Tag Archives: Philadelphia Theatre

Indecent Meets the World

One of the great pleasures of Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company is that one can have an intimate experience of a play or musical that began its life in a giant Broadway barn. Arden has a history of utilizing its space to the advantage of the story the company is trying to tell. The best recent example is the production of Once, a show I had seen in New York and Toronto, but the Arden experience – with Thom Weaver’s light design that invoked Dublin and the proximity of audience to performers – was the magical one.

The company continues in that vein with Paula Vogel’s Indecent. Vogel had a unique achievement with this work as the protagonist of her play is another play, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. Vogel follows the journey that play took from a reading in a flat in Warsaw to a production in Berlin to a tour of the capitals of Europe to off-Broadway to Broadway (1923) and finally back to a ghetto in Poland during World War II. Playwright Asch is a supporting character in the life of his work. God of Vengeancewas accused of everything from anti-Semitism to indecency. It was the first Broadway production to dramatize a kiss between two women, and the “indecency” of the title derives from the charges of the Manhattan district attorney against the production (though not the play itself).

Vogel smartly places God of Vengeanceas foundational to the American theatre as we know it. She emphasizes the off-Broadway run at the Provincetown Playhouse; it shared the season with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. O’Neill himself shows up in a pivotal scene late in the play, and he places his imprimatur on the work. (Interestingly, when Indecent premiered in New York, a revival of The Hairy Ape with Bobby Carnavale was playing at The Park Avenue Armory. That 1923 Provincetown Playhouse season was pivotal that the city needed to experience it anew.)

Director Rebecca Wright keeps the production values confined to the bare necessities. She opens on the ensemble covered in ash, foreshadowing the play’s (and history’s) horrific trajectory. By the design, Indecentcalls for a Brechtian approach, and the director and her cast are up to the challenge of moving quickly through, time, and language. The company must nimbly from perfect English representing Yiddish to a broken English signifying an individual’s struggle with a second language (all made clear by super titles). The actors have so imbued their various characters and their world into their bodies and very being that set pieces are unnecessary. Doug Hara playing Lemml, the stage manager, serves as the beating heart of the play and chief defender of God of Vengeance. Michaela Shuchman and Mary Elizabeth Scallen find the elegiac complexities of a same-sex couple in early twentieth-century America. David Ingram as the older Asch bears the weight of the world and his own weariness in play’s coda set during the McCarthy period.

Part of the foundational myth of God of Vengeancewas how it traveled the world and touched so many individuals across a variety of cultures and circumstances with its – for then – unique tale of love and hope. What the Arden has demonstrated here is that Indecentcan take that same journey and transform every audience it encoutners.

Passing Strange Leaves Its Mark

Though often referred to as a musical, Passing Strange is more than that. It cold be called an autobiography/memoir/meditation accompanied by musical interludes eliding with moments of comedy and tragedy. There is a lot of that going around of late (see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway). I had seen the original on Broadway where book and lyric writer Stew (he shares composition credit with Heidi Rodewald) also told his story on stage. I did not know how such a work of self-confession would work without its confessor on stage. Ten minutes into the production at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, I realized that my worries were without warrant.

The Wilma’s presentation establishes that Passing Strange was not a piece that could thrive only with its original cast but as a seminal and innovative piece of new American theatre that belongs in the same movement with Hamilton and Hadestown. Indeed, it feels more necessary now than it did in its initial run. The clear parallels with james Baldwin’s story land with greater force as the novelist/essayist has returned to the spotlight in our current discourse. When it arrived in 2008, it was at a moment of hope. Now, here in 2018, the spirit of liberation becomes more emphatic, more urgent. American culture is no longer “the white experience”, despite what the Administration is trying to promulgate through its reactionary policies and politics, and Passing Strange articulates that new societal reality.

Director Tea Alagić has assembled a powerful ensemble cast. The elation and, in the end, painful dawning self-realization of its protagonist that comes with the journeys of Youth (a compelling Jamar Williams leaving his fingerprints on the role) through punk-rock Europe still lands with its concluding tragic punch. The final reckoning too between Youth and Narrator (Kris Coleman who releases his anger in measured proportions), his older self, found new and dramatic dimensions as Coleman was more part of the action while when Stew did the role he was stuck to one place because of his instrumental duties.

Coleman and Williams create electricity between them in their two-hander moments. They have able support from the rest of the cast. Lindsay Smiling is wonderfully loopy in everything he does. Savannah L. Jackson and Tasha Marie Canales portray the various women with whom Youth has romantic/sexual encounters. Their prickliness and ennui allows them to tell their own stories rather than being ancillary to his story. Anthony Martinez-Briggs, whom I had seen in Flashpoint Theater’s Hands Up, successfully mines every line for its comedic possibilities. Kimberly S. Fairbanks conveys an entire life in her scenes as Mother, and she infuses her final conversation with Youth with such elegiac anticipation; her voice belongs to the angels.

The Wilma space serves the work well, allowing Alagić to paint her canvas with the language and music of the piece, the acting, and some strategic use of video in service of setting of time and place.

I have only recently begun to explore Philadelphia theatre (Arden, Lantern, etc.), and, late in the game, I have come to the Wilma. I have been pleasantly surprised by this exploration and, with Passing Strange, have come to appreciate the City of Brotherly Love as a place with a rich theatrical life.

More information by the show can be found here: https://www.wilmatheater.org

 

Who, or What, is John?

I saw Annie Baker’s John at the Arden Theater in Philadelphia on my 50th birthday. This was perhaps not the best choice as the play, deep in Joseph Campbell territory, trades in the primordial forces lurking just beyond the veneer of civilization. It is The Bacchae kept at bay, a Lovecraft story except not, a connection with a past both unexplained and inexplicable.

The Arden production, overseen by director Matthew Decker, gets the creep just right. This is not as easy as it may first seem because the play also interweaves elements of a yuppie relationship gone sour story coupled with a fish-out-water story. Jenny (Jing Xu) and Elias (Kevin Meehan) check into a Gettysburg B&B run by Mertis (Nancy Boykin). The set-up here is that this dysfunctional city couple – that can neither quite stay together not can quite break up – will receive salt-of-the-wisdom from the good country folk and find some sort of happy medium in their relationship. That by play’s end they are as dysfunctional if not more so as the play began is one example of Baker’s strengths in playing with expectations and genre.

The real pleasure of the play, though, is how it touches on the elemental of earth, humanity, and life itself. The operative word here is “touches”, almost like a cold breeze on the back of the neck. Nothing is explicit or overwhelming, but one always feels that there is something sinister just beyond the forced cheer of the B&B’s décor. The history of the house (a make-shift field hospital during the famous battle), the utilization of birds and dolls (totems) as compelling images, the strange language Mertis and her friend Genevieve speak, and the sense of female power that harkens back to Maenads of legend places the orderly world we perceive on very shaky ground indeed.

MVP Carla Belver portrays the role of Genevieve, originally assayed by Lois Smith at the Signature Theater’s production in New York City. Though Genevieve has the shortest stage time of any of four characters, she is the thematic glue that holds the play together. Belver admirably keeps the audience guessing about Genevieve. Is she touched? By mental illness or the supernatural? We simply do not know. Her monologue concerning her descent into madness and the power of her husband John over here captivates. That a John also crops up in Jenny’s life just deepens the mystery. Not who is John but what? That this question – like so many in the play – is left unanswered may be initially frustrating, but should ultimately be satisfied as the play’s very structure becomes a part of the cosmic uncertainty it is dramatizing.

Baker’s work is very challenging requiring precision and complex engagement from cast and director alike. I was heartened to see that her play survives and thrives beyond its initial production.