Mamet's masterpiece lights up Merrimack

David Adkins, Todd Licea and Joel Colodner in Glengarry Glen Ross.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

The Merrimack Rep is perhaps our leading example of a great theatre constrained by its budget. They consistently operate in the black, and enjoy a great deal of support from their community (indeed, up in Merrimack you feel an extraordinary bond between the theatre and its audience, closer and more trusting than just about anywhere else).  But you can also feel in their season, which is typically devoted to small-cast plays, a sense of financial (and hence to some degree artistic) limits. This perception is particularly acute given the fact that their "big" play each season is so reliably terrific. One guesses that with only a little more funding, Merrimack could mount seasons that would consistently rival, and possibly eclipse, the best being done on the regional landscape.

Certainly Glengarry Glen Ross (through this weekend only) is the most powerful show currently on the local boards.  It's true I've never seen David Mamet's balls-out potboiler fail; given a competent cast, its nasty mix of coiled masculine anxiety, frustration, and aggression always grips.  After all, it's practically an X-ray of the power dynamics of the locker room, where the stakes are always high, and the men always naked (at least metaphorically).

What's more, alas, the script also makes one reminisce for the days before Mamet lost his mind to the sort of political and sexual paranoias one would associate with a denizen of one of his shark tanks. For Glengarry is not only perhaps this playwright's greatest play, it's also his last great play; in his next major effort, Speed-the-Plow, he crossed over from sympathy with his bad boys to literal identification with them. Women became the Enemy, and thus the ironic finale of Glengarry, which dashes any hope of honor among his masculine thieves, would prove the last of its kind in the playwright's oeuvre.

But at least we have director Charles Towers, and the cast at Merrimack (which is far better than competent), to remind us how electrifying the playwright once was. You could argue, I suppose, that this Glengarry plays everything by the book - but to my mind that only underlines the fact that, as the culture really moves so slowly these days, the play's constructs still feel up-to-the-minute. Mamet's men are stripped of any connection to society at large, much less the other sex. They seem to exist in a vacuum, and even their sales prowess is somehow evanescent; it's a skill - or a potency - that has no physical basis (it can evaporate at a customer's whim). Thus these men are only men when they believe they're men, and so their emotional predicament in a way feels timeless (even if the sums of money in play clearly date the script).

David Adkins and Will Lebow make a deal.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

They are, of course, not only near-tragic figures but snakes-in-the-swampgrass as well. As mentioned earlier, part of what makes Glengarry so much more bracing than later Mamet is that it's so unsentimental about the dishonesty and back-stabbing moving behind the solemn cult of masculinity. Mamet's real estate gods - so seemingly concerned with admiration and trust - are constantly cheating on the down low; their very livelihood, in fact, is based on proverbial Florida swampland. (Which may be why the play was at first misinterpreted as a critique of capitalism.)

Fortunately the cast at Merrimack is all but expert at floating between these opposed identities and moral poles - and their command of the famously staccato "Mamet-speak" (here at its hilarious height) is virtuosic.  As cocky top salesdog Ricky Roma, Todd Licea exudes a more open sense of predatory Las-Vegas charisma than usual, but he so smoothly manipulates each and every social transaction that his sales success is utterly convincing.  Ditto for Will LeBow's desperate Shelly Levene, a kind of lizard on his last legs who alternates between claims of prowess (he was once known as "The Machine") and pathetically low compromises, deals - and even thefts.

These two superb actors supply the engine of Mamet's own machine, but there are several remarkable performances elsewhere in the production. Merrimack mainstay David Adkins gives his Williamson (the shop boss, in effect) a stronger shot of alienation than callow slime, but he's intriguing all the same. Meanwhile Jeremiah Wiggins is just about perfect as the shop's latest mark, and Jim Ortlieb makes the aging, bumbling Aaronow a figure of true pathos.  I was only dissatisfied with Charlie Kevin's Moss, who had less of a hidden edge than I think the character demands - but after the play's opening gambit, his is a minor role.

In its look and feel, the physical production is likewise just right - from the blood-red backdrop of the Chinese restaurant to the cheap, off-white gypsum board of the burgled office (thank you, designer Bill Clarke).  All in all, Towers and company have practically built a time machine on the Merrimack stage (even the salesmen's 80's-era ethnic slurs have been preserved, along with the c-word, and a deluge of other profanity).  It all brings us back to the days when Mamet was a playwright of promise, and still had the talent (and self-awareness) to grip you by the lapels - and not let go.

Proof positive at Merrimack Rep

Keira Keeley and Colby Chambers ponder the music of the spheres.  Photo: Meghan Moore

As a self-appointed high priest in the sacred temple of the theatre, I know I'm supposed to look down my nose at dramatic "vehicles" - but shucks, who doesn't enjoy a spin every now and then in a finely-tuned theatrical machine?  Just as there's a secret thrill to the sound of all the doors in a Feydeau farce slamming at precisely the right time, so there's a melodramatic pleasure center at the bottom of every theatre-goer's brain that is forever waiting for a playwright to line his or her dramaturgical ducks all in a row - and then tump them over, one by one, like so many dominoes.

And then - oh, yeah, baby, yeah!!  The only trouble comes when people confuse the streamlined chassis on a gleaming new vehicle with something more; which has been the case, I'm afraid, with many a Broadway hit - including David Auburn's Proof  (now at the Merrimack Rep through April 14) which seems to take on Big Questions, but only uses them to set up finely-crafted conflicts that never even hint at Big Answers. 

Not that I mind, particularly in a production as smooth and assured as the one up at Merrimack.  Well, okay, I mind a little bit.  When one of the characters in Proof cries "The machinery!  I can feel it working!" (he's talking about his mathematical ability), I always feel like jumping up and shouting, "Yeah, so can I!!"  But that would be rude, I know (so I don't do it).  But I'm not silly enough to imagine that the various themes - the intellectual thrills (and ruthless competition) of math geekery, the guarded warfare of sibling rivalry, the tortured knots of father-daughter love - around which Auburn has sculpted his script amount to more than so many dramaturgical red herrings.

Still, herring makes for a tasty snack if it's done just right, and the cast at Merrimack seems to know precisely how to serve up Proof.  Auburn's script focuses on Catherine (Keira Keeley), the damaged daughter of a great mathematician who, in the now clichéd style of A Beautiful Mind, long ago succumbed to madness.  Catherine, herself a mathematical talent, became her father's caretaker instead, tending him in their decaying home in Chicago while her elder sister Claire (Megan Byrne) seemingly found fortune, if not fame, in New York.  The play opens, however, with the death of their unstable patriarch - and the hint that he may have passed on his curse, along with his other gifts, to his devastated younger daughter.

But wait, there's more - through the funeral games Auburn expertly threads a treasure hunt:  a mathematical acolyte of the Great Man arrives to hunt through his papers for intellectual gold, and at Catherine's direction, stumbles on a possibly paradigm-shifting thesis on number theory.  Catherine immediately claims the  "proof" as her own - but as she's already seeing Dad's ghost wandering around the premises, can her honesty, or sanity, be trusted?

You can see there's more than enough here for a skilled dramatist to spin a satisfying web of intrigue, and Auburn is more than up to the job.  His first act in particular snaps like clockwork; the second, it's true, loses some loft as we realize the playwright isn't going to deeply develop any of the issues he has so expertly raised.  But his knack for structure never deserts him - and frankly, this is such an unusual skill for a dramatist to have these days, we can forgive him the rest.

This is especially easy given the quality of most of the cast at Merrimack.  Keira Keeley seems to heartbreakingly suggest Catherine's instability without any apparent technique at all, and confidently turns on several unlikely emotional dimes without ever missing a beat; it's almost a perfect performance.  Hardly a step behind are the reliable Megan Byrne as the gently overbearing Claire, and new face Colby Chambers as the eager post-doc who morphs with agile speed from romantic lead to smooth operator to chief inquisitor (and back) as the gears of the script demand.  The one gap in the cast, I'm afraid, is Michael Pemberton, who invests Claire's brilliant father with a kind of bluff heartiness, and hardly  a trace of the psychological frailty that haunts his daughter.  Director Christian Parker, who clearly knows this play inside and out (he served as dramaturge on its original production) is wise to underplay this issue - still, without even its ghost shadowing the action, Catherine seems slightly untrustworthy in the wrong way.  Parker also perhaps misses a subtle dimension to the show's coda - which to my mind is most effective when it suggests that even in matters of "proof," a little faith is sometimes required.

Elsewhere the production is strong, but perhaps not in Merrimack's top tier.  Lauren Helpern's set gets the job done, for instance, but little more - there's no eccentric specificity to the decay of this quirky homestead.  The lighting, by Josh Bradford, and costumes, by Bobby Tilley, are more evocative - but I still sometimes longed for a richer showcase for these extraordinary performances.

Painting the town Red - again

Mark Zeisler and Ryan Barry see red in Red.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

Bostonians rarely get a chance to see a new script from two different perspectives - but we're enjoying just such a chance right now, as Merrimack Rep presents John Logan's Red (through this weekend), which SpeakEasy Stage produced in town only about a year ago.

I was probably the lone voice questioning the success of that earlier production (partly because I have a special place in my heart for the play's subject, Mark Rothko).  And to my mind the Merrimack version - helmed by its incisive artistic director, Charles Towers - is more serious and satisfying than the SpeakEasy model, which I found far too slick and manipulative.  Indeed, it was so devoted to flattering its audience that it almost became an unconscious travesty of Rothko's ideals, as the artist famously dedicated himself to a lonely mode of transcendence in his luminous, abstract "multiforms."

But you know - I have to admit that the show-bizzy calculations of SpeakEasy weren't entirely in the wrong.  For it eventually becomes apparent at Merrimack that there's only so far even a forceful theatrical intellect like Charles Towers can take this particular vehicle; there's greatness in Rothko, yes, but in the last analysis, Red is only a slick little play about that greatness.  The SpeakEasy boys may not have known from Mark Rothko - but they did know from John Logan.

So it would take a great philosopher to accurately weigh these two approaches in the balance - but me, I'd go with the Towers version any day, which at least gives us a Rothko to reckon with (the man himself at left)  in actor Mark Zeisler, who brings to the role a sense of tragic scale and barely-contained ferocity.  Zeisler not only resembles Rothko (although the artist was taller than the actor), he also conjures a credibly macho aesthetic lion, roaring in sad defeat before the lavender tide of irony that washed over Manhattan in the late 50's and 60's, and pushed Abstract Expressionism into the shadows (seemingly forever).

Does that sound homophobic? Sorry, but that's the historical subtext; Rothko's generation were he-men who spattered, shot, and ejaculated their art all over the canvas (or in the later case of Richard Serra, all over the room) - the symbolism was really that crude; but in contrast, Warhol's generation packaged and marketed their imagery - which was, of course, largely about packaging and marketing.  Logan seems on the surface to treat this divide - his script revolves around Rothko's commission to decorate the Four Seasons, a modernist temple to consumption designed by Philip Johnson, who wasn't only queer but also a Nazi (and Rothko was Jewish!).  The ironies here couldn't be more intense, but Logan basically tiptoes around them. Still, even within the script's limits, I felt actor Ryan Barry, who is playing an amalgam of Rothko's assistants (as well as the only other character in the play) could have teased a bit more unspoken sexual dimension from his role.  (Again, at SpeakEasy this was something of a given - in fact the trouble was that Rothko and his assistant both seemed gay!)

But when I think about it, no production of this slim script I've seen (and this is no. 3 for me) has fully limned the only purely dramatic interest I think Logan's conceit has: the tentative, frustrated attempt at connection between the essentially lonely Rothko and probably the only person he dealt with all day long.  But this hinges on another factor that Logan barely develops: the insecurities lurking beneath  the artist's magisterial mask.  For he was a man with plenty to be insecure about: a Russian who left Russia, a Jew who elided his Jewishness, a Surrealist who had dropped surrealism - Rothko needed an identity, hence his imperious insistence that he had synthesized half of Western culture into  totemic - but non-specific - panels of color (which in Kevin Frazier's subtle lighting design, glow just as they should).

But how could actor Mark Zeisler get beneath the polemics of Logan's play (largely stitched together from Rothko's own statements) to the psyche lurking beneath them?  I'm not sure; Logan gives him little help - although Zeisler does pull off some impressive meltdowns (his voice is a resonant wonder), and he invests the finale (which seeks to conflate Rothko's decline of the Four Seasons offer with his eventual suicide) with a poignant resonance.

But in the end we keep bumping into the play itself.  Logan patches the holes in his text with obvious filler (poor Ryan Barry is saddled with an entirely disposable back story), and the central relationship is only barely developed; but Logan can ride a long way on Rothko's own fierce rhetoric.  And with Mark Zeisler delivering those lines, maybe that's enough.

Meet the Beats

Merrimack Rep takes the Kerouac legend off-road with Beat Generation.

Last weekend Merrimack Rep played host to a minor - maybe even a major - literary event: the world premiere of Lowell homeboy Jack Kerouac's only play, Beat Generation, in a staged reading directed by artistic director Charles Towers, and performed in concert with a Kerouac conference at UMass Lowell.

And it proved an intriguing evening - although to answer what I assume is your big question: is Beat Generation dramatically viable?  Alas, no; it's of biographic and academic interest only - clearly a first draft abandoned in a drawer as soon as the mood that spawned it had waned.  But its very tossed-off quality enhances its cinéma vérité atmosphere (you can spot just about every player in the Kerouac posse in its thinly disguised cast of characters), and it provides a touching corrective to the hip, outlaw image of Kerouac that has slowly replaced in our consciousness the alienated, tormented man himself.

In short, you won't recognize Kerouac in this play - well, you might if you were perceptive enough to appreciate the passivity of his authorial presence (as opposed to voice) in On the Road (I haven't read the other books).  In Beat Generation, tellingly enough it's Neal Cassady, the man whose charisma pulled Kerouac onto that eponymous highway, who appropriates the novel's voice, getting all the jazzy riffs, and rattling on in an endless, spontaneous cadence identical to that of the famous "scroll" from which Kerouac derived his magnum opus.  Kerouac, for his part, mostly just listens.  It's almost enough to make you wonder - just who is really narrating On the Road, anyway?

It must also be admitted, however, that Beat Generation hardly cracks the code of Cassady's personal aura (a nimbus that the team at Merrimack was unable to conjure either).  Cassady, of course, looms behind much hipster culture like a kind of ghost - or silent, bisexual god; he inspired not only Kerouac's masterpiece, but also figured in the oeuvre of Allen Ginsberg, and later mixed it up with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary - in the meantime inspiring a range of golden American cowboys with homoerotic subtexts, ranging from the buddies of Route 66 to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

A drifter blessed with intense physical charisma (you can feel it in the photo below) who struggled intermittently to be a family man, Cassady related to Kerouac in some strange mode that oscillated between brotherly love, disinterest, and sexual obsession (at least on Kerouac's part; Cassady thought nothing of dumping Jack when he felt like it, which is in effect how On the Road sputters to a stop).  I think it's worth noting here that the poet Allen Ginsberg (the openly gay member of this particular posse) penned paeans to Cassady's penis, and even Kerouac was in awe of his buddy's "enormous dangle" - while Cassady's artsier girlfriends sometimes sketched portraits of it (I'm not kidding).  What can I say, it must have been something special - as you might expect, as it basically sired the entire Beat generation.

Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady, in a photo by Allen Ginsberg from the Electric Kool-Aid Acid days.

But like many a libertine, Cassady was intensely self-destructive, and he paid for his pleasures by dying at the early age of 41 - slipping into a coma while wandering along a Mexican railway (Kerouac died from alcohol only a year later, in 1969, at age 47).  They had long since drifted apart, anyhow - and Beat Generation could possibly mark the beginning of that rift, for it traces a kind of "Long Day's Journey into Beat," during which Kerouac (or "Buck," played by Tony Crane) trails after Cassady (or "Milo," played by Joey Collins), just as he did in On the Road, from a friend's apartment to the racetrack - and then finally back to Milo/Cassady's home, where among the wife and kids Cassady's hipster mask suddenly drops, and Kerouac is left out in the yard in his sleeping bag, abandoned again.

It could be a poignant story of an alcoholic little-boy-lost, but Kerouac clearly had few skills as a dramatist, and with minimal rehearsal time, Towers and company managed minimal theatrical shaping until the last act (more on that in a minute).  And as Kerouac/Buck, actor Tony Crane proved an intriguing presence, but seemed more interested in impersonating a sexy icon (Kerouac was a looker, too, as you can see below) than actually limning any of the tensions that surfaced in the script (when Cassady demands that Kerouac shine his shoe, for instance, Crane simply did so with a happy smile).  Meanwhile, as Cassady, actor Joey Collins seemed overwhelmed by the sheer torrents of verbiage he was required to deliver about karmic cats and moonbeams and such; with little happening as subtext to these harangues, it was hard to imagine him attracting any disciples.

Hey, Jack Kerouac - the man himself.

Still, things edged up hill over the first two acts - the second, at the race track, clearly has some potential.  And then suddenly the last scene was weirdly compelling - its centerpiece an interview with some kind of Transylvanian bishop that came off here as a sketch penned by Harold Pinter and directed by Roman Polanski.  Suddenly I was reminded of much that has been forgotten about Kerouac - he was no Buddhist hipster, but a devout Catholic, for instance.  And the scene is one of the few instances of dramatic writing I can think of that powerfully distills what it's like to be drugged, and perceiving social interactions in a warped way.

The whole thing played like a hallucination, to be honest, anchored by one of the most bizarre performances I have ever seen, from actor Seumas Sargent, as the innocently vampiric bishop.  And the whole cast suddenly seemed to pull itself into top form, perhaps because nobody had any long soliloquies to deliver - even as actor Ari Butler did a clever little comic cameo as an amusingly heterosexual Allen Ginsberg.  The mood was still far too straight in general, I suppose - but the scene seemed to get at something strange, and damaged, and deeply personal for Kerouac; his lines ached with a kind of yearning for any kind of meaning that might be available, anywhere, anyhow.   As the curtain fell on Kerouac once more alone, gazing up at the stars, I felt I had, at least for that scene, had the chance to meet the Beats.

Arrested development at Merrimack

What's past is prologue in Homestead Crossing.

William Donnelly's Homestead Crossing - at Merrimack Rep through September 30 - is the kind of new play that is just good enough that you wish it were even better.  It's steadily amusing - and to be fair, it's also, finally, intriguing; yet it almost cries out not to be produced yet, because it's only about two thirds of what it could be.

But how is that possible, you may ask, given the rigors of today's "development" process?  Well - you've got me there! But honestly, by now I have no faith in said process, and I wonder - can we just start calling it the "grooming" process instead? Because over and over again, I find scripts that have gone through development come out buffed to a high (superficial) sheen, but are still afflicted with their original structural and thematic issues (which are now in a way permanent).  If you doubt me, simply check out The Motherfucker with the Hat at SpeakEasy, which spent three years in development, and came out stuffed with hilarious zingers - yet structurally it could almost pass for a first draft.


A similar problem afflicts Homestead Crossing; you can feel playwright Donnelly coasting on his dialogue skills for close to an hour (out of a 90-minute play).  He's even sophisticated enough to hint that he knows exactly what he's doing - one character actually quips about scripts that only boast "a pivot and a twist."  So we pretty much know what's coming - especially as the play fits neatly into one of Merrimack's favorite genres: the two- or three-hander that conceals a spooky little surprise.

But when the big reveal does arrive in Crossing (the play takes a left turn into Twilight Zone territory, as re-written by Edward Albee), we're hardly cross.  In fact we're relieved that Donnelly has, indeed, had an intriguing trick up his sleeve all along.  But then we quickly sense we're being hustled toward the exit, or at least the epilogue - what in a more ambitious play would have been a new springboard of dramatic speculation, a major complicating incident, here turns out to be the climax.

Face to face - but with a fantasy.

Which strikes me as too bad, because I think Donnelly has more in him.  What this (local) playwright has given us so far is a witty, wearily bemused meditation on the fate of many a long-term relationship: Noel (David Adkins) and Anne (Corinna May) are a couple clearly becalmed on the shoals of mutual frustration when we meet them on a rain-soaked afternoon in the comfortable confines of their suburban home (atmospherically designed and lit by Anita Stewart and Paul Hackenmueller, respectively).  Their dysfunctional calm is shattered, however, by the arrival of the soaked Claudia (Lesley Shires) and the stoned Tobin (Ross Cowan), two damaged free spirits kind of on the lam from something, and kind of about to make a break for freedom somewhere else.

Hmmm.  If you can sense the buried parallels and potentials in this set-up, then you're halfway to guessing the metaphysical back-flip Donnelly has in store for you.  The trouble is that beyond that big conceptual gambit, the playwright doesn't have too many cards to play; so his script quickly settles into the well-worn grooves of a certain familiar boomer fantasy.

In the meantime, though, audiences can still enjoy the skillful ensemble on display at Merrimack.  The youngsters, Shires and Cowan, make a stronger impact, I think, than their seniors - Cowan is effortlessly sexy in his shaggy way, and Shires's fractured sparkle is particularly intriguing, although David Adkins's carefully wary Republican did often tickle my funny bone.  Only Corinna May, as his beyond-bored wife, seemed to me somewhat too submerged in her characterization; it was hard to believe that even a wrinkle in time could really awaken her lust for life.  And the stripped-down acting style that is Merrimack's signature - here guided by director Kyle Fabel - didn't help her much; it's fine for a richer script than this, but with such streamlined stage action, Donnelly's one-liners leave us aware of a certain thinness in both meaning and manner.

And it's hard, as the curtain falls, not to note this play's echoes of such meatier conceptual cousins as Albee's A Delicate Balance - a script which continually extended the reach and ramifications of its superficially-similar set-up.  Does Donnelly have that kind of dramatic mojo in him?  I don't know - but if he does, he's going to have to bring it to the party himself, it won't be "developed" for him.

The Ghost-Writer at Merrimack Rep

Dan Kremer and Rebecca Harris in The Ghost-Writer.

We've all heard of the "ghost in the machine," that famous tag for one of philosophy's central conundrums, the mind-body problem.

But now, in The Ghost-Writer (at the Merrimack Rep through May 13), playwright Michael Hollinger offers us the ghost in the type-writing machine: in this elegant three-hander, Hollinger conjures a late author who (perhaps) can still dictate from the great beyond, to the devoted secretary who has survived him, but has yet to complete his final novel - although she's working on it.  Even if the jealous widow of her beloved is utterly determined that their illicit - spiritual collaboration, shall we say? - will never see the light of day.

This is, of course, the kind of basically-silly, but irresistibly-romantic conceit that can open out onstage into something deliciously evocative - in the right hands.  And it's in almost the right hands at Merrimack.  Director Charles Towers is clearly hoping to spark something like the spooky fire that made last season's thriller Tryst such a hit - and with the help of brilliant lighting designer Dan Kotlowitz, he does conjure a dozen different dramatic moods, each worthy of holding a séance by.  Indeed, it's hard not to believe in ghosts - the hair all but stands up on the nape of your neck - when you're confronted by any of the louring dusks with which Kotlowitz has washed the nearly-bare Merrimack stage.  (In fact I'd say next year's IRNE lighting design award already has a front-runner.)

Photos: Meghan Moore

And odd as it may sound, the script is almost as good as the lighting; Hollinger has crafted a compellingly cool draught of a play that should go down in one delicious pour.  But I'm afraid it has a hidden flaw - or perhaps booby trap might be the better word.  The playwright has sculpted a series of meticulous exchanges over grammar and punctuation which essentially serve as the mating song of his two utterly repressed lovebirds.  (Thus even that hyphen in the author's title is, I think, important.)

The trouble is that, at least for a time, director Charles Towers, and actors Dan Kremer and Rebecca Harris, have taken Hollinger's precisely clipped words a little too much at their word, attending obsessively to the elocution of the text, while only nodding in the general direction of the emotions rising beneath it. Indeed, we only realize in retrospect that love has bloomed, and that Harris is now essentially Kremer's muse - or that at least she imagines she is.

Still, once love is indeed in the spectral air, there are several delicious shivers to be had in the play's final scenes - thanks largely to the perfectly pitched performance of Maureen Garrett as that not-so-grieving widow, who was always pleased to imagine that she was her famous husband's muse.  And Hollinger does manage to tease a few amusingly ambiguous vibrations from the plight of his lonely amanuensis, her pale fingers poised over her dark keyboard as if it were a Ouija board, while one ear remains cocked to the spiritual plane.  Is she indeed (as she believes) taking dictation from the dead?  Or is she only indulging a delusion designed to stave off the painful reality of her passion's passing?  Or - or - has her long collaboration with her virtual lover endowed her own imagination with something like his voice?

Even if these mild mind games fail to intrigue you - and even if you find Hollinger's meditations on artistic collaboration (he also wrote Opus, the popular tale of a struggling string quartet) fall flat - it's still hard not to be moved by the spooky stylishness of this production.  Leaving it, you may discover a certain chill has filled your heart as you gaze at the setting sun . . . and is that just the wind in the chimney, or the echo of a howl from the great beyond?  Is that only the scratch of a tree-branch at your windowpane?  Or is it a dead voice whispering its lonely secrets in your ear . . ?

The Play That Wasn't There, or: Are We Pinter Yet?

Rebecca Harris, Dennis Parlato, and Jay Ben Markson in Mrs. Whitney.  Photos: Meghan Moore.

With John Kolvenbach it always seems to be "one step forward, two steps back."  This prolific playwright keeps getting produced, and so I keep getting exposed to him.  And I keep being mystified by the fact that he keeps getting produced, and that I keep getting exposed to him.

Or at least I felt that way until I saw Love Song, which Orfeo Group did last summer, and which had at least one great idea, and some sharp writing, to recommend it.   Love Song also sang with something like a theme - call it "romantic autism," or "relationship autism," if you will - that I suddenly realized had been a component of everything I'd been seeing by Kolvenbach all along.  This playwright seems obsessed with relationships that are in the end impossible because of the perceptual or emotional deficits of his characters; what made Love Song so witty was that it turned this gap on its head; the play's romantics learned to conduct the most passionate of affairs with themselves, and their own fantasies - indeed, it turned out the script's central love object wasn't even there.

So I actually began to think - you know, maybe there is something to this guy after all.

But now I've sat through Mrs. Whitney (which closes this weekend up at Merrimack Rep), and I think I'm ready to throw in the towel again on Mr. Kolvenbach, even though in some ways Mrs. W. counts technically as a step forward for him.  He does juggle more characters here than he has previously, and attempts to connect to a longer timeline, while conjuring an unstable sense of the past; he's trying to expand his range.

And yet at the same time a kind of playwriting autism seems to be afflicting him; for his superficial new accomplishments in Mrs. Whitney are all undermined by deep dramatic lacunae - that's a fancy word, btw, for voids.  As in empty spaces.  Vacuums.  We leave this play, in fact, never quite comprehending what it has been about, or whether it was even intended to be about anything at all.

Which, yes it has occurred to me, may be the larger point.  Is Mrs. Whitney actually a huge conceptual-art gambit, one whose clever surface conceals the fact that it is actually another "show about nothing"?  I often pondered this during the course of the performance at Merrimack (which seemed obsessed with actory surface, btw), and I got the feeling it had also occurred to Campbell Baird, the production designer, as he'd built a cheery winter homestead out of plastic and drapes, with fake snow on the windowpanes and holes in the walls opening onto - well - black, empty voids.  This house isn't really here, the set all but screamed, because these people aren't really here, just like their relationships aren't really here - because this play isn't really here.

So if that was your intent, Mr. Kolvenbach - to write a play that wasn't really there - then congratulations!  You have succeeded!   You have expertly shrink-wrapped a good deal of clever dialogue around absolutely nothing at all (except possibly denial).  Oh, I know there are things that seem to be here, like - well, alcoholism; and infidelity; and lost love and loneliness and despair.  But none of those things are actually there, are they.  No, I'm quite sure they're not.

The only question for me is - do you think they're there?

Ah, perhaps there's the rub.  For I'm afraid there's at least one other explanation for Mrs. Whitney.  The first is that John Kolvenbach has brought off a brilliant aesthetic illusion.  The second, however, is that he just doesn't realize he has left out everything that counts about a play.  And I admit that when I learned Mrs. Whitney was actually the second part of dramatic diptych (the first play of the duo is called Goldfish), I did begin to lose faith in that first explanation!  For in interviews Kolvenbach has actually opined that Mrs. Whitney was written to further explore the background characters of Goldfish.  And in the Merrimack program, he muses that his script "is a comedy.  About heartbreak."  Okay, but he goes on: his  plays are "scored," he explains; the empty spots in the script "serve the same purpose as the lines in the play . . . they convey information . . . the audience will only receive the play if the music is in place.  The plays should sing."

Oh, no.  Oh, shut up John Kolvenbach.  Please shut up.  Because all that makes the conceptual gambit explanation a little hard to swallow.  I mean . . . you don't really think you're some sitcom Pinter, do you?  That your gaps and lacunae operate with some sort of resonant mystery?  Oh, no.

But - oh well!! I'll go through the set-up of the drama anyway, and let people decide for themselves.  We meet the eponymous Mrs. Whitney (Dierdre Madigan, at left) just after Christmas, when she's brooding on her empty nest (her daughter is now grown, and AWOL).  We sense that we're entering the scene after some sort of crisis (Gap #1), but we've no idea what it might be (my advice is: check the script of Goldfish).

At any rate, there's a neighbor on hand, Francis (Joel Colodner) who is eager to make her less lonely, but she sets her eye instead on the former Mr. Whitney, whom she divorced for very good reasons something like two decades ago.  We have reason to doubt Mrs. Whitney's judgment on this score, of course - just as  we have some reason to doubt her judgment on everything.  We get the impression, in fact, that we may have caught her in the middle of drinking herself to death (she actually orders Francis to take the food he has brought her out of the house and leave it in the snow).  But then again - maybe not; she certainly seems to be entirely in hand, indeed, she's a model of crisp, ironic control.  Hence - Gap #2:  What's up with Mrs. Whitney?

But onward.  Mrs. W. pursues the former Mr. W. to the aforementioned cheery homestead, where the current Mrs. Whitney (Rebecca Harris) is waiting to brain her absent husband - or whoever walks through the front door - with a shot glass.  It seems that Mr. Whitney has gone missing, as he often does - indeed, it seems one key reason why all the various Mrs. Whitneys (there have been four or five, I can't quite remember exactly how many) have left this serial divorcer is that he's simply often missing. (Hmmmmm.)  Why he goes missing is unclear - although he seems to be on the wagon now, so maybe his absences have been alcoholic benders; or maybe they were meant to prevent him from going on alcoholic benders (that was Gap #3, btw, and probably Gap #4; are we Pinter yet?).

Now taken together, these various vacuoles do suggest some sort of thematic profile that (normally) a playwright might be interested in exploring.  But not Kolvenbach.  He keeps his 'action' - essentially a zillion variations on denial - humming, that's for sure - Mr. Whitney shows up, the current Mrs. Whitney walks out, the previous Mrs. Whitney moves in, etc., while Fin, a forlorn son of Whitney by some previous Whitney, tramps in and out, cracking mighty wise.  There's a short diversion with Francis, which of course comes to nothing.  There's a hint that Mrs. Whitney actually has completed her emotional mission, perhaps unawares, by connecting briefly with Fin - but if you blink, you miss this.  By now you can almost hear the clock ticking . . . will the playwright make it past 90 minutes without actually revealing anything?  Hurrah!  He does, and the script can end - with a restatement of its opening line; the whole pointless exercise has been circular - get it?

Yes, we get it.  But to answer my rhetorical question - no, we're still not Pinter.  You see, in Pinter (and Beckett, and any number of other absurdists)  the mysterious gaps around which the action revolves seem to expand as we watch; the lacunae grow in significance, because the playwright is steadily delineating their form and pressure; statements about faith, and power, and knowability are ultimately made - just indirectly.  But no such luck in Kolvenbach.  He seems to think that simple denial is theatrical subject enough.

And it ain't.

Still, you do get to enjoy some finely wrought superficiality at Merrimack; this theatre pulls in the best actors from all over, and they've wasted some fine ones on Mrs. Whitney.  I'll say this much; Kolvenbach can write banter; everybody in the play speaks with the same self-aware, sitcommy voice, but these actors make at least their jokes sing. As the heroine, Deirdre Madigan was all tart/bitter wisdom masking - well, something, but who knows what; despair?  Self-hatred?  Your guess is as good as mine, but at least she's dry as a good martini.  There was an arguably even sharper turn from Rebecca Harris as the fourth or fifth Mrs. W. - we last saw Ms. Harris being equally good in Kolvenbach's godawful Fabuloso; please, please can we see this fine actress in something other than John Kolvenbach?  Rounding out the cast, Jay Ben Markson gave a precise spin to Fin's one-liners, Joel Colodner did what he could with Francis, and Dennis Parlato remained likably, knowingly poised while revealing absolutely nothing of himself (of course) as Whitney.  I'm not sure what to make of Kyle Fabel's emotionally under-realized direction; I guess that's what the play called for, but still - that's kind of the problem, isn't it.  Sigh.  And I notice that yes, the Merrimack has programmed another John Kolvenbach for next season.  Which I think is evidence of a certain lacuna in the decision-making of this normally reliable theatre!  But who knows - perhaps the next Kolvenbach will be another Love Song.  At any rate, the mystery continues . . .

Deirdre Madigan and Jay Ben Markson actually connect, briefly, in Mrs. Whitney.

The best show in town is out of town again

Robert Adelman Hancock and the adorable Megan McGinnis in Daddy Long Legs. Photo: Meghan Moore.

This is just a quick note to let you know that by far the most enjoyable show in town right now is Daddy Long Legs, up in Lowell at the Merrimack Rep.  I won't make any false claims as to its depth or artistic greatness - it's just a sentimental, charming evening out.  But what charm it has got. Sometimes, you know, it's enough (more than enough) to simply see a show in which everything is as it should be, in which everything has clicked precisely into place.  Perfect script, perfect direction, perfect cast, perfect set - it's a special kind of theatrical pleasure.  I admit the music's so sweet you may get a cavity, but you will leave smiling nevertheless (that's a guarantee).  I'll save a full review for later, but I thought I'd let you know as I've heard good seats are already hard to find for this one, and it only runs through March 4.

Call of the mild

Photo(s): Megan Moore

Period music is all the rage in classical circles; indeed, these days it's often in the engagement with the past that we feel serious music's most thoughtful connections with the present.

In the theatre, however, the "period piece" is still frowned upon (for reasons that I feel are intellectually naïve). Yet there's a small scene devoted to this kind of thing nonetheless, and one of its exemplars is director Carl Forsman, artistic director of New York's Keen Theatre Company, who luckily for us has a relationship with Lowell's Merrimack Rep.

According to Forsman, his artistic focus is on "sincere theatre;" he aims to "make earnestness sophisticated," with an emphasis on "candor, vulnerability, and optimism."  You understand then why he must so often perforce turn to the past for material, and why in effect what he does is period performance.  Indeed, his plays are almost always drawn from the American stage of more than fifty years ago - he generally favors domestic dramas and comedies of manners.  And generally they've proved to be fantastic.

It helps that Forsman is a subtle and superb director - one of the most reliable in America, I'd argue.  That he is in principle non-radical, of course, is in itself a radical statement these days; his consistent elucidation of decades-old bourgeois conventions reminds us with embarrassing honesty that today's "edgy" entertainments are themselves only another set of bourgeois conventions - and that we perhaps can feel the form and pressure of our own age in their mirror as well as we can in our own.

And frankly, the comparison is not always flattering.  Take John van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle, which Forsman is reviving right now at Merrimack Rep (through next weekend).  On the one hand, it's a slender three-hander, a vehicle for a trio of skilled actors to exploit the unconscious yearnings of a certain period (that is, the war-weary years of the mid-forties).  To those who feel this makes the piece permanently dated, I'd only point out that Forsman usually chooses pieces that share an intriguing quality; they are about the degrees of freedom an individual may have within an existing set of mores.  It's amusing to realize that today we may be more often beset by "type" on stage than we were half a century ago; the politically-correct in particular are always trumpeting this or that character or situation as emblematic of class, race, or political beliefs; their texts are too often structured as symbolic political drama.

But Forsman's favored craftsmen of the past are rarely so doctrinaire, and indeed, The Voice of the Turtle turns entirely on its characters' engagement with public sexual and social mores while they are engaged with each other in a cocoon of isolation.  It takes place in a Manhattan apartment that feels like a nook of mysterious solitude - its slightly enchanted quality is heightened by Bill Clarke's intriguing set, which is done up precisely as it might have been sixty years ago, that is in streamlined, slightly-artificial pastels, with a storybook model city twinkling outside its window (and an elegant period curtain that rises and falls before it like the hand of Time).  A quiet sense of self-aware artifice pervades the acting, too - the performers all exude a sophisticated sense of personality balanced somewhere between dueling public and private identities (this kind of behavior was a staple of 40's movies, too).

But if the atmosphere of the piece is rich, the story is admittedly slim; it's essentially a finely-scaled fantasy about a lonely soldier and a pretty girl finding love while he's on leave.  And Van Druten has to work a little hard, frankly, to fill out his essentially conflict-free frame with more than two hours' worth of traffic on the stage.  But if his complications are sometimes a bit forced, they're also delicately rendered, and with a literate craftsmanship that's imbued with a knowing sense of grace.  So perhaps it's also no surprise that Voice of the Turtle ran on Broadway for years - although what's most striking about it today is the way it clearly reflects the forgiving set of sexual mores that prevailed during wartime.  Here, as in movies like On the Town, nice girls are allowed to make whoopee with soldiers on leave and still be considered "nice."  Indeed,  they can even admit they like sex - although the all-American Sally (Hanley Smith) wonders to her partying girlfriend Olive (Megan Byrne) whether after two affairs she could be considered "promiscuous" yet (both ponder this at top left).

This question is rendered so innocently it's sweet, but you can feel real anxieties floating behind it.  In wartime, sexual mores aren't the only social codes that are suspended, after all, and you can feel beneath all the characters' chatter about great times at the Stage Door Canteen not only the looming tragedy of the war but also a sense of creeping alienation, of life gone adrift at home.  Sally herself has been bruised by love already, and so has decided to swear off sex until she's 30, at least.

Enter Bill (William Connell), who I think you will be not be shocked to discover eventually triumphs over this obstacle to their intimacy.  But you may be shocked to realize that the inevitable unfolds in a way that never feels manipulative or cheap, and that Bill is portrayed as far more romantic than Sally.  And really, what can you say to a handsome soldier who can quote Milton?  (Besides "yes," I mean?)

Even if you're immune to the charms of this kind of drama, I think you may appreciate the obvious technique of the trio of actors at Merrimack.  All three manage the neat trick of projecting heartfelt performances through what is essentially a self-conscious screen of period convention; Hanley Smith makes the perfect 40's ingénue while still surprising us with her honest freshness, and William Connell hints at believable reserves of worldliness and rue beneath the facade of his smoothly handsome G.I.; meanwhile Megan Byrne nails her laughs in period style, but never pushes Olive too far into caricature.  I suppose a cynic might say that The Voice of the Turtle in the end is just a "date play."  But to some, of course, that may count as high praise (I think it still operates as a pretty effective "date play," by the way).  And even a cynic I think would have to admit, at least while watching this production at Merrimack, that they don't make date plays like they used to.

All you want for Christmas - and less!

The Reduced Shakespeare Company

Okay, folks, it's back to our regularly scheduled programming here at the Hub Review.  When I heard that the Reduced Shakespeare Company (you know, the guys who famously "abridged" the Bard) was coming to the Merrimack Rep with their Christmas show, I couldn't help but wonder, "Wow - has someone really figured out a way to abridge Christmas?"

Well, no such luck, I'm afraid.  The RSC's (yeah, it kind of reminds you of that other Shakespeare company, doesn't it) Ultimate Christmas Show doesn't really boast any of the whip-smart condensations that made The Complete Works such a hoot (like the British crown working its way down a football field in a mash-up of the history plays).  Instead, this time you get a quick shot of just about every tradition in the seasonal sprawl - from the Nativity to Dickens to the Nutcracker to Kwanzaa and Hanukkah - at random, without much in the way of witty insight connecting the dots.

The conceit for all this is that a blizzard has stranded the traveling "St. Everybody's Universalist Multicultural Interfaith Holiday Variety Show and Christmas Pageant." So the RSC is forced, like Judy and Mickey back in the day, to put on the show themselves. And if that set-up sounds a little tired, I also have to report that part of the joke is that the wit isn't actually all that fresh, either - you've heard many of these gags (or something like them) before; the fact that even our Christmas parodies are going meta is built right into the show.

Still, the energy of the RSC - Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor, and Matt Rippy (at right) - keeps the show moving, and gradually it wins you over.  These guys are willing to do anything for a laugh (warning: they not only cross-dress at will but also come out in their underwear) - but as they keep throwing comic spaghetti (and ornaments and holly) at the theatrical wall, some of it inevitably sticks.  And their sheer gonzo-goofiness is appealing, too - even when they willfully pursue "stoo-pid" ideas (I don't know why dressing the Three Wise Men up as the BeeGees is funny, for example, but slowly it becomes hilarious).

To my mind, the audience participation sequences were the jolliest - particularly the sing-along "Twelve Days of Christmas," in which people got to carol their own wish list (Ferraris and Maseratis were popular items up in Lowell).  And a few of the lines, like "I'm a Utilitarian; I believe in God when it's useful!" were up to the usual RSC standard.  I'm also happy to admit that the finale - in which the Nutcracker gets it in the pistachios - was well worth the wait. And for all the jabs at political correctness, rest assured, this is a naughty, but also very politically-correct, show.  And a sweet one, too.  Which is perfectly okay, to my mind; I mean, seriously, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

Rumi with a view

Imprisoned in history in The Persian Quarter.  Photos: Megan Moore

There's a lot wrong with Kathleen Cahill's The Persian Quarter (at the Merrimack Rep through October 9).  Its structure is unwieldy, and it doesn't always have a forceful dramatic engine; and sometimes its timeline shifts simply so some political point or other can be made (and then, alas, too quickly dropped).  It also never really integrates its action with the philosophy of the mystic poet Rumi, which it often references. It even closes with a cloying piece of sentimental uplift.

So why did I like it so much?  Why did its emotional resonances linger for so long?  I've been wondering that for a day or two now.  Perhaps because Cahill's central project - the treatment of the Middle Eastern "character" as, indeed, a "character" that can be understood by the West - is a pressing and unfinished business of our current theatre.  And perhaps for the same reason I forgive many of the masterpieces of our culture for their own all-too-apparent flaws; playwriting is a patchwork game, even for the greats - and when a play reaches something deep and moving, you forgive it the wayward path it took to get there.

Surprisingly. The Persian Quarter is, indeed, deep and moving at its best; and when I hear the tremble of genuine tragedy echoing beneath a text, I always listen, and try to puzzle it out.  Plus the playwright's aims are worthy ones: to limn the parallel wounds that echo through the recent history of two cultures and two countries, both with much wrong and some right on their respective sides, that have been locked in a Cold-War-style battle for the past three decades.  

The countries, of course, are our own United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A long time ago, a famous poet (but not Rumi) noted that those to whom evil are done, do evil in return, and such an evil is the thematic starting point of The Persian Quarter.  It opens with two Americans flirting poolside (below) in the American quarter of Tehran during the Carter years.  They seem cockily indifferent to their nation's checkered involvement with their hosts, and imagine - as most Americans do even now - that they are democratic masters of the universe, free to play spy in their bathing suits and toy with other nations' destinies, indemnified by American power from any consequences of their actions.  Indeed, one of them, Mike (Jason Kolotouros) is actually a descendant of the diplomat who maneuvered the Shah into power a generation earlier.

Swimming toward danger - Beth Wittig and Jason Kolotouros.

History, of course, has other ideas; and the wound that has been festering since that notorious coup snaps shut on Cahill's characters like a fated trap: soon they have both been taken prisoner in the American embassy.  And they'll spend 444 days in captivity there before, in effect, being ransomed in a deal with the incoming Reagan administration.

At this juncture in her story, however, Cahill's play suddenly shifts into a second narrative, and a new set of themes.  She abandons her male lead (and never successfully re-integrates him into the play) to ponder a new duo, this time female - one of her Americans, Emily (Beth Wittig), and her captor/attendant, Shirin (Christina Pumariega), an articulate Iranian woman dressed in the traditional hijab.  At once the playwright seems less interested in the causes of the conflict between the U.S. and Iran than in its effects: both Emily and Shirin imagine themselves idealists, perhaps even zealots; yet their political positions are steeped in unknowing irony, and neither seems aware of how false or secret histories have shaped her own assumptions and prejudices.  As the long scene draws near its end, in fact, we slowly realize that Shirin's deepest wish is that Emily understand why she has been imprisoned - but of course that is the last thing Emily wants to do.

Most interestingly of all, Cahill begins to make a case for the co-existence of Islamic belief and a kind of feminism.  Shirin is hardly a crushed violet, and she feels strongly that the hijab - along with its general connotations of modesty and privacy - empowers her, as it frees her in her dealings with men from the exploitation of her sex.  Intriguingly, we learn that Emily herself was once a nun - and nuns, of course, long wore the Catholic version of the hijab, and for something like the same reasons.

Cahill doesn't force (or even directly state) the irony of this counterpoint, however; nor do the characters pick up on their own hidden similarities.  Which may be where the Sufi poet Rumi comes in - in various incarnations (all played by Barzin Akhavan), he drifts through the entire play.  And central to Rumi's vision was the notion that we have all been cleft from our unity with the universe, and that alienation is the very basis of the human condition; we must always search to reconnect with the divine, and with each other.  Cahill's mission, then, seems to be to render Rumi's vision through the prism of U.S.-Iranian relations, and the various sets of thematic doubles and twins she has sprinkled throughout her play.

But this is a tall  order, surely, particularly for a fledgling playwright; for dramatizing the pain of disconnection - especially unconscious disconnection - is a tricky business; hence Cahill's awkward structure, and scenes that spin, rather like a whirling Sufi dancer, around the wounds of history without ever actually revealing them.  She even takes her sense of historical alienation through a second generation, when the daughters of Emily and Shirin (again, Wittig and Pumariega) connect by chance in the present day.

If all this sounds like a lot of poetic theory without much dramatic drive, well, at times that's a problem with The Persian Quarter.  But Cahill has been blessed with a miraculous cast up at Merrimack Rep; Beth Wittig and Christina Pumariega are both luminously compelling as the two sets of women at the center of the playwright's design, and Jason Kolotouros is astonishingly nimble as their multi-foliate male foil.  Only Barzin Akhavan can't quite triumph over the heavy symbolism of his wandering-Rumi persona; but this is probably because in the end, Cahill can think of little for him to actually do.  Pumariega is wonderful throughout, but Wittig deserves special mention, I think, if only because the daughter she plays in Act II is so convincingly derived from the mother she plays in Act I; a startling feat of acting right there.  None of these great performances would be possible, however, without consummately subtle direction from Kyle Fabel; the production also boasts an evocative set from Campbell Baird.

Still, in the end I felt that playwright Cahill has perhaps bitten off a bit more than she can chew. But I also know true talent and true seriousness when I see it; at times The Persian Quarter is frustrating, but at other times a mysterious sense of the tragic rises unexpectedly from its dialogue and strikes you to the heart. Which is why I'm convinced Ms. Cahill is a talent to watch, and why I hope to be seeing all of these actors on the Merrimack stage again, sometime quite soon.

Picasso and politics are a problematic theatrical mix; the great artist's "neutrality" in the face of fascism (followed by his vocal conversion to Communism) isn't the kind of thing that wins an audience's sympathy. Of course there's not much in his biography that could win an audience's sympathy, frankly; I've forgotten who first said that "Like life, Picasso was nasty, brutish and short," but that pretty much sums up the divine Pablo.

Of course by now there's no denying his work was often divine (although personally I'll always prefer Matisse), and if there's one thing you could admire about him, I suppose it would be his devotion to his own gift. Which playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has wisely made the crux of his two-hander A Picasso, now playing at the Merrimack Rep in a thoughtful production directed by artistic director Charles Towers.

Hatcher's conceit is that the great modernist has been dragged off the streets of occupied Paris for an interrogation by the Nazis in some dank subterranean dungeon, complete with Phantom-of-the-Opera arches, echoing footsteps and clanging doors. And his interlocutor has come straight from central casting, too - "Miss Fischer" (Kate Udall), a drily clipped power-fräulein in form-fitting Casablanca chic.

Her aim is to get the nervous artist to authenticate at least one of three sketches the Nazis have recently confiscated - although there's little doubt, actually, that any are anything but genuine Picassos.  So why is Miss Fischer so insistent on the artist's sign-off?  Well, it turns out she's organizing a curious kind of "group show" - one so hot it's going to literally burn, in fact.  (The Nazis did, indeed, execute public immolations of "degenerate" art.)  And once Picasso gives one of these works his blessing, she'll offer it up to the flames.

So far, so good, in what looks to be an elegant cat-and-mouse game over which work, precisely, must meet an untimely end.  And Hatcher's structure does offer a relatively sturdy frame for the playwright to skillfully drape a lot of art history and name-dropping - along with a quick sidebar on the meaning of Guernica; thus to many audiences, the script offers an entertaining tutorial; to the initiated, the recap may be less compelling, but at least it's painless.

The playwright does have one big - and good - twist up his sleeve, which I won't spoil except to hint that sometimes cats can secretly be in cahoots with mice.  Alas, the trouble with Hatcher's play is that its real drama only gets started after this big reveal - and then the playwright doesn't push his new premise nearly far enough before ringing down the curtain.  Indeed, the ironies that ripple out from the re-constituted situation he has conjured might have offered some original insights into the contradictions - and cruelties - that Picasso was famous for, but Hatcher seems happy to keep the artist firmly on the side of the angels, and with a bevy of quips at the ready, to boot.  (When he is told that Hitler is himself something of an artist, for instance, Picasso replies that yes, only he has a problem with borders.)

As it stands, Miss Fischer therefore emerges as the more compelling and complex character - and actress Kate Udall fully rises to the challenge of the role (and then some); after her wildly varied turns in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Four Places, and now A Picasso, in fact, I'd say Miss Udall has long since taken her place among Boston's best actresses (although you only get to see her in Lowell!).  Meanwhile, as the Great Man himself, Mark Zeisler - who bears a passing resemblance to Picasso - colors strictly (if subtly) within the lines of Hatcher's script, so we rarely get any sense of the artist's brilliant but destructive fire, even if the slow burn of the performance never entirely loses its intrigue.  Still, the impression left by both actors - and by their director, Towers - is that they're slightly spinning their wheels; A Picasso is an enjoyable trot through a particular episode of art history, but these thoroughbreds are capable of running a far greater race.

Did you hear the one about the last two Jews in Kabul?

Jeremiah Kissel waits for inspiration in Two Jews Walk into a War . . .

Now I bet you thought stand-up comedy about the strife in Afghanistan was impossible.

Well, you're wrong!

Playwright Seth Rozin actually pulls it off in Two Jews Walk into a War. . ., his amusing two-hander up at the Merrimack Rep through this weekend.  Rozin charts the declining fortunes of the last two Jews in Kabul (it's roughly based on a true story, apparently) in this valiant vaudeville, which features an abundance of jokes spiked not with drum rolls but actual gunshots.  I know, I know - I was skeptical, too.  But the show is, indeed, funny and poignant (if in a slightly formulaic way).  And who better to sell it than local stars Jeremiah Kissel and Will LeBow, two of Boston's best actors, who play off against each other with ace precision under the thoughtful direction of Melia Bensussen, who has helmed a string of successes (The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, Circle Mirror Transformation) that I'd say have won her the title of best female director in Boston.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot (because there isn't too much to give away, anyhow).  Suffice to say that Kissel and LeBow are the aging Zeblyan and Ishaq, the last two Jews in the hostile environs of Kabul.  Their temple was long ago ransacked by the Taliban (its forlorn ruin, evoked in detail by Richard Chambers, fills the Merrimack stage) and its Torah has been stolen; when the play opens, they're still reeling from the recent death of the third Jew in Kabul.  But Zeblyan and Ishaq refuse to say die themselves!  Trouble is, these last two pillars of the community can't stand each other; the street-savvy Zeblyan and the bookish Ishaq are constantly at each other's throats.  Still, they resolve to work together to rebuild their community - the foundation of which, of course, must be a new Torah.

The rest of the play revolves around their attempt to pen their own Pentateuch (from Ishaq's sometimes-addled memory) - with the punchline being that every time they make a mistake, they must start over again from scratch (because there can't be any mistakes in the Torah).  Now before you write in - the play is open about the fact that Zeblya and Ishaq are cutting some serious theological corners here (a true Torah can only be produced under very carefully proscribed conditions).  In fact, that's the source of much of the script's comedy.  (So if the set-up offends you, you've been warned.)  But the determination of these two to make do with what they've got (even if all they've got is butcher paper, for instance) in pursuit of their devotion is Rozin's main theme, and it is, indeed, a touchingly funny one - and one with a poignant historical resonance (for the Jews, of course, have faced down foes far more powerful - and even more evil - than the Taliban).

As I said, the comedy is often formulaic; it's a bit raunchy, but basically sentimental (which is to say it conforms precisely to the new Hollywood "bromance" template).  For instance, Zeblya and Ishaq puzzle over the fact that Jewish men aren't allowed to masturbate - but women, apparently, are; likewise gay men are an "abomination," yet lesbians - well, HaShem seems to be down with a little girl-on-girl action.  The difference between "clean" and "unclean" animals is likewise an enigma - and why didn't Noah save the elephants?

All this makes for several rounds of great punchlines, but Rozin tiptoes around the deeper implications of the Torah's many curious commandments.  It's rather obvious, for instance, that the Pentateuch never bothers proscribing lesbianism because it considers women second-class citizens whose sex lives only rate moral consideration in relation to men.  Needless to say, the sweet Zeblya and Ishaq never ponder things that far - that way Reform Judaism lies!  And Rozin's only really interested in a valentine to the core of his faith, not a critique of it.

But when you've got pros like Kissel (at top) and LeBow (at left) at the wheels of a vehicle like this one, it's hard not to enjoy the ride even when it's calculated and gentle, and even though you know every turn before it comes.  With these two, the jokes all land just where they should, and the "unexpected" ending does still draw a tear.  I left Two Jews Walk into a War . . . bemused if not bewitched, and somehow I think you will, too.



Crystal Finn, Tony Ward and Joey Collins peek into Beasley's Christmas Party.



It's not often something genuinely new - or at least genuinely true - gets added to our local Christmas traditions, so Merrimack Rep's dramatization of Beasley's Christmas Party deserves special attention.  I can't say this literate staging of Booth Tarkington's short story is a great show - it's small, even slight, in size and scope (three actors, about 70 minutes).  And its message is an old one - the old Christmas message, in fact, about love and your neighbor, etc., blah blah blah.  Its virtues are that it seems sincere, and that its old tale is tinged with understated romance and whimsy.  It is, in short, the genuine article.  If you don't care for the genuine article, then you won't care for it; if you do, then you won't want to miss it.

Tarkington (at left) made a wildly successful career out of nostalgic ruminations on the passage of time and the loss of American innocence (once a celebrity who landed on the cover of Time, he's best remembered at one remove, for the hauntingly stylized film of his novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles). I won't spoil the narrative surprises of Beasley's Christmas Party, a short story from 1909, which reveal both Tarkington's virtues and flaws: shot through with conventional sentiment, the story trades in obvious cliches; it's filled with lovely spinsters, lonely bachelors, and inspiring cripples, but it never cloys because it's so delicately, even reticently, rendered. Indeed, what touches us most about Tarkington - his awareness that our lives are haunted by the spectre of lost opportunity - is always in evidence in Beasley, however much it relies on pseudo-Dickensian pathos.

And the production at Merrimack - which began its life at New York's Keen Theatre - seeems to know just how to translate Tarkington's courtly spirit to the stage.  The sugar never congeals into sap in this production because it's so wry and fleet of foot.  The set is spare (Beowulf Boritt has built impromptu Christmas trees of Victorian bric-a-brac), and the adaptation accurate (indeed, perhaps adapter C.W. Munger hangs on to a few too many of Tarkington's genteel circumlocutions).  Best of all, director Carl Forsman is confident enough to never push any of his effects.  But then he has been lucky in his three able actors - Tony Ward, Joey Collins, and Crystal Finn, who do double and triple duty (sometimes within the same scene) to tell Tarkington's winsome story.  Indeed, I longed to see these three sink their teeth into something more substantial - they're all natural Shavians, which means they can also handle Maugham, Barrie and Wilde - and maybe even Ibsen.  What a rare treat it would be, to see any of those authors done straight up on a local professional stage!  It would almost be like Christmas . . .

Life with Mother

Three for the road: Carole Monferdini, John Wojda and Kate Udall in Four Places.  Photos by Meghan Moore.

Joel Drake Johnson's Four Places (at the Merrimack Rep through November 7) has one of those deceptively simple titles that seem all too easily explained. At one level, the play's moniker bluntly refers to the fact that it occurs across four settings (a car interior, then a restaurant's waiting area, dining room, and ladies' room). But when one considers the script also features just four characters, one senses in its sobriquet a deeper, colder statement: the dysfunctional players of this desolate drama are always apart - always in four separate places - even when they're together.

And it's this sense of mutual isolation that Charles Towers' fine production honors, in its delicately grim way - under his direction, the characters, though seemingly all too familiar with each other's every flaw and failing, nevertheless float in a moral twilight zone in which nothing about any of them can ever be precisely pinned down.  The story spine of the script is so simple that it can be encapsulated in a sentence: the unhappy children of an unhappy marriage stage an intervention to prevent their mother from hurting - or possibly even killing - their father.  But the precise circumstances that brought them to this pass remain always slightly vague; the witness to Mom's actions may be unreliable (tellingly, she's called "schizophrenic"), said actions, even as described (half-smothering with a pillow), were aborted anyway, and perhaps the victim has been begging to die.  What Mom did, and what she knew, and when she did it and when she knew it, are all hard to parse precisely.  Not that Brother and Sis are any different - both of them have curiously unstable back stories, and it seems even the waitress who attends them may actually be a half-sibling, although then again, maybe she's not; we never know for sure.

I do want to say at this point, however, that most of the reviewers of Four Places have seemed quite confident about exactly what transpires in this streamlined, yet mysterious, little drama; indeed, Four Places may be the most widely - and blithely - misinterpreted local production I've come across in some time.  Jenna Scherer in the Herald, for instance, declared that its conflicts were "instantly recognizable in that all-American family way." Really? I'm not even exactly sure what said conflicts are.  But in the Globe, Sandy MacDonald likewise confidently intoned that Johnson's Mom "is a monster, of the garden-variety sort." Indeed, even at its Chicago premiere, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones announced that Johnson had forged a world that was "thoroughly credible and recognizable and raw." Yeah, and that's thoroughly wrong.  (For the record, the print critics hardly had a corner on misperception in this case. The "Wicked Local" blog, for instance, insisted that "one chilling truth after another reveals itself in brittle pronouncements." Uh-huh.)

Sigh. Sometimes people ask why I write this blog.  Well, this is one reason why: I have the rare ability to accurately interpret plays! Although at least all these critics liked the show, even if they didn't understand it. (What that means, I think I'll leave intentionally vague, in the spirit of this particular script.)

But back to Four Places, the despairing theme of which, I think, is the impossibility of real connection - given our limited knowledge of each other - and yet the endless need for it, particularly within the (four) emotional walls of the family. It's more than possible that something serious did indeed go down between Mom and Dad; and so something serious must be done. And yet that action - or intervention - implies issues of judgment that not only play hacky-sack with parent-child dynamics, but require a kind of moral authority that no one in the play can legitimately claim.

All in the (extended) family - Kate Udall, Laura Latreille, Carole Monferdini, and John Wojda.

And at the same time, what seems clear from the text is that no, Mom is not a monster, of any variety; if anyone's a monster here, in fact, it's probably Dad; her description of his behavior, and his begging for his own death, are heart-rending, and we also believe her when she says she could never go through with assisted suicide (although she adds, with a hiss, "If this is any of your business!").  Indeed, in what counts as probably the play's core thematic statement, Mother goes further with her children: "Your dad and I actually have a life outside yours. We have a relationship that is not part, any part of who you are. We have our own little universe into which NO one else is invited - a secret life . . ." Yet tellingly, a moment later she's begging her daughter to reveal her own "secret life" and excoriating her son for his "little white lies;" Four Places is not so much a glimpse into American Gothic as Chicago's take on No Exit.

Although in the end, Johnson's play may be more poignant than despairing; for despite the many recriminations exchanged between this mother and her children, something like love still binds them, and something like reconciliation still seems possible between them. "I don't love you anymore!" Mom tells her judges as she retreats into her lonely home, but as she gazes back through the window, her offspring know different. "Jesus, those faces!" her daughter marvels. "Look - she still loves us."

It's a credit to Towers's uniformly excellent cast - John Wojda, Kate Udall, Carole Monferdini, and Laura Latreille - that such internally-contradictory moments are so precisely limned. This is another superb ensemble in a season crowded with them. And Johnson's play is certainly a worthy one - although at times it does seem to be marking time in its action as it works out its carefully balanced themes; it felt to me like a kind of stepping-stone play for a writer who may be testing wider, deeper waters. Or perhaps it's that director Towers has staged the script in almost too considered a manner; I felt that a few of the bombs dropped in the show should have detonated more loudly - or at least loudly enough to make it immediately clear why Mom must retreat to the ladies' room. And Towers seems unsure of precisely how to deploy Barb, the too-attentive waitress who may be Dad's illegitimate daughter; somehow the siren call of her sweetness, its "false" familial aspect, never came clear thematically. Still, this production counts as another feather in Merrimack's cap - a subtly-shaded gray feather, perhaps, but a beauty nonetheless.