2012 marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of British mathematician, Alan Turing, widely acknowledged today as the father of the computer. Internationally it has been dubbed Alan Turing Year, and Olympic torch bearers stopped before a commemorative statue of him on route to the London stadium in tribute to an, as yet, little recognized giant in the history of technological advancement. Winston Churchill opined that Turing’s decryption device helped to end WWII years earlier than might otherwise have been achieved. Turing’s life story, however, is a singularly harsh tragedy. A homosexual, in 1952 he was convicted of gross indecency with another man, and compelled to take female hormones as a therapeutic treatment for his “criminal” deviance, a procedure widely referred to as chemical castration. Just two years later he was found dead in his bed due to cyanide poisoning.

Alex Paul Young‘s theatrical piece, Pink Milk, is a highly personal, impressionistic work – a mash up of contemporary gay themes and biographical details from Turing’s life. Fueled by a righteous outrage and abandoned to a fantastical world of make believe, it dispenses with any sense of historical, cultural, or scientific accuracy, to present a free-form poetic narrative fused with dance and music. It’s an odd departure point from which to explore the life of a celebrated logician and mathematician, but that’s not all that’s odd about it. Young’s Turing, as a boy, develops a robotic playmate that runs on apples. In real life, the adult Turing was enraptured by Disney’s animated film, Snow White. Apples – plastic white ones and natural red ones – denote the stage boundaries, and actors regularly bite into one together as an indication of shared understanding. As a boy Alan is shown to be distracted by daisies growing on playing fields, and these engage him in life and death discussions. A glass of milk is another personified character, and the Pink Milk of the title is a somewhat strained symbol of tainted motherhood – both bloodied breast milk and TB-infected cow’s milk. Despite what grown-ups think or say, logic does not apply in young Alan’s world. Young’s unruly script, rendered in a somewhat textureless blank verse, gallops along on a dizzy note of abandoned self-indulgence. Its utter whimsicality can be hard to swallow.

What it does have going for it though is a relentless strangeness, a bold insistence on its own terms. The cheap sense of fatalism and overwrought lyricism are suddenly disrupted by a break out of music and synchronized ensemble dancing. The actors huddle in a group as a clubby electronica pop permeates, and a staccato, mechanical choreography takes hold. Apropos nothing, rigid arm thrusting and stiff-necked twisting are enjoyed, and it’s clubland 1982 again. At once bizarrely appropriate, and yet inappropriate, these instances have a distinctive flair and contribute a signature with its own peculiar gravitas. The troupe of seven young performers are utterly down when it comes to these movement passages and the sequences are as compelling as they are perplexing.

It really is too bad for the play’s Chicago-based company, White Elephant, that they found themselves booked in to perform here at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Originally devised for a surrounded stage forum, the presentation suffers in Frankel’s compressed space and traditional stage-facing-audience format. Gamefully Elephant string a line of audience seats along the back and side walls of the performance area, but this doesn’t fully suffice as an answer. Worse still, the Frankel’s regulations regarding noise levels means the music is played at an absurdly low pitch during dance segments, as if an elderly relative were trying to sleep next door. Energy levels are impacted accordingly.

A hard working cast let none of this really stand in their way. Everyone gives it 100 percent, with stand-out contributions by Casey Hartley as “The Authority Figures”, and Joe McManus who, as Turing, struggles to put some humanity into an abstracted, romanticized central character. Young is very lucky in his cast, and perhaps even more so in the directorial hand of Brandon Powers, who propels all along at a headlong tilt with unpredictable turns. Powers is additionally credited as joint choreographer and, as such, it can safely be said that he’s helped save Pink Milk‘s bacon. The original, catchy, and entirely on point music is by Visager. Anyone looking for a mature reflection on the life and contribution of Alan Turing is advised to look elsewhere. But if intriguing performance, gay themes, and fantastical whimsy are your bag, you’ve come to the right place. Drink your milk.

~~~

Pink Milk
White Elephant
Writer: Alex Young
Director: Brandon Powers
Choreographer: Brandon Powers & ensemble
Movement, nosebleeds, electronica, and a talking daisy. Lonely gay genius Alan Turing builds robots to replace his lost love. PINK MILK, inspired by the father of Computer Science, explodes themes of creation, destruction and eternal love.
1h 40m   National   Chicago, Illinois
Drama   Dance
Staycation: In Someone Else’s Shoes   Ride the Rollercoaster of Love
www.pinkmilk2012.com
VENUE #09: The Gene Frankel Theatre
Fri 10 @ 9  Sun 12 @ 4:15  Wed 15 @ 2  Sat 18 @ 9  Sun 19 @ 2

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Chris Phillips‘s new play, Pieces, running briefly at The Cherry Lane Theatre as part of NY Fringe 2012, is a fine example of dramatic writing and boldly engaging theatrical entertainment. Set amidst the gay male milieu of haves and have nots, it concerns a grisly murder in Hollywood. Specifically it involves the fallout as experienced by five associated parties; a straight woman – the District Attorney, and four gay men – the defendant, his Defense Counsel, a friend, and an interested journalist. The plot is thick right from the start – an apparent clear case of guilt, an outraged populace calling for capital punishment, a D.A. with a broad humanitarian streak, a predatory, trouble-rousing reporter, and an ambivalent counsel figure. But Phillips delves deeper, teasing out the complicated emotional histories and psychological motivations of the principals, exposing the greater social ills that underpin personal actions or failures to act. Social, sexual, and psychological, it’s a dense investigation, unsparing of its characters, and not a little damning in its broader implications. It would not be an understatement to say that Phillips, writing as an insider, reams the contemporary gay male social world. Oh yeah; he tears it a new one!

Explicitly this is done in the character of Rory Dennis, the Defense Attorney, a prickly, emotionally defended, verbally excoriating personality with a treasure chest of issues about himself and, as he sees it, his gay male brethren. Dennis is a giant of a dramatic character – a real accomplishment for Phillips – and is powerfully embodied here by actor Jonathan Gibson who gives him all the steam required, and then some. There isn’t a stone Dennis hasn’t already turned and found under it something ugly, cruel, and repugnant. Lacerating and far-sighted as his views are, they hold him a helpless prisoner, remote from the deeper contact and comfort that human intimacy can offer. He would rather use everyone as a chess piece in his own personal game of exposé. Presently at a critical juncture in his life, the incidents surrounding this new case push, all at once, his splenetic and rather tender buttons. His sad case, tumbleweed rent toy, Shane Holloway; the pushy, crusading journalist, Nick Goff; and most exactingly, Shane’s suave, successful erstwhile benefactor and confident, Jonathan Nielson, all have it coming and they hear it, but trenchantly, from Dennis. As do we in the audience. It’s quite electrifying and  -plot development, character evolution, etc. aside – well worth the price of admission. Gibson grandstands passionately, sweatily, and there’s never a dull moment.

The opening sequences slyly encapsulate Phillips’s theme of casual social assessments. The play begins with a scene of the blood covered suspect surrendering to police. It swiftly moves to the initial client/defense lawyer consultation scenario, and the audience is lulled into a sense of familiarity, dismissal even of another standard courtroom drama cliché. Dennis, the lawyer, is himself a chilly, officious suit, someone perhaps who will be on the wrong side of the story rather than its centerpiece. Shane is an apathetic presence, devoid of individuality and therefore, interest. But then Phillips begins to twist the stuff, opening up characters and situations in fresh ways. The audience’s preconceptions are implicated, part of a dulled pattern of socialized response which the writer wants to overthrow. Despite all the sturm und drang, the wider themes invoked, there’s yet a murder mystery and a courtroom drama in this play. Demanding critics might opine that , as treatments, these stories don’t break fresh ground. They’re merely a trope. The conclusion, when it arrives, is a little abrupt, perfunctory; and the landing, given all the in flight turbulence, a little smooth. But perhaps that’s a measure of what has come before; if you dig up large parts of the rose garden, it can be difficult to see it just as a rose garden afterward.

Brian Zimmer directs with assurance, soliciting on point performances and keeping a wordy play animated, unencumbered, and paced. Technically everything flows, though there are some questions about character lighting and whether shadow is intentional during a few exchanges. It’s a treat when a chewy dramatic text meets with receptive and able performers. Phillips is sharp at characters and everyone here is honed to a high pitch. Dennis’s emotional tornado does not preclude the other actors from making their mark. Chris Salvatore (Shane), Joe Briggs (Goff), Paolo Andino (Nielson), and Nina Millin (D.A. Mary Hamilton) resolutely stand their ground and present fully rounded, humane performances. This suits in a fully rounded, humane play. Pieces works as entertainment and as drama with teeth. Go, for pity’s sake, while you can. You should consider yourself lucky to be so bitten.

~~~

Pieces
Revolve Productions
Writer: Chris Phillips
Director: Brian Zimmer
A brutal murder. A damaged suspect. A public defender unsure of his place in the gay community. Straight from a sold-out run in Los Angeles, PIECES takes no prisoners and pulls no punches. You have been warned.
2h 0m   National   Los Angeles, California
Drama
Staycation: Ripped from the Headlines   Celeb-reality TV in Hollywood
www.piecestheplay.com
VENUE #12: Cherry Lane Theatre
Sat 11 @ 12:30  Tue 14 @ 5:45  Wed 15 @ 6:30  Thu 16 @ 4:30  Sun 19 @ 8

Related Posts:

• Elysian Fields (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Final Schedule Announced for Fringe Encore Series
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• Mad Women By John Fleck

Does being a “fan” always mean that in some sense you are intrinsically a “fanatic”? There is ample, and shocking evidence at this point in the twenty-first century to suggest that there is, well, to some degree, a measure of being “touched” in our adoration of public and performing figures, aka “celebrities”. Some performers, of course, have a more invasive reach than others, and in this regard Judy Garland emerges as singular in her ability to stir the more extreme emotions of her devotees. Mark it down to a singularity of presence and performative intensity in her case – in so many ways a relentlessly raw nerve of emotion projecting powerfully beyond the simple melodic lyrics she could sing. Several generations have been passing the torch for Judy now, and in the gay male community she has been deified many times over. “Friends of Dorothy” have given way to worshippers of the later Garland – the obviously wounded, out-of-control spitfire who could turn it on at performance and Deliver.  So when a gay male performer undertakes a role invoking Miss Judy Garland, there is an immediate and heavy-breathing audience that can be relied upon. But beware, there’s a lot of it out there so you’d better be good. And really, at this point, there better be a reason.

John Fleck, in his self-authored performance, Mad Women, playing at La MaMa, never stops to explain why he is tying Garland in with this autobiographical tale of a modestly successful performer with some national notoriety  - he was one of the original NEA-4 back in 1990, Jesse Helms and all that – making his way on the boards and the screen over the last 30+ years. It’s just a given that she should be a touchstone of talent, and a cultural icon of special, coded appeal to any gay man of his generation – he was 18 years old when she died. And it’s a given, that as a gay man, he is permitted to get down and dirty with the “facts” in Garland’s life – Judy gave great head, and at least two of her three children exhibit signs of fetal alcohol syndrome – yadda, yadda, yadda. More pointed is the unaddressed question of why he is specifically focused on one of Garland’s late performances, at L.A.’s Coconut Grove in 1967, when she is wretchedly drink and drug-addled, forgetful, rambling and volcanically angry. He treats us to original recorded excerpts from this low point in her career, content merely to embody her with minimal wardrobe props, a loose physical impersonation, and the lip-synching of her public performative meltdown (one of several, it should be admitted). He is positively gleeful as he shares the details of her pill and liquor regimen at the time.

At one point he is transformed into young Joey Luft, Judy’s youngest child, who witnessed this exhibition at the age of nine. Abandoned in the Grove following his mother’s triumphant exit born aloft by her fans, Joey approaches the microphone and sings to an empty auditorium, an aria from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Fleck’s falsetto is accomplished and affecting, but he has Joey sing it to his mother’s discarded wig, a clumsy, slightly twisted visual. Then he has Joey put on the wig and his mother’s show jacket before storming off stage. Suddenly we are presented with film footage of Fleck’s elderly mother during her battle with Alzheimer’s. Segue to the story of young John Fleck’s first performance in public at the local veteran’s meet at the Legion Hall, where the unwary boy performed Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland in a simpering, coquettish style that brought the curtain down on him before he had finished. Young Fleck is entirely in the dark as to the nature of his offense, and is in turn shunned by the Legion Hall patrons, and snarled at by his mortified father – “Freakin’ fag. I’m gonna kill you when I get home.” As a formative episode it has all the hallmarks of a classic, prompting him to cling to his sympathetic, protecting mother, and flee his alcohol-fueled, abusive father. More film footage follows of his bed-ridden mother fulminating about alcoholism and her husband, and there’s a long, meandering monologue about Fleck’s turn in the HBO series, Carnivale, as Gecko, a carny freak. Snatches of Judy’s audio are inter played, and there are allusions to drug dependency on Fleck’s part. “I’m not an addict!” he snaps petulantly, and more than once. A confused and worked-up recounting of a dream forces everything towards a lurching, melodramatic climax, caustically overplayed with Garland sounding out the Battle Hymn of the Republic, some more sentimental home movie footage, and a horribly flat, would-be up-beat ending – “A big hand for my mother, Josephine. Wasn’t she something?” “My dad was hot, wasn’t he?” The piece seems to have slipped from Fleck’s control, morphed into an angry, narcissistic, runaway car that’s jumped the tracks and hurtling toward a smash up – one that never really arrives.

But Fleck likes things out of control: Judy; his ailing mother; the danger of drug enhanced experience; perhaps even (gasp!) his father. Inexplicably (and disastrously during the show I attended), he invites the hazards of audience participation (shudder) not once, not twice, but three times. Is he playing with form, playing with fire, or does he know what he’s doing? He’s bored by the tight leash, and he definitely slips it in this wired, sweat-drenched performance. But in the end he offers no insight. Looking for the silver lining is for him a lovely lyric but, realistically, a complete waste of time. Perspective it seems is not in his vocabulary, unless it’s the agreed adoptive perspective of being at the bottom looking up. This is a bitter little pill taking you nowhere, unless it’s to a mirthless laugh of hopeless scorn. It’s too bad; he is magnetic and can be clever and funny. To arrive at a convincing conclusion perhaps, would require him to get over that most massive of obstacles that looms in every performer’s life; himself.

~~~

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There is a delightful episode in Chris Phillips’s play Elysian Fields, which was presented at the Kraine Theatre during this year’s New York Fringe Festival, when the characters Maggie (“the cat”) and Skipper, from Tennessee Williams‘s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, are talking. Skipper is recounting to Maggie the early years of his friendship with her husband, Brick Pollitt, and making a veiled confession about the tenacity of his attachment to Brick. He describes a hot southern afternoon as he watches an old tabby cat patiently riding out the uncomfortable afternoon heat on a rooftop, awaiting a patch of shadow to alleviate its situation. He is struck by the cat’s stoic forbearance. He has it in mind to be just like that cat in life, patiently staying put, expectant that what he desires will one day fall to him. This image is more famously invoked by Maggie in Williams’s celebrated play, when following Skipper’s death, she pleads for her grieving husband’s attention and affection. It’s a clever piece of writing, respectfully returning us to the allusive power of Williams’s theatrical storytelling.

The pleasures of Phillips’s play, and they are many, are watching well known characters from the works of Williams acting in freshly contrived scenes. He releases the characters from their celebrated, somewhat tragical cages, to breathe and talk again in earlier phases of their stories. Most especially he is resurrecting the ghosts of three deceased characters, figures whose tragic demise worked as triggers for Williams’ plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Allan, Sebastian, and Skipper never make appearances in these three plays, but their ghosts pervade the stories, propelling the action. They are all coded as homosexual and as such are emblematic of Williams’s relationship with his own sexuality and its configuration in dramatic works that  powerfully addressed the social taboos of his time. Phillips, in large part, is respectful of the mores that prevailed during the period of rapid social evolution these theatre works spanned, from WWII through the dawn of the sixties counter cultural revolution. He is sensible too of the cultural status some of the characters have attained today. So he can throw us delicious treats with scenes in which a youthful Blanche DuBois succumbs to her own carnal appetite; Sebastian rubbishes his poetry and yearns to run through his mother’s garden setting the plantings on fire; and Brick and Skipper go at it in a chair as Maggie sleeps in the room next door. Whether or not Williams might approve such liberties is not so much the point as whether they hold up in context of the original plays. In a rush of desire the young Blanche might well have lost her affected little head, but did the playwright envision the spit-lubricated attachment we are presented with here between Skipper and Brick? The times were the times, and frustrated desire is most pointedly Williams’s theme, not clandestine liaisons. His dramas are filled with allusions to castration and lobotomy. Sex, for the principal characters, is an agent of destruction and chaos, rarely ecstatic release.

But perhaps that’s a quibble. Before the shadow of tragedy overtakes each tale, there is much to enjoy. Suicide and murderous vengeance take their toll on all our resurrected phantoms. Asking why Williams insisted on these endings for these characters is a bit like asking why Iphigenia had to be sacrificed at the beginning of the Trojan War. These are the original blood sacrifices that offend justice, that precipitate the action, that sow potential ruin for all in proximity. It’s one thing to play at revisionism in works like L. Frank Baum‘s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, but something else to tangle with the complex psychological, elaborately theatricalized characters of Williams the playwright. Acts of redemption are nice, but can Phillips really have these characters ask their original author why they had to die thus? As affecting as this is, it is a contemporary sensibility addressing that of another era. If you begin that process, there is no likelihood it could ever end. And perhaps there’s something willfully anachronistic about it. Which is perhaps why in the final act we are left with a fantasy realm, with neither recourse to Williams’s world, or our own. Here at least, the three fated figures can arrange themselves into a somewhat classical tableau of heroic brotherhood, no longer alone, rinsed temporarily of the tragedy that hangs over them. Fanciful and affecting sure, but you can’t file down all of the sharp corners of life, in the real world or the fictional one; not if you want anything to be worthy of the term tragedy.

The production, by Revolve Productions, glides seamlessly from opening to end, figured with a minimum of props, some well-used lighting, and just five actors. Amanda Kruger, as the only female cast member, has the unenviable task of filling some major iconic pumps in the parts of Blanche, Catherine, and Maggie, and she does very nicely. Muscular performances are turned in by all the men, Scott Hinson (Sebastian), Aaron Hartzler (Skipper), and Daniel Marks (Brick), with the stand-out Miles Cooper (winner of a Fringe 2011 acting honor) as young Allan, disarmingly vulnerable as he approaches his shrouded desire nature. With his co-director, John Michael Beck, Phillips pulls out all of the drama written in to this accomplished new play, and New York can only hope that this production, so cruelly cut short by the onslaught of Irene, will rise again for a longer run. It should not be short of a captivated audience.

~~~

Elysian Fields ran until August 26, 2011 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.
 

Related Posts:

• Pieces (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Pink Milk (Fringe Festival 2012)
• FringeNYC Announces 2011 Encore Series
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