Gabriel Kuttner, Liz Hayes, and Daniel Berger-Jones get romantic in Love Song.

I admit that up until recently I kind of hated playwright John Kolvenbach.  I detested his Fabuloso, and felt that his On An Average Day should really have been credited to "Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, as told to John Kolvenbach."

So I dragged myself to Orfeo Group's current production of his latest, Love Song (at the Charlestown Working Theatre through this Saturday) with a heavy heart.  And determined to jump ship at intermission (as is my current habit!) if things headed south.

Well, there was no intermission.  (Ha!  Fooled again by that old A.R.T. trick!!!) So I had to stay till the end.

But I was glad I did, and I also admit that the production made me change my mind about John Kolvenbach.

A little bit.

For believe it or not, there's at least one really good idea - and maybe two - banging around inside Love Song.  The trouble is, John Kolvenbach himself doesn't quite realize how good these ideas are!  So inevitably, after initially striking out into truly original territory, the playwright slowly returns to the familiar "whimsical" tropes of (wait for it) . . . . Fabuloso.  Before our eyes, he turns back into . . . John Kolvenbach.

Aargh.   It's really too bad there's no intermission!  Still, there is that first half .  . . which convinced me that Kolvenbach has a spark of actual talent - as opposed to mere facility.  But thinking back, even in the sitcommy Fabuloso, there were cold glints here and there that hinted at the playwright's weird sense of emotional isolation - and he pushes that angle to amusing new heights in Love Song, which centers on a kind of metaphysically-autistic hero, "Beane" (Gabriel Kuttner) who is so relentlessly reductive he can't see the point of raincoats (since your skin is waterproof already!) and rants at the redundancy of owning a fork when you've already got a spoon.

Needless to say, "love" has no place in Beane's worldview - although "fear" certainly does; he has begun to imagine the walls (or in designer Cristina Todesco's brilliant re-working of the CWT space, the ceiling) have begun to close in on him.  His Nazi-yuppie sister (Liz Hayes) and her whipped, but wise-cracking, husband (Daniel Berger-Jones) aren't much help when it comes to human connection, either; it takes them several minutes to even notice Beane when he arrives in their white-on-white apartment, and their idea of "relating" to him is to give him a personality test (which he fails hilariously, in the play's funniest set-piece).

So far, so good; but Kolvenbach has an even better gambit up his sleeve - he pushes his lead character all the way through the emotional keyhole, as it were, when a female thief, "Molly" (Georgia Lyman) invades his apartment and subjects him to her own interrogation.  Molly is a funny kind of burglar, though: she specializes in stripping from apartments that special vase or painting people have carefully chosen as a personal statement; she's a kind of personality thief - the reductionist turned inward.  And as Beane has nothing to steal in his apartment, in a way she's forced to take him instead.

The resulting "romance" at first feels just as freshly astringent as what has come before - even though it's rather obvious (particularly to those who remember that high-school chestnut Harvey) what big "twist" Kolvenbach has rolled up his sleeve.  Still, the playwright keeps up an admirably conflicted tone as Beane at first rejuvenates his own life, and then his sister's, with what amounts to joyful self-delusion.  The trouble is, the script steadily grows more sappy, in the manner of King of Hearts and Harold and Maude, and Kolvenbach again doesn't seem to appreciate the quirky originality of his own second theme - that the blossoming of Beane's sister "Joan" is a troubling kind of emotional vampirism.  By the time the curtain is rung down (at ninety minutes, roughly the limit of the millennial attention span), there has been some chatter about light and dark, and a few perorations about bodily fluids and other gross stuff, and we have been regaled that "all you need is love" - and the clever, cold quirk of the piece's opening scenes has all but been forgotten.

Oh, well!  From the response of the audience, it was obvious that the hipsters of today, beneath their jaundiced 'attitudes,' are just as sentimental as the hipsters of yesteryear, and it's certainly hard to fault Orfeo's slickly enjoyable production.  As noted, Cristina Todesco's set is a stroke of genius, and Katherine O'Neill's costumes were nearly as good; meanwhile Peter Bayne's music and sound design, though over-amplified, seemed to hit all the right notes.  Director Risher Reddick kept his foot firmly on the gas, and directed with a tight technical flourish - which, frankly, the Orfeans seem to like; only Kuttner came through with a fully interior performance, it seemed to me (but then a "lack" of visible technique has long been his specialty).  Indeed, for a while the contrast between Beane and the other characters was all the more resonant because the respective actors' performance styles were so different.

This worked less well, however, as the show progressed, but the high finish always kept the show moving, and light on its feet.  Still, I wished the confident Georgia Lyman could have been a little spookier as Molly.  And surely there are more dimensions to the horrifying Joan than the talented Liz Hayes limns here (funny as she is); likewise, the perennially clever Daniel Berger-Jones found a zillion ways to launch her husband's zingers, but never really drew out into genuine (if covert) drama his horrified hostility toward his driven wife.  And just beneath the surface, isn't Joan just as lonely and reductive as her brother?  I think that's the idea - but you would have been hard-pressed to pick that up from these performances (the set designer got it, but the actors didn't).

Still, it was apparent from the response in the house that Orfeo has a hit on its hands, and they're certainly talented and hard-working enough to deserve one.  And I'll admit that Kolvenbach half-deserves the accolades he has received for Love Song.  The question now is - can he go the distance through an entire play? Only time will tell.

Marivaux meets the millennium in Island of Slaves.

Some twenty years ago, it seemed that no one had heard of Marivaux, and those that had merely thought of him as playing second fiddle forever to Molière. Nowadays, of course, you might be forgiven for reversing that ranking, as one of the Enlightenment's greatest authors has slowly edged back into the repertory. But it seems we prefer the second tier of his work to the first; plays like The Dispute and Island of Slaves - now in a broad but engaging production from Orfeo Group - seem to be seen far more often on our stages than The Double Inconstancy or The Game of Love and Chance. This is no doubt because we relate to the political edge of these works more than we do to the subtle arguments of the masterpieces - all of them delivered in a prose style, btw, that's so melodious it could be taken for verse (and which inspired its own epithet - "marivaudage").

Ah, well, I suppose every step forward requires at least one step back - and even if there's no way anyone could call this production "musical," second-tier Marivaux on a kazoo is still better than most of what's coming out of today's dramatists. But didn't we just see Island of Slaves two or three years ago, in a wild, Robert-Woodruff-on-acid (and when is he not on acid?) production at the A.R.T., you may ask? Yes, I think we did. In that version, Woodruff brought his usual paranoid intensity to bear with a vengeance: drag queens stalked the stage like amazons, and poor Karen MacDonald was actually strapped to a giant wheel and spun like a top! Yeah, that was lofty, all right.

Orfeo keeps something like the same familiar aesthetic, but doesn't go quite so far over the top, spinning or not. The eponymous archipelago is here a kind of pop junkyard, where spooky sound-effects echo off the dirty, Saw-like sewer-tiles, and folks roam about in punked-out, quasi- Louis Quatorze duds. The text has been cleverly updated and adapted by Neil Bartlett (who was also known to pop in at the A.R.T.) to maximum comic, but negligible poetic, effect. There are plenty of laughs, however, and the structure of the play is still there: two shipwrecked master-slave couples wash ashore on a desert isle, inhabited only by, yup, slaves - and a brutal regime of "re-education" for the helpless aristocrats begins. Marivaux's satire of the justifications for servitude (France had by his day only just abandoned its medieval near-serfdom) is of course terrific - but we realize he has a subtler argument up his sleeve (of course) as the freed slaves begin to descend to the same moral level as their former masters. This is where Woodruff began to paint with too broad a brush - here director Kathryn Walsh doesn't make the same mistake, but she doesn't exactly pull Marivaux's themes into tighter focus, either.

Indeed, Walsh often seems content to frame Island of Slaves as merely some kind of crass, wacky hoot. In one of the weirder director's notes I've ever read, she frets no end about the meaning of "author" and "authority" (we wouldn't want to be slaves to the text, now would we???) and let's us know that we're really the authors of what we're going to be watching.

Well, too bad none of us are Marivaux, huh! I guess we're just shit out of luck on that score. For make no mistake, Walsh has indeed nearly succeeded in eliminating the author from this production. She manages to get his ideas roughly over, in a TV-friendly, lowest-common-denominator kinda way, but that's about it. The Globe will love this, of course, but more experienced viewers may find it a bit tiresome. And why, precisely, do qualms over authorial authority only surface in the case of dead white males? I mean, does Ms. Walsh claim authorship of Toni Morrison's Beloved because she read it, or saw the movie?

But you know, it's all good (right?) - I'm trying hard not to hold its director's post-baccalaureate babble against this funny, sharply-designed production. A deeper problem, however, is that you can tell Walsh doesn't really care for the little sting coiled in Marivaux's insight that these slaves may be no better than their masters - because she doesn't let either her maid or her manservant slide very far toward perdition (so their eventual redemption doesn't really ring true, either). And I simply can't tell whether it hurts or helps that the aristocrats in this production aren't particularly poisonous, or make too much of an impression. The smart, strapping Hannah Husband is obviously miscast as the simpering Euphrosine, and Jared Craig is likeable but too lightweight as her comrade-in-arms, Iphicrates. Meanwhile Amanda J. Collins displays strong comic chops as lady's-maid Cleanthis, but oddly, she's got a bit more aristocratic porcelain in her composure than her boss does, and while she's quite funny, she skates along the surface of the role (until her final speech, which at last resonates with real frustration). And this is a problem, because Marivaux charts the temptations of power most clearly through her character - so if she doesn't have a real arc, in a way the play doesn't actually happen. Luckily Daniel Berger-Jones, a mainstay of Orfeo, is better as the protean master-of-ceremonies, Trivelin; he manages to morph from savage autocrat to ironically soothing bureaucrat at will, and on cue.

But the show really belongs to Risher Reddick, whose performance maybe owes more to Jackie Gleason (or Chris Farley) than it does to commedia dell'arte, but who nevertheless always knows just how to punch a punchline. His Harlequin is so sloppily likeable, in fact, and so dominates the production - sometimes this almost feels like a showcase - that he pretty much squashes flat any critique Marivaux might be attempting to construct of his character. Of course you can't blame a comedian for doing what he does best, but I do wish this Island of Slaves had more to offer than consensus politics and broad populism. Because with more internal character development, the show's strangely-frustrating ending might make some kind of sense; right now, despite the "edge" of the production, it rings politically false. Because in case you haven't noticed, the aristocrats in America have mastered that whole "populist" thang (see Palin, Sarah); indeed, they do it better than Ms. Walsh - or the other "authors" of her production - ever could. So maybe it's time we all began to move on to our own enlightenment about authors and their authority.

A plug for Orfeo Group

I'm a little tired of "Shakespeare, etc. (Abridged)," but I doubt anyone could do it better than the talented Orfeo Group. And this promo, with its note-perfect parody of those "In a world . . ." promos at the Kendall Sq. Theatre (Handel's "Sarabande," Carmina Burana, and all), is a perfect introduction to the show. So it should be funny, it's definitely cheap, and you can even barbecue on site (or "Bardbecue," as Orfeo calls it). Plus who knew Gabriel Kuttner could do a backflip? We are definitely impressed. Opening this weekend.

Anger management

Orfeo's video preview for Look Back in Anger.

All art operates within its social context - on which it depends to a lesser or greater degree. El Greco, for instance, would be ravishing but baffling without our knowledge of Catholic myth, which has remained (fairly) fixed until the present day.

But what happens when the context of a work of art vanishes? One hopes the reputations of the great would somehow soldier on, if in some new form - clearly the whirligig of time is the crucible in which artistic gold is centrifuged from dross; the true masterpiece will eventually find a new context (indeed, at the very top of the artistic food chain - say with Shakespeare - the work generates its own future contexts). But the rest - even those hailed as "revolutionary" in their day, like The Weavers, seen earlier this year - inevitably slip unheeded into the dustbin of history.

And alas, it's hard to pretend the dustbin won't be the final destination for John Osborne's fifty-something Look Back in Anger, now at the Piano Factory through July 6, and for several reasons. The first is that Osborne didn't deal with his context - the suffocating landscape of postwar Britain - directly; he assumed it instead, and so didn't have to build a brand new dramatic model from scratch (as Beckett had a year or two earlier with Godot). Sans any new structure, Osborne treated his supposedly revolutionary subject by subverting the tropes of its stylistic antithesis, the soapy, Terence-Rattigan-like "well-made-play." In short, Osborne attempts to evoke lower-class social drama via middle-class domestic drama. It doesn't sound like a strategy that's going to withstand the test of time, does it - although to be fair, it did suggest the technique Pinter and Albee later deployed far more effectively (by subverting the well-made play not with politics but absurdity).

The second problem with Anger is that not only has its original context vanished, but a new context has arrived which maps well to its materials, but doesn't flatter either author or play. In the year of its premiere, the cruel beratings of his wife by the play's hero, Jimmy Porter, read as deflected fury at the upper classes; today they read as spousal abuse. Is Jimmy raging at the injustice of his society, or is he merely a misogynist and narcissist operating under the cover of raging at society? The play's effect depends on this question, but the productions I've seen, while trying mightily to convince me of the first interpretation, inevitably left me with the second. And the river of piss and vinegar running through Osborne's oeuvre - along with lingering questions about the author's sexuality (the obvious source for "Cliff" always maintained that he and Osborne were lovers, not friends) - does little to wash away that intuition.

It should be said, however, that the current version, an Equity Code production from the new Orfeo Group, does about as good a job with the play as the others I've seen (although it's not nearly in the same league as Orfeo's previous effort, last summer's Marisol). Director Gabriel Kuttner has trimmed the text here and there (he should have trimmed more - Peter Hall's drastically reduced version was reportedly more successful than the original), and has shaped the material intelligently, if not always incisively (it's his first directorial effort, and frankly, Look Back in Anger should be no director's maiden voyage). More problematic is that Kuttner has drawn thoughtful work from his actors, but hasn't dug deep enough to overcome the fundamental miscasting of his leads.

Said leads - Daniel Berger-Jones and Liz Hayes - are two of Boston's best young actors, and of course good actors are always looking to stretch beyond their inevitable "types;" that's only natural, and just what you'd expect from an Equity Code production, which is designed by and for its performers. Still, when both leads are playing against type, and what's more, against each other's type, let's just say crossed signals and missed climaxes tend to be the order of the day, however talented each actor may be. To grossly overgeneralize, the essential conflict in Anger is between the smart but sexily crude Jimmy and his gently refined, yet subconsciously smug, wife, Alison. He's earth; she's air. Yet Liz Hayes is obviously the earthier, more believably working-class of the two, with naturally practical smarts that she tries desperately to suppress in a quiet, passive-aggressive mode. Meanwhile Daniel Berger-Jones is indeed a hunk, but is also a physical thoroughbred; tall and in gym-trim, with a refined physical grace, he's the natural aristocrat of the two. Still, despite the fact that they really should have traded roles, they both have their moments; Berger-Jones is at his best when he drops his occasional histrionics in the third act and simply toys with Helena, his wife's "girlfriend" who replaces her in his bed. And Hayes brings a memorable intensity to her final scene, when she re-lives the horror (the loss of a child) that her husband had wished on her earlier (nice guy, huh).


Risher Reddick, Daniel Berger-Jones and Georgia Lyman get past their Anger.

The supporting players manage better, perhaps because, unlike their costars, they're nestled comfortably in their respective types. Georgia Lyman is the standout, I'd say, playing yet another "other woman" - she looks smashing in her dark hair and prim blouse, and her accent is spot-on; my only feeling is that her hatred of Jimmy (which morphs "unexpectedly" into lust!) should be played with more energetic attack beneath her upper-crust poise. As flatmate Cliff (the role that gave Alan Bates his start), Risher Reddick is likewise mostly on-target with a tricky mix of conflicting emotion, and his fisticuffs with Jimmy prove robust and believable. Still, his accent seems to hop the pond from Wales to Tara with surprising rapidity, and he sometimes seems to lose focus along with his character. He, like Berger-Jones and Hayes, flourished far more in Marisol - which, if anything, is a weaker play than Anger. One wonders if there's something about these actors that makes them seek out challenging roles in weak plays - if so, I'd say they're better off with the wacky fireworks of Rivera than the bitter Method of Osborne.

Angels on the down low

When José Rivera's Marisol opened in New York in 1993, many took it as a kind of Latino riposte to Tony Kushner's too-white-for-its-own-good Angels in America, which had opened the year before. Marisol, however, had actually been completed in 1990, about the same time as Millennium Approaches; the two works had developed in tandem - and intriguingly, were shadowed by the same sense of thematic overreach. Neither brought off their promised sense of annihilation and re-alignment (neither did the millennium!), but Kushner, with his gay Mormons and his face-offs between Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, nevertheless orchestrated stunning collisions between the extremes of American culture that still reverberate today. Marisol, by way of contrast, has practically dropped off the cultural map - perhaps because, despite a savagely-etched vision of apocalypse that Kushner never matches, Rivera fails to pull together what amounts to a series of disturbing vignettes into anything approaching a real play; in fact, he doesn't even try.

And if the brand-new Orfeo Group, which is staging Marisol at BU's Studio 210 through Monday, can't transcend the script's limits, it's obvious why they chose it anyway: these perversely spicy sketches, peopled by on-the-edge or over-the-top types wielding machine guns, knives and golf clubs (!), must taste like catnip to talented theatre grads. Thus it's no suprise that in its maiden effort, Orfeo has pulled together some of the best young actors in town. As a whole, the ensemble is certainly among the strongest of the year, and deserves IRNE and Norton nominations, although said whole is essentially elevated by three of the six performances. Elizabeth Hayes, who last impressed as a smart, knockabout Helena in Boston Theatreworks' Midsummer, here builds on that impression with an up-to-the-minute career grrl who's unfazed by the moon dropping from its orbit, and who is soon believably splashing gasoline on vagrants and setting them afire. Risher Reddick likewise delivers a memorably gonzo performance as a homicidal loser who winds up, once the apocalypse has reversed the natural order, as the first pregnant man. But the show really belongs to Daniel Berger-Jones, who, fresh off his success as the fey personal assistant in Mr. Marmalade, here confidently executes a brutal suite of hair-raising turns (most memorably as a seemingly flayed-alive street person who's still searching for his skin) that may cement a reputation as Boston's most versatile actor.

Elsewhere the performances are solid, but perhaps not strong enough to cover the plot's roughly Winnebago-sized holes. Ramona T. Alexander, whom Brandeis has been keeping all to itself the past year, gives her guardian angel role her best shot, but can't really cut through its rhetorical limits, and Georgia Lyman is only intermittently compelling as the Woman in Furs, who even though the city is in smoking ruins is still looking for her matinee of Les Miserables. At the show's center, Cristina Miles once again provides an appealing ingenue performance, but little more. Given that Marisol's Puerto Rican identity, and her hard-won entry into the middle class, should resonate with the curious ability of Rivera's apocalypse to play hacky-sack with the social hierarchy, Miles' lack of specificity in accent and physicalization is disappointing - director Sarah Golden Martin, who has drawn such high quality work from others in the cast, should have demanded more. She certainly got a lot out of sound designer Peter Bayne and lighting designer Caleb Jon Magoon, who with the help of a little haze, together manage to conjure quite a bit of end-of-the-world atmosphere. The only real downside to the evening is that finally, Orfeo's trip to hell hasn't been worth the trouble; but with a more worthy script, it will be interesting to see just how far this group can go.