Month: May 2012

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Wrestling with Reality

Eldwood P. Dowd (Jim Parsons) must be the nicest character in American theater.  Within a minute of being onstage, he has enthusiastically accepted two subscriptions to Lady’s Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and invited the telemarketer over to his home.  Later, an elderly lady (Carol Kane), tells him that a Dr. McClure is having a party for his sister from Wichita.  “I didn’t know Dr. McClure had a sister in Wichita,” he says with interest.  “Oh—do you know Dr. McClure?” the lady asks.  “No,” he replies, without any sense of having behaved unusually.  And when his sister, Veta (Jessica Hecht), tries to have him committed to a sanatorium, he is not angry but simply admires her tenacity. Continue reading “Wrestling with Reality”

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I’m Ready For My Closeup

Tracie Bennett dominates the stage in End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s play about the final days of Judy Garland.  Her performance is wonderfully athletic—she bounds across the stage, striking poses, belting out songs, smoking cigarettes, laughing uproariously one minute and bawling uncontrollably the next.  She is not just playing Garland—she is playing Garland playing GARLAND.  She is the superstar who is constantly performing, not only for her fans, but for her friends and her fiancé as well.  Even in moments of anger, in moments of drunken despair, her diction is perfectly theatrical, as when she tells her hubby Mickey Deans (Tom Pelphrey), each syllable carefully enunciated, “Oh, suck—my—dick.” Continue reading “I’m Ready For My Closeup”

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Take My Whole Life Too

It’s the early ‘sixties and the counterculture movement has not quite caught up to the small Midwestern town that provides the setting for David Rabe’s An Early History of Fire.  In fact, they are still not ready to let go of the ‘fifties: Jake (Dennis Staroselsky) insists that Elvis will live forever while Terry (Jonny Orsini), unable to imagine the future, tells his friends, “I ain’t never going to be forty.”  Terry, in particular, is hung up on the past, and begins the play by reminding Danny (Theo Stockman) of the time when they would set hill fires as kids—once, Danny was trapped out on Indian Bluff and thought he was going to burn alive.  But the fires were always put out.  Even Danny’s father, Pop (Gordon Clapp), doesn’t seem to know what decade he’s living in—he spends his time reminiscing about his old chess buddies in Germany or retelling the story of his escape from the Nazis. Continue reading “Take My Whole Life Too”

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Goodbye, Cruel World

The script for Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis contains no stage directions and does not assign its lines to any characters.  Words, numbers, and snippets of dialogue are littered across the page, and we only slowly become aware that the action concerns a psychiatrist and his or her suicidal patient.  This offers directors, designers, and actors a great deal of opportunity for interpretation: the original production featured three actors, one male and two females, while this one, currently running at the Magic Futurebox Theatre, has just two women, who alternate between playing the doctor and the depressive. Continue reading “Goodbye, Cruel World”

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Peter Gets His Name, Starcatcher Drags J.M. Barrie’s Through the Mud

Before Peter (Adam Chanler-Berat) met Wendy—before, in fact, Peter even had a name—he met his famous companion’s mother, Molly Aster (Celia Keenan-Bolger).  In Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher, a prequel to J.M. Barrie’s play, the two embark on their first quest, to protect “star stuff” from falling into the (two) hands of the Black Stache (Christian Borle), a rather unintimidating pirate who will later become Peter’s nemesis Captain Hook.  What exactly is “star stuff”?  It’s never entirely explained, except to say it grants different powers to different people and has nothing to do with Carl Sagan.  Judging by the way it glows from within its sea chest, it is as elusive as the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction—or, as Stache would have it in one of his more far-reaching jokes, “as elusive as the melody in a Philip Glass opera.” Continue reading “Peter Gets His Name, Starcatcher Drags J.M. Barrie’s Through the Mud”

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Fare You Well, Señor Satan

The Irish Repertory has not had a good year.  First, there was Brian Friel’s stultifying, cringingly sentimental Dancing at Lughnasa, then Eugene O’Neill’s bloated, unbearable Beyond the Horizon.  A Shavian comedy is just the kind of play that is needed to inject some life into this theater—and at first glance, Man and Superman seems to be that play: it is an easy comedy of manners about reluctant lovers chock-full of witty one-liners that even features an extended scene in hell in which Don Juan debates the nature of life with the Devil (Jonathan Hammond). Continue reading “Fare You Well, Señor Satan”