Theater

Triumph of the will

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:37:32 GMT

2nd Story's stirring Miracle Worker
It's easy enough— unavoidable, actually — to admire and be amazed by the accomplishments of Helen Keller, but it took the account by playwright William Gibson for the remarkable work of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, to be so widely appreciated.

REACHING OUT: Thompson as Keller.

It's easy enough— unavoidable, actually — to admire and be amazed by the accomplishments of Helen Keller, but it took the account by playwright William Gibson for the remarkable work of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, to be so widely appreciated. The current 2nd Story Theatre production of The Miracle Worker (through December 14) manages as powerful and affecting a job with the play as we will ever see.

This is a brisk and skillfully told tale to work from, for the most part. We are plunged into the emotional plight of the Keller family in the first seconds, as Annie's mother, Kate (Erin Olsen), suddenly discovers that her infant, just having recovered from a deathly illness, cannot see or hear her. The drawn-out scream of her name blends into the sight of an older Helen (Amy Thompson) across the stage, isolated in a spotlight, disheveled and groping the air.

Helen is virtually feral. Not wanting to add to her misery, her genteel mother and lovingly hapless father, former Confederate officer Capt. Arthur Keller (Eric Behr), simply stand back and watch. The wild child does what she wants, snatching food off their plates instead of eating at her own place, throwing violent tantrums at any objection. Only her half-brother James (Jonathan Jacobs) keeps calling, futilely, for some discipline.

Into the maelstrom steps Annie Sullivan (Joanne Fayan). She has spent most of her life at the Perkins Institution for the Blind — operations have restored most of her vision — and her very first job has sent her to the Keller household as a governess and teacher.

The central scene is the drawn-out battle to teach Helen table manners. The rest of the family is sent out of the dining room, and away from their dinner, as Annie repeatedly forces Helen back into her seat. Helen's hand keeps being pulled away from her plate, and spoons arc over her shoulder like a succession of sheep being counted. By the end, not only is the child eating, but she also is folding her napkin, to the astonishment of her parents. Annie's concern that she discipline Helen without breaking her spirit is relieved. But Helen now flees at her touch, a bit of a problem when you're trying to spell words into someone's hand. Needless to say, Annie solves that with desperate ingenuity.

Wallowing

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:07:39 GMT

Lockerbie overdoes the melodrama
Playwright Deborah Brevoort looked at the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, shook her head, and reduced the tragedy to its effect on one family and one town in The Women of Lockerbie , being staged by Roger Williams University Theatre (through November 22).

As affecting as hearing about the death of someone can be, the reaction doesn't scale up properly. Large numbers of dead draw attention to the numbers rather than to the individuals. Playwright Deborah Brevoort looked at the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, shook her head, and reduced the tragedy to its effect on one family and one town in The Women of Lockerbie, being staged by Roger Williams University Theatre (through November 22).

Planned in Libya in retaliation for American military actions, the bombing took the lives of all 259 people onboard and 11 on the ground in the southern Scotland town. Brevoort didn't take on the challenge of writing about the incident until she saw a 1997 documentary about the Lockerbie laundry project. That involved women of the town washing the bloodstained clothing of the victims, which had been in storage for years, to return the items to the families.

The play focuses on the parents of one of the victims, who have traveled to Lockerbie to participate in a vigil on the seventh anniversary of the incident. Bill Livingston (Jesse Trimbach) has never fully grieved over the death of his 20-year-old son, Adam. He has been too busy trying to calm his wife Madeline (Mandie Hittleman), who has been in constant tears. Their friends back home have stopped calling or visiting. Being in Scotland, at the site of the crash, apparently has driven her mad, as she wanders the hills shouting her son's name and searching for evidence of him. Other parents had bodies returned to them, but he was too near the explosion. "The sky wasn't meant to be a burial ground," Madeline insists. "It's too big."

Since this is being presented as a tragedy, three townswoman serve as a Greek chorus (Stacey Mendyka, Elizabeth Before, and Rebecca Murphy), consoling and advising the couple. More directly helping them is Olive Allison (Amanda Jenkins), another woman of the town. She is the main person talking to Bill, drawing him out, since his wife is too absorbed in her own pain to communicate much beyond that. Madeline is choked with rage and self-pity. She was making a pie when news of the explosion interrupted her soap opera (All My Children, in which a character was considering having an abortion, no less). "I live in New Jersey," she sputters. "I have two cars in the driveway. This was not supposed to happen to me." Death visits briefly, the chorus agrees, but grief stays forever. But the chorus mainly offers truisms and bromides, such as that awful events are part of a divine plan "so that we may learn and grow." That notion angers the father, who points out that this would mean his son died so that he could learn a lesson.

Timeless treat

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:14:06 GMT

It's hard not to enjoy a rousing production of Oklahoma!, for more reasons than any musical needs in order to get audiences smiling and humming afterward. URI Theatre is pleasing those familiar with the classic and winning new fans with a production (through November 23) that just can't stop moving.
URI heads to Oklahoma!

FARM GIRL AND COWBOY Maynard and Hawver.

It's hard not to enjoy a rousing production of Oklahoma!, for more reasons than any musical needs in order to get audiences smiling and humming afterward. URI Theatre is pleasing those familiar with the classic and winning new fans with a production (through November 23) that just can't stop moving.

Directed by Paula McGlasson, its musical direction is by Lila Kane and choreography by Angelica Vessella.

Taking its cue from the production of Show Boat 15 years earlier, 1943's Oklahoma! taught subsequent musicals how to do their job. Oscar Hammerstein didn't just fit his lyrics to Richard Rodgers's music, he used the songs to integrate with and advance the plot. We take that for granted now in musicals — that the songs won't merely decorate the story.

Coming to Broadway in the midst of World War II, Oklahoma! was designed not only to make audiences feel good, but to feel proud about their country. Commendably, this isn't done with flag-waving but by harkening back to Oklahoma before it was a state. (It's a musical reprise of the 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, adhering closely to the turn-of-the-century characters and plot, but smoothing out Lynn Riggs's clunky, western-hillbilly dialogue.)

The feel-good part centers around a traditional love story, but with a difference. Plucky young cowboy Curly (Nile Hawver) hankers after sweet young farm girl Laurey (Lara Maynard), as she does in return. But these are independent sorts out there on the prairie, so both of them have too much pride to admit as much to the other. Their coy duet, "People Will Say We're in Love," continues in that tone.

The other romance is a comical triangle unmatched in musical theater. Ado Annie (Stephanie Morgan) is a lusty, giggling teenager whose hormones turn her head toward whichever boy is sweet-talking her at the moment, as she admits in "I Cain't Say No!" Her main boyfriend is Will Parker (Naysh Fox), a gangly, goodhearted simpleton. Her father promised that if Will ever managed to scrape together $50, they could get married. But that's too much detail for poor Will, who wins that much in a rodeo but spends it all on presents for Annie.

Her other admirer, of a sort, is Ali Hakim, a plaid-suited peddler from Persia, delightfully portrayed by Cory Crew with gulps and fidgets and a healthy aversion to shotgun-wielding fathers. Other men join him in singing "It's a Scandal! It's a Outrage!," which didn't make it into the movie version, though it should have. ("A rooster in a chicken coop is better off than men/He ain't the special property of just one hen!")

A 'beautiful life'

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:39:50 GMT

Center Stage's Cabaret is in top form
In the context of today's new political dawn, Cabaret , the Kander and Ebb musical about 1930 Berlin, is like one of those silly horror movies that couples go to for an excuse to cling together and shriek. Isn't it great that the mayhem isn't happening to us is the unspoken message.

In the context of today's new political dawn, Cabaret, the Kander and Ebb musical about 1930 Berlin, is like one of those silly horror movies that couples go to for an excuse to cling together and shriek. Isn't it great that the mayhem isn't happening to us is the unspoken message.

Center Stage is doing the 1966 Broadway musical made famous by the 1972 film, which starred Liza Minnelli, Michael York, and Joel Grey as the spooky emcee. The West Kingston company, directed and choreographed by Russell M. Maitland, is in top form with it — edgy and bawdy, not holding back.

Cabaret is based on Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories, which also informed the 1951 play I Am a Camera. To convey the heedless hedonism of the time, which allowed the National Socialists to come to power, Joe Masteroff's book for the musical uses the metaphor — and explicit references — to a party. Everybody is just out for a good time and waiting for the inevitable moment when the parents return to break things up. In this case, the grown-ups are the Nazis, who were elected in sizable numbers to the Reichstag that year.

We are at the Kit Kat Club, with its name glowing hotly above running white lights. Barely clad young women, gartered and seductive, and men in garish makeup and suspendered shorts mill about and flirt in this den of decadence. Amplifying the tone is the emcee (Maitland): "Leave your troubles outside," he invites. "In here, life is beautiful!"

Wandering in is Clifford Bradshaw (Preston Lawhorne), a young American wannabe novelist who has drifted from London to Paris to Berlin in search of a life worth writing about. Befriending him is the amiable Ernst Ludwig (Brad W. Kirton), in need of English lessons, and thus begins Cliff's introduction to the seemingly innocent side of Berlin.

Cliff is passive, in search of his identity, like Germany itself after the humiliation of having to pay World War I reparations. Representing another aspect of this milieu is cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Emily Woo Zeller), a young English expat getting by on beauty and charm. She's learned to do whatever she needs to in order to survive, whether that's sleeping with the nightclub manager or, when she is fired, showing up at Cliff's cheap boardinghouse unasked, to move in with him.

Power play(1)

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:29:24 GMT

The Gamm's An Ideal Husband
At this time of renewed political idealism in the country, director Judith Swift has labeled the London setting of An Ideal Husband , at the Gamm through December 7, as "inspired by the 19th century, set in the 20th century, reflected in the 21st century."

MAKING A POINT: Hawkridge and Estrella.

At this time of renewed political idealism in the country, director Judith Swift has labeled the London setting of An Ideal Husband, at the Gamm through December 7, as "inspired by the 19th century, set in the 20th century, reflected in the 21st century."

The text hasn't been altered in this Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre production, just the context. The fallibility of our species — and accompanying defensive hypocrisy — is under comic examination by playwright Oscar Wilde. We get to apply it as we will to the results of the recent election.

As the play begins, we are at a dinner party given by Sir Robert Chiltern (Jim O'Brien) and his adoring wife Gertrude (Casey Seymour Kim). Also attending are his young sister Mabel (Karen Carpenter) and the witty perpetual bachelor Lord Goring (Tony Estrella), who is constantly spouting Wilde's trademark bon mots ("I always pass on good advice. It's the only thing to do with it.").

One of the other guests is unexpected and quite unwelcome. Mrs. Cheveley (Jeanine Kane) was a schoolmate of Lady Chiltern's, forced to leave the school because of thievery. She also was briefly engaged to Lord Goring. Mrs. Cheveley is there to make a deal with Sir Robert, when she finally gets him away from the others. She reveals to him that she knows of a scandal in his past. In government as a young man, he was privy to information that England was going to purchase the Suez Canal. Passing on that fact to an interested financier was the basis of his own fortune and thereby subsequent political success. Mrs. Cheveley was the mistress of the man that he sold the information to, and she has the letter that will reveal Sir Robert to be a scoundrel. He has a reputation as an honorable and influential member of Parliament, and he can have the letter only if he will speak in favor of a fraudulent scheme to build another canal in Argentina, in which Mrs. Cheveley has invested heavily.

As difficult as Sir Robert's disgrace would be if he refuses her, even worse is that he would lose the wife he adores. "We women worship when we love," Gertrude says. "I will love you always because you will always be worthy of love," she later adds, a ticking threat bomb wrapped lovingly in a compliment.

Mixed Magic’s Moby Dick goes to DC

JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:38:08 GMT

Whale tale
In 2006, Pitts-Wiley wrote Moby Dick: Then and Now , a theatrical version of Herman Melville’s book, which joined the story of Captain Ahab chasing a great white whale to an urban tale of teenagers chasing “that Great White Thing” — cocaine.

When Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, co-founder and artistic director of Mixed Magic Theatre (mixedmagictheatre.org), taught Moby-Dick to young people at the Rhode Island Training School four years ago, he could not have predicted that this literary classic would lead him to MIT, Poland, New Bedford, and on November 15, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

In 2006, Pitts-Wiley wrote Moby Dick: Then and Now, a theatrical version of Herman Melville’s book, which joined the story of Captain Ahab chasing a great white whale to an urban tale of teenagers chasing “that Great White Thing” — cocaine.

Under Pitts-Wiley’s direction, Moby Dick: Then and Now was given its first full production at his Pawtucket-based theater in spring 2007, as part of a three-day Moby-Dick symposium. It was reprised last year at the Providence Performing Arts Center, and it was showcased at MIT in August. A special kick-off-to-Washington performance is scheduled for November 7, at the Pawtucket Congregational Church.

What initially got the Moby Dick ball rolling was a connection to the Melville Society Cultural Project in New Bedford, one of whose members was on the faculty of MIT. The Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, which had just received a MacArthur grant to do New Literacy Projects, contacted Pitts-Wiley to support the development of the Moby Dick project. In turn, Pitts-Wiley has collaborated with them to create a nationwide strategy guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture.

Pitts-Wiley had dreamed of getting 10,000 people — “students, but also doctors, lawyers, regular people” — to read Moby-Dick, and although he doesn’t know how many have been inspired to do so, he has heard from many who have seen the show. “We wanted them to not only love the novel,” he says “but to have a thirst for a deeper understanding of things, through literature.”

Asked why he chose that particular book for the project, Pitts-Wiley has a quick response: “Because everybody was on the Pequod — it had every race represented, with a variety of cultures and economic levels.”

Being able (with help from US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy) to take this production to the Kennedy Center is particularly important for Mixed Magic, because, in Pitts-Wiley’s view: “Our ability to grow from a 90-seat theatre in Pawtucket had become very limited. We had to think bigger than Rhode Island.”

“We had to find a way to tap into the bigger river,” he adds. “Sometimes you can get caught into little thinking, and that’s where you will always stay, and we didn’t want to do that anymore. We wanted to build projects that we owned and could be done in any city in the country, as opposed to waiting for someone to discover us.”

It’s all relative

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:13:16 GMT

PC’s madcap Charley’s Aunt
There is something especially fascinating about a play that you know knocked the socks (or sandals) off its original audiences.

D-DAY IN A DRAWING ROOM: Keyes, Francis, Orlando, and Burns.

There is something especially fascinating about a play that you know knocked the socks (or sandals) off its original audiences. If we’re aware of what those first viewers brought to the experience, we can take away a lot, and the show becomes a time machine. The farcical Charley’s Aunt, by Brandon Thomas, is demonstrating that notion at a breakneck pace in the current Providence College Theatre production (through November 2).

The comedy was a hoot and a long-running hit in 1892 when it premiered in otherwise not-so-merry olde England, which had another decade to go before the dour Victorian era would end. As the informative theater program details, at the London premiere one prominent aristocrat laughed so hard that his seat collapsed, and the attending fireman toppled over, causing the curtain to come down mid-performance.

What could get those staid Victorians slapping their knees? Well, while vigorously denied at the time, the cross-dressed role of the title character bore an obvious resemblance, in mourning dress and diction, to Queen Victoria herself.

More to the point, what about the comedy’s success abroad at the time, when 20 companies were touring Europe and America by the end of the four-year London run? Obviously, there’s something about Charley’s Aunt that tickles the universal funnybone. It’s one of those plays that you can be sure is being staged somewhere in the world at any given time.

The PC production owes its success to director Brendan Byrnes, who has choreographed this like D-Day in a drawing room. Of course, the costume design by David Costa-Cabral ain’t too shabby, with more tassels on most of the billowing dresses than on a chorus line of Las Vegas showgirls. Patrick Lynch’s scenic design is simple and clever, with two doors, ready to be slammed, bracketing a floor as slanted as the off-balanced antics taking place upon it. Things start out with a chair in each corner, so symmetrical, so orderly. Byrnes destroys that order again and again, as those characters in their alliances form phalanxes, with chairs and without, against each other. With actors sometimes cheek-to-jowl, sometimes sprawled on the floor, at emotionally fraught moments the director quickly reconfigures them like a kid with toy soldiers.

The basic story is a simple one, although complication upon complication stretch it into 2-1/2 hours, as required by 19th-century audiences who wanted their evening’s worth.

Loud and clear

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:09:08 GMT

Center Stage Productions is branching out in South County
Things certainly changed dramatically at the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston when Russ Maitland signed on last December as executive director.

MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Maitland at the Courthouse Center For the Arts.

"The joy of excess," by Bill Rodriguez

Things certainly changed dramatically at the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston when Russ Maitland signed on last December as executive director. The priorities had been renovation and the consequent fundraising from the time that the state had given the decommissioned Washington County Courthouse to an arts group in 1989. Now, finally, programming could be the main concern.

Theater and finance were Maitland’s dual academic trainings, with extensive background in both, so he wasn’t going to be just an arts administrator, he was also going to give them a producer and director. In only a month, he assembled a full year’s schedule, and Center Stage was born.

“I went crazy trying to pull things together and make things work,” he says, sitting over a cappuccino in his office. “The facility lends itself to becoming a full year-round production organization because it’s air-conditioned and heated. So that’s what I decided to do, a full subscription program.”

This year started with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in April and will continue with Cabaret in November and Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story in December.

“I don’t want to do the old Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals every time,” Maitland says. “I don’t want to do things that have been done every year.

“I’m doing a lot of things that are a little bit on the edge. Sweeney Todd is coming in November [2009],” he says. “We actually are putting together an opera company here that will be doing two operettas: Little Red Riding Hood and Amahl and the Night Visitors. But then the opera company will also be involved with the Sweeney Todd production.”

Speaking of edgy, he has also scheduled the offbeat off-Broadway musical Violet, about a journey by a disfigured young woman. For fun that’s a little more layered than Nunsense, there will be Dan Goggin’s Nunsense Ah-Men, a musical comedy with an all-male cast. And capping off next year, Center Stage will again be doing something family-oriented for the holiday season: Wonderful Life, which Maitland wrote. It’s an adaptation of the Frank Capra film classic It’s a Wonderful Life. He hopes that it will be become an annual family tradition with theatergoers, like Trinity Repertory Company’s A Christmas Carol.

An intriguing trio

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:36:02 GMT

Perishable’s Women’s Playwriting Festival
There were 196 plays submitted to Perishable Theatre, and three were chosen for the 14th International Women’s Playwriting Festival.

LAUNDRY DAY: Harrison and Dersham in Lazarus Disposed.

There were 196 plays submitted to Perishable Theatre from around the country, and three were chosen for the 14th International Women’s Playwriting Festival. For three weeks, each of the one-act plays has been staged by itself, supplemented by local talent presenting film, hip-hop, fado, and other entertainment.

The trio of plays will now be presented at each performance through November 2.

Desi Moreno-Penson’s Lazarus Disposed is a wacky little romp, full of broad humor and larger-than-life emotions. The husband of Bethany (D’Arcy Dersham) is missing and presumed dead. A memorial service has been held that afternoon. She is shrieking with a grief that has streamed rivulets of mascara not just down her cheeks but into her décolletage. The target of her abuse is Ferdinand (Patrick Harrison), the best friend of the deceased, and her secret lover. His competitive wailing indicates an affection for his friend that is not on the straight and narrow, if you catch the drift.

The humor here is as black as their mourning apparel: for him a ruffled tux shirt (and a clown tie sticking out of his pocket); for her, a low-cut sexy-chic dress, offset by runs and holes in her stockings, to indicate how extremely distracted she is. But her dishabille is neat and tidy compared to that of her kitchen. Laundry is heaped everywhere — in baskets, in corners. It becomes another character in the play, as sullied and disordered as their lives, as does an eerie sound emanating from the kitchen sink drain.

Dersham takes slow, pornographic delight in showing how she rolled up his laundry and squeezed the water out of it. Harrison similarly, deliciously, milks Ferdinand’s torment for every ambiguous morsel of suffering. Director Beth F. Milles whips them into frenzies, but quickly settles them down when some fine-tuned emotion needs our attention. By the time late in the play that we meet the mysterious, silent Man (Luis Astudillo), who has been in the bathroom for several hours, we have become accustomed to a weird and wonderful world where anything can happen, so anything that does happen seems perfectly reasonable. The playwright has set us up to accept any concluding flight of fancy she can devise, and she doesn’t waste the opportunity to soar.

Playwright Moreno-Penson, based in New York City, has an MFA in dramaturgy and theater criticism from Brooklyn College.

A powerhouse play

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:17:06 GMT

URI’s compelling Small Tragedy
For a play titled Small Tragedy , playwright Craig Lucas certainly has packed in a bundle of large feelings.

WAR STORIES: Gillette and Grills.

For a play titled Small Tragedy, playwright Craig Lucas certainly has packed in a bundle of large feelings. The current URI Theatre production (through October 19) is proving more than capable of overpowering us with them.

The challenge to engage us is immediate, since we are asked to follow the rehearsal process of actors preparing a production of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex — with masks, no less. As backstage dramas go, this is no light-hearted 42nd Street.

But compelling interactions among the three couples, interestingly complex applications of the ancient tale to our times and temperaments, and a riveting central performance make for a production likely to leave you shaken and deeply affected.

The director of Oedipus, Nathaniel (Benjamin Gracia), couldn’t care less what we or his actors feel about the characters in the play. Fanny (Autumn Gillette) says she doesn’t un-derstand why she’s supposed to like the self-mutilating king; Jen (Jolie Lippincott) says that no, she’s supposed to pity him. The director tells them to stop thinking like that. He gets furious when he hears them discussing the characters’ motivations in contemporary terms, such as the blind soothsayer Teresias being a kind of left-wing intellectual. The play should speak for itself and the audience judge for itself, their director insists.

The concept of a tragic flaw “is crap,” he thinks, and “no more than an error in judgment,” according to his actor wife, Paola (Kira Arnold). He does convey one understanding that wouldn’t shock the Greek gods — namely that fate isn’t predestination but rather the result of succumbing to your nature, like a woman who keeps picking abusive boy-friends.

What these actors feel in the small tragedies of their offstage lives is made vitally important to them by Lucas (Reckless, Prelude To a Kiss). For example, director Nate’s pride in be-ing able to separate intellect from feelings hasn’t helped his marriage. Paola is HIV-positive, and in pre-AIDS-drugs days, she got to feel that she was taking care of him.

The play soon begins to revolve around Hajika (Benjamin Grills), and the second act lives or dies on that performance. He has recently emigrated from Yugoslavia. “Isn’t there sort of a war there?” inquires the sometimes dippy Fanny, who doesn’t even know the country is in Europe. He tells them he is a Muslim, and his eventual descriptions of the hor-rors he witnessed are hard to listen to. (“What kind of a person would tell you that?” asks Fanny, as the playwright smirks.)

Into the woods

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:45:42 GMT

Theater of Thought’s Brilliant Traces
In its several productions, the Narragansett-based Theater of Thought has finessed the problem quite nicely — by making us flies on that wall, as the expression goes.

Theaters have been trying to break down the fourth wall for a while now, from ancient Greek choruses addressing audiences in man-in-the-street Greek to the Living Theater haranguing us in the aisles. In its several productions, the Narragansett-based Theater of Thought has finessed the problem quite nicely — by making us flies on that wall, as the expression goes.

Their current two-person play (through October 19) is being performed in a small, dilapidated cottage in the woods.

Brilliant Traces, by Cindy Lou Johnson, is an ideal story for such a setting. Henry Harry (Jeff Hodge) is as much of a hermit as he can be, in his remote Alaskan cabin 400 miles inland. He works as a cook on the oil rigs, and he secludes himself here for the two weeks he has off every seven weeks.

Stumbling out of a blizzard into his refuge comes Rosannah DeLuce (Amber Kelly), bare-shouldered in a wedding gown. She’d been wandering around for an hour after her car broke down and eventually was attracted by his light. As, inevitably, conflicts arise and she wants to leave, he can’t in good conscience let her. When the wind whips up a whiteout, no one can see 10 feet ahead; she would freeze to death.

But it takes a while for that conflict to come up. Rosannah is one of those people who can’t stop talking when she’s jittery, so she jabbers away for long minutes while he stares mute and groggy from his bed. She learned from a TV movie that she could save her fingers from frostbite by keeping them in her armpits. We worry about her toes, covered only by filthy satin slippers. She apologizes for her “Mars bar tremble,” from living on candy bars in recent days, stocking up every five hours when she would stop for gas. She scarfs some pretzels he has around, keeps taking hits from his bottle of Jameson as she prattles on about “this terrible pain in my DNA” and, not surprisingly, faints dead away.

We are 20 minutes into the play before her reluctant host speaks. She has been sleeping for two days. Their back-and-forth progresses interestingly, as what brought each of them to their troubled states gradually emerges from their reluctant conversation. In his case, it’s a trauma, as melodramatic as it is affecting. Her reason is more existential, not some sudden revelation at the altar, as Henry suggests.

A battling brood

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:23:41 GMT

2nd Story’s stormy Another Part of the Forest
Although Lillian Hellman wrote Another Part of the Forest as a prequel after The Little Foxes , it was by no means an afterthought.

FAMILY CIRCLE: Petronio, Sherba, Crenshaw, and Jacobs.

Although Lillian Hellman wrote Another Part of the Forest as a prequel after The Little Foxes, it was by no means an afterthought. As 2nd Story Theatre is making frighteningly clear, the Hubbards of 1880 are as fascinating to follow around as the middle-aged characters of 20 years later.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this production (through October 26) is that while the central characters are unsympathetic, either weak or outright villains, they are all utterly engrossing. Hellman’s skillfully told story, brought to life by superb acting and Ed Shea’s trademark snappy direction, becomes a play about family dysfunction expressed through psycho-logical gladiatorial combat.

Widely disliked businessman Marcus Hubbard (Vince Petronio) is the perfect role model for training his brood to be self-centered. He is sadistic to his sons, on the pretext of making them self-reliant. Having had to claw his way through an impoverished upbringing, he made his fortune during the Civil War by smuggling salt into the South and outra-geously overcharging. His relationship with his spoiled daughter is suspiciously affectionate, its closeness smugly encouraged by her.

At the beginning, daughter Regina (Gabby Sherba) is flaunting to her underpaid brothers, who work for their father, that daddy will of course pay for the expensive dresses she bought on a whim. But he would be upset to find out she is having an affair with former Confederate officer John Bagtry (Mark Gentsch). And he’d be apoplectic to know that she is madly in love and wants to run off with him, although Bagtry is kind but indifferent to her, preferring to prove his manhood by traipsing off to Brazil as a mercenary soldier.

Ben Hubbard (Coleman Crenshaw) is the spunky son, smarter than his brother but just as taken for granted. We first see him when he has rushed home from a business deal of his own, ordered back to his father so frivolously that the man can’t remember, so he says, why he did so. We get the idea that Daddy doesn’t exactly want his boys to get ahead.

Brother Oscar (Jonathan Jacobs) is a grown man, but he whines. He says he is madly in love with Laurette Sincee (Rae Mancini), whom Ben calls “that little whore,” to no one’s disagreement. Oscar wants money from Marcus to go off and start a business where her reputation won’t precede her. Fat chance.

World party

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:15:40 GMT

Fresh fare at the FirstWorks Festival
In its fifth year, FirstWorks Festival 2008 has grown to be a culturally diverse showcase, distinctly international in flavor, with an array of theater and family entertainment.

GENRE-HOPPER: Roumain.

In its fifth year, FirstWorks Festival 2008 has grown to be a culturally diverse showcase, distinctly international in flavor, with an array of theater, dance, new media, and family entertainment. The talent on display will hail from Providence and France, from Africa and Bulgaria, in the more than five weeks of performances, from October 2 to November 9. Some of the concerts are world or regional premieres, and several are free.

On the opening day of the festival, LO CÒR DE LA PLANA, an all-male a cappella ensemble from the La Plane quarter of Marseilles, France, will perform at 8 pm at the RISD Auditorium. Singing in the medieval Occitan language of southern France, the group is known for vocal techniques that display influences ranging from African rhythms to Gregorian chants. This tour is their US premiere.

Also on October 2, PIXILERATIONS [V.5]: FRAGMENTS & (W)HOLES will take place in various downtown Providence locations. More than 60 new media artists will present surround-sound electronic media concerts, experimental nightclub jams, and video art in various interactive gallery installations. The opening will be from 6 to 9 pm, the exhibition runs through October 11, and all Pixilerations events are free. For details, go to pixilerations.org.

Bulgaria’s CREDO THEATRE, also on its US premiere tour, will present a family show on October 4 at 8 pm at the RISD Auditorium. In Daddy’s Always Right, clowns and puppets will create a winter fairyland in the audience’s imagination, which the theater created for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen.

October 3 will see a world premiere performance of Kompa Variations by DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN (AKA DBR), written by him and staged with DJ SCIENTIFIC, WYNNE BENNETT, and the PROVIDENCE STRING QUARTET. DBR is a dynamic, classically trained violinist with hip-hop experience. As he has stated, the performance will be “about Paganini, but also about Prince.” The show ($18) is at 8 pm at the RISD Auditorium (with a pre-show at 7:15 pm). DBR will read from his essay on musical philosophy at 5:30 pm (free).

At Waterplace Park on October 5 at 2 pm, CHRIS TURNER AND THE MAXI MINIMALS will present a free performance of Terry Riley’s In C. Providence’s Turner, a hurricane of a harmonica player, credits this musical work by California composer Riley as having changed the course of 20th-century music, influencing rock as well as such composers as Brian Eno. (The rain location will be the RISD Auditorium.)

Race and rage

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:09:54 GMT

Brown’s Funnyhouse packs a punch
Race relations in America were in tumult when Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro was first staged in 1962.

Race relations in America were in tumult when Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro was first staged in 1962. The Brown University Theatre and Sock & Buskin production of this avant-garde historical set piece (through October 5) may be as surreal and confusing as the period was, but it certainly packs a punch.

More than a dozen figures, mostly weirdly garbed, scatter and dash around the stage, and you can’t necessarily figure out who is who from the program. The black self-consciousness of the time, ratcheting up to self-loathing, comes across more strongly than does any anti-white hostility. This is a fever dream boiling up from the black psyche and has more to do with surviving than with blaming.

This angry play is 75 minutes long in this production, directed by Kym Moore. In its time, it was addressing long-suffering blacks, and perhaps sympathetic whites, giving permission for stifled rage to be expressed. Nineteen-sixty-two was a time, after all, when blacks were still calling themselves Negroes or colored people, and they were still in this society’s shadows.

That was eight years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that finally initiated post-Civil War reconstruction, supposedly for real this time. The play was produced two years after the first sit-ins in the South, but four years before the Black Power Movement began.

For the most part, what specifically “happens” in this experimental play doesn’t much matter. That’s an odd thing to say, but in fact most of the images and even dialogue in this play could be exchanged with similar ones. The playwright’s offering is to convey an impression of dire social circumstance, and the specifics don’t much matter. Funnyhouse of a Negro is basically a gladiatorial arena in which demons of black despair fight it out.

Director Moore finds plenty of ways to enliven the proceedings, which are chaotic but have the semblance of controlled chaos. The actors are attentive and energetic, difficult tasks when what has to be inhabited is more idea than person.

An incidental character, Funnyman (Sam Yambrovich), caped and dressed in black, starts things off by clambering across the stage, screeching with laughter and scratching like a monkey as he occasionally will do later. There is fear of Father (Jonathan Dent), who “comes through the jungle, he the blackest of all.” At one point, “Black is evil!” is announced and echoed by everyone.

Motel hell

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:08:53 GMT

PBRC’s creepy-crawly Bug
For all its ambition to wider purpose, it’s mainly a horror story.

UNDER HIS SKIN: Lilly and Davis.

It’s a pity that Tracy Letts’s Bug, which Providence Black Repertory Company is staging through October 19, won’t be running on Halloween. For all its ambition to wider purpose, it’s mainly a horror story.

The tale is impressively acted, with excellent production values, so director Megan Sandberg-Zakian gets plenty of help in quickening our pulses. Yet the play itself puts all the skilled dramatics to the service of a melodrama. The stuff of a one-act is stretched into two, making the story pretty thin.

In a motel room outside Oklahoma City, Agnes (Jackie Davis) keeps getting phone calls, but the person on the other end never speaks. Her ex-husband Jerry (Raidge) has just been paroled from a stretch in prison for armed robbery, but when he shows up he insists that it wasn’t him.

A friend from work, R.C. (Marie Michaelle Saintil), has come over with a nervous guy named Peter (Cedric Lilly), who is a little too quick to say “no” when Agnes jokes that for all she knows he could be an ax-murderer.

The stage is well set for an evening of tension. Speaking of which, the set design by Maggie Pilat doesn’t just hint at a motel room, it replicates one. The steamy summer night is established by a lazy overhead fan and Agnes standing in the open doorway when things begin, smoking and getting some air. We hear traffic whizzing by and, from a radio in another room, the sad sounds of a female country singer. Atmosphere means a lot in a play like this.

No, Peter is nothing as obvious as a serial killer. But playwright Letts doesn’t develop all of this into anything nearly as interesting as his Pulitzer Prize-winning and darkly comic August: Osage County. The title of this play refers both to creepy-crawly insects and to listening devices. Letts plays with ambiguity at every point when things get sinister, offering both a relatively innocent explanation for what is happening and one involving a possible conspiracy.

Bug is well served by the play being so claustrophobic, taking place in that single, dingy room. The story was opened up in the 2006 film version, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist), with Ashley Judd an Agnes and Harry Connick Jr. as the ex-con ex. (Raidge, big always and menacing here, certainly makes for a more threatening Jerry.)

Fightin' words

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:07:52 GMT

Trinity Rep’s thoroughly modern Dreams of Antigone
The trouble with Greek tragedies is that they tend to be Greek to us.

The trouble with Greek tragedies is that they tend to be Greek to us. Losing too much in translation isn’t a problem with the intelligent and relevant The Dreams of Antigone, now in its world premiere at Trinity Repertory Company (through October 26).

Its first version was written by the theater’s artistic director, Curt Columbus, and the play has come to have an unusual co-credit added: “& Trinity Rep’s Resident Acting Company.” Honesty like that is remarkable in theater.

Yet the result, 85 brisk minutes, is not at all like a play written by committee. The final staging is a lucid telling of a complex story. Relying on the Sophocles versions of the Greek legends and incorporating smatterings of his text, the play reconstructs the conflicts of the House of Cadmus. Creon is the king of Thebes, who feels duty bound to have Antigone executed. Originally titled Antigone Anew, the play uses the freedom of dream life — that of Creon as well as her — to go over encounters and confrontations, conversations that occurred and some that might have if ghosts could talk.

Although there are many supporting characters, the central story is simple, taking place amidst the fluted columns and marble rubble of Tristan Jeffers’s set design. Antigone (Rachael Warren) buries one of her two brothers — they have fallen in battle, killed by each other. Such a ritual had been forbidden by King Creon (Fred Sullivan Jr.) because the young man had led the rebellion against him. Despite Creon’s sympathy and understanding of her loyalty, he cannot tolerate her defiance of his first edict as ruler. Otherwise, the center will not hold, as W.B. Yeats would later fear, in a more broadly existential regard — anarchy would be loosed upon Thebes.

The difficulty of succeeding with an adaptation of Antigone can hardly be overstated. I’ve seen more than my share of them and can’t recall one that has so fully developed the strands of sub-themes and character relationships that whip about and spark like downed power lines. Most productions go straight for the money: girl meets conscience, king meets both, king kills rebellious niece, regret ensues. Trinity audiences have more in store.

A word of warning: this play is Rated P. Theatergoers seriously allergic to presentational theater, with actors addressing the audience, sometimes in stentorian tones, should bring their EpiPens. This is a modern update, but it is a Greek tragedy.

School daze

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:16:48 GMT

Legally Blonde charms at PPAC
Is this all a larky celebration of post-feminist feminism or just a lark?

HARVARD-BOUND: Gulsvig and friend.

"Winning Ways: Legally Blonde's almost-leading ladies," by Bill Rodriguez

How strange, that Legally Blonde didn’t hit the Broadway stage before it got to the big screen. The storyline might as well have a yellow brick road and a wizard at the end, it’s so musical-friendly, as is being peppily demonstrated at Providence Performing Arts Center (through September 28), where the national tour is starting out.

Propelled by songs more briskly and efficiently than spoken words could in the movie, Legally Blonde — The Musical is the tale of Elle Woods (Becky Gulsvig, in marvelous voice and fetching personality). She’s a can-do sorority sister who, dumped by her boyfriend in favor of someone more serious and less risky career-wise, proves herself big-time — at Harvard Law School.

Is this all a larky celebration of post-feminist feminism or just a lark? Elle follows her boyfriend to Cambridge, after all. But, on the other hand, she does come across as a kind of Wonder Woman in pink. Hmmm . . . .

Well, as a musical it’s goodhearted, boisterous fun, but don’t expect more than shorthanded motivations and chapter headings in lieu of a well-developed story. But then you weren’t expecting Anna Karenina — The Musical, were you?

Ironically, Legally Blonde is a celebration of social outliers who learn to love themselves by being themselves, their banner carried by a cultural stereotype who is envied by many. Elle is a Malibu Barbie doll, a Delta Nu princess with a 4.0 major in shopping (well, fashion merchandising). When that boyfriend says he needs a Jackie and she is more of a Marilyn, she vows to get serious, though to her that means “wearing black when no one’s dead.”

You know where all these characters are coming from, and the songs — sometimes very funny, sometimes place-keepers — usually tell you where they’re going. (Music and lyrics are by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin; book is by Heather Hach, based on the novel by Amanda Brown; direction and choreography is by Jerry Mitchell.)

Since the story is formulaic, even it can be made fun of in the songs. When her boyfriend, Warner Huntington III (Jeff McLean), is singing “Serious” and she joins, he stops her and the music with, “Uh, honey, I’m not finished.” The most memorable song, “Blood In the Water,” is led by a law professor (Ken Land), declaring he’ll soon separate the sharks from the chum.

Under her skin

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:42:55 GMT

Laurel Casey is back in town
Who is Laurel Casey? If you figure her out, let her know. She’d love to learn that too.

SELF-IMAGE: “The wounded healer-clown, that’s how I see myself,” Casey says.

Who is Laurel Casey? If you figure her out, let her know. She’d love to learn that too.

Her night club/bar/lounge act is part-entertainment, part-psychodrama, part-postmodern deconstruction of the audience/microphone-holder relationship, fraught with ten-sions. But then, her life is as well. She recently started playing the Side Bar & Grille, on Dorrance Avenue on Wednesdays from 7 to 10 pm.

As far as Laurel is concerned, it’s high praise to say she runs a crass act.

Wearing a black top hat atop a curly blonde wig, a black miniskirt, black feather boa, and net stockings, Mona Lott — primary personality for the evening — pleasantly points out to a guy looking over his shoulder at the bar how rude it is to sit with his back to her. She goes into her first song, “You’ve Got a Lot of Living to Do.” The big guy looks a little sheepish, smiles and obliges. But it’s a bar. After a while, when she’s not looking, he returns to resting his elbows.

There were about a dozen people in the room, including staff. With no advertising, word-of-mouth was relied on to get out the news of Casey’s return to Rhode Island, her first gig here in six years. This was one of her first shows at the Side Bar, and while there already were more people than the nearly empty room the week before, word hadn’t gotten around yet that Laurel was back in town. If you want to see busy here, you come at the beginning of the week when the “Meatball Madness!” special packs the place.

She’s backed by a keyboard and stand-up bass, and during an instrumental break in the song, she prances about the room, then settles against a post and not so much pole dances as pole gropes. The seeming spontaneity becomes a 10-second study in intentionally awkward improv.

Thanks to Irish genes, good bone structure, and a facelift, Laurel Casey is pretty as well as 55. She works a counterpoint to that in her act, sometimes tearing off her wig like it’s leapt down from a branch, revealing a clipped, gray Laurie Anderson shag.
Thanks to the predations of her mother’s Alzheimer’s, Laurel has spent the last six years out of local sight, taking care of her in Vermont and Florida, until her mother’s death in May. Rhode Island fans checking into her entertainment website (as opposed to her more serious blog site), in recent weeks came across an ad for her Side Bar act as bewigged lounge singer Mona Lott: “She is Back! She’s Blonde! She’s Dumb!”

New + old classics

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:44:16 GMT

Life on the boards
As if freshly presenting stage classics isn’t challenging enough, new adaptations are in the lineups this fall at two companies, Trinity Repertory Company and the Gamm.

A POLITICAL THRILLER AND AN OLD-FASHIONED ROMANCE: Steve Kidd and Richard Donelly in
the Gamm’s Don Carlos.

As if freshly presenting stage classics isn’t challenging enough, spanking new adaptations are in the lineups this fall at two companies, Trinity Repertory Company and the Gamm.

Trinity’s artistic director Curt Columbus is opening the season with the world premiere of THE DREAMS OF ANTIGONE (September 19-October 26), directed by Brian McEleney.

Columbus has described his play as “Orwell’s 1984 meets Brazil at Gosford Park.” Such inventiveness was likely, considering how intensely the company handled a table reading of Sophocles’s Antigone at the beginning of the development process this summer.

“There was no moaning chorus of fakey-fake acting,” the director recalls. “There was a real attack on the thing, and it just hit us like a sledgehammer. Everyone in the room at the end of it was weeping. We thought: ‘Oh my God, look what power a 2500 year-old drama has!’ ”

The ancient story was treated in tragedies by both Euripides and Sophocles. The core conflict in the latter’s account deals with King Creon decreeing that there be no funeral for Antigone’s brother Polyneices, because he fought against Creon for usurping their father’s throne. More loyal to her family than to the state, Antigone buries him, and Creon is troubled by having to punish her.

The adaptation’s original title was Antigone Anew, but now there are a lot of dream sequences, with reality and fantasy conflating.

“Originally, I just was going to write a new adaptation of Antigone,” Columbus says. “Then what’s arisen is that Brian, as he states over and over again, has little or no interest in naturalism, and has little or no tolerance for the container of the play being just the play itself, but that the event needs to be something bigger.

“We are not looking to do an historical reenactment,” he adds. “We are looking to find out what the resonance and the significance is today. Plus — really important — nobody looks good in a toga!”

With plenty of input from the 15 company members who were available for the production, the play developed not from any previous text but rather from the central conflict itself, which certainly resonates today.

As Columbus puts it: “Antigone says to us: What happens if you wake up one day and go, ‘No. No, no more. No more! Today I’m going to act. Today I’m going to do something, [although] all of the forces of the society and all of the halls of power echo with no.’ ”

Living histories

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:35:37 GMT

The Gamm stages a remarkably timely Don Carlos
Political intrigue, parallels to today’s electoral brouhaha, and reminders of historical warnings, all presented in dignified but unpretentious blank verse cadences.

WEAKNESS AND STRENGH: Kidd and Donelly.

"Honoring the spirit: Estrella on condensing Schiller," by Bill Rodriguez

Political intrigue and peril, romance and swordplay, parallels to today’s electoral brouhaha, and reminders of historical warnings, all presented in dignified but unpretentious blank verse cadences. Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos has it all, at least in the adaptation written and directed by Tony Estrella, which is premiering at the Gamm (through October 5).

When people speak of a production of Don Carlos, they’re usually referring to the opera by Verdi. There was a London adaptation of the play in 2005, but the late 18th-century work by Schiller, staged two decades before the opera, is known mainly to comparative literature students. Written to run six hours, full of lengthy disquisitions on politics and power and religion, even in its own time it was ruthlessly chopped down by directors for actual performances.

Don’t check your history book if you want the end to be a surprise, but you might check the original Schiller version if you want to put in perspective its length at Gamm (less than three hours, including intermission; see sidebar) and complicated plot (a flowchart would be helpful, to follow who is deceiving whom; see below).

Don Carlos (Steve Kidd) is the heir apparent to the throne of the Spanish Empire in the late 16th century. At the opening, he hardly appears to be a prince of kingly bearing, weeping as he is over a handful of old love letters. The current queen, Elizabeth (Georgia Cohen), his stepmother, used to be his fiancée. His father, King Philip II (Richard Donelly), stole her as much out of lust as from political convenience, allying with her native France. Elizabeth doesn’t want anything to do with Don Carlos, being the kind of girl who keeps her head.

The lust noted above courses through this play like a river with numberless tributaries. Philip also has flaring nostrils for Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Eboli (Amanda Ruggiero), who in turn schemes to meet secretly with Don Carlos, who arrives only because he thought Elizabeth had relented. Poor Eboli, whose only claim to dignity is a tearful speech lamenting the plight of young princesses usually forced to marry graybeards twice their age.

Kidd presents Don Carlos effectively, though our empathy is reduced by the character being so weak and vacillating at times — especially in contrast with Donelly’s powerful Philip, whose stern glance is more unsettling than the prince’s anger.