Month: November 2009

What stayed with me from my childhood reading of Saki was the sense of eerie irony, along with the threatening feeling of something wild lurking just beneath the veneer of civilization. What actually happened in the stories mattered less. But Toby Davies' stage adaptation of a selection of the stories has brought back both the mood and the materials, and made it clear to your humble reviewer, though he must shamefacedly admit to not having re-read Saki as an adult, that the tales retain their punch.

Mr. Davies has woven a number of Saki's short stories into a web of darkly funny, skit-like scenes, populated by an assortment of broadly drawn and eloquently written characters all played by four fabulously droll actors. The cast, like Mr. Davies, director Thomas Hescott, and, sadly, H. H. Munro (alias Saki) himself, won't be too familiar to American audiences – not, at any rate, as familiar as playwright Alan Ayckbourn, who is also represented at this year's "Brits Off Broadway" series at 59E59 Theaters. But do catch this production if you have a chance – it's a delight, and a fine introduction for those unfamiliar with Saki, who was born in 1870 and died fighting in World War One.

Dark and sometimes macabre materials, laid out with a humorous touch – that's Saki, and this play is faithful to the writer's tone. Animals star in many of the selected tales (Mr. Davies has drawn from ten). An ancient tiger is goaded via his own predatory instincts into becoming prey for two absurd British huntresses. A woman uses a tiny, tyrannical dog to lord it over her household. A cat learns to talk, but with disastrous consequences for his elegant self when the family that once adored him realizes with horror that "He's heard…everything…" And always there are the wolves of the title, baying and howling in the background (just one element of Tim Saward's effective sound design), advancing in literal fashion into more than one story, turning the haughty, hunting homo sapiens into the hunted.

Even when there's no animal per se there are predator and prey. In the very first story, a grifter tries to gull a smart-ass, who ends up betrayed not by actual gullibility but by an unexpected twist of fate. In the last, a violent end awaits two feuding neighbors, who have buried the hatchet only to fall victim to a literal manifestation of the old "if a tree falls in the forest" question. A malevolent core hums at the center of everything, taking on various guises: petty human deceit, real wild animals – or a vengeful Pan, jealously guarding the tribute left for him. Pan's appeaser is a gentleman who has taken a holiday in the country reluctantly, but adjusted rather more successfully to pagan ways than his jittery wife.

Cleverly constructed and gracefully directed – and superbly lit by Richard Howell – this devilish evening of theater is as enchanting as it is eerie, with many laughs, brilliant acting, and a number of effective goosebump moments. It, just like its source material, could have come from nowhere but Britain. "I suppose," says the con artist in the opening skit, "you think I've spun you quite the impossible yarn." But Saki isn't pulling the wool over our eyes. He's exposing bloody nature. "I've heard it said," declares the city gentleman, "that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them." Indeed. Saki meant to skewer Edwardian manners and mores. But when it comes to the human animal, things change very little, whatever century you're in or continent you're on. See this show, then go forth from the theater into the wilds of Midtown, and watch your back.

Wolves at the Window runs through Dec. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, NYC.

With the decline of the newspapers, mainstream coverage of Broadway and other New York theater has dwindled. The flip side is that there are fewer bigshot reviewers with inflated influence. In response, producers have become hip to the importance of bloggers to getting out advance word about new shows (and then reviewing them).

Today I had the opportunity to meet the all-star cast of the upcoming premiere of David Mamet's new play, Race. David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, the seemingly ageless Richard Thomas, and James Spader, who confessed that he hasn't done a play in decades, met us upstairs at Red-Eye Grill near Columbus Circle and answered questions about the play, the process, and their own backgrounds.

Understandably, they couldn't tell us anything about the plot. But as the new production of Oleanna reminds us, Mamet's work has a way of generating heat, and the very title of the new play seems to promise a controversial or at least highly thought-provoking evening. Besides, said Thomas, it's "so complex, so many perspectives – to talk about the plot would be reductive. A quick summation would make it seem much simpler than it is. It's about things that no one says. It's strong stuff. Provocative, but not shocking for the sake of being shocking."

“I play,” he was willing to squeeze out, "a man in a suit who's in a lot of trouble." And muttered something about lawyers.

Mamet is directing too, which has the benefit that "we don't have that struggle [to understand the writer's intention] because the man is in the room," as Washington put it. "The playwright and director aren't arguing," added Thomas.

About Mamet's famously exacting language, Spader noted that "you can't stumble your way through this material or be off by a syllable." Mamet loves patterns, and they can get ruined if anything like improvisation occurs. At the same time, the play is still being rewritten as the cast works through it in rehearsal, including tiny things like adding an "and," then changing the "and" to a "but" – those little patterns and sounds that mean so much in a Mamet script. And yes, if you're wondering, there's cursing, though Thomas complained, "I have only one 'fuck.'" ("Richard, you're married," Grier interjected.) "And I'm afraid if I don't say it right I might lose it."

While Grier and Thomas have done a good deal of theater in recent years, having left (respectively) In Living Color and The Waltons behind long ago. (For example, I saw Thomas in Michael Frayn's Democracy on Broadway a few years back.) Nearly all of Spader's career, however, has been in film (Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Crash) and TV (Boston Legal, The Practice), and "I'm really glad to be doing a play again after so many years," he said. Washington is best known for screen work as well (Ray, Fantastic Four), but told us that she "fell in love with acting doing theater. This is where I learned to be an actor."

About Race and David Mamet, she says, "The process is delightful and fun and challenging and creative, he's fantastic." Of course, actors have to say things like that. But this cast seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the play, and Thomas predicted that "there'll be a lot of talking about it after it's been seen."

Previews begin Nov. 16. Tickets are available at Telecharge.

Scheduled to close January 10 after a two-year run on Broadway, this lark of a production remains funny and fresh. Maria Aitken directs a versatile, bustling cast of four who play dozens of characters in a frequently hilarious yet loving sendup of Hitchcock’s famous 1935 thriller, paced like an extended Monty Python skit and delivered in a series of not very serious accents and silly walks. The cast is small but the business is booming; the quick character and setting changes are a nonstop delight, the Tony Awards for lighting and sound well deserved. Jolly good show.

Heidi Schreck's first full-length New York production peels the hardened hide of history off a corner of life in turn-of-the-century England – the turn of the 15th century, that is. It was a time when people with delusions and hallucinations were venerated as mystics and saints (rather like now), and when mobs, egged on by the priesthood, burned religious heretics at the stake – also pretty much just like some parts of the world today.

Ms. Schreck, a well-known downtown performer, has based her script very loosely on The Book of Margery Kempe, sometimes considered the first autobiography in English. Kempe was a middle class wife and mother who ran a brewery and had a vision of Jesus around the time of the birth of her first baby. The story focuses on her inner battle to keep herself spiritually "clean" despite being a married woman. She wanted to be a saint in the way a reality show participant wants to become a celebrity, but she lived under the scrutiny of an intolerant orthodoxy that forbade women from preaching, among other strictures.

Ms. Schreck's characters speak in a colloquial, mostly naturalistic American idiom, a good choice for two reasons. First, her 600-year-old story resounds powerfully into our own times. Second, the blunt language creates an immediacy which, juxtaposed with a whiff of the supernatural, forms a close, magnetic atmosphere.

At the same time, director Leigh Silverman and set designer Rachel Hauck make effective use of the Ohio Theatre's deep, decaying-church-like space. The baby spends most of the play in a cradle suspended high above stage right, rocked via a pulley operated by the Nurse (a funny and touching Tricia Rodley). Characters enter from unexpected angles. Solid-looking tables and benches and an overall brownness evoke the deadly inflexibility of the ruling religious authorities. Candlelight and Theresa Squire's rich, rough costumes create an effectively Medieval feeling.

A blustery Darren Goldstein plays Margery's longsuffering husband John with admirable balance, measuring an old-time male sense of privilege against a genuine love – both affectionate and carnal – for his sexy wife. Jeremy Shamos and Will Rogers are respectively sympathetic and darkly funny as the cautiously heretical Father Thomas and the earnest youth Jacob, two searchers who fall into Margery's charismatic orbit. Margery herself (Sofia Jean Gomez) has a charming late scene with the wonderful Marylouise Burke, who plays the elder mystic Juliana of Norwich with equal parts holy panache and down-home friendliness, a wise old spiritualist and a sweet old coot.

But the play belongs proudly to Margery, and we left the theater feeling that we personally knew this complex and fascinating woman. Ms. Gomez gives a suitably dangerous and sometimes screamingly funny performance. Put simply, she plays the hell out of her, and with a terrifying Hell (along with Purgatory and Heaven) ever-present in the anxieties of the age, this feels like exactly the Margery we ought to have. One can read a proto-feminist strand into this lusty and freethinking depiction of the character, but any sense of anachronism is made palatable – fun, in fact – by the script's unabashed honesty. The comic dialogue and the flow from scene to scene feel effortless.

The second star of the show, besides Ms. Gomez, is the language. Ms. Schreck cleverly fuses modern talk with old topics, and old phrasing creeps in at times like words from an ancestral tongue. In one of Margery's many manic moods, toying with her husband she mimes stabbing him with her keys, then bursts out,

"I'm teasing you! Don't look at me like that. I'm going to open the pantry with these and then I'll make us Fritters. Yum! I'll take yolks of eggs, add flour and ale and stir it together till it be thick. Then I'll take pared apples, cut them thin like wafers, lay them in the batter, fry them in butter and serve them forth!"

When, charmed in spite of himself, John embraces her, she grows suddenly serious: "John. We sin too much."

The urge to be and do good versus the lustiness of the human animal – it's the same basic struggle, whether couched in centuries-old religious doctrine or modern secular morality. With a firm hand steering her characters through their struggles, Ms. Schreck transports us to a distant but not so different world. Haunted House or Tunnel of Love? The creatures lurking within can be one and the same.

Creature runs through Nov. 21 at the Ohio Theatre. For tickets please visit Theatermania or call 866-811-4111. For more information and group rates call 646-336-8077.

Photos by Jim Baldassare.

Having missed Jeff Grow's award-winning show during the soloNOVA Arts Festival earlier this year, I was glad to get a chance to catch it in its limited return engagement at D-Lounge last night. But I found it hard to figure out just what to make of the performance, which mixes magic, mind reading, and storytelling.

Mr. Grow quickly establishes his warm, witty personality along with his sleight-of-hand skills. The tricks are old ones, but when done well they still work, no matter that Houdini was performing and improving upon the same types of illusions a century ago. In any case this act isn't about a succession of magic tricks; it's more of a meta-magic show. Between Mr. Grow's impressive demonstrations of manual dexterity and mental skill, we're treated to stories about classic street scams, peppered with topical references and swayed (and slowed) by plenty of audience participation.

The ultimate payoff is a real showstopper. Along the way, though, things periodically bog down. For an audience with little knowledge of the arts of the magician- mentalist, the narrative parts of the show may be more edifying than they were to me (I had read a biography of Houdini recently and much of what Mr. Grow talked about was familiar to me from the book).

I found it hard to tell how much of his seeming distraction and his rather scattershot presentation was shtick, intended to charm and distract the audience. Magicians' stock in trade, after all, is to make us focus on one thing and thus completely miss something else. But some of the hemming and hawing occurred not in the context of an illusion or trick, but of a story. This, I found myself thinking at various points, is just going nowhere. Not having looked carefully at the promotional material, I wasn't aware that there was a director, Jessi D. Hill. The show didn't seem directed. It seemed haphazard.

In the end it all does go somewhere, and I'm glad I attended. With a show that requires so much audience involvement, there's always going to be some variation, and perhaps this was an unusually slow-paced night. But I couldn't help feeling that tautening the show up would have significantly improved it.

On the other hand, maybe it's an advanced form of performance art which only highly evolved beings can fully appreciate and which therefore went over my head. Wouldn't be the first time.

Creating Illusion has two more performances, Oct. 23 and 30, 10 PM at D-Lounge, 101 E. 15 St. (at Union Square). It's a small space and it was packed last night, so getting tickets in advance would be a good idea. Visit Smarttix or call 212-868-4444.

Photo by Zack Brown.