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subway
series|tangent theatre co.
door wide open|sanctuary theater workshop tough|real people theater lady from the sea|wax factory reviewed by brook stowe "Subway Series" at Workshop Theater: In some ways, "Subway Series", an evening of six short plays based on and around New York's much-maligned underground public transportation system, functions as a kind of extended in-joke for the locals. The knowing murmurs of recognition one character's line prompts about what a skanktank the "C" train is probably wouldn't mean much even to those MTA riders beyond Manhattan and Brooklyn. But for those of us doomed to ride the line that sounds as though it's breaking apart each time a train leaves the station, it was good to know others share my resigned, well, resignation when it comes to the NYC subway system. For the most part, this "Series" is content to offer up vignettes both amusing and poignant of the actions and reactions produced when you jam a random cross-section of humanity into a big steel can and push it through a hole underground. The program's opener, Craig Pospisil's "The Subway" is, like the rest of this well-ordered evening, well-positioned as an ice-breaker. A skit more than a play, Pospisil takes the simple premise of a stranger asking directions and builds it into a near-brawl amongst the local riders, each convinced s/he has the best route to the destination. Breezily directed by Keith Teller, it gets the evening off to a brisk start. Similarly, P. Seth's Bauer's "The Attractive Women on the Train", coming late in the program, is a familiar grab-bag of urban weirdo types that could have easily crashed and burned in a collision of clichés, but instead is made fresh and engaging by its cast and by Greg Skura's wisely throttled-back direction. As Bonnie, the target of a fellow rider's unencouraged attentions, Barbara Helms avoids slipping into easy caricature, instead playing on real fear and anger for edgy comedic effect as she gradually morphs from the stalked into the stalker. Far and away the highlight of the evening is David Riedy's "Quick & Dirty (A Subway Fantasy)", a deliciously insightful little pas de deus between a man (Michael Rhodes) and a woman (Jill Van Note) alone on a subway platform, waiting for the train. With a highly-charged sexuality that is at times truly palpable (thanks in no small part to the chemistry between Van Note and Rhodes and another strong, subtle turn by director Skura), Riedy's short play brilliantly explores the unbridgeable chasm between not only the content of female and male sexual fantasy, but their purpose and consequences as well. Actor Rhodes also contributes two plays as a writer, and they are the weakest links of the evening. Not that he is a poor writer per se, but both "The Local" and "Down in the Depths" are long-winded, circuitous pieces crying out for either a good dramaturg or a director with a big blue pencil. "The Local", about a gay man (the ubiquitous Greg Skura) assaulted upon exiting a train, circles around being about a hate crime and being about victimizing the victim but never really makes either point very convincingly, despite director Darleen Jaeger's attempts to build tension and climax from what simply isn't there on the page. "Depths", which closes the evening, fares better, because Rhodes crosscuts, so to speak, between three separate couples, thus minimizing his tendency as a writer to bog down. Still, Sophie Acadine's panhandling Young Woman arrives just in time to provide a much-needed boost with a beautifully rendered bluesy a cappella tune. The uncredited "10:20PM", a brief, charming pantomimed vignette capturing a chance encounter between a famed stage actor (Mark Hofmaier) and his fan (the marvelously expressive Hilary Ward) is delightfully directed by Ms. Jaeger. "Subway
Series" "Door Wide Open" at Bowery Poetry Club: Its title taken from a cable writer Joyce Johnson sent to boyfriend Jack Kerouac in response to his request to crash at her Greenwich Village pad upon his return from Paris, "Door Wide Open" also serves as a kind of Über-explanation of how Johnson (née Glassman), a nice, blonde Jewish girl from Riverside Drive, managed to hold on at all to the drunken, mother-obsessed bohemian Beat from working-class Lowell, Mass. "You have to forgive him," the young Joyce says rather plaintively at one point. "I always did." Especially when he didn't even like blondes. Presented as readers' theater, mostly just letters to and fro Johnson (Adira Amram) and Kerouac (John Ventimiglia) with occasional excerpts from Johnson's later memoir Minor Characters sparingly mixed in, "Door" is a swift and engaging ninety minutes, with none of the tedium one might expect from watching stationary actors reading from music stands. The secret? Both Johnson and Kerouac could write, a skill that transferred elegantly and seemingly effortlessly from prose to letters. In this day and age of emails and SMS text messaging littered with BTWs, BFNs and LOLs, the art of letter writing has become a lost one, a particular observant skill at capturing not merely the words, but the zeitgeist of the times as well. And what times they were. Covering mostly 1957-58 and spanning Tangiers, Paris, San Francisco, Florida and Mexico as well as New York, "Door" vividly captures the exhilarating, almost painful excitement of a sheltered young woman immersing herself in the sensual abandon of the Beats. Admittedly living much of her life vicariously through Kerouac's dissolute adventures, Johnson's relationship was filled with as much frustration and longing as it was requitement, or even togetherness. Noting that they went on but a single standard "date" in their entire relationship (Sweet Smell of Success amidst a bunch of snoring bums at the Variety in the Bowery), Johnson's encounters with the maestro of the Beats were more likely to be like the time he woke her up at 4AM, drunk and bloodied from a bar brawl howling, "Cauterize my wounds! Cauterize my wounds!" Playwright Johnson and director Tony Torn have made the novel (for readers' theater) choice of adding a third character: the contemporary Johnson (Amy Wright), who acts as both narrator and occasional sparring partner with her younger self. The choice works, and not only in the functional sense as far as segues, etc., that may have been unclear otherwise. Having the contemporary Johnson questioning and prodding her younger incarnation -- and vice versa -- helps in a subtle way to underscore the limited choices a single woman in her early 20s had in 1950s America. To its greatest credit, this "Door" neither wallows in the past nor tries to re-define or apologize for it. Rather, it is a clean, spare and unsentimental look into a time that was and will never be again. "Door
Wide Open" "Tough" at Collapsible Hole: It's time to say goodbye to "Our Town". At least the Thornton Wilder version which, along with "The Crucible" and maybe "Guys and Dolls" has been on the short-list of acceptable high school theater for a long, long time. Too long. Good plays, all of them, fine plays, plays that spoke to a number of generations. The thing is, those generations are gone. Those generations are no longer in high school. In fact, most of those generations are probably six feet under by now. Real People Theater is doing a new kind of "Our Town": it's called Their Town. It's called My Town. It may even be called Your Town. Real People Theater is theater of the street by those and for those who are growing up on it. Right now. RPT is a company of actors who formed out of Bushwick High School in Brooklyn. Three of them (Cinthia Candelaria, Doris Santiago and Albert Young) were at the Collapsible Hole this weekend with their own adaptation of Canadian playwright George F. Walker's "Tough", under the direction of Stephen Haff. I am not familiar with Walker's original work, and RPT is upfront about doing a "ghetto remix" (with the playwright's blessing) of the text, but what came out Friday night was a visceral blast of anger, pain, confusion, rage and hope. A charismatic trio with a skill that belies their young ages (Santiago is 19; Candelaria and Young, 18), RPT layers an improvisational surface over some very disciplined underpinnings; never does the conflict descend into overlapping, garbled shouting and never does the energy disintegrate into unfocused anger or rage, two common pitfalls of novice improvisation at any age. Underneath the loose "street" vibe lies a honed and polished infrastructure of powerful, resourceful skill. RPT's "Tough" is an hour's worth of love, anger, betrayal, of the labyrinth of relationships, of unwanted pregnancy and what it means and takes to grow into an adult with responsibilities. In other words, this is exactly the type of play that should be performed in high schools for high school students. And because it is, it is exactly the kind of play that most likely won't be, at least under official, bureaucratic administrative sanction. You know, talk of sex and all that street language, and... Right. But RPT is getting the word out. According to their press release, "Tough" has already toured in Toronto, L.A. and Chicago, and they are soon off to Germany. This is a young company with passion, commitment, huevos grandes and the chops to pull it all off. May their town become ours. For
More Info on Real People Theater "Lady From The Sea" at American Can Factory: Out along 3rd Street, deep within the wastelands of industrial Brooklyn, out past the truck repair garages, the welding shops, the overflowing dumpsters and the reeking canals rises the grim, grimy brick of the American Can Factory. And within its yawning 19th-Century caverns and hallways this past weekend, there occurred the most magnificent dream. For it was here, spread out over twelve locations within and without the sprawling Can structure, that The Wax Factory put up its stunning interpretation of Ibsen's relatively little-known 1888 play, "The Lady from the Sea". WF's presentation was not so much a deconstruction of Ibsen's text as it was a complete re-imagining, a distillation of the play's central themes of loss and longing reinterpreted and redesigned as a complementary collective of video, sound, music and dance jutting in and out and about a dank and sprawling structure to unprecedented and at times overwhelming theatrical effect: In the lobby, a young woman struggles, suspended in a large fishing net, her occasional cries electronically sampled and played backwards through large speakers, resembling the sounds of whales; In a room at the end of a hallway, black-clad human mannequins read watery manifestos, their green-hued likenesses captured on video monitors while across the room beyond, a nude woman drifts in a large aquarium, her languid body randomly shocked by sudden strident bursts of distorted, watery sound; In a red fluorescent-lit elevator, a cheerful young woman in a red, archetypal attendant's uniform offers smiles, directions and rides up and down; At the end of an alleyway, on a large videoscreen squeezed into a portal alcove above a rank, flooded basement, the grainy image of a woman in black twists slowly against a pulsating, watery orange horizon; Out in the courtyard, two lovers in black reach for one another from opposing fire escapes. Below them, a long hallway lined with locked doors seeping a lavender fluorescence emits the murmurs of voices and the sound of the sea; At the end of the hallway is an immense, empty cavern of a room where, on a powder-covered mat ringed with ticking metronomes, three young women in white twist and writhe slowly to a pulsating electronic drone, one occasionally breaking off from the others like some protoplasmic discharge to wander the stairways and hallways, lurching and staggering amongst the roving audience. And everywhere, the presence and sound of the sea. When you come out the other end, you emerge drenched not only in the sense of loss and longing that "Lady"'s protagonist Ellida -- trapped in a loveless marriage -- felt for her one-time lover, but also in what director Ivan Talijancic terms the "force that gave us life [that] will eventually come back to reclaim it." The only regret I have about this "Lady" is that, like a dream you don't want to awake from, this Wax Factory presentation was for one weekend only. For
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