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.

Decky Does a Bronco Speaks to Our Moment of Pain

Douglas Maxwell’s Decky Does a Bronco first appeared in the playwright’s native Scotland in the year 2000. It is a not uncommon tale of a childhood loss of innocence, in this case taking place in a council estate outside of Glasgow. There are some parallels with the Stephen King short story “Stand by Me” and it Rob Reiner’s subsequent film adaptation. Works of art sometimes need to find their own time and place when they are most resonant and relevant. Decky Does a Bronco has found its in the United States of 2019 for its premiere in this country.

[Be warned that spoilers lie ahead. It is near impossible to review Decky without revealing some critical details about the play. Knowing them, however, will not substantially alter your viewing experience.]

Pre-teen Decky (Misha Osherovich, A Clockwork Orange at New Work Stage) dies horribly, pointlessly, and randomly. It remains for the four remaining remaining friends – O’Neil (Graham Baker), Barry (Kennedy Kanagawa, Lolita My Love at the York Theatre), Chrissy (David Gow, Waverly Gallery at Shakespeare & Co.), and narrator David (Cody Robinson) – to live with the consequences of that horrible end. In an interview with The Modernist Beat, Gow – who also produces for Starting Five Productions – explained that it has been usual for past productions for these four roles to be played by two actors: one juvenile and one adult. Here, adult actors take on both. it creates some interesting challenges in communicating the shifts to the audience, but director Ethan Nieuaber nimbly navigates his actors from one age to another – sometimes the shifts move quickly – and the results are more complicated and nuanced character portraits.

As narrator, Robinson has to carry the emotional burden of the piece. The construction of the story – of the play – of the life and loss of Decky evolves into David’s process for trying to grapple with the events of the past. He is a survivor, and he finds himself overwhelmed with survivor’s guilt. He searches for ways in which he was responsible. He suffers from PTSD, and it is through the process of sharing the story that he can find healing. Robinson dives into that pain twisted with guilt and conveys that that process of healing was a hard won thing and still tenuous at best. The other survivors are not so lucky, particularly Chrissy who disappears into himself psychologically.

And it is in David’s journey, in his authoring his pain, that should speak with a roar to the 2019 American audience….because we lose so many Deckys every day. From Sandy Hook to Parkland, from the recent shootings in El Paso to Odessa (which have seen babies and high schoolers shot and killed), the number of those who must survive and continue after the loss of a friend, family member, school mate grows exponentially. We are become a nation of shell-shocked survivors, particularly our children. How will we carry these terrible burdens into adulthood? In this dark times, it is a play like a Decky Does a Bronco that will offer a map to escape the worst of their nightmares. There are certain parallels between the play’s David and activist David Hogg.

Osherovich brims with life, energy, and joie de vivre, so of course, the dimming of that light only enhances the sense of loss. Indeed, much of Nieuaber’s strategy in the first half of the play is to keep the proceedings uproarious and brisk, so that our descent will be that much greater. Baker finds the swagger and bluster in perennially cool kid O’Neil. He also the first to intuit what has befallen Decky. Gow seamlessly moves between the two ages of Chrissy in a frenetic performance that turns dark and grim as the boy becomes the second victim of the central event of the play. Kanagawa is the production’s secret weapon. He always surprises from the sheer comic lunacy of rushing to his auntie’s for tea on a bicycle to a more dramatic turn when he realizes he is the oldest of the boys and must accept responsibility for his cousin David. As always, Starting Five Productions always does incredible design work for an off-off-Broadway company. A special shout-out to scenic designer Diggle for the construction of a complete swing set on stage.

As gun violence will seemingly continue without end, it is plays like Decky Does a Bronco that will guide us in the aftermath. Starting Five could not have found a better time to premiere the work here and speak to our dark national moment.

For the interview with Gow, please follow this link: http://www.themodernistbeat.com/2019/08/13/decky-does-a-bronco-premieres-in-the-usa-an-interview-with-producer-david-gow/

For more information about the show, please follow this link: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4302610

Decky Does a Bronco Premieres in the USA: An Interview with Producer David Gow

The Modernist Beat sat down with actor-producer David Gow to discuss his upcoming production of Decky Does a Broncoby Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell. This production is the American premiere of the piece that first toured Scotland in 2000. [NB: There is a character “David” in the play that Gow discusses.]

THE MODERNIST BEAT: David, if I’m not mistaken, you saw a production at the Edinburgh Fringe. What attracted you to Decky Does a Bronco?

DAVID GOW: I first fell in love with this play because of the way it handles adolescence and innocence. Maxwell identifies childhood dynamics so accurately in his writing, and he knows exactly what to strip away from the kids when they grow up.

TMB: Why bring this play from Scotland to the United States? Does it translate to the American experience?

DG: I’m particularly excited about American audiences seeing it for two reasons. The first is I’m very proud we get to be the first ones. The second is because I think our culture in the United States doesn’t handle this subject matter as well as other countries do.

The cast of Decky Does a Bronco. From front to back: David Gow, Kennedy Kanagawa, Misha Osherovich, Cody Robinson, and Graham Baker. Photo from the production.

TMB: What does it illuminate about the “coming-of-age” narrative that perhaps an American work would not?

DG: It can be an ugly, uncomfortable topic of conversation for people, and whenever that’s the case I love when theater throws it up on stage right in people’s faces.

TMB: Over the course of the work, the characters of the play, five boys, grow into men. The same actors play those characters at both ages. What were the challenges in making that journey? How were rehearsals structured so that the cast could believably inhabit both realities?

DG: That’s been one of the most rewarding parts of this process. We’ve done a great deal of physical improv that has really helped define the relationships within the group, and those changing relationships have dictated a lot of the behavior that shifts as we become adults. In past performances they have different actors split the role, one playing the child one playing the adult. I greatly prefer what we are doing because we get to finish the characters arc and really sit in the changes of the characters.

TMB: What insights do you think the play offers on childhood trauma (and how that trauma continues to haunt us into adulthood)? Also, what does it try to convey about guilt and responsibility?

DG: That’s the big question in this story, one that the narrator David is wrestling with out loud with the audience throughout the play.

TMB: In 1990, Tim O’Brien wrote a volume of interlinked short stories entitled The Things They Carried. It focused on a platoon of young soldiers during the Vietnam War whose every action was something they carried on life (assuming they survived). But the central incident in Deckyhappens when the characters are 9. How do you dramatize “carrying” that incident into adulthood? Is it possible to strip away the judgement and focus on the complexity of it all?

DG: There’s no question that all the boys carry the incident into adulthood and that it has an influencing power as to who they become. But through the help of David the characters are all really trying to focus on the overall picture and not the looming guilt they’ve carried for years. He asks questions that are trying to help him make sense of things – how do they all continue to go on with their lives as if nothing happened, how to they now process watching similar events on the news, ect. And while David is definitely still discovering this for himself as the play goes along, I think it does offer some relief to the characters and the audience.

TMB: What should audiences be prepared for stepping into your space? What counts as (artistic) success for you?What do you need the audience to carry with it out of the theater?

DG: I hope audiences will experience three things:

How hilarious the kids’ antics together are.
How simple and pure Douglas Maxwell’s writing is
How brilliant and unique this form of storytelling is.

TMB: What about that set?

DG: We are building a swing set ON STAGE ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF A BUILDING AND WE DO STUNTS ON IT. That alone should be reason to see this show.

Decky Does a Broncofrom Starting 5 Productions plays from September 6 – September 21 at Royal Family Productions, 145 West 46^thStreet, New York City. Ethan Neinaber directs. The cast includes: Graham Baker, Gow, Kennedy Kanawaga, Misha Osherovich, and Cody Robinson. For more information and tickets, please follow this link: https://www.deckydoesabronco.com

Whether in a Big House or Small, The Waverly Gallery Devastates

I have had the rare pleasure to experience a contemporary American play in two very different venues and productions in a ten-month period: Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. I had seen the Broadway production back in September that garnered Elaine May a well-deserved Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. More recently, I had the opportunity to catch Shakespeare & Company’s production in its smaller Elayne P. Bernstein with a three-quarter thrust stage. The point here is not to compare the two productions because ultimately that is an empty intellectual exercise and, well, plain silly. I mention the former in regard to the latter because it demonstrates the endurability and power of Lonergan’s work that it resonates with its elegiac fury regardless of the trappings of its given production.

With its narrator Daniel (an always nuanced David Gow) recounting a familial past, The Waverly Gallery would seem to belong to the tradition sparked by Tennessee Williams with The Glass Menagerie. And while that is certainly part of its DNA, Lonergan’s play also finds itself as part of an even more storied theatrical tradition – that of Greek tragedy. The plague here does not come in the form of a disease brought down on the City of Thebes but rather as Alzheimer’s as it cruelly afflicts Daniel’s grandmother Gladys (Annette Miller mining the full vivaciousness of this grande dame). In the large Broadway house, the tragedy is Gladys’s with Daniel serving as chorus. In the smaller house in Lenox, the tragedy is that of the entire family.

That sort of tragedy can be difficult for actors to play as they are not necessarily playing an action but reacting to an unseen force that overwhelms them. The family of Gladys, Daniel, Ellen (Gladys’s daughter/Daniel’s mother), and Howard (Ellen’s second husband) is an extremely accomplished one professionally and intellectually; indeed, you could easily find them in one of Woody Allen’s frequent romps through Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And yet, they are unequal to the task at hand. Who could be? They are by no means negligent. They address each new further turn into the darkness with competence and capability using humor as a defense mechanism to shield them from what they know must be. We can certainly empathize with them as they try to hold off fate for just one more day and then just one day more. When the owner of the building where Gladys keeps her little art gallery wants to renovate the space for a café, they are simply incapable of telling her at first. On Broadway, we as the audience were kept distant from their turmoil (aided by a production design that emphasized a rather cool palette) until the devastating coda. In the significantly smaller space, we are on the ride with them, which paradoxically places greater emphasis on the comedic moments andthe building dread.

This production is directed by the legendary Tina Packer, who founded the company. She has assembled an exemplary ensemble that feels like a family, jagged edges and all. She has given the actors the room to find every nook and cranny in their roles and to build fully-realized three-dimensional individuals. She finds the poetry in the often-overlapping dialogue. I did, however, think her guiding thesis for the play to be on the tentative side. She occasionally steps into her toe into the metatheatrical when, at one moment, she has Daniel step over the constructed “proscenium” to address the audience directly. Those moments, alas, are few and far between as she gives into a realism, which – given the limitations of the space and the demands of the play in terms of set changes – did not serve the production as fully as it might have. Whether Greek tragic or American dramatic tradition, often all we need is the rich language of a play and a powerful cast to realize the world of that language. She had both here coming into that rehearsal room.

The cast is uniformly excellent. The one not weakness exactly but weirdness of the Broadway production was the casting of Michael Cera as Don Bowman, the last artist Gladys showcases in her gallery. He is a more a product of the world of Lonergan’s film Manchester by the Sea, a man from the working-class environs of Boston who struggled to become a painter. Previously, I did not understand why either Don or Cera were involved in the proceedings. Here, thanks to David Bertoldi fully integrating himself into the production and fully realizing the pain haunting the character on the margins, I understand Don’s place as a reminder that this tragedy is not the tragedy of those who are visible in most of our storytelling but the tragedy of the human condition regardless of circumstance. Michael F. Toomey is a force of nature whenever on stage, but he allows the audience to see that his bluster and tactless joking are just means of buffering himself from the fateful journey his mother-in-law is taking (and the very different Hell of his own elderly parents). Elizabeth Aspenlieder bares open the brittleness, fragility, and desperation of Ellen. Her evolving grief charts with the vicious course of the disease. Aspenlieder wisely avoids making Ellen a saint or martyr, conveying that her ultimate act of giving will also devastate her.

David Gow as Daniel builds a complex character who has sought to insulate himself from complicated emotions and yet must by play’s end confront the hardest ones of them own. When Gladys has her final break with reality, Gow effortlessly puts Daniel on a rollercoaster ride where the final destination is despair. His humor will not prevent it. Deflection will not prevent it. Cheery reasonableness not will prevent it. His helplessness enrages him, and that rage scares him to the bottom of his core. By his final monologue, you can see him slowly build the architecture to face the harsh realities of the world, and one can well imagine Gow bringing equal power to Tom’s “blow out your candles” monologue in The Glass Menagerie. At the beating tragic heart of the production is Annette Miller’s Gladys. She makes clear the achievements of Gladys’s earlier life, and so the tragedy of what she is losing has that much greater weight. I wish that in that second act she founds a beat or two where Gladys has some momentary lucidity – the false hope of such moments would only have compounded the tragedy – but this is a quibble. By the end, when she is lost in her own mind – confused, frightened, without anchor, without understanding – one would have be dead three days not to be overwhelmed emotionally by Miller’s performance. At that moment, she is not Gladys character on stage but a woman in all of our lives whom we are losing.

Without question, Shakespeare & Company’s The Waverly Galleryis a production that should be seen. But I want to emphasize that you should see it even if – or especially if – you have seen the recent Broadway revival. It is a different vision and a successful one. And so your experience will be different but equally meaningful.

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.

Terrence McNally Spoke A Truth No One Wanted To Hear

Perhaps the most important moment of The Tony Awards occurred when Terrence McNally received his lifetime achievement award. No one wanted to hear him. His infirmity cut into time for commercials, but he reminded us that the theatre has always been a place for rebels, outcasts, and truth-seekers. “The world needs artists more than ever to remind us what truth and beauty and kindness really are,” he stated.

Follow this link to see his whole speech: https://www.broadwayworld.com/videoplay/VIDEO-Legendary-Playwright-Librettist-Terrence-McNally-Accepted-his-2019-Lifetime-Achievement-Award-at-the-Tony-Awards-20190609

Norma Jeane Goes Old School

Anne Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (directed by Katie Mitchell) does what its title suggests: elides the the mythologies of Helen of Troy with those of Norma Jeane Baker (better known as Marilyn Monroe) together. This is one of the first productions playing at The Shed, the beautiful new theatrical space at Hudson Yards. However, the modernity that is very much part of the new space’s design stands in compelling opposition to the piece’s foundation in antiquity.

Many commentators and reviewers have stated that Carson’s new work is experimental. Nothing could be further from the truth. The playwright harkens back to the earliest origins of Greek tragedy and dithyrambs wherein there is a conversation between the spoken word and the sung word, between an actor and one (as is the case here) or more singers. It is the production’s great fortune to have cast two individuals who represent the very best of both professions. Ben Whishaw (Q from recent James Bond films, Lilting, Bright Star) is the actor, and Grammy Award-winner Renée Fleming is the singer. Whishaw and Fleming outwardly appear to be an executive and secretary in a Mad Men-esque office on New Year’s Eve 1964. Over the course of the evening, Whishaw evolves from the man in the grey flannel suit into something John Cameron Mitchell charted in Hedwig. And despite its very obvious exploration of the Helen of Troy myth (or conflicting myths with reference to Herodotus’s very different narrative for the tragic figure), the work reminded me of Aeschylus’s The Persians with its emotional echoes of loss and grieving.

And that is pretty much what happens. This is not a show heavy with plot. It is more of that ancient dithyramb. It is a poem told in a word and song that dance with each other and build toward an emotional epiphany if not a more familiar dramatic climax. And the poetry here not only theorizes but also seeks to understand the parallel between Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe; both paragons of beauty stood at the precipice offer for both their nations. That means the audience members must be active listeners and hear both the words in terms of both sound and meaning. There is very little movement, and the lighting design emphasizes darkness (far too dark, in my opinion). Carson asks that we step into the aural river and trust her and her performers on that ride through gentle currents and rapids.

It is hard to imagine this show in the hands of other performers. One of Whishaw’s many strengths as a performer is his bravery in showing his vulnerability. That ability is a necessity in channeling Marilyn Monroe and finding the truth behind the glamorous image. In this, he has a great partner in Fleming who deploys her voice to communicate the pain of both Monroe and Helen. They come together to create catharsis. Make no mistake. That is a difficult thing to experience in a theatrical setting. It requires attention in an age where attentions easily wander. I emerged from the evening somewhat exhausted but also exhilarated by what I had experienced. Audiences ready to make that commitment will be equally rewarded.

Tickets can be found by following this link: https://theshed.org/program/4-norma-jeane-baker-of-troy – it closes May 19.

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.

Mothers, Sons, and the Passing of the Torch

My old playwriting professor, Howard Stein, used to say, when evaluating students’ work offered up in class, “You’re hiding! You’re hiding!” This critique was often given to young writers who often danced around what their plays wanted to be and should have been about. I have a feeling that Professor Stein would have said much the same to Terrence McNally after reading his Mothers and Sons.

To be fair to McNally, he has good reason to avoid the heart of his drama. In short, the play concerns Cal Porter (Bill Mootos), who survived the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and early 1990’s but who also lost his lover, Andre, of the time. It is a sequel of sorts to McNally’s television play Andre’s Mother; it also converses with the AIDS plays of the 1980’s such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. That mother, Katharine Gerard (Annette Miller), returns to New York City to return Andre’s diary to Cal. Cal is a survivor, and, Mothers and Sons is as much about surviving catastrophic circumstances as are David Rabe’s loose trilogy on the Vietnam War. But McNally keeps steering away from the beating heart of his play, from the trauma of his characters’ past as well as his own.

Much of the early portion of this play trades in strained humor about the minutiae of Manhattan upper-middle-class life (e.g. what those on the West Side versus East Side refer to as “The Met”). McNally, like 1990’s era Woody Allen, name checks bourgeois cultural touchstones without really delving into them in any meaningful way. Cal has moved on. He is now has a husband – Will Ogden (David Gow) – and a son – Bud (in my performance, Evan Miller). While he has moved on, life has conspired to chain Katharine to the past. He offers a potent set-up for an explosive drama, but the playwright keeps sidestepping it with heavy-handed maneuvering of the cast to switch move individuals on and off-stage so we are constantly mired in more comedic two-hander scenes instead of more dramatic three-handers.

However, the pain that McNally wants paradoxically both explore and avoid lurks just beneath the surface. The responsibility of any production of this work is to allow that pain to slip through the cracks, to transcend from sub-text to text, and rampage across the playing space. I am happy to report that the production at Shakespeare & Company under the direction of James Warwick let’s that pain out of the cage and rampage across the stage. Though he must bend to the sentimentalization of the play (an unearned family portrait at the coda), he mines the tragedy for the maximum impact on the audience.

Mootos and Miller in their early scenes frequently devolve into mannered performances as they struggle with one of the play’s main structural issues: why does Katharine not leave? But once the comedy of manners is put aside in favor of the conflict over Andre’s legacy, they find their voice and stride. The rawness that characterized McNally’s work when he was a protege of Albee is cathartic. Gow expertly marries civility with rage as he must t negotiate with the continuing shockwaves from the death of someone he has never met. A recent graduate of the School of Arts from the University of North Carolina, Gow is on his way to becoming one of our leading interpreters of McNally having starred in the title role in a New York revival of Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? this past winter. Through sheer force of charisma, Evan Miller as Bud built an island of calm in an otherwise stormy night of the theatre. Set designer Patrick Brennan ably recreates a West Side apartment in winter for the Berkshires in the summer.

In short, this a flawed but important play that benefits from a superlative production. It serves as a strong lead-in for Shakespeare & Company’s production of Taylor Mac’s Hir.

Interview with Peter Allas, Director of Danny and The Deep Blue Sea

The Modernist Beathad the opportunity to interview Peter Allas (perhaps most famously The Calzone Man from Seinfeld) who is directing John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and The Deep Blue Seaperforming this month at The Loft at the Davenport Theater. He is in New York from San Francisco, where he holds the post artistic director of the Firescape Theatre. His directorial resumeis a who’s who of the leading American playwrights of the past quarter century. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

MODERNIST BEAT: Hi, Peter. Before we dive in, I noticed that you have just directed a production of Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat. Just as an aside, I saw the production at the National in London a few years back. And I was standing on que for my tickets at the box office, and there was a man in front of me who was very much the cliché of the English toff. He wanted to find out about the play, but he didn’t want to say the title out-loud in public, so he ended up asking, “Could you tell me about The Disagreeable Gentleman with the Hat?”

PETER ALLAS: That was a fun show to direct because I grew up blocks from where it takes place in the late 70’s early 80’s and I was a DJ in may teens so I loved adding a whole soundtrack to really bring the audience in to that “Latin” world and NYC. Funny thing EVERYONE asked for my “SOUNDTRACK” because it was so memorable and colorful, but then again so is NYC!

MB: You’ve directed works by some of this country’s most important living playwrights. What would you say are the joys versus the challenges of directing a work by Shanley as opposed to Guirgis, Hwang, or Mamet?

PA: Every play I direct is a challenge! Because like Elia Kazan would say “shock yourself”, as an actor, and I do so as a director as well. If it’s “too easy” I don’t want to do it! The joy to me is the words and style. I love Shanley, David Mamet, Guirgis, Theresa Rebeck, Nilo Cruz,and William Mastrosimone of the modern day writers because of their Love of language and character rich dialogue/story. But I also love Clifford Oddets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter and of course Chekhov, because they are great story tellers who have rich characters and a great sense of humor in the face of tragedy! I’m partial to Mamet because I was born and grew up South Side Chicago like he did. I became “the kid” to my mentors of the “Mamet Mafia” – Jack Wallace, J.J. Johnston, Mike Nussbaum, amd especially Joe Mantegna whom I later worked with as well – to name a few. The challenges are to make the street style dialects authentic, real, and flow while maintaining the integrity of the story itself. Too many actors and directors miss the boat with these writers because its colorful, funny, or edgy but the miss the humanity, or “music of the people” and soften it.

Which leads me into why I like directing as opposed to acting. My goal as a director is first, to awake the audience; most are sleeping and come to just to be entertained…..hmmm well, not in my theatre, and certainly not with these authors. Then I have to “wake them up’” and “enlighten them”, and finally get a visceral response to the art! I’d like them to leave having “real thoughts and feelings” about what they just saw and stir up conversations at the dinner table or at home two hours later. For instance, when I directed Neil LaButte’s Reasons To Be Pretty, I wanted the audience to be right in the thick of it and be emotionally invested in every scene so I had the actors break the fourth wall and speak there monologues three-to-five feet away from the audience. In the end, I used Robert Flack’s “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” to emphasize and evoke deep regret yet change by the lead actor for not telling his girlfriend Steph…”You look pretty”….! Well, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house at curtain! Audiences were having real discussions about communication in a relationship and images of beauty that are damaging!…… Mission accomplished!!!!

MB: Your resume leans heavily toward Shanley. What is it about his voice that draws you to his work? Is there anything consistent in your preparation as you go into pre-production for a Shanley play?

PA: Shanley, or here in after I will say John, and I have had success because he speaks my language. Some directors and actors worked together because of that exact reason such as Dan Sullivan and Don Margulies, Gene Saks and Neil Simon, Tony Taccone and Tony Kushner and my mentor the late Milton Katselas and Edward Albee to name a few.

MB: One aspect of Shanley’s work that continues to fascinate me is the moral complexity, emotional ambiguity, and flawed humanity he instills into almost everything he write. I’m thinking of that powerful scene in Doubt between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Muller. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is certainly informed by a flawed humanity. What are your conversations like with your actors, what is the rehearsal process like, to pull the play toward that grey rather than a stark black-and-white duality?

PA: What I love about John is his strong emphasis on characters from the street, their need to be heard, to feel, to connect and do it with danger, pain, humor and poetry. The key is to be a specific as possible and true to the core (Bronx vs. Little Italy). John’s earlier works like Danny, Savage In Limbo, and Italian-American Reconciliationtend to repeat the same Catholic themes from the resurrection and guilt, to the seven deadly sins and redemption! As I re-read this play for the umpteenth time I fell in love with the richness of John’s heart, much like Moonstruckand Italian American. This is raw, unpolished, and lean, much like Mamet’s earlier work. As for Doubtand Defiance, I feel John changed his message to some degree, but he does have that “moral compass” issue you so eloquently put! These characters struggle with that and have a need for “forgiveness of their sins”!!!!

Nothing personal but I don’t reveal my process. I will say that, I was blessed work with great directors as an actor from Milton Katselas, Joy Zinoman, Sharon Ott, on the television/film side, Patrick McGoohan, Leo Penn, Sydnie Fury and Martin Campbell just to name a few. And my early studies at Boston University and Fordham with David Wheeler, B. Rodney Marriott (later at Circle Rep).

MB: I see that you are the co-creator and artistic director of the Firescape Theatre in San Francisco. Tell me about that.

PA: Firescape Theatre Co in San Francisco came out of a dream I had to run my own rep company from the old “Circle Rep Co”. days as a young actor/director. I watched Gary Sinise and John Malkovich as “young unknowns from Chicago” knock me out with True West. Funny thing, who knew seven years later I would act with Sam Shepard in Defenseless. Last year we had sellouts for ten weeks and one of our biggest hits, with the US premiere of Brilliant Liesby David Williamson (Australia’s most successful playwright) about sexual harassment at an insurance firm, and of course, right after we closed the Weinstein thing exploded! Sadly, we should have gone to New York instead of LA, and it closed quickly. Perhaps next one.

MB: Are they any intriguing differences between directing in San Francisco versus New York?

PA: San Francisco is a funny market. It seems like a little New York, prides itself more cultural than LA, & Chicago, and has the 5th largest theatre Market in North America, but I feel, the bar needs to be raised. Having been to over 65 plays in three year (if not more) I find the lack of quality, commitment to professionalism, and attitude a bit “in the dilettante” phase. Perhaps it the weather, the beauty of the lifestyle, or simply put, the “New York hustle and drive and strive to be the best” just doesn’t filter down. I will say there has been some stellar work at Berkeley Rep and Amy Potozkin (the CD there) really knows truthful acting, and a handful of other theatre like Palo Alto Players (where I am directing the Bay Area Premiere of All the Waynext in November). New York has a hunger, a drive, an edge and most all, the best of the best come here to be actors, not STARS!!! Although it’s good to be a star, too.

MB: Anything you would like to add?

PA: In closing I’d like to say “please come and support live theatre and this heartfelt, rich local writer”.

MB: Well, thank you for your time. Break a leg with the show. One last question: do you still refuse to take loose change? 😉

PA: I promise to say at the box office, “You can’t pay in change…….You’ve got to have bills, paper money! THEN YOU GOT NO CALZONE!!!!!!!!!”

Danny and The Deep Blue Seastars Hannah Beck and Jonathan Crimeni. It opens Wednesday September 12 and runs to Sunday, September 23. For more information, follow this link: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3562037