New York Critic

photo by Untitled Theater Company No. 61 JR Brinkley was a Kansas doctor - faux doctor, actually - in the 1920’s who gained fame with a cure for erectile dysfunction: implanting goat testicles in his patients. He was so celebrated that he ran for governor and won the popular vote, but his opponent won the election on a technicality, praise God (votes misspelling his name were discarded). He was ultimately exposed, discredited and convicted of the obvious crimes. An American success story indeed. Edward Einhorn has based his play The Resistable Rise of JR Brinkley on this unlikely biography, and it’s been produced by The Untitled Theater Company No. 61 as part of FringeNYC. It’s a terrific production. Mr. Einhorn, who himself directs, employs a cast of five actors/musicians on a nearly bare stage with a backdrop. Included in the show are country songs - real country songs, bluegrass maybe - that Mr. Einhorn has revised from authentic tunes with new lyrics, making the show a...

photo by Mike Cantarella The theater of the absurd is alive and well, thank you. I don’t use the term in the loose sense, as applied randomly to nearly everything written after World War Two that’s not realism. I use it in the strict sense, le théâtre de dérision , in which nonsense is baked into the form of the play as a philosophy. I’m speaking of Normandy Sherwood’s play Ruffles, or a Progression of Rakes , recently produced by and at The Tank. The substance of this terrific play, such as it is, concerns a vaguely 18th-century dandy (Florian, played by Ean Sheehy) who scoops up a stable boy and makes him a sort of servant-cum-psychoslave. The young person (played by Bear Speigel) is made to wear ruffles around his neck - hence his new name. Sometimes the script sounds like Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano , and there’s an allusion to Genet’s The Maids when Florian has Ruffles engage in some role-playing with a row of silent maid-servants watching. The period is inconsisten...

photo by Russ Rowland The Hysteria of Dr. Faustus , produced by The Seeing Place Theater at The Paradise Factory, is yet another turn on the Faustus myth. It’s written by Brandon Walker, who also plays the title role, and it’s directed by Erin Cronican, who also plays Wagner and Mephistopheles. The play opens with the 80-year-old Heinrich Faustus addressing his Wittenberg class (us). He storms off after some inexplicable student heckling. When he’s at his home desk we meet his assistant, Wagner. Wagner is transformed into Mephistopheles and the good doctor makes his famous pact (he chooses the “highlight package”, for impatient people). After a quick trip to the bathroom to appreciate himself (and to let Mr. Walker remove his make-up), he’s transformed to age 30, which he will remain for 24 years. Heinrich Faustus becomes Henry Faust, English writer (although the actual, unfortunate progenitor of the myth was named Johann Faust). The plot centers on Faust’s ruining a you...

credit: Eileen Meny Photography What a wonder Salome is! Oscar Wilde wrote it in French in 1891. His infamous crush, Lord Alfred Douglas, translated it into English, but Wilde was so dissatisfied with his work that, some critics tell us, he essentially translated it again. At any rate, the Lord Chamberlin suppressed the London production (which would have starred Sarah Bernhardt) and the play premiered in France. It’s unabashedly hyperbolic, deliberately overwritten, as extravagant and overblown as dramatic prose can be. Wilde tells us everything six times. What style is this? It’s aestheticism - aka decadence . It represents the intersect of melodrama and exoticism. The script is as heavy as a fruitcake and great fun as well, and I don’t believe Wilde was entirely serious. The reader will be familiar with the Biblical story: Herod tells his step-daughter, Salome, that if she’ll dance for him, he’ll give her anything she asks for. She dances the Dance of the Seven Veil...

photo by Frictionville Studio Shadow puppetry holds flat, almost two-dimensional puppets behind a screen. A lamp behind them projects their moving shadows on to the screen, and we, the happy audience, see the shadows form the other side. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre tells us that shadow puppetry in the Middle East was used to avoid the censors: “Shadow puppet theatre similar to that found today throughout the East and South-East Asia was probably introduced to the Middle East at the time of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. … Their [shadow puppets’] method of manufacture helped them deal with basic orthodox Islamic objections to their existence. Shadow puppet makers were able to circumvent these objections by pointing out that since the figures were perforated with holes, they no longer represent animate beings.” Mercifully, Hamid Rahmanian doesn’t have to contend with censors. An Iranian-born artist, he’s conceived, designed and directed an elaborate shadow pupp...

photo by Kait Ebinger The  Scandinavian  American Theater Company is presenting a solo play by Lisa Langseth called Beloved at The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row. The actress, Elinor DiLorenzo, presents us with Katerina, a rather common young woman who gets scooped up by a high-class orchestra conductor named Adam after she takes a job as a receptionist at the concert hall. She tells us about Mathias, the guy she used to live with, and the step-by-step development of her relationship with Adam that makes her leave him.   Katerina’s not well-educated to the arts, but she falls in love with classical music, particularly Mahler, and her seduction by Adam is just one element of this larger life transition she’s telling us about. Playwright and actress do a great job of showing us more of Katerina than she can see herself. She tells us repeatedly that she’s not stupid. Her monologue is not sprinkled but rather iced with obscenities (rather overly so). When she tells u...

Arthur Schnitzler (Austrian) wrote La Ronde (German title Reigen ) in 1897, but it was so scandalous that it wasn’t formally produced until 1920, in Berlin. Schnitzler was charged with obscenity - it was too much even for the Weimar Republic - and he withdrew it from production.  La Ronde - need I say? - focuses on sex. It’s the rare example of a play without structure that works perfectly, and this is so because of its concept. There are ten scenes, each centering round the act of sex. One character in the first scene shows up in the second with a new partner; the character we just met in the second scene shows up in the third with a new partner, and so on. The girl in the first scene, whom we did not see again in the second scene, we meet again in the tenth, to complete the ring. David Hare adapted La Ronde into a play called The Blue Room , first produced in London in 1998. It’s designed to be performed by one actor and one actress, each playing five roles. I’v...

Photo by Hunter Canning Ben Josephson ’s play The Property, presented by New Light Theater Project at The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row, centers around a weak-willed woman, Irene, whose tenant - he’s renting the cottage - offers an enticing alternative to her nerdy husband, Eddie. Her self-absorbed high-school son, Todd, is no comfort to her, and her overbearing ex-husband, Vernon - he’s returned after 16 years - is a liability. The play is essentially plotless. The relationships and the lack of overt action suggest Uncle Vanya , but Chekhov’s characters are actually doing things beneath the stasis, and they’re steeped in the activities of daily life. Mr. Josephson’s characters do nothing but talk, mostly about themselves. The play’s divided into three acts, each of about a half-hour. Greg and Vernon show up in Act One, and it’s a long stretch until the next piece of action, in Act II. There is, at least, some interesting characterization in the dialogue. “You, mother...

photo by Roa Kavanagh The Public Theater has brought across the Atlantic Cyprus Avenue from The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and The Royal Court Theatre, London. David Ireland has written a 100-minute piece that starts as a black comedy and morphs into serious tragedy. In late middle age, poor Eric, a Protestant in Belfast, has been having trouble sleeping. The insomnia triggers a psychotic episode, and we watch as his delusion develops. He has a new granddaughter, Mary Mae, who looks like Gerry Adams, the Catholic political leader (and, some would say, terrorist sympathizer). No! He decides Mary Mae is Gerry Adams! Worse, he’s always considered himself British, but now he worries that he himself might be - gasp! - Irish. From then on, it’s an unswerving downward trajectory. Eric befriends Slim, a Protestant paramilitarist out on his first job, which is to kill Eric because he’s been raving on the park. Eric talks him out of this, and, by way of compensation, invites him to ...

photo by Joan Marcus What a strange set of inexplicable choices director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has made in The Public Theater’s production of Othello at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park! He has, first of all, cast a black actor in the role of Roderigo. There’s no point in Othello’s being a black man if he’s not the only black man in the story. The entire subtext of racism that runs through the play is lost, and Brabantio’s outrage at his daughter’s marriage is ill-explained. The beating of the play’s heart has been stopped. This is Shakespeare victimized by political correctness. Secondly, Mr. Santiago-Hudson has cut Othello’s epileptic seizure, although he’s retained most of the scene in which it occurs. We never  see the intensity of The Moor’s emotions, particularly not his state of mind before he commits the murder. In fact, Mr. Santiago-Hudson has cut considerably, both through fine pruning and large hacking. A couple of the shortest scenes disappear comple...