Month: May 2009

I have now seen all three productions in the inaugural series from the new tripartite Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear, comprised of three Off-Off Broadway companies which have economized by sharing production costs, space, and design teams, subsuming their individual identities as well.

From a technical standpoint, the operation has been a success. All three plays, for example, share one easily modifiable set (by the talented Elisha Schaefer). There's one publicist, one graphic designer, one technical team. All good.

As for the productions themselves, they're a mixed bag. David McGee's Mare Cognitum, reviewed last week, had some fine writing and very good performances, but sacrificed dramatic integrity for philosophical meandering.

Lenny Schwartz's Squiggy and the Goldfish is painted in brighter, childish colors, which lends weight to its theme of abuse, but it too suffers from a weakness of focus.

At the center of Squiggy is a brave, sharp performance by Josh Breslow as the title character. Abuse at the hands of his suicidal father has made him a cutter of long standing, though he's successfully hidden his scars from his ineffective, half-unmoored mother (Dana Aber). Terrorized by his cruel fiancée Veronica (the excellent Katrina Ylimaki) and her violent father (Jonathan Miles), Squiggy gets no relief even in his dreams, where a horror-movie psychiatrist and a nightstick-happy cop chase him through paranoid fantasies.

Salvation appears in the form of Blossom (Elyse Ault), a clerk at the pet shop where Squiggy goes to seek a cure for his excessively voluble goldfish, Goldie. This animal spirit, played with comic bluster by Eric C. Bailey, leads Squiggy through the this-is-your-life sequence that forms most of the action, and at first Goldie is a very funny beast. But Mr. Schwartz and the director, Michael Roderick, relegate him further and further into the background as they gradually reveal the story of Squiggy's unfortunate life. In the process we learn more about the women he loves as well – his mother, his fiancee, and then Blossom.

As they reveal themselves, the characters stimulate aches of recognition, but the effect is too often subverted by Recovery Movement catchphrases, characters stating the obvious to one another, and narrative inconsistencies. Goldie informs Squiggy he is to die in a week, but a revelation at the end seems to tell a different story. Mr. Breslow does absolutely all he can to keep the play centered, but he can do only so much.

Duncan Pflaster's Ore, or Or, the most successful of the three plays, also makes use of dream sequences, but here they are in the context of a well-rounded, coherent drama about relationships and racial identity. It is also staged with much starker realism than the other plays; though it's the same theater, we feel we're in an entirely new and somehow larger physical space. The crafty lighting and brittle, economical set create the illusion of more depth on stage, and Mr. Pflaster lights it up with an artfully constructed, well-aimed, and resonant story.

The action flows quickly, thanks to director Laura Moss, and that's good, because these characters have much to go through. The tale is essentially a classic love triangle, with the beefy Calvin Kanayama (E. Calvin Ahn) at the apex. He seems to love his new girlfriend, down-to-earth Debbie (Elizabeth Erwin), but lusts after the lithe and forward Tara (Clara Barton Green). Along the way he bonds with Sean (Shawn McLaughlin), Debbie's gay roommate, who, through no fault of his own, suffers from knowing more than he wants to about his friends' love lives. In creating a supportive and single "gay best friend," Mr. Pflaster flirts with cultural stereotype, but comes out pure, as Sean flowers into the most likable and vivid character of all.

The action skips deftly through one seriocomic situation after another. The mostly solid cast has fun with video games, food poisoning, Star Trek, and Sean's adventures as a substitute teacher. Periodically, a gong and some evocative shakuhachi music divert us into one of Calvin's dreams. These have been touched off by his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he's researching some gold figures that just might come from the legendary Yamashita's treasure. This sub-theme is an appealing, ornate framing device, though perhaps not totally necessary, as the imperfect, realistically rough-edged New Yorkers living their laughing, heartbreaking lives in front of us are intriguing enough by their plain selves. Still, without the dream sequences, we wouldn't have the lovely costumes and the great score, and they do provide some neatly dramatic moments as well, so who's complaining? The car may be a little used, but the paint job is smooth and the engine runs very well. Climb aboard; this is a worthwhile trip.

Squiggy and the Goldfish and Ore, or Or play in repertory through May 30 at the Workshop Theater, 312 W. 36 St., NYC. Tickets are only $12.

Like a chunk of green cheese with an emerald inside, this meditation on the power of imagination contains a hard, bright nugget.

Mare Cognitum follows three twenty-somethings reliving the wide-eyed excitement of intellectual discovery they experienced in college. Or rather, that's what the playwright himself, David McGee, seems to be indulging in.

There's promise in his effective opening scene, and dramatic flair in several other segments along the way. At the start, Lena (Devon Caraway) and Jeff (Kyle Thomas) can't see eye to eye about whether they should bother joining the anti-war protest marching past their apartment building. Jeff decries the crowd's lack of focus; Lena, too, casts a critical eye, but feels an urge to join her own passion to the masses'. Their compromise involves protesting at home without merging with the mob; "Nobody's listening to them either," sighs the withdrawn, Hamlet-like Kyle, "and at least we'll be warm."

Though the dialogue feels a little bloated, the actors' precise delivery and director Jesse Edward Rosbrow's smart staging keep the scene moving well. But when the third roommate, Thomas (Justin Howard), arrives home, ostensibly from a job interview, the play bogs down in a repetitious and overlong discussion of (Doubting) Thomas's nihilism and atheism.

When the friends act out the job interview, it's the first instance of a role-playing trick that works better during a few later scenes, when it's used more crisply to turn the living room into a classroom and (too much later) a rocket ship. The interview itself turns out to have been something else entirely; Thomas has been keeping a secret from his friends, a secret which leads to more college-coffeehouse discussion but little character development. Though poor vexed Thomas seems at first to be going against character to seek some kind of enlightenment, when the chance comes for him to really engage his imagination he retreats.  He's a tragic character in this sense, yet at the end he's right back where he started — just a guy looking for a job, not sure yet what he wants to do with his life.

The play's problem is that not enough happens. The characters' exchange of ideas can't carry 90 minutes of drama. When something does occur — notably, Lena's spiritual awakening, and at the end, a half-real trip to the Moon — the production springs to life. Lena's description of her church visit is a fine piece of writing, and Ms. Caraway brings it home brilliantly. It's one of the periods of focus that represent the promise of the play, which, tightened up, could be a powerful piece of theater.

Mr. Rosbrow, the director, cannot be much faulted for the play's problems, and the cast and crew are very good. Mr. Walters' Jeff sulks and whines a lot, sometimes becoming tiresome, but at certain moments he holds tension like a grieving tiger, switching personae with ferocity when the grudging script gives him the chance.  For her part, Ms. Caraway's sharp, exhilarating performance is worth the price of admission; she's fixedly present at all times, making it hard to look away from her.

Yet even when the playwright has focused his intentions and brought us someplace exciting, he tries his best to sabotage the mission by inserting a squabble about the sexist nature of language ("one giant leap for mankind"). The actors, and the rest of the talent involved in this production, are too good for that.

Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear, which is presenting Mare Cognitum in repertory at the Workshop Theater through May 30, is an amalgam of three erstwhile companies: Theatre of the Expendable, Small Pond Entertainment, and Cross-Eyed Bear Productions. They have not only joined forces, but taken the risky step of ditching their individual company names to create the new, combined group, which is sharing costs, space, and design teams. This production is part of GET S.O.M.!, their first repertory effort. It’s a promising start; I’ll be reporting on the other two productions soon.

Context-free, on a bare stage with a bright light shining in the audience's eyes, a young man and a young woman exchange secrets. He speaks in flamboyant metaphors.  She's charmingly down-to-earth. It's clever and amusing, then takes an unexpected, grim turn; the actors (the talented Joe Stipek and Kari Warchock) have us right in the palms of their love-sweaty hands.

Cut to young Eugene at home. It turns out he's a rich boy, attended by manacled female servants. Nelson, an avuncular friend, takes him in hand, the (deliberately?) bad acting begins, and Go-Go Killers! never recovers. There's no way to sugarcoat it: this is a terrible play, and director Rachel Klein, who did better work with All Kinds of Shifty Villains (another genre piece) last year, seems to have no idea what to do with it.

In and around a post-global-warming New York, rival girl gangs compete to murder the rich men who are enslaving their sisters. One gang captures Eugene and Nelson and drags them before the Queen, played by Leasen Almquist, in her underground lair.  Ms. Almquist is a pro, but utterly at sea in a role that's so nonsensical playwright Sean Gill has to have her explain it in a monologue. Along the way, the gang and their captives spend an interminable, poorly paced night quarreling, getting bitten by snakes, and alternately assaulting and making out with an offensively stereotyped fellow called The Wop who seems to have stuttered in from a completely different play. It's all very difficult to suffer through.

Ms. Klein is obviously drawn to stage works that play with the devices and customs of genre pictures and mannered theater traditions. With All Kinds of Shifty Villains it was noir films and circus clowning. Go-Go Killers! is meant to evoke a number of B-movie genres, especially girl-gang flicks and those manic movies that featured go-go boots and hot pants — all-American MST3K fare, in other words. This sort of thing can make for spectacular theater, as Soul Samurai proved a few months back.

But in this case, evoking is as much as the play can manage. Interspersing clumsy, overlong scenes with less-than-crackerjack go-go-inspired dance numbers does not automatically create a re-imagining, an homage, or even a parody. Those good-bad movies of yore had stories one could follow, silly though they might have been. They had bad acting, too, but the New York stage creates higher expectations than did low-budget films of the 1950s and 60s. Go-Go Killers! boasts some good dancers and nifty costumes, but little else.

Go-Go Killers! runs through May 23 at the Sage Theater, 711 Seventh Ave., NYC, through May 30. Tickets at Smarttix.