The Bagel And The Rat

Oslo Elsewhere is a theater company specializing in bringing Norwegian plays to US stages (and vice versa) in new translations. Its current production of Jon Fosse's Sa Ka La is the first time the work has been seen in the US. The company bills the play as "about syllables and expectations, preserving time and wasting it."

That statement is true enough as far as it goes – the title does come from the nonsense syllables uttered by the central figure, Mom (Kathryn Kates), who's been hospitalized by a massive stroke on her 60th birthday. But the deep subject of the story is distance. Fosse, through director Sarah Cameron Sunde's witty translation, effectively explores the distances between even the closest family members. Sunde makes those gulfs manifest by physically separating actors during key exchanges, while cleverly staging alternating scenes, which occur in two settings, in and around each other.

Using the occasion of an illness or death to gather a family and thus set a play's action in motion is one of the oldest and commonest tricks in the dramatist's book. But that's because it has a tendency to work. And Fosse has a very distinct delivery. His language is minimalist and repetitive, Beckettian and (to use a musical analogy) Reichian. The pacing (at least in this production) is slow, sometimes agonizingly so. It's probably safe to say that if you like Ingmar Bergman movies, you'll appreciate this play, but if you don't, there's a good chance you won't.

Slow pace isn't the only thing distinctly Scandinavian about the play. Leaving aside the Ibsen references, a certain Nordic stiffness and reserve is manifest, particularly in the character of the older daughter, Hilde (Birgit Huppuch), whose embrace of her more emotional sister Nora (Marielle Heller) in Mom's hospital room positively bleeds excruciating hesitancy and discomfort. That reserve is also found in the short lines of dialogue that dominate the script, clanging with Anglo-Saxon hardness. And it extends even to the funny scenes between the sons-in-law, who, uninformed of Mom's stroke, wait uncomfortably, like Vladmir and Estragon, for their mother-in-law to arrive, with their wives, for her own party.

Henning: Yah that's how we met / yah / we married sisters / you the youngest / and I the oldest

Johannes: That's what happened / yah / [Johannes walks over to the window, stands next to Henning and looks out] / What a beautiful day / [short pause] / it was a beautiful day / the day she turned sixty / [somewhat short pause] / that's good / [somewhat short pause] / because we do love her / don't we

Frank Harts and Raymond McAnally, the two fine actors who play Henning and Johannes respectively, generate a lot of laughs with their arch delivery of passages like this. Their early repartee provides a humorous counterfoil to the sometimes overly drawn-out scenes in the hospital, where the daughters' helplessness in the face of their mother's precipitous decline rides a wave between heartrending and frustrating.

As Mom sleeps, wakes, and utters her nonsense syllables, wordless yet fraught with human feeling, we're moved equally by Hilde's icy repression and Nora's flowery anguish. Yet Mom's personality somehow comes across just as powerfully as those of her putatively more articulate daughters.  That's a testament to Kates's remarkable performance in a role that includes a lot of sleeping, never lets her get out of bed, and permits her no actual words – only syllables and stroke-mangled facial expressions. She's painful to watch, and utterly convincing.

We're left with some open questions. Trine, an old family friend, arrives for the party with her new husband. Why, though she is the sisters' age, did she end up in a lasting friendship with Mom? The fact is raised as if it might be a key to understanding the family dynamic, yet it's never addressed.

The frequent use of the syllable "Yah" (halfway between Norwegian "Ja" and American "Yeah") effectively ties all the characters together and replaces the usual "Um"'s and "Well"'s and "Y'know"'s of American idiom. But we can't help pausing to wonder whether it's carried over from the original Norwegian, and if so, what did it mean there?

When a third sibling, Ola, eventually arrives – even more painfully detached from his feelings than Hilde – is his old-fashioned three-piece suit meant to indicate a setting some time in the pre-cell phone past? And does that explain why the characters aren't phoning one another at the first sign of lateness or uncertainty, the way 21st century folks normally do?

Sunde leaves the characters from one scene on stage while the next takes place, with the actors brushing past each other and even occasionally touching, across time and awareness, producing a spooky tingle. In the hospital scenes, the actors string out their lines across what seems every fiber of their beings.  They do the same with their pregnant pauses. Meanwhile, back at the house, the in-laws and friends verbally dance around their mutual discomfort. Through it all, repetition, sometimes excessive, infantilizes the stricken family, especially the daughters.  This process rings harshly true, and is thrown into even higher relief by the light of their mother's tragic reduction to a creature of nonsense syllables.

Finally, the production values are high, matching the skill of the excellent cast.

Problematic but thought-provoking, and intermittently fascinating, funny, and insufferable, Sa Ka La is – or maybe isn't – a good introduction to the work of a major Scandinavian artist. Fosse doesn't like to explain his plays. Explaining isn't the point.

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Sa Ka La runs through Sept. 27 at The Theatres at 45 Bleecker St. For tickets and further information, click here or call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or (outside the NY metro area) at (800) 432-7250.

Photos by Jim Baldassare. 1. Marielle Heller and Birgit Huppuch 2. Raymond McAnally

Vital theater can start from the inside and flow outward, its drama rooted in human psychology. Or it can shine a light from the outside world of society and politics into humanity's recesses, revealing them square by square like headlights scouring a country road at night.

Andrea Lepcio's sharp, funny, touching play One Nation Under takes the latter course. The bendable realities of war and class clash and twist with the inflexibilities of ideology, illuminating the lives of a number of complex characters who hail from both sides of "the tracks." It's a play of ideas and characters; and while the latter do embody the former, Lepcio's script and the fine actors in this Three Chicks Theatre production make them real and conflicted people, not the stereotypes that often inhabit stories like this.

It's 2005. A politically conservative and highly principled judge (Olivia Negron) is thrown for a loop when her ne'er-do-well hacker son Eric (Jon Eisworth) enlists with Halliburton for a long tour in Iraq. Having befriended the oily presidential advisor (the very good Joel Haberli) who's vetting her for a possible Supreme Court appointment, Judge Stanton starts to call in favors and spend money to get preferential treatment for her son.

These protections are not available to Darcee Washington, the Bronx reservist (Chanté Lewis of Platanos and Collard Greens) who's been assigned to protect him. While Eric's motives for going to Iraq have to do with breaking free from his mother, Darcee has enlisted because she needs the health benefits for her asthmatic son. The collision between her hardscrabble family and the judge's Park Avenue values is explosive, and the excellent cast delivers on its potential. Negron is marvelous as the judge, and Toks Olagundoye and Chrystal Stone are quiveringly good as the judge's ambitious clerk and the soldier's proud, scrappy sister respectively. Lewis and Eisworth bond cautiously, touchingly, and amusingly, in the corner of the stage representing Fallujah.

Though events turn out somewhat predictably, the path is strewn with small surprises and powerful scenes. Pairs hit it off but ultimately can't stand one another as the rich folks' conservative views grate against the realities of inner-city working-class life. It's all told via a plot that is both mobile and moving, and frequently funny.

Stories "ripped from the headlines" can be formulaic. One Nation Under avoids this trap. Deftly directed by Tye Blue, it's a gripping, superbly paced example of theater's power to reflect our own triumphs and failures more clearly than we can usually see from merely thinking them over, or from pondering the big questions in the security of our living rooms.

Presented by Three Chicks Theatre, through Sept. 13 at Theatre 54, 244 W. 54 St., New York City. For tickets visit Theatermania or call (212) 352-3101.

An Everyman undergoing an existential crisis climbs to a seventh-floor ledge and contemplates jumping. But before he can make up his mind, Venetian blinds begin opening onto seven different apartments, revealing the lives and characters within, and the Man is drawn into their dramas and absurdities. Though he knows no one in the building, he's given a drink and a cigarette, hectored, befriended, philosophized at, and accused of all kinds of complicities. Before you know it, nearly an hour and a half has gone by and our antihero is still perched on the ledge.

Will he jump in the end? I won't give that away. Though the play is nearly 20 years years old, and won awards in Vancouver BC, it's fairly obscure and most New York audiences won't know it. As realized by director Greg T. Parente and his Strain Theatre Company, with a skilled cast and crew, it's an entertaining piece of theater.

The denizens of the building, who appear through their narrow windows, are written as eccentric caricatures, not realistic characters. Crisply directed by Parente and played with wit and charm by the cast – each of whom, except for the Man (Erica Terpening-Romeo), plays at least two characters – they represent disparate human elements like religiosity, paranoia, duplicity, obsession, and the wisdom of old age.

The lesson the Man learns in the end results in an effective final set-piece of magic realism. But the lesson itself is conveyed verbally rather than dramatized, and that's the play's flaw; the manic scenes that make up the first two-thirds of the action don't lead, in any clear way, to what happens later.

The playwright, Morris Panych, has a great way with funny lines. "She doesn't actually want me to die," says the old lady of her fatalistic home care nurse, "because then she'd have to fill out a form." "The presence of Dacron," says the wife of the obsessive interior decorator, "gives him the flu."

More to the ultimate point, the old lady warns the Man against running "the risk of a protracted survival"; although she's philosophical and uncomplaining about her own confined life, she urges him to take the plunge. The message is about defying what we perceive as our fated path. Absurdism, like animation on TV, allows the writer to make a point in a way he couldn't otherwise, to make happen what could never "really" happen – with pleasing results.

Standout performances include that of the stunning Alice Kremelberg as the fetishistic Charlotte, and then, transformed by the mere donning of an old nightie, as the old lady. Thomas Patel does a remarkable job of motoring through his extended scene as the young psychiatrist Leonard, though the scene's too long nonetheless (through no fault of his). Toni-Ann Gardiner's nurse is hilarious. Really, the whole cast is quite good.

However, I wasn't delighted with the casting of a woman as the Man. It smacks of expedience rather than making any sort of statement, and while Terpening-Romeo shines during the character's climactic monologue, up until that point the casting against type proves a bit of a distraction. Dressed in an old-fashioned business suit, the Man is a descendant of a Magritte man, or Bartleby the Scrivener – someone adrift in his own questionable existence. That could be anybody, but, as written by Panych and indicated by the costuming, here it's the quintessential male office clerk/drone, lost without a sense of meaning.

You may not leave the theater enlightened, but odds are you'll have had a good time.

Presented by the Strain Theatre Company through Aug. 24 at the Gene Frankel Theatre, 24 Bond St., NYC. Tickets at Smarttix or call 212-868-4444.

Just as there are all sorts of dramatic traditions, from Elizabethan to operatic to Noh, so are there multiple styles of clowning. One that we hear relatively little about, despite its continued presence in popular culture (from the early films of John Waters, for example, and Cirque du Soleil), is the French bouffon tradition. This began, so it is said, when the deformed, insane, or simply very ugly were banished from society but allowed back into town on festivals solely to entertain.

Quasimodo, in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, is the best-known bouffon character today, and Lynn Berg, one-third of the cast of Bouffon Glass Menajoree, wears a silly prosthetic hunchback in his role as Tom in this very funny parody of the Tennessee Williams classic. The original Glass Menagerie doesn't get too many serious professional productions – at least here in jaded New York – precisely because it's so well known and integrated into the artistic consciousness. But Williams's tale of a lame girl and her family's desperate hopes for a "gentleman caller" is as ripe for parody as his swampy settings are for decay and disaster, and this production takes the unicorn fully by the horn.

Playing well off Berg's manic Tom is the superb Audrey Crabtree, who reinterprets the repressed, shy Laura as a nightmarish figure in blood and white, half evil zombie and half Crazy Mary. Afflicted with a respiratory disease and a lame leg, Laura makes a perfect bouffon character to begin with, and Crabtree pounds the stuffing out of the character with insane glee.

The third leg of the stool is Aimee German as Amanda, padded to giant size and obsessed with her own past as a magnet for gentleman callers. From the moment the three climb out of their box and begin spreading their net of horrendous dysfunction over the helpless audience, this excellent cast, directed by Eric Davis who clearly knows his clowning, has us in its loud, obscene power. It's grotesque in the original and best sense of the word.

Those familiar with the original play may be wondering: what of Jim, the gentleman caller who finally does pay a visit to shy Laura? Jim's still here – played by a member of the audience. This works quite well, and indeed there's a fair amount of audience participation throughout. But not to worry, there's no blue paint involved, and no real danger, just a thrilling whiff of it.

Go see the Bouffon Glass Menajoree (and maybe grab a cup of coffee first, it's a late start). It runs through Aug. 29, Fridays only, at the Green Room at 45 Bleecker Theatre. Visit the show's website for tickets, or call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 inside the NY metro area, outside at (800) 432-7250.

One of the great things about being a writer is getting invited to all sorts of interesting events, including some that fall outside the categories you’re used to. Like, say, an evening of lovely women taking off their clothes.

“Burlesque” originally meant a comedic, parodic style of variety show, of which striptease was only one element. Nowadays, although there is a serious “New Burlesque” movement out there somewhere, from my standpoint the non-titillating aspects seem to have dropped off, and we’re left with striptease. That’s the case, at least, in the burlesque shows I’ve seen in New York City. This form of burlesque can be closely compared to the dances you may find being preformed by Perth Strippers in Australia and around the world.

The other night I had the pleasure of experiencing Revealed, a monthly show at Under St. Marks, a little theater at St. Marks Place and First Avenue (complete with bar) that I’ve started to think of as a home away from home. It’s a warm, divey little spot, perfect for burlesque. In Revealed the artistes show more skin than in most shows, hence the title: yes, there’s full nudity, and I for one approve, but the best part of the fun is in the gaudy creativity on display.

Costumes and props are important, of course. Ms. Tickle, who had the most fabulous getup, made her reverse striptease into one of the sexiest numbers, walking on stage totally naked and then putting on her costume ver-r-ry slowly. Miss Ruby Valentine had great fun with plush boas, Gigi La Femme spanked herself, and so on. Scenarios are a big part of it. Kobayashi Maru had the most inventive act. Not to give it away, I’ll just say that her soundtrack came from a classic science fiction film, and unlike the other acts, it wasn’t music.

The puritanical busybodies of times past and present have it all wrong. Nothing about the naked human body is corrupting or immoral; quite the opposite. Yes, there are depressing strip clubs out there and a variety of pornography websites online like https://www.hdsexvideo.xxx/ to name just one of them, but in a burlesque striptease show the performers have all the power.

Striptease and raucous humor go naturally together. The engaging Bastard Keith is a jolly host (he’s funny and he can sing, too!), but half the best lines are shouted out from the gonzo audience. If you’d like to be part of the gonzo, Revealed runs the third Wednesday of every month at 10 PM. Tickets are available online or call (212) 868-4444.

You can also get more information at the show’s Myspace page, where you’ll find links to the performers’ individual pages. The fetching Creamy Stevens, for example, the “child of slaughterhouse workers” who hails “from some decayed hamlet in Washington State,” “learned she loved to entertain through making children cry at the juvenile detention center where she spent most of her teens.” Fictional biographies aside, everyone does seem to end up in New York eventually.

Amidst the ongoing destruction of what was once a funky, creative stew-pot of a way of life, tucked between the chain stores and rich-people-only developments that are taking over the city faster than you can say “My dog was electrocuted by a manhole cover!”, places like Under St. Marks hosting shows like Revealed persist, giving hope for the creative energy and street life of the, um, naked city.

Photo credit: Photo of Gigi La Femme by Luke Ratray

With their new theater piece, writer Robert Attenweiler and director Rachel Klein set out to combine the noirish flavor and tropes of the gangster genre with the circus/clown tradition. They’ve succeeded: All Kinds of Shifty Villains is an oddball play, but an entertaining one.

Fair warning: at the beginning, I hated the play. It began unpromisingly, with a musical number sung inaudibly by Precious Jones (Elizabeth Stewart), the story’s stereotypical femme fatale. Then, for the first couple of scenes, as we were introduced to philosophical tough-guy gumshoe Max Quarterhorse (Joe Stipek) and a batch of seedier types, I felt at sea, unable to fix on anything. Uneven acting didn’t help, and Stewart’s singing wasn’t the only thing hard to hear: some dialogue got swallowed by the Kraine Theater, thanks to certain actors’ lack of projection. (A rattling air conditioner didn’t help, but it wasn’t entirely to blame).

Gradually, though, the play won me over. It has two big things going for it: Attenweiler’s writing, and Klein’s funny, inventive, and occasionally eye-opening choreography – not as in dancing, but as in stylized and sometimes acrobatic movement, especially fight scenes and love scenes. Here much credit goes to the cast; standouts include Kari Warchock as Therese “Terry” Trueblood, Max’s loyal assistant, and Bret Haines, who plays the bearish half of a pair of lowlife brothers whom Max hits up for information. But the whole cast is good in this area. Together with the presence of a mysterious and vaguely sinister clown, the choreographed movement represents the circus element of this hybrid story.

As for the writing, it’s sharp and funny. “Will you be stepping into this sack of your own accord,” the brothers ask Terry as they kidnap her, “or must I produce a bludgeon?” Max, the detective, has just quit smoking, and his withdrawal symptoms take the form of hallucinations, which are sometimes amusingly acted out but often merely suggested by his absurd non sequiturs, which keep us enjoyably guessing. The suggestion of magic realism that comes from the evident lunacy mixes in interesting ways with the screwball comic action and Guy-Noirish set pieces, and holding it all together is Stipak, whose Max is a pretty strong focal point for the broad-ranging action. And he’s not the only nutcase in the house. “Something’s coming,” Max warns. “If it’s not what I think, at least it will be something else.”

So true, Max Quarterhorse. So true.

All Kinds of Shifty Villains runs Thursday-Sunday through June 28 at the Kraine Theater, 85 E. 4 St., NYC. Tickets online at Smarttix or call (212) 868-4444.

Scientist-playwright Carl Djerassi’s fourth play premiered in 2003 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (under the title Ego) but has not received an American production until now. I’m delighted to report that Redshift Productions’ new Off Broadway staging does absolute justice to this intelligent, witty, and very funny concoction of noir, psychodrama, and clowning.

Djerassi is an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University and the inventor of the birth control pill. He’s one of our culture’s premiere crossover figures between the worlds of art and science. I figured I’d mention all that, since it’s what one does. But he is also, quite independently of any other accomplishments, a playwright of the first order.

In Three on a Couch Stephen Marx, a famous novelist, fakes his own death in order to read the obituaries and critical appreciations he knows will follow. More than that, he is inspired by the real-life Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to create “heteronyms,” alter egos to publish works in different styles for an audience meant not to know that the books all come from the same brain.

Sadly for Stephen, his original self cannot disappear without leaving a very large loose end: his wife, the sultry Miriam, who is at least Stephen’s match in force of personality and wit. The action takes place in the office of Dr. Theodore Hofmann, Stephen’s Freudian psychoanalyst. Played with antic clowning by the wonderful Brad Frazier, Theo is the glue that holds the plot together, and that’s critical because the plot is tricky and a little bit shaky in one or two places – but that hardly matters.

The pleasures of this longish one-act play begin immediately, with Theo attempting some very funny stylized acrobatics between his stool and his analysand’s couch, where Stephen lies apparently asleep. This business symbolically suggests the shrink’s attempts to “reach” his difficult patient, but it also opens up Theo’s character to our amused and sympathetic eyes: he is himself a very troubled man.

His role as confidante to Stephen and Miriam, initially professional and then personal, serves superficially to grease the gears of their story, yet on another level the therapist’s inner life is the very subject of the play. He’s on stage for almost all of the action, and his pursuit of his craft, with all his peccadilloes and insecurities, is the intellectual heart and soul of the work, at least in this production, carefully directed by Elena Araoz, stunningly lit by Justin Townsend, and luxuriously costumed by Chloe Chapin.

Theo is both an iconic shrink and a shrinking violet. He knows the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis as well as anyone, but is incapable – at least with Stephen – of maintaining objectivity, of keeping his cool. Between sessions and meetings with the husband and wife, he repeatedly tries to persuade his answering machine that he is master of his domain, yet all it does is stare back at him with its single blinking red eye. No analyst could possibly function in this way in real life, but the entire play is consistently absurd, both larger and smaller than life. By the end Theo does achieve a surprising sort of catharsis aided by (of all things) Susan Zeeman Rogers’s simple but clever set design. We cheer him rather like we cheer Georges in Act I of Sunday in the Park with George, a character Theo oddly resembles in some ways.

Mark Pinter plays Stephen with a pomposity so hearty it’s believable, in the over-agitated way a Seinfeld character seems “real”; Lori Funk is equally larger than life as the vengeful wife. Lush and noirish, Arielle Edwards and David Thomas’s music and sound dance us from scene to scene and state of mind to state of mind. The director has her cast play brilliantly with the fourth wall; the action is speckled with telling details like Theo bending into the stage light to read a letter, Miriam violently batting her eyelashes for much too long, husband and wife pounding out all the lines of a dramatic private scene while looking only at the audience. All told, it’s a full-throated sounding out of the possibilities of live theater.

Given the story’s psychological setting, I could quibble with how certain motivations are explained. But this play, and this production, hardly leave room for such quibbles. Both are superior in every way.

Three on a Couch runs through June 22 at the Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam St., NYC. For tickets visit the theater’s website or call (212) 691-1555.