Boxing 2000
Present Company Theatorium

Leave it to the skewed sensibilities of downtown darling Richard Maxwell to fashion a play around amateur boxing—a sport that is equated with agility and speed and still bless it with his trademark deadpan dialogue. In his latest effort, Maxwell turns his attentions to two brothers, seemingly products of the street, Jo-Jo (Gary Wilmes) and Freddie (Robert Torres), who are prepping for a small-time fight.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
September 2000
Artaud Le Momo
Collective Unconscious

This was the world premiere for Alexander Panas's look at seminal theater theorist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). Committed to an insane asylum in Rodez, France, Artaud spent dearly a decade there undergoing regular shock treatments that completely destroyed his health. Panas shows a man with violent mood swings and uncontrolled libido but one who is also a victim of overzealous therapy and nonstop predatory sexual taunting.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Bacchae, The
La Plaza Cultural

In The Bacchae, Euripides shows the disastrous consequences of challenging a superior power.  Young Pentheus (Kenneth Garson), governor of Thebes, is alarmed by the appearance of a new religion, which promotes orgiastic revelries in the woods and especially corrupts his city's women.  His entire family, including grandfather Cadmus (Glenn B.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Cuban Operator Please
Teatro 309, Charas/El Bohio

Adrian Rodriguez paints a very personal picture of the Cuban exile community, a very different one from what filled our TV screens earlier this year. Father (Jose Antonio) has lived in Union City, Cuba's "northernmost province" since leaving his country. Now married with two sons, he has worked long hours in an embroidery factory to support his family. The transition to life in the U.S. has left him taciturn and unable to show emotion except when playing baseball, his passion.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Don Juan In Hell
Irish Repertory

I don't know about you, but to my mind, George Bernard Shaw's plays always seem like a philosophical dissertation in search of a drama. Characters talk and talk and talk, but the outcome always seems the same, no matter where the play would end during its run. That said, the Irish Rep's revival of Shaw's Don Juan In Hell seems more than ideal. Staged as a reading and starring four old-time pros, this is a sit-down production that truly lets you experience the words in every sense.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Godspell
Theater at St. Peter's - Citicorp Center

I think it might be safe to say that never in my life before have I encountered two tasteless, punishing religious rock musicals in one theatergoing year.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Habitos Oscuros
Teatro Armando Perez, Charas/El Bohio

Appearances can be deceiving. What goes on inside the Convent of the Humiliated Redeemers may be shocking to anyone who doesn't know their Almodovar. Coke-snorting nuns that pen porn on the side are just the tip of the iceberg. When divine providence leads an egregious sinner in the guise of pop singer Yolanda (Lorena Arriagada) to the sisters, a massive show of hospitality ensues. The only problem is that Jolanda wants to go straight, an impossible goal among these perverted religionists.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Die Ungarische Medea
Teatro Armando Perez, Charas/El Bohio

What if your husband were about to leave you for a young blonde? What if your son turned against you? What if a few moments later he died in a car crash? Like her mythological antecedent, this "Hungarian Medea" picks an extreme solution. Playwright Arpad Goncz (former President of Hungary) sees Medea's predicament as a spiritual quest: when Mada concludes life has no more meaning, her decisive nature allows only suicide as a response. Goncz's reference to the Medea is ironic, because modern times don't permit triumphant revenge.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Habladores
Present Company Theatorium

My high school Spanish teacher always suspected that the English verb "to blabber " came from "hablaba," Spanish for "he was speaking." She must have been thinking about Habladores, by Golden Age Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). Most noted as the author of "Don Quixote de la Mancha," Cervantes also wrote over a dozen intermedios, brief plays to fill the space between acts of a tragedy or other more serious stage work.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
August 2000
Brothers And Sisters - Part I: Meetings and Partings
John Jay College Theater

This is the first time New York audiences have seen Lev Dodin's well-traveled production of Brothers and Sisters, which dates from the precise beginning of perestroika in 1985. Russians would be in a better position to grasp the irony in this adaptation of Fyodor Abramov's trilogy of novels about village life in Russia's Far North at the close of WWII.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Brothers And Sisters - Part II: Roads And Crossroads
John Jay College Theater

Part of Lincoln Center Festival 2000, this stage adaptation of Fyodor Abramov's trilogy of life in Russia's Far North continues over a second evening to show the same village five years after the end of WWII.

In this more somber Part II, the villagers' mood is temporarily lifted by a film clip of smiling peasants harvesting wheat -- until it is announced that the state grain requirement will be doubled. This effectively condemns them to another year of near famine; forced "loans" to the Party district committee further bled them.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Dance Like a Man
Tribeca Performing Arts Theater 2

A long-overdue Festival of Indian Theater brought U.S. premieres for works by two of India's most popular playwrights to the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. The one reviewed here, Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man, asks whether a performer should have special rights within an upper-middle-class, traditional family.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Filao
Damrosch Park Tent

Inspired by Italo Calvino's magical-realist novel "The Baron in the Trees," this "new circus" event is called Filao, a clever contraction of the French word for high wire. Now, after having toured Europe and America since 1997, Filao comes to Lincoln Center Festival 2000, its second-to-last venue.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
July 2000
Annie
Iroquois Amphitheater

Crusty old Harold Gray, who wrote and drew the Little Orphan Annie comic strip from 1924 until his death in 1968, once famously defended the strip's emphasis on violence with this retort: "Sweetness and light -- who the hell wants it? What's news in the newspapers? Murder, rape, and arson. That's what stories are made of."

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Rosemary Clooney
Regency Hotel

Rosie's back with a new beat, a Bossa Nova beat. It's not that the incomparable Rosemary Clooney was ever afraid of taking on a challenge during her amazing 55-year career as a professional "girl singer." Opening a two-week engagement at Feinstein's At The Regency to launch the release of "Brazil," her new Concord album, Clooney demonstrated on opening night that her heart, if not her soul, was on the beat that has proved daunting to many a popular American singer.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Current Events
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage II

Politics is always a tricky subject for a playwright to tackle; either you're preaching to the converted or talking to a brick wall. People don't come to the theater to be lectured; they want to be entertained. I'm happy to report that David Marshall Grant's Current Events emerges victorious on both fronts.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Glass Menagerie, The
Cap 21

Set in St. Louis on the eve of World War II, The Glass Menagerie is a family tale of hope, despair and deception. Mississippi transplant Amanda lives with her two adult children in a modest apartment with shabby furnishings -- a far cry from how she hoped to end up. Her husband abandoned them years before to turn Amanda into a single mother, a status that commanded none of the respect but all of the drawbacks that we have with us sixty years later. Son Tom, who doubles as narrator in the play, works in a warehouse for a piddling salary.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Hotel Suite
Gramercy Theater

Neil Simon's new pastiche of his one-act, hotel-based plays of old, now newly dressed up and called Hotel Suite, is truly the first theatrical experience that I can recall that is both remarkable and stunningly awful. The four tales represented are all by Mr. Simon and have varying degrees of success as plays.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
June 2000
Blind Alley
Puerto Rican Traveling Theater

This is a trio of one-acts, each with realistic female characters in a contemporary urban setting. Hopscotch shows teenagers Haydee (Monica Read) and Dee (Mariana Carreno) dickering over how to spend Christmas. With a mother doing time, Haydee has "graduated" from school dropout population to petty crime, so Dee's more stable situation of separated, inimical parents makes her seem a bastion of stability. Add to that Dee's vestigial moral schema, and she is on her way to escape from the squalid life depicted. Maybe.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Bruce Vilanch: Almost Famous
Westbeth Theater Center

The moppet-haired guy who usually sits to the left of center square Whoopi Goldberg on "Hollywood Squares" is the latest Hollywood denizen to get his own one-man gig.

While amusing at times, Bruce Vilanch's humorous diatribe exploring his long life as a gag writer, celebrity emergency jokester and sometime actor is seriously under-imagined and never as funny as the awards shows he has made a lucrative career writing for, it's almost like watching the outtakes of material that wasn't quite gut-busting enough to make it into Billy Crystal's oeuvre.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
Hypatia
Soho Rep

All right, I'm going to confess something. I'm not one of those critics who feels it necessary to go into long, windy plot synopses just to prove how crafty I am at understanding narrative. I happen to find that it robs readers of their sense of discovery, and I like to leave them with a little something to feel out for themselves. Well, in the case of Mac Wellman's new play Hypatia, you're totally on your own folks.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
I Do, I Undo, I Redo
La MaMa ETC - Annex Theater

Now pushing ninety, prominent modern sculptor Louise Bourgeois has consistently shocked the public with barely-disguised, larger-than-life representations of male genitalia. When questioned, though, she has always played the innocent. Where all this comes from, Brazilian performance artist Denise Stoklos never quite broaches in I Do, I Undo, I Redo. Stoklos has pieced together excerpts from the French sculptor's writings to create this lively sketch combining biographical detail with trenchant personal observations.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
I Wanna Be Adored
Red Line Theater

Early on in Marc Spitz's I Wanna Be Adored, a darkly comic take on the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, your heart sinks when you think you've pegged the play as a routine, earnest "why did he do it?" parable about someone you could care less about. Thankfully, you're proven very wrong in this playful, often hilarious take on celebrity, the afterlife and bizarre strip clubs.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
May 2000
American Buffalo
Atlantic Theater

I have a theory that on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," everyone in the cast made a vow to do a New York play when it wrapped, because it seems that everyone from that film is illuminating Gotham these days, with Sam Shepard's True West on Broadway (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly) and now an electric update of David Mamet's American Buffalo, featuring Anderson secret-weapons Philip Baker Hall and William H. Macy.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Balladeer, The
KGB

Conceived and directed by Caden Manson (of Big Art Group), The Balladeer is a worthy candidate for cult status, unfolding like a downtown theater version of a midnight movie. An ambitious look at the tribulations of a confused group of high schoolers, the piece blends vulgarity, puppetry, ballads and nifty choreography into one brazen stew. For an alarmingly brief 45 minutes, the play manages to cover a lot of ground, but oddly, despite the obvious cleverness on stage, it still seems to come up short.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune
Adrienne Theater

One of Terrence McNally's earliest hits is receiving its first Philadelphia performance in years. It's a welcome revival. Its extended (no pun intended) full frontal nudity no longer shocks, partly because this production features 40-ish lovers of average looks and imperfect bodies. These are real people, not glamorous stars like Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer of the movie version. They've just finished having sex as the play begins, and now they start to get to know each other.

Steve Cohen
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
House Arrest
Joseph Papp Public Theater

As a work of tenacity and dramaturgy, Anna Deavere Smith's latest one-woman show, House Arrest, is pretty arresting, but as thoughtful theater, it registers far below expectations. Using the presidency, past and present, as her focal point, Smith employs her usual tactics: she interviewed close to 300(!) public figures, ranging from politicians and Washington insiders to TV personalities and authors. In addition to her usual copious research, she composed a show using verbatim excerpts from her findings.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
April 2000
Altruists, The
Vineyard Theater

The black comic farce gets an overhaul (and I mean overhaul) in Nicky Silver's newest opus The Altruists, a tirelessly energetic but strangely unaffecting tale of a group of New York City residents who enter each other's lives through the aid of family relations, lovers and a dead body. Played with broad conviction by a first-rate group, Silver's writing is certainly admirable, especially in creating a rapid-fire discourse that doesn't grow too wearying. Clever as the play sometimes is, though, it has the feeling of being rushed.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Antigone
Florence Gould Hall

Anticipating Martha Graham's directive to know what the protagonist had for breakfast (Clytemnestra in that case), Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) in fact shows Antigone having her anachronistic petite cafe. Written and first produced during WWII, his adaptation of the Sophocles tragedy is full of domesticating, realistic details, and a modern psychological dimension clearly specifies each character's thoughts and motivations.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Anton in Show Business
Actors Theater Of Louisville

Jane Martin takes us backstage at the modern regional theater in the wickedly funny Anton in Show Business. Full of insider jokes and strange situations, the play does have something to say about modern theater, acting and friendship. It follows a doomed-from-the-start production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, presented by a fictitious San Antonio theater. The cast includes a TV star, a New York playwright and a aspiring young Texan.

Ed Huyck
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Anton in Show Business
Actors Theater of Louisville - Bingham Theater

Another popular entry at the Humana Festival of New American Plays was Anton in Show Business, written by the mysterious Jane Martin (often thought to be a pseudonym for director Jon Jory). This spoof covers it all, from the naive ingenue (Monica Koskey), to the seen-it-all, 36-year-old veteran (Gretchen Lee Krich) and the surgery-enhanced TV star (Caitlin Miller). These three unlikely actresses all wind up in a Texas production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Like Chekhov's characters, they all search for meaning in a world of politics, greed and corruption.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Anton in Show Business
Actors Theater Of Louisville

If Jon Jory, producing director of Actors Theater of Louisville, is indeed the pseudonymous Jane Martin, playwright, as many believe, his/her Anton in Show Business is a smashing valedictory for his soon-to-end 31 years heading the renowned institution.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Grapes Of Ralph, The
St. Mark's Theater

Dubbed "sketch comedy that doesn't suck," the comedy troupe known as Ralph don't suck by any means but could benefit a bit by watching some of their influences, which they cite as including "Mr. Show" and "South Park." Basically "The Grapes Of Ralph" is a sketch show, not unlike "Saturday Night Live" except grosser and usually funnier, and the comedy has a refreshingly un-PC bend to it.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Las Horas De Belen
P.S. 122

With its compelling theme and striking presentation, this Mabou Mines production became an instant experimental classic when it opened in finished form in May 1999. Framed within the structure of hourly devotional prayer in use since medieval times, the story of the unwed mothers, prostitutes and other undesirables that inhabited the refuge/prison is told with words, song and mime. Once admitted to Belen (the Spanish equivalent of Bethlehem, in an ironic name choice) established in 17th-century Mexico City, the women could never escape their strictly-regimented existence.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
March 2000
Arms and the Man
Gramercy Theater

Theater of the most noxious kind, this disastrous revival of George Bernard Shaw's 1894 play Arms And The Man engages in the eye-rolling fop school of dramatics. Every performance is ten times more mannered than it needs to be, the art direction more involved than it needs to be, and the line delivery a lot more pronounced than needed. This is a production that bathes itself in excess but never seems to realize that subtlety is always the ticket to creating the best kind of human comedy, more like the kind Shaw had in mind when he wrote this play.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Another Summer
Derby Dinner Playhouse

Landing the rights to produce the musical version of the much loved On Golden Pond play and film was quite a coup for Derby Dinner Playhouse. Ernest Thompson, who wrote both play and screenplay, has now written the musical's book as well as lyrics for composer Roy M. Rogosin's 18 songs. This is the third incarnation for the show, still very much a work in progress after short engagements in New Hampshire and Michigan. Its six-week stay here will allow for a great deal more fine tuning.

Charles Whaley
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Babysitter, The
McCadden Theater

This adaptation of Robert Coover's pungently satirical short story shows that literature and theater can be mixed successfully.  Utilizing a narrator (Pearsall) and seven gifted actors who have been choreographed in seamless fashion by Vincent D'Altorio, reality and fantasy are explored -- make that deconstructed -- by D'Altorio in contrapuntal fashion.  Triggered by the arrival of a beautiful young babysitter (Rhonda Patterson) at the home of the Tuckers, the story goes back and forth in time to dramatize the impact her budding sexuality has on everyone.  We become privy to

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Director, The
ArcLight Theater

All through Nancy Hasty's twisty, hugely entertaining new play The Director, I couldn't help but wonder what the late Lee Strasberg would have made of it. A psychological drama about a young playwright named Annie (the wonderful newcomer Tasha Lawrence) who calls upon a once-notorious theater director-turned-janitor (John Shea) to helm her latest play, it is one of the rare instances of theater genuinely turning on itself, an intriguing dissection of the dehumanization that can often result in "committing to the work" a little too much.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Fuddy Meers
Minetta Lane Theater

Now playing in an open-ended run at the Minetta Lane Theater after a smash engagement at Manhattan Theater Club, David Lindsay-Abaire's wacky look at a really dysfunctional family has charms to spare but too often falls into that pseudo-Coen Bros. funk that has marked too many comic plays of late. The tone is so bustling at times; you just wish everyone would take a Valium and get some rest. Still, this would be more of a gripe if the cast weren't so wonderful and the overall look of the play so striking (by the remarkable Santo Loquasto, no less).

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
February 2000
Bomb-itty Of Errors, The
45 Bleecker

As I noted in mid-1999, Shakespeare is invading off-Broadway theater at an alarming rate.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
January 2000

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