Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 14

Set in a high school where certain girls, banded together as The Carpenters, are in an anorexia/bulimia competition, where the intermediate prize is to date the hunky The Brad and the longer-term prize is death by malnutrition, the show follows the battle between the utterly unscrupulous uber-bitch Renee and fierce competitor Jeanine to succeed Monique, the late victor in these hunger games, as The Brad's choice.

We know from the fact that playwright and performer Valerie David is standing before us that the upshot will be triumphant, and we don't mind the predictability at all. This is a good, healthy kind of predictability, based in the truth and commonality of the experience being shared. And if there are some storytellers' tricks employed along the way, that too is just fine.

This is not a show about big issues; the pathos comes from the human condition, to the basic facts of which the play is usually true, even when operating as a well-tooled laughter-delivery-vehicle. If there can be said to be a moral to Silverman's story, it is simply that it is extremely hard to become close to someone, and even harder to stay close. A good thing to be reminded of, and especially in such an amusing way.

Anne, like Henry, is engaged in more than just affairs of the heart. She too ends up playing (and winning, on the best terms available to her) the game of thrones. Just before her arrest, she is offered a choice, which she recognizes lies between survival and legacy. Her choice of the latter is immediate, and has long-lasting positive effects, dwarfing those made by her ostensibly more powerful husband.

It is a tour-de-force for the actress who portrays Juliana. Juliana is called on to deliver a huge range of emotions, sharp at some times, pathetic at others. She must be violent, querulous, authoritative, analytical, disoriented, witty, nicotine-deprived, paranoid, serene ... etc., etc., etc. She must even wolf down what looks like a complete Chinese carryout dinner. Julia-Ann Elliott seems to have this mercurial role firmly in hand.

It is a safe bet that at every institution of secondary education with female students, there are Mean Girls. It is also a safe bet that there isn't a reader who needs the term defined, because there probably isn't a reader who hasn't experienced Mean Girls - or been one of them. And one trait we know the Mean Girls all share is they make people want to kill them.

Such dramatic suspense as exists in Crash and Burn hangs on the question whether it is possible Financier Milty has outsmarted himself (perhaps out-stupided himself might be a better phrase) by retaining two such paragons of dimness, greed, and vanity as Lawyers Crash and Burn to represent him: Might they fail at failure?

We watch as Doug takes stock of his situation, recognizes the failure of vision on the part of his captors, their inability to see him as a fellow-human, and recognizes what this means in terms of his power and his lack of power. It is a humbling lesson, but one he needs to learn to survive.

Perhaps most important, 20th Century Blues (notwithstanding its title) addresses, from the inside and the outside, the universal experience of aging, an experience common to all times and places.

Charles, the ship-charterer (Brian D. Coats), is a black man who believes himself superior to all the black people who surround him. He has internalized the view held by Jim Crow America of African Americans as the inferior "other," but in order to entertain that view he necessarily has mentally set himself apart. Anderson's remarks in the program suggest Charles is an exemplar of America's notion of exceptionalism.

What makes The Second Girl a comedy more than anything else is Cathryn Wake's electrifying performance as Cathleen, a confection of flashing eyes, red hair, a tell-the-truth-and-shame-the-devil attitude, and naked ambition. Her vivacity is inescapable.

The great legends and myths have their roots in common human experience. Yet it is not always obvious which experience gives rise to them. Take the myth of Medea, the sorceress who aided the hero Jason and who, when Jason cast her aside to make a politically expedient marriage, murdered their two sons. Only part of the story is commonplace: the part about Medea being cast aside. We all know (if we are not ourselves) women (and men) whose spouses have deserted them and left them heartbroken. Few of us, however, know parents, and especially mothers, who have murdered their children for that reason. Nor is it fair to trace the roots of the myth to occasional feelings of 'wanting to kill' Junior; those feelings are seldom serious to begin with, and almost always transient.

Hairspray is, in fact, a great raspberry blown in the face of realistic expectations, a visit to a fantasyland where cruelty and meanness and class pretensions stand no chance. And we never get tired of watching that raspberry get blown.

If you love Love Letters, if you want to Oliver and Jennifer again (sort of), or you just want to see two old professionals having gentle fun together, this show's for you.

I know a gripping mythos when I see one. This is the real deal. If you have the kind of imagination that responds to graphic novels and Game of Thrones, this one is for you. You will find yourself transported for three hours into a world completely different from our own, but it is nevertheless detailed, dramatically coherent, and totally absorbing.

Driven to a frenzy by the thought that director film director Frank Capra is in the audience, the Hay family and their retinue get completely confused about the play to be performed for him. Is it Private Lives or Cyrano de Bergerac? It kinda matters which, since the two plays aren't interchangeable, as Moon Over Buffalo will in due course illustrate.

This Sally (Andrea Goss) is definitely British, definitely a waif and of limited talent, and has her eyes wide open to the hell her generation of revelers is headed toward in a handcart. Her biggest number, Cabaret, is delivered as nearly a de profundis, a wail of a trauma victim.

Morisseau's explanation of the Detroit riots makes a lot of sense, and resonates with my understanding of what happened last year in Baltimore. Morisseau's thesis is that the black citizens of Detroit were not crazy, just reacting to an ongoing culture of police abuse, and that abusive police and military responses were to blame for most of what went wrong once the spark of protest had been struck by the raid of an unlicensed after-hours drinking club known as a 'blind pig.'

We in the audience are continually torn between cheering the gumption and the desire behind Blanche's lies and being appalled at the human cost the lies inflict, not least on the teller of them.

The unresolvedness of social themes is a feature, not a bug, as far as Miller is concerned. Miller has willed the ambiguities and the gaps in information, and tightly controlled the opportunities for interpretation that might resolve or suggest resolutions to the ambiguities. There is a path to execute, and the Everyman crew execute marvelously, but this is not the same thing as the artistry that directors and actors can ordinarily exert. Most plays give their performers more room to interpret, to breathe.