Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – “By now you have a sense of the downward trajectory that this evening is going to take.”

Gordon Boudreau, in The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes (Photo: Paul Siebold)

by Michael Dale

This week…

The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes at The Tank through February 9.  Tickets $25.

Song Of Joy at The Tank through January 29.  Tickets $25/$35/$50.

This week I saw two terrific productions at The Tank…

…a two-venue theatre center in a rather innocuous-looking office building on West 36th Street.  Both were in The Tank’s smaller space where audience members on three sides of the stage are never more than three rows from the action.  And both can be enjoyed for just $25.

The same building houses the Chain Theatre, where, for the same price, audiences caught two of the best plays I saw last year, G.D. Kimble’s What Passes For Comedy and Sophie McInTosh’s Macbitches.

For reasons usually having to do with finance, Off-Off Broadway productions normally have short runs, so my tip for the day is to check out the websites for these two spaces to see what current and upcoming shows piques your interest.  

“By now you have a sense of the downward trajectory that this evening is going to take.”

Writer/performer Gordon Boudreau, in his guise as the title character of The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes, understands completely if you’re so offended by the tastelessness of his presentation that you choose to get up and leave the theatre.  In fact, he encourages the rest of us to applaud anyone who walks out, in admiration of their good judgement.

His tongue is firmly in his cheekiness, of course, and even if anyone cared to exit his recital of iambic vulgarity by the faux-16th Century English libertine scribe, the rest of us would be too busy belly laughing to notice.

Boudreau has been developing his character – whose oeuvre mixes highbrow literacy with debauched irreverence – through tours of Renaissance fairs, but director David Rosenberg’s mounting is more like a quaint visit to an intimate salon, which our host explains replicates the late-night naughtiness once on display in some of olde London’s seedier districts.  (For an equivalent contemporary experience, the porno DVD shop next to the theatre will have to suffice.)

Mind you, this is not like innocently studying The Canterbury Tales in school and years later being enlightened as to how smutty it is.  There’s little subtlety to pseudo-classics like the adolescent lament “Mother, Will My Stones Drop?”, the gross descriptions of bodily reactions in “The Tewkesbury Pudding” and the raging misogyny of “"I Built My Love a Menstrual Hut" (which is paired with a piece that offers his love’s reaction), and yet “I Bought A Cheese And Thought Of You” contains some legitimate sentimentality before the eventual twist.

While I’m no literary scholar, I found that Boudreau’s erudite wordplay gave a sense of authenticity to the show, which made the ideas conveyed all the more funny.  You can watch a sample of Boudreau creation here, and if you decide The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes is not for you, I’m sure the author would graciously applaud your good taste.

So let me see if I have this right…

Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida has cancelled its production of Paula Vogel's Indecent, a history-based play about a play that was forced to close on its 1923 Broadway opening night when the inclusion of a lesbian kiss had the producers and cast members arrested on obscenity charges.  Students are saying this is a direct result of Florida's new Parental Rights in Education law, which states, "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."

Instead, the school has decided to have the students do Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, which is about the son of a successful actress who rebels against the middlebrow entertainments she stars in by writing plays he believes are more meaningful.

Got it.

I just assumed it was the house manager giving the traditional pre-show announcement about turning off cell phones and locating fire exits…

…before Carol Mazhuvancheril’s charming and uplifting autobiographical (mostly) solo piece, Song Of Joy.  But no, it was the playwright/performer himself giving the spiel, which smoothly flowed into a brief bonding exercise where he asked audience members to reveal their names and the stories behind them.

I like him already.

Living in a city of immigrants, which is also one that attracts artists from around the world, Mazhuvancheril’s story of parental and cultural expectations versus self-expression is one that I was very familiar with, though never experiencing it firsthand.

Carol Mazhuvancheril in Song Of Joy (Photo: Johnny Pozzi)

The specifics of his case involve being born in Kerala, South India and spending his youth in search of a personal identity while growing up in multiple countries.  Though he develops a love for the Carnatic music of his homeland, his first grand act of self-expression is a third grade solo performance of “My Heart Will Go On” that shocks his boarding school.

While attending college in Texas, seeing the movie Black Swan inspires him to audition for ballet school, though he preferred dancing to the spirit within him than trying to learn the choreography.

Director Nick J. Browne’s production has numerous fabrics hanging above, which Mazhuvancheril uses to change into a vibrant array of relatives, friends, teachers and numerous other characters.

But throughout the performance, the thrill of self-discovery is tempered by the disapproval of his parents, who are loving, but cannot understand his artistic inclinations nor his being gay.  In a particularly poignant scene, he compassionately plays a confrontation with his father.

But true to his title, Mazhuvancheril is insistent on sharing joy with his audience, evidenced by a lovely, tear-jerking epilogue that imagines a significantly more joyous future.

Curtain Line…

I saw a production of Waiting For Godot Goes Wrong that closed pretty quickly because audiences couldn’t figure out if anything was going wrong.