2008-2009 Season Preview
Reviews of plays from the upcoming 2008-2009 Season
Well By Lisa Kron (October 15-November 2, 2008)
Theatre Review; A Mother Speaks Out, And Hearts Dissolve
By Ben Brantley New York Times Published: March 29, 2004, Monday
When Lisa Kron walks out on her own play, the wonderful Well at the Public Theater, it appears to be in a fit of pique. And for the character Ms. Kron is playing, a writer and performer named Lisa Kron, the motivation is indeed that embarrassing, childish combination of sulkiness and exasperation that descends on people of all ages.
But what Lisa Kron the playwright is doing, when she stalks up the stairs and out of view of her audience, is an act of generosity and humility. She is letting a character other than herself control the stage: a woman who happens to be her mother.
O.K., to be exact, it's an actress who's playing Ms. Kron's mother, the excellent Jayne Houdyshell. As Ann Kron, Ms. Houdyshell is a kibbitzer for much of Well, which opened last night. Sitting on the side of the stage in a La-Z Boy reclining chair, in a well-worn cardigan and nightgown, Ann keeps correcting her daughter's distortions of fact and slips of memory.
It's all Ms. Kron can do to get on with the story of their shared lives, which includes Ann's energetic and triumphant years as the organizer of a neighborhood integration program in Lansing, Mich., as well as the paralyzing effects of her various and mysterious illnesses.
Ann is the archetypal parent who hovers in eternal rebuke and praise in so many adults' imaginations as a mythic and slightly grotesque nag and comfort. But when Ann is finally allowed to have her say in this ingeniously self-sabotaging memory play, something magical happens.
A flood of feelings that have been hammering at the door of Well for the previous 90 minutes break in to seize unconditional power. And as Ann speaks simply and regretfully about a daughter she thought she knew to her core, the whole play, as it has been presented up to that moment, seems to dissolve. So, it might be added, do the hearts of the audience.
I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda by Sonja Linden (January 28-February 8, 2009)
A CurtainUp Review of I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda
Juliette, a
young refugee from Rwanda, lives in a lonely youth hostel room, while she
documents her horrifying experiences back home. Simon is a blocked poet and
novelist (he's trying to write a novel without using the letter "I") who has
just begun working at a refugee center. In British playwright Sonja Linden's
gentle but penetrating I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by
a Young Lady from Rwanda, in its New York premiere staged by Phoenix Theatre
Ensemble, these two lost souls caught up in inner and outer turmoil somehow end
up helping each other find their way.
Elise Stone, artistic
director and founder of Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, directs the play with love and
compassion. She lets the story's incredible humanity shine through, unhindered
by directorial interference or overproduction. Rohit Kapoor's set is no more
than a few chairs and recesses that allow the two characters to appear and
disappear. The excellent dialogue creates the setting.
I Have Before
Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda is a
two-hander that requires intense cooperation and communication between the
actors. Susan Heyward (Juliette) and Joseph J. Menino (Simon) are so natural and
believable one would think they have been working together for years. The two
are also quite adept at alternating between talking to each other and blocking
each other out when they confide in the audience. This is a source of great
humor when they make observations they would most assuredly not want the other
to hear.
The emotional heart of
the story, however, is only in small part Simon and Juliette's relationship. The
most powerful moments are those in which Juliette relives her harrowing
experiences in Rwanda, those moments when neighbor turned on neighbor and her
father was told that if he wanted to die by a bullet he would have to pay money.
Linden wrote this play after she started working with clients of the
Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, where she met a young
woman who, like Juliette, had lost her entire family and wanted to write about
it. As the daughter of refugees from Nazi German, Linden was especially moved by
this latest chapter in the history of genocide.
Given its theme, I
Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady from Rwanda
could easily be depressing, self-righteous and derivative. It is none of these.
Phoenix Theatre Ensemble has produced a play that portrays human being who are
resilient and resourceful, who stumble toward understanding and forgiveness. It
is never demoralizing, always moral. Most of all, it insists on the power of art
to change the world.
Looking Over the President's Shoulder by James Still (March 11-22, 2009)
A CurtainUp DC Review: Looking Over the President's Shoulder
This
was my art. To set up a beautiful table...it's an art.
---Wendell Wright as Alonzo Fields
In a show that is
ideal for its space, Ford's Theatre is offering the DC-area premiere of Looking
Over The President's Shoulder. More than just a historical drama about the
White House's first African-American Chief Butler, it's also a discussion about
one man's coming to terms with how he has spent his life and what he has done
with his creative talents. When all is done and he finishes up his First Family
reminiscences, Alonzo Fields asks the same question many of us do -- "Have
I lived my life wisely?" And in Mr. Fields case, he comes to the
conclusion, that perhaps there were different paths he could have chosen, but
in the end he lived his life expressing the inner creativity that he knew shone
so brightly inside himself. And that said, I haven't given away anything at all
about this enjoyable evening of personal reflection and historical documentary.
Written by James Still, this one-man show is based upon the diaries of the real
life Alonzo Fields, who worked in the White House for twenty-one years and
three months. During his time he saw four different administrations: Hoover,
Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. Each new president was a unique personality,
with his own idiosyncrasies, requiring a different repertoire of interpersonal
skills to work with and assist. Mr. Still's play attempts to go beyond the
historical record to bring each of these different men and their families into
a more personal and human focus, while touchingly sharing the life story of the
man who ran their various households.
While Alonzo Fields takes you behind-the-scenes of the most famous address in the nation, the audience never stops wanting to know what motivates Fields to continue in a job that required him to give up so much of his own personal life. We care not just about Alonzo's gossip regarding Eleanor Roosevelt, but also what he endured while working at the White House. He allows the audience time to catch up to where he is going and then quickly turns the spotlight from the first families to himself to highlight his own unique perspective of watching things from "over the President's shoulder."
Whether he is discussing racism within the walls of the White House, recalling Roosevelt's reaction to Pearl Harbor, or sharing that Harry Truman was his favorite President ("I always felt that he understood me as a man, not just a servant to be tolerated -- but as a man.") Mr. Fields shines as he takes us on a backstage tour of history's epicenter during the past century.
Prelude to a Kiss by Craig Lucas (April 22-May 10, 2009)
Review/Theater; Providing a Reason To Keep On Living In a Terrible World
By Frank Rich Published: May 2, 1990
''The world's a really terrible place - it's too precarious,'' says Rita, the young heroine of ''Prelude to a Kiss,'' the Craig Lucas play newly arrived on Broadway. Rita, a bartender aspiring to be a graphics designer, lives in a modern city whose ills are all too depressingly recognizable. Crack dealers approach first graders, unspeakable diseases consume the bodies of the young and old, and there is never any escape from ''the constant fear of being blown up.'' As Rita warns Peter, the young man with whom she has found love at first sight, the world is so rotten she couldn't even think of bringing children into it.
Yet two hours of stage time later, Rita has reversed her perspective entirely, and not because the world has changed. In this wonderful play, a comic and affecting fairy tale for and about adults, Mr. Lucas acknowledges much that is defeating about civilization as we now know it, then heroically insists on finding a reason to go on living anyway.
Mr. Lucas's reason - that ''the miracle of another human being'' is ''never to be squandered'' - may sound sentimental, but as dramatized it is not. There's nothing treacly about ''Prelude to a Kiss,'' a play that acknowledges even those modern terrors it leaves unmentioned, like AIDS, by forcing its young lovers to test their bond against the threat of imminent physical decay and death. ''My love is a prelude that never dies,'' sings Ella Fitzgerald in the Duke Ellington song whose nocturnal blues haunts the evening. What this play celebrates, and it's as rare as the moonlight in Ellington's music, is the redemptive power of unselfish love that never dies, of true love that survives transient flesh.
As in any classic fairy tale, Rita and Peter must overcome such terrifying obstacles to seal their union and live happily ever after that their hard-won hope and elation at the final curtain is contagious. It's hard to recall a recent play so suffused with sorrow that sends one home so high; the heady feeling of disorientation that lingers at the denouement, a heightened sensitivity to love and death alike, recalls not only the Grimms but also D. M. Thomas's psychoanalytic fable about the Holocaust, ''The White Hotel,'' that is pointedly Rita and Peter's shared reading.
Nothing in ''Prelude to a Kiss'' is as simple as the author makes it look. While Act I recounts the courtship, marriage and Caribbean honeymoon of Peter and Rita in the hip terms of contemporary, Manhattan-dry romantic comedy, the laughs never deflate the passion of lovers who are not joking when they exchange sentiments like ''I would really, really like to see you with all your clothes off and stuff like that.'' Meanwhile, the baroque storyteller's diction of Peter's narration - ''That night everything was miraculously restored,'' goes one typical line -helps prepare the audience for its own leap into fantastical plot twists that are no less enchanting for taking place in such prosaic settings as Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and are no less moving for involving such surreal events as a chaste heterosexual love affair between two men.
By the time the laughter subsides, at least temporarily, in Act II, ''Prelude to a Kiss'' has deftly locked its audience with its characters into what Peter describes as ''one of those dreams in which you keep telling yourself 'Hang on!' '' because you know that sooner or later you will have to wake up. And so you do. But Mr. Lucas's revivifying dream of love, as beautiful as it is miraculous in these precarious nights, hangs on.