WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY

Attend the Profiles Theatre production of Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette and meet Gena, Katie, and Regan – three foul-mouthed, pot smoking, cocaine sniffing, pill popping young ladies that the audience can accept as funny, pathetic, repulsive, or tragic. The maidens spend about 70 minutes of stage time doing their drugs, stabbing every back in sight, and generally raising bitchiness to a new plateau. The play rides on the raucous, destructive (and sometimes self-destructive) conduct of its manic female characters, but it doesn’t have much plot.

The locale is a luxury suite in a fancy New York City hotel. Regan occupies the suite with the consent of Becky, who is about to be married to a wealthy young man. To help pass the pre-nuptial hours, Regan, the maid of honor, invites Katie and Gena along, a pair of wanton young women who are alleged friends of the bride (Becky specifically instructed Regan not to invite them to the hotel, knowing that they are likely to explode out of control). The three young women immediately start doing drugs, drinking Becky’s booze, graphically discussing their sex lives, and backstabbing each other and especially Becky.

The one-act is basically a nonstop farrago of screaming insults and obscenities fueled by drugs and alcohol and a deep-seated desperation that afflicts all the gals. Katie, Gena, and Regan are coming to the end of their partying years with little to show for their past and nothing positive to anticipate in their future. They resent Becky for undeservedly marrying first – she’s fat, for heaven’s sake, and marrying a rich guy. Where is the justice in that?

Katie is the most manic of the threesome and the most self-destructive, repeatedly talking of suicide. Regan superficially is in the best shape, with a degree from Princeton, a job in a hospital, and a boyfriend about to become a physician. But Regan’s discontent is boundless. She enters the play after spending several hours with two young men she picked up earlier in the day who figure in the action later on. Gena wants to party but she recoils when things get out of hand, especially when Katie and Regan threaten to burn Becky’s oversized and expensive wedding gown.

The atmosphere grows increasingly intense and ferocious, ending with the two men and Gena taking the overdosed Katie to the hospital, leaving Regan and Becky to end the play in a frenzy of recriminations. The suite is in a shambles, and so are the four women. The play resolves nothing, it just…stops. But the audience has seen enough to recognize that they have eavesdropped on four young females doomed by their own disappointment, frustration, jealousy, and uncontrolled appetites for sex and drugs.

Under Darrell W. Cox’s high energy directing, the characters hit the stage running and they never flag in their desperation and vulgarity. At times, the play turns into a door slamming farce, and much of the evening can be construed as comic. The play was a runaway hit in New York City with many commendations for its humor. But the Profiles production veers into an intensity that makes the comedy double-edged at best. The audience may laugh at the antics of the women, but it’s a nervous laughter. These are women on the emotional edge, and their furious and cruel conduct is no joke.

The Profiles Theatre has a genius for finding talented but little known young actresses and casting them in challenging roles that promote them into instant stars. And so it is in Bachelorette. All four actresses are making their Profiles debut and all four are stunning. Linda Augusta Orr is terrific as the over-the-top Katie, whose insistence that she wants to kill herself will probably be realized in short order. Hillary Marren is likewise outstanding as Regan, superficially the woman with the most going for her, yet maybe the most desperate. Amanda Powell keeps Gena on the boil throughout the play while a sensitive, decent woman may lurk beneath all her bad behavior.

Rakisha Pollard makes a late entrance as the much vilified and overweight Becky. It’s a tough role, with Becky first appearing after the other three women characters have already staked out considerable emotional and psychological territory. But Pollard’s Becky fits right in and carries the action to its tumultuous conclusion – never mind the final moment of pseudo reconciliation.

Adam Soule and Eric Burgher play the two young men who think they have fallen into a fantasy of available sex with the three girls, and in a luxury hotel to boot. But they actually have stepped into a maelstrom of overwrought and unpredictable females who mean trouble. Burgher is especially good as a guileless young man in over his head amid these volcanic young women.

Technical credits are excellent, as usual, in the Profiles intimate playing space. Scott Davis designed the suite setting, Bekki Lambrecht the lighting, Erica Griese the costumes, and Jeffrey Levin the sound (and original music).

Audience opinions may differ on Bachelorette. Some viewers will love the play as an incisive set of character studies buoyed by razor sharp writing. Others will dismiss the play as a noisy and vulgar evening spent with disagreeable, pointless characters. But like it or hate it, the spectator will certainly be blown away by the acting.

photos by Shawn Cagle

Bachelorette
Profiles Theatre in Chicago
scheduled to end on March 11
for tickets, visit http://www.profilestheatre.org/

PHOTO REALISM

Time Stands Still has only four characters and a single set, but it covers an immense amount of dramatic ground, exploring personal matters of love and commitment while addressing larger public issues connected to our attitudes toward war and violence. The play can be seen in an impeccably acted and directed production at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, where Donald Margulies is reaffirmed as America’s greatest and most underappreciated playwright under the age of 60.

Sarah Goodwin is a famous American photojournalist who travels the world taking pictures of wars and atrocities. She is brought back to her loft in Brooklyn to recover from massive injuries suffered by a roadside bomb in Iraq.  There, she is tended to by her current lover of nearly nine years, a journalist named James Dodd. Welcoming Sarah back is her former lover, Richard Ehrlich, a middle-aged photo editor at a news magazine. Accompanying Ehrlich is Mandy Bloom, a well-meaning but gauche young woman fervently in love with Ehrlich.

Sarah is a skilled and dedicated photographer, but she’s also a war and violence junkie, emotionally distancing herself from the horrors she sees by hiding behind her camera. Sarah claims her pictures can be forces for good by displaying to the world the brutality of war and violence. She could be a hero or just a voyeur of violence and suffering. In spite of the effectiveness of her photos, how much good will they really do? Can a photographer, however brilliant, even begin to ease the pain and violent death that have been a part of human history forever?

On a personal level, James is dealing with the guilt he feels for collapsing emotionally in Iraq and leaving the country weeks before Sarah got blown up by the car bomb. He also feels betrayed by Richard’s inability to get an article on refugees in the news magazine. At the same time, Richard is forced to defend his romance with the naïve Mandy, a woman young enough to be his daughter. All of the relationships are tested and, in the case of Sarah and James, ultimately realigned.

Margulies injects some vigorous debates about the ambiguous moral nature of the press coverage of violence. The highly sensitive Mandy angrily wants to know why Sarah didn’t put her camera down and help the wounded instead of taking their picture. Sarah replies calmly that it’s her job to photograph images of devastation and suffering so people (like Mandy herself) can take action. But Mandy responds that she’s just one average person, powerless to reduce anyone’s suffering.  Is that a fact or a copout?

James decides he wants a normal existence, away from the dangers of life on the edge. But Sarah can’t settle for a normal lifestyle, watching television and having babies. She needs the rush of putting her life on the line in the world’s hot spots. She’s seen and endured too much to fit herself into a safe and predictable everyday life. So she prepares to depart again, alone, to photograph humanity at its worst.

Margulies’s writing is continuously intelligent and challenging and often very funny. The four characters are all passionate in their beliefs, but they speak as individuals, not as mouthpieces for the playwright’s agenda. Sarah, James, Richard, and Mandy come into conflict, but they are decent people. During the course of the play, they undergo seismic shifts in their assorted relationships, but each ends up more or less happy with the ways things worked out.

Sally Murphy is superb as the prickly and committed Sarah Randall. Randall Newsome is outstanding as the conflicted James, trying to deal with multiple emotional traumas. Francis Guinan is excellent as Richard, a generous and humorous man who agonizes over the fissures that eventually divide him from Sarah and James. Kristina Valada-Viars is terrific as Mandy, the most difficult role in the show. She takes a character that could be a ditsy butt of everyone’s humor and turns her into a sympathetic, caring person, just out of her depth amid the worldliness and emotional intensity surrounding her.

Austin Pendleton’s directing strikes just the right tone of realism and never allows the debates over moral issues to descend into preaching. Walt Spangler designed the wonderfully detailed loft set.  Rachel Anne Healy designed the costumes, Keith Parham the lighting, and Josh Schmidt is responsible for the sound design and original music.

photos by Michael Brosilow

Time Stands Still
The Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre in Chicago
scheduled to end on May 13
for tickets, visit http://www.steppenwolf.org

THE SHOW ABOUT THE HAND THAT GIVES YOU THE FINGER

I get a thrill when I think of the tourists who are milling about Old Town in San Diego. Exhausted from tchotchke shopping and sugary treats, they decide to take in a play at the incredibly lovely Cygnet Theatre. Most of these unsuspecting travelers have undoubtedly never heard of Martin McDonagh, the playwright from across the Pond whose dark comedies about low-class and low-income Irish folk involve mutilation, crass language, and shocking revelations.  Soon, A Behanding in Spokane begins and, in trademark McDonagh fashion, the violence, mayhem, dismemberment, and four-letter words are gleefully hurled at the audience. The thought of these souls squirming in their seats as their jaws drop from the bizarre and gruesome circumstances pleases me to no end. Cygnet Theatre lives up to their credo by producing this play, as they believe in the power of theatre to startle the soul and ignite debate.

However, Cygnet has its hands full with this four-hander. Not even the Broadway production starring the great Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell could hide the fact that Behanding is basically a stinker. In a chillingly seedy motel room somewhere in small town America, we meet Carmichael, a threatening man who searches for the hand that he lost to a pack of hillbillies. A mixed-race, pot-selling couple, Marilyn and Toby, tries to scam Carmichael by selling him a phony hand while Mervyn, a disturbing death-wishing desk clerk, pops in and out of the scene (apparently for comic effect, he adds nothing to the story – what little there is of it).

The shenanigans at hand are preposterous, goofy, gratuitous and littered with two-dimensional characters – especially those of Toby (Vimel) and Marilyn (Kelly Iversen): the actors at Cygnet certainly fit their roles of loser drug dealer and his Goth girlfriend, but both performers lack shading and character choices, relegating them to indicating and screaming their lines in annoying desperation. As Carmichael, Jeffrey Jones offers some moments of terrorization and danger, but they are largely situational, such as when he handcuffs the fraudulent perpetrators to a bed or affixes a lighted candle to a gas can; Jones’ internal machinery shows little sign of true menace and unpredictability.

It is Mike Sears as the goofy clerk who proves that a great actor can overcome, if temporarily, the limitations of this script – one which amounts to no more than variations on an already unstable theme. By infusing his performance with pauses, tics and other fresh choices, Sears brings plausibility to an implausible character – his monologue is a highlight of the show.

The disturbing and claustrophobic motel room set by Christopher Ward is worthy of the highest praise. Aided by the brilliant props and scenic artistry of Bonnie L. Durben, Ward’s design is a perfect collision of Stephen King and David Lynch, made all the more spooky by Michelle Caron’s lighting design and the detailed work of scenic painter Jessica Harriman Baxter. Some of the clever staging by Lisa Berger comes off as over-rehearsed and inorganic.

McDonagh is legendary for cranking out scripts in less time than it takes to see a few shows and write a review for them. After a string of theatrical hits, McDonagh took a stab at filmmaking, receiving an Academy Award for his short film “Six Shooter” (2005) and a nomination for his screenplay of the immensely well-received In Bruges (2008). It was his status, not his script, that allowed his return to New York with Behanding in 2010. With the “N” word and bloody appendages scandalously bandied about in badminton fashion, one senses that the Bad Boy of the theatre is more intent on shock value than actually telling a story. Even Ben Brantley in the New York Times said, ‘Behanding feels like a just-written Saturday Night Live sketch, for which the jokes have yet to be tested.”

But what Broadway (or Off Broadway) producer in his right mind would turn down a proven playwright when he appears with a new script? All that the backers see is a possible cash cow milked from the deliciously demented pen of a proven playwright (Roger Berlind, Scott Rudin and the Shubert Organization were among the producing team of Behanding at the Schoenfeld Theater). Unfortunately, the likes of Mamet, McDonagh, and LaBute are beginning to pump out some discouragingly inconsequential products; nonetheless, they are produced on Broadway, receiving mixed to poor reviews. Soon, these undeserving plays are mass produced by companies like Cygnet who rely on McDonagh’s popularity to sell the show (even though most folk have no idea who he is).

While I was unmoved (and, frankly, a little bored) with Cygnet’s production, next to me two tourists with shopping bags were agape with incredulity at what they’d just witnessed, as if they had seen a train wreck. Long after the curtain came down, they just sat there, dumbfounded and nonplussed. Finally, one man muttered, “Bizarre…that was just…bizarre.” For that moment alone: thank you, Cygnet.

photos by Daren Scott

A Behanding in Spokane
Cygnet Theatre in San Diego
scheduled to end on February 19
for tickets, visit http://www.cygnettheatre.com

THE FEATS OF THE FOOTES

America is preoccupied with an unstable economy, tax increases, oil profiteering, cash deficiencies, and the plummeting worth of real estate. Yet history does indeed repeat itself, for these were the same issues facing Americans in the Reagan years, and Dividing the Estate, which takes place in 1987 Texas, will reverberate with familiarity to modern audiences. Horton Foote’s entertainingly mild 1989 drawing room comedy isn’t particularly insightful or ambitious, but it has an appealing, Chekhovian nature that wins us over with its all-too-human characters and diverting commentary about a world that is slipping away.

Classic themes of materialism, alcoholism, and classism abound when full-blooded Southern matriarch Stella (Elizabeth Ashley) has her three children over for dinner. The oldest is widowed Lucille (Penny Fuller), who lives with Stella on her plantation-like estate. Lucille helps out with household duties while her son (Devon Abner) – named Son (in typical Foote fashion), handles Stella’s affairs.

It’s easy to see how the 1980s gave birth to slackers, as Lucille’s two younger siblings epitomize those who are wholly dependent on the family fortune: Gambling womanizer Lewis (Horton Foote, Jr.) keeps drunkenly asking for advances in his allowance while Mary Jo (Hallie Foote) complains that her share of the loot isn’t nearly enough to support her materialistic lifestyle, and that of her husband Bob (James DeMarse) and their two pampered daughters, Emily (Jenny Dare Paulin) and Sissie (Nicole Lowrance).

It is before and during dinner that the banter crumbles into a combative discourse between the avaricious siblings and the implacable matron. No one, it seems, is willing to give up the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. This includes the 92 year-old African-American servant Doug (Roger Robinson) who refuses to stop serving dinner even though he has violent shakes. Above all, Stella is unwilling to discuss either how the estate will be divided or the possibility of oil-leasing on her land. Without revealing too much plot, suffice it to say that an unexpected occurrence puts the quarrelling on hold, but later bolsters the children’s demands to divide the estate.

This slight but amusing play – it’s essentially plot-free – will especially resonate with those who come from a Southern background. The characters retain graciousness even as they take delicious turns rubbernecking at each other’s lives and deliberating over lineage and its inherent mythology. Other spectators will wish that the dialogue had tastier morsels of venomous, Hellman-esque Southern behavior or the cancerous secrets of Tennessee Williams’ gothic families. But Horton Foote wrote with gentility – a charming politeness reserved for gentlemen and ladies (“yes ma’am” simply teems in his works), so you will see no August: Osage County-like in-your-face, dysfunctional fireworks going on here.

The proceedings feel both antiquated and somehow familiar, and since the story lacks impetus, there is a threat of boredom hanging on the script like Spanish Moss. The laughs are mainly mild because what appears to be a black comedy on the surface lacks the gallows humor necessary for true guffaws, even as the dominant theme is death itself. (Also, some of the acting seemed inconsequential and lacked spice.) Thankfully, director Michael Wilson and a few of the actors liven up the gentility by creating distinctive characters out of ones that – truth be told – don’t seem particularly remarkable on paper.

The standouts are Ms. Foote, who brings rib-tickling physical antics to the whiny and demanding daughter Mary Jo, and Mr. DeMarse, who adroitly vacillates from an agreeable hangdog husband to pushy interloper son-in-law Bob. It is Mr. Robinson who truly steals the show as the servant Doug as he trembles with pride when he sees his world coming to an end.

Although Dividing the Estate was first produced in 1989, this is being billed as Horton Foote’s final play. This is because the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright re-tooled the script for an off-Broadway production, which ran for a month in 2007. That production, which moved to Broadway and closed after a two month run, ended in 2009, exactly two months before Mr. Foote’s death at the age of 93. The show now playing at the Old Globe is the Broadway transplant, with much of the original cast and design team intact. Included in the transfer is the luminous Ms. Ashley, who is repeating her role of Stella; she may be a bit too youthful for the part, but she certainly has the flavor of a Southern matriarch (her interpretation of Williams plays are legendary). Also on board from New York are the brilliant lighting by Rui Rita, which shifts in tone and hue as the evening progresses, and the magnificent, plush set of Jeff Cowie.

I can’t call the show exciting. Indeed, it seems clear why it took 20 years for this play to hit Broadway, and why it did not have a long run – it’s almost too subdued and old-fashioned – but it contains all of the elements that made Foote a classic American playwright. Just as with his The Trip to Bountiful, Foote brought decorum to the stage, along with a wistful understanding of a vanishing world, the bittersweet yearning of memory, a twinkling empathy for his fellow man, and, above all, a gracious humor that accompanied his keen understanding of human nature. The reasons to see Dividing the Estate are the qualities of Horton Foote himself.

photos by Henry DiRocco

Dividing the Estate
Old Globe Theatre in San Diego
scheduled to end on February 12
for tickets, visit http://www.theoldglobe.org

THE SILLY BLONDE MUSICAL THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

Local musical productions will have problems hiring skilled and energetic young performers for the next couple of months. The Chicagoland talent pool of youthful men and women is being monopolized by the presentation of a deliciously silly musical comedy at the Marriott Theatre.

Legally Blonde originated as a novel and then became a popular motion picture in 2001 before being converted into a hit Broadway musical in 2007 (which became even more popular in London). The show is undiluted froth, and the laws of probability weigh very lightly on its storyline. But the musical score by Laurence O’Keefe and Neil Benjamin is an upbeat charmer, with lyrics that tickle with their droll and hip wit.

This crowd pleaser tells the comic saga of Elle Woods, a ditsy California girl who enrolls in the Harvard Law School so she can prove to the feckless beau who ditched her that she isn’t just a blonde airhead. Elle is convinced she can be serious, and, omigod, like, what’s more serious than Harvard Law School, right? How Elle gets accepted into Harvard is as nonsensical as the rest of the plot, but that nonsense delectably drives the musical, so who cares?

After Elle is admitted to Harvard, the rest of the musical traces her rocky path to success, meaning she triumphs at law school and still gets the right young man as a husband. I take the moral of the story to be that a girl can find true love and a great career by overcoming the handicap of being a beautiful, shallow, pampered blonde. It’s not a message to stir the hearts of determined feminists, but the premise provides a superstructure for a sequence of high velocity song and dance numbers that carry the evening to considerable entertainment heights.

The show’s story is a comic soufflé, but it still finds time to make jokes at the expense of gays, lesbians, and European men. A number called “Bend and Snap” demonstrates how a young woman can entice the opposite sex by certain body manipulations in close proximity to the male of her choice. It may be sexism at its most blatant, but only a confirmed sourpuss in the audience would take any of this political incorrectness seriously. It’s too funny.

Director-choreographer Marc Robin works his usual stagecraft magic to accommodate herds of high-stepping performers on the Marriott’s limited performing space. The velocity of the evening never diminishes as the players make their entrances from the aisles, changing costumes at warp speed off stage.

Marriott found an ideal Elle in Chelsea Packard, a beautiful blonde who nails Elle’s pure Valley Girl persona. She sings, she dances, and she acts to bring Elle alive, if not as a credible three dimensional woman, at least as a character we can enjoy without embarrassment. The musical’s audience in New York City and elsewhere included a high percentage of “tweeners” (girls approaching their teenage years) who obviously found Elle an inspiring role model. What 12-year-old girl wouldn’t want to grow up to be beautiful, a Harvard lawyer, and win the perfect mate? There are worse dreams.

The show may center on the tribulations and eventual triumphs of Elle Woods, but the production still accommodates a saucy character named Paulette, a beautician at a salon near Harvard called the Hair Affair. Paulette’s song “Ireland,” about her Irish heritage, is a hoot of clever lyrics delivered with irresistible comic passion by an Amazon of a performer named Christine Sherrill.

The cast is female-oriented but still accommodates several solid performances by males. David Larsen is perfect as Elle’s mentor at Harvard and, eventually, her romantic partner. Cole Burden is fine as the young man who dumps Elle to attend law school, thus precipitating the whole delightful evening. Gene Weygandt is a Harvard law professor who terrorizes first year students and shows his nasty inner self by trying to hit on Chelsea, a characterization that must have thrilled the real Harvard male faculty. And Steve Calzaretta is very funny as a hunky FedEx deliveryman who becomes Paulette’s soul mate.

The production is awash in fine female performances, mostly in ensemble numbers, including a fantasy Greek chorus who gives Elle moral support in her darker moments. Stephanie Binetti is excellent as a Harvard law student who starts out as Elle’s bitchy adversary but comes over to her side in a noble display of sisterhood.

The production is a riot of pink (Elle’s chosen color), and still another triumph by Marriott house costume designer Nancy Missimi. Thomas M. Ryan designed the flexible set, Diane Ferry Williams the lighting, Sally Weiss the properties, and Robert E. Gilmartin the sound. A very loud shout out to William Berloni, the dog trainer responsible for the antics of a Chihuahua named Chico and a bulldog named Nellie, who gave the two most endearing animal performances I’ve ever seen on a live stage. And, as always, the Marriott off-stage orchestra led by Patti Garwood is outstanding, swinging the rock-tinged score all night.

photos by Peter Coombs

Legally Blonde
The Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire (Chicago Theater)
scheduled to end on April 1
for tickets, visit http://www.MarriottTheater.com

EXCELLENCE VS. HOKUM

With Lonesome Traveler, a compendium of the golden years of American folk music, writer/director James O’Neil has developed a long-winded and incoherent revue that is more appropriate for a pledge drive on PBS than a stage. Almost 50 songs are beautifully warbled (at least 36 in their entirety!) by a multi-talented, incomparable cast in this 2 hour and 40 minute revue, but there’s no mortar to hold the bricks together. Traveler may be winding up its run at the Laguna Playhouse (it began at the Rubicon in Ventura), but based on some of the astounding interpretations of songs covering  40 years of folk, I pray that O’Neil takes this back to the drawing board with a different writer (or at least a different perspective).

Compilation shows of a composer or genre can be perfidiously challenging to execute. One song after another after another after another can induce tedium, regardless of how pleasurable the ditties might be independently. Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), one of the first revue-style rundowns to become a runaway hit, was in many ways the genesis of the jukebox musical, but scant revues since have achieved that same level of success. The collection of Fats Waller hits was a joyous smash because it employed performers that growled with rough authenticity and managed to capture the spirit of his era.

Not so with Lonesome Traveler, which uses peerless performers (such as powerhouse Jennifer Leigh Warren), to annotate the work of folk creators, confounding us as they consistently assume different guises and bounce back and forth between eras. O’Neil even goes so far as to assign his voices from the past to speak in present vernacular: “As y’all would say, the song went viral.”

The sappy conceit is that narrator Justin Flagg, aka “The Lonesome Traveler,” is not a flesh-and-blood character, but some sort of embodiment of folk music as a whole. Warren herself starts off as “The Muse,” an old, hunched-over, black woman who sings a spiritual from her porch in 1926, and then encourages Mr. Traveler to transform her songs into folk music with: “You tell ‘em, Lonesome!”

While we have to endure some truly syrupy banter, O’Neil speckles the evening with fascinating tidbits about the social issues that fueled folk, such as unionizing, working classes, and migrants. We also learn the fascinating genesis of some tunes: for example, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” was a rejoinder to Irving Berlin’s uber patriotic “God Bless America.” But these scraps from the table of folk music merely whet our appetite for some kind of narrative to glom onto.

As one who has scoured the Blue Ridge Parkway, I can tell you that stories abound about how spirituals morphed into Appalachia music, which in turn became Country, which then branched into folk (with a generous helping of the blues).  But these stories, some of them mighty juicy, are barely touched upon in Lonesome Traveler. Showing us the Carter Family in a studio during the infancy of recordings may look and sound swell, but an examination of the Carter story would have elucidated the evolution of folk music far better than five different songs from other artists.

Granted, O’Neil isn’t going for story here. Nor is he imitating the gobs of jukebox musicals out there, wherein a songwriter’s accumulated works are haphazardly inserted into a blockheaded story. Nope, he’s going straight for the warm fuzzies, inviting audience members to sing along in between mawkish recollections and hokey interchanges (“Remember this one?”). Unfortunately, once you invite spectators to sing along, they never shut up, spitting out-of-tune notes and incorrect lyrics on my neck while I’m trying to listen to a professional do it right. Goodnight, “Goodnight, Irene!”

Why then should Mr. O’Neil take this show apart and start over? The songs. The show became mesmerizing and wistful during the second act, when a series of songs was perfectly executed in a coffee house setting (where the songs weren’t interrupted with inane commentary). We were treated to wonderful impersonations of The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and, with surprising effectiveness, Ian & Sylvia covering Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain.” Their rendition was so touching that I was startled when they left the stage – it just feels odd having this duo rock my world and then suddenly depart. (Turns out that Ian & Sylvia came from Toronto to New York and caught the eye of Albert Grossman, who managed Peter, Paul and Mary and would soon take on Bob Dylan. Years later, Ian & Sylvia would be credited with pioneering country-rock before they divorced in 1975.)

The entire cast consists of holdovers from the Rubicon (except Ms. Warren who, incidentally, blew the roof off the house from Laguna back to Ventura). Justine Bennett (“The Activist”), Sylvie Davidson (“The Lady”), Mr. Flagg (you know, “The Traveler”), Brendan Willing James (“The Poet”), Anthony Manough (“The Man”) and Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper (“The Preacher”) cannot be celebrated enough for their astounding renditions and superb instrumentals. Associate music director Trevor Wheetman backed up the gang by playing a variety of instruments (he is also the son of music director Dan Wheetman, whose dedication and hard work shines bright). A special nod to James Webb, whose gracious spirit and compassion were evident as he frolicked on the upright bass.

The multimedia display was not used to great effect, but David Mickey did some beautiful work. The technical achievement of the night was the sound design by Jonathan Burke – aided by Jason Tuttle, this duo created a showcase of inventive variety, volume and clarity. This is exactly what was needed in a show where the song was the thing.

And these songs have the power to melt the coldest of hearts, even as the dialogue will surely melt your brain.

photos by Ed Krieger/Laguna Playhouse

Lonesome Traveler
Laguna Playhouse in Orange County
scheduled to end on February 5
for tickets, visit http://www.lagunaplayhouse.com

BECKY SHAW WON’T LET YOU FORGET HER – THAT’S A PROMISE AND A THREAT

I’m pleased to report that Becky Shaw is not easy to sit through. Five well-chiseled characters (that you pray you will never encounter) deliver a tsunami of shocking revelations (that you hope you will never experience) in a play that will have you laughing even as you squirm. The strong, unsettling reaction you experience – that is, after you catch your breath – comes from the fact that you want to look away, yet remain completely engrossed with this gem of a theatrical experience.

Under Amy Glaser’s solid direction, this regional premiere of Becky Shaw, a 2009 Pulitzer finalist by young playwright Gina Gionfriddo, is brought to unforgettable life in the close quarters of The SF Playhouse. Artistic Director Bill English is right on when he bills the show as a 21st-century twist on what Oscar Wilde might do with today’s more convoluted and angst-ridden relationships. No wonder that, while stagehands gracefully reshape English’s terrific set, a bed is the dominant feature.

The play begins with Suzanna Slater (the gripping Liz Sklar), a psych grad student right out there on the edge of sanity along with her patients. Following her emotional reaction to the death of her father, she breaks conventional sibling boundaries by sleeping with her adopted brother Max (a finely honed, multi-layered Brian Robert Burns). Immediately after that, viewers are thrown for a loop even more by the introduction of Suzanna’s all-too-compassionate husband Andrew Porter (the appealing and folksy Lee Dolson) and waspish mother Susan (Lorri Holt, who perfectly captures the ruthless and embittered woman who is compromised by multiple sclerosis).

Into this unimaginably co-dependent mix enters Becky Shaw (Lauren English), who is set up by Suzanna and Andrew for a blind date with Max. Edgy yet heartbreaking in her vulnerable neediness, she is definitely and chillingly no shrinking violet. Thrust into the churning melee of multiple romantic triangles that exist among the other four characters, she becomes a catalyst that pushes them toward resolution, but whether or not that is even possible is a large reason why this story is so captivating and compelling.

Becky’s arrival, along with an unfortunate brush with a crime that mars the blind date, reshuffles the already unstable mix. The ensuing story will no doubt provoke quandaries in the viewer: What do we owe to those we love? What – if anything – do we owe to those who thrust responsibility onto us? How do we negotiate – or even recognize – the fine line between casual and dependent or healthy and mega-dysfunctional relationships? What do we do to ourselves, given things we can and can’t control? There is little choice for spectators but to grapple with answers and reflect on human nature.

Part of the thrilling suspense occurs as the quintet lurches toward resolution, only to have everything upended and poised to backslide into dysfunction in the end. Given Gionfriddo’s masterful writing and all of the surprise twists in her labyrinthine story, you should be grateful and all the more satisfied when she leaves us hanging with no clear answers. No, this Pandora’s Box of the shockingly unimaginable just creates more questions for us to reflect upon. How refreshing.

photos by Jessica Palopoli

Becky Shaw
The SF Playhouse
scheduled to end on March 10
for tickets, visit http://www.sfplayhouse.org

HERE COMES MR. JORDAN

Have you ever been to a sultry party that has the oppressive feel of a languid, humid day in the Deep South, only to have the energy shift dramatically when a raconteur blows in like a refreshing breeze off the Gulf Coast? Usually, it is someone who can recount their adventures with style, pith, and crackerjack one-liners. The energy shifts and crackles as this bon vivant shocks, delights, and transports you with extraordinary tales of their best and worst of times, sandwiching insightful social commentary between layers of anecdotes.

Perhaps you have not been in the presence of a raconteur, as these witty and frank conversationalists are becoming a rare breed (if not an endangered species), victims to the social media and its world of transitory communiqués. Yet on an unpretentious, antebellum living room set at the Celebration Theatre, you now have the opportunity to meet the life of the party, Mr. Leslie Jordan.

Jordan’s largely-gay fan base will recognize the middle-aged, drawling, diminutive pixie as Beverley Leslie, the contentious, sparring nemesis of Megan Mullally in Will And Grace. Others may remember him as a mental drag queen in Del Shores’ Sordid Lives. More recently he made a big impression in the cast of The Help.  But audiences lucky enough to see the world premiere of Fruit Fly, his latest one-man show, will never forget Leslie Jordan as…well, Leslie Jordan: a rascally storyteller who imparts his erstwhile true-life, sordid escapades.

The context of Fruit Fly is a coming-of-gay story, where a sissified boy in Chattanooga, Tennessee could do little to hide his natural flamboyance. His mama, Miss Peggy Ann, understood her boy was different and made sure he had a secret garden where boys could play with dolls. She even allows the lad to accompany her to the Beauty Salon, after which she is treated to the child’s uncanny knack for impersonation. But after tragedy strikes the family, Mama’s got problems of her own, leaving her brassy, brave child to sow his wild oats – whether by inculcating members of the Chattanooga Boys’ Choir or getting high on Black Beauties while lip-synching Tina Turner at an all-black speakeasy when he was 17. (“Y’all caint make this shit up!”) Jordan comfortably sashays around Jimmy Cuomo’s set as he regales us with seemingly unbelievable stories which are nonetheless validated by photos projected on the back wall.

The staging is a bit loose and we need more than an ottoman on wheels for variety in blocking, but director David Galligan keeps the production flowing very well and has aided Jordan in focusing on mama as a central theme.

The show truly is transporting, but it could use some tightening at the top and feel a bit less schlocky at the end. Plus, it feels inauthentic when Jordan chastises someone in the light booth for projecting an incorrect slide – given that we know it is part of the show (“She’s on medical marijuana, y’all”). Then the same gag is repeated with the same line. This terrific one-person tell-all has too much going for it to feel superfluous on any level; the show will resonate more profoundly if all traces of stand-up are removed and we feel as if we are actually in his living room.

Jordan treats us as friends, delivering many of his stories with the delicate veneer of a gracious Southern Belle; it’s surprising that he doesn’t serve mint juleps as he comfortably chit-chats while making eye contact with audience members. When some folks couldn’t see the upstage screen, he merely wheeled a part of the set out of their way – talk about a hostess with the mostess.

photos by Matthew Brian Denman

Fruit Fly
Celebration Theatre in Hollywood
scheduled to end on February 18
for tickets, visit http://www.CelebrationTheatre.com

WHOSE ETHNIC HERITAGE IS IT, ANYWAY?

Black Pearl Sings! is a two-hander that explores the odd couple relationship between a black woman in prison for murder and a white female academic in Texas during the depths of the Great Depression. The play touches on lots of chewy issues, like racism, sexism, and, most provocatively, what constitutes authentic national heritage and who owns it. The play, written by Frank Higgins, is receiving a strong production at the Northlight Theatre, thanks to a pair of superior performances by E. Faye Butler and Susie McMonagle.

The first act takes place on a women’s prison farm in southeast Texas in the summer of 1933. Susannah (McMonagle) is a folklore scholar traveling the hinterlands recording authentic folk songs. She stops at the prison because she knows that some of the best folk songs are embedded among prisoners in the South, especially black prisoners. She singles out Alexandra Johnson, known as Pearl, as a likely reservoir of genuine black folk songs. Pearl (Butler) grew up in the Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina, a fertile source of folk music as yet untouched, and thus unblemished by contact with the outside world. Pearl makes a stirring entrance, trudging slowly on stage with her legs in chains and carrying an iron ball. She’s been in prison for 10 years for murder and has nothing to live for beyond trying to locate her daughter, a child of 12 when Pearl went to jail.

It is mostly a cat-and-mouse game between Susannah and Pearl. The black woman is suspicious of this white woman, as her relations with whites have not been happy throughout her life. She is wary of what Susannah really wants from her. Susannah has a genuine passion for preserving the nation’s folk heritage in its pristine form, but she also has an agenda, using her folk music expeditions to earn grant money and build a resume in the academic community, aiming as high as a teaching position at Harvard. Each woman sees the other as a meal ticket, Pearl to find her daughter, and Susannah to make a reputation as a folk music conservator.

The second act moves to a Greenwich Village apartment in New York City in early 1934. Susannah has managed to get Pearl paroled in her custody as a national treasure of folklore. Susannah sets up a series of performances before liberal white academic organizations, showcasing Pearl’s folk singing. The liberal organizations eat up Pearl’s personality and her music…so long as her music doesn’t get controversial, such as songs that praise unions.

This act supplies the intellectual meat of the evening. Pearl agrees to perform before white audiences to earn money to finance the search for her daughter. She remains wary of the white interest in black folk culture, a culture totally foreign to white society, but she is willing to play the game, even encouraging the audience to sing along in a call and response mode. Susannah isn’t above promoting Pearl’s violent past and her primitivism for publicity, actually proposing Pearl wear her prison stripes uniform in the concerts to lend “authenticity” to her presentations.

For Susannah, the personal holy grail is being the first to record a black folk song that dates back to slave days, an achievement that would make her reputation in academia. Pearl knows such a song but withholds it from the white woman. That song will belong to her people and she won’t barter it away for the pleasure of uncomprehending white listeners. Pearl’s performance of that song brings the show comes to its emotional conclusion.

Black Pearl Sings! probes the question of who owns the rights to a national heritage, the creators of that heritage or society at large. Higgins could have delved into the issue more deeply but at least he has raised the point for audience consideration. It’s an ongoing controversy. The Greek government still wants England to return the Elgin marble sculptures back to their birthplace in Athens, while the English claim the masterpieces serve the world better preserved in the British Museum in London. So the ownership of fragments of a heritage will always remain a touchy question, colored by volatile national and ethnic feelings.

Higgins’s play doesn’t solve the issues it raises, but it does provide sumptuous roles for its two actresses. The show includes numerous folk songs, mostly performed without instrumental accompaniment; but this isn’t a musical, it’s a drama with music. The play is a special showcase for the actress playing Pearl, and E. Faye Butler seizes the opportunity with a brilliant performance that is variously belligerent, humorous, and yearning. Pearl isn’t supposed to be a professional singer, but Butler is one of Chicagoland’s leading divas, and the power of her voice can’t be suppressed. Plus, she does a terrific job of portraying a woman beaten down by racism and hard knocks her entire life, but one who still retains strength of character and a certain dignity, even when trying to survive in an alien white world.

McMonagle has the more difficult of the two roles. Pearl will naturally get the attention, and sympathy, of the audience. Susannah is a more problematical figure, a woman of good intentions who is still on the make in building a career, with Pearl as her chief tool. In addition, the play scores comic points off the white character (playwright Higgins is white), mocking white stereotypes about blacks and its patronizing attitudes. At times the play seems like a white apology to the black world for misunderstanding and mistreating African American life so blatantly. White liberal audiences should eat it up.

But on balance, Black Pearl Sings! is a solid, sometimes provocative work built on a pair of luminous characters. Viewed solely as an E. Faye Butler concert, the play is worth the price of admission. Fortunately, there is enough dramatic substance underpinning the music to offer patrons two hours of stimulating, if not perfect, entertainment.

Credit Steve Scott’s directing for sustaining the play’s dramatic and musical momentum. Jack Magaw designed the settings, Emily McConnell the spot-on Depression era costumes, Sarah Hughey the lighting, and Christopher Kriz the sound.

photos by Starbelly Studios

Black Pearl Sings!
Northlight Theatre in Skokie (Chicago Theatre)
scheduled to end on February 19
for tickets, visit http://www.northlight.org

A FEAST FOR THE SENSES (LEAVE YOUR MIND BEHIND)

Chicago’s Redmoon Company is famous for its work in puppet theater. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is the preeminent classical theater in the region. So when the two companies combine on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s late romance The Tempest, the prospects are enticing for a special evening of theater. The adaptation, titled The Feast: an intimate Tempest, is undeniably something special if the audience seeks a production of vivid, sometimes startling originality. The visual and auditory aspects of the adaptation carry the evening. But patrons shouldn’t expect a coherent narrative line or probing insights into the story and characters. This is a theatrical experience for watching and listening, not necessarily for thinking.

Created and directed by Jessica Thebus and Redmoon co-artistic director Frank Maugeri, this adaptation runs about 65 minutes with no intermission in the intimate Upstairs Theater at the CST.  The show is indeed intimate, with only three actors, plus two behind-the-scenes puppeteers. John Judd plays Prospero, the magician who rules an enchanted island. Twelve years before the start of the action, he was marooned with his daughter Miranda after being deposed from his kingdom in Milan by his treacherous brother Antonio and Alonso, the king of Naples. Now Prospero creates a storm that wrecks a ship on his island, a ship that carries Antonio and Alonso and a cluster of other characters, including Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples and soon to become Miranda’s beau.

Shards of the plot are doled out in this version, but viewers who don’t know the story will struggle to figure out what’s happening. In the opening minutes, Prospero rehearses parts of the narrative with the other two characters in the play, the sprite Ariel (Samuel Taylor) and the monster Caliban (Adrian Danzig). Prospero impatiently rings a bell to restart a scene each time the other two characters fail to satisfy him with their line readings. The audience isn’t secure as to whether they are watching Prospero’s rehearsal or the actual events in the story. And the momentum of the jagged narrative is often blunted by extended silences that suggest deep dramatic waters I couldn’t identify.

The language in The Feast comes from the Shakespeare original and preserves some of the more familiar passages of The Tempest, notably Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” monologue (but we don’t get to hear Miranda proclaim “O Brave new world”). Judd’s Prospero is an irritable old man who still melts with emotion as the play winds down. Ariel and Caliban portray other characters from the original, such as Miranda, Ferdinand, and a pair of drunken stewards (injected by Shakespeare for comic relief), who plead for their freedom from Prospero’s magical powers.

The three actors all do well, with Judd demonstrating that he would make a fine Prospero in a full length and more orthodox presentation. Taylor and Danzig are kept busy moving from character to character; their rendering of Ariel and Caliban briefly suggests the characters’ resentment toward Prospero that normally helps drive the narrative of The Tempest. As soon as Danzig puts on the Caliban mask, his transformation into the monstrous slave is particularly effective.

Multi media images are projected onto screens at the rear of the playing area (design by Mike Tutaj), which is a stage of wooden planks shaped like a cross (Neil Verplank is credited as “scenic engineer/builder”). Ariel and Caliban change characters by assuming wonderfully expressive masks (designed by Andrea Everman and Jesse Mooney-Bullock, who also worked on the puppets) – the mask that Danzig wears as Caliban is a marvel of grotesque ugliness, and the mask representing Miranda delicately replicates a beautiful and gentle maiden.

The action is enhanced by atmospheric lighting effects (by Andrew H. Myers) and sounds (by Jeffrey Allen Thomas) that vary from dissonant jazz lines to pop songs that sound as if they are being played from a scratchy 78 rpm record. The design team, including co-costumers Sue Haas and Anna Glowacki, creates a fresh and absorbing sensory experience for sympathetic audiences; but the play’s final moments are a real coup de theater of light and sound.

The CST is to be commended for lending its resources to Redmoon to nurture and finally stage this adaptation. It’s a high risk endeavor but the risks were worth taking. A person with CST management said that The Feast is a hot ticket, and while negotiations are underway to extend the show, there is no guarantee it will run beyond its scheduled closing date. Therefore, enterprising lovers of Shakespeare and cutting edge stagecraft should act accordingly. Patrons may not like everything in the adaptation, but they have to admire the imagination and commitment captured in those 65 minutes.

photos by Michael Brosilow

The Feast: an intimate Tempest
Chicago Shakespeare Theater
scheduled to end on March 11
for tickets, visit http://www.chicagoshakes.com/feast