Nothing but Thunder

Last night, I saw Duncan Pflaster's new play Nothing but Thunder, which is currently showing at Theater for the New City as a part of the Dream Up Festival.

Much like The Frogs by Aristophanes, the play depicts a descent into the underworld by the Greek god Dionysus. Like in The Frogs, the god is accompanied by his slave, Xanthias, and in fact some of the dialogue is taken word-for-word from Aristophanes (though translated into English, of course).

In his biography in the program, Pflaster states that the piece is a tribute to playwright Charles Ludlam, whose Ridiculous Theatrical Company used many of the same methods, blending high and low culture, and frequently stealing whole scenes from dead writers and inserting them into new plays to the bemusement of audience members who recognized the gag.

What I found most interesting about Nothing but Thunder is that in spite of having all of the materials for a farce like the Frogs, Pflaster tends to avoid the ridiculous at times, and creates moments of genuine pathos amidst a sea of absurdity. (This is something Ludlam tended to do as well.) Spencer Gonzalez, who plays Dionysus, has an emotional journey as he undertakes his literal journey down to the underworld and back.

Matt Biagini, who plays Xanthias, tends to keep the tone of the show light and comic, but he, too, has moments of emotional insight. As he oils up his master and some maenads for a steamy orgy, we think we're in for one sort of play, but when Dionysus must get aid from the shepherd Prosymnus (played by Kenny Wade Marshall), we appear to be in very different territory. This mirrors the situation of Dionysus himself, who doesn't know how to act when people don't immediately fall down and worship him.

There are few surviving texts that give a complete, flushed-out story of Prosymnus, so Pflaster provides some details of his own, giving him a dear sister named Adelpha, played by Katrina Dykstra. We first see Adelpha carrying a cute stuffed sheep named Tasso, a clear reference to the Italian poet who wrote what many people consider to be the definitive pastoral drama about shepherds. As you can see, the play rarely passes up an opportunity to make a clever literary reference.

After a rather... interesting bargain with Prosymnus... Dionysus gets to the underworld, and specifically to Tartarus, a land of eternal torment and suffering. There he meets Sisyphus (played by Eric Hedlund) eternally pushing a rock up a hill. He also runs into his own dead ex-wife, Ariadne. Olivia Kinter, who plays Ariadne, delivers one of the more nuanced performances in the show, in spite of the relatively small size of her role. Dionysus, it turns out, went to the underworld not to rescue his ex, but his mother Semele, played by Alyssa Simon.

Aliza Shane directed the production, which--be warned--contains no small amount of nudity. For this reason, everyone entering the theatre must turn off their cell phones and place them in special pouches provided by Yondr. The pouches ensure that the phones stay locked up and unable to take photographs until the audience leaves the theatre and has their pouches unlocked by the staff. Sadly, this is what we have to do when certain irresponsible people continue to take photos during plays.

If you do want to be a horrible person and take a nude photograph of an un-consenting individual, though, I recommend you not try to photograph any Greek gods. If you do, pushing rocks for eternity might be the least of your problems.

Mary Speaks

I just saw Angela Polite's one-woman show Mary Speaks at Theater for the New City. She gives a tour-de-force performance. If you have a chance to see it in the next two weeks, go.

Angela and I first met when she was in my play Foggy Bottom at the Abingdon Theatre Company. She is an extraordinary actress, and as she proves in Mary Speaks, a fine singer as well.

The play utilizes monologues, song, poetry, and dance to tell the story of Mary, mother of Jesus, through the lens of African-American history. We hear Mary's mother tell about the horrors of slavery, see Mary experience the injustice of Jim Crow, and ultimately watch her son die in what could be a scene ripped from the headlines today.

My one criticism is that I wanted more! The death at the end happens suddenly (as death often does) and we never really get a chance to see Mary's son do the great things we all know he is destined to do.

The death leaves us with a tremendous sense of a life with potential that will never be realized, which of course is the point. He is never allowed to grow up to become the man he could be.

Christopher Burris directs this production, which features live music provided by Jeff Bolding. The play runs until February 26th. If you're interested in seeing it, check out:

Mary Speaks at Theater for the New City

The Boom

Last night I saw Vinnie Nardiello's play The Boom at Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival. This wonderful new piece about the lives of stand-up comics (written by a stand-up comic himself) is only playing until September 20th, so make plans to see it now. It is not to be missed!

Nardiello's title comes from the boom in stand-up comedy in the late '80s and early '90s when clubs across the country thrived, offering an array of often shocking comedians to young, hip audiences who flocked to nights of drinking and good times. That boom is now long gone, and a nostalgia for the good old days sweeps across most of the characters in the play.

Some clubs keep special apartments for traveling comics, and The Boom takes place in a condominium in Pittsburgh owned by a local comedy club. Three comedians are sharing the place: the mediocre MC, "Big" Tim McGuinness (played by Richie Byrne), the up-and-coming YouTube sensation Ray Messina (played by Dan Stern), and the nearly washed-up oldtimer, Buddy Darby (played by DJ Hazard).

Much of the play centers around the conflict between Buddy and Ray, as the bad-boy genius of yesterday's comedy circuit finds himself being upstaged by a younger rival eager to replace him as the headliner. Like his character, Hazard has worked with some great comics (Bobcat Goldthwait, Paula Poundstone, etc.) and toured all over the country (even living out of his car when he needed to at times). He brings an immediate sense of authenticity to the role, and his performance is the highlight of the show.

Ray is ingratiating, but we also are not terribly surprised when it turns out he's been less than honest about his sudden rise to fame. Stern does an excellent job making the character likable, even as he descends lower and lower in his bid for success. As Big Tim, Byrne is loud, crude, and obnoxious, but occasionally exhibits a tender side that reminds us why Buddy wants to keep him around. Make no mistake, though. This is a dog-eat-dog world, and Big Tim seems ready to jettison anything and anyone he needs to in order to keep his career alive.

The club's manager, Miranda (played by Kara Jackson), has a touching relationship with the aging Buddy. Their unromantic romance is simple and complicated at the same time. And just when the play seems to have settled into a sad reverie on the passing of greatness, party girl Cara (played by Melissa Stokoski) comes on stage, offering a fresh burst of energy. The high and drunken Cara's painfully bad attempts to tell jokes to a room full of professional comedians are so un-funny that they end up being hysterical.

Director Mark Riccadonna deserves credit for helping the cast to meld together into a wonderful comic unit. My only regret is that Nardiello seems unsure how to end the piece. A play this moving and entertaining deserves a stronger finish. Still, it's one heck of a ride, and I definitely recommend checking it out before it closes later this month.

For more information check out the show's website here:

The Boom

Possibility of Imagination

Cherríe Moraga begins the printed version of her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea with a quote from the German feminist Christa Wolf:

Where can I go?
is it possible to imagine a world,
a time, where I would have a place?
There’s no one to ask.
That’s my answer.

For Moraga, it is not only impossible to create world that accepts her--it is impossible to even imagine such a world.

The Hungry Woman takes place in the future, after the failure of a utopian state known as Aztlán that was supposed to create a homeland for people of indigenous ancestry living in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. In her notes for the program, Moraga states that “Rebels scorned the ballot box” and that after the revolution individuals without native blood were “permitted to reside” in the new country, but the right to hold land was generally reserved for people who could certify they had native ancestry. Those who were not ethnically native in this non-democratic state were essentially second-class citizens, permitted to live (at least for now) within the borders of the native homeland.

Substitute “German” for “native” in this scenario, and the supposedly utopian state of Aztlán begins to sound an awful lot like the Third Reich. Though Moraga is sympathetic toward her fictional revolution, she makes the parallels between Aztlán and Nazi Germany fairly explicit. The character of Chac-Mool is also named Adolfo, a clear reference to Adolf Hitler, and in a conversation with a Border Guard, Chac-Mool claims, “I was born to be a Nazi, to have a Nazi life.” The fascist turns both he and the nation take in the play are inherent from the beginning. When a revolution is founded on an inborn ethnic link to the land--or “blood and soil” as the Nazis put it--how can anything go right?

What Moraga seems to be expressing is an inability to dream, an inability to even imagine a better world. Like Christa Wolf, she sees no political movement of the past that has been able to create a place for people like her. There is no one to ask how something could be done, so the implied conclusion is that nothing can be done. Women like Moraga’s Medea are condemned to always dwell on the borders, never truly finding a place for themselves. A world where they might find happiness cannot even be imagined.

This inability to dream, an inability to even imagine a better world, also haunts Nilo Cruz’s new play Sotto Voce, which closed recently at Theater for the New City. The character of Bermadette, though a famous novelist, is unable to write about the fate of her former lover Ariel who failed to escape from Germany on the eve of World War II and was in all likelihood murdered during the Holocaust.

Bermadette, it seems, needs to tell Ariel’s story, to imagine him on the ship leaving Germany, and to perhaps dream of what his life might have been like had he escaped. Paralyzed with guilt and regret, she walls herself up in her Manhattan apartment, unable to leave, and also unable to write anything new. She knows that Ariel is almost certainly dead and that there are no other reasonable possibilities, so she cannot even fantasize about his possible life. Yet this inability to dream prevents her from living her own life as well.

Cruz offers a way out for Bermadette by introducing the character of Saquiel, a young Cuban writer trying to get the governments of the U.S. and Cuba to apologize for not taking in refugees from the S.S. St. Louis, the ship that carried Ariel back in 1939. Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of politics must know that getting the governments of the United States and Cuba to issue a joint apology for anything is nothing other than a dream, but at least Saquiel has a dream. He relentlessly stalks Bermadette, calling, sending her electronic messages, and even standing outside her apartment building. Gradually, Bermadette warms to the young man. She even takes to calling him “Ariel.” Through Saquiel, Bermadette is able to enter an imaginative space where Ariel did in fact live.

For a writer like Moraga or Wolf, the creation of such an imaginary world might seem pointless and escapist. In Cruz’s play, however, it is Bermadette’s salvation. By remembering Ariel again and imagining him alive, she is presumably able to break through her writer’s block, which has yielded only pages and pages that she has thrown away as trash. She is also able to enjoy life again and venture beyond the confines of her apartment. The final image Cruz leaves us with is Bermadette dreaming of Ariel (played by the same actor as Saquiel) sailing off into a dreaming sunset—a happy ending that never was but that is necessary for her own psyche.

Franca Sofia Barchiesi as Bermadette and Andhy Mendez as Saquiel in Sotto Voce by Nilo Cruz. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.