Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 10

Alex Podulke progresses by tiny gradations over the course of an hour and a half from impersonating a machine in speech and movement to a near-human in those regards, and one finds oneself saying, Of course that's how a machine trying to imitate a human would look, even though one has never seen it before.

There are the bones here of a perfectly respectable play about rape and what comes after in the U.S. military and veterans' system. They are often overwhelmed by formulaic exposition and too much going on. The play needs to be broken down and retooled.

The duel of these two characters is so absorbing and funny that I have to rate her black (in all senses) comedy as the strongest in this year's Contemporary American Theatre Festival. This is not just a duel of characters, but of actors. Lizan Mitchell, a face most viewers are probably familiar with from quality television like The Wire, is powerful and dignified, even with no clothes on - and delivers sharp-tongued zingers with scornful abandon. And N.L. Graham, a sassier sister of Laverne Cox of Orange Is The New Black (another great exponent of the art of making femininity issue from an originally male frame), mines every delicious wisecrack for all it might possibly be worth.

It's often been observed of Shakespeare that his plays don't tell you what he thinks about most subjects. But it is hard to doubt that he believed in romantic love, that mad, intoxicating, all-encompassing feeling that inspires courtship and marriage. Many of his comedies are essentially love delivery vehicles, giddy confections that give the audience an extraordinarily broad license just to roll in the bliss of it. I think especially of Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the most love-mad of all is surely As You Like It. And thankfully, that love-mad champagne feeling is served up nearly full-force in the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's latest rendering of the play.

Eventually Gil wins the struggle for the right to define his mother's obsequies. He is handed the urn with her ashes. He has sole custody. But then what? While Gil doesn't have the answer, Mo does. It involves a car chase down I-95 and the Cinderella Castle Suite at Disneyland, and a vision of Adelaide dancing in a magical white dress, and fireworks.

It is about sex, but mostly because that is where love starts. The effect is orgasm, of course, but it is also the breaking down of walls. As the barriers finally fall, the mood turns lyrical, and the action ends with a kind of latter-day echo of the wedding dance that would often finish a Shakespeare comedy.

It is gratifying that Christopher Durang's latest comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which is assuredly going to be produced in time by every community theater company in the country, gets its Baltimore premiere in style at Center Stage, as a sort of reference production by which other local ones can be gauged. The show, which rolled out over the last two years in regional test runs, then at the Lincoln Center, and then on Broadway, where it closed last year, is in joint production here with the Kansas City Repertory Theatre. The fun seems effortless; with a solid cast and wonderful direction by Eric Rosen at Center Stage, of course nothing is going to go wrong. But I'm willing to bet it would take a lot of trying to do this well-made play badly; I expect we'll find out.

Of course, the musical is not just the tale of the working-out and the ultimate dispelling of a family curse. It is also a poignant account of a woman relating to a treasured younger brother and an even more treasured son in light of the early loss of the brother.

The Last 5 Years is a treasure of the American musical theater, the quintessential chamber musical. Jason Robert Brown's mini-masterpiece boasts but two performers, a small musical ensemble, a challenging but moving score, and a simple but powerful structure designed to maintain dramatic equilibrium and balance between the characters from start to finish. Not surprisingly, it is often produced (34 productions announced this year - not to mention a film version).

The vulnerability of Witt's recreated Illyria makes the joy in the show shine all the brighter. There will never be a definitive production of any Shakespeare play, but this is one of the truly special ones.

So, after trashing Mormonism, and by implication most other faiths (since most have foundational myths about as likely-sounding as the LDS ones, and taboos that are no less but also no more sensible than those which restrain the Mormons), there are two natural places to end up. One would be in some kind of existential humanism, the other in some kind of existential despair. But the creators don't want to go either place. So they have to fudge it, with a huge spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down and a philosophically confused but dramatically permissible twist. There is some kind of reason for the whole cast and the audience to be exultant at the end.

Something happened involving those two and Mrs. K's deceased husband. We may think we know, but I suspect most guesses will be wrong. We know the play is going in a dark direction, but we may well not guess how dark.

There's nonsense delivered in true Cantabridgian style, i.e. with insane argumentative rigor. There are dazzling scantily-clad showgirls and showboys. There are songs that are wonderfully self-referential and songs that push the limits of taste. And there are lots of tag-lines and tropes for Monty Python fans - and who isn't? Hard to quarrel with an assemblage of attractions like that.

You may know it as Here's Love. You may know it as It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. (The show has been produced under both titles.) Currently the 1963 Meredith Willson musical based on the film Miracle on 34th Street goes under the name of its source material, the 1947 classic movie, and Toby's Columbia is presenting it in a very impressive revival.

This is probably the preeminent jukebox musical, beautifully presented. And if you can't visit the New York mother ship, this will do nicely.

The point of von Mahlsdorf was that she survived, and in doing so permitted her collection and the world it evoked to survive as well. As she tells the audience at the end: "You must save everything and you must show it as is. It is a record of life." Everything, in this case, including accounts that cannot entirely be reconciled with the documentary history. It is all, in some sense, true, all, in some sense, a record of life.

I cannot honestly report I saw much profundity in what was said here. We learn next to nothing about Oscar's need to walk out the door, where it came from, why he yields to it so willingly and thoughtlessly, why he is so stubbornly resistant to his family's promptings to man up, stick around, and step up to the plate on occasion.

This is poetry, poetry for the mind to sink into and be overwhelmed. To paraphrase Mae West, goodness has nothing to do with it. Nor does badness. It comes from some amoral place in Wilde's psyche and appeals to that place in ours.

I am not sure what Shepard is doing in Shepherdstown. The Contemporary American Theater Festival held there is dedicated to performing 'new American plays.' There's nothing new to me about Sam Shepard's play Heartless; it seems distinctly old hat. I went back to a review I wrote of one of his plays for my college newspaper in 1970, and a number of the things I wrote about that play (The Holy Ghostly) could be said about Heartless. I commented how characters migrate into each other, how they become composites of various characters, how there is no predictable logic to their interactions, and how the drama loses the sense of being story-telling about distinct persons. I compared what Shepard did to abstract painting. And, on the evidence of Heartless, it's still true.

'Every good story's a war story,' says a character in Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, premiering at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. That certainly seems to be playwright Mark St. Germain's approach in imagining a 1937 encounter between writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.