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More than anything this time of year with these little wrap-up things, I'm reminded not so much of what I saw and what I liked, but of all the shows I wanted to see and missed, dusted over with the distinct yet elusive certainty that there is something and/or someone really important that I am forgetting. Overall, 2004 was a crappy, embarrassing, humiliating year to be an American, but a great year to be a New Yorker. And here's some of the evidence why -- ******* Bug: It may seem strange that a show with the mainstream appeal to run ten months and carry advertisements on MTA buses would ever make this list, but Tracy Letts' hallucinogenic tale of convoluted government conspiracies and waaaaay too much crack just gets under your skin. Lauren Helpern's No-Tell Motel set made me almost nostalgic for my own days of chemically-induced euphoric paranoia on the outskirts of Buttcrack, USA. (Barrow Street/March). ******* Audit: theater et al's shake-n-bake of George Orwell, Elmer Rice and that great old TV show, The Prisoner, produced this sardonic ode to the repetitive obliviousness of this, our life. Whirring about in tightly-choreographed, eternal repetition of mundane bourgeois activities amidst increasingly ominous and violent news reports from the outside world, Brian Rogers, Aaron Rosenblum and Ryan K. Vemmer's production seems even more relevant now than it did just last Spring. And Mikeah Ernest Jennings still has the best hair of any I saw on stage anywhere this year. (Chocolate Factory/April.) ******* The Internationalist: Seemingly transforming not only her style but her entire persona with each new play and making each as convincing as it is challenging, this latest from Our Lady of the Chameleons Anne Washburn was also the first offering from the very promising 13P. Set amongst the murky dealings of "the foreign office" in some unnamed, slightly-sinister country, Washburn had the huevos to dish out a sizeable chunk of this "elusive comedy" in a made-up language. The result was a most effective disconnect between what might have been happening and what I thought I almost understood about it . Ken Rus Schmoll directed a stellar cast that included Heidi Schreck, Kristen Kosmas, and the ever-watchable Travis York. (45 Bleecker/May.) ******* Blind Ness: The Irresistible Light of Encounter: Any show that can keep me parked in a hard metal chair in a packed house for over two hours without a break or elbow room and not even notice it, has got to be pretty damn special. The specialness at work here was the pure theatrical brilliance of Ping Chong & Co.'s masterful multimedia exploration of Belgium's ruthless colonial pillaging of the fertile natural resources of the Congo in the late 19th Century. Without ever uttering the words, "Iraq," "oil," "SUV" or "puppet government," Blind Ness could not have drawn a more clear-eyed, more infuriatingly-poignant parallel between the bumbling, plundering Belgian exploiters of then, and their American counterparts of today. (La MaMa/June.) ******* No RNC: I never would have thought that some of the brightest, most hopeful fallout from a dark and toxic year would come from the very porcine source of contamination: the Republican National Convention that drifted over the City like a foul cloud of smug entitlement in late Summer. If indeed every cloud has a silver lining, this was '04's for me: never before have I experienced such a unified, galvanized outpouring of talent, commitment, positively-channeled righteous rage and just plain old-fashioned camaraderie as I did during the weeks before, during and after the RNC invasion. Tossed into the middle of things beyond my wildest expectations, t2k was extremely fortunate to garner the contributions of such fine activist scribes as Jason Grote, Victoria Linchon, Jessica Slote, Alec Duffy, Howard Pflanzer and about a dozen more fine folks I can't squeeze in here right now but will once I get this remarkable record appropriately archived. And I'm gonna do it. Yes. I WILL. And soon. Really. (Locations all over town/August-September.) ******* Entrenched in the Oath: One of the ironies of the above-mentioned windfalls of talent during the RNC was that I spent so much more time here playing editor, I ended up seeing much less than I had planned to. Fortunately, one of the few I did see was this Kiva Company entry to the UnConvention. Beautifully shaped into quiet dramatic form by playwright Jessica Jill Turner from actual interviews with soldiers and the families of soldiers in Iraq, Entrenched pulled its estimable power from just telling it like it is. There was no grandstanding, no diva moments from directors Melissa Boswell and Jane Steinberg's disciplined young cast, no polemics or political tract. It was just the stories of everyday people trying to deal with circumstances beyond their control, and by not trying to put its own stamp on it, the Kiva Company created one of the most powerful pieces of theater I saw all year. (June Havoc/September.) ******* 4.48 Psychosis: Too-often misunderstood and glibly dismissed as playwright Sarah Kane's final fuck-you kiss-off to a disappointing world, the first thing that struck me (OK, one of the many things that struck me, and hard) upon reading Ms. Kane's final work was, "how the hell would anybody stage this?" Fortunately, director James Macdonald had the answer in this touring Royal Court Theatre production: with simplicity, and humor. Splitting Kane's nameless soliloquy three ways (to Jason Hughes, Marin Ireland and Jo McInnes), and putting them upon a bare stage under a huge, angled mirror beautifully complemented the simplicity and cleanness of Kane's text, while heightening its inherent clarity and focus. (St. Ann's Warehouse/November). ******* I Am the Moon and You are the Man on Me: Somehow, I feel that the more I write about this dance performance piece by Julie Atlas Muz, the more I dissipate its power. It was a show that really had to be seen, and no amount of words, however well-chosen or intended, can aptly describe it. So I will let it suffice here to say that Ms. Muz' show caught the essence of gender politics with a taut brilliance I have never before experienced so completely and may never again. (And it was just so fucking FUNNY!) Moon's closing image -- that of the Stars & Stripes waving feebly in the grip of Muz's butt sphincter -- effectively and completely rendered mere words forever useless. (PS122/November.) ******* The Show I Missed Missing The Most: 6 Nights. It wasn't just the lineup of six of the best playwrights working in the City today (Sheila Callaghan, Kia Corthron, Lisa D'Amour, Jason Grote, Sung Rno, Caridad Svich) -- it was the tres-cool settings, site-specific (a personal fave) and radically different each night (a loft in DUMBO, a hotel in Manhattan, a rooftop in the Village, Bryant Park, Roosevelt Island, a carousel). And I was stuck in lowly servitude and couldn't make any of the 6:30PM start times!!! (Ms. Callaghan posted her contribution, Soak, to the RAT list and it totally rocked, as I suspect the others did as well. Regret, regret. Ah, well. Perhaps it will come around again. Someday.) (Various locations/September). ******* And finally, this time around, one NO and one YES for what I hope will continue and what I pray will disappear in the coming year. You pick which is which -- -- The scourge that is the "24-hour play." Two years ago, I foolishly thought I had seen the end of this gimmick-riddled circle-jerk, or at least found it mercifully banished to the suburbs where, if it must exist, it best belongs. But, no. Like a persistent, low-grade virus it came creeping back this year to plague a couple of City theaters that really should have known better. So, please, God, if you haven't already completely abandoned us for our myriad other grievous sins, please let this embarrassing amateur-hour pandering to the fast-food world of McTheater ("would you like fries with that play?") be once and forever expelled to the hinterland stages where the end-product is really for the yuk-yuks of the propellerheads putting it up and not about the quality and nuance that makes real theater, theater. You know, the stuff that takes some time to slap together. -- Writer and occasional t2k contributor Sheila Callaghan's blog. I don't recall now how I first came across it, or just when, but I do remember it was late one night and she had posted a Japanese TV commercial about a very special toilet. One that magically conforms to your butt, or something. Anyway, I was hooked, and not just on the visuals. Ms. Callaghan writes about herself and about life as a writer in NYC in a way that consistently -- sometimes painfully -- takes the personal (hers) and makes it universal (mine/yours/ours). That's what good writers do. They inspire their readers to utter profound exclamations of recognition such as, "yeah, fuckin'-a, yeah!" and the like. (Whenever I've tried this, the result has always read more like a press release for the life I wish I had/want you all to believe I am having). No such filters here. Plus she has myriad arcane links that can only come from long, unhealthy hours prowling the net. And that's good. She does it, so you don't have to. So here's hoping Ms. C blogs on righteously in '05. Oh, and did I mention she also writes plays ... ? Brook Stowe is editor of theater2k.com, has big plans for 2005 and can't wait to share them with you all. |
