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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There’s an undeniable elegance about the Irish singer/performer (composer, orchestrator, producer) Julie Feeney who is appearing for a 10 day booking at the Irish Arts Center on 51st Street. The elegance is there in the assemblage of instruments she has corralled on stage, as well as in the controlled voice, smooth flowing toothy lyrics, and sophisticated orchestral arrangements she deploys. But the elegance really comes about when Feeney emerges into the auditorium, using the regular patrons entrance way, singing in hushed tones the introduction to her song Myth. Leaning over from the aisle, she breathily exchanges some of the words with a surprised, somewhat unnerved audience. She’s sparkling in the reflected stage lights, an ornate crystal gemmed collar on her dress and tiny rhinestones in her hairnet twinkle in the shadows. It’s nothing to get really alarmed about, but that towering beehive coiffure is teased up just that little bit high enough to signal caution; who is this? And the song she is singing keeps dropping into abrupt silences. Before picking up once more and conducting you along a melody that achieves its pop bounce from a delicate arrangement of strings, bowed and pizzicato. She attains the stage and relaxes the audience with a complicit, almost coy smile, while working a silken black balloon dress that is at once sumptuous and brief. It’s a wonderfully poised balancing act between refinement and boldness, and it proves the perfect introduction for what is to follow.

She delivers a succession of self penned lyrical gems that play with a chamber orchestral style as comfortably as they address contemporary pop sensibilities. Using a backing group of seven musicians (she makes each musician, including her backing vocalist, play at least 2 instruments) incorporating a classical strings line-up, a touch of trumpet, and a hint of woodwind, Feeney gently moves through feelings that range from delicately vulnerable to reflexively sharp, by way of fluidly philosophical. Her presence and performance hold an element of theatre which is all of a graceful piece with the imaginative vocalizing and rich musicality. As perfectly manicured as her delivery is, there is enough live nerve on show to require attentive listening and to permit the unexpected. She is that rare thing, a striking mix of eccentric genius and comfortable intimacy.

In this show she presents works from her critically lauded, self produced, first two albums – 13 Songs and pages – and what is surely an eagerly awaited third, scheduled for release this Fall. In the hotbed of young musical talent that Ireland is today she is a strong individual presence, radiating assured musical understanding and punctilious execution. She holds three degrees, at least two of which are music focused (the other is in psychology). In Dublin she has performed at the National Concert Hall to rapturous reception (she is currently working on an opera commission from that quarter) but in the comparatively cozy setting of the IAC’s Donaghy Theatre she is very naturally at ease with a smaller audience. Her wide musical reach and meticulous attention to detail – as well as her sartorial distinctiveness – have prompted comparisons with Bjork, but she is very much her own entity, extinguishing likenesses. The wile and wit woven in to her lyrics, as well as evident in her orchestrations, speak eloquently on that point. In Britain The Guardian has offered its praise in the words  ”the world will listen”, to which I can only add, and so it should! Julie noted.

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New York City is host to two concurrently running productions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth this Spring: Aquila Theatre‘s presentation at the Gym at Judson (April 18th – May 6th), and Epic Theatre Ensemble‘s interpretation at the 47th Street Theatre (April 20 – May 26th). A stable of many a theatrical company’s portfolio, apart from its matchless, vivid language, Macbeth as drama has much to attract aspiring ensembles, not least the challenge presented in portraying two of Shakespeare’s most unsympathetic lead roles. We watch as Macbeth and his wife are enticed into evil by the lure of power and then, as good stage villains, are punished for their crimes. The trick, however, is in making them into more than stage villains, for in that resides the case for tragedy and its capacity to ennoble human existence. It is a tricky bit of the equation as both of these productions can testify.

Aquila Theatre is devoted to the classics of western theatre, in restating their claim to preeminence as timeless pieces, triumphs of human artistry and culture. As such they tend toward language focused productions that are light on the use of contemporary stagecraft elaborations. For their Macbeth Desiree Sanchez wears both directorial and production designer hats. She is spare in her approach. A minimum of props are deployed in the expansive and lofty space  Judson’s Gym theatre offers. There is an economy and subtlety at work in the way she groups the action about the squared arena. An innovative, momentary introductory prelude scene which highlights a blood-soaked, battle worn Macbeth in one corner, and a bereft Lady Macbeth on bloodied bed sheets following unsuccessful labor in the opposite corner, acts as a startling, punched signature of this director’s suggestion for the fatal couple’s motivations. The Macbeths are traumatized people, destabilized, estranged, in search of a project into which they can pour themselves, erase the past, and reunite. This prelude dispatched in an instant, there is little other tinkering with the body of the play and all unfolds to order.

The performances are vigorous, emotive, well spoken and, most importantly, psychologically grounded. If you have an ear for Shakespeare this is a wonderful production to hear his words delivered eloquently and with conviction. Rebecca Reaney as Lady Mabeth is nuanced and bold, spectacularly benefiting from Peter Meineck‘s well-judged lighting, which is at once lavishly theatrical and self-disciplined. Guy Oliver-Watts, working to uncover an aspect of post traumatic stress disorder in the role of Macbeth, has a more complex part. He is thoroughly convincing, but in so doing projects a weakened, dependent quality in the man who would be king and, strangely, this deflates the character somewhat, puncturing the fullness of the play’s tragic reach. He is doing well what he has been directed to do but herein lies the rub, and a very fine rub it is for the measure of what might be deemed tragic theatre. The rest of the cast are for the most part assured in their roles, with Peter F. Gardiner, (Banquo), James Lavender (Macduff), and Rachel Barrington (Lady Macduff) especially commendable.

Coincidentally the notion that the Macbeths, and especially Lady Macbeth, are grieving former parents, is made central in Epic Theatre’s version of the play. This idea is evident in the presence on stage of a small shrine with a framed photograph of a toddler, to which Lady Macbeth touchingly returns for some of her scenes. Also, it is manifest in the large projected photo image of the Macbeths, tenderly converging about a drowsy infant, which is thrown up on the broken surface of the rear wall. This projection is relentless, hanging like a grey cloud above the proceedings, at once lugubrious and sentimental. Interpretation, with a capital I, is the strategy of this production. Set in a more contemporary world, we are treated to off-stage electronic voices in ear pieces, and a video screen displaying action elsewhere. The Weird Sisters are a heterogeneous mix of sexes and ethnicities, and hang about the stage throughout the action on overhead ladders and walkways, like jaded demi-gods, stonily unmoved by the unfolding drama below. Innovation appears one of director Ron Russell‘s chief concerns with his production. In the banquet scene where a guilty Macbeth is plagued with visions of the murdered Banquo, the bloodied apparition is suddenly encountered in a dance embrace by the newly crowned king. This shift works dramatically, as do some of the other re-imaginings. Richard Easton as Duncan, hailing from the video monitor, is a treat as a telegenic royal talking head, at once hammy and calculating. However, a growing awareness dawns as it becomes plain that Russell as director, engaged with innovation it seems for innovation’s sake, completely loses the plot in the finest sense. This might have been more immediately evident if I had read the production’s publicity notes which describe the play as “a brutal and darkly funny exploration of the banality of evil.” Really? Macbeth? Funny? If the line had been offered by Mel Brooks I might have taken closer note, but otherwise it seems merely, but utterly, wrong-headed. And how wrong-headed becomes dismayingly clear in due course as Russell stokes up moments of sour humor (one of the witches sings her lines in a borrowed tutu as a karaoke turn) and rubbishes any solemnity. It’s as if the idea of theatrical tragedy is unknown to him. The most damaging turn occurs amidst some rapid fire scene shifts toward the conclusion which require one actor to change swiftly between two characters. This is done on stage by the actor (James Wallert) taping and un-taping a fringe of hair to his brow to distinguish between roles. In the duration a cry is heard off stage. Jumping from left to right, Wallert, fringed one moment, un-fringed the next, delivers the news of Lady Macbeth’s death. It is, richly, a Mel Brooks moment, and there was more than one chuckle in the audience.

Can Russell actually hear the language Shakespeare is putting in his characters’ mouths? The evidence is scarce and the actors suffer from the inability to sound as if they mean their words. Who is to blame them if the director has no feeling for the real emotion of the play? Apart from Easton in the role of Duncan, and Julian Rozzell, Jr. (with presence to burn) as one of the witches, everyone seems merely focused on unburdening themselves as rapidly and succinctly as possible of their Shakespearean metre. Russell is not the director who can marry them to their lines. As Macbeth, Ty Jones actually commences the soliloquy – “Is this a dagger I see before me?” – with his back to the audience. No chance here for an actor to convey facially the extremity of the moment. Russell, it seems, is not interested in psychological subtleties (witness the never-changing backdrop projection) merely the chance of creating something different. Well sad to say, something different definitely this way comes, but you’ll be lucky if the pricking you feel is confined to your thumbs.

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There’s much more than a touch of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the character of Katharine Sherman‘s Christopher Marlowe in her new play, Christopher Marlowe’s Chloroform Dreams, running at the lower east side’s The Red Room. The time-and-smoke shrouded legend of the Elizabethan playwright hangs over the proceedings and propels the story all the way, and then nearly, to its end. Familiar tropes from classical mythology and fairy tale erupt everywhere in a noiresque style tale of a femme who is at once fatale and in flight. Mix in more than a strain of poetic patter and the result might be ponderous, over rich and over-reaching if it weren’t from the pen of a careful, gifted playwright who has a sharpened sense of when to call off the big thunderous themes to allow the smaller human story to breathe. Sherman is excellently served in this production by director Philip Gates who has done a great deal to let this highly theatrical, complexly structured drama flow. And flow it does, like silk, like smoke.

Gumshoe Marlowe (the playwright, not the fictional detective) is on the case and it’s a case of love’s labor’s lost as the gal he pines for, Daphne Fairchild, has a problem with the needle. It’s somewhere, sometime in the eternal noir of Hollywood’s 1940s and the environment is murky with urban underbelly, its sinners, and its saints. Daphne has taken up with contraband king Ingram Frizer, who keeps her in morphine embrace. Marlowe tries to cut a deal with Frizer to release Daphne, and Frizer, like the southern drawling megalomaniac he is, perversely agrees. Confident of the weakness of the human spirit Frizer is sure of Daphne’s faithlessness, or rather as he would have it, faithfulness to the true church of humanity – what he has to offer. The narrative evolves in non-linear fashion, jumping between episodes of elation and degradation, hopefulness and despair. We pretty much all know in what direction the story is heading and this disrupted sequencing brings a freshness to the unfolding, allowing us to see the tale as if shot from diverse angles. Clever staging and ingenious scenic design (Joshua David Bishop) work to brilliant effect in keeping the tempo up while contributing to a sense of layered story and hidden motives.

A polymorphous narrative builds in a polygeneric world. Marlowe, playwright/detective, is in search of his muse/dame, herself enthrall to intoxicating sensual abandon, emotional numbness. She is at once the mythical Daphne, in flight from the god of poetry and his promise of ennoblement, and the Sleeping Beauty, in love with a solitary dreamworld. The excellent Sheila Joon, as a supporting actress, plays three roles that give a sense of the multi-dimensionality of the story. She is Eleanor del Toro, a hardened habitue of Frizer’s drug world, with yet a pulse of sympathy for its entrapped denizens; Nicholas Skeres, one of Frizer’s goons, and the name of one of actual playwright Marlowe’s dodgy comrades; and The Ferryman, a sleazy guide in the city sewers, who takes payment in coin and conducts Marlowe to the underworld drug den where Frizer holds Daphne captivated.

In synch with this variegated narrative, and part of the torrent that carries you headlong through the performance, Sherman’s vibrant language shifts and morphs from hard-boiled, snappy Bogart/Bacall banter, through rhythmic Beat poetics, pulpit fire and brimstone, to gin-soaked Tom Waites-ian monologues, complete with the whine of a bruised melody off in the distance (wonderful sly sonics by Will Fulton). Opening lines intoned by Marlowe, characteristically slouched against a wall, collar up, hat brim down, run:  Once upon a time there was a habit. A habit’a mine. For a time. A time. And once upon a time she hadda have it – the girl she had a habit she was mine. This sort of linguistic bravado might be annoying if it didn’t intimately serve the themes in the piece, echoing the broken time line the play deploys. Harmonious with the whole production, it’s vividly alive to its own artificiality, risking boldly, yet never quite overplaying itself, anchoring in small moments of naturalism that draw you back in. In the play’s intriguing, only pastoral moment (Chris Marlowe did after all bequeath us the lyric poem, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love), Marlowe, Daphne, and side-kick Tommy the Kid (Thomas Kyd? wink, wink, nudge, nudge!) share a star lit night by a campfire. Relaxed for once, Daphne observes – there’s a beam of light coursing through the trees. You can only see it if you blow smoke on it. I wanna live here forever. This eloquent line speaks volumes about Daphne’s character, as well as the play’s central themes.

But wait. Lunar Energy Productions (both Sherman and Gates are founding members) have to mix it up that one notch further. If you think you know everything that can happen in a noiresque rendering of a tale of dark addiction dovetailed with classical allusions and historical references, you might yet be surprised by a sudden eruption of ensemble dancing. Honest to god in-synch dance movements that might happen at a Madonna Super Bowl performance break out, complete with the skeevy, strung out, I-got-the-needful-jones jitters.

The laurels should be lavished, and shared here by all involved in this courageous production. Detailed attention has been paid in every department: scenic (Bishop), sound (Fulton), costume (Kalere Payton), and lighting (Alana Jacoby). The hard working actors deliver handsomely. Compelling leads, Christopher Fahmie and Valerie Redd, are squarely matched with supports Sheila Joon, Michael Markham, and Curry Whitmire. In her conflation of characters Christopher and Philip Marlowe, Sherman is really on to something. This is a hero that could go almost anywhere, uncovering nasty secrets; theatrical gold dust. We would all be lucky to have another installment. Meantime, Chloroform Dreams is knockout.

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Little Lady featuring Sandrine Lafond (Photo credit Paolo A. Santos)

I can’t remember, before this show, the last time I saw an adult person unhesitatingly put their whole big toe in their mouth and suck on it with a sense of blissful satisfaction. You can marvel at the flexibility of such a feat even as you cavil at the notion of exactly how clean, now, was that toe before it went in to that mouth. This combination of awe and uncomfortable personal fastidiousness is what Sandrine Lafond, the performer and creator of Little Lady, is happy to promote. She wants to hold you in a spell of fascination as she pricks away at your comfort levels, never allowing you to lapse into a passive, carefree enjoyment of her performance. Perhaps it’s her butoh training at work, or perhaps she’s artfully channelling a sense of anger stemming from her experience as a female performer. Either way she has devised in this one woman piece a highly individual performance of peculiar distinction.

We first meet the Little Lady of the title, as lights come up on stage, in a kneeling position, head down, derriere aloft, face averted, apparently sleeping comfortably. After some don’t-try-this-at-home wakeful stretching exercises, she turns to us revealing an alarmingly wide-open pair of eyes behind buffoonish spectacles and a broad, guileless smile. But she is wearing some sort of head covering, has a stuffed, protruding stomach, and favors a cropped fur jacket that gives her a dowager’s hump. She appears a strange hybrid of Little Edie from the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens, and a kinkajou. Shortly she falls into the aforementioned luxurious morning toe suck. Is she human at all? The question seems even more apropos when she flourishes a two foot walking stick and stiffly, awkwardly rises to a posture that might be called a stand, staggering uncertainly on the balls of her feet, legs bent outward in spastic totter, emitting a sort of babyish gurgling laughter. Who she is and where she is are a mystery. There’s an animalistic unpredictability to her movements and a sort of leering carnal sensuality in her investigations; nostrils sniffing, tongue extended, she appears to appraise the male audience members in the front row. Her movements and gestures recognize no bodily decorum as she stirs up an air of possible social affront. In short, despite the open faced smile and stare, she’s a bit dangerous.

Lafond’s Little Lady is a creature of routine however, and we watch as she follows a pattern of behavior revolving around her rest, her meals, her television programs, and her bodily self enjoyment. Unseen by the audience, the television shows serve as clues to the passages in her life. Programs devoted to knitting, boxing, and warfare are relayed through the actresses enthusiastic and alarmed reactions. Physically her body undergoes a series of transformations, from the crooked, lurching movements of the opening sequence, through a grotesquely sexualized persona, to a more naturally moving, unencumbered personality. En route she seems to lose much of her animal self-satisfaction and confidence. Less bizarre and recognizably human by the conclusion, she is also clouded with uncertainty, newly timid. The final act is played out in a video clip showing the freshly formed Little Lady alone and lost in a desert landscape, buffeted by winds, scorched by the sun, pricked by thorns. Despite her predicament, and aided by a genteel parasol, she perseveres, eventually stumbling upon …

There’s a visual freshness in the presentation of all of this, both skillful and compelling. Lafond seems to be comically and ruefully evaluating her evolution as a performer, and as a woman. The formally confrontational manner in which she relates the tale partly gets in the way of making you care what becomes of her character, but she isn’t – thank goodness – asking for our sympathy here, merely our attention. Which she is quite adept at capturing, and manipulating. For all the apparent clowning there’s an evident performative maturity and poise at work. She’ll take you there alright, it’s just that, much like herself, you may end in mere bewilderment at where exactly you find yourself. Deferential nods are owed to director John Turner for following her all the way, videographer Paolo Santos for the atmospheric – dare one suggest Lynchian? – film footage, and make-up and costume artists, Elisabeth Lehoux and Nelly Rogerson, who contribute effectively in elaborating such a bizarre tale. Yves Frulla‘s musical accompaniment feels the most familiar part of the exercise and helps to frame the performance in a tradition of clowning which Lafond, happily and admirably, disposes of. Though not precisely a joyride, there’s enough surprises and  whoop-de-dooh to make it memorable. It’s a trip alright, oh yeah.

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The 2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL will run February 22-March 4 at The Kraine Theater & The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Ave and Ave A). Tickets to all shows may be purchased online at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

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Suzen Murakoshi‘s self-authored, one-woman performance, Breathe, Love, Repeat, presently playing at Under St. Marks as part of this year’s Frigid New York Festival, is an autobiographical recounting of her last days with her mother. For anybody this might represent a daunting theme, vast, self-examining, possibly too much. But Murakoshi has an imaginary alter ego to call upon in the face of such a challenge – a samurai super daughter – and unhesitatingly she jumps in and grabs the bull by the horns. Why or whence came this super daughter is never made clear, she just magically appears in the form of Murakoshi heroically brandishing an invisible sword above her head in full spotlight. She is the pluck, the resistance, and later the resilience that help carry the author through the ordeal of watching her mother gradually sicken and decline. She is some sort of Asian folkloric warrior princess, alive to the existence of a spirit realm, knowledgeable of the proper respects and tributes owed the demons that haunt us.

Suzen Murakoshi

Perhaps she springs from her mother’s early Buddhist-inspired tales of the kami spirits of the woods and the proper forms of address and appeasement. Perhaps she’s just an aspect of Suzen the snowboarding fanatic, addicted to the adrenaline rush of speed and movement , the one who seems merely distracted and impatient with her mother’s telephone revelation that she has been diagnosed with cancer. Whoever she is she doesn’t say very much or get into it, just poses heroically in the spotlight with her signatory sword salute after the manner of a manga champion, as undeniable and inscrutable as She-Ra. Correspondingly mother is appraised as Queen Supreme Buddha, a repository of old world wisdom, craft, forbearance and tolerance. We’re in a fantasy realm, whimsically pirouetting atop the darker, sadder world of human suffering and mortality. This is an elegant and fresh strategy for addressing themes of loss and dying.

In several compelling instances Murakoshi elects to turn her back upon the audience, drops into a slouch, and growls out some lines by Dylan Thomas or Shakespeare. Who this stage interloper might be is never addressed, but as a theatrical device it proves quite effective. She certainly can move about the stage in graceful or comedic manner – at one point effortlessly falling into a cartwheel – but when this theatrical persona is dropped, so that we can hear the author speaking in her own voice, there is a dramatic shift to, well, neutral.  One just wishes that Murakoshi playing Murakoshi were in some form more actually present upon the stage. The voice is problematic – vocal modulation is narrow and inexpressive, as if she were reading off a list of shopping groceries. There’s a rattling impersonal character in the way she imparts her unfolding story, almost as if she wants the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. The performance lasted just under 45 minutes. It isn’t helpful that Murakoshi seems very comfortable with linguistic and familial cliches such as – “more guilt Mom, pile it on”, and “You were the best Mom in the world.”

In the late stages of her mother’s illness the nurse at the hospice opines that they should administer a shot of morphine to alleviate pain. Mother has expressed the desire to live consciously to the end in the Buddhist tradition, not succumbing to the use of sensory- or pain-killing medications. Murakoshi and samurai super daughter wish to honor this request, and in order to convince the nurse there is no essential need, the author asks her plainly suffering mother to smile and not frown. Which she does. It is a chilling moment and one that touches on the greater theme of: Which reality are you living? Murakoshi appears fully given over to her imaginary universe, almost desperately so, which might rankle with some when the stakes are so critically high. Such audience members might even observe that she can’t fundamentally deal with “reality” and this performance is her apology for the fact. One is left with the sense that at no point has the author gotten out of her own way long enough to approach objectively her mother or, indeed, herself. The concluding mantra, offered as a gem of hard won understanding – Breathe, Love, Repeat – feels cosmetic, unearned, pat, and frankly senseless. A tingling note of emotional exhibitionism prevails which, alas, is the rout of any attempt at sincere understanding or illumination, theatrical or otherwise.

Directed with a light hand by Ching Valdes-Aran, the presentation makes effective use of some simple photographic back shot projections. The silent photo album slide show reserved for the ending is, however, a theatrical misstep, awkwardly lacing the harder stuff with a sentimental syrup at odds with the preceding, and betraying a greater need at work here: the formulation of a hagiographic postcard to the author’s much-loved, late mother. Plainly and simply, after all, samurai super daughter just doesn’t do grief.

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The 2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL will run February 22-March 4 at The Kraine Theater & The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Ave and Ave A). Tickets to all shows may be purchased online at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

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Stabat Mater Fabulosa

The Morningside Opera company offered up a quite singular interpretation of Pergolesi‘s Stabat Mater in their Fabulosa rendition on January 26th at Dixon Place, which proved, at once, a scholarly as well as a quite literal undressing of the original. Composed in 1736 – the year of Pergolesi’s death at the august age of 26 – the piece has been an iconic work in the canon of western sacred music ever since and has enjoyed an unbroken record of performance for nearly three hundred years. This surely says something about a work, to have endured so vigorously the vagaries of artistic, musical, and religious change, never mind or dare one say, taste. Which in many ways explains its attraction for Morningside Opera, who see their role as boundary-pushers wishing to invigorate dialogue between traditional and new modes of the form. Their stripped down presentation was both scholastically dense as well as visually provocative.

Stabat Mater Fabulosa at Dixon Place

As the slowly drawn out, deliciously mournful harmonies swelled to fill the auditorium, we were presented with two female singers attired in silky camisoles and nickers more evocative of the flapper era than anything from the 18th century. This anachronistic note is key, as the physical performance in large measure is characterized by a panotomimed broadness of expression redolent of the 1920s cabaret era, a time that was interested in the exposure, as much as in the celebration of artifice. From there, as the sequence of songs unfolded, we were subjected to a sort of reverse strip tease as the women, an alto and a soprano, episodically dressed themselves in layer after layer of high baroque costume, enacting scenes in varying degrees ridiculous, mocking, sentimental, and titillating. These little mimes were intentionally played to undermine the exquisite feeling in the vocalizations and critique the psychological realism on display.  While this is going on photographic projections were thrown up on a wall behind, exhibiting scenes of feminine intimacy and maternal ideality, a foil to the silly capering and posturing in the foreground. As the singers graduated into foundation garments, dresses, and eventually wigs, the greater question of the construct of feminine identity surfaced and, with a grand historical sweep, addressed details of formal 18th century attire and contemporary notions of the ”undressed” feminine, maternal self. It could not be ignored that the photographs appeared in the form of “projections”, and with some subtle lighting play, remained gauzily vague, fading in and out of prominence.

The voices meantime, ever beautifully harmonized, persisted throughout, hardly impacted by the movements and gestures of the singers as, gamefully, and with dumb show agony, they were trussed into punitive corsets, chased each other about the grand piano, swooned in affected attitudes of grieving faints, and skipped in merry passes, revealing the schism between form and feeling. Implicit is the Roman church’s sado-masochistic excitement at the representation of Mary, mother of Jesus, in her moment of anguished grief, as the vessel of mortification and sorrow that believers should aspire to in contemplation of Christ’s ultimate and bloody sacrifice. That this idea should be elaborated in such a musically sensuous, celebratory style singularly at odds with its subject, is one of civilization’s exquisite, yet abundant paradoxes, and the primary focus of the Fabulosa production. The sense of contradiction is echoed in finer details throughout the performance and is given special focus in the costuming, which plays a central role. One singer is laced tightly into a corset severely compressing the waist, and the other is obliged to saddle herself with a steel-framed pannier belt, which works to dramatically expand the hipline. They both put on identical, pastel colored dresses and harmonize perfectly. Their lofty, powdered wigs are adorned with miniature bird cages, inside of which are tiny birds; the spirit of freedom and movement is entrapped and stilled for human contemplation. The puritanical mindset might demur, but the baroque era is nothing if not  anathema to such a sensibility.

Stabat Mater Fabulosa itself is a rich confection for contemplation. I couldn’t begin to pretend I had understood or unpacked all the pointed charades and features on show. Of course there will be purists (as opposed to puritans) who will not countenance this kind of aggressive deconstruction of a classic that, in some measure, still owns a religious dimension. But that would be their loss. This is a show that could prove as poised on a Las Vegas stage as it might at La Scala. One scene, where the scantily clad singers, supine together atop the grand piano, draw on stockinged hose while intoning Latin lines of dolorous gravity – “O how sad and afflicted was that blessed mother of the only- begotten” – could write its own ticket to play anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. And that alone, perhaps, might suffice as a badge of success.

Brett Umlauf and Amber Youell were respectively the soprano and alto performers and displayed a real harmonizing intimacy in their singing, despite all the distractions they had to attend to. Kelly Savage was the stalwart keyboard accompanist, and Laura Careless devised choreography and movement. The projections were supplied by Jessica Ng, and the utterly thoughtful and no less fabulous costumes were the work of Annie Holt. One would hope and think that this production was on the radar of the opera community, and that it should stimulate the sort of discussion and investigation that Morningside Opera aspire to provoke. For all its playful heart, Stabat Mater Fabulosa ultimately proves perfectly serious.

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The writer and performer of Horripilation!, John Sowle, is unquestionably a shining light in the fields of research and preservation of obscure global theatrical traditions, as well as being an imposing performative figure in the relating and embodiment of these same traditions. In 1973, with a Fulbright fellowship to research a doctoral thesis in dramatic art, he spent time at the Kerala Kalamandalam in southern India, where he was obliged to rise each morning at 3 a.m. in order to begin his day’s grueling training in traditional dance movement and actorly craft. Kept on his feet for hours at a time, in a highly repetitive form of dance stepping, his relief would come finally in the form of a massage administered by his teacher (asan), who would walk up and down his back while he lay in a formally controlled position. It should come as no surprise that classical traditions of drama and dance, wherever they originate, involved a regimen of severe physical hardship and mental discipline, but the sharing of these events in the performance by Mr. Sowle, as he reproduces the exercises nearly forty years later, is quite something to witness.

He is telling us about the southern Indian tradition of Kutiyattam, and of the Natya Shastra of Bharata, an ancient text on the rules and aesthetics of theater – a medium itself imparted to humankind as a divine gift because its sacred deviser would not entrust the gods with such a potent form of diversion. The historical and mythic dimensions of the tradition are complex and rich, and as involved as the formal rites, rules, and roles of the drama are exhaustive. Alone on stage, in traditional Indian garb, Mr. Sowle enumerates some of the primary categories of consideration as to theatrical principles: for the erection of a theater, the composition of such, the qualities requisite in an actor, and the physical language of actorly expression. He demonstrates for us as he does so, at one point marching out into the auditorium with a length of rope in order to show the necessary dimensions required in establishing both the performance space, and the audience space. Indeed, and not surprisingly, there are rules that extend to the audience too, as to their composition, number, and receptiveness. In many ways we are witnessing a form of cultural archaeology.

As he speaks, gestures, and dances, the actor casually moves the minimal props around the space, and matter-of-factly attires himself in various parts of his costume and make-up. He segues easily into excerpted scenes from classical epics of sanskrit, demonstrating the formalized expressions and gestures he has introduced to us. Short of an enticing image of himself as a young man, cycling in the hours before dawn, through monsoon rains to classes, he does not deliver any personal content. Indeed, at the heart of the Kutiyattam tradition is the notion of a non-empathic experience on the part of the audience, a learned, highly abstracted and aestheticized appreciation of the codified artifice of performance. Mr. Sowle here seems uninterested in breaking with this tradition. To whit, at the end of the show I felt like I had been attending a highly informative lecture that made imaginative use of demonstration. I did not feel I had witnessed a dramatic performance. If I had anticipated attending an educational presentation, I might have been a little more prepared to sound the depths of my considerable ignorance.  As it was, I felt a little cheated out of my expectation of a moment of imaginative catharsis. Consciously or unconsciously, we come to theater with our own inherited expectations of  in what a drama should consist.

Mr. Sowle does have one great “dramatic” trump card in this piece, which he plays to perfection right at the conclusion. Horripilation, a word we should all adopt into our vocabularies, is a term describing the upward movement of the hairs on our skins on account of goosebumps stimulated by something observed. In Kutiyattam, all performers should be capable of producing this effect in their audience. For the jaded audiences of the present, it sounds like a tall order. But eerily, almost quietly, the actor creates just this effect in the final five minutes of his show as, fully painted and costumed in high finery, he becomes an extraordinary character while dancing in a quaint, exotic manner, eye and head movements formally observing the codes he has related. You were looking at something quite other, quite riveting. I didn’t check to see if I had goosebumps but, for several minutes together, I was experiencing something quite beyond them.

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Horripilation! was featured as part of the Times Square International Theater Festival at the Roy Arias Studios & Theatres located at 300 W. 43rd St, NY, NY.

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Deploying a short and narrow raised, wooden platform, with a total area surface of 21 square feet, seven actors in blue spandex outfits (that’s 3 square feet each they have to work with; you do the math!), no scenery or lighting effects, and just 35 minutes, Theater Un-Speak-Able set out to tell that well-worn saga of our age, Superman, transposing it to the year 2050. No actor gets to leave the platform during the telling. All of the fantastical visual effects necessary in the elaboration of this story – illustrated comic book panels, complexly designed camera shots – must be generated solely by the actors as they shuffle, dip, duck, dodge and dive while dramatizing such a highly visual narrative. This is both extreme physical performative stagecraft and compacted theatrical story telling.

Despite an unavoidable aura of farce, the adaptation is purely deadpan in delivery. There’s barely a hair out of place as we are introduced to the familiar cast of characters – Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and Lex Luthor. Even Lana Lang gets a look in here. All proceeds in orderly fashion as the villainous genius Luthor schemes to destroy the mid-western high-speed rail network (I know we don’t have one now, but in 2050…) and, of course, take out Superman in order to achieve that end. Will his dastardly plan succeed, or will the man of steel save the day? (Oh, come on.) Tropes from the popular Alexander Salkind movie of 1978 (will we ever get passed this rendition?) – John Williams‘ music (dum-de-de-dum-de-de!), lifted lines of dialogue (“You’ve got me? Who’s got you?“) – are sprinkled into the mix to create a narrative shorthand, generate atmosphere, and, cunningly, a sense of nostalgic conspiracy. After all, this piece is fundamentally reliant on the audience’s imaginative participation. And this is where and how it scores. Make no mistake, for all the light-weight silliness at play, this is a sophisticated and highly disciplined piece of theater, and its steel is what brings it off. Which really is the ultimate pleasure about Superman 2050; it is a meringue developed by engineers and architects, who just happen to be savvy chefs too.

An ensemble-developed project, it emerges from the Lecoq-styled approach which stresses disciplined physical performance and improvisational story-telling. As director and original conceiver, Marc Frost must rank as the head chef.  A quietly enchanting Clark Kent/Superman, Frost is to be commended also for his direction and for assembling such an extraordinarily winning cast of cartoonishly perfect performers, each of whom seems to resonate with the recalled ghosts of by-gone cameo role greats. As well as characters, actors stand in for scenery and  objects, in forms both hackneyed and original, generating illusions, visual and audial, that deftly and economically command attention.  There are even some moments of transcendental beauty, such as when Superman is flying with Lois, and the other actors, huddled at their feet, making low whooshing noises, hands sweeping softly to an fro, suggest clouds and the passage of air over the duo. It’s simple and startling. No green screens needed here. No super-padded and enhanced costumes either. There’s enough firm flesh to ogle that could while away more than twice the tale’s duration. Just say no to CGI.

My one small cavil, if I could be allowed, is with the determined G rated feel of the exercise, the refusal to develop subtext or analyze the original tale. The well-worn frame is broken in only one instance, in the character of Jimmy Olsen, who is shown to be more than a little slavishly attached to the company of Clark Kent. At the finale, Brittany Bookbinder, in the role of Jimmy, emits such a hysterical shriek of complex delight when the Daily Planet employees are rejoined by the mysteriously absent-for-everything Clark, that it opens up all sorts of imaginative new perspectives on the saga. But perhaps I’m asking for too much here from this otherwise masterful, rapid-fire condensing of one of our great modern fairy tales. It’s a mistake, after all, to look for the yolk in a meringue. With it, it would simply be something quite other. That it’s taken out is frankly the pleasure of it.

A Chicago based outfit, the hard-working cast and crew is rounded out by Kathleen Wrinn, Thomas Kelly, Melissa Cameron, Becky McNamara, Lily Emerson, Zachary Baker-Salmon, and Alice da Cunha. More good works must be anticipated from this imaginative group, who surely are struggling to keep theatre performance alive –  for truth, for justice, and the American way.

Superman 2050 was featured as part of the Times Square International Theater Festival at the Roy Arias Studios & Theatres located at 300 W. 43rd St, NY, NY.

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In a late hour email before I attended the first night performance of The Mad Ones‘ Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War at the New Ohio Theatre, I was notified that Con Edison were currently addressing a problem with the theatre’s heating system and I should consider dressing in a thick sweater. I grumbled a bit putting on my thick sweater as I headed out, but was actually entirely comfortable in my seat for the duration of the performance. Thinking about it now, it is not inconceivable that this alert may have been part of the very clever, meticulously thoughtful and imaginative production team’s idea at generating a theatrical reality for their play. How very 1950s to deploy a thick sweater while attending a theatre in wintertime, be it in the U.S.S.R. or the U.S.A. The production might have been dressing the audience for their performance.

The reason I am left with this speculation is because it seems there is nothing, quite simply nothing, that this production has not given some sharp thought to in their dramatization; sharp thought and imaginative response to. The thoroughness with which the team at The Mad Ones have undertaken this self-authored work is as impressive as it is deeply satisfying. Originally premiered at Brooklyn’s The Brick in 2010 – a production that garnered them a deal of notice and a clutch of NY Innovative Theatre awards and nominations – the play, allegedly, has undergone some minor tinkering and some extra polish since then. The result is a real gift for theatre lovers.

Developed by the ensemble from a premise by writer/actor Marc Bovino, the play springs from the somewhat cracked idea that the 20th century’s Cold War was interrupted at the end of the fifties by an invasion of giant robots who emerged from the ground in the U.S. mid-west. (Hmmm…) The action unfolds years later, in an unrecognizable analog-using present,  in a secret bunker hold-up in Irkutsk where a team of Russian radio actors are broadcasting diversionary entertainment, complete with lackluster advertising interludes, to a devastated global audience. The fact that we are in a traumatized world where humanity’s survival hangs by a thread  is never elaborated upon, merely suggested by a series of panicked siren warnings, over the air explosions, morse coded messages, and enigmatic episodes which are never explained. The characters take them all in their stride, never engaging in discussion about what is exactly going on. Instead we are treated to a lightly comic work environment where, whilst telling a radio story for their listeners – the tragic tale of fond brothers Alasdair and Samuel, “our favorite story” the on air host calls it – cornily rendered into a nostalgic, hackneyed narrative with songs, the broadcasting team – the host, an actor/technical advisor, an actress, a musician – go through their routine professionally bored with the familiarity of the material, mutely (we are live on air, after all) signaling and interacting with each other. Reality is presented as a dumb show behind an elaborately artificial dramatized story. These are Russian performers – what the U.S.S.R. now looks like we can only guess at (not so good as evidenced here) – presenting a touching tale set in the U.S heartlands that deploys American country music favorites from the fifties to build atmosphere and entertainment. The piece might be both crassly comical and unbearably ponderous if it weren’t for the considerable judgement at work in spinning such an apparently simple, if far-fetched story. The tiers of story telling each take a turn in the spotlight – the radio narrative, the actor’s interactions, the vast cataclysmic backdrop off stage – but all are held in a tight balance, and knit seamlessly together. As corny and at once bizarre as the tale of the two brothers is, we are brought to the brink of tragedy in the story telling. As compelling and troubling as the situation of the radio actors is – the vivid, nuanced performances of each allude to complicated backstories beyond the scenario presented – everything is perfectly framed within these scenes. And as apocalyptic and sci-fi as this story world is, all is solidly foregrounded in what is another ordinary day for the characters in their extraordinary situation.

I don’t believe I’ve sat through a performance before where the question of who the dramaturg is seemed so pressing. Mark it down to the uniform excellence on show. In this case it is Sarah Lunnie, who must take her part in the laudations well deserved by company members Lila Neugebauer (director),  actors and musicians Marc Bovino (Dr. Mischa Romanav), Joe Curnutte (radio host), Stephanie Wright Thompson (Anastasia Volinski), and Michael Dalto (Alexei ‘Tumbleweed’ Petrovya).  Impossible not to include mention of the contributions by everyone involved, but especially Stowe Nelson (sound design), Laura Jellinek (set design), and Mike Inwood (lighting).

Though listed as only the third production by this young company, founded just in 2009, it seems admirably mature in every way. They offer theatre thrillingly neither fish nor fowl, original, skillful, honed and captivating, with a lightly worn mocking panache of its own which stresses how stubbornly married we are to the notion of story in order to make our lives tolerable. I can hardly recommend The Mad Ones’ Samuel & Alasdair highly enough. As another author who knew a thing or two about dramatic story telling once wrote, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

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