New York Critic

photo by Pablo-Calderon Santiago Princess Diana was certainly a phenomenon. Wikipedia reports that 750 million people watched her televised marriage to Prince Charles in 1981. She was, of course, a media sensation until her death in a car crash in 1997. I’ve always failed to see what there was to admire in this woman. She was not a Cinderella, and if she was exploited for her pedigree, she apparently did not object. After all, she was Lady Diana before she was Princess Diana. She was killed returning from an evening of clubbing in Paris - at the age of 36 - with a man not her husband. And this from a member of the British royal family! I grant that she worked for charity, but that was her job. As far as I can see, her only real contribution was to refuse to include in her wedding vows that she would “obey” her husband. Andrew Morton published a biography of the great lady, Diana: Her True Story , based on audiotapes of interviews that her friend James Colthurst conducted...

photo: BittenByAZebra Ten-minute plays are very difficult to write well. Actually, all plays are difficult to write well, but ten-minute plays give playwrights a particular challenge. They need to create a reality quickly. Nonetheless, a ten-minute play can be great. After all, drama needs compression. Falling Forward: An evening of ten-minute plays , from Athena Theatre at Symphony Space, gives us 11 plays that succeed to various degrees. The scripts, which are mostly mediocre, are well served by some good acting. Of the 11 plays, seven use non-realistic techniques to deal with the challenges of this form. Of the remaining four, only one has a through line.  Only two of the 11 plays are really successful; they present the best scripts and they enjoy the best acting. boys don’t look at boys [no capitals in the title], by Jeremy O’Brian, presents a high school student who earns the attention of his teacher through a monologue. The speech in question is delivered by a ...

photo by Alex Papps Randy is a purple hand puppet who gives an 80-minute monologue from behind a table on stage, speaking educated strine. It’s a stand-up comedy act called randy writes a novel . The premise is that he’s going to read to us from the first draft of his novel. He’s reluctant to read, and by way of diversion he flies off on comic tangents. The program credits the actor playing Randy as Randy, but between us the comedian’s name is Heath McIvor. Presenting himself through a felt puppet puts a whole new complexion on his comedy. We feel superior to a bug-eyed puppet, but through great puppetry we accept Randy as a character. He leans over the table, throws his head back on his scrawny neck, and throws his arms around (on control sticks). Through a varied vocal life, Mr. McIvor creates a complex personality, frustrated, angry, sly. He insults his audience without being offensive, and he’s common without being cheap. We allow ourselves to laugh at a puppet when he t...

photo by Joan Marcus Miss You Like Hell , at The Public Theater, is topical and timely , a musical about a Mexican resident of the US who’s requesting a stay of deportation (it’s also called a “cancellation of removal”, as if the individual were an object). But the play presents in its foreground not a political issue but a genuine personal drama. If it’s uneven, its concept is solid. The character with the looming deportation hearing in Los Angeles is Beatriz. She surprises her daughter in Philadelphia, Olivia, whom she hasn’t seen in years, with a visit and an invitation to accompany her on a westward road trip for a week. The substance of the play is the mother/daughter bonding on this geographical and spiritual trip, accusation and forgiveness. There are events on this road trip, but they’re episodes; one doesn’t lead to another. Early on the trip, they meet a pair of older gay men who travel the country getting married in each state (they’re on their 24th state). T...

photo by Theo Cote Romana Soutus’ play Martyrs , at La MaMa, presents nine women in a room with two king-sized beds and a garish sort of expressionist Madonna on the wall. The walls are chicken wire, like a cage. This is a secluded cult, with three leaders whom the program calls cats, and six followers whom the program calls kittens. They’re all waiting be “lifted”, living in the eternal present. “There’s no before. There’s only now,” one says. They talk a lot, but nothing happens until late in the play. Nothing can happen because the characters, for the most part, are deliberately not individuated. The cats are three manifestations of cat and the kittens are six manifestations of kitten. What happens to one cat physically happens to all three. This is innovative playwrighting as far as it goes. And it’s clever of Ms. Soutus to  keep the play so abstruse that we spend the early part asking “Who are these people? What’s happening?” However, she hasn’t overcome the pr...

What we do without science fiction? It keeps our imagination sharp even when it’s not on-the-mark predictive. And we can see the imaginative value even in the sci-fi of the past. photo by Adam Smith Jr. It Came from Beyond is a musical frolic through the sci-fi of the 1950’s, produced by John Lant, Cornell Christian and ICFB Productions, at St. Luke’s Theater. It’s not so much a send-up as an comic musical interpretation, with a book by Cornell Christianson and with music and lyrics by Stephen M. Schwartz and Norman E. Thalheimer. It presents a story about a high school student reading a sci-fi comic book paralleled by a story about a military scientist detecting an interplanetary invasion. So the writer has it both ways, and he does a great job of twining the two plot lines together. Actors double as students and military staff: the teen-age nerd parallels the military professor, the school bully parallels the alien in the military base, etc… It’s really cool! Jim Blan...

photo by Theo Cote The pre-show set of The Hess Collective’s production of Elizabeth Hess’ play Love Trade , at La MaMa, is stunning: when we enter the theater we see something shrouded under white gauze, in a white spotlight, with dozens of white balloons on the floor, all on an otherwise unadorned stage with a black floor and backdrop. When the show begins that something begins to move and gradually reveals itself to be actress, but she removes the gauze so subtly (by the lower layers, I think) that the revelation is gradual. We see her arms moving and we’re astonished when a third arm appears, and then a fourth. Ultimately two actresses reveal themselves. Great! The two laughing women show themselves to be Persephone and Demeter.  To review that wonderful Greek myth: Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, is kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld, who brings her to the nether-world with him. While Demeter searches for her, the crops ...

photo by Paula Court Distant Observer: Tokyo/New York Correspondence , presented by La MaMa at La Mama, was written by two playwrights, one in New York and one in Tokyo. The segments of the final script alternate between the work of the two of them. The play, then, is modeled after a renga , a Japanese verse form in which multiple writers collaborate. The creative method is interesting, but D istant Observer reflects nothing of this dyad process. It simply makes no difference, as we can’t discriminate between the style of the two writers, at least in translation. The two playwrights in question are Takeshi Kawamura and John Jesurun, and the play is strange even by Off-off-Broadway standards. Its five actors play characters who are essentially amorphous. Although one is called “Mary” at one point, the only other names assigned are “A” and “B”. One character even says “I’m not even a character. I’m just some kind of idea floating around.” and “I think we have become each ...

photo: Carol Rosegg Sam Graber’s skillfully written play SHOOTER  is a study of “a pre-emptive shooting massacre”. Jim has shot to death a would-be mass killer and seriously wounded a student in order to prevent the killer from “shooting up a high school”. We learn this through well-placed delayed exposition after meeting Jim and his attorney - an old buddy - in the first scene. Most of the play consists of flashbacks. Its scenes fill in the back story and relate the circumstances that lead to Jim’s preoccupation with his handgun.  Jim’s wife and daughter have left him and he’s lost his job. He’s been abandoned by his higher-achieving pals. He’s drifted - for unspecific reasons - into a gun training class where the instructor, Troy, tells him “This place is for joyless fanatics.” Troy refers to a gun saying “What this is is purpose,” and he tells Jim “Once you belong, a man could get back to whatever he feels he’s lost.” Jim is so ill-at-ease on the shooting rag...

photo by Beatriz Schiller Karen Malpede’s play Extreme Whether , presented by Theater Three Collaborative at La MaMa, describes itself as “a Cli-Fi drama.” Its concern is climate change, and it explores the issue through a family drama. John is a climate scientist, Rebecca West his live-in colleague. Living with them are his 13-year-old daughter and an older gentleman called Uncle. John’s sister, Jeanne, and her husband, Frank, are visitors. The home is on protected land that John and Jeanne have inherited. Needless to say, the characters of the climate scientists and the resistance they encounter refer to actual people and events. The character of John is particularly based on Dr. James Hansen, who warned Congress against global warming in 1988. Ms. Malpede manages both to create both a moving family drama and to make a social statement in the vein of Ibsen. John and Rebecca, of course, are trying to save the world, and Jeanne and Frank are their avaricious foils. The pl...