Theatre Review: Comic left-right conflict of “Other Desert Cities"

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 16 February 2011 10:00

Written by Lucy Komisar

Other Desert Cities
Written by Jon Robin Baitz
Directed by Joe Mantello

This is a very New York play even if it takes place in Palm Springs, California. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz tells what happens when a New York writer who lives in Sag Harbor (where a lot of New York writers go in summer), journeys west to visit her extremely Republican parents. “Extremely” means they were friends of the Reagans.

Baitz lives in Brooklyn and is on the faculty of the New School Drama Division in Manhattan. He’s also at home in movieland and teaches at the University of California/Santa Barbara writing program. I think he should stay in New York. I will explain.

Brooke Wyeth (a portrayal of great range that one has come to expect from Elizabeth Marvel), had suffered a depression that sent her to a hospital and keeps her on medication. After six years she’s visiting her parents. Rather than be sympathetic, her mother, Polly (Stockard Channing), is cold. Channing expertly channels her as tough, rigid, and controlling. Her father, Lyman (Stacy Keach), is exacting, like a general. Laid-back brother Trip (Thomas Sadoski), who lives in LA and produces a dumb TV game show (is “dumb” redundant?), wants everyone to cool it.

The surroundings speak wealth. The living room, with a curved stone wall and a smoke cone over an open fireplace, was designed rather than built. (The set is by John Lee Beatty.) The seating is on three chaises, all separate. In a corner stands a fake Christmas tree densely hung with gold bulbs. Fine, except they are Jews and are planning to “celebrate” with dinner at the country club.

“Other desert cities” is a subtle put-down of Palm Springs; the words appear on a highway sign.” Baitz deftly depicts the sociology of these folks, and director Joe Mantello keeps the action moving smartly.

Brooke has brought her manuscript of a family memoir that deals with an episode her parents want to forget, but was the cause of her emotional breakdown. As a troubled young man in the 1970s Vietnam War days, her brother Henry joined a Venice, California (think hippie and drugs) group that blew up an army recruiting station. A worker inside was killed. Not long after, Henry’s belongings were found with a suicide note on the deck of a ferry going to Canada. Brooke blames her parents: they never let the kid be himself, they cut his hair, they sent him to a school for delinquents.

What else could you expect from her father, an actor who went into politics, became head of the state Republican party, and then was named an ambassador? Father owns a gun. Mother says, “chink food” and thinks war is justified. Brooke quips, “This is America; we get warm and fuzzy about war.”

They don’t want her to publish the book. Baitz laces the conflict with funny one-liners. Polly: “Now you know what I believe in.” Brooke: “Aside from the right to bear arms?”

Polly’s sister Silda (Linda Lavin), who wrote a series of B movies with her, is a recovering alcoholic but seems to see quite clearly. Lavin is terrific in the role, giddy, saucy and cynical.  She is fighting to stay sober, but the downside is, she says, “I have more Nazi dreams than Elie Wiesel.” But she is also solid, sensitive and smart.

Polly criticizes Silda’s multi-colored blouse that probably came from a thrift shop. Silda is out of work and dependent on her sister for a place to stay. (Both women wear pencil slacks and high heeled shoes, even around the house. Is that the West Coast bourgeois uniform?)

Marvel is brilliant in displaying Brooke’s seething, suffering, distraught fury. She accuses her mother of being a bully and her father of rejecting his son. What can you expect, Brooke declares, dissing “the zealots who’ve taken over your party” and “their silence over the war.”  It’s 2004, so now it’s the new war.

So, we know who are the good guys and the bad guys, right?

The family clash goes on too long. Then comes the surprise melodramatic ending. I found it disappointing, a Hollywood dénouement that wraps up the plot a little too facilely and makes the set-up hard to believe. Still, until that moment the play is absorbing and entertaining.

Other Desert Cities
Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center
150 West 65th Street
New York, NY
(212) 239-6200
Opened Jan 13, 2011
Closes Feb 27, 2011

Movie Review: "Cedar Rapids"

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 February 2011 14:54

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Cedar Rapids
Directed by Miguel Arteta
Starring Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Stephen Root, Kurtwood Smith

Ed Helms has quickly become a key member of very successful comedy ensembles as evidenced by his work on Comedy Central’s signature program, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” NBC’s “The Office,” and last year’s wildly successful movie comedy, “The Hangover,” which will have a sequel in theaters this spring.

Read more: Movie Review: "Cedar Rapids"

Theatre Review: Kimber Road

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 08 February 2011 05:00

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Kimber Road: A Serious Musical Comedy
Written by Harold Lerner
Directed by Scott Klavan
cast: Robert Abelson, Joanne Borts, Josh Breitzer, Jenna Gabriel, Jeremy Geller, Mel Kaiser, Laurie Lawrence, Emanuel Perlman, Leo Schaff, and Molly Stark
Musicians: Mark Toback, Piano, Gene Keyes, Clarinet

Kimber Road is a spirited new satire on synagogue life and star [of-David]-crossed lovers in America and the Old Country by retired Cantor Harold Lerner.

Kimber Road opens in flashback mode in 1980, as key characters Rosa Leah and her papa, Cantor Moishele Bratzker, recall events of 40 years earlier, when Rosa becomes smitten with David, the son of a rival religious leader, Reb Sholom Finkelman. With the knowing persistence of the tough, magical matchmaker, Chaye Sur’l, the two opposite-family scions are with effort affianced.

Not so fast: The arduous engagement is torpedoed almost instantaneously by a dispute between the two religious factions before a wedding can transpire. From there, the dispute flares to engulf the community, when the full-blown feud is confronted with an unexpected common enemy. Each congregant must sort out the reasons for where he or she stands.

Playwright and lyricist Lerner perfected his understanding of the rhythms and vaulting melodies of Jewish cantellation in 60 years of singing in and creating soaring music for synagogues in upstate New York.

Themes addressed in the satirical musical offering -- and the threats such modern-day concerns pose to the survival of the Jewish people, particularly in an environment defined by contemporary cultural assaults, generational cross-currents, and ubiquitous doubt -- find their robust and pleasing outlet in the play.

The large issues addressed through zesty humor and delicately restructured liturgical compositions by cantorial greats of the past, good-natured chiding, and acutely observed Yiddische zeitgeist provide an insider’s peek at life in a just-yesterday bygone era. These provide meaty insights into some of the strains that cleave our generations today.

Although the theme of disharmony is necessarily at the centre of these conflicted relationships, Lerner and director Klavan deviate slightly from the iconic originals to create an opposition between the modern man or woman who “loves love” and the hard-fought images and values of a religiously and ideologically strict ancien régime.

With the character of the parents giving way to the modernity of their offspring in the goldene medina, America, the invocations and definitions of the past fuse with the choral invocations of the opposing synagogue members’ activity, and brushes over the aesthetic of the poignant musical satire as a whole, with its own repeated dramatic, plaintive and narrative motifs of loss and redemption. Klavan casts a dozen talented actors and musicians in roles that give each a chance to shine musically and, often, dramatically.

Serviceable plays about the workings of faith and its adherents are noticeably sparse. Those that manage to dramatize intergenerational disputes without losing the cohering thread are indeed smaller still.

As entertaining as is the plight of the youngsters who seek to be with those they choose, the true target audience is parents and adults who forget that under the temporary rivalries of place or community group, it is incumbent upon grown-ups to strive for understanding of the Other, even in one’s particular religious stratosphere; to listen with open hearts to those we might dismiss or impugn for less-than-exalted reasons. Kimber Road is a flash we need to heed: Though surely society is partially to ‘blame’ for the occasional dysfunctions of our various groups, the miraculous effort of love and open-heartedness can heal the fissures that crop up and threaten to calcify our interactions.

Though the characters do not have extensive speeches on the stage, since the staged-reading production is a swift 90 minutes, they all come across as fully dimensional, without artifice or separation from people we all know. Lerner manages to sketch a character in a few lines of  potent dialogue, and extend that reality with lilting music that combines the best of Old Country nigunim, cantorial liturgies, with a satisfying awareness of Broadway and contemporary music. And for his part, the director marshals the elements of Jewish weltschmerz, poignancy, wringing Polish pathos, Russian recognition and Talmudic tradition out of the script and tapestried music.

A wee caveat is that the name of this tuneful satire does not immediately convey to a prospective audience what delights are to come. I would have preferred a name with more gemutliche resonance to tease the theatre-goer with what joyfulness, humor and perceived story lies ahead.

But with inspired and inspiring lyrics, melodies that stay with one and -- thanks to a cast that is top-notch and professional -- an author with so many years of musical expertise under his belt, Kimber Road offers at once a resurrection and construction of beloved sounds and imminent sense that beguiles an audience, even in a reading. With a full-bore staged piece, this would be a complementary sidecar addendum to the likes of a Fiddler or even a folksy, re-purposed Oklahoma!

Kimber Road: A Serious Musical Comedy
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2011
7:00 PM
AT THE JCC IN MANHATTAN
334 AMSTERDAM AVE,
NEW YORK, NY 10023

http://www.bigvisual.net/kimberroad

Marion DS Dreyfus ©2011