FringeNYC 2011: The Town of No One

The Town of No One by Tariq Hamani, presented by Playsmiths at Teatro LATEA as part of this year’s New York Fringe Festival, has been billed as a “surprising black comedy” but, while it may be “black,” there really is nothing comedic about it.  Rather, it is a dark, existentialist, nihilistic work which provides few laughs.  But if it is not funny, it certainly is thought-provoking  and, on that score alone, it is worth seeing.

The play is set in a somewhat phantasmagorical seaside town which boasts no laws, no rules, and no religious nor marital institutions.  Women procreate but don’t necessarily raise their own children nor even know their names: Mother May (Mary Catherine Wilson), the proprietor of the local pub, has borne eleven children but she never sees and can’t even recall the names of ten of them who she handed off at birth to be raised by Felice (Iriemimen Oniha).  The only one of her children who she still maintains contact with is Charlie (Timothy John McDonough) who publishes and hawks a trashy newspaper and drops into her pub where, at his mother’s insistence, he engages in a game of “Tick Tock,” the town’s favorite sport, with Mag (Helen McTernan) the town gravedigger’s spunky daughter.  (The game or sport of Tick Tock consists of two players alternately punching one another until one is physically unable to continue.  When Mag and Charlie play, it is Mag who prevails.)

Residents of the towns neighboring on “the town of no one” are followers of the “Religiobook” and, consistent with its teaching, they ritually toss the bodies of their deceased out to sea, envisioning their souls arriving at a better place in some afterlife.  That may or may not be so, but so far as their physical bodies go, it certainly isn’t: their bodies end up bloated and decomposing, only to be fished out of the sea by the gravedigger, Deadmen (Michael Selkirk) who, with the reluctant assistance of Mag and occasional help from Bub (Ben Newman), buries them in “the town of no one.”

The “town of no one” is thus something of a libertarian dystopia – or, worse yet, a libertarian nightmare.  With no laws and no rules, everyone does as he wishes and communal needs tend to go unanswered.  When the school house burns down, for example, the ineffectual Mayor Monty (Jim Nugent) is reduced to seeking voluntary contributions from the town’s citizens to rebuild it, but to little avail.

Things begin to change, however, when Harold (James Parenti), a runaway from another town, arrives on the scene.  In rapid succession, he and Mag fall in love, he is (possibly) seduced by Felice, and Mayor Monty resigns his post.  Mag assumes the position of mayor, promulgates new regulations for the town for the first time and, armed with a lead pipe, enforces her will on the town’s citizens.

But is the town any better for that?  Deadmen ultimately discloses to Mag that neither he nor she were born in “the town of no one” but that they immigrated there from some other place after Mag’s mother died in childbirth.  It was her mother’s death that made Deadmen realize that the platitudes he had been fed all his life – that if men engaged in productive labor and if women fulfilled their biological destinies by reproducing, all would be well in this world and that, in any case, an even better world awaits us all after death – were all just so much pap and that he and Mag would be better off in a town that had no such nonsensical illusions.

So what point, exactly, is the playwright, Tariq Hanami, trying to make?  Surely it’s not that an anarchic town with no rules and no laws, depicted here so distastefully, is more to be desired than a world in which laws and rules exist.  But equally surely, it’s not that rules and laws imposed by force and a society suffering from religious mystical delusions is preferable to one that is based on rational considerations and individual freedom.   Perhaps Hanami is simply saying “a plague on both your houses” – on both the libertarian dystopia that inevitably would result from a total lack of rules and laws and the totalitarian monstrosity of a state that would inevitably emerge from the forcible imposition of rules and laws on an unwilling citizenry coupled with that society’s facile acceptance of religious platitudes.  Or maybe Hanami is saying that what is really needed is something in between – a compromise suggestive of the big deal that eluded Barack Obama and John Boehner.  In any case, it’s worth thinking about.

FringeNYC 2011: What the Sparrow Said

Kevin Mannering and Matthewl Michael Hurley in What the Sparrow Said.  Photo by Alona Fogel.

What the Sparrow Said by Danny Mitarotondo, produced by The Common Tongue and now playing at Teatro Latea as part of the 2011 Fringe Festival, is an outstanding example of what the Fringe Festival is supposed to be all about.  It is a wonderful example of a new playwright’s pushing the limits of his craft to produce a work that transcends traditional theatrical boundaries and that, notwithstanding its limitations, makes its audience sit up and take notice – if only to say “I was there when he first burst upon the scene.”  For there is little doubt in my mind that Mitarotondo is, indeed, a major new talent from whom we’re likely to be hearing much more in the years ahead.

What  the Sparrow Said doesn’t really break any major new ground in a substantive sense: it is simply a variation on the oft-told story of two brothers who meet after several years of estrangement at their mother’s deathbed.  But it does break new ground in form and structure: it is a non-linear, right-brained exposition of the relationships among a number of tangentially related characters which forces its audience to view it from a variety of perspectives (in much the way that Braque or Picasso may initially have engaged their audiences with their visual arts).

The play’s overarching theme is the fractional, fractal, fractious and refracted nature of human relationships – the degrees to which we all may be perceived as composites of those whom we may resemble in one way or another and the sense in which we filter our impressions of others through our recollections of still earlier encounters.  All six of the actors in this production were up to the tasks set before them – Brenda Currin as Hannah, Lila Dupree as Amelia, Matthew Michael Harley as Dan, Kevin Mannering as Blaze, Ruby Ruiz as Nursie, and, most especially, Heather Oakley as Cynthia – and the director, Jenna Worsham, elicited the very best from them.

One caveat: while I very much enjoyed this production, not everyone will.  If your tastes run more toward the theatrically traditional, including temporal linearity with plots and characters developing along reasonably predict able lines, this might not be the play for you.  But if, like me, you’re intrigued by theatrical risk-taking experiments, then this is one you might not want to miss.

FringeNYC 2011: Lola-Lola

Lola-Lola, one of the better submissions in this year’s Fringe Festival, is well-written, well-directed, well-acted and a load of fun.  John (Christopher Sutton) is a full professor of anthropology at a conservative Christian college and a nationally recognized expert on “the missing link” (or, rather, the apparent absence thereof).  By the standards of his university, he is relatively liberal – that is, he accepts the general validity of the theory of evolution as it relates to all species other than man – but he refuses to believe that man, himself, descended from any ape-like ancestor, emphasizing the fact that “no fossil link” between man and the great apes has ever been found.

John’s wife, Mary (Leanne Barrineau) seems to share John’s general convictions on the subject of evolution and is herself a teacher of elementary school students.  She is also in the throes of an extra-marital affair with Ted (Colin McFadden), who is John’s best friend and a second-rate associate professor of anthropology at the university himself.  When Mary returns from a trip to Africa, she brings back a pet chimpanzee named Lola-Lola (Melissa Sussman) with her.  And, as it turns out, the chimpanzee is not only highly intelligent and insightful but falls in love with John who ends up reciprocating her feelings.

Superficially, at least, the play might appear to deal (at least metaphorically) with a whole host of “big” issues including interracial marriage, same sex marriage, polygamy, homosexuality, nature vs. nurture, animal rights, the advantages (or disadvantages) of assimilation vs. the retention of one’s historic ethnic identity, speciesism, and on and on and, assuredly, there will be those both on the left and on the right with such intellectual, religious, political or philosophical pretensions that they will focus all their attention on just those sorts of metaphorical allusions. The liberals and secularists among them surely will recognize in this play the obvious ignorance of the right in its denial of the self-evident truth of evolution while the religious right is certain to discover ample evidence of the left’s narrow-mindedness in its refusal even to allow an investigation into intelligent design’s alternative explanation to evolutionary theory.  Animal rights advocates will focus on the mistreatment of Lola-Lola and will see in her the virtual evolution of a chimpanzee into a “woman” under the proper environmental conditions.  Religious fundamentalists will disapprove of Ted and Mary’s extra-marital affair but will see it as inconsequential in comparison to John’s fornicating with a chimpanzee; secularist ethical relativists might consider John’s behavior no more reprehensible than Mary’s.

But if one focuses on issues of that sort, one will run the risk of failing to see the forest for the trees.  For the fact is that this really is not a very deep nor intellectual production – and I don’t think it was ever intended to be one. None of the plays characters present any intellectually rigorous arguments in support of any religious, political or philosophical positions and I don’t see that as an oversight or shortcoming on the playwright’s part.  On the contrary, I think that the playwright, Peter Michalos, just wanted to create an entertaining work and he certainly succeeded at that.

All five of the play’s actors were wonderful in their respective roles: Christopher Sutton as John, the renowned but conflicted anthropologist who ends up in the sack with a chimpanzee; Leanne Barrineau as Mary, the shallow, unfaithful wife; Colin McFadden as Ted, John’s disloyal friend, Mary’s lover and a second-rate intellect; Dennis Z. Gagomiros in multiple comic roles, all of which he plays to perfection; and, best of all, Melissa Sussman as Lola-Lola, a chimpanzee in love with a human, on the cusp of becoming human herself, and yet still maintaining her chimpanzee-ness.  Her performance alone was worth the price of admission.

FringeNYC 2011: Hush The Musical

Madelyn Schwartz, Diana Falzone, Seth Blum, Tommy J. Dose and Emelise Aleandri in Hush The Musical

Now playing at Le Poisson Rouge as part of the 2011 Fringe Festival, Hush The Musical is set in the VIP Lounge at LaGuardia Airport during a blinding snowstorm which has grounded all flights.  It is there that we meet Othello Salviati (Seth Blum) who, having been cuckolded by his wife Vittoria (Diana Falzone) is ambivalently conspiring with Nick, a soft-hearted hitman (Tommy J. Dose) to arrange her murder.  Also in attendance is Georgia, a pesky New Age meditation instructor (Emelise Aleandri, who is also the play’s librettist and the artistic director of The Frizzi & Lazzi Theatre Company which, together with Charles Mandracchia who co-conceived, composed and directed the work, was responsible for the overall production).  The cast also includes a rather bereft stewardess (Madelyn Schwartz) and assorted other airline passengers (Blair Anderson, Emily Billig, Jim Roumeles and Isabel Cristina Orbando).

It all makes for a somewhat amusing 75 minutes entertainment and I left with a smile on my face.  But while the score and the lyrics were serviceable, they were scarcely memorable and I didn’t find myself humming any of the tunes at the end of the show.  Musical direction and orchestrations were provided by Mitch Marcus who also played the piano; he was accompanied by Alisa Horn on cello and Yuiko Kamakari on violin.  All three exhibited exceptional musical talent and can’t be faulted for the score’s shortcomings.

All five of the leads (Blum, Falzone, Dose, Aleandri and Schwartz) performed well but the one who came closest to stealing the show was Dose who, as a homesick and somewhat inept Eastern European hitman, was responsible for virtually all of the show’s comedic high points.  If there’s any really good reason to see this show, his performance is it.  The rest of the show’s cast (Anderson, Billig, Roumeles and Cristina) seemed to be there more as filler than anything else and it wouldn’t have mattered much one way or the other, had they been left out.

Off Broadway: The Pretty Trap

Katharine Houghton, Nisi Sturgis, Robert Eli and Loren Dunn in The Pretty Trap. Photo by Ben Hider.

After more than sixty years, The Pretty Trap, Tennessee Williams’ one act precursor to his much better known autobiographical masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie, is only now having its New York premiere at Theatre Row’s Acorn Theatre. One’s inclination is to say “Well, it’s about time,” but that really would be overstating the case. Not that this very well done production by Cause Celebre isn’t likely to prove of great interest to literary historians in general and Williams scholars in particular; it surely will. But for the typical theatre-goer, more interested in being entertained than in learning about a play’s evolutionary development, not so much.

The four characters in The Pretty Trap – Amanda Wingfield (Katharine Houghton), Laura Wingfield (Nisi Sturgis), Tom Wingfield (Loren Dunn) and the Gentleman Caller (Robert Eli) – are the same four characters who appear in The Glass Menagerie, but they are not nearly as well fleshed out in this earlier version. To be sure, Amanda, the one-time Southern belle, is just as obsessed with finding a husband for her morbidly introverted daughter Laura in The Pretty Trap as she is in The Glass Menagerie. But the overbearing narcissism and almost delusional bouts of nostalgia Amanda exhibits in The Glass Menagerie, which at times seem to border on outright personality disorder, are much less apparent in The Pretty Trap; here she is considerably more good humored - indeed one might almost say “normal” (albeit still irritating). (Houghton, incidentally, does a wonderful job of bringing this somewhat lower-keyed Amanda to life in The Pretty Trap and one might only speculate on how terrific she might have been had she been given the opportunity to play the even richer role of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie.)

Similarly,Laura in The Pretty Trap is also a far cry from Laura in The Glass Menagerie. In both plays she is painfully shy, but she is not also physically handicapped in The Pretty Trap as she is in The Glass Menagerie and her obsessive relationship to her collection of glass animals, which is at the symbolic core of The Glass Menagerie isn’t much more than an incidental allusion in The Pretty Trap. And much the same can be said of both Tom and the Gentleman Caller: neither is nearly as fully developed a character in The PrettyTrap as he is in The Glass Menagerie.

The Pretty Trap was subtitled “A Comedyin One Act” by Williams but it really isn’t very funny (except, perhaps, by comparison to the truly depressing The Glass Menagerie) and it does have a happy ending. But tacking a happy ending on the play didn’t make it a better work but merely a shallower one.

The director and the entire cast (especially Houghton) do a first rate job with the material they’ve been given but, notwithstanding that, the play itself, running under 50 minutes, is slight. Indeed, it really is little more than the germ of an idea for The Glass Menagerie, the exceptional work that succeeded it.

Off Off Broadway: The Jazz Age

When we first encountered a description of The Jazz Age on TDF’s website, we immediately purchased tickets with very high expectations that this just had to be one terrific show.  Billed as a trilogy of one act plays by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Floyd Dell, with musical numbers by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin, the production sounded like a sure winner.  And so it was with heightened expectations that we entered the Royal Theater at The Producers Club yesterday to attend one of only a half dozen performances of this small off off Broadway show presented by Love Creek Productions and The Dialectix Group and conceived and directed by Aaron Sparks.

Alas, we were to be sorely disappointed.  The Jazz Age was a time of gaiety, exuberance and excess, but you’d never know it from this production.  The theatre itself is small and dark, and the dreary sets and minimal costuming did nothing to offset that.  The plays themselves were slight; the songs were B-list selections at best; and the singing, acting and direction were very uneven.  The net result was a generally leaden production.

The first of the three one act plays, Porcelain and Pink by Fitzgerald, was less a play than a fleeting idea for one or, to be generous, little more than a scene from a play rather than a full act.  The entire play takes place with Julie (Kristin Carter) in a bathtub, first in conversation with her sister and then with her sister’s beau (he, discreetly placed on the other side of the bathroom door).  Ms Carter plays her part with a delightful impetuosity but the play itself is so trivial and the set so dull, that even her charming performance can’t save it.



Kristin Carter as Julie in Porcelain and Pink.  Photo by Steven Barrett.

In a Director’s Note in The Jazz Age program, Mr. Sparks remarks that, prior to his having embarked on this project, he had been unaware that Fitzgerald had written any plays.  We were similarly unaware but now we can understand why we did not know of his plays before this.  It’s not that Fitzgerald’s plays simply were forgotten gems; rather it’s that they are eminently forgettable. (This only assumes, of course, that Porcelain and Pink was at least as good as Fitzgerald’s other theatrical work.  But this is a fair assumption, I think, since Mr. Sparks did claim to have been even more enamored of this play than he was of any of Fitzgerald’s other plays.

The second of the three one act plays, Here We Are by Dorothy Parker, was the best of the bunch.  Parker’s sardonic wit shone through this dated take on a newly married couple’s anxieties in anticipation of their consummating their marriage later that night.  Karen Zondag as “She,” the new bride, was the standout in this one but, again, neither the play itself, nor the costumes, nor the set, were especially memorable.

The third play in the trilogy was Sweet-and-Twenty by Floyd Dell, one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s many lovers (and a minor literary light in his own right.)  The play treads familiar ground (boy and girl meet and fall in love, believing that they are being independently impulsive in doing so, but without realizing that their respective aunt and uncle were desirous of their getting together in the first place), and exploits a variety of stage cliches without really breaking any new ground.

Before the plays begin, in between the plays themselves, and after the final one act play ends, we are inundated with a number of songs from the Jazz Age, performed by the actors themselves.  These include “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “All by Myself,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “Everybody Step,” and “Look for the Silver Lining” but the most enjoyable renditions are “Ballin’ the Jack” and “Stairway to Paradise,” both performed by Kristin Carter (who provided the small spark in Porcelain and Pink as well).

Off Off Broadway: Alice: A New Musical

When I took my granddaughter Naomi (aged 10 1/2) to see Alice: A New Musical, I felt a bit as if we were about to descend into our own rabbit hole.  We were eagerly anticipating what we were about to see, we were more than willing to suspend our disbelief, and yet we were fearful that we might be disappointed by a limited off off Broadway interpretation of the book by Lewis Carroll that we both knew and loved so well.  In my experience, off off Broadway plays, particularly adaptations of classics, are notoriously uneven: a few are delightfully creative productions but all too many others turn out to be pale imitations of the original works upon which they are based.

Rocio Del Mar Valles debuting as Alice in the NY production of Alice: A New Musical

But in this case, I must say that we really lucked out and we emerged from our descent into the rabbit hole with broad smiles on our faces that would have done the Cheshire Cat himself proud.  To be sure, Andrew Barbato and Lesley DeSantis (co-writers of the book, music and lyrics), in squeezing Carroll’s opus into a one hour stage production, did omit many of Carroll’s best scenes and I must admit that if I’d had my druthers, I’d have preferred to have seen the play expanded to, say, two hours, with even more of Carroll’s original work preserved.  But given the time constraint, what remained was relatively true to Carroll’s book with Alice (Rocio Del Mar Valles) and her sister (Ashley Dawn Mortensen), the Queen of Hearts (Rachel Bahler) and the White Queen (Lizzie Klemperer), the Mad Hatter (David R. Gordon) and the White Rabbit (Cameron Perry), Tweedle Dum (Joe Chisholm) and Tweedle Dee (Devon Stone), and all the rest of this very talented cast all dutifully appearing on schedule to entertain an entranced audience.

The music, book, lyrics and costumes were all enjoyable and the entire company’s singing was truly exceptional.  The set was close to as minimalist as you can get but Andrew Barbato (who not only co-wrote and directed the play but was its set designer as well) was more than up to the challenge: he set a tall ladder on its side, added a box, a wheel and a scrap of cloth and –voila! – there was the ship adrift on Alice’s sea of tears.  He angled the ladder a bit differently and dispensed with the box, the wheel and the cloth – and there was the entrance to the rabbit hole.  He stood the ladder upright and as Alice ascended and descended, the audience shared her magical shrinkage and enlargement.

The play’s producers did take one small liberty with Carroll’s book and that was all to the good: it was to portray Alice as a thirteen year old girl who runs away from home and embarks on her adventure on the very day scheduled for the birthday party her mother has planned for her, lest she be forced to grow up too fast and abandon her youthful imagination.  By portraying her in that manner, the play’s producers managed to deliver a couple of worthwhile messages to their audience (as well as an hour’s entertainment): to wit, that becoming an adult doesn’t have to mean totally relinquishing one’s childhood; that one’s own mother is seldom as bad as her daughter might make her out to be; that mothers, too, have problems of their own; and that, when all is said and done, not only mothers but siblings too (even big sisters!) are still worth having around.