nytheatre Archive
FringeNYC 2001

SHOW REVIEWS ON THIS PAGE: Vaudeville's Not Dead (I'm Killing It Every Night) · Absolutely Abreast (Version 3.0) · The Shrew Sketch · Fifty Minutes · La Fabrica · 3-D World · Fuck You

VAUDEVILLE'S NOT DEAD (I’M KILLING IT EVERY NIGHT) by Julie Congress
Theatre is magical, and this show demonstrates just how enchanting it can be. It’s a one-man show; but you never lack for characters. It’s educational; but does not jam it down your throat. It’s accessible to children; but is equally suitable for adult audiences. Mainly, Vaudeville’s Not Dead is a light-hearted; captivating look at what Vaudeville was, portrayed by R.J. Lewis, a true jack-of-all-trades. The story takes place in a decaying, forsaken Vaudeville theatre that is to be torn down the next day. Simon is a guard who has been sent to look after the theatre for the night prior to its demolition. Everything is going smoothly until Simon hears a noise that turns out to be a ventriloquist’s dummy named Wilson, who is locked in a trunk and wishes to get out. Simon rescues him, and they begin to do Wilson’s old vaudeville act; trading shtick insults back and forth. Simon is so caught up in it all that he agrees to do the other vaudeville acts with the assistance of the performers’ spirits. Assuming different personas for each act, Simon becomes a ventriloquist, stilt-walker, opera singer, plate spinner, magician, dancer, juggler and numerous quick-change parts in a melodrama. It is amazing to see these astonishing feats performed one right after another, all done by one person. Though the music may be a bit sappy at times, there are very few faults with this production, the major one being the space Lewis must perform in. Not only is the stage small from side to side, but also from top to bottom. The fact is that low ceilings and stilt walking do not go well together. Even his juggling was affected when the rings kept hitting the top of the theatre. It’s very sad that so much of the performance was hindered by the fact of having a small space. Despite the inadequacies of the auditorium, the show is still a thrilling experience. Not only are so many breathtaking acts performed but they all come together into a totally enjoyable musical, appropriate and exciting and pleasing for everyone. After the show I met R.J. Lewis and my uncle, who was with me, mentioned that I was a budding magician. Lewis said that he would give me a tip; to always make sure I have a “why.” Don’t just come onto a stage and do a trick but have a reason for doing it. That’s exactly what I think he has achieved in this show. All of the marvelous feats he did had a purpose, they all went hand in hand with the plot to make not only a highly entertaining experience, but to educate and to supply a moral for kids and adults alike, to have confidence in yourself. In my mind R.J. Lewis was right, it all made the show that much more enjoyable.
ABSOLUTELY ABREAST (VERSION 3.0) by Tim Cusack
Dance is not usually thought of as a vessel for comedy. Of the great classical works of the nineteenth century, not one comes to mind that is primarily funny. Even in the twentieth century, the giants of American modern dance such as Graham, Cunningham and Ailey were either primarily concerned with the big passions or with cool abstractions that circumvented emotion all together. Comic subjects were just not considered the purview of dance. When you’ve spent years putting yourself through various physical tortures to achieve expressive mastery of your body, the last thing you’re prepared to do is laugh at yourself. In recent years, this has changed as postmodern dance has come to embrace a more playful, pop sensibility. The dancers of The Monkeyhouse are very much in this new stream of deconstructive dance. These women are obviously polished technicians, but they are not above subverting their own technical mastery to get the laugh. In the first piece on their program Absolutely Abreast (Version 3.0), "Phallic Fallacy," Karen Krolak, wearing a red bathrobe, bourrées diagonally down into the space of the Kraine holding a toilet plunger as if it were a sacred object. Over the course of the dance, the plunger transforms into a phallus, a dart, and, in its funniest morph, a dagger, which Krolak wields like Graham’s Clytemnestra before plunging it into her own heart. Since Krolak performs the dance with an expression of utmost seriousness, it is, needless to say, very amusing. What has the audience doubled-over in laughter, however, is its accompanying voice-over. A man watches the piece that we are watching, and we are allowed to hear his thoughts. He is the personification of the judgmental male gaze and his running commentary encompasses everything from the lack of music in the piece to his belief that dance is supposed to be entertaining. When Krolak whips off her robe to reveal a skimpy, spangled Duncanesque tunic, his interest very clearly, um, rises. Funniest of all, though, is his inability to realize that the piece is about men. He decides that it must be about the failed promise of communism. The more he misreads Krolak’s intentions, the more we laugh. And when a toilet plunger tampon falls out of her dress, we realize that she’ll fearlessly plunge into any comic depth. This fearlessness is even more prominently displayed in "What’s Next." Here Krolak is a future-world odalisque seductively dancing for our visual pleasure. This culture must place high erotic value on long legs in women, as she is dressed in what is apparently the height of fashion with a stilt attached to one leg. Extending it over her prone body, the appendage goes far beyond the possible human range of movement. She sinuously drapes herself over a large rubber ball, showing off her supple spine. Indifferent to her own sexual power, she yawns, and her hand ripples away from her face. Even her breath is sensuously curved. Another woman (Nicole Harris) enters dressed in identical fashion. She tries to execute the same seductive floor moves, but is hilariously inept at balancing on the ball. She tries to keep up with the confident one, and finds it impossible. It’s a bitingly funny indictment of the fashion endurance torments women test each other with as they compete for male attention. The second part of the dance begins to feel overlong, though, and at its end, when Harris chooses to reject the trappings of fashion, we wonder what took her so long. Comedy is not this company’s only language, however. In Krolak’s beautifully simple "Relentless Reins," Harris presents us with a woman burdened with a sadness that she carries around with her like a personal rain storm (a prop umbrella to which green glitter streamers have been glued). Gently undulating her umbrella and turning around herself, she is like an interior-directed heroine out of Henry James. This is a very strong program, and my only criticism is that Krolak and company don’t seem to trust their own clarity of vision, and feel obliged to add intervals that provide jokey explanations for each dance. Relax, kids, we get it. They’re plenty funny and thought-provoking on their own.
THE SHREW SKETCH by David Fuller
The blurb in the FringeNYC Guide tells us the following about The Shrew Sketch: "A 1950’s television comedy writing team creates The Taming of the Shrew as if Shakespeare never wrote it." Aha, I thought, this will be a clever adaptation worth a trip to East Broadway. Being a Shakespeare lover since high school, I am always intrigued by adaptations, some of which as we all know have been brilliantly done. When I entered the Mazer Theater I was not disappointed. At the back of the house was a telephone switchboard operator answering the phones as if she worked for a television show called " The Billy Shakes Comedy Program." Her banter was quite clever as she fielded calls from, among others, Chris Marlowe; a neurotic actor named Simon ("Keep it simple, Simon."); Bill Shakes’s mom; and his wife ("He hasn’t been home for twelve nights?"). This non-credited performer turned up later in the play as Rosie (Elizabeth London). The set was visible on stage, and the design by Rob Cardazone added to the 50’s feel of the evening – monochromatic desks and a door made from flats with painted 3-D details. It looked like a television studio set, with presumed stage managers bustling about. This was all a great set-up and I happily anticipated the show as I sat and read the program, which told me that Carol Bennett Gerber directed this play written by Cardazone with "additional text by W. Shakespeare." The Induction to The Taming of the Shrew has been a problem to producers for centuries: how do you deal with the Christopher Sly prologue, which appears to be the first half of an unfinished pair of bookends to the main story? The solution has often been to cut the Induction. In The Shrew Sketch, Cardazone chose to re-write the Induction as his way into his adaptation. So, we got the set-up of the Billy Shakes comedy writing team, the most talented member of which is Christopher Sly, who has a drinking problem. Get it? And this team was going to, before our eyes, create extemporaneously the story of Lucentio, Petruchio, Kate, et al. The resonances to "The Allen Brady Show" setting for "The Dick Van Dyke Show" were painfully obvious, but I was still willing to suspend my disbelief and prepared to be entertained with a sit-com style update of the Elizabethan farce. Oh what a fool this mortal is! History tells us that if you are updating and adapting the Bard you need to do two things: have a good idea and be at least as good as Shakespeare. The first one is the easy one. London and her fellow cast members, Dave Shalansky, Holly Meyers, Matthew Del Negro and Peter Farrell tried hard to make the material work. As they "created" the Shrew tale, they donned wigs and hats and "played" the story. Herein lay the problem: this was not really an adaptation, but 90% Shakespeare’s text. And the cast as a whole was not up to the task of playing Shakespeare. Shalansky, Farrell and London were the most successful, portraying a multitude of supporting roles. But Del Negro (as Lucentio and Petruchio) lacked panache and Meyers (as Kate) was simply miscast. I felt misled by the pre-show hype. Gerber should have simply cut the Shakespeare play, used Cardazone’s setting but not his text, and cast it well.
FIFTY MINUTES by Julie Congress
The opening of Fifty Minutes is full of oodles of potential. You walk into the theatre and are met with the sight of the six actors, in a line, facing the house, all with suitcases. Gradually, they begin to move and soon thereafter they begin to talk to the audience members. "Do you still have that cigarette?" "What gate is our flight?" and so forth. With the interaction and the eerie background music it makes a great scene, alas it is, in my mind, also the highlight of the show. Fifty Minutes (and by the way it is not fifty minutes in length nor the listed time of one hour and twenty minutes but in fact all of twenty-nine minutes long) is a play "based on the true story of the first in-flight homicide committed by passengers on August 11, 2000, on a fifty minute flight from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City." From what I gained from the play it seems that this flight to Salt Lake City had been delayed, and when they finally did get on and the plane took off, one of the passengers went somewhat crazy (possibly from drugs) and the other passengers tried to sedate him, resorting to physical violence. However, even after they had calmed him, their rage could not be stayed and they beat him to death. Unfortunately, the main problem with this play is that it lacks information. What I have just relayed is all that is said in the show, they just keep repeating it, through use of reporters, stream of consciousness and reenactment, repeating this small bit of information again and again and again. The play has no climax nor resolution, it’s merely built up of repetition. I think it would have been very beneficial for the spectator if we could have learned some more background information. For instance, how long was the plane delayed? If it was a great deal of time that might explain why the passengers were quite so vicious. Did all 120 passengers participate in the murder? If not, what were the others doing? Granted, no one knows exactly what happened (passenger testimony was conflicting), but providing more of the who, what and when might have helped us understand why it did. Fifty Minutes has a good premise and potential, it’s just not quite there yet.
LA FABRICA by Martin Denton
La Fabrica (The Factory) is the second play by Adrian Rodriguez, and also second in a planned trilogy about the lives of Cuban-American exiles living in Union City, New Jersey. Its predecessor, Cuban Operator Please…, was one of the highlights of last summer’s New York International Fringe Festival; I liked it so well that I included it in my anthology Plays and Playwrights 2001. Cuban Operator told the story of a young man named Abel and his troubled relationship with his father Ramon, who lay dying in a nearby hospital to which Abel could not bring himself to visit. La Fabrica is a prequel, more or less, in which we see Ramon in his last moments in Cuba, just before he boards a plane and leaves his first family behind him in a homeland where he is no longer able to live; and then twenty years later, at work in a stifling job at an embroidery factory, about to receive some devastating news. Particularly if you know Cuban Operator, you will be riveted by these scenes, which reveal new facets to Ramon’s character (as well as that of his wife in America, Rosa). Having these roles recreated by the fine actors Jose Antonio and Mercy Vailladares (who originated them last year in Rodriguez’s earlier play) is especially rewarding: it’s like seeing old friends again, in circumstances that will break your heart. La Fabrica also contains the stories of two other Cubans in exile in Union City, both of them co-workers of Ramon at the factory. One is Emilio (David I. Maldonado), an impulsive young man who has just arrived, one of thousands risking his life on a dangerous journey by raft. The other is Francisco (Xavier Domingo), an older man who came to the U.S. after being released from prison. Though their situations provide a certain amount of counterpoint to Ramon’s, I’m not sure that they contain sufficient dramatic heft to justify the amount of time Rodriguez spends on them. I would have liked to learn still more about Ramon and Rosa, even if it meant seeing less of Emilio and Francisco. Rodriguez also introduces us to Jimmy (John C. Cunningham), the manager at the embroidery factory, but again he hasn’t fleshed the character out beyond a one-dimensional bully. (He serves as an instructive reminder, though, of what it must be like to work in a place where severe language barriers exist between boss and employee.) It’s important for me to mention that La Fabrica is almost entirely in Spanish, a language I don’t know very well. So my impressions are based upon what I gleaned from the occasional recognized phrase, the non-verbal cues provided by the actors and director Arian Blanco, and the author’s synopsis helpfully included in the program. That said, I remain astonished by the power and simplicity of Rodriguez’s writing and dramaturgy: what’s essential in his play comes through loud and clear, even when you don’t understand most of the dialogue.
3-D WORLD by Tim Cusack
If Brecht and Feydeau had collaborated on a Marx Brothers’ movie, the resulting political insanity might resemble The No-Pants Theatre Company’s production of 3-D World. Written by the company’s artistic director Dominic Orlando and directed by producing director Karen Bowersock, the play is the Bizarro World version of U.S. Latin American foreign policy. Although considering how bizarre things already are in the present reality, perhaps the play is closer to a documentary than a comic book. In the imaginary island dictatorship of El Kornea, located off the coast of Brazil, an incredibly precious substance has been discovered on a mountain, which could shake, quite literally, the entire global industrial-political order to the very roots of its foundation. On the slopes of this same mountain, an endangered species of pine grows, coveted by the lumber industry and whose bark is the primary ingredient in the latest American drug craze: hotspur, a mind candy that apparently combines the properties of crack, ecstasy and mushrooms into one mind-blowingly addictive substance. To make things even more complicated, the mountain sits on the ancestral land of the Tinadoros Negros, the indigenous people of the island who are waging a terrorist campaign against the Kornean government to gain political autonomy. Also fighting for control of the country are the siblings Coyote, the country’s most powerful drug lord and Commandante Renee Tortuga (doubled by Suzi Takahashi), its ruler. Needless to say this confluence of issues economic, environmental, political and pharmacological has brought many of the major enforcers of the Pax Americana swooping down onto the tiny nation—government functionaries, the CIA, the media, big business. As these players gather at the American embassy, a building that seems in its veritably Borgesian proliferation of rooms, corridors and hiding places to be metastasizing to cover the whole country, the double and triple crosses soon start multiplying at a dizzying pace, as does the cast. Everyone’s loyalties are divided, and no one is quite whom they claim to be. One tries to keep score but soon gives up in complete bewilderment. Orlando’s play is so much fun, however, that the confusion becomes part of its pleasure, and the audience contentedly goes along with each new plot complication and character introduction, trusting that eventually all will be clarified. It never really is, or rather it is, but in the temporal confines of the theatre it’s nearly impossible to absorb all of the information as it comes whizzing at you from the stage. Of course never being quite sure what has happened or remembering who is who is part of Orlando’s point: In a world where the true motivations of our government are often murky at best, the foreign policy shell game is one that the casual observer is never going to master. Only by paying careful attention to the whole picture, will we have any hope of correctly identifying where the pea of motivational profit is located, and even then the powers controlling the game are not above changing its rules to keep us in the dark, usually by turning its own exploitative excursions into mass spectacle. The play’s satiric bite comes from our willingness to be passive consumers of our own oppression. If Orlando had stopped there, his play would have been a particularly astute extended remix of sketch comedy, but he’s after bigger piranha because lurking underneath the pointed political satire is the soft nether region of a Freudian family drama. The psychosexual dream world keeps surfacing to bedevil the characters, finally climaxing in the primal scene of a son witnessing his mother’s rape. But Orlando doesn’t just introduce psychoanalytic theory to spice the politics; he reminds us that one always fuels the other. The ineffectual Vice-President (who commits the rape) brandishes a fountain pen as his appropriately underwhelming, yet no less dangerous, phallic totem, and the dream world itself is exploited by both Hollywood and the drug trade for their profits. This is an incredibly complex text, and Bowersock’s cast is not entirely up to its comic and poetic demands. There are, however, some exceptional standouts: Carri Levinson, Beth Hylton and Gerald Marsini all distinguish themselves. Let’s hope Orlando’s play has a long, nasty life.
FUCK YOU by Eva van Dok
Ok, so we all agree that Fuck You is a really catchy name for a potentially really bad show. And I’m happy to report to you doubters, and you know who you are, that Fuck You encompasses my utopian idea of what every fringe show should be: a chaotic gem of possibilities. It’s described as "a mesh of stark realism and abstract reflections of an American tragedy." The American tragedy, or tragedies, I should say, refers to the still-shocking wave of school shootings that has plagued the U.S. since the mid 1990’s. The piece is not, however, a political diatribe on how we solve the problem. It’s much more scary than that—Fuck You reveals the mechanism at work as three angry teenage boy-men go on a killing spree in a high school classroom. Fuck You places your usual stereotypes—the jock, cheerleader, nerd, druggie, kids in the closet, etc. in a sterile, fluorescent classroom. As Freddy (Adam Hardman), Michael (Jeff Dickinson) and Jason (John Bowman) take the students hostage, we get a familiar reminder of teenage angst, insecurity and confusion as well as a glimpse of what may occur in the final moments of these all-too-real tragic situations. When juxtaposed and dramatized together, these two worlds give the piece its own special brand of realism and over-the-top absurdity. Fuck You’s four directors (John Bowman, Adam Hardman, Tanya Ritchie & Raymond Sanchez) shamelessly disregard all rules of theatrical or plot continuity. They mix death and Whitney Houston ballads (which, I guess to many of us are one and the same), dark satire and cheesy camp, terror and masturbation. Murdered students return from the dead to give us lip-sync numbers oozing with teenage horniness. In general, the underlying sexuality of the kids under these circumstances is surreal and frightening, as is the absence of anguish or fear in many of them as they watch their classmates being killed. A simple light shift from fluorescent to blood red acts as the room’s "unconscious realm." Through this, we find out what is happening in the hostages’ heads amidst their fear—who they are, where they come from and what they want. Melissa (Wessley Swift) confides that she is pregnant, Bob wishes he were someone else, Jennifer looks tough but says she is still sexually naïve. They collectively chant, "I am not normal" while in this stylized and effective reality, and their faces shift from fear to (more disturbingly) diabolical laughter directed at us. The kids who terrorize the other kids in the classroom tell us, incidentally, that they were terrorized first. Freddy’s unusually early sexual exploits have definitely left a mark on his teen years, and Jason’s mother made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in such an unorthodox manner (she sort of rolled the bread instead of laying them flat against each other), that he was plagued about it during elementary school. Their pasts, whether absurd or disturbing, are reminiscent of our modern society that tries to place an unrealistically simple cause -and -effect line of reasoning to these kids’ complicated motives. Fuck You is probably not for everyone. But I have to shamelessly admit that the raw creativity and sheer gall of this talented ensemble won me over. They save Fuck You from the possibility of being in poor taste by giving the piece an underbelly of intelligence and complicated characterization. The ensemble constantly works as a unit to elevate the piece above commentary mode, and most of the menaced students rise above their stereotypes when faced with the continual fear of their losing their lives. I should also mention the talent of Ann Enzminger, who provides Fuck You with gorgeous original music and has the voice of an angel. At its worst, the White Trash Hamsters’ Fuck You can be childish, a bit slow and self-indulgent. It is also a risky, scathing in-your-face observation of politics, teen angst and violence. If you’re up to the challenge, see it before it closes on August 23rd.