"Soldier's Heart" at Premiere Stages through July 27, 2014

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Michael Colby Jones and Mairin Lee (photo: Mike Peters)



When Tammy Ryan's play Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods had its world premiere at Premiere Stages in 2010, it had an encouraging critical reception ( review) that was further rewarded when it won the Francesca Primus Prize for Playwriting given by the American Theater Critics Association.

It's story about one of the seventeen thousand boys who fled Sudan during the Civil War of 1980 to escape the brutality was finely dramatized by Ryan with heartfelt compassion. Now we are again able to get immersed in another drama by this splendid playwright, this time for its New Jersey premiere.

Ryan brings a heart-wrenching experience into alignment with the blisteringly traumatic aftershock of rape as it applies to a thirty year-old Sergeant in the Marines Casey Johnson (Mairin Lee). Casey is, to use the old phrase, gung ho and looking forward to her first deployment to Iraq. It is September 2006. Raised in a military family, patriotic to its core, and ultra organized, she displays a strong sense of duty as well as the independence and confidence that allows her to raise her ten year-old son Sean (Azlan Landry). This, with only minimal help from her ex Marine/ex husband Kevin (Benton Greene), with whom she shares custody.

Just as Casey has come to terms with the disintegration of their marriage due in large part to Kevin's prolonged and difficult recovery from post-traumatic-stress disorder, she is now about to be almost completely dependent upon her mother Margie (Kim Zimmer), an ex alcoholic who works at Foodland, for taking care of her son Sean in her absence.To read the entire review please go to http://curtainup.com/soldiersheartnj14.html

"The Long Shrift" at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre through August 23, 2014

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Scott Haze and Ahna O'Reilly (photo: Joan Marcus)

To better understand the title of Robert Boswell's gripping and unsettling play, you have to consider how reversing the dictionary meaning of the phrase, "getting the short shrift," as it is has been traditionally understood: "The brief interlude given a condemned prisoner to confess and receive absolution before execution." Although Boswell, is more renowned for his seven published novels, The Long Shrift is his second play, and it's a humdinger.

In defense of his oft-explored theme — you unwittingly hurt the one you love — it explores aspects of rape and repentance with uncanny insight and a clear-minded compassion for both the victim and the perpetrator. That it has been cast with excellent actors and directed with imaginative intelligence by the multi-gifted film star James Franco helps to make this a rewarding, if also harrowing, theater experience.To read the entire review please go to http://curtainup.com/longshrift14.html

"Lone Star" and "Laundry and Bourbon" at the Clurman Theater through July 26,2014

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Mike Schraeder (photo: Julie Ann Arbiter)


Lone Star , a one-act comedy by the late James McLure (1951 - 2011) is making a limited return visit to New York courtesy of the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. It has been thirty-five years since the rowdy, funny play first appeared in a double bill on Broadway, at that time with another McLure opus Pvt. Wars .

Although the plays received enthusiastic reviews, McLure's paired plays about rural Texans in 1974 failed to draw enough ticket-buyers to survive beyond two months. Since then, Lone Star, along with another of his one-act-ers Laundry & Bourbon, has been making the rounds of regional theaters, with those in Texas notably receptive. New Jersey got on board in 1980, when Lone Star and Laundry & Bourbon, under the umbrella title 1959 Pink Thunderbird , was presented at the McCarter Theatre.

It won't be easy, but you should make an effort to survive the tedium of the curtain-raiser Laundry & Bourbon . In it, Elizabeth (Marianne Galloway) is not having a good day. The AC is on the fritz and it's beastly hot on her front porch where she is attempting to make some headway with a huge basketful of laundry ready for folding. She is, however, depressed because her husband Roy, an unsettled Vietnam veteran has been A.O.L. from their home for two days along with his 1959 Pink Thunderbird. To read the entire review please go to:http://curtainup.com/lonestarny14.html

"The Village Bike" (through July 13) at the Lucille Lortel Theatre

Scott Shepherd and Greta Gerwig (photo: Matthew Murphy)

"The Village Bike" (through July 13, 2014) at the Lucille Lortel Theatrear

If the best thing about the British import now filling the seats at the Lucille Lortel Theater is the outstanding Off Broadway debut performance of film actress Greta Gerwig (Golden Globe nominee "Frances Ha"), the play by Penelope Skinner  is also worthy of attention. She has a provocative and probing story to tell and dramatizes it effectively, if not with total credibility. "The Village Bike" gives us an almost feminist perspective on marriage, sexuality, pregnancy, libido, infidelity, and pornography, as they are mashed into an amusing but dark comedy.

It will remain for a psychoanalyst and a therapist to explain all the reasons that compel/impel Becky (Gerwig) to given in to her intensified urges to have sex during the early stages of her pregnancy and put her marriage at risk by being not only promiscuous but recklessly aggressive about it. From my perspective, Becky's needs appear to be only partly the result of a hormonal adjustment and a reluctant husband who doesn't want to risk intercourse for fear of hurting the baby. What appears quite obvious is that Becky doesn't want impending motherhood to put a damper on her increased desire for sexual activity no matter what the course or the source..

It appears that husband John (Jason Butler Harner) has suddenly shifted gears from being as sexually available and adventurous as was Becky to being now almost romantically negligent, if not right stupid and insensitive.  Where the two had previously shared a mutual enjoyment of pornographic videos, the collection that has been saved and sent to their new home in the English countryside only remains tantalizing to Becky.

An almost light-hearted  investigation of their once intensely compatible  relationship turns a bit raunchy and risky when Becky turns, during John's  business trips, to others in the quite little village where good neighborliness comes either in the person of Jenny (Cara Seymour), a friendly, chatty doctor's wife with two children, or more meaningfully with sexual gratification from the town's married lothario Oliver (Scott Shepherd) who brings Becky his wife's (also away on business) bike to ride around on during her absence. With the bike in need of repair, Oliver's visits leads to an affair that get messier and kinkier and all consuming by the day and hour. That doesn't prevent Becky from also activating a sexual liaison with Mike (Max Baker) a plumber,  a lonesome widower who has come to fix the leaky pipes. We've heard that joke before.

What makes Becky's bike-propelled adventures interesting and somewhat  courageously beyond the genre of the typically British sex farce (the kind they don't write any more) and the more sophisticated forays into the sexual dalliances of the middle class by the prolific and well-known British playwright Alan Ayckbourne , is the psycho-sexual twist in Becky's agenda once she begins to realize things are getting out of control. Certainly Oliver sees the writing on the wall but possibly a little too late for his own good. Although she has only a miniscule role, Oliver's savvy wife Alice (Lucy Owen) makes a late appearance in the play and with a few lines puts a sharp coda on a play that, under Sam Gold's fine direction, makes us laugh, cringe, and empathize - not a bad thing to happen.

Of special interest is the complicated set design by Laura Jellinek that is unsparing when it comes to making the stage hands earn their keep. The entire set is dismantled and rebuilt during intermission, an arduous undertaking that, from my perspective, is as impractical an exercise in effecting meaningful change as the one that Becky chooses. Looking at the new setting one has to wonder, just like Becky at the end of the play, was it worth the trouble?

"The Village Bike"

Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street

For tickets ($75.00 - $89.00) call  212 - 727 - 7722   

"When We Were Young and Unafraid" (through August 10, 2014) at the Manhattan Theater Club

Cherry Jones (photo: Joan Marcus)

Having had the pleasure of seeing and enjoying two of Sarah Treem's plays ("A Feminine Ending," at Playwrights Horizons and "The How and the Why" at the McCarter Theater), I went to her third play with high expectations, many of which were met in the excellent production afforded it by the Manhattan Theater Club.  A major plus was the casting of Cherry Jones, who is following up her stunning performance last season in "The Glass Menagerie" in a role that once again shows her off as an actor that you must see no matter what she is in.

In this play, she is superb as the dedicated, no nonsense owner/manager of a Bed & Breakfast off the coast of Seattle. As an independent but socially committed spirit, she quietly and courageously uses her skills to maintain a safe house for abused/ brutalized women.  The play is set in 1972 at the time when women were making waves and taking a particularly robust stand on feminist issues.

Outspoken and an activist in her own way Agnes (Jones) is former nurse who lost her license for performing an abortion. She has not lost her skill or her compassion for those who find their way to her, but who, nevertheless, have to comply with her strict rules and regulations in order not to upset the regular guests. Her daily life is assertively free of activism, but rather one of commitment to the raising of her teenage daughter Penny (Morgan Saylor), and keeping her as best as she can from the issues that confront those whom she shelters.

The engrossing play centers about the relationship that develops between the sexually naive but nevertheless typically rebellious Penny and the battered married runaway Mary Anne (Zoe Kazan) who attempts to show Penny how to get a man's attention. A sound and fury-propelled Lesbian African-American activist Hannah (Cherise Boothe) finds her way into the mix to bring a little tumult to Agnes's life, as does an ingratiating Paul (Patch Darragh), a thirty-something divorced song-writer from San Francisco with an eye for MaryAnne.

Although we get the feeling that Treem's intention is to stuff as much feminist ideology into the plot as possible, each one of the short, swiftly paced and excellently acted scenes, under the expert direction of Pam MacKinnon (the most recent Broadway revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"), moves logically and persuasively from one dramatic crisis to the next. While Treem's messaging is a bit problematic and is arguably made too paramount throughout, she is crafty enough of a playwright to make each of her characters interesting and credible.The play's expected explosive climax and its bittersweet resolve are played out dynamically within Scott Pask's fine single setting.

One little complaint: characters in the playbill should be listed in order of appearance, not in alphabetical order, to help the audience  (forget the critic) know who is/was and when.

"When We Were Young and Unafraid"

Manhattan Theater Club, at the City Center Stage 1. 131 W. 55th St.

For tickets ($89.00) go to ManhattanTheatreClub.com

"Donogoo" at the Mint Theater Company (through July 27,2014)

The barometric evaluation treatment is administered to Lamandin (James Riordan) by Dr. Miguel Rufisque (George Morfogen) and his man servant (Vladimir Versailles).
(Photo: Richard Termine)

"Donogoo"  at the Mint Theater Company  (through July 27,2014)

Faster isn't always funnier but it could have helped propel the purposefully preposterous plot as well as the cleverly inane dialogue that give Jules Romains' 1930 French farce its raison d'etre.  Despite its shocking contemporary theme of buyer-beware, "Donogoo" is unfortunately not the lost dramatic find of the season. Yet it has much to recommend it.

It's all about one man's ability to sell the proverbial bridge rather than literally jump off of one as Lamendin (James Riordan) initially sets out to do. Influenced by a nutty geographer cum pseudo-scientist to initiate and orchestrate an outrageous business scheme/scam that involves bankers, investors and adventurers, Lamendin finds himself  leading the gullible and the greedy on an expedition to an uncharted city in the South American jungle, but mainly to a place that doesn't exist, well almost doesn't exist.

Before we get any more twisted up in the details of the plot, which I will likely omit in any case from further scrutiny, I want to praise the Mint for a physical production that is as arresting for its visuals than it is by the aggressively whimsical text or even the deft performances by a large cast, some in multiple roles. This is a play with twenty three scenes and if I read the program correctly that many different locations, all created by a delightfully dazzling array of colorful projections, as created by Roger Hanna and Price Johnston.

So what if the physical production gives a lift to a play that really isn't worth the effort, especially by the Mint Theater whose specialty is the unearthing of lost but worthy plays. Undaunted by the ascribed mise-en-scene, director Gus Kaikkonen (who also did the translation) has placed his splendid performers in a kind of graphic comic-book world – one, however, that is also filled with scarily funny resonances of  modern day investment chicanery.  

Following the misadventures of a madcap group of diverse but single-minded  characters as they are each seduced and sucked into a fraudulent scheme is amusing up to a point. The plot gets a little bogged down by the predictability factor, as do the one-dimensional characters slogging through it. And farce without the ability to sustain the funny factor is an inherent problem. But that, in itself, should not deter you.

One has to admire the Mint for reviving  the memory of Romain whose plays the French adored in the early 20th century and whose most excellent "Dr. Knock" was revived wonderfully by the Mint a few seasons back. "Donogoo" may not hit all its comical marks, but it is amusing to think as we trek deeper into the jungle how the investment world continues to be impacted by the unscrupulous as well as attract the unwary. Despite my quibbles, the adventurous theatergoer would do well to pay a visit to the Mint, as the rewards of this enterprising production outweigh its flaws, including that title.

"Donogoo"

For tickets ($55.00) to the Mint Theater at 311 West 43rd Street, go to  www.minttheater.org