Michael Dale's Theatre Crawl - “Can you speak specifically on what you’re not loving?”
By Michael Dale
Dee Beasnael, Brian Bock, Julia Greer, Derek Smith and Haley Wong in Events (Photo: Travis Emery Hackett}
This week…
Events at The Brick through December 18. Tickets $25.
The Weak And The Strong at La MaMa through December 18. Tickets $30, Students/Seniors $25.
Becky Nurse of Salem at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater through December 31. Tickets $103.
Inexpensive and recommended…
Underneath The Skin at La MaMa through December 18. Tickets $30, Students/Seniors $25.
“Oh, so that’s why they call this place The Brick.”
One of the reasons for the existence of this column is that, by spending most of this century committed to reviewing around 130 Broadway and Off-Broadway productions a year while holding a 9-5 day job, there wasn’t much time for me to check out the Off-Off Broadway and indie theatre I loved so much when I was in my twenties and thirties.
So last week was my first visit to The Brick, the funky Williamsburg venue that opened in 2002 at a former auto garage. A big smile came on my face as I entered the makeshift auditorium, a small narrow room with exposed brick walls on three sides and two rows of seating on opposing sides.
And given the setting of Bailey Williams’ stinging social satire of life-consuming office culture, Events, it was practically environmental theatre. I’ve done enough office temping in my life to know that if there’s one thing hip companies full of creatives love, it’s exposed brick.
And we know the people employed by Todd David Design in Williams’ play are all creatives because they hold staff meetings at a table made of dry erase board, so they can write notes directly on it. (The design collective DOTS has the table divided into sections that can quickly split into individual desks, keeping the action moving.)
“There is a whimsy to eggs,” Todd David advises his staff as they confer about an upcoming ovum-themed project. Actor Brian Bock oozes with artistic pretention as he inspires his employees, and solidifies their full devotion, with lofty ideas about their tasks in planning their clients’ events.
“Never forget that you are the next generation of storytellers and idea generators that make the magic happen”
Director Sarah Blush’s cast gives top shelf performances, with Claire Siebers as the ass-kisser-in-chief, Dee Beasnael as the unflappable creative producer, Derek Smith as the easy-going lead designer (“Can you speak specifically on what you’re not loving?”) and Julia Greer as the underling relieved to have her responsibility of answering the phone transferred to the new office manager (Haley Wong); someone so new to the environment that she doesn’t understand the harm in asking what time the work day ends.
Former employee Itchy (Zuzanna Szadkowski) provides a darker aspect to the playwright’s commentary with monologues addressing the circumstances by which she’s no longer with the company. Is she a victim, is she delusional or just burned out? True to its name, Events doesn’t offer a full narrative story, but its collection of moments will have many laughing in recognition of the destructive environment.
A few seasons back, David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s Soft Power cleverly demonstrated…
…how the public’s view of history can be widely affected by popular art. Citing how many Americans base their perceptions of 19th Century Siam on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s inaccurate and romanticized The King & I, the story of Soft Power imagines a contemporary musical about a Chinese businessman visiting New York City, where openly gun-toting locals take romantic strolls along the Golden Gate Bridge after partying at the town’s swankiest nightclub, McDonald’s.
Playgoers at 1776, may leave the American Airlines Theatre thinking of Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson as a greedy Tory villain, but in fact, as I once detailed in a favorite article of mine, historians see Dickinson as a great American patriot – nicknamed The Penman of The Revolution – who refused to sign The Declaration of Independence because he practiced Quaker pacifism and sought to resolve the colonies’ differences with England via diplomacy rather than bloodshed.
And then there’s Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, written to attack Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunt disguised as an enforcement of national security by drawing comparisons to the Salem witch trials of the early 1690s.
Deirdre O'Connell in Becky Nurse of Salem (Photo: Kyle Froman)
With The Crucible being a part of many American high school curriculums, and performed in student productions for decades, Miller’s fictionalized version of the events of 1692-93 has become the most popular educational source for that historic period, a fact that annoys the title character of Sarah Ruhl’s sharp and gratifying Becky Nurse Of Salem.
Played as gritty dynamo of survival skills by Deirdre O'Connell, Ruhl’s fictional Becky Nurse is a descendent of the real life Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged for witchcraft at age 71. As a tour guide for a Salem witchcraft museum, Becky is well aware that if her guests know anything about the witch trials, it’s mostly from Miller’s pen, so she’s quick to point out that while his play presents the “relationship” between John Proctor and Abigail Williams as a married 35-year-old farmer being tempted by a 17-year-old girl, in actuality he was a 60-year-old tavern owner and she was eleven.
Aside from dramatizing a grotesque condemnation of women and girls who are blamed for a man’s inability to control his lust for them, Becky (and Ruhl) argue the married Miller wasn’t so much writing about Salem and McCarthy, but about his feelings for the nine years younger Marilyn Monroe, who he would marry three years after the play opened on Broadway.
But bringing the subject back to me, my own modest success as a playwright peaked with a piece called Boys And Girls Together, based primarily on the career of Jackie Mitchell, who, in 1931, was signed by the Chattanooga Lookouts to became the first woman to play minor league baseball.
I say primarily because, in doing research for the play, I found so many interesting historic details about women playing organized and professional baseball, going back to the 1800s, that didn’t involve Jackie Mitchel that I still wanted to include. So I opened the play with a monologue explaining that the story being told is less truth and more legend, assuring that everything about the story really happened; it just all didn’t really happen to Jackie Mitchell.
Not that I’m putting myself on any higher moral plane than the likes of Rodgers, Hammerstein and Miller. While I have been known to complain about plays and films that seem to mislead audiences away from the facts enough to give a false impression of the truth, usual I’ll leave it to historians to get it right, and to artists to make it interesting.
Except when it comes to baseball.
Being neither theologian nor rodeo rider, I won’t claim to have the background to completely get Erik Ehn’s The Weak And The Strong…
…an episodic theatre pageant about an aging rodeo rider who attempts to continue on with his profession after a stroke. The playwright takes inspiration from St. Paul's letters to the Romans and Hebrews to present, ”a look at the mysterious compulsions that lead us to do what we wouldn't and avoid what we would.”
Onni Johnson and John Kroft. in The Weak And The Strong (Photo: Bronwen Sharp)
I did a bit of Googling on the subject after seeing director Glory Kadigan’s sweet and spirited production at The Downstairs at La MaMa and reviewed notes on the lobby’s art exhibit based on its themes, but all I can conclude is that this was one of those shows that I knew I wasn’t connecting with, but there were enough enjoyable aspects that I could just kick back and take in whatever was offered.
And I did enjoy seeing the tender relationship depicted in the performances of James B. Kennedy as the elderly tough guy facing a future of vulnerability and Onni Johnson as his wife assuming the role of caretaker.
John Kroft has a cocky charm as the nephew trying to ride in his uncle’s footsteps, there’s some fun singing and dancing and Jane Catherine Shaw’s puppet representations of birds and a horse (manipulated by ensemble members Fig Chilcott, Kim Savarino and Perri Yaniv) are quite lovely.
Perhaps I’m too urban and secular to relate to this one, but as an appreciator of underappreciated theatre, I was delighted to watch the happy faces of the actors at curtain call as they took in cheering applause from the audience and two-stepped their way offstage.
Curtain Line…
An Annie Baker Hanukkah: The script only had enough dialogue to last for one hour, and yet the play lasted for eight hours!