It’s a moment that captures the travails of the covid-era theater artist with the expressive precision of a daguerreotype tinted with blood. It’s like finding at the bottom of a shoebox full of yellowed newspaper clippings a dog-eared photograph of distant relatives in which we recognize–ourselves.

The resemblance to our current plight is no accident. “These words also capture the complicated journey of coming back to the stage in the IRC’s first in-person stage show post-pandemic,” writes Artistic Director Tina Brock in the program notes. As it happens, this review also marks the return of Reviews from Underground. Like survivors stepping out of a cellar and blinking in the footlights, we survey the ruins of our industry with a range of emotions: anger, a sense of incalculable loss, futility, an urge to retreat behind screens, but above all, a desire to rebuild.

And if The Two-Character Play is any indicator, there is reason to hope. Everyone was welcome, regardless of vaccine status. The house was full, the stage lavishly dressed, the acting impassioned, unabashedly theatrical. After all, this is a play about theater by a master of the theatrical gesture. And in the hands of a poet like Tennessee Williams, the play-within-a-play becomes far more than a clever framing device. It serves to sift the actors like wheat and arrive at rare moments of naked truth amid a cloud of chaff.

Not that chaff is a bad thing. It’s entertaining. And part of the process. It protects the kernel of the self and allows it to grow. It clothes the characters in amusing conceits. Tina Brock’s Clare and John Zak’s Felice shed it with each thrust and parry as they circle each other in a death match of the soul, choking on the echoes of their own absurdities.

And their commitment to these roles-within-roles is total. After nearly three years on a steady diet of carefully curated onscreen acting, what a relief to see actors splurge, chew scenery, yet remain fully within the bounds of believability. Their mastery of a difficult and sonorous text without the benefit of ten takes, an editor, and ADR reminded me why I fell in love with cinema’s poor relation in the first place. And Tennessee’s tale of a brother and sister on an underfunded tour of half-empty theaters reminded me of the cost. Now more than ever.

That said, I did feel the production could have benefited from a clearer distinction between narrative levels. Lighting shifts or differences in acting styles or dialects would have helped the audience distinguish play from meta-play, which in turn would have increased the impact when the two worlds ultimately converge. But that final convergence is so powerful that the occasional moments of confusion preceding it are easily forgiven as the characters’ own.

As mentioned earlier, the show’s impact derives in part from a resemblance to life under covid. While we may have been locked out of the theater rather than in, the hopeless isolation that settles over Clare and Felice as the lights fade to black still feels achingly familiar, especially for those of us whose exile from the stage lasted twice as long due to an absurd and unscientific prejudice against natural immunity.

So, hats off to Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium for making theater of the absurd a stylistic choice rather than an enforced reality, for unearthing this buried treasure, and for giving us something timely and moving to live through and write about.

It’s good to be home.

“The Two Character Play” ran from September 7-25 at The Bluver Theatre at The Drake as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. For more information visit idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.

The post Confining Nature: A Review of “The Two-Character Play” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

This bridging of ancient and modern, of pious tradition and absurdist farce, is in many ways the play’s driving force. That it succeeds with such admirable lightness without in any way diminishing the traditions it lampoons is largely to the credit of writer/director Hideki Noda. It’s a bit like watching a brilliant comic roast someone they love and respect.

The subversion begins with Noda’s decision to cast himself as a traditional Japanese housewife (Boo) and Swiss actress Lilo Bauer as her husband Bo, a “master of the classical stage” from a theatrical tradition that excludes women. Both are hilarious in their opening spat over who will stay home tonight with their pregnant dog Princess and what’s to be done with their selfie-obsessed daughter Pickle. When Pickle enters mid-argument in the form of seasoned actor Glyn Pritchard, the absurdist triangle is complete.

All three have secret plans for tonight, but one has to stay with Princess. Who will it be? Pickle pouts and preens, Boo mocks and mimics, Bo struts about in split-toe socks. But the truth will out, and before long they find their secrets revealed and their ankles locked in a predicament none can escape.

The set, like the plot, is a kind of elaborate trap. Apart from being a wonder to behold, Yukio Horio’s set conceals even more secrets than the characters themselves. To tell those secrets here would be to give away a magician’s tricks. Suffice to say they build to a disturbing climax in precisely the manner of a good magic show. And they do so without diverting attention to themselves and away from the story.

Which brings me to the story. This was perhaps the one area I felt could have been taken a bit further. After all the escapist antics of act one, the characters seemed too quickly resigned to their fate. Once the trap had been sprung, the story became all stick and no carrot. There was no hope, nothing to strive for. Anything—the postman knocking twice, the daughter nearly repairing her broken cellphone—a single false hope would have kept the characters and the audience on edge. Instead we are treated to a series of poignant scenes, bracketed by blackouts, as preludes to the inevitable. The result is sometimes touching, but at the expense of dramatic tension.

This minor note aside, I would strongly recommend One Green Bottle. It’s a rare vintage, full of comic moments and artistic flourishes. In biblical terms, it’s new wine in old wineskins, and it bursts at the seams with flawless comic timing. Best of all are the countless sly references to Japanese theatrical forms. Apart from noh, there’s kabuki in the actors’ poses and Tanaka’s Foley work, bunraku puppetry in the hilarious bit with the stuffed dog, and probably many more that sailed over my Western head. The production as a whole reminded me of the paintings of Takashi Murakami. There is so much colour, so many references, so much going on, that one is simply overwhelmed—with laughter and admiration.

“One Green Bottle” runs through March 8 at La Mama. For more information visit lamama.org/one-green-bottle.

The post Noh Joke: A Review of “One Green Bottle” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

The Englishness, the precision of his plays makes them hard to pull off in a land that favours emotional “truth”, Meisner technique, whose idea of theatre is as far removed from Pinter’s as Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is from The Dumb Waiter. Which is why I jumped at the chance to see Stairwell Theater’s revival of the latter. And in short, I was not disappointed.

It was a Pinteresque experience from start to finish—disorienting, suggestive, startling at times, at times humorous, even grotesque, but never, ever predictable. Take, for example, the mere act of entering the lobby of 122 Community Center. A porter putting on a British accent informs you that the theatre can be accessed through a gate at the side of the building. Is he with the theatre? If not, why the accent? And is finding the side gate and navigating the alley and climbing the nondescript staircase part of it? Is this the stairwell the company is named for? Or does the building management prefer off-off riff-raff to take the servants’ entrance?

Whatever the reason, the circuitous route to your seat has the effect of putting you in much the same state as Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter: Wondering just what the devil is going on.

As you settle in, Ben and Gus lie abed, reading and sleeping, respectively. Oddly cheerful organ music emanates from behind the set. And what a set it is. Designer Andy Sowers has stretched a filthy canvas across a frame of steel and chicken wire to create walls that breathe and tremble and clang and—when backlit by lighting designer Ryan Castalia—gleam like a rib cage exposed to a deadly dose of X-rays.

In this mouldering subterranean chamber, two men casually await the appearance of a third who, in accordance with instructions recounted in one of the play’s funnier moments, will be shot on sight. It’s a setup familiar from many a gangster movie (most notably Pulp Fiction), and the dynamic between Theodore Caywood’s level-headed Ben and Anthony Leung’s bumbling Gus is pure Abbott and Costello. Given free rein by director Sam Gibbs, Caywood and Leung abandon themselves to these exaggerated roles and revel in the rigorous cadences and hieroglyphic pauses of Pinter’s dialogue. Yet the whole exercise would remain fairly conventional if not for the opening, on the wall, of a little window onto the unknown.

The dumb waiter. What, if anything, does it signify? A tiny elevator descending from above, delivering handwritten orders impossible to fulfill. Divine commandments, perhaps? Or something less metaphysical, more class-conscious? Tightly lit in a rectangle of light, the dumb waiter functions here as a technological oracle, a gleaming, mechanical Bocca della Verità. And what about the speaking tube that descends into the room like a severed trachea? What is that, exactly? Or the actors milling about in surgical masks, their shoes sometimes visible in the gap between frame and floor? Or the chain-link fence closing in behind us as if to say “You’re next”?

The chief merit of Sam Gibbs’s direction is that he clearly grasps the essence of the Pinteresque: a nebulous threat defined with surgical precision in terms of what it is not. A theatrical via negativa. Accordingly, he answers none of our questions, choosing instead to use all the theatrical means at his disposal to augment and magnify our sense of dread and disorientation, of something wicked this way coming. Of course, the risk of raising the stakes so high is that it makes a satisfactory payoff nearly impossible. And the backlight effect notwithstanding, the climax does feel somewhat rushed and underwhelming. It’s a problem that would most likely work itself out in a longer run.

But alas, “The Dumb Waiter” closes today, after just a single weekend. So much work, so many ideas, such a worthy effort, and just like that—gone. It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing about reviewing off-off-Broadway. Even a name like Pinter can ill afford a decent run in this town.

Fortunately, Stairwell Theater shows no sign of slowing down. With past productions ranging from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, this brave little company and so many like it continue to defy the laws of market-driven economics, bringing edgy, experimental theatre to a financially besieged city.

For more information visit stairwelltheater.com

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That’s not a line from “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.” It’s a quote from public interest lawyer and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson. But it could serve as a tagline for John DeSotelle’s deeply affecting production of John Patrick Shanley’s modern classic, running at the NuBox Theater through December 22nd.

Danny (Jacob Saxton) may have killed a man yesterday in a fight over ten dollars. When we meet him at a dive bar in the Bronx, he’s a bruised and bloodied sociopath with a chip on his shoulder the size of East Tremont. Across the bare stage on a desert island of her own sits Roberta (Maggie Alexander), to all appearances a drunken barfly looking to score with a local bad boy. Part of what makes this play so potent is how Shanley has these two characters chip away at their first impressions of each other (and our first impressions of them) to reveal two vulnerable, wounded souls starving for love and redemption. It’s a difficult, painful transformation, and one that Saxton and Alexander make believable and real.

The challenge to playing Danny is twofold. On the one hand, we—and Roberta—have to believe Danny is dangerous. If he comes across as a paper tiger, Roberta merely calls his bluff. But everything about Saxton signals a clear and present danger—his build and bearing, gruff voice, tribal tattoos, realistic wounds on face and hands, and above all his cold-blooded intensity. So when Roberta pushes him too far, she does it to punish herself, not to expose him for the wounded lamb he turns out to be. And this makes her surprise at his tenderness all the more real—so real that the tables turn the next morning when she finds him ready to follow her to the altar.

Which brings me to the second challenge to playing Danny: He has to be dangerous and vulnerable. It’s a rare actor who can do both, and Saxton burrows so deeply into his character’s psychosis that he seems genuinely surprised at the gentle words coming out of his own mouth when Roberta asks him to say nice things about her.

That post-coital exchange of primitive poetry is in many ways the turning point of the play. With it, Roberta gets what she thought she wanted from Danny: a pipe dream of happiness to lull her to sleep. In the harsh light of morning she awakes to find that dream a real possibility. And her efforts to reject it out of guilt for committing incest with her father are what make her a complex character, rather than a masochistic dream girl with a Bronx twang.

This last stage of their life-in-death match or “Apache dance” is Alexander’s time to shine. Pinned down by Saxton’s Danny, she shape-shifts rapidly from cruel cynic to guilt-ridden Catholic to abused daughter like Proteus caught in the grip of Odysseus, until at last she reveals her true form: a single mother with a glimmer of hope for a better life. Alexander commits truthfully to each false identity, and like Saxton she seems genuinely surprised to discover who she really is.

Director and acting teacher John DeSotelle could hardly have chosen a better play to showcase the strengths of the Meisner technique. His casting choices are excellent and his direction of the actors exemplary. Set and lighting designer Matt Imhoff makes outstanding use of the limited space, staging the bar scene against a curtain with the tables spaced widely apart and lighting from both sides to emphasize the horizontal axis, then drawing the curtains to create a vertical axis defined by a bed, high window, and artificial moon.

Only in two brief sequences where the staging departs from naturalism did the show feel slightly adrift: the sex scene with just a single formalized pose and the opening tableau with a verse from a pop song that explains the story a little too clearly. The former could be clarified and taken further, and the latter would benefit from layering and diffusion.

This is an outstanding production of a seminal American play, and I highly recommend it. Whether or not you believe in the redemptive power of love, in the power of people to change for the better, whether or not you agree with Stevenson that our worst deeds don’t define us, Shanley’s play and DeSotelle’s production make a strong case for hope in a time of cynicism and despair. And that alone makes this a show worth watching.

“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” is playing at the Nubox Theater through December 22. For tickets and information visit desotellestudio.com. For more on Bryan Stevenson check out the trailer for HBO doc True Justice.

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Kirill: Duck.

Max: Bitte?

Kirill: That’s the word that came to me when Emily Cass McDonnell’s Hilda tried to speak telepathically with the audience member.

Max: You mean you actually thought that was an audience member? And you tried listening with the part of your brain just a little above your eyes? Really, Kirill, there is suspension of disbelief, and there is gullibility.

Kirill: Laugh it up, Max. But when I was little, I tell you I could find any card in a face-down pile. My sister would say “queen of hearts,” for example, and I would let my hand wander over the pile like this and find the right card every time. It scared us both.

Max: You Russians. It is one of history’s great paradoxes that the first country to make materialism the state religion also gave the world Madame Blavatsky.

Kirill: In this case the medium comes from England by way of West Indies. The play is about a woman who goes to a psychic after her mother’s disappearance—I know you know this, Max. It’s a review, remember?

Max: I know it’s a review. I raised an eyebrow because the playwright’s note said [takes Kirill’s program and leafs through it] “Best to watch it with a blank mind. The less you know, the better.” By the way, what catalog is Hnath posing for here? Is there an endorsement deal with Peek & Cloppenburg?

Kirill [snatches back the program]: Stay on task, Max, or I’ll have Chris cut you off. Randy Danson was excellent in the role of Linda, don’t you think? A true grande dame of the theatre.

Max: They were all good. But Kelly McAndrew’s Sylvia is what brought out Linda’s complexity. With Hilda, Linda was a little predictable. And Triney Sandoval played a bit too much to the audience for my taste, though he had some fine moments as Jerry. No, McDonnell is the one who deserves special mention. For building a character so original and understated. It takes clear intentions to play unintentionally comical, and confidence to play someone so awkward. And she never lost the thread or played for laughs. It was such a tight, focused performance, the way she shifted from listening to Linda to addressing the audience. Really one of the best things I’ve seen in some time.

Kirill: Hmm. You will admit she was helped by a text that was more subtext than text. A rare thing in American writing. And that bare stage with two armchairs and an end table. Nothing to distract from voice and gesture. That to me is the essence of theater: an actor and a text. It’s refreshing to see theatre stripped to its essentials at the off-Broadway level.

Max: Yes, what our colleagues wrote about A Strange Loop and especially Heroes of the Fourth Turning made Playwrights Horizons sound rather conventional. But then this was the smaller stage on the fourth floor. Was that done for the sake of intimacy, I wonder, or was “A Thin Place” considered too experimental for the main stage?

Kirill: I wouldn’t say it was especially experimental. The narrative device is as American as “Our Town.” What struck me was the faith in the power of the word over image and spectacle. Very un-American. Which is perhaps why the end disappointed me, with its reliance on red light and silence and a woman draped in a sheet.

Max: The end disappointed me too, though for different reasons. It was the obligatory rebunking after the debunking.

Kirill: Rebunking? Explain.

Max: It’s what writers do when they don’t know where they stand. They debunk and then rebunk. For example: “Of course spiritualism is bunk. But…” pause for sign from beyond “….maybe there’s something to it.”

Kirill: That’s just good writing. Not taking sides. A writer should referee his characters. Not coach the winning team. Your East German weakness for agitprop is showing.

Max: And your weakness for Slavic ambiguity is hanging out. And spiritualism with a capital dollar-sign “S”. To think you actually tried to hear the word…

Kirill [to bartender]: Chris! Is there a deck of cards? [to Max] Do what the Americans say. Put your money where your mouth is. I bet a hundred dollars to your hundred.

Max: You Russians again. I won’t let you gamble away your inheritance like some Dostoevsky novel. The odds are 1 in 52. 54 unless you take out the jokers.

Kirill [spreads out the deck face down on the bar]: Tell me a card. [Max shakes his head] Tell me! [Grabs Max by the lapels].

Max: Ok, ok. The ten of diamonds.

Chris stops the music. By now a crowd has gathered. Dead silence. Kirill closes his eyes and moves his hand over the pile. He picks a card and flips it over. Shouting, laughter, music again.

Kirill: It worked when I was younger.

Max: The ten of diamonds wouldn’t have proved anything, Kirill. Any more than Rosenkranz flipping a coin and getting heads again. It’s just a coincidence. Like my guessing the word.

Kirill: What do you mean? What word?

Max: Staircase. That’s what I was thinking of when Hilda spoke to the audience.

Kirill: What?! But that’s the word she wrote down! Max, don’t you see what this means?!

Max: It means the play was almost over and I was thinking we should take the stairs instead of the elevator. To beat the crowd. It’s a coincidence, Kirill.

Kirill: No, it’s a sign! A sign for you to believe! You can’t ignore it!

Max: Of course I can. Can and will. Chris: Noch eins, bitte!

“The Thin Place” is running at Playwrights Horizons through January 5th. For more information visit playwrightshorizons.org.

The post Max and Kirill Go to “The Thin Place” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

It’s a start, but where do you go from here? How do you review a play when the only adequate response is silent wonder? When analysis feels like a scalpel applied to a living thing, a rare specimen of the purest form of theatre—the Holy?

But you have to write something. So you describe your favorite scenes: the doomed survivors swaying and singing softly in the guts of Greek galleys, or the mother uttering strangled cries as she pours a libation into her daughter’s cupped hands, or the victim tumbling down the green-lit ramp in slow motion like a floating corpse drifting down a sickly stream. You praise the blend of musical styles and musical languages—Greek, Latin, Nahuatl, Navajo. You applaud the dedicated international ensemble, director Andrei Serban and composer Elizabeth Swados for creating this extraordinary work, La MaMa for producing it and keeping it running worldwide since its 1974 premiere.

Or you wax theoretical, go on about the unnerving duality of spectator as playgoer and conquered Trojan, about how the production immerses the audience in the tragedy almost to the point of complicity. Or maybe you use the play as a springboard for an erudite thesis: The Birth of Modern Tragedy from the Spirit of International Cooperation; The Paradox of Euripides as Proto-Feminist Playwright Writing for an Audience of Men; The Theater of Dionysus as the Birthplace of Empathy for the Conquered.

In the end you might even take a subjective turn and tell of the audience member who nearly fainted and had to be walked out. Or describe how it felt to be crammed in an elevator with a group of giggling children dressed as if for an Easter pageant, only to hear them hissing demonically at a funeral pyre an hour later.

But as an accurate account of what we saw and felt tonight, all of this is somehow inadequate. And as I reread what I’ve written and compare it to the vast wonder of “The Trojan Women,” I feel as if I’ve played the part of the learned astronomer in Walt Whitman’s poem:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

If nothing else, maybe my review will compel someone to rise and go see this work of cosmic proportions before it closes December 15th. And that would be a good and useful thing. Because to see it is to be reminded that the theatre is not dying. Troy is fallen, but tragedy lives on. Attic Greek is no dead language as long as there are people alive to speak it onstage. And the message of empathy for the conquered is a timeless one that echoes through the ages.

“The Trojan Women” is playing at La MaMa through December 15th. For more information visit lamama.org.

The post La MaMa’s “Trojan Women” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

First impressions are important, and co-directors Ivette Dumeng and Lori Kee know how to set the right tone. The atmosphere alone prepares us for the post-apocalypse. The set by Raye Levine makes full use of the unique space, even incorporating the building’s massive columns into the design. There are walls of salvaged crates, military-style bunk beds, inaccurate maps of the cosmos, analog devices bristling with wires and diodes—all of it glowing menacingly beneath a subterranean sky by lighting designer Gilbert Lucky Pearto. The thoughtful play of light and form creates an appropriate sense of clutter without overwhelming the eye or hemming in the actors.

And the actors are a lively, gifted lot. Sara Rahman is utterly convincing as Squeak, a blind girl who traverses the desert in a quest to join the Listeners, a band of youths tasked with scanning the sky for radio transmissions from beyond. Their ranks include Matthew Carrasco’s sceptical yet idealistic Fayette, who reluctantly shows Squeak the ropes, and Rouke and Lanolin, played by Taylor Petracek and Alex Chernin with the kind of love-hate chemistry that makes for a good buddy cop movie. But the highlight is their fearless leader Marcus, played by an English actor who, as the Yanks say, knocks it out of the park.

Now I’m hardly impartial where things British are concerned, but fervent political rhetoric and an English accent simply go well together. Perhaps I’ve spent one too many Sundays at Speaker’s Corner. Or perhaps Tim Palmer is just that good. All I can say for certain is that his rhetoric raises goosebumps. And when word arrives of his impending trial before the council, his transformation from smirking, self-assured revolutionary to scared little boy is entirely believable.

But the cast list would be incomplete without mentioning Sound, a crucial sixth character in a play about listening. Sound designer Bryan James Hamilton has an ear for subtle, layered effects. He draws on his background as an actor as well as advice from veteran sound designer Andy Evan Cohen to create an aural presence that settles around the characters like Stephen King’s “The Mist”, ultimately tearing them apart.

Nor is the violence in “The Listening Room” purely auditory. Extended, expertly choreographed fight sequences by former Airborne Ranger Randall Rodriguez spill across the stage and overflow into the wings. Personally I’m no fan of stage combat, not for reasons of pacifism (Speaker’s Corner again), but because it releases tension rather than letting it build. And because it never feels quite real. Even when it’s disturbingly realistic, as in this case, I find myself worrying more about the actors than about the characters, which takes me out of the story.

So much for fisticuffs. For the rest, directors Kee and Dumeng do a fine job of combining disparate elements into something coherent, entertaining and sometimes moving. They put a wealth of ideas to work for the text. And it was really only the text that left me with mild reservations.

It may have been a matter of subverted expectations. The synopsis promises a story about a group that listens to old Earth transmissions rebounding off stars—a picturesque premise suggesting all kinds of possibilities. Yet there is not a single historic broadcast, old advert or radio show to prompt speculation among the Listeners as to who we were and why our civilisation collapsed. Instead they spend much of their time debating the actions of a council we never meet nor have any reason to care about, save as it relates allegorically to our current government.

Which brings me to my second reservation. The joy of allegory is the joy of discovery. Having everything explained to us deprives us of that joy and makes us feel talked down to from a soapbox (Speaker’s Corner a third and final time). It also weakens the characters by reducing them to mouthpieces for the author’s ideas. And worst all—unless estrangement is the goal—it takes us out of the story.

Which isn’t to say “The Listening Room” is guilty on both counts. The infractions were minor and largely a matter of personal preference. The script as a whole is very well written. The characters are clearly drawn and distinctive, the dialogue pops and crackles and there are some fine poetic passages and rousing speeches. I strongly suggest visiting the old vault of The New Ohio this December to form your own opinion. You won’t regret you came.

And while you’re waiting in the lobby, why not try your ear at cracking the vault? By my reckoning, the odds are 1×10^8 or one in a hundred million. Don’t you wonder what’s inside?

“The Listening Room” is running at The New Ohio Theatre through December 21. For more information visit nylonfusion.org.

The post An Ear to the Celestial Vault in “The Listening Room” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

It was literally cocaine that brought Joe and Nora together in 1910s New York. Six years his senior, she took the strapping young boxer under her wing and now walks the streets to keep the two of them and their habit fed. Or she did until a sore on her lip sent the Johns running. The rent hasn’t been paid in weeks, and the landlady is demanding sexual favors from Joe in exchange for dope. Drug addiction, male and female prostitution—edgy stuff for a play written in 1916. Even Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” a decade later leaves drugs out of the equation when describing a similar arrangement in The Pimp’s Song.

We meet Joe and Nora in their garret, artfully suggested by a slanted wall of irregular planks and authentic period furniture. But rather than start the play naturalistically, director Judith Feingold treats us to an intriguing prelude of expressionist physical theater. Against the roar of the elevated train and music from old radio broadcasts, the couple writhe in each others’ arms like tortured fornicators in Dante’s Inferno, caught in limbo between agony and ecstasy.

The ensuing dialogue relies on street slang from the period, making it hard to follow in parts. But the gist of the story is clear: The situation is hopeless, and Nora wants Joe to commit suicide with her. Maria Swisher delivers a fierce performance as Nora, half femme fatale, half prostitute with a heart of gold, driven by an excess of love. André Vauthey’s broken Joe puts up a bewildered fight for his life and hers until Nora wounds his pride, the one thing he has left. What happens next is better seen than told.

As a faithful revival of a forgotten play, “Cocaine” delivers. Swisher and Vauthey have palpable chemistry, and Feingold choreographs their Danse Macabre with real feeling. Personally, I would have liked to see the expressionist elements from the prelude woven into the fabric of the play. Or, since the play ends (spoiler alert) with the characters in the same situation as at the beginning, why not have the play end as it began? Otherwise we leave the theater thinking something has been resolved, when in fact the couple’s position is as desperate as ever.

After the show, “Joe” and I walked around Hell’s Kitchen and tried to imagine how this story would play out today. We realized that the people and problems are basically the same. Only the clothes and cars are different. Addiction, poverty, exploitation, prostitution are all around us and always have been. How many people in New York alone are peering over the edge today and saying, as Joe does, “We weren’t anybody much. I expect they’ve forgotten about us”?

With its emphasis on big gestures and big emotions, “Cocaine” offers little in the way of insight into the social problems it dramatizes. But it does something equally, if not more, important: It reminds us of their human cost.

“Cocaine” ran from November 22 – 24 at the Nubox in Hell’s Kitchen. For more information visit show’s Facebook events page.

The post Cricket Does “Cocaine”: A Playdate Review appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

Max: The culinary link is obvious in what is billed an “immersive performance dinner party,” but less so in the case of “Infinite Wrench.” Really only the menu structure is food-related. You consult a menu of two-minute plays and shout the number you wish to see performed. With any luck you are heard over the crowd. And the crowd is large.

Kirill (consulting menu): Don’t forget number 27. “We will stop the clock and read out the digits of pi while dancing to Cotton Eyed Joe on a loop until someone in the audience uses this dollar to buy Katie a $1 pizza slice from the place around the corner on 2nd ave between E 4 and E 5 streets.” If we had reacted faster we could have won that whole pizza.

Max: I preferred watching them dance and listening to make sure they weren’t faking the digits of pi.

Kirill: How could you tell?

Max: I know pi when I hear it. In any case, I was in no mood for pizza at “Infinite Wrench.” My appetite was gone from the cold hotdog I was served in “Now Serving.” Or perhaps it was when our hostesses poured ranch dressing all over their faces. A strong image, but not exactly appetizing.

Kirill: The moment before was my favorite, when the frog shouted “SALAD!” and wheeled in a machine that sprayed the audience with rucola.

Max: Was it the frog or the pig? Either way, I loved the useless machines. Like the conveyor belt that carried dirty plates down the middle of the table and dumped them in a filthy pile. The machines I suppose are the link to pataphysics. Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even” comes to mind.

Kirill: There were thematic links also. But we should decide which play to review first. We can’t very well bounce between them like this or the reader will be confused.

Max: Both plays are essentially controlled confusion. The review should reflect that. As a whole, “Infinite Wrench” did a better job of keeping things confusing. Only for the “message” pieces did the insanity grind to a halt. And then the message was so sane I felt I was being hit on the head with Ubu’s debraining spoon.

Kirill: I thought you, with your radical politics, would like those plays. For example, the one where Michaela Farrell pours water into a glass to Greta Thunberg’s UN speech until it overflows onto the floor. That was clever. And Michaela looked so much like Greta…

Max: There is a time and place for serious messages. A UN summit is one. An absurdist play[s] is not. How are we to laugh at the meaninglessness of life one instant and care about our extinction the next? I need time to care about anything, even global warming. Certainly more than the ten seconds between plays.

Kirill: I disagree. To me the contrast is an excellent jarring device. A wrench in the machine, so to speak. Even when I question the message, I welcome the change in tone.

Max: Your seriousness is your least pataphysical quality.

Kirill: Oh, and what is my most?

Max: Your nonexistence. And this is where “Wrench” parts ways with pataphysics, which programatically refuses to exist or take anything seriously, including itself. It’s where the show reveals itself to be pataphysics with no apostrophe rather than ‘pataphysics proper. It’s an American Alfred Jarry sobering up on Sundays rather than drinking ether nonstop in a Parisian shack on stilts.

Kirill: I doubt many readers will know what you’re talking about. As usual I’ll do the actual work of explaining. ‘Pataphysics is the science of exceptions, an imaginary science founded by French Symbolist Alfred Jarry and conceived as being as far from metaphysics as metaphysics is from physics. The apostrophe in front of the P is generally taken to signify the science pursued deliberately, as by Marcel Duchamp, a Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique.

Max: That was a serious explanation, and therefore wrong. Readers are better off confused than thinking they understand something which by definition cannot be understood.

Kirill: In any case, not all the serious plays in “Wrench” had obvious messages. Yael Haskal showed surprising depth as a young woman simply trying communicate with her mother. And there was a play about M&M’s that fit the overall style yet still made a point about marketing and corporations.

Max: True, that one did work. My favorite though was the five ages of a king as portrayed by a green apple. The homage to Magritte was clear, and the stabbing of the apple recalled Macbeth, which of course inspired Ubu Roi.

Kirill: You’re really reaching with your references, Max. And besides, I think “Now Serving” is closer in spirit to Jarry and ‘pataphysics. The useless machines, the ubuesque fat man with a pig snout, the banal small talk recalling Ionesco, Grand Satrap of the Collège.

Max: You saw all this coming, which is why you brought your Dr. Faustroll.

Kirill: I admit, I wanted to brush up for our review. And at some point in the dinner party the book got splattered with some kind of blue goo. At first I was upset, but then I realized that nothing could be more pataphysical, as when Duchamp’s “Bride” cracked in transit and he accepted the cracks as part of the piece. The book is now complete. Or rather, its incompleteness is complete.

Max: The culinary link is also more clear in “Now Serving.” Certain audience members sit at a long table and are served a feast of “haute vaginal cuisine” while their servers make pointless small talk into microphones. From our seats in the gallery the diners looked somewhat uncomfortable, don’t you think? Both with being watched and with what they were eating. Especially during the long periods of silence.

Kirill: Discomfort was probably the point, but I have to agree about the silence. I imagine it had something to do with the diners taking longer than the writers expected. Still, there were some fine ideas. The Wonder Bread dropping from the ceiling. The phone booth as a loudspeaker. The wine from IV bags. And I did enjoy the complimentary Junior Mints.

Max: You forget the large cigarettes and other props drawn on white paper. Very Jarryesque. They say he once went to the opera in a paper shirt with a tie drawn on it.

Kirill: Yes, I told you that. The sets, props, and costumes do belong in the Musée Patamécanique. But I must say I thought the piece lacked an arc of any kind. Most of the fun came at the beginning, when all was new and surprising. Why not build those excellent elements into a story of some sort, even a simple one? Otherwise the last dish is served and the night simply ends.

Max: Story is the most overrated dish on the menu. What do I care about the fate of imaginary people? It’s hard enough to care about real ones. And besides, Kirill, this spirit of radical experimentation is exactly what drove our Berlin Schreiereien and what we started Reviews from Underground to promote. And while we are on the subject: I have to say our editor has been far too lavish lately in his praise of the straightforward and conventional. And I dare him not to cut that statement [Dare accepted – Ed.].

Kirill: He should probably cut something, as we’ve gone on far too long, even for a long-form review. Even the name tag they gave me at “Infinite Wrench” says so. How did they know?

“The Infinite Wrench” runs every weekend except the last two in December at the Kraine Theatre. Visit nyneofuturists.org for more. “Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses” ran from November 2-16 at The Collapsable Hole. Learn more at radiohole.com. For an introduction to ‘pataphysics, check out ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide.

The post Appetite for Deconstruction or A Culinary Guide to ‘Pataphysics: Max and Kirill Review “Now Serving” and “The Infinite Wrench” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

So begins “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a gripping new play by Will Arbery, at Playwright’s Horizons through November 17. It’s a brilliant opening for many reasons: It waves guns and dead animals in the faces of enlightened New Yorkers; it effectively introduces the laconic Justin, played with grim determination by Jeb Kreager (the rare actor whose real name is probably a better fit for his character); it lends symbolic weight to the story; and it provides a nonverbal counterpoint to the ensuing flood of words.

And flood is no exaggeration. The torrent of borrowed, coked-up eloquence that pours from Zoe Winters’ Teresa requires every inch of concentration to follow. It’s worth following, too, because unless you’ve read Strauss and Howe and their popularizer Steve Bannon, chances are you’ve never heard its like before. Their Fourth Turning theory gives the play its name and Teresa her mission: to make the world safe for Catholic conservatism.

She and two other alumni of a tiny college in Wyoming have gathered at Justin’s house to toast their mentor’s appointment as college president. Together they make up a representative sample of an obscure milieu known intimately to the playwright, the son of two Catholic conservative academics. Justin stands for quietism posing as pragmatism, Zoe for revolutionary heroics/histrionics. Julie McDermott’s chronically ill Emily embodies doubt and the moderation it engenders. And John Zdrojewski’s self-loathing onanist Kevin is Catholic guilt personified.

What really sets Arbery’s writing apart is his ability to breathe life into schematic types. Playwrights tend to excel at one or the other­—big ideas or big characters—but Arbery delivers both. He does this by creating characters who live and die by big ideas, who each have their cross to bear. Whining, cowering, begging, weeping, vomiting, but never boring—Kevin is a distant American cousin of Dostoyevsky’s underground man. Justin’s suffering is less flamboyant, but no less evident. Emily quietly stores up the agony of Lyme disease for a final outburst. Only Teresa seems impervious to pain—at least until her mentor appears, slightly tipsy from her fêting.

Played with the casual dominance of someone accustomed to power, Michele Pawk’s Gina drops by only to knock down Teresa’s house of cards and reduce her to a trembling freshman. It’s a fascinating scene, as it illustrates just how monolithic Catholic conservatism is not.

And that may be the main takeaway for those who picture the Christian right as a united front. How ever repugnant some of their views may strike those on the left (and there were gasps and groans aplenty from the audience, especially during the abortion debate) there is little agreement within the community. Recognizing this is the first step towards opening a much-needed dialog between the camps. For it reveals the true nature of the other side: a group of individuals to be approached individually, not a faceless mob of fanatics that can’t be reasoned with.

As pure theatre, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” triumphs. It never drags, despite a two hour runtime. Director Danya Taymor ratchets up the tension gradually, like an inquisitor tightening the rack. And the actors never stumble, unless on cue. My only objections were to Emily’s closing rant and the heavy-handed symbolism of the generator. Both of these merely virtue-signal what we already know full well: that the playwright has distanced himself from this community. How else could he have written such an honest play?

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is running at Playwrights Horizons through November 17. For more information visit playwrightshorizons.org.

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