenly there’s only one person left holding the handle. Into this lively bunch strolls an angel, the remarkably tall and thin Michael Wayne Hart. After all this pedestrian movement, he launches into full Tricia Brown postmodernist dance. This has no discernable effect on anyone else, except for one man who falls in love with him right there on the spot. They dance together, although the steps are nothing special—definitely no tricky lifts or exchanges of weight here. Everyone else looks on adoringly. End of piece. The viewer is left with the final frustration of movement possibilities unexamined and drama edged out of the dance.

I’m not at all sure what playwright Caroline Murphy is going for in her work Shifts of Focus, which is being presented by Mod 83 Productions at the New York International Fringe Festival. This hour-long play is set in a restaurant where, we are told, there are never any customers. (Why?) At a table sit two managers (One and Two), who say they are writing a play in which the pieces of the game of chess they are playing—or, more accurately, starting and restarting—are to be characters. Their play is governed by rules that they discuss and flex; one rule is that it will be written in verse, and so a lot of their back-and-forth dialogue (but, oddly, not all) is in rhyme.

Meanwhile, at the restaurant’s other table, a waitress reads a Bible and fends off attempts at interaction initiated by another waitress and a busboy. (The waitresses are also named One and Two in the program; I’m not sure which was which.) At the bar, a bartender tells long dull stories that, another character explains, are his memories. I honestly can’t remember what these four people actually talked about; the whole effect, which may well be intended, is of half-heard or half-remembered snippets of far-off conversation.

And that’s pretty much it, for, as I said, about an hour. The talk is littered with wordplay, which is fitfully amusing; but the dialogue is so banal (probably intentionally so) that it’s practically impossible to stay interested in what’s happening on stage. The play’s title suggests that perhaps that is the point: but that’s not much of a point to make, I’m afraid. And the portentousness of the set-up—a place of business that does no business, managers/playwrights manipulating chess pieces/characters—suggests that Murphy and her director, Timothy Andrews, have something more substantial on their minds than mere gimmickry.

But on the basis of what I saw, I don’t have even a guess as to what that might be. Certainly some of the trouble stems from seeing the play on a hot, sticky night, as well as from the evident inexperience of the company, not one of whom held the stage in a convincing way. Most simply struggled to make their voices heard over the room’s loud air conditioning system.

John Hughes meets George Orwell in Angst: 84, a clever and sincere offering from Cleveland’s Dobama Theatre. The plot is pure ‘80s teen comedy: popular cheerleader Winnie (Elena Averbach) and uncool jock Julian (Joshua D. Brown) decide to buck the school’s caste system and embark on an illicit love affair. But, playwright Toni K. Thayer has a deeper message to convey than "Be True to Yourself!" For her, the popularity that her characters covet and yearn for is a reaction to the totalitarian, Big Brother-type hierarchy that runs the school (a hierarchy not unlike, say, the Reagan Administration, or 80's Republicanism). They want to be popular, to fit in—to conform—or else they will be "erased." Suddenly, the humorously ridiculous booster messages that run throughout the play—"Learning is Obedience!"; "Do What You’re Told!"—take on a chillier meaning. The mention of Principal Duce’s name (a knowing reference to Mussolini) invokes laughter and fear. And, Winnie and Julian’s relationship suddenly looks a lot like Winston and Julia’s forbidden love in Orwell’s 1984.

This is pretty strong stuff for a theater company whose target audience is 15-30 years old. But Thayer and director Dan Kilbane are smart enough to know that, by sandwiching their theme within the conventions of an ‘80s teen comedy, they have a good chance of getting their point across. To that end, they populate Angst: 84 with a rogue’s gallery of freaks-and-geeks archetypes that the audience will remember from Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and many other films.

The entire cast is terrific, but special mention must be made of Brian Douglas as Traverse, the requisite gay student, and Heather N. Stout as Shannon, the goth girl who presides over the action like a Greek chorus. Stout is enormously charismatic, and her pitch-perfect performance anchors this splendid company.

Angst: 84 succeeds as both entertainment and political allegory. For those who were young enough to have been in high school during the’80s, it will leave you a little nostalgic for the good old days. It will also leave you trying to draw more comparisons between Reagan and Big Brother. Hopefully, Dobama will continue to enjoy much success in Ohio, and we will get to see them again in New York before long.

I have to admit I got really excited about the air conditioning in the Kraine that flowed on Saturday like the Ganges River. I then got even more excited when I opened my program to see that Yi Sang Counts to 13, described a piece that "re-imagines" the life of Korean Surrealist writer Yi Sang, was first developed at Mabou Mines. I started to anticipate a wild ride as the lights went down. After the first 30 seconds of the play, I realized that it was going to exceed all of my 3-minute-old expectations. What began to unfold in this gorgeous surprise Fringe offering was a rich and bizarre tale of the ill-fated life of an extraordinary talent.

Surrealist writer and poet Yi Sang--whose work prospered in the 1930’s while his country was under Japan’s severe colonial rule--is something of a national hero in Korea according to Yi Sang’s writer and director Sung Rno. He also tells us that most Koreans admit that they don’t understand Yi Sang, who died in of tuberculosis in a Tokyo prison at the age of 27, and that this exquisite play is "just one more crack at "getting" Yi Sang." The play, or puzzle, or dream sequence, threads the author’s life and work through 20 short vignettes. We are told that Blue, played by C.S. Lee, "could be" Surrealist writer Yi Sang. Red (Paul H. Juhn) could be his best friend, and Green (Deborah S. Craig) could be the woman they both fall in love with.

Green is a performer in a Diet Coke strip-show of sorts, maybe. What we do know is she is an extension of the product she represents--saccharine in nice packaging, and possibly harmful to Blue’s (Yi Sang) health. Blue’s best friend Red is caught in the middle by falling in love or lust with the lascivious Green. In subsequent scenes, we see how Green becomes both the writer’s muse and the one that ultimately "clips his wings"--taking his life from its fearless flight in an ethereal world of imagination and peculiarity to one that is grounded in realism, jealousy and pain.

Sung Rno skillfully clarifies difficult and, well, surreal material and gives us a map to follow. Yi Sang's life and prose are continually woven together like a tightly structured piece of classical music. The play’s first vignette is described as a scene in which Blue, Green and Red try to "unfathom the mysteries" of ramen noodles. Blue says that someone stole his water (or maybe life-force, or maybe just water) and therefore he is unable to cook the noodles. Some other highlights: A tongue-in-cheek dance rendition of "What I Did for Love" reveals Green’s psychological abuse of Yi Sang; the writer’s prose becomes the material for a hilarious 1930’s-style tale of three scheming limbs: Blue’s Glove, Red’s foot and Green’s elbow; Red and Blue try to physically imitate the form of the one-sided Moebius strip because they want to know what it feels like to be totally subjective.

Yi Sang Counts to 13 is funny, morose and delicious to watch but above all, intelligent and professional. Yi Sang’s artists know how overcomplicated acting and directing can weigh down a production, and this one contains neither. All three actors are physically and emotionally exact and handle the difficult material with ease. The piece’s design elements, both lights and stark set, are as lucid and simple as they needed to be.

Sung Rno gently invites us into Yi Sang's imagination, where we see how the young writers’ prose in this piece is a place to make sense of his life and unfulfilling relationships, or maybe, on a more surreal level, a mechanism to rob them of any sense at all.