Two at Second Stage

In the past couple months, I’ve seen two plays at the Second Stage Theater Company:  Mary Page Marlowe and Straight White Men.  Both were interesting, by and large well-acted, yet neither fully succeeded, for different reasons.

In Mary Page Marlowe, deep character development with no end but death was made more interesting by having multiple actors playing the eponymous woman at various ages — and not in chronological order.  By and by we saw her life, one scene after another adding to our understanding, just not in order so that, perhaps, we could understand her better than people who knew her all her life — in order.  And since it’s so very well done, it almost worked.

Straight White Men, however, is flawed. Again, interesting character relationships, but to no resolution.  Is this why the playwright/director/producer decided to blame it on the audience during the pre-show by blasting electronic percussion at an offensively high decibel level, then making a theatre curtain out of a glitter ball to flash strobe lights at the audience?  At least last year’s exceedingly unpleasant production of 1984 forewarned the audience that there’d be migraine-inducing effects.  But the audience of Straight White Men was assured that they were being abused to make a point:  That some LBGTW+, as explained by two pointless characters, often felt as uncomfortable as the audience did just by being in non-LGBTW+ society.  The relief at the end of that 30-odd minutes was so great we were bound to be glad of the play, right?  Talk about hitting the audience over the head with a baseball bat to send a message. Which, by the way, does not appear to be the point of the play at all.

Mary Page Marlowe by Tracy Letts, directed by Lila Neugebauer.  Hereafter “MPM.”

MPM was largely about one woman’s life of not dealing with her alcohol and sex addictions.  We first meet her as her first marriage is coming apart.  It takes a while, with this not chronological play, to learn something about why.  When we meet her mother (passionately brittle work by Grace Gummer) and father (sympathetically portrayed by Nick Dillenburg), we feel the gap between these young marrieds just after WWII.  When we meet the mother again distancing herself from her 12-year-old daughter with alcohol and a sharp tongue, we see the beginning of Mary’s rugged road.

Mary is played by six excellent actors:

·         Mia Sinclair Jenness at the age of 12

·         Emma Geer at the age of 19

·         Tatiana Maslany at the ages of 27 and 36

·         Susan Pourfar in her 40s

·         Kellie Overbey at 50

·         And Blair Brown in her 60s-70s.

Geer and Brown were the only Marys who got to smile.  The 19-year-old (Ms. Geer) in hope of a different life from that of her mother, and Ms. Brown at having made it through to sobriety and her third and favorite husband, Andy, sweetly played by Brian Kerwin.

·         Tatiana Maslany is so good that her lack of theatrical experience was negligible.  Already broken, her Mary is tough, aloof, and protective.

·       Susan Pourfar is a New York actor I have followed for some time, from a far off Broadway production of Turn of the Screw, to Tribes and most recently Mary Jane at New York Theatre Workshop.  She never disappoints. Here her Intensity disguises her pain and perplexity.

 

Kaylie Carter, Ryan Foust, and Susan Pourfar as Mary Page Marlowe

·         The harshest scene in the play and probably in Mary Page Marlowe’s life, was the aftermath of a particularly dreadful time when Mary hit rock bottom, presumably precipitating the end of her second marriage.  Kellie Overbey is devastating, first in her quiet acceptance of her guilt and just deserts, and finally in her fury.  Her husband, very well played by David Aaron Baker, cannot deal with this Mary and his floundering marriage.

·         Blair Brown’s Mary, having survived her life and three marriages, is the only Mary with a real smile. 

·         Kayli Carter is excellent as MPM’s daughter Wendy, a put-upon (and she really is!) teenager and a concerned young adult losing patience with her alcoholic mother. 

All in all, MPM offers good direction, good acting, good design, and a just slightly off script by the always interesting Mr. Letts.

Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Hereafter “SWM.”

The Premise:  The father, Ed, has his grown boys over for the Christmas holidays, harking back to the days of the boys’ youth, while their mother was still alive. 

Entertaining as SWM sometimes was, with some very nice ensemble work and an excellent scenic design by Todd Rosenthal, it didn’t seem to know where it was going.  Witness the pre-show, which we were told was part of the play.

The Players:

·         Armie Hammer is the youngest brother, Drew.  He is tall and handsome and OK, but this actor’s lack of theatrical experience shows.  Without an editor to cut away, Mr. Hammer did not flow from one scene to the next, even though the play, unlike Mary Page Marlowe, was in chronological order.  Not that he made mistakes, or if he did I was unaware.  Unfortunately, he was not alive on stage.

·         Josh Charles is excellent as middle brother Jake, unctuous to cruel, living in the moment as well as in the past, frequently “fighting” with his younger brother Drew. 

·         Paul Schneider as the eldest brother Matt was quietly full of surprises and quite marvelous. I am not familiar with this subtle actor’s work but will be paying attention in future.

·         Stephen Payne as Ed, the father, seemed a little uncertain of his lines early on (as the third actor to play this role in rehearsal and previews), but strengthened as the evening wore on. Mind you, his final scene was quite unbelievable, but that’s the fault of the writer, not the actor.

 

Payne, Charles, Hammer, Schneider.  Photo by Sara Krulwich.

Matt is presently underemployed and living with the father, who is happy to have his company.  While the others leave their messes behind, Matt cleans up after everyone.  He says more than once, “I just want to be helpful.”  That he does a great deal of work to make everyone else comfortable, things his mother would have been doing had she been alive, was barely noticed and not meaningful to his brothers or even his father.  This of course is insulting to the boys’ mother, and all mothers.  Matt’s brothers wonder why, with his brains and college degrees, he’s not doing more with his life.  They don’t get him at all.  He is not behaving like their notion of a privileged straight white male.

Strong relationships of a lifetime between the brothers are powerful and hilarious.  If one says something unforgivable and others leave the room, somehow they come back to dance it off in delightful choreography by Faye Driscoll.  After all, family is family and it seems they’ll always get along in the end.  Until they don’t and the ‘different’ one, with unaccustomed ideas and conclusions, is left out in the cold.  These three sons have no resemblance to “My Three Sons” of 1960s television. 

By the end it seemed to me that the play had moved on to gender issues.  Matt started being what he considered truly useful when the mother died, and he took care of the youngest brother the way the mother would have — talked him down from hysteria, encouraged him to take a shower (you’ll feel better) and then to have a sandwich (ditto).  Throughout Matt played the mother’s role of feeding the men and cleaning up after them.  Her loss, which clearly affected each man, made Matt step into her place.  And none of the other men in the family had any respect for what he was doing — to them Matt had become a loser if he lacked ambition and didn’t use his intelligence and training to do something “bigger.”

Since that was the most interesting thing to come out of the play, I do not understand why the writer and director decided to disguise this by implying in the obnoxious pre-show that the play was about LGBTQ+ issues and punishing the (largely white) audience with overly loud electronic muzak and glaring strobe lights. 

Theatre and politics go together, but this pairing ended in a nasty divorce.

Note regarding a truly annoying and unfair trend in Playbills:  In the (not so distant) past, the cast list was in order of the actors’ appearances, making it easier for the audience to figure out who played what if they didn’t already recognize the players.  Lately the listing has been alphabetical by the performer’s last name, which means that if you didn’t already know the actor’s name, you won’t learn it from the program.  For instance, in MPM, there are six men in the cast.  One male character had a full name listed, so was easily identifiable as the father of the main character.  All other male character names showed just a first name, so if you missed a mention from the stage in each man’s sole appearance, you were out of luck.  I recognized Brian Kerwin as MPM’s third husband, therefore spotted him in the program as “Andy.”  For the first two I have no clue, and there were three non-husband male characters.  If we’re not identifying characters by “married lover” or “guy at the dry cleaners” in the character list, how can we know the actor name?  Until Playbill goes back to listing characters in order of their appearance so we can figure out those actors we don’t already recognize, I will continue to complain about this to all and sundry.

It’s been a while since Molly spoke her mind.  I will try to catch up this summer, as I did last summer, and fill you in on theatre-going not mentioned since April (!) of this year.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to search for scraps of paper on which she scribbled her thoughts about other plays….

The Elements of "Orange Julius"

Last Wednesday night, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater & Page 73 presented the New York Premiere of “Orange Julius” by Basil Kreimendahl as directed by Dustin Wills.

At the end of 90 minutes of fine acting by the small cast on the compact stage, I asked myself, “What was that play about?” 

“Orange Julius” has many elements.

The five-person cast was fabulous, particularly Stephen Payne as Julius and Mary Testa as his long-suffering wife France — I do not recall ever hearing her name, but that was her name according to the program.  Of course, it was his name that was important:  Naming a Vietnam vet “Julius” allowed him to make a joke about Orange Julius while linking his name with Agent Orange.

Mr. Payne and Ms. Testa played with utter naturalness, creating organically grown and shaped and developed characters in beautifully textured performances.

Their children were called “Nut” (played by Jess Barbagallo) and “Crimp” ( played by Irene Sofia Lucio).  The first time we see her she’s crimping her hair and threatening to crimp that of her little sister.  These two have a lovely sibling rivalry, taunting, teasing, helping one another.  A real relationship on paper, although a real connection between Mr. Barbagallo and Ms Lucio seemed lacking. 

 

In rehearsal:  Stephen Payne and Jess Barbagallo (Photo Credit:  Bruce Cohen)

The play takes place in the family garage, which sometimes seems to play a living room, sometimes a car, and, when the garage door is open, Vietnam.  Kate Noll’s set design was simple and clear, evoking a time, an economic class, a trap.

Montana Levi Blanco’s costume design was excellent — every person was wearing clothes befitting the character. That’s good costume design, to be essentially unnoticed.  The small space was well lit by Barbara Samuels and the sound by Palmer Hefferan was effective.  Director Dustin Wills’ staging used the tight quarters to excellent advantage.

The play begins in the 1980s, told in flashbacks by an ever-present onstage narrator — Nut — who talks way too much and is not quite reliable.  She — or he — is earnest, but memory is not fact, as noted when Nut says he was 7, 9, or 8.  Later she was 12, or 10 or 13. 

Nut is of small stature.  While referred to throughout as a girl, a daughter, a sister, Nut is played by a male.  Nut speaks of wanting to go through a past life regression, to the audience, and to his mother when still pre-pubescent.  Is this play Nut’s past life regression?  The confusion is not clearly settled (perhaps not for Nut either), even when Nut’s older sister offers him/her a training bra.  Nut at some point was a girl, but enters the Vietnam scene clearly as a male. 

Nut is simultaneously engaging and annoying.  Sister “Crimp” is sometimes mean or angry, always the epitome of a big sister bestowing wisdom and love on her younger sister, Nut.  At least one character is missing, a brother referenced in several scenes but never seen.  Is he dead?  Is he in a hippie commune feuding with his Vietnam vet father?  There’s a story left untold.  Not every story need be told, yet the missing brother nagged at me and held my interest longer than Nut did.  Because Nut is telling the story, it’s an awful lot about him/her when it is Julius and Mary who are the most interesting characters.

Back to my original question:  What is this play about?  What point is playwright Kreimendahl trying to make?

ەThe effect of war on the next generation?

ەThe aftermath of science used for evil (i.e., Agent Orange)?

Possible fact:  Julius went to war, was attacked by American military industrial complex and fatally poisoned with Agent Orange.  It was vile from the very beginning and it took decades to kill, but kill it did, via multiple cancers.

Not quite possible fact:  Nut says that in Vietnam, a girl was born the same day he was and her father too had been poisoned with Agent Orange.  The Vietnamese father was dead and the girl was born with bulging eyes that could never close. 

Is that true?  How could Nut know that?  We only know what Nut tells us, shows us, but we readily believe that Julius was poisoned with Agent Orange and died a slow death psychologically and physically.  Therefore, should it not follow that we believe that a girl was born in Vietnam the same day Nut was, with a birth defect, possibly connected to the poisoning of her father with Agent Orange.

ەIs the play about the nature of Self?  Of Truth?

 

In rehearsal:  Director Dustin Wills and Ruy Iskandar (Photo Credit: Bruce Cohen)

There are many flashbacks to Vietnam played beyond the open garage door with Julius and the angry foulmouthed soldier “Ol’ Boy” (only named in the program), well played by Ruy Iskandar. Julius and “Ol Boy” are there, but so is “Nut.”  Or at least the actor is.  Was his “past life” self there, is he playing someone else, is he playing his father?  But Julius was in the same scenes.  It’s not that they weren’t good compact little scenes.  It’s that they didn’t make much sense as a part of the whole.  Is this Nut in his memories of another life?  Has this character in Vietnam anything to do with Nut?  Are any of Nut’s memories reliable? 

An old television is on a worktable in the garage.  It is often on through the play, showing old films and television programs and a lot of “Platoon.”  I do not have clear memories of that film, just the scenes repeatedly shown in movies about war movies.  An audience cannot be expected to remember the film, and yet I think much of it was re-enacted in the Vietnam flashbacks, so what was the story of Julius and why was Nut re-enacting “Platoon?”

 

In rehearsal:  Irene Sofia Lucio and Mary Testa (Photo Credit: Bruce Cohen)

Meanwhile, Nut’s sister grows up to be a nurse who is defecated on by a patient she was turning to prevent bedsores.  While this was clearly not on purpose, still, this is what she thinks her life is, being “dumped” on. She is bitter.  Her choices seem to be based on what she knows she can do (take care of sick people) but which do not please her.  She tried to help her mother care for her father, but France wouldn’t always allow it.  France needs help and cries out for it, but does not accept it from her children.  Ms. Testa’s pain is heartbreaking. 

It’s difficult to know over what time period the episodic play takes place:  mostly in the 1980s, although once Nut says it’s 2004.  There are some touching moments, some funny ones, some sad ones. Late in the play, and presumably in time, France tries to feed her husband baby food, which may be all that he can stomach.  He pushes the spoon away, makes a mess as a child would, and pushes France’s hand away.  He then gently clasps her wrist.  He is still Julius, her husband.  The moment is brief, but memorable.  Julius is broken, supported by his family.  He is angry, he is in pain, he has terrible memories.  France is cracking under the strain but holds the family together no matter what.  Sister “Crimp” traveled in and out, seemingly always there until we’re told she lived in another part of the country.  At some time or another.  Time matters.

Nut appears to have been transgender in a time that would not be forgiving or understanding.  That issue, however, comes off as a sidebar, a distraction from the real story of Julius & France.  If the play is supposed to be about Nut discovering herself as male, why isn’t that the story?  Why not tell Julius’ story with a son?  We don’t know why Nut is telling us all this, and since she or he isn’t a reliable narrator, we may never know.

All in all, I liked everything about the production except the play, because the playwright could not make up his mind as to what it was about.  Many interesting elements, interesting moments, interesting characters. But too many elements.  It was a surprisingly long 90 minutes.

~ Molly Matera