Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

The Illusion by Tony Kushner, adapted from Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion Comique, directed by Michael Mayer, Signature Theatre Company

… “an extravagant trifle” …

The Illusion is well produced, stunningly acted, and trivial.  It's interesting, though, for the attention it brings to formal aspects in theater history.  When Corneille wrote L’Illusion Comique in 1635, it was highly experimental for the time -- daring variations on the theme of how to write a play by a young but experienced playwright (7 plays written by the age of 29).  As one would surely learn if one took the course in college, in L’Illusion Comique Corneille breaks with the three classic unities of action, time and place, mixes various traditions – tragic-comedy, pastoral, Commedia del’arte, etc. -- and incorporates not one (as in Hamlet) but multiple plays within a play, the characters’ names changing in concert.  This play about the evanescence of all things is as confusing as it’s meant to be.  It's very much a precoscious -- by close to 400 years -- exercise in deconstruction.

This is not, however, simply Kushner’s translation of Corneille’s play but an adaptation:  Kushner simplified the structure somewhat, and in many places substituted his own poetry for Corneille’s, with a focus on the pains of love that seems separate from the characters and has something of a modern whine to it.          

How does it play (especially if, like me, you didn’t take that 17th-century French drama course?)  After seeing it, I did some research on Corneille’s original play and its context, and what I learned about its experimental aspects was extremely interesting.  I found watching The Illusion, however, mainly boring, with some perking up at surprising moments toward the end (I was almost ready to leave after the first act but I hung in there), a few good laughs and, scattered here and there, some fine poetry.

It starts in a dark, spooky magician’s cave, where a father enters looking for news of his son.  The father had thrown the boy out of the house years ago because he was a troublemaker and hard to handle, but now, nearing the end of life, feeling guilt and ambivalent love, he yearns to know what happened to his son.  The cave has two creepy denizens, the magician, Alcandre, and her gnome-like, scary servant, piano player and “Amaneunsis”,  whose tongue she’s cut out and ears deafened, or so she says.  Together they conjure up episodes from the son’s life for the father to watch … and things are not looking good.  We see the young man -- serially named Calisto, Clindor and Theogenes -- as a philanderer,  a gold-digger, a heart-breaker, precariously near death, and dead, causing his father great grief (in other words:  the son fulfilled his promise).  But things are not as they seem, in case you thought they were.

The situations Calisto etc. gets into of courtly love and infidelity come across as silly:  early on, there’s no sign of depth or meaning so the episodes are irritating rather than interesting.  In Act II the increasing convolutions become so preposterous that they take on the independent life of the excessive, and they are helped by outstanding character acting.  In particular, Henry Stram (also great as the servant) is powerfully weird and intense as the heroine’s wretchedly mean father, and Peter Bartlett is fascinating and touching as the bewigged, pompous Matamore whose dreamy sadness we come to know.  The subtle and humorous expressions that cross Merritt Weaver’s face as the servant who figures out how to strike it rich are a pleasure to watch when things otherwise get foolish.  Throughout, Lois Smith has great stage presence as the magician.

So there are some saving graces in The Illusion, including especially the prompt to learn more about Corneille, and all in all I’m not sorry I saw it, but not seeing it would have been fine, too.  Corneille called his play at various times “a strange monster,” a “caprice,” and “an extravagant trifle, ”  descriptions that survive Kushner’s adaptation.  Corneille knew what he was talking about.  

The Illusion plays at the Signature Theatre on West 42nd Street in NYC through July 11.  For information and tickets, click on live link of the title. 

Yvonne Korshak 

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I Married Wyatt Earp, a musical, book by Thomas Edward West and Sheilah Rae, Lyrics by Sheila Rae, Music by Michelle Brourman, Prospect Theater Company and New York Theatre Barn, at 59 E 59

Throwing convention to the winds, a girl from a well-to-do San Francisco Jewish family joins a traveling theater troupe to get herself to the wild west, where she meets and marries, well, common law, Wyatt Earp -- what a promising idea for a musical! 

And in many ways the promise is fulfilled.  There are great production numbers, beautifully performed -- see I Married Wyatt Earp and you’ll have a good time.  And the idea's original, too -- a Western with no men!  Instead, the story, loosely based in real characters and events, is told through a cast of 11 women, the idea being to place the women’s lives center stage, although that doesn’t work quite as well as it might. 

The wives (common-law and otherwise)  of the three Earp brothers are living together as a tight knit family in the silver boom-town of Tombstone, Arizona when Josie Marcus, the San Francisco outlier, arrives.  She creates quite a stir as a singer-dancer, and in giving up another man for Wyatt Earp, "the love of her live."  

Earp's common-law wife of the time, Mattie, a laudanum addict, tortured now by jealousy, is driven to violence first directed at Josie and then turned inward.  In an ironic turnaround of a traditional Western, Mattie, the weakest of the women, is the one who brandishes the long barreled silver revolver.  But she dies of a suicidal overdose, leaving Josie with Wyatt and a sense of guilt -- though not enough to shake her sparkle. 

I Married Wyatt Earp is framed as a play within a play:  at the start, we see Josie, now 81 years old, and Allie, widow of Wyatt’s brother Wilbur, age 90, in Josie’s apartment for an evening of settling old scores and -- booze at hand -- finding some amicable resolution to their conflicts.  Allie blames Josie for Mattie’s death, and for creating the myth of Wyatt Earp as the toughest law-man, fastest gun and greatest entrepreneur of the West when the crown should have gone to her husband. 

As they reminisce, scenes of their young lives -- the loves, the drama, humor, workaday pleasures and pains -- rise up vibrantly before our eyes.  One of the most powerful aspects is the way the old Josie and Allie move among their young selves, bending over them, observing, and sometimes -- it's absolutely beautiful to see -- singing along.  Of course they can’t change anything – even if they wanted to.  This is marvelously done. 

Other great strengths are the musical numbers, and there are lots of them, this is a real musical and a feast of singing -- solos, duets, quartets and ensembles.  Some of the titles give the flavor:  “High Class Attraction,” “They Got Snakes Out Here,” “Pins and Needles,” “Didya Hear?” (gossip!).  Some of the rhymes are too obvious, still, often I felt I was watching the next great musical.

There's a problem with the musical’s book, though.  The intent is to focus on the women’s lives but the depiction of their lives is incomplete and confused.  It's implied constantly that they work hard, but at what and why is not clear.  At running the bar?  We first meet the wives at the Earp-owned bar where Josie has just arrived and performs with the theatrical troupe (in a rousing number!).  We do see young Allie carry in a crate of bottles but that's it:  there are no customers, nobody serves a drink, wipes a table or mops a floor … and after that scene the bar pretty much disappears. 

Later we find the wives singing about the hard work they do to pay the rent by sewing tents for miners (“Pins and Needles”).   Pay the rent?  Maybe everyone had to pitch in, but we know their husbands are well employed in law enforcement and own a silver mine:  surely they'd be paying the rent, not their wives.  Here and elsewhere, touches of pathos are arbitrarily planted trading on the assumption that we all know that women were exploited and had to work hard so we'll be sympathetic automatically and it doesn't much matter what they're shown working hard at doing. 

Conveying the lives of women whose lives are inextricably tied to those of men, without men, accounts for some of the problems.  So much so that for the episode of the famous Shootout at OK Corral where the Earp brothers wipe out their rivals, the play resorts to the actual presence of males, but as shadowy, silhouetted, forms, all in black, faces hidden by western hats.  Still, I think that with the loose ends more carefully tied, and the women's activities and relationships with the men (even unseen) clarified,  the all-female cast could be maintained.  Take the idea of focusing on the lives of the women to its conclusion -- and really do it! 

Also, we need to have a deeper sense of Josie -- a cliche like "he's the love of my life" is not enough to bring us close to this feisty woman and the unusual choices she makes. 

All the roles are sung, danced and played beautifully – this is a well cast show.  Mishaela Faucher has the singing, dancing and acting strength to hold the play together as its main character.  I was particularly fascinated by the wry wisdom of Carolyn Mignini as the older Josie.  Tina Stafford is irresistible -- tough and extraordinarily graceful in the “pants role” of leader of the theatrical troupe.  Karla Mosley is a great showgirl, with charismatic vitality and beauty.

With some strengthening of the book, this could  be the next great musical but here and now it’s an engaging, fun-filled delight. 

I Married Wyatt Earp  plays at 59 E 59 theater in NYC through June 12.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of the play's title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down past the phoeo, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments. 

 

 

 

2010 - 2011 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards -- Independent Theater Bloggers Association

The Independent Theater Bloggers Association (the “ITBA”) is proud to announce the 2011 recipients of the Third Annual Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards.   Patrick Lee was one of the ITBA's founding members. Patrick passed away suddenly last June, and was an erudite, passionate, and tireless advocate for theater in all its forms. Patrick was also the ITBA's first awards director, and was a regular contributor to Theatermania and TDF Stages.

 

The 2010-2011 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Award Winners:

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY

Jerusalem

 

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL

Anything Goes

 

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL

The Normal Heart

 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

The Kid

 

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL (PLAY OR MUSICAL)

Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches

 

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW/PERFORMANCE (ALL VENUE CATEGORIES)

Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

 

CITATIONS FOR OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF BROADWAY SHOW

Feeder: A Love Story

Invasion!

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Belarus Free Theater's Discover Love

Black Watch

ReWrite

 

UNIQUE OFF-OFF BROADWAY EXPERIENCE

Sleep No More

 

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE

The Scottsboro Boys

 

CITATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE BY INDIVIDUAL PERFORMERS

Nina Arianda, Born Yesterday

Laura Benanti, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Reed Birney, A Small Fire

Christian Borle, Peter and the Starcatcher

Norbert Leo Butz, Catch Me If You Can

Bobby Cannavale, The Motherfucker with the Hat

Colman Domingo, The Scottsboro Boys

Sutton Foster, Anything Goes

Josh Gad, The Book of Mormon

Hamish Linklater, School for Lies

Joe Mantello, The Normal Heart

Arian Moayed, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Lily Rabe, The Merchant of Venice

Mark Rylance, Jerusalem

Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

Benjamin Walker, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

 

CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN OFF-OFF BROADWAY THEATRE

La Mama

 

The list of the 2011 recipients of The Patrick is read by Susan Blackwell, Heidi Blickenstaff, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, the cast and creators of the acclaimed [title of show] and who are currently collaborating on Now. Here. This.", a Developmental Lab Production at the Vineyard Theatre: http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/show-now-here-this.html.   A video of their reading is on Youtube at  http://youtu.be/-aC4viVcP2Y  which was filmed by ITBA member Jesse North. 

 

The ITBA, is comprised of bloggers who regularly see live performances in all its forms in New York City and beyond.   Members are in New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and London.  For further information and a list of our members, our website is www.theaterbloggers.com.  If you are interested in learning more about the ITBA, email info@theaterbloggers.com.  To invite the members of the ITBA to your show or event, please send an email to  invite@theaterbloggers.com.

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Sleep No More, Punchdrunk Theater Company

... What is it? ...

I went to Sleep No More thinking, from what I'd heard, that it would be an exciting, deconstructed version of Macbeth.  That is, I expected to see a play since it's listed as "Off-Broadway" and Punchdrunk is a British theater company.  Oh was I wrong.  I'm writing about it to let you know, if interested, that it's not a play and not much about Shakespeare's Macbeth.  Still, it's well done for what it is, and admirably polished, though not my cup of tea. 

It's a kind of spooky fun-house entertainment installed in a re-worked old hotel in NYC's Chelsea district.  Almost everyone in line (you wait in line outside as for a club until your scheduled time comes up) was in their early 20's, lots of couples who'd made a fiscal investment for a night of fun.  Teenagers would love it but it's expensive and the large bar is the central launching point for the experience so in feeling it's more for "over 21" -- but not much over.

Finally allowed in, you pass through a long, dark, high-ceilinged passage, check your belongings (for a hefty fee) since it's best to be unencumbered and the staff keeps repeating "It's hot up there," turn your reservation into a playing card ticket farther on, and then set off on narrow, winding (Sleep No More is not for the claustrophobic) twists and turns to emerge into a large bar and lounge:  its smoky illusion unifies staff in evening dress, vistors in jeans and whatever, and the blood red decor for an oceanic experience:  cocktails are available for purchase to heighten the intoxication.

From there -- when your number comes up, heh heh -- you embark on the path of Sleep No More.  Wearing a mask to further remove you from yourself, you follow maze-like dark corridors at seeming random with illuminated vignettes with elaborate and well done sets, and music and dance, that are scary, seductive or both:  unlike, say, Disney's "Pirates of the Carribean," these scenes have live performers.  Some make reference to Macbeth, e.g., there's an attack by witches, and others are just violent -- a man kills a woman -- or sexy -- two guys in bed, and other mixes and matches.  

The staff is well trained (you can tell them by their black masks, yours is white) and are on hand to rescue the faint-hearted or those who just want to find their way back to the bar -- or the exit.  Still, the sense that you're in a fire-trap ... well, let's just say it adds a realistic note of fear.  DISCLOSURE:  I didn't see all of it but after getting the idea, found a black mask to guide me to the exit.

So that's what that's about.   ...  chacun a son gout ... caveat emptor ... etc ...

Sleep No More  plays on West 27th Street in NYC through June 27th.  For information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

ART EXHIBITION - Anthony Caro on the Roof, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 26, 2011 - October 30, 2011, weather permitting

Midday, 1960, Anthony Caro, painted steel, 7' 73/4" x 37 3/8" x 12' 1 1/4" (233.1 x 95 x 370.2 cm), collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, photo:  MMA

There are two ways to think about a sculpture exhibition on the MMA's roof -- the pleasure of being there, surrounded by rosy sun-lit skyscrapers in one direction, Central Park in another, the big sky and fresh air.  And then there are the sculptures themselves that are set against this gorgeous backdrop.

This year the roof is given over the eight large works by the British sculptor Anthony Caro (b.1924).  Caro had a really important idea in the early 1960's -- to use found industrial metal parts, already made but able to be altered, to construct large sculpture.  It was a key contribution, a further development from the use of found objects or ready mades for the creation of art discovered by Dada artists in the early 20th Century -- one of the greatest inventions -- if not the greatest -- of modern art.   And boldly he sets his works directly on the ground -- no bases.  In contrast to his work in the new-for-art material, Caro's forms remain conservative, though, in the Cubist tradition.  Still, he grows as a sculptor -- and all this can been seen in the current mini-retrospective on the roof. 

For instance, the earliest work in this exhibition, Midday of 1960 (illustrated top of page), is constructed completely of I-beams, cut and arranged in a kind of bench form, 12 feet in its longest dimension, and painted all-over yellow.  In it, he pulls away from the swooping curves and organically felt figures of the British sculptor Henry Moore, whom he'd worked for in the '50's.  Newly arrived in the U.S. , he's fallen in with a forward-looking  group of young American  abstract artists.  He expresses his excitement:  "America made me see that there are no barriers and no regulations."  It's interesting, though, that while looking forward in his materials, he bypasses the most liberating aspects of the American artists he met, David Smith, Kenneth Noland, as well as of Moore himself.  Caro translates some of the more abstract aspects of Cubism into large scale sculpture of industrial metal.

After Summer, 1968, painted steel, 5' 2" x 19' x 24' (157.5 x 579.1 x 731.5 cm), collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto, photo MMA.

 But after this straight edge period -- a young artist's reaction to the notably swooping curves of his mentor, Moore -- he allows curves to creep back into his work.  At first the curves are a kind of mathematical sections, as in After Summer of 1968, above, a piece that's softened by its outdoor setting, where it takes on the breezy suggestion of an armada of sailboats, or Viking ships ... or ancient Minoan "horns of consecration."  

  Odalisque, 1984, Steel, 77 x 100 x 65" (195.6 x 254 x 165.1 cm), collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo: MMA 

 In Odalisque of 1984, the curves begin to suggest the organic;  it's even somewhat representational -- a woman.  Odalisques -- exotic, reclining women, and a favorite theme of art -- are almost inevitably curvaceous.  Caro's Odalisque conveys the shapes -- fundamental relationships of masses -- of a woman with her perky little head and voluptuous body, comfortably reclining with bent knees, leaning on her elbow -- a monumental cubist rearrangement, rendered in steel with Picasso-esque wit.

It's remarkable and inspiring the find in the current work of this 88-year  old sculptor a release from Cubist restraints beyond anything he'd reached so far.  End Up of 2010 looks at first straight-line geometric but -- check this on the roof -- there's a really wildly suggestive curving form squiggling between the larger metal pieces.  With a little imagination it becomes X-rated.  Also, he brings back with End Up  a crafted wooden base. 

End Up, 2010, Steel rusted, cast iron and jarrah wood, 72 x 90 1/4 x 62 1/4" (182.9 x229.2 x 158.1 cm), collection of the artist, courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, photo MMA.

 

 

And in an interview among his roof-top sculptures, Caro, charming, articulate, friendly, and alive to questions, told us that currently he's hard at work designing a three-block long sculpture for the median grassy strip of Park Avenue in NYC -- unless (he says) it grows longer!

 
Anthony Caro, photo MMA

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome, please scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.

Anthony Caro on the Roof will continue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC through October 30, 2011.  Museum hours:  Tues - Thur 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 pm, Fri and Sat 9:30 am to 9:00 pm, Sun 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 pm, usually closed Mondays but check with the Metropolitan Museum of Art website  (click on link) for holiday dates, and suggested admission prices (suggested so don't stay away if you don't have the full admission --pay what you can).  The exhibition "Anthony Caro on the Roof" is included with your admission.   Refreshments are available for purchase on the roof.

Future Anxiety by Laurel Haines, directed by Jim Simpson, The Flea Theater

                ... normalcy meets end of world ...

Future Anxiety is a vast, crisp ensemble play that brings you to the future by following through on everything that's undermining our earth as we know and love it.  "Vast" even though it all takes place in The Flea's rather small Off-Off-Broadway theater but when this talented group gets through with it -- it seems positively epic! 

Things we take for granted are in short supply -- toilet paper's doled out one square at a time.  Violent storms rack the sky interrupted by fires broad as the horizon -- shades of today's news of tornadoes and fires.  Radioactivity everywhere is a given.  When an awakened cryogen who hasn't yet fully accommodated to her new body wants to go outside for some fresh air, the thought sends the nurse into paroxysms of laughter.  Oh yes, and China having collected on its debt, Americans are serving as slaves to the Chinese. 

Karl, a man with a Jesus complex, played by Ugo Chukwu, is offering  salvation via a space voyage to another planet but it's clear that in spite of his manic optimism, the trip isn't going to make it.  But is staying behind any better?  As a parable, Future Anxiety reminds me of Thornton Wilder's optimistic The Skin of Our Teeth, but in reverse.

Ugo Chukwu as Karl recruiting for a space trip.  Photo:  Richard Termine

One reason the play manages to seem so big is that the set is a series of platforms on different levels, performance spaces for fast moving individual vignettes of impending disaster.  The actors are from the Flea's young theater group, the BATS, which is a good thing because the staging and directing require outstanding agility and energy.  Reynaldo Piniella (as Jake) leaps at full twisting speed from level to another -- but he makes it!

A compelling aspect is that this future is not too distant and things are not all that different from today, only worse.  The population that's crowding the planet isn't 40 billion or 200 billion -- it's 12 billion (today, approximately 6.9 billion).  Sonia (Katherine Folk-Sullivan), the sweet girl with the mean job of people collector (like house re-possessor) munches a bag of chips she's found somewhere with an expiration date of 2012. 

Among the excellent performances, Holly Chou's as Comrade Li, in charge of U.S. debtor-slaves, is a genuine show stopper.  The expressions that cross the face of this martinet party-liner who finds liberation in poetry are in  themselves a reason to go to The Flea and see the show.  I've never  seen anyone carry a bucket on stage that looked so genuinely heavy as when Raul Sigmund Julia as the slave-poet Malcolm labors under her eagle eye.  Same when he digs his shovel into a pile of rocks.  

 

Raul Sigmund Julia as Malcolm sets down his heavy bucket for a moment as Holly Chou as Comrade Li profers a creation. Photo: Richarde Termine

While not the first future dystopia by a long shot, Future Anxiety rings a new and important bell:  a growing sense of guilt among human beings about the state of the planet and, joined to it, a negative assessment of our own kind.   In expressing this point, the role of the poet, Malcolm, is key.  Malcoln is given a chance to be free of his slave labor, but he's so burdened by a sense of guilt for what human beings have wrought on this planet that he prefers to remain a slave, rather than add his hand to the destructive work of those who play responsible roles in this world. 

There's some brief but wonderful use of constructed masks/dummies, like the one Karl makes to replace his beloved but estranged Christine (Joy Notoma), leaning his head against it and draping its limp puppet arm across his own chest in a poignant-though-you-know-it's-a-dummy moment.  

For some of its jokes the play relies too closely on Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone (I know it well because I acted in it).  Future Anxiety doesn't need anybody else's jokes, though.  It's fired by the underlying seriousness that makes for the best humor!    

Future Anxiety plays at The Flea Theaterin NYC's Tribeca through May 26th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak 

Comments very welcome.  Scoll down and click on "comments" -- write in comment box and click on "post".  Thank you.

 

School For Lies by David Ives, directed by Walter Bobbie, Classic Stage

... triple play ...

What a romp!  What sheer fun!  Moliere would have loved The School For Lies .

And what a record, three for three, for Classic Stage and David Ives:

    2009:  Classic Stage produces Ives' brilliant play about    Spinoza,  NewJerusalem:  The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza

    2010:  Classic Stage produces Ives' Venus in Fur which was a big success and launched Nina Arianda into stardom (though I found it tiresome)

    2011:  Classic Stage produces Ives' The School for Lies, from Moliere's The Misanthrope, and they're right back on brilliant

The School for Lies  roughly follows Moliere's The Misanthrope with Ives translating it into the words, rhythms, and catch-all phrases of today's youth-slanted English -- and these are very young characters.  He's discovered complete freedom of vocabulary -- no word for word translation but every attempt, and success, at catching the sense of each line, its feeling, the characters' pleasure in saying it and the impact on the hearer.

The effect in its way is pure Moliere.  Ives bridges the 17th to 21st Centuries!  

And, though perhaps less inventive, Ives is as witty as Moliere!  Like The Misanthrope, The School for Lies is in rhyme -- rhyming couplets, strings of internal rhymes, can-you-top-this? rhymes, punning rhymes, delayed rhymes that you wait for and that never disappoint on arrival -- bringing a grin, a chortle, a guffaw, and a sigh of satisfaction.

We're in Paris among aristocrats in the 17th Century.  Well, we're sort of there:  the furnishings are of the time, and the characters wear gorgeous period costumes  but they talk like us.  Celimene is a spirited, witty recent widow and a flirt who loves society.  Frank is an impulsive, sarcastic brooder, disdainful of humanity and its superficial social conventions -- hugs in particular.  He's sort of a hippie, she's a party girl, and yet they love, sparring like Annie and Frank in Annie Get Your Gun.   The play abounds with rich characters, Philante, Frank's friend with the "be reasonable, Frank" message who turns into a Queen ex machina;  Clitander (fun and names) super rich and content with his stupidity;  Oronte, whose dreadful poetry bears the brunt of Frank being frank, and others to entangle themselves in each others' lies and loves. 

This is a cast with great comic timing and marvelous expressions -- subtle and broad as needed -- Jenn Gambatese is particularly amusing as Elainte who loves ... well, everybody here loves a few different people.  The tall, tousled Hamish Linklater gives a vigorous and always humorous performance and he's handsome so that we can believe Celimene falls in love with him against her better judgment.  Mamie Gummer is persuasive as Celimene though the role could use more sparkle.  Everybody's good but I'd particularly mention Steven Boyer whose long-suffering deadpan in the role of two servants holds the play together -- you'd think that particularl joke that goes along with him might be overdone, but it works every time.

I've seen The Misanthrope at the Pearl Theatre recently which prompts comparison:  the stories and characters are similar but the differences are interesting -- though I was so captivated by The School for Lies  that these took awhile to sink in.   In The School for Lies, the hero, Frank, speaks of his hatred of hypocrisy.  In The Misanthrope,  the parallel hero, Alceste, hates hypocrisy and injustice.  And therein lies a tale.  The School for Lies is focused on individuals, on the foibles of this group and the hilarity they engender.  Injustice looms larger in The Misanthrope where, for all the laughter, one is always aware of the great power imbalances of the social structure and the insecurities they cause.  All in all, The School for Lies is a less political play than The Misanthrope.  In a way this is surprising, since Moliere, living and writing under the tight reign of Louis XIV, had two of his plays banned by the government, while Ives has nothing to lose.  

(And those court cases often referred to are totally unclear to me in both plays.)  

And Moliere's play, for all of its exaggerated characterizations, is more realistic in terms of personalities and relationships, particularly in the more complex, anguished and genuinely philosophical character of Alceste, now Frank in The School for Lies.  And speaking of realism, Frank impossibly turns out to be someone else -- but it's so wonderfully funny you wouldn't want it any other way.  These aspects give Moliere's play the universality that inspires interpretations, adaptations, performances and other kinds of conversations with it in new generations -- like The School for Lies.  But The School for Lies  has its own great wit and language.     

The School for Lies plays at Classic Stage in NYC's East Village through May 22;  that's too short a run for such an enjoyable play!  For information and tickets, click on live link.  Check the website (live link) for tickets and note of extended run.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.