“Andy Warhol in Iran” at City Theatre

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City Theatre

The title of Brent Askari’s new play, Andy Warhol in Iran, sounds like it could be the beginning of a tasteless joke, or the most unlikely setup for a plot one could imagine. But it’s neither: what seems improbable today – a famous and “decadent” American artist like Warhol, visiting Iran – hardly raised an eyebrow in the early and mid 1970s, when he did, in fact, travel to Tehran, to take photos of the royal family at the invitation of the Shah and Empress of Iran.

Jeffrey Emerson as Andy Warhol. Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover, courtesy City Theatre.

From that historical fact, Askari builds an entirely fictional encounter that is simultaneously dramatically satisfying and deeply informative. Stuck in a lavish hotel room (rendered by scenic designer Michael Raiford as a marvelous midcentury interior in orange and gold and teal), Warhol (Jeffrey Emerson) opens the door to room service, only to admit Farhad (Arian Rad), a revolutionary in disguise who has come to kidnap the famous artist in order to garner publicity and call attention to the Shah’s regime of torture and repression. While they wait for the rest of Farhad’s group to arrive and spirit Warhol into captivity, the two men talk, revealing both the cultural and spiritual ideals that create a gulf between them, as well as the physical and psychological traumas they have in common.

Arian Rad as Farhad. Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover, courtesy City Theatre.

Askari’s dialogue is nimble and at times quite witty; it’s also deft in its delivery of a history lesson most of us likely never learned in school (I’ll confess I did not). You may discover some things about Warhol you didn’t previously know; you’ll almost certainly come to understand aspects of Iranian history occluded by both time and cultural insensitivity. By setting his play a few years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Askari can focus attention on the ways in which 19^th– and 20^th-century American and British imperialism – along with Capitalism’s insatiable appetite for oil – propped up cruel, repressive, and anti-democratic regimes in the Middle East and set the conditions for a revolution that would turn the US and Iran into geopolitical enemies.

Askari also subversively turns the tables on our perception of the iconically progressive artist. While we often think of Warhol as an iconoclast who exposed and demystified our national sacred cows, to the revolutionary Farhad Warhol represents the worst kind of conventional American: he’s shallow, soulless, apolitical, and utterly ignorant of his complicity in creating and perpetuating conditions of suffering for people like Farhad and his fellow citizens. Seen through Farhad’s perspective, the cynical, dismissive Warhol appears as a quintessential Ugly American, a man who fancies himself superior in his capacity to see and discern but who is, in reality, blithely myopic, his vision obscured by the fog of both ideology and his wealth and privilege.

Under Marc Masterson’s sure-handed direction, actors Emerson and Rad bring depth and nuance to characters who each have both a strong one-dimensional purpose and a complicated back story. Emerson uses a light touch to personate rather than impersonate the idiosyncratic Warhol, conjuring him in a recognizable manner without shading into caricature or satire (Susan Tsu’s understated costumes work well in support of this subtlety). This allows him to show some real vulnerability and even, at a crucial moment in the action, empathy and care for his captor. There’s an unexpected depth to his Warhol, an actual human behind the carefully polished façade. Rad is utterly convincing as an inexperienced “terrorist,” at turns assertive and cocksure and desperate and terrified, and his sympathetic portrayal opens us to consider the perspective and goals of a figure whose actions are, on their face, abhorrent. Both actors are electrically present and tuned in to the moment-to-moment shifts in the characters’ thoughts and feelings, while also maintaining a level of theatrical conceit that allows them to break the fourth wall and provide us with information that couldn’t otherwise be contained within the “realism” of the scene. These interruptions pop with the help of projected documentary imagery (designed by Mike Tutaj) and shifts in lighting and sound (Paul Whitaker and Zachary Beattie-Brown).

City Theatre could not have known, when it programmed this production, that it would play at a time of yet another agonizing-to-witness conflict in the Middle East. Andy Warhol in Iran is a reminder that the history of the region is far more complicated and multi-sided than most of us have had the resources or insight to comprehend. We may think, like Warhol, that we have the superpower to “really see” things; but it’s writers like Askari who show us that there is always another perspective that we haven’t considered. And as the play notes, towards the end: “It’s happening here. Now.”

“Scenes from an Execution” at Quantum Theatre

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Quantum Theatre

Playwright Howard Barker is known for creating worlds of remorseless cruelty. Many years ago I was part of the creative team for a production of his play The Castle, in which, as punishment for a crime, a woman is sentenced to be chained to a corpse for the rest of her life. Brutal. 

So I might be forgiven for feeling a bit of trepidation about a play from his pen titled Scenes from an Execution, which Quantum Theatre opened in Allentown this past weekend.

Fear not, intrepid Reader: the only thing that is executed in this play is a painting: a depiction of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto that the Venetian state – and, specifically, its Doge (Robert Ramirez) – has commissioned the free-spirited and mercurial artist Galactia (Lisa Velten Smith) to create – that is, to “execute” (no paintings die, either). Venice wants an image that will laud its victory over the Ottoman enemy; Galactia wants to depict the reality of war, with all its pain, suffering, and horrific brutality. Her obstinate refusal to bend to the political winds eventually lands her in a dark and filthy dungeon, but the ultimate punishment Barker doles out to his (evident) surrogate is even more dreadful: in the end, the Doge puts the painting on public display as a demonstration of his magnanimous commitment to art and tolerance, thereby managing to coopt both art and artist. 

L to R: Hansel Tan and Lisa Velten Smith; Photography by Jason Snyder, courtesy Quantum Theatre.

Barker’s main idea – that even the most radical and resistant of artistic expression gets absorbed into the execution of power – is not a new one, but the play spools it out in a complex and compelling fashion. Galactia’s status as a female artist means that she is also battling against sexism and double standards. On the one hand, her daughters (Mariana Garzón Toro and Leyla Davis) worry that if she offends the powers-that-be, she will waste the opportunity she’s been given to break new ground for women artists; on the other hand, both her character and her work are predictably assassinated in gendered terms (she is lambasted for her sexual freedom – in particular, for her adulterous affair with fellow artist Carpeta (Hansel Tan) – and her work is labeled “shrill”). 

Ironically – and, for a person like your Tatler, somewhat gratifyingly – the figures who wield the greatest power within the world of this play seem to be the scholar-critics who interpret and contextualize art and its meanings. In the first act, that role is filled by Sketchbook (Amy Landis), a modern-day art historian who narrates disparate “scenes” from the unseen painting’s “execution” and gives us insight into its intrinsic value as a work of art, in terms of its style, composition, and content. She also describes the painting so vividly that it is as if it’s right in front of us. In the second act, the role is filled by the Doge’s scholar friend Gina Rivera (Bria Walker-Rhoze), who understands that “in art nothing is what it seems to be” and becomes the mastermind who devises a framework through which both the painting and the painter can be absorbed into the State’s interests. Both of these figures are responsible, within the world of the play, for ensuring that the artwork perseveres; both also secure the impact of both the artist and her art.

L to R: Jerreme Rodriguez and Robert Ramirez; Photography by Jason Snyder, courtesy Quantum Theatre.

Andrew William Smith has directed with an actor’s sensitivity to the ambiguous complexities of Barker’s characters, a clear-eyed understanding of the play’s theatrical needs, and a sly sense of humor. Yes, you read that right: the play is in many ways a comedy – maybe the funniest play in Barker’s oeuvre – and the strong ensemble is well-attuned to the dialogue’s mischievous wit. Particularly formidable in this regard are Jerreme Rodriguez as the narcissistic Admiral Suffici, who throws a fit because he doesn’t like the way Galactia has painted his hands; Randy Kovitz as the sad-sack Prodo, who makes a living charging people to view his unusual war wounds; and Martin Giles (Cardinal Ostensible) and Robert Ramirez (Doge Urgentino), both of whom deftly sidestep the pitfalls of making their characters unctuous villains and instead give us portraits of men who are secure enough in their power to wear it lightly and wield it with flair. But it’s powerhouse Lisa Velten Smith who drives the action, both comic and otherwise, as the strong-willed, frank-talking, take-no-prisoners Galactia. In the course of the evening she gets a physical workout, too, as she traverses pretty much every inch of scenic designer Chelsea Warren’s multi-level and multi-purpose set, which evokes both a painter’s scaffolding and a gallows. Angela Vesco’s costumes set the action in a luxurious 16th-century Venice, and the lighting and sound design (C. Todd Brown and Steve Shapiro) adroitly modulate the mood of the action.

Towards the beginning of the play, when Prodo comes to her studio to model for the painting, Galactia accuses him of being a “monkey” because he has turned himself, and his suffering, into a form of entertainment. By the play’s end, all of her efforts to “bring the truth to birth” have brought her to a similar fate – she’s a celebrity draw at the Doge’s table. Has she compromised her principles, or simply – like Brecht, and countless other artists – made the pragmatic decision to survive in order to continue to speak truth to power? And is that even possible in a world in which power absorbs all resistance? Barker and his play don’t offer any unambiguous answers, only potent questions. 

“The Importance of Being Earnest” at the Pittsburgh Public Theater

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Pittsburgh Public Theater

You might ask yourself: why would a person want or need to see a (or, if you’re like the Tatler: another) production of The Importance of Being Earnest? 

To that question, two responses. First, because Oscar Wilde is an unmatched genius when it comes to comic dialogue, and no matter how many times you may have read the play, or seen a production, the wit and barb of his writing never fails to delight and surprise. 

And second, because the production at the Pittsburgh Public Theater is not only charmingly funny, but also fresh and a bit subversive. Director Jenny Koons’s tight adaptation weaves excerpts from etiquette and manners books into the scene transitions in order to shine light on the restrictive social rules that Wilde’s play comically sends up. This choice offers a bit more access to what Wilde might have had in mind when he subtitled his play “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People”: those “serious people” being, perhaps, the ones who either wrote or conformed to those rules in earnest in his day – and who perhaps need to learn to lighten up in our own.

L to R: Paul “Paulie” Deo, Jr. & Dylan Marquis Meyers. Photo by Michael Henninger, courtesy Pittsburgh Public Theater.

Other changes Koons has made in this adaptation seem minor; I suspect that some dialogue has been trimmed, but Wilde’s plot is largely unchanged. That revolves around Jack Worthing (Paul “Paulie” Deo, Jr.), who has presented himself under the name “Earnest” to his social circle in London. When his friend Algernon (Dylan Marquis Meyers) uncovers his ruse, Worthing confesses that he invented a troublesome brother in the city – named Earnest – in order to give himself a pretext for spending time in London, away from his country house and his ward, Cecily (Alex Manalo). Worthing is in love with Algernon’s cousin Gwendolyn (Veronica Del Cerro) and intends to propose marriage to her, but this plan is thwarted by Gwendolyn’s mother Lady Bracknell (David Ryan Smith) when she discovers that Worthing does not know who his parents are, because as an infant he was abandoned in a handbag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station. (The interview in which Lady Bracknell extracts this information from Worthing is one of the funniest scenes ever written: I offer as evidence Lady B’s peerless pronouncement that “to lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”)

Worthing also has another obstacle to his marital aspirations: Gwendolyn, who declares that her goal has always been to marry a man named Earnest. This sets the play’s farcical engine in gear: Worthing returns to his country estate with the intention of announcing the death of his fake brother so that he can take on the name Earnest himself; meanwhile, Algernon arrives at the estate pretending to be Jack’s brother Earnest in order to woo Cecily. When Gwendolyn turns up, there are both too many Earnests, and not enough of them. A third couple indispensable to the plot is the Rev. Canon Chasuble (Joseph McGranaghan) and Cecily’s buttoned-up governess Miss Prism (Susan M. Lynskey), the latter of whom becomes essential to unwinding the play’s complications.

L to R: Veronica Del Cerro & Alex Manalo. Photo by Michael Henninger, courtesy Pittsburgh Public Theater.

Koons has made some directorial choices that make the play zing in unexpected ways. To begin with, she has dispensed with British accents; instead, she has the actors speak in their native (US) accents with heightened enunciation. This works surprisingly well: not only does it serve the rhythm and snap of Wilde’s dialogue, but it also makes the superficiality of the action – which is key to the play’s comedy – feel more authentic and light. Freed from the labor of maintaining an artificial accent, the actors can focus instead on building and maintaining the ridiculous social artifice of the world of the play. 

The actors are also more “American” in their physical embodiment of their roles. I’ve seen productions of this play that are hilarious precisely because the characters’ stuffy British physical restraint is so at odds with the surprising candor of their language. Koons loosens things up and offers a different mode of comedy alongside the dialogue, with moments that border on slapstick (as when, toward the end of the play, the towering Lady Bracknell tells Cecily “You may kiss me” – an action that presents a comical challenge to the diminutive Alex Manalo).

As for Lady Bracknell – just as the ensemble finds authenticity in the comedy by not “playing British,” Smith makes Lady Bracknell a force in the play by not “playing female.” The laughs stem not from the tired trope of “man in dress” drag (although her outfits, along with  Hugh Hanson’s entire costume design, are spot-on gorgeous), but rather from Smith’s haughty and imperious embodiment of the character itself.

L to R: Joseph McGranaghan, Dylan Marquis Meyers, and David Ryan Smith. Photo by Michael Henninger, courtesy Pittsburgh Public Theater.

So, why would you want to see The Importance of Being Earnest? Because it’s a comic masterpiece, beautifully produced, and there’s no better way to spend a couple of hours than in the enjoyment of Wilde’s wickedly funny writing.

“What did you think you just heard me say?” at CorningWorks, and “Joy of Bach” with Chatham Baroque

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Chatham Baroque, CorningWorks

CorningWorks’ most recent dance performance will undoubtedly communicate something different to each person who sees it. I suspect one can make that statement about most good works of art, but here the tendency of communications to misfire or get misread is the central focus of exploration, so it’s fitting that this piece is perhaps the most communicatively ambiguous of CorningWorks’ compositions to date.

Beth Corning. Photo by Frank Walsh, courtesy CorningWorks.

The piece opens with a choreographic version of the game “telephone,” in which a phrase of movement is passed from choreographer-dancer Beth Corning to co-performers Claire Porter, Evan Fisk, and Alberto del Saz, each in turn changing the quality and details of the phrase as they pass it along the line. That game – and the question of how we pass along what we think we’ve understood – recurs throughout the hour-long performance, which movingly meditates both on how the meaning of something can shift as it travels between different bodies and minds, as well as on our failures to connect not only through verbal communication but also through body language.

A duet between del Saz and Fisk performed in the first half of the piece conveyed (to me, at least) something about the reluctance of the two figures to allow themselves to be vulnerable to each other; but later, a repeat of the exact same choreography – with Corning taking Fisk’s place in the duet – seemed (to me) to be about a couple who were in conflict because they were letting each other down. Same choreography, different disconnects. Likewise, the final quartet, guest-choreographed by Victoria Marks, also finds the dancers connected in their lack of connection, as they simultaneously look in disparate directions or seek eye contact where there is none forthcoming.

Some of the other movements might be summed up with the phrase: “words fail.” Porter takes the stage three times as a sweet-sad clown who attempts to gather her thoughts in the form of word balloons that get progressively less obliging as the evening proceeds. A duet between Corning and Porter is prefaced by a comically passive-aggressive conversation between a mother and a daughter, each of whom reads hidden negative meaning into seemingly innocent assertions. A mountain of wooden letters is occasion for a game of word building that quickly becomes chaotic as the dancers are forced to steal letters from each other’s words.

As always with CorningWorks, the choice of music to accompany the choreography is exquisite, perfectly enhancing the emotional pull of each piece (my only wish is that the program would list the titles of the music compositions so I can add them to my playlist!). The four performers each bring their own unique quality of movement to the piece. Yet all four dance with a lovely understated affect which invites you to bring your own thoughts, feelings, and context to bear on what you see and hear and – in line with Corning’s premise – to wonder how large or small the gap is between what this performance “says” and what you “heard.”

Speaking of exquisite music, this past weekend was also Chatham Baroque’s annual “Joy of Bach” concert in celebration of J. S. Bach’s birthday. The concert featured five works: the Prelude and Fugue in C for organ (played magnificently by guest artist Alan Lewis), the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, the Ricercare à 6 (my favorite of the evening), and two cantatas sung beautifully by bass-baritone Jonathan Woody. The evening of music was gorgeous all around: setting (the Calvary Episcopal Church is a glorious space), musicianship (this is an ensemble at the height of its craft), and selection of oeuvre (the sheer variety of music, from a single composer, was astonishing). I could desire, for your sake, dear Reader, that I had a greater capacity to write from a place of expertise and knowledge about music. Alas, I cannot share more with you than my enthusiasm and delight, and commend this company to you for future performances – join their mailing list and check them out the next time they perform. 

“Fat Ham” at City Theatre

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City Theatre

Within the first few moments of Fat Ham, playwright James Ijames gives a tip of the hat to the tragic tradition he’s about to categorically (and hilariously) reject: in reference to the fact that the main character Juicy’s uncle has “swooped in” and married Juicy’s mother just a week after his father had been killed in prison, Juicy’s cousin Tio (Jordan Williams) opines “Man I don’t know what I’d do; I’d probably put my eyes out or something.” To which Juicy (Brandon Foxworth) replies: “Yeah well I ain’t about to do that so…”

He’s also not about to do most of the other things that might be expected of a character in a play that takes off from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although Ijames has a lot of fun playing with our expectations along the way. Don’t expect suicide-drownings, feigned madness, swordfights, or poisoned chalices of wine; do be ready for karaoke, charades, lots of snarky comedy, a good deal of metatheatrical commentary and fourth-wall breaking, and some stunning transformations.

L to R: Jordan Williams and Brandon Foxworth. Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover, courtesy City Theatre

The scene is the backyard of a home in Maryland; as the play begins, Juicy and Tio are blowing up balloons for a barbecue party to celebrate the aforementioned marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra (Maria Becoates-Bey) to his uncle, Rev (Khalil Kain). But before the party begins, it’s crashed by the ghost of Juicy’s father, Pap (also played by Kain), who tells Juicy that Rev had him murdered and demands that Juicy avenge his death. Juicy is, however, no Prince of Denmark; he’s just a young queer Black man working on an online degree in human resources, who also doesn’t feel a great deal of loyalty toward his violent and abusive dad. “Fathers and sons,” Juicy tells us: “It can get dark.”

The questions Ijames is interested in exploring here stem from that “darkness” between generations, and his answers point toward a triumph of the young over the old, and of acceptance over animosity. Where in Hamlet the younger generation gets sacrificed to the cycle of patriarchal violence begun by their elders, in Fat Ham the youth reject not just the violence but the whole hetero-patriarchal system that spawned it. Joining Juicy in his rebellion are his friends Opal (Elexa Lindsay Hanner) and Larry (LaTrea Rembert), siblings who likewise chafe under the restrictive gender-role expectations of their Sunday-church-hatted mother Rabby (Linda Haston), who is the overinvolved Polonius-like figure in the play. The patently butch Opal comes to the party in a frilly dress Rabby has insisted she wear (the play tells a whole humorous story on the side courtesy of designer Alexis Carrie’s ingenious costume choices); the closeted Larry shows up in full military dress in an endearing attempt to impress Juicy. Along with Tio, all of these kids are, in Opal’s words, “on the edge of figuring something out.” When they get there, in the play’s triumphant and joyous finale, it’s with the conviction, á la Billy Porter, that “the children’s where the future is.”

L to R: Brandon Foxworth and Alexa Lindsay Hanner. Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover, courtesy City Theatre

Director Monteze Freeland is working at the top of his game with this buoyant and energetic production, shading the play’s tricky variations in tone with masterful precision. The performance register of the play ranges from a few clicks beyond realism to the fully super-theatrical, with a good bit of post-dramatic direct address to the audience sprinkled in (a clear nod to the Shakespearean soliloquy, updated for the 21^st century). We’re delightedly yanked from one register to the next not only through the actors’ expert shift in playing style but also via beautifully choreographed sound (Howard Patterson) and lighting (John D. Alexander) design, as well as through Sasha Jin Schwartz’s set, which seems innocuous at first glance, but contains all sorts of hidden surprises. 

The ensemble here is first-rate across the board, and they work with and off each other with terrific connection and timing. They also sing (Becoates-Bey in particular brings the house down with a rendition of “I’m Every Woman”), dance, and play, all while at times also diving into some pretty deep existential shit. It’s clear that the actors are having a roaring good time playing these larger than life characters, and their invitation to the audience to share in the fun is contagious and irresistible. 

Indeed, in the end the production practically dares you to resist. Fat Ham’s rejection of the tired tragedy of toxic patriarchal violence and oppression couldn’t be more timely or more welcome, and its vision of the future beckons from a place of joy and delight. Who wouldn’t want to join the dance?

Looking Forward to…

On occasion I like to share events that are on my calendar – or that might be on my calendar if I didn’t already have something on my calendar – that you, too, might be interested in knowing about. March & April are looking to be busy months for your Tatler – here’s why:

This week Fat Ham opens at City Theatre, directed by Monteze Freeland. I had the chance to catch this show on Broadway last year, and am very much looking forward to a second opportunity to enjoy this funny, moving, and timely queered adaptation of Hamlet. Opening night is Friday, March 8.

If you are looking for opportunities to enjoy art for free this weekend, you have a couple of options. On March 8 the Mattress Factory hosts the opening reception for three new exhbitions, by artists Isla Hansen, Marvin Touré, and Catalina Schliebener Muñoz – the event is free but registration is required. And on March 9 & 10 the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh will present two free performances entiteld “Coming Home” to introduce their new artistic director, Daniel Singer; this too is free with registration.

Next week is equally rich. On March 12 at 5:00pm, CMU’s Center for the Arts in Society (of which I am the director, so this is a bit of a shameless plug) co-hosts an artist talk with Isla Hansen (see above) at the Kresge Theater in the College of Fine Arts building, and on March 14, in the McConomy Auditorium of the University Center, we are presenting “To the Stars! The Colonization of Space in Print and on the Screen” – a panel on the representation of space in literature and film followed by a screening of the movie Elysium. Specialty coffee and mooncake cookies will be served! Both of these events are free and open to the public.

On March 15 you’ll find your Tatler at the opening of CorningWorks’ What did you think you think you just heard me say?!, a multidisciplinary dancetheater work that explores the psychological & emotional nooks & crannies of human (mis)communication. The performance has limited seating and runs from March 15-24. Also that weekend is Chatham Baroque’s Joy of Bach concert, featuring the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 and Cantata 82, in celebration of Bach’s birthday – concerts on March 15 & 16 at 7:30, at Calvary Episcopal Church.

Speaking of Bach: on March 23, there’s the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh’s “Bach Day SMASH”, a fundraiser/ celebration of the Choir’s 90th year, and 20 years of innovative leadership by artistic director Thomas W. Douglas. VIP tickets include a special performance by Pittsburgh legend Treasure Treasure. Additional performances throughout the evening will be by Charlene Canty and Stephanie Ramos; specialty cocktails and mocktails (included in the ticket price for VIPs and General Admission guests) will be provided by TLC Libations, and there will be a dance party DJ’d by Kinsel Land from 9:00 to 10:00 PM. Early bird discount available through March 10.

They say March goes out like a lamb; what about with some timeless comedy, too? On March 30, the Pittsburgh Public Theater opens The Importance of Being Earnest, adapted and directed by Jenny Koons – I’ve always been a fan of this play and am looking forward to seeing it again.

April is also starting to look pretty packed. On April 5, Quantum Theatre opens Scenes from an Execution, directed by my colleague Andrew Smith and featuring actors Lisa Velten Smith, Bria Walker-Rhoze, and Robert Ramirez (all colleagues at CMU….things are startin’ to get a bit cozy here, eh?); the show runs through April 27 in Allentown. That same day, Attack Theatre opens its The Show of 1000 Tomorrows, which runs for two weekends, April 5-13. And on April 26 & 27 the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh will present Carmina Burana Africana, an adaptation of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with African drumming & dance; performances will take place at the Campbell Memorial Chapel on the Chatham University Campus.

Finally, a heads-up about a non-performance event that is, nonetheless, a highlight of spring: the Union Project’s “Mother of All Pottery Sales” which will take place this year on May 11 – perfect timing to pick up a last-minute Mother’s Day gift.

I bet I’m missing quite a few events here – feel free to add ’em to the comments, and when I have a spare minute I’ll update this post to feature them as well.

“Skeleton Crew” at barebones productions

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barebones productions

“I signed up for a future.” So asserts Skeleton Crew’s Shanita (Saige Smith) about her job on the line of an auto stamping plant in Detroit. Hers is a good job, a union job, with benefits and overtime and collective bargaining protections. But it’s the winter of 2008, the bottom has dropped out of the economy, the auto industry is in full crisis, and that future looks as bleak and chilly as a Michigan winter can get. 

In Skeleton Crew playwright Dominique Morisseau crafts a tight drama about four individuals who very much aren’t getting what they signed up for. In addition to Shanita, there’s Faye (Etta Cox), who has worked the line for 29 years and is only months away from retiring with a full pension; Dez (Brenden Peifer), a young hothead whose goal is to work enough overtime so that he can squirrel away the capital to open his own repair shop; and Reggie (Richard McBride), their foreman, who has just managed to eke his way into the middle class. All four find their lives and ambitions under threat as the auto industry collapses during the Great Recession. 

But that big picture is mostly gestured at, in anxious sharing of news about other plants shuttering, other companies auctioning off assets, and other laborers getting laid off. Morisseau is more interested in drawing a contrast between the community of workers – their care for each other, their solidarity, their sense of how and why they each matter in and to the world – and the impersonal system that treats them as mere cogs in the machine and as disposable, fungible “labor” instead of unique and valuable human beings. 

L to R: Saige Smith and Brenden Peifer. Photo by Jeff Swensen, courtesy barebones productions.

Skeleton Crew is in many ways a play about the precarity of contemporary life, and about the physical, emotional, and psychological toll that precarity takes. Faye is a cancer survivor who has been bankrupted by medical bills and gambling; her full time job does not earn her enough to keep her housed, and so she now lives out of her car. Shanita is about to become a single parent and needs not only the secure future she signed up for, but also the medical benefits that come with union employment. Dez is an honest and hard worker, but the play hints that he has the connections, and the capacity, to move into less legitimate dealings if he were to have no other options. And Reggie, having risen the highest up the socio-economic ladder, has the most to lose: home ownership, security, and, above all, status. That sense of precarity has metastasized in the decade since Morisseau wrote the play, making its insights into the symptoms that characterize the disease of late Capitalism feel both prescient and timely.

The same can be said of its understanding of the racism that constitutes the play’s constant background noise. All four characters are Black, and though the play was also written several years before the Black Lives Matter movement, it speaks pointedly to the economic dimension of BLM, and in particular to what has historically mattered most in the good ol’ USA: profits and property over people, especially over BIPOC folks. Repeatedly throughout the play the characters gossip about theft: someone is stealing materials from the plant, and management is imposing stricter regimes of surveillance and regulation in response, threatening dismissal of employees who break even minor rules. But who is robbing whom? As Dez points out, the real crimes are happening way above their pay grade, among the investment bankers and C-Suite occupants who have emptied cities like Detroit of stable, union-protected manufacturing jobs, destroying once-vibrant communities in the process and leaving a ghost town behind. Viewed from that perspective, the theft of materials looks less like a crime and more like a community pushing back against a system that puts “matter” before lives that matter.

The barebones production is directed in a mostly realist style by Tomé Cousin, with the addition of robotic dance breaks in between the scenes (performed by Mario Quinn Lyles) that gesture toward both the dehumanizing routines of factory work and the deep wellspring of Black creativity. The realism is underscored by Tony Ferrieri’s detailed recreation of a mundane breakroom, which the cast inhabits as if it is a second home for their characters.  It’s here that Faye finds respite when the night gets too cold; it’s here that Shanita and Dez allow themselves to become vulnerable to each other (Smith and Peifer’s excellent chemistry makes their scenes together crackle); and it’s here that Reggie figures out how to use his positional power to protect his crew.

That they come to own this space also matters: what seems like just a place of work at the play’s opening becomes, by the end, a site of solidarity and community.

“Dragon Lady” at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre

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Pittsburgh Public Theater

Generational trauma is complicated. It’s also, in the hands of Sara Porkalob, often quite funny and – because musical talent runs in her family – best delivered in song.

Sara Porkalob in DRAGON LADY at Pittsburgh Public Theater. Photo by Michael Henninger for Pittsburgh Public Theater

Porkalob’s one-woman show Dragon Lady  is the first installment of her three-play “Dragon Cycle,” which traces the story of her “Filipino American gangster family” by centering three generations of badass women: her grandmother, Maria Senora, her mother, Maria, and Sara herself. Dragon Lady trains the spotlight on Maria Senora, who was born in the Philippines in 1945, worked as a nightclub/brothel singer as an adolescent and teenager, gave birth to her eldest daughter, Maria, at the age of 19 as a single parent, and then immigrated to the US as the bride of an American serviceman, only to be subsequently left by him to raise five children alone.

The frame around this storytelling is Maria Senora’s 60^th birthday party: she has brought her granddaughter, Sara, down into her basement apartment ostensibly to show off her new karaoke machine, but really so that she can avoid an inevitable confrontation with Sara’s resentful mother, Maria. Sara is Maria Senora’s “favorite,” and the story of her life is the gift she wants to Sara to have. The tale she spins is often lurid – for example, she claims that the man who took her virginity and fathered Maria was not only the leader of the most dangerous gang in Manila, but also the person who tortured and murdered her own father in front of her, and then claims to have killed this gang leader to get her daughter back – but Porkalob presents the narrative in the dismissive, no-nonsense, “life was tough but I survived” cadence of the “dragon lady” stereotype evoked by the show’s title. 

But you may suspect that grandma is not entirely reliable as a narrator, and sure enough, just when you are fully on Maria Senora’s side in feeling that her daughter Maria is ungrateful for all the sacrifices she made, the narrative record-scratches and Porkalob takes up her mother’s point of view, showing her as a frightened and overwhelmed eighth grader in the late 1960s, suddenly burdened with the care of four younger siblings, with no idea where her mother has gone or when she will return, and no money to pay the bills or purchase food. The way Porkalob nests her stories inside each other raises questions about where the difference in perspective and understanding between Maria Sr. and Maria Jr. comes from. Is grandma’s blithe ignorance of the trauma she inflicts on her kids cultural – a product of her own hardscrabble upbringing in the Philippines – or generational – a result of being a postwar “grin and bear it” baby boomer? Or both? Whatever the explanation, what is revealed is the yawning gap not only between Maria Senora and her oldest daughter, but also between her memory of the life she provided for her children, and their experience of that life. Nowhere is this more poignantly illustrated than in the scene, in the second act, in which Porkalob impersonates her two young uncles as they pretend to be boy scouts collecting food donations for the poor in order to fill their own pantry during one of their mother’s extended absences. Where they see themselves as scrappy and self-reliant heroes, we (and Maria Jr.) see endangered (and emotionally abused) children.

Porkalob is a powerhouse performer, conjuring multiple characters with only her voice and precisely embodied gestures. She creates theatrical monologue magic in the tradition of the great Ruth Draper, with the added bonus of out-of-this-world singing– her a cappella rendition of “I Need a Hero” is alone worth the price of admission, and her versatile singing ranges from soft lullaby to rap remixes of songs like “House of the Rising Sun.” Musicians Pete Irving, Jimmy Austin, and Mickey Stylin (members of the band Hot Damn Scandal) are equally agile as they accompany her on guitar, trombone, and bass.

L to R: Mickey Stylin (Bass), Pete Irving (Guitar), Jimmy Austin (Trombone) and Sara Porkalob in DRAGON LADY at Pittsburgh Public Theater. Photo by Michael Henninger for Pittsburgh Public Theater

Dragon Lady is captivating, moving, funny, and entertaining; it’s at once Porkalob’s love letter to the fierce and imperfect women who raised her, and a testament to the capacity of storytelling to help people make sense of, and perhaps heal from, generational struggle and trauma. And – breaking news – if you can’t make it downtown to see it, the final four performances, from Feb. 23–25, will be livestreamed, as part of the PPT’s membership in the League of Live Stream Theater! Tickets for those are available at www.lolst.org/dragon-lady. 

“South Side Stories” Revisited at City Theatre

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City Theatre

Twelve years ago, when Tami Dixon performed her first version of South Side Stories, I initially hesitated to see it because I assumed that – as a relative newcomer to Pittsburgh – I wouldn’t “get” it. When I finally got around to seeing the show, late in its run, I realized just how wrong that assumption was: Dixon, also a non-native, used her talents as an empathetic listener to paint a loving and generous portrait of the community she had adopted as her home, and she brought the neighborhood to life, character by idiosyncratic character, with charm, wit, and abundant humor.

A lot of change has happened since that production closed, and with South Side Stories Revisited Dixon and director Matt M. Morrow paint a fresh picture of the South Side, one that is just as funny and winning as its predecessor but also in many ways more sober, as some of the challenges of the last several years – the pandemic, the opioid addiction crisis, homelessness – have had outsized effects on the neighborhood and its quality of life.

Tami Dixon in South Side Stories Revisited. Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover, courtesy City Theatre.

As in the original version, South Side Stories Revisited consists primarily of Dixon impersonating members of the community that she interviewed, in a manner reminiscent of the work of Anna Deveare-Smith (or, to stretch back even further, of the incomparable Ruth Draper). Nearly all of the “characters” are new, with the exception of the irascible parking chair yinzer, whom Dixon brings back to start the show (and you know you have achieved some semblance of Pittsburgh insider-status when the words “parking chair” mean something to you!). Among others, Dixon offers stories from the perspective of a local librarian, a pair of people who are unhoused, a firefighter, a Brazilian trash warrior, a local club owner, a couple of recent immigrants from Portugal, and several “old-timers” born and raised on the South Side. She brings these individuals to life with a kind of magical sleight-of-voice, capturing each person’s age, origins, life experience, gender, and attitude toward life on the South Side with shifts in timbre, accent, volume, tone, and mannerism, enhancing the incisiveness of the writing of each story with precision in vocal and gestural performance. 

While many of the stories elicit laughter, the humor never comes at the expense of the person whose story she represents; Dixon takes seriously her responsibility to share with respect the stories she has been gifted. Indeed, a good deal of the delight of this work comes from the opportunity it offers to understand the world through the point of view of folks who seem simultaneously familiar and unknown: they are to a certain extent “types,” and yet they are fleshed out in glorious specificity and individuality. While it’s likely you may disagree with some of the perspectives voiced by her interviewees, Dixon’s openhearted approach to her task offers an opportunity to empathize and understand where those perspectives are coming from. In an era in which it feels increasingly difficult to find common ground with people who see problems and their solutions differently than you do, such an opportunity feels precious and timely.

New to this version of the production are interludes in which Dixon interacts directly with the audience and narrates her own experience of working on revising it, as she, too, has had to adjust to her neighborhood’s ever-changing landscape and challenges. As she observes toward the end of the show, a common thread uniting all of us and all of the people she interviewed is that we all want what’s best; we all just have different ideas of what that is. 

“Miss Bennett: Christmas at Pemberley” (Letter from a Fellow ‘Tatler’)

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City Theatre

Dear Reader!

The following arrived by post late yesterday, from a fellow connoisseur of art and culture. You may find it helpful (for reasons that will become obvious) to hear it in the voice of Julie Andrews ;-).