Weekly Margin, 2018 W3: Fire and Air, Mankind, Hangmen

1/17/18: Fire and Air
What: A bioplay about Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, founder and producer of the Ballets Russes, following his complicated relationship with dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinksy, and the struggle of those around him to live up to the beauty and vision only he fully sees.
And? It was okay? It was the first preview, and I don't know if rewrites are in the works. It had the John Doyle stamp, with seamless transitions between scenes and non-literal space and staging, as well as an embrace of the minimal listening style of performance. The production is polished, but I didn't care a whole lot about what I was being shown. I don't think it was a story, so much as a series of things that happened.

1/18/18: Mankind
What: One hundred years after the last woman has become extinct due to over-regulation and bad treatment, two men who have been casually hooking up find out one of them is pregnant - and attempt to have an illegal abortion. Things then pivot pretty extremely out of control in ways I don't want to spoil.
And? I had a lot of trepidation going in, both from being concerned that I was seeing a play about how horrible men had been to women, without any women there to speak for themselves; and because I'd been hearing mixed reviews. I think, ultimately, this play really isn't about feminism. It doesn't feel like it's about gender politics at all, except for the absurdity of laws regulating women's bodies still being on the books, a century after their extinction. The disappointing part is probably the conviction that seeing this same treatment inflicted on men is the only way for some men to grok the injustice. But what I think this play is actually about is the dangers of extremism, fanaticism, and the removal of context and humanity. Arc-wise, it reminded me very much of another Playwrights Horizons prod, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, in that we keep returning to rehash earlier moments, each time farther from true understanding, each time farther from the actual people, and (spoilers?) each time approaching more the behaviors of a religious rite. This play isn't quite about people, and it's a satire without being funny, and maybe that's why it got some pushback. I see what it's doing without necessarily liking it, if that makes sense.

Ariel Shafir, Anson Mount, Bobby Moreno, and David Ryan Smith as
Bob, Mark, Jason, and Bob. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Weekly Margin, 2018 W2: Hansbury & Slack, Improvised Shakespeare, Cardinal

1/10/18: Hansbury & Slack
What: Brian Hansbury and Beth Slack perform an improvised hour-long musical based on a suggestion from the audience, exploring an important moment in someone's life.
And? These two (three if you count their pianist Jody Shelton - and you should) consistently blow me away with their talent, humor, and heart. This particular rendition of a couple anticipating the birth of their child while Ocean's 11 plays on the television was both touching and hilarious.

1/12/18: Improvised Shakespeare
What: A troupe of five players improvise a ninety-minute play in iambic pentameter (ish), based on a suggestion from the audience, using familiar Shakepearean tropes, style, and structure.
And? These guys are absolutely phenomenal and I don't know how they do what they do. "The Globe and the Shell" was hilarious, weird, bloody, and full of weasels.

1/13/18: Cardinal
What: Young mayor Jeff gets persuaded by former classmate Lydia into painting downtown red, in the hopes of putting their small town on the map, revitalizing outside interest, and boosting commerce. When the outside interest comes in the form of a bus tour full of made-up stories, they have to decide if what they love is the town or those who inhabits it.
And? I think whatever message playwright Greg Pierce was trying to convey was muddied at best. It is a good question, but there's a lot of excess noise, to the degree that I ultimately didn't know why we were here. (I also got a bit annoyed by the set design, but it's a bit of a petty rant that would probably be appreciated only by my fellow PHTS alum)

Weekly Margin, 2018 W1: John Lithgow: Stories By Heart, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Farinelli and the King

1/2/18: John Lithgow: Stories By Heart
What: A one-man show in which John Lithgow shares two of his favorites from a short story anthology prized by his family, framed by connected anecdotes from his life.
And? An excellent vehicle for Lithgow's talents as a storyteller. I was more engaged by the first act, where he enacted Ring Lardner's "Haircut," which had some good pantomime in addition to the charisma of the conversational style, even as the story got nasty. The second act, featuring P.G. Wodehouse's "Uncle Fred Flits By," was funny though less compelling to me in its content; however, he framed it well within his family's story.

John Lithgow in Stories By Heart. Photo by Joan Marcus.

1/5/18: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
What: A deconstruction of Mary Shelley's classic, interspersing the journey of the creature with Shelley's grief at losing her children to illness and miscarriage. The performance is a mix of text and scene with live music, aria, and dance.
And? Meh. Neither the creature's story nor Mary Shelley's were interestingly told. Redeemed only by Robert Fairchild's dancing (The Monster) and the live music provided by Krysty Swann (Mezzo-Soprano), Steven Lin (Piano), Parker Ramsay (Organ/Harpsichord), and Kemp Jernigan (Oboe).

Krysty Swann and Robert Fairchild as Mezzo-Soprano and The Monster.
Photo by Shirin Tinati.

My Favorite Theater of 2017

Paul Hilton and Anna Francolini as Peter
Pan and Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
Photo by Steve Tanner.

It's been an odd year (in many, many, many ways). On the theater scene, one of those many oddnesses was the top-heaviness of it - the 2016-2017 season was so jam packed, I can't quite hold it all in my head. And then here at the tail end of the first half of the 2017-2018 season, we've had instead a rather spare (and unfortunately largely uninspiring) autumn. I still managed to find plenty to love, however: my initial attempt at building a Top list started at 35 which I then whittled to 26, then 21 (the task becoming more challenging with each culling), before landing at the current list. Some shows culled from the list made a strong impression on first viewing, but perhaps haven't etched themselves in my memory enough to warrant place here.

Part of why, even with a sparse autumn, the whittling was so difficult, lies in the fact that I hit a personal record this past year: 151 shows total (ho-ly merde), with 16 repeats, leaving 135 unique shows, besting last year by 24 unique shows and besting my highest year (2013) by 13.

So we should probably get started. I've had such a difficult time cutting the list down, and at this point, I don't even know how to rank them, so instead for a change of pace, I'm presenting them in chronological order of when I saw them.

Margin Notes: Pericles: Born in a Tempest

Pericles: Born in a Tempest

Jacques Roy and Kathryn Metzger as Pericles and Thaisa.
Photo by Al Foote III.

Seen on: Friday, 11/3/17.
My grade: A

Plot and Background

A new mother, mourning the death of her father, opens his parting gift: a handwritten story in a leather-bound journal. A story of Pericles and his adventures, a story from her childhood. Her family and friends take on the task of enacting the story within, summoning the spirit of her father to play the role of Pericles on his seafaring voyages, and eventually leading her to a reconciliation of her memories and grief. Hunger & Thirst Theatre, which specializes in modern updates to classic works, reimagines Shakespeare's romance as a story within a story, building parallels from the tale of Pericles and his daughter Marina to the contemporary woman grieving her father.

What I Knew Beforehand

I'd seen a production of Pericles at TFANA, but didn't retain a lot of specifics, beyond the memory of an episodic structure and a father and daughter separated and reunited.

Thoughts:

Play: While the play is a little slow to start, with the grieving characters fumbling for action, shifting boxes and juggling a squalling infant, it bounds into liveliness once Pericles himself joins the party. The spell cast by the storytellers then reaches its full potency, and doesn't wane. Weaving easily together the makeshift playfulness of puppetting dolls to simulate a fight, and a full-out duel, director Jordan Reeves synthesizes what should be disparate styles into the only elixir which could coax this woman out of her grief - the joy of play, and the romantic sweep of the story her father told her so many times. We are wooed as she is wooed, slowly but surely, to see what in the story of Pericles reflects her memories of her father, and her relationship to him. We, too, feel the loss of a great spirit. In addition to its cuts - mostly cinching in of the story to a tight 90-minute narrative - this production makes a few distinct shifts to the story of Pericles itself, outside of its framework of the grieving family telling an old story. Thaisa is not revived and ultimately reunited with her family; and Marina's reunion with Pericles, though achieved, is short-lived - here the play of storytelling crashes into the framework, as the daughter attempts to reconnect with her fading father, a man in the deep stages of dementia. He is able to speak the scene with her, recognizing and embracing her as his child, but the joy is short-lived, and he soon retreats once more into bewilderment and catatonia. While this shift adds a poignancy, particularly to the framing narrative, it is also a deliberate departure from the intention of the source material, and it's perhaps an individual audience member's prerogative to decide whether or not that matters.