The Happiest Medium » Geoffrey Paddy Johnson

Almost A Genius (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:17:25 +0000

Mental disorder is a prickly theme for a comedian, at once courting a humane sympathetic response all but extinguishing of levity, while summoning a degraded, inhumane call for ridicule – an entirely viler form of laughter. As a chosen topic it is demanding, requiring skillful handling, but there are some who seem qualified to do so, much the way there are some who can juggle chainsaws. Maria Wojciechowski is one of those artful jugglers. In her self authored comedic monologue, Almost A Genius, playing at this year’s Frigid Festival, she offers an account of her fairly recent diagnosis as a bi-polar personality. A devastating label to be handed at any stage of one’s life, with presently no known “cure”, the knowledge carries a heavy burden of responsibility. It provides, however, a framework with which to look back on past experiences and reappraise them. It seems Wojciechowski is presently at this point in her young life, but it doesn’t stop her from finding comedy in reflection. And perhaps it opens up understanding in larger, freer ways.

Witness, for instance, her opening act here as slowly, painfully almost, she inches from behind a curtain wearing a head-to-toe banana suit, her face a riven mask of angst. She closes on the microphone and haltingly commences in a cringing voice a sequence of bad to very bad banana puns and humorisms. It’s agonizing. And darkly, deeply funny. Everything is up for the cut: the performer, the audience, humor itself, and the banana – most maligned of fruits. This is clever stuff. Mercifully the lights go down, the banana suit comes off, and she stands before us as herself, launching into the story of her recent real life diagnosis. She has a soft, gentle voice and a slight and graceful physical presence. There is something mild and vulnerable about her, altogether at odds with the evident sharpness of her intelligence and the gritty humor she conjures in this clear-eyed, slightly self-mocking account of her harsh situation.

Punctuating her affecting confessional monologue are a series of sketches and performances that crank up the laugh factor and deepen the investigation. Away from herself, in character, she is a bold and brassy performer, committed to her creations with a vitality that is almost scary – that banana is really quite alarming. We get some singing, some dancing, and a bunch of impersonations shedding various degrees of light on her personal story – some hilariously on point (an earnest nun singing How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?) – and some more vaguely so (a chatty Whitechapel prostitute who quips her way through a near fatal encounter with Jack the Ripper). Breezily she moves from act to act, effortlessly shifting gears, but the break in continuity and character sometimes damages the rhythm of the whole, and the proximity between scathing take-downs and heartfelt confession is an awkward one. What are we to make, for example, of her plaintive pronouncement concerning a cherished family pet -”sometimes I wonder if I loved that dog more than some of my family”? Does she mean it, or is she being funny again, sending up the trite sadness of the situation? Both, most likely. And really that’s the fine steel hook she can catch you with in this piece. She can use the comforting language familiar to support groups in a way that plays at once as sincere and as ridiculous. Many will be lulled by her soft ingenuous-seeming voice, the tender reality of her plight, but this is only half the story. Even though there are some broadly comical moments few could resist, by and large she’s a sly one.

With direction by Natalie Sullivan Shipman, as a piece it could use a little tightening up to improve pace, a little polish, perhaps even a little squaring up as to where the humor is contained and the real self prevails. But that might be tampering with a rare and delicate concoction from a distinctive performer. In its current form Wojciechowski has given us something already suffused with a vivid comedic sensibility and a brave creative reach. It’s almost a work of genius.

~~~
Almost A Genius
Directed by: Natalie Sullivan

Remaining Performance:
Mar 07, 5:30PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 0 h 45 min
Price: $10.00 – $15.00
Seating: General Admission

UNDER St Marks
94 St Marks Place
New York , New York 10009
1st Ave and Ave A

Horse Trade Theater Group will present the 8th Annual FRIGID New York Festival at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4^th Street between 2^nd Avenue and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1^st Avenue and Avenue A) February 19-March 9. Tickets are available for purchase in advance at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling 212-868-4444.

Professor Ralph’s Loss Of Breath (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:33:54 +0000

Watching the performers in Playlab‘s production, Professor Ralph’s Loss of Breath, can shortly leave you in ready sympathy with the central character’s unlikely plight. The proceedings move at such a rate, the lines flow at such a pace, you’ll be virtually breathless trying to keep up. You needn’t fret unduly, however, if you miss a detail or an allusion (and you’ll probably miss a couple). You are fairly comfortably installed in a parallel cartoon universe where nothing matters too much because, well … because now look what’s happening! The two performers, Scott Michael Morales as Mr. Lackobreath, and Robert Berliner as Toby Dammit (and everybody else, come to that) charge through their scenes describing character, setting and action, alternately capering, prat-falling, breaking into song, dueling – verbally and physically – at a positively giddy tilt as the madcap tale unfolds. This could prove mere irksome slapstickery if it were not for the quality and commitment of the actors. Director Kevin P. Hale has struck a rich seam of gold in recruiting this duo, never mind it being some class of fool’s gold. Both project an instantaneous theatrical charisma, lavish with the vaudevillian understanding that only a high energy showmanship will do to keep this quirky puffball of a feature aloft. As a team they have a comedic aura just standing together: Berliner tall (and by more than just a head and shoulders), soignée and devious; Morales shrimpish, cocky, and gullible. Together they could almost put over anything, which is good as they’re asked to put over quite a lot. They’ll keep you watching even as your brain is wondering – how does anyone find the time to think this stuff up?

Robert Berliner as Toby Dammit. Photo by Paul Fox.

A downright silly storyline follows the frankly fatuous quest of Mr. Lackobreath to retrieve his, well, lost breath. This he has lost in the course of an argument with his new young wife. Of course. In rapid succession he becomes a fugitive from the police, the patient of a surgical quack, the quarry of a lustful virgin, the dupe of a convicted criminal, the subject of a public hanging, and the mark of Mephistopheles. And probably a few other things I forgot to mention. The rag-taggle tumult of events comes from the pen of Kevin P. Hale, who so brilliantly showed his puppet piece, Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment, at the 2012 Frigid festival. Hale claims to have adapted it from one “Professor” Ralph Phillips, a nineteenth-century American itinerant puppeteer, who translated it from a German language version which was itself an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, Loss of Breath, from 1832. Said Prof. Phillips allegedly, following his absinthe-soaked tour of Europe, repaired to Vermont where he established the puppetry department at one Eldritch College, in Glover, VT just before he died on Halloween night in 1911.(Searches on line for an Eldritch College in VT yield nothing, but there is in the virtual vicinity an Eldritch Institute promoting a fairly wicked tee-shirt design featuring an impression of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.) Invention, adaptation, or a combination thereof, the piece does hold much of the naive quality of story telling common to popular entertainments of the 18th and 19th centuries, being riddled with vulgar sexual innuendo while hollowly purporting to tell a tale of moral instruction (this one champions Perseverance). Poe’s original story is itself breathtakingly silly, but does bear the hallmarks of some of his distinctive phobic obsessions – guilt, suffocation, paralysis, live entombment – which are all nimbly presented here. A good smattering of olde world misogyny gets some play, coded and uncoded, and for those who would wish to delve a little deeper for subtext, themes of emasculation, loss of libido, impotence, homophilia, and auto-erotic strangulation might be induced to raise their curly heads. Then again, Punch and Judy was about a wife-beating, tyrannical felon. It’s all great fun. Inquiring minds might like to know more about Prof. Ralph, Eldritch College, and the ur-text of this creation, but it’s probably a safe bet to consider that Hale and the Playlab troupe are from that select type your grandma warned you about, carny folk. Providing you don’t believe a word of it, you’ll be fine.

Scott Michael Morales as Mr. Lackobreath photographer Paul Fox

More than fine, you’ll be highly entertained. Beneath all the tom foolery and apparent sham-ery is a cunning mind, rich in theatrical lore, and better, a beating heart of creative purpose.

~~~

Professor Ralph’s Loss Of Breath
Company: Playlab NYC
Directed by: Kevin P. Hale

Remaining Performance:
Mar 05, 7:05PM
Mar 08, 12:30PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 1 h 0 min
Price: $10.00 – $15.00
Seating: General Admission

The Kraine Theater
85 E. 4th Street
New York , New York 10003
2nd and 3rd Ave

Charlotte The Destroyer (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 17:53:05 +0000

Gretchen Knapp, Shawn Patrick Murphy, Megan O’Leary
(photo Credit: DFXDEN)

The idea behind Megan O’Leary‘s play Charlotte the Destroyer is at once intellectually brilliant and artistically fecund. An author of a series of successful children’s stories featuring the character of a a young girl, Charlotte, elects to write a novel in which her youthful star will grow up. She chooses to do so, however, at a point of singular mental fragility in her own life, and as her world slides out of control, her heroine evolves into a powerful agent of destruction in the process. The created character who overtakes the creator is, of course, a shadow tale that has been around since Pygmalion was found outside the Garden of Eden. But what a compelling twist O’Leary gives the story in this new suit of clothes.

The play opens on a truly squalid apartment interior, and you don’t need to have a PhD in psychology to know that all is not well in the world of the occupant. At the rear of the stage loom three large two dimensional storybook illustrations; a woman, a man, and a cat. Huddled amidst them is a live figure, ponytailed and knee-socked, still as a statue for the moment – the eponymous Charlotte (Gretchen Knapp). Already she is more real, larger than the frame that tries to contain her. In the foreground Charlotte’s creator and her boyfriend go at it in a bitter round of morning, post alcoholic dejection. Nothing, really, is working in these people’s lives and we are set up to wonder if, by story’s end, it ever will. Between bouts of sulky drinking and trenchant bickering the author works at her typewriter, and her creation takes the stage as the new story unfolds. Much as we could wish to escape the author’s bleak and bruised world, Charlotte’s new scenarios become only more horrible at every turn. Each novel episode burrows away at the author’s own plausibly repressed history, but only digs us deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. There is no way out for the writer and, indeed, for us. Charlotte proves to be a feelingless sociopath, infecting each moment with an uncomprehending cruelty even as her world rises up to abuse and victimize her. As jaggedly desperate as her creator is, the creation is even more alienating. The only reason you might wish to laugh here is because otherwise you would think to cry.

Like much that is designated dark comedy – and here the accent falls very gravely on the dark – Charlotte the Destroyer is almost entirely cerebral as an exercise, and distrustful of feeling. The writing repels empathy. And here is the rub for this production. In the dire battle of wills between author and creation, who is to prevail? As O’Leary herself demonstrates little to no sympathy for her characters, it is well nigh impossible for an audience to really care. Which sadly - in this otherwise excellent production - goes a long way to diminishing the overall impact.

Reprising their roles from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival of 2006, playwright Megan O’Leary takes the part of the sketchily named author character, and Gretchen Knapp that of Charlotte. Both are effective, Knapp - hosting more than a spoonful of whiskey in those girlish tones (another quietly thoughtful and startling detail) - especially absorbing as the wan faced, perverse destroyer. The production is by The Playhouse Creatures Theatre Company. Joseph W. Rodriguez, Emily Dahlke, Shawn Patrick Murphy, and Alex Carmine flesh out the cast, and all deliver under the watchful direction of Janet Bobcean. Some steely and assured theatre awaits; you’re sure to be appalled.

~~~

Charlotte the Destroyer
Company: Playhouse Creatures Theatre
Directed by: Anais Koivisto

Remaining Performance:
Feb 26, 7:05PM
Mar 03, 5:30PM
Mar 08, 2:05PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 0 h 55 min
Price: $10.00 – $16.00
Seating: General Admission

The Kraine Theater
85 E. 4th Street
New York , New York 10003
2nd and 3rd Ave

Something Wicked (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 17:20:51 +0000

Anaïs Koivisto’s Something Wicked, produced by the Everyday Inferno Theatre Company as part of this year’s Frigid New York Festival, consists almost entirely of original lines from Shakespeare‘s Macbeth, cropped and re-arranged in deconstructed collage form to explore, in a very modern way, the character and motivations of its notorious anti-heroine, Lady Macbeth. Academically of course, rivers of ink and storms of hot air have already been unleashed in this cause, so Koivisto’s contribution, for all its formal expressiveness and vibrancy, can only hope to stand some ground in an already crowded field. The alignment of character with fate is at the core of classical conceptions of tragedy but, however undeniably effective it is in art, it rankles with contemporary notions of personality development and redemption. Every generation has to find something of worth in the cultural inheritance of the previous in order to sustain an interest. Perhaps this is why the great villains of literature and history continue to demand our attention; we need to understand in a contemporary light what precisely made them tick.

Something Wicked commences at the instance of Lady Macbeth’s death. In the original play this momentous act occurs off stage and is merely a matter of report passed along to an already besieged and desperate Macbeth. Whatever the unsettling impact this unseen demise works on the imagination, for Koivisto it is an unsatisfactory way of finishing with the Lady. And so the action commences from this point and revolves entirely around the character, as she wakes to find herself in some otherworld, visited by the three Weird Sisters, who encircle her like tormenting Furies, recounting her deeds and conjuring scenes from her past. A weakened, bewildered soul, she observes her former steely self, black-eyed with murderous ambition, bloodthirsty in her speech, relentless in her provocation of her husband, and seems appalled. The original character’s abrupt shift from extreme ruthlessness to guilt-laden mental collapse is one of those undying academic topics of debate, but here Koivisto is unabashedly attempting to recast her in a more sympathetic light.

For the purpose the author has devised an ingenious re-ordering of the original lines, recited in over-lapping, echoing delivery by actors representing both the primary figures in the action, and the Lady herself (there are up to three separate Lady Macbeths on stage at any given time). Dark as it is, Macbeth is arguably one the Bard’s most linguistically rich poetic concoctions and Koivisto’s ear is sensitive to the meter and the music as she arranges one speech followed or over-taken by another. Music and movement seem close to the heart of this production. There is a sense that Koivisto, directing as well as adapting, is getting her actors’ movements to echo the rhythm of the line delivery, as if they are engaged in a formal dance of some complexity. This could be worked on to tighten up composition and co-ordination, but on a blank stage, with just rudimentary flat backdrops, it is a wonderful thing to watch when it flows.

A rich sense of theatricality is at play and Koivisto employs a bold pallet of effects. At one instant of heated drama the scene suddenly shifts from the Macbeth story to present four seated academic types all intoning opposing notions of just why Lady Macbeth behaves the way she does. It is a welcome eruption of comedy in an otherwise charged account, and the actors don’t miss a beat in the transition. Musical performances too are used to temper proceedings, but whilst they have a lyrical appeal, and one serves to present us with the strange sight of the thane and his wife engaged in a tango, they could be enfolded more smoothly into the action to prevent a drop in pace. The musicianship feels rather basic. In contrast to the production’s formal boldness, the visual style is minimal, but might have benefitted from a fresher approach. The preponderant insistence on black and red feels well worn, if not traditional. The actors are all on point and sound conversant with the Shakespearean language, but there are some moments of under projection, even in such a small auditorium.

“What’s done cannot be undone” is one of the lines frequently repeated here. It seems peculiarly relevant for Koivisto, as to whether she can successfully reveal a new part of her doomed, age old subject. She certainly succeeds in enhancing the tragic aura surrounding the Lady, and if tragedy, finally, is that which can ennoble humanity, then that’s saying much in regard to a figure most usually condemned to being one of theatre’s most notorious villainesses. Villainesses of course have always proven fascinating, and this original experiment in theatre proves no less so.

~~~
Something Wicked
Company: Anais Koivisto & Everyday Inferno Theatre Co.
Directed by: Anais Koivisto

Remaining Performance:
Feb 25, 8:40PM
Mar 01, 2:05PM
Mar 08, 8:25PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 1 h 0 min
Price: $14.00 – $16.00
Seating: General Admission

The Kraine Theater
85 E. 4th Street
New York , New York 10003
2nd and 3rd Ave

Petunia And Chicken (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 01:47:54 +0000

There’s something immediately audacious and comical about compressing a voluminous turn of the century literary oeuvre into a one hour performance piece. When said performance is delivered by just two actors, deploying only a hat and a scarf as props, the ante rises significantly. As does the challenge. Such is the project Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher, jointly the Animal Engine production company, set themselves in their show Petunia and Chicken, presently showing as part of the 2014 Frigid Festival at the Kraine Theater. Skillful performers both, trained clowns, they arrive at this year’s event with the accolade of having won last year’s Participants Pick Award for their joint authored show, The Vindlevoss Family Circus Spectacular!

Petunia and Chicken takes as inspiration Willa Cather‘s well regarded literary Prairie Trilogy – My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and Song of the Lark – wide reaching stories illuminating the experience of the agricultural peoples that settled the plain states at the latter end of the nineteenth century. The genius of Cather’s apparently simple narrative style is that it has roots in some of humanities darkest places. While ever respectful, Animal Engine address only surface Cather, mining the humor to be found in characters, tropes, and plot devices which – today – nearly all hold a whiff of nineteenth century corn about them. This is, after all, clowning, but clowning that wishes to breathe some of the finer air found in great literature. Funny, no?

Petunia and her family – father, mother, brother Ambrosz – are immigrants from Europe, looking to settle on cheap land holdings in Nebraska. Their’s is the make-it-rich dream of coming to America. “Chicken” Burden is an orphan – his parents victims perhaps of a similar dream – and grandson of the neighboring property owners. Whilst children, they meet and become fast friends and, as the years pass and parents succumb, shy lovers. Chicken wants adventure and experience, Petunia is dutiful and rooted. The familiarity of this story arc serves Brown and Muasher well, as their formal telling of it is original, imaginative, and at times startling. The writing is clever and there is evident ingenuity of editing and dramatization. We get some memorable invocations of landscape – an essential component of Cather’s world; waving fields of wheat, rhythmic sighing windmill sails, the ceaseless rise and fall of water pumps all mimed by the performers on a blank stage. Brown gives us a touching and hilarious impression of Chicken’s faithful canine companion, smushed face and hunched shoulders, as he tries to keep up with his restless young master. These moments are precious and vivid theater. But the necessary break-neck pace at which the whole thing has to unfold works sometimes to blur the sharpness of personation and gesture.

Additionally, if you overwhelm your central characters with cartoon surroundings and personalities, you shouldn’t be surprised if they partake of some of that cartoonism, and dramatic impact is depleted. So even as your story is building towards an inevitable climax, it is losing air, and the eventual pop is muffled – regardless of how heavy the inverted commas around that pop might be

in the first place. Melinda Jean Ferraraccio’s directing must take some blame here. It wants crispness. Clever and sharp is how to keep things aloft. There shouldn’t be room for the serviceable gesture or allusion, despite the speed of proceedings. First night opening issues aside, this reviewer felt the performance in need of some polish.

One feels Brown and Muasher, imaginative and energetic as they are, can find it. They are shrewd enough to turn the rudimentary lighting set-up they deploy into a moment of fun, when there’s some direct address to the lighting booth controller during the performance. Other than the lighting, they conjure everything else. And however jaded your outlook you’ll be rooting for them throughout. On evidence, Thursday night’s audience certainly were, and seemed utterly taken by them to wherever they traveled, narrative whiplash notwithstanding. Clowns, of course, can be gratuitous crowd-pleasers, but their durable notoriety resides not merely in this fun raising provocation, but ultimately in the canny ability to unsettle. This sweeping, romantic tale of settlers ultimately wants a little unsettling.

~~~

Petunia And Chicken
Inspired by the works of Willa Cather
Created and performed by Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher
Direction from Melinda Jean Ferraraccio

Remaining Performances:
Feb 24, 8:40PM
Mar 03, 10:15PM
Mar 06, 8:40PM
Mar 08, 3:40PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 1 h 0 min
Price: $10.00 – $15.00
Seating: General Admission

The Kraine Theater
85 E. 4th Street
New York , New York 10003
2nd and 3rd Ave
~~~

Silent At The Irish Arts Center

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:56:25 +0000

There’s not too much that’s quiet about Pat Kinevane’s performance in his self-authored, one man play, Silent, now playing at the Donaghy Theatre in the Irish Arts Center. This is a piece that has shown some legs since it’s development through 2010 and performances in 2011, when it won prizes at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Brighton’s Argus Angel Awards, and accolades around Ireland. Energized by an electrifying performance from Kinevane, and a richly theatrical dramatization from both performer/author and his director Jim Culleton, it’s not difficult to see why it works so successfully as fine entertainment with a dark twist.

It emerges against a background of contemporary Irish theatre works that show a marked inclination toward the dramatically dark comedy. Stifling social mores work hand in hand with smothering familial circumstances, producing situations so bad that – well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? In this bleak tale our narrator, Tino McGoldrig, a homeless wino on the Dublin streets, recounts his sorry history and the story of his tragic older brother, Pearse. Set in the present, as Tino tells it, there was a sustained small-town roughness, a narrow-mindedness to their upbringing in the picturesque town of Cobh, Co. Cork. We’re back in the world of Brinsley MacNamara’s Valley of the Squinting Windows, where the residents have little to do but shame and one-up each other, ever watchful for anything that might not conform to a coveted normalcy. Pearse, alas, is recognizably light in the loafers from an early age, and soon attracts the scorn and ridicule of his community. He is, however, surpassingly beautiful, and wins the attentions of a merchant seaman. Discovery and public disgrace follow soon after and from then on he is hounded, suffering threats of humiliation and physical violence at every turn. Young Tino observes all fretfully, but silently, happy in his own evasion of attention or accusation. Isolated and hectored, Pearse gives up in his teen years and commences a series of suicide attempts as coarsely comical as they are pitilessly unsuccessful. Stigma and shame attaches to the family and even though Tino struggles towards a blameless normal existence – marriage, and a child, and denial – guilt and depression overtake him and he succumbs to alcoholism and a downward spiral. He is thrown out of his home, debarred, and eventually institutionalized, ending up on the streets of the capital.

It’s baroque stuff, with a whiff of melodrama, but all retold in a caustic, unsentimental manner, swinging from the anecdotally ridiculous to the inflatedly operatic. The lost romance of the silent movie era is given some play – Tino and his father having been named in honor of Rudolf Valentino – and there are arresting sequences of old-school actorly projecting – smoldering dumb shows with opulent lighting effects and text placards. These passages are nicely foiled by Tino’s more natural, direct stage address, comprising elements of contemporary stand-up, satirical impersonation, and loquacious bar stool Blarney. Everything is punctuated by the recorded tinkle of a coin dropping into Tino’s pavement begging bowl, recalling us to the here and now, and Tino to his present predicament – the need to ‘perform’ for his supper.

Kinevane as Tino is mesmerizing, both to watch and to listen to. This is a performer as fully adept with traditions of physical theatre – mime, dance, voguing – as he is with vocal modulation – pitch, expression, mimicry. He even works in some audience interaction, relaxing the dramatic tension, just as easily as he can sharpen it, never losing control. This is a considerable asset, as in the final analysis, there is something over-long in the telling – a tendency to meander off on a riff that proves as compelling as the main narrative itself. If it’s possible for the teller to upstage his tale, then perhaps Kinevane is a bit guilty here. Tino’s life has been devoured by Pearse’s story, but Kinevane’s performance, in some measure, overwhelms his narrative. Whether you agree or not, it’s something to see.

In dramatic visualization, director and co-developer, Jim Culleton, displays insight and authority. Along with Kinevane, Culleton devised the lighting design. One wonderful scene – at a moment of high drama - deploys shadows thrown up on a backdrop as separate stage presences, heightening mood and tension. This high degree of imaginative thoughtfulness is consistent in Catherine Condell‘s simple, but supple costuming, and in the evocative sound design by Denis Clohessy. Taking a compelling lead from Kinevane, this condensed company have produced a work of elaborate theatricality, sounding a bold and refreshing note for theatre as theatre.

~~~

Silent

Written and Performed by Pat Kinevane

Directed by Jim Culleton

Composed and Sound Design by Denis Clohessy

Irish Arts Center / The Donaghy Theater553 W. 51st Street
New York, NY 10019
Located between 10th and 11th Avenues

in association with Georganne Aldrich Heller

September 6 – 23

Wednesday – Saturday | 8pm

Sunday | 3pm

Running Time: 80 minutes

Admission: $30 non-members / $24 members

Click Here for tickets

An Evening With Kirk Douglas (Fringe Festival 2012)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 16:02:38 +0000

Katherine Maughan‘s An Evening With Kirk Douglas opens on a modest, tidy motel suite, with a neatly made-up bed, a nightstand, and a backpack resting on a table. Enter Maisie Kingsley, a young wife celebrating her first anniversary with a road trip around northern California. Her hands are covered with blood. Lots of it – that garishly bright, glistening theatrical blood favored by make-up artists. Immediately there is tension. Maisie moves about restlessly in a state of shock. She wants something in her backpack, but is reluctant to touch anything with her gore drenched hands. A beat. She tries delicately picking at a pocket zip on the bag. Okay – now it’s funny. The phone begins to ring. Maisie’s eyes open wide with terror. The tension tightens as we witness her dilemma. Enter -thank goodness! – her husband, Walter. Without batting an eyelid he begins a discussion about answering the phone. The phone continues to sound shrilly, and your nerves begin to stretch, as you watch these two – presumably imperiled fugitives – show every sign of bungling their escape because of some thick-headed disagreement.

As an introductory scene that builds dramatic tension while playing on comical ridiculousness, these opening moments are truly a class act. It’s contemporary screwball with a nod in the direction of something darker. The humor is sustained, the scenario explained (weird and funny), as our protagonist couple try to come to terms with what they have done, and what they must do. While a body lies bleeding in their bathtub, the high drama of the situation is comically undercut by their frequent segues into petty irritable exchanges and inappropriate sentimental overtures. High-strung Maisie is hopelessly panic-prone and histrionic, and Walter contrarily hard-headed and calculating. Everything they have done thus far, around the scene of an accident, is exactly the wrong thing to have done. It’s a funny metaphor, but only a matter of time, you surmise, before Maisie deploys those blood-stained hands in an inadvisable manner. Which shortly she does in epic fashion, hysterical to observe. As played by Morgan Grace Jarrett (Maisie) and Winston Noel (Walter) this first part of Maughan’s two act play is clever and funny, wickedly so. It’s too bad everything it has going for it is let down by what follows.

Farcical as the first part was, we have removed to much further along the comedic scale, and foolishness, for the second act. We are in heaven, in the company of God, Jesus, and St. Peter, who are conducting a dull staff meeting regarding the day’s expected entrants at the Pearly Gates. It may be amusing to entertain the notion of these figures as broad 21st century types – God as an unimaginative authority figure with a soft spot for celebrities, Jesus as a responsibility-shy, feel-good slacker, and St. Peter as a put-upon, under-appreciated, make-do manager – but only mildly so. The day’s big arrival is going to be Kirk Douglas, which is exciting for God who has been trying to reel him in for some time now. Jesus meantime is grumbling about the present batch of his followers who find their way up here; they’re limited and boring. Heaven is presented as something like a less than spectacular, under-serviced holiday camp. Everything, however, is thrown out there merely for its humorous appeal, and nothing activates to drive along a plot, or even describe one. With a start-stop momentum, it’s a loose sequence of sketches, of variable impact, set in the same environment. Except for the fleeting appearance of Kirk Douglas – with allusions to the reason for his demise – it has hardly any connection to the previous act, holds nothing of its pedigree, and leaves a much weaker wake in its trail.

Too bad, as some of the actors – Brian Faas (in a class of his own as St. Peter), Austin Rye (Jesus), and Brandon Scott Jones (Caleb, a Jesus freak) – have something going here. The author’s looser writing, however, just goes nowhere. It’s not aided by Kerry McGuire‘s slack hand in the directing role, who might have contributed something with just a tighter blocking of her actors. The obvious unevenness between the two acts is problematic and partly spoils enjoyment of some promising comedic writing by the young Katherine Maughan.

~~~

An Evening With Kirk Douglas was part of the 2012 Fringe Festival.

Mahmoud – Selected As A Fringe Encore (Fringe Festival 2012)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:04:37 +0000

Iranian-Canadian actress Tara Grammy portrays three distinctive characters in her one-woman show, co-authored by director Tom Arthur Davis, Mahmoud. We see her as the titular Mahmoud, a Toronto-dwelling, Iranian ex-patriot taxi driver in his middle years; as Emanuelos, a gay Spanish immigrant working happily as a department store cologne salesman; and as Tara, a twelve year old Iranian-Canadian schoolgirl with aspirations to acting. Each character is richly invested with a clutch of mannerisms and a particular voice, stylizations which -while attention-grabbing – come perilously close to stereotypes. There’s something more than just a little cartoonish about Grammy’s turn as the rapid-speaking, gasp emitting young Tara, and her Emanuelos could cause Will & Grace‘s Jack McFarland to blush. There may be a political point being made here about westerners – they’re spoiled, shallow, and self-centered – but it’s a pretty broad one. Mahmoud, by contrast, an immigrant who fled Iran during the cultural revolution, is shown as friendly and engaging, with a moderately pitched voice. Even though he wants to talk relentlessly about how wonderful his former country is, and he’s no slouch when it comes to sounding off at other predatory drivers, he’s the soul of modesty. But it’s a comedy – isn’t it? – so go with it.

We’re in Toronto and it’s 2009. The television news media is focused on the protests and social upheaval surrounding forthcoming presidential elections in Iran. All of the characters are vaguely impacted, even Emanuelos who, it transpires, is dating a nice Iranian man (who just happens to be Mahmoud’s closeted nephew). The stories begin to draw together and broader themes of cultural displacement, immigration, racism, and homophobia come into focus under a wider banner of -’what price personal liberty?’ The writing in this regard is skillful and more subtle than the performances suggest. Time passes, things change. Tara gives up on the notion of ever being seen as anything other than Iranian. Emanuelos becomes engaged to his boyfriend, who returns to his country to “announce their plans.” As things continue to heat up in Tehran, the three characters encounter each other in telling exchanges. Tension mounts until the video-captured shooting of a young Iranian woman attending a rally is broadcast around the world; the Neda story. Various simmering issues in the lives of the three principals abruptly erupt with dramatic consequences. The comic vein the piece began in has been left well and truly behind, and the stereotypes melt into more recognizable flesh and blood individuals.

There has been method in Grammy’s broad impersonations after all. Commencing with almost two-dimensional types, the story closes in on the real individuals as the political, social realities of their lives close in on the characters themselves. The climax has a somewhat melodramatic, symbolic over-reach perhaps, but the story holds together and is deftly brought off. For all her enjoyment of comic overkill, Grammy is an agile and attractive performer. She proves disciplined and well timed, both in conducting the story’s narrative flow, and in her changes from one character to another. The performance is all the more praiseworthy for being enacted on the limited platform stage at Jimmy’s No. 43, with no curtain or props; just fluidly synchronized lighting (Jenna Koenig) and sound effects (Mike Conley). As co-author, director Tom Arthur Davis knows what he is looking for from her, and she delivers here handsomely.

Mahmoud is a winner of a 2012 FringeNYC Overall Excellence Award, and will be part of the Fringe Encore Series. Details about the encore performance are below:

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Mahmoud
Pandemic Theatre
Writer: Tara Grammy and Tom Arthur Davis
Director: Tom Arthur Davis, Consulting Director: Soheil Parsa, Assistant Director: Omar Hady
One Iranian actress, three characters: an Iranian engineer-cum-taxi driver, a fabulously gay Spaniard, and a pre-teen Iranian-Canadian girl. Their stories intertwine in unexpected ways in this personal and hilarious story. Learn more about Iranians, and maybe even yourself.
Huron Club. 9/22 at 8PM; 9/23 at 3PM; 9/25 at 8PM; 9/29 at 5PM; 9/30 at 5PM.
1h 0m
Solo Show Comedy

www.mahmoudtaxi.com

The FringeNYC Encore Series will present 19 “Best of The Festival” shows in rotating repertory at SoHo Playhouse and The Huron Club (both located at 15 Vandam Street between 6th Avenue & Varick) as well as at The Players Theater (115 MacDougal Street between Bleecker and Houston Streets). Tickets are $18, available at 212-691-1555 or www.SohoPlayhouse.com

Bang! The Curse of John Wilkes Booth (Fringe Festival 2012)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:21:14 +0000

Dressed in a dapper costume of 19th century clothing, with a drawn on mustache, Scott Baker addresses us in the opening section of his self-authored, one-man show, in the character of John Wilkes Booth, the pompous Shakespearean actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in a theatre in 1865. Of a distinguished acting family, an inveterate performer, Booth speaks in a hammy, stage pentameter which borrows heavily from the Bard, seeking to ennoble his murderous intentions with an eloquence that would prove less suspect, perhaps, on the boards of a 16th century play house. He glowers and fulminates, preens and pontificates in ways that make you despair of his Brutus, or his Hamlet. The tyrant must die! He brandishes a Bowie knife and his pistol – stagily turning the barrel on himself – before re-directing it, leaping to action, and killing the house lights with a shout of “bang!”

Bang! The Curse of John Wilkes Booth is divided in to two parts. Mopping off his mustaches with a handkerchief at the commencement of the second act, Baker shifts gears, engaging a more measured tone as he tells us of what first excited his interest in Booth as a subject for a monologue. Not only were all the elements of the story, with their own theatricality, so richly and historically in place (in a diary entry Booth actually recounted a sort of dress rehearsal of the planned assassination, like the scene we have just witnessed), but obscure parts of the tale persist. Parts that suggest that Booth did not die in an army-lead raid just days after the event, but escaped to settle in Texas where, years later, as a wealthy, married man, he allegedly died at his own hand. Claims for his survival are presented, details elaborated, conspiracy theories revisited, as gradually we discover in the telling – the dramatic persona of Booth having been discarded – that we are now in the hands of quite another theatrical animal; narrator Scott Baker. With stagey flourishes of his own – lame vaudeville style jokes, acts of prestidigitation, vocal atmospherics – Baker assumes a 21st century Boothian hamminess in his accounting. As the trail leads gradually toward increasingly outlandish claims, Baker’s delivery proves spot on. Following not one, but two enacted death-bed confessions, there is perhaps something inevitable about the introduction of a traveling sideshow and some mummified remains. Imagine (if you will) Jack Palance concluding a narrative, as drawing to a close, he intones haltingly, breathily, “believe it or not”, and you’ll catch something of the spirit.

It’s all very enjoyable, sharp and humorously self-deprecating at the same time. Baker’s narrative delivery makes wise use of past theatrical styles, weaving them together into a teasing game of revelation that diffuses factual data even as it presents it. A secret society? A sinister globe-embracing plot? A curse? Well, of course there’s a curse! Now listen closely … An elaborate game of smoke and mirrors history may well be, but there’s an admirably restrained use of contemporary effects here; just the deployment of some long-serving, cheap magic of yore – a good story and an entertaining speaker. Strange the potency.

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BANG! The Curse of John Wilkes Booth
The Drilling Company, Hamilton Clancy Producer
Writer: Scott Baker
Director: Richard Harden
One Actor! Thirty Roles! One Twisted Shocker! Verse, Song, Magic, Sideshow Antics and Stand-up Comedy! Discover how your History book lied to you about Lincoln, Booth and just about everybody else. And yes, there’s a mummy involved…
1h 20m   Local   Manhattan, New York
Vaudeville/Sideshow/Magic/Burlesque   Solo Show
Staycation: Ripped from the Headlines   In Someone Else’s Shoes
www.drillingcompany.org
VENUE #09: The Gene Frankel Theatre
Sat 11 @ 4  Fri 17 @ 7:15  Tue 21 @ 5:45  Wed 22 @ 2  Sat 25 @ 7

This show ran as part of Fringe Festival 2012 an is now closed.

Becoming Butch (Fringe Festival 2012)

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 05:24:14 +0000

Would anyone today contest the notion that growing up gay, as the youngest only son in a traditional white Catholic family in Queens during the seventies, would not be easy? Such is Vincent James Arcuri’s story, and in his one man, self-authored show, Becoming Butch, he delivers himself of it in an engaging comedic monologue. Vincent wasn’t one of those quietly gay boys (whoever they may be) but a real – shall we say? – screamer right from the checkered flag. There were three older sisters in the house and an atmosphere of femininity into which he fit right in. Until, that is – as a little boy who was supposed to do things “normal” little boys do – he didn’t. His father and uncles tried to wean him off Barbies and cheer leading and get him on to “harder” things, like baseball. At which his instinctual nature balked. At which Vincent sucked. It was the beginning of a fostered sense of inadequacy and self-rejection which many gay children experience, and prompted his prolonged stop-start campaign of becoming butch.

With so little in the way of external positive reinforcements available, is it any wonder he took an avid interest in the on-tap fantasy worlds television entertainment offered? Even here, however, perhaps something resistant and pugnacious was at work when he elected as his childhood role model Arnold Jackson, the character played by black actor Gary Coleman in Diff’rent Strokes. Arcuri dwells on the humorously inappropriate aspects of his youthful enthusiasms more than their psychological edge and import. In some measure those speak for themselves, as when he re-enacts a high school bullying scenario which abruptly shifts the tone and atmosphere of the narrative. It’s harsh and unsettling, devoid of the comic twist used to disarm the jibing critiques thrown his way by well-meaning, masculine relatives. Which speaks impressively of the degree of control Arcuri exercises over of his audience. Just how much of a “faggot” he really is occupies a huge part of his developing personality, and the trauma is suggested through recollections of incidents played more for laughs than for any claims of sympathy. Sympathy, the broader reach of this performance, is something young Vincent rarely finds for himself; not until fears, tears, and years later.

All the TV soap bubbles propel young Vincent toward a career as an actor. But even in this would-be-make-believe realm he is told he is unacceptable, too much a type as himself, too “gay” to find favor with casting directors. He takes speech lessons and tries sports in order to butch himself up. It’s arduous and all but ineffectual. The breakthrough, believe it or not, occurs when he falls in love. A shift begins that launches him into the greater world, or at least to L.A., where dreams really can come true (for actors).

In essence it’s not a story that is unfamiliar, certainly to gay people or anyone in touch with them. There’s something generic about it, its insistence on the ordinariness of the social environment, the family dynamic of tough, straight-man dad; ever-approving, doting mother; extended family of types. Nothing in his story – from his childhood fears, to his Catholic guilt, and West Hollywood run-ins – partakes of the unusual, the strange. Can this really be the case, or are we being served an account that has been tamed, pruned of thorns; a history divested of anything that might be deemed too queer? There’s something gratingly mainstream in its address. A projected dial graphic, like something from a TV game show, regularly clocks score ratings for the butch factor in each episode.

As a performer Arcuri is captivating – sharp, funny, and convincing. He has a deft sense of comic timing and a highly expressive face that can swoop up and down the register with the flick of an eyelash. Enjoyable as this piece is, one feels that he could go much further without the weighted attachment to light entertainment. In the meantime though, perhaps he can be happy in the knowledge that he’s certainly a crowd pleaser.

~~~

BECOMING BUTCH
Writer: Vincent James Arcuri
Director: Gary Riotto (NY), Louis J. Cuck (CA)
From the streets of Queens, NY to life amongst the queens in West Hollywood, CA, Vincent’s coming-of-age tale takes audiences on a rousing journey through baseball, soap operas, speech lessons and more to redefine the true meaning of becoming butch.
1h 5m   National   Los Angeles, California
Comedy   Solo Show
Staycation: Family Vacation   Celeb-reality TV in Hollywood
www.BECOMINGBUTCH.com
VENUE #11: The Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre
Fri 17 @ 3  Tue 21 @ 2:45  Thu 23 @ 6:30  Fri 24 @ 8  Sat 25 @ 5:45  Sun 26 @ 12

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