Theater Roundup: Mom Stories, Absurd Dreams, Vile Weill

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 08 October 2011 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Motherhood Out Loud
Written by Leslie Ayvazian, Brooke Berman, David Cale, Jessica Goldberg, Beth Henley, Lameece Issaq, Claire LaZebnik, Lisa Loomer, Michele Lowe, Marco Pennette, Theresa Rebeck, Luanne Rice, Annie Weisman and Cheryl L. West
Directed by Lisa Peterson
Starring Mary Bacon, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Randy Graff, James Lecesne

Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling
Written by Adam Rapp
Directed by Neil Pepe
Starring Betsy Aidem, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Shane McRae, Reed Birney, Christine Lahti, Cotter Smith, Katherine Waterston

The Threepenny Opera
Music by Kurt Weill
Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Robert Wilson

Motherhood Out Loud, a collection of sketches, monologues and short one-acts about being a mother from childbirth until being alone after the grownup kids leave the nest, has laughs and tears in abundance, just like the experience it dramatizes.

Brainchild of Susan Rose and Joan Stein, this 90-minute show is divided into 5 sections comprising 19 playlets. Most of the one-acts are written by Michele Lowe, with solo contributions from the likes of Beth Henley, Lisa Loomer and Theresa Rebeck. The quality varies wildly, with Lowe’s “fugues” that open each section coming off as more formulaic and sitcomish than the four excellent performers deserve.

But there are compensations. Henley’s Report on Motherhood focuses on an old lady (a mordantly funny performance by Randi Graff) who’s seen it all telling her teenage great-granddaughter the truth about love and pain and the whole damn thing. Graff is also heartbreaking in Lowe’s best contribution, Queen Esther, in which a confused mom discusses dealing with her young son’s preference for dresses instead of toy guns.

Graff is one part of a superb quartet. Saidah Arrika Ekulona wrenchingly portrays a mother’s sadness over son joining the military in Stars and Stripes, James Lecesne hilariously tosses off hit-or-miss gay-dad jokes in If We’re Using a Surrogate, How Come I’m the One with Morning Sickness?, while Mary Bacon reins in a tendency to over-emote in the touching finale, My Baby.

Savvily staged by Lisa Peterson on Rachel Hauck’s cleverly minimalist set (with a big assist from Jan Hartley’s amusing projections), Motherhood Out Loud speaks loudly and effectively about our shared humanity.

Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling, set in the home of an affluent Connecticut couple giving a dinner party for the son of close friends who recently attempted suicide, traffics in an all-purpose absurdism reminiscent of Edward Albee. That’s no compliment, since Albee has been churning out second-rate copies of his own best works since his last gasp, Three Tall Women, in 1992.

Rapp has paid close attention to the self-aggrandizing nastiness and gratuitous vulgarity Albee has stuffed his later plays with, so Flying/Falling has much meandering, meaningless talk about dreams (both flying and falling, hence the unwieldy title), crude flirtations by the wife with her husband’s surprised longtime friend, a chandelier-swinging sex scene between the couple’s medicated daughter and the dinner’s guest of honor, a black maid who recites Shakespeare and speaks fractured French, hosts of symbolic geese slamming into the side of the house (one of them gets cooked for dinner), and an even more symbolic lioness which may or may not be locked in the basement, and whose appearance is a blatant rip-off of the end of Albee’s The Goat.

Rapp’s blank-slate play that could be seen as a symbol for anything: America’s role in a post-Sept. 11 world; a cautionary tale about our economic collapse; even a simpleminded generation gap story. But a play that means anything ends up meaning nothing; Rapp’s absurdism gets more desperate and shrill as it goes along, despite director Neil Pepe’s estimable efforts to keep the whole mess on track, and a cast all too willing to follow Rapp wherever he leads them.

Christine Lahti, who looks smashing in a form-fitting “Chanel” outfit, gets Rapp’s nastiest lines as the bitter wife, biting into them with xenophobic, racist, classist glee. But ultimately Lahti, Cotter Smith (friend), Katherine Waterston (daughter) and Reed Birney (husband) are defeated by Rapp’s stale rap.

Theater and opera legend Robert Wilson is up to his old tricks with his production of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht classic The Threepenny Opera, imported from the Berliner Ensemble’s German home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for five performances attended by rapturous audiences, if the well-dressed middle-aged couple seated next to me, gasping, oohing and aahing throughout in admiration, is any indication.

Wilson’s usual style--kabuki makeup, robotic and regimented movement, neon lighting, minimal sets--is the antithesis of Brecht and Weill’s kinetic musical theater work, which follows the charismatic crook Macheath who juggles his women Jenny, Polly and Lucy. That Wilson makes an already lengthy show nearly unendurably static--the spoken German is so slow that even non-German speakers like myself could understand what was being said--halt the brilliantly precise musical, dramatic and comedic rhythms that Brecht and Weill built into their masterpiece.

For over three hours, we get Wilson’s processions of actors crossing the stage, occasionally striking but mostly uninspired lighting cues, pointlessly loud and crude sound effects (which got the evening’s biggest applause), overdone facial and verbal tics from an otherwise accomplished group of actors, and the dumbing down of Weill’s memorable tunes and Brecht’s biting lyrics.

Wilson cheapens The Threepenny Opera, devised by its creators as a lively, colorful and varied satire, by transforming it into a cartoon that’s monochromatic, dull and hackneyed.

Motherhood Out Loud
Performances through October 29, 2011
Primary Stages, 59 E 59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY
http://primarystages.org

Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling
Performances through October 30, 2011
Atlantic Theatre Company @ Classic Stage, 136 East 13th Street, New York, NY
http://atlantictheater.org

The Threepenny Opera
Performances through October 8, 2011
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Street, Brooklyn, NY
http://bam.org

For more by Kevin Filipski, visit The Flip Side blog at http://flipsidereviews.blogspot.com

"Atys" Revives the Court of Louis XIV at BAM

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 20 September 2011 10:13

Written by Jack Angstreich

Atys
Music by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Conducted by William Christie
Directed by Jean-Marie Villéger
Performed by Les Arts Florissantsand members of Opéra Comique

Celebrated conductor William Christie led his extraordinary ensemble specializing in the French Baroque, Les Arts Florissants, along with the artists of the Opéra Comique, in a rewarding revival of the Jean-Baptiste Lully masterpiece, Atys, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the matinee gala opening performance on Sunday, September 18, 2011.

This production, directed by Jean-Marie Villéger, is of little interest as a work of theatre -- it rather meaninglessly updates the classical setting -- excepting the delightful 17th-century-style ballet interludes that punctuate the dramatic action --  to that of the aristocracy of the Louis XIV era. However, the costumes and scenography are attractively opulent.

From a musical viewpoint, the production is uneven. The instrumental players, under Christie's baton, were superb and all the choral passages sounded glorious. But the featured singers varied in quality.

Among the men, Ed Lyon, in the title role, was one of the best, if not quite a great tenor. He was surpassed by Francisco Fernández-Rueda and Reinoud Van Mechelenas the two Zephyrs.

On the whole, the women fared better than the men. The most impressive female voices included those of Anna Reinhold in the lead role of Cybèle, Élodie Fonnard as Flore, and Rachel Redmond as Iris. But the most exciting discovery in this production was the lovely Emmanuelle de Negri as Sangaride, a first-rate singer with abundant personal charm.

Off-Broadway Roundup: Sept. 11 Revisited; Hearts vs. Minds

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 20 September 2011 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Sweet and Sad
Written and directed by Richard Nelson
Starring Jon DeVries, Shuler Hensley, Maryann Plunkett, Laila Robins, Jay O. Sanders, J. Smith-Cameron

Completeness
Written by Itamar Moses
Directed by Pam Mackinnon
Starring Brian Avers, Aubrey Dollar, Meredith Forlenza, Karl Miller

Civilized people having civil conversations, Richard Nelson’s stock-in-trade, reached its apogee with last fall’s That Hopey Changey Thing. Too bad that such lively talk turns dull in Sweet and Sad, a Hopey Changey sequel that finds the Apple family of the Hudson River town of Rhinebeck together on the afternoon of September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that changed America.

Where Hopey Changey was filled with delicious, diverting political discourse, Sweet and Sad merely marks time as its characters dance around one another, discussing any little thing to avoid the September 11 elephant in the room: their avoiding “big” topics makes the rest of the dialogue a muddle. (That Nelson has Marian Apple’s teenage daughter commit suicide some months before the play begins smacks of dramatic desperation, an attempt to conjure an event that‘s as personally cataclysmic and traumatic as September 11 was for our collective psyche.)

Indeed, it’s not until the last 30 minutes, when they can no longer avoid the issue, that talk returns to 10 years earlier and their emotions finally, touchingly well up. Nelson uses Walt Whitman’s The Wound Dresser not only for his play’s title but also to pad his running time. Uncle Ben recites the poem as a run-through for his doing the same at a memorial service later that evening, and its vivid description of the Civil War’s horror makes an obvious if unoriginal parallel to our unbrave new post-September 11 world.

The acting sextet (comprising Jon DeVries, Shuler Hensley, Maryann Plunkett, Laila Robins, Jay O. Sanders and J. Smith-Cameron) is as good an ensemble as in the previous play, and Nelson says he will return to the Apple family for at least two more episodes in their lives. Let’s hope that the Apples (and Nelson) can get back on track, conversing  pointedly as in Hopey Changey, rather than wanly as in Sweet and Sad.

Completeness is an overstuffed romantic comedy about exceptionally smart people--graduate students and their professors--who are more adept with their minds than their hearts. Itamar Moses’ play nods to Tom Stoppard’s and Michael Frayn’s work in its melding of the cerebral and the romantic, his characters alternating between spouting arcane, nearly incomprehensible (to this layman) gibberish about mathematical theories and problems to solve, then stammering, hemming and hawing about their inability to find love that’s satisfying.

The play revolves around computer scientist Elliot and molecular biologist Molly, grad students who leave their current lovers (his another grad student, Lauren, hers her faculty advisor, Don) to get together. But they discover that being compatible physically and mathematically doesn’t mean they are soul mates. Moses does, however, provide an open ending, where it’s possible that they may try again, which may end in failure like their attempted  problem-solving through algorithms.

Moses’ uneven dialogue never gets a handle on these people. While they run their mouths about mathematical matters, they pepper their talk with inarticulate interjections like “like” and “f++k” and other unscientific terminology. If Moses was taking satirical swipes at these supposed brilliant characters by showing how they become tongue-tied when dealing with matters of the heart, that would be one thing, but since they speak like that all the time, that’s doubtful.

Pam Mackinnon directs energetically, but she’s flummoxed by the wrongheaded scene where the two supporting actors appear in front of the audience as themselves to no discernable point. On David Zinn’s nicely appointed set that stands in for student apartments and school study areas, a fine acting quartet acquits itself well, particularly in the schizophrenic dialogue they‘re forced to say. 

In all, despite its allusions to high science and higher love, Completeness feels strangely incomplete.

Sweet and Sad
Performances through September 25, 2011
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY
http://publictheater.org

Completeness
Performances through September 25, 2011
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://playwrightshorizons.org

For more by Kevin Filipski, visit The Flip Side blog at http://flipsidereviews.blogspot.com