Review - Le Switch - Jungle Theater - All The Reasons You Should See This Play Even Though It Drives Me Crazy - 5 stars

As intermission drew to a close for Philip Dawkins’ play Le Switch at the Jungle Theater, a friend told me, “You’re not allowed to write anything bad about this play.”  I jokingly responded that I saw no reason to, everything was going great so far, “But they’ve still got the second act to screw it up.”  Why do I say things like that out loud?  They never end well.  Still, it’s often the sign of a good play if I find myself ranting about it for an hour and a half afterward, dissecting it all with another friend, trying to figure out why I suddenly turned against it when I started out liking it so much.

“I say this from the very heart of my bottom.”

Le Switch begins after New York state passed marriage equality into law, but before 2015 when the Supreme Court made it a nationwide reality.  David (Kasey Mahaffey) is drafted into his best friend Zachary (Michael Wieser)’s wedding party.  When they head up to Canada for a double bachelor party blowout, David gets lost in transit and finds himself stopping at a flower stand looking for a gift before he links up again with the grooms.  There he meets and is immediately smitten with the florist Benoit (Michael Hanna), and they end up wandering the streets, talking and getting to know one another, until the sun comes up the next morning.  Benoit needs to keep going back and forth from his native French to the English he uses for the tourists (the literal “le switch” of the title) in order to keep their communication flowing.

“Why pick a side when you can straddle?”

Before Benoit appears in David’s life, the play goes about establishing David’s difficulty with relationships.  David and his twin sister Sarah (Emily Gunyou Halaas) have a rather jaundiced view of marriage because of the less than perfect example set by their now-divorced parents.  David and Sarah’s pact never to marry is showing some cracks, however, because Sarah’s green card marriage of convenience to a soccer player from Africa is developing some genuine feeling between the two.  On the flipside of things, David has a positive example of a loving relationship that seems nearly impossible to match - his friend and current roommate Frank (Patrick Bailey).  Frank and his late partner Danny were surrogate parents to David and were together for many years until Danny died of cancer.  They weren’t married, it was never an option.  But their devotion to one another was just as genuine as if they’d had a license and a ceremony.  Frank is hobbled by grief, still, which is why David took him in, but most days, most of the time, Frank can put on a brave, and comic, face.

“The Associated Press is no longer condemning the use of the word ‘hopefully’.”

Philip Dawkins’ script is smart and hilarious.  The cast is fantastic, each and every one, under Jeremy B. Cohen’s direction.  Kate Sutton-Johnson’s scenic design of many moving parts practically dances - and it has to, in order to deal with the multiple locations (and countries) this story bounds around between.  John Novak’s properties make all the locations seem real and lived in without weighing the whole thing down with any unnecessary clutter.  Novak is also the stage manager who, along with his run crew, has to keep the many different plates spinning - dizzying set changes; dazzling light, sound and projection cues.  Sean Healey (sound), Barry Browning (lights) and Daniel Benoit (projections) all use their design to flesh out the world around the handful of characters in the play so it all feels plugged into our larger reality, rather than people isolated in a little box telling one another stories.  Moria Sine Clinton’s costumes do that weird intangible thing that all the best costume designs do - the clothes seem like clothes the people on stage would wear, rather than costumes they put on.  The costumes blend with and support the performances.  It’s a strange thing I only notice after the fact “Hey, those clothes were really perfect, because they didn’t draw attention to themselves as something outside the story.”

“Staying married is a lot harder than getting married.”

The sequence where David and Benoit meet and then go wandering together is a pitch perfect evocation of that kind of dreamy, otherworldly, non-reality people can find themselves in, if they’re lucky - when they meet someone that rearranges the chemicals in their brain and that person goes straight to their heart.  And the opening of the second act jumps forward in time two years in a way that is so simple and elegant, I nearly cried. Just lovely.  And then the rest of the second act happened.

“He loved ‘Romeo and Juliet’ - everyone loses.”

See, if you’re looking for an audience for a romantic comedy, I’m your man.  And a gay romantic comedy, sign me up, absolutely.  Le Switch also has a great cross section of different types and generations of gay men that I really admire - with Frank representing the post-Stonewall generation, Zachary doing the fabulous lumbersexual thirtysomething thing, David taking on the mantle of the intellectual in his 30s, and Benoit being the more laid back 20ish generation that doesn’t fret so much about labels.  Is poor Sarah the lone island of estrogen in this tale?  Yeah, but that’s the risk you run focusing a story on gay men (just like men would be in short supply if Le Switch were about lesbians instead).  Is the cast a little blindingly white?  Sure, but I’m not gonna ding the Jungle for that one.  I seem to recall early press information included an actor of color but he’s in demand right now so he probably just got a better deal they needed to release him to pursue.  Plus, they started the season with an all-female multiracial Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the final two plays of the season prominently feature characters of color, so the Jungle’s doing well on the diversity front.  That’s not my problem.

“Sh*t.  *I’m* the lonely businesswoman.”

The problem is that the great obstacle to David and Benoit’s potential relationship in this story is the fact that David has his head lodged so far up his own ass, and so firmly, that he is unable to allow himself or anyone else be happy.  To the point where you honestly wonder, what does Benoit see in David?  What is attracting him to this person who keeps pushing him away?  (In this way, it’s a lot like Next Fall, even though Le Switch is a much, MUCH better play than Next Fall - so, progress.)  It’s not the actors’ fault.  Mahaffey is great as David - I wouldn’t want to shake the character so hard his teeth rattled if the actor wasn’t bringing him so fully to life in all his prickly glory.  Same with Hanna as Benoit - he could be too good to be true, but except for his baffling devotion to David, the character seems fully realized and well-rounded (and let’s face it, no one in this cast of characters is hard on the eyes, from Frank to Sarah to Zachary to David to Benoit).

“People who love each other sometimes split the utility bill.”

But David doesn’t grow.  He doesn’t change.  Even though literally everyone else around him does.  He hasn’t earned a happy ending.  He doesn’t deserve one.  He’s done nothing to convince me that Benoit doesn’t deserve better.  And yet David’s supposed to be our lead character.  He’s the one we’re supposed to be rooting for.  The one exception to his generally self-absorbed demeanor is when it becomes apparent right at the top of act two that David is trying to learn some French to better communicate with Benoit.  That’s part of the reason I nearly cried.  It’s all downhill from there.

“You’re a terrible liar.  Keep going.”

There’s three delusions I wish storytellers could be broken of somehow.  The first delusion is that New York City is the center of the known universe.  I have a friend who specifically looks for new plays that are not set in New York City.  We understand, you like your city.  It takes a special kind of person to live there.  We are not all that person.  New York as a default setting for all human drama borders on lazy.  People use it as shorthand assuming we all know and we all care.

“As God as my witness, I shall never go LARPing again.”

The second delusion is that neurotic intellectuals are naturally interesting and lovable.  Again, shorthand you can just plop into a story and everyone will go along with it.  Sorry, there have to be some additional redeeming qualities involved - and I don’t just mean they have to be played by cute actors who can take off their glasses and wow, what do you know, they were hot all along under those frames.  Your neurosis doesn’t make you interesting, it makes you exhausting to be around.

“Sit down.  Let me tell you everything that’s wrong with you.”

The final delusion is that there is an unlimited number of people in your life who will find you adorable and want to have sex with and/or devote their life to you.  That is a finite resource.  (The subset of those people who will be 12 years your junior with abs you can actually see, that’s even more finite.) You can burn through dozens of them if you want to with no thought to the consequences, but eventually you are going to run out.  And you’re not going to get any warning.  There will come a day when people no longer look at you on the street.  There will come a day when people still see you as a person, but give no thought to you as a sexual being at all.  The character of David is fast approaching that boundary, but seems completely oblivious to it.  (It's ridiculous to say that, I know.  He's just in his mid-30s.  But AIDS massacred a whole generation of gay men, so we're a couple of decades behind the eight ball in learning how to get older - and deal with older people - gracefully.) Any number of people around David are aware and could clue him in (especially Frank), but it just doesn’t penetrate David's consciousness.  The levels of unacknowledged privilege and entitlement involved here are staggering.  At one point in the play, someone (I believe David) actually says aloud the words “You don’t know what you have.”  It’s not in regard to a person but it could be.  Obviously, that’s deliberate, but it’s about all the time the play spends on the idea.

I’m reminded of Rosalind’s advice to Phoebe in As You Like It:
“But, mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love,
For I must tell you friendly in your ear,
Sell when you can; you are not for all markets.”

There’s a ticking clock in this play.  There’s mortality in this play.  There are milestones of life and the passage of time in this play.  But David never seems affected by it.  He just magically comes to his senses right before the play’s about to end, Benoit makes yet another gesture in David’s direction, and with precious little in the way of explanation, David just takes it and gets his happy ending.  Do I want a gay play with an unhappy ending?  No, no I don’t.  We’ve got PLENTY of those in the canon, thank you very much.  So yes, I’m glad we got a happy ending.  I just didn’t see our lead character work for it, so I have to wonder whether it’s going to stick.

“Do you want me to be happy, or do you want me to be married?”

All that said, so much of the script and all of Jungle Theater’s production of Le Switch is so good, you have to see it.  It’s funny, it’s moving, it’s dazzling, it’s sweet.  It frustrates me enormously, but it’s just so great to see a new play so expertly acted and directed and designed that celebrates love between people that I’m still giving the damn thing five stars.  Le Switch is a rare thing, and it deserves to be embraced for all the many things it gets right.  Forgive me for letting it set my expectations so high that I want just a little more.

5 stars - Very Highly Recommended

(photo by Dan Norman, courtesy of Jungle Theater - the fantastic ensemble cast of Le Switch - l to r: Frank Bailey, Emily Gunyou Halaas, Kasey Mahaffey, Michael Hanna, Michael Wieser)

Review - EX (remade) - Skewed Visions - Revisiting the Missing Pieces - 5 stars

Sometimes in theater you get second chances.  Sometimes an artist will remount a production that, the overabundance of theater in this town being what it is, you miss the first time around.  Such a second chance is Skewed Visions’ Charles Campbell presenting EX(remade). It’s not a literal point by point remounting of the original EX from back in 2014, more a revisiting with the same collaborators, expanding on the themes and work that went before.  It will be familiar, but not a complete repetition for those who saw it before (it’s about a half hour longer - 90 minutes this time, for starters).  It will also not be completely bewildering to anyone, like myself, who had the misfortune to miss the first one.

“When you finally have time to clean out your basement, that’s when you know it’s all over.”

Campbell drew inspiration from the year he lost both his mother (to Alzheimer’s) and his sister (to cancer). Helping family members on the last leg of their journey through life, and then cleaning out the belongings that remain, and the memories that cling to them, ready to be dusted off.  EX(remade), of course, is never that literal.  This is Skewed Visions.  There is movement, there is sound, there are stage pictures that get repeated through multiple variations, there is music, there are words.  But often those words are beside the point.  They are not the focus much of the time.  Skewed Visions asks you to process live visual images as if they were a kind of poetry, the meaning exploding out of the juxtaposition of things that would mean less all on their own.

“My great aunt painted these ceramic shoes. All of them have a mistake on them.”

Campbell gives us the basic context as he hands off the various costume pieces to his fellow performers. EX(remade) is a performance that isn’t shy about acknowledging itself as a performance. So the costumes, laundered and hung up collectively on a hanger under a plastic sheet from the dry cleaners after the last performance of EX, now get released for opening night of the new outing - another level of memory to be excavated.  Campbell gives Annie Enneking his mother’s old green dress - something from her youth he never saw her wear, but something that was packed carefully away among her belongings, waiting to be found after she died.  Campbell gives Billy Mullaney a large white T-shirt worn by his sister in her final days battling cancer.  Campbell gives Megan Mayer a jacket and tie he once used, while outfitting himself in a black fleece.

“Do you remember how we first met?”

Mayer clutches a metal lockbox.  Mullaney picks up a table and holds it over his head.  Campbell holds a wooden chair.  Enneking clings to an empty picture frame.  Leaning against the brick wall is a wooden door with peeling white paint.  These are their icons.  These are the physical items they bond with and return to throughout the performance.  They take on different configurations and meanings.  Other family tokens are taken out of their hiding places, their history recounted, and votive candles lit and placed in the nooks and crannies where they used to hide.  Sound effects that sometimes seem like a storm and sometimes seem like a fire, blend with the noises of real life that sneak in over the transom through open windows.  Birds, and children, and passing traffic.

“That is my sister’s scarf.  Leopard print, of course.”

Rituals of movement are repeated, and as people are lost, we see the next go-round and notice the empty space.  Families gather for portrait poses in picture frames that get progressively smaller.  But when there’s no one around to jockey against for position anymore, you miss them.  An image that I didn’t realize until afterward was an homage to Edward Hopper’s painting "Nighthawks," also kept recurring.  In one sequence, Charles Campbell “introduces the band” talking about his collaborators each in turn, enumerating their talents, and explaining why he brought them into the project as they go about their business.  In another, they each take a turn in the hot seat, even Jeffrey Wells on the sound board, and Charles asks them to do random things or speak to a random subject of his choosing.

“This is very old.  Take care of it.”

EX(remade) is both intensely personal, and universally recognizable.  Taking someone’s hand, carrying someone across the room, engaging in a battle of wills to get them to take their medicine.  Trying to divine an object’s meaning, when the person who gave it meaning is no longer around.  It has a healthy sense of humor (or is it whimsy?), a clinical eye and an open heart.  It’s not overly sentimental, but neither is it cold and detached.  EX(remade) tries both to acknowledge and make sense of the passage of time, while also grappling with loss as something neither good nor bad, just constant.

“I’ve come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world.”

There’s a doozy of a final image that I won’t spoil, but it involves clothing made out of paper (constructed by Alison Heimstead).  Honestly, I could go on talking about EX(remade) or you could just go and see it - and you should, of course.  After all, how many second chances do you get in theater?  Performances at the Fresh Oysters Performance Research space - 512 East 24th Street, Mpls 55404 (same block as Open Eye Figure Theater).  Seating is limited. 3 more performances, next weekend Thursday through Saturday 8pm, June 23, 24, and 25.

5 stars - Very Highly Recommended

(photo courtesy Skewed Visions - l to r: Charles Campbell (background), Megan Mayer (foreground), Billy Mullaney, and Annie Enneking)

Review - Final Frontier: Heroes and Villains - Set B - Gadfly Theatre - Unintentional Messages? - 3.5 stars

I’ve struggled with how to write about Set B of Gadfly Theatre’s Heroes and Villains edition of their annual geek festival of short plays because on some really basic fundamental level, I don’t get either of the plays that are included.  I want to, I tried to, but I failed.

“When I woke up with blood-soaked hands, I had a smile on my face.”

Normally, I would be inclined to blame the artists somehow, rather than myself as an audience member, but I’ve been running into a lot of theater lately, most of it written by and/or directed by women, that just baffles me.  So I’m starting to wonder if I, as a man, am just not its intended audience, and thus should let both the artists and myself off the hook on this one.

“There’s only so far anger can take you.”

The thing is, I don’t want to let anyone off the hook, least of all myself.  I consider myself a feminist, for any number of reasons - I was raised by and am still fortunate to be surrounded by strong, smart, powerful women; and I’m godfather to a seven year old girl who I want the world to treat well and respect, because she’s brilliant and the world is a better place for having her in it.

“All I know is I wanted to look up and see her beside me.”

So when I see pieces of theater such as the two plays in Set B - Katy Koop’s The Amazing Cunt and Lil’ Bitch Take Minneapolis, directed by Megan Lembke; and Nicole Jost’s Slut directed by Shalee Mae Coleman - I want to find a way to engage them on the level which they mean to meet me as an audience member.  But they both seem determined to confound me in this attempt.

“Please let me play with them first.”

The Amazing Cunt (Sarah Maxwell) and Lil’ Bitch (Alyssa Perau), both survivors of sexual violence, have taken it upon themselves to execute a little vigilante justice on those who would prey upon others.  These others - as well as the reporters and police who dig into their stories - are all portrayed by Justin Betancourt and Cayla Marie Wolpers.  You find yourself wanting to root for the vigilantes and against their victims, but Koop’s play allows no such easy answers - and that’s a good thing.  The play, in fact, opens up a whole host of thorny questions, and then leaves them open and unresolved for the audience to contemplate.  I don’t think a satisfying ending is possible or even desirable for a play like this, so the writer wisely doesn’t even try.

“They don’t think we’re good people.”

Everyone involved here throws themselves unreservedly into their roles, which is commendable.  There’s only two things that trouble me - one of which is under the production’s control and the other of which is not.  Hard as it may be to watch, I think The Amazing Cunt and Lil’ Bitch Take Minneapolis is crying out to be a longer play, in order to adequately explore all the complex issues it’s grappling with.  In the context of this festival, more time just isn’t possible, so they can’t be faulted for the whole affair feeling abbreviated and unfinished.

“It’s like they weren’t even people anymore.”

The thing the production did have control over was some artistic appropriation that was problematic on two levels.  Lil’ Bitch is outfitted like and sports the same theme song (a wacked-out cover of the Banana Splits TV show theme) as the character Hit Girl from the movie Kick-Ass.  This is problematic because the appropriation is so blatant, it borders on theft.  And it’s also problematic because that character was a 12 year old child.  This play’s Lil’ Bitch is not, of course, a child.  But however adult or well intentioned, using bitch in that context bothers me.

“I want to make sense, but I can’t make sense of you.”

Slut is a play that I couldn’t spoil the plot for you if I tried.  Slut is so aggressively non-linear, you just have to go with it and stop trying to piece it together like a normal story.  As the title might clue you in, prepare for a LOT of sex, both seen and unseen, but definitely heard - and from all reports on the characters’ parts, quite satisfying and consensual.  Plenty of woman on woman, and woman on androgynous man, action to be had.  Lots of caressing and kissing.  Here again, everyone is game for what the script requires and creates the world quite vividly.

“Kindness comes easily to those that aren’t very smart.”

The Slut (Hillary Olson) invites Various Lovers (most of them played by Beckett Love) into her Bed (personified by Suzi Love).  She also has a deeply meaningful friendship with a Taxi Driver (Heather Burmeister), who probably gets the closest to who the Slut really is.  The only person without ready access to the Slut’s bed or heart is Elliot (Armando Ronconi), and this denial in the face of the Slut’s unapologetic promiscuity with others, causes Elliot for some reason to become completely unhinged.

“If you die, what a waste of regret.”

I feel strange having this particular problem with Slut but why is the guy in this play the only one who gets a name?  I guess you could argue that it makes him more ordinary while the other characters are more archetypal and thus larger than life, more important than him.  But that’s not the way my brain processes it.  It seems emblematic of the privilege his character seems to feel is his right and due.  So I may have just answered my own question, and maybe still need more time to process and appreciate the ways the text is screwing with labels and language.  Maybe, like Amazing Cunt and Lil’ Bitch, this script is forcibly reappropriating and unashamedly embracing labels like Slut.

“Rule #7: You must forget one thing about her.”

But honestly, how many times do we have to watch the same character get shot?  And the out of left field transformation/resurrection that consumes the play’s final moments, while it strangely feels earned, still leaves me with the troubling message of:  It’s OK.  This senseless violence is part of some greater good. (When the everyday violence this mimics is definitely not a path to a greater good.)  Also, even the man is allowed here to become a transcendent figure - even though he’s done everything that’s the opposite of earning it.

“That’s the part you don’t get to see.”

Maybe, again like The Amazing Cunt and Lil’ Bitch Take Minneapolis, Slut is trying to provoke discomfort and eschew easy answers.  My main worry is that misogyny here is so richly and chillingly portrayed, and then it feels like it wins and is rewarded.  I wouldn’t have any of these problems, of course, if the performers weren’t so good at what they’re doing.  So kudos for making me squirm.

“I can’t find my body.”

Disturbing and elusive as both these plays were, I have to err on the side of praising rather than dismissing them.  Give ‘em a look and see what you think.  Brace yourself for some non-family-friendly material and you should be fine.

3.5 Stars - Highly Recommended

(Photo: the artistic team behind Slut, courtesy of Gadfly Theatre Productions)

(You’ve got two more chances to catch Set B on Friday, June 10th 7:30pm and Sunday, June 12th 3pm, also don't miss Set A's last performance on Saturday, 6/11 at 7:30pm at the Phoenix Theater)

Review - Final Frontier: Heroes and Villains - Set A - Gadfly Theatre - 2 Outa 3 Ain't Bad - 4.5 stars

Set A of the 2016 edition of Gadfly Theatre Productions’ Final Frontier annual geek fest of new short plays, Heroes And Villains, has a couple of real winners, plus one intriguing idea that gets undone by weird directing choices.

“Saddle my rooster!  I go to seek my fortune!”

Eli Effinger-Weintraub’s comical feminist deconstruction of fairy tales entitled Your Princess Is In Another Lair is a perfect way to kick off the geek fest and submerge us in the world of heroes and villains.  The script is a hoot and the cast and director Denzel Belin had a ball putting the whole weird thing together. A young female Reader (Catherine Hanson) gets a book of fairy tales from an uncle who doesn’t realize she’s a little old for storytime. Looking at fairy tales with a more mature eye, the Reader is appalled and decides to rearrange the narrative into something a little less misogynist.  When she tries to put a princess in the role of beleaguered hero, she learns that the princess has some gender identity issues and so prefers to be called The Unfortunate Prince (Mary Kathryn).  Their nemesis is The Hedgehog (Michael Hentges) - long story - and between the three of them, they manage to get a father, a king (both Paris Kelvakis), a witch and a queen (both Megan Guidry) into and out of a lot of trouble along the way.  The Unfortunate Prince needs a love interest, so the Reader quickly gets dragged into the thick of the story herself.

“You’re a woman in a fairy tale and you’re not a queen or anybody’s mom.  There aren’t a lot of options left.”

There’s a ton of humorous knowing asides and meta-dialogue that takes patriarchal hetero-normative fairy tale stories to task for being such lousy formative source material for girls in general, and queers in particular.  “Your Princess Is In Another Lair” is just a heck of a lot of fun.  Effinger-Weintraub’s got a point to make, but the premise is so goofy, and the whole cast is so enthusiastically in on the joke, that you never feel like you’re being preached to.  But it’s also smart comedy, so you don’t need to feel silly for enjoying yourself.

“A guy in tights and a cape could say things to another guy that he couldn’t say if they were dressed in street clothes.”

Also funny, but with a whole lot of heart is Kathleen Warnock’s Further Adventures Of… a bittersweet story of a young woman, Maggie Day (Emily Rose Duea), her awakening both as a writer and a lesbian, and the history of the closeted Hollywood actors (Phillip Matthews, James Satter) who helped get her there.  As a little girl, Maggie was transfixed by afternoon reruns of an old fantasy adventure serial called Atlantis 1,000,000 B.C., whose central pairing was a young prince and the soldier who guarded him and kept him safe.  The homoerotic subtext in the writing, and the real life chemistry between the two actors launched Maggie on her own bouts of storytelling to fill in the blanks.  As an adult, Maggie’s writing career leads her to research the people behind the TV show, and what became of them.  Warnock’s script is a marvel of economy, taking us back and forth in time, and from fantasy to reality.  (Honestly, it’s so good, and right up my alley, I wish I’d written it, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay any play.) 

“I lost him somewhere along the way.  I regret that more than you can know.”

The whole story is lovingly rendered by director Meggie Grievell and her cast.  Duea is a perfect narrator and audience surrogate.  Matthews and Satter really get put through their paces - playing the soldier and the prince, respectively, as well as the two actors who portrayed them.  They also play Maggie and her childhood friend playing their own version of the Atlantis characters, and the two women later in life at a high school reunion.  They play Hollywood producers, assistants, and elderly TV writers as well.  There’s not much in the way of costume changes (there isn’t time), so the production relies largely on the power of the actors to create new characters and flip back and forth between them in the blink of an eye.  Matthews is a gregarious emotional presence on stage who chafes at limits, while Satter is more reserved, playing the role on screen and in life of a guy who knows the limitations of his talent and is happy just to get the character parts. I have to resist the urge to spoil the whole damn plot for you because it’s such a beautiful heartbreaking story of another time, in another Hollywood that I want to live it again by retelling it, but you should really see it for yourself, because it’s lovely.

“I just wanted to say thank you.  Some of us still remember.”

The one headscratcher in the trio of scripts for Set A is Michael Merriam’s At The Edge of Flight.  And it’s not the weak link because of the script.  Merriam’s play is actually a fun idea, and when the production isn’t fighting it that fun breaks through.  Fallen superhero Melissa Ballister (Valerie Borey) has suffered some kind of “super”-stroke and been knocked out of the sky.  Her healing process at government run rehab facility is hampered by officious Nurse Montgomery (Jody Bee), but helped by good-hearted nurses John (Ian Donahue) and Cindy (Anna Lakin).  Cindy and Melissa’s connection evolves into something more romantic (and, of course, incredibly unprofessional), which gives Melissa the inspiration she needs to push back against her institutionalization.

“Your kind needs to be controlled.”

Sounds like another winner, right?  For reasons that escape me, director Cassandra Snow has decided to set the thing at an absolutely glacial pace, with all the energy of a funeral dirge.  The whole play plods grudgingly from scene to scene in a way that forbids it from attaining any momentum.  Melissa the superhero had a stroke but what’s everyone else’s excuse?  Donahue as Nurse John at least can’t help himself - he’s just a sunny, perky presence on stage.  But he just serves as a starker contrast to the joylessness of a lot of the other scenes.  The rest of the cast isn’t bad.  You get the distinct feeling that they’re just doing as they're told.  Pick up the pace a little and I’m sure they and the story as a whole would be just as fun as that one nurse.  I realize rehab isn’t a lark, nursing homes are often depressing, and some nurses are just burnt out.  But the extra unnecessary layer of grim here often makes you forget that it’s a superhero story at all.  It’s possible something was just off opening night and the thing’ll pick up steam.

“I got to explore my own creation myth.”

Right now Your Princess and Further Adventures are the winners here.  They are well worth the price of admission, and bookend the evening, so you start and end on very high notes indeed.  They help keep the average up to -

4.5 stars - Very Highly Recommended

(You’ve got two more chances to catch Set A, Sunday 6/5 at 3pm, and Saturday, 6/11 at 7:30pm at the Phoenix Theater)

(photo courtesy of Gadfly Theatre Productions: L to R: Maggie Day (Emily Rose Duea) and the two closeted Hollywood actors who inspired her (James Satter, Phillip Matthews) in Further Adventures Of...)

Review - Sons of the Prophet - Park Square - A Good, But Prickly, Comedy - 3.5 stars

It’s rare that I sit around after a play talking about that play for longer than the actual run time of the play itself, but that’s what happened with Park Square Theatre’s production of Stephen Karam’s comedy/drama Sons Of The Prophet.  The cast is stuffed with great actors whose work I’ve admired for years, as well as newcomers getting a prime showcase for their talents.  Joseph Stanley’s epic two story set with multiple sliding doorways allowing for a variety of locations to emerge is fun to watch in action.  Karam’s script is as funny as it is deep, and director Jef Hall-Flavin orchestrates the whole thing with a light touch (which is important, because with everything going on in this play, and there’s a lot going on both above and below the surface, it would be easy to get bogged down).

“That kind of healing only happens in Lifetime movies.”

Joseph (Sasha Andreev) needs to extricate himself from his eccentric and emotionally needy boss Gloria (Angela Timberman) in order to deal with the aftermath of a car accident involving a member of his family.  A high school prank with a hijacked football team mascot - a decoy deer - in the middle of the road to make cars swerve went a bit too far.  Joseph has to take on the responsibility for his teenage brother Charles (Maxwell Collyard) and elderly uncle Bill (Michael Tezla).  Meanwhile, Joseph’s own body starts to turn against him, but the doctors can’t figure out why.

“I’m in a bus station that smells like urine.  I’m not gonna have an emotional moment with you.”

When the high school prankster Vin (Ricardo Beaird) gets his sentence in juvenile detention postponed by the judge so that the young man can finish out the football season, the community is divided and Joseph’s family is put in the middle of the controversy.  The weird nature of both the crime and its punishment attract the media, including a reporter named Timothy (Dave Gangler) who takes more than a professional interest in Joseph.  (Patty Mathews and Sally Ann Wright round out the cast playing multiple supporting roles of colorful townspeople in this Eastern Pennsylvania community.)

“This shouldn’t be easy for you.”

The thing I liked best about Sons Of The Prophet was how inclusive it was when it came to addressing gay identity in the context of an extended family and the community at large.  Three characters in the play are gay and a fourth is certainly leaning that direction.  But being gay is not the issue.  No one’s gayness is a source of angst or struggle here, any more than their eye color or hair color is.  The best example of this is the scene where Joseph and the reporter Timothy meet.  In most other plays, movies or TV shows, one of them would be a man and the other a woman.  Here, it’s two guys.  But they flirt and dance around their attraction to each other while they talk about anything else but, just like any other couple meeting for the first time and encountering a spark between them would do.  It’s a charming piece of writing, well-directed and subtly acted, and sets the stage for everything that happens afterward between the two of them.

“It’s so nice coming in out of the cold.”

The thing about the script that left me befuddled, and the source of most of my post-show conversation, was the troubling intersection of both class and race.  The treatment of those subjects seems entirely deliberate on the part of the playwright, but it’s hard to know where he wants his audience to land when it’s all over.  Because people do some fairly gross or borderline insensitive things to one another from the beginning of the play right up to the end.  To the point where I end up not liking most of them.  So is the playwright saying, yes, you should be uncomfortable with all of this, and you are under no obligation to like any of these characters; you are also under no obligation to enjoy yourself watching this play - and if you do, I may have failed?  That seems like a strange and counterproductive mission for a play.

“You should be grateful that you have a central nervous system for your body to attack.”

For instance, this is 2007, pre-President Obama and Obamacare, so Joseph’s boss Gloria is not above using health insurance as a tool to blackmail him into writing a book about his family.  Joseph’s family name is Douaihy.  They are Lebanese-American and incredibly distant relatives of best-selling author of The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran.  Gloria sees a publishing goldmine here and is willing to back Joseph into a corner to take full advantage of the connection.  She is wealthy.  He is not.  She wants to use him, and his family, to make herself wealthier and put her lopsided career back on track.  Gloria thinks talking sympathetically to Joseph about the ongoing troubles in the Middle East counts as being his friend - even though Joseph and his parents were born and raised in the USA and Joseph’s never even visited Lebanon.

“I don’t want the fact that we’re estranged to keep us from seeing each other.”

Then there’s Vin and his relationship to Joseph’s family.  Vin is African-American and being raised in the foster care system.  Football is his only reliable route to college.  So the judge wasn’t just postponing Vin’s sentence to help the high school football team win a championship.  The judge was also trying to preserve Vin’s opportunity for a better life.  Since Joseph’s family is the one most harmed by Vin’s prank, Vin seeks them out to apologize.  They have the power to tip public opinion quite easily against Vin, and ruin his life.  Charles, Joseph’s more flamboyant gay brother (yes, both sons in the family are gay), is attracted to Vin.  Charles in addition to not hiding his gayness, also was born with only one ear.  He had a second ear fashioned out of skin the doctors carved out of his chest.  Charles flirts with Vin, offering up both his ear and his chest to be touched, and Vin obliges.  They then go upstairs to spend time together in Charles’ room.  Vin also ends up staying the night.  All of this seems innocent enough, and Charles doesn’t seem overtly manipulative. 

“Go.  Get on a plane.  What’s stopping you?”
“Their airport just blew up.”

Vin doesn’t seem an unwilling participant in all this either.  Yet, how much power does Vin really have in this situation? He needs something from these people.  So if they want something from him, whatever it is, how much freedom does he feel in being able to withhold it?  It feels predatory and exploitative in the same way that Gloria blackmailing Joseph over his health insurance does.  There a white woman is pressing her advantage over someone she sees as both lower in status because he’s below her on the economic scale, and ethnic (and thus different, even though Joseph and his family see themselves as just as white and American as she is).  In the latter situation, the middle class Lebanese-American family is holding sway over a young, lower-class, African-American man with no one to advocate for him.

“In medicine, when we hear hoofbeats, we think horses, not zebras.”

A side concern is that the play thinks nothing of showing us Joseph’s physical encounter with Timothy, but not Charles’ night with Vin.  You could argue, of course, that the play focuses on Joseph, not his brother.  (On one level, I know, I know, I should be grateful for even one gay love scene before a spinal tap - don’t worry, that makes sense in context - and shut up.) But it’s still another example of the greater visibility given to “straight-acting” “normal” gay men rather than more effeminate gay men.  Also Collyard does a good job in portraying Charles, and Hall-Flavin does a good job of setting the tone of the production, so that we’re not laughing at Charles but with him.  Still, when a script and a production embrace a stereotype this wholeheartedly that’s been used for cheap laughs before, it always makes me a little nervous.  Kudos for not playing into my worst fears there.  Charles’ sensitivity comes less from being gay and more from the fact he’s a teenage boy who lost both parents, has an uncle on a downhill slide into old age, and a brother with compounding medical conditions the doctors can’t seem to get a handle on.  You’d be a little on edge and emotional, too.

“Look at me, please.”

Speaking of emotional, Charles actually handles himself a lot better than his older brother.  Joseph wants to always seem like a good person, do what’s expected of him, not offend anyone.  But it turns him into a giant mass of neuroses, and he can only suppress his own feelings for so long.  Periodically Joseph has explosions of anger and petulance that are far more hurtful to those around him than if he’d just sucked it up and faced people and told them what was bothering him as it happened.  I’m not sure I see anything noble or self-sacrificing in that.  It’s not healthy for him or anyone else around him, and his body keeps trying to tell him that.  Having a tale revolve around a character this neurotic has its downsides.  Funny?  Sure.  But if you feel anything for any of the other characters in his orbit, then a lot of the time Joseph seems like a jerk, not someone you root for.  Andreev is to be commended for not holding back but giving us this potentially unsympathetic character with all his faults on full display.  The production wouldn’t work without him at the center of it.

“We’re not strangers.  We know each other well.”

Sons Of The Prophet was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a reason.  Loyal subscribers to Park Square lobbied hard to get the theater to do this play for a reason.  Karam’s writing is as smart and complex as it is funny.  Saying I enjoyed it seems weird.  Saying it fully engaged me from start to finish and then refused to get out of my head for hours until I talked it through seems more to the point.  Expect to laugh, but don’t expect the play to spoon feed you anything like an easy answer.  Audiences will have to figure that out for themselves.  (I still am.)  Should a storyteller give an audience more guidance than this?  There’s a range of options between simple clarity and beating an audience over the head.  Should a writer not want an audience to emotionally connect to their characters, or feel for them?  I may be overthinking it (I’d be surprised with this play if I weren’t), but Karam seems to be asking this of his audiences.  You should probably be among them.  You probably won’t see another play quite like it on this scale again this year.

3.5 stars - Highly Recommended

(Photo by Petronella J. Ytsma - Charles (Maxwell Collyard, above) argues with his brother Joseph (Sasha Andreev, lower left), while Timothy (Dave Gangler, lower right) tries not to listen in)

Review - The Glass Menagerie - Theatre Coup d’Etat - Fighting A Classic - 3.5 stars

I have to admit when I heard Theatre Coup d’Etat was producing The Glass Menagerie, my first thought was, “Really?  The Glass Menagerie?  Why?”  (The quick answer that leaps to mind is it has two large, meaty roles for women - which are still all too rare.  It takes place on a single set and only requires four people.  Logistically it’s an easier lift and also free from the sex and/or violence of other Williams plays like A Streetcar Named Desire, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, or Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.)

“Success and happiness for my precious children.  I wish for that whenever there’s a moon, and when there isn’t a moon, I wish for it, too.”

But then I remembered I had the same bewildered response to the announcement they were presenting Equus last year, and that turned out great.  And it’s not as if an older play doesn’t still have something to say to us in the present day. I tend to lean toward newer plays because there seem to be so many things going on that urgently need addressing in the here and now, and playwrights of yesterday perhaps didn’t even have those things on their minds.  Because theater is live, I expect it to address its time.  That said, some issues are timeless and always with us, and writers of any era can cross time and remind us of our common humanity in ways we didn’t expect. 

“Being disappointed is one thing, and being discouraged is something else.”

The minute the actors began speaking in Theatre Coup d’Etat’s production of The Glass Menagerie, I was reminded again of the biggest reason why it endures - Tennessee Williams has a beautiful way with words, both funny and poetic.  The Glass Menagerie is probably the prettiest excuse anyone ever committed to paper about why a man would abandon his family.  The situation isn’t pretty, but the play certainly is.  Even inept productions of The Glass Menagerie (and there are a lot of them, which is why people can be forgiven for rolling their eyes and thinking, oh no, not again) have the benefit of Williams’ script.  The script will not be denied.  It claws its way up and out from under any number of odd production concepts.  And I’m not gonna lie, it had to do a little fighting here. 

“I know what you’re dreaming of.  I’m not standing here blindfolded.”

The Glass Menagerie has two big advantages that carried over from Equus - Kevin Fanshaw and James Napoleon Stone.  Fanshaw played Alan in Equus, the troubled young man with the horse fetish - here he plays Jim O’Connor, the Gentleman Caller.  Stone was the director of Equus, but for The Glass Menagerie, he takes his place onstage as our narrator, Tom Wingfield.

“You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura.  But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”

Tom, now a merchant marine, tells the audience the story of his final days living with his mother Amanda (Cynthia Uhrich) and younger sister Laura (Kaylyn Forkey) in St. Louis.  Since the father abandoned the family, Tom has been supporting them with his job in a local warehouse, and Amanda is scraping together some extra cash selling magazine subscriptions.  It’s Depression Era America of the 1930s, pre-World War II, so times are even tougher for a broken family struggling to get by.  Laura, sadly, isn’t much help, since her nervous and shy personality sabotages her attempts to learn a useful trade, even something as simple as a typing course at a business school.  Her insecurities stem from a childhood illness that left her with a slight limp.  That small defect is magnified in Laura’s mind, making her want to hide from the world.

“The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it.”

Amanda’s upbringing in the deep south has her convinced that, even though her own marriage was a disappointment, a husband might be just the solution for Laura to give her some security.  Despite the fact that Laura is much less of a social butterfly than her mother, Amanda gets Tom to bring home a friend from work, Jim, as a dinner companion for Laura.  Of course, things go unexpectedly right and horribly wrong from there.  The Glass Menagerie is full of the humorous and hair-raising family dynamics displaying why your family is the one group of people who can genuinely drive you crazy, and yet at the same time, you can’t stop loving them almost in spite of yourself.

“Unicorns - aren’t they extinct in the modern world?”

Theater can also drive me crazy, even though I can’t stop loving it - or maybe because I can’t stop loving it. The trick to The Glass Menagerie is the scene where Laura and her gentleman caller Jim are left alone after dinner to get to know one another and, against all odds, they do.  If that scene works, then you’re home free.  If it doesn’t, you’re toast.  Here, it works great.  Kaylyn Forkey as Laura and Fanshaw as Jim are a lovely mismatched pair of imperfect people fumbling toward a connection to one another.  After that scene, the play is barreling toward its conclusion so, as they say, if you end well, they’ll forgive you anything.

“Her not speaking - is that such a tragedy?”

Most of the other choices for the production made by director Lanny Langston are pretty baffling to me.  The Glass Menagerie is a memory play.  It’s not a literal depiction of reality in the “kitchen sink” realism school of theater.  The play even tells you this - in the dialogue.  Not stage directions or essays written by Williams or others that may preface the plays.  The characters, speaking directly to the audience, of which the director is one, tell you how to stage the play:

“The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

That’s the narrator, in his opening speech.  For some reason, the production takes this as an indication that it should not be dimly lit, not be sentimental, not happen to music, and should be as realistic as possible.  The music issue is doubly strange because the director is also listed as the sound designer.  Laura keeps referring to the fact that she can’t get enough of using the Victrola to play the records her father left behind (though her mother references this as an annoying habit).  Plus, there’s a dance hall across the street in their neighborhood and the music keeps wafting in from there as well.  The production has a pre-show and intermission soundtrack but struggles to incorporate music into a play that constantly refers to it.  Maybe the sound levels were off the night I attended.  There was also a rumble of thunder that seemed to come out of nowhere at a key moment in the action that wasn’t supported by sounds of a storm that I could make out at any other time before or after.

“We won’t be brilliant but we will pass inspection.”

Meagan Kedrowski’s set and props transform the recessed corner of Savage Umbrella’s Space into a spare but nicely furnished apartment.  The illusion is so well-rendered that it then seems weird that there’s no portrait of the father on the wall, just an empty frame.  The cast mimes food and drink with empty plates and glasses.  And despite the fact that everything else is realistic though the play largely doesn’t require it to be, the one item in the apartment about which all kinds of business revolve is a door.  Which doesn’t exist.  So all the actors have to mime it.  Which happens inconsistently, and takes the air out of pretty much any moment that involves it.

“Someone ought to kiss you, Laura.”

Something else that impacts the momentum of the play are the repeated blackouts between scenes.  Again, it’s a memory play.  You don’t need blackouts.  Dim the lights if you must or change the color if you want, play some music (there’s an idea), but it’s not literal.  One scene can flow into the next, you don’t have to punctuate them with darkness.  Also, it’s theater.  We get that actors, props and set pieces have to move around.  You don’t have to shield us from it or pretend it isn’t happening.  Particularly in a memory play where the narrator - standing outside the action - says it’s both memory, and a play.  The script is constantly drawing attention to its own artifice.  It’s giving you permission.  So go with it.  During the first blackout, Laura just had to put on a sweater.  It couldn’t be on a hook on the wall with the rest of the coats, or the back of a chair?  She had to walk offstage to do that?  I know these sound like small things, but they add up.  It’s as if each of the scenes was rehearsed completely independently from one another, for a directing or acting class, and not a lot of thought was put into how they were all supposed to work together as a whole story.

“Now it is just like all the other horses.”

Nowhere is this piecemeal approach more glaring than in the production’s treatment of the mother Amanda.  Cynthia Uhrich tries valiantly to make the character work, but the director’s sympathies are clearly with the children, Tom in particular, even though the playwright tries to keep everything balanced.  Amanda is not a monster.  She has her moments, yes, but all mothers do.  Does she lean on Tom too hard to be the breadwinner of the family?  Sure, but this is a woman in the 1930s who married poorly and was left to raise two children by herself with no support system (what family she had was down south, not in St. Louis).  It’s a miracle she got them to the age where Tom could take a job.  When she’s wishing on the moon, she wants her children to be successful and happy.  If anything, she wants them to do better in life than she did.  Both Tom and Laura are long out of high school, and yet they’re forced by necessity and limited resources to live with their mother.  Amanda's main fear is that Laura, with even less advantages than her mother had starting out, will end up destitute.  Does she reminisce constantly about the past?  Sure, but if you were a single mom raising two children by yourself during the Depression, you’d probably try to think about happier times, too, just to keep your spirits up.  Amanda Wingfield is a complex character, full of contradictions.  But she didn’t get 17 gentlemen callers in a single day just by being pretty.  And she certainly didn’t attract them by being an annoying harpy.  The woman had charm.  It’s gotta still be in there somewhere.  Women do not exist merely as obstacles to, or helpless victims to be rescued by, men, even in 1930s America, especially not in the plays of Tennessee Williams.  They are fully formed human beings as well.  They should be allowed to exist as such.

“I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be.”

Theatre Coup d’Etat’s production of the The Glass Menagerie has its problems.  But underneath it all, there’s still the Tennessee Williams script that attracted them in the first place, and the audience gets to hear that, too.  In fact I heard some things for the first time, and heard some other things in a different way, that I hadn’t before.  And that’s a gift for which I’m grateful.  It makes me wonder what the production might have been like if it was working more closely with the script rather than fighting against it.

3.5 Stars - Highly Recommended

(photo courtesy of Theatre Coup d'Etat - Beleaguered siblings Tom (James Napoleon Stone) and Laura (Kaylyn Forkey) in The Glass Menagerie)

Review - The Christians - Walking Shadow - Best Theater I’ve Seen All Year - 5 stars

So far this year I’ve seen 32 theater productions, plus five play readings, a dance show, a 24 hour play festival and a night of improv comedy.  Out of all that, Walking Shadow Theatre Company’s current production of Lucas Hnath’s The Christians is the best thing I’ve seen all year.  Fair warning: depending on your tolerance for information in advance of seeing a show, some may consider this review mildly spoilerish.  (But then why read a review in the first place, right?)  I will try my best to leave the bulk of the surprises for your seeing the show yourself because, wow, should you see this show yourself.  But I also imagine with a title like The Christians, you might need some convincing to go.  And those who hear the title and don’t need convincing might be going for the wrong reasons - either to have their faith mindlessly reinforced, or to see some good ol’ godless, liberal artist-style, Christian-bashing.  Neither of those is going on here.

“I have a powerful urge to communicate with you but I find the distance between us insurmountable.”

The synopsis on the Walking Shadow website is also incredibly vague: “Twenty years ago, this church was just a modest storefront. Now our congregation of thousands gathers together to share faith and hear a monumental announcement from Pastor Paul. This will be a day of celebration... But what Pastor Paul has to say changes everything, shaking the foundation of his church, community, and home.  Backed by a live choir, The Christians is both epic and unexpectedly intimate, an unflinching look at faith in America – and its power to unite or divide.”

“There is a crack in the foundation of this church.”

Based on that you could be forgiven for thinking - sex scandal.  Pastor Paul is cheating on his wife.  Pastor Paul is secretly gay.  Pastor Paul is a pedophile.  No.  No.  And, no.  (And just to be clear, I’m thinking of those as three distinct things, not different layers of the same revelation because, well, ew…)  So if it’s none of those things, then what is it?  Well, the phrase “unflinching look at faith” is pretty apt.  And since I can see your eyes beginning to glaze over, if I tell you the playwright’s other titles include: Red Speedo, The Courtship of Anna Nicole Smith, and A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, does that cause you to breathe a sigh of relief that the guy has, you’ll pardon the expression, an irreverent sense of humor?  Not to mention the fact that Pillsbury House Theater did his play Death Tax just last year.

“You’re saying absolute tolerance requires intolerance of the intolerant?”

So: smart, yes.  Funny, yes.  Moving, surprisingly, and absolutely yes.  Pastor Paul (Andrew Erskine Wheeler - where the heck did he come from? he’s amazing) drops a faith bomb of sorts on the unsuspecting congregation of his megachurch.  It’s an announcement equally unexpected by the crew sharing the front of the sanctuary by the pulpit with him: his faithful wife Elizabeth (Bonni Allen), the assistant pastor Joshua (Kory LaQuess Pullam), church board representative Jay (Charles Numrich), and singer in the choir, Jenny (Brittany Parker) - who speaks up on behalf of those in the congregation who are beginning to doubt Pastor Paul after his announcement.

“Isn’t it a church that should make a thief feel welcome?”

There is an actual choir onstage, accompanied by keyboardist Rick Bernardo, led by choir mistress Sophia Bauer, and including Sue Gerver, Siri Hammond, Anika Kulander, Anita Mack, Lily Noonan, Jessica Thompson Passaro, and Alex Yang.  Eli Schlatter’s uncanny set is an eerily perfect presentation of many of the elements seen in suburban megachurches around the country and on TV, right down to the large flat screen TVs which broadcast the words to the hymns so everyone can sing along (don’t worry, you don’t have to - as the choir mistress reassures us at the top “The spirit moves each of us differently.”) 

“If there’s no punishment, why are we good?”

The video content from Megan Reilly is just generic and innocuous enough to fit the whole environment perfectly - that can’t have been easy.  It’s so hard to hold down our sense of irony in situations like this.  Sara Wilcox’s costumes are spot on, for the precise reason that they don’t seem like costumes at all - it’s just how these characters would dress.  The pastor’s wife doesn’t speak a word until the closing minutes of the play but you can tell so much about her just by looking at her.  The actress and the costume together are doing work so subtly that you don’t even really notice.  Given that director Amy Rummenie’s staging encompasses all four corners of the Mixed Blood space and not just the stage proper, Wm. P. Healey’s lights are key to throwing emphasis as needed and tying this whole world together around the audience.

“What good is a church that no one goes to?”

Huge kudos have to go to Eric Wigham working the sound system because a unique feature of this play is that everyone works with a microphone either in their hand, on a stand, or at the pulpit.  It begins with the pastor’s sermon but widens out to include all the scenes, even the most intimate ones.  It’s all part of a larger sermon style presentation.  Pastor Paul is subtly presenting these scenes to us as if they were further stories he was using to illuminate his message.  Long mic chords, possible feedback, volume issues - these are all challenges ably met in the production.  And when someone leaves their microphone behind, it can be just as violent a statement as any mic drop.

“It’s not your problem because you haven’t made it your problem.”

I was surprised by how uncomfortable I felt at the beginning of the play.  I wasn’t expecting that.  I didn’t grow up in a megachurch but I did grow up in a series of suburban churches, some of them led at times by my father or my mother in the pulpit.  Our hymns were more old school, traditional hymns than the kind of inoffensive synthesizer Christian pop ballads they have nowadays, but the choir robes look very familiar.  The reasons I felt uncomfortable were several.  I didn’t know what I was going to see, and felt it could go horribly wrong in any number of ways.  I wasn’t sure how much audience participation was going to be required of me (blessedly, none - though I guess closing my eyes and bowing my head at appropriate times for prayer counts).  I wasn’t, frankly, sure about the audience I was in.  Why were they here?  Though I feel as though I have a personal relationship with God, and we’ve made our peace with one another, there are a lot of well-meaning, good-hearted folks out there who still see me, as a gay man, as out of place in a church setting.  To say I felt unsafe is not an exaggeration.

“No matter what you’ve done, it can all be washed away.”

Thankfully once Pastor Paul makes his announcement I then realize, “oh, it’s gonna be THIS kind of play.  This play wants me here, wants all of us here.  This play NEEDS us here.  This is gonna be great.”  Sometimes after a long day at work, if the play doesn’t engage me, my attention can wander.  My body may even strongly encourage me to take a nap, an urge I have to actively resist giving into.  For The Christians, no such worries.  I was riveted from start to finish.  The performances are thrilling.  The mindf*ck this play works on the audience is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s both entertaining and thought-provoking.  It managed to put into words things I’ve been wrestling with, and things our country should be more consciously wrestling with, for a while now.

“All God asks of us is to just believe that He is there.”

I didn’t know I needed The Christians.  Thank God (pun intended) Walking Shadow knew.  I want to buy myself a copy of this play.  I want to read and see more things by this writer.  And all these performers and production artists either reinforced my high opinion of their craft, or just introduced themselves to me in one heck of a showcase.  Even if you don’t think you need to see The Christians, trust me when I say you need to see The Christians.  It tackles where we are as a country right now, and challenges us to find a more humane and inclusive way forward - warning us the entire time that, damn, it’s not gonna be easy.  But it’s necessary.  It’s a rollercoaster of a play, with a heart as big as its brain (and it’s got a pretty big brain).  It’s a perfect example of why we still do live theater.  This experience couldn’t happen any other way.

“And I said, please.  Please.  Please.”

See The Christians.  (It’s going to be hard to top this production, but the Twin Cities theater community still has seven months of 2016 left to try.)

[There.  Did it.  Relatively spoiler-free.]

5 Stars - Very Highly Recommended

(Photo courtesy Walking Shadow Theatre Company: Bonni Allen as Elizabeth and Andrew Erskine Wheeler as Pastor Paul in The Christians)

Review - Queens - Sandbox Theatre - Half a Great Play About Boxing - 4 stars

Here’s the weird and frustrating thing about Sandbox Theatre’s latest offering, the boxing drama Queens - it’s half a great play.  Act One is almost entirely fantastic, with the exception of the very last sequence that gets us to intermission.  The beginning sequence of Act Two is a thrilling and clever bit of theatrical storytelling.  Then the bulk of the second act after that kind of sputters out.  Granted, so does the lead character and his fortunes, but many a downfall over the years has been compelling to watch.

“Raymond Queens once hit a man so hard…”

The thing that makes it especially weird is that the three performers involved (Neal Hazard, Theo Langason, and Emily Madigan) are uniformly excellent throughout, beginning to end.  Their talent, energy and commitment to the story never flags.  It’s just that the play doesn’t give them much to work with in the second half, and there’s only so much even a great actor can do.  This is also partly because Queens is a story about boxing, and American popular culture has always been more than a little obsessed with boxing.  As my friend who attended the show with me observed afterward, “If you hadn’t read a book, watched TV or seen a movie in the last twenty years, some of that might have seemed more fresh and original.”

“It makes me wonder what happens when they get past the horizon.  Where do those tracks lead?”

Queens is the story of fictional boxer Raymond Queens, told as part biography, part legend.  Plagued by a ringing in his ears, and unable to hold down a job in the steel mills of Pennsylvania without getting himself into a fight, Raymond turns his hotheaded personality and unrelenting spirit into advantages in the boxing ring.  The three person cast all play multiple roles throughout and make it look so easy you can forget how hard that is to do well.

“I can hear it, the silence.”

At intermission, I marveled at how Sandbox does what they do, creating shows from scratch with an ensemble like this.  The dialogue in act one really sings - it’s both believable as everyday conversation and shot through at the same time with so many poetic turns of phrase that your ears just have a good time listening to these three actors talk.  In addition, there’s plentiful (and beautiful) music, courtesy of deVon Gray who performs live on the piano the music he composed for the show.  It’s a perfect soundtrack for the story, augmented by the original song “The Difference” written and performed to bookend the show by Theo Langason.

“It’s the falls you know are coming that are the worst.”

Langason also served as co-director of the piece alongside Matthew Glover.  The ways in which boxing becomes almost like dancing in Sandbox's physical approach to theater storytelling are really exciting to watch.  The design of lights (Heidi Eckwall), costumes (Samantha Rei Crossland), and set (Derek Lee Miller) all simply and beautifully create the world of Raymond’s story.  A basic square of canvas and the empty space surrounding it include the addition of a fourth bank of seats for the Park Square space, making it a show in the round.  These wooden bleachers also help complete the boxing world of Raymond Queens.  Every time the audience looks across the space at one another and sees those bleachers, they help to ground us in the past.

“With the sun in your eyes, and the wolves at your back…”

So if the story and production are so good for so long, what’s the problem?  I think it starts to go wrong when young Raymond’s coach and mentor gets approached by a shady character in order to get Raymond to throw a fight (so the gambling business can make a little more money).  Again, the actors do a great job here creating these characters, especially Emily Madigan who has to, and does, convincingly play a menacing man.  The performances aren’t the problem, it’s the story.  The coach never makes it explicit to the boxer that he’s supposed to throw the fight.  So the enthusiastic boxer doesn’t throw the fight but wins instead and the coach pays the price.  Before there can be any personal, especially emotional, repercussions for Raymond, we’re at intermission.

“A dream of what not to be.”

The first act up until this point is all about playing with boxing story cliches and subverting them by making them specific to Raymond’s character.  Here, at the end of the first act, and one could argue a crucial turning point for Raymond’s career, it stops doing that.  Even though the beginning of the second act is a great kickoff - swapping in older Raymond right at the start, and efficiently giving the audience a quick tour through the evolution of his career - it doesn’t adequately deal with what Raymond’s record means.

“They’ll come for the body, baby.  They’ll come for yours.  Don’t let ‘em have it.”

The implication of the end of the first act is that Raymond will now become someone who throws fights when he’s told to, for the convenience of others, for money, and under potential threat to his own health and well-being.  Raymond’s records of wins, losses and draws isn’t a true snapshot of what he can do as a boxer.  Not all those losses were fights he should have lost.  Not all of those draws were fights he shouldn’t have won, if he’d been allowed to.  A more detailed exploration of that could have been fascinating.  When does it turn from a career or a calling into something that’s just a job, where you do what you’re told but there’s no joy in it?  Why do you keep fighting - is it because sometimes you’re allowed to win?  Is it because you don’t feel like you were built to do anything else?  That people from a certain class, or a certain race, have limited opportunity and this is a way to buck society?

“Virginia’s got a funny way of reminding you of things.”

What we get instead is Raymond, and a prostitute named Elizabeth - for two-thirds of the second act.  Raymond loses a lot of his specificity as a character, and Elizabeth never really gains much of her own.  Again, not the actors’ doing really, it’s the text.  It seems to run out of steam, or run out of ideas, or both.  Think of a generic story that comes to mind when you hear the words “boxer” and/or “prostitute.”  That’s what’s going on here.  Complete with a potential escape to a happy life away from the madness of their current situation, and the one last fight that the boxer just can’t resist.  I understand that the story is trying to do something different in the second half and so the structure and approach of it change accordingly.  But if ain’t broke in act one, why fix it?

“Can’t change it, but you can make it right.”

If we’re going to spend that much stage time - the remainder of the play - with the actors playing just these two characters, then we should learn more about those characters.  We should learn why they live the way they live, why they want to change that (or why not), and what’s stopping them.  In Queens, we don’t.  What do they see in each other?  What convinces them that the other person is a vital part of their way out of a dead-end life?  Everything in the second half is pretty vague.  There’s promise in these characters, and very much in these actors, and Sandbox Theatre needs to do a better job of exploiting that.  Because Queens could be a powerful story, legend, morality tale - that’s the exciting promise of the first half.  It needs a second half that delivers more fully on that promise.  But man, that first act.  You should see that first act.

4 stars - Highly Recommended

(photo: Theo Langason, Emily Madigan and Neal Hazard in Sandbox Theatre's Queens - photographer: Dan Norman)

Review - Q-Stage, Set B - 20% Theatre - Pull The Blinds and Hide Your Dolls - 3-1/2 stars

If you ever wondered what it’s like watching someone deep throat the head of a Ken doll while roller blading to the strains of Celine Dion belting out “My Heart With Go On” from the film Titanic, well, have I got a show for you!  The odd thing is that the whole Ken Doll/rollerblades/Celine interlude may be the least strange, most accessible thing about Set B of 20% Theatre Company’s third annual Q-Stage developmental showcase for new queer work in progress.  While the entries in Set A last weekend had a more traditional beginning/middle/end sort of structure to them, the two offerings in Set B were much more experimental, and much more works in progress.

Gender Tender (aka Will Courtney and Syniva Whitney) presented their dance/installation art piece Bent/Straight as the first half of the evening.  Directed and choreographed by Whitney, underscored with music by Ariskany Records with installation art by Madeleine Bailey, Whitney and Courtney danced through a landscape of window blinds (white on one side, yellow on the other) on rolling racks, a hodge podge of different table lamps, and dizzying assortment of flashcards with black and white photos of parts of the human body. 

There was an extended sequence where the performers would take turns falling down dead, as the other performer would talk out the unfortunate scenario which took their life.  Toward the end, the falling down dead and other person standing over them tableau would be repeated, but this time, the living seemed to cast some sort of resurrection spell on the dead.  The dead didn’t quite rise fully to their feet, but their limbs would rise again.  On more than one occasion, one person would use the other as their ventriloquist’s dummy.  They would start by speaking words or singing notes, moving the other’s mouth.  Then the “dummy” would continue to “speak” or “sing” with no sound coming out.  The audience having heard the words or the notes before, our minds filled in the missing element.

Sound provided markers, and shifts in mood and tone throughout.  Light, particularly the different table lamps snapping us in and out of the dark, provided the opportunity for the performers to be found in different configurations each time the light would shift.  Costume also proved key to the evolution of the piece.  The performers first emerged onstage, hidden inside large black and white striped sweaters, as a single big blob of humanity, crawling over and clinging to each other in a big large amorphous striped entity.  Out of the sweaters later, their T-shirts mimicked the look of a suit jacket and tie.  Later still, another T-shirt gave them each a set of painted on breasts, bursting out of their formal button down “shirts.”

I haven’t a clue what Bent/Straight was “about” in any specific sense I could put into words, or even what I was supposed to feel.  Maybe that’s a challenge for the next iteration of this work.  For now, though, it certainly offered a whole host of images and arresting visuals, and humor, so it feels like time well spent.

The second half of the evening was A.P. Looze’s The Grief Experiments, directed by Zoe Michael, with significant voiceover support from Lisa Marie Brimmer.  This would be the show with the previously mentioned Ken Doll extravaganza.  In fact, in an extended video sequence set to “My Heart Will Go On,” Ken hooks up on screen with a brunette doll acquaintance and the two end up having rather vigorous sex for two dolls without any anatomically correct genitalia.  Ken also ends up tossed into the middle of a stormy lake.

But The Grief Experiments isn’t about the dolls, it’s about Looze, and loss.  It’s also about alcoholism, and mental illness, and suicide.  Looze’s onstage persona has recently lost a loved one to suicide and is having an understandably hard time coping with it.  Anger is a response that surfaces regularly in a variety of ways.  Consumption of alcohol isn’t helping matters.  In order to bring a little order out of chaos, Looze’s character consults a lot of self-help resources (voiced by Brimmer) to guide them in the process of organizing and purging their belongings.  Admonished to fold, rather than hang things, the word “hang” takes on other meanings in the context of the loved one’s suicide.

In fact, language is something that Looze does a masterful and clever job of manipulating.  Many words end up carrying multiple meanings at once in the context of The Grief Experiments.  One great sequence has Looze embarking on a recipe for cookies, which gets tangled up in the 12 Steps for Alcoholics Anonymous, and the instructions for all that purging and organizing of belongings - and memories.  Another memorable scene finds Looze hiding behind a sparkling blue sheet repeating the same word or phrase, leaping about and animating its meaning: blah blah, academic language, poetry, slam poetry, non sequitur, fact.  It’s hard to convey on the page but the many different things that Looze does with their voice (and moving behind the sheet) are impressive and enormously entertaining.

Not everything works the way I think it’s intended.  A little often goes a long way.  Looze sometimes makes their point, and then keeps making it.  Looze is a compelling performer so there’s no doubt the audience is with them.  Trust that the audience gets it the first time.  For instance, there’s a sequence where Looze alternately breathes into a paper bag, then shouts angrily at the person who has died.  Unlike in all the other areas of the piece, Looze didn’t seem to have full control over their voice here.  It was either normal voice or shouting, no modulation, no levels, no nuance.  Now, that might have worked if they only did it once.  They did it repeatedly.  So not only did it start at such a high pitch of emotion it had nowhere to go, the repetition also had the effect of diluting the impact.  Done once, something like that would have hit me hard.  Repeated exposure desensitized me, and I fear the point was lost by overdoing it.

The lines also get fuzzy here in regard to subject matter.  One gets the feeling that Looze intends for the whole to end up being greater than the sum of all the disparate parts.  But it’s hard to tell just what Looze is driving at.  Because grief is not mental illness is not addiction is not suicide.  Often they collide, and they certainly can complicate one another.  But they’re all mixed up in the same stew together here.  The boundaries and definitions can get unhelpfully vague, and sometimes the exploration of one shoots off in the opposite direction from one of the others.  It feels at times like the different parts of the performance are fighting each other. 

Any or all of this may be intentional, of course, but it does make it hard for the audience to know where to land when it’s all done.  The mix of humor and the subject matter is a good one, though, and a bold one.  I don’t mean to discourage that at all.  Of the two parts of Set B, Looze’s The Grief Experiments, by virtue of the fact there was a person speaking to me trying to convey meaning, reached me in a way that Gender Tender’s Bent/Straight didn’t.  That said, they’re both intriguing experiments and I’m glad 20% Theatre gave them all a place to play.  I’ll be curious to see what’s next from these performers and these pieces.

3-1/2 stars - Highly Recommended

Photos for 5/24 Writing Group Challenge

Our host Val says:

"Write a scene that ties these two pictures together in a coherent way. I took them in LA last month and thought they'd pair well."

Review - 3rd Annual Q-Stage, Set A - A Very Queer, Very Different Double Feature

It would be hard to find two shows more different that the two halves of Set A in 20% Theatre Company’s third annual Q-Stage.  Hector Chavarria’s The Big Gay Mexican Show! is a colorful, polished, flashy variety showcase where the central character isn’t struggling with the Gay part of his title, but the Big and Mexican parts.  JamieAnn Meyers’ First Person: A Life In Transition is a raw, intimate travelogue through JamieAnn’s personal journey toward understanding her fluid identity as a bi trans woman - the queer part of her identity and its affect on all other aspects of her life, and the lives of those around her, is the central struggle here.  Both productions are about self-acceptance but they take very different routes to getting there.  And the things that make them different are the things that make them work so well.

“Changing your story comes with a price, but it is SO worth it.”

Hector Chavarria is the author, central performer and title character of The Big Gay Mexican Show! He sings a number of songs, in both English and Spanish.  When he kicked off the opener, the old Fred Astaire standard “Cheek to Cheek,” I had to look closely because I thought, “Is he lip syncing? That voice can’t be real, can it?”  But it is.  Chavarria has a hell of a set of pipes on him and he knows how to use them.  And he may be a Big Gay Mexican, but he’s surprisingly graceful and nimble on his feet as a dancer as well.  The primary aim here is first to create a buoyant, entertaining confection in many shades of pink and sequins, which Chavarria, his director Stacy Schultz, and his fellow performers Jennifer Buckout and Donn Saylor most definitely do.  But there’s something else going on under the surface, and periodically it breaks through the shiny, happy exterior.  My theater-going companion likened it to being “emotionally flashed” by the performers.  Again, being gay and a dreamer wasn’t the issue.  If he was put in a quiet corner at school for not fitting in, the Big Gay Mexican simply daydreamed a funny and fabulous musical number in his head to pass the time.  Interacting with Buckout, first as Cinderella, then as childhood best friend Angie, Chevarria returned more than once to the theme of how family can hold you back.  Chevarria pleaded with Cinderella to save herself from the emotional abuse that kept her tied to her home,  unable to make a better life for herself.  And when Angie berates the Big Gay Mexican for losing touch with his roots back home, it becomes clear that the distance and silence are deliberate - that he must take the extreme step of cutting off the needs and demands of the people in his past if he’s to build a future of his own.

“How do you know I don’t love you?”
“Because I would never allow it.”

Neither of those struggles is uncomplicated, and the brief flashes we get of them are effective.  But one wonders if, given a broader canvas of more time (as this is a work in progress designed to be a one-act), how The Big Gay Mexican Show! might dig deeper.  Does it require the narrative of an actual play, or would the variety show format still allow the possibility of further exploration?  Similarly, when Saylor takes on the role of Dream Date and perfect boyfriend, Chevarria’s title character can only take so much love and support before he snaps.  The Big Gay Mexican says he accepts himself, but he won’t allow others to accept him.  The Dream Date is a fictional character he can’t let become something real.  Can a person be fabulous 24/7 and leave room for another person to enter their orbit, or at some point do you have to drop the act and get real?  Is dropping the act even possible when the act isn’t an act, but it’s who you are?  Again, these are flashes.  The comedy and satire, as well as music and dance, are the things that take center stage here, and Chevarria and company do them all extremely well.  (And I didn’t even touch on the hilarious old actual TV ads that appear in the “commercial breaks.”)  I’ll be very interested to see where this performer and these ideas go in the future.

“You were born a boy, but now you’re a girl?  I didn’t know you could do that.”

By contrast, JamieAnn Meyers’ First Person: A Life In Transition is the sort of “rough around the edges” work in progress that I expect to see at Q-Stage.  That unfinished feeling, though, is part of what allows First Person to be raw in a way that a more polished production might have lost in its developmental journey.  Meyers isn’t taking on a character here.  This is her story.  Like Meyer’s own life, the story is full of unexpected twists and turns simply in the way it’s constructed.  It doesn’t present itself in strictly linear fashion from childhood to the present, though there are stretches that seem to go “in order.”  First Person jumps back and forth in time, and also wisely takes the time to broaden the world beyond just Meyers’ singular experience.  Meyers has parents, a wife, children and grandchildren, all of whom are also effected by Meyers’ decision to embrace her gender identity and make the transition from her outer shell being that of a man, to becoming a woman both inside and out.  The perspectives of these other important people in Meyers’ life are taken into account.  They aren’t simply obstacles.  They are as much a part of Meyers’ understanding of herself as her own inner thoughts and struggles.

“You may always call me Jim, and I’ll always be your son.”

Meyers didn’t break away from her family.  She stayed married to the woman she loved and fathered children with.  But that doesn’t mean either one of them is a lesbian.  If that’s confusing for other people, imagine how they deal with it.  Meyers comes out to her 88-year-old mother, and though mom tries to both love and understand her child, there are still things she can’t quite wrap her head around.  Meyers’ father is far gone mentally by the time Meyer feels she can come out to him - but the father doesn’t recognize the woman before him, and instead he thinks his grandson (also come to visit) is his son, because that’s the man in the room.  The acceptance of Meyers’ own grandchildren is often much more uncomplicated than Meyers coming to terms with herself.

“But there’s a collective story, isn’t there?”

First Person is also as much declaration as it is explanation. Meyers is a vocal advocate in real life - examples of which are also peppered throughout the narrative (and this whole performance is its own advocacy).  Meyers is also joined on stage by five other trans performers (Erica Fields, Zealot Hamm, Suzi Love, Beckett Love, and Pearl Noonan).  Under Shalee Coleman’s direction, this ensemble takes on multiple roles from a sort of trans Greek chorus to individual people in Meyers’ life.  (Fields gets quite a workout playing Meyers’ mother, and father, and wife.)  All this vocal, positive trans energy onstage gives Meyers’ story that much more punch - and a healthy dose of the feeling that this isn’t just theater, it’s real life for some people.  Trans people aren’t quite the “other” after this show that they might have been for some audience members before the show.  One wishes all the people currently running around with their hair on fire over the thought of people using the “wrong” public restroom could sit down and be presented with a dose of Meyers’ reality.  It might calm people the heck down.

“I was trapped in binary thinking and gender stereotypes.”

That said, First Person is an adult piece of theater.  There’s a lot of frank discussion of sexuality, and some accompanying pictures projected on the back wall of the theater are not something you see every day.  Should we all be a little less uptight about the the human body? Sure.  Consider First Person an exercise in expanding your comfort zone.

“I’m the Big Gay Mexican. Tell your friends.”

Q-Stage’s Set A this year is a cleverly matched pair of very different, but both very positive, explorations of places on the queer spectrum that we don’t see presented to us on a regular basis.  It’s a good reminder that there are all kinds of diversity, and we’re all a little more human when we understand each other better.

4 stars - Highly Recommended