play

Hapgood

mandy — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 03:00:00 +0000

Tom Stoppard’s 1988 espionage thriller, Hapgood, addresses the insanity of the Cold War by zooming in on a band of British spies. Alongside the CIA, the group engages in crosses and double-crosses, the end result being little more than a game of chicken.

Led by Mrs. Elizabeth Hapgood, AKA Betty, AKA Mother--played by actor Elise Stone with a perfect mix of sass and sadness—the reconnaissance team’s efforts are a showcase for three distinct plot lines: The juggling of employment and child rearing responsibilities for single mothers; the temptation of forbidden love; and the competitive race for scientific knowledge between the “free world” and the Communist bloc. While the first two themes are presented with straightforward punch, the latter is muddled, perhaps emblematic of the Cold War itself. As Hapgood says near the denouement of the play, “It’s them or us. We’re keeping each other in business. We should send each other Christmas cards.”

Indeed, the inanity of the spy effort is underscored as the two-act drama unfolds. Can anyone be trusted? Is it possible to know good people from bad? As the characters assess and then reassess one another, a host of preposterous, and often funny, mishaps occur. Hapgood’s associates—Ridley (Jason O’Connell), Merryweather (Brian Costello), and Kerner (Joseph Menino)—stomp, probe, and snoop, all the while trying to determine who among them is leaking strategic military secrets to Moscow. Unfortunately, despite terrific acting and wonderful staging, this element of the plot is confusing as it intertwines numerical data—supplemented by a host of algebraic and scientific formulae that are projected onto the stage’s back wall—into the dialogue. Yes, it’s illustrative of the secrets being pursued, but the long-winded repartee gets tiresome for non-scientifically inclined audience members.

Apparently, this was of little concern to Stoppard who reportedly became obsessed with particle physics when his son was studying the subject. “Stoppard saw in physics a metaphor for human nature,” the Playbill for Hapgood explains. “Does light operate like a bullet or a wave? The answer is both—depending on whether it’s being observed or not. So too people, who have different selves sharing the one body, which appear or disappear depending on who’s looking.”

Hapgood’s exploration of duality includes all the tricks of the international spy trade—or at least the ones one might find in a John Le Carre novel. There’s blackmail, entrapment, fraud, lying, and kidnapping. At the same time, there’s also kindness, collegiality, loyalty, and love between contending parties.

Some critics have found Hapgood dated, but while the Cold War is surely over, the ongoing international quest for domination and conquest of the Middle East and Africa makes espionage as relevant today was it was decades back. That said, I would have enjoyed Hapgood more had it been pared down, with a tightened script that shifted the focus to politics rather than mathematical and scientific jargon.

Stoppard had an answer for critics like me: “I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness,” he wrote in the late 1970s. Using that criterion, Hapgood fits the bill, turning the foreign policy foibles of world governments into something that is both absurd and mildly entertaining.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, December 19th 2010

In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (8/29/2010)

annette — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Washington, D.C.

“Please turn off anything that beeps, buzzes, or vibrates.” And with that comic admonishment to the audience, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Sarah Ruhl’s play about the advent of vibrators began.

The setting is Dr. Givings home, where his living room is located next to, and within earshot of, the “surgical theater.” Here, Dr. Givings (played by Eric Hissom) treats hysteria, a “medical ailment” dating back to about 300 BC, when Hippocrates thought women’s madness stemmed from their womb. Meanwhile, back on stage, the good doctor’s wife (Katie deBuys) wonders why patients come in with symptoms of anxiety and leave, only anxious to come back again—and soon.

Above the noise of “oh-ooh-oooh,” Dr. Givings himself groans about the bygone days of manual stimulation: “It was like a child’s game–trying to rub the head and the stomache at the same time.” Why, the procedure could take up to an hour! With the electric massager, “paroxyms” can be had within three to five minutes time and, if they don’t, um, come, Dr. Givings hands the tedious task over to his competent assistant Annie (played by Sarah Marshall).

While patients such as Mrs. Daldry (Kimberly Gilbert) and a male patient named Leo Irving (Cody Nickell) make it clear their emotional needs are not being met–Mrs. Daldry cannot have children and Mr. Irving cannot find the passionate love that his creative soul desires—the doctor steadfastly believes their symptoms can be treated with the latest technology of the day, the electromechanical vibrator for her and the anal dialater for him.

So the new device makes patients happier—so happy that Mrs. Givings breaks into the room and tries it out herself for her own hysteria–feeling unfulfilled in her marriage and inadequate in nourishing her newborn—but, alas it’s not fixing the problems.

Aside from having unmet emotional needs, women’s sexuality is still not recognized and even feared, as the men highlight in their joke about a friend that thought women looked like marble statues you see in a museum—and then ran like a mad man from his wife when he saw she had beastly hair “down there.” Only the wet nurse Elizabeth (played by Jessica Frances Dukes) hired to feed Dr. and Mrs. Givings’ baby, understands the connection between the vibrator and sexual pleasure. Otherwise, the technological wonder is thought to produce a confusing mixture of pain and pleasure. So confusing it brings them back daily to figure out if they like it or not!

Behavior like this and many other comedic opportunities make director Aaron Posner’s In the Next Room a humorous, but not insensitively so, play about the history behind the medical use of vibrators. It subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly highlights the utter lack of knowledge and understanding of women’s physical bodies, sexual desires, and emotional needs. It beautifully portrays women’s roles, relationships, and subordination to men during Victorian times and reminds us that even today, we still grapple with some of these issues. However, the play about vibrators will make an historical imprint itself—made many years after we laughed about the link between masturbation and mental illness in men-and will stimulate discussion of female sexuality for years to come.

Written by: Joan Dawson, September 22nd 2010

Black Pearl Sings! (6/18/2010)

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Adrienne Theater

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

With their current production, Black Pearl Sings!, InterAct Theatre brings a powerful story to the Mainstage of Philadelphia’s Adrienne. The intimate performance space, where third row is a mere six feet from the floor-level stage, helps one feel immersed in the story.

Written by Frank Higgins and directed by Seth Rozin, the two-act play stars C. Kelly Wright as Alberta “Pearl” Johnson and Catharine K. Slusar as Susannah Mullally. In the story, set during the Great Depression, song collector Mullally meets Johnson while visiting a Texas prison. Mullally hopes to find an old song that has never been documented, a song that might land her a university teaching job. She helps to obtain parole for Johnson, with the condition that Johnson will be in Mullally’s custody. After parole, the women go to New York, where they present a performance meant to make both of them famous. The play ends with a powerfully triumphant Johnson in control of her own future, and Mullally humbled and grown through this relationship.

The play is based upon the true story of musicologist John Lomax, who collected songs for the Library of Congress during the 1930s. In a Louisiana penitentiary, Lomax met guitar player Huddie Ledbetter, later known as Lead Belly.

During the course of the play, Mullally reveals that her wealthy family has disowned her for pursuing a nontraditional path (“Why would I want to get married?”), and that a man used her research to advance his career. I sat shaking my head in disbelief, thinking to myself, “So now you are going to use a woman to advance your career? At one point she asks, “We’re friends, aren’t we?” to which Johnson replies, “We’re friendly.” For how can there be true friendship when one party’s freedom is dependent on another’s exploitation?

There were many moments when I found myself embarrassed for Mullally, as well as the ignorance of the community in which she moved, which viewed Johnson as a discovery or exhibit. In Act II, Mullally reads a review in which Johnson is referred to by the writer as “Black Pearl.” Johnson responds indignantly, “How come you ain’t White Susannah?” Mullally was schooled through her relationship with Johnson, and at many times humor eased the way.

For me, the greatest beauty of this show lay in the voice of C. Kelly Wright as she sang a cappella spirituals and folk songs, and her visceral expression of emotions throughout the performance. Her rich voice brought tears to my eyes multiple times, and manifested great power and strength. I felt her voice not only in my ears but in my bones.

Written by: Lisa Rand, June 24th 2010

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Edited by Sandra Spanier

Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press

It's impossible to dislike a female protagonist who opines, fifteen miles south of the Italian front in the second-to-last year of World War II, "If there's anything I really loathe, it's a woman protector." Delivered by Annabelle Jones, war correspondent for the San Francisco World, in conversation with Jane Mason, war correspondent for the New York Bulletin, this line refers to one of the many well-meaning men who are the butts of the jokes in the play Love Goes to Press.

Longtime friends as well as colleagues, Jones and Mason are globetrotting journalists chasing after war stories when both improbably show up in the same tiny press camp in Italy. There, amid refrains of, "No, I am not a nurse," any time one of them places an intra-military call, each of the two women pursue dangerously-won exclusive stories and navigate surprise romantic encounters, the latter portrayed as considerably more perilous than the former.

The mostly-journalist ensemble draws an easy comparison to His Girl Friday, released six years before Love Goes to Press first appeared on stage. By contrast, the play's pacing and gender commentary read as tersely contemporary, and its production history as relatively dismal. First performed in the summer of 1946, audiences in London packed theaters to see it, taking advantage of the small luxury of cheap tickets, and in co-author Martha Gellhorn's estimation, eager to laugh amid grief, rationing, wide-spread destruction, and exhaustion in the first year of peace after the war.

American audiences, however, did not crave such levity. After only four performances in New York in the first week of 1947 (where, Gellhorn further recounts, the cast was ecstatic to shop and eat as much as they could), the play folded then disappeared. American reviews from the time reflect a limited range of emotions running from irked boredom to disgust: either the veteran lady war reporters who authored the play couldn't get war quite "right," for all of their experience, or they simply had the bad taste to profane such a sacred subject in a three-act comedy. From the distance of sixty-three years—perhaps as cushy as the distance between New York drama critics of the '40s and the European theatre of war—this self-important response seems a bit comical.

Editor Sandra Spanier does a fine job, in this expanded edition of Love Goes to Press, of providing historical and literary context for the play, which did not see a first printing until 1995. Her biographical focus remains overwhelmingly on Gellhorn, whose sixty-year career was comprised of relentless war correspondence, as well as fiction and travel writing. Co-author Virginia Cowles is comparatively unknown, despite being an experienced war correspondent and prolific nonfiction writer herself. (Gellhorn and Cowles met when both women were reporting on the Spanish Civil War—Annabelle Jones and Jane Mason are based on them, respectively.)

In addition to Spanier's description of rescuing perhaps the only extant copy of the play, and her recovery and reprinting of deleted sections of Gellhorn's war reporting from the Collier's archives, Gellhorn's original introduction to the 1995 edition may be the most enjoyable historical work here. Good-humored but pitiless, Gellhorn's recounting of the more hapless accomplishments of the play's authors, which included fleeing stunned from cries of "Author! Author!" at the close of the play's premier, is like an authorial bow on behalf of both herself and Cowles, albeit regrettably late.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, April 3rd 2010

Silence Not, A Love Story

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:07:00 +0000

By Cynthia L. Cooper

Gihon River Press

Everyone loves a love story, especially one with a happy ending, and award-winning playwright and journalist Cynthia L. Cooper’s latest play, a forty-four-scene two-act, is a whopper. Silence Not, A Love Story tells the improbable tale—based on a true story—of Gisa Peiper, a young Jewish student stifled by religious Orthodoxy, and Paul Konopka, a Catholic craftsman, who met in late-1920s Germany while working with the anti-fascist International Socialist Combat League, known as the ISK. It was not love at first sight, but it was close, bolstered by each individual’s ironclad commitment to social justice and human rights.

Their organization, Cooper writes in the play’s Prologue, “was made up of pacifists and humanitarians. Politically, the group was strongly opposed to communism, but deeply committed to the labor movement… Members of the ISK studied political issues through group analyses and Socratic questioning, and they believed that action must follow understanding.” Members ran a school and published a newspaper; they were also encouraged to follow a vegetarian diet, avoid alcohol and spend time outdoors, hiking and enjoying the natural world. By all accounts the ISK was bold and members routinely put themselves in harm’s way. Peiper and Konopka were especially fearless and took incredible risks to publicize the danger posed by newly appointed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

From his first utterances as a national leader, Peiper and Konopka attempted to activate German citizens to oppose him and his fascist Nazi Party and Peiper’s reporting for the ISK press acknowledged the threat. People, she wrote, knew what Hitler and the Nazis stood for before they came to power. “Their terror tactics showed in street fights, in writings, in threats…The demeaning and torturing of anyone resisting them started immediately after January 1933. Fear pervaded the country. Everybody knew about the terror. It was also known outside of Germany.”

But breaking through angst is no easy feat and Silence Not, A Love Story includes riveting depictions of the general public’s go-along-to-get-along capitulation to Hitler’s demands. Not surprisingly, Konopka ended up on Nazi radar and, in short order, was forced to flee Germany and continue his underground agitation from France. Peiper eventually joined him, but not before being jailed for her pro-democracy efforts.

After the war, the pair moved to the United States. They married in 1941, 12 years after meeting, and remained together until Konopka’s death in 1976. Peiper became a social worker, writer and professor at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work and her long career as a youth advocate was dedicated to fostering human dignity. Her message was constant. We must never forget the millions of people whose lives were cut short by the Nazis. What's more, she served as a living rebuttal to Holocaust deniers and fascist apologists until her death in 2003.

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, in an introduction to Silence Not, puts Peiper and Konopka’s lives in context: “For Gisa Peiper, and for Rosa Parks and the civil rights activists, their very humanity lay in their acts of resisting evil. They could no more remain passive, removed, and quiescent than they could stop breathing… Without those who stand up for justice, where would the rest of us be?”

After this summer’s murder of Dr. George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns, this question seems particularly resonant.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, September 24th 2009

The Clean House 7/10 - 8/17/2008

admin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:13:00 +0000

Zach Theatre

Austin, Texas

Sarah Ruhl's play The Clean House opens with Mathilde, a Brazilian housekeeper, telling a long and very funny joke - in Portuguese. I don't understand Portuguese, and I doubt very few of my fellow audience members in Austin, TX did, either. Luckily, Mathilde's self-induced laughter, gestures, and a summary translation projected for the audience onto a screen make it easy to get the gist. The joke is dirty, and it's hilarious.

Mathilde goes on to tell the story of her parents: They were in love, and they made each other laugh. Her mother died laughing at a joke her father told, and then her father killed himself. After their deaths, Mathilde came to the United States to become a comedian. She is always trying to come up with the perfect joke, which she describes as "somewhere between an angel and a fart."

Mathilde, played by Smaranda Ciceu in this production, cleans house for Lane (Lauren Lane), a doctor who prescribes Mathilde antidepressants when she neglects the dusting and silver. Lane's sister, Virginia (Barbara Chisholm), is of the obsessive neat-freak type – à la Monica on Friends – and offers to help Mathilde out by cleaning Lane's house herself.

When Lane's husband, Charles (Tom Green), also a doctor, leaves her for an older cancer patient, Virginia and Mathilde are caught, and the plot turns to focus on the relationships that ensue. Charles, stupefied and awed by finding his soul mate Ana (Alicia Kaplan), brings her to meet everyone, and the preposterousness of the situation has Lane beside herself. At the end of the scene, Mathilde agrees to split her time between Lane's and Ana's houses (even though now everyone knows she doesn't like to clean) and joins Charles and Ana to go apple picking. Apple picking!

As Lane sulks at home, playing cards with Mathilde while Virginia continues to clean, Ana's cancer returns, and she refuses to go to the hospital. "I don't want a relationship with a disease. I want a relationship with death," she says. Charles, doing what any honorable man would, dons a parka and disappears to Alaska to find a yew tree, which he thinks has healing properties. By the time he re-enters, carrying an entire tree, Ana has died as the result of laughter induced by Mathilde's perfect joke.

The play is pretty smart. Characters that may have seemed fresher four years ago when The Clean House premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre could come off as flat and stereotypical, but the way they are manipulated by the actors makes them meta-aware of the play's symbolism. For example, in the "what-do-you-have-that-I-don't" conversation with Ana, Lane exasperates, "You have a balcony!" - a balcony being the setting for Ana's carefree, giddy life with Charles. This production was played in the round with a crisp and imaginative set by Michael Raiford

Though Dave Steakley's direction worked well during comic scenes, heated discussions between Lane and Virginia seemed overwrought and abrasive. It bothered me that Chisholm could not convincingly hold and drink from a coffee cup, although her costume, a frumpy getup straight out of a Swiffer commercial, was perfect for Virginia (costumes by Susan Branch Towne). I questioned the casting: Lauren Lane seemed to play Lane older that the script suggested, and Kaplan and Green had playfulness, but not sensuality as the lovers Charles and Ana. However, Mathilde was played superbly by the enchanting Ciceu; she was wonderfully funny, fresh, and eager. I kind of wanted to take her home too. With a friend like her, who needs a cleaning lady?

Written by: Jonelle Seitz, July 28th 2008

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda (4/13/2008)

admin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:18:00 +0000

Phoenix Theatre Ensemble

New York, New York

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda is an amazing two-person play set in London, England in the modern day. It chronicles one Rwandan refugee’s struggle to write about what happened to her in 1994, and the Englishman who helps her.

While living in England, Juliette (Susan Hayward) meets an aging poet, Simon (Joseph J. Menino), who works at the refugee center part-time. She comes to him for help in getting her book about the Rwandan genocide published. After reading her work, Simon notes that the book is completely—and only—historical and factual, so much so that he asks, “Where are you in all of this, Juliette? Where is your story?”

The rest of the play follows Simon and Juliette as they create a much more personal account—Juliette’s account—of the genocide. They are the only two characters we ever see, but Simon’s wife and Juliette’s younger brother are important off-stage recurring characters. The theater itself is set very sparsely; only a small table and two straight-backed chairs adorn the stage while most other props are brought to life through the actors’ movements.

I found two things especially interesting about the way the play is performed. First, Simon and Juliette tell the audience their thoughts. At one point, Simon “reads” his poetry for a group of people, but instead of the poem, the audience hears an inner monologue—what Simon is thinking while he’s reading aloud to the imaginary audience. He and Juliette both speak as though directly to the (real) audience throughout the play, whether or not the other character is present. Hayward and Menino, however, do a great job clarifying the separation between personal thoughts meant only for their characters (and the audience) and dialogue with one another.

Secondly, even when Juliette and Simon face each other, they also face the audience. For example, when Simon is reading his poetry to an imaginary audience, he faces the actual audience. Juliette, who is part of the imaginary audience, sits near him, but is also facing the real audience. The effect is notable; though they are not looking at one another (or even facing each other), the actors did a great job making the connection between the two characters clear.

Running for ninety minutes without an intermission, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda is a beautiful tribute to the humanity within the inhumanity in the Rwandan genocide. I don’t want to spoil the play for those who would like to see it, but let me say it’s certainly worth the watch. I was brought to tears more than once. The play ends with Juliette and Simon reading her the beginning of her book to an imaginary (and the real) audience: “Once upon a time…” belays their hope for a good and humane future. I congratulate the Phoenix Theatre Enemble, Sonja Linden (the playwright), Joseph J. Menino, and especially Susan Hayward for putting together a truly remarkable performance.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, April 23rd 2008