Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 3

There can be rational decisions to end one’s own life, but when such decisions are driven by most kinds of depression, which by definition are not rational, no one else, especially no one else touched by it, can make sense of it. And no string of “Whys” will bring us closer to an explanation. But comedy can at least supply insight into the dilemma.

Audiences need each other as much as the performers need audiences; in the aisles we feed off each other's energy, helping each other get the jokes, experience the pathos, and admire the performances. Steel Magnolias, is an excellent way to make our return, with plenty of jokes, plenty of pathos, and plenty of opportunities for actors to shine. Baltimore's Everyman Theatre's lovely production makes the most of these assets.

Given all the slapstick in this staging (jousting with pool noodles, silly sound effects, outrageous costumes, sending a coffin to a sea burial down a playground slide, tossing a babe-in-arms around like a fumbled football), the endless choruses of What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor in which the audience is encouraged to participate, the deliberately absurd doubling, it might almost seem at times that children are the target demographic here. But grownups will not be bored.

So while the course of true love does not run smooth when pursued by these slightly deranged lovers, it does in the end run true. All in all, then, this is a pleasing way for theatergoers to begin emerging from hibernation.

Playwright Payne's evident intent here was to illustrate the fullest range of things that can happen when Boy Meets Girl. Boy and Girl here are, respectively, a Wiltshire beekeeper named Roland (Christian Smith) and a University of Sussex cosmologist named Marianne (Ryan Gunning). We are plunged right into the multifariousness of possibilities as they first encounter each other at a party. Each version of the encounter starts approximately the same way, with Marianne venturing a pickup line about the impossibility of licking one's elbows. But in the first, he is not available, because he is still sorting himself out after a recently ended relationship. In the second, he is married. In the next universe, other facts are different, but he is again married. Only on the fourth a?oeGroundhog Daya?? variation do the variables permit them to proceed. And then we follow them in similar fashion through differently realized smorgasbords of first dates, him proposing, her cheating, him cheating, them breaking up, them encountering each other in a post-breakup context, etc.

Turns out Undine doesn't exist in the public records beyond 15 years back because Undine was born Sharona Watkins, and cruelly deserted her folks' lives to reinvent herself with a highfallutin' name and a highfallutin' profession. Now she needs to rebuild the bridges she burned and reclaim Sharona-dom because Undine-ness has collapsed on her.

While there are four characters in Kill Move Paradise, and they are endowed with names and hints at backstories, their individual identities don't matter much. They are unified more than distinguished, engaged as they are in a common enterprise, chorally addressing the same issues. Specifically, they are all African American men, all (apparently) killed by police gunfire, who are still coming to terms with the ongoing trauma attendant upon being born black and therefore vulnerable to what happened to them in today's America. And, having landed in an afterlife of some kind, they are required now to come to awareness of their present circumstances, and apparently to heal from the inner wounds their earthly lives have inflicted.

It isn't easy to stage Shakespeare's Henry V (1599). It's a big play), with a large complement of characters. Structurally, it is partly built around a siege and a battle, each of which occurs onstage. There are scenes and pageantry in two royal courts. No wonder, then, the directors tend to cut the lines, scenes, and dramatis personae to what they deem manageable proportions. Given all these challenges, the theatrical company taking on Henry V must be at the top of its game. And this time Baltimore Shakespeare Factory is not. It's an honorable failure, but BSF is simply overwhelmed.

Now presented by the Annapolis Shakespeare Company in Patrick Barlow's adaptation (London 2006, Broadway 2010), The 39 Steps is part music hall, part slapstick, part sex comedy, part thriller a?" and requires the skills necessary for each. Add to this that it contains 157 roles written to be performed by only four actors.

If we can climb beyond the foothills of the weird norms of the dramatic universe, we can take in how marvelously has Shakespeare anticipated some issues we must confront today. Showing us the Duke's deputy Angelo telling novice nun Isabella that he will save her brother Claudio from the executioner, but as a certain contemporary leader would put it, he a?oeneeds a favor from her, though,a?? or showing us Angelo defending himself from public accusations of sexual harassment by pleading a good reputation we know is maintained only by threats, conspiracy theories, and spurious claims about his accusers, or showing us Angelo getting his way (he thinks) by making promises he has no intention of keeping, Shakespeare conducts us to very familiar territory.

There is no question that R. Eric Thomas has serious things to say about the state of race in our country. In a Single Carrot press release, he is quoted, for instance, as saying that the play was written now to address a?oethe scourge of white supremacy,a?? and that the play is a?oeabout priorities for the future and a way out.a?? He calls his thoughts a?oecomplicated.a?? And complicated is fine, so long as the audience is given as concrete and coherent a map of the way through that complication as Thomas can fashion. But that work has not been done.

Churchill's take on love and on information seems a bit chilly. There may be a lot of both love and information out there, she appears to intimate, but it's not usually of very good quality. Much of Churchill's frostiness is, however, presented with a comic touch, emphasized by Dierdre McAllister's direction, by the energetic and youthful ensemble, and by the audience, which seemed to be goading on the performers with constant and frequently loud laughter.

Neil Simon's indecision about genre in Brighton Beach Memoirs was related to his problem being direct about his parents. A true account would necessarily have revealed their fighting, his father's desertions and infidelities, and the eventual failure of their marriage, and could only have been presented as a tragedy or melodrama. A comedy (and Brighton Beach is formally a comedy) would need to present a sanitized version of what Simon remembered; it would satisfy his audience (which expected comedies) and his parents, but it would also come further from the flavor Simon wanted to present. What we get in consequence is a play in three somewhat inconsistent genres.

The Powell expedition down the Colorado was a voyage of discovery only from the perspective of certain white Protestant men, since Native Americans lived along the route – and white Mormons dwelt close by as well. But only when the river and surrounding lands were surveyed and mapped by certain kinds of white men could they truly be considered part of the American imperium. While the travelers can acknowledge that various people “have run these streams” before them, including “natives” and military deserters, these predecessors were persons whom “no one counts.” That laughably foreshortened perspective does not rob the travelers of bravery, resilience, or grit. It just makes their heroic sacrifices less consequential than they understand.

Clearly, the story of a king who would, legally speaking, seem like the safest person in the land, but who nonetheless is slain, as is his lover, because their relationship is considered taboo, seems facially like a perfect vehicle to provide that treatment. But it simply isn't, or at least not without more work. There are too many complications unique to a royal situation, as this play cannot help showing.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle is rarely produced, and it certainly deserves the occasional outing, if only as a reminder that our forbears were just as interested in trying experiments with theatrical genre and form as we are.

And thus the struggle over ways of thinking and dealing commences. For Hicks, the past that Sterling and Barlow are protecting has no value, and the validity of Barlow's legal claim is irrelevant. From his standpoint, when the powers that be have firmed up their plans to a certain point, mere legality must step aside. For Wilks, abandoning the rule of law leads to chaos, even if following that principle leads to results that disappoint the oligarchs. I'll leave it to audiences to discover how the clash of perspectives works out, but it is clear that, regardless of what becomes of Aunt Ester's home, Wilks' choice to adhere to the rule of law and to honor his roots and ancestors would destroy his great plans, his business partnership, and probably his marriage. Though, of course, regardless of the outcome, such a choice would also make him a hero.

Getting Americans in a frame of mind where they'll despise British aristocrats is like shooting fish in a barrel (unless they're Americans who happen to be still in a daze from a viewing of Downton Abbey). And here the setup provides all the inducement we Yanks need to salivate for Limey blue blood: a highborn family, the D'Ysquiths, disowning a daughter because she eloped with a lowborn foreigner, and (most of them) behaving in impeccably beastly ways towards her son Monty.

One of the things drama does so well is to make us think and feel about the vectors a society is following. And one of the things happening in our society that drama needs to address is our headlong rush into technology with a personality verging on personhood. Proxy is a thoughtful and perceptive consideration of that rush.

All politics is personal, as the saying goes. Seldom is this point made with greater dramatic clarity than in Miss You Like Hell. The ending is powerful, but because of the politics. Miss You Like Hell illustrates, in a very personal and detailed way, how deportation policies damage and destroy lives and families, even away from the border. An enjoyable and uplifting evening of theater.