Theater

Winter's tales

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:41:45 GMT

The cold season heats up on Boston boards
The cold season heats up on Boston boards

THE SEAGULL: János Szász directs the Chekhov classic at the ART.

Now that the most disquieting holiday season in recent memory is past, you have the long, frigid winter to warm your financially fissured heart. Well, maybe not. But as they say in the theater, the show must go on. And whether you're looking for gut-wrenching drama that puts your own personal bankbook saga into perspective or just escapism, you'll find comfort somewhere when the curtain rises.

Perhaps last season's longest-running drama was the fever-pitched election campaign, an O'Neill-worthy marathon, to be sure. Politics — ancient and contemporary — have always been a go-to source of inspiration for the great playwrights. Just a few days after our new president is inaugurated, we get to take a look at politics back, when Stacy Keach blows into the Colonial Theatre (www.broadwayacrossamerica.com) to lead the cast of FROST/NIXON (January 27–February 8). Peter Morgan's play, which was also recently released as a film, delves into the famous interview encounters between the disgraced ex-president and the breezy, cavalier British TV journalist. Athol Fugard, on the other hand, builds his drama EXITS AND ENTRANCES around apartheid in South Africa. New Repertory Theatre (www.newrep.org) presents this investigation of the meaning of art amid a tumultuous society (February 22–March 15).

Politics get personal in THE DUCHESS OF MALFI (January 8-February 1), by Jacobean dramatist John Webster. Actors' Shakespeare Project (www.actorsshakespeareproject.org) carries on its custom of performing in unconventional spaces when the company takes over Midway Studios in Fort Point for this rarely seen play, in which an Italian duchess marries beneath her, inciting her brothers to take revenge. And those aren't the only Italians in town. The Huntington Theatre Company (www.huntingtontheatre.org) offers TWO MEN OF FLORENCE (March 6–April 5), historian Richard N. Goodwin's play about Galileo's intellectual showdown with Pope Urban VIII. Edward Hall, associate director of London's National Theatre, is at the helm. Meanwhile back at ASP, the troupe led by Benjamin Evett isn't content to stir up trouble just on Malfi. It moves to Rome when it stages the Bard's CORIOLANUS (March 12–April 5).

Shakespeare, of course, is alchemical when it comes to transforming tragedy into poetry. Joan Didion did the same thing in her 2005 memoir THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, which she then adapted for the Broadway stage. Lyric Stage Company (www.lyricstage.com) offers the New England premiere (January 2-31) of this personal dissection of grief that began when the iconic author's husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack at home. Eric C. Engel directs Nancy E. Carroll in the one-woman play.

Year in Theater: Staged right

CAROLYN CLAY — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:06:48 GMT

Changing of the local guard
It's been a Buckingham Palace season on the local rialto.

ANGELS IN AMERICA: Boston Theatre Works’ blisteringly natural revival couldn’t keep the company solvent.

It's been a Buckingham Palace season on the local rialto, with a changing of the guard at both the Huntington Theatre Company and the American Repertory Theatre and another under way at New Repertory Theatre, whose artistic director, Rick Lombardo, heads for California to lead San Diego Rep. There's no word on Lombardo's successor, but Peter DuBois took over in July for HTC honcho Nicholas Martin (who moved to the helm of the Williamstown Theatre Festival before suffering a stroke in September, from which he is expected to make a full recovery).

Across the river at the ART, Obie winner Diane Paulus took over in October, after a protracted search for a successor to Harvard-ousted visionary Robert Woodruff. The acclaimed director of theater and opera is currently manning the moving van that will transport her hit Public Theater revival of Hair from Central Park to Broadway. She has yet to announce her first ART season, which will commence in the fall of 2009. But there is hope that the downtown New York theater star will reprise — or add to — the genre-busting crossover works that have made her name, among them The Donkey Show, a 1970s disco riff on A Midsummer Night's Dream that ran for six years Off Broadway. Roll over, Shakespeare; tell Donna Summer the news.

On a more frustrating note: the 10-year-old Boston Theatre Works followed its blisteringly natural revival of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning Angels in America by . . . going out of business. In financial straits, the feisty troupe cancelled the rest of its season, and artistic director Jason Southerland has moved to Chicago's Next Theatre Company. But lest we get either pissed off or maudlin, the beat does go on. Among the bangs and whistles were these.

Regards from Broadway
If the street where you live is Washington, on which the Opera House resides, February brightened it with the Trevor Nunn–directed National Theatre of Great Britain revival of the sparkling Shavian musical MY FAIR LADY. Pygmalion couldn't have asked for better than Lerner & Loewe, whose 1956 classic was elegantly reproduced right down to the towering architecture of Covent Garden. More obscure but just as charming is Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick's evanescent 1963 show SHE LOVES ME, which Nicholas Martin made his warm, lavish swan song at the Huntington. And Broadway shows don't get more iconic than the 1927 SHOW BOAT, which Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II built on Edna Ferber's novel. Like the Mississippi, the gorgeous score just keeps rolling along, and the North Shore Music Theatre made the full-throated most of it.

Adam Bock is a good listener

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:09:42 GMT

Talking the talk
When Adam Bock first came to Providence in the late '80s, after a friend told him there was this great playwriting teacher at Brown, he was busting with unstoppable aspiration

"I'M ALWAYS MANIPULATING LANGUAGE," SAID BOCK.

When Adam Bock first came to Providence in the late '80s, after a friend told him there was this great playwriting teacher at Brown, he was busting with unstoppable aspiration. When Paula Vogel told him he had to start by studying acting and proving his writing skills, he agreed and eventually was accepted into her MFA writing program.

Theatre Review: The Receptionist

No, it's never been easy to discourage Bock. For example, in his third-grade Montreal classroom, he was cast as one of the oompa loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

"I was not happy with that," he confesses, chatting animatedly at Trinity Rep before a rehearsal of The Receptionist. "So I went home and made my own version of James and the Giant Peach and made myself James. So we had two sort of rival theater companies in my third- and fourth-grade classes."

After that coup, the rest of his career might sound anti-climactic. The first play of Bock's that received serious attention was a decade ago, when an unknown in San Francisco; Swimming In the Shallows beat out plays from Berkeley Rep and ACT for a Bay Area best play award, though staged in a tiny, 50-seat gay basement theater, Theatre Rhinoceros. That primed the pump for further awards and successes. Moving to New York, where he now lives, his 2006 play Thugs won an Obie and paved the way for two plays to be staged there last year. Bock has written 13 so far. He is still going strong. Major Hollywood producer Scott Rudin is having him write a screenplay, the subject yet to be decided.

Bock, 47, is not sure why he stuck with plays rather than other kinds of writing. "I would try to write poetry, and I was a very bad poet. And I got exhausted writing fiction — because it's too long, you have to say everything."

But with plays you don't even have to bother saying "he said" and "she said." And besides: "I like spoken language. I'm very interested in that."

That fascination was locked in for good at a semester-long workshop after college (Bowdoin) at the O'Neill Theater Center, in Connecticut. "Anna Deavere Smith came in and taught us for three days," Bock says. "So that's where I first got interested in language, because she explained how she was capturing language by taping it and then playing it back through herself. She learned how to notate it so she could always come out the way it sounded. I got really charged up."

Arise and hail

JEFFREY GANTZ — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:13:30 GMT

Revels goes to Thomas Hardy's Wessex
"At first blush, Thomas Hardy seems an unlikely figure to associate with Revels." With due respect to Revels artistic director Patrick Swanson's program statement, this Hardy fanatic of almost 50 years begs to differ.

WEST-GALLERY WIZARDS: England’s Mellstock Band bring Hardy’s world to life.

"At first blush, Thomas Hardy seems an unlikely figure to associate with Revels." With due respect to Revels artistic director Patrick Swanson's program statement, this Hardy fanatic of almost 50 years begs to differ. To be sure, as Swanson continues, Hardy "is not an obvious recruit for a hanky waver in 'The Lord of the Dance' ": this is the pointedly agnostic Victorian novelist whose "President of the Immortals" made sport of Tess Durbeyfield. Yet even Hardy's late (1915) Christmas poem "The Oxen" is less about unbelief than about hope. And his detailed — and loving — observation of the Christmas traditions of his native Dorset in Under the Greenwood Tree and The Return of the Native is perfect for Revels. Throw in a guest appearance by England's superb Mellstock Band, who've dedicated themselves to the instruments and the music of Hardy's time, and you have a fabulous 38th annual Christmas Revels (December 18-22 and 27-30 at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre). Even "The Oxen" turns up.

The setting is taken from Under the Greenwood Tree: the fictional village of Mellstock on Christmas Eve, with the Mellstock Quire preparing to sing carols outside the schoolhouse and the new schoolteacher, Fancy Day (Mary Casey), catching the eye of our hero, young Dick Dewy (Mayhew Seavey). Dick hasn't the field to himself, however: Parson Maybold (Tim Sawyer) and rich Farmer Shiner (Richard Snee) also fancy Fancy. What's more, they're looking to replace the Quire's west-gallery church music — part-singing with instrumental accompaniment — with an organ, which Miss Day just happens to play. Should the old give way to the new?

The Quire move on to a Christmas Eve party at Farmer Shiner's, where the sharp-eyed will note that Fancy, after initially being led out by Shiner, is secured by Dick for the Portesham Feast Dance. Thereafter, Dick's pretty much on his own, as the music takes center stage, "the songs and tunes of country church bands and choirs of the 18th and 19th centuries," as Mellstock Band leader Dave Townsend describes it in his program note.

Behind closed doors

CAROLYN CLAY — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:08:06 GMT

Trinity fires off The Receptionist
Ricky Gervais meets Dick Cheney in The Receptionist.

“NORTHEAST OFFICE” Trinity stalwart Janice Duclos seems to the switchboard born.

Ricky Gervais meets Dick Cheney in The Receptionist (at Trinity Repertory Company through January 11). Does that make Adam Bock's unsettling workplace comedy Richard II? Hardly. The short, Pinter-influenced work, seen here in its New England premiere, zeroes in not on the eloquence of kings but on the sometimes veiled, irrepressible mundanity of office chatter — even when it turns out that what the office is up to is nefarious. The play is full of allusions, oblique and otherwise, to recent national paranoia and the Big Brotherish encroachments on our integrity and freedom for which it has provided a convenient inroad. But like a cheerful mask pulled over a monster, the inane, omniscient business of the title character goes on as, in Tony winner Eugene Lee's set design, she mans her bland communications center backed by a bulletin board full of tacked-up Christmas cards and a coffee machine crowned with a Frosty the Snowman fortunately too fake to take the damaging heat.

Read: Adam Bock, a good listener. By Bill Rodriguez.

I have been a fan of the Canadian-born, Paula Vogel–trained Bock since Coyote Theatre premiered his Swimming in the Shallows, in which the love object is a steadily lap-executing shark, almost nine years ago. Since then, he's become a fixture Off Broadway, where The Receptionist premiered in 2007, following by a year its Obie-winning companion piece, The Thugs (recently produced by Boston's Apollinaire Theatre Company). Bock's brief, edgy pieces tend to be sketchy, if not slight, with roughly half of The Receptionist emerging like a sharply written episode of a workplace-set sit-com before the harried boss, Mr. Raymond, breezes in with a single line that quite changes the tone of things.

Following a cryptic prologue, we have innocuously whiled away the time listening to sexy, ditzy, slightly frantic co-worker Lorraine Taylor regale bosomy receptionist Beverly Wilkins with skittering tales of romantic crises. That's when the latter was not juggling the buttons that allow her to announce "Northeast Office" to multiple callers while at the same time carrying on a string of sage personal conversations of her own. True, there had been the unsolicited appearance of Mr. Dart from the Central Office, he hugging his dossier while throwing awkward small talk into the mix. But all had seemed regulation around-the-water-cooler intercourse. Now, like Otis Redding suddenly slammed up against Kafka or Václav Havel, we're sittin' by the banks of Guantánamo Bay.

Regifting

CAROLYN CLAY — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:56:34 GMT

Aurelia's Oratorio; All About Christmas Eve; How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical
Aurelia's Oratorio; All About Christmas Eve; How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical

'Tis the season for regifting, and the practice is rife on area stages. In Aurelia's Oratorio (presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through January 3), new-vaudeville scion Aurûlia Thierrûe recycles mother Victoria Chaplin's surreal and winsome acrobatics, proving herself a practitioner once removed — twice if you count grandsire Charlie Chaplin. In All About Christmas Eve (at Machine through January 3), Ryan Landry channels his inner Bette Davis, turning her into a gaily bedecked second-hand present. And Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical (at the Wang Theatre through December 28) takes a delightful nugget of Seussian whimsy and swaddles it in layers of superfluous wrap. So, which of these used Yule offerings should you deign to accept?

Aurelia's Oratorio is a mere 70 minutes long, and 20 or 30 are delightful. For openers, the Aurelia of the title, daughter of cirque nouveau pioneers Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thierrûe, emerges limb by lissome limb from a squat dresser parked on a mostly bare stage framed by voluminous red curtains. But first, smoke drifts out of a top drawer — from the heroine's cigarette, as it happens. Then a hand emerges to encase a foot in a red high-heel before the latter appendage can slam a drawer shut. A head arches from a lower drawer as two feet peek from the uppers, the spikes of their scarlet slippers clicking like Dorothy's. Various appendages, seen slinking out of apertures of the bureau in unlikely juxtaposition, seem to signal spectacular if unseen contortion within — until the whole body emerges, extra leg, extra hand, and all. It's a delicious illusion that's cheekily debunked in the end.

There are other such roughhewn and magical triumphs studded into the Oratorio, a dream scenario performed by Thierrûe and dancer Jaime Martinez to continuous recorded music more redolent of piercing strings and Gypsy jazz than a church. A lifesize puppet theater emerges from the shadows, and in a snowstorm of scrolling lace, Thierrûe is menaced by a hinged, square-headed figure with digits like Edward Scissorhands'. The heroine's leg unravels and she furiously knits it back together. Her head appears as a lone, severed Judy entertaining an unruly audience of antique puppets. There is also a fair amount of filler — interludes in which the players pull endlessly on endless swaths of red cloth or do battle with anthropomorphized clothing.

Slideshow: The Slutcracker

PHOENIX STAFF — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:55:30 GMT

A burlesque take on the Nutcracker

A rehearsal for TheSlutcracker, Babes in Boinkland dancers' ribald burlesque take on The Nutcracker ballet,
to be performed on December 12, 13, and 14 at the Somerville Theatre.
Read the story on how these babes found their way to Boinkland.

Drag race

CAROLYN CLAY — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:46:56 GMT

The Lyric cracks The Mystery of Irma Vep
Jane Twisden, the sinister housekeeper of The Mystery of Irma Vep , harbors a mad, secret passion for her employer, the aristocratic and manly Lord Edgar Hillcrest.

A “TOUR DE FARCE” And John Kuntz and Neil A. Casey are the perfect tourists.

Jane Twisden, the sinister housekeeper of The Mystery of Irma Vep, harbors a mad, secret passion for her employer, the aristocratic and manly Lord Edgar Hillcrest. But if she were to act on it, the result would be an orgy of onanism, since in Charles Ludlam's gender-bent "penny dreadful" set in the 1930s, maid and master are one and the same person — played at the Lyric Stage Company (through December 21) by John Kuntz, who looks in one guise like Jean Marsh with a bad perm and in the other like Dudley Do-Right after a long, liquorous night.

Kuntz is abetted in four-time Obie winner and Ridiculous Theater pioneer Ludlam's 1984 send-up of all things gothic by Neil A. Casey. Arms aflutter and blond wig askew as powder-puff-pink-clad Lady Enid Hillcrest when not dragging an artificial leg as ribald caretaker Nicodemus Underwood, Casey also makes an appearance as a hustling Egyptian pushing lynx urine and Maltese falcons. Under Spiro Veloudos's direction, the two performers play these and other roles in a self-reflexive, far-flung frippery that takes them from the creaking halls of Mandacrest (Lord Edgar's estate on a moor located strangely near Hampstead Heath) to the shores of the Nile as the bwana and his retainers dodge fur-sprouting werewolves, come-hither mummies, the vampire of the title anagram, the ghost of Daphne du Maurier, and flying shards of Shakespeare. Irma Vep is a shameless, sometimes sophomoric amalgam of high (well, one way or the other) and low art that, odd as it seems as a holiday chestnut and as oft as it has appeared on the rialto, may appeal to kids without the ballet gene more than does The Nutcracker.

At its parodist heart, Ludlam's oft-performed spoof is a drag race — run not just by the two performers playing seven roles and doubling in one but by the quick-change team shooting them like bullets back onto the stage after each costume change (through most of which frantic off-stage dialogue ensues, often between two characters played by the same actor). Ludlam — who with partner Everett Quinton made up the original cast — specifies that the players should be of the same sex, though he doesn't say which. And much of the leering melodrama's fun lies in the multiple-casting device. At one point, Casey's Lady Enid and Nicodemus carry on an urgent dialogue with one head or the other — bewigged or bald-pated — popping through the drapes. And when Lady Enid wishes to summon Nicodemus, Lord Edgar points out that this would be impossible — cue the significant eye signals — "for obvious reasons."

Threshold of revelation

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:58:11 GMT

Einstein dreams in Central Square; Skylight is illumined in Lowell
Einstein dreams in Central Square; Skylight is illumined in Lowell

EINSTEIN’S DREAMS: These contemplations of time are framed in human rather than mathematical terms.

Time does cartwheels in Einstein's Dreams — and so does Einstein, in Wesley Savick's lyrical hurdy-gurdy built on MIT professor Alan Lightman's 1993 novel about a young Bern patent clerk sleeping on the job (from MIT Catalyst Collaborative/Underground Railway Theater at the Central Square Theater through December 14). Lightman's imagining of the 26-year-old Einstein's subliminal peregrinations as he labors to formulate his theories of time and space is a dreamier, more poetic affair than Savick's jaunty vaudeville, which Savick also directs. But both are rife with the bustle of the early-20th-century world through which the dreamer moves, however distractedly, while upright. And Savick's 80-minute theater piece — said to be Lightman's favorite of the several performance works into which his brief tome has been translated — captures not just the aura of the era but that of its music-hall entertainments. Enacted by a cast of three who share the stage with little more than three rotatable flats — one side black, the other luminescent — and an invaluable composer/accordionist to push time and time traveler along, the show is brain food that's more beer and pretzels than dense computative sausage.

Of course, it's Lightman who dreamed a burgeoning Einstein whose contemplations of time are framed in human rather than mathematical terms. There is no mention of gravitational fields or relativity in Einstein's Dreams. And Savick just falls into step, adding some jêtûs and softshoe. We meet the newlywed patent clerk as he snoozes center stage, putting the finishing touches, we're told, on a paper he intends to mail off to Germany's leading physics journal that very day. Abetted by male and female figments of his imagination that double as Einstein friend Michele Besso and the officious typist who will turn his notes into a more neatly chiseled cornerstone of modern physics, our somnambulistic office worker then doubles back on the chimeræ in which he has imagined various possibilities for the properties of time in different if geographically corresponding worlds. In these flights, the time-space continuum flows backward, stands still, runs in circles, bounces as if between mirrors, or goes on forever, dividing the humans in its maelstrom into "Nows," who can't wait to get cracking on infinite possibilities, and "Nevers," for whom procrastination becomes a way of life.

Sympathy for the Devil

CAROLYN CLAY — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:29:01 GMT

Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington; McPherson's The Seafarer at SpeakEasy
Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington; McPherson's The Seafarer at SpeakEasy

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: So much for those who say Tom Stoppard is all head and no heart.

"It's not just the music, it's the oxygen," sputters Czech rock fanatic Jan, trying to explain what Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones mean when you're wrapped in a straitjacket of repression and looking toward a revolution that will prove more velvet than violent. That feeling of being hemmed in and gazing through a shaft toward the freedom that's in the music is ingeniously captured in the American Conservatory Theater/Huntington Theatre Company production of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, currently at the Boston University Theatre (through December 7). Inspired by an Eastern Bloc photograph, Douglas W. Schmidt's monumental set is like a drab tenement laid on its side, so that the audience is looking past gray concrete toward a patch of blank white sky. The production, too, makes it through Stoppard's sumptuously limned tunnel of political argument, Sapphic poetry, human passion, Cold War espionage, and 22 years of Czech history filtered through a lens of disappointed English Marxism to achieve the exhilaration encapsulated in the loud electric-guitar licks that introduce the Rolling Stones at Prague's Strahov Stadium in 1990. But there are some drab patches, as well as brilliant ones, along the way.

The Tony-nominated Rock 'n' Roll is a heady mix, even for one that's seen the churn of Stoppard's brainy blender. The play, its scenes bridged by era-anchoring bursts of the title commodity, straddles not just two decades but two worlds: the leafy academic cloister of England's Cambridge University, where intellectual systems may butt heads but at least dare speak their names, and Prague, in the years between the Soviet quashing of the 1968 Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is on one level about the supremacy of words as well as music. But, critics of Stoppard as a playwright who's all cerebrum, take note: it also sets up a debate between head and heart, sophistry and soul, that pure emotion, riding the music, carries in the end. As one character, a Czech expatriate looking back from the cusp of the '90s to the anarchic '60s, remarks, " 'Make love, not war' was more important than 'Workers of the world unite.' "

Call of the cash

CAROLYN CLAY — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:46:36 GMT

The Merchant of Venice ; Voyeurs de Venus ; The Oil Thief
Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason.

MONEY: That’s what they want.

Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason. The victim isn’t half as compelling as the avenging victim, and such is Shylock, the diamond-hearted center of Shakespeare’s unsettling comedy set on the Rialto — in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s current rendering (at Midway Studios through December 7) a street as lucre-centric as Rodeo Drive. Coins are jingled and bills peeled away from thick wads of cash from the get-go in a bold, fleet production in which Shylock is not the only man made — or unmade — of money.

Director Melia Bensussen is not the first to suggest that the Christians of Venice are as obsessed with cash as Shylock is. But what Bensussen, an intelligent director who is also a practicing Jew, brings to the table is an unwillingness to take a Sound of Music approach to solving the problem that is Shylock. In her judiciously trimmed modern-dress production, Jeremiah Kissel, also an observant Jew, is a tough if also heartrending Shylock — in the beginning a guy you might meet at a bar mitzvah, later one you might meet in a nightmare. Approached by Antonio and his empty-pocketed chum, Bassanio, for money to finance the latter’s wife-winning mission to Belmont, Kissel’s Shylock is a half-menacing, half-mischievous kibitzer, a fast-talking gum chewer who, every time he mentions the rich sum of 3000 ducats, either takes his head in his hands and shakes it or slaps himself silly. Here the frisky Borscht Belt businessman may hide malevolent intent beneath some pointed clowning, but he’s more likable than Robert Wash’s black-clad, suavely depressive, arrogantly derisive Antonio.

The turning point, of course, is Shylock’s betrayal by his daughter, Jessica, the browbeating of whom Kissel does not stint. But the young lady flees with her Christian lover with not just a casket but also a fat briefcase of booty. Encountering some Christians who have met this tragedy with hilarity, Kissel cuts short his opening riposte at the words, “You knew — ,” thus implicating all Christian Venice in his heartbreak. From this point on, he is agitated but stony, except for a few courtroom flashes mimicking his demonization.

The production separates with uncommon smoothness the play’s courtroom melodrama and its Belmont-set romantic comedy, which is ebullient, particularly when Marianna Bassham’s lively, conspiratorial Nerissa has anything to do with it. The teasing, boudoir-bound comedy of the rings that brings the play to a close, leaving Antonio alone like the cheese, is particularly charming and lusty. Then again, Antonio’s not quite alone. The production’s last image is of Shylock in his counting house, letting hollow coins slip through his fingers.

Rough justice

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:47:17 GMT

The Lieutenant of Inishmore; How Many Miles to Basra?; Legally Blonde the Musical
Except that it's a black farce, not a tragedy, you could call The Lieutenant of Inishmore Martin McDonagh's Titus Andronicus .

THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE: Hammering its audacious juxtaposition of savagery, mawkishness, and sheer stupidity like a stake through a vampire’s heart.

Except that it's a black farce, not a tragedy, you could call The Lieutenant of Inishmore Martin McDonagh's Titus Andronicus. The 2002 Olivier Award winner and 2006 Tony nominee, which is getting its area premiere from New Repertory Theatre (at Arsenal Center for the Arts through November 16), is so rife with mutilation and dismemberment that you might as well direct it with a Cuisinart. Faced with similarly poetical mayhem in the Bard's Titus, David R. Gammons, who won an Elliot Norton Award for his staging, spilled not one jot of stage blood. Now we know why; he was saving it up! Gammons's production of Inishmore sets the largest Aran Island afloat in a bucket of plasma: it gushes like Old Faithful and splatters like Jackson Pollock.

Not that a pristine and stylized staging of McDonagh's 1990s-set wild Irish bloodbath would work. The play's perverse comedy lies in its mix of Grand Guignol and abject sentimentality among a gang of political terrorists who can't think, much less shoot, straight. In Janie E. Howland's design, it opens in a squat hovel backed by cartoon rocks and a large "Home Sweet Home" sampler. In the house, a couple of dimwits bend over the corpse of a cat that's missing most of its head and dripping innards. "Do you think he's dead, Donny?" the effeminate younger one asks his scruffy older counterpart. Afraid so, guys, and the crude assassination of Wee Thomas, beloved pet of Irish National Liberation Army loose cannon Mad Padraic, will unleash a concatenation of carnage worthy of the Greeks — if, say, the entire population of Thebes had been subject to a lobotomy.

McDonagh, the author of the creepier if less gruesome The Pillowman, and the Leenane trilogy, does mean to make a point about the numbing mindlessness of sectarian violence. But the play hammers its audacious juxtaposition of savagery, mawkishness, and sheer stupidity like a stake through a vampire's heart. Padraic, who was deemed too unstable for the IRA, has splintered from a splinter group, which has lured him back from a tour abroad trying to detonate chip shops and torture drug dealers by axing his only, if feline, friend. Seems this trio of cat-battering patriots have it in for Padraic because of his persecution of pushers, at least one of whom had funded their operation — until Padraic cut his nose off and fed it to a dog (which choked, causing the sort of outrage here evoked only by cruelty to critters). With so much violence afoot, there's little room for sex. But don't tell that to 16-year-old Mairûad, a militant if boyish colleen whose crush on Padraic comes in handy.

Of myth and men

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:47:15 GMT

The ART’s Communist Dracula Pageant ; the Publick’s Faith Healer
There is more pageantry than either Stalinism or Stoker in The Communist Dracula Pageant , Anne Washburn’s ambitious jumble of a Romanian-history play now in its world premiere from the American Repertory Theatre.

THE COMMUNIST DRACULA PAGEANT: The greater point would seem to be that history is as much theater as theater is.

Photos: The Communist Dracula Pageant

There is more pageantry than either Stalinism or Stoker in The Communist Dracula Pageant, Anne Washburn’s ambitious jumble of a Romanian-history play now in its world premiere from the American Repertory Theatre (at Zero Arrow Theatre through November 9). Taking its cue from the self-deluded dictatorship of Communist-nationalist strongman Nicolae Ceausescu, which ended in December of 1989 faster than you could do your Christmas shopping, and reaching back to the 15th-century reign of the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes, the play is a grotesque meditation on the march and media manipulation — from Gutenberg to television — of history.

The complete, longwinded if whimsical title is The Communist Dracula Pageant by Americans, for Americans, a play about the Romanian Revolution of 1989 with hallucinations, phosphorescence, and bears — which underlines the far-ranging intent of this sinister satire of the political rewriting of the national script. But its best parts riff on the cheesy, propagandistic pageants favored by Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, at the height of their power. After a brief opening gambit lifted from the pair’s kangaroo-trial transcript, the play jumps back to 1976 to imagine such a spectacle, in which a glamorized, intellectualized version of Elena (who painted herself a scientist despite a fourth-grade education) celebrates the 500th anniversary of the death of Tepes, who quickly gets into the act, strutting in velvet robes and a bejeweled cap.

Tepes, despite his nasty habit of skewering citizens on sticks, is considered a national hero in Romania for his actions against the Turks. And in the Captain Hook–esque figure of Will LeBow, he delivers a message both ghoulish and seductive, in which national identity is a skein of pride and ruthlessness, history a mesh of rumor, imagination, manipulation, and fact. This conjured Tepes is joined in the play’s flag-waving celebration of Ceausescu-esque aggrandizement and Romanian lore by robotic “pageanteers” in coveralls, folk costume, hammer-and-sickle headdresses, and military uniform, all singing the praises of “Dracula, a man . . . sinisteracula, simicuracula, perhapula.” Finally, this messenger from history looks up into the grid of lights and is surprised to find written in the stars the name CEAUSESCU.

Love and politics

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:45:43 GMT

Boleros for the Disenchanted ; November ; Martha Mitchell Calling
In Boleros for the Disenchanted , Puerto Rican–born José Rivera looks beyond the fairy dust and sexual spark to probe the full meaning of “till death do us part.”

BOLEROS FOR THE DISENCHANTMENT: Jaime Tirelli and Socorro Santiago try to keep the enchantment going.

In Boleros for the Disenchanted, Puerto Rican–born José Rivera looks beyond the fairy dust and sexual spark to probe the full meaning of “till death do us part.” But at the same time that this moving if hardly magical work, which is based on the playwright’s parents’ marriage, is about connection, it is also about disconnection — about a married life lived severed from all roots but each other. In other words, Boleros is as much an emigrants’ as a couple’s story, and it’s seen here in a production by the Huntington Theatre Company (at the Calderwood Pavilion through November 15) that follows the script’s premiere last May at Yale.

At first glance, Rivera’s look at the beginning and the end of romance seems more naturalistic than the magical-realist works that have made his name. Well, at last glance, too, there being no guerrilla angels or anthropomorphized moons in sight. Set in Puerto Rico in 1953, act one tells how pious if tempestuous Flora loses a philandering fiancé and gains a better young husband in Eusebio. Act two takes place 39 years later in Alabama, where Flora and Eusebio, now in their 60s, deal with disease, a destructive deathbed confession, and the disenchantment of the title. Still, if Boleros does not spin a metaphysical or apocalyptic fantasy in the manner of Cloud Tectonics or Marisol, neither is it entirely realistic: act one unfolds in a glimmering haze of nostalgia through which the tried and toughened couple of act two cling to a dream of “the enchanted island,” whose enchantments, alas, did not include gender equality or employment.

Chay Yew’s production for the Huntington makes the visual most of the play’s 39-year leap. As young Flora transfers identity to her older self along with a favored sweater, young Eusebio puts his shoulder to rotating Alexander Dodge’s floating set, trading a colorful Caribbean abode backed by a tangle of banana trees for the cramped tract house in which a bedridden Eusebio and a drudgingly ministering Flora are winding down their union. This does not change the fact that, except through exposition, we miss the meaty middle of their story — in which Eusebio neither realizes the American dream nor shakes the frisky, desperate machismo of his original, materially emasculating culture, and the sensual if saintly Flora is denied the one thing she frankly demanded in act one: sexual fidelity. But the point is not so much what the couple didn’t get as what they did: a lifetime of each other, warts and all. And that is tenderly conveyed, if with more grit than sentiment.

Still crazy after all these years

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:13:52 GMT

The Force is with Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show Wishful Drinking
Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive.

SURVIVOR: Fisher’s saving grace is her scathing wit.

Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive. Really, she’s as funny as Dame Edna Everage and as screwed-up as Britney Spears crossed with Sylvia Plath. In her one-woman show Wishful Drinking (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through October 26), this scion of Hollywood royalty lets her pimpled personal history hang out, from a childhood caught in the winds of scandal to an adolescence as a Star Wars icon in hairmuffs to an adulthood spent in the lusty embrace of drugs, alcohol, manic depression, and Paul Simon. Lumpy, candid, and caustic at 52, the artist formerly known as Princess Leia sprinkles wry humor like heavy pixie dust across her cautionary tale of a life that “if it weren’t funny would just be true — and that is unacceptable.”

Not only is Fisher’s on-stage memoir immensely entertaining, it’s been trumped up with multimedia accouterments uncommon in a one-person show. There is a contemporary living-room set backed by roiling orange and a montage of projections. Fisher enters warbling “Happy Days Are Here Again” as newspaper headlines fly behind her chronicling events from the severing of America’s sweethearts — her parents, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — to her own hospitalizations and bad reviews. (She’s declared “bovine and unappealing” by infamously misogynistic critic John Simon.)

The writer/performer breaks the ice by recalling the moment when she woke up with a dead friend in her bed. (“He not only died in his sleep, he died in mine.”) Then she backtracks to the beginning of an existence that’s been equal parts celebrity and absurdity. The events and relationships revisited in Wishful Drinking may be twisted, but Fisher’s ironic celebration of the success-studded train wreck of her life will keep you doubled over for two hours. It’s only in the aftermath that you worry about this poster girl for bi-polar disorder, who apologizes early on for any memory lapses she may suffer as a result of recent shock therapy — which she heartily recommends. (If Wishful Drinking has a serious purpose, it is to destigmatize mental illness.)

I sink, therefore I am

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:22:55 GMT

Zeitgeist’s expanded Seascape. Plus Gutenberg! The Musical
Seascape , Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company.

SEASCAPE: The lizards are cute, but less is still more.

Seascape, Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company. The feisty troupe is presenting the American premiere of the playwright’s whimsical existential fantasy in its original three-act form (at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza through October 25), in which the playwright splices in an episode of The Little Mermaid. Here the play’s at-odds aging couple, having had an energizing if initially terrifying beachfront encounter with a pair of giant lizards just up from the briny, are dragged back into it by their reptilian counterparts. The play, in this initial version, was presented in the Netherlands prior to the sleeker edition’s Broadway premiere. But this is the first time it’s been produced on American soil (well, American sand, four and a half tons of it dragged by Zeitgeist into the BCA) — and for good reason.

Sure, a peek at Albee’s rough draft will prove interesting to theater scholars. It’s interesting to me, less for the gleaming moray-eel eyes and plastic lobsters of the excised act than because it places the final version’s hopeful conclusion at the close of act two and substitutes a tougher ending redolent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the human couple are left to make do with each other. But this original Seascape, most of the content of which made it verbatim into the shorter version, both belabors the play and interferes with its inner — not to mention its evolutionary — logic. We can’t, after all, be sure that massive English-speaking lizards won’t appear in Montauk or on Cape Cod, raring for a chat. But we do know that humans shanghai’d to the ocean floor would drown — unless they suddenly grew gills, and wouldn’t that be anti-evolutionary? Just asking.

Zeitgeist honcho David J. Miller is always up for a challenge, but this one seems less an ambitious leap than a stunt — though the director’s reasons for doing the play in the first place are thoughtful enough. In addition to restoring Albee’s journey to the bottom of the sea, Miller’s production addresses the playwright’s displeasure with the 2006 Lincoln Center revival (the work’s first Broadway appearance since its initial two-month run), which focused on Seascape’s comedy of inter-special manners. Miller’s production is more earnest, emphasizing the play’s mordant ruminations on evolution — on whether the knowledge of mortality and the naming of emotions are really preferable to a mindless swim in the primordial soup.

Cry me a river

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:19:14 GMT

The Dreams of Antigone; In the Continuum; Show Boat
It would seem that Sophocles has been hanging around for 2500 years waiting to be improved — and the makeover artists have been numerous.

THE DREAMS OF ANTIGONE: Did Sophocles really need to be improved?

It would seem that Sophocles has been hanging around for 2500 years waiting to be improved — and the makeover artists have been numerous. Antigone alone has been given a new look by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, Seamus Heaney, A.R Gurney, and Judith Malina, to name a few. Now Trinity Repertory Company’s artistic director, Curt Columbus, gets in on the act with The Dreams of Antigone, an Upstairs, Downstairs update of the tale of Oedipus’s martyred daughter that’s in its world premiere on the company’s home turf (through October 26). It’s easy to understand the motivation: the formality of Greek tragedy can be intimidating, and the device of the Chorus, as it chants its cautionary if sympathetic strophes and antistrophes, is hard to handle. But why not leave well enough — and Sophocles did well enough — alone?

Columbus’s rewrite, undertaken in collaboration with the Trinity acting company, weaves ancient Greece and contemporary America into a script that begins “We the people” before segueing from the US Constitution to Sophocles’s story of heroic defiance in the face of unbending governmental authority. The piece is intended to resonate with a crowd for whom the role of fate and the will of the gods have less pull than they did with the original audience and to examine the roles of myth, the populace, and even theater itself in determining the course of public events. It asks why Antigone’s story has so stubbornly endured and whether there is a point at which it might have gone in another direction.

You remember the basics: Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, fought a brutal civil war over control of Thebes, at the culmination of which they killed each other. Their uncle, Creon, seeking to restore order and establish his own authority, has declared Eteocles a hero and Polyneices a traitor who deserves to rot where he fell. The new honcho issues an edict — which Antigone disobeys — that anyone who tries to bury him will be executed. In the Greek play, Antigone places her allegiance to a Higher Authority ahead of her allegiance to the State; here it pretty much comes down to “doing the right thing.” And too much of the script has that sort of blunt, simplistic ring — as if it were the result of intense improvisation rather than authorial intent. Columbus’s audaciously Americanized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard brimmed with colloquial vigor; this one, with its shared narration and political speechifying interspersed with family squabbling, ricochets between the obvious and the jarring — as when dead relatives appear in dreams, calling snide attention to their incestuously twisted family tree or, in the case of the brothers, re-enacting the battle for Thebes as a joust played out on high, movable scaffolds. Hey, this is Antigone, not American Gladiators.

Undiscovered country

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:24:23 GMT

New Rep’s Eurydice, the ART’s Let Me Down Easy, SpeakEasy’s The Light in the Piazza
A young woman steps off the Elevator Styx into a Hades ruled by Pee-wee Herman.

EURYDICE: What if Orpheus’s wife chose oblivion over the return to complicated life?

A young woman steps off the Elevator Styx into a Hades ruled by Pee-wee Herman. The estimable Anna Deavere Smith embodies victims of war, cancer, and the Rwandan genocide as she turns herself into a Nancy Drew seeking to solve the mystery of “grace.” Mortality is on the menu this week in New Repertory Theatre’s Eurydice (at the Arsenal Center for the Arts through October 5) and the American Repertory Theatre’s Let Me Down Easy (at the Loeb Drama Center through October 11), works so diverse and piercing that they demonstrate the groaning board of theater, with shimmering myth at one end of the table, incisive documentary opposite.

Sarah Ruhl, now 34, began her profound and playful meditation on Orpheus’s wife while still a graduate student at Brown mourning a father who had died when she was 20. That her teacher was Paula Vogel will be apparent to anyone spellbound at the intersection of poetry and whimsy that is the locus of her work. In Eurydice, Ruhl shifts the focus from the ultimate music man, who induces the gods to release his dead wife and then loses her again when he fails to follow instructions, to Eurydice herself, as she’s caught between her desire to follow her husband back into the world and the delicate limbo in which she has reconnected with her deceased dad. Welcoming her to the Underworld, Eurydice’s father teaches her forgotten words and family history. And when the daughter who at first does not remember him (she thinks he’s a porter) demands to be shown to her room in this borderless territory occupied by a bossy chorus of talking stones and ruled by a petulant prince on a tricycle, he lovingly constructs her a shelter of string.

Ruhl’s unconventional Eurydice explores both the pain of loss and the converse comforts of memory and forgetting, music and language. Orpheus’s thoughts are tunes; Eurydice loves books. In Hades, where the river Lethe is a slit in the floor, the Stones advocate letting go of earthly recollection. And in Ruhl’s Freudian version of the tale, it is not Orpheus who makes the mistake that sends his recovered wife back to the Underworld but Eurydice herself, choosing childish oblivion over a return to complicated life.

Buffalo’d Bard

STEVE VINEBERG — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:06:42 GMT

This West doesn’t win the East
It’s nifty that Boston has snagged the world premiere of Richard Nelson’s new play, How Shakespeare Won the West , which opens the season at the Huntington.

THE PREMISE SEEMS IRRESISTIBLE If only the execution didn’t wander cross-country.

It’s nifty that Boston has snagged the world premiere of Richard Nelson’s new play, How Shakespeare Won the West, which opens the season at the Huntington (and runs through October 5). But this talented, prolific playwright blows hot and cold, and Shakespeare isn’t one of his successes — though the premise seems just about irresistible. Set in the mid-19th century and based on real events, the play is about a New York tavern owner named Thomas Jefferson Calhoun (Will LeBow) who, inspired by a visiting Ohio actor’s tales of prospectors in the California gold rush who revere Shakespeare, assembles a theatrical troupe to trek across country to perform for them.

The company includes Calhoun’s family — his wife, Alice (Mary Beth Fisher), who retired from the stage upon becoming pregnant and has always longed to return, and their daughter, Susan (Sarah Nealis), an eager novice. They’re joined by the Ohio thespian Buck Buchanan (Erik Lochtefeld) and Susan’s childhood friend John Gough (Joe Tapper). They take on a couple who claim to be English (Jeremiah Kissel and Kelly Hutchinson) but are obviously inauthentic both as Brits and as a couple (he’s gay), and an older character man (Jon De Vries). Their star is a handsome drunk and sometime celebrity (Chris Henry Coffey) who just got thrown out of another company; his wife, a gifted actress to whom he has just become reconciled, begs to come along too.

The play, which is performed without an intermission, is episodic; the problem is that it’s also misshapen. It begins as a genial — and not terribly eventful — comedy, but halfway through it makes an abrupt tonal shift, as the troupe is beset by internal and external difficulties. Handling the personal problems of the actors (illness and sexual jealousy), Nelson veers into melodrama. Then, when the actors land in South Dakota and find themselves drawn into the Indian wars, the play becomes didactic and heavy-handed as the playwright feels the need to address the themes of racism and religious intolerance. For a space, the troupe is broken up and Buck winds up being adopted by religious zealots who teach him to shoot at Native Americans and blacks. This dreadful section, which is reminiscent of the worst excesses of Little Big Man, is jarring; I felt as if I’d wandered into some other play. Moreover, the drama keeps getting interrupted by narration shared by the ensemble in the old-fashioned reader’s-theater style, in which each character describes his or her own actions.

Still doing it

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:00:25 GMT

A Chorus Line at the Opera House
In the finale of A Chorus Line , 16 dancers do a precision routine against a mirrored backdrop that makes them seem like a cast of thousands.

ONE SINGULAR SENSATION? The premise may be dated, but the staging continues to look great.

In the finale of A Chorus Line, 16 dancers do a precision routine against a mirrored backdrop that makes them seem like a cast of thousands. Created by production teammates director/choreographer Michael Bennett, scenic designer Robin Wagner, and lighting designer Theron Musser, this is one of the all-time great images of the musical stage. In the touring edition of the show now at the Opera House (through 12 October), it’s been re-created under the direction of Bennett’s long-time associate Bob Avian, and it still glitters.

The show-biz gypsy’s highest aspirations are ironically fulfilled in this glamorous but banal chorus of high-shouldered, hat-doffing kicks and anonymity. A Chorus Line has no plot, really, only the stories of the hopefuls as they’re put through their paces by a hardbitten director, Zach, and his dance captain, Larry. The initial workshop process, during which Bennett coaxed real chorus dancers to pour out the painful personal stories that were developed into the script, has become as much of a legend as the show itself.

A Chorus Line isn’t about the great American success story — a star-is-born sort of thing. Instead, it’s about modest talent, hardship, desperation, getting old, and what you do for love. More than three decades after its premiere, the show is still entertaining, but I’m not sure the triumph of the little guy is still a poignant theme. Or that even dancers do anything for love any more.

The show begins with a stageful of boys and girls [sic] in practice clothes running through dance combinations as Zach scans them to make the first cut. They sing about how they need this job, but what we learn as Zach interviews them is that they probably don’t need the money so much as the personal validation. They’ve all constructed some identity for themselves, and dancing is what makes them feel real.

In 1975 we didn’t know much about teenage sexual experiments, abusive parenting, surgical body enhancement, or the homosexual underground — at least, nobody talked about those things in a mainstream show. Under Zach’s sadistic prodding, the auditionees reveal these intimacies as part of their tryout. Their stories now seem not quite ordinary but not quite shocking, either. As played by Michael Gruber, Zach seems more sympathetic, almost likable, and — miked to the max — the show plays for its surface glamor and expertise rather than its darkness.