Tag Archives: New Jersey Theatre Alliance

Trenton is More than OK

It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. It has lain fallow during the long months (now years) of Covid. With theatre in this country in even greater crisis than it has ever been in before, I wondered if there was a point to continuing on with this site, in this medium. Passage Theatre’s necessary and propulsive The OK Trenton Project inspired me to return.

In 2017, Black and Brown students of Camp Mercer sponsored by Home Front (as a matter of disclosure, my church frequently works with Home Front on charitable projects) under the mentorship of artist Eric Schultz, created a sculpture entitled “Helping Hands”, a work that was displayed at the intersection of Montgomery and Perry Streets in Trenton, NJ. It’s time there, however, was short-lived after accusations that it was a gang sign forced its quick removal. Since it vanished before the plaque could even be installed, the work has become known as “Ok Trenton”.

Playwrights David Lee White, Richard Bradford (who is a member of the acting company as well) and the rest of the ensemble have crafted a piece of documentary theater that seeks to understand why exactly “Ok Trenton” was removed. This choice serves the proceedings exceedingly well. White, Bradford, and their collaborative team seek to find out the who, what, where, when of the event beyond the hyperbolic headlines. In that, the play stands as a superlative work of investigative journalism. Schultz, the teens who worked on the project, gang members (current and former), politicians, other artists, and community activists were interviewed, and the interviews with them are performed by the tight-knit ensemble of five. Further, in the best tradition of The Tectonic Theater Project, they also want to find out the how and even more importantly the why. What elevates the proceedings is that that why remains elusive to the very end. No compelling reason for the destruction of public art reveals itself because, at the end of the day, what compelling reason could there be?

Overseen by the director (and Passage’s artistic director) C. Ryan Domingues, the stage is a judgement free zone – which proves difficult for the audience to maintain when one particular character emerges toward the end. What we the audience witness is the symphony of Trenton in all of its beautiful messy complexity, its hopes, its history, its trials, and its tribulations. As much as Bradford is the protagonist as he, Columbo-style, doggedly seeks resolution, the hero of the play is Trenton itself.

A piece of documentary theater can prove to be a difficult construct as there is frequently a tension between the needs of the documentary part of the equation and the theater part of the equation. White and Bradford make a daring choice when the pivot on the question of “has something like this ever happened before?” And, the answer is yes: a mural of Michael Brown and then a painting of the Puerto Rican flag on the side of a house. What The OK Trenton Project conveys achingly, passionately is that the diverse communities of Trenton long to express themselves through art in the face of reflexive and thoughtless opposition. As the company interviews local politicians, they find the official articulation for removing the sculpture is inchoate at the best (and it is rare we even get there). The tragedy here is the tragedy of the nation: irrational anger, resentment, grievance, fear is all that is needed to shut down someone just trying to have voice. The teenage artists have a clearer vision of trying to create a positive force for good, then those who seek to shut them down. Theatre is at its best when it can take the local, specific, and individual and make it universal. That is certainly what White, Bradford, and the company have accomplished.

Domingues makes great use of The Mill Hill Playhouse to represent all of Trenton. The company is uniformly excellent. The cast takes on multiple roles. Briefly, each stands out in a specific turn: Kevin Berger as Schultz, Carmen Castillo as graffiti artist Leon Rainbow, Molly Casey Chapman as Councilwoman Marge Caldwell Wilson, Wendi Smith as drama teacher Felicia Brown, and, most of all, Bradford, playing himself.

As part of its curtain speech, Passage welcomes its audiences back to live theatre. Thank you Passage for allowing me to return to my blog.

Pirira Shoots for the Moon but Misses Its Mark

J. Stephen Brantley’s Pirira, now playing at Luna Stage in West Orange, NJ, has an epic vision and noble ambitions , but, alas, in its execution, cannot live up to its lofty goals. There are two principle narratives at play: Gilbert (Kevin Hillocks) and Chad (David Gow), two workers in the store room of a florist wholesaler in New York, deepen their relationship beyond casual acquaintances; Ericka (Naja Selby-Morton) and Jack (John P. Keller), two American NGO workers in Malawi, hide from an angry mob in a store room in Malawi. Eventually, the two strands will tie together at the end through the unseen title character Piriria.

Brantley attempts something quite complex in trying to forge connections between two disparate points in the world and uniting them together through shared connection, grief, and loss. This technique is one with which the likes of Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard have experimented. When it works, the various pieces come together and forge a theatrical musicality that transcends any one element. Alas, with Pirira, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts.

Firstly, the action moves too quickly from one store room to other. Just as the audience is beginning to get a grounding in one place, we jump to another. Churchill in Cloud Nine and Stoppard in Arcadia give space to allow the different worlds to breath. For instance, in Arcadia, a given scene in, say, the early nineteenth century can last a good 10 to 15 minutes before moving to a scene set in the late twentieth century. Only at the end do the two worlds blend together.

Secondly, in this age of smart devices, we tend to want our plays to be short. That instinct, however, does not serve this work. There are four characters on stage – and Brantly should be commended for crafting equally complicated, flawed, nuanced, and three-dimensional characters – as well as the unseen Pirira. But the play is so rushed at 70 minutes that these characters suddenly feel compelled to tell their rich back stories not in a way that is organic but rather because we are nearing the climax of the play and we are required theatrically to have an epiphany here. Also, I lost track of Pirira in this, who obviously should be important but comes across as a last minute device. Chad, for instance, is a former undergraduate from Georgetown who experienced a great personal tragedy which prompted him to make a terrible mistake and now he is for some reason working at this flower shop. He comes across in the opening as a figure of white privilege, then becomes the voice of moral outrage, before, finally, allowing his defenses to drop away to emerge as a tragic victim. It can work and could work beautifully. But all that needs time for the character to live, breathe, show and not tell. The character of Ericka has similar problems with her trajectory, moving far too quickly from spoiled city girl to something more vulnerable (and I am not sure I bought the spoiled city girl piece of her character either).

Thirdly, ultimately, crises of Malawi should be center, but too often it feels like that this is seen too much through an American lens. (I do not necessarily know how to move past this as this is an American production by an American writer.) But it does feel that the scales of the play are tipped so that Chad has the moral high ground over Gilbert.

The actors are all at the top of their games because the script does provide a lot of meat for them to chew on. Keller imbues Jack with the right amount of world-weariness and damaged but still present hope. Hillocks subtly builds the fear beneath the anger of Gilbert. Selby-Morton digs into  Ericka’s past and ably and fully creates a person of contradiction and has that made those contradictions clear so the audience can embrace her empathetically. Gow travels the distance from comedy to drama with an effortlessness that marks an actor on the pathway to greatness. He makes the audience feel every horrific beat in his monologue about what happened to his lover back in Washington, DC with an elegiac percusiveness. Director Ari Laura Keith keeps the proceedings at a brisk pace, which is usually something productions should strive for, but here a slower tempo would have served the play better. She was not aided by the space, which often forced the audience to bounce back and forth between the two couples like they were at a match at the US Open.

There is a great a play inside Pirira, but it needs expansion and further development.

Only Vaunting Ambition

Given the preponderance of Shakespeare productions in major playhouses on both sides of Atlantic (and the presentation of those as special events at the cinema) as well as film adaptations of the canon – all of which have the resources to engage in world-building – it is left to the smaller theatre companies to focus on the internal lives of the characters. This is a fine and worthy mission indeed,  and that is the course taken by Hudson Theater Works with its production of Macbeth at the Woodrow Wilson School in Weehawken.

The play needs no introduction here. One of its most powerful themes – that of overweening ambition – has markedly modern resonance, especially close to a metropolitan center where fortunes and political careers are built upon such ambition. Though the play is set in a dark age of Scotland when Christianity’s hold on the population is far from a sure thing, where the appearances of witches is far from surprising, and power comes from the sword rather than law and tradition, director Frank Licato’s concerns are on the contemporary moment. Times and technology may change, but  ambition is still the destroyer.

Kevin Cristaldi and Daniela Mastropietro as Macbeth and his Lady embrace the complexity, offering up nuanced Shakespearean performances while still channeling a more modern vision of the roles. They first appear as that accomplished, tasteful, and, above all, nice professional couple. Yet, when opportunity presents itself, they abandon all morals and ethics and pursue their ambitions to the detriment of all, including themselves. The yuppie veneer of respectability is just that – they are hollow to the core. Cristaldi’s Macbeth whispers rather than bellows (think Pacino’s turn as the corporatized mobster in the second Godfather); his weapons is less a bludgeon and more a scalpel. His existential exhaustion come Act V is a refreshing and right choice. Mastropietro too reveals how Lady Macbeth is surprised (but not nearly enough) as she takes each harrowing step away from humanity into her own lust for power. When she realizes at the end of Act I that she would have murdered her own baby to satisfy her own bleak desires, she takes away everyone’s breath, including her own.

Brendan Walsh and Peter Collier as MacDuff and Malcolm make worthy adversaries. Shakespeare works not in binary oppositions but in trinary oppositions. Think Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Often Malcolm gets lost in the crush between Macbeth’s murderous rampages and MacDuff’s need for violent retribution. But important in there too is Malcolm, and Licato wisely refrains from cutting their scene in England when they plot Macbeth’s overthrow (and MacDuff learns of the loss of his family). As played, these two men do not necessarily like each other all that much, but they form an alliance anyway to destroy a shared enemy. Collier in particular crafts a tougher-than-usual Malcolm, informed from his experience playing Henry V. The troubles that afflict Scotland will not end with Macbeth’s death. It will be difficult for either men to defeat the other, and the civil wars will continue. Licato emphasizes that cycle of violence with the return of the witches who repeat the opening lines of the play.

For a Macbeth that is very much part of our world, check out Hudson Theater Works production.

Details can be found here: http://www.hudsontheatreworks.com