BWW Reviews: Zeitgeist Stage Offers Ample Feast With 'Tiny Kushner'

Tiny Kushner: An Evening of Short Plays by Tony Kushner

Direction & Scenic Design, David J. Miller; Stage Manager, Margaret Umbsen; Costume Design, Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design, Chris Fournier; Sound Design, Walter Eduardo

CAST: Maureen Adduci, Craig Houk, Kara Manson, Victor Shopov

Performances through October 22 by Zeitgeist Stage Company in the Plaza Black Box Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, MA; Box Office 617-933-8600 or www.BostonTheatreScene.com.

One fact is irrefutable: Tony Kushner is an intelligent and gifted writer. If he had retired after penning his 1993 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning epic play in two parts Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, this singular achievement would have cemented his legacy in the pantheon of the finest American Playwrights of his and several other generations. It is our great fortune that Kushner is prolific and has continued to write for both stage and screen, garnering an Emmy Award, three Obie Awards, and an Oscar nomination, among many others. Now, Boston theatergoers have an opportunity to sample a tasting menu, as it were, as Zeitgeist Stage Company opens their 2011-2012 season with the East Coast premiere of Tiny Kushner, a collection of five short plays which were packaged together in 2009 by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for a mini-Kushner Festival.  

Artistic Director David J. Miller directs the play and hand selected four cast members who have all previously worked with him at Zeitgeist. Although none of the four has acted together before, their chemistry in the mix and match nature of Tiny Kushner is organic. Kara Manson and Maureen Adduci set a light tone in the opening segment Flip Flop Fly!; the duo concludes the play on a decidedly more serious note in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. Adduci and Craig Houk pair up in Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker In Paradise, Manson plays a bit part with Victor Shopov in East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: A little teleplay in tiny monologues, and all four appear in Terminating OR Sonnet LXXV OR "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" OR Ambivalence. (Note that Kushner's penchant for lengthy, detailed titles for his plays persists!)

Kushner's scripts often cast a laser beam on both political and religious topics, and he skewers real people, dead or alive, in the process of telling his stories. The roster of characters in Tiny Kushner includes 20^th century musician and eccentric Lucia Pamela, Queen Geraldine of Albania, Richard Nixon's psychotherapist Dr. Hutschnecker, and former First Lady Laura Bush. The author mines his own life and Shakespeare's 75^th sonnet as the basis for Terminating which explores a symbiotic relationship between a therapist and her client who can't seem to disengage from each other. The 36^th president's shrink finds himself on the analyst's couch in the afterlife with Metatron, the highest of the Jewish angels who also serves as the celestial scribe. In searching for common themes amongst the five plays, there aren't many, but three of them are set in the afterlife and Hitler's name is dropped on more than one occasion. However, Miller concedes that there are none that pervade the entire collection.

What does pervade Tiny Kushner is the playwright's incisive wit (three of the selections are comedic) and the Zeitgeist ensemble makes solid contact with the funny bits, as well as the more deeply dramatic. Shopov is practically manic, yet masterful in his portrayal of twenty-two characters (seven of whom are women) in East Coast Ode. In the tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, he differentiates each person simply by facial expression, voice modulation, or a shift in posture. His only props are a nail file and a typed sheet of paper. Houk is believable, first as the clingy client prone to rages, and later as the psychosomatic medicine specialist undergoing his own analysis.  

Manson makes a quick emotional transformation from the unconventional and lighthearted, albeit deceased, Pamela to the lesbian therapist in Terminating. Unable to disconnect from Hendryk (Houk) and unable to conceive a child, the actress convincingly displays Esther's suffering from existential angst as a great weight that slows her movements and virtually elongates her face. As the angel in the concluding play, Manson is ethereal, her face a peaceful mask. Adduci captures the haughty, I-can't-be-bothered-with-peasants attitude of royal superiority in FFF! and maintains a serviceable accent, but her moment to shine comes in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. 

Although not without humor, the latter is the most serious play in the quintet and features the most recognizable character. Adduci's interpretation of Kushner's version of Laura Bush walks a fine line between evoking sympathy for her and showing her complicity, by association, in the policies of her husband W's administration. Prepared to read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov to a trio of dead Iraqi children, she starts off sweet and light, touting the party line about weapons of mass destruction and the evil Saddam Hussein bearing responsibility for their deaths. However, as it begins to sink in that hundreds of thousands of children have died in the war-torn country, Adduci lets us see Laura's porcelain veneer crack and the layers of unspoken, perhaps unacknowledged, guilt rising to the surface, complete with hand-wringing. Just when it appears that she will become unhinged, she pulls herself together and comports herself like a southern lady, her head held high and her ideals intact. 

Wearing his hat as scenic designer, Miller keeps things simple. The black box is configured in the round with four benches in the middle of the performance space. The benches are rearranged to accommodate the requirements of each play, and Director Miller's blocking keeps the bodies moving around to provide all sides of the audience egalitarian viewing. Costumes by Fabian Aguilar help define the characters, especially in the case of Manson's trio of women. Pamela wears a beauty queen sash and tiara, Esther dresses professionally in a little jacket and straight skirt, and the angel is draped in a flowing white gown. Chris Fournier's lighting design adds to the haunting effect of Only We Who Guard The Mystery and Walter Eduardo provides the sound of bird music to give voice to the dead children. Tiny Kushner will ring in your ears well into the night.

 

 

 

 

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