“A Christmas Carol” at Off the WALL productions

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Off the Wall Theater

Actor Mark Coffin has a good story to tell, and the twinkle in his eye and sly smile on his face signal just how much he relishes sharing it. The story is, of course, Dickens’s familiar tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and his transformation from (sorry, can’t resist) scrooge-iness to benevolence after being haunted by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. ‘Tis the season for staging that story, and if you’re looking for a fresh reboot, Coffin’s one-man show – playing for one more week at Off the WALL in Carnegie – has you covered.

Mark Coffin. Photo courtesy Off the WALL productions

Coffin has pared Dickens’s novel down to ninety captivating minutes of deceptively simple yarnspinning. He slips between the narratorial voice of the author and the large cast of characters with fluidity and ease, using a different timbre and accent for each character – an effect reminiscent of listening to Jim Dale narrate the audiobooks of the Harry Potter series (which, in my humble opinion, is one of the great joys in life). Director Heidi Mueller Smith has given Coffin just enough to do to keep the stage picture active, but not so much that it detracts from his main business of bringing Dickens’s world vividly to life. Their co-adaptation, which revels at times in the baroque word choice and sentence structure of the Victorian era, doesn’t need much else to set it firmly in that world, and scenic designer Adrienne Fischer leaves most of the world building to our imagination. A backdrop that sketches out the gesture of a cityscape serves as a surface on and against which projection designer Jessie Sedon and lighting designer Madeleine Steineck throw images and color to establish both the workaday world of Scrooge’s pennypinching and the spooky aura of his life-altering haunted night; sound and music designer Ryan McMasters fleshes out the atmosphere with sounds of knocks, rattling chains, strange creaks and groans, and other cues that suggest the creepy goings-on of the spirit world.

Coffin’s performance is confident and winsome, and even if you think you alreadly know this story from other stage or film adaptations, you may find there are some surprises in details pulled from the novel. Moreover, Coffin’s one-man performance lends the tale a comforting bedtime-story aspect that perfectly suits its fable-like ending. I usually find Scrooge’s transformation too miraculous to be believed, but here – framed as it is as a tale from a world similar to, but not quite exactly like, our own – I was far more ready to indulge in the wishful thinking that a moral awakening on the part of our present-day Scrooges might also be in the realm of possibility.

“I Won’t Be In On Monday” at Off the Wall Productions

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Off the Wall Theater

Anne Stockton’s new one-woman show I Won’t Be In On Monday, which is receiving its world premiere at Off the Wall, might best be described as a character study, albeit one that requires a little detective work to uncover. When we first meet Stockton’s character, Nikki, she presents herself as a competent and poised professional – well-dressed, articulate, and charming. But as the play progresses, we get clues that she is not fully what she seems, and by play’s end the person before us bears little resemblance to the woman we first met.

Writer-Performer Anne Stockton as Nikki

In fact, I Won’t Be In On Monday asks its audience to “play detective” in more ways than one, as it also explicitly puts its audience in the physical and imaginative position of the detective who is interviewing Nikki about the workplace theft of a couple of valuable rings – that is, Stockton’s monologue consists of answers to questions posed by an imaginary detective who seems to be sitting front and center of the audience. It quickly becomes clear from her answers that this detective suspects Nikki is the thief, a suspicion we just as quickly begin to share, as she begins to offer elusive answers to some of his questions and as details about her personal life – such as her imminent plans to spend a vague amount of time in Tahiti – engender suspicion that she’s about to become a fugitive from the law.

But all is not what it seems in Nikki-land, and what she has to hide goes beyond stolen rings. I don’t wish to spoil this little gem of a character study by giving away its secrets: part of what makes this a compelling story is that its ambiguous clues and its misdirections rope you into sympathy with a character that it might otherwise be hard to find common cause with. Stockton presents Nikki’s unraveling under pressure with sensitivity and subtlety; she’s made a study of people like Nikki, and she gets the details right. Austin Pendleton directs with a light touch, using light and sound sparingly to capture the shifts in register in Nikki’s thoughts, moods, and tactics. Together they offer an opportunity to detect the humanity and pain in the kind of character we would generally prefer to keep at a distance.

“The Pink Unicorn” – Off The Wall Productions at Carnegie Stage

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If only all gender non-binary kids in conservative small towns had moms like Trisha, the protagonist/narrator of Elise Forier Edie’s 2013 one-woman play, The Pink Unicorn. When Trisha’s daughter, Jo, cuts her hair short and requests to be addressed as “they” instead of “she,” Trisha’s first reaction is not to kick her daughter out of the house or send her to conversion therapy, but to open a web browser and google terms like “genderqueer” and “LGBTQ.” Her second reaction is to seek advice for dealing with this unexpected development from Pastor Dick, the spiritual leader of her church, but when he announces his intention to fight against a decision to allow homosexuals to be ordained within the USA Presbyterian Church, she surprises herself and her community by becoming a local activist for gay rights.

Amy Landis, photo Off the Wall

What ensues is a funny and endearing account of a battle on the frontlines of the culture wars, one that reveals both the breathtaking hypocrisy of religious rhetoric and the hope-inspiring transformations that can be achieved when people have the courage to take a stand at the local level. Indeed, although this play focuses on a mother’s outrage over the local school’s treatment of its genderqueer students, its bigger message about the power of people to effect change through committed activism, even when they represent a minority view in a homogenous community, is one that is all the more urgent in our current political environment.

Trisha is the kind of character it would be all too easy to caricature or patronize, but both Edie’s script and Amy Landis’s beautifully nuanced performance wisely choose to pull us deeply into her point of view instead. Ingrid Sonnichsen directs with a deft comic touch, and has made choices for the setting and context that enhance our feeling of connection with Trisha. Instead of staging the play as a formal presentation, as the script seems to encourage, Sonnichsen invites us into Trisha’s kitchen, where she tells us her story while she folds her laundry and bakes up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Landis is warm and winning as Trisha, roping us in with an endearing southern graciousness, and her chatty friendliness opens us to her perspective.

That’s important, because although we might be tempted to feel smugly superior to Trisha, her journey is one that is only possible because she has the humility to distance herself from such self-righteous certainty, and spending time with her provides a gentle nudge to be skeptical of our own pieties. Paradoxically, the very characteristics that make her a person so alienating to urban progressives – her Christian values and Southern etiquette – are also what make it possible for her to let difference into her personal sphere in a more than superficial way. Quick as she is to stereotype people who don’t conform to cis-gender norms, once her habits of hospitality and charity bring them into her orbit she comes to see past stereotype and love and value them for the people they are. At the same time, her predisposition to sketch the other people in her life with broad caricaturing brushstrokes also complicates our response to her: that is, her tendency to paint mocking and dismissive portraits of gays and lesbians – the very people she is ostensibly trying to defend – provokes cognitive dissonance (in both the character and us).

The play and Landis are both at their funniest when they offer comic insight into the gulf between the ideological right and left. For example, at one point in the narrative Trisha recalls discovering that the ACLU – an organization that she had always been told was doing Satan’s work – was actually dedicated to helping people, like her daughter, who have had their civil rights violated. “Who knew?!?” Landis demands, looking straight at us with deadpan bewilderment. It’s that willingness to step out of her comfort zone and into the unknown that makes Trisha such a model for citizen-activism, and her story such a rich and rewarding journey.

“Lungs” at Off The Wall Productions at Carnegie Stage

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Off the Wall Theater

What’s the best way any given individual can take action to mitigate climate change? Recycle? Drive an electric car? Buy energy efficient appliances? Insulate and use less heating and cooling? Stop flying? Buy organic and local? Use public transportation? Pee in the shower and turn off the faucet while brushing teeth?

Eco-virtuous as all those actions may be, their net effect, even multiplied across the many billions of people living with the resources to make those choices, would be virtually nil compared to the one choice that would truly make a difference if taken collectively by a majority of inhabitants of the Earth: not having a child (interested in reading more about this? Try here and here).

But what does it mean, for an average couple, to take the planet under consideration in their family planning?

That’s pretty much the premise from which Duncan Macmillan’s extraordinarily smart and timely play Lungs takes off. A young-ish couple has reached that point in their relationship when baby-making is in the cards. But these two – a nameless man and woman – are the kind of high-information, self-reflective people who want to do what’s rational, right, and moral, even as they feel the irrational urge to do what generations of humans before them have done without much reflection at all. She (played by Sarah Silk) is a Ph.D. student, an overthinker and overanalyzer who is initially thrown completely off balance by her boyfriend’s suggestion that they even discuss the possibility of having a baby together, and almost immediately brings up the ecological implications: “they say if you really care about the planet then don’t have children.” He (played by Alec Silberblatt) shares her concerns, but also sees a responsibility for “good people” like themselves to reproduce, lest the genes of responsible and caring persons like themselves not survive. Their (often quite absurdly funny) back-and-forth on the decision touches on many of the arguments and rationalizations that are brought forth whenever people think about their individual actions in the face of the enormous problem of climate change – like, for example, the argument that if the only people who stop reproducing are the altruistic ones, then the world will fill with selfish people, or the argument that not having a child might mean not bringing into the world the genius who could invent a technical solution to the problem.

L to R: Alec Silberblatt & Sarah Silk. Photo by Heather Mull, courtesy Off the Wall Productions

What’s brilliant about this play is the way it puts our human tendency to rationalize and justify decisions on display and opens that tendency to both sympathy and scrutiny. As “He” puts it: “everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing.” At the same time, the play vividly makes clear that our current ecological predicament is a direct consequence of that tendency to rationalize. Multiply the kinds of individual justifications we see the man and woman making by 10 billion (the projected population in 2050), and you have a planet that will no longer be able to sustain human life.

Lungs is not only or even mostly about climate change, however – at its core, it’s a play about the relationship between the man and the woman, and about how they miscommunicate and misread each other and yet still find what they need in each other. Macmillan’s portrait of the couple feels honest and fresh, and his dialogue is sharp and often surprising. His play is also unconventionally challenging to stage: he specifies that it should be played on a completely bare stage, with no lighting or sound cues to indicate scene transitions, and although the action shifts forward in time and takes place in several locales, the script gives no clear indication where and when those shifts occur. The Off the Wall production cheats on the “bare stage” parameter a tiny bit: Adrienne Fischer’s set is a pair of oval platforms covered in bright green shag carpet, which is bordered by a set of fluorescent lights canopying like the branches of a tree over the playing space. But otherwise the play is presented in accordance with the playwright’s insructions, without furniture, props, or mime. Rising magnificently to those challenges, director Spencer Whale does a beautiful job of choreographing the action to tell the story with precision and lucidity.

This kind of spare storytelling is a gift to talented actors, and Silberblatt and Silk are superb beyond description as the man and woman. These may, in fact, be two of the finest performances I’ve seen in Pittsburgh this year – and if you didn’t make it out to Carnegie to see this play, you missed out on a highlight of 2016 (although you still have time, if you don’t have plans for tonight!!). Not only do Silk and Silberblatt bring the relationship between the man and woman into crystal clear focus and flesh out their characters’ needs and vulnerabilities with empathy, sensitivity, and wit, but they also give us two people to whom those of us who like to think we are “doing right” (and isn’t that all of us?) can utterly relate. In so doing, they give us pause to consider all the ways in which our own individual actions – as justifiable and rationalizable as they may be – will collectively bequeath the children we can’t seem to stop having a world they won’t want – or be able – to live in.

“Or,” at Off the Wall Productions

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The (not particularly attention-grabbing) title of Liz Duffy Adams’s 2010 play “Or,” refers to the vibrant and complicated state of sexual, intellectual, and political ambiguity in which its main character, the 17th-century playwright Aphra Behn, dwelled. (It’s also a bit of a jest on her tendency to hedge her bets with the titles of her works). Best known for her authorship of the short novel Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (1688) and the play The Rover, or, the Banish’d Cavaliers (1677) – her most-revived work in the modern day – Behn was one of England’s first professional female writers, famously lauded by Virginia Woolf for having earned women “the right to speak their minds.” Behn is also a figure cloaked in a fog of historical mystery: before she started writing professionally, she is known to have worked as a spy in Holland for Charles II during the early years of the Restoration, a job that plunged her into deep debt and may have landed her in debtors’ prison upon her return to London in 1666. But other details of her private life and personal history are maddeningly obscured, mostly by Behn herself; she comes to us through history, as her biographer Janet Todd has noted, as an “unending combination of masks.”

That historical uncertainty leaves room for Adams to play with reckless abandon in the sandbox of Behn’s life, taking up real historical characters like Nell Gwynn (one of England’s early actresses), King Charles II, Lady Mary Davenant (the widowed manager of The Duke’s Company), and William Scot (one of Behn’s fellow spies in Antwerp) and weaving them into a good old-fashioned door-slamming farce. We’re in London, 1670, and Behn (Erika Cuenca) is under the gun to finish a play by morning for the Duke’s Company, but she finds herself distracted by the seductive Nell Gwynn (Robin Abramson). Their budding flirtation is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Scot (Ethan Hova), who has intelligence of a plot against the King’s life he wants to bargain for his safe return to England. Scot’s also here to release a bad case of pent-up desire for Behn, who (in this play, at least) was his comrade-in-arms in more ways than one. The King himself (also played by Hova) turns up wanting a turn in her bed, too (he’s Behn’s lover and patron), so there’s a lot of hiding in cupboards and closets and, because Abramson and Hova play multiple characters, much hilarity with quick costume changes and unexpected entrances. Behn’s evening is spent trying to keep these ex-, current, and future sexual partners apart – with mixed success – while also putting the finishing touches on the play that will launch her career.

L to r: Ethan Hova, Erika Cuenca, Robin Abramson

Duffy’s writing is witty and spirited, at once a comic celebration of openness and an earnest valorization of the space “in-between” as the space of human creativity and generosity. The play’s queer gender politics suggest parallels between the Restoration – a time marked by sexual libertinism and cultural revolution – and the modern day, but without heavy-handed dot-connecting. Indeed, one of the play’s strengths is its mixing of 16th-century verse with modern vernacular; the weaving of time periods into each other feels fresh and smart and easy. With farce, timing is everything, and director John Shephard has his ensemble in and out of closets and bedrooms (and dresses and cloaks) with delightful rapidity. Clever metatheatrical moments (like the sound cues that ding each time one of Behn’s play titles is mentioned in passing) keep the tone ironic and knowing, an attitude very much in keeping with Restoration comedy, which frequently called attention to its own theatricality and – particularly in Behn’s case – to the author’s often precarious relationship with her audience.

“The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs” at Off the Wall Theater

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Off the Wall Theater

Houses in dreams are rich in meaning, often symbolizing the human psyche. When you dream of a house with a lot of empty rooms, for example, it might represent untapped potential; one with secret, hidden rooms might point to an aspect of self that has been repressed, locked up, shunted aside.

Carole Frechette’s chamber play The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs (at Off the Wall Theater in Carnegie) takes up this latter idea and hangs it, like a shimmering cloth, on the skeleton of the Bluebeard legend. In the play, Grace, a Cinderella-like beauty with “sky-blue eyes,” has captured the heart of a modern day prince, the fabulously rich Henry. Henry lives in a superbly appointed mansion with twenty-eight rooms, and he ensconces Grace in her new digs with the freedom to “spread her wings” everywhere in the house except one, small room at the top of a hidden staircase down a narrow hallway. This, of course, is the only room that captures her interest and curiosity, and the playwright depends on our collective memory of the Bluebeard story to set up expectations about what Grace will find when she defies her husband’s wishes – expectations that are subverted and twisted in ways that it would be unfair for me to reveal here. That said, the play itself drops plenty of hints about how we are to interpret what she finds: when talking to her sister Anne, Grace describes the house as “like the human mind…ninety percent unoccupied,” an assessment that Henry echoes a few lines later. Like nineteenth-century gothic novels, Frechette’s play uses creepy supernatural elements as a means of figuring psychological wounds, and she allows those elements to materialize in order to make palpable how powerful hidden and damaged aspects of the psyche can be.

Under Ingrid Sonnichsen’s direction, the fine ensemble – Daina Michelle Griffith, Ken Bolden, Brooke Lerner, Sharon Brady, and Amy Landis – tells the story with a good mixture of tension and suspense, and with just the right amount of humor mixed in. Each character appears, at first, rather one-dimensional, but as the play unfolds the inner complexity of each character also gets unveiled. The cast parcels out these revelations much the same way the play metes out its secrets, producing a compelling and intriguing bit of theater.