Steve Seabrook: Better Than You (Fringe Festival 2012)

The Happiest Medium — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 01:38:32 +0000

The Happiest Medium Review by guest contributor Rebecca Bernard

What would you be if you truly were your best self on all fronts of life: in work, play, mind and body? Why, you would be “better than you!” says Steve Seabrook of the show Steve Seabrook: Better Than You, a show conceived and directed by Kurt Bodden. Using the format of a motivational speaker, Bodden takes us through the highlights of a weekend crash course workshop aimed for greatness. We as audience members become his subjects as self-help lectures and demonstrations unfold. In the spirit of Tony Robbins, Seabrook spouts rhetoric and catchy affirmations that all conveniently tie back to merchandise and 5 disk sets that can be purchased before leaving the theatre.

Bodden is a charismatic performer, grabbing his audience from the moment he steps onstage and first addresses us as “people he would not want to be at 7pm on a Friday night.” This he insists will all change towards the end of the workshop as we undergo a revolutionary transformation. Also a gifted improvisor, Bodden often includes the audience’s energy (or lack of energy) in his performance, delivering some of the wittiest lines within these moments.

Though the speaker’s material is solid, the true magic of this piece lies in the contrast Bodden creates by showing Seabrook both on and off the stage. A relationship is forged between he and an offstage lighting designer that allows us to see a different and more vulnerable side of Seabrook. It soon becomes clear that Seabrook is not always the better version of himself he describes onstage, a point driven home when the lighting designer offhandedly compares him to the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz.

It would have been nice to see Bodden take this idea one step further by allowing us to not only see Steve Seabrook unravel backstage, but onstage as well. Instead we are left with more of the same, having been granted a peek under the wizard’s curtain, to then continue with the illusion that has just been broken. The audience sees the “light” of who Steve really is, but we are left wondering, is he aware of his own?

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Steve Seabrook: Better Than You
Kurt Bodden
Writer: Kurt Bodden
Director: Mark Kenward
The master motivator takes the audience to a safe, nurturing place of empowerment to examine why they’re vaguely disappointing. Survivors of actual personal-growth seminars call it “hilarious” and say it “nails the tone perfectly,” including “that little creepy edge.”
1h 0m   National   San Francisco, California
Solo Show   Comedy
Staycation: Spa Getaway (Mind & Body)   In Someone Else’s Shoes
www.steveseabrook.com
VENUE #04: JIMMY’S NO. 43
Fri 17 @ 4  Sat 18 @ 7  Sun 19 @ 1:45  Thu 23 @ 9  Sat 25 @ 3:30  Sun 26 @ 3:30

Romeo And Juliet, Empirical Rogue Productions

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:03:23 +0000

The first thing you can’t fail to notice upon entering the performance space for Empirical Rogue‘s production of Romeo and Juliet, is the spectacular environment chashama have provided for the company. Formerly a taxi service garage on Jackson Avenue, LIC, the space retains the character of its previous functionalism, but the translation of the environment for its theatrical purpose is all but awe inspiring. This is immersive theatre space at its most captivating. Three very simple arrangements of double rowed seats place the audience right at the edge of the action. Behind them floor to ceiling drapes of canvas enclose the space and focus attention on one corner of the performance area, where a raised office hutch serves as the play’s famous balcony setting. The raw cinder block walls are spectrally painted with fading murals and decorative effects that describe location and contribute atmosphere almost slyly – “Verona” the largest declares boldly, like some pageant-styled vermouth advertisement of the Forties. A raw building scaffold sits easily in the space, spotlights glow in constellation behind canvas walls, and a wide grill metal gate recalls you to the actuality of the location. Before the drama has begun you want to take your hat off to production designer, Dante Olivia Smith, muralist, Adam Fujita, and producer/director, Tim Eliot. This is one of the most intelligent and graceful set designs I have come across.

Susannah Hoffman and Doug Chapman.

And very happily, all of its cleverness and lightness of touch is nimbly echoed in the performance that follows of Shakespeare’s most famous story of the tragic, young, star-crossed lovers. Eliot has honed down the play to use just four actors, each necessarily playing several roles. The choreographing of characters to scenes requires rapid-fire role changes, asking both performers and audience to stay alert and keep their wits in order to follow the action. Rudimentary costume changes are effected in seconds behind the scenes, and on this first night of performance all ran effectively as actors disappeared through narrow gaps in the scenery to emerge moments later in alternate character from another partition. Timing is precise and impressive. Having the same actors portray different genders and different generations is engrossing to watch, but also throws into relief contrasts in the story’s culturally imposed roles and restrictions. Jacob Martin takes both the role of the impassioned and reckless Romeo, as well as that of the socially constrained and conservative Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother. All of the actors can be commended on the stamina which they bring to bear in sustaining the charged atmosphere, and it is a special note of success that I found myself, while watching the four actors in scene together, expectant of the arrival of yet another. The sense that another character was waiting in the wings was proof of the effectiveness of the illusion they were working so hard to create.

This is a physical production and swordplay (Shad Ramsey) is vigorous and convincing. Creating the sense of a factional melee can be understandably difficult with just four, sometimes three, actors at a time. Eliot’s direction is equal to the challenge and he gives us a delightful note of chaotic confrontation at one point, when a van pulls up outside the garage, headlights blazing, the gate rolls noisily upward, and sword-wielding actors rush in. The illusions of a masqued ball and of populated public space are similarly creatively suggested with a minimum of effects and participants.

If there is a villain in the production then it is undoubtedly the acoustics in this raw space. Intimate exchanges between characters can get lost and, as there is much active space in use, the same may be said when actors are turned away from the audience. As Romeo, Martin projects the most effectively, conjuring youthful vitality and a character who is touchingly over-taken by new passions and the will to be an honorable man. There were moments though when I wished he would modulate his delivery more; not everything the young lover says is an exclamation. Susannah Hoffman as Juliet gets it right, marrying the charge to the lines. This is a full throttle performance with great range, taking us from girlish excitement all the way to womanly anguish. Her Mercutio is equally impressive, startling even as she projects a complex braggart and hot head who seems to be masking a woundedness at Romeo’s attentions towards women. Sarah Baskin gets great play out of the Nurse, driven by sympathy to imprudence, she is all attentiveness and want of wisdom. To Doug Chapman fall the less meaty roles of Benvolio and Friar Laurence, well-intentioned voices of temperance, and he dithers and agonizes leanly. As an ensemble these actors come together most effectively and in moments of pitch, the language and acting engender a white hot intensity that melts your sense of time and place, all the poise and cleverness, any need of a suspension of disbelief. It’s powerful.

Fine touches abound. Live music is featured in the form of Becca Bernard, a solo cellist, sitting all-but-not-quite out of sight behind wooden pallets in one corner. The wardrobe (Summer Lee Jack) is a hybrid of contemporary wear and historical costume notes, lithely at play with a notion of dress-up and realism. In a similar vein, features of the scene-setting mural decoration archly confess to their own artificiality, their recently applied theatricality. But there is a lyricism amidst this self-consciousness. In the one instance when the space is plunged into complete darkness, a small, plastic night light that has been glowing unnoticed throughout the action, becomes the sole point of light. Keen-eyed observers might note it is a figure of the Virgin, the mother of all sorrows, herself a complex symbol of themes that underscore the drama. Utterly thoughtful, innovative, bold and tempered, Empirical Rogue and Tim Eliot have produced a memorable version of this much played Shakespearean favorite, itself the mother of all tragic romances. All one can say is Bravo! Bravo!

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Romeo and Juliet

Directed by Tim Eliot

chashama

26-15 Jackson Avenue

New York, NY 11101

United States

May 19, 2012 – Jun 10, 2012 8:00 PM

Tickets: $15.00 – $18.00

Click Here to purchase

The Happiest Medium » Becca Bernard

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You (Fringe Festival 2012)

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