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| Michael Hogan in Kandahar in the LABUTE NEW THEATER FESTIVAL Photo by Carol Rosegg. |
When
Lila (Alicia Smith) first approaches him at the cocktail party, Lucas (Mark
Ryan Anderson), doesn’t even realize she’s flirting with him. He is, after all, 42 years old, slightly
inebriated and physically challenged, while she, a beautiful and irrepressible
26-year-old, is nearly young enough to be his daughter. And yet, ultimately, flirtation leads to
seduction and at least one classic middle-aged male fantasy is fulfilled.
It
all takes place in Stand Up for Oneself
by Lexi Wolfe, the first of the six one-act plays that comprise St. Louis
Actors’ Studio LaBute New Theater
Festival, currently premiering at 59E59 Theaters on East 59th Street in
midtown Manhattan. The six plays are by
seven different playwrights (one is co-authored by two writers); their settings
run the gamut from Greenwich Village to Memphis, Tennessee to Northern Ireland;
and plotlines range from the pleasures of sexting to the ramifications of PTSD. But for all their differences, they do share
a unifying theme in their exploration of the human imagination and its location
somewhere between fantasy and reality
Stand Up for Oneself focused on the
fulfillment of a classic male fantasy in real life but the play that followed
it, Present Tense by Peter Grandbois
and Nancy Bell, went a step further, into the world of virtual reality. In Present
Tense, Martin (Justin Ivan Brown) and Debra (Jenny Smith) are carrying on
an illicit long distance affair which, due to logistical necessity, requires
that they satisfy their desires through sexting rather than the real
thing. But as the sexting takes on a
life of its own, it appears that their laptops may become more important to
them than their own laps. Or as Debra
expresses it in a text message to Martin: “Please love me when I meet you. Please prove that I am real.” And as Martin responds: “I’m sorry. I don’t know how.”
In
The Comeback Special by JJ Strong,
Bonnie (played by Alicia Smith even more delightfully and irrepressibly than
she portrayed Lila in Stand Up for
Oneself) and her boyfriend, Jesse (Michael Hogan), are touring Graceland in
Memphis, Tennessee. Bonnie instigates
their wandering off from their tour group and, by climbing over two velvet
ropes and a sleeping guard they manage to make it into Elvis’ bedroom, which
should, by all rights, have been off-limits to them. There Bonnie fantasizes about making love to
Jesse in Elvis’ bed but fails to persuade Jesse to have sex with her there.
That
unfulfilled fantasy pales by comparison, however, with the emergence of Elvis
himself (Neil Magnuson) from the en suite bathroom. Elvis, it seems has been ”stuck”
in something of a limbo-like state since his untimely death in 1977, a
reflection, perhaps, of the degrading circumstances under which he died. (His body was found in the bathroom and he
apparently died from a heart attack, possibly brought on and almost assuredly
compounded by his history of drug abuse.)
In order to get “unstuck,” Elvis attempts to convince Jesse and Bonnie
to kill him again or, barring that, at least to share his bed.
It
is a truly fantastical situation. But is
Elvis really Elvis? Or is he some
lunatic Elvis impersonator who just wandered on the scene? Or is it all a figment of Bonnie’s and
Jesse’s vivid imaginations?
In
Coffee House, Greenwich Village by
John Doble, Jack (Justin Ivan Brown) and Pamela (Jenny Smith) are on a blind
date, resulting from Jack’s having responded to a personals ad placed by Pamela
in the New York Review of Books. As they
get to know one another, they allow their conversation to stray from the real
to the speculative to the imaginary to the dangerously weird, culminating in a
situation beginning to resemble a folie a deux.
Their ultimate victim is their unpleasant waiter (Mark Ryan Anderson)
who, despite his rudeness, really doesn’t deserve the fate that befalls him.
The
four plays already commented upon were all, in their own way, romantic
comedies, and all dealt with the inter-related issues of human imagination,
fantasy and reality within the confines of the “war between the sexes.” But not all wars are as much fun as “the war
between the sexes” and life is not always a romantic comedy. There are real shooting wars, too, and they
are much more painful to contemplate, even if they also provide us with an
opportunity to explore human imagination.
The other two plays in this program – Two Irishmen Are Digging A Ditch by G.D. Kimble and Kandahar by Neil LaBute – fall into that
category.
The
title of the play Two Irishmen Are
Digging A Ditch derives from the first line of a long ethnic joke, the
point of which is our tendency to demonize “them” for their unacceptable
behavior while rationalizing our own behavior when it turns out to be no
different from theirs. It is a classic
example of our denial of reality and our substitution of imaginative
explanations for valid truths, when it suits our needs to do so.
In
the first scene of Two Irishmen Are
Digging A Ditch, Hagerty (Mark Ryan Anderson) is a naked, broken, beaten,
Irish combatant, who apparently has been betrayed by his neighbors, family or
friends and is on the verge of being executed by firing squad. (His powerful anguished performance in this
role is one of the highlights of this entire production.) In the second scene, it is Doyle (Justin Ivan Brown), who may well be the man who betrayed Hagerty, who is about to be
executed by Evans (Neil Magnuson). The
futility of war and our tortured justifications for it are all front and
center.
The
final play in this program is Kandahar by
Neil LaBute and, to my mind, it is the very best of the lot. In a sharply written monologue, LaBute
presents us with an example of the ultimate breakdown of the distinction
between reality and fantasy. An unnamed
veteran of the war in Afghanistan (Michael Hogan), clearly suffering from PTSD
to the point of being virtually paranoid-schizophrenic, delivers his poignant
monologue in a way that is likely to remain with you long after you have left
the theater.
