Happy Days

“Don’t overdo the bag,” says Winnie (Fiona Shaw), buried up to her waist in a pile of sand and rubble, possessing only a bag of simple objects – toothbrush, umbrella, pistol – with which to relieve the tedium of her constricted existence. Winnie is a master at rationing out her activities in order to create some semblance of variety in her life, a mastery matched by that of Shaw and director Deborah Warner in utilizing the limited theatrical resources bequeathed to them by Beckett during the first act of Happy Days, a transplant from London’s National Theatre now playing at BAM.

Winnie’s monologues are as rich as her possessions are economical and Shaw, her lilting Irish tones a perfect match for Beckett’s quotidian poetry, unpacks every bit of humor and pathos from within them. Shaw brings an almost impossible athleticism to this immobile role, emphasizing in lightning-quick succession Winnie’s hauteur and her vulnerability, her boldness and her fear. This Winnie is a determined winner, pluckily optimistic (or insanely delusional, take your pick) despite her desperate situation and the first act plays as a humanistic paean to man’s (or, in this case, woman’s) capacity to make bleakness bearable. In the shorter, more severe second half, with Winnie buried up to her neck, the production falters; Shaw, with only her expressive face in view, still evokes empathy, but the conception of Winnie’s brutish, subhuman husband (Tim Potter), who crawls out of his hole to share a final tableau, lacks assurance. At the production’s overly abrupt conclusion, one recognizes anew that none of us, even people as resourceful as Shaw, Warner, and Winnie, can fend off the inevitable blackness forever.

Man is Man

Does it really take a war for New York theater artists to remember Brecht? We hardly needed a reason to pay some attention to the 20th century’s greatest dramatist, and certainly not one as costly the debacle in Iraq. In any event, the current climate has inspired a new generation to try their hand at the “alienation effect,” including a group of recent NYU/Tisch students called the Elephant Brigade, who are performing Man is Man at HERE. Fetchingly dressed in an assortment of military fatigues, they make an attractive group but their aesthetic choices end up making Brecht look bad.

The story, set in a Kiplingesque colonial India, concerns the transformation of humble porter Galy Gay into a robotic killing machine. This production suffers under a philosophy that Dutch director Paul Bellerts calls “real time” acting. According to the program, this approach is based on “the presence of the actors as themselves,” which unfortunately means that the cast comes off looking like a bunch of really earnest kids, excited by their own experimentalism (like the use of live video projections and remote-controlled tanks). The play may argue that mechanized warfare has made individuals virtually interchangeable, but Brecht’s dramaturgy of gestus demands great physical specificity from the actors in order to make Galy’s transition meaningful. (Brecht reportedly envisioned one of his favorite comedians, Charlie Chaplin, in the role.) Natalie Kuhn, as Galy, and her castmates speak most of the play’s lines in “natural,” uninflected tones and walk nonchalantly around the stage as if posing for a low-key Gap ad. These young Brechtians have yet to discover the fierce artistic clarity required to make his plays truly effective; meanwhile, the rest of us have yet to discover how we can bring this maddening war to an end.

Doris to Darlene, a cautionary valentine

At its start, Jordan Harrison’s new play feels like an extended set of musical liner notes, exploring the journey of a stirring leitmotif (the Liebestod theme in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) from 19th Century opera into the bubble gum pop music of a Sixties girl group. Harrison’s characters frequently speak in the third person, explaining their thoughts and actions to the audience, underlining the parallels that connect the play’s three storylines. One of them remarks that great art can make an audience member “lose their lunch”; while clever, the first half of Doris to Darlene noticeably lacks that visceral effect. Scenes between Wagner and mad King Ludwig II play mostly for Bavarian buffoonery, while the story of Doris, the eponymous pop singer, and the producer who makes her a star has little more depth than Dreamgirls.

As an explicator of music’s mystical power, Harrison is no match for Mr. Campani (Tom Nelis), the buttoned-up high school music teacher in the play’s contemporary storyline who once trained to sing opera and remains under its spell. As the story focuses in on Campani and his young would-be protégé, the third person narration drops out of the dialogue and Harrison finds new juice in the familiar dramatic dynamic of homoerotically charged mentorship between teacher and student. Though the Liebestod seems to have been played ad nauseum, Harrison, like any good soprano, has saved something for his finale; in its emotional concluding moments, this intellectually artful play finally sings.

*For more about the play, visit the Playwrights Horizons website.

Queens Boulevard (the musical)

Theater rarely conveys a vivid sense of place; unlike films, plays can’t be shot on location. Which makes it all the more impressive that Signature Theatre Company’s production of Queens Boulevard (the musical) actually feels like a walk down the play’s titular thoroughfare. Sure, Mimi Lien’s busy set is filled with tacky signage, vendors’ carts, and assorted ethnic knick-knacks, while the varied soundtrack mixes bhangra, Asian pop, and an assortment of other tunes from all over the global village. These carefully-observed details, however, combine to create an effect far removed from documentary realism. Davis McCallum’s frequently fun production, performed by a likeable multi-racial ensemble, defies naturalism to capture the essence of New York’s most diverse borough.

Theatrical collagist Mee typically works by reconfiguring classic works and other found sources, here using an Indian dance-drama about a bridegroom’s quest for a mystical flower to give his new wife. Mee and McCallum have gamely set out to imitate the ritual form of non-Western theater, giving precedence to dance, song, and picaresque storytelling. If only there were more ritual and less talk: our protagonist encounters a series of friends and neighbors who discourse with him (often at great length) about the meaning of love and the fabric of community. With its cheek-by-jowl juxtaposition of cultures, Queens offers Mee a brimming metaphor, but the repetitive episodes and speeches eventually succumb to the law of diminishing returns. Imagine walking down the street only to have every Tom, Dick, and Hrishikesh tell you what they think of your marriage; you'd be only too eager to get back home.

*The Signature Theatre Company, as is their wont, is devoting an entire season to the work of one playwright, Charles Mee. You can find out more about him.
**Mee's scripts are all in the public domain. He encourages people to produce and mess around with them.

1001

The politically fraught romance between Alan and Dahna, an American Jew critical of Israeli policies and a Palestinian student activist, provides what amounts to a throughline in Jason Grote’s demanding new play. If the central characters sometimes seem sketchy, that may be deliberate: Grote’s main concern is the way that these lovers’ sense of their own identities is burdened, enveloped, indeed re-written by the stories that surround them. Framing narratives abound, generating one another like a never-ending set of Russian nesting dolls. An intrepid cast of six shift roles continuously, offering a prismatic portrait of Orientalism in its many guises, presided over by Scheherazade, the mother of all storytellers.

Director Ethan McSweeney, aided by Rachel Hauk’s inventive set design and a fluid soundscape provided by Lindsay Jones and DJ Arisa Sound, manages for the most part to make this impossibly complicated script stage-worthy. Though the play’s many truncated tales initially leave the audience (like Scheherazade’s listeners) hungry for closure, dazzling patterns of resonance slowly reveal themselves. Like Flaubert in the casbah of an Egyptian courtesan, Alan and Dahna have politically exoticized one another and their relationship breaks under the stress. The real excitement in 1001, however, comes from watching Grote construct a plot through transhistorical hyperlinks (it’s no wonder that one of his most effective scenes takes place in an Internet chatroom). While steeped in literary tradition, Grote’s structure captures a feeling of political and information vertigo unique to our globalized era. In a theatrical culture increasingly out of touch with contemporary life, that’s a story worth celebrating.

*Befitting its postmodern structure, 1001 has a pretty cool interactive website that riffs on the themes of the play.