“Oscar & Walt” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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I don’t envy the challenge Kinetic Theatre Company has in marketing the new play Oscar & Walt. At first glance, it’s a rather hard sell, particularly in our current WSYWAT moment. The play consists of ninety minutes of conversation between two White nineteenth-century poets, the elderly Walt Whitman and a young Oscar Wilde, inspired by a real life meeting between the two that took place in early 1882 at Whitman’s residence in Camden, New Jersey. It’s the sort of play in which, on the surface at least, nothing much seems to really happen: Wilde arrives, they talk, they imbibe a bit, they talk some more, they are interrupted repeatedly by Whitman’s sister-in-law Louisa, and then Wilde departs to give a lecture in Philadelphia. I’ll confess it’s the sort of play that – if described to me as I just described it to you – I’d likely put in the mental basket labeled “not my cup of tea.”

And, it turns out, I’d have been wrong.

Playwright Donald Steven Olson’s imagined version of the encounter between the two men is both engaging and enlightening. He begins with the historical fact that Wilde was a fan of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and spins out from that a queer historical version of their meeting that dances around Wilde’s desire to meet the poet who wrote openly and frankly about what Wilde would later refer to as the “love that dare not speak its name.” What Olson gives us, in other words, is a meeting between two men who share a sexual orientation but have decidedly different orientations toward their sexuality. His Wilde – played with delicious circumspection by Nick Giedris – is not yet the confident, arrogant litterateur he will in time become, but rather an insecure and sexually inexperienced young man who hides behind the shield of his Aesthetic sensibility. In contrast, Olson’s Whitman – brought to vivid life by the luxuriantly bearded Sam Tsoutsouvas – is gruff, plainspoken, and bluntly sensual. 

L to R: Nick Giedris and Sam Tsoutsouvas. Photo by Suellen Fitzsimmons, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

Olson presents them as opposites in many other ways, too: Wilde is British, classically educated, a child of privilege, formal in manners, and a rising star, where Whitman is American, self-taught, self-made, casual in affect, and near the end of his career. What they have in common, besides a gift for writing and attraction to other men, is vanity. Their meeting begins inauspiciously, with a kind of pissing contest to establish their bona fides and level of fame. But it gradually morphs into a conversation that provides empathetic insight into what might have made each of these men tick. They share stories about their childhoods and families, divulge personal information, compare favorite poets, gossip about the competition, and talk about the challenges they each face as writers and public figures. Sounds a bit like a first date, right? There’s certainly an undercurrent of flirtatious tension throughout that I suspect is deliberate: after all, the internet offers plenty of speculation that Whitman and Wilde may have done quite a bit more than just talk at their actual meeting (go ahead, search it; I’ll wait). 

The Kinetic Theatre ensemble gives the characters depth and complexity. As Louisa – the sister-in-law who takes care of Whitman – Lisa Ann Goldsmith is the epitome of warm practicality while also punctuating the action with moments of comic relief. Tsoutsouvas brings a twinkle-in-the-eye canniness to his portrayal of Whitman, while also providing much of the production’s gravitas and pathos. His poignant recollection of the horrors he witnessed as a Civil War nurse – and his evocation of the PTSD he suffered in its wake – is particularly moving, as is his nostalgia for the energy and vigor of his youth. Giedris has a skittish energy that may be at odds with the historical Wilde’s reputation for loucheness but also feels right for this occasion of a fanboy meeting his literary hero, and it’s intriguing to imagine a version of Wilde who had not yet perfected his camp persona and still had chinks in the armor, whether or not that’s historically true to life.

“An Octoroon” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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The Octoroon is a 19^th-century melodrama by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault that tells the story of a young woman, Zoe, who passes for white but whose “single drop” of black blood condemns her to being sold as a slave.

Ananias J. Dixon as George, Jenny Malarkey as Dora, and Sarah Hollis as Zoe. Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

An Octoroon is a 21^st-century refraction of Boucicault’s play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, an African-American playwright whose plays often center on questions of how historical representations of race continue to wield social power and cultural influence. For example, in his 2010 play Neighbors, he used blackface minstrelsy to explore questions of black identity, pride, shame, and self-loathing. In the many-faceted An Octoroon (which premiered at Soho Rep in 2014), it’s the melodramatic treatment of race and race relations that comes under scrutiny, and in particular the way that melodrama – with its display of suffering within a moral universe that punishes the bad and rewards the good – has historically structured, and continues to inform, the American imaginary.

That scrutiny starts with a prologue in which an actor playing “BJJ” (Ananias J. Dixon), wearing nothing but white underpants, frames his adaptation of The Octoroon as a therapeutic exercise, as his (that is, Jacobs-Jenkins’s) attempt to grapple with the question of what it means to be a “black playwright.” Among the challenges he lists is the fact that white actors refuse to play racist oppressors in his plays (this, apparently, is based on a true experience), which explains why BJJ starts to apply whiteface makeup: his “therapist” (who may or may not be real) has suggested that he play the white parts in his play himself. At some point in the middle of this comic rant, “The Playwright” – that is, Dion Boucicault, played by Martin Giles – appears, in an identical state of undress. The two face off – literally, in this production – and then, in a mirror image of the first part of the prologue, The Playwright launches into his own tirade, mostly about his vanished legacy, all the while putting on redface makeup in order to play the part of Wahnotee, the Native American character in The Octoroon (a role which Boucicault apparently took for himself for the beginning of his play’s original run). Race and racial casting are a subject of The Playwright’s monologue as well: where BJJ complained about not being able to get white actors for his cast, the Playwright is glad that “you can actually use negroes in your plays now….you really save a lot on makeup.” But because the budget can only afford “three negresses,” he’s recruited his Assistant, played by Parag S. Gohel, to take on the remaining black parts. So, by the end of the prologue you’ve got a black actor in whiteface, a white actor in redface, and an Indian actor in blackface, all about to participate in a melodrama that has a plot revolving around a definition of race that has to do with “one drop of blood.” Got it?

Ananias J. Dixon as M’Closky. Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

This emphasis on the performativity of race is but one of the devices Jacobs-Jenkins puts into play in his attempt to interrogate how we think about, and represent, race on stage. Another comes when the melodrama proper begins, and a curtain opens to reveal two slave women, Minnie (Melessie Clark) and Dido (Kelsey Robinson) at work. A projection tells us that none of us knows what slaves sounded like, and Jacobs-Jenkins’ solution is to endow these two with the language and demeanor of a couple of young African-American women from our current day. They gossip about other slaves on the plantation with the same kind of prurient and disaffected Schadenfreude you might overhear on a bus or at work, and the contrast between their manner of speaking and the content of their conversation is simultaneously funny and horrifying, particularly when it comes to the nonchalance with which they allude to the ever-present threat of sexual violence. In the course of a conversation about their new master George, for example, Minnie muses briefly on whether or not she would “fuck him” and then, after a pause, notes, “But I kind of get the feeling you don’t really get a say in the matter.” Where Boucicault erased the reality of slave life in his original play by sentimentalizing the relationship between white slaveholders and the people they enslaved, Jacobs-Jenkins uses anachronistic language to comment ironically on that erasure.

Minnie and Dido’s casual banter is further contrasted by the broad, over-the-top mode of performance that kicks in for the reenactment of The Octoroon itself, in which Dixon plays both the white hero and the white villain; Gohel plays two black slaves, both with cringe-inducing stereotypical shuck-and-jive; Giles is Wahnotee, a grunting Native American; Jenny Malarkey plays Dora, a rich Southern Belle; and Sarah Hollis is Zoe, the “Octoroon.” The plot of the melodrama centers on the villain M’Closky’s scheme to take over ownership not only of the plantation but also of Zoe, who believes herself to be a free woman. Dixon is terrific playing both the effete George (not just in white face but also in “white voice”) and the mustache-twirling M’Closky, and Malarkey is a comic confection as Dora, a perfect mix of high artifice and dripping “sincerity.”

Director Andrew Paul has done a good job of putting air quotes around the action within the melodrama, making visible the offensiveness of attitudes and language that an earlier era would have taken for granted. Often those air quotes render something funny that shouldn’t be, yielding moments when your laughter sticks in your throat. But the play also provides some unambiguous comedy, particularly in the bravura scene in which the hero George fights mano-a-mano against the villain M’Closky, which requires Dixon to fight himself. Props to fight director Michael Petyak and costume designer Kim Brown for making that moment a theatrical coup.

There are many other dots that Jacobs-Jenkins throws out for connection in this play, more than I have space to describe in this short post, and I’m not sure I could connect them all anyway (I’m still trying to figure out how Bre’r Rabbit fits into the whole thing).  An Octoroon is a complicated play, and it’s also a rather messy one, presumably deliberately so. Jacobs-Jenkins claims that he doesn’t “know how blackness onstage works,” and his play doesn’t so much seek to figure that out as to demonstrate that the representation of race on stage has been, and will continue to be, an ongoing challenge.

“The Father” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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In his Hamburg Dramaturgy, the 18^th-century German playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing claimed for theater, above all other arts, the capacity to arouse in an audience member a feeling that he termed Mitleid. That word, if you were to translate it literally, would be something like “suffering with”; Lessing theorized that drama achieved its greatest effect when spectators found themselves in a state of Mitleid with the character or characters in the play. The closest equivalent we have in English is probably “empathy” (although that’s far too modern a word for Lessing); other equivalents are “sympathy” or “compassion” (which is the term we used to translate Mitleid in our new translation of Lessing’s text). But there isn’t really a good English word to capture that sense of being with someone in their anguish and distress that the German term carries with it in its root of Leid.

Why am I talking about the translation of a German word in a post about Kinetic Theatre Company’s production of The Father? Well, because in fact, when I think about it, I can’t recall many experiences of theater in which I truly felt that I was “suffering with” a character in a play. I can think of instances where I felt sorry for a character (pity, compassion), or could imagine myself in their situation (empathy), or could identify with them on some level (sympathy). But truly suffer with them? That’s rare.

And that’s precisely the experience French playwright Florian Zeller offers in his masterfully constructed play The Father (the excellent translation is by Christopher Hampton). The central character – the father of the title – is Andre (the marvelous and heartbreaking Sam Tsoutsouvas), a retired engineer who suffers from dementia. He has an adult daughter, Anne (Catherine Gowl), and – at least as far as he knows – he lives in a large, beautifully appointed, immaculately clean apartment in Paris. At first, it seems that our glimpse into Andre’s condition will be mediated by Anne’s experience of coping with the symptoms of his dementia, that is, with his forgetfulness, his irritability, his hostile aggression toward the caregivers she employs, and his lack of understanding about what is happening to him.

Sam Tsoutsouvas in The Father; Photo by Bea Nyilis courtesy of Kinetic Theatre Company

But we quickly come to realize that our point of identification is not Anne; it’s Andre himself, and the playwright has contrived to structure his scenes so that Andre’s experience of reality is replicated in our experience of the play. In the first scene, Anne tells Andre that she is about to move to London with her new boyfriend; in the second, a man (Gregory Johnstone) comes into the room and patiently reintroduces himself to Andre as Anne’s husband of the past decade. In the next scene, a different woman (Lisa Ann Goldsmith) arrives and claims to be Anne, and when a confused Andre asks after the husband, she gently reminds him that she is not married. In later scenes, Anne and her husband Pierre (now played by a different actor, Darren Eliker) try to get Andre to accept a new caregiver, Laura (Erin Lindsey Krom). Andre likes Laura because she looks like his other daughter Elise, whom he thinks is travelling but who is in fact deceased. Imagine his distress when Laura returns to take care of him the following day and no longer looks anything at all like Elise. This type of switcheroo continues, scene after scene after scene. Not only do people get mixed up, but time does too – we see and experience (with Andre) events happening in one order, or on one time scale; but then other characters in the play gently contradict our experience of time, explaining that things have, in fact, been happening in a different order, or occurred longer ago than Andre (and we) believe they did.

You could imagine a play or film in which a group of characters conspire to screw with someone’s sanity in such a manner, as part of an elaborate and cruel practical joke. That’s also one way to figure what it must feel like to suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia – it must feel as if the world is conspiring to undermine your understanding of reality at every turn, by fucking around with the cast of characters who populate your world and making hay with the order of events and the flow of time. And as Andre suffers from the confusion and bafflement produced by his dementia, we find ourselves sharing in his bewilderment and in his incapacity to distinguish memory from present reality. At any given moment, it’s unclear whether what we are observing on stage is actually happening or only playing out in Andre’s mind, as reality, memory, and hallucination collide before our eyes.

Zeller’s play also opens an empathic window into the emotional lability of a person with dementia. Most of us would become enraged, too, if some person we had never seen before walked into our home and insisted that they were the caregiver we had met just the day before.  We, too, might respond to the tenuousness of our hold on reality by perseverating irritatingly on some beloved comfort item – a watch, for example  – or by treating the family members who have the difficult task of caring for us with cruel dismissiveness.

L to R: Catherine Gowl, Erin Krom, & Sam Tsoutsouvas. Photo by Bea Nyilis, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

Johnmichael Bohach’s eloquent scenic design plays a prominent role in the storytelling. The apartment morphs and changes throughout the play, subtly at first but then – in parallel with Andre’s loss of self – gradually losing its familiar features and becoming another space entirely. Tellingly, the unpredictability of the environment is at odds with the efforts, on the part of caregivers, to impose structure and order on Andre’s life, as evidenced, for example, in repeated urgings along the lines of “let’s get dressed now.” The production makes clear just how nonsensical and baffling such attempts at order must seem to a person whose surroundings appear to be changing inexplicably around them.

The Father is a structurally and emotionally complicated play, but director Andrew Paul makes it look easy. He has taken an understated approach that works beautifully: many of the scenes feel as if the characters are walking on eggshells with held breath. This feels right both as a depiction of what it feels like to be a caregiver to a person with dementia, and as an imagining of what a person with dementia might feel as they navigate a world in which reality shuffles around them like a jigsaw puzzle with interchangeable pieces. We suffer with them all, and in so doing, gain a world of understanding and insight into a devastating condition.

“Holmes and Watson” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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I’ve seen a lot of Sherlock Holmes in the last few years, both on the screen (as played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and on our local stages (nearly always with David Whalen in the title role). So I’ll admit, when Kinetic Theatre announced yet another episode in the Sherlock Holmes saga – featuring Whalen in the cast, yet again – I paused for a moment to consider how much Sherlock is too much Sherlock. You may be wondering the same.

Well, I’m here to tell you that, although there’s a lot of Sherlock – or perhaps better put, although there are a lot of Sherlocks – in Holmes and Watson, this is one iteration of the story you really don’t want to miss.

L to R: Gregory Johnstone (Holmes #3), Darren Eliker (Holmes #1), Daryll Heysham (Watson), and David Whalen (Holmes #2). Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre.

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher sets his tale three years after Sherlock’s final encounter with his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Although no bodies were ever found, the world has assumed that both Sherlock and Moriarty perished in the fall’s roiling waters. Now Dr. John Watson (Daryll Hesham) has been summoned to a mysterious asylum on an island off the coast of England in order to determine whether any one of three “madmen” claiming to be Holmes is, in fact, the real deal. The asylum is run by Dr. Evans (Tim McGeever), who refuses to divulge to Watson any information about the three men in his charge; he also keeps his reasons for needing Watson’s positive identification of Holmes a secret. Watson quickly discovers that this asylum was expressly renovated to house just the three “Holmes’s” (played by Darren Eliker, David Whalen, and Gregory Johnstone) and the only other inhabitants of the institution – indeed, of the entire island – are an orderly and matron (played by James Keegan & Gayle Pazerski) who help Evans keep the Holmes-trio in line.

This is a suspicion-generating setup of the highest order, and if you’re anything like me, dear Reader, you may already be thinking you know what kinds of twists lie ahead. I was implored not to spoil the fun for you, so I won’t say anything more about the plot, other than to heap admiration on Hatcher for very cleverly feeding what he supposes to be our expectations as the action unspools, and on director Andrew Paul for using both the casting and staging to underscore the script’s diabolical misdirections. I thought I had the whole thing figured out midway through, and was tickled to the bone to discover just how wrong I had it. Ah, the pleasures of a well-plotted mystery!

L to R: Tim McGeever, Daryll Heysham, and James Keegan. Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre.

Paul stages the play like one big magic trick, keeping your attention focused on distractions while what you’re supposed to be paying attention to hides in plain sight. The excellent cast – many of whom are playing more than one character, and some of whom are playing characters in disguise – has the tricky job of maintaining the magic trick until its payoff is revealed at the end, and they do so masterfully; this is a play that – much like the film The Sixth Sense – will have you rewinding scenes in your imagination to see whether all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and because the actors do such a skillful job of maintaining a double reality, those pieces fall neatly into place. The production is fine at every level: Johnmichael Bohach’s scenic design makes excellent use of the architecture of the New Hazlett Theatre, with dropcloth-draped scaffolding making a gothic labyrinth of the playing space, and a large rumbling metal shop door adding menace to the environment. Lighting design, by Alex Stevens, establishes an eerie and threatening atmosphere, and Kim Brown’s costuming grounds the play in a 19th century milieu, while small touches – like David Whalen’s goofy wig – also signal that there’s a bit of comedy afoot. Joe Spinogatti’s projection design and Angela Baughman’s sound design play an important role in establishing the atmospherics for repeated flashbacks, and key moments in the play’s plot get their punch from Steve Tolin’s formidable special effects.

The weather is dreary, and I imagine that for many of you – as for me – it’s hard to resist the temptation to just curl up inside and binge-watch some cliff-hanger of a show. But if it’s a well-plotted mind-twister you’re after, get up off the couch and down to the New Hazlett – you won’t regret it.

“Love Love Love” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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Kinetic Theatre closes its production season with a deceptive confection of a play. Mike Bartlett’s Love Love Love might best be described as an generational comedy wrapped around a family tragedy, a bitter pill delivered in a spoonful of comedic honey.

The target of Bartlett’s biting satire is the baby boom generation, and more specifically that set of boomers who hit college age in the late sixties and early seventies, raised Generation X while they rode the wave of eighties prosperity, and are just now hitting retirement age. This is the same set of folks whose transition from counterculturalists to middle-class homeowners was the subject of the late 1980s TV series thirtysomething. But unlike that show, Bartlett is less interested in the struggles of the baby boomers themselves than in the effect they have had on the generation that came after them.

L to R: Ethan Saks, Mindy Woodhead, Aviana Glover, and Darren Weller in Kinetic Theatre’s U.S. regional premiere production of Mike Bartlett’s LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. Photo by Rocky Raco.

The play hopscotches from 1967 to 1989 to 2010 (a time travel achieved adroitly through Johnmichael Bohach’s ingenious scenic design and Abby Stroot’s spot-on costumes), showing three snapshots in the evolution of Kenneth (Darren Weller) and Sandra (Mindy Woodhead) from freewheeling, doped-up hippies to self-absorbed, alcohol-addicted parents and finally to smug, self-satisfied retirees. Meanwhile, their children Rosie (Aviana Glover) and Jamie (Ethan Saks) devolve from smart teens with loads of potential (she’s a talented violinist; he’s a math nerd) to adults who have failed to fully launch.

Who or what is to blame? The comedy of the play lays the fault at the feet of the “Me” generation, which – as Bartlett wants us to see it – managed, as it aged, to shed its countercultural rebellion but not its self-absorption. Where the play is funniest is where it reveals the hypocrisies of the generation whose desire for self-actualization brought us all sorts of positive social changes (the sexual revolution, civil rights, women’s rights, etc.) but who also managed to parent a bunch of kids who couldn’t tie their own shoes or do their own laundry and for whom – as Jia Tolentino put it in this week’s New Yorker – self-actualization “was a mandate to be undermined.” Bartlett is sharp and stinging in his portrayal of Kenneth and Sandra as so wrapped up in “disappointment” over their slide into middle-class conventionality that they are blithely indifferent to their children’s aspirations and needs, and he makes a trenchant connection between the “Me” generation’s navel-gazing and the socio-economic fact that thirtysomethings in the 2010s are drowning in student debt while their parents cash in on paid-off homes and a lifetime of retirement savings.

Director Andrew Paul and his excellent cast keep that comedic generational critique front and center throughout. But strip away the dates, and the play could also be seen as a tragic tale of a narcissistic substance abuser (Sandra) and the toxic effect she has on all who love her. An emotional Tasmanian Devil, Sandra splits Kenneth from his older brother Henry (also played by Saks) in the first scene, destroys her marriage and causes lasting psychological damage to her children in the second, and gaslights Rosie when she confronts her in the third. There’s nothing very funny about that story; indeed, in several spots the play takes an unexpected detour into poignancy.

Paradoxically, much of the production’s comic punch emerges out of the cast’s commitment to leaning in to that pain and confusion and giving this family’s dysfunction emotional weight. Woodhead is masterful as Sandra, keeping her just on the bright edge of crazy throughout, and the havoc she casts about her is believable, and – in consequence – often quite hilarious. Weller, on the other hand, has got the vibe of the cool dude – and, later, cool dad – down pat. He’s a guy who rolls with the times, and you could imagine that if he had been born a decade later he might have been socialized to be a more caring parent; as it is, he surfs (like so many baby boom fathers) on his own domestic incompetence. Neither Woodhead nor Weller is very convincing as a nineteen year-old in the first scene, but that’s probably an unmeetable challenge posed by the play: there aren’t many actors who can span the age range demanded for these characters without the help of film special effects. Glover and Saks, on the other hand, have an easier range to fill, making comic hay out of their characters as teens and really blooming as the adult Rosie and Jamie in the third scene. Saks, in particular, deftly captures the deflated introversion of the adult Gen-X underachiever who can’t manage to focus his energies or his life (there’s a hint that both Kenneth and Jamie suffer from an attention-deficit disorder, an ailment that seems not to have hindered members of Kenneth’s generation in the way it has held back their children).

So which is it: comedy or tragedy? The play ends with the parents back in a bubble of love that their children can’t penetrate. It’s a happy ending for the erstwhile hippies, I suppose, but a rather dire warning for the future.

“The Liar” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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L to R: Patrick Halley as Cliton and Ethan Saks as Dorante in Kinetic Theatre’s THE LIAR Photo Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

In an age when our leaders play loose with the facts
What a lark to return to a play from the past
That takes joy in exposing the fibs of a liar
And does so while setting our laughter a-fire.

Ethan Saks plays Dorante, a great teller of fables
On whom pert Clarice and Lucrece turn the tables
(Erika Strasburg’s the former, Sarah Silk is the latter,
and all three young acteurs knocked the socks off your Tatler).

Erika Strasburg as Clarice and Sarah Silk as Lucrece in Kinetic Theatre’s THE LIAR. Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

He’s also “come-upped” by Geronte, his dear dad,
and Alcippe, an old friend, whom he makes very sad
When they catch him out on a lie that’s truly whopping –
And this leads to a moment – at least – of lie stopping.

There’s also Cliton, Dorante’s servant, whose quirk
Is compulsion to always be truthful, which works
Against him in wooing the maid Isabelle
(He blurts out the truth, and she gives him hell).

Isabelle has a twin, the priggish Sabine;
Philiste yearns for her, even though she’s quite mean.
(You must look below for the names of these actors,
Their phonemes won’t fit anapestic tetrameter!)

David Ives’ “translaptation” is a clever mashup game
Of modern and classic; Andrew Paul’s done the same
With souped-up Vivaldi behind the transitions,
Sly trendy shout-outs, and old/new appositions.

Kim Brown’s witty costumes take everyday Gap wear
Add lace and a cape and voila! we are there
In 1643, where fops fight in duel-ery
(albeit with 20th-c. light saber tomfoolery).

Ethan Saks as Dorante and Charlie Murphy as Alcippe in Kinetic Theatre’s THE LIAR. Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

Do I tax with my rhyme? I’m no Ives, I confess
His vocab’s prolific, he pairs with finesse
words like “cuff,” “love”, and “Pont-neuf,” and quite unexpectedly
invents new expressions – for instance: “lace-ectomy.”

I love plays in verse when they’re done really well
And the Kinetic production is just nonpareil.
The acting’s pitch-perfect, the staging’s sublime
Go see this rare show, you’ll have a great time!

David Ives’ The Liar, adapted from the comedy by Pierre Corneille; directed by Andrew Paul. In addition to Saks, Strasburg, and Silk, the first-rate ensemble includes Sam Tsoutsouvas as Geronte; Patrick Halley as Cliton; John Michnya as Philiste, Alcippe’s friend; Julianne Avolio as Isabelle/Sabine; and the unsurpassable Charlie Francis Murphy as Alcippe. The versatile scene design is by Gianni Downs; Angela Baughman’s sound design provides modern mashup not only for the transitions but also for a gloriously antic duelling scene (staged by fight choreographer Michael Petyak). Lighting, by Cat Wilson, and props, by Johnmichael Bohach, also play prominent roles in generating the production’s comedy.

“The Christians” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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Your Tatler encountered a lot of religion this past weekend – indeed, far more than she, as a secular humanist, is wont to do. And all of it was on our local stages: there was the irreverent and impious An Act of God at the Public on Thursday, the reverent and affirmative A Gathering of Sons at Pittsburgh Festival Opera on Friday, and finally, on Saturday, Lucas Hnath’s intelligent and deeply captivating play The Christians.

L to R: David Whalen and Mindy Woodhead. Photo by Rocky Raco, courtesy Kinetic Theatre

In many ways both An Act of God and The Christians address a similar fundamental problem at the root of all religion, which is that the texts that purport to contain God’s will must be read and interpreted by humans, who inevitably impose and project their own needs and wants and agendas into their interpretations. So who can really know what God wants? An Act of God cheekily tries to answer that question by imagining what message God might want to deliver to humanity in the 21st century were he to take form and visit us; The Christians tackles that question via the pastor of a modern American megachurch who has suddenly begun to doubt whether his evangelical faith has correctly interpreted the Bible’s teachings about the afterlife. And while The Christians is far more respectful in its depiction of Christians than An Act of God is in its representation of the deity, in the end it’s also far more devastating in its demonstration of the shaky foundations on which faith is built.

The whole of Hnath’s play takes place in the sanctuary of the megachurch that Pastor Paul (David Whalen) has devoted his life and work to building, and which scenic designer Johnmichael Bohach convincingly evokes with the sparest of architectural gestures: a large modern cross hanging above a raised, blue-carpeted dais, with a cross-shaped podium for the pastor and a semi-circle of seats on the floor of the stage for the audience, which takes on the role of the congregation. Screens on either side of the cross display misty images of sunrises, clouds, and nature (projections by Joe Spinogatti), along with quotes from the Bible and subtitles for Pastor Paul’s opening sermon, in which he makes a surprise announcement: after a confab with God while doing his business on the toilet, the good pastor has realized that he has been misinterpreting the Bible all these years. He has come to understand that there is, in fact, no hell; that God is all-forgiving and will admit all, believers and nonbelievers alike, to heaven; and that henceforth “we are no longer a congregation that believes in hell.”

Paul’s announcement has both immediate and far-reaching consequences, for him and for his church. The immediate fallout comes when his associate pastor Joshua (Joshua Elijah Reese) pushes back against this doctrinal shift and leaves the church, taking a handful of congregants with him. As time goes on, more and more members of the church take issue with the new doctrine, especially as the rift becomes complicated by issues of power, politics, and money, and in the end Pastor Paul is left with little more than his own increasing doubts.

Under Andrew Paul’s sensitive direction, Kinetic Theatre’s production has a magnetic energy, drawing in even those (like myself) who might instinctually distance themselves from squabbles over theological doctrine. The top-notch cast does an exceptional job of making all of the characters warm and likable, in particular David Whalen, who rightly avoids the temptation to portray Paul as unctuous and self-serving (the potential is there in the character). Whalen’s Paul comes across as kind and sincere, the kind of man you can imagine would inspire trust and deep respect among his congregants, and his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, seems a genuine partnership. As Elizabeth, Mindy Woodhead morphs fascinatingly from what at first appears to be a smiling dummy into a fiercely intelligent doctrinal sparring partner. Reese brings conviction and passion to the role of Joshua, a man whose conversion to Christianity saved him from a life of both spiritual and material poverty, and Gayle Pazerski (as Jenny, one of his congregants) and Robert Haley (as Church Elder Jay) both bring a quiet urgency to their characters’ spiritual and emotional claims. Hnath unconventionally calls for microphones to be used for all of the dialogue, even during intimate scenes, and the cast makes good use of this device, which paradoxically allows for a more naturalistic mode of speaking even as it adds a layer of performativity to the character’s speech. At times the mics give the impression that we are listening in to their unvarnished thoughts; at others, they serve to reinforce the essential debate-like nature of the play.

The play itself does several things quite beautifully. To begin with, it takes seriously, and gives insight into, the kinds of exegetical questions with which Christians have to grapple as part of their belief system, and shows that faith is likely never as blind as it might appear to non-believers. In addition, the play is astonishingly fair-handed, allowing all sides of the dispute equal weight. In the beginning, it seems that Pastor Paul, as the spiritual and intellectual leader of the congregation, will have the upper hand, but his vision of an all-forgiving God is challenged not only by Joshua, but also  by the relatively naïve congregant Jenny, who challenges him, among other things, to explain how Hitler could possibly be in heaven. There are no straw arguments here, no ridiculing of belief: in fact – and especially given the rhetorical environment of our current political moment – what may be most refreshing about the arguments presented in this play is the deep respect with which the characters treat each other, even as they are feeling themselves compelled to reject a way of thinking as anathema.

Yet another thing this play does beautifully is to explore the barriers to opening oneself to doubt and change. For Elizabeth, the prospect of changing belief systems raises the possibility that her future self will look back and consider her present self stupid and ignorant; this idea is so repellent to her that she cannot even consider such radical change. Joshua, on the other hand, would like nothing more than to accept Paul’s vision of an afterlife that only contains heaven, if only it could provide him the same solace and moral guidance that present doctrine does.

But much as this play succeeds in giving equal time and space to contradictory arguments and diverging points of view, in the end what it really accomplishes is a trenchant deconstruction of the relationship between faith, organized religion, and morality. What Pastor Paul discovers is that, convincing as his argument may be for an all-forgiving God, the fear of spending an eternity in hell is a much stronger motivator of expressions of faith such as tithing and church membership; for, as Jenny innocently points out, if everyone is saved no matter whether or what they believe, what’s the purpose of belonging to a church? What sets apart the faithful, if the faithless are saved as well? If God doesn’t punish sin, why be good?

The real chicken-and-egg question behind these queries, of course, is: does the church serve the belief system, or is it the belief system that serves the church? That’s a question the play leaves us to ponder, just as it leaves Paul and Elizabeth in a terrible yet wonderful state of radical uncertainty.

“The Hound of the Baskervilles” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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Kinetic Theatre Company

Take three inventive actors, trunks full of costumes, and a well-known story from the Sherlock Holmes canon, season liberally with Monty Python-esque humor, lace with a good dose of metatheatrical self-parody, whip it all into an energetic concoction of not-quite horror and suspense, and what have you got? The zany, playful, and at times downright silly Kinetic Theatre Company production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, currently running at Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre.

L to R: James FitzGerald, Connor McCanlus, and David Whalen. Photo courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

The script, by Steven Canny and John Nicholson, roughly traces the contours of the Arthur Conan Doyle tale – there’s the mystery of whether or not a demonic hound is stalking the moors, chasing to their deaths successive generations of Baskerville heirs (all played by Connor McCanlus), solved, in nearly proper deductive fashion, by the “world’s greatest detective,” Sherlock Holmes (David Whalen). But not before Dr. Watson (James FitzGerald) – who’s hardly the brightest bulb on the tree – repeatedly mucks things up through a combination of carelessness, inattention, and downright befuddlement.

The three actors populate the stage with a dizzying array of colorful be-wigged, be-bearded, and be-hatted characters who zip on and off stage with frenetic energy; at times, they also play themselves (or some version of themselves) spooked by theatrical superstition and egging each other on. It’s all a bit chaotic, and it’s hard to see much connection between the play’s metatheatrical scenes and the Sherlock Holmes story, but there’s no point in being a killjoy and trying to find method in the madness. Director Andrew Paul proves himself an observant student of the Flying Circus, staging all matter of verbal and visual gag with deadpan seriousness, and his ensemble is fully up to the task. Whalen offers a nudge-nudge wink-wink parody of his own self-absorbed Sherlock, and also plays multiple other roles, including an eye-patched villain, the villain’s Spanish (or is it Italian?) wife, a mysterious bearded butler, and the butler’s daffy wife. McCanlus is suitably goofy as the “Canadian” Henry Baskerville (who speaks, unaccountably, with a Minnesota twang), and FitzGerald’s Dr. Watson is delightfully batty.

Horror is promised at the beginning of this show, but if you want to be scared, you’re in for a disappointment; if you’re looking for a couple of hours of frothy fun, Hound of the Baskervilles won’t let you down.

“Cock” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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Kinetic Theatre Company

The title of this play is a bit of a red herring. I suppose it’s meant to refer to what’s “between” John (Thomas Constantine Moore) and his two lovers – his boyfriend of many years, “M,” played by Ethan Hova, and the woman he’s recently met and fallen in love with, “W,” played by Erika Strasburg – but the play is not nearly as racy and rough, in language or attitude, as the word “cock” would conjure for the American imagination. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing: it’s a nice surprise to find that the play eschews in-yer-face explicitness, but unfortunately its title also risks turning off audience members who would otherwise be charmed and taken in by this smart, complicated, and riveting play about the complexities of coupling in a “post-identity politics” age.

Cock is, in fact, only very tangentially about what hangs between the legs of three of its four characters. More centrally, it’s about a young man’s struggle to make sense of who he is by trying to figure out what he wants from a relationship, both physically and emotionally. John is a strange character to place at the center of a drama, because unlike most dramatic characters – who are defined in terms of “what they want” and “the obstacles that keep them from getting what they want” – John seems immobilized by an incapacity to define his desires. He’s a gay man who suddenly finds himself in a sexual relationship with a woman, and his inability to choose between M and W becomes not only an existential crisis for him, but also a condemnation of the kind of identity-politics that insists on categorizing and pigeonholing people in terms of sexuality and sexual preference.

Thomas Constantine Moore as John. Photo courtesy Kinetic Theatre Company.

The play has a deliberately disorienting structure and style: playwright Mike Bartlett notes that it should be staged as if it were taking place in a cockfighting arena, and Johnmichael Bohach’s set offers a credible replica. A low wall encircles a floor covered in sawdust; distressed corrugated metal panels form the walls behind the audience risers, which surround the playing space, with bench seats up close for spectators who want to get intimate with the action. The space is otherwise devoid of all furniture and props, and the playing style it demands takes inspiration from the likes of director Ivo van Hove – that is, spare, stark, stripped to the essentials. A character says he’s going to sit down and then doesn’t; objects get mentioned, but they are neither seen nor mimed; W moans as John fingers her, but Moore is not even touching Strasburg. All that busy work of pretending and faking and imitating and indicating is abandoned as the actors focus on the presence of the thoughts and emotions expressed by the text. It’s thrilling and captivating.

It’s also, at first, rather confusing. This is a play that demands a little patience. The first section of the play offers glimpses, in snapshot-style, of John’s relationship with M, hopscotching forward in time; the second section fills in the gaps with John’s intervening relationship with W. Nicholas Erickson’s sound design provides buzzing bells and static-y radio to help jump-cut all these moments together, but the first two sections are hard to put together.

The payoff comes with the third section, when the warring lovers spar over John at a dinner party, to which M has invited his father, “F” (Sam Tsoutsouvas), as reinforcement. From this point on, metaphorically, John is the weakest bird in the cockfighting arena, pecked at from all sides by the other characters, all of whom have much more clearly defined wants and needs. At the same time, he’s also the “prize” the other birds are fighting over. That fight is both entertaining and horrifying. As M, Hova neatly treads the line between charmingly catty and manipulatively abusive; Strasburg wears an equally sharp set of spurs as the direct, winning, shoot-from-the-hip W. Director Andrew Paul is unafraid of letting his actors and audience stew in cringingly awkward moments: for example, when M and W finally realize that John has not yet chosen one of them over the other, there is a long, awful silence in which Thomas Constantine Moore masterfully embodies the anguish of his indecision, his face a grimace of shame, embarrassment, and self-disgust.

That anguished silence was, for me, the biggest takeaway from the play; in the end, although John finally makes a choice, it’s a paralyzing one – and one that reveals the universality of the contours of abusive relationships, no matter the gender of the abuser and victim. Although John’s waffling initiated the contest, he’s its ultimate victim: his bedraggled, scarred, and bloodied carcass is what gets left behind in the sawdust.

“Sherlock’s Last Case” at Kinetic Theatre Company

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Kinetic Theatre Company

I’ll admit, dearest readers, that I was a bit worried during the first twenty minutes or so of Sherlock’s Last Case. Not so much because the title made me anxious for Sherlock Holmes’s fate (although that is an anxiety you are expected to entertain as part of the play), but more because the play starts out looking like the kind of creaky drawing-room whodunit that’s generally a wee bit too lite for my tastes. But the play – written by Charles Marowitz in the late eighties – is all about misdirection, and director Andrew Paul follows Marowitz’s lead by regularly pulling the rug out from under his audience’s expectations. By somewhere in the middle of the first act, it’s clear that we’re in the midst of a play that refuses to take itself too seriously, deriving as much fun from mocking its own genre as it does from its plot turns.

Paul and company have gone to great lengths (including some sleight-of-hand in the program) to keep Marowitz’s plot twists a surprise, so I won’t spoil any of it for readers who have not yet seen the production. Suffice it to say that Holmes’s “last case” gives a prominent role to Dr. Watson, played here with virtuosity by Simon Bradbury. The casting of David Whalen in the role of Sherlock Holmes lends this production an added frisson of intertextual metacommentary for Pittsburgh theater insiders (who will recall that Whalen previously played Holmes in two productions with PICT in the very same venue). Rounding out the cast are Weston Blakesley as a befuddled cockney Inspector LeStrade, Susie McGregor-Laine as Holmes’s Scottish housekeeper, and Joanna Strapp as the mysterious visitor who sets the machinery of the plot in motion.

Johnmichael Bohach’s scene design helps set the self-referential tone of the play with oversized framed newspaper headlines that comically highlight the ridiculously convoluted cases Holmes has already solved (and provide satiric context for the ridiculously convoluted manner in which he ends up, er, overcoming the challenges of the case at hand). Like the production itself, Kim Brown’s Victorian costumes start off somewhere in the realm of historical realism and get gradually campier as the play itself does. Topping off the fun are Steve Tolin’s ingenious special effects, involving, at various points, massively foaming potions, exploding skeletons, and projectiles of fake blood.