Vanya on Winnisimmet Street

I wish I could say the current Apollinaire Theatre production of Uncle Vanya was truly great, rather than just pretty good; it's the kind of production that you root for, because the play is a challenge for a small company, and this version is unpretentious, straightforward, and at the finish quite moving. Director Danielle Fauteux Jacques has also had the clever idea of staging the production all over her theatre's 1906 home (it was built only a decade after Uncle Vanya was written, on Winnisimmet Street in Chelsea). Fauteux Jacques has done this kind of thing before - she quite effectively staged The Seagull all over a nearby park a few years ago.  And it's intriguing how well the technique works for Chekhov; somehow it carries the playwright's vaunted naturalism right through the "fourth wall" and into our laps; after all, the setting is now literally "real," and we're no longer a theatre audience but seemingly flies on the walls of an estate in the Russian provinces a hundred years ago.  Indeed, you somehow feel a little frisson when the door to the Apollinaire "set" opens, and you can see other corridors and rooms beyond it (through which gunshots sometimes echo from points unknown, but hardly "offstage").  The drama fittingly plays out in smaller and smaller spaces, too - so that as the characters' lives close in on them, so do the walls.

If only I could praise the acting as much as I can the concept!  But I wasn't taken with too many of the performances in this Vanya, I'm afraid.  It has gotten a lot of attention from the press because local luminary John Kuntz (above, with Marissa Rae Roberts) has been cast in the title role, but he's basically wrong for it (though with a beard he looks right enough), and despite an earnest effort, only taps into the character's anger rather than his fresh disappointment or romantic, free-thinking nature.  Thus Kuntz is pretty much over-shadowed by newcomer Ronald Lacey, whose defeated whimsy isn't quite right for Astrov either, but who consistently intrigues you anyway.  (Watch out for this guy, I think we'll hear more from him.)  I also liked Ann Carpenter's gruff Nanny and found Anne Marie Shea amusingly pretentious as Vanya's mother.  And local casting honcho Kevin Fennessey was fine, but not distinctive, as Telegin. Meanwhile Erin Eva Butcher came through at the last second (with real tears) as Sonya, but till then didn't always seem connected to her character; likewise Marissa Rae Roberts, who made a quite lovely Elena, took the character's self-described boredom far too much to heart - she was just sleepy, rather than a sleeping mermaid. Elsewhere the production felt either a little flat or a little shouty - and perhaps most problematically of all, you never believed anybody in it was truly in love with anybody else.

Still, the despair of the last scene came over - and I think the outlines of Chekhov's vision were discernible here and there (despite an up-and-down translation from Craig Lucas).  At least I could tell the audience - perhaps thanks to the Vanya on 42nd Street effect - left talking over the play's issues, with that look on their faces people get when they suddenly realize there's a whole world out there beyond cable, movies, and video games.  And maybe that should be good enough for any critic.

Pirates of the corporation

After the surprising success of Dark Play, I was eager to check out the Apollinaire Theatre's current offering, Men of Tortuga, a new drama by Jason Wells which was developed at Steppenwolf. But alas, I'm duty-bound to report that neither the script nor the cast (above left) of Tortuga has the confident sheen of the earlier piece. Still, the show has its moments, and fans of legal thrillers may find it a satisfying-enough evening out.

To me, however, just about everything about Tortuga is a little too familiar, even though it's been capably constructed by Wells, who manages several deft twists in his last act. The trouble with this kind of writing, however, is that by now we expect several twists in the last act, even if we can't predict precisely what they're going to be; unexpected variations on the formula can't transcend its inherent lack of surprise. And the playwright's take on capitalism - that corporate raiders, like pirates (which I assume is the reference intended by the title; perhaps "Men of Grand Cayman" sounded too much like a calendar) aren't above simply murdering their opponents to get what they want - hardly counts as a new angle, either.

Wells clearly is attempting a minor variation on, say, Glengarry Glen Ross, only this time in the inner sanctum of some nameless corporation or law office. The suits the author assembles in this marble interior (which looks a bit more like a lobby than a boardroom, although its trompe-l'oeil effect is convincing) never give away exactly what threat they're trying to eliminate (or why), but it's clear that murder is what they have in mind; there's even a hot-headed weapons expert on hand to goose them along toward the best, and most cold-blooded, options available.

The first half or so of the play is intended, I suppose, as coldly "outrageous" black comedy, but we feel throughout that we're well ahead of the playwright's tactics. Wells gets a bit more traction from the inevitable introduction of a possible traitor into this corporate clique, and swings a compelling little debate over the Biblical account of Judas. But even here the playwright doesn't quite have the Mamet- or Pinter-like chops to limn anything new in the way of moral or metaphysical speculation from these developments. Still, the "surprises" keep coming from then on, and we watch with interest till the finish, just to see how it all turns out. So Wells may have promise, although I worry that he looks rather like the male answer to Theresa Rebeck, i.e. a craftsman who can smoothly re-purpose film and TV material for the stage.

At the Apollinaire, the actors are all the right ages, and have some skill, but generally can't project the sense of deep disguise that might give the goings-on a little more sense of mystery. Alain Groene Pieters as the weapons specialist has the most presence, but eventually begins to chew the scenery; meanwhile castmate Tom Giordano seems at first on the right track as the innocent in this crowd, but needs to grow up quite a bit faster once he understands exactly what's at stake. Danielle Fauteux Jacques directs crisply, but perhaps a bit naïvely. But then these days it's tough to be more jaded than your audience.

A winning dark horse

Mark Vashro and Erez Rose hook up in Dark Play. Photo by Danielle Fauteux Jacques.

I caught up late to Dark Play, or Stories for Boys, at the Apollinaire Theatre in off-the-grid Chelsea, so this note is inevitably a post-mortem. Which I feel bad about, because Dark Play proved to be the best local production of the year so far, and deserved an even larger audience than it got. Director Danielle Fauteux Jacques may have been lucky in her cast - mostly talented Emerson types who were at ease with the script's Dawson's-Creek-gone-bad dialogue and aggressive semi-nudity (if Cam4-style antics disturb you, this is not your play). But her direction was also smoothly assured, and she managed something like the perfect pace as well as a cool, sympathetic-yet-distant tone. Fauteux Jacques couldn't quite disguise the growing gaps in Carlos Murillo's script, but the show's slick surface distracted us from that pretty much till the finish.

The play, in case you haven't heard, loosely follows the true story of a confused lad who posed as a lass on the Internet, seduced another lonely teen in a chat room, and then, rejected once his gender was revealed, attempted to engineer his own murder by his former "lover." It's quite a story, and I really wish Murillo had managed to do it justice. But he hasn't, I'm afraid, not by a long shot - Dark Play has a compelling set-up, but begins to coast on its knowingness just as a truly disturbing abyss begins to open up beneath its characters. When we first meet 14-year-old "Nick," (a scarily poised Erez Rose), it's enough to merely hear him say "I like to make shit up," to know we're about to go on a rollercoaster ride with "reality." But by the final, ironic coda, we feel we've a right to have seen behind the veil of Nick's self-deluding ego, but instead we're in precisely the same place regarding his character as we were at his opening line, with far too many questions about his true nature (and the fate of his "friend") left hanging; the ride has taken us right back to our starting point, despite some truly heinous "shit" going down.

So the talented Perez can't really take us to the dark places promised by the playwright; still, he's so on top of the hyper-articulate, totally-self-aware mode of teenage life today, that he's always superficially compelling (as well as utterly believable as a 14-year-old). And the supporting ensemble was just as skillful; Mark Vashro brought a sweet goofiness to Adam, Nick's target in chat, while Christine Busler managed just the right level of digitally-conjured "feeling" as Nick's chatroom persona (who describes herself as "a combination of Hilary Duff and Avril Lavigne, with a little Natalie Portman"). Indeed, one of the production's gambits was watching the synthetic interactions of the Internet play out before us in flesh and blood, via supporting players Lorna Nogueira and Brian Quint (whom I once directed), who brought hilarious life to these wayward teens' digital avatars as well as the clueless parents and self-dramatizing teachers who crossed their paths. All in all this was a sterling production from Apollinaire, and one that is sure to be remembered come award time.