For Richer or Poorer, In Shades of Gray

The third production of the Theatre for a New Audience’s (“TFANA”) first season in its new Brooklyn home, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is the rarely produced The Killer by Eugène Ionesco as translated by Michael Feingold.  The first two and a half acts of this production are marvelous.  Director Darko Tresnjak has purposed his cast to be alternately ordinary and menacing.  They come together to portray a society that, although originally written in 1957, seems frighteningly like our own -- loud, intrusive, ill-mannered, and everyone has ADD.  There are the haves (who usually live in Radiant City, a climate- and municipally-controlled neighborhood with one little problem:  a serial killer) and the have nots, the majority, who live in a dull part of town best known for damp, chilly homes and gray skies, buildings, streets, sidewalks, people.  This dank majority is represented by Ionesco’s oft-used everyman, Berenger.  He is us, he expresses all his thoughts aloud whether there’s someone else to hear them or not.  In the latter part of the play he frequently addresses us directly as if he acknowledges there’s no one else around to hear him.  And we respond.  Even in the painfully over-long third act, when he walks slowly on a turntable and says he feels like he’s “walking in place,” we dutifully laugh.

Michael Shannon as Berenger and Robert Stanton as the Architect.  Photo credit Gerry Goodstein.

This Berenger is played by the extraordinary Michael Shannon, whose face moves from angled to soft and back, looking like everyone then only himself, as his voice mutters down and shrieks upward.  A perfect “everyman,” he gazes about the stage, talks to himself, to The Municipal Architect (a finely repressed performance by Robert Stanton), and falls immediately in love with the Architect’s secretary Dennie as she quits the protection of the Municipality and immediately falls victim to the serial killer.

Kristine Nielsen is hilarious and powerful in her two roles: the first as Berenger’s busybody concierge, who sweeps the gray dust constantly, knows everybody’s business, and gets upset to learn there are things she does not know.  In the vibrant beginning of the third act, she switches roles to become Ma Piper, a politician surreptitiously running a grass roots campaign for change.  Her change would be to change the names of things so as to not change the status quo at all, but "free soup for all."  Ms. Nielsen knows how to run a rally.  She has a following of geese whom we can hear offstage, and eventually her human followers will goosestep. 

Kristine Nielsen as the Concierge.  Photo credit Gerry Goodstein

Mr. Tresnjak’s production engages the audience physically as well as emotionally.   Characters (citizens) surreptitiously pass out fliers for Ma Piper’s political rally, and when the police come and beat citizens, said citizens reach out to the audience, even holding the hands of some, looking for comfort and support they will never receive.  The space, a thrust with audience closely surrounding three sides on the same level as the stage, with shallow balconies wrapped around the second and third levels, is intimate without seeming small, and Mr. Tresnjak and the designers have created a remarkable reproduction of the playing area Ionesco apparently described minutely in his stage directions.

Berenger, never at ease,always full of repressed energy.  Photo credit Gerry Goodstein.

Mr. Tresnjak directs his actors in a naturalistic style in an absurdist play, but for one actor, who could be from the Grand Guignol, he is so heavily made up and caricature-like.  Paul Sparks’ performance as Edward, who may or may not be a killer, is obvious, out of synch, off-key.  It jars. Until the second half of the last act, it was my least favorite part of the play.

Berenger, thinking he has discovered a clue to the identity of the serial killer who haunts the only beautiful place available for people to live, heads toward the police station. He gets caught in a effectively realized traffic jam, instructs lost people to talk to the policeman, who beats them. Berenger tries to interfere in police beatings only to be beaten himself.  When the traffic jam clears, he is alone on the stage, walking past dusk and twilight into night on a lonely road leading, we hope, to the police station, which apparently closes overnight. He walks on turntables so gets nowhere. He finally comes upon a man who stands in the shadows, a man who does not speak but sometimes laughs, and once or twice shrugs. Berenger asks him questions, accuses him of being The Killer, interrogates him, tries to psychoanalyze him all the while revealing his own reasons to kill, which he clearly suppresses. This goes on for about 25 minutes that feel like 45.  It starts off almost intriguing, but becomes tedious because it goes nowhere very slowly. Sometimes playwrights are wrong about their own work  ̶  Brecht considered his characters to be symbolic of issues, and not real people at all, but any actor can tell you that Brechtian characters are solid, three-dimensional creatures.  Ionesco may be wrong about this extremely lengthy meandering and hopelessly lost ending to an otherwise fascinating and funny piece of theatre. Because the second part of the last act runs the play to well over three hours with a disappointing ending, I can firmly place The Killer into the file of plays I need never see again.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, wondering how the play reads….

Durang + Chekhov + Disney = Laughter

Happy April.  Still pretty chilly, but I can offer some hope:  My cats are shedding like crazy, so the cold weather is almost behind us. 

It’s been quite a week.  My friends and I have seen three plays over eight days and all of them provided fascinating, funny, and/or thought-provoking evenings in the theatre.  I’ll go chronologically and start with Christopher Durang’s new play on Broadway:  Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at The Golden Theatre. 

Naturally I have a gripe:  When will audiences stop applauding just because a movie or television star shows up on the stage?  It’s their job to show up.  OK, I’m over it.  Until next time.

In Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Durang speaks to the discomfort of growing older in times unfriendly to society’s elders.  The first three named characters of the title are doing just that — the last won’t age for quite some time, and that contrast is telling.  Happily, it tells in a very funny manner.

The scene is a charming rural home in Bucks County.  Two 50-something siblings, Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen), don’t do much of anything these days in the family home, which is paid for by their sister Masha, a Movie Star.  Their professor parents named the children (even the adopted daughter Sonia) after characters in Chekhov plays.  Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is Durang’s mash-up of Chekhov plays in modern times with mod.cons.,* and just as my friend Horvendile predicted, it gets funnier and funnier, hits its pathos of sad and romantic and sweet, and ends (relatively) happily.  The first twenty minutes notwithstanding, this old broad found the play delightful and recommends it despite being uncertain about the Chekhovian themes — I recognized and enjoyed them (probably not all), but cannot be sure if these were extra layers for people who got them, or if the Chekhovian novices won’t get the play at all.  I would hope and wish all theatregoers get the Chekhov, but hope is pretty slim (pickings) in the 21^st century.

 

Sonia and Vanya and Masha

Mr. Durang pushes his assumptions a bit more:  The house cleaner is named Cassandra, and she comes in with a buzzing energy warning everyone of bad things to come connected with various words or names of unknown persons, sometimes sounds that don’t resolve themselves into names until later.  Shalita Grant is a whirlwind, funny if often incomprehensible in the role. 

Masha the Movie Star (Sigourney Weaver) has been advised by her young assistant (who is not a financial advisor) to sell the parental home where Vanya and Sonia have lived their entire lives, much of which was devoted to caring for their aging and demented parents.  Masha was off making the money to pay for the care of the parents, the house, and her otherwise unemployed siblings.  She suffered no hardship doing so — she’s a movie star, after all.  Masha is, dare I say it, aging and not getting cast in the juicy roles (with their associated pay levels) as she used to, so she worries about her future like anyone of her age.  Apparently the reason for her visit is to tell her siblings that they’re going to have to find somewhere else to live.

What ensues is an emotional roller coaster of a houseparty filled with odd and discordant creatures together for the weekend.  Happily one evening is devoted to a costume party being held by a neighbor down the street.  Vanya and Sonia, who live there full time, do not know this neighbor, but Masha the Movie Star was invited, and she’s arranged costumes for her siblings that support her own choice — to go as Snow White, with her handsome boy toy Spike dressed as her Prince Charming.

Masha, in constant need of reassurance, insists her siblings go as her dwarves.  Vanya of course acquiesces, but this is too much for Sonia to bear, and she goes to get her own costume.  She agrees to go as the wicked queen.  Ah, but which wicked queen?  The scene is set for Ms. Nielsen's Sonia to do one helluva Maggie Smith impression, and wear a fabulous dress.

Spike loves everybody and invites a stranger to join them, a young girl visiting her aunt and uncle next door.  She’s an aspiring actress and her name is … you guessed it: Nina.  Now we have a house of mismatched siblings, a boy toy, a psychic housekeeper, and the nemesis to all aging movie stars, a ”Nina.”

The imperfection:  The first 20 minutes were rather excruciating, as Kristine Nielsen’s Sonia tried too hard to fit someone’s view of a slightly disturbed person.  Even Mr. Hyde Pierce, who is an absolute genius, couldn’t pull Ms. Nielsen into Vanya’s playing space.  Considering Kristine Nielsen’s priceless performance for the rest of the play, I think it’s fair to blame that opening misstep on the director, Nicholas Martin.  The balance of the characters’ universe was fake in the opening.  It began to correct itself when Ms. Weaver showed up as Movie Star sister Masha.  (No, I am not repeating myself. Masha is never merely Masha.  She is always the Movie Star.)

 

Spike and Sonia and Masha and Nina and Vanya

Director Martin let Ms. Nielsen live her character in relation to Ms. Weaver’s character and Mr. Hyde Pierce’s for the rest of the play.  Ms. Nielsen is splendid, regal, adorable, and hilarious.  Unfortunately Ms. Weaver is not in the same class as the actors playing her siblings.  She tries very hard, but this is not her medium.  In some ways, you’d think Mr. Durang wrote this role for her, it seems to fit her so well.  But no matter her history with the playwright, she lacks absurdist skills on stage.  Mr. Hyde Pierce’s naturalism is a great foil for his sisters, but he and Ms. Nielsen show up Ms. Weaver without even trying.

Christopher Durang is writing for his own generation and we appreciate his voice.  It is, after all, our voice.  Just funnier.  When Mr. Hyde Pierce’s calm and calming demeanor cracks, he speaks with thousands of voices about our lost comforts and our discomfort with the ease and speed and shallowness of those mod.cons.  Once this play starts moving, it runs, it glides, it flies, it bounces and barely rests for laughs.

Billy Magnusson’s Spike is endlessly hilarious as the hunk of a Boy Toy who accompanies Masha back to the old homestead.  Spike likes to touch people intimately, he likes to take off his clothes, he likes to talk, and he can multitask on his smartphone, and he almost got called back for a part in the sequel to Entourage.  He is very fit.  He really likes stripping.  When Masha wants him to put his clothes back on because she’s jealous of Nina (you remember Nina, a sweet young thing visiting her aunt and uncle next door, played quirkily by Genevieve Angelson), she advises him to do a reverse strip.  Which he does rather literally, to everyone’s consternation — except Vanya, who sits down to enjoy the show.

It’s funny, during an evening in costume for a party, the siblings disguised as other people (or fictional characters) come closer to the truth of who they are than they do when dressed as themselves. Next morning, we get a play within a play, the truth will out, and Vanya’s magnificent rant that is totally comprehensible to people of a certain age. I felt his pain item by item.  And who knew about Tommy Kirk!  Important to note is that I understood every word he said despite his rage and railing, but did not understand about half of what Shalita Grant as Cassandra said.  I hope she learns from him.

Naturally we end up listening to the Beatles with the siblings, which makes everybody happy.  Other technical matters:  I want to live in David Korins’s beautiful warm set.  I would and/or have lived in the perfect costumes by Emily Rebholz, and the lighting design by Justin Townsend was just right.

It must be noted that we continued laughing even after the play was over as we fought our way out of the theatre onto the very crowded street.  Sweet.  The only thing wrong with Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is that Kristine Nielsen’s name comes after the title instead of above it.

*Mod.cons is an old real estate term in ads for residences, meaning "modern conveniences."  That originally meant things like running hot water, a bathroom inside the apartment as opposed to down the hall and shared with strangers.  Now it means smartphones and PDAs and tweets and constant yet meaningless communication and multi-tasking.

~ Molly Matera, logging off.  I have more theatre to tell you about, but I need to sleep on those reviews.