Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 8

This was a substantial play that dealt thoughtfully with a host of issues. There's feminism: the story of a woman fighting her way through a male-dominated profession, rising from a little paper in Battle Creek to a national byline with the Associated Press. There's journalistic ethics: what happens when a reporter gets too close to a subject, and the tricky line between reporting and public relations. Then there's the problem encountered by an involuntary archivist: what to do with a trove of letters that reveal a historical personage's private life? And most of all, there's a strange love triangle: on the evidence of the play, Hickok was nearly as smitten with Franklin Roosevelt's policies as she was with his wife, going so far as to serve in his administration.

There is no perfect way to realize Shakespeare's vision, but employing an all-female cast is apt to be among the less successful ways. In the alternative, you can say the hell with realizing Shakespeare's vision, and simply have fun with your own. And that, I think, is the approach that director Wendy C. Goldberg has chosen to pursue at Center Stage

If you view this production as an entertainment for those whose taste runs to Mad Max, to Rocky Horror, and to the movies of Quentin Tarantino (none of which I'm knocking, but let's not call them Shakespeare), then this may be a lark for you.

That you're going to have a wonderful time at Kinky Boots is something I don't have to tell you. If you're a theatergoer with a pulse, you'll have heard about the musical's great success (six Tonys, two-and-a-half years on Broadway). And you'll probably know that it was crafted from a movie that was itself all but a perfect musical, but for the absence of dedicated songs. You'll also know that Kinky Boots' book is by Harvey Fierstein and the songs by Cyndi Lauper. With credentials like that, it would be inconceivable that the result could be other than bliss. All the rest is simply a bunch of details.

The America depicted here is a place of quests: Father's for the unknown horizon, Tateh's for a land where he and his daughter can prosper, Coalhouse's for reuniting with Sarah and raising his son in a world where blacks are regarded and treated as equals. To these quests might be added two more: Younger Brother's for some ideal he can build a life around and Mother's, a quieter one, to nurture a family, whatever contours her decency and generosity cause it to assume. And all of these quests are played out among the novelties and sensations of an exuberant American decade: among the things which will figure in the plot are Henry Ford's Model T, J.P. Morgan's library of priceless incunabula, the notorious charms of uber-courtesan Evelyn Nesbit, and the antics of escape artist Harry Houdini.

Inspector Goole (Chris Genebach), already knows the answers to all his questions, yet his method, bullying confirmatory confessions out of the family members, is great theater. Until the advent of the Cockney-accented Goole, the King's English-speaking Birlings mostly fancy themselves honorable, kind, and praiseworthy. In reality, they are the beneficiaries of a caste system which, as Priestley depicts it, is a citadel against the poor, whose poverty is an inevitable outcome of the rules that the caste in the citadel impose. Goole exposes the unsavory truths of this arrangement, destroying all the Birlings' illusions of innocence in the process - perhaps, though the play also makes clear how evergreen and hard-to-eradicate such illusions are.

The characters are all compelled by circumstances to go back into the woods, and this time they encounter there such things as infidelity, divorce, the death of parents, the death of children, abandonment, catastrophe - and overarching this the absence of a narration (the narrator becomes a casualty) or any other authoritative guidance as to the choices that need to be made. As one of the characters observes: 'The path has strayed from you.' The unsettling conclusion: 'You decide what's right / You decide what's good.' This is all incredibly sad and confusing, not to mention frightening, and yet as the core of surviving characters gels, so does the indomitability of the human spirit they evince.

For a weightless and elegant good time, it would be hard to beat The Full Catastrophe, by Michael Weller, at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. There is not one thing in the story to tether it to reality, or trouble us with any true sense of its characters being in any kind of jeopardy, and the presentation of the whole farrago, under Ed Herendeen's direction, is smooth and amiable. This play is best consumed at the end of one's visit to this year's Festival, after sampling the weightier and more nutritional fare.

The overall effect is a bit like a fireworks display, with loud fun things happening more or less continually. It is not profound, a quality seldom looked for in shaggy dog stories, but the tale at its heart, a whimsical family drama, is sturdy enough, and perhaps the place where a more genuine feminism is lurking than may be found in the odd evocation of fashion.

The action, from the shadowy world of religious cults and deprogrammers, takes place in the ruins of a derelict motel, where distraught mother Kate (Tasha Lawrence) has been brought by Stine (Lee Sellars), a supposed specialist in reuniting abandoned parents with cult-brainwashed youngsters. Stine intends (so he says) to abduct Kate's daughter from the cult's commune and work with her here. The shockingly scuzzy room tells us immediately is that something is terribly wrong with Kate and Stine's scheme. So does a financial fact revealed in the early going. In the course of the play, we find out what that something and several other somethings are.

The success of PUSSY RIOT rests upon what author Barbara Hammond gets right. This includes a recreation of an actual Pussy Riot provocation/performance; excerpts from the Russian government's show trial which rely largely on the actual words of the defendants, lawyers, and judge; and the language and attitudes of the authorities, especially the police and the judiciary, which are notorious. And overarching these, the show nails the crisis of authority and legitimacy for the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church, a crisis the Pussy Riot protestors helped exacerbate for a while to an acuteness sharper than even the play conveys.

Whitney and Max have been compelled by their mental disorders to turn their backs on the real world, and on the actual human connections available to them with friends and family, to obsess instead about imaginary worlds of their own making. But for each of them, their world, however artistic and creative, is also of a place of some danger. When medicine begins to cure them, they must compare the value of a sane life with love but without creativity and an insane life with creativity but without love

The Pillow Book takes off from the current vogue of non-consecutive story-telling; everyone wants to emulate the mystification of Pulp Fiction, with its sudden reveals of not only what will happen, but of what did happen. And recently there has been an additional vogue, which I call Cubistic story-telling, in which the characters and their lives turn out multiple ways, without an authoritative single story line. The approaches can also be combined. Such works always make the viewer struggle to follow the conflicting and shuffled storylines, but seldom leave the viewer in the dust. The dust, however, is where Anna Moench's The Pillow Book will leave you. The more is the pity. Anna Moench writes beautifully, and the acting and directing in this collaboration of two interesting fringe companies is uniformly good. But the conflicting storylines shred each other.

There is a kind of magic which will exorcise the problems of Blithe Spirit, and let us not notice them: This production cruises and coasts on the farcical elements and the bickering and the eccentricities of Mme. Arcati the medium, and in so doing it certainly keeps the audience laughing. But it does not dispel the sour taste lingering at the end.

There are times it's hard to credit that 1776 is even a musical. In this retelling of the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, there is some singing and some dancing, and even some laughs, but little effort to follow the tried-and-true path to rousing musical success. This is fundamentally a tale of a group of men sitting in a room debating, and Peter Stone, author of the book, gives us - a group of men sitting in a room debating. And yet the work has considerable power and appeal, and it is not strange either that it won the Tony for Best Musical in 1969, or that Toby's has revived it.

Even though the historical Marley was probably mainly thinking about apartheid when he sang these words, you could not possibly sing them on a Baltimore stage these days without making the audience think of events closer to home. Bob Marley, very self-consciously a prophet, sang for his moment, but he sang as well for the ages, which includes our own. Center Stage could not have bought Bob Marley's topicality, but it could earn it, and did. One could believe it really was Marley up there, singing right to us.

Only a brave community theater would take on The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico Garcia Lorca's last play. Written by a closeted gay playwright at the very outset of the Francisco Franco's conservative fascist rule and savagely attacking that era's repression of female freedom, both social and sexual (and by implication other freedoms), it inevitably betrays an air of extreme avant-gardeism. Ibsen and Strindberg and Wedekind may have gone into the same territory, but as of 1936 not too many others. And Lorca drives home his message as if no one had ever conveyed it before - which was more or less true in his time and place.

If charming and silly are your thing, you'll have fun at Thirteen Dead Husbands by Tom Horan. Set in 'a Paris of the Imagination,' it centers around Dee-Dee (Cassandra Dutt) the 'most beautiful girl in the world,' whose stunning looks come with a serious drawback. The drawback: You marry her, you die promptly of some kind of unpredictable catastrophe. When the action starts, she has already been widowed twelve times, and has a trunk-full of wedding dresses to prove it. The question then becomes what kind of man would now seek Dee-Dee's hand, and what are his chances (of matrimony, and if so, of survival) if he does?

Playwright Miwa Yanagi is almost certainly right that the authorities convicted the wrong Tokyo Rose, but the main point isn't that, but rather that the spirit of Tokyo Rose was ethereal, ephemeral, and not subject to being captured, either by soldiers or even by memory. Except for recordings of her voice, she is absent.

There is much more to the play than Mama's turn as a sort of Auntie Mame-of-the-Ituri-rainforest. It is also the unflinching story of how, in the words of Salima, men wage war "on [women's] bodies." Particularly in contemporary warfare rape is a form of combat, aimed at destroying societies. The scene in Act Two where Salima describes what happened to her is not only uncomfortable, it is a display of raw theatrical power and a tutorial about the mechanics of social destruction in the wake of rape.