Promising Workshop Presentation of Damascus Square

Last Friday we attended a workshop presentation of Damascus Square, a new musical co-written by Shai Baitel, Oran Eldor, and Sarah Hirsch, at 54 Below in midtown Manhattan.  While the play still has a few rough patches to be ironed out (which is, of course, the reason for doing a workshop production in the first place), even at this early stage, we found this work in progress to be very promising - both stimulating and entertaining, with a strong book, a delightful score and clever lyrics.  A full-scale staging of the musical is expected sometime next year and we’re very much looking forward to it.

The musical is based on the story of Eli Cohen (herein played by Richard Blake), the Israeli Mossad agent who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Syrian Government in the 1960s and whose actions are generally credited with having played a major part in Israel’s subsequent overwhelming success in the Six Days War.  In this re-telling, Cohen is revealed not only as one of the most heroic of Israeli patriots in that nation’s history but also as a much more complex man whose divided (and, at times, misguided) personal loyalties may have driven him in unexpected directions (somewhat reminiscent of Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson’s behavior in the classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai).  It is an intriguing and provocative concept and one that is intelligently and effectively explored in this production by a first-rate cast including, in addition to Blake, Tovah Feldshuh as Tamara Sharon, the head of Mossad; Bradley Dean as Amin al-Hafez, the Ba’ath Party leader befriended by Cohen; Natalie Charle Ellis as Nadia Cohen, Ed Cohen’s wife; and Etai Benshlomo as Majid, the innocent intermediary who unknowingly facilitates Cohen’s undercover exploits.  

Jericho Starring Jill Eikenberry at 59E59 Theaters

L-R: Jill Eikenberry, Carol Todd, Andrew Rein, Kevin Isola, Eleanor Handley, and Noel Justin Allain in JERICHO by Jack Canfora at 59E59 Theaters.  Photo by Carol Rosegg.

“Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down…."

Currently premiering at 59E59 Theaters in midtown Manhattan, Jack Canfora’s Jericho is set in Jericho, Long Island, circa 2005, not in the ancient Canaanite city of the same name.  But in the Long Island community, battles (albeit familial and emotional rather than nationalistic and military) still are being fought.  Joshua – or “Josh” (Noel Joseph Allain) as he is known in the off-Broadway production – still plays a decisive role.  And, perhaps most telling, the walls still come tumbling down.

In fact, the walls (of the World Trade Center) came tumbling down on 9/11/2001 - four years before the play began, thereby setting the stage for all that was to follow.  This is intended to be not only figuratively but literally the case: the stage is cluttered with debris, a mass of upended tables and chairs and other assorted non-descript objects, the flotsam and jetsam of the 9/11 attack, all of which the actors access in creating the sets for their subsequent scenes.  This, in fact, suggests two things: first, that the characters current lives are really a consequence of the 9/11 tragedy; and second, that out of the chaos that the 9/11 attacks engendered, new and better worlds yet might be created.

Alec (Kevin Isola) died in the 9/11 tragedy and his traumatized widow, Beth (Eleanor Handley) never fully recovered: despite medication and psychotherapeutic intervention, she remains delusional, refusing to accept the fact that Alec is truly gone and unable to establish an intimate relationship with another man.

That other man, at least potentially, is Ethan (Andrew Rein) a patient and decent chap whose own brother, Josh, narrowly escaped death himself at the World Trade Center on the same day.  That narrow escape apparently left Josh suffering both from “survivor’s guilt” and from an accentuated sense of his own “Jewishness” and it wreaked havoc on his marriage to Jessica (Carol Todd) who is understandably reluctant to join him in emigrating from Long Island to Israel in fulfillment of the sudden re-awakening of his sense of Jewish identity.

Rachel (Jill Eikenberry), Josh’s and Ethan’s mother, continues to live in Jericho, Long Island in the house where she raised her sons, but she is about ready to sell the house and move on herself – not to Israel but to Florida where she could join her sister, Helen,  in comfortable retirement in their golden years.  But Rachel hasn’t left yet and, before she does, she hosts her traditional Thanksgiving dinner for her family: her two sons, Josh and Ethan; her daughter-in-law, Jessica; and Ethan’s latest flame, Beth.

One need not be solipsistic to recognize that, at least to some degree, we all live in worlds of our own making and build walls around ourselves to preserve those worlds as we perceive them.  For many, it is difficult enough even to think outside the box, let alone live outside the box, but should the worlds to which we’d become accustomed begin to crumble, as they so often do, we may be forced to face up to the unpleasant reality that our world might no longer be what we once imagined it to be or that it might be time for a change or that another’s world may not necessarily coincide with our own.

And that is what this play really is about, not the the literal collapse of the World Trade Center as much as the figurative crumbling of the worlds we construct around ourselves and our need to construct other worlds over time to replace them.  Thus, Rachel’s perfectly satisfactory original world was her Long Island home but ultimately she came to explore an alternate reality in Florida’s retirement community.  Ethan’s free-wheeling Jewish-American world was up-ended when he began dating Beth – a shiksa of partial Palestinian descent.  And while Josh’s youthful insular worlds in Long Island and Manhattan, may have satisfied his needs prior to 9/11, they proved inadequate for him in the days after 9/11; once terrorists destroyed the Wall Trade Center, he found himself forced to tear down the world of his youth, replacing it with an alternative orthodox Jewish religious community structure.

Beth’s world collapsed when Alec died and she struggled mightily, albeit unsuccessfully, to replace it.  Jessica was content with her assimilated Jewish-American world and didn’t really want to replace it with Josh’s new vision of a brave new world in Israel.  (In a way, Jessica’s problem was the mirror image of Beth’s: while Beth could not accept that the world that included her dead husband was truly gone, Jessica could not accept the fact that Josh’s own world had so changed that, although still very much alive, he was truly lost to her.)

This is a thoughtful and well-written play in which it seems that there is almost always more to a character’s persona than first meets the eye and all of the actors do a wonderful job of pacing their revelations to retain our interest throughout the entire work.. As we come to understand Josh better, we learn that the “survivor’s guilt” he feels at having survived the 9/11 tragedy has a deeper basis than we might at first have suspected.  And we discover another dimension to Beth’s deep despondency over Alec’s death as well.

Kevin Isola is charming as Alec (and as Beth’s shrink, Dr. Kim).  Andrew Rein, as Ethan, exhibits a wide range of emotions in his various relationships with his mother, his brother and his girlfriend, Beth.  Not surprisingly, Jill Eikenberry is delightful as Rachel, a Jewish mother making a valiant effort to understand her children and keep her family together while attempting to build a life for herself. 

The role of Josh – son, brother, husband, newly-minted Zionist, and tortured survivor – is a particularly difficult one to play but Noel Joseph Allain does it with considerable skill.  Eleanor Handley’s role as the mentally disturbed Beth role is far from an easy one either but she too pulls it off with great aplomb.  But it was Carol Todd as Josh’s put-upon wife, Jessica, who I thought did the very best job of all, enabling the audience to actually experience the feelings of one whose world is falling apart in the most unexpected of ways. 

The Film Society in Revival on Theatre Row

By the 1970s, the British Empire had begun to crumble and South Africa was still in the throes of Apartheid - and it is against this backdrop that all of the action in Jon Robin Baitz’s remarkably insightful play, The Film Society, takes place.  Set in Blenheim, a boys’ boarding school in Durban, South Africa in late 1970, the play revolves around the inevitable changing of the guard at Blenheim and the conflicts and contradictions faced by Jonathon Balton (Euan Morton) as he attempts to balance his nascent youthful liberalism and his loyalty to his friends, Terry Sinclair (David Barlow) and Nan Sinclair (Mandy Siegfried) against his love for his school, his devotion to his mother, Mrs. Balton (Roberta Maxwell), and his obligations to the school’s owner and Headmaster, Neville Sutter (Gerry Bamman) - and all within the context of his own personal loneliness and self interest.

Originally produced in Los Angeles in 1987, when Baitz was still only in his mid-20s, and making its New York debut a year later, The Film Society is now enjoying its first New York revival in an excellent off Broadway staging by The Keen Company at The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row on West 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan.  Directed by Jonathan Silverstein, the play effectively captures the ambivalent spirit of the times and the inevitable conflict between generations.

 

On the one hand, we have Neville Sutter who has sought to navigate a gradualist course, modernizing the school’s philosophy by hiring younger, idealistic teachers like Jonathon, Terry and Nan while not fully abandoning the school’s traditional values.  In his camp is his Assistant Headmaster, Hamish Fox (Richmond Hoxie), a retired military officer, who has clung even more tenaciously to the school’s old values – including cricket, penmanship, and caning, not necessarily in that order.  And finally there is the wealthy Mrs. Balton whose deceased husband provided Neville with the funds he needed to purchase the school in the first place.

  

On the other side are the mildly activist Terry, whose invitation to a black priest/educator to participate in Blenheim’s centenary celebration enraged the parents of the school’s students and threatened the school’s very existence; and his wife, Nan, even less radicalized than her husband but still much more aware than Neville, Hamish or Mrs. Balton that, indeed, ”the times they are a’changing.”

And then there is Jonathon, whose sympathies well may be with Terry and Nan  - it is he, after all, who seeks to expand his students’ horizons by exposing them to classic films, whence the title of the play – but whose ties to his mother, his headmaster, his school, and his own self-interest are what create the tensions that make this play so well worth seeing.

What is seen as betrayal and “selling out” by one man may be interpreted as “becoming an adult,” or “facing reality” by another.  That is the question that confronts us in judging Jonathon.  Depending upon the choices he makes, will he be betraying his friends and “selling out”  - or simply “growing up” and “facing reality”?  Or is there even more (or less?) to Jonathon than meets the eye?  Might his actions simply be a matter of his own self-interest or self-preservation – or even just a reflection of his own insecurities?

All of the actors in this revival of The Film Society have been well cast and all deserve praise for their performances. In particular, Gerry Bamman, in the role of Neville Sutter, perfectly captured the essence of an uptight controlled traditional British Headmaster; Richard Hoxie was absolutely delightful as Hamish Fox - the retired British military officer now serving as Neville’s Assistant Headmaster; and David Barlow portrayed the mildly activist but ultimately submissive Terry Sinclair with beautiful precision.  Most outstanding was Euan Morton who succeeded admirably in pulling off the most challenging role of all, that of the lonely, ambivalent and conflicted Jonathon Balton, 

The symbolism which permeates The Film Society is sometimes quite heavy-handed. Blenheim, itself, a declining boys’ school clinging to the past, may be taken as a proxy for all of South Africa in the days of apartheid.  When Jonathon orders a copy of the film “A Touch of Mink” to show to the students in his “Film Society,” he receives a print of “A Touch of Evil” instead - a harbinger, one might suspect, of the unexpected consequences yet to come.  Neville is going blind - reflecting, perhaps, his refusal to see the changes coming to South Africa - although they are all around him.  And Hamish is suffering from terminal spine cancer – about which no further explanation would seem necessary.

  

The heavy handedness of all that symbolism might best be explained by Baitz’ relative youth when he wrote the play and, had he been a bit more subtle, the play might have been even more effective..  But that is a very minor quibble over what is otherwise a very stimulating production and one well worth seeing.

Bless You All! A Broadway Revue Revived After 60 Years

Ruth Pferdehirt in BLESS YOU ALL! A BROADWAY REVUE.  Photo by Dixie Sherican

Bless You All!, A Broadway Revue with sketches by Arnold Auerbach and music and lyrics by Harold Rome, originally opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway to positive reviews in 1950 – but that still didn’t prevent it from closing after only 84 performances.  Now, after more than sixty years, UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC), is staging the show’s first ever revival off off Broadway in a limited three-week engagement at The Connelly Theatre on East 4th Street in downtown New York – including in it some new sketch material by Herman Wouk.

This revival does have  a lot going for it.  Some of its jazzy tunes are quite delightful; the choreography is very impressive; and both the singing and the dancing are memorable.  I was especially impressed by the long-legged, balletic Jennifer Lee Crowl, by Ruth Pferdehirt’s terrific rendition of “Little Things” (which came close to being a show-stopper), and by Billie Wildrick’s powerful and touching “You Never Know What Hit You.”

But it wasn’t quite enough for me.  The show’s material was very uneven to begin with more than a half-century ago and, despite the valiant efforts of Ben West, UMC’s Artistic Director, to re-organize the show’s sketches, eliminating its weakest numbers and tacking on the Wouk skit, it remains a very uneven production to this day.  The comedy sketches, in particular – a send-up of the snooty 21 Club, a vaudevillean slapstick pie-in-the-face routine, a caricaturish mockery of presidential campaigning on television, and Wouk’s comedic depiction of a corrupt judge on the lam, to name just four – were sophomoric at best and failed Borscht Belt routines at worst.

 

So here’s my bottom line: if you’re into nostalgic reminiscence of Broadway revues of the 1940s and 1950s – including some fine song and dance – this revival of Bless You All!, A Broadway Revue might just do it for you.  But if your sights are set somewhat higher than that, you may find yourself more disappointed than delighted by this production.

English Language Premiere of Mr. Bengt's Wife by August Strindberg

Kersti Bryan as Margit and Eric Percival as Mr. Bengt in MR. BENGT'S WIFE.  Photo by Jingxi Zhang.

In Mr. Bengt’s Wife, August Strindberg’s ambivalent attitude toward women, coupled with his view of marriage as an emotional battleground, are in full display.  Sometimes referred to as Strindberg’s response to Ibsen’s The Doll House, this play has only been performed infrequently and never before in English.  Indeed, since 1882, it has been produced just five times – in Stockholm in 1882, Cologne in 1908, Vienna in 1914 (where the Austrian Church demanded that it close after only two performances), Berlin in 1920, and again in Stockholm in 1971.

The current production, very professionally staged off off Broadway by The August Strindberg Repertory Theatre at The Gene Frankel Theatre on Bond Street in lower Manhattan, is based on the play’s first translation into English (by Malin Tybahl and Laurence Carr) and is directed by Craig Baldwin.  Set in Sweden in 1882, it focuses on the life of Margit (Kersti Bryan), a complex character with sado-masochistic tendencies, given to childlike fantasies of being swept off her feet by a dashing knight on a white charger, both victim and seductress, at times submissive while at other moments nothing but a selfish, self-centered bitch.  A prototype of the independent New Woman, perhaps, and a potential feminist icon.  Bryan plays her role brilliantly, practically stealing the show.

Margit was orphaned as a young girl and sent to a convent where she was abused both physically and emotionally by the Abbess (Vicki Blackenship) but befriended by The Confessor (Matt Hurley).  She is rescued from the convent by Mr. Bengt (Eric Percival), a mounted nobleman, just as she had fantasized she would be and he carries her off to be his wife and live happily ever after with him in his castle.

Unfortunately, Margit’s expectations are not fulfilled.  Mr. Bengt’s crops fail.  He goes bankrupt and is plunged into poverty, losing his estate to The Bailiff (Shawn Fagan), the King of Sweden’s unscrupulous representative and Margit’s childhood friend.  Margit’s marriage collapses and she sues for divorce.

After her divorce, Margit not only is pursued by The Confessor and by The Bailiff but also remains the love of Mr. Bengt’s life.  Or at least we are led to believe all that.  It’s also possible that the entire realistic-surrealistic story we’ve just witnessed on stage was nothing more than Margit’s dream.  You’ll have to decide.

While Kersti Bryan may steal the show as Margit, she is ably supported by all of the other five members of the cast, particularly Matt Hurley as The Confessor, Shawn Fagan as The Bailiff and Vicki Blackenship in the dual roles of The Abbess and The Chief Judge’s Wife. 

Freefall by Charles Smith at Drilling Company Theatre

L-R: Omar Evans, Milena Davila, and Rosario Salvador in FREEFALL.  Photo by Lana Davidovich.

Freefall by Charles Smith initially premiered at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in 1993 and had its off-Broadway debut at Theatre Row the following year.  Now, nearly 20 years later, it is being revived in an outstanding limited run off off Broadway production by Theatre for a New Generation at Drilling Company Theatre on West 78th Street in Manhattan.

The play is set on the south side of Chicago in 1991 but it is far from dated.  Its broadest themes relating to familial and quasi-familial relationships - parents and children, siblings, and the brotherhood of the streets – are as compelling today as they were two decades ago.

Grant (Jason Bond) and Monk (Rosario Salvador) are two brothers whose lives have diverged sharply over the years. Grant is a desk cop in Chicago who, with his wife, Alex (Milena Davila) is attempting to live out a version of the middle-class American suburban dream.   Monk, on the other hand, has just been released from prison after having been incarcerated for five years for burglary and is seeking to establish a new life for himself while searching for the mysterious benefactor who befriended him in prison.  Complicating Monk’s efforts are Spoon (Omar Evans) a Chicago crime lord and drug kingpin who is attempting to lure Monk back into a life of drugs and burglary.

When Monk shows up at Grant’s and Alex’s home, the brothers are forced to confront the meaning of family ties, a confrontation made all the more difficult by the fact that it was Grant who arrested Monk in the first place.  And the issue of family relationships is further underscored by Alex’s own seeming ambivalence toward her own familial responsibilities: is her primary role that of a daughter to her own aging parents or that of a wife to her despondent spouse?

All four actors are absolutely first rate in their portrayals of relatively dysfunctional characters in difficult circumstances but I was especially impressed by Omar Evans as the street-wise gangster Spoon and by Rosario Salvador as the struggling conflicted Monk.  

Playing Sinatra by Bernard Kops at Theater For The New City

L-R: Katharine Cullinson, Austin Pendleton, and Richard McElvain in PLAYING SINATRA at Theater For The New City.  Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Bernard Kops, an 87 year old immensely talented and prolific playwright, has written more than 40 plays for stage and radio, nine novels and six volumes of poetry.  Despite his well-deserved European recognition, to date few of his plays have been produced in the United States.  Fortunately, that oversight is now in the process of being at least partially corrected: his Playing Sinatra, which originally opened to rave reviews in London in1991, is finally receiving its American premiere at Theatre For The New City on First Avenue and East Tenth Street in downtown Manhattan.  And it is just terrific.  Indeed, it is difficult to understand why it took so long for it to get here.

Theatrical history is rife with plays dealing with dysfunctional siblings, in many instances focusing primarily on sexually repressed spinster sisters.  Think The Glass Menagerie or The Rainmaker.  Playing Sinatra is a play of that genre but one packing even more of a wollop.  It is The Glass Menagerie or The Rainmaker on steroids.  Imagine The Glass Menagerie as it might have been written by Jean Genet or The Rainmaker had it been penned by Harold Pinter and you’ll get some idea of what I’m driving at.Since the death of their parents just a few weeks apart, Sandra Lewis (Katharine Cullison), a middle-aged spinster has lived with her brother Norman (Richard McElvain), a sometimes violent  bookbinder whose agoraphobia may be the least of his mental ailments in their cavernous ancestral home in Streatham, London.

Norman appears to be content with his life as it is.  He seldom leaves the house and busies himself with his bookbinding and with his fancied gourmet cooking (which, if truth be told, amounts to little more than microwaving TV dinners which are transformed in his mind’s eye into haute cuisine).  He remains the boy he once was, albeit now in a man’s body.

Sandra, on the other hand, does leave the house on a daily basis to work at a tedious office job and she, at least, has not given up entirely on life.  Indeed, she even may have been exploring the possibility of selling or moving from their home. .In a way, she is the opposite of Norman, not a girl trapped in a woman’s body, but rather a middle-aged sexually repressed woman who never allowed the young girl she once might have been to emerge.  Today, the only things that bind the siblings together are their shared history, promises they made to their deceased parents, and a mutual passion for the life and music of Frank Sinatra.  It is in Sinatra’s lyrics that they find what others might discover in Ecclesiastes.

When Phillip de Groot (Austin Pendleton), an American and self-described “seeker” arrives on the scene, his disruptive influence on the lives of Sandra and Norman is immediately palpable.  But will Phillip be Sandra’s “platonic lover,” her savior, or her destroyer.  He’s certainly nothing like Laura Wingfield’s “gentleman caller” (a la The Glass Menagerie) and whether or not he’ll turn out to be the likes of Lizzie Curry’s Bill Starbuck (a la The Rainmaker) remains to be seen.

Cullison is absolutely wonderful as Sandra Lewis, at one moment capturing her distraught angst and sexual frustration, in the next portraying her fear of men seeking to get into her knickers, moving on to exhibit her deep devotion to her brother (which almost appears to border the incestuous), only to affirm her dream of finding in Phillip the “platonic lover” she has long sought.  McElvain is equally good as the mentally disturbed Norman, whose delusional quirks run the gamut from a damaging agoraphobia, to a compulsive love of Sinatra, to momentary ourbursts of violence to repressed homosexuality.  And Pendleton is just grand as the enigmatic and manipulative Phillip who, chameleon-like, manages to allow the other characters and the audience to make of him what they will.

This is one hell of a play and deserves a longer run.  Go see it.