Because life is short and summer tests my patience, and quite frankly, despite the estimable talent of all the artists involved, some theatrical experiences do not warrant more than a paragraph, let alone an exhaustive examination, I’ve decided to start an occasional post called Two-Word Review. Reserved for those rarest of birds – the earnest, well-intentioned misfire and the spectacular, ill-conceived flop - I promise to use it sparingly. But suffice it to say that at the root of every Two-Word Review is the inherent wish that I could get the time I spent watching them back. Richard Greenberg, Scott Frankel, and Michael Korie’s musical adaptation of Todd Haynes’ film Far from Heaven, now at Playwright’s Horizons, has the dubious distinction of inspiring me to create the Two-Word Review, so it only seems fitting that it be honored first.  Far from Heaven: far indeed.
two-word review: far from heaven
at the theatre: cock & tribes
Coincidentally, two of the more satisfying evenings I’ve had at the theatre this summer took place off-Broadway. (Perhaps coincidentally is the wrong word. Looking back on Broadway’s mostly disappointing season “inevitably” seems the more realistic choice.) Both of these plays do something most commercial fare would rather eschew: look at how we define ourselves – and where we belong in the social order. Mike Bartlett’s Cock is the more aggressively titled of the two and gives you a pretty good idea that you can expect to be grabbed by the dialectics. Should John stay with M, his longtime male lover or commit to W, the first woman he’s ever slept with? Far from the navel-gazing psychobabble you might expect, Bartlett’s take no prisoners approach doesn’t just hold up a mirror, it pile drives it into the audience’s face, proving that sticks and stones ain’t nothing next to a well-crafted equilibrium that’s been wholly upended. The four cast members are well matched but I found Jason Butler Harner especially heartbreaking as the older lover:  a man so clear-eyed about himself yet fatally blinded by his love. Reconfigured to provide the most uncomfortable seating imaginable, reviewers have commented how the space at the Duke Theater cleverly resembles a cockfighting pit but for me it was aesthetically far grander – like a Roman amphitheater. Gladiators of love, these people are lucky to escape with their heads – if not their hearts – intact. Nina Raine’s Drama Desk Award-winning play Tribes is equally combative, though it’s the bonds of family that come in for a right bashing. Billy, the fantastic Russell Harvard, was born deaf into a hearing family, and raised inside the fiercely idiosyncratic and unrepentantly politically incorrect cocoon of his parents’ house. He has adapted brilliantly to the family’s unconventional ways, but they’ve never bothered to return the favor. It’s not until he meets Sylvia (Susan Pourfar, equally exceptional), a young woman on the brink of deafness, that he finally understands what it means to be understood. Director David Cromer directs the intimate, in-the-round production, which has gone on to become the sleeper hit of the season. Raines covers a lot of ground, so much that clarity is often sacrificed in the face of so much sparkling badinage. Yet what makes it so compelling is the real family at its core and the divides they face. The struggle to hear and be heard proves a painful endeavor for all the characters. And ultimately some of their greatest triumphs of understanding occur, ironically enough, without resorting to language at all.
at the theatre: the common pursuit
I did something at the theater the other night that I haven’t done in a very long time, I left at intermission.  It’s not that there was anything particularly egregious about the current off-Broadway revival of Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit at the Roundabout Theatre’s second stage, it’s simply that I while I was supposed to be engrossed in the earnest navel-gazing of a group of Cambridge, England confreres I found myself unable to stop my mind from drifting off to thoughts about whether or not I had left in the dry cleaning or if there was enough milk for morning coffee. When the act break finally arrived my own insubstantial intellectual pursuits appeared vastly more consequential than what was happening onstage and so I left, wondering to how many other people the possibility of a stove left lit in any empty apartment suddenly occurred. 25-odd years ago The Big Chill made it safe, even fashionable, to obsessively scrutinize the idealistic slide from who we think we are to who we turn out to be and Mr. Gray’s play – having arrived from England in 1985 – is at one with that gestalt. But either my patience has grown thin or the years have not been kind to any artistic endeavor which features people of privilege extolling the possibilities of what might have been while whining about the roads they didn’t take. Collectively we’ve all briefly indulged in that pity party – especially if you’re of an age (like me) which today might kindly be called grown up. But we’ve matured, haven’t we? Events of the last generation have taught us to get on with it already: there’s little point in dwelling on the past when tomorrow might never happen. Or as my mother might say, “you’ve made your bed – now lie in it.”
at the theatre: once
With some shows it’s love at first sight – or sound. Others slyly creep up on you after the fact, infecting you like a virus. Still others out and out break your heart for one misguided reason or another. But most frustrating of all are the shows you want to love that wind up leaving you cold. So went my heart at Once, the slender new musical which seems to have lost its way in an over-produced transfer of the well-received production at New York Theatre Workshop. For anyone who hasn’t seen the moody and romantic film on which it’s based, it’s the story of a socially disconnected Irish busker and an immigrant girl who meet and over the course of three Dublin days enjoy a mutual love affair with music and – unconsummated - each other. Simple, spare and elegant, it’s a film about the power of music and the redemptive effect of having someone believe in you when you no longer believe in yourself. When the film’s two leads, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova – who had gone on to become partners in life as well – won an Oscar for Best Song (the hypnotic Falling Slowly) it seemed to bring the story full circle. What gets lost in the stage version is the Spartan elegance that lets you feel for the characters without being told what you should feel. Director John Tiffany relocates the action to a Dublin pub and suddenly we’re all pullin’ for pints, so we are. Feel free to go up on stage before the show and grab a drink. If that’s not twee enough for you, there’s a ceilidh band onstage to Oirish up the joint even more. (Don’t worry if you show up late, the whole noxious process will repeat itself at intermission.) Despite this annoying tendency to tart things up for Broadway – not to mention the now cloying trend of actors doubling as the band – there are a pair of wonderful performances by Steve Kazee and Cristin Miloti as – don’t choke – Boy and Girl. They share great chemistry  – and even better voices. If Once were built around their artistic collaboration this could be the stuff of fairy tales, as the title subtly implies. But Enda Walsh’s lumbering book skews the focus towards something far less interesting, another boy meets girl, boy loses girl story. A handful of barely sketched secondary characters make lame attempts at comic relief but it comes at the expense of dragging the story down to a leaden pace.  I’m wondering if the show ran with an intermission off-Broadway, too, or if what’s happening uptown is a just a bloated excuse to sell merchandise and drinks. Either way, a judicious bit of dramaturgy would have served this production well. If anything, Once highlights a problem specific to many a fairytale: let them go on too long and they eventually turn into nightmares.
at the theatre: carrie, the musical
Let me state the obvious: Carrie is a curious subject for a musical. (Full disclosure: I spent close to seven years developing a musical called The Screams of Kitty Genovese, so I consider myself somewhat of an authority on curious source materials.) Yet director Stafford Arima, along with the crackerjack producing team behind MCC, presciently understood that the recent explosion of bullies as a cultural phenomena – along with the slow simmer of religious fanaticism dancing on the lip of a Republican primary race – made the basic premise of Broadway’s most famous flop more than just current. It was suddenly, dare I say, about to be very relevant. Perhaps the time had come to give Carrie her due; perhaps the time for a revisit was now? All of which begs the question: was telekinetic Carrie ahead of her time? To be quick, No – but not for want of trying. The much revised and structurally re-imagined take on Stephen King’s first novel is no lost masterpiece but neither is it destined to remain the butt of so many Broadway-insider jokes. Strangely enough, where it fails is in not going far enough into the extreme: Carrie has all the trappings of an oddly modern Wagnerian opera: religious myths, animal sacrifice, lots of blood, the creation and destruction of the world. In fact a few times I heard what I thought were musical snippets of another bloody opera-disguised-as-a-musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. That said Michael Gore’s score is less the finale of Gotterdammerung than a simplified Spooky Mormon Hell Dream. Despite a handful of powerful musical duets afforded to Carrie and her mother, Margaret, there is noticeably a lack of specific writing for supporting characters. It’s in this miasma of 80’s soft rock that Carrie’s camp quotient is eternally mired. Lawrence D. Cohen’s book is the antithesis: taut and clear, finding the heroic within the quotidian lives of small town America and making the 40-year old story more relevant than ever. Where he stumbles is in framing the evening with a clumsy inquisition of the solitary survivor from the prom. Sure, it provides a wedge into the story while imparting a volume of background but it’s a far from elegant trick, delivered by actress Christy Altomare with all the histrionics of a waterboarding at Gitmo. The rest of the ensemble is fine – if smaller than it should be. Marin Mazzie is in good voice, finding a well of sympathetic depths in Carrie’s lonely zealot of a mother. Molly Ranson might look like a refuge from HBO’s Big Love, but her Carrie White is solid, sensitive, and ultimately sad. It’s enough to make me wish the authors got around to fixing the scene at the prom. After everything Ms. Ranson has been called upon to suffer through, she - and we – deserves her big Brunnhilde moment. Still, despite any misgiving about this particular production I have to tip my hat to Michael Gore, Dean Pitchford and Lawrence D. Cohen for their risk-taking spirit in revisiting a project some 20 years on: there is hope, after all, in honest error.
at the theatre: one arm
Most unproduced scripts remain so for a good reason: they stink. Though on rare occasion a worthwhile or revelatory story falls victim to the passing zeitgeist – or even something as mundane and random as “scheduling difficulties” – coming to light only in an author’s afterlife thanks to the random diggings of an academic or biographer, more often than not the majority of aborted dramas remain squirreled away in the proverbial bottom desk drawer because they’re efforts unworthy of the author who either cannot let go of them for some intimate reasons known only to them or because they have been rightfully forgotten, not because they are misunderstood masterpieces awaiting post-millenial redemption. I’m afraid that One Arm, adapted and directed for the stage by Moises Kaufman for The New Group from an unproduced screenplay by Tennessee Williams, falls firmly in the category of one those bottom drawer curiosities best left undisturbed. Thematically, it’s vintage Williams: regret and redemption in the seedy underbelly of the Vieux Carre; however, this story of a champion boxer who loses one arm only to quickly descend into the lonely world of hustling – and ultimately murder – doesn’t hang together dramatically. One has to blame Kaufman, who makes a fatal error in creating a god-awful framing device that only serves to keep the audience at arms length. “One Arm, an unproduced screenplay by Tennessee Williams,” intones the narrator/writer at the curtain’s rise. It sets the audience up to be spectators, disconcerted voyeurs even, but it also shuts us out as participants. About all we can do is ogle the story of Ollie Olson, all-American hustler, as he suffers one moral degradation after another. What we can’t do is identify – something that’s crucial to making Williams’ heightened lyricism work. On the eve of his execution, a stranger’s visit causes Ollie to realize just how many lives he has touched. Facing down death, the protective shell cracks: his arm may be mangled but Ollie still feels things. His final moments are a desperate grasp at connection with this stranger; a thwarted need to receive love. It’s the kind of moment any lover of Williams aches to believe – the moment of the metaphor made flesh. What’s heartbreaking is that in Kaufman’s production it comes off as half-baked. Or rather, er, one-armed.
at the theatre: gazillion bubble show, the next generation
I never saw the original Gazillion Bubble Show so I can’t compare it with Gazillion Bubble Show: The Next Generation. However, I can attest to the fact that despite any generational disputes it remains accurately titled. Over the course of 75 short minutes – in between skits and celebrations of the bubble arts – the theater, and by extension, the audience, gets bombarded with millions and millions and millions of bubbles. And sometimes that’s all it takes to make man, beast, and child smile.
at the theatre: gruesome playground injuries
