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pugilist
specialist | 59e59 09.20.04:
Plays are all about the suspension of disbelief. The more convincingly
a playwright, director and cast Such is the case with the Riot Group's Pugilist Specialist. Undeniably powerful in its presentation -- due largely to playwright Adriano Shaplin's remarkable ear for supercharged, sparring repartee and the drill-team precision of the ensemble -- Pugilist tracks the planning and execution of a United States Marine Corps "black ops" mission to assassinate a certain bothersome Middle Eastern dictator code-named "The Bearded Lady." Combative, suspicious and constantly testing one another, this is a group of jarheads like you've never seen. Or, more accurately, heard, unless there is some special USMC Mensa Squad out there somewhere. Not conversing as much as continually pummeling one another, ace hit team members Lieutenants Stein (Stephanie Viola), Studdard (Drew Friedman) and Freud (playwright Shaplin) hurl the invective of their personal philosophies and worldviews at one another in a kind of protracted, profanely erudite Socratic dialogue marginally moderated by their CO, Col. Johns (Paul Schnabel). Not that the Colonel is able to maintain much order, respect or even attention from his charges. The discipline and rank hierarchy that is the glue holding the Real Life military together quickly dissolves here into a kind of tumultuous group-therapy session in which everyone has serious issues to unload but no one has the talking stick. Dancing further out on the edge, Riot Group's staging (the ensemble directed and designed the production as well) is in a static, presentational style in which the characters direct all out at the fourth wall, never looking at one another, and seldom even moving. This is a risky approach that would more than likely sink at least eight of any given ten plays out there, but Shaplin's writing is such a delicious pleasure to immerse in from moment to moment that nothing else really matters. Not even Shaplin's own sound design, a simple -- and simply exasperating-- four-chord keyboard loop that begins at pre-set and continues without respite or mercy throughout the show's 60+ minutes, incurring vivid fantasies of ripping out 59E59's impressive sound system by its roots (and then there were those repeated references to the "cover" of the New York Times, whatever that may be). Less picky-picky is the play's violent climax. For all its investment in dazzling top-dog dialogue, Pugilist ultimately turns on its plot points, and the payoff here seems both unnecessarily abrupt and not particularly well-earned. But these are glancing blows that can't knock this Pugilist more than a little off-balance. Playwright Shaplin is still very young (he's in his mid-20s) and still very much in the early "hey, look at me!" phase of what could be a formidable playwriting career. Pugilist is both a visceral gut-punch and a philosophical gut-check -- it's astringent, abrasive theater from a gutsy Bay Area quartet. 06.28.04: I am sitting here staring at my Sidekick 99 calendar just to confirm the fact that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 opened just three days ago (OK, five days if you're in NYC).
All anyone needs to do is take a scroll down our front page to get a pretty fair idea of which side of the fence we fall on here at t2k when it comes to the current administration, so the fact that we endorse this film with extreme prejudice probably won't come as a surprise to anyone (even so, the ice-cream truck bit was great). Moore's film isn't a "documentary" in the classic, objective, fly-on-the-wall style of, say, a Frederick Wiseman. Moore is a gleeful, unapologetically virulent polemicist, wielding his own incendiary brand of agit-prop cinema like a caveman's cudgel, and F911 is so balls-to-the-wall outrageous at points, it is unlikely to change anyone's position on the issues. You're either gonna dig the shit out of it, or you're going to want to rip Moore's fat guts out. And that, I think, may be the ultimate impact and importance of this film -- waking people up to what the fuck is going on and what America is doing in and to this world. "Fuck" being the operative word here. Case in point: strolling along Broadway on a fine Saturday afternoon, I noticed a sizeable crowd between 62nd & 63rd Sts. Naturally, I had to investigate. The draw? The box office of the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, which is showing F911 about 18 times a day on 3 screens. All of the shows were sold out through the weekend. And this, on a Saturday afternoon. In NYC, maybe that was to be expected. But the atmosphere around the theater was perhaps indicative of this film's greatest potential impact, and therefore its ultimate legacy: there was, in fact, a political bazaar happening, out on the sidewalk, all around the box office. MoveOn.org had set up a table; there was voter registration going on; people were hawking derisive Bush playing cards and t-shirts; a lone geezer circulated about, silently handing out neatly-printed cards about the "Bush-Saudi Conspiracy." Again, this is NYC, and NYC is not necessarily America (believe me, I know -- I did time in Orange County, CA, where Ronald Reagan is GOD and John Wayne has an airport named after him). F911 had a huge opening weekend here in the City, but the true test will be how it does in Tulsa and Rapid City and Milwaukee and, yeah, Orange County, CA. If Moore manages to wake this country up to what the Bush Adminstration is doing -- really doing -- both to the Iraqi and Afghani people and to the reputation and credibility of the United States in the international community, then F911 will be not merely a successful film, but a benchmark, perhaps, in the righting of our national wrongs. The response that this film has generated here in the City, is just a mild precursor of what this town is going to be like come the end of August and the Republican National Invasion, if the volume of stuff that's starting to hit the t2k mailbox is any indication. As the summer progresses and the end of August draws ever-hotter and ever-nearer, we will continue to post what will surely be an ever-increasing amount of counter-convention information. If you're coming to town to be a part of it, or if you're just considering it, check in with us as the summer moves forward. We especially recommend CounterConvention.org, noRNC, Involver, United for Peace & Justice and, of course, Theaters Against War as sources of Convention protest and resistance information. And, oh yeah, if you haven't yet seen the film, go see it. There is no way you should be living in this country right now and not be at least aware of what this pack of right-wing Christian extremist thugs is doing under the guise of your government. Yes, yours. Because of F911, you can't say later, "Gee, I didn't know..."
06.28.04: Whether by extraordinary prescience or depressing inevitability, Ping Chong & Co.'s brilliant new work, BLIND NESS: The Irresistible Light of Encounter draws unmistakeable parallels between Belgium's brutal colonialization of the Congo under King Leopold II in the late 19th-Century and America's similar aspirations underway in Iraq today under George Bush II. Under
the pious guise of "opening up Africa to Sound familiar? Some of Leopold's proclamations on "developing" the Congo to Western Christian "standards" drew collective groans of contemporary recognition from the capacity crowd at LaMaMa's Annex Thursday night. But Chong's work is much deeper than mere historical precedent, and much subtler than just political tract. The true brilliance of BLIND NESS lies in the deftly fluid and dramatically captivating weave of Leopold's murderous plundering with both the growing awareness and resistance of actual contemporary individuals (namely, British shipping clerk Edmund Dene Morel, Irish nationalist Roger Casement and American missionary-photographer William Sheppard) and Joseph Conrad's fictional Marlow as he pursues the elusive Kurtz into the "Heart of Darkness." Told through a visually dazzling, highly theatrical blend of live performance, period photographs, slide projections, puppetry, and spookily cinematic shadow projections, Chong & Co. made two hours on a hard metal chair sans interval fairly fly past. Particularly outstanding in the large, cohesive ensemble -- which included students from Kent State University's School of Theatre and Dance, where Chong originally developed the work with Michael Rohd -- were Hollis J. Hayden, Jr. and Bobby Bermea in multiple roles, Jeff Randall's egomaniacal Henry Morton Stanley and M. Burke Walker's Leopold. Technically, Stephen Zapytowski, Sr.'s surround-sound design deserves a special note of appreciation. A two week run (which closed June 27) was far too short for a production of this depth and exceptional intelligence. Hopefully, it will find a longer run here in town soon. Or ... perhaps during the Republican National Invasion later this summer? I cannot think of theater that could be more relevant to that event -- and all it represents -- than this. 05.03.04: Anne Washburn is fast emerging as one of New York's most engagingly versatile playwrights of this young century. Chameleon-like in the form, style and structure of her plays, one factor that remains consistent throughout Washburn's work is her strong, vibrant use of language. By turns playful, sparring, baffling and challenging, Washburn takes obvious delight in both the turn of a phrase and in turning phrases against one another and on their heads. Plus, in "The Internationalist," Washburn and her linguistically nimble cast give us an entire new language to confront, a kind of slippery-Slavic tongue that both draws us into the intrigue of this unnamed foreign setting and distances us through our inability to understand a substantial chunk of what is going on. This distance is especially important as we follow Mark Shanahan's Lowell -- a protypical, gregariously clueless American -- as he attempts to navigate both the internecine squabbles and alliances of the "foreign office" and the mystery cuisine, libations and customs of a taciturn foreign culture. The play's elusiveness congeals slowly into a stifling haze that drifts about Lowell and his mysterious, increasingly sinister business colleagues. The effect for both Lowell and audience is cumulatively unsettling, like standing on unstable ground that is constantly shifting, sliding slowly towards some unstoppable catastrophe. In addition to Shanahan, standouts in director Ken Rus Schmoll's sharp cast include Kristen Kosmas' sinuous Irene and Heidi Schreck's inscrutable Sara. Sue Rees' cooly economical set design makes optimal use of 45 Below's special cavernous space. 04.10.04: It has become increasingly difficult over the past 3+ years to mark the dividing line between reality as we know it and Orwellian nightmare. "Audit" -- theater et al's complex and involving new theater piece, blurs that line just a little bit more. Inspired in part by the "ethically dubious" cash awards dished out by the federal government to the families of those lost in the September 11 attacks, "Audit" places three neighboring suburban families onstage under the watchful eye of The Auditor and an all-seeing Big Brother, arbitrarily assigning monetary value to each based upon material wealth and physical attributes. As designed and excecuted by Brian Rogers, Aaron Rosenblum and Ryan K. Vemmer, "Audit" is a tightly-choreographed dirge to the repetitive drudgery of daily life, and the fickle expediency of material value. Under Rogers' ironic direction, the 9-member cast whirs about in robotic repetition of their meaningless lives while TV newscasts report increasingly apocalyptic national events, local murders and mysterious government experiments. Every once in awhile, somebody drops dead, and we get to find out how much their life has been "worth." The video design by Rogers and David Chikhladze is excellent. As Big Brother, Bob Harbaum creates a post-modern, hipster Big Daddy observing all from the large video projection screen. As The Auditor, Mikeah Ernest Jennings sports the best hair we've seen on any stage so far this year. 03.01.04: Bug, Tracy ("Killer Joe") Letts' apocalyptic play about government conspiracies, dope and country music opened at The Barrow Street down in the Village Feb. 29 for an open-end run. Featuring a strong cast led by Shannon Cochran's Agnes and Michael Shannon's Peter, "Bug" takes its audience on a violent, crack-crazed downward spiral of paranoia and delusion. Or is it? Letts' clever script raises enough ambiguity to make ex-serviceman Peter's conviction -- that he is the guinea pig carrier of prototype transmitter bugs implanted in him by a secret government-corporate consortium -- seem at times downright plausible. Then again, maybe it's all, as Agnes wonders at one point, on account of "we've been hitting that pipe a little too hard." The cast also includes Amy Landecker, Michael Cullen and Reed Birney. Dexter Bullard directs. Lauren Helpern's outskirts-of-Oklahoma City motel set is dead-on, gorgeously tacky.
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