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

Review - The Sparrow - Live Action Set - Seen, Heard, Understood(?) - 3 stars

It’s hard to know what to say about Live Action Set’s latest devised, company-created new work The Sparrow.  In a lot of ways the production defies description, and sense.  Neither of which in and of itself is a bad thing.  The Sparrow is two very different half hour blocks of performance, with an intermission between for a rather startling costume change, as well as a change in mood, tone and delivery.  You have the give the Live Action Set folks credit for just going for it.  They’re throwing a whole lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks.  I suppose how successful they are really depends on who you ask because the whole thing is massively open to interpretation.

The first half of The Sparrow is told almost completely through movement.  Any sound out of the enormous cast of almost two dozen performers is not words but breath, chanting or screaming.  Not a word is spoken in part one, unless you count the soundtrack in the second part of that section, which gives us Nina Simone singing “Wild Is The Wind,” then AronChupa’s foul-mouthed dance track “I’m An Albatraoz.”  There really isn’t anything in the printed program to ground you to what’s going on, and if you check their website as I did after the fact, you get:

“Sea-weary sailors regard the arrival of a sparrow as the harbinger of a journey's end. With it, momentum recycles, and a new journey begins. "The Sparrow" celebrates a world of infinite possibilities as it takes hold of joy by the jowls in this new portrait of explosive expression by genre-blurring Live Action Set.”

Um… ok… if you say so.  If you’d asked me to describe it to you without looking at the website, I wouldn’t have come up with sailors at all.  Bird?  Definitely.  And there’s a fair amount of time spent with people writhing around on the floor in ways that make you think of the tide rolling in, or people riding waves.  When I encounter dance, and the first half of The Sparrow is unquestionably a dance piece, I tend to worry less about things like a strict plot or narrative.  Honestly, to be told afterward that there was a story was a little bewildering.

Partway in, it starts to morph into a depiction of what seems like eggs being fertitlized, zygotes forming, and a baby bird breaking out of an embryonic sack.  That last is probably part one’s most stunning visual, so kudos to Sam Kruger for embodying that image so fully.  He was in that plastic bag so long I was starting to worry about him.  A lot of credit for the most evocative moments in the first half has to go to the women of the ensemble, though.  Unfortunately in the dim light, with no headshots and only a list of names to go by, even a search on the internet only leads to wild guesses on my part as to who is who.  The women drive most of the movement of the narrative in the first half, though, particularly a blue-outfitted dancer who becomes the titular bird in question (and I think the internet just helped me identify her as Eve Schulte).

When the audience comes back from intermission and the second half starts, we’re in more brightly lit, and brightly costumed, territory.  Also, everyone emerges on stage as exaggeratedly crass and grotesque individuals.  The speaking begins right away, and almost right away I found myself thinking, “Man, I wish they’d stop talking and go back to the movement and chanting again.”  (Which, after sitting through and concentrating on a half-hour of that already in the first half, was not a response I was expecting.)

We’re served a strange, disjointed stew of existential musings that I can only call “Non-Sequitur White Privilege Theater.”  Maybe I’ve just had too many people in my life kill themselves recently to have a lot of sympathy for characters onstage who bemoan the state of being alive, being healthy, having a job, a place to live, a car, someone to love, family. 

Calling them characters is charitable since we don’t really get much of a chance to spend time with any one of them or really get to know them.  Most members of the very large ensemble get a quick turn at engaging the audience with tales of loneliness, disconnectedness and isolation.  The forays into absurdity and improv that are present don’t seem to serve a purpose.  The women aren’t really driving the forward motion of the second half of the evening and that may also be part of the problem.

Here again, there’s a single moment that stood out for me, and tellingly it had two people interacting rather than just individually breaking the fourth wall to not quite, almost talk to the audience.  Two guys (I’m taking a wild stab at identifying them here - Benjamin Kolis and Kalen Keir) get right up in one another’s personal space, taking turns grasping the back of one another’s neck to use each other as ventriloquist’s dummies. The proximity of their faces to one another throughout this extended sequence ended up being pretty homoerotic, and because it was the rare example of two people actually interacting in the second half, it was very compelling to watch.

I’d be hard pressed to tell you how the first and second halves of the evening fit together thematically.  The program does a little riff on the title The Sparrow - also namechecking “espero” (which can be translated to “I hope”) and “despair-row.”

Also, the use of Nina Simone seems a little careless here.  A number of the artists involved may identify as artists of color but with only one exception I could catch, the group as a whole presents itself visually as almost blindingly white.  Just looking at the names doesn’t help - Mark Benzel, Todd Bruse, Torre Edahl, Deanna Gooding, Robert Haarman, Cate Jackson, Anna Johnson, Kalen Keir, Benjamin Kolis, Sam Kruger, Jennifer Mack, Eric Marinus, Vladimir Messing, Yvonne Mont Martin, Blake Nellis, Chelsie Newhart, Alys Ayumi Ogura, Rachel Petrie, Jennifer Pray, Peter Rusk, Tony Sarnicki, Eve Schulte, and Kathleen Willard - because, again, all but one seemed to be firmly rooted in European ancestry. As for the rest of the production team, we have co-directors Noah Bremer and Joanna Harmon, along with assistant director Schulte.  Keir and Petrie do double duty as music directors, Harmon doubles up with costume design and Megan Reilly designed the lights.

Given that Nina Simone means a lot of things to a lot of people, and given our uncomfortably highly charged racial atmosphere right now, also currently being manipulated by candidates for political points in an election year, you want to tread lightly.  I don’t think there’s anything overtly cynical or manipulative going on here with Live Action Set, but it could be misinterpreted as a move to get a contact high off a significant artist of color for the pleasure of considering yourself diverse.  I’m not saying white people shouldn’t have the pleasure of dancing to Nina Simone.  But she is not simply pretty background music for anyone, especially not for white folks.  Proceed with caution.  That music’s a lot more loaded than you think it is.  Give it the respect and deliberate use it deserves.

Live Action Set is right to lead with the movement first, since it’s the stronger and more successful of the two experiments going on here.  Both parts of the evening give audiences a lot to think about and discuss, but if you’re like me and my theatergoing companion on opening night, you may spend a lot of that time scratching your head in confusion.  The Sparrow may be one of those theater pieces that’s meant more to be experienced than understood in any literal sense.  And good on Live Action Set for giving it a try.  That's what the support of ARTshare at the Southern Theater is for, taking risks and trying new things.

3 stars - Recommended

(photos: Eve Schulte, and Sam Kruger, in Live Action Set's The Sparrow - photographer: Bill Cameron)

Review - Kid Simple, a radio play in the flesh - Swandive Theatre - Dazzling, but Heartless? - 4-1/2 stars

It’s easy to see why Kid Simple, a radio play in the flesh was one of the plays that put Jordan Harrison on the map as a playwright over ten years ago.  Kid Simple is all the things that people who have to read dozens of scripts every week long to see - something different.  Kid Simple is funny and absurd.  Kid Simple has a female protagonist.  Kid Simple uses sound in a myriad of compelling and hilarious ways.  Kid Simple gives a small group of actors a host of crazy and challenging roles to play.  Kid Simple revels in words and language.  For all these reasons, it’s also easy to see why Swandive Theatre took to the play so readily.  It’s like Jordan Harrison wrote it for them.

“There are three speechless cellos in the whole wide world.”

Swandive Theatre’s production of Kid Simple is the kind of fully realized technical marvel that they last pulled off with their great presentation of An Outopia For Pigeons (which I know drove some people crazy, but which I loved). Anne Henly’s set and Jesse Cogswell’s lights create the framework in which this weird story exists, and Lucas Skjaret outfits everyone in distinctive and brightly colorful costumes which further enrich the palette that gives the production its “look.”  There is also a repeated use of video and projections (the work of Ian Knodel and Nathan Gebhard) that keeps everything just a little off-center.  But the real star here, naturally, is the sound and foley work of Derek Trost, the human manifestation of lead character Moll’s creation known as The Third Ear.

“If only she could murder her memory.”

In the lead-up to the start of the show, all the actors keep checking the variety of microphones placed around the set while a metronome ticks off the time in concert with an enormous projected clock face on the back wall of the Southern Theater.  Those microphones get quite a workout.  Debra Burger is the silken-voiced narrator for the evening (though don’t cross her, she has her limits).  In addition to playing Moll’s parents, Kevin McLaughlin and Sarah Broude take on the roles of villain and heroine, respectively, in an old-time radio show serial called “Death and The Music Teacher.”  And The Third Ear is all about the microphone for amplifying sounds both mundane and ridiculous.

“The loneliness most of all.”

High school student Moll (Boo Segersin) creates The Third Ear, which can hear sounds that can’t be heard by the human ear.  She wins the science fair but also catches the attention of two nefarious cave dwellers (also McLaughlin and Broude) who dispatch their henchman (Kip Dooley) to seduce Moll and steal The Third Ear to be used for their own destructive purposes.  Moll enlists the aid of the last virgin left in the 11th grade (Nathan Gebhard) in her quest to retrieve The Third Ear before it’s too late (because I guess if you’re going to have a mythic hero’s journey, you need a virgin).  Along the way, the henchman manifests himself in various forms to block their path.  Moll sacrificed a little piece of herself to bring The Third Ear to life, and she may have to sacrifice another part of herself to stop it.

“Sound of a great piece of wood straining.”

The whole cast is fantastic (though Broude’s radio play heroine, Dooley’s shapeshifting mercenary, and Berger’s omniscient and exasperated narrator are particularly wonderful).  Co-directors Meg DiSciorio and Damon Runnals have all their collaborators working in perfect sync at just the right pitch of lunacy for the whole crazy story to work.

“Sound of cogs turning in her head.”

So why didn’t I love it as much as I wanted to?  When the script is clever and the actors are great and the directors are rock solid and the design is stunning, what’s missing?  The script for Kid Simple might actually be just a little too clever for its own good.  As much as I love the dazzling word play of it all, there was often a feeling that the play was a bit cold, and holding me at arm’s length - “No, don’t get swept up in feeling things.  Stand back and look at what tricks I can do!”  The words often came before the needs of the characters, or of the audience to really bond with and care about the characters.

“A ship wrecked at sea.”
“All ships wreck at sea.”

And then there’s the, what I hope are, unintended messages embedded in the script.  In a weird way, Kid Simple seems to be saying, “No good can come of a young woman using her brain, or having sex.”  Also, “Sex is a dark and bad thing.”  It’s not enough to just a put a woman in the center of the story.  She has to drive it, not just be the victim of it.  And it doesn’t really do much to undo all the silly tropes about the over-inflated value society places on virginity if you swap a male in for a female virgin, but still reinforce all the cliches.

“You’re the mad scientist AND the monster.”

Does any of that undermine all the amazing things that are happening in Kid Simple, a radio play in the flesh?  Not really.  The production is very much worth seeing.  It’s exciting to watch all the things that theater can do, and Kid Simple really swings for the fences on all fronts.  There’s a little thrill in the way Swandive Theatre pulls off all the many tricks that Kid Simple asks of a company.  Everyone here deserves a big enthusiastic audience for the stunts they’re pulling off with such aplomb.  Kid Simple is something different, and for that reason alone it deserves to be seen.

4-1/2 stars - Very Highly Recommended

(Photo: Kevin McLaughlin and Sarah Broude perform the radio play within a radio play "Death and The Music Teacher" in Swandive Theatre's production of Kid Simple, a radio play in the flesh; photographer: Dan Norman)

Review - Charm - Mixed Blood - Lives In Need of a Happy Ending - 4 stars

Any play that conjures Emily Post up from the afterlife in the body of a trans person can’t be all bad.

“Have pity on the straight people, baby.  They get confused.”

Talking with my friend after the production of Charm at Mixed Blood, I found myself in the unusual position of holding the happy ending of the play against it.  As a fan of happy endings, you’d think I’d cut a play some slack if it had a happy ending.  My problem was that Charm did not in any way, shape or form seem like it was setting us up for a happy ending.  Then my friend reminded me of something she’d once heard in a similar discussion of art - we don’t always apply a happy ending because it makes sense or because it’s warranted; we create a happy ending because we need more of them.  Fair point.  The characters in Charm could use a happy ending, so who am I to begrudge them one?

“Don’t you just feel like a whole new you, instead of a ho you knew?”

I also didn’t realize until after the show that the playwright for Charm, Philip Dawkins, was also the playwright on Failure: A Love Story, a 2014 Fringe show that I loved quite a lot.  Charm is a very different play from a number of angles but the same talent is at play in this script as well.  The ensemble of Charm is a big noisy cast of nine characters - all individuals unrelated to one another introduced in a classroom setting.  It’s a credit to the cast that they all quickly present their characters to the audience as fully formed people cobbled together out of snippets as the play furiously juggles all the characters to give their subplots something akin to equal time.  It’s a tough task in this “teacher and student” context and the cast, under the direction of Addie Gorlin, often succeeds at this task more effectively than the play itself does.

“You make the transition from the painful realization that everyone’s looking at you to the uncomfortable truth that no one sees you anymore.”

Mama Darleena Andrews (Julienne “Mizz June” Brown) has volunteered her time to teach at a local community center that serves at-risk and gender non-conforming youth of all sexualities, many of them also homeless.  The center is run by the beleaguered D (Meighan Gerachis), a bit worn down by the day to day realities of the community they are serving with limited resources. Mama wants to teach the young people etiquette, following the rules of the late Emily Post.  Now, the gender norms Miss Post was enforcing in her day are a lot more fluid in 2016.  That fluidity running up against such rigid rules can make for some confusion, and some friction.  Also, of course, a lot of comedy.  When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, or your next kind word, charm school can seem like a luxury on which you can ill afford to waste your time.  And getting the kids to behave in the classroom is a far cry from getting them to treat each other, and themselves, better out in the real world beyond the community center’s walls.

“I’m just an old dog and you’re teaching me new pronouns.”

But the young people are intrigued by Mama, a trans woman of color who’s made it to the other side of 50 in a world that doesn’t have good odds for that happening.  Fabulous streetwalker Ariela (Rehema Mertinez) is especially drawn to Mama, lobbying hard for the role of teacher’s favorite - and a little jealous and spiteful to anyone who gets in her way.  Ariela’s opposite is Beta (Jay Simmons), a sullen and quiet gang member who sits in the corner wearing clothes so non-descript it’s hard to tell who they are.  Victoria (Jennifer Waweru) and Donnie (Ryan Colbert) move as a unit, a couple bound by the children and history they share together, but always on the verge of being pulled apart.  Lady (Jay Owen Eisenberg) is a nervous, spastic soul who has a hard time connecting with others.  Logan (Nathan Barlow), a gay college student, drops in just to get a taste of how the other side lives, but ends up staying to pursue a relationship with Jonelle (Alyssandra Taylor), who fills out their paperwork as a boy but presents as a girl.

“I just wish there was someone I was enough for.”

Though the play could sidestep the rough edges of its characters and their lives, to its credit, it doesn’t.  However, the characters nearly all headed down some dark paths of their own does make that happy ending seem a bit more jarring.  Is it nice to see them all together at the end?  Sure.  Does that mean their lives are magically fixed?  Of course not.  Does the fact they have to go back to those lives of struggle negate the loveliness and warmth of this one moment in time on which the play chooses to close?  No. But it doesn’t feel like the play or the production is necessarily presenting that happy ending with the tenuousness that surely accompanies it.  It’s almost as if we in the audience, like Logan the college student, have the privilege to go slumming for a little while on the wrong side of town, and then get to quickly return to our safe and sheltered lives - and think no more about it.  Are we better for the visit?  Yes.  Are we also using other people’s misfortune and hardship as our entertainment, secure in the knowledge it isn’t really going to touch us?  Maybe.

“To expect perfection is rude.”

It’s good that Charm has me asking these questions.  It’s good that Charm is making me uncomfortable.  It’s good that Charm is presenting these characters to audiences, giving them a platform and a voice.  I just worry that because there is so much getting crammed into a single play, no single element of the play is getting a fair hearing.  Any one or two of these characters in any combination could easily be their own play.  Charm draws them all quickly and deftly, but I wonder about the depth.  For instance, one character presents themselves and their life in a certain way for the first two-thirds of the play, and then suddenly tells us that it was all a lie.  OK, then what’s the truth?  The play lets that slide.  So the character we thought we knew just turns into a cypher that is never fully explained by the play’s end.  We know them less well after spending two hours with than we did when we started.  That seems like a poor use of a character, an actor, and stage time.  Charm does this, to a lesser extent, with every one of the characters who are all fighting for their moment in the spotlight so the audience can see them better.  Charm often seems like a lot of set-up with little ultimate delivery on its introductions.

“Thank you for correcting me.  Names have power.”

Still, just to get a cast of this many gender-fluid and sexuality-fluid characters (and actors) of color on the same stage together is notable all by itself, and well worth seeing.  Charm is not like anything else you’re likely to see on stage this year.  And you can see it at Mixed Blood for free (because of their Radical Hospitality program).  So what are you waiting for?  (You already know you’re going to get laughs and a happy ending)

4 stars - Highly Recommended

(photo: From left to right: Rehema Mertinez, Jay Owen Eisenberg, Jennifer Waweru, Alyssandra Taylor, Nathan Barlow, Ryan Colbert (on floor), Mizz June; photography by Rich Ryan)

Review - Everything’s Free - Mission Theatre Company - When The Bill Comes Due… - 4 stars

What if someone offered you a credit card with an unlimited balance that you never had to pay?  What would you do with that purchasing power?  What if one of the only conditions of receiving this card was that you could never let anyone else know you had it or were using it?  Could you keep your mouth shut?  Could you live in a a way that wouldn’t arose suspicion?  When our capacity to do good runs up against our capacity for selfishness, which side wins?

“The human dream only lasts nine seconds. That doesn’t leave us much time.”

These tantalizing questions, and many more, are floating around inside local playwright Sam Graber’s new play Everything’s Free, commissioned for a world premiere by Mission Theatre Company.  Being familiar with a lot of Sam Graber’s work, I have to say this is one of the strongest scripts I’ve seen from him.  Clocking in at only about 90 minutes, using only a handful of characters, Graber manages to cover a lot of ground and offer up a lot of food for thought to the Mission Theatre audience. 

“You accepted responsibility.  With responsibilities come conditions.”

Opening night was unfortunately also the day we all learned that Prince had died, so a lot of people were naturally preoccupied elsewhere.  The audience that showed up for Everything’s Free just barely outnumbered the cast of five.  To their credit, the actors went full out, as if the nearly empty room was instead a packed house.  The small crowd responded in kind, all very much keyed into the concept and story of the play.  I hear audiences since then have been quite full, which is good news.  This script and this production deserve to be seen by a lot more people.

“There have to be jobs.  Just walk to the tall buildings and ask.”

I have to be careful here not to spoil too much of the plot.  What I can safely say is that Tyler (Jake Rivet) and Mackenzie (Tynelle Marschall) are a young couple, fresh out of college, and fresh out of small town America, come to the big city of Minneapolis to make their mark and see what the larger world has to offer.  They think that people in their 30s are old, and that going back home would be a fate worse than death, but they also aren’t too adept at living hand to mouth.  Mackenzie calls herself an internet artist, and is somehow actually generating income - both of which struck me as being more fantastical that a lot of the genuinely weird things that happen in the play.  You could be forgiven for perhaps wanting something bad to happen to these two.

“Never let tomorrow stop tonight.”

Introduced alongside Tyler and Mackenzie are Clutch (Corey DiNardo), inexplicably wearing a bowler hat, and his companion Eula (Anna Sutheim), swathed in the multiple layers that make surviving a Minnesota winter possible.  Eula also seems a bit fixated on Tyler, which unnerves him, even as Clutch throws his money around to keep the good times flowing for his newfound friends.

“I can almost taste the smiles of people.”

In short order, Tyler also comes into some money.  What he chooses to do with it is surprisingly altruistic.  But as Tyler and everyone around him soon discovers, if something’s too good to be true, then it probably is.  The way things unravel and how the nightmare is resolved make for an unusual journey for characters and audience alike.

“Blood, bones, fingers, eyes.  Breathe and let the spirits rise.”

There’s a twist I won’t spoil near the end that almost seems like a cheap writer’s trick, but then turns around again to leave things a bit more open-ended and potentially ominous (you know, the kind of ending that would feel at home at the end of most typical episodes of The X-Files).

“There’s no due date.  There’s just us.  All of us.”

Outside the central foursome, Eric Balcerzak moves around the borders of the action of the story, only really having a chance to insert himself as a character when he takes on the role of a doctor doing charitable work with homeless people.  Since we have plenty of avarice among the main quartet, it might be nice to see some more of this, or similar, characters to add some balance and contrast as the script develops.  Just a single appearance by the doctor opened up the world of the play and grounded the strangeness of the premise in our everyday reality - which just ended up making it all that much more unsettling.

“There’s no advertising in homeless people freezing to death.”

Director Anneliese Stuht trusts Graber’s script and the performances of her actors to be enough the carry the story.  Everything’s Free is a fairly barebones production.  Obviously as you can see from the above, Krista Weiss’ costumes made an impression on me.  A nod must also be given to the lighting, sound and projection designs of Ben Harvey.  There’s one particularly evocative image in Graber’s script near the end, of dispossessed people each hanging by a thread in the moonlit nighttime sky, which Harvey actually delivers.  It’s as unsettling as it is beautiful, and for all that also remarkably simple in its execution.

“Everyone’s living on the street these days.  They just don’t know it.”

For some reason, I found myself wondering about why the production was so white. Nothing in Graber’s script seems to preclude actors of color.  In fact, mixing it up a bit might allow the story to seem less like a cautionary tale just for self-involved, entitled white folk.  Right now, the homogenous population of Everything’s Free makes it just a little easier to dismiss than I think it should be.  The performances here were all fine, however.  Sometimes it seemed like there were only two volume settings, though - reserved or shouty.  Some extra levels in between might have been useful.  The one cast member who skirts this problem rather nimbly, and had me wishing for a little more nuance across the whole story, was Sutheim as Eula.  She always seemed to have just the right mix of allure and menace. She takes the strong material in the text and really runs with it.  Is she more than human or less than human?  See and decide for yourself.

“You should reconsider your tone.”

We don’t get a lot of original storytelling along the lines of Everything’s Free all that often.  While we all work to change that, catch this new play while you can.  If you’re like me, you’ll probably find it unnerving and inspiring in equal measure.  Congratulations to Mission Theatre on given this new script a proper birth.

4 stars - Highly recommended

Review - Fight Night - Theatre Coup d’Etat - Fighting, Drinking, and Fun - 5 stars

Fight Night is Theatre Coup d’Etat’s monthly excuse to gather people together in order to drink and engage in stage combat.  What could possibly go wrong?  (I’m kidding, of course.  It’s all perfectly, relatively, safe, especially the audience participation.) (Don’t worry.  It’s self-selecting audience participation.  And with the crowd this show attracts, there’s always plenty of willing volunteers.  If, like me, you just want to stay in your seat and watch, you totally can.)

Have you every watched a play and just wanted to skip straight to the fight sequences?  That’s what Fight Night does.

First, they tag the audience as they arrive, handing out either red or blue strips of fabric for audience members to tie around some part of their body (this gets very creative for some people).  Then the two female referees explain that everyone wearing blue in the audience is on one team, all the folks with red are on the other.  Throughout the evening, there are competitions in which both teams can accumulate points.  When one team gets a point, the other team drinks (everyone wins).  At the end of the night, the team with the fewest points “loses” and needs to down the number of drinks that is the difference between the winning and losing scores.

But first, the classics.  Kevin Fanshaw and Elohim Pena join one of the referees in a rapid fire, very irreverent, summary of the plot of Hamlet.  Then Fanshaw takes up Hamlet’s foil, and Pena that of Laertes, and they stage the climactic sword fight from that play.  Later in the evening we get the Romeo/Mercutio/Tybalt knife and sword fight from Romeo and Juliet.  In both there’s a really sense of humor, even in the swordplay itself.  Playfulness with weapons is just another method of taunting your opponent.

Another part of the evening is fantasy fight matchups.  Each team in the audience picks a side and whoever’s champion wins the fight gets a point for their team (once more, losers drink).  First fantasy fight - Macbeth vs. Darth Vader (smart money was on the Dark Lord of the Sith).  The other fantasy fight matchup featured the ladies - homicidal Harley Quinn of comic book fame vs. Disney princess Snow White. (I was not aware before that evening that Snow White is surprisingly good in a knife fight.)  They are soliciting suggestions for future fantasy fight matchups - my brain for some reason wants Emily Dickinson to fight Sylvia Plath, and W.H. Auden to fight e.e. cummings, complete with a poetry smackdown.  (Clearly, I need help.)

Audience members can also rack up fight points themselves.  No actual knives and broad swords here, though.  The sword fight is fought using styrofoam pool noodles.  For added protection, each swordsman gets a literal human shield: either Theatre Coup d’Etat’s artistic director James Napoleon Stone or company fight choreographer Adam Scarpello.  The volunteer swordsmen from the audience loop their arms through the arms of the human shield in front of them and wield the sword from there.  The human shields can also talk strategy with their fighters. (Fair warning: Scarpello is willing to take a bite out of a pool noodle if he has a chance.)  More hits, more points, more drinking.

There are also fisticuffs to be had.  Those audience volunteers get enormous inflatable red or blue boxing gloves, and are basically just aiming for a chest hit.  They get baseball catcher’s masks for a little extra protection (though when one fighter’s mask came off, the other fighter graciously removed his as well to keep it a fair fight).  More hits, more points, more drinking.

For the less combative though no less competitive, there’s Pictionary.  The words and phrases are ones here from either Shakespeare or Star Wars.  More points, more drinking - plus bad art and wild guessing.

Something additionally impressive here is that - other than Stone and Scarpello - everyone else on stage in the classic duels and fantasy matchups is relatively new to stage combat.  Scarpello specializes in training actors to bring the fights out from a place of character first.  So it’s an extension of character rather than something tacked on because the play says so - not just an actor turning attention away from the play and instead focusing on getting the moves right, like it was a dance or something.  The method works well here.  Everything’s safe, but the fights still seem real and even a little reckless and unexpected.

Fight Night is a heck of a lot of fun.  I was a little worried about the 10pm start time, but it’s such a brisk lively hour of fun with the audience games mixed among the fantasy fights and classic duels that you never have a chance to get sleepy.  And if you’re someone for who the night’s just getting started at 10pm, Fight Night’s a great way to kick things off (and start drinking).

They’re back again on the Bryant Lake Bowl stage on June 24 and July 29, so mark your calendars and enjoy a boisterous late night out.  (Meanwhile, for something completely different, they're doing The Glass Menagerie May 20th to June 6th, so check that out.  I'm fairly certain there are no weapons involved.)

5 stars - Very Highly Recommended

Review - Lasso of Truth - Workhaus Collective/Walking Shadow - 3 stars

It’s not often the run crew gets called out on stage to take a bow with the cast at the end of the play, but with Lasso of Truth, it’s warranted.  And I don’t say that lightly.  The cast of Lasso of Truth is first rate - Annie Enneking, McKenna Kelly-Eiding, Meghan Kreidler, John Riedlinger, and Stephen Yoakam.  The cast is so good, and so stuffed with recognizable names from the Twin Cities theater community, it’s almost not fair to the other plays being produced right now.  I’m gonna have to make a guess here, but it looks like the two man stage crew was Isaac Arreguin and the assistant stage manager Mitch Swanson.  Why did they get a curtain call?  Well, Erica Zaffarano’s lively set for Lasso of Truth is almost another character in the play.  There are two rolling wall pieces (you couldn’t really call them screens) that might actually have more blocking than a lot of the actors.  Scenes are obscured then revealed from behind these walls as the two threads of the plot barrel along. If the crew wasn’t timing things just right and hitting their marks just so, the production wouldn’t work.  And the actors clearly know that.  You can see in the way the cast and crew look at each other, they’ve been through the wars, they’ve bonded.

“How can you tell when someone is lying to you?”

The set with a life of its own isn’t the only thing which sets Lasso of Truth apart from your average stage play.  Since Carson Kreitzer’s play explores the origins of the comic book superhero Wonder Woman and the life of her peculiar male creator, the play in its structure and this co-production of Workhaus Collective and Walking Shadow Theatre Company both embrace that comic book style.  There are some truly wonderful illustrations by Jacob Stoltz woven generously throughout the evening projected on three screens behind and above the action.  These comic book panels add detail, information, and punctuation (often comedic) to the story, making it seem a bit larger and more vibrant than life. 

“Let’s play ‘Leukemia.’  Now there’s one less of us.”

There is also a humorous side plot commenting on the action featuring Gloria Steinem writing a forward to a collection of Wonder Woman comic book covers.  The snippets that make up this side story are filmed and then given a comic book style coloring overlay making them that much more fun to watch.  The filming and editing was done by Daniel Benoit and the projections designer for the production was Davey T. Steinman.  There was also a cheeky but informative preshow video done by Kwame Brown running in a loop as the audience filed in and took their seats which helped give the show some helpful context.  Given the style of this production, under the direction of Leah Cooper, it’s hard to imagine the show working as well, or at all, without all the different varieties of visuals helping to prop it up and flesh it out.  Abetting all this visual and physical trickery, of course, are the added design elements of light and sound, designed by Michael P. Kittel and Dan Dukich respectively.  And though there were a couple of minor glitches opening night, one can hardly fault the board operators Jason Hanson and Damon Mentzer.  Like stage manager Mawrgyn Roper, the stage crew, and all the designers here, they have their work cut out for them to keep Lasso of Truth clipping along smoothly with all its many moving parts.

“The tickle at the edge of your brain.  Do you ignore it because you don’t want to know?”

Let me say this up front: I love Carson Kreitzer’s writing.  I love her style.  I love her way with words.  I love that even here, where the story is ostensibly focused on the man behind Wonder Woman, she finds a way to make it even more about the women in this man’s life, and how they inspired him as well as his creation.  I also love that in Lasso of Truth, unlike a lot of her other plays, there isn’t some incredibly dark turn that then paints the world as such a bleak place you wonder how the playwright gets out of bed in the morning.  All that said, Lasso of Truth is kind of a disappointment.  While I applaud, and even at times thrill to, the play imitating the visual style of a comic book in its structure - brief scenes centered on a single visual picture, like panels in a graphic novel - the content inside those panels is missing something.  They are often as flat as a two dimensional image.  The depth and human emotion is missing.  This, despite compelling performances by all involved.  The whole cast works hard to imbue the skimpy story with meaning, to put some meat on the play’s bones, but there’s only so much they can do. 

“Don’t struggle.  Just stay.”

Kreitzer is blatantly trying to have it both ways, and says as much in the author’s note in the program.  Lasso of Truth both is, and isn’t, about William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, and the creator of the polygraph (or lie detector) machine.  But the characters in the play are “fictional characters inspired by real people.”  Kreitzer, as any good writer does, takes the details she finds useful (not being bound by the rest), creates her own emotional truth around them, and makes her own world on the page.  The tension here is that even though the characters are listed as - in the past - The Inventor (Yoakam), The Wife (Enneking), The Amazon (Kreidler), and - in the present - The Girl (Kelly-Eiding) and The Guy (Riedlinger) - there are very specific non-generic references to the source material invading the play from a couple of directions.  The modern day Girl is obsessed with the particulars of the different iterations of Wonder Woman in popular culture (such as the successful Lynda Carter TV show).  Gloria Steinem on film (also Enneking, delightful) digs into both the sometimes troubling evolution of Wonder Woman on the comic book page and the unconventional sexual proclivities of Marston in real life, wondering aloud how the creator’s behavior influenced or reflected on his creation.  All the specifics in those two threads of the story seem to undercut, and make unnecessary, the coyness in other areas of the script just so perhaps the author still feels they have the room to take whatever dramatic license they wish with the characters and their lives.

“You may be used to being the smartest guy in the room, but that’s over.  I’m here.”

The main trouble I kept having as I watched was that nothing hung around long enough to have any impact.  In the present, our modern day Girl alternates between talking about Wonder Woman, telling stories from her past involving people we’ll never meet, and badgering a modern day Guy who runs a comic book store until he shares with her his vintage comic which contains the first appearance of the character of Wonder Woman.  This last quest results in - nothing, as far as I can tell.  After all the build up, we don’t get to see the comic.  Neither do we learn what, if anything, in this Wonder Woman debut has an impact thematically or personally for the Girl and Guy.  Yes, it’s a turning point in their relationship, but it sidelines the comic book (and Wonder Woman) into being more of a  maguffin.  No payoff. 

“I mean, how long do we expect this to last?”

That story as a whole is rendered in miniature time and time again in the scenes from the past where the Inventor, the Wife and the Amazon (the third in their polyamorous relationship) are repeatedly launching themselves into scenes that end abruptly without achieving anything.  Most of them start something like “Hello darling, let me share with you this little piece of exposition which will establish where we are in the timeline of our story and the history of America.  And now… oh, I’m sorry, we seem to have run out of time before we could really speak to one another.  Look at that shiny thing over there!  On to the next scene we go!” No one is allowed to exist in one place and engage another character for more than just one or two minutes at a time.  The actors all do their best to imbue these scenes with a sense of character and gravity and consequence but they don’t really seem to have enough to work with.  Comic books have more sustained explorations of their characters than this.  Lasso of Truth is more like a set of snapshots with captions than pictures that are conveying a narrative.  What’s the story and why are we watching it?

“No one else has to understand.  It’s enough that we do.”

Even saying all that, there is a certain amount of fun in just watching the artistic team band together in service of the script and just go for it.  It’s certainly not boring.  It never sits still long enough.  I’m not sure what all the component parts of Lasso of Truth add up to in the end, but it’s a wild ride getting there if you just give over to it and hang on tight.  In a way, Lasso of Truth is a fitting send off for Workaus Collective, which is shuttering operations after this production.  Workhaus was always about serving the script, giving the writers an opportunity to take chances and get new work out in front of audiences.  The work itself may have been a mixed bag, but no one ever played it safe.  Workhaus’ producing partner Walking Shadow continues on after this, of course.  Walking Shadow’s love of new plays should help fill a little of the void Workhaus is leaving behind.  Lasso of Truth is a good way to say goodbye.

3 stars - Recommended

(Photo: The Wife (Annie Enneking) restrained by The Amazon (Meghan Kreidler); photographer - Alana Horton)

Review - The Fantasticks - Nautilus Music Theater - A Big Dose of Old School - 4 stars

I find myself torn when I think about Nautilus Music Theater’s production of The Fantasticks.  The show is chock full of incredibly talented, seasoned performers (but then, that’s not at all unusual for Nautilus).  The show is also brimming over with one beautiful, memorable song after another.  Since it had been about, oh, thirty years since I’d seen a production of this piece, I’d forgotten just how many songs I knew from The Fantasticks.  I repeatedly found myself thinking, “Oh, that’s where this song comes from.  And this song.  And this song.  And this song.”  There’s a reason the thing is so durable.  Not only does it have a wealth of great material in it, it’s one of the original black box musicals.  It’s incredibly simple to stage because it blatantly engages the audience’s imagination by having the characters ask for it directly.  Fourth wall?  What fourth wall?  Every self aware piece of musical theater that’s come along in the last 55 years owes a debt to The Fantasticks.  If you think you’ve seen the tactics used before, it’s because you have.  This is where everybody else learned them.

“What at night seemed oh so scenic, may be cynic in the light.”

Nautilus has also put their own particular spin on the play by making it less a meditation on the way youth loses its innocence, and more about what love looks like from the opposite end of the age spectrum.  The “young” lovers are played by real-life married couple Gary Briggle and Wendy Lehr, two stalwarts of the Twin Cities theater scene over many decades.  The term “mature performer” is a fair one to apply here.  And perform they do.  Briggle is especially impressive because the man still has the lung capacity many a twenty-year old (who would normally get cast in the role of young lover Matt) would envy.  He can hold a note so long you start to wonder whether he’s human.  Most mere mortals don’t have pipes like that.

“Soon it’s gonna rain.  I can feel it.”

Speaking of amazing pipes, Nautilus’ Artistic Director Ben Krywosz had another little bit of fun with casting and put the Baldwin sisters (Christina Baldwin and Jennifer Baldwin Peden) in the role of the fathers to the young lovers - Christina being Bellomy, Wendy Lehr’s father, and Jennifer being Hucklebee, Gary Briggle’s father.  Not only were women playing male roles, they were decidedly younger than their characters and the actors who were supposed to be their children.  But oh those beautiful Baldwin voices.  Rounding out the cast was William Gilness in the narrator role of El Gallo, and Brian Sostek was the wacky ham actor who is central to the elaborate plot to get the young lovers together.  (Sostek also serves as choreographer and fight choreographer.)  The mini-orchestra consisted of music director Jerry Rubino on piano, and Andrea Stern on the harp.

“I say they’re only young once.  Let’s get us a first class abduction.”

The plot of The Fantasticks is pretty simple.  Matt and Luisa fall in love.  Matt and Luisa are pulled apart by circumstance.  Matt and Luisa find their way back to each other, just a little bit older and wiser.  Their fathers, who Matt and Luisa thought were trying to keep them apart, were actually only putting up obstacles so that the children would work that much harder to fall in love just to defy their parents.  The final flourish to this fatherly plot is enlisting El Gallo and his sidekick to stage a fake abduction of Luisa from which Matt can rescue her.  It’s only because happily ever after doesn’t seem as exciting that everyone drifts apart and then must find a way to reunite.

“Try to remember when life was so tender that no one wept except the willow.”

The concept behind the production was to put older artists in traditionally younger roles to add a different perspective to the story.  The same with the decision to go with women in traditionally male roles.  Having seen The Fantasticks through this lens, I’m not entirely sure it works.  The play seems to resist reinterpretation and commentary placed on it.  It seems to be resolutely a product of its time, and that time was over 50 years ago.  The music largely transcends time - the songs, and the talent of the performers here, make for an absolutely gorgeous piece of musical entertainment.  The script is another story altogether.  The fact that the abduction used to be referred to as a rape (which, in the classical sense, isn’t incorrect usage) was so problematic that over time the script was altered to not run afoul of more cultural sensitivity around the word.

“Just once before I’m old.”

The fact remains that it’s a fairly immovable story of white male privilege.  Written by two men, it makes much of the fact that the girl is 16 and the boy is 20.  So the entire time I’m sitting there thinking “statutory rape” in the back of my head.  Then there’s the whole notion that the boy must strike out and see the world, while the girl is simply waiting for some man, any man, to make her life complete.  He will be her adventure.  Add to that the ethnic stereotypes flying around El Gallo and his sidekick as they stage the abduction, then later take the lovers on a whirlwind tour of how American culture sees everyone else, and well… I got uncomfortable pretty quickly and stayed that way.  I was surprised as anyone that this was my response coming back to a musical I remembered so fondly from my teenage years.  Some scripts just don’t age well.  You can say it’s all just meant in fun, but fun at whose expense?

“Their moon was cardboard.  Fragile.”

With all the talent onstage, and all the beautiful songs, you can’t really be mad at the production.  When the music is front and center, for the most part, the production is on solid ground.  Is The Fantasticks lovely and entertaining and enjoyable?  Absolutely.  Is it necessary?  Probably not. 

“Are we happy?”
“Yes.  Aren’t we?”

You can argue that all art doesn’t need to have a purpose.  But I’d argue that it needs a compelling reason for being.  Just looking at the random sampling of things I’ve seen in the last four months, the ones that are most successful are the ones that are tapping into something in the zietgeist.  Given the political upheavals going on right now, productions as different as Tamburlaine and Julius Caesar can’t help but feel a bit more urgent.  Given the bewildering battles over bathrooms, marriage and civil rights for the LGBT community, a production like June is a timely reminder of a former era we’re always in danger of slipping back toward.  On the flip side, a production like Everyman provides a window into the belief system of people who feel compelled to insert themselves into other people’s personal lives.  Given the general feeling of personal unrest and displacement in so many quarters, disparate tales such as The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Aliens illuminate the sometimes desperate struggles of people who feel trapped in lives that are too small for them.  Productions like You Bring The Party and Semester, Lecture 1 look to unpack the very structure and purpose of the performer and audience relationship, questioning the validity of live theater itself.

“There’s usually an audience somewhere.”

So what exactly is The Fantasticks bringing to the table?  Escape, I guess, if that’s what you’re looking for.  Most of the songs still hold up remarkably well, and here they are performed better than you’re likely to see anywhere else.  For that reason, I can’t give the production any less than 4 stars.  As a piece of musical theater, Nautilus, as usual, executes the show flawlessly.  But the script is a relic.  If it were the songs alone, it would be a 5.  The framework that the songs live in is looking a little the worse for age.  The performers are aging far better than their material.  (Tickets are, quite rightly, rapidly selling out, so I shall do them no harm in saying this.)  Go for the singing, and when the book kicks in just trust that the next beautiful song is always right around the corner. 

4 Stars - Highly Recommended

Review - Julius Caesar/Macbeth - Classical Actors Ensemble - A Bloodier Brand of Political Fighting - 5 stars/3 stars

If the seemingly endless American presidential selection season is getting you down, Classical Actors Ensemble is here to remind you, through a double dose of Shakespeare in rep - Julius Caesar and Macbeth - that things could be a lot worse.  Choosing one’s leaders through assassination and civil war is a whole lot messier than anything we have going on right now.

“He’s a tried and valiant soldier.”
“So is my horse.”

After seeing CAE’s Julius Caesar, I want to see director Randall J. Funk’s take on a whole lot more Shakespeare plays.  This is the first telling of Julius Caesar, and I’ve seen a few, that actually resonated with me as a human story, with human consequences, and characters I understood and cared about.  You’d think that’d be the first hurdle you’d clear with a play, but with Shakespeare it all too often gets forgotten.  The promise and challenge of all that beautiful language is regularly where a lot of average Shakespeare productions stop.  Funk’s creative collaborators on Julius Caesar dig a whole lot deeper, and effort like that starts at the top.  These are some of the best performances I’ve seen these actors give. 

“Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius?”

CAE’s Julius Caesar actually makes me care about a group of assassins.  Sure, their methods are all wrong, but I understand their cause and concerns.  Plus, the characters who stand arrayed against them regularly show themselves to be no great prize.  When “order” is restored at the end, nobody’s happy, and it’s a legitimate question whether the country is any better off.  This is a production that keeps you on your toes.  Your sympathies keep shifting among the cast of characters.

“Will you dine with me tomorrow?”
“Ay, if I be alive, and your mind hold, and your dinner worth the eating.”

For the uninitiated: Julius Caesar (Arthur Moss) has the support of the masses (among them, Travis Bedard, Kris Snow, Alice Tibbetts, Mason Tyer, and Daniel Kristian Vopava) but he’s clearly been reading a little too much of his own publicity, and his view of his own importance and invincibility has increased accordingly.  Caesar ignores the warnings of his wife Calpurnia (Marci Lucht), and a random street person they call the Soothsayer (Lucas Gerstner) who tells him to “Beware the ides of March” (March 15th, which in the play is fast approaching).  [The soothsayer doesn’t appear to be played as the town drunk here, rather a homeless person who is perhaps mentally ill, an intriguing modern touch that makes you wonder what kind of dire warnings we might be ignoring every day as we, like Caesar, walk on by.]

“Three parts of him is ours already; and the man entire, upon the next encounter, yields him ours.”

Those worried about Caesar’s growing influence over Rome, led by Cassius (Peter Simmons) and Casca (Samantha Veldhouse - in a delicious and sardonic bit of cross-gender casting), settle on Brutus (Neal Beckman) as the ideal spokesman and poster boy for the opposition.  Assembling a willing cast of co-conspirators - Trebonius (Michael Kelley), Metellus Cimber (Michael Ooms), and Cinna (Dakotah Brown) - they decide assassination is the only way to stop Caesar’s rapid and dangerous rise to power.  Though Brutus has serious doubts, and willing sounding boards in the form of his wife Portia (Marika Proctor) and loyal servant Lucius (Morgan LeClaire), he nonetheless moves forward with the bloody plan.

“Set honour in one eye and death i’the other, and I will look on both indifferently.”

But Caesar has his own ardent supporters - most notably his right hand man Marc Antony (Daniel Ian Joeck).  Along with Lepidus (Andy Schnabel) and the next Caesar in line, Octavius (Rick Miller), Marc Antony leads a counter-revolt to revenge their fallen leader.

“Poor man!  I know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the Romans are but sheep.”

Seeing this production of Julius Caesar in rep with Macbeth (directed by CAE’s artistic director Joseph Papke) finally made clear to me why Macbeth has always been a harder sell for me as an audience member.  In Caesar, some of the characters have strong feelings about Caesar not being the best choice for leader of the country.  It seems to genuinely be a concern for the greater good.  Ambition enters into the decision, too, but it doesn’t feel like the driving force.  In Macbeth, it’s all about ambition.  The fact that Macbeth’s decisions will undoubtedly throw his country into turmoil is a secondary concern and doesn’t deter him from acting.  He starts out as a good man, but his motivations as he moves through the story are entirely selfish.  So ultimately, it’s hard for me to care.

“Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Macbeth (Michael Kelley) is a valiant warrior who helps turn the tide of war in his country’s favor, alongside his fellow soldier and friend, Banquo (Daniel Ian Joeck).  Macbeth and Banquo stumble upon three witches in the woods (Marci Lucht, Samantha Veldhouse, Morgan LeClaire).  Those witches serve up a number of enticing prophecies about future greatness for both men that quickly seem to start coming true.  After sharing the news with his wife Lady Macbeth (Hannah Steblay), Macbeth is spurred on by her to eliminate all obstacles between himself and the throne of Scotland.  A lot of these unfortunate obstacles are human, including the current king Duncan (Arthur Moss), and his sons Malcolm (Neal Beckman) and Donalbain (Rick Miller).  In order to hang on to power, Macbeth may need to eliminate his friend Banquo, Banquo’s son Fleance (Morgan LeClaire) as well as the family of Macduff (Michael Ooms, Samantha Veldhouse and Alice Tibbetts).

“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg, which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous; and kill him in the shell.”

The main stumbling block to the Macbeths’ plan is themselves.  They are reluctant murderers at best, and their well-developed consciences give them no end of emotional pain and nightmares.  The witches’ half-truths provide just enough incentive to keep on killing, but also just enough doubt and uncertainty that the Macbeths can never rest easy in their newfound good fortune.  (Other unfortunate residents of Scotland caught in the crossfire include Travis Bedard, Dakotah Brown, Randall J. Funk, Lucas Gerstner, Zachary Morgan, Marika Proctor, Andy Schnabel, Peter Simmons, Mason Tyer, and Daniel Kristian Vopava.)

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Since most of the cast and almost all the creative team is involved with both plays, the difference in results are sometimes puzzling. Take the costumes designed by Marco T. Magno, with assistance from Genevieve Kafka.  Their fantastic design for Julius Caesar, suggestive of 1920s/1930s, gives everyone involved a sharp distinctive look that invokes a feeling of nostalgia.  Everyone looks great and the costumes seem to help the actors do their job onstage.  In contrast, Macbeth just kind of looks random and thrown together.  There’s also some serious fake beard and wig action going on for poor King Duncan.  And in a baffling move, Hannah Steblay as Lady Macbeth is outfitted in something that looks vaguely nun-ish, with the added impediment of a drape billowing off of her headgear that repeatedly ends up falling into and covering her face.  When you’ve got a acting powerhouse like Steblay, you don’t take away half her acting tools by covering her entire body and then hiding her face besides.  Unsurprisingly, Steblay still overcomes this outfit to be the best thing in Macbeth, but I wish she didn’t have to fight so hard.

“Pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude.”

Then there’s the running bit in most CAE productions, present in both these offerings as well, of adlibbing as well as incorporating silent additional moments for characters.  As if Shakespeare somehow missed a dick joke or just needed a little extra help outside the dialogue to really make a character’s intentions clear.  In Macbeth, these things continued to misfire.  But in Julius Caesar, for the most part they really worked and that’s about the last thing I thought I’d be saying in regard to that approach.  The adlibs are still unnecessary, and there’s a prop gag with a wine bottle that just refuses to be funny no matter how many times they to try to insert it into the action.  But the moments where the audience just gets to live with the women in this story turn out to be really powerful.  Marika Proctor’s Portia and Marci Lucht’s Calpurnia, watching their husbands head off down dangerous paths and being unable to stop them, make the human consequences of this story very clear.  And when Casca is captured in war and the enemy sentences her to be taken off and shot, Samantha Veldhouse doesn’t say a word in that sequence, but her defiance, even with the realization of her impending death, adds a lot to the play.  It doesn’t feel like something that was slapped on, it feels like it’s part of the script. I certainly don’t want to encourage the habit, but I have to admit when it works.

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”

I really didn’t expect to come out of this double feature saying I enjoyed Julius Caesar more than Macbeth, and yet that’s the case.  It goes beyond whether I’m rooting for the characters or not, though.  Everyone in Julius Caesar is delivering the lines as if they were real words they might actually say.  They understand what they’re saying and it emerges from their mouths in a natural cadence.   That applies across the whole ensemble.  The previously mentioned work by Proctor and Lucht is impressive, as well as Peter Simmons’ task as Cassisus of constantly driving the plot forward.  (This is the first time I’ve seen the argument scene on the battlefield between Cassius and Brutus really work.  It was a treat to watch, and that’s as much Cassius as it is Brutus.)  Morgan LeClaire’s supporting work as servant Lucius really sneaks up on you.  And this is some of the very best work I’ve seen from CAE regulars like Neal Beckman (Brutus), Daniel Ian Joeck (Antony), and Samantha Veldhouse (Casca) - they really take the stage and give inspiring performances.

“If I do live, I will be good to thee.”

By contrast, most of the performers in Macbeth feel like they’re reciting the script rather than people speaking to one another.  The weird thing is it’s the same actors.  Notable exceptions to this are the Macbeths themselves.  Michael Kelley might not seem to some like a traditional choice for a leading man but the actor grabs hold of the part with both hands and really makes it his own.  You quickly find yourself thinking, “Yup, that’s Macbeth.”  He and Hannan Steblay as Lady Macbeth make a great married couple - albeit one that makes terrible life choices.  Their relationship is so strong it blinds them to the fact that other people around them might have to live with the decisions the Macbeths make.  I was excited to see Hannah Steblay’s take on Lady Macbeth and she didn’t disappoint.  The script often seems to call for some radical shifts from one scene to the next for Lady M, but Steblay makes it all flow together naturally.  The big mad scene at the end (you know, “out damned spot”) had so many different levels it was a delight to watch.  The variety of things Steblay does with her voice in just that one scene is quite breathtaking.

“The evil that men do lives after them;
the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Even the CAE house band’s musical interludes before the show and between acts seem to work better for Julius Caesar than for Macbeth.  Though Macbeth’s musical bits seem jarring, I have to admit that watching Steblay gleefully sing the Romantics' “(I Hear The Secrets That You Keep, When You’re) Talking In Your Sleep” makes me wish Lady Macbeth had a cabaret act.

“Do not presume too much upon my love: I may do that I shall be sorry for.”
“You have done that you should be sorry for!”

The whole “let’s really punch up the comedy in Macbeth” approach for this production is an odd one, and it doesn’t really hang together very well.  Horror comedy, even when the comedy is pitch black, is a hard thing to pull off successfully.  Kelley and Steblay give it their best shot, and in the places it almost works, it’s down to them.  Maybe that’s part of what’s throwing everyone else off.  How do you reconcile yourself to being the “straight man” in the sketch comedy world of the Macbeths, how do you take yourself seriously?  The strange viewing experience here is that Julius Caesar is the more complex and difficult of the two scripts to wrap your head around, and yet that production was crystal clear and felt like it clipped right along.  Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shorter and more straightforward plays from a plotting standpoint, and yet this production felt longer and more confusing than Caesar.

“Coward die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

Classical Actors Ensemble’s pairing of Julius Caesar and Macbeth thematically is a good move.  Macbeth is worth seeing for the two lead performances, but Julius Caesar is the overall standout in the double bill this time.  It’s the Julius Caesar that Shakespeare fans have been waiting for, and that everyone else didn’t know they needed, but will be very happy they saw. Go, see for yourself.

Julius Caesar - 5 stars - Very Highly Recommended
Macbeth - 3 stars - Recommended

(Photos: Left - Casca (Samantha Veldhouse) threatens Cassius (Peter Simmons) in Julius Caesar; Right - Lady Macbeth (Hannah Steblay) descends into madness; photography by Kory Koehnen)

Review - Semester, Lecture 1 - Billy Mullaney - Knowledge As Performance - 5 stars

If I told you that you would consider the delivery of a lecture on relativistic quantum field theory to be entertainment, you’d think I was strange, right?  Well, thirty people turned up to see Billy Mullaney do just that, so he must be doing something right.  He ran out of chairs, so people took to standing at the back or seating themselves on the nearby flight of steps in the Fresh Oysters Performance Research space.  Mullaney seemed genuinely surprised that so many people showed up to watch him do this.  I wasn’t.

“Now we can define creation and annihilation.”

As with any Billy Mullaney project, Semester is a strange beast.  Mullaney isn’t really presenting the lecture himself, in a strict “instructor imparting knowledge to a student” sense, because he has no idea what he’s saying.  He’s not performing, per se, either, because he’s not pretending to be a professor who is educating a class.  It’s sort of like watching someone present something to you in a language that isn’t your own, and on top of it, the language isn’t the performer’s own either.  Neither of you understand, in a literal sense, what is being said.  Someone who did understand the subject could probably translate it for you, but that person is not present here.  When I first saw Mullaney present an excerpt from this as part of his Uncreativity Festival last year, I said it had “its own little dance of language and symbols that had its own sort of beauty out of context.”  That still holds.

“Having done this we can now proceed with the continuum theory directly.”

Because it’s not just Mullaney reciting the verbatim text of a lecture on “quantization of the free scalar field.”  He’s also writing out all the equations involved on a white board as he speaks.  The challenge of not being in a lecture hall with a multitude of white board space is partially solved by the fact that, part way through the lecture, when his first white board is full, Mullaney simply swaps that white board out for a fresh one, keeping the other nearby for reference.  (No doubt the money audience members put into the fish bowl by the door will go in part to obtain still more white board space and more erasable markers.) (In the brief talkback afterward, one audience member - who might have understood the subject matter a bit better than I - tweaked Mullaney just a little for the cramped quarters of some of the equations, and his handwriting.  More white board space would help both those complaints, I think.)

“The only possible equation in the curly brackets vanishes.”

It’s an odd kind of exercise your brain gets when watching Semester because the mind can’t help but try to assemble some kind of meaning even out of something it has no hope of fully understanding in this context.  You start to see and hear patterns in the things Mullaney is writing and saying.  You also start to appreciate the flow of his hand, and by extension his body, across the white board space, in the space that traditionally a professor would inhabit.  Then the thought suddenly occurs to you “there are people much smarter than me who actually do understand this - they understand this language, it means something to them.  They derive knowledge from this and build to further knowledge.”  We all have our languages specific to the worlds we live in, and this is one of them.  I’m sure some theater terms are equally impenetrable to non-theater people.

“I think the whole thing is the fabric of space time but I’m not sure.”

One of Mullaney’s non-artistic occupations is that of tutor for high-level math and standardized test prep.  So he’s a lot closer to the understanding of equations in, say, algebra or calculus than I am anymore, since I left my elementary and middle school days behind me long ago.  He knows the construction of the language, and the cadence of how you present it.  He’s also understandably cynical about how children these days are required to “perform” knowledge, with little regard for whether a student actually understands or incorporates that knowledge into their life.

“phi twiddle… Hamiltonian H… position vector… dagger…”

None of that cynicism is on display here, though.  It might have been the genesis of the piece, but Semester is sort of a strange little valentine to the human mind.  Space and time and the building blocks of the universe are all bound up in these multi-level equations.  Humanity has wrestled what once seemed mystical and unknowable into lines of symbols allowing us to bend and twist that knowledge into something on which we can build.  Build what, for what purpose?  I don’t know.  But the scientists and mathematicians who do know, they need a foundation to step on to reach the next level.  This lecture is one of those foundations.  And while I still don’t understand it, it’s fascinating to watch that knowledge dance in front of me for a while, just outside the grasp of my comprehension, and feel my mind reaching for it - because that’s what minds do, when they’re invited.

“It’s just another way of knowing.”

Billy Mullaney recently started memorizing lecture number two for this course.  His plan is to have a whole semester’s worth, hence the project title.  The next time one of these Semester lecture performances rolls around, you should see it.  I can’t adequately describe it, and it’s like nothing you’re imagining.  It’s worth the time spent out of your everyday knowledge zone.

5 stars, Very Highly Recommended