Tennessee topless

Erin Markey and Alan Brinks in Green Eyes.

I did want to mention that I managed to catch Company One's import (by the New York company "The Kindness") of the recently-discovered Tennessee Williams one-act Green Eyes, at the newly-refurbished Ames Hotel over the weekend.  And I'm not quite sure what the fuss has been about regarding this production.

Well, actually, I do understand what the fuss has been about; the audience is in close quarters (in a hotel room) with a hot topless lady and a ripped guy in boxers for almost an hour, as they declaim bad Tennessee Williams.  Now I want to state up front that I am all for hanging out in hotel rooms with attractive, half-naked young people; I wish I got to do that more often.  (Or ever.)  So in one way, the production was definitely a success.  (And I think the straight men in the audience were secretly giving it a standing ovation throughout.)

If only the play were a success - but alas, it's clear why this one wound up at the bottom of Tennessee's underwear drawer.  In it, he gropes about in an effort to extend his usual format of sexual tease (and  hysteria) into the political realm of the Vietnam War and its associated issues.  And I suppose you can't blame him for trying; but seriously - can sexual hysteria explain everything?  Somehow I don't think so, and it looks like in the end Tennessee agreed.  If only he'd found some way to align his usual concerns with a new dramatic mode (as he successfully found common ground with the Theatre of the Absurd in the far-superior Rooming House of Madame LeMonde), the play might still be of interest.  But no dice; and  Green Eyes doesn't even offer much in the way of Williams' distinctive dramatic language - and in case you haven't noticed, basically all the Williams plays that have remained securely in the canon are distinguished by the fact that in them his poetic cadence is at its peak.

In the end, the play (it's really more of a sketch) is basically a riff on the amusingly dirty-minded, but artistically only so-so movie Baby Doll (which in turn was derived from the so-so 27 Wagons Full of Cotton), so it's no surprise that the lovely Erin Markey capably channels Carroll Baker from that film, only in air quotes and slow motion (which helps to stretch out the running time).  She does manage to convey more real minx, however, in her languid drawl than we've seen in other local Williams productions, which is of some formal interest (actresses take note - Blanche and Maggie should have claws like these, too).  And she's totally un-selfconscious about being half naked throughout, which I'm sure many in the audience appreciated.  As her tormented husband (a soldier on leave from "Waakow"), Alan Brinks fares less well, however - he throws himself into the part, but it's terribly underwritten, and all but leaps from one overwrought reaction to another, and so the performance comes off as forced.  (Here you think director Travis Chamberlain might have lent Brinks a helping hand, but again, no dice.)

Then again, the script is such lurid malarkey - a split condom in the toilet, big bruises on bare breasts, plus maybe a rape, or a seduction, by a stud with "HUGE green eyes!" - that I'm not sure what more I could have reasonably expected.  Add a whole lotta potted palms, and sound effects from the Tet Offensive, and all you need to make this turkey fly is a big bag of popcorn with extra butter.

The Shawn & Kati Show

Okay, you've probably been able to tell that there has been a certain amount of turmoil going on here at the Hub Review.  And if you're in the theatre community, you're going to hear about all this anyway.  So I might as well tell you.

I have resigned as a member of the IRNE Awards, largely due to the scheming of the ART's Kati Mitchell (the addled old bat who has long defined the local nadir of the public relations profession) and Company One's "artistic" director, Shawn LaCount.  For many readers, I suppose an introduction is in order to both these unsavory characters.  First, batty Kati - she's been after me for years, I think because I could precisely explain why most ART productions were pretentious junk. She didn't like that, not one bit; not because she understood the productions herself (don't be ridiculous; she's crazy but not that crazy); no, it was just that my level of insight threw a serious wrench into the campaign of intimidation and threat by which the ART maintains its reputation against all artistic and moral odds. Kati not only used to send me crazy emails in all caps after a bad review, but, believe it or not, she even penned the IRNE folks an angry letter declaring that the ART's failure to win more awards every year only made the IRNEs look bad.  She's hilariously beyond the pale - easily the worst PR person I've ever encountered in my life.

Next: Kati's latest cohort in crime, Shawn LaCount, whom (yes) I called an "a**hole" in one of my tweets a few weeks ago. Shocking, I know; such language!  (And in my own Twitter feed!)  I tossed off this "personal attack" (in Kati's self-serving lingo) because Mr. LaCount was serving as her replacement for Jeff Poulos, late of StageSource, who was her previous pawn in a plot last year to get me off the IRNEs. (Yes, the poor IRNE critics have gone through all this before - Mitchell essentially wages wars of attrition.)

Now calling LaCount an a**hole may be crass, but is it inaccurate? Before you answer, consider that LaCount has spent the last few weeks relentlessly badgering and harassing various IRNE members (until finally I resigned just so he'd leave them alone). He whined and screamed and stamped his feet. He called the IRNE critics racist (of course); what's more, he actually called good old Beverly Creasey a racist, even though she was one of the founders of the non-traditional casting project, back in the days when local critics like Arthur Friedman (Bill Marx's mentor, of course) would publicly argue for all-white casting for classic plays - and many years before LaCount discovered (as so many of his generation have) the career-enhancing aspects of "fighting" something that nobody actually supports anymore.  To be fair, LaCount was also probably smarting from my labeling him a "race diva" after Company One refused me press tickets to their crude blackface extravaganza The Neighbors - which was dreadful, everyone says in private, so maybe I should be grateful I didn't have to suffer through it.  And to be honest, I was also pretty grateful for their hilarious explanation as to my exclusion - according to the logically-challenged Mason Sand, it was because of Company One's commitment to diversity!  That's right: "We are excluding you because of our commitment to diversity."  (Really, you can't make this stuff up.)

I should add, though, that LaCount went well beyond simply playing the liberal guilt card to get what he wanted.  He claimed he would boycott the IRNE ceremony unless I left the organization,  and would talk other companies into boycotting, too.  He threatened that he would not allow his actors to accept their awards should they win.  Which was pretty ironic, since one of those nominated actors - Becca A. Lewis - was on the ballot largely because I argued for her to be there.  So it's also amusing to ponder that if she wins, and I hadn't resigned, LaCount would have ripped the award right out of her hot little hand. That's how much he loves his "collaborators."

And Lewis well may win; like diversity specialist Mason Sand, she has some talent.  But Shawn LaCount, like his sidekick Summer L. Williams (who also specializes in browbeating critics), just doesn't - funny how that works, isn't it - and that's going to hurt more and more as the years go by and Shawn doesn't get the recognition that (like Kati!) he's sure he deserves. To pile irony on irony, however, I should also tell you that I actually argued for a directing nomination for Shawn only a few weeks ago, because I thought he'd done better than usual with his direction of The Aliens; isn't that just a hoot? I was shouted down, though; other IRNE members felt his sterling cast had made him look good, which is probably true.

Anyway - back to the Shawn & Kati show. Mitchell and LaCount were clearly in cahoots, but they weren't alone, I'm afraid; I don't have the full story from anyone on this, but I imagine the usual suspects (Steve Mahler, of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, I'd guess, and maybe the neurotic John Kuntz?, or the weird Mitchell crony Henry Lussier of the Lyric Stage?, perhaps the bitter Debra Wise of Underground Railway Theater?) got involved with drafting a Scary Letter of Outrage against me.  I know, I know - a scary letter!  EEEK!  The IRNE people really need more spine, but to be honest, the situation was more that their spines were just being worn down from the ongoing neurotic frenzy.   Still, I wish I'd been able to read this letter!  I can just imagine: Tom Garvey said "a**hole" in a tweet!  Plus he said Shakespeare was white and James Levine is gay!  He is a terrible stain on your entire organization!  (Remember, Kati Mitchell works for Diane Paulus, so I think she knows from stains on reputations.)

Anyway, long story short, together Shawn and Kati slowly wore the IRNE members down.  Kati didn't threaten to deny them all press tickets (she has done that before, it seems), but I'm sure they feared that was the final step, after the Scary Letter, in her ongoing Inquisition.  They wouldn't actually get rid of me, of course, but I kept getting calls and requests to go to meetings that all revolved around their begging me to censor my blog (and then even my tweets) as if I were writing for the Globe.

In a word, that ain't gonna happen.  So I resigned, just to get the whole thing over with. And the bitch won.  (Yes, you can quote me on that.) Although it may be a pyrrhic victory, at least for Shawn LaCount - for as you can see, my resignation actually means Company One has lost an advocate on the IRNEs.  (And I don't think they've gained any others!)  Of course Shawn couldn't have known that, just as I'm sure he couldn't figure out that Mitchell was playing him for a patsy.  What the other dolts who apparently signed on to Mitchell's letter thought they could possibly gain from it I've no idea.  People do seem to think I have a mysterious influence over other IRNE critics, but rest assured, I don't.  Behind closed doors, my opinion of the quality of the productions at both the ART and Company One is widely shared.  I've really never had to argue against the ART, or Company One - or Steve Mahler, or Ryan Landry, or even David Miller (in fact I'm careful just to never discuss David Miller).

Anyway, for a few days I was very blue.  I thought I wanted to close The Hub Review, in fact. It wasn't that Kati Mitchell "won;" it was, as another critic put it, that her example, along with the fact that several other theatre producers would fall in line behind her, made you not want to go to the theatre at all.  Because Kati's - and Shawn's - vision of the theatre is a place of sleazy, crude gamesmanship overlaid by Harvard "class" and political correctness, where artistic quality comes dead last.  It's creepy - a kind of theatrical hell, in fact. 

And I have to say that this whole affair has set a horrible precedent.  It gives the impression that PR people are setting critical policy - at least at one remove.  Which, in a word, should never happen.  Plus there's the dispiriting sense of what the IRNEs have turned into backstage - a vile exhibition of arm-twisting and back-biting.  It wasn't supposed to be that way.  The IRNEs are entirely a volunteer organization, of critics who do indeed love the art form they cover; they "owe" the grasping Kati Mitchell and Shawn LaCount, as well as the theatre companies they represent, precisely nothing.  And yet both feel entitled to attack and bad-mouth these volunteers at will.  They're just disgusting.

Never fear, however - I'm not abandoning the Hub Review. (Then the bitch really would have won.)  Mitchell and LaCount may have tarnished the IRNEs, but who knows - things change, and if there's any justice, Mitchell will be struck by lightning and a piano will fall on LaCount.  And as my partner pointed out, the only practical difference to me is that now I don't have to cover their mediocre theatre companies anymore.  Because that rogue's gallery of "usual suspects" I listed above - the ART, Company One, et. al. - are, indeed, the shallow end of the theatrical talent pool, the ones who have to lean on money, clout, or political correctness to "win" awards.

So I'll keep writing.  I have to.  If I quit, the amount of theatre coverage in Boston is almost cut in half!  And I'm really not concerned that my reputation for skeptical, fair-minded analysis will be at all impacted by this whole imbroglio.  Everyone knows I'm the strongest, most versatile, and most prolific critic in town.  That's why Kati wants me gone.  But yes, it's true that if you poke me enough, I will respond with a word like a**hole - and that's just the way it is.

Triple play

What has the Annie Baker festival told us about its playwright?

The boys from New York, Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley, just love playwright Annie Baker. Isherwood called her most recent opus, The Aliens,"a gentle and extraordinarily beautiful new play" when it opened in Manhattan. And colleague Brantley seconded that emotion when he journeyed north (What?? He left the five boroughs???) to see the festival of her work currently filling the Calderwood Pavilion. After viewing Company One's production of the same script last week (it runs through this weekend), Brantley gushed that Baker was "seriously gifted" and thrilled to her "bittersweet sounds of silence."

But when I saw The Aliens, I . . . well . . .

I fell asleep.

Twice.

So maybe I missed the extraordinarily beautiful part. But you see, a third of The Aliens is performed in silence (as Baker dictates).  Which comes to, oh, almost 50 minutes of stage time. Longer than a lot of plays.

During these periods of being-but-dramatic-nothingness, we listen to the grass grow, or distant birds sing (even they twitter sotto voce, as if they were in a library).  Meanwhile the main character, KJ (Alex Pollock, below, with Nael Nacer) grows steadily more stoned. He smiles a lot, and sometimes hums to himself, lost in some reverie that we imagine has to be more interesting than what we're watching.

And if you're me, well, after about ten or fifteen minutes, you start drifting into your own reverie, just like KJ, and . . . well . . . all I'm hoping is that I didn't snore as loudly as a certain critical éminence grise often does. Because then I would have completely drowned out all those distant little birds!

Not that I can fault the production much in any detail for my slumber; from what I saw, I'd say it's easily the strongest thing I've seen Company One do.  The actors are all excellent, and make every melodramatic turn fresh and truly poignant.  I'm serious.  I gave a Hubbie to Alex Pollock when I first saw him about two years ago, so I wasn't surprised by his tour de force here - and it's nice he got his picture in the Times (below)! I've never seen Nael Nacer before, but he too seemed just right.  As the teenager drawn into their orbit, Jacob Brandt was perhaps slightly mannered, but was still basically fine. Director Shawn LaCount, of whom I'm not always a fan, has done well by all three actors (although I think Baker intends a trace more irony to cling to the show's final rendition of "If I Had a Hammer").  Meanwhile Cristina Todesco - who has designed the entire triumvirate of plays at the Calderwood - pulled off another subtle trick with a set that was just about perfect in every detail.

Alex Pollock and Nael Nacer in The Aliens.

So - why am I complaining?  After all, I got a good nap, didn't I?  Well, I'm sorry to get quite so snarky about Brantley and Isherwood, but there's only so much gentle afflatus of Baker's reputation that I can stand.  So let's turn back the critical clock to pre-millennial standards of awesomeness for a moment.  Why not - play along with me.  And perhaps I'll start the deflation of Baker's critical balloon with something that has been bugging me about her plays, and that's all this "Shirley, Vermont" crapola.  I mean, it's a cute marketing hook, yes - and I know it's all about "butts in seats" - but there is just no way anyone can truly believe Ms. Baker conjures an imaginary town in these three plays.  Not that anyone truly has believed that.  Brantley, for instance, in a classic example of his trademarked doublespeak, writes on the one hand about "assessing more fully the dimensions of a town called Shirley," and even half-compares Baker's hamlet to Wilder's Grover's Corners, but simultaneously backpedals with lines like, "But for all their specificity of locale, these plays are as notable for their sense of displacement as for their sense of place."  Translated from Brantlese, that means: What I just said?  Total bull!

Egg-zactly. Because Grover's Corners is, indeed, a fully-fledged "imaginary place," with a deep sense of  artistic reality - like Bedford Falls, or Maycomb. "Shirley, VT" doesn't rank with any of these - the overlaps between Baker's plays give them roughly the same amount of resonance that Petticoat Junction had with Green Acres. Because Baker isn't writing about a town, she's writing about a class - why can't we admit that? She writes highly attenuated, sentimental comedies of manners about a certain liberal, moneyed demographic. If you want to pretend there's a virtual "Shirley, Vermont" in Williamsburg, and Cambridge, and Berkeley - fine. But Baker hasn't bothered giving her fictional village nearly enough detail (her minimal technique prevents that) for anyone to claim that she has created a mythological place.  So let's all just stop pretending she has. Okay?

Okay.  So what we have with Annie Baker is a smart and highly skillful writer of sentimental material.  Very sentimental material.  In a word, she's kinda sappy, and The Aliens in some ways may be her sappiest work yet.  But she gets away with her Hallmark-card-level pathos by whispering it, or insinuating it through various gambits-at-one-remove, in tiny little blips; sometimes it feels like she's texting her well-wishers a sweet, sad little play. Which gives her themes the appearance of a sophistication they don't really have.

Take The Aliens.  Actually, a better name for it might be The Walking Clichés.  KJ, the gentle pixie at the center of the story, is a harmless stoner, who hangs out all day behind a coffee shop, and is also (maybe!) a mathematical genius.  But he's poignant because he has OCD, and maybe other, you know, psychological stuff wrong with him.  But he's cool to talk to.  (That is, when he talks.)  His buddy is different - he's like mad at the world, and even a little scary!  But you know, his girlfriend left him, so you have to cut him some slack.  And he plays guitar, and is writing this awesome novel, just like his hero, Bukowski - he, too, could be a secret genius!

Oh, Jesus Christ.  I mean seriously.  Two secret geniuses in a single backyard?  Isn't that pushing it?  But wait - there's more; enter Death, stage left!  Yes - one of our lovable friends is mown down in the prime of life. Just like in Arcadia, et in Shirley ego!

Well, that's one way to get around the fact that you haven't devised a plot for your characters. But to be honest, the actors actually make this out-of-left-field development touching, as shamelessly tear-jerking as it may be.  So why do I feel, somewhere deep inside, that I'm being taken for a ride?  Not by Ms. Baker, I should say - even though sometimes when I contemplate her, I imagine her with those big, sad eyes that waifs have in paintings on black velvet (only this time the waif has an iPhone).

No, I agree that Baker's talented, and a genuine craftsman - she has potential; someday, I think, she might begin to grapple with some real themes and write a great play, as Lydia Diamond suddenly did with Stick Fly.  And maybe I should count my blessings; yes, she's much better than the gratingly fatuous and self-indulgent Sarah Ruhl, who has been queen of the white-girl playwright hive for far too long.  Indeed, in some ways Baker is everything that Ruhl's not: she's disciplined, and self-deprecating, and even takes on political correctness, to some degree (in Body Awareness).

I don't think Baker has written a really great play, though - not yet; she has demonstrated her technical ability, and even developed a thoughtful technique that seems to map to her generation's attitudes. And she has written three pretty good plays in a row.  That's saying something.  She should be produced.  But should writing three good plays mean she should already have a career retrospective? I'm not so sure.  Because Baker seems unable to directly engage with the dark sides of her characters (they just don't have dark sides) or really with anything like the moral or political compromises (or other vicissitudes) of actual life.  (Even her big gambit in The Aliens happens off-stage.)  This struck me with all the more force as I was watching Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular in Providence this weekend.  Compared to Baker's plays, Singular seemed singularly layered and deep, and calmly savage with its character's flaws and failings.  Yet we're still arguing over whether Ayckbourn has any lasting value!

But then Ayckbourn critiqued his culture, while Baker subtly celebrates her own.  Indeed, sometimes she feels more like a symptom of that culture than an observer of it - I mean, we're going through the Great Recession, we've become a nation that tortures, a nativist-facist movement is on the rise, and in our theatres we're listening to Annie Baker sing a little song to herself about the Starbucks crowd?  Something about that seems - well, just wrong.  What's more, if this festival has done anything, it has shown a clear arc in her work - only it's in the wrong direction, toward smaller canvases and ever more distant delicacies, and perhaps more and more self-involvement.

Although somewhere (and I realize I'm beginning to sound like Ben Brantley here!) I'm aware that yes, these are desperate times artistically, so maybe I should just count my blessings with Baker. In a way, she's more than a poster child for the millennials - she may be the best they've got, and you can feel on the blogs a kind of rising tide of frustration with the fact that us grown-ups aren't as impressed with this generation's artistic achievements as they are themselves. Actually, they kind of know they're under-achievers, but to their minds, that doesn't matter, they should just be produced anyway! The recent dust-up over the Wasserstein Prize gives you some idea of what a pickle we're in - a prize specifically set up to honor young female playwrights literally couldn't find a script good enough to give the money to. That tells you something, doesn't it - only it wasn't what the millennials wanted to hear; their collective tantrum was swift, and damning. And almost immediately, the Wasserstein people backed down - they'll find something they can give that prize to, even if it kills them! Given that kind of environment, yeah, maybe Annie Baker counts as some kind of genius, and fluffing her makes perfect sense.

Grimm isn't so grim

In a way, I'd have to say that Grimm, Company One's "remix" of the Brothers Grimm, says something grim about the current state of playwriting. Out of the seven authors the ambitious young theatre commissioned to "re-imagine" the familiar folk tales, really only one - Kirsten Greenidge - came up with a new, fully-fledged play. The rest - some of whom have national profiles - delivered long-form sketches of one type or other.

Why did things turn out that way? I'm not really sure. But the very concept of the evening feels slightly past its fresh date, to be honest, and the familiarity of the tales may have proven something of a challenge to the authors, many of whom "play off" the originals rather than truly re-imagine them. (It's perhaps telling that Greenidge chose to "remix" the least familiar of the seven, the odd "Clever Else.") And several succumbed to the temptation of simply contrasting the Germanic whiteness of the original stories with the politically correct mores of our "post-racial" present, and so wound up with skits that might have played years ago on In Living Color or Chappelle's Show. In a way, this sometimes made the tales just as cutesy as their versions on the Disney Channel - just with, you know, outrageous attitude, etc.

But at the same time that I found myself disliking most of the scripts, I found myself liking the cast more and more as the evening progressed. They're basically out to show us a good time, and mostly sell the sketches, one way or another. And while perhaps there's no new Brando lurking in their ranks, there are plenty of resourceful and committed performers, who were up for pretty much anything, and had no trouble morphing from Southie girls to Snow White in a single bound. The lighting and design elements (particularly Arshan Gailus's imaginative soundtrack) were likewise strong - or at least as strong as they could be given how much ground they had to cover.

It must be said, however, that several of these writers (particularly the supposed heavy hitters) have written real clinkers. Gregory Maguire (of Wicked fame) and local scribe Melinda Lopez both left me bored with their respective tales; Maguire was repetitive, while Lopez was just flat. Somewhat better were the kickier, if looser and sillier, "Cry Baby Jones," by John ADEkoje, and "Half Handsome & Regrettable," by Marcus Gardley - which featured a very funny turn by company stalwart Mason Sand, as well as an appealingly gonzo one from Victoria Marsh. Meanwhile Lydia R. Diamond dusted off her core brand (racism!) for "The White Bride and the Black Bride," in which three young readers discover that - gasp - the Brothers Grimm liked the color white a whole hell of a lot more than they liked the color black. (You could make the same critique of George Lucas and Star Wars, but never mind.) Still, Diamond was at least witty in her development - and she's by now self-conscious enough to de-construct her own position halfway through. And the skit featured a real sparkler in newcomer Tasia A. Jones, whose freshness kept the slightly-tired political outrage lightly buoyant.

The best scripts of the evening were probably John Kuntz's "Red" (featuring Raymond J. Ramirez and Becca A. Lewis - both above left), and Greenidge's "Thanksgiving." Kuntz re-imagined "Little Red Riding Hood" as a sexual power game - only that doesn't really take that much imagination, does it? Still, even if "Red" was predictable, it was always creepily gripping, and Lewis - who'd been a model of versatility, btw, throughout the evening - was fearless as the "victim" who, of course, might be anything but.

Lewis also shone in "Thanksgiving," along with newcomers Molly Kimmerling and Nicole Prefontaine, who aced the accents as well as the buried resentments of three under-achieving townie girls, now all trapped in marriage and motherhood (the script revolves around their endless wait for their little girls outside ballet class). I was a bit worried at first that Greenidge was indulging in what I've begun to call "whiteface" - a new age variant of the minstrel show in which the (often formerly) racist white underclass itself becomes the object of affectionate comic stereotype. But in the end,"Thanksgiving" proved subtle and thoughtful enough to transcend such concerns. And hey, one out of seven ain't bad, is it? Particularly when all seven get the benefit of this kind of production?

Lives of the saints

The central triangle of The Good Negro.

History is made, of course, not by saints but by men of flesh and blood.

And so Tracey Scott Wilson's The Good Negro, now at Company One through Feb. 6, is a welcome attempt to treat the heroes of the civil rights struggle as imperfect individuals, while at the same time honoring their achievement - in a word, to reveal their feet of clay while not actually knocking them off their pedestals. Indeed, Ms. Wilson's clear intent is to give us a mature sense of how history actually happens, with flawed men and women (but mostly men) undermining their own best efforts, and making calculated gambles with other people's lives, while simultaneously risking their own safety in a manner that yes, can only be called heroic.

But Ms. Wilson, I'm afraid, isn't always up to the complex task of playing Bertolt Brecht to this historical episode. Of course Brecht himself wasn't always up to playing Bertolt Brecht (Galileo, anyone?) - and at any rate Ms. Wilson seems to want to conjure not simply the judgmental stance of "epic theatre" but something more like passionate identification mixed with critical distance. A tricky blend, surely. But the lumpy structure and abrupt shifts in tone of The Good Negro, along with a certain inability on the part of the playwright to actually penetrate the psyches of her characters, means that Wilson's execution lags behind the subtlety of her conception. And the talented Company One cast generally lacks the experience and tactical smarts to cover for the playwright.

Ms. Wilson has slightly disguised her characters - but they're so slightly disguised that we sometimes wonder why she bothered. The Reverend "James Lawrence" is clearly the Reverend Martin Luther King, and his wife "Corinne" is obviously "Coretta," and other figures are so close to the profiles of Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Bayard Rustin as to barely qualify as "composites." (Oddly - and I hope this isn't some kind of strange political statement - it seems that only the name of a white racist character, "Gary Thomas Rowe," matches an actual historical figure.) The playwright has an astute sense of the machinations and ethical compromises that must have dogged King/Lawrence and his inner circle, who in the play are focused on finding "a good Negro," a victim of Southern racism whose morals are so impeccable that he or she can serve as a standard-bearer for the struggle. They seem to find one in "Claudette Sullivan" (Marvelyn McFarlane), an accomplished young woman who is arrested for taking her daughter to a whites-only restroom. Claudette's husband (James Milord) is suspicious of what could be considered her exploitation, but despite his misgivings, she agrees to join the movement. Only predictably, the womanizing ways of the civil rights leadership mean that soon Claudette is making her own compromises, and even allowing her daughter to be led into harm's way.

As you can surmise, Ms. Wilson has thought through a gripping throughline for her script - but she dramatizes it awkwardly, blunting its ironic edge, and never really allows Claudette any room to breathe as a character. She instead concentrates on "Lawrence" and his trusted inner circle of "Cliff Odle" (Henry Evans) and "Bill Rutherford" (Cedric Lilly) - yet even here her writing is somewhat wooden, and really hot topics (like the open homosexuality of Rutherford/Rustin, and Lawrence/King's comfort with same) are treated superficially. And Wilson's just not very good at conjuring the kind of masculine intimacy that must have reigned here (King would eventually die in Ralph Abernathy's arms). Nor does she manage to convey the extraordinary rhetorical fire of Martin Luther King, so precisely what makes "Lawrence" so special has to be assumed from outside the drama. It's often claimed that men have difficulty writing women characters, but this is one case where I sometimes felt the opposite was true.

But wait, I'm afraid there's more. Wilson frames her drama with the FBI's famous effort to wiretap (and thus undermine) the movement, and at the same time infiltrate the KKK - but she often colors this stuff as low comedy (the G-men seem more like Keystone Kops than pawns of the KKK), so the whole sub-plot must make an abrupt U-turn to accommodate the drama's tragic finale. And in the staging at Company One, the eavesdropping agents are always off to one corner, dreaming of trips to Vegas, rather than hovering in the background like menacing, if incompetent, cousins of Big Brother.

I suppose a galvanizing production could distract us from all these missteps by the playwright, but the Company One cast, though talented, doesn't have quite that kind of star power, and director Summer L. Williams lacks the technical savvy to disguise the shapelessness of many of the scenes. Charismatic newcomer Jonathan L. Dent bears more than a passing resemblance to MLK, and he certainly throws himself into individual moments, but the sense of MLK's personal mystery, as well as the arc that the playwright seems to want to conjure, somehow elude him. Still, we hope to see more of this young actor on local stages, and soon. Marvelyn McFarlane and Kris Sidberry are perhaps more effective as Claudette and Corinne, but both are shortchanged by the script, just as Cedric Lilly is forced into a comic superficiality as Rutherford/Rustin. Probably the most compelling work comes from James Milord as Claudette's recalcitrant, not-ready-for-prime-time husband, and Henry Evans as the hearty Odle/Abernathy - and there are a few interesting moments from Jeff Mahoney and Jonathan Overby as the good-old-boy FBI agents, although both performances seem too light in conception. To be fair, the production nevertheless ends with a wallop - and there's one wonderful scene in which Lawrence and Odle briefly believe they're about to be lynched - which together give one a sense of the power latent in the material. But it may take more time, another playwright, and more productions before that power is finally unleashed onstage.

Our man in Rwanda

Fedna Jacquet and Tory Bullock face the overwhelming ending of The Overwhelming.

You have to admire the good intentions of J.T. Rogers, who decided to pen a searing drama in response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and his own clueless, but horrified, response to same.

But you don't have to admire his play.

Because The Overwhelming - now in a solid production from Company One at the BCA - is derivative as drama and contradictory as politics. And it's not hard to understand why. The play concerns an American academic family (Dad's researching a book) blundering into the Rwandan genocide equipped with little more than their own cultural assumptions and politically naïve good will - and that's pretty much all J.T. Rogers has brought to the party, too.

Indeed, the playwright has blatantly lifted his key plot points from Graham Greene (from The Third Man in particular), then tacked them onto his African mise-en-scène, cribbed together a half-baked domestic drama as counterpoint, and bound the two halves together with long spiels of political exposition. To be fair, the final scenes are indeed gripping - but generally, once people begin pulling out machetes, things get interesting all by themselves. And until then, The Overwhelming tends to be somewhat underwhelming.

True, Rogers's ongoing lesson plan does serve the purpose of enlightening us, the audience, regarding the Rwandan backstory. But how does it avail the play's characters? The author seems to want us to pin some sort of blame for the crisis on their ignorance - if only they'd understood all this, they might have done something to stop it, etc. But at the same time, his movie-thriller conventions depend on the unknowability of who's who and what's what; indeed, the dramatic action seems to imply something like a brief for the Clinton administration's indifference - since us ugly Americans can't understand the complexity of the bad blood between the Hutus and Tutsis, the play implies despite itself, it's best we not get involved at all.

These issues are of course only symptoms of a deeper, rather exasperating conceptual problem with the script: why, exactly, should a play about Rwanda take the form of a thriller about white people? This is the kind of assumption that Company One usually skewers, and it seems intuitively obvious that only an African could convincingly dramatize the dark heart of the Rwandan genocide. (And Wole Soyinka already has, at least at one remove; so why hasn't Company One produced him?) Okay, J.T. Rogers is no Wole Soyinka; still, even by Hollywood standards he offers a pretty thin and predictable pastiche, along with clunky chunks of symbolic dramaturgy that can't help but irritate: when Sonny loses his virginity, for instance, Dad simultaneously loses his innocence about the situation in Rwanda, too. (Somehow I think Junior got the better end of that deal.)

The Company One cast does what it can with this material, and director Shawn LaCount, if not actually drawing much subtlety from his players, keeps things moving at a crackling pace (on an evocative and smoothly functional set by Sean Cote). In the lead role of Jack Exley, local stalwart Doug Bowen-Flynn has his moments, but doesn't exactly chart a harrowing downward arc. The fresher faces in the cast by and large make a better impression; as Exley's new, African-American wife, Lindsay Allan Cox proves smartly poised, even if she doesn't nail her character's unconscious vanity (she styles herself a writer of "narratives of self"). As their troubled son (whose mother died not long ago - get the parallel?), Gabe Goodman is also appealing, but a bit generic (above left, Bowen-Flynn with Cox and Goodman). The young actor does develop a nice rapport, however, with newcomer Tory Bullock, who sports perhaps the easiest, most natural stage presence of anyone in the show (Bullock hasn't quite essayed his character's murderous underside, however). In the "Harry Lime" role, the eloquent Cedric Lilly likewise hasn't quite shaded in any of the troubling doubts the script forces on him; meanwhile Obehi Janice and Fedna Jacquet make strong impressions in simpler, shorter parts. In the end, you get the feeling most of these folks could overwhelm you, given an overwhelming play.

Itchy and Scratchy

The talented cast of The Pain and the Itch.

God, I hate white people! Don't you? I mean they're such hypocritical, neurotic snobs, impotent yet promiscuous (not to mention porn-addicted, the slobs), it's really too bad they came up with all that science and culture, otherwise we would all be so much better off without them! And if you look beyond their so-called "accomplishments," really what is there to them? I mean they can't even dance!

Although I suppose there is one other mitigating factor in their favor:

Their guilt.

And oh, white guilt. There's nothing like it. You might think the genocide in Rwanda would give Africans some moral pause - or the rape of Nanking might make the Japanese feel a bit guilty, or the Chinese might be embarrassed about the Cultural Revolution. But are there any plays about black, brown, or yellow guilt? Obviously not. But white guilt - now you're talking! It's a whole genre, the cultural spring that never runs dry, the pseudo-moral courtesan that makes hungry where s/he most satisfies. White guilt! Just thinking about it makes me dizzy!

Hence my admiration for playwright Bruce Norris, whose play The Pain and the Itch (now at Company One through April 4) may give him a claim to the title of most sophisticated white-guilt whore on the planet. For you see, guilt-addicted as we are, us white folks are jaded; it takes a lot to get our conscience - um - up, if you know what I'm saying. The old "surprise visit" may in fact be the only way to the golden temple these days - that is, the long, distracting tease followed by the nasty pounce. It's a demanding strategy, but if said tease can bounce between primary and secondary forms of guilt - say, between our original racism as well as our hypocrisy over believing we can ever shed that racism - then you're well on your way to the white-guilt trifecta, which is to lead us into the very behaviors we originally felt guilty about! Then wham, bam, thank you, Aunt Jemima - you pull that ole white supremacist rabbit out of its, um, hat of color, and we all but dissolve into a shuddering jelly of sheer culpability! Not only were we guilty before, but we are doubly, triply guilty now!

And Bruce Norris just about pulls this trifecta off, despite an obvious contradiction in his central gambit - because when you think about it, there's something a little odd about a play that decries racial stereotyping while indulging utterly in white stereotypes. But at least the playwright is a skilled juggler of clichés, and knows how to tie them up in a neat (and somewhat new) conceptual bow. The meat of his play occurs at Thanksgiving, that whitest of holidays, amidst a privileged family of liberals all too happy to turn the carving knife on each other (of course). Those who have seen any Alan Ball cable show - or really any cable show - will be unsurprised to discover that the resident powermom is emasculating (and her baby just an accessory); the earnest house husband is a whiner and closet porn hound; grandma's a font of addled PBS platitudes, and on the edge of Alzheimer's; older brother is an alpha-male asshole - a plastic surgeon, even - with a politically-incorrect sexpot girlfriend, etc., etc., etc. Was there a single original idea or character in that list? No. But if the tropes are familiar, Norris nevertheless cross-cuts between them with assured technique, and the Company One cast gives them more than enough heat to make these left-overs taste fresh; as a result, the whole bitterly ironic soufflé rises nicely throughout most of the first act.

But in the second act, when Norris's conceptual ambitions come more into play, he falters, and his technique seems to desert him. This is probably because his somewhat intriguing-concept - that Thanksgiving dinner is actually being "re-told" to a black cab driver, Mr. Hadid, who's mysteriously on the scene - requires building up a central pyramid of circumstance and conflict that will cascade into an unforeseen disaster. Only the playwright is too interested in his many satiric side-shows (sibling rivalry, liberal Bush-bashing) to actually construct this structural pillar at all credibly. Thus it doesn't feel particularly compelling; instead it becomes an improbable sideshow of its own, and the dismay and abashed horror that I guess we're supposed to feel at the play's conclusion don't really take.


Company One's promo for The Pain and the Itch.

And everything is complicated by the presence of a very young actress playing the part of the central couple's eldest child, Kayla, who is suffering from the genital rash that gives the play its winsome title. Okay, you can immediately sense the needling edge of this meta-theatrical ploy: it's easy to be horrified and protective of this youngster in exactly the same way - Norris seems to want to say - that his privileged characters are about their child. After all, here we are, worrying about whether it's "appropriate" or not for an eight-year-old to deployed in this manner, when of course we should be worrying about Darfur instead! (See what I mean about white people? Ugh!) I was willing at first to go along with Norris for this particular ride - but began to blanche a bit as the play rolled on. At first the charming young thing playing the role at my performance was always off-stage when things got "inappropriate" - but then, in the second act, Norris and Company One toyed with that line. And I just began to wonder whether it was all that "white" of me to be concerned over an eight-year-old running around with a hypodermic, or gamboling near a widescreen TV that was playing a porn movie (albeit one obviously contrived for the production, with nobody's "uglies" actually showing). No, I'm not about to call the authorities or point a finger at anyone, but I am wondering what these moments were intended to prove thematically.

To be fair, you could argue Norris is merely cramming together a host of privileged paranoias (of sexual abuse, foreigners, terrorists) into one rickety plot, and maybe that's a valid approach. But note that adjective "rickety." By the time Norris gets to his dénouement, it's all too easy to argue that a) his characters aren't actually guilty of the social crime he's pinned on them, and b) the personal crimes he then must reveal (think Ibsen!) are so outré as to render his characters monstrous, and safely beyond the pale, as it were. And I found Norris's bait-and-switch choice of victim intriguing - he uses paranoia about terrorism and pedophilia not to conjure complicated feelings for Arabs, or, well, pedophiles, but for that old stand-by, the immigrant African. Which sounds to me an awful lot like (dare I say it?) PBS.


Believe it or not, this is actually the basement of the BCA.

As you can probably tell, I'm of several minds about this play - I actually agree with the playwright's seeming thesis, i.e. that privileged whites are horrifying in their self-absorbed "tolerance" and "cultural awareness," which only hide unconscious racist and classist assumptions. But I'm dismayed by his methods.

One thing I couldn't argue with, however, is the Company One production, under the smoothly confident direction of M. Bevin O'Gara, and on a set by Cristina Todesco that works a small, elegant miracle in the BCA Plaza space (above). Indeed, I'm pretty sure this large ensemble will prove one of the best of the year (its only competition so far has been from the actors of the Apollinaire Theatre's equally-edgy Dark Play). Local star Nancy Carroll is nearly perfect (of course) as the fog-bound matriarch, who's so tolerant she even finds her son's cache of porn adorable, but she's almost bested by two of her co-stars. Aimee Doherty, who did strong work in the New Rep's Cabaret just last month, here absolutely nails her gleaming, glaring powermom (who even has a designer outfit for nursing her baby). But the real find of the production is Philana Mia, who gives the seemingly airheaded, politically-incorrect girlfriend a convincingly frightening backstory and an admirable spine. The men are somewhat overshadowed by this talented sorority, but Dennis Trainor, Jr., brings a wearily cynical edge to his jaded lothario, Cedric Lilly negotiates the mystery of Mr. Hadid with understated skill, and Joe Lanza projects about the right amount of earnestness and wimpiness (although he hasn't quite figured out how to manage the slow, hysterical build required). And Rebecca Skye Hamberg, who played Kayla on the night I attended, was absolutely adorable. Just nobody tell her what this play is about.

Sweet'n'sour

With the title of his black comedy Mr. Marmalade, playwright Noah Haidle may have come up with the perfect sobriquet for himself: his dramatic tone (at least as evidenced by this and the recently-premiered Persephone) is much like that of the eponymous spread – sticky sweet with an edge of bitters. His real point, however, may be that this sour tang is the keynote of most relationships - at least as secretly experienced by the feminine half of the population: Mr. Marmalade is a dark fable about four-year-old Lucy (Rachael Hunt, above with John Kuntz), abandoned in her New Jersey home by her single mom, who conjures up an imaginary friend out of some lost episode of Entourage: an Ari-Gold-like player who’s got everything a girl could want, except a heart. And for a while, Lucy’s disillusionment with her nasty swain casts a funny pall over many a post-feminist myth: after all, she’s no incipient Powerpuff Girl but instead the innocent core of human need, and Mr. Marmalade’s crude-dude abuses pack a real punch (literally, to judge from the look of his personal assistant).

Still, the play winds up being a good deal less disturbing than many have implied. Lucy is slowly established as so conversant with our adult milieu (soon she’s even ordering sushi from Nobu) that her tribulations tip into abstract satire. And the play backs off its feminist critique, and remains well within our current Cablevision consensus (Lucy wises up, and trades in her imaginary friend for that imaginary personal assistant). Which is all well and good, I suppose, as far as it goes; and I didn’t even mind that in a pinch Mr. Haidle picks the pockets of fellow absurdists Christopher Durang and David Lindsay-Abaire. No, the real trouble with Mr. Marmalade is simply the fact that at 90 minutes, it’s spread a little thin – like the best bits of Persephone, this is a wicked-good sketch stretched to “full-length play” by the injection of gelatinous filler. In the current production by Company One (through August 11 at the BCA), director Shawn LaCount and his cast get through the not-so-royal jelly by simply redoubling their already-over-the-top energy: the results are often hilarious, and the production showcases at least two break-out performances, but the final effect is to make this smart, superficial play seem even a little superficialler than it really is.

Still, it’s hard not to fall for these hard-working actors. Perhaps first among equals are Daniel Berger-Jones, as the fey p.a. to Mr. Marmalade, and Greg Maraio as Lucy’s real-life playmate, Larry. The drolly coy Berger-Jones is just about perfect (or should I say fabulous?), while Maraio is endlessly, inventively funny – although he never slows down long enough to convince us that poor Larry, the “youngest suicide attempt in the history of New Jersey,” really has any dark, hidden depths. Still, both actors essentially earn their Equity cards with these turns, and sweet spitfire Rachael Hunt isn’t far behind as Lucy – she, too, merely needs to bring things down a notch every now and then to get in touch with her character’s lonely longings.

As Marmalade, the reliable John Kuntz brings his considerable talents to bear on the role, but alas, his familiar presence simply doesn’t exude quite enough menace (Six Feet Under's Michael C. Hall, the original off-Broadway Marmalade, was indeed the ideal choice). Still, Kuntz is game for anything, and certainly earns his laughs as Marmalade devolves from power-asshole to just plain-old-asshole (one who even demands a prostate exam). Meanwhile, Amanda Good Hennessy can’t figure out what to do with the thankless role of Lucy’s careerist, sexually-active mother, but has a lot of fun with her bad-girl babysitter (an intriguing doubling, given actor Mark Abby VanDerzee doubles both her boyfriend and Mom's), and Danny Balel and Tory Bullock actually pull off Larry’s latecomer imaginary friends (who happen to be plants – again tellingly, a cactus and a daisy). This isn’t the strongest play Company One has fielded (and yes, after Persphone, even Haidle’s biggest advocate, the New Yorker’s John Lahr, has had second thoughts about him), but it may be their strongest production – one that could certainly be deeper, but only arguably sweeter.