Upcoming! The Bach Choir, Pittsburgh Public, Fake Friends, Quantum, and more…

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Bach Choir of Pittsburgh, Front Porch Theatricals, Kinetic Theatre Company, off the WALL productions, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Quantum Theatre

It’s Memorial Day weekend; summer is here, and your Tatler has some recommendations for you!

To begin with: this coming weekend, June 3 & 4, the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh is presenting its “Obsessions” concert, which was postponed back in February due to you-know-what. This is a collection of choruses from operas, ranging from the familiar to the rarely performed, including pieces from Porgy and Bess, La Traviata, Carmen, Dido and Aneas, Faust, Mefistofole, Cavalaria Rusticana, Susannah, Madama Butterfly, The Tender Land …and more! The program includes solos by soprano Charlene Canty, mezzo soprano Demareus Cooper, tenor Michael Vallikappil, and bass-baritone Miles Wilson-Toliver; don’t be scared off by the idea of “opera,” the range of styles and moods is thrilling and inspiring. Use BCPALTO21 to get a discount on tickets.

Also opening on June 4 is Two Trains Running, an August Wilson play set in the late 1960’s, which centers on the fight against “gentrification” of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Directed by Justin Emeka, the production features actors Melessie Clark, Brian D. Coats, Ananias J. Dixon, Justin Emeka, Wali Jamal, Brenden Peifer, and Brian Starks. And of course, this week also begins the ten-day Three Rivers Arts Festival.

June is also Pride Month, and in celebration the New York-based theater company Fake Friends is bringing back its Pulitzer Prize-nominated work Circle Jerk, both live and streaming, from June 8-25. The blurb describes it thusly: “It’s winter on Gayman Island, a summer retreat for the homosexual rich and fame-ish. This off-season, two White Gay internet trolls hatch a plot to take back what’s wrongfully theirs. Cancellations, meme schemes, and political and erotical flip flops abound as three actors playing nine parts play out this chaotic live-streamed descent into the high-energy, quick-change, low-brow shitpit of the internet.
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I watched hundreds of online performances during the pandemic “lockdown”; there were only two or three that felt electrifying and new, and Circle Jerk was at the top of that short list. If I could make it to NYC to see the show live, I would; and if you’re there in mid-June, you should (and if you buy your ticket before tomorrow, you can use the code CJMEMORIALDAY to get a discount). Nonetheless I’m still looking forward to seeing the streamed version again; it’s a blast (and it’s cheap: just $5)! Full disclosure, one of the company members, Cat Rodríguez, is an alum of the dramaturgy program at CMU; but I would find this performance amazing even without the personal connection. Here’s a little teaser:

Early June also sees the world premiere of Simon Bradbury’s new play The Illustrious Invalid at Kinetic Theatre; described as “riotous” and a “madcap romp,” the play imagines the final day in the life of the playwright Molière as he prepares to put on a performance of his play, The Imaginary Invalid. Directed by Andrew Paul, the production features the author in the role of Molière, in addition to ensemble members Derdriu Ring, Joanna Strapp, and David Whalen; it opens June 9 at City Theatre. And, opening that same day, is the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s “Open Air” performance series, which also features performances by the Pittsburgh Festival Opera on June 9: if you are still not ready to see live performance in a closed auditorium, this is your chance to get your fix in the open air, on the riverfront in Sharpsburg. Tickets are free!

Further on in the summer, Off the Wall in Carnegie will open Not My Revolution on June 17 – a one-woman show written and performed by Elizabeth Huffman about two women whose lives are impacted by civil war. Quantum Theatre will open The Cherry Orchard on July 8, directed by Katie Brook and with a cast that not only features three actors from the same family (Gregory Lehane, Laurie Klatscher, and Nick Lehane) but also artistic director Karla Boos herself, in the role of Lyubov Andreyevna. And in mid August, Front Porch Theatricals will produce the musical The Grand Hotel.

There’s more, of course: the Pittsburgh CLO has performances running through the summer, as does the Pittsburgh Festival Opera, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the Allegheny County Summer Concert Series. I bet I’m missing some; feel free to add recommendations in the comments!

“Not Medea” at off the WALL Productions

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off the WALL productions

The character of Medea from Greek mythology is often evoked as a shorthand for bad mothering. She was, after all, the woman who killed her children as part of her revenge against Jason, the husband who betrayed her and left her for another woman.

But Medea’s story, like motherhood itself, is complicated: from Medea’s point of view, Jason’s abandonment leaves her young sons with no future, so to kill them is to spare them a fate that she sees as worse than death. By her rather twisted logic, the murder of her children is an act of maternal love.

The complicated logic of maternal love – its fierceness, its rages, its tenderness, and its resentments – is at the heart of Allison Gregory’s new play Not Medea, which interweaves Euripides’ version of the Medea legend with the story of a Woman (Drew Leigh Willliams) who has her own parenting tragedy to cope with.

The conceit of Gregory’s play is that the Woman has come to the theater to see a production of Medea, taking a rare night off from a weekend in which she has sole custody of her very young daughter, Alcyon. She arrives late, because of babysitter issues, and after some initial nattering at the rest of the audience she is drawn, through some unexplained device, into the play Medea itself, as the title character, where her own experiences as a mother who has made regrettable parenting decisions get juxtaposed, mirrored, and compared with Medea’s. What follows is something of a therapy session for the Woman – Gregory uses the Medea material to allow the Woman to make sense of, and come to terms with, the loss of her adopted daughter, Electra, who died in an accident that stemmed from one of those everyday moments of inattention that any parent might have.

Williams is engaging as both the Woman and as Medea, and her emotional journey through anguish, guilt, self-recrimination, and rationalization is moving and thought-provoking, as are the parallels drawn by the play between Medea’s anger at Jason and the Woman’s bitterness toward her own ex (also named Jason), who has also left her for another woman. But the play struggles to gel into coherence. To begin with, the fiction that the Woman is an audience member feels like a forced contrivance that raises more questions than the play agrees to answer. The Woman shifts back and forth between interacting with the Chorus (Elizabeth Boyke) and Jason (Allan Snyder) as if she were Medea in the world of the play-within-the-play Medea, and interacting with us, the audience, as if she were a modern human being in our world. During those latter interactions the Chorus/Boyke is often part of the scene, but it’s unclear what or who she represents in those moments – that is, she doesn’t seem to have a status as an “actor” in the world in which the Woman is an audience member, which muddies the distinction Gregory seems to want to establish between the fictional “real world” and the play-within-a-play. It’s also never clear what happens to draw the Woman into the world of Medea – one minute she’s futzing with her umbrella and the next she’s suddenly intoning lines from Euripides. The fact that she’s given both of her children names from Greek mythology is a bit too clever by half; the fact that she’s left her remaining daughter home alone, in what amounts to an act of criminal child negligence (the photo she shows us is of a child under the age of five!) beggars belief, particularly given the circumstances of her other daughter’s fatal accident.

The play is at its best where it uses the Medea myth to deconstruct contemporary myths of motherhood and offer an honest and unflinching account of what women lose when they become mothers – things like sleep, time, freedom, and autonomy – and of the taboo resentments women may harbor against the creatures who have robbed them of those things. That is to say: both Medea and the Woman have reasons for being “bad mothers,” reasons that the play makes both comprehensible and fully relatable.

“Mumburger” at off the WALL productions and “The Double Threat Trio” at Pittsburgh CLO

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off the WALL productions, Pittsburgh CLO

Mumburger

The tagline in the publicity for Sarah Kosar’s new play Mumburger reads “a surreal play about grief, parenting, and alternative meat.” You’d be forgiven for hoping – as I’ll confess I was – that the play’s title is a feint and that it has some bait-and-switch up its sleeve that doesn’t involve cannibalism. The title, however, doesn’t lie:  ground “mom” meat is indeed on the menu.

How does it get there? Well, eco-activist mom Andrea has recently died, after her car was crushed by a Birdseye truck on the highway. Her daughter Tiffany (Jessie Wray Goodman) and husband Hugh (Ken Bolden) are trying to cope with her sudden loss, each in their own way, when they suddenly receive a grocery bag full of ground meat patties, with a note from beyond the grave. Andrea had arranged to have her remains delivered to her family as a “digestive memorial,” and she directs her husband and daughter to consume her over the next several weeks (some of the patties are conveniently already pre-frozen so that they can be saved for later).

Hugh and Tiffany are now faced with a dilemma – should they obey “mum’s” wishes (eeuw) or get rid of her in some other manner? Their choice is complicated by the fact that they are vegan: i.e., does the fact that mom is effectively “road kill” make eating her meat okay?

L to R: Jessie Wray Goodman and Ken Bolden. Photo by Heather Mull, courtesy off the WALL productions.

I guess in the real world their choice would also be complicated by all sorts of other logistical questions, like: Who would have processed her remains in such a way, in such a short time, and how could she have arranged it in advance? Would such “meat” even be edible, given that mom has only been dead a day or two, and most meat is aged a couple of weeks before consumption? And how did they fit a whole human’s worth of burgers into such a small grocery bag?

But this play does not take place in the real world, as is evidenced not only by the oddly askew set, in which all of the furniture floats off-kilter in a void (an apposite visual metaphor for the state of sudden grief, from scenic designer Adrienne Fischer), but also by the nonreferential physical vocabulary that director Robyne Parrish imposes on the text. Bolden and Goodman engage in highly formalized movements and gestures – incessantly circling the table, for example, or shoving each other back and forth, or aimlessly shuffling “mum” patties on the kitchen counter – that seem purposely disconnected from the dialogue. The intention may be to underscore the play’s surrealism, but the effect is to make the emotional content of the story harder to access: the characters seem less like real people than like figures under the control of some befuddling force.

I suspect Kosar intends her play to be something of a black comedy, but Parrish’s physical approach to the work gets in the way: I felt I needed to care more about these characters as humans in order to find their situation, off-putting and weird as it is, funny. The most emotionally real moment in the production is also the stillest one: after Tiffany discovers that her dad has consumed all of the remaining burgers and left none for her, they embrace on the floor, Tiffany wailing in uncontrolled grief in his lap as he tries to comfort her. Whether or not you can get on board with the idea that anyone would want to eat her deceased mother in order to keep her memory alive, Tiffany’s anguished realization that her mother is really gone forever resonates deeply.

No real humans are consumed in the course of the performance, but something resembling meat is cooked on stage and eaten, and as icky as the idea of eating a “mumburger” is, even more disconcerting is the fact that the characters don’t spend enough stage time cooking the “meat” to render it safe for consumption. That is, they seem to be eating their “ground mom” raw.  All of which is to say: bring a very strong stomach.

The Double Threat Trio

Where Mumburger serves a meal that may not be for all tastes, The Double Threat Trio offers the equivalent of a delectable dessert: it’s sweet, light, and pretty much guaranteed to give you a little dopamine kick.

The premise of this new small musical, which was written and composed by Adam Overett, hearkens back to the gloriously goofy “can-do” spirit of those old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films. Jamison (J. Alex Noble) is an actor who can sing, but not dance; Nina (Drew Leigh Williams) is a singer who can dance, but not act; and Kenny (Jerreme Rodriguez) is a dancer who can act, but not sing.  Each, in other words, is a “double threat” competing for roles against “triple threat” actor/dancer/singers. What are these poor not-quite-talented-enough performers to do?

Why, put on their own show, of course! They seek out a wealthy writer/director/producer named Millicent (the terrific Michelle Duffy) who just happens to have the perfect vehicle to showcase their talents: “Oed!,”  her own musical adaptation of Oedipus Rex. (Yes, you may groan now).

L to R: Jerreme Rodriguez, Drew Leigh Williams, J. Alex Noble & Michelle Duffy; photo by Matt Polk, courtesy Pittsburgh CLO

Millicent is a “multi-threat” herself, explaining to the trio that she wears many hats, which turns out not to be an idiomatic expression but a witty comic device. Duffy wheels in a hat rack festooned with different hats, and with each piece of headgear she precisely and lovingly skewers a theatrical stereotype: as the writer, she’s an awkward introvert with buck teeth; as the producer, an aggressive, stooping lech; as the choreographer, an ebullient and overenthusiastic California Valley Girl; as costume designer, a severe Slavic artiste; and as stage manager, a bossy pragmatist. This quick-change routine is uproariously funny, made even more so by the trio’s bewildered acquiescence to Millicent’s outrageous insistence that she be in control of all aspects of the production.

Of course, everything has to go completely awry in the course of putting on the show within the show – and of course the awryness has to involve each of the characters being compelled to do the one thing they can’t do, and also survive the doing. Meanwhile, along the way Overett sprinkles musical numbers that give a glimpse into each character’s past and add depth to their insecurities and fears. If you’re thinking that this sounds a bit like a stage musical version of Waiting for Guffman you’ve got the right idea: it is simultaneously a lampoon of the people who make the making of theater their business, and love letter to them.

Nothing goes awry in The Double Threat Trio itself, however; on the contrary, director Scott Weinstein shows strong mastery of craft in his staging, and the cast is so fully committed to the peppy zaniness of the premise that you can’t help but cheerily go along for the ride. Overett’s lyrics are chock-full of witty and unexpected rhymes, and he has the good grace not to take himself too seriously, even at one point having Jamison exclaim, apropos Oed!, that  “the characters are cartoons!” – a sentiment that could equally apply to The Double Threat Trio. Tony Ferrieri has designed a playful and clever set that manages, with little fuss or muss, to solve the problem of a hall of talking portraits and the destruction of Thebes (if you want to know what I’m talking about, well, you’ll have to see the show for yourself). And while the characters they play may not have the full range of talents, Noble, Williams, and Rodriguez certainly do, and they achieve the difficult feat of singing/acting/dancing both really well and “badly” with considerable panache.