Archive: October, 2011
By Wendy Rosenfield
For the Inquirer
It’s curious that Curio Theatre wasn’t too intimidated by the Wilma Theater’s 2008 production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice to produce it themselves. That earlier version, with its Barrymore-winning original music, sunbleached set, and stylized direction, set a standard that this small, new-ish, low-budget West Philly company would have a rough time matching.
Even curiouser? Curio’s production, under the direction of Liz Carlson, gets at the heart of Ruhl’s work, humanizing it, bringing its tragic elements to the fore, and making the Wilma’s production seem downright aloof. Part of that warmth may emerge naturally from the play’s casting. Curio artistic director Paul Kuhn, who plays dear, departed Father to Tessa Kuhn’s Eurydice, also happens to be her real-life dad. But the younger Kuhn, still in high school, radiates an innocence that renders Eurydice’s naive decisions an outgrowth of her lack of experience, rather than those of a mature woman willfully ignoring her instincts.
By Jim Rutter
For the Inquirer
The explosive growth of Philadelphia’s theater scene has coincided with a rise in local new play development. Internationally produced playwrights Michael Hollinger and Bruce Graham and InterAct’s participation in the National New Play Network only represent our city’s more-publicized contributions to the genre’s future.
Since 2009, B. Someday Productions and Hella Fresh Theatre have brought new voices to the local scene with Hella Fresh Fish, an annual festival of short plays. This year’s lineup consists of 12 works selected from 500 submissions; Walking Fish Theatre’s program featured eight of these 10-to-15 minute shorts.
Two of the pieces proved that even snippets of dialogue can enable smart performances. The three actresses in Kristen Scatton’s “Porn for Women” transformed tired themes about obsessive weight loss into an amusing hors d’oeuvre. Mark Cornell’s “The Rental Company” showed Kenneth McGregor barking and bum-rushing his way to laughter as a shady rental agent in a scenario practically plagiarized from David Mamet (and set, no less, in 1975 Chicago).
In Bristol Riverside Theatre’s production of William Luce’s Barrymore, we meet Philly’s own John Barrymore, “The Great Profile”--grandfather of Drew, sibling of Ethel and Lionel--one month before his death at age 60. He staggers toward the final curtain of a prolific career whose impact on stage and both silent and talking films (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grand Hotel) was rivaled only by the self-destructive zeal with which he pursued women and alcohol.
Luce’s conceit, Barrymore’s hopes to reprise his role as Richard III, and rents a theater for the evening to run lines in front of an audience, begs a certain amount of forgiveness. It’s a flimsy premise, sure, but ultimately worth suspending one’s disbelief. Keith Baker might not have Barrymore’s “Plantagenet nose,” but he can channel the actor’s spirit.
It’s a plum role for Baker, who can swing between quippy, hammy and overwrought, and still get at the mortar in Barrymore’s grand facade: his genuine, deep misery. Behind the man’s struggles to get through a single iambic line hangs Brakenbury’s observation in Richard III that the difference between princes and paupers is an “outward fame”; for both, an “inward toil” remains. Baker’s command of Shakespeare’s linguistic power offers a fine tribute to the legend at his best, and underscores the tragedy of the man’s fall from grace, trembling, delusional, and embittered.
A prompter named Frank (William Selby) serves mostly as stage prop and plot device, though Selby remains steadfast and earnest. The set itself, designed by Roman Tatarowicz, echoes Barrymore’s crumbling grandeur. Bristol’s proscenium is replaced by a half-destroyed arch, its stage stripped to its inner workings. Curtains hang askew or fall off the walls, a piano is covered by a dropcloth. Clearly, no one’s fooling anyone anymore.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
It’s a rare Broadway opening that earns its advance hype, but ‘The Mountaintop’ by Katori Hall exceeds all expectations: theatrically, emotionally and politically.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
You may have been challenged. You may have been intimidated. You may be dealing with people who put you in a compromised position. You may have had a bad day. No matter how bad, though, nothing as terrible as the day Felix Artifex is having.
But then, you probably don't deserve your day, and Artifex does. He is a manipulative, exploiting, disingenuous piece of scum -- in all other references, theater producer. Yes, Craig Wright's Mistakes Were Made, which opened in an 1812 Productions staging on Wednesday night, is yet one more insular piece of theater about the theater, but at least it's absurdly funny and best of all, self-mocking.
Mistakes Were Made is essentially a one-man show, and 1812 Productions has the man to do it: the busy actor Scott Greer, whose wife, Jennifer Childs, is the company's artistic director. Greer is alone for all but two minutes in the too-long 100-minute one-act, and he fills Bob Phillips' full-stage office set with the theater producer Felix Artifex, a character larger than life and overwhelmed by it.
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By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
NEW YORK - Nuance - the shadows and creases that provide depth and richness - is what makes the Off-Broadway production of Any Given Monday so different from its world-premiere version last year in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia playwright Bruce Graham has reworked a bit of his striking, funny play, which overturns commonly held values in order to celebrate the very notion of values. But that's only partly why Any Given Monday differs in overall effect from its first productions at Theatre Exile in Center City, then Act II Playhouse in Ambler, joint producers of its premiere.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
“We are tolerant, but we have our limits,” says a city official. Somehow 17th century Amsterdam sounds oddly familiar, especially when it comes to immigrants, religious broadmindedness, interfaith romances and radical new ideas. And so this play by David Ives, New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656 at Lantern Theatre, launches a absorbing 2 ½ hour theological debate.
The Portuguese Jews had fled persecution and found refuge in Holland, but their safety came at a price: obedience and silence. Thus restricted as a community which necessarily had to defend itself against any threat to the status quo, a young Jew named Baruch de Spinoza—a philosopher who would change the course of civilized thought—rocked the boat. Whether his ideas were misunderstood and thought a danger to both the Jews and the Christians, or whether the latent anti-Semitism of the Dutch motivated his trial, he was threatened with excommunication.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
This week, 1812 Productions' season opens with Mistakes Were Made, a comic play by Craig Wright that was named "Best of the Year" by both New York and Time magazines in 2010. The producer, almost its only character, speaks the play's first line: "Look, here's the deal." And who should know the deal better than Wright, himself a successful producer as well as a successful playwright?
This producer, one Felix Artifex, is not like most producers - at least as they appear in plays about show business, where they're likely to be greedy, coked-up, fast-talking, backstabbing cynics.
By Jim Rutter
For The Inquirer
Identical twins gave writers the original basis for situation comedy. Mistaken identity, the ability to appear in two places at once, and jealousy all flow from this prenatal premise for humor.
Dramatists from Plautus to Paula Vogel have built plays around twins, but none with as much flair and comic mastery as Carlo Goldoni’s 1747 The Venetian Twins. Under Alexander Burns’ inspired direction, Quintessence Theatre Group’s side-splitting contemporary staging surpasses Goldoni’s success.
The Venetian Twins finds brothers Zanetto and Tonino (Josh Carpenter) in Verona. Both seek wives, neither knows of the other’s plans, and they haven’t seen each other since childhood. While genetics gave
them identical appearances, separate upbringings fashioned them into opposite personalities.
If you walked your pooch past Act II Playhouse in Ambler last month, you and your dog could have gotten a little deal.
All you had to do was buy a ticket to Sylvia, a play about a couple whose marriage is beset after the husband brings home a dog - played by an actor - as a surprise.
If your dog had accompanied you to purchase your ticket, Act II would have knocked $10 off the face price. "And we also had dog snacks to give out," says Bill D'Agostino, the company's communications director. "So both species got a treat."
Yes, it's dog-eat-dog when it comes to putting keisters in theater seats. As a result, professional theaters all over metropolitan Philadelphia - the new season boasts 51, the most ever - have been coming up with ticket plans created to fill houses during their plays' runs.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
