Okay, okay, here are my thoughts on Clybourne Park (Part 2 of a series)

Work of art or house of mirrors?  The SpeakEasy version of Clybourne Park.  Photo(s): Craig Bailey.

Every single theatre acquaintance I've bumped into over the past month has asked me the same question:

"When are you going to write about Clybourne Park???"

Sometimes people said,  "You are going to write about Clybourne Park, aren't you?" or "You didn't already write about Clybourne Park, did you?" or "I didn't miss it, did I?"

A few emails simply cut to the chase: "Clybourne Park?" was all they said.

But no, you haven't missed it - even though I did already write in depth about Clybourne, in a widely noted review of Trinity Rep's savage production last year.  But I understood that I had to write about it again - people were actually yearning for it.  For one thing, everyone knows I'm the only writer in Boston who dares to write honestly about questions of race in the theatre - plus I'm one of only a few local critics with any insight into dramatic mechanics. Those points were particularly salient because the vast majority of my friends, it seemed, were hesitantly trying to vocalize a common feeling they were hoping I would validate. As one put it:

"It seems like a really good play.  But it really isn't, is it."

And what can I say?  You're all quite right.  Clybourne Park seems like a really good play - but it isn't, not really.  Instead, it is an "important" play - and there's a big difference between an important play and a good play.

Still, the SpeakEasy Stage production (which recently closed) was undeniably a strong one - it honored the work's "importance" in an astutely dignified way, and often - but not always - disguised its flaws. That is what it was designed to do, and it clearly succeeded in its objective.  (It certainly snookered almost all the Boston critics.)  The Trinity Rep production was in a way more intriguing - it cast the play as polemic - in effect a sardonic riposte to Hansberry's text, or at least its comfortable, classic status; and thus it sank its teeth into the dark snark at the core of Bruce Norris's authorial tone.  The trouble was, this led to a dead end, because Norris doesn't really complete any kind of artistic or politic arc in his action, and the buried "secret" driving his plot feels like a complete non sequitur to his racial themes.  Thus after a roaring act-and-a-half, the Trinity Rep version abruptly ran out of steam, and sputtered to a frustrating stop - which led me to wonder whether the mainstream "race play" was already "written out."

But at SpeakEasy Stage, director Bevin O'Gara was - well, cannier in manner and method, although it has crossed my mind that she may have actually been simply disinterested in the script's political particulars.  To her, you felt, Clybourne Park operated as kind of figurehead, like one of those bare-busted ladies on the prow of a ship, for a certain theatrical movement of which she sees herself as avatar; its individual features or flaws were of secondary concern.  Indeed, it was mounted as an indirect companion piece to the simultaneous revival of A Raisin in the Sun (from which its plot is derived) at the Huntington (where O'Gara works as an associate producer). And given that production's rather sentimentalized tone, clearly what counted was that Clybourne convey a vaguely progressive posture despite itself (indeed even though it often feels like a sarcastic shrug of despair).

Thus O'Gara's was a kinder, gentler Clybourne Park -  a transformation which she effected by making it an actor's Clybourne Park, focused on sympathetic, naturalistic detail rather than debate (after all, O'Gara, and SpeakEasy Stage, just don't do debate). This approach was somewhat compromised by the fact that a key role in the production was miscast; but the actor in question, Thomas Derrah, is so technically skillful that this issue, like so many in the script itself, was successfully disguised.

Of course O'Gara's version inevitably stalled, too, like Trinity's - although so much more slowly and subtly that I think many observers never even felt themselves drifting to a stop. Perhaps more importantly, it was pushed into rough alignment with Raisin, its source material  - indeed (in a move that made you wonder about some level of meta-collusion between the two directors) the Huntington's Liesl Tommy brought onstage the ghost of the deceased patriarch whose death kick-starts the plot of Raisin - as if to openly reference the dead son who haunts Clybourne.

But do those particular reflections really make sense (even if they're what Bruce Norris had in mind)? Probably not - indeed, I'd argue Tommy's gentle but forced gesture violated Hansberry's intents, and the suggested parallels with Clybourne were just fuzzy anyway.  Thus inevitably, more discerning theatre-goers left both productions with the troubling sense that they'd been  - well, slightly hoodwinked.  And in a way they had; Raisin and Clybourne are opposed, not parallel, works.  One (Raisin) is far greater than the other, but oddly, the weaker play attempts to undo the optimism of the stronger; and any attempt to suggest that they orbit each other in the way that Norris's two time frames do in Clybourne is (I think) an inherently misguided strategy.

What's past is prologue in Clybourne Park.

Of course perhaps all this is simple coincidence. And to be fair, O'Gara's approach had one great virtue: it drew out the incredible detail that Norris has worked into his mirrored diptych of two eras, and the modes in which racism was and is secretly honored, but officially denied, in each (the approach is neatly summed up in the photoshopped "mirror" of two sets of characters, at left).

Still, this mirroring should really only be a means toward an end - and it's that end, that climax, that's missing from Clybourne Park.  Yes, racism has survived A Raisin in the Sun, and even the Civil Rights Act - but in what form, really, has it done so? That, you feel, is the question that would have pre-occupied Lorraine Hansberry, had she not been taken from us at such an early age - and while Norris nods toward it, he seems unwilling to answer it.  Instead, the playwright lets his many reflections take over, and Clybourne Park becomes a house of mirrors rather than a work of art.

But if Clybourne Park isn't actually a work of art, is it at least an interesting cultural artifact, a kind of unconscious aesthetic symptom? This is an intriguing argument, and one that the rapturous critical reception to O'Gara's production seems to validate.  And which I'll consider more deeply in the third part of this series.

A night to remember

Miss Cook in action.

I spent Saturday night this past weekend with an old friend, Barbara Cook (at left). No, Miss Cook doesn't know me personally - just as she doesn't know the two or three thousand people who also crowded Symphony Hall for her Celebrity Series concert.  

But it seems as if she does; such is the intimate magic of her singing style.  It sounds almost funny to say that the greatest torch song singer alive is now 85 years young - but it's true.  It's also true, I suppose, that Miss Cook's sunny soprano has grown dusky with the years, and so she no longer attempts the high notes of signature tunes like "Ice Cream" (in days gone by she could even hit the coloratura heights of "Glitter and Be Gay").

This hardly matters, however; indeed the slow retreat of her voice to its warm, golden core has only brought a poignant glow to her singing.  For time cannot touch the essence of Miss Cook's appeal, which simply transcends questions of range or even technique.  For this lady doesn't seem to sing a song - she just lives it; next to her, every other vocalist on the planet seems to be trying a little too hard.

Whence comes this legendary magic?  I'm not sure - no one is - and I don't think you can bottle it, as Miss Cook's recordings, wonderful as they are, can't convey the luminous aura she projects from the stage.  As a sentimental old song begins to bloom in her hands (and they always do, however familiar they may be), and she gazes out into the crowd, it soon seems as if - as the old cliché insists - everything and everyone in the concert hall has vanished but the two of you.  And maybe the piano.

At least that was the trick she accomplished with Hoagy Carmichael's gorgeous "The Nearness of You" - a song she has only recently added to her repertoire (yes, at 85 she's still working on new material).  It was enough to leave her co-star for the evening, the noted jazz guitarist, vocalist and band leader John Pizzarelli, briefly speechless. And could you blame him? Poor Mr. Pizzarelli! The son of legendary guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, he's a brilliant and wide-ranging talent - a fabulously nimble instrumentalist and a lightly witty singer. He's also, of course, "the Foxwoods guy" (a star-making gig he no doubt regards today with some degree of rue) as well as a major concert draw in his own right; and he and his crack quartet (brother Martin Pizzarelli on double bass, Tony Tedesco on drums, and the lightning-fingered Larry Fuller on piano) are tighter than a duck's - well, you know. 

But the bemused Pizzarelli knew somehow that in Miss Cook he was up against something bigger than all of us. I think somewhere, she knows it too. Hence, perhaps, the long good-bye (she's got club dates booked well into the future); she doesn't want to give up - and we don't want to give her up. Indeed, at the finish, people cried out for just one more tune, even though with pianist Ted Rosenthal she had already delivered a bouquet of flowers from the American songbook - "I've Got the World on a String," "The Very Thought of You," a wickedly droll "Makin' Whoopee," "We Three," and the lesser known (but Grammy-nominated, in Shirley Horn's haunting rendition) "Here's to Life."

She also happily dueted on a snappy "I Got Rhythm" as well as a sweet "Just You, Just Me;" and Pizzarelli had his solo moments too, including a charming version of the list-song "Rhode Island," and a quietly moving take on, yes, "As Time Goes By" (he included the forgotten, but utterly wonderful, lead-in verses, which refer to Einstein!).  And to be honest, I thought I could sense his influence on Cook; her phrasing on Saturday was ever so slightly looser and syncopated, ever so subtly more conversational. We all got a sense of this in the penultimate sing-along, "Shine On, Harvest Moon," as well as the encore, Lennon's "Imagine," sung sans amplification, in a gentle nod to the ideals that have quietly informed Miss Cook's career.  Yes, she has always been a dreamer; by the end of the night, so were we all.  And what we were dreaming was that we'd someday have the chance to hear her give another concert like this one.

Spellbound casts its spell

A moment of stillness in Downshifting.

You don't have to be a dance critic to sense immediately the appeal of Spellbound Dance Company; Italy's leading modern troupe (currently re-branding itself as "Spellbound Contemporary Ballet") boasts dancers with a startling level of technique, led by an artistic director (Mauro Astolfi) with a signature style and a taste for high concept and big ideas.  These virtues were all evident only minutes into the company's current Celebrity Series appearance (which closes tonight at the Schubert). What took longer to register was a slight frustration with Spellbound's final statements; the company holds you spellbound all right, in a sexily urbane kind of daze; but by the end of the night, you may find that, like a sleepwalker, you've wandered far afield and been left without a map.

Still, for many the sheer pleasure of watching Spellbound in action may be enough; and no one could argue the company isn't easy on the eyes - I had a hard time not just leaning back and ogling blonde punk angel Michelangelo Puglisi, for instance (and I've got nothing against hunky Mario Laterza or Giacomo Todeschi either!). What's more, there was a frank, nearly-sexual sense of physical contact between these men which is unusual in the uptown dance world.  As for the alluring women - Maria Cossu, Marianna Ombrosi, Alessandra Chirulli, Giuliana Mele, Gaia Mattioli, and Sofia Barbiero - they were likewise sexually self-aware players (no ingénues here), with knowing personae that were, perhaps, more complex and streaked with pain than their male partners'.  Although surprisingly, the women (Alessandra Chirulli was a stand-out) cut their sharpest profiles in their more sardonic moments, as in the brand-new She is On the Ground, a sunny stretch of Italian sex comedy (set to the ironically sweet accompaniment of viols) that was not only the most successful dance of the concert, but also reminded you why this country was the home of commedia dell'arte.

Elsewhere the program was more somber; Lost for Words (excerpts above), for instance, seemed to eloquently circle questions of frustrated communication without, ironically enough, ever quite coming to a point itself.  A key problem was that while the soundtrack for Words was largely a spoken text about withdrawal, the choreography was more concerned with struggle.  Like much of the international dance community, artistic director Astolfi is focused on bringing to the swiveling, unstable vocabulary of break and street dance the formal rigors of ballet; and at this, he and his company succeed brilliantly, minute-to-minute.  Long passages of Lost for Words are thrilling free-for-alls, full of dodges and pops in which the incredibly flexible dancers lock and interlock and "flare" while cantilevering off each other; sometimes they seem to be manipulating each other like puppets (in what I took as a key piece of symbolism), at others they're practically moving through each other in morphing waves of physical form.  

At its best, the sheer virtuosity of all this is dizzying, but it's dogged by the perennial problem of street dance; like many a b-boy or b-girl, Astolfi conjures a potent attitude, but struggles to shape a statement.  He's a master of improvisatory group dynamics (indeed, Spellbound was initially devoted to improv), but teases only disconnected vignettes from the heaving tide of the work, and his penchant for leaping between musical styles, and to spoken word and back - all while maintaining a sense of choreographic independence from his accompaniment - only means the dance has even more trouble coalescing.  Indeed, you could often feel Astolfi trying to maintain a kind of distance between "pure" movement and musical structure - which years ago was a totem for the Cunningham/Cage crowd - but frankly, I thought he could simply use more of the discipline that musical structure can provide. Still, Lost for Words is heavy with a potent, if vague, sense of tragic poignance (and of course its very theme is the inability to truly communicate, isn't it).

The same issues haunt the more low-key Downshifting, although this time around longer narrative strands do hold us in their thrall, and connections seem to be growing into something like relationships by the end of the dance.  Over its course, a group of twenty-somethings - partly dressed, and partly undressed, in a mix of casual attire and pajamas - seem to "fall" out of their orderly existences, and begin to grope toward some kind of transcendence, and each other, in a series of interlocking duos and trios (it seems the dance was once done in nudie pink tights - we didn't get that in uptight Boston, too bad!). Like Lost for Words, the piece seems poised between frank, physical contact and a kind of inner, lovelorn sigh.  There's a deep theme there, I think, that could be more than enough to build a company around - and Mr. Astolfi certainly has the company already (and in Marco Policastro's striking, architectonic lighting, seemingly designed to recall the heyday of Italian futurism, there's a signature look to his staging, too).  Which is why we look forward to falling under Spellbound's spell once again sometime soon.

A beauty of a Beauty from Boston Ballet

Jeffrey Cirio and Misa Kuranaga, the perfect couple.

To turn from Boston Ballet's "All Kylián" program of two weeks ago to the lush embrace of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty is to experience a dizzying kind of high-cultural whiplash.  For while the Kylián program tiptoed up to (and perhaps over) the cutting edge of modern dance, Beauty conjures a retro-classic version of a ballet classic. Actually, make that a classic retro-classic ballet classic - for you'd need an archeologist to fully excavate all the layers of dance development embedded in this sumptuous production. The choreographers listed on the program tell the story all by themselves - Petipa; de Valois; Ashton; the sobriquets of a full century of ballet aristocracy. No wonder watching this dance is like peering through the pentimento of one genius to the portrait of another, etched on the palimpsest of a third; the very history of ballet seems to sleep within this Beauty.

It must be admitted, however, that the weight of history can make the second, and most imperial, of Tchaikovsky's famous trio of ballets seem almost too stately - especially in the Prologue, in which for awhile it's the plot that slumbers.  Or maybe it was simply that at the performance I attended (for once I missed opening night), the divertissements by the various fairies who visit Princess Aurora's christening were essayed in a rather desultory manner by recent graduates of the corps.  But the production quickly came together with the entrance of star Erica Cornejo as the wicked Carabosse (below right) - you know, the one who lays down the curse that Aurora will someday prick her finger on a spindle and sleep forever. Zooming onstage in her badfairymobile, Cornejo hardly danced a step, but nevertheless all but smacked her lips as she chewed  on David Walker's opulent scenery.

In this version of the tale, the Lilac Fairy (no, I'd never heard of her either) somehow has the power to cut back Aurora's life sentence in dreamland to just twenty years - after that, she can be awakened by a kiss.  Luckily, of course, lonely Prince Désiré (hmmm), who's just the man for the job, happens to be wandering by with a hunting party at the right moment, and the rest is - well, ballet history.

Erica Cornejo vamps it up as Carabosse.

It's hard to believe, I grant, that real poignance could be wrung from such a libretto, but of course The Sleeping Beauty, like most fairy tales, taps into deep psychological tropes, and its basic theme - the destruction, then redemption, of feminine innocence - resonates through the culture.  And the Ballet has been lucky in its casting of Aurora -  indeed, there's a classic performance set within this classic production. Misa Kuranaga, a porcelain presence with one of the company's lightest, cleanest techniques, has danced Aurora before, and always to acclaim.  But now she seems to have reached some lustrous new identification with the role; she isn't "interpreting" Aurora, she simply is Aurora.  Kuranaga soars through the ballet's famous technical challenges (including the punishing "Rose Adagio," in which she must remain frozen on point for an eternity); but more importantly, whenever she is onstage, she awakens a kind of luminous joy in Th Sleeping Beauty that makes it transfixing.

And it's hard to imagine a more perfect partner than Jeffrey Cirio, who has always been adorable, but whose technique seems to have been building by leaps and bounds from year to year; you feel you can almost see him growing artistically, like some sprouting adolescent.  Now he has a technical sheen to match Kuranaga's, and has become quite the romantic lead, too - his sudden swoop into melancholy when left alone during his hunting party, for instance, was a triumph of subtle emotional suggestion. And there are few danseurs in the Ballet who can rival him as a responsive, supportive partner; indeed, his final swan-dive catches of an utterly trusting Kuranaga elicited gasps from the audience.

Misa Kuranaga and the corps in The Sleeping Beauty.  Photos: Rosalie O'Connor

Well, that right there is reason enough to see The Sleeping Beauty - if you have Aurora and Désiré, you are, as they say, in business.  But wait, there's more in this particular production; in the famous "garland dance" of the first act, for instance, the corps made up for its seeming indifference in the Prologue.  Meanwhile Lia Cirio made a sweetly determined Lilac Fairy - all motherly concern above, calm steel below - and in the triumphant third-act divertissements (in which characters from other fairy tales drop by to party down) there were impressive turns by John Lam, Adiarys Almeida, and Ashley Ellis in a courtly pas de trois, as well as an amusing double hissy-fit by Bradley Schlagheck and Kimberley Uphoff as Puss'n'Boots and the White Cat.  More striking still were Dalay Parrondo and new soloist Avetik Karapetyan as Princess Florine and the Blue Bird; Karapetyan made a pretty muscular avian, but he and Parrondo shared an intriguing, teasing vibe - she was seemingly all frail temptation, he all languid power.  Together they brought an intriguing note of exoticism to this grand paean to innocence regained.

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.

The Winter Hubbies 2013

Somehow the Hubbies always make us feel a little frisky.

It has been a long, hard winter, hasn't it.  (And it's been even longer since our last Hubbie Awards post!)

But spring seems finally to have sprung (if we keep our fingers crossed), so it's time to look back and hand out a few budding bouquets to the best this particular critic has seen and heard over the past few months.

So without further ado -

Best Ensembles 

Middletown - Steven Barkhimer, Marianna Bassham, Gabriel Kuttner, Paula Langton, Michael Forden Walker, Esme Allen, Grant McDermott, Margaret Lamb; directed by Doug Lockwood, Actors' Shakespeare Project

Lungs - Liz Hayes, Nael Nacer; directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, New Repertory Theatre

Stones in His Pockets - Phil Tayler, Daniel Berger-Jones; directed by Courtney O'Connor, Lyric Stage

Dog Meets God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead - Michael Underhill, Joey C. Pelletier, Mikey DeLoreto, Nick Miller, Kiki Samko, Audrey Lynn Sylvia, Lesley Anne Moreau, and Lizette M. Morris; directed by Lizette M. Morris, Happy Medium Theatre

Vinegar Tom - Melis Aker, David Anderson, Melissa Barker, John Greene, Obehi Janice, Becca A. Lewis, Caroline Price, Jennifer Reddish, Karin Webb; directed by Mac Young, Whistler in the Dark

Best Individual Performances

Keira Keeley, Megan Byrne, Colby Chambers - Proof, Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Seana McKenna, Shakespeare's Will - Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Mark Zeisler, Red - Merrimack Repertory Theatre

LeRoy McClain, Keona Welch, Kimberly Scott, Ashley Everage - A Raisin in the Sun, Huntington Theatre Company

Teagle F. Bougere, Brian D. Coats - Invisible Man, Huntington Theatre Company

Nael Nacer - Our Town, Huntington Theatre Company

Gretchen Egolf - Betrayal, Huntington Theatre Company

Gísli Örn Gardarsson, Selma Björnsdóttir - Metamorphosis, Vesturport Theatre/ArtsEmerson

Allen Gilmore - The Servant of Two Masters, Yale Rep/ArtsEmerson

Paula Plum, Maureen Keiller - 33 Variations, Lyric Stage

Celeste Oliva, Alexander Platt - Ch'inglish, Lyric Stage

Joel Colodner - The Chosen, Lyric Stage

Paula Plum, Marvelyn McFarlane, DeLance Minefee - Clybourne Park, SpeakEasy Stage

Phil Tayler, Aimee Doherty, Erica Spyres - Marry Me a Little, New Repertory Theatre

Zach Eisenstat, Lynn Guerra - Our Country's Good, Whistler in the Dark

Phil Tayler, Harry McEnerney, Erica Spyres - Of Mice and Men, Moonbox Productions


Best Direction

Maria Aitken - Betrayal, Huntington Theatre Company

Doug Lockwood - Middletown, Actors' Shakespeare Project

Lizette M. Morris - Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, Happy Medium Theatre

Rest assured, we're always on the hunt for great theatre!

Best Direction/Design

David Cromer - Our Town, Huntington Theatre Company

Allison Olivia Choat - A New Brain, Moonbox Productions

Mac Young - Vinegar Tom, Whistler in the Dark

Matthew Woods - The Death of Tintagiles, Imaginary Beasts


Best Design

Börkur Jónsson, set - Metamorphosis, Vesturport Theatre/ArtsEmerson

Katherine Akiko Day, set; Chuan-Chi Chan, lighting; and Valérie Thérèse Bart, costumes - The Servant of Two Masters, Yale Rep/ArtsEmerson

Allen Moyer, set - Betrayal, Huntington Theatre Company

Making good on Our Country's Good

Mac Young is puzzled by Jesse Wood's theatrics in Our Country's Good.  Photo: Christopher McKenzie

As readers of the Hub Review know by now, Boston's fringe is where the intellectual action is  - indeed, the brain waves emanating from our various theatres are all but inversely proportional to their supposed status.  At the top of the heap, Harvard's A.R.T. has long been brain-dead (before you write in, I know, The Glass Menagerie wasn't bad - hooray!), and the Huntington, despite a sterling commitment to lighter classics, has been edging away from any highbrow heavy lifting as well. Meanwhile, after a strong start, even ArtsEmerson is getting a little light in the loafers these days. Face it, the local stage is steadily being dumbed down to the level of PBS (and frankly, most local critics are only too happy to see that happen; big ideas make them a little nervous, too).

There are a few candles in this encroaching dark - or at least there's Whistler in the Dark, which reliably programs challenging fare with a touchingly earnest faith in the Boston audience. And perhaps indeed not all hope is lost, for the Whistlers have slowly built a solid base of support, despite their devotion to the likes of Caryl Churchill and Ovid.  (They've certainly built a base among the actors of the fringe; the cast of their current production, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good - through April 6 at the Charlestown Working Theater - is stacked with local performers who remind you that an Equity card doesn't always count for that much artistically.)

Still, despite several galvanizing moments, I felt that the Whistlers stumbled slightly with Country, perhaps because their own post-modernist methods blinded them to what in the end ties the play together. Wertenbaker's breakout hit from 1988 is based on an evocative historical fact: improbably, when the British founded Australia as a penal colony, the first prison ships also seeded the Land Down Under with the acting bug.  For the jailers and their convicts took it upon themselves to stage a production of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer for their own entertainment; and in this poignant episode the playwright finds much to ponder about the manner in which civilization (and even romance) take root in a harsh climate.

Indeed, the civilizing power of the stage is openly debated by this Country's characters (most of them based on historical figures) - and that includes the officers as well the convicts; they're all almost as skeptical of the value of the theatre as today's governors of Harvard.  Artistic director Meg Taintor, and the Whistlers in general, do well by these disputes - after all, they've long specialized in the dry barbarism of the Greeks and Howard Barker - and they likewise crisply conjure the cruelties of the British penal code (some actors must rehearse the frothy Recruiting Officer while facing new punishments and charges - even capital charges).

But the episodic nature of Wertenbaker's text seems to throw Taintor and her cast ever so slightly.  Or perhaps their efforts to simultaneously mount The Recruiting Officer itself in rep with Country proved an exhausting challenge.  Or perhaps they've just become a little too used to the formal questioning of the likes of Caryl Churchill, who seems to undermine her own premises with each passing scene. Timberlake Wertenbaker is different, however; the epic-theatre episodes of Our Country's Good are built on a stable, even sturdy, melodramatic structure.  But several actors, despite convincing accent work and a calm conviction within each scene, seem unable to connect the various dots of their characters' actions into convincing arcs - and thus the overall impact of The Recruiting Officer on its players and audience never quite makes theatrical landfall.  

Farquhar's farce, of course, has its own unexpected resonances (it's funny how often history works this way!), in that it's a roundelay of disguised courtship pirouetting on the edge of military indenture. But the Whistlers have trouble mining the veins of feeling this romance suggests; indeed, mainstay Mac Young looks merely perplexed at the increasing commitment of the officer he plays (Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark, an actual person) to the production he himself has proposed - even though it's obvious that Farquhar's play sparked his own longing for a lost love (and indeed eventually delivers a new romance into his arms).  Likewise Chris Larson, as Clark's nemesis, Major Robbie Rose (again a historical figure) can't seem to limn much in his character's punitive persona.  Of course such people are often a mystery - who knows what drives Justice Scalia? - yet their intrinsic vengefulness is always a potent political force; here Wertenbaker conjures in these two British officers an epochal social showdown, but the Whistlers don't seem to realize this.

The performances are generally stronger among the convicts (intriguingly, each member of the cast plays two parts, one in each stratum of Australia's penal society).  Here the standouts are the reliable Zach Eisenstat and Lynn Guerra, who worked together to such memorable effect in The Play About the Baby, and who bring a subtlety and surprising charm to their parts here.  Not far behind is Jesse Wood - late of Heart & Dagger - who brings not only his usual confident sex appeal but also a remarkable technical command to the role of convicted thief Robert Sideway, who was so moved by The Recruiting Officer that he founded the first theatre in Australia upon his release.  Wood's technique is pretty impeccable (and, like Eisenstat, he nails a complex accent - the production's dialogue coach was Liz Hayes, hire her) but I felt he too missed the role's passionate dimension; after all, Mr. Sideway had a touch of the poet in his soul that apparently elbowed aside the Artful Dodger once it had been awakened by the theatre.

Elsewhere Alejandro Simoes threw himself into the tormented role of a haunted hangman, while Lorne Nogueira (whom we see far too rarely on stage) this time, oddly enough, underplayed things a little too much as Simoes' love interest.  But then it's that kind of production - slight miscalculations and a few missteps undercut what at other times is an engrossing evening.  In the end, the Whistlers put over Wertenbaker's thesis - just without quite all the power her play deserves.