New York Critic

A la Carte: A Feast of New Plays Presented by Workshop Theater Company directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby One-act plays can be terrific. Drama, after all, demands compression. They can be great, and when they’re bad, well, at least they’re only one act. Workshop Theater Company (OOB) has served up a buffet of one-acts in A la Carte: A Feast of New Plays . It’s a program of a half-dozen short plays loosely connected by images of food. The quality of the scripts runs from very nice to merely standard, but the evening enjoys some satisfying acting. One of the better plays – the first in the program and the longest – is The Cook and the Soldier by Allen Knee. It concerns a young girl, Molly (played by Tess Frazer), and a veteran named Tom who went AWOL by stealing the identity of a dead photographer (played by Joe Boover). The writing is delicate and stylistically very good, working largely through character revelation. The relationship develops from a bump-into-each-other m...

My Technology Presented by Deena Levy Theatre Studios Conceived and directed by Deena Levy Personal monologues – that is, autobiographical monologues – are tough to pull off. They need to work without drama. They need to be so personal that they’re universal. We need to like the actor, to identify with them, and to see our own faults in them. My Technology , presented by Deena Levy Theatre Studio, is a set of nine of this sort of monologue, revolving around technology and its effect on our personal life (although in truth some of them touch on technology only in passing). The best monologue, which is very good and the only one that works for us, is Danny Patrick’s piece Deaf Man Crossing . Mr. Patrick was in a coma for 12 days after a bar fight. When he woke he had lost most of hearing. The pacing of his work is very nice; we have the time to relate to what he’s saying and to care about him. There are particularly welcome moments when he relates talking to his grandmother,...

Woyzeck FJF by Georg Buchner adapted by Jeremy Duncan Pape and D.L. Siegel directed by Jeremy Duncan Pape presented by No-Win Productions Georg Buchner, German, wrote Woyzeck in 1837, but the play wasn’t produced until 1913. Its distinction among important plays is that it’s probably unfinished, and we don’t even know in what order the scenes were meant to be presented. Its series of scenes are held together less by plot than by theme. Woyzeck tells the story of a downtrodden soldier oppressed and humiliated by his betters. A doctor uses him as for experiment and orders him to eat nothing but peas. His military superior routinely abuses him verbally. His mistress takes a lover and finally, at the end of his tether, Woyzeck murders her. No-Win productions has set the play in a psychiatric hospital. We recognize this immediately by the padded wall. Alfred Schatz’ set is simple and handsome, a white wall over a white floor, two beds. Woyzeck and Andres (Andres is Woyzeck’...

Kafka’s Quest by Lu Hauser directed by Manfred Bormann Presented by Theater for the New City In Kafka’s Quest , playwright Lu Hauser conflates Franz Kafka with his most recognizable character, Gregor Samsa, the anti-hero in the story The Metamorphosis . Kafka and the fictitious Samsa each lived/lives with his parents and a sister (Kafka had three sisters, actually). The character’s name is Samsa, but he’s just as much Kafka as he is that character. This sort of devise, this referral to literature, demands a lot of playwrighting skill, and it’s likely to fail. Ms. Hauser, however, handles it deftly. This Samsa also reflects Kafka’s life in his relationship with a couple of performers in the Yiddish theater, characters based as well on actual people, Itzhak Lowy and Mme. Trassik. The split stage on Anna Yates’ nice, spare set reflects their interpersonal environments. Throughout the play, we see Samsa writing material relating to his overbearing father, material that would ...

Judgment on a Gray Beach presented by La MaMa in association with Teatro Dramma written and directed by Elia Schneider Judgment on a Gray Beach , written and directed by Elia Schneider, presented by La MaMa in association with Teatro Dramma, is a series of bizarre, sometimes haunting images. Without dialogue, its ten deadpan actors are uber-marionettes expressing an uncompromising desolation. The person and the spirit of Franz Kafka pervade the piece. A disembodied voice at the opening of the show tells us we’re at “a closed road and a dead end.” We find ourselves on a desolate beach (there’s sand on the floor of the bare stage), but it may as well be a concentration camp. Schneider works with icons – a Hitler character, a ballerina. All are drained of emotion. Making the stage picture surreal, all the costumes are black. The only color is on a couple of almost-Nazi armbands. Everyone’s a prisoner here. There’s the almost-Hitler character has a number on the back of ...

The Quantum Eye written and performed by Sam Eaton produced by Eaton Magic Creations, Inc. In The Quantum Eye , mentalist Sam Eaton presents such terrific demonstrations of his talent that by the show’s end we’re certain that he possesses telepathy, precognition and any other paranormal skill he might choose to claim. Actually, he doesn’t claim any; he tells us that he works with suggestion, mnemonics and non-verbal cues. In the first demonstration of his powers, he has four volunteers on stage. One is told he’s the murderer , and each one tells Eaton that he is not the murderer. By examining their facial expressions and holding each one’s arm, he can tell which one is lying. He chats with them a bit first, and he told us in the performance I saw that was establishing “a base line for truth.” In another demonstration, he draws the same figure that his audience member has drawn and concealed. He writes numbers on a chart so that vertically, horizontally and in blocks they add...

Going Once! Laughing Twice!! by Brian Jaffe directed by Eric Parness produced by Sixth Sense Productions The premise of Going Once! Laughing Twice!!, the silly, entertaining, interactive show from Sixth Sense Productions, is that the audience is bidding at a fine art auction – the type we might find at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. We’re given bidding paddles when we enter, and a wad of big phony bills in large denominations.  We’re encouraged to go on stage and examine the “artwork”, and we’re offered “champagne”. And so we’re already a part of the show by the time the bidding begins, primed to participate. Once the auction is underway, the paddles flutter and the bids jump by millions. Under the direction Eric Parness, the actors do a terrific job of keeping in parody. The personalities we meet are mostly zany. The auction house owner, played by the playwright, Brian Jaffe, is the buffoon. His girlfriend is a doll whose “performance art” – performed privately in the ...

Winter Light: Songs, Music and rituals from the Carpathians a Baroque Folk Nativity Play and Serhiy Zhada looks at Ukraine Today created by Yara Arts Group directd by Virlana Tkacz Winter Light: Songs, Music and Rituals  the Carpathians is a delightful hour-and-a-half from Yara Arts Group (at La MaMa) consisting primarily of Ukrainian folk music. The cast of 21 sing in a range of flavors, sometimes clapping, sometimes stamping their feet. The styles range from the ethereal to the staccato, from the placid to the hearty. The singing is almost exclusively in Ukrainian, with only a few moments of translation indicating the lyrics. “Nothing lasts forever,” we hear, and “How long I waited for you.” The night I attended, the audience broke into spontaneous clapping as the singers ran through a song. Such is the contagious energy of this troupe. Many songs are sung a capella , but there’s an instrumental accompaniment to others, and the instruments are choice. There’s ...

A Christmas Carol, Oy! Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa presented by Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater adapted from the Dickens by Vit Horejs Vit Horejs began to study puppetry as a child in Prague. He toured the world as a puppeteer before he found 69 Czech marionettes, some of them two centuries old, in the Jan Hus Church in Manhattan. They formed part of his inspiration to establish the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater in 1990. He's written or adapted more than 20 plays for his company, and the productions use some of those old puppets. The marionette theater's latest offering is  A Christmas Carol, Oy! Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, recently presented by LaMaMa. More suited for adults than children, it uses the frame of Dickens' story as a vehicle for Horejs' unique art, and Horejs is the sole, very busy puppeteer. It begins with a lovely moment when Horejs awakes on stage. There are songs between scenes sung very nicely by two actresses next to the tiny stage...

The Tempest by Shakespeare adapted and directed by Taesuk Oh produced by Mokwha Repertory Company presented by La MaMa Mokwha Repertory Theater is a Korean company founded by Taesuk Oh that combines the techniques of traditional Korean theater with contemporary Western theater. They recently presented an adaptation of The Tempest at LaMaMa directed by Oh. It's a fascinating production with a novel approach and terrific techniques. It's best to forget about the Shakespearean text when watching this production and to enjoy it as a fable. It's much abridged, brief at 90 minutes. The three plot lines are there, but only the Ferdinand-Miranda story has a focus. The text is more a riff on Shakespeare than a translation. The King of Naples becomes The Dragon King (and magic comes from his fan). The lines allude to Confucius and "the Buddhist saints" - and use the word "like" (as in "I mean"). The play is presented in Korean wi...