Knock Knock; Who's There?; 9/11; 9/11 Who?; You Said You'd Never Forget!

Someone asked me last week what it was like to be in New York on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. And the answer is, well...a shitload better than being here on 9/11/01. I spent most of last weekend not turning on the TV, ignoring newspapers, and definitely not reading the countless "Ten Years Later" magazine cover stories. I didn't especially need an anniversary in order to remember, you know?

That morning, I did exchange some texts with someone I was with on the day, each of us contributing pieces of memories that the other had forgotten or, more likely, blocked out. We were both RAs at an NYU dorm, and our dining hall became a place where people who had family or friends in the towers went to await news. I had actually slept through the towers falling somehow, and she was the one who told me what happened. She had no memory of this. It's better that way.

That was Remembrance, Part 1. Part 2 came in the form of a "political cabaret" at the Highline Ballroom that night. Earnest and sad, I could have done on my own. What Knock Knock did was provide a space where boundaries would be pushed, good taste obliterated, and remembrance filtered through the offbeat art of a bunch of self-described freaks. It was, in short, exactly what I needed.

Burlesque star Julie Atlas Muz put the whole thing together and opened with a heartfelt speech about memory and about the need of artists to reflect the world around them, heavily quoting Nina Simone. It was a good place to start. What followed were three acts: one for New York, one for the fractured world, and one called "Oh No, You Di'int!"

Rather than take you through every act (I was there for four hours and it was still going when I packed it in), let's talk highlights and lowlights. The Stanley Love dance troupe dressed as iconic New York buildings as the Twin Towers danced to "This Used to Be My Playground." It was the sort of overly earnest, deeply sentimental performance that in any other space I would have laughed off the stage. Instead, it was lovely and appropriate. Silly, yes, but in a loving and sensitive way. Justin Bond hosted the second act and provided the most cutting commentary of the night, comparing the powers that led to the AIDS pandemic to those that created the level of animosity driving the 9/11 terrorists. "I told you I'd complete a thought," he said after teasing the audience with threads of ideas throughout his set. "I never said you'd like it."

The night was heavy on burlesque: a firefighter couple stripping naked and covering themselves in ash to David Bowie's "Hero," a woman pulling dollar bills out of (well, YOU guess) to "I'm Proud to Be an American," and so on. If you were going for an overall theme, it was this: New York is awesome. America is a little sleazy. Hey: what did you expect?

There were also some acts that seemed to have no idea where they were. A breakdancing crew did a legitimately amazing number that had nothing to do with anything. Everyone's favorite trannie, Amanda Lepore, tried to sign along with a backing track and took off all her clothes because...well, that's just what she does.

Most alarmingly, butch transgender woman Rose Wood did a sort of strip-ish thing that involved homeless garb and fake feces showered on the audience. I actually shouted, "Oh shit!" before realizing how literally it could be taken. And Breyer P-Orridge sang/slammed a song/poem she called "a big downer." And it was. In that it was hideous, not in that it actually touched a nerve.

Here's the thing: sometimes simply being provocative is enough for me. Is it easy to just be outre? Sure. Is sarcasm and low humor the sucker's way out? Absolutely. But on a day when you just want to be shocked out of your misery, there's absolutely nothing wrong with mixing moments of tender emotionality with some brutally distasteful shit jokes. It's the downtown way.

The Tenant

I got more blog hits out of Sleep No More than almost any other show, War Horse and The Motherfucker with the Hat being the only exceptions. It makes sense too. Going into a performance where you have to wear a mask, no one really tells you what it's about, and you know you're going to more or less be aimlessly wandering a few thousand square feet...it's intimidating. Maybe you want to make sure that no one is going to jump out of dark corners at you. Maybe you don't trust yourself to make the right choices with so much space and so little time and want some more direction. Maybe you just want to know where the naked people are (try the tubs). On the one hand, there's something thrilling in diving into this sort of experiential theater. On the other, it can be overwhelming, and sometimes confrontational art just isn't the order of the day. Personally, I love unsettling shit, but when I headed uptown to catch this year's OTHER five-floor, openly wandered theatrical presentation, The Tenant, I was feeling tired, under the weather, and just generally not up for stumbling about in the dark not knowing what to expect. As I waited outside, I checked out a review or two, and while in the end I'd say it wasn't necessary as The Tenant is even less interactive than Sleep No More, I'm nevertheless glad that I did since the reviews grounded me a bit in the plot.

There's the crucial difference between Sleep No More and The Tenant. The former is an impressionistic piece with characters pulled from Shakespeare and Hitchcock, but your enjoyment doesn't at all feel related to an ability to follow the particulars, even if throughlines do occasionally present themselves. The Tenant, while significantly lower-rent, is in some ways the more ambitious piece as it not only has a plot, it has a fairly traditional structure.

Trelkovsky searches for an apartment and ends up locating the custodian of one building attending to a tenant who tried to kill herself by jumping out of her window. As long as that apartment's available... This piece is presented in the basement of the building the show is presented in. Everyone is gathered together to watch a single opening and then sent off into the "apartment building" Trelkovsky takes his room in. Then shit goes crazy. Here's the storyline in a nutshell: the other residents are frigging crazy and try to drive him mad. He begins to believe they want him to kill himself just as the former occupant of his apartment did. And he may be right. They all seem to have it out for him--some find him a nuisance, some seem to hate him because he's Polish, and others just don't trust anybody new.

What was so completely fascinating about this project was that you could follow Trelkovsky and his descent into madness, or you could roam through his neighbors' apartments where talk would occasionally drift to him, but where independent story lines also made headway. Somehow, and even though I experienced it, I can't quite explain it, the entire thing felt manageable and as though it was always leading towards one inevitable end. It WAS, of course, but that it didn't feel forced or erratic or random is an incredible testament to the team of writers who assembled the piece.

Side by side with Sleep No More, a lot of The Tenant doesn't fare well in comparison. SNM looks to have cost millions. The Tenant easily cost in the thousands. The low thousands. The sets are chintzy and the sound design leaves a lot to be desired. The cast is wildly uneven. One or two performers are brilliant. The rest range from average to...let's say below average. Of course, there's another key difference: The Tenant is free. The price isn't reflected simply in the cheaper look. It also feel apparent in the deeply earnest, gung ho approach of all involved. These are people who are giving everything to the show they're in, and you can feel that commitment, even when it's filtered through a few amateur-hour elements.

The Tenant as a production is a beautiful marriage of high and low--technical precision and spirited ambition, and that marries well with the material which is sort of a high-minded horror-farce. Once people start doing drag, it's really anything goes. Based on a Roman Polasnki movie (itself based on a novel) that was panned upon release but later developed a cult following, the whole enterprise is a really good bad time. I'd love to go back again if I have the chance.

If anyone stumbled upon this review looking for where the nudity in THIS production is, I can't help you. I saw a sign warning of nudity, gun shots, and strobe lights. I missed them all.

Man and Boy

I have three really exciting shows to share my feedback on. Before I get there, though, let's talk about the latest Roundabout show! Okay, so here's the deal: I often like the shows the Roundabout does more than just about anybody. I liked Matthew Broderick's widely panned performance in The Philanthropist. I really enjoyed Sienna Miller in the deeply loathed After Miss Julie. And damned if I didn't get a kick out of the sappy Holocaust musical (you read that right) The People in the Picture. But even with those shows, I suspect that my enjoyment is intrinsically related to the fact that I only spent $10 on each. And even then, my expectations may have been lowered by the fact that it's the Roundabout. Still, even for $10, I couldn't get behind The Ritz or The Understudy (even with Zack Morris!) or Old Acquaintance or any number of other shows. Still, I stay in the $10 game for the moments when they nail it out of the park--their Waiting for Godot, The Glass Menagerie, Assassins, and Cabaret were all stunning. Of course, the material in each of those cases was exceptional. Give Roundabout an amazing show and they may well do an incredible production. Give them middling material, and they aren't going to find a way to elevate it. At this point, that seems verging on undeniable.

So where does Terrence Rattigan's Man and Boy fall? Well...they didn't knock it out of the park.

The unimpeachable Frank Langella plays Gregor Antonescu, a sleazy financier caught in a terrible scandal that may take him down. The implications are far-reaching, and on a pivotal night, he goes to his estranged son Vasili's apartment in the West Village to try to save his entire career, reputation, and holdings. The deeply moral Vasili has been hiding out under the assumed name Basil Anthony. Not even his longtime girlfriend knows his real past. Five years earlier, Basil took a shot at his father when he learned the extent of the old man's financial misdeeds. Even still, Gregor believes the boy doesn't mean him any harm ("He missed"), and it's apparent to those around on this fateful night that Basil still holds his father in high esteem. Perhaps too high.

A treacherous family drama in the guise of a financial thriller, Man and Boy provides many moments of black comedy and appealing (or appalling, depending on your take) seediness. Most notable is Gregor's plan to use his son as a pawn in a game of sexual cat and mouse with another financier. And Langella seems to take great pleasure in playing this decidedly despicable yet oddly sentimental criminal. The production around him isn't up to the task in spite of a handful of wonderful supporting turns--Francesca Faridany as his countess wife, Michael Siberry as his longtime confidante, and Zach Grenier as his business friend/rival all strike high notes. The younger cast members--Driver, Brian Hutchison, and Virginia Kull--seem a bit stymied by the decidedly more earnest parts they've been given, and I don't believe that's a matter of age or experience. Instead, it seems the production can't seem to settle on a tone. Everything is played a little too black and white, where it seems the joys of the play lie in its middle grounds. I found myself wishing the whole thing was played a bit meaner. For me, the highlights came in Gregor's interactions with his wife and his confidant. The depths of the cruelty on stage were plumbed, but the humor was never sacrificed. The show is at its best when it's at its most unsettling, and Driver, Hutchison, and Kull all seem to be playing their parts to garner the good will of the audience, effectively letting the air out of the show.

I'm not sure if Man and Boy is a great play, but I feel like there's potential for it to be greater than the whole I saw. From my one experience with it, which I will say was slightly unsatisfying but not at all unpleasant, I just wanted to see it more vicious. Right now, it feels like Dracula without his fangs--sinister but harmless. Hopefully as it carries on performances, the whole ensemble will find a way to engage in a bit more bloodletting.

Completeness

Why, hello again. How incredibly erratic my theatergoing has gotten lately. I didn't see anything and then I saw everything. I went from nothing to write about to way behind, so let's dive in with the first of five shows I saw in the past six days: Itamar Moses' Completeness at Playwrights Horizons. You know how some things can be too clever for their own good? This is like that. But it works. Mostly. In spite of itself. Let's get more specific.

Boy are you lucky this blog isn't in real time because I just went on a crazy hunt for my Playbill. Never found it. So let's just say I might be guessing at some character names here. The show opens with Elliot and Molly (confirmed names!) meeting in a computer lab on an unnamed college campus. He's a computer programmer. She's a biology grad student studying the reactions of different proteins in yeast. Or different proteins ON yeast? It's something about proteins and yeast. How to summarize this as quickly as possible while also not revealing how much of the science-y discussions I didn't understand? So...to map the possible chemical reactions of proteins, you need to be able to isolate the independent reactions of properties and find a way to take into consideration every other stimuli that may be itself causing the reaction. Computers can help by processing algorithms that will limit the potential outcomes and produce incredibly specific answers. But to be able to process every single outcome of something, you need a big fat algorithm that technology as we know it wouldn't be able to solve within our lifetimes.

In other words, all things are at the cusp of being knowable, but the incredible number of variations that could potentially occur might as well be infinite as far as the human brain is able to comprehend them. Not everything is possible, but it might as well be. Surround this discussion with a love story that takes these principles into account and...voila: Completeness.

So yeah, it's an incredibly complicated metaphor for romantic interaction, and why we can't know whether or not things will ever work out. And that metaphor is perhaps too conveniently grafted onto a play about two nerd geniuses falling in love just as they're each falling out of love with two other people (the other two cast members, Meredith Forlenza and Brian Avers as characters I can't name from memory). The dialogue is too self-consciously clever, and the themes are passed along in a less than subtle way, but you know what? I really dug it.

Here's why: the play is nothing if not ambitious. From the author's willingness to tackle big, complicated concepts to his breaking of formal convention in the second act (in a hideous bit that should be cut except that it means so well), he may not always succeed, but that it is as accomplished as it is as often as it is...it's just really promising. It's also crazy funny at times, and it manages a pitch-perfect demonstration of the mating rituals of the privileged and over-educated. Also, the cast is fantastic. Karl Miller is adorable as Elliot, a self-involved yet oddly romantic doofus with charm to spare. Aubrey Dollar as bio grad student Molly is perfection. She's a self-loathing narcissist, drowning in guilt that she can't stop being fascinated by. She may hate her life, but she definitely doesn't find anything else more interesting. Dollar is also a natural comedian, provoking the hardest laughter without ever seeming to try.

This is one of those shows where you feel like in lesser hands, you'd be chewing your own hand off hoping the experience would just end. But somehow a cast was assembled that could be witty and believable and effortless even while spouting off about complicated algebraic and biological nonsense. While the show may be ham-handed in its delivery, it also shows a beautiful sense of balance between comedy and drama with the characters balanced precariously on the edge of being hideously irritating without ever going over.

Completely is a deeply imperfect, lovingly executed, totally enjoyable show.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

As summer wound down, I didn't take in as many shows as usual. Part of this is that I didn't have a ton of time. A bigger part is that there just hasn't been anything new to see. I actually wanted to head to the theater tonight but literally couldn't find a single thing I wanted to go to. I thought about seeing Follies a third time even though I already have tickets for next Monday. That's how dire the situation was. Instead I came home and engaged in the great mouse hunt of 2011. The mouse has still not been caught, but there are three different types of anti-rodent devices scattered about my single room apartment now.


Point is, I can't wait for the Fall season to kick off, but before it does so in earnest, I did manage to catch the Elevator Repair Service's production of The Select (The Sun Also Rises) at NYTW last weekend. ERS's Gatz, a six-plus hour show in which the script was the entirety of The Great Gatsby was a major event last season that I chose not to partake in. Here's the thing: I'm not the hugest Gatsby fan. Yes, it's beautifully written. Yes, it probably has the best last sentence of any novel ever. But that doesn't mean I LIKED it. And however brilliant the show was (and reports were that it was pretty damned brilliant), I just couldn't bring myself to drop $150 to spend several hours watching the performance of an entire novel that I feel iffy about.


Okay, fine. I waffled for the above reasons for a really long time and by the time I decided to see it, the whole run was sold out, and I've been kicking myself ever since. Point is, they're back, and this time they're doing a version of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (which I somehow never read). And it's not the whole novel. And it's a mere...three and a half hours. So I was in.


All of the text is Hemingway's. His narrator, Jake Barnes, becomes ours as well. Beautifully played by Mike Iveson with a detached amusement barely concealing a wealth of anxious, useless desire, he is an ex-pat in Paris rendered impotent by a war wound. He and the increasingly desperate ex-boxer Robert Cohn are in love with Brett Ashley, a promiscuous divorcee. Cohn has an affair with her that ends brutally for him but barely even registers for her. Barnes continues to be a center for her--she keeps spinning back, but his irresolvable impotence keeps them apart. It's also about war, the "Lost Generation," bullfights and all that, but if you want that summary, just check out the SparkNotes.


Long story short, it's a booze-soaked romantic tragedy. Tragic only in the most intimate (and thus unsettling) ways. It's too funny and self-aware (and real) to allow for a broad moment of catharsis. So let's call it...subtly devastating. In only the most entertaining of ways.


Performed on a single set designed to look like the Parisian bar The Select that the characters frequent, Barnes narrates in frequent monologues while the other characters are given only Hemingway's dialogue. It wasn't until I had a chance to step back and think about the mechanics long after the show was over that I really appreciated how deeply impressive that all was. There's no dramaturge listed in the program which is either a gross oversight or an incredible testament to the director and troupe's collaborative efforts.


For the most part, the largest, trickiest roles are also the best played which is certainly better than the opposite. I remember when Holly Hunter won the Oscar for her wordless performance in The Piano, my mother said, "I don't know that she deserved it. I mean...she didn't have to memorize any lines." If remembering the most text is the greatest achievement of an actor (which I obviously don't believe to be the case), Iveson deserves any award thrown at him. But the fact is, in addition to remembering a hideously overwhelming amount of text, he also manages an incredibly well-shaded performance as our broken, yet spirited protagonist. Matt Tierney does delicate work as the alternately infuriating and heartbreaking Robert Cohn. You want him to be rejected, but damned if you don't feel bad from him when he is. And Lucy Taylor is frigging ridiculous as Brett. It's easy to see why men would fall at her feet, but more importantly, why they'd stick around after she dismissed them. She's thoughtless without being cruel--a woman dancing as fast as she can to keep the party going, needing to find (or pretend) happiness, even if she leaves people lying in her wake. The tragedy is a result of her not realizing how much of an impact she has on those around her. She's Sally Bowles with even less direction but much more money.


This is not to say the cast is perfect. I don't know who thought Susie Sokol should be cast as 19-year-old bullfighter Pedro Romero, but it's hideous casting. It felt like they were going for Cathy Rigby as Peter Pan and got Patti LuPone playing Dennis the Menace. Absolutely nothing about it worked. And to stick with awkward casting comparisons Kate Scelsa as Frances, Cohn's wife, reads like Carol Channing playing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Literally EVERY time she opened her mouth, the elderly woman next to me started cursing. "Jesus Christ. Here she goes again. Fuck. She just...Jesus fuck." I could relate. Related: I can't wait to be old enough to be able to pull that shit off without getting in trouble.


Back to the production. The sound design is miraculous. Normally, I'd say that if you're paying attention to the sound design, it's a bad sign, but here it's actually mixed on stage and so thoroughly integrated into the show in an intentionally artificial way that it just reads brilliantly. And the two dances scenes are stunners--kicking us out of the action and into a more interprative space in a way that captures the joy and also the menace of the era's drunken decadence.


Interestingly (to me) this isn't a show that I left feeling elated. My immediate response was actually that they needed to hack 30 minutes and get the thing moving more quickly. But as I think about the performance more and more, I'm increasingly impressed with what I saw and how rich the experience was. It's hard to say how much of that was the show itself and how much was the source material, but in the end, I'm very, very glad I saw it.