2008 New York International Fringe Festival Reviews
The Vajayjay Monologues
reviewed by Ross Chappell
Aug 9, 2008
It's nice to be surprised by something truly new, and Lindsay Burns's original one-woman show, The Vajayjay Monologues, is most definitely an altogether new creature. Its title might make it seem like an obvious or simple comic takeoff of Eve Ensler's acclaimed The Vagina Monologues. Rest assured, it is not. Part parody, part sociopolitical statement, part homage, this play is the oddest and most outstanding balance of honest appreciation and legitimate questioning I've ever seen. While fans of The Vagina Monologues (and of Ensler's vital movement, V-Day) will get the most out of this show, Burns has carefully crafted a show that speaks to a wider audience, due to both its humor and its pathos.
The play is brilliantly funny and Burns's slightly over-the-top delivery is a marvelous send-up of Ensler's original performance. From the opening line, "I bet you're worried," I wasn't. Not the least bit. Burns is a wonderful performer and her stage presence is immediately apparent, somehow managing to be simultaneously commanding and inviting. Therein lies the brilliance of her writing as well. The show, a series of monologues with a couple songs, echoes and even answers Ensler's original work. Burns warns against the dangers of the "fake Bob" and the "coochie snorcher cherry popper." (Don't worry if that didn't make sense. She provides just enough exposition to include everyone in the jokes.) Her skewering of Ann Coulter as an "odious gasbag of spew" had me nearly falling out of my chair, while a revolt against cosmetic vaginal procedures had me wincing and howling at the same time. Her segment on the various slogans that vaginas might choose is absolutely priceless. Her scene recalling the onset of a schoolgirl's menstruation made my heart ache. Once again, the brilliance is in the balance. Every moving scene has a light note, and all of the humor is laced with meaning, but it's somehow never heavy-handed. Every moment, every character, every riotously funny observation about the current state of society, the Internet, politics, feminism, etc., has at its heart the clearest sincerity.
Vicki Stroich's direction is an excellent match for this unique work. Stroich clearly understands the piece and does a marvelous job with both the staging and the pace.
Burns makes the audience laugh out loud but also confronts them with some tough questions. How much progress has really been made, Burns asks, when Oprah (a one-time Vagina Monologues cast member) uses the euphemism "vajayjay" on national television, and we are under constant visual bombardment by the vaginas of Britney and Paris? She not only understands but has also managed to capture and humorously present a rather elusive truth: when we so canonize a person or movement that we can no longer stop and take an honest look at where we are, at the successes and failures of a particular effort, then we become static and wind up undermining the very empowerment that people like Eve Ensler have devoted so much time and energy trying to inspire in us. We cede the movement to history and consign true progress to the shelf while we pat ourselves on the back for walking around in circles. In this piece, Burns asks us how we can move forward. It is a question we must all work to answer if progress is to continue.
Written/created by: Lindsay Burns
Directed by Vicki Stroich
Presented by Pot of Jam Productions
The Pantyhose Grid
reviewed by Heather Lee Rogers
Aug 12, 2008
The Pantyhose Grid is FAST. With a run time of just an hour, this play by Cynthia Frank features characters who are fast talkers and fast thinkers. There are a lot of ancient literature allusions and big concepts that the actors move through very quickly. It also skids to a halt so suddenly I was too stunned to clap, in utter disbelief that they had ended the show before I'd even figured out what was going on in the last scene.
Nevertheless, I will try to explain what I think I saw as it blew by. The first chunk of the play is with Bill, Felicia, and Craig in Bill's apartment. I gathered that Felicia and Bill are both tenured, mid-career, research professors at Columbia and that Craig is Bill's graduate assistant or maybe an adjunct under his wing. According to the official FringeNYC show description Bill is a "religion professor" but in the play he was referred to as a... um... Neoplatonist? (I think that's what they said) and Felicia is an expert on Jane Austen. All three are old friends, sex-obsessed, and have epic potty mouths, which begets most of the ironic humor in the play. So if you think esoteric academic literature discussions peppered with the F-bomb are hilarious, then this show is for you!
About 20 minutes into the play, Felicia, in a manic bipolar fit, reveals that she has gained possession of a diary that was written by none other than Jane Austen. She hasn't shown it to anyone else before but begins reading it with Bill to get his help in analyzing it. Here we start going back and forth between Bill's apartment and Jane Austen's time to get scenes with her and others in her life to illustrate the stories in her diary. For me these were the most enjoyable scenes in the play. Both the writing and the performances are more relaxed and easy to follow. Also Lauren Beth Ferebee is lovely and interesting as Jane. I also liked the scenes Bill and Felicity had adjacent to these scenes from the diary. During them I began to understand the deep intellectual friendship and admiration between these two scholars—a relationship dynamic you don't see every day on stage. It was fun seeing them spark their brilliant minds off each other as they tried to figure out what the diary revealed about Austen.
I'd explain the significance of the title of the show, but although the Pantyhose Grid concept is an important revelation to the characters, I confess I didn't really get it. No fear of me giving away the ending either in this review, since I'm only about 70% sure I have that (partially) figured out. Perhaps if you move in circles of uber-educated literati this show is more accessible. Certainly the audience around me laughed a lot and seemed to really enjoy it. Me, well, it made me feel like I should spend less time in theatres and more time at the library.
Written/created by: Cynthia Frank
Directed by Paul J. Michael
Presented by Cynthia Frank
Doppleganger Joe
reviewed by James Comtois
Aug 12, 2008
Doppelganger Joe is a 30-minute one-woman show written and performed by Caroline Lesley about, well, someone meeting her doppelganger.
Lesley plays Joe Cole, a manic, down-on-her-luck brunette actress going nowhere fast. While preparing for an audition, a friend calls to tell her to check out a Web site that shows you your doppelganger. Since the myth says that you die once you meet your doppelganger, she's apprehensive (well, since she goes to the site immediately after hanging up with the friend, she can't be that apprehensive, but never mind that). She finds her ringer, a blonde British woman named Lilly Joe (also played by Lesley). They meet and become friends.
One day, Lilly accidentally walks into an audition session for a role Joe has just tried—and failed—to get (we're given the impression that it's not just bad luck or a tough market that's stopping Joe from getting her big break: she's just not very good). Lilly wows the casting agent and her career takes off. Joe ends up being Lilly's anonymous stunt-double and is of course consumed with jealousy. And...well, I think you can see where this is all going.
The main problem with Doppelganger Joe is that it has only one joke, and the joke isn't particularly funny. Even with only a 30-minute runtime, the show's weak premise limps along until it has nowhere left to go.
There's also a problem with one of the personas: Joe is fundamentally obnoxious and irritating. She's unlikable and unsympathetic, and not in an interesting way. For example, she gives a constant running commentary for all her actions, which ends up being quite grating. Since Lesley portrays Lilly with some grace and appeal, I'll assume this is a deliberate choice; I'm just hard-pressed to figure out why.
Something else is going on here I found a bit odd: Joe has what feels like a borderline psychotic obsession with her body image. She has this bulletin board with pictures of models and actresses and notes to look like them (with even a picture of her face taped over one model's). However, since Lilly, her exact double, becomes a famous actress without effort, Doppelganger Joe doesn't seem to be making any sort of comment on the unreasonable demands Hollywood makes on women; it's just another neurosis Joe has.
I will admit that the show gave me one big laugh toward the end when an off-stage film director gives Joe a surprisingly demeaning assignment (which I won't reveal here). It was a nice comedic sucker-punch.
At the end of the day, Doppelganger Joe just seems to be a vehicle for Lesley to play two different characters. And unfortunately, neither performance is particularly captivating.
Written/created by: Caroline Lesley
Directed by Caroline Lesley and Jon Erlichman
Presented by Caroline Lesley
WALLS
reviewed by Saviana Stanescu
Aug 12, 2008
Aron Ezra's play WALLS pays tribute to Eugene Ionescu and Christopher Durang by having an absurdist premise: a couple wakes up one day—the day of their anniversary, actually—and realizes in shock that a wall has appeared out of nowhere in their upper middle-class house and divided everything in two: the bed, the room, the kitchen, the childhood dolls of the wife, etc. Even the fish in the fish tank are now half-fish that are still magically swimming. As the husband still has to go to work (on Wall Street probably), the wife—a teaching assistant for whose grad studies her significant other is paying—stays at home, desperately trying to make sense of this wall-thing. The husband comes back, climbing through the bathroom window because he's too overweight to fit through the main door, and the two of them set up to destroy this strange apparition that has disturbed their daily routine on such a special day. The wall doesn't give any sign of becoming thinner or more transparent until the two of them figure out what works on it, instead of sledge hammers and other sharp objects.
I am not going to spoil the suspense by revealing what has effect on that wall—a transparent metaphor for the distance that grew between the two domestic partners—but I guess everybody has figured it out already. Anyway, the writing is smart and witty and manages to reveal most of the quite predictable problems of a couple in a fresh way. We all know what this is all about and where it is going, but still the writing and the acting are so good that we can take the journey, waiting to see how the last blow at the end will sound. It sounds as expected but again—it wasn't boring to take the ride.
The actors, Julie Jesneck and Adam Richman, are very strong, bringing powerful nuance to the lines and the actions. My small disappointment is the directing, although I understand the limits that a FringeNYC show poses: the play has such a juicy absurdist premise that one would expect it to be more interestingly exploited visually. A realistic set doesn't seem the best choice in this case. The actors are great but even they have trouble making that wall "alive" on stage. It's not clear when/why they can see through the "wall" and what is the progression of the wall's growing transparent toward its disappearance. When realistic and non-realistic elements are mixed, the convention has to be extremely clear, and the "walls" between the two plans excitingly drawn. That doesn't happen here. I hope director Markus Potter looks upon this as a starting point for a fully-developed future production.
Written/created by: Aaron Ezra
Directed by Markus Potter
Presented by New York Rep
George the Fourth
reviewed by Richard Hinojosa
Aug 11, 2008
"Most families don't love each other enough to play at our level," says the caustic mom in the comically cruel play George the Fourth. But when she says love, she really means hate. They seem to be interchangeable to her. In this play, love is a sharp stick jabbed into the ribs. This makes for many very funny moments but for all the needling and cruel mind games, the play never delves into why the members of this family are so cruel to each other or why love and hate are two sides of the same coin.
David and Henrietta have been married way too long and perhaps never should have been in the first place. Their only daughter, Diana, grew up in an environment of malicious metaphors and relentless disapproval. She desperately tries to be normal but she can't seem to get it right. She brings home her new boyfriend, Hayden, who is a bartender at a gay strip club and occasional makes a little cash on the side as a gay prostitute. She has tried to bring other boyfriends home in the past but they never last more than a few minutes in her parent's house of brutality. Her father, for example, always makes it a point to be cleaning his guns when she brings a new boy over. But there is something about Hayden that the father takes to, and they become friends...well sort of. Possibly because Hayden is brutally honest and admits that he's drunk and gay and everything else within the first ten of meeting them.
David and Hayden go off to a bar together and bond on some level while Diana and Henrietta try to bridge the enormous rift in their relationship. Diana wants to win all the old fights with her mom. She thinks that she can trump all the cruelty by bringing home Hayden, but it backfires on her. Her parents see right through her and know that she only wants to hurt them and that her love for Hayden is just her idea of control.
Playwright Michael T. Middleton has a very clever way with words. His dialogue is sharp, acidic, and extremely elegant. This play feels as if Neil Labute had written Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Middleton manages to make us laugh at his characters' failings and vile wit, but he never really makes us feel something for them. They seem to be having the same conversations over and over again because they use the same tactics over and over again to needle each other. Nothing is resolved and very little is revealed about what makes these folks tick, with the possible exception of David who delivers a beautiful and exposing monologue at the end. Director Dina Epshteyn lends the production a very clear picture of this family. She keeps the dialogue moving fast, as if it were exchanging gunfire, and creates some good stage pictures.
The cast is very solid. Erin Krakow is perfectly uptight, desperate, and even a little innocent as Diana. Clancy O'Connor is so likeable and yet so contemptible as Hayden. Denise DeMirjian nails the cold-hearted sarcasm of Henrietta but her vocal pattern reminded me of Katharine Hepburn in her later days. Richard Pruitt really stands out as David. He balances all the maliciousness with some deeper human qualities and creates the most complete character.
I really enjoyed George the Fourth. I laughed quite a bit and in the end, I felt thankful for the mundane family I grew up in. I realized that I like to see bugs tossed into a jar and shaken up so they'll fight. If that's something that entertains you as well, you may enjoy this production as much as I did.
Written/created by: Michael T. Middleton
Directed by Dina Epshteyn
Presented by Michael T. Middleton
Raised By Lesbians
reviewed by David DelGrosso
Aug 11, 2008
Leah Ryan's Raised by Lesbians is one of the 13 FringeHIGH productions of the festival, which means it has been identified as a boundary-stretching piece that will connect with teenage audiences. I agree that this play could do just that, and I hope it gets the chance to. The challenge, of course, is getting that audience to the play, and I was sorry to see very few, if any, teenagers at the performance I attended.
The drama of Raised by Lesbians is rooted in a situation that will be accessible to many audience members. 16-year-old Joe's parents have divorced, and he must choose whether to keep living with his mother, or to accept his father's offer to come live with him and his new wife. Complicating things for Joe, his mother is gay, a fact which is well-known by his classmates at school. Though he clearly loves her, Joe wonders if a more "normal"—or at least more anonymous—life could be had living with his father.
Joe's mother, Alice, is also faced with a big decision—whether or not to settle down with her girlfriend Rita, or to keep holding her off with their once-a-week routine. As Joe and Alice face these choices, their fears and anxieties play out in energetic dream sequences, including a series of metaphoric scenes set in a laboratory. In these, Joe's mom becomes the scientist Dr. Glenda, her girlfriend Rita becomes the cartoonish and vapid assistant Betty, and his father appears as The Masked Man, a sort of Zorro figure. In the world of the lab, Joe takes the form of the grunting, caged Feral Freak Boy, whom Dr. Glenda is trying to domesticate and The Masked Man is trying to free.
Director Dev Bondarin leads a spirited and versatile cast and the play flies through its 80-minute single act. It may be my age, or more likely just my personal taste, but I prefer the less busy scenes set in the real world to the dreams and the visits to the lab. For me the play is at its best in these quieter moments, when the artifice drops away and leaves the characters sincerely dealing with each other. Particularly good are any scenes between Joe, played by Matthew Giogowski, and his best friend Gracie, played by Kira Sternbach. Both actors give honest and engaging performances that help to ground the play, which at times runs the risk of losing the importance of the situation by getting too silly.
I think that Raised by Lesbians is a great choice for FringeHIGH. It is theatrical and likely edgier than anything that would be allowed to perform inside a high school. I just hope that, in the performances that remain, more of the target audience will take the opportunity to see it.
Written/created by: Leah Ryan
Directed by Dev Bondarin
Presented by Geek Ink
TINY FEATS OF COWARDICE
reviewed by Loren Noveck
Aug 11, 2008
Paradoxically, Tiny Feats of Cowardice, a solo musical written and performed by Susan Bernfield and directed by Daniella Topol, is in and of itself an extraordinary display of bravery—and in that context, let me repeat the words "solo" and "musical." Bernfield, you see, is excessively shy, a person who admits that her "whole sensation" is "anticipation of humiliation," a person for whom asking a cafeteria counter guy for water is an almost insurmountable challenge—and yet, she's up on stage. By herself. Telling stories about her life, and SINGING. In Front of People. Telling us all about everything she's afraid of. Which is...everything.
Really. Just about everything you could think of being afraid of day to day makes an appearance here, and probably, unless you too have great experience in neurosis, a lot of things you've never thought to worry about: Leaving the toaster on and burning down the house. Small planes. Vehicles and transportation, generally speaking. Including Vespas. And tractors. Bungee jumping, skydiving, scuba diving. Slippery bathtubs, second hand smoke. Malaria. Heights. Balconies. Other people. You name it, Susan Bernfield has analyzed it with trepidation and fretted it over it on more than one occasion, and the narrative here is basically a catalog of her life's milestones of fear, from a childhood near-drowning incident to the daily anxiety of waiting up for her husband to get home from work, from social anxiety in junior high school to the perils and terrors of raising children in New York City in the early years of the new millennium.
But if the show were just a list of one woman's fears, it might be good therapy but it wouldn't necessarily be good theatre. And Tiny Feats is really terrific theatre. If you, like me, are a person who's ever stopped before entering the subway trying to remember whether you locked your door or unplugged your coffee pot, you're bound to ruefully recognize some of your own paranoid foibles; if you're one of the lucky few who breezes through life with blithe confidence, then you'll learn a lot about how the rest of us live.
As a writer, Bernfield has a sharp ear for the telling detail—the way a Dorito looks, big Swiss cows with really big Swiss cowbells, the way the Elizabeth Arden pedicure salon looks—and the clear-eyed honesty to turn those powers of observation on herself, then and now. There are a few places where description threatens to overrun story, but for the most part, the richly remembered details turn monologue into a fully fleshed-out scene and makes her storytelling pop. She's both incisive about and generous to her younger and present selves. She's still trying to work out the eternal battle between living in fear and just letting go, right up to the moment in which she stands before us singing about it, and that internal struggle is both funny and touching.
And as a performer, Bernfield is chatty and charming, with a great rapport with the audience; she doesn't have a traditional musical-theatre belt of a singing voice, but she knows how to put emotion into a song. Director Topol has wisely kept both the staging and the performance style simple, focusing on clarity and transparency in the storytelling, and on building that rapport in both the monologues and the musical numbers. And with the songs woven into the middle of monologues (sometimes perhaps a little too woven into the monologues; the alternation of text and music sometimes seems a little arbitrary), the piece sometimes feels like a very rich cabaret act.
The score, by Rachel Peters, is a pleasingly eclectic array of music, ranging from Sondheim-esque numbers with funny rhyme schemes ("All the possibilities / Short in wire / leads to fire / We expire") to jazzy upbeat numbers to torch songs (including my favorite number, "Fragile," a sweet, soft song about the fears of giving your heart to another).
The first of those songs, "Intro or Not to Intro," doubts the whole enterprise: "It seemed like such a great idea / A show about / Everything I'm afraid of / Which is / Everything./ It's clearly not a great idea. / A show is something you / Perform! / For people."
It turns out to be a pretty great idea after all.
Written/created by: Susan Bernfield, music by Rachel Peters
Directed by Daniella Topol
Presented by Precipice Partners
THE BOSS IN THE SATIN KIMONO
reviewed by Josh Sherman
Aug 10, 2008
Now who among us doesn't love a good musical about whores and nuns? Certainly the folks at Fabulous Productions do—and they deliver a deliciously crass, raucously fun time with the fluffy tuner The Boss in the Satin Kimono. Like an ideal summer drink, the show washes down easily and probably won't give you too much of a headache the morning after, provided you don't over-think details like meaningful exposition. The Boss in the Satin Kimono delights in its trashy appeal, and its gay-friendly approach will surely attract a sassy fun audience for the rest of its run.
Our heroine, Lady Maybelline Jones (played with Mae West aplomb by the brassy Erin Buckley) is in financial distress. Her brothel has been whittled down to one lonely whore/housekeeper, her Latina maid Jacinta (hammed up by Kyla Garcia), and they are about to be evicted from their "ecumenical clinic for men in need." Salvation comes from the nearby convent, where Mother Marcus (Jim Noonan, in comical drag) and young nun Sue (Emily Senn) have also been evicted by their local Catholic bishop for Marcus's underage "indiscretions." They proceed to open up a soup kitchen in the brothel to provide shelter for all involved, and musical theatre hilarity ensues. The purely incidental plot thickens with the introduction of the local villainous do-gooder Renata St. James (Emily Dorsch), who sends meek social worker Ronda Marquez (Jody Cook, in serious drag) over to close the soup kitchen/brothel.
All of this is an excuse to poke fun at prostitution and Catholicism through lewd cabaret-style song stylings. The most satisfying laughs are had through the recurring number called "Tapestries of Joy," sung by Mother Marcus, who keeps luring the not-so-innocent cast members into her/his lascivious bosom through weaving. I give the co-creators Blake Hackler (book, lyrics, and music), Steve Silverstein (music), and Paul Ford (music) all the credit in the world for creating perhaps the strangest seduction device I've seen on stage. I also give them ample credit for giving Ronda an eleven o'clock barn-burner of a number, replete with a backline tap extravaganza with the whole company.
The Boss in the Satin Kimono is frothy, filthy fun that is definitely not for the FringeJR set. Director Susanna Gilbert is blessed with a great cast that embues the piece with flair to spare and a ton of energy. Check your good taste at the door and have a delightfully tacky time at The Boss in the Satin Kimono.
Written/created by: Blake Hackler
Directed by Susanna Gellert
Presented by Fabulous Productions
FELL
reviewed by Martin Denton
Aug 13, 2008
What I really admire in Harrison David Rivers's new play Fell is its depiction of a loving, if somewhat insular, upwardly mobile African American family. Even though Jesse, the dad, is absent more than he wants to be due to long hours at the office, and Angela, the mom, is transparently striving and opportunistic in her dealings with—well—just about everyone, these two people clearly and authentically love each other and their two children. Functional (as opposed to rampantly dysfunctional) family relationships are hard to come by in American drama, and I was charmed by the one Rivers offers us.
There is, for example, a simply magical scene near the beginning of the play, in which the two kids—Web, a perpetually awkward teenager, and Zora, about 10, with what her mother describes as a big personality—are playing jump rope. The phone rings, and Angela strides over to answer it. The kids instantly turn the jump rope into a make-believe phone cord with a receiver on either end, each playing their Mom as gracious lady on the phone. Funny and heartwarming because it's so completely real, this is the kind of writing that showcases Rivers at his best and makes Fell's portrayal of this family-in-trouble so affecting.
Unfortunately, the main turns of events in Fell aren't this trivial and natural. The principal conflict has to do with Jesse's treatment at work, at the hands of his boss, a white man named Bill. The press materials and some of the dialogue deal in a general way with a glass ceiling resulting from racism; but the scenes between the two men are of a more sexual nature (Bill asks Jesse to show him how large his penis is). The problem here is that though the demeaning treatment of Jesse is clearly illustrated, the nature of it feels inappropriate in a way that only partially has to do with racism—Jesse seems to be more a victim of sexual harassment than bigotry, and that detracts from Rivers's theme.
A slave woman, identified as a ghost, figures in several scenes as well, reminding Jesse and his children to remember and honor their African roots. But a lack of pride in his heritage doesn't seem to be Jesse's problem, either (or even Angela's, for that matter: it's not that they want to be white so much as that she wants to be rich; Oprah is her role model).
So though race and other issues get serious airing here, the drama doesn't finally hang together or make cogent points the way we'd wish. But Rivers's writing and characterizations are rich and rewarding, and make me eager to see more work by this fairly new playwright.
The production, directed expertly by Jess McLeod, boasts a company of likable actors—Laurence Stepney as Jesse, Melissa Joyner as Angela, Kendale Winbush as Web, Jehan O. Young as the ghost, and Jack Perry as Bill (okay, he's not really likable in this role, but he is effective). The show is stolen by Rory Lipede as Zora, though; she's described in dialogue as a firecracker, and that's exactly what Lipede gives us in the role: a sweet, smart, completely charming and completely guileless little girl who is a handful-and-a-half. Lipede is a major find; her performance here is certainly one of the highlights of this FringeNYC.
Written/created by: Harrison David Rivers
Directed by Jess McLeod
Presented by 7.15 Productions /Columbia U. Black Theater Ensemble
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
reviewed by Matthew Trumbull
Aug 11, 2008
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, like the main character of its title, has a daunting mission. It is a World War II play based on the five-line Randall Jarrell poem of the same name, and features interpretive movement. Randall, whom we meet in his ball turret gunner position at the rear of a B-17 bomber, reflects on his family and post while the aircraft heads for Germany to drop bombs and somehow return intact under heavy Nazi fire.
The ball turret of the legendary B-17 Flying Fortress was a swiveling glass sphere with two 50-caliber machine guns on the bottom of the aircraft's fuselage, and a perilous post to man. It was too cramped for all but the smallest of the crew and for any parachute whatsoever, and forced the gunner to contort his body into the fetal position for hours. These conditions, and certainly aerial combat in general, pose tricky problems to re-create on a stage, and it is a respectable challenge for six performers and a stool to effectively suggest the magnitude of 32.5 tons of flying metal getting shot at six miles over the earth. But if the audience's imagination is riveted, I would not put anything beyond its reach. Unfortunately, this piece has too many jarring elements that ultimately sabotage the power of its imagery.
When the aircraft is attacked, the actors form tightly together in plane battle mode and launch into sequences of sharp, repeating movements in time to a live orchestra's music. The movements are meant to suggest the actual physical activities engaged in by each crew member, in accordance with their duties. The trouble is, we haven't the slightest idea what activities require all these specific sorts of rapid crouches and arm movements through the air. I would guess that few in the audience have recently been on a bombing raid to Europe or could describe the inside of B-17. Our perception is therefore limited to distinguishing between the front of the plane (Nathaniel Kressen, playing the pilot facing upstage) and the back of the plane (Randall, the ball turret gunner, facing us), yet even the way Mike James, playing Randall, is seated comfortably on his stool doesn't seem to suggest the physical restraint, danger, and isolation inherent to that post or Randall's fears. The duties of the two characters on each side of the plane (Raquel Cion, Elisa Matula, Azhar Khan, CJ Holm) are anybody's guess—I didn't know from their movements if they were gunners, navigators, radio operators, or none of the above. The frantic pace of the mystery movements, plus the music's odd rock beat, make the air battle sequences seem awkward and seizure-like.
The rest of the play certainly lies within easier grasp of theatrical storytelling, dwelling on Randall's flashbacks about his abandoned, worried mother (Raquel Cion), deserting father (Azhar Khan), and rail-hopping sister (Elisa Matula). But playwright/director Anna Moench's dialogue and scenarios frequently get stuck in melodramatic cliché, and the ensemble does not provide enough help. Too often generalized rapture is deemed an adequate interpretation of the many passages laden with descriptive imagery. Despite the play's frequent and literal reaching for the heavens—plane battles, cloud formations—I couldn't help but feel left six miles below.
Written/created by: Anna Moench
Directed by Anna Moench
Presented by Catalytic Collective
Extraordinary Rendition
reviewed by Robert Attenweiler
Aug 13, 2008
Ostensibly, Extraordinary Rendition, written and directed by Jim Balestrieri and playing now as part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, is about interrogation. The Major is trying to crack a coded spy message and, in the empty chair across from him, the audience is led to believe, sits the person able to give him the answers he seeks. But, actually, the play is more about the results of espionage: paranoia and fear.
In fact, cracking a code (the code is, in this case, an eerie toy piano-sounding broadcast attributed to the East German Stasi) is of particular relevance to The Major. Human code breakers are being replaced by computerized data analysis systems and The Major, as the last code-cracker around, desperately wants to crack the code known as "Swedish Rhapsody" to prove his relevance to the military and, consequently, himself.
In using the idea of a coded message, Balestrieri is working with a potent metaphor for the fear and paranoia of modern life. After all, these codes are supposedly unbreakable and are only used once. Each time he hears one, The Major knows that something is being conveyed that is hidden to him—and who knows what the consequences will be? So, we'll forgive The Major if he seems to be losing his grip.
For all the richness of the play's central image, Extraordinary Rendition lacks the focus and clarity to convey its ideas to the audience and then push them to a satisfying conclusion. As in any solo show, there is a lot of talk—but even if The Major is going a bit mad from it all, that talk can be clear in the journey its audience is meant to take. Madness, it seems, is the point of it all.
The play also struggles in its characterization of The Major. Michael Raymond Fox does an admirable job with all the directions he's asked to go, but since we meet The Major near the end of his tenure he's already been stripped of the confidence to make us believe that he could ever extract information from anything—code or detainee.
Extraordinary Rendition is mining interesting territory. There is no shortage of interesting ideas in its net, but, right now, the audience has to work too hard to figure out what some of them are. But, the play shows promise, and I am interested to see Balestrieri's work further.
Written/created by: James Balestrieri
Directed by James Balestrieri
Presented by Raptor Pack Theater
We Three
reviewed by Garry Schrader
Aug 11, 2008
Mental illness can be a risky topic for a playwright to take on, particularly a young, relatively inexperienced playwright. You may, for one thing, overdramatize your material with "snake-pit" histrionics and exploitation. Or you may romanticize, elevating the suffering to a spiritual state. Perhaps the biggest risk of all, dramatically, is that you lose the interest of your audience, which often tends to regard the repetitions and self-defeating behavior of the sufferer from mental illness with the same exasperation as the friends and loved ones around them. In We Three, playwright Will Goldberg has evaded these missteps and given us a play about mental illness that is full of subtlety and frequent grace; quiet snapshots that impressionistically portray both sanity and family devotion nearing the breaking point.
Amory is a young man in his 20s who cycles between relative lucidity and increasingly alarming disorientation. He wanders the streets, homeless, squatting, or imposing on the kindness of old friends who have moved on in their lives. Looking after him with dogged but increasingly frustrated devotion is his younger brother, Tommy, a high school senior. Only slightly less involved is Olivia, Amory's ex-girlfriend, who agrees, with understandable misgivings, to put him up with her—until she no longer can.
Most of the play is composed of short, understated exchanges between these characters that convey almost subliminally the powerful shifting forces of love, anger, and sacrifice in a tragic situation where there is no one to blame. Olivia has her own life and a job she is committed to; Tommy is about to graduate and leave for college, which means leaving Amory behind. One of the vital questions Goldberg is asking is: How far can—and should—we go to take care of others we love, if it means neglecting ourselves? This gives the play a relevance that will resonate for many audience members with no direct experience of mental illness.
I do think a little suspension of disbelief is required to accept Goldberg's premise. Everyone asks Amory if he's taken his medication—the answer is usually no, as its side effects make him feel like the walking dead—but no one asks him if he's seen his therapist, or gone to a local clinic, and indeed such options are never mentioned. It is as though the play says that if you have schizophrenia, your choices for treatment are powerful, sedating medications, a cold and impersonal state hospital...or your kid brother. But this is a minor bump when larger themes are so successfully engaged.
It does seem, with the appearance halfway through the play of Amory's unnamed mother—or rather his frightening vision of her—that he would have something to talk with a therapist about. Loving and rejecting, seductive and bizarre, this is the "schizophrenogenic" mother of old, when schizophrenia was believed to result from traumatically inconsistent parenting. This notion is not currently in fashion—the focus having shifted almost solely to a chemically "broken brain"—and is a somewhat jarring element in the otherwise smooth flow of events.
It is a strength of We Three that Goldberg has let Amory speak for himself, that he is not just a straw figure the others react to. Mitchell Conway conveys with quiet power Amory's intelligence, his helplessness, his shame and embarrassment at the burdens he puts on those he loves ("I don't help people at all. I'm dead weight on them")—and his selfishness and entitlement. A touching high point in both performing and writing comes as Amory tries to describe to Olivia his personal experience of his illness. He presents her with a long list of similes and approximations, knowing they don't quite suffice: "...like a trick you play on yourself...like you wrote something on your arm, and then you sweated, and pieces of it are gone...like you need to throw up in the middle of the night and there's no one there to hold you."
Ryan Emmons (Tommy), Julie Congress (Olivia), and Samantha Hooper-Hamersley (Mother) are equally strong and sensitive in their roles, and the play is smartly directed by Erin Daley.
We Three is produced by No. 11 Productions, a theater group comprised of recent Skidmore grads new to the city. From the evidence on display here, they are a company worth watching.
Written/created by: Will Goldberg
Directed by Erin Daley
Presented by No. 11