What: Urban Stages presents the return of "a new play with old music," about Mira, who inadvertently reunites with her estranged grandfather while on a hootenanny-hunting road trip with her enthusiastic grad school boyfriend.
And? This is a rare special piece that is perfectly tailored to the three performers at its center (which makes sense as two of them are also cowriters on the piece): each adept at a variety of stringed instruments, from banjo and dulcimer to guitar and mandolin to violin (or fiddle, depending on the song) and urhu (a two-stringed Chinese instrument with a long narrow neck and a small wooden soundbox). As the three characters trade stories and song across the porch of Edgar (Mira's grandfather)'s porch, the timbre varies: when they play together in traded melody lines, singing along in a joyous shifting harmony, everything seems easy. But between the songs the unhealed wounds reopen, confronting unresolved tensions and heartbreak. Music may be Mira and Edgar's connector, but it's not the thing that can actually mend what's broken. Words spoken a cappella are the only road to reconciliation. The dialogue sections themselves are uneven, pace-wise, and need to be sharpened and tightened. But the emotional beats are still there and hit well, especially as performed by Tora Nogami Alexander as the closed-off but hopeful Mira, and David M. Lutken as a beautifully understated--and also a bit closed-off--and homespun pure Edgar (the third voice in their trio, Morgan Morse, plays Beckett, who keeps verging over into annoying and intrusive. But he does it so well, I have to think it's deliberate). But oh, when the three of them play--when they're playing, harmonizing, improvising--the joy of it, the beauty of the sound. When they play, none of the rest of it seems to matter, if we can just be here and listen to them go.
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| Tora Nagomi Alexander (Mira), Morgan Morse (Beckett), and David M. Lutken (Edgar). Photo by Ben Hider. |
What: Douglas Lackey's new bioplay about the attorney, Hans Litten, who in his capacity as private prosecutor questioned Hitler on the stand to answer for the violence of his storm troopers. Later, when Hitler assumes the role of Chancellor, Litten is specifically targeted for imprisonment, interrogation, and torture. Though his family and allies campaign for his release, he ultimately dies in Dachau by suicide.
And? Having appreciated him in a number of supporting roles over the past few years, I'm pleased to see Daniel Yaiullo step into a leading role. He leads the cast with gentleness and intelligence, tracing Litten's arc from a confident young man of conviction, to a battered and beaten-down shell still determined to hold onto his honor as well as his love for music and the written word. The ensemble is a bit uneven under him, but Zack Calhoon's turn as Hitler is strikingly understated, and Dave Stishan makes an affably practical Barbasch (a colleague of Litten's), contrasted with the glowering visage when he plays a stormtrooper. The design is in large part utilitarian if unremarkable, except for a transformative and stomach-dropping moment that closes out the first act. The script itself is clunky and overlong with a bit of a dragging pace right now--issues that could be fixed with a tightening and focus to a theme, rather than a strict adherence to the facts as they happened. I'm not saying make things up; I'm saying make it a story rather than a biography. It's a story worth telling.
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| Foreground: Daniel Yaiullo as Hans Litten. Background: Zack Calhoon as Adolf Hitler. Photo by Nejamin Rivera. |
