Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- DAWN at The Flea Theater by Thomas Bradshaw, Directed by Jim Simpson, through December 6

                                              ... partial redemption ...

Dawn at The Flea Theater has lots to keep you interested including vivid and sensational scenes, great acting and important content -- alcoholism and child sexual abuse.  It would be stronger if it did not struggle with problems of character and plot.

In the most powerful episode, a pedophile Unc le transforms an on-line Lolita into his sexual partner all the way to rolling-on-the-floor-naked success.  It's the crux in this play of family disaster and a classic scene:  well observed, well written, an engine for the narrative and on a significant topic.

But other scenes are only titillating ad-ons.  A gorgeous young actress in a Victoria's Secret garter belt ensemble lustily climbs astride her elderly, gin sodden husband, failing to get a rise out of him.  It's part of a subplot that brings hype to the play, not drama, and doesn't ring true.

The acting hits every target.  Gerry Bamman as the successful business man and elderly alcoholic conveys psychological nuance and hilarity -- he's never out of character.  Irene Walsh as the desirous younger wife, Kate Benson as the ironic but vulnerable first wife, Laura Esterman as the beleaguered mother of the sexually abused 14 year old, Steven as the God loving abuser, Jenny Seastone Stern as the 14 year old "in love" with her Uncle -- all are perfect.

But in spite of their best efforts, the play is unconvincing.  How on earth does this elderly, violent, man who polishes off gin by the quart maintain his successful business and -- if that were not enough -- remain an object of sexual and emotional desire for two women?  Why on earth is his young wife filled with lust for an old drunk who doesn't reciprocate her passion, and why so unwilling to leave him?  Why should we believe in the facile religious conversion of this brutal, dyed-in-the-wool alcoholic?

The ending, though, is smart, thought provoking and true -- it goes part way to redeem the rest.

DAWN plays at The Flea Theater on White Street in Manhattan's Tribeca, through December 6.

                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- American Buffalo by David Mamet with Cedric the Entertainer, John Leguizamo and Haley Josel Osment at the Belasco Theatre

                                    ... Creative Transformation ...

Van Gogh, in his painting The Night Cafe turns a down and outers' bar into a Church, recreating its denizens in the process.  In David Mamet's American Buffalo, we come to see a low-life junk shop as a home and its loser occupants gain a big win -- a family.

This play is in many ways the opposite of A Man for All Seasons, recently reviewed below.  Instead of men in hgh positions loftily debating issues of Universal Importance, it's about three at the bottom of the ladder planning a heist with profanity peppered language.  These men have vast failings but genuine feelings they don't themselves know until the hot circumstances and cause and effect of the failed heist bring them deeper understanding.

"Teach," played brilliantly by John Leguizamo, is violent, bitter and clutchy for love.  Bobby, played by Haley Joel Osment, is just a kid but already, we assume, tossed around by life and dropped down on a path of crime.  Donny Dubrow, played by Cedric the Entertainer is the stable, though opportunistically criminal, owner of the wonderously cuttered junk shop -- an alter ego of the rich clutter of lived lives.  They seem like losers but when, through a series of torturous misfires they come to understand the love that keeps them together, sublimity enters.  They're in a new place -- though it's still Donny's junkshop. 

It's too bad this play has a limited run and is closing tomorrow, November 23 but, having just seen it, I'm reviewing it because there'll be other chances to see it.  Like the object of desire in the play, the American Buffalo nickel, it's an American Classic.

                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, Starring Frank Langella as Sir Thomas More, Roundabout Theatre Company

                                        .... A mixed bag ....

A Man for All Seasons is founded on a topic of great inherent power:  the collision of individual conviction and state power.  The play is well written, well constructed, and given every advantage in the fine acting of Frank Langella and the excellent production by Roundabout Theatre.

Why then does it fall flat?

Because Sir Thomas More has all the virtues while his enemies have all the vices.  That's not human nature nor history and so, as drama, it doesn't ring true.

King Henry VIII and his lieutenant, Cromwell, override the opposition of Thomas More and others to wrest an independent Church of England free from the grasp of the Roman Catholic Church.  The historical context is highly ambiguous in terms of "right" and "wrong."  Yet More in this play is all high minded, personal conviction, the King is a callow youth and libertine devoid of political purpose -- a vast oversimplification of this empire builder -- and the passionate Protestant Thomas Cromwell is a conniving, power hungry Iago -- though not endowed with Shakespearian charisma.

The play recounts More's fall from royal grace to poverty, imprisonment and execution because of his principled stand -- his refusal to sanction the King's divorce from his wife of nineteen years who had not borne him a son, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the very acts that catalyzed the King's leap for his nation's independence from the Roman Catholic Church.  At the play's end, More is beheaded for his refusal -- "I will not bend" -- to sign the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

You'd never guess that Cromwell, who some see as the originator of the English Reformation, was as devoted to his vision of a sovereign England as More was in his loyalty to Rome.  History tells us that More persecuted Protestants and was not opposed to burning at the stake for heretics, although he tolerated his Lutheran son-in-law.  Evidently he was a mixed bag, like everyone else.  Outstanding theatrical experience and skills at play in this production can't mask the strain of covering up the overly simplistic view of A Man for All Seasons.

It's interesting that so far this Fall there have been four plays that focus on the conflict between individual conscience and the power of the state -- A Man for All Seasons, The Grand Inquisitor, Galileo, and Antigone, all discussed in posts here below.  Three of them focus in one way or another on the Inquisition.  Is this a category?  Theater of the Inquisition?

A Man for All Seasons is playing at American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street in New York City.

Of related interest, see New thoughts on A Man For All Seasons in post above, and Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII in post above.

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

               

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- BLACK WATCH at St. Ann's Warehouse

 

BLACK WATCH -- What a title!  The famous Black Watch regiment on its blackest watch:  Iraq. 

The regiment's proud history and the tragic trajectory of its assignment during the Iraq war  melded by the acid of irony.       

What's astounding here is the union of naturalistic acting with choreographic flights of imagination.  The regimental crew is so totally believable as soldiers, simple Scottish guys turned military, that it's hard to believe they're actors, even from one foot away as I saw them from the first row.  After the play, I expected they'd head back to barracks.  Actually, I felt I'd been in the army.  These are actors?

Yes, brilliant and versatile--and energetic--actors, resolving hostilities in the group with dancing wrestling matches, miming their responses to letters from home--bitter or joyous--with sign language and mime.  Taking gunfire with shock and gallows humor.  Their claustrophobic living conditions and desert dry days are relieved by poignant porn photos, and a sensory overload of raucous, blaring firepower seen from the distance...until it closes in.  In  the individual, resistant breaths of bagpipes we hear men struggling to stay alive.

St. Ann's theater is set up like a local high school stadium with the drama arena the playing field, and we cheer and fear for these soldiers we know as well as the kids in our class.  It keeps us in touch with their vulnerability.

This is the finest contemporary play I've seen since Stephen Adly Guirguis'  Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train. 

BLACK WATCH is written by Gregory Burke and directed by John Tiffany, and presented by the National Theatre of Scotland.   

St. Ann's Warehouse is in Dumbo, Brooklyn.   Their web site will tell you a lot of ways of getting there.  Go.

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Grand Inquisitor, from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, at New York Theatre Workshop, starring Bruce Myers

                          ..... Did Dostoevsky read this over befor he published it ... ?

It's hard to take on Dostoyevsky but this really is somewhat sophomoric.  Bruce Myers was too appealing and spry for the aged Grand Inquisitor with terrifying power over life, death and torture -- and that's the whole piece, a dramatic monolog.  Christ just sits and listens with his back to the audience until the end when he gets up, gives the Grand Inquisitor a kiss (love? betrayal?) and walks off, released from the Inquisitor's threat to burn him at the stake, presumably because we all know that never happened.  The whole does not add up to a "great argument" as people like to say, and as  was repeated often at a recent roundtable.

Christ, we're told, arrived in Seville at the height of the Inquisition because he felt sorry about all the people burning, and starts off by bringing sight to a blind man and raising a child from the dead, causing an excited and hopeful stir but the Grand Inquisitor soon puts a stop to that, arrests Christ and in a prison visit speachifies to him for 52 minutes.  And when all is said and done, they continue to burn people in Seville. 

The Grand Inquisitor's claim is that Christ isn't really good for people, the Catholic Church is, and Christ's "freedom" spoils the Church's hold on people's obedience and faith.  The Inquisitor's argument includes the idea that Christ spurned miracles, although they are useful for the Church -- this IN SPITE OF THE FACT that Christ's first acts in Seville are miracles.  The Inquisitor's argument is full of holes.  He says it's better for people to have food than freedom but there are at least two problems there.  1) The Church hasn't ensured food for the people and 2) why Christ's "freedom to chose" interferes with people getting food isn't taken up.

This is not, generally, an ambiguous piece of writing.  There are two basic interpretations.  1) It's an expression of what he saw as the hocus pocus of the Catholic Church (Dostoyevsky being a strong believer in the Russian Orthodox Church)  2) It's prophetic of future totalitarian states which give food to people at the expense of their freedom, robbing them of their freedom of choice.  Since a totalitarian state with those attitudes did in fact rise in Russia after Dostoyevsky, that gives, I suppose, some kind of credibility to his "prophetic vision" but the connection's pretty lose.

Dostoyevsky is a great novelist because he creates vivid characters with heart wrenching desires, passions and quests.  In this Grand Inquisitor segment, which is an anomalous drop-in to the novel, although it does have an effect on the characters outside and beyond it, the Inquisitor is a mouthpiece for ideas rather than a character.  Things are said well -- this is a great writer after all -- but they are not thought out well.

For what Ben Brantley calls an "immortal  parable of of worldly and spiritual power," none surpasses the character driven, situation driven argument between Creon and Antigone in Sophocles' Antigone (see critique of The Oedipus Cycle below) -- though I wouldn't want to see that played out of context either.

The Grand Inquisitor presented by Theatre for a New Audience & New York Theatre Workshop, directed by Peter Brook, plays at Theatre for a New Audience on East 4th Street in New York City through November 30.

As always, comments welcome!  Just scroll down and click on gray "comment" button.

Nearby restaurant favorite:  Cucina di Pesce, 87 East 4th Street

            NEXT:  Black Watch at St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn

                                                                              Yvonne Korshak