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Listings for Friday June 23 through Thursday, June 29, 2000
CHAPTER TWO,
Phoenix Ascending Theatre. One of Neil Simon's more tragic comedies, this autobiographical play follows writer
George Schneider (James Treacy) through his mourning over the untimely death of his first wife to the whirlwind
wooing of his second, Jennie Malone (Tracy Repep). Alternately encouraging and cautioning the impetuous pair are
Leo (Jeffrey Hoge), George's wisecracking older brother, and Faye (Traci Stanton), Jenny's flamboyant best friend.
The dysfunctional foursome offers us a glimpse of the eternal cycle of breaking and healing hearts. ¶Despite
the dark context, Simon's script is peppered with his usual zippy dialogue, which challenges the director and players
to look through the layers of shtick and repartee to the drama beneath. Director Stephen R. Roath comes up short,
as do Treacy and Repep, who haven't internalized their characters' suffering. Instead of complex, three-dimensional
people, they seem like schizophrenics, two nice young kids in love who suddenly rage, cry, and scream about their
fears in certain pivotal scenes. Any sense of the traumas that haunt them barely penetrates the surface, defusing
the script's intensity and making its shifts from ecstasy to depression to vulnerability seem simply manic. As
the two sidekicks, Hoge and Stanton might take note of Simon's own advice: If an actor knows he's being funny,
he's not. They have some genuine moments of humor and affection, usually during the serious scenes; bringing that
humanity to their one-two punch lines would do much to bolster this flat-line production. --Kim
Wilson
JOY OF THE DESOLATE, Apple Tree Theatre. What's most effective about Oliver Mayer's semiautobiographical play--which concerns
a Native American Ivy League freshman who loses his father, finds faith in a choir, and becomes involved in a love
triangle with a sweet singer and her fiery baritone boyfriend--is its ability to convey the transcendent quality
of both sacred and secular music. In Apple Tree's elegant, exceedingly well cast production directed by Geraint
Wyn Davies, the first-act scenes--in which DC finds his musical voice with the help of the college's stern yet
generous choir leader and a doubting pastor who rediscovers her own faith--are truly transporting. ¶But the
second act is full of dreamy digressions, including DC's Oedipal fantasies about his hippie mother and an imagined
encounter with doomed singer Donny Hathaway. These scenes detract from the plot and from some of Mayer's more intriguing
characters, such as DC's witty, gay, black roommate and a saintly prostitute DC befriends. Ultimately far too little
of the drama approaches the soaring majesty of the music performed by the characters. --Adam
Langer
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, Attic Playhouse. In this account of dirty doings in the Danish court, our guides are a pair of self-absorbed
slackers who fritter away their time in philosophical who's-on-first games, oblivious to the intrigues surrounding
them. Their attitude is contrasted with that of the traveling players' manager, who cheerfully accepts the risks
inherent in a world where even the laws of syntax are pliable. ¶Tom Stoppard's brilliant manipulation of those
laws requires little more than that the actors speak trippingly. Under the direction of F.W. Brent Bridgman, the
Attic Playhouse cast delivers workmanlike performances, with Brad Archer and Christian Heep valiantly swapping
sophistry, Geoff Isaac supplying plenty of razzle-dazzle as the lead player, and Kevin Wieter projecting lots of
angst as Hamlet. Cutesy anachronisms--the Star Wars anthem,
a golf club among the players' props, a sailor reading the Cliffs Notes for Hamlet--along with a miscast actress in the role of Polonius, diminish this effort. The production also starts
to run out of steam after the second hour, but Stoppard's theme of mortals striving to control their destinies
in an indifferent universe still ennobles it. --Mary Shen Barnidge
SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM, Pegasus Players. Born a generation too late to fully participate in Broadway's most fertile era--roughly
the 1920s through the '50s--Stephen Sondheim still turned out witty tunes and pleasing lyrics worthy of the masters:
Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin. When this revue of early Sondheim songs opened
in 1976, he hadn't yet written Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, or Into the Woods, yet this lively,
loving anthology contains an embarrassment of riches. It's packed with songs from West Side Story and Gypsy (to
which Sondheim contributed lyrics) and Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum (for which he wrote music and lyrics), as well as songs from his famous flops Do I Hear a Waltz?,
Anyone Can Whistle, and Pacific Overtures. ¶There's nothing particularly brilliant about the way directors
Peter Amster and Michael LaTour present these songs. But then you don't have to be inspired to make them soar--you
just have to work like the devil to master Sondheim's difficult, playful, literate lyrics and then step out of
the way. The four-person ensemble handles the material fairly well, winning big laughs with the comic songs and
moving us with the more somber meditations. Still, everything seems a little lost on the huge, mostly empty Pegasus
stage--this show should be performed either with much more glitz or in a smaller, black box space. --Jack Helbig
STICK KNIFE HERE,
Theatre Corps, at Viaduct Theatre. Though it may at times lack the clockwork precision or accessibility of Charlie
Chaplin's best material, Theatre Corps' new ensemble piece owes an awful lot to the great silent film comedians
of the early 1900s. The influence of Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle, in particular, is undeniable: Stick Knife
Here--with its deep undercurrent of violence and innuendo--is clearly clowning for adults. Director Blake Montgomery's
fixation on murder, death, and defilement is evident from the opening scene, in which a sandwich board in a funeral
home proclaims the body in the casket to be "today's special" and one of the mourners eulogizes their
dearly departed leader as a "son of a bitch." ¶As with last year's PD:
Position Doubtful, this collaborative piece combines slapstick antics, pure clowning,
and commedia dell'arte sight gags to great effect. Montgomery and his nine-member troupe convey a deep understanding
of the ensemble aesthetic; this piece is full of tiny epiphanies, scenes where every performer is working in tandem
(a Lewis Carroll-style tea party, a speeding train barreling toward a damsel in distress) to create moments of
pure visual poetry. What Stick Knife Here lacks, however, is
a more cohesive through line for its rich images and non sequiturs. Montgomery has done well in allowing his cast
free rein to create a world where comedy and brutality are essentially interchangeable; a narrower focus could
only drive that disturbing point home further. --Nick Green
TOUCHED BY
AN ANGLO, ¡Salsation!, at Idiot Box and Donny's Skybox Studio, Second City E.T.C.
¶The ¡Salsation! troupe bills itself as "comedy with a Latin flavor," though the flavor of
their show at Piper's Alley might not be as picante as the flavor of the one in Pilsen. Crossover themes dominate
the material in Touched by an Anglo. There's the "Who Wants to Be an American Citizen?" game show, in
which immigrants from various countries compete against one another for prizes ranging from visa extensions to
full citizenship. And the sweetly serious testimony of a farmer determined to master computers--he vows, "I
will not let my children leave me behind, as I left my father behind." And the extended title scenario, in
which divine intervention leads a father to reveal the secret of his daughter's multiethnic lineage. ¶"Cooking
With Frida Kahlo," with its exaggerations and inside references, is hilarious, and the ensemble's sharp-edged
timing and concentration make even such comedy-revue staples as an interviewer's search for a sufficiently stereotypical
"ethnic" candidate ("Latinos--the other dark meat!") both funny and thought provoking. These
wry observations of universal human foibles display real intelligence. --Mary Shen Barnidge
WILBUS AMADEUS CROAKLEY, Giants in the Sky Productions, at Second City, Donny's Skybox Studio, and MY UNCLE'S FAVORITE DISH IS CASHEW CHICKEN...NO
NUTS, Stir-Friday Night!, at Second City, Donny's Skybox Studio. ¶I do believe Jason
Flowers is insane. I mean that in the best possible sense. A student at Second City's Training Center (as I am),
he's not content to do what earlier improvisers have done. Following his own eccentric comic muse, he sometimes
looks so out of sync with his fellow players that it seems he's been digitally pasted into a scene. And judging
from Wilbus Amadeus Croakley Flowers's writing eludes categorization
as well. While he draws on improv's satiric tradition, this hour-long comedy, which he also directs, is more than
just another improv-based play. Mixing genres with promiscuous glee, it reads at times like broad parody like Forrest
Gump, Croakley, who's half white and half black, stumbles into key moments in history: he meets the Black Panthers
in Oakland, lands on the moon before Neil Armstrong, and trips at Woodstock. But it also has naturalistic comic
scenes, as well as Monty Python-esque silliness. ¶Some of the material falls flat, either because the timing
is off or because Flowers hasn't found the best way to present his trippy humor. For every joke that bombs, however,
Flowers has another equally odd gag that works. He also has a great eye for comic talent: this midnight show employs
some very sharp young comic actors, notably Jordan Peele in the title role: he wrings big laughs out of everything
he touches, even a rather dull bit about being the first black man on the moon. (The gag: he wasn't expected to
make it so there's no fuel for the return trip.) ¶I hope the folks at Stir-Friday Night! check out Flowers's
show this Asian-American improv group could learn a lot about finding and sticking to a comic vision. Though they've
been performing off and on for the last five years, their material still feels a lot like the stuff at Second City
only not as funny. They make some halfhearted, tentative attempts to comment on the Asian-American experience but
don't seem to want to offend either non-Asians or their own community (or communities). My
Uncle's Favorite Dish Is Cashew Chicken...No Nuts is a "best of" show. I'd
hate to see the material on the cutting-room floor. --Jack Helbig
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