Lily Tomlin at Duke

Duke Performances Review
An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin Showcases

By Scott Ross

Lily Tomlin. Magical, musical name. But, my God—what can be said that hasn’t been already? And where to begin?

With her first inspired bit on national television, taps attached to her bare feet, tripping the light fantastic on a portable wooden floor? Or perhaps those indelible, utterly original characterizations—the endearingly acerbic yet somehow oddly sensual Ernestine Tomlin, Ma Bell’s favorite enforcer; the bratty, precocious, and utterly sane Edith Ann, dispensing fractured wisdom from her oversized rocker; and Audrey Earbore, the indefatigably proper “Tasteful Lady”—that both shot her to stardom and made the otherwise spotty “Laugh-In” the television comedy to watch in 1970?

Should we begin with the sublime Judith Beasley, that heartbreakingly sincere Calumet hausfrau with a backbone made of tungsten? Or with Tomlin’s astonishing movie debut in Robert Altman and Joan Tewkesbury’s superb 1975 mosaic Nashville, resplendent and moving as the Gospel-singing wife and mother who leaves perpetual satyr Keith Carradine dazed and confused after what he assumed would be just one more in an endless series of one-night stands? Or maybe with her loopy yet resilient Margo, first confounding, then becoming indispensable to tattered private detective Art Carney in Robert Benton’s charming take on modern L.A. criminology The Late Show (1977)?

But, stay—that doesn’t dent the surface, omitting as it does Tomlin’s exasperated corporate secretary Violet in ersatz Snow White costume, cheerfully ladling rat poison into her hated boss’s coffee cup, to the approval of her animated forest pals, in Nine to Five (1980). And what about her imperious, lonely Edwina Cutwater in All of Me (1984), challenging Steve Martin not to love her and creating an indispensable comic portrait out of little more than voice-overs and the occasional glimpse into a mirror?

And I haven’t even mentioned her sui generis multilayered (and densely populated) one-woman collaborations with her partner, that quiet genius of subversive wit Jane Wagner: the landmark “Modern Scream” LP, arguably the single most creatively brilliant and incisive comedy album of the 1970s; their superb initial journey to Broadway, Appearing Nitely (1977); their charming (if environmentally alarming) 1981 comic remake The Incredible Shrinking Woman; and—supremely—the transcendent The Search for Signs of Inteligent [sic] Life in the Universe (1986), the nearest thing to a Zen extravaganza Broadway has ever seen.

The foregoing may seem an exhaustive list, but I don’t think it touches the breadth and accomplishment of this most chameleon-like and protean of all solo performers. To call Lily Tomlin a stand-up comedian would be a bit like referring to Mark Twain as a humorist. It’s all too easy, and it doesn’t come close.

The Sept. 15th Duke Performances-sponsored An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin was something of a regression for this American original, a sort of “Greatest Hits” tour taking in selections—some excerpted, others fully realized—from her disparate projects. Whereas it was surprising to see Tomlin redux, rather than charting new horizons, the more important thing was just seeing Tomlin.

This was the irrepressible Lily in full: at the improbable age of 66, her inimitable voice deepened to husky smoke, her particular genius honed to glorious perfection. Present too those crisp, double-take-inducing cosmic one-liners (“Why is it when we talk to God we’re said to be praying -- but when God talks to us, we’re said to be schizophrenic?” “The most valuable survival skill we have is the ability to delude ourselves”) that, taken with the wistful smile, constitute the Tao of Tomlin (or is it Jane?) Here was Lily Tomlin, all of them: that gallery of strikingly sane eccentrics, from Trudy the Bag Lady to Sister Boogie Woman, that constitutes one of the living greatest ensemble companies in American entertainment. Tomlin is a little bit like illustrated radio: it’s all laid out for us, if we can only hear it. Perhaps only Richard Pryor (with whom she occasionally worked in the 1970s) shares Tomlin’s unbound ability to slip into and out of personas at will, locating their centers of comic gravity with unerring precision.

Re-locating material now outmoded by the speed of technology is a risky business, but may be imperative. What would today’s young people make of Ernestine’s telephone switchboard? (And when Lucille the Rubber Freak talks of eating a typewriter eraser, do they even know what she’s talking about?) We can take heart that Ernestine herself may be bowed as well as bloodied (“I gave the best years of my life to Ma Bell and what did it get me? When she went to pieces, so did I”) but not down and defiantly not out (“No matter how nasty I become, I’m still holding back”). Or that Judy Beasley, having given herself over to a more personal technology (the “Good Vibrations” sexual aid) has become “a semi-orgasmic woman”: “‘But does it kill romance?’ you say. And I say, ‘What doesn’t?’”

In the universe as seen by Lily Tomlin, you could almost swear she’s cloned herself; as Lud and Marie argue anew over that piece of cake that drives daughter Lily to paroxysms of hysteria, the merest gesture of hand miraculously convinces us that a conversation may be conducted by a single person, or that the carefully emolliated face of Madame Lupe, the World’s Oldest Living Beauty Expert (who once advised Somerset Maugham to “live by candlelight”) can be undone by a sneeze.

And when Tomlin waxes political (“I worry that we have the technology and the Administration to finally make Fascism work”), we can—after shuddering—only concur with Trudy, that survival of the fittest should be re-thought: If the continuity of life really was dependent on “survival of the wittiest,” Lily Tomlin (and Jane Wagner) would outlive us all.

Lily Tomlin: http://www.lilytomlin.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina prints these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/.

Paula Poundstone at the Carolina

Paula Poundstone at The Carolina Theatre

By Scott Ross

Ask most people what Improvisational Comedy means and chances are they’ll assume you’re referring to what happens on “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” or (at the other extreme, and with more preparation) Viola Spolin’s noble experiment in Chicago, which led to the original Second City and the ascendancy of its graduates—Alan Alda, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Joan Rivers, Severn Darden, Roger Bowen, Robert Klein, Paul Mazursky, and, earlier, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—to the Pantheon of post-war American humor.

Those are valid responses, of course, but the greater form is that practiced occasionally by Robin Williams and wholly by Mel Brooks in his heyday with Carl Reiner: wading in without prepared remarks. Call it what you will—working without a net, riffing on the audience itself—it’s the comedian’s equivalent of an extended jazz break, an ability so uncanny it’s almost akin to spiritual channeling. And while there are, seemingly, thousands of comics around, big and small, more than ready to perform what Spaulding Gray once called “genital-scented humor” (“pop!” “bang!” “pow!”), usually on the prescribed topics, there are never more than a handful of true verbal magicians in existence at any one time. Paula Poundstone is more than one in a million; she’s one in 300 million.

She was in top form last Friday evening, when she brought her Big Picture tour to convulsively funny life in Fletcher Hall at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, skewering with deadly accuracy everything from the ubiquity of Viagra commercials and the media’s current obsession (in which the news is about “how everyone’s talking about Martha Stewart”) to her own, much publicized, difficulties with alcohol, during which she “got a court order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous—on television.”

Poundstone, as her website correctly maintains, is not a comic “defined by the usual gender-biased topics of relationships, diets, men, or sex.” Yet the last time I saw this astonishing American treasure, at Charley Goodnight’s in Raleigh, some unsung idiot booked three female stand-ups to open for her, and all three made endless (and largely puerile) jokes about—wait for it—relationships, diets, men, and sex. It was as though Henny Youngman had introduced Lily Tomlin.

Although she now works a good deal of material concerning her foster and adopted children into the mix, Poundstone’s observations are the furthest thing from the usual young comedian’s applause-milking pap about family or—more horrifying—the precious, sick-making bilge we used to get courtesy of Art Linkletter. Poundstone’s world is one in which her daughter uses cerebral palsy as an attention-getting device, abandoning her mother to the task of explaining it to strangers (“Really, she doesn’t fall over any more than the rest of us”); her son’s grammar school teacher thinks she’s reading obscenities to the class when the phrase “silly ass” turns up in Emil and the Detectives; and their school requires parents to compose something called “Comfort Notes” in case of emergency.

Poundstone also delivered a phalanx of achingly funny remarks on any number of peripatetic subjects: the increasing difficulty, in our age of ear-bud cell phones, to tell CEO from the schizophrenic; the insanity of injecting man-made fat into our food. Concerning Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Poundstone proved her own manifestation of the condition -- as she phrases it, her “inability to stop talking”—by regaling us for over two hours, sans the intermission she forgot to stop for.

I doubt anyone minded. We were all much too busy laughing.

Paula Poundstone: http://www.paulapoundstone.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

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Glen Berger's "Underneath the Lintel" at Flying Machine

Underneath The Lintel

By Scott Ross

If you’re perusing this and have not seen the Flying Machine Theatre Company production of Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel at Raleigh Charter High School, stop reading, call 800/514-ETIX, and book your tickets now. Because if you miss this one—and too many Triangle theater-goers already have—you will have deprived yourself of an experience so unique and rapturous it will refresh your spirit, fire your mind, and enrich every corner of your life.

Make the call. I’ll wait.

Got your tickets? Good. Now please allow me to give you some small notion of the sublime pleasures that await you. I’m going to be brief, and somewhat elliptical, because any proper encapsulation of this play risks revealing too much, and lessening its powerful impact.

Underneath the Lintel consists of an impassioned semi-lecture by a shabby Dutch librarian—played with extraordinary depth of feeling by Julian “J” Chachula, Jr.—which relates his belief-shaking, life-altering attempt to track down the borrower of an extremely overdue book. As interest becomes obsession, the Librarian takes us on a mystic, metaphysical journey that, much like a peeled onion, reveals layer upon layer of the miraculous. The play is spiritual in the very best sense, and concerned with some of the profoundest questions of human experience.

It gives little away to note that the Librarian’s “Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences” takes in an ancient Baedeker, a laundry ticket used as a bookmark, a pair of unclaimed trousers, a tram ticket from 1912, a 232-year-old work voucher, several productions of Les Misérables, a whistled tune that defies the logic of time, the death of Aeschylus, and a 50-cent recording made at the 1939 World’s Fair.

There’s more than a hint of the marvelous James Burke series “Connections” here, but that is peripheral. What matters is the emotional core the playwright slowly reveals, and the exquisite texture of those revelations. In Underneath the Lintel, Glen Berger has pulled off one of the most difficult forms of theater—the monodrama, or one-man show—with verve, wit, style, passion, and breath-taking aplomb. The language soars with unselfconscious brilliance, and the characterization is one of exceptional solidity. All of that is impressive enough, but Berger’s ultimate triumph lies in the contents of the exercise. Here, the everyday assumes the contours of the genuinely poetic and the unexceptional an emotional aspect of terrible, moving import.

I can only hint at the transcendent perfection of Chachula’s performance in this limited space, but it’s a beauty. The Librarian is slightly self-important, more than a bit priggish, and often achingly funny, and the actor gets it all absolutely right. (His Dutch accent is somewhat variable, but that’s a minor aside.) Chachula lets us see how obsession enlivens this gray little functionary in increments, until at last his eyes shine with the fever of discovery, desire, hope, and a desperately human need. This is a performance of such rare acumen, joy, erudition, and anguish it can sear your skin off.

The staging by Mark Perry (himself a playwright of note) could scarcely be bettered: his work encompasses pace, tension, and a superbly timed reflectiveness that meshes perfectly with the actor and the text. Devra Thomas deserves a mention as well for her apt and well-chosen props, which are of uncommon importance to the play. Steve Tell has done wonders lighting a difficult space, and Wade Dansby III has designed an exceptionally haunting graphic image for the playbill.

This vital production has been playing to shamefully small audiences during its run. This, it seems to me, is so appalling it verges on the criminal. The Librarian wonders if he would recognize a miracle if he saw it? To which I can only reply: I would. I saw one Saturday night: it’s called Underneath the Lintel.

Go thou and do likewise.

http://www.flyingmachinetheatre.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

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Harold Brighouse's "Hobson's Choice" at PlayMakers

Hobson’s Choice

By Scott Ross

Few theatergoers, I suspect, are all that familiar with Harold Brighouse’s 1915 comedy of Victorian manners Hobson’s Choice. Movie mavens may recall with fondness Charles Laughton’s drunken encounter with a huge, puddle-reflected moon and his subsequent (and marvelously cinematic) fall down a coal-chute in the 1954 David Lean adaptation. Musical theater aficionados may likewise call up dim recollection of the 1966 Broadway musical Walking Happy, about whose star John Simon memorably remarked, “If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon Folly.”

It is with thanks, then, that we turn to PlayMakers Repertory Company, whose current, scenically spare production emphasizes Brighouse’s rich dialogue and precise characterizations and returns a forgotten treasure to glory.

Hobson’s Choice is also a cunning curtain raiser of sorts for PRC’s next undertaking. For, as with King Lear, the Lancashire bootmaker Henry Horatio Hobson—a small-time tyrant—must contend with three querulous daughters, a divided kingdom, and inexorable descent into helplessness. Unlike Shakespeare’s monarch, however, Hobson is able to discover the true nature of his wayward daughter’s fidelity before irreparable harm is done and is thus spared having to carry her lifeless form to cries of “Howl, howl, howl!” That’s the difference between comedy and tragedy.

The play’s bustling, forward drive keeps the events moving at a brisk pace yet allows for a reflective contemplation of its characters, and a quietly dawning realization that these Victorian figures (the period is, roughly, 1886) are far more modern than may at first be supposed. Hobson’s eldest, Maggie, contemptuously referred to as an Old Maid, is something of a feminist prototype; and her final triumph over her father’s patriarchy is a victory for all disenfranchised daughters.

But Brighouse was no polemicist, and his characters are more than mere symbols. The play’s final scene carries with it a darker, more contemporary notion: the father becomes the child, the daughter his caregiver. (Maggie’s sisters, as one with Regan and Goneril, deny this second-rate Lear any succor.)

Blake Robison, the production’s director, gives us Hobson’s Choice neat. My only cavil is his tendency toward stasis, which robs the actors of some physical characterization and blunts the effect of later moments that require a contemplative stillness for their impact.

Still, the cleanness of Robison’s staging is perfectly realized in McKay Coble’s minimalist set design, a thing of beauty in its own right. Coble’s spare set (in concert with Peter West’s evocative lighting and Russell Parkman’s peerless costumes) strips away the overfed clutter of Victorian verisimilitude, replacing it with a striking simplicity which provides just enough detail to place the action and allow us to revel in Brighouse’s splendid stage language.

A ladder, some curved stools, a rack of display shoes, a fitting seat, a large hanging boot icon, and a trapdoor, below which the bootmakers toil in anonymity, represent Hobson’s bootery. A brick façade hangs above, which will eventually fuse with a rising cellar to create the impoverished storefront of Hobson’s eventual rival Will Mossop. A beautifully detailed period street along the upstage wall, complete with plank fence, worn advertisements and the residue of old posters, completes the detail. An addition fillip is Anthony Reimer’s delicious Victorian band music, which punctuates the action between scenes with witty aplomb.

The casting, with a single exception so small it barely merits comment, is perfection. Robert Breuler’s expansive Hobson is everything one could wish—imperious, disdainful, petty, misogynist, sodden, and oddly endearing at once. Matching him blow for blow is the indomitable Rachel Fowler, who manages the enviable feat of making Maggie both holy terror and curiously likeable, never more so than when playing Pygmalion to the Galatea of Jeffrey Blair Cornell’s adorably reticent Will Mossop.

As Maggie’s siblings Alice and Vicky, Carrie Heitman and Karen Walsh move from latent to explicit snobbery without a hitch. As the sisters’ equally social-striving beaus, Kenneth P. Strong and Jeffrey Meanza deftly slide from potential caricature to Hobson’s worthy opponents. In smaller roles, Julie Fishell, Adam Sheaffer, David Adamson and (all-too briefly) the superb Ray Dooley, lend the imprimatur of absolute thespic authority.

It’s doubtful we’ll see a more intelligent, thoughtful, or fulsome comedy this season than this sunny, if black-tinged, saga of upward mobility and the downward spiral of dipsomania. This Hobson’s Choice is choice indeed.

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John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Joe Calarco's "Shakespeare's R & J" at StreetSigns

Shakespeare’s R & J

By Scott Ross

I’ve often thought a fascinating play is waiting to be written around the Elizabethan practice of boy actors assaying the female roles in the plays of Shakespeare, and the sexual tension this convention almost certainly lead to. This idea applies perhaps especially to the lucky youths who first performed those magnificently ardent adolescent lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare’s R & J, Joe Calarco’s re-imaging of the Bard, isn’t precisely the play of my fond imagination either. But, as its splendid new production by StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance in Studio 6 of Swain Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill proves, it doesn’t need to be. It’s quite stunning enough on its own.

By setting his adaptation in a Catholic boy’s school where four young students surreptitiously examine the play by enacting all the roles, Calarco gets to the heart of institutionalized taboo. For Shakespeare’s lovers, of course, the forbidden nature of their courtship lies in the extreme enmity between their warring clans. For Calarco’s, it’s the bursting forth of feeling between young males in a repressive environment.

The promotional material for Shakespeare’s R & J emphasizes that Romeo and Juliet itself (and, presumably, all of Shakespeare) is banned by the school, and that the book from which the students read is discovered hidden away, yet there is no real evidence of this in Calarco’s treatment. We see the boys (called Students 1-4) in regimented study, much of which consists of misogynist discourses on the prescribed differences between the sexes, but there is no direct imprecation against the reading of Shakespeare; Student 1 merely produces the volume from a trunk. The subsequent “performance” is clearly clandestine, but the reasons for its surreptitious nature are barely implied.

That said, Shakespeare’s R & J, especially as performed here by a superb cast of young actors under the searching direction of StreetSigns associate artistic director Joseph Megel, is joyous. We hear that glorious text enacted by a quartet of uncommonly gifted players, and the seditious context gives this well-known tragedy a resonance well beyond the contours of your high school English prep experience.

The game is afoot early on, when Student 1 (Akil) breaks away from the stultifying routine of Latin, mathematics, religious instruction, and antiquated imprecations against sex to “write” Shakespearean love poetry while his cohorts make obeisance to God for their sins. This, already, is Romeo: aloof, apart from his friends in his romantic melancholy—a grandiose form of painful pleasure accessible only to the young and hopeful.

It is this young man who entices the others to imbibe from the fount of iambic pentameter. His reluctant friends, embarrassed at first (and initially inclined to childish improvisation, particularly when called upon to portray the women of the play), gradually become intoxicated by the words they’re speaking and submit to the power, and the beauty, of Shakespeare’s Verona. This is especially apt given that Romeo and Juliet are as besotted with words as they are with each other; they’re as drunk on language as they are on their own sudden passion.

As Student 2 (Francis A. Sarnie IV) takes on the role of Juliet, what begins as anxious and fearful role-playing relaxes into acquiescence and, finally, to full-bodied romantic feeling. As their staged courtship intensifies, the emotional and physical desires of the two boys likewise catch fire. At the same time their compatriots, disturbed by the blurring of the line between stage poetry and sexual expression, begin to reflect the actions and attitudes of those characters most opposed to the union between Capulet and Montague in the play itself.

This is notably true of Student 3 (Christopher Salazar), who frequently thrusts himself physically between the lovers—attempting to stave off this “unacceptable” behavior and, perhaps, to protect himself from his own deepest fears. Student 4 (Ronnie Cruz) is, initially, as troubled as his friend, but relents more easily. The “impromptu” casting in this play-within-a-play reflects these concerns: Student 4 assumes the role of the sympathetic Nurse (although he’s also the hot-blooded Tybalt); Student 3 the bellicose mother Capulet and an initially reticent Friar Laurence.

The opposition of the third boy to the events swirling out of his control is most effectively illuminated when, in the marriage scene, he and Student 4 play “keep away” with the book before he tears out the offending page, crumples it, and hurls it to the ground in righteous defiance. (When the event goes ahead, both boys mockingly vocalize the familiar Nino Rota theme from Zefferelli’s film.)

The impact of the greater social forces surrounding the budding lovers is alluded to early on when, at the Capulet’s ball, the boys attempt to waltz with each other; each time two of them face off, the stern warning “Thou shalt not!” is repeatedly invoked just as hands are about to touch. When Romeo woos Juliet, Student 2 first resists the closeness of Student 1, then relents; allows his hand to be kissed, then resists; yields again, allowing Student 1 to take his hand but covering this intimacy with the length of red cloth the boys employ as their sole prop. When he finally gives in, that first tender, halting kiss is wrenchingly curtailed by the other boys—just as the couple’s wedding kiss will be rudely torn asunder by the tolling of school bells and a flash of antiseptic institutional light.

As the Romeo of both Calarco’s play and Shakespeare’s, Akil gives a performance of enormous sensitivity and a certain cunning that lends his portrayal a quality of interesting edginess: it is his cajoling that encourages the others to undertake the tragedy, his intensity that wears down his reluctant Juliet. His “Nightingale” scene with Student 2 is terribly sweet and ineffably moving. As Student 4, Ronnie Cruz is an altogether more malleable figure, troubled by the flaring of erotic and emotional attachment between Students 1 and 2 but less obstreperous than Student 3 in opposing it. Cruz’s Nurse begins as caricature and finishes all too human.

As the object of Student 1’s increasing affection, Francis Sarnie gives a lovely, iridescent performance. As Student 2 Sarnie, like Juliet herself, goes from skittish but pliable to swooningly entranced, triumphantly rebellious and, later, unabashedly grieving -- all without recourse to anything so obvious as the broad effeminacy a lesser actor might affect. Like the boy he plays, Sarnie gives himself over to rhapsody; as the balcony scene begins, he sits, musing, a look of hopeful serenity on his face that broadens to a smile of utter romantic joy at the approach of his beloved. I’ve seldom seen the state of love-struck bliss so endearingly conveyed.

It would be unfair to single out one performer from a quartet as accomplished as this. A special nod must be given, however, to Christopher Salazar’s complex and unpredictable Student 3. His Mercutio is athletic, playful, and insouciant in equal measure, and his reading of the “Queen Mab” speech begins with joking and climaxes with a shout of agonized, enigmatic rage. Later, as Friar Laurence, his fury at Romeo’s self-pitying emotional excess neatly dovetails with the Catholic schoolboy’s own impotent anger as his classmates step over the boundary of play-acting into genuine emotional entanglement.

The play, and Megel’s direction of it, resounds with delicious theatricality. When figures of mature authority (Lord Capulet, the Prince, the Apothecary) speak, they do so in staggeringly effective roundelay as the boys recite together or echo and overlap each other’s lines, giving the speeches a gravity and a sense of adult propriety lording itself over the students even in their play-acting. As the first act closes, the boys doff their school ties and sweaters, a simple act that stands as a metaphor for their increasing rebelliousness—a revolutionary pose all too easily retreated from at the close of the play. As Juliet awaits news of Romeo, two of the boys beat out the hours of the clock. Calarco (and Megel) use the play’s single prop, that vibrant red cloth, as everything from prince’s cape and priest’s vestment to Juliet’s wedding veil and even as a representation of the blood that flows so freely throughout the text.

Rob Hamilton’s set design powerfully conveys both the medieval architecture of Verona and the sense of the Church’s repressive corporeal solemnity hanging over the boys and their play, and is beautifully complimented by Steve Dubay’s evocative lighting.

Personal Note: There seems to be some curious force at work on Triangle audiences of late. At a recent Friday evening performance of Underneath the Lintel, fewer than a dozen spectators gathered to see that beautifully lucid, incandescent play. At the subsequent Saturday night performance of R & J, there could scarcely have been more than double that number in attendance.

What is scaring audiences away from theater so vital and enriching that nearly everything else on offer pales to insignificance? Is the economy to blame? It seems unlikely, given the crowds that assemble for other, less probing and essential fare. Have we become so frightened of the new, the untested, that we eschew the experience altogether? Great theater is available right this minute, and it goes begging. Why are there so few takers?

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and Fucking" at Manbites Dog

Shopping and Fucking

By Scott Ross

When it comes to assaying Mark Ravenhill’s deliberately scabrous 1996 London hit Shopping and Fucking, I suspect there’s no winning. A rave invites accusations—on evidence, well deserved—of pretension, a lukewarm response some suspicion of obtuseness, and outright condemnation those dread twin bogeys “closed-minded” and “homophobic.”

A playwright who names his magnum opus with a word no newspaper will print is looking for means to shock. And when that play begins with a graphic display of vomiting and includes gratuitous nudity, simulations of anilingus, and copious quantities of bloodletting, sadomasochism, impenetrable dialect (and dialogue), and characters who bear little relation to life as we know it on this planet, that dramatist pushes well beyond outrage and into something very like assault.

For someone who attempts to uphold Seneca’s maxim (“I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me”), a play like this is something of an acid test for tolerance. I don’t mind being disturbed by art or performance; indeed, I often relish the experience. But Ravenhill (who, astonishingly, has been compared to Joe Orton) piles on the ugliness and casual—if not downright bored—depictions of violent activity, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by and against characters for whom we feel not the slightest empathy. His script gives every sign that its author has suckled too long at the teat of Sam Shepard and David Mamet—pretty undernourished sources to begin with.

The current production of the play by Manbites Dog Theater Company, under the direction of Jay O’Berski, is certainly arresting. His cast, especially Sarah Erickson and Amit V. Mahtaney, is game, but the play is gamier. Only the treasurable Lissa Brennan (in a role written for a male actor) manages to combine humor and profanity in a striking manner. Despite my intense aversion to the play, I suspect I’ll long cherish the way Brennan expresses the phrase “attacked by a herd of wild coos.”

Publicity for Shopping and Fucking includes this helpful imprecation: “Faint of heart or easily offended? Attend A Christmas Carol instead.” It takes a special kind of arrogance to make a statement like that, a presumption that any yahoo philistine enough to dislike this play deserves, and can appreciate, only pap—even an audience predisposed to support the decidedly adult offerings of Manbites Dog. Judging from the number of walkouts at intermission (my own included), that snotty little caution may turn out to be less caveat than self-fulfilling prophecy.

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John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

"Cabaret" at NCSU

Cabaret

By Scott Ross

Before discussing John McIlwee’s recent, often astonishingly effective, production of Cabaret for University Theatre at N.C. State (Oct. 1-5), a few side observations on the show’s artistic progenitors.

First, Christopher Isherwood. Although heavily camouflaged, Isherwood’s dispatches from pre-Hitler Berlin—collected in Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin—are the front from which all else flows: the John Van Druten play I Am a Camera, which first enshrined Sally Bowles as the central figure of the franchise (she’s only one of many in the Isherwood stories) and its subsequent film; the 1966 musicalization; the great 1972 Bob Fosse film, arguably the finest movie musical of the past 50 years; and the current, aggressively de-glamorized 1998 revision, still tempting New York audiences with its slightly sinister opening number of welcome. (When it closes in November, it will have run nearly twice as long as the original production.)

Each incarnation of the material has played fast-and-loose with its source, to varying degrees of success; the Fosse film comes closest, but even it transforms the Isherwood figure from ardent homophile to reluctant bisexual. (At an early screening, Isherwood was heard to hiss, “It’s a goddamned lie! I never slept with a woman in my life!”) But no version, even the gritty recent edition put together by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, has had the courage to deal honestly with the author as an observer of, and participant in, the action. Isherwood went to Germany in search of an idealized romantic friendship; his fictional compatriots are there to write, or teach English, or both—certainly not to indulge their erotic imaginations with the more adventurous boys of Berlin. Worse, every edition of this material gets the Isherwood figure (whether called Chris, Cliff, or Brian) romantically—and sexually—involved with Sally Bowles.

Skipping over such matters as Christopher’s Americanization—like Sally, he was British—the second difficulty with Cabaret is its secondary leads: a pair of Rodgers and Hammerstein holdovers, they’re purveyors of the subplot, made more relevant only by dint of their confrontation with nascent Nazi-era anti-Semitism. Fraulein Schneider, the landlady, and her Jewish beau Herr Schultz are vividly rendered, and Schneider benefited originally from the inspired casting of Lotte Lenya, a living link to the era and the Kurt Weill-ish vamps by the show’s composer John Kander. But they’re still largely comic relief until late in the first act. Their story, however affecting, is—as with Sally and Cliff—all too conventional for a musical as boldly theatrical as this one.

Which brings us rather neatly to Harold Prince. More than anyone else, it is Prince who “created” Cabaret, or at least, gave it its iconic style. I would go so far as to say without fear of contradiction that Hal Prince has had a greater influence on musical theatre, both here and abroad, than any other single figure of the past 40 years. Devotees of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon aren’t aware of it, but the shows they love are the direct result of the innovations Prince (with Jerome Robbins, and abetted by Stephen Sondheim) bequeathed to the musical play: continuous action, unbroken by all those boring blackouts to shift the scenery; complex, contrapuntal intermingling of scene, character, and song; juxtapositions and narrative commentary that buttress and expand upon the emotive and intellectual cores of the shows themselves. More than staging his musicals, Prince has shaped or re-shaped them, often before the authors’ ink was dry. With Cabaret—more than most—what you see today, however revised, exists only because Harold Prince dreamt it first.

It was Prince who recalled the midget M.C. of a seedy dive in post-World War I Berlin, patent-leather hair parted down the middle, face whitened and lips painted red. It was Prince as well who, floored by a performance of the Taganka Theatre in Russia, burned to adapt its radical notions of staging and brilliant use of light. It was Prince, too, who gave the show its central metaphor: the tilted mirror over the stage which rose and fell, reflecting and implicating the audience. It was also Prince who, with his librettist Joe Masteroff, took 15 minutes of introductory material and wove it into the show itself, each number now illustrating the hedonism of the late Weimar era and commenting on the action. And it was Prince’s notion that the Emcee (and other characters as well) should observe the action of the “book” scenes, from various vantage-points, throughout the evening. There was, of course, a superbly dark score by the always-underrated Kander and his lyricist Fred Ebb, and Masteroff’s concise, effective book; but it was Prince’s direction of the show that made Cabaret, with Fiddler on the Roof (which he also produced) one of the two essential musicals of the 1960s.

Prince’s creative spirit hovered over the recent production of the Mendes edition of Cabaret at Stewart Theatre, beginning with the pre-show arrival of the Kit Kat Klub’s audience: the maitre d’ teased a leather-clad waiter, playfully swatting his bottom; a drunken, eye-patch and fez-wearing Moroccan tottered drunkenly about the stage; a pair pinstripe-suited Lesbians flirted with a lumpen showgirl; a cabaret boy crossed by, in half-drag, while respectable ladies and gents thrilled to the demi-monde around them. The Kit Kat Klub was now much a dive, tattered and stripped of all glamour, the girls more closely resembling the blowsy Valkyries of the Fosse vision—tawdry, dumpy, and omnisexual.

This, more earthy version of the cabaret also rings changes in the opportunistic figure of the Emcee. He still sports make-up and parted hair (in this production, Dan Seda wore garish, glitter lipstick) but his tuxedo has been replaced with a bare chest augmented by parachute straps, and his manner is even seedier than the more familiar Joel Grey characterization. This Emcee positively glories in his own vulgarity and (seeming) pansexuality. I say “seeming” because at the end of the evening he’s dressed in the striped uniform of the concentration camp inmate, an unambiguous pink triangle pasted over his chest.

McIlwee took a few liberties of his own, such as adding a trio of boy singers clad as brown-shirted Hitler Youth to perform the show’s Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” their beautiful voices a perfect counterpoint to the ominous lyric and their angelic Aryan looks a chilling reminder. (This year marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the more or less beginning of the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of Germany.)

The cast of this production was just about perfect, from the protean Bobby of Jeff Spanner, whose interpolations included a stint as one of the Emcee’s “Two Ladies” and the female gorilla courted by the Emcee in the alternately hilarious and chilling gymnastic buck-and-wing “If You Could See Her,” to the spectacularly effective Sally of Katie Flaherty.

Sarah Schrock was a warm, funny Fraulein Schneider, her almost maniac devotion to being sensible finally winning out over her romantic feelings for Herr Schultz (Fred Gorelick). Long a University Theatre favorite, Schrock had an unerring sense of movement, gesture, and intonation: when the inevitable Nazi brick was hurled through Schultz’s fruit-shop window, her reading of Schneider’s line “I understand ...” carried within it all of the character’s warring emotions. That one moment, devastating in its clarity, was easily as heartbreaking as Schrock’s impassioned rendition of that haunting ode to practicality, “What Would You Do?”

Gorelick gave a lovely interpretation of Schultz, his blindness to the reality closing in on him most movingly conveyed at the end when, with incomparable—and exceptionally underplayed -- dignity he sealed his own fate with the unutterably sad statement of defiance, “After all, what am I? A German.” Kate Isley made the most of her role as the opportunistic Fraulein Kost, a whore who—like so many Germans of the period -- places her shattered faith in the promise of National Socialism.

Curtis Kirkhoff, lithe and blond, was practically a poster child for the Nazi movement as the charmingly seductive Ernest Ludwig who, in this version of the show, is reputedly attracted sexually to Cliff—making him less an SS man than a member of the SA—although I could detect no sign of this. Will Sanders’ Cliff was a well-meaning minnow swimming against the increasing current of nationalism. The Mendes revision leaves him largely un-musicalized, which works toward making him a more Isherwoodian figure, observing but never quite a part of, the events. And that brings us to Katie Flaherty’s utterly flawless Sally Bowles.

Hal Prince felt that Sally, a third-rate entertainer in a fifth-rate nightclub, wouldn’t be much of a singer. He caught a large measure of flack for this decision, but as Mendes proved in his casting of Natasha Richardson, it can be made to work. The great contradiction of the Fosse film is the presence of Liza Minnelli who, great as she was (will she ever be again?), sang far too well to be quite believable, yet pulled us over that hitch in logic with consummate musicianship and complete conviction. The same may be said of Flaherty, whose intensity, overwhelming strength of personality, and staggering vocal ability somehow made the fantasy work. Her vocal quality put me in mind of the clarion belt of Bernadette Peters, but that isn’t saying nearly enough to convey the sheer, staggering force with which she essayed those familiar anthems.

When she stepped outside the scene she was playing with Cliff to imagine herself as the (in Ebb’s curiously un-Sallylike phrase) “Lady peaceful/Lady happy” of “Maybe This Time,” Flaherty almost made us believe the character’s momentary self-delusion. And when, late in the second act, she confronted Cliff with the news of having aborted “their” child, Flaherty allowed Sally’s pain to surface incrementally but without the hysteria a lesser actor would be tempted to indulge. Her performance of “Cabaret” was masterly. When she sang, “I used to have this girlfriend/Known as Elsie,” her faraway look suggested she had really just recalled that girl—a stand-in for Sally herself—who succumbed to “too much pills and liquor.” And her movements, increasingly frantic, became a kind of mad invocation; this Sally Bowles was desperate to convince herself that life really was a cabaret, old chum.

Matching Flaherty blow-for-blow (a feat in itself) was Dan Seda’s polymorphously perverse Emcee. His body a fluid mass of unabashed exhibitionism, his every leer a come-on to some as-yet undiscovered level of Hell, and possessing a voice that floated with seeming ease from high baritone to lyric tenor, Seda gave an account not of evil but of show-biz with a death’s-head grin: his Emcee’s foolish embrace of National Socialism, born of god only knows what sense of self-satisfied pragmatism, is only a reprieve. By the end, it has betrayed him, as it did so many others. His support of its gleaming promise was not enough to keep that pink triangle off his cadaverous chest.

I cannot say enough about how the varied elements of this production—Cindy Hoban’s exuberantly vulgar choreography; Julie Florin’s superbly balanced musical direction; Crawford Pratt’s marvelously tatty and inventive set designs; Terri L. Janney’s the evocative, chiaroscuro lighting effects; Ida Bostian’s cheerily decadent costumes—illuminated the dark corners of this great, flawed masterpiece of American musical theater. Nor can I convey the authoritative command with which John McIlwee mounted it. For well over a decade now this witty, congenial man has been quietly directing some of the Triangle’s most consistently engaging productions, usually with scant (and often willfully dismissive) critical praise. It’s long past time his undemonstrative genius was acknowledged. Consider it done now, and gratefully.

University Theatre at N.C. State: http://www.ncsu.edu/theatre.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

"Tintypes" at Peace

Peace College Theatre Review

Tintypes May Well Be the Best Show
of the 2003 Theatrical Year

By Scott Ross
Robert's Reviews

When Tintypes premiered in 1981, Stephen Sondheim called it “just about the best show I’ve seen in 20 years.” Heady praise indeed, but as the new production by Peace College Theatre so deftly proves, Tintypes is a musical of rampant joy and boundless ingenuity. It’s been one of my personal favorites for just over two decades, but I must admit I never expected to see it done with the unalloyed brilliance on display in the Leggett Theater.

Conceived by Mary Kyte (with an assist from Mel Marvin and Gary Pearle) and featuring the great Lynne Thigpen (can she really be dead?), Tintypes suffered—unfairly, I think—through comparison with E.L. Doctorow’s magnificent Bicentennial novel Ragtime. One could almost call the show the first musical based on Doctorow’s book.

Both are set in the early days of what came to be known (rather prematurely, I suspect) as The American Century. Both use that syncopated explosion once called “ragged-time” as a jumping off point. Both refract the era’s less discussed, more bitter realities through the artless optimism that greeted it. Both contain as central figures that remarkable anarchist Emma Goldman, and both look askance at the activities of that perpetual infant, Teddy Roosevelt. (As Gore Vidal reminds us, the British Ambassador once warned his superiors, “We must never forget that the President is seven years old.”) Both feature a distinctly prominent stage performer of dubious origins—Stanford White’s mistress Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime, Ziegfeld’s inamorata Anna Held here. And in both is the genteel noblesse oblige of the comfortable white male contrasted sharply with the experience of the Jewish immigrant, the black American, and the poor of all stripes welcomed so memorably by Emma Lazarus, if not by many of her contemporaries.

But Tintypes is less a plotted musical play—as is the eventual musical based directly on Doctorow—than a kind of ragtime oratorio, a scrapbook illuminated (and just as often, unironically misrepresented) by the American popular songbook.

The canvas from which Kyte et al. took their the score is not only rich, but beautifully encapsulates the urban American experience from roughly 1890 to 1917: the parlor-safe romantic oleos of Victor Herbert are made obsolete by the “scandalous” rags of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries; the brash enthusiasm of George M. Cohan must make way for the rueful comic arias of Bert Williams; and the marches of Sousa (himself a child of immigrants) fall before the exuberant vulgarity of the “coon” song and the vaudeville turn.

The emergence of Jewish and African-American tonalities swept away the more decorous cobwebs and gave us a new music to match the changes being wrought in our formerly white bread—and white-bred—world. When the Jewish composer filtered the melodic strain of black America through the klezmer-call of Eastern Europe, something new arose: a native American sound which would receive its fullest apotheosis in the songs of George Gershwin and Harold Arlen. This cross-pollination, so vital to our cultural sense of self, is what Tintypes is really about.

None of this, I hope, makes Tintypes sound like some ethnographic musicological treatise, because nothing could be further from the truth. But that’s the kind of show this is: you’re royally entertained for two hours by one of the most ebullient little musicals ever created, then left to ponder the most profound questions about what it means to be an American.

Under the astonishingly inventive yet never obtrusive direction and choreography of Deb Gillingham, a protean cast of five expertly plays out all the contradictions, disparities, joys, and affirmation Tintypes bequeaths. It’s the tightest, most gifted ensemble of musical performers I’ve seen in years.

Kenny Gannon is by turns wistful, tremulous, abashed, joyous, and altogether endearing as the Chaplinesque newcomer—he even does a tiny dance of mechanized heebie-jeebies, like Charlie in the factory of Modern Times—whose rush of immigrant enthusiasm (“I think in this place, anything is possible”) butts up against the crueler realities of the closed society. David Bartlett essays any number of impressive roles but is at his considerable best mouthing the empty jingoism of T.R., behind which lay disquieting dreams of American imperialism. (It’s no accident that his signature song is that egotist’s delight, “I Want What I Want When I Want It,” climaxed by a held “I” that threatens to go on forever.) The seemingly guileless menace lurking beneath Bartlett’s robust performance may put you in mind of another occupant of the White House, rather more recently ensconced. (For the Philippines, think Afghanistan; for Cuba, Iraq.)

Christian Sineath has a lyric soprano of uncommon beauty, but she’s equally adept at putting over a blazing vaudeville turn like the pre-feminist comic anthem “Fifty-Fifty.” And Yolanda Batts can turn her unerring melismas loose on a hymn-shouter one moment, and build Bert Williams’s “Nobody” from a disconsolate lament to a full-fledged battle cry the next, sending her intoxicated audience through the proverbial roof.

A solo nod must be given to the astonishing, infallible comic artistry of Meghan Beeler. Hers is the smallest of the evening’s singing voices, and she has a tendency to render Emma Goldman’s passionate intensity a bit shrill. But in her breathtaking comedic aplomb she is the ablest clown I’ve seen on an area stage since John McIlwee took a silly British farce by the horns during this year’s TheatreFest and wrestled it to hilarious submission.

To list the feats of zany dexterity Beeler displays would be akin to compiling a master class in physical humor. I’ll chance it, because it’s deserved: her open-mouthed, horrified reaction to T.R.’s sudden wooing of her with a buck and wing; her hilarious pantomiming with Gannon’s bemused suitor; the exuberant, shameless means by which, with an oversized hair ribbon and a single roller skate, she persistently interrupts a coloratura aria. She has exquisite facial and eye command, her timing is a thing of absolute beauty, her instinct is unerring, and her pauses triumphant. This is not the sort of thing that can be learned, and at times she seemed to me the happy love-child of Jane Curtin and Nanette Fabray. Should she persist in her stubborn pursuit of a psychology degree, I can only remark with a certain sadness that therapy’s gain will definitely be comedy’s loss.

Thomas Mauney has designed, and perfectly executed, a little marvel of a set, festooned with bunting and complete with footlights and a weathered wooden floor. Murals represent (at right) Lady Liberty and (at left) girders and a dynamo, capturing precisely the bifurcated hopes and realities the show depicts, and hemming its performers between them. Paul B. Marsland’s lighting consists of a warm, supple palette that gives the musical a glow at once idealized and sincere, while Judy Chang’s delicious costumes complete the picture, especially the stunning lavender gown with which she clothes Anna Held. The musical director, Brett Wilson, has assembled a band of uncommon versatility and expertise; if it occasionally (although never fatally) drowns out the singers, that may be a small price to pay for this much sheer, euphonious plenty.

Deb Gillingham’s staging is immaculate in every way—clean, uncluttered, swift, and brimming with invention. It’s difficult to say where her direction leaves off and her inspired choreography begins. Her sense of movement is zippy, wonderfully alive. She depicts the backbreaking, mind-numbing (and soul-stealing) nature of repetitive industrialization with piquancy and a sense of how even that contains within it a kind of musicality. Yet moments later she creates, with little more than a rubber sheath pressed into service as a steering-wheel, the uncanny illusion of an Oldsmobile filled with terrified joy-riders. The exhortations of three soapbox orators meld together, summoning up a cacophony of rhetoric turned to rhythmic expression; a challenge dance becomes a struggle for political power; and a seemingly impromptu game of musical chairs attains the quality of metaphor. I realize that these moments are scripted, but it takes a special sort of genius to pull them off with the concision Gillingham exhibits, and she does it time and again throughout this show.

It’s early in the season to say so, I know, but Tintypes may well be the show of the theatrical year. It’s going to be that tough to beat.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Tim Miller's "US" at Manbites Dog

Tim Miller: US

By Scott Ross

When it comes to Tim Miller, I lack much of anything you could reasonably call objectivity.

This incisive, brilliant man seems to me—in a term I think he would probably disavow with vehemence—the voice of his generation. Not simply those at the tail-end of the Baby Boom, but a more specific demographic: 40-ish gay men who came of age in a time of sweet abandon which, all too soon, became a nightmare. Men—like me—who must look at the world (or more to the point, the country) around them through a prism of disillusionment, rage, and resolution knowing that, whatever our gains, a basic human grace is beyond our grasp.

Miller’s current performance piece, US (presented Sept. 18-21 in Durham, NC, as part of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell 2003,” Manbites Dog Theater’s 10th annual festival of queer theater and performance) will be his last as a permanent resident of the United States. If that fact doesn’t shake you, it should.

On October 3rd, the visa held by Alistair, Miller’s Australian-born partner of nine years, will expire. With no legal standing as a couple in the Land of the Free, the pair will be forced to immigrate to Great Britain. The government that attempted to still Miller’s artistic voice a decade ago (when, as one of the “NEA Four,” his federal grant was rescinded—he fought that one, and won) has found an effective means of getting rid of him altogether—one a great deal easier, and right under its nose all along.

Because while these two have been together nearly a decade, they lack the right to marry, which would give Alistair an automatic reprieve. That this basic right, granted (as Miller puts it) to “any straight couple who’ve known each for five minutes” is denied these two and countless others, is the basis upon which Miller builds the edifice he calls US.

That simple moniker contains a world of meaning. As a word, “us” refers not only to Miller and his partner, but also to every gay person in America—even to our society as a whole. As an acronym, of course, it stands for the country itself. The central question, to Miller, is not “What’s wrong with us?” but “What’s wrong with US?”

As with all of Miller’s performances, US takes in its author’s autobiography, making the specific universal and the idiosyncratic a metaphor. In pondering which personal necessities to take with him on his journey, the performer begins with that cultural artifact so crucial to the shaping of his (and I would say, legions of gay men’s) identity, the Original Cast Album.

For Miller, these recordings were “where [he] learned about the world ... they were [his] finishing school.” As he lays a series of LP jackets on the stage floor, they become his stepping stones: “A bridge to my future.” For the queer-in-training, Broadway scores are a kind of talisman; they evoke dreams, legitimize yearnings, and illuminate a sense of ethics. “Who needed Marx and Engels,” Miller asks, “when you had Rodgers and Hammerstein?” (Not that they can serve every need: while preparing his “one-hour fifth grade adaptation of Hamlet” Miller’s choice of incidental music—the overture to Hello, Dolly!—was nixed by an older brother. Probably only Miller himself could explain that peculiar artistic association.)

The solace he takes in these totems is only one of many instances in which Miller’s past, his passions, and the creative commingling of the two, strike a plangent chord in me. When he considers the concomitantly soothing and inflaming images he sought in the National Geographic, he could be reading a page from my own adolescence (for me it was underwear pages in the Sears catalogue.) When he talks of affecting an English accent, he brings me up with a start; I did the same thing when I was 17. And when he broods on the part the televised images of that living room war we called Vietnam might play in his own future, the conclusions he reaches (“I knew it would go on forever ... and I knew I didn’t want to die”) are the same ones that caused me so many sleepless 12-year-old nights.

US reaches its emotional zenith when Miller and Alistair, “planning [their] exile” from America, visit Niagara Falls in hopes of a Canadian wedding. And it is here that Miller’s unique observational gifts attain their richest images: Observing the—sometimes openly hostile—heterosexual couples promenading “like shabby Balkan royalty.” Standing in the middle of that loaded metaphor which links the U.S. and Canada, the achingly-named Rainbow Bridge. Watching as police officers from both sides engage in an annual tug-of-war that somehow metastasizes into the struggle taking place within Miller’s own conflicted psyche. Wondering how a nation that in its much-vaunted love of peace has casually sanctioned its own invasions of “112 countries in the past 58 years” can so blithely dismiss any two souls caught in the hopeful embrace of love.

The ritual doffing of his clothes during his performances brought Miller his initial notoriety, and has become its own kind of artistic curse—a weapon with which the biased and the ignorant (so often the same) can pummel him. But those who take this symbolic unveiling out of context miss the point, as they always do. Becoming naked is intrinsic to Miller’s work, and to our understanding of it. For him, this act of “stripping in the light” is a creative means to an instructive end: “Stripping away lies, stripping away hypocrisy.” It is, quite literally, the way Tim Miller gets to the naked truth, of his life and of ours.

Finally, heartbreakingly, US boils itself down to an essential desire. “Someday,” Miller concludes, “I want there to be less fear in US—less fear of us.” Maybe when a sufficient number of native artists are self-exiled to other lands? (And how many are too many? One, I would think, is one too far.) Or perhaps when enough of us face our own October 3rd.

Manbites Dog Theater:http://www.manbitesdogtheater.org/. Tim Miller:http://members.aol.com/millertale/timmiller.html.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

The Capitol Steps at Stewart Theatre

The Capitol Steps

By Scott Ross

Surprisingly for a nation with profound political interests, America lacks much in the way of true political satire.

For dryness and wit, we turn to Gore Vidal’s peerless essays. But the Sage of Ravello is, for all his gifts as a polemicist, less satirist than amused observer of the scene. Vaughan Meader and David Fry are mere memories now, and Norman Lear has more or less hung up his TV producer hat for good. Satire—some of it brilliant—reigns on the Internet, but is by the very nature of the medium, largely hidden.

Larry Gelbart writes the most caustic and darkly hilarious satire around (Power Failure and Mastergate for the stage, Weapons of Mass Distraction for cable) but he’s a minority of one. If not for Jon Stewart and the inspired gang of put-on artists who concoct “The Daily Show,” trenchant political humor in this country would be, for all intents and purposes, as dead as Mort Sahl’s career.

Potent musical satire is even rarer. Mark Russell’s middlebrow musings, once a PBS mainstay, were never especially incisive. And our most gifted, biting purveyor of the form, Tom Lehrer, hasn’t written a new song in years.

Which leads us to—or leaves us with—the Capitol Steps, which performed two sold-out shows Jan. 31st for N.C. State University Center Stage.

A quintet of former political staffers, the group (Kevin Corbett, Brian Ash, Brad Van Grack, Nancy Dollar, and Janet Gordon) has, rather astonishingly, cut 23 discs of lukewarm song parodies—one for each year of its existence—and the troupe’s concerts are aired, with a certain numbing regularity, on NPR. While the material is occasionally amusing, most of it is drear: piddling send-ups of the most obvious targets. It certainly has its followers, though, many of whom packed Stewart Theatre last weekend—mainly, I would guess, to have their prejudices reinforced.

I’ll elucidate. The Steps’ introductory medley was a rapid series of takes on the Democratic candidates. Lieberman was represented by “The Candy Man” (“The Lieberman Can”), John Kerry with “Kerry Baby,” and Wesley Clark with a Gilbert and Sullivan parody (“I am the very model of positions that are general”). If this is your notion of stinging political wit, you might also have enjoyed John Edwards being skewered via an “I Feel Pretty” knock-off, for which I can see no logical point. I’m not aware that Edwards has made an issue of his own good looks. And if not, why parody them?

The capper was “Cheer Up, Howard Dean,” a thigh-slapper performed by a pair of Steps masquerading as two of the Queer Eye squad. As the number devolved into a shameless series of limp-wristed faggot jokes and the audience hooted its approval, I felt myself sinking into my seat. It was going to be that kind of an evening.

A shame, too, because this ugly bit was immediately followed by one of the evening’s few truly inspired moments; as the cast bulled its way through a parody of “Shout,” the sleeves of Dean’s shirt unrolled themselves into a handy straight-jacket in which the manic candidate was quickly enwrapped. That is pointed, specific, and funny. But the number’s impact—on me at least—was diminished by the residual loathing I felt for its predecessor.

There were a few other good moments. Saddam Hussein, talking via cell-phone with the President, asked that ubiquitously annoying question, “Can you hear me now?” George W. Bush was cited watching “what he called an Al Passino movie.” Intrusive telemarketers were roasted to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening” (“Ev’ry single evening/MCI will call you”), John Ashcroft morphed into the Phantom of the Opera (“The loonies of the right”) and Dick Cheney made his appearance in a hilariously opaque baldhead wig.

But what were we to make of an extended Bill and Hillary duet explicating Mrs. Clinton’s exasperation with her husband’s philandering when it ended with the line “She’ll see that I’m spayed”? Males aren’t spayed, they’re neutered—or aren’t the Steps aware of the difference? Similarly, a knee-jerk skit on the perceived cowardice and anti-Americanism of the French ignored the truth of the matter for the sake of cheap laughs at the expense of one of our most generous and longest-standing allies. First “Freedom Fries,” and now this. And can the most scathing possible satire of Donald Rumsfeld really be no more than a toothless re-setting of an old Beach Boys song (“Help Rwanda”)?

The Steps’ funniest bit was, interestingly, its least overtly political: Brad Van Grack’s marvelously loopy backwards-talking ramble on celebrity scandal, “Lirty Dies.” Much of it was silly, some of it merely clever, and good parts of it were utterly without a point, but all of it made us laugh. And we laughed, I think, not so much at any particular, pointed wit as at the sheer, intoxicating daffiness of the sounds. It’s a schtick, but at least it provided genuine amusement. The Capitol Steps could use more of that.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Chiam Potok's "The Chosen" at Theatre Or

The Chosen

That the late Chaim Potok (1929-2002) rebelled against his stringent religious upbringing is not incidental to his work as a novelist. Yet he was not a mystical skeptic like that sly Yiddish fabulist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904—1991). His writing often examined the painful choices open to young American Jews in the secular, adopted land to which their fathers refused to assimilate. Yet he did so not with the slashing satirical fury of a Philip Roth but with a gently rabbinical approach. He saw both sides of the struggle, and it is his compassion and empathy for characters with wildly divergent systems of belief that has made his books treasurable to so many readers.

With novels such as The Chosen, The Promise, and My Name Is Asher Lev, Potok, to his credit, remains one of the most important of post-war American writers. The play the author (with Aaron Posner) made from his first novel is a thing of beauty: spare, precise, and marvelously theatrical. The Chosen dramatizes its source with astonishing candor and shattering emotional impact.

As with the novel, the play concerns the difficult friendship of two boys and the means by which each navigates the troubled waters of family, faith, and expectation. Danny (Marshall Botvinick), aloof and seemingly cold-blooded, is the eldest son of the rigidly Hasidic Reb Saunders (Bob Barr) and, as such, his chosen successor. Reuven (Max Kaufman) is his polar opposite: scion of the respected Torah scholar David Malter (Herb Wolff), devout but relaxed in his Americanism. The relationship between the pair begins in murderous antagonism before mutating into something altogether remarkable. The boys do not switch positions exactly, but each finds in the other the key to his unexpected future.

Potok and Posner wisely retain much of the novel’s rich passages of observation through the omnipresent narration of the adult Reuven (Scott Franco), whose presence also cunningly allows for the appearance of minor but important characters, shoes Reuven steps into with theatrical aplomb. The action is largely confined to three spaces—a pair of diametrically opposed locations for each of the fathers and a central area belonging primarily to Reuven and Danny (and into which Reb Saunders will pointedly enter at the climax, in a sense uniting these disparate galaxies.) Yet, like the dialogue itself, the staging spills and overlaps, creating a mosaic of life in the Williamsburg of 1944—48 as rich as the evocative black-and-white collages by Rob Hamilton against which the drama is performed.

If Max Kaufman’s Reuven is physically taller than his adult self, it’s a slight distraction. This young actor pours himself into the confusions, fears, and hopes the character must negotiate with a sureness that belies his age. Marshall Botvinick’s Danny, meanwhile, is altogether exceptional. He absolutely commands the conflicted schoolboy’s persona, from the rigidity of his stance to the superior smirk he often wears. He makes Danny’s desire for a world of knowledge outside his own, and the attendant guilt he feels in reaching for it, achingly palpable. He even manages to overcome a badly matched set of earlocks—no mean feat, that.

Bob Barr too triumphs over earlocks and beard that turn his head into a pigmentational triptych. When his Reb Saunders engages in an earnest Numerological explication, he pierces you with a glare at once challenging and profoundly humane. His cry upon gauging the true extent of the horror we know as the Holocaust (“The world kills us! Oh, how it kills us!”) is a knife to penetrate the stoniest heart. As David Malter, the gentle yet impassioned Talmudic scholar who becomes a passionate supporter of the Zionism so despised by Reb Saunders, Herb Wolff provides a superbly calibrated counter-balance to Barr’s exclusionary patriarch. His easy camaraderie with Reuven provides a wrenching contrast to the cool formality with which Reb Saunders deals with his own son.

Scott Franco proves a most amiable interlocutor, knowing yet almost surgically disengaged from the past playing out before him; he listens with an extraordinary sense of concentration, aware of the outcome the boys cannot know but never quite giving the game away. He also provides a boisterous baseball coach (much different from the one in Potok’s novel) and a taunting instructor who swivels his lectern around when pontificating at Danny. In one of the play’s most audacious moments of theatricality, he confronts his troubled younger self, engaging the boy in a Socratic dialogue that one suspects even Reb Saunders would admire.

It’s always a pleasure to welcome a new performing company to the area, particularly when its initial production is as accomplished as its aspirations. Such is the case with Theatre Or and its maiden effort. “Or,” for the uninitiated, is Hebrew for “light,” and it does my soul a world of good to report that this name proves an apt one indeed. Under the muted yet vibrant and inspired direction of Joseph Megel and the dedication of his producer, Diane Gilboa, THE CHOSEN casts revelatory illumination on some of the most profound questions of 20^th (and 21^st) century experience. It’s a labor of love, and it shines.

Theatre Or: http://www.theatreor.org/.

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John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.