The last four shows I've seen fit semi-neatly into two categories: the comedies and the plotless bores.
THE COMEDIES
I saw two "comedies" this week - one was "The New Century" and the other was "The Walworth Farce." The former is pretty much pure fun fluff, and the latter is Irish (needless to say it was one of the most bleak, disturbing and depressing things I've seen in a while). "The New Century" is a series of four short plays by Paul Rudnick, with the first three introducing the separate characters, and the fourth bringing them all together. I think this is one of those plays where you need to be a gay and/or Jewish New Yorker (or very much aware of those cultures) in order to get any of the humor. The four stories all have fairly thin, silly plots, but it's really those oh so hilarious one-liners that come fast and furious that make it so very entertaining worthwhile. At intermission and again after the play (and to be perfectly honest, even thinking about it now), we couldn't help going around and re-telling our favorite jokes like "In this house we use a toilet, not our friends from Tribeca" or "It's like if Patti LuPone was a store." Those are just paraphrases of the lines since I don't have a script in front of me, and honestly I they're probably not nearly as funny out of context and when just read on a screen as opposed to being recited by a master comic actress like, say, Linda Lavin, but trust me, when recited on stage those lines and ones like them had me falling out of my seat in laughter. I will say that all five of us in our group felt that the second play (about Mr. Charles - who was thrown out of NY for being "too gay" and then ended up having a cable access show in the middle of the night in Florida) was the weakest of the four. But even if that one seemed to be a bit stale, it had it's choice moments. Oh and I must say that I'm certain the cast, with my favorites being Linda Lavin and Jayne Houdyshell, had a good deal to do with making Rudnick's lines land as often as they did. Yes, the show is a silly piece of mindless entertainment, but what's so wrong with that? And not only did I love it, but my grandmother who usually sleeps through and hates most shows we take her too, both stayed awake the entire time and loved it. Now if that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.
In the category of the most certainly not a silly piece of fluff, is Enda Walsh's "The Walworth Farce" - which is your typical Irish comedy - meaning you may laugh a bit, but you completely totally and utterly depressed. It's the sort of thing that Martin McDonagh does so brillianty, and Walsh seems to be in very much the same league here, though I will say I was often very confused by the comic portions of the play. The basic premise is that there are these three men (an older father figure, and two grown "sons") who just stay in their apartment all day and perform the same farce. Every single day. For years and years. I suppose partly because there are so many characters in the play within the play, but only three actors to play all of them, I found it extremely difficult to follow the story that they were presenting. It was still fun and funny (for a time anyway) to watch their zany quick changes and bad acting (you can tell when a section is real vs part of the play-within, because the characters are all rotten actors, so when the dialogue sounds natural it's supposed to be real, versus the forced over-the-top stuff that's part of the "play"). I got the basic premise from the first act and was basically amused through, but it's the second act, where things just snowball and become increasingly disturbing and depressing, to the point where I was jaw-dropped in miserable shock for the last maybe ten minutes of the play, as I saw what I suppose was inevitable play out before me. The production, from the Druid Theatre Company (that also I think presented the premieres of Martin McDonagh's plays), plays for around a month or so (tonight was the first preview) at St. Ann's Warehouse, and I think is very much worth seeing. If you don't mind depressing Irish comedies. If it happens to pop up on tdf again, I think I may actually try to see it again - both because I really "enjoyed" it, and because I want to see if I can get a better handle on the stuff I missed the first time around.
And now on to the...
PLOTLESS BORES
Is it so much to ask for a show to tell a story? Maybe I'm lazy and I just like my theatre spoon-fed to me, but I don't see what's so wrong with shows telling stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The first example of that this week was "God's Ear." I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Supposedly it was about a parents dealing with the death of a child. But it all sounded like repetitive gibberish to me. I think the play must be more interesting on the page, when it can be looked at as a long piece of poetry. But as a piece of theatre, I really just didn't get it at all. It's by a young writer named Jenny Schwartz, and while I applaud her for being what I would certainly call an original new voic for the theatre, it was just totally over my head, and not at all to my taste. The only entertainment I was able to glean from the experience came from the older couple in my row (the first row, no less): after around twenty-five minutes, the wife whispered to her husband that she couldn't take anymore and she was going to sit in the lobby; the husband stayed and kept watching the play and about five minutes later she came back and asked him why he hadn't left yet; he said he wanted to see if it would get better, she grunted and sat down again, and then five or ten minutes after that they finally both left. At least it wasn't a total loss :O)
And then there's "Satyagraha," an opera that makes "Tristan und Isolde" look action packed. I will say that the Met's new production (or, well, it's co-production with the ENO) is really marvelous. Does that make it worth sitting through all three hours and forty-five grueling minutes of the opera? I think not. I'm sort of hit or miss with Philip Glass, but even the minimalist music didn't bother me all that much. What really bored me to tears was the story, or lack of one. The opera is made up of random scenes from the life of Gandhi. For some bizarre reason, the designers chose to not provide met-titles for this production, and instead to just project the translations on the back wall of the stage. We get about one line every fifteen minutes. There's also an insert in the Playbill that I think may be the libretto. It's two pages long. Two pages for three hours and forty-five minutes of opera. So basically, I sat there the whole time, watching the actors go through motions that seemed to only vaguely resemble the scenes listed in the synopsis, and listen to people sing words I couldn't understand (either because they were in Sanskrit, or English with bad diction). I just don't understand how anyone could find this remotely entertaining as a musical drama, considering there isn't actually any "drama." In the last scene, Gandhi walks slowly towards the stage, singing the same line what seemed like forty times. Maybe if I knew what he was singing, I would have found this interesting. But listening to someone slowly walk towards the front of the stage singing the same line of what sounds like gibberish over and over again, and sorry but my limited attention span can only stand so much. As for the most entertaining moment of that evening... On the subway platform, after I think every opera I've been to at the Met, there's a single musician playing music from that's evening's opera. I had sort of forgotten about this, but when I got down to the platform I heard music playing, and a woman walking next to me said to her friend, "Oh god, the flutist is playing Philip Glass." At which point I could barely contain my laughter. That comment definitely made my night, even as I was considering asking if I could pay the guy playing the flute to STOP playing the music.
Okay - that was long, it's now very late, and so good night.
