New York Critic

In Torben Betts’ play Invincible, presented by The Original Theatre Company and Ghost Light Theatre Productions at 59E59 Theaters, a London couple named Oliver and Emily move to Northern England and experience culture shock. Specifically, they invite their neighbors, Alan and Dawn, over for a visit one evening and find that they have no mutual ground. Oliver and Emily are quintessential sophisticates, unmarried, progressive, slender, refined. Alan and Dawn are boors. She dresses like a streetwalker and speaks a dialect using “were” for “was”. He’s an overgrown baby. His beer belly shows under his T-shirt and he has a loud, stupid laugh. Emily paints abstracts. Alan paints childish pictures of his cat, Invincible, brutally bad. The four neighbors manage to slug their way through conversation until Alan produces his paintings and Emily gives her candid opinion. This somehow gets tied into the couples’ contrasting attitudes toward the military, and the evening is a disaster. The...

Tychyna, Zhadan & The Dogs is a production conceived and directed by Virlana Tkacz and presented by La MaMa and Yara Arts Group. It combines Ukrainian poetry with Ukrainian rock music. The poetry was written by Pavlo Tychyna just after World War One, and by contemporary poet Serhiy Zhadan (with additional verse by Bob Holman of the Yara Arts Group). Mr. Zhadan is the lead singer for the rock group, Zhadan and the Dogs. The opening of the show takes place in the lobby of the theater, creating a nice transition from life to art. An actor (he neglects to introduce himself) announces that he’s Czar Nicholas II. He then abdicates by removing his epaulettes, sash, medals, and he stops being the character. The actor has with him 12 hats. He explains that Kiev saw 12 regime changes in 3 years, one of them lasting only a day, and he dons a hat for each regime. “History is written, of course, above, but it’s lived below,” he tells us. A couple of actors (one of them Serhiy Zhadan) reci...

At The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, Off-off-Broadway, Blackfriars Repertory Theatre and Storm Theatre Company are presenting a show called Death Comes for the War Poets . It calls itself “ a dramatic verse tapestry”, and the phrase describes the piece well. It’s comprised of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, with additional verse by Joseph Pearce. It’s wonderful to see a show almost entirely in verse. There are three characters in this play. Sassoon and Owen, of course, and the third character is Death herself. I use the feminine pronoun because Director Peter Dobbins has cast as Death a young, pretty actress. It’s a great choice. Indeed, for Sassoon and Owen, death – their own deaths – must have been a seductive alternative to the hideous life they led and witnessed in World War One. It’s a creative miracle that they transformed the horror they saw in the trenches into art. It’s a matter of opinion which was the better poet, but they both wrote poems t...

A Hunger Artist is one of Franz Kafka’s most difficult stories. The writer’s concern in this story is the nature of the artist, his relationship to his public, his motivations. Kafka’s not concerned here with the ordinary guy, the Everyman that he writes about in so many of his other stories. The title character is a performer whose art is simply to fast. He would fast for up to 40 days, sitting in a cage in public, but that’s the maximum length of time that his impresario would allow. More recently however, he’s separated from his impresario and he’s been forced to join a circus. He’s made to wear a silly collar and a party hat. It’s demeaning, but at least he can fast without limit. Like all of Kafka’s stories, this is an extended metaphor, without a suggestion about what stands on the other side of the metaphor. Kafka’s mysterious, suggestive, dream-like prose is at its best, heavy with connotation. And there really were hunger artists, in the 18 th and 19 th centuri...

There is a moment in Fusion Theatre’s production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (at Theatre Row’s Studio Theatre) when Creon says to Antigone “Don’t annihilate me with those eyes.” And indeed, Antigone’s unrelenting stare does seem to be annihilating him, as it’s been annihilating everyone. As Antigone, Eilin O’Dea motivates Creon’s line so well that it seems Anouilh has written it in response to the actress. Anouilh’s play, as this production makes clear, is an important drama. Anouilh reworked Sophocles’ play keeping the ancient Greek names and keeping the action in Thebes. The characters, however, mention tobacco, blood tests, film and cars. The dissonance reminds us that Anouilh’s message of courage and moral responsibility is ageless. Anouilh has created a raisonneur in a character called simply The Chorus. Tragedy, he tells us, “has nothing to do with melodrama”. “In tragedy, argument is gratuitous,” he says, but this is a very strange line; Antigone and Creon will soo...

In J. B. Priestley’s 1932 play The Roundabout , Lord Kettlewell is having a trying day. He plays host to his mistress, to a dowager aristocrat, and to a chubby old buddy named Chuffy. What’s more, his daughter, a young woman he hardly knows and a communist to boot, drops by, maybe to stay. She’s brought a male comrade (they’ve just returned from Russia). And finally his estranged wife drops in. This isn’t a great drama. In fact, there’s hardly any plot. People come and go, but the activities aren’t connected in any meaningful way and the story, such as it is, is highly predictable. In fact, the play would probably never receive any attention if it weren’t written by the playwright who wrote An Inspector Calls . Cahoot Theatre Company, in association with The Other Cheek and Park Theatre, has just presented the play at 59E59 Theaters. And, stressful as it all may be for our long-suffering central character, this drawing room comedy is terrific fun for us. What makes the produc...

Ingrid Betancourt was a Colombian Senator who was kidnapped by FARC rebels while she was running for President in 2002. She was held hostage in the jungle for six-and-a-half years. Catherine Filloux has written a play based on Ms. Betancourt’s experience, Kidnap Road , which was recently presented by La MaMa. The handsome set, by Justin Townsend, consists of a cube of violent white representing Ms. Betancourt’s prison. It has perforations in it, and it’s surrounded by long sticks representing the forest. There’s a swing downstage, suspended from the ceiling. There are two performers in this production. Ms. Betancourt is played by Kimber Riddle. Marco Antonio Rodriguez plays a number of characters, including another hostage, a FARC guard, Ms. Betancourt’s father, and God. Ms. Betancourt speaks with the other characters as the play moves around in time and location. In the most interesting dialogue, she talks with God, Whom Mr. Rodriguez sometimes plays while swinging on t...

Karen Finley’s latest work is The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery . It’s recently been presented by La MaMa as part of its Downtown Icons Series. And that’s suitable: Ms. Finley has been the very picture of downtown theater for decades. In the 1990’s she was one of the NEA Four, performers whose NEA grants were canceled for violating “general standards of decency”. Ms. Finley took the government to court. The case finally ended up before the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the government. The set for this production is really cool, cluttered, with music stands and a small table, all draped with fabric, and fabric hung like laundry, fabric hanging on the wall. There are two versions of The Unicorn in Captivity , and unicorn bric-a-brac. As she has so often in the past, Ms. Finley performs solo, reading from a script, generally unbridled, sometimes in a harsh whisper, sometimes hysterical. She makes no attempt to impersonate people. The writing is inconsistent, sel...

“Every time they fire up The Large Hadron Collider, they open up a portal to a parallel universe,” a character in The Conspiracists points out. What’s more, “the collider was fired up 12 hours ago.” Quite promising for the first scene of a play. Or the second or third, for that matter. And indeed, we hear these lines in all three scenes of T he Conspiracists , a clever play by Max Baker. The three scenes all take place at 8:47 pm on November 1, 2016, in the same church basement. The Under-35 Conspiracy Theorists Addict Support Group is holding their weekly meeting in each scene. “My name is Win and I’m addicted to conspiracy theories,” its leader announces. The three scenes are alike in many of their particulars. The four regular attendees of the group are the same. We find Jo sitting alone when the lights come up; Win enters and says “Oh, hey Jo.” Then the other two regulars and a newcomer join them. The newcomer has a different name in each scene, although she’s played by the ...

Sitting in the audience of The Room Sings , I thought of Caliban’s marvelous speech in The Tempest : Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. And so is this play full of noises that give delight. The Room Sings , which is presented by La MaMa in association with Talking Band, blends dialogue with background sound and music so beautifully that they together form one sublime soundscape. There are chirping and banging, vibes and a sort of pinging, and a voice that’s doing something like scatting. There are water sounds and a sound that’s a cross between a whistle and a soft scream. And when the coyote cries, one of the characters says “It sounds like it’s in pain.” The aural delights aren’t beneath the dialogue in the way we might expect. Sound and dialogue are carefully woven together in this production. Indeed, the cast deliver their lines as if those lines were music. As directed by Talking Band’s Artistic Director Paul...