[In the late 1980s and early ’90s, I wrote reviews for Stages, a monthly magazine that covered theater all over the country (but principally in New York City) and was distributed free in selected theaters from 1984 to 1996, and the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published in New York City from 1980 until 1997. I covered mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway.
[I forget now what my word limit was for Stages (probably around 500 words), but it varied for large subjects such as the visit of the Grand Kabuki company of Japan, which played at the Met in a two-night repertory in July 1985, or when I did a feature article on theater in Washington, D.C. (see “Grand Kabuki (July 1985),” posted on Rick On Theatre on 6 November 2010, and “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985),” 25 December 2011, respectively).
[The length of the Native notices was also limited—about 800 words—and the paper ran reviews in pairs, so there were two plays covered in the column. I could, however, divide the column up between the two productions any way I wanted. (For some of the reviews republished here, the companion play has been omitted—though it may have been published in another post.)]
SUMMIT
CONFERENCEby Robert David MacDonaldNew
York Theatre StudioTOMI Terrace
Theatre
[I
reviewed Scottish playwright Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference for Stages in July/August
1985. Directed by Richard Romagnoli, the
show ran from 18 May to 9 July 1985 (its New York première) at the TOMI Terrace
Theatre in the Park Royal Hotel on West 73rd Street. (TOMI stood for “Theatre Opera Music Institute.”)
[The production had sets by Gerard P. Bourcier, lights by John Hickey, costumes by Walker Hicklin, sound by Tommy Hawk, and hair and make-up by Michael Kriston.]
It is not clear why the New York Theatre Studio chose to produce Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference, except perhaps to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of VE Day (8 May). The play purports to be a fictional meeting in 1941 Berlin between the mistresses of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Eva Braun and Clara Petacci. Very shortly, however, the women become surrogates for their “friends,” speaking and acting like men, and behaving just like the gangsters Petacci says such men must be.
What they talk about is pap history—the Axis alliance as seen by the two dictators. Nothing new: Hitler is a depraved, bigotted megalomaniac and Mussolini a pompous buffoon, puffed up with the hot air of his imagined Roman heritage. With the proper humor we might have been treated to an Anglo version of the Romans of Asterix the Gaul. Unfortunately, the humor all derives from the gratuitous sex-shift and cheap ethnic jokes. MacDonald’s only point seems to be that all persecution is cruel, senseless, and opportunistic. Don’t most of us know that by now?
The performances are adequate, but cannot overcome the plodding script. Susan Sharkey’s Braun is alternately mousy and bullying and Mary Jay’s Petacci is sensuously attractive. Laurence Overmire, as the SS soldier assigned to serve the two women, is convincingly naive and virginal as he suffers harassment, seduction, humiliation, and, finally, persecution as a Jew. The play, however, is so static and talky that no performance would likely be able to enliven it.
It is doubtful any director could make this leaden script bouyant enough to float, though Richard Romagnoli does not seem to have tried very hard. It is not clear, for instance, why the actors use heavy accents. Certainly, when Braun talks to the soldier before Petacci’s arrival, they would speak unaccented “German.”
In fact, the whole issue of what “language” the women are speaking is confusing. Is Braun speaking Italian? Or Petacci German? I’m not aware that either mistress spoke anything but her native tongue. Are they speaking English with one another?
There’s an attempted joke that only works if they’re speaking English, but both women would also have to understand German. Petacci asks Braun if she has any children. Sharkey’s Braun answers simply, “Nein”—German for ‘No.’ But Petacci interprets that to be “Nine,” and responds with surprise, “Nine children?” It’s a dumb bilingual pun—and makes no sense in context.
John Hickey’s lighting seems arbitrary. When Braun begins to taunt the soldier and convince him he is Jewish, the lights dim, leaving Petacci in the dark fringes of the set. Granted, MacDonald seems to have forgotten her at this point, but she is still part of the play. She may be better off before the lights come back up.
[A curious sidelight: Robert David MacDonald (who died in 2004 at 74) saw Summit Conference produced in London’s West End in 1982. Esteemed British actress Glenda Jackson played Eva Braun.]
* * * *
THE SECOND NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
OF CLOWN THEATRE
“All Fall Down (Clown Shorts #10)”
If Every Fool, Inc.
Westbeth Theatre Center, Theatre B
[Not all my assignments were for traditional plays. I saw all kinds of performances as a stringer for Stages, like the Grand Kabuki (which I actually requested) and the clown festival I covered in the fall of the same year. My review of one program of the Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre (11-30 June 1985) at the Westbeth Theatre Center on Bank Street in Greenwich Village ran in Stages in September 1985.
[An evening of ensemble clowning, the program was coordinated by John Towsen with lights by Drew Richardson and Christopher Agostino and a performance ensemble comprised of Christopher Agostino, Susan Avino, Laine Barton, Mari Briggs, Bernie Collins, Terry Dinneen, Maris Engel, Marilyn Galfin, Judith Harding, Joe Killian, Ian Kramer, Richard Nasch, Drew Richardson, John Rusk, Wellington Santos, Andy Teirstein, and Aaron Watkins. I saw the performance at 8 p.m. on Saturday, 15 June.]
“If every fool wore a crown, we would all be kings” is the motto of the Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre’s sponsor, and if there were no majestic jesters onstage at the Westbeth Theatre Center, there were clown princelings aplenty.
One of four programs of “clown shorts” in the schedule, the evening ranges from the space-age a capella musical, “The Right Stuff,” to Shakespeare’s “Rude Mechanicals,” extracted from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On the way, it stops at “Joe’s Restaurant” and the barricaded garden of the “Bocci Brides,” two pieces devoted almost exclusively to the corporeal pyrotechnics of physical comedy.
All the performers are young, animated and clearly enjoy their tomfoolery. So does the audience. The company is a mix of experienced professionals, novices, amateurs, and “ordinary” actors trying their hands at clowning.
Not every fool is crowned with equal success, however. The silliness of “The Right Stuff,” which depicts America’s race for space, is so childlike it often crosses the border into childish. One spectator observed very accurately that the performance was “like [what] the kids put on every summer” at camp.
In both “Joe’s Restaurant” and “Bocci Brides,” the physical buffoonery, though frequently clever, is so carefully executed, the technique is visible. Some lazzi can be seen on the way before they arrive, which is a little like knowing the punchline before the joke is told. On the other hand, the clowning in “Rude Mechanicals” is better than most of the acting, though Wellington Santos’ Flute/Thisbe at Pyramus’ death is the belly-laughable quintessence of “the art of coarse acting.”
That short also provides a wonderful see-saw routine as Bottom (Bernie Collins) repeatedly springs up causing his comrades to tumble off the other end of a tipping bench. The variations on this turn are increasingly hilarious.
All in all, this was a delightful evening—despite torture-rack folding chairs that nearly caused paralysis—and it will likely be true for the whole festival, a smorgasbord of clowning, mime, buffoonery, and satire. If you like clowns, there is something here for you: foreign or domestic, political or pure entertainment, high or low. There are even classes in clowning for the participation-minded.
* *
* *by Cary Hoffman and Ira GasmanActors’ Playhouse
[The same issue of Stages, September 1985, contained my review of the musical entertainment What’s A Nice Country Like You . . . Doing In A State Like This?, a revue presented by Alice Kopreski & Bick Goss. It was directed and choreographed by Suzanne Astor Hoffman with sets by Charles Plummer, lights by John McKernon, and costumes by Henrietta Louise Howard. The cast included Missy Baldino, Jane Brucker, Steve Mulch, and Hugh Panaro and Rob Resnick.
[The show ran at the Actors’ Playhouse on 7th Avenue South (in Greenwich Village) for 252 performances from 31 July 1985 to 9 February 1986; I saw it in August 1985.]
Before What’s A Nice Country started, a woman came onto the stage, and proceeded to rearrange the audience. Several large groups had been separated from one another and she wanted to put people back with those “to whom they belonged.” The audience cooperated cheerfully, or amiably declared they were happy where they were. That is the tone of this amusing little entertainment: friendly.
Billing itself as a “typically topical revue,” and warning us all to “Get Out of Here” in the opening number, Country is a non-threatening, cute, decidedly liberal send-up of current and recent news items. Performed by five very perky young singers, the evening covers such national and local concerns as the religious right (“Church and State” and “Hallelujah”), new sexual roles (“Male Chauvinist Pig of Myself” and “Liberation Tango”), Latin America (“Carlos, Juan & Miguel” and “Nicaragua”), Herpes (“I’m Not Taking a Chance on Love”), organ transplants (“I’m Not Myself Anymore”), life in New York (“A Mugger’s Work is Never Done” and “How’m I Doing”), and Bernhard Goetz (“Everybody Ought to Have a Gun”).
Though some of this is as new as last week’s headlines, most is as old as the decade, and some even harks back to the ’70s. (As it happens, Country was first presented at the American Place Theatre in 1972.) A notification appears in the program with the “Musical Numbers” warning: “Similar to our foreign policy, this program order s subject to change without notice.”
A few numbers were extremely platitudinous, like “Why Do I Keep Going to the Theatre?” and “Nicaragua,” both of which were superficial and sentimental. Worse yet, the lyrics of “Take Us Back, King George,” a mock punk number, were unintelligible.
The most amusing moments, however, were really timeless. Missy Baldino, for instance, had a recurring role as a woman who falls in love with all manner of unreciprocative types: a bisexual, a priest, a transvestite . . . (“I’m in Love With”). In “Runaway Suite,” Steve Mulch did a very touching turn about growing up with “It’s Getting Better,” and Baldino poignantly explained how “I Like Me.”
In the end, though the audience quite enjoyed themselves, the topicality was, for the most part, safe and tame, aimed at the easy targets. There were few surprises either in the subject matter or the music (by Cary Hoffman) and lyrics (Ira Gasman). For cleverness and bite, Country cannot hold a candle to Mark Russell, Tom Lehrer, or even TV’s old That Was The Week That Was.
[A couple of quasi-historical notes—for those under 50 or who grew up beyond New York City:
[“How’m I Doing” is an evocation of the catchphrase of Edward I. Koch (1924-2013) who was Mayor of New York from 1978 to 1989. He habitually rode the city subway or stood on street corners greeting passersby with the slogan “How'm I doin'?”
[Bernhard Goetz (b. 1947 in Kew Gardens, Queens) was known after 22 December 1984 as “the Subway Vigilante.” On that date, Goetz shot and wounded four African-American teens on a New York City subway train in Manhattan. He was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and several firearms offenses. After several grand juries and trials, a trial jury found Goetz guilty of one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm, for which he served eight months of a one-year sentence.
[On a personal point, Goetz lived in my neighborhood—he
had an apartment somewhere in Greenwich Village—and I used to see him now and
then on the streets near my home or going in or out of the 7th Avenue-and-14th
Street subway station. We were not
acquainted.]
* *
* *
ONLY
KIDDING
by Jim
Geoghan
American
Jewish Theater
Susan
Bloch Theater
[“Hitting
Below the Borscht Belt,” the headline I gave my notice for Only Kidding by Jim Geoghan, ran in the New York
Native on 14 November 1988. The play premièred
at the American Jewish Theatre’s Susan Bloch Theatre on West 26th Street in
Chelsea; it later moved to the Westside Theatre on 43rd Street in the theatre
district where it won two Theatre World Awards and was nominated for a Drama Desk
Award.]
Early in the first act of Only Kidding, Catskills comic Jackie Dwayne (Larry Keith) tells one tired, old joke after another to Sheldon Kelinski (Michael Jeter), who has been sent by Dwayne’s manager to write new material for him. Each time, Kelinski beats the middle-aged comic to the punchline. That’s the way it is with the whole play: we know the “snappers” before playwright Jim Geoghan tells us.
Only Kidding, which Geoghan says is partly autobiographical, explores the underside of stand-up comedy, focusing on two kinds of Jewish performers. In the first act, we meet Dwayne, the older man with the mostly ethnic one-liners whose main claim to fame is that he did The Ed Sullivan Show back in the ’50s.
As soon as obsessive, compulsive Sheldon shows up, we know they will clash. In the second act we are introduced to Jerry Goldstein (Paul Provenza), the younger, hipper fellow who does character schtick and off-beat situations. It is immediately clear that he and his Irish partner (Ethan Phillips) are bound for a split-up, and when the owner (Sam Zap) of the Brooklyn nightery in which the team are performing offers them a management contract, we can see he will use his mafia contacts to coerce them.
The only real difference between the two men, though, is that Dwayne drinks rum and Coke and Goldstein does pills and coke. Both comedians are waiting for their big break, an appearance on the Buddy King Show, a Tonight Show clone. Before the third act begins, we know that both men will make it one way or another, and that there will be a confrontation between them. Along the way, we are treated to a flow of low, vulgar, ethnic jokes that provide something to offend everyone.
Some familiar targets for insult humor are gays, Italians, Poles, Greeks, and, of course, Jews. That some of the jokes are funny has little to do with the play itself, which is supposed to be a paean to humanity and honor. Geoghan doesn’t introduce this theme, however, until the last moments of the play, when the young comic’s mafioso manager engineers the removal of the older man from the show.
Despite the material, director Larry Arrick cast his production suitably. The actors create credible characters from the stereotypes provided by the playwright. None, however, rises above the script’s mediocrities. Akira Yoshimura’s sets and Jeffrey L. Ullman’s costumes are appropriate and serviceable, as is Susan A. White’s lighting.
This is AJT’s first production in its new space, the Susan Bloch Theater, to which it moved because its previous theater was inadequate. It should be noted, then, that the sightlines in this theater are so bad that, even from as close as the third row of the three-sided auditorium, it was difficult to see anything below table-top level.
* *
* *
THE
MAJESTIC KID
by Mark
Medoff
Golden
Glow Unlimited, Ltd.
Theater
at Saint Peter’s Church
[“Cowboys
and Fools,” the omnibus title for my reviews of The Majestic Kid by Mark Medoff (1940-2019) and Jean
Colonomos, Peter Dee, and Edward Taussig’s Chain of Fools, appeared in the
New York Native of 19 December 1988.
The production of Majestic Kid, which seems to have been the New
York première, ran at the Theatre at St. Peter’s Church (Lexington Avenue in
Manhattan’s Midtown East) from 1 December 1988 to 15 January 1989.
[Medoff’s play was first performed, as were most of his works, at the American Southwest Theatre Company at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where Medoff headed the theater department and served as artistic director if the theater company, in March 1981 under the direction of the playwright (who’s best known as the composer of Children of a Lesser God, Broadway 1980-82, which won three Tonys, including Best Play, and two Drama Desks.)
[The Majestic Kid went on to mountings in Aspen, Colorado, in July 1983 and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in February 1985. It has been a perennial in regional theaters ever since, and is still popular today. The No Strings Theatre Company of Las Cruces, for example, just streamed The Majestic Kid in November 2020.]
Hopalong Cassidy. The Cisco Kid. The Lone Ranger. Wild Bill Hickok. Gene Autry. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
Do these names strike guitar chords in you? Did your childhood heroes wear buckskins, chaps, and ten-gallon hats? Were their best friends a horse and a funny sidekick? After helping the good folks, did they ride off into the sunset and never get the girl? If this sounds like you fifteen or twenty years ago, then you will identify with Aaron Weiss, who fancies himself The Majestic Kid, helping “people without hurting other people.”
It’s an engaging image. We all sometimes wish we could be the wonderful heroes and heroines of our more innocent childhoods. Aaron, however, has kept his idol with him; The Laredo Kid, dressed in an elaborate black-and-white wrangler’s outfit, comes down off the screen and out of Aaron’s imagination to advise and help him. But, as Aaron finds out—somewhat later in life perhaps than the rest of us—Laredo’s world and the real one don’t mesh.
Mark Medoff’s new play, staged by Derek Wolshonak. links the cowboy-movie hero and the modern-day citizens-advocacy lawyer. With old movie stills for scenery, extras, and mood-establishing backgrounds, the production digs into a large number of problems. As lawyers, Aaron (Stuart Zagnit) and his partner, A. J. Pollard (Kay Walbye), pit right against wrong in their fight with the local ranchers on behalf of Apache Indians who claim the land as their ancestral property.
Then there’s the matter of preserving the land, which is being bought up by Judge William S. Hart Finlay (Michael Cullen) for a toxic waste dump. At the same time, Aaron is torn between loving his yuppie partner and the young rancher Lisa (Juliette Kurth), neither of whom wants to play the sidekick role the way Laredo (Alex Wipf) would have it.
Aaron is also uncomfortable with the lone, macho hero image, preferring to share the struggle with his love. Woven all through the play is the clash of Laredo’s fantasy world and Aaron’s real one, which parallels but doesn’t meet the clash of the mythological Old West with the reality of the modern one.
As hard as it is to
focus on one or two of these themes, the send-up of the old movie situations
and dialogue, Laredo’s film plots and songs (a love song for him is an homage
to his horse), and the cartoon characterizations—particularly Laredo and
Finlay—make for an amusing and entertaining performance. If the play is at its best when it is least
serious, there is still much fun in The Majestic Kid.
* * * *CHAIN
OF FOOLS
by Jean
Colonomos, Peter Dee, and Edward Taussig
Actors’
Alliance, Inc.
Nat
Horne Theatre
[The Chain of Fools review was part of the same column as the Majestic Kid notice, published on 19 December 1988. The show was presented in its “world première” at the Nat Horne Theatre on Theatre Row from 1 to 18 December 1988.]
Actors’ Alliance is a group of theater artists who meet regularly for workshops. Sometimes the workshops develop into full-scale productions, and their season often includes original works by the group’s resident playwrights. Chain of Fools, this season’s opener, is a collaboration among three of the company’s writers, each one writing a section of the play and then passing it along to a colleague when he or she had no more to contribute.
You can’t tell where the seams are between each of the sections, but the play does have a pass-along structure anyway. Like a La Ronde for the ’80s, Chain of Fools creates relationships between pairs of people that is passed along by one half of the couple. Kate (Judith Heineman) loves husband Bill (Tim van Pelt); Bill loves Brandon (Daniel J. Sherman); Brandon doesn’t love anyone, but is pursued by Jennifer (Lee Robin). Linking the chain together is Natasha (Juanita Walsh), a psychic at whose apartment Kate, Bill, and Jennifer all meet for the penultimate confrontation.
It is all very contemporary, though in the end it is little more than an eternal rectangle which the final scene between Kate and Brandon does not resolve. When Brandon admits that he cannot return love, either from Jennifer or Bill, Kate calls him a “cliché” and leaves. As he was the catalyst for the crisis, he is also the cause of its ultimate inconclusiveness.
Director Melanie Sutherland has melded the elements into a smooth performance, moving from the apparently disconnected monologues of the opening to more integrated scenes, opening up the characters a little at a time so we can get to know them and sympathize with them.
A few scenes seem more slowly paced than they ought to be, but the characters and situation do involve us and the actors develop an effective ensemble. Set designer James A. Crocker has created a jagged, geometrical environment of raw wood triangles and squares that is appropriate to the unfinished lives of the characters.
* *
* *SMILE
& LIEPower
Lunch by Alan Ball & Tribe by P. Kevin StraderAlarm
Dog Rep
[My review of the two-one-act bill of Smile & Lie was published in the New York Native on 31 December 1990 as part of “Money, Money, Money”; the second play in this pairing was Martha Horstman’s Junglebird, a slight Cinderella comedy.
[The production was staged at the HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art in TriBeCa in lower Manhattan from 29 November to 15 December 1990.]
You have to wonder about the patrons of the restaurant in Power Lunch, the first one-act in Alarm Dog Rep’s Smile & Lie. Not only are they served by a waitress named Dorothy who looks like a man (until she has the world’s fastest sex-change operation and comes out a man named Donald who looks like a woman), but they silently witness a relentless ’90s version of the battle of the sexes. The combatants would probably call it “the battle of the genders.”
Power Lunch by Alan Ball and its companion play, Tribe by P. Kevin Strader, are witty, slightly off-center, and endlessly surprising. Smile & Lie is also excellently mounted by the ADR ensemble, who clearly have a quirky, clear-eyed view of our modern world.
Though both plays winnow out the chaff of life, reserving only its most basic elements—Strader even reduces some language to a telegraphic Newspeak—they differ in style and structure. Power Lunch, directed by Jeff Mousseau, is for the most part realistically acted, with a few well-timed exceptions.
A businessman (author Ball) and -woman (Carol McCann) test each other’s vulnerabilities in language stolen from Psychology Today and Dr. Ruth [Westheimer (b, 4 June 1928); German-American sex therapist, media personality, author, radio, and television talk show host]. Ball is Gordon Gekko-manqué: arrogant, brusque, and condescending; McCann is a neo-feminist put-down artist: superior, tough, and self-assured.
There is considerable gender-switching as each in turn goes after Dorothy/Donald (Andrew Watts and Carol Halstead, respectively). Halstead is the quintessential bimbo, a Vanna White wannabe. Watts, however, provides the evening’s most incongruous performance. A large man who looks like he ought to play a quarterback, his Dorothy is sensitive, modest, and vulnerable.
Strader’s Tribe, directed by Ball, is a cartoon. Along with its truncated language, its set is a gray-and-white cardboard apartment cut-out. The two black-clad couples meeting for dinner are so upscale they are entirely ignorant of practical matters. The paradigm is Minx (Tara Buckley) who charges other people “a real lot” of money to advise them on taste. “Taste of what?” asks her hostess, Pam (Vicki March). “Everything,” replies Minx, asserting that people need the assurance that what they have is good.
Consumerism and boredom are hallmarks of this world. Host Jim (Watts) owns a riding mower, although he lives in a highrise apartment “with no grass.” When the evening’s activities lag, the four are terrified until Jim saves them by turning on the TV.
But it is egocentrism that holds these people’s lives together. Guest Rex (Marc Ashmore) is a performance artist whose subject is essentially himself, as he demonstrates in a puerile movement piece about his small-town home. Pam is raising their “infant” by tape-recordings piped through tiny earphones; it is also catheterized so she never has to change it.
The cast, speaking as if in balloons, acts two-dimensionally, with mercurial changes of affect as though each moment were a cartoon panel come momentarily to life. Tribe is extremely clever—Strader deftly targets television news, commercials, diplomacy, and yuppie oenophilia—but it’s cleverness with a sharp point and a wacky perspective, a reductio ad absurdum.
Marc Ashmore’s sets and Richie Williamson’s lighting for both Power Lunch and Tribe add extra dimensions to the style, wit, and theatricality of Smile & Lie.
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