Off-Broadway Roundup: Kahane's "February House"; Lonergan's "Medieval Play"; Gionfriddo's "Rapture"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 13 June 2012 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

February House (photo: Joan Marcus)

The ingredients are in place for a mature, serious musical: a fascinating story of colorful (and real) celebrities living in a Brooklyn boarding house during World War II. But February House, despite its pedigree, meanders when it should be tautly focused.

The frustrating result has a culprit: Seth Bockley’s book, which strains for significance, but is a cut and paste job that brings together the house’s inhabitants—editor George Davis, authors Carson McCullers and W. H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten and his lover, tenor Peter Pears—and reduces them to uninteresting caricatures, none of whom get enough stage time to be anything more than cartoon versions of the actual people.

It’s a shame that two other famous occupants of the house, author/composer Paul Bowles and his wife, writer Jane Bowles, have been erased from the show: they’re as worthy as the others. If the objection is that the Bowleses would have made the onstage population too crowded: since the characterizations are superficial anyway, what’s another two?

Gabriel Kahane’s music, while accomplished, only occasionally lives up to the drama’s and characters’ demands. That Kahane isn’t in Britten’s league—even the “young” Britten (or Benjy, as he’s called)—is obvious; perhaps that’s another reason why Bowles was omitted: two superior composers onstage are too much for Kahane to go up against.

The performers don’t get a chance to create real characters, although Kristen Sieh’s McCullers and Erik Lochtefeld’s Auden come closest. And too bad that Britten and Pears are reduced to a Laurel and Hardy tag team by Stanley Bahorek and Ken Barnett, including a badly misconceived Act II curtain raiser, the unfunny “A Certain Itch,” concerning an infestation of bedbugs.

Medieval Play (photo: Joan Marcus)

Kenneth Lonergan’s messy but affecting character-driven explorations of contemporary individuals—which have populated his plays (This Is Our Youth, Lobby Hero, The Starry Messenger) and movies (You Can Count on Me, Margaret)—are jettisoned for his latest stage work, Medieval Play.

This amusing but overlong farce has some good moments, but there are too many stretches where Lonergan simply treads water. It opens as two knights discuss their part in the ongoing Hundred Years War, with profanity and modern observations butting heads with a farcical attitude, and the rest of the play follows suit.

Zany, sometimes funny horseplay, even zanier and sometimes very funny dialogue, and enough wall-to-wall anachronisms to make one think that Lonergan overdosed on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Love and Death and real old Saturday Night Live sketches.

Lonergan overplays his hand by too often having his characters talk about the absurdity and insanity of war, obviously mirroring our own era: even if he allows the delightful Heather Burns to narrate with winks to the audience about how hugely inconsequential the whole thing is, it starts to wear thin long before the curtain comes down.

As director, Lonergan (who stages the physical comedy quite effectively) has smartly cast real actors as his lead knights: Josh Hamilton and Tate Donovan never ham it up as, say, Nathan Kane or David Hyde Pierce would, all the better for the comedy to percolate. Walt Spangler’s cartoonish sets, Michael Krass’ cute costumes and Jason Lyons’ clever lighting keep Medieval Play on the right path when its author wanders far afield.

Rapture, Blister, Burn (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Gina Gionfriddo—whose last play was the unwieldy dark comedy Becky Shaw—returns with Rapture, Blister, Burn, which has the same strengths and weaknesses, although its characters’ motivations are somewhat more believable.

Catherine and Gwen, now in their mid-40s, had gone their separate ways after grad school: Gwen married Catherine’s boyfriend Don and is raising two sons; Catherine became a feminist writer and theorist famous enough to appear on Bill Maher.

Catherine has returned home to care for her mother, who had a heart attack, and when she, Gwen and Don start catching up, it’s obvious nobody’s happy: homemaker Gwen finds her porn-watching husband—dean of a local high school—insufferably lazy, while Catherine feels that maybe she wrongly let Don go to Gwen many years ago.

Gionfriddo definitely has the pulse of her female characters’ shattered hopes and dreams, demonstratively shown in the Act I scene where Catherine, Gwen, Avery—Gwen and Don’s 21-year-old fired babysitter—and Alice, Catherine’s mom, talk about feminist and anti-feminist writings of the past few decades. But what begins as a shrewdly written and bitingly intelligent scene of women pointedly discussing intellectual matters soon degenerates into academic speechifying.

So it’s worrying that Gionfriddo actually lets her polar-opposite women switch places in Act II: Gwen goes to New York with her theater-loving teenage son and lives in Catherine’s apartment, while Catherine and Don start carrying on as if the two decades since their breakup never happened.

It’s not that these people wouldn’t behave like that—although they probably wouldn’t—but that Gionfriddo never makes it believable that they would. Similar to her haphazard plotting and characterization in Becky Shaw, the people in Rapture, Blister, Burn are mere author’s pawns, lessening their dramatic—and comedic—impact.

Glaringly obvious too is Lee Tergesen’s turgid Don: sure, he’s supposed to be anything but a catch now, but there must be something in this unambitious and plainly exhausted man that causes a spark in his old girlfriend. But Tergesen plays Don so flatly it’s impossible to see what either Gwen or Catherine ever saw in him.

Happily compensating are Amy Brenneman’s Catherine, a shrewdly expert mix of heady intellect and emotional messiness; Kellie Overbey’s Gwen, a level-headed, extraordinarily ordinary woman; and Virginia Kull’s Avery, the playwright’s hilariously catty mouthpiece.

Peter DuBois efficiently directs on Alexander Dodge’s sharply defined set, but Rapture, Blister, Burn—a discordant title that paraphrases a Courtney Love lyric—ends tepidly rather than searingly.

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