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Endgame

by Max Sparber
posted on Mar. 14, 2009 - 1:57am

Like all of Samuel Beckett's plays, Endgame, now being produced by the Ten Thousand Things company, is an odd piece. The author tended to write claustrophobic plays in which a few people bother each other over and over again; the most famous of these is, of course, Waiting for Godot, in which two bored men spend the entire play waiting for the titular character, who (spoiler alert!) never arrives. He is also the author of Happy Days, which features a woman who is, inexplicably, buried up to her bosoms in sand, who has an exacting daily routine that she obsessively repeats, and who talks compulsively. One of his last pieces was Breathe, which was just a scene, really, in the notorious 1969 pay Oh! Calcutta! It lasts for 25 seconds and consists of a cry, some breathing, and then another cry. And that's it.

It's safe to say Beckett was something of a weirdo, but he was a weirdo whose writing inspired a lot of attention throughout the 20th century. It was, after all, a century in which all of humanity seemed determined to repeat the same hideous mistakes over and over again until they destroyed themselves. It was a century that seemed abandoned by God, or, at least, was overseen by a God who didn't care. Beckett is often associated with two of the more pessimistic movements of the century, the Theater of the Absurd and the Existentialist movements, which both tried to grapple with man's meaning in an uncaring and often ridiculous and grotesque world -- although neither of these were movements so much as they were disparate and often contradictory creations that were lumped together by critics and academics who felt a need to group them together under one clearinghouse phrase. And, come to think of, in a century that produced two World Wars, the Holocaust, the mass deaths in Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot, among an endless and exhausting list of Terrible things people do to each other, "pessimistic" might not be the right word for these philosophers and dramatists. A better word might be "honest."

And so, among all these authors of misery and weirdness, we have Beckett, one of the most miserable and weirdest of all, and, in 1957, he wrote Engame, one of his most miserable and weirdest works. The story, if I can summarize it briefly, is that of the blind and crippled Hamm and his somewhat less crippled manservant Clov, and their story, as the title suggests, takes place at the end of time. Some unnamed tragedy happened in the not-too-distant past, and Hamm and Clov managed to surive it, albeit just barely. Now they torment each other and busy themselves with little rituals, as characters do in Beckett plays, and wait for something to happen, which is also what Beckett characters do. In this case, they are waiting to die. There are two other characters, Hamm's parents, who live, if you can call it that, in dustbins, emerge very briefly to tell jokes and reminisce, and then (spoiler alert!) expire.

It sounds depressing. All of Beckett's plays sound depressing, and none of them are, not really. They're sometimes described as being blackly comic, but they aren't that either. Audience members sometimes laugh, in part because Beckett seems to have been inspired by European vaudeville, and so there is sometimes a baggy pants comic quality to his scripts. Bad directors will play this up -- one famous production of Godot featured Steve Martin and Robin Williams. But Beckett wasn't really a funny writer. When his characters engage in clowning, there's a sort of desperation to it that really isn't very amusing. The comic story that Hamm's father tells here, as an example, has the quality of a tale that has been told so often it has lost its meaning, told by a man who no longer remembers why you tell jokes.

So if Beckett's plays don't have the happy face of comedy or the frowny face of tragedy, what do they have? Well, that's the question, and it's a hard one to answer. His plays are pretty fascinating to watch, if you don't mind their general plotlessness and tendency to engage in obsessive repetition. As much as Beckett is associated with the Absurdists, he sometimes feels more like a kinsman to the Dadaists, who were deliberately anti-art, and fairly meticulous in creating work that defied our presumptions about what art is. Beckett eschews plot, he eschews action, and he generally eschews climax. He plays exist in a sort of endless present, long after anything has happened and with nothing seeming likely to happen any time soon. But his plays, and Endgame in particular, weren't just exercises in form -- his characters seem very human, albeit pretty unlikable. This is not to say you wind up disliking the characters you see in Beckett's plays -- no, they just aren't very sympathetic, and know it, and don't care.

So Ten Thousand Things has mounted Endgame, and they are a good company to do it, because they take their plays to prisons and retirement homes and homeless shelters, where the audiences may share some of the experience of living a plotless life of waiting for something to happen, and either not having it happen or having it be terrible. This production was directed by Marion McClinton, and she gets the tone of Beckett right -- it's morose and unfunny, but never drags or feels freighted with significance, which is a risk with Beckett. It helps that she has cast two actors in the lead roles who are enormously watchable: Terry Bellamy as Hamm and Christiana Clark as Clov. Bellamy plays the blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm with the hammy grandeur of an ancient thespian, but there isn't a trace of camp in his performance. Instead, he gives us a character who is used to giving orders and holding court, and still takes a theatrical pleasure from it. Clark's Clov, in the meanwhile, is frazzled and numb; she was a child when the end of the world began, and has never really known much of anything but waiting for it all to wind down. She comes when Bellamy calls, but has none of the obsequiousness of a servant, but instead the exhausted sense of duty of a child tended to their dying grandparent.

Ten Thousand Things has always had its pick of great local actors, as demonstrated by the fact that this production features Steve Hendrickson, who is one of the Cities' workingest and highest-regarded stage actors, and Barbra Berlovitz, who cofounded the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. They play Hamm's parents. The roles are very small, particularly for Berlovitz, and involve hanging around in a rubbish bin for the entire play, which is not the sort of thing performers of the stature of Hendrickson or Berlovitz do unless they really want to. The roles are pretty juicy, though, and both actors take advantage of this, Berlovitz bringing to her role a spacey sweetness that suggests a woman whose mind is almost gone, while Hendrickson limns his character with a thick Irish brogue and a jokey bonhomie -- until, at least, he wants something, at which point he starts snapping and making demands like an impatient tyrant.

The play is staged simply, as Ten Thousand Thing productions must be, as there are limited stage properties or sets you can lug into a prison. Hamm sits in a jerry-rigged wheelchair, and there are two trashbins onstage, and that's about it. A woman named Heather Barringer sits behind Hamm, surrounded by an assortment of small acoustic musical instruments from around the world, mostly tuned rhythm instruments, but she doesn't so much provide musical accompaniment as occasional sound effects. Hamm will sometimes roll a few inches in his wheelchair, and Clark enters and leaves with several ladders, but that's about it for stage action, which is as it should be -- directors who try to impose to much stage action onto Beckett risk detracting from the essentially static quality of his plays, and, if you're afraid of long stretches in which not much happens, you shouldn't tackle Beckett.

But this may be a good time for a Beckett revival. After all, we're less than a decade into the 21st century, and humanity still seems determined to turn parts of the earth into a mass grave, and the rest of us watch from the sidelines, bewildered by the monstrous absurdity of it and waiting for something to change. Beckett could be speaking with the most pessimistic of contemporary voices -- or, at least the most honest.

Endgame plays through March 15. Call 612.203.9502 for tickets and showtimes.

Romeo and Juliet

by Max Sparber
posted on Mar. 09, 2009 - 10:08am

It's hard to figure out how many times Romeo and Juliet have died onstage. The plays is four hundred and some odd years old, and one of Shakespeare's most popular, even when the playwright was alive. And so it is that his star-cross'd juvenile lovers get trotted out with great frequency, to sweet talk each other on a balcony and then protractedly dispatch themselves in the Capulet crypt. I suspect more Romeos and Juliets have died onstage than any two other characters in history, with their equally doomed friends and kinsmen Mercutio and Tybalt coming in close behind.

I've never really known what to make of the generalized idiocy of the play. It's a deliberate idiocy on Shakespeare's part, but it's still troubling. The simmering hostilities between the houses of Montague and Capulet are scarcely explained, and the young Montague Romeo is a callow and feckless lad, moping over his love of the unseen Rosaline at the start of the play and then instantly forgetting her the moment he meets the 13-year-old Juliet. The relationship between Romeo and Juliet is brief and unsatisfying -- they see each other and spout poetry for an hour, and then, out of the blue, marry -- an impulsive decision that even the Elizabethans would have considered ill-advised. And then, in a series of dramatically improbable events, the two begin their march toward self-destruction. Were these modern times and both kids were to wind up on Dr. Phil, both would receive very stern lectured about the impulsiveness of their actions, the excessiveness of their responses, and the shallowness of their relationship, as would anybody who married young after a courting period of a few hours and then threatened suicide any time anything went wrong.

But whatever. Romeo and Juliet isn't going to lose any audience members because I think the main characters' romance is trashy rather than moving. And, in fact, the Children's Theatre Company is currently introducing a new generation of theatergoers to the play, in an abbreviated production that seems to move the central romance out of the houses of opposing political factions in Renaissance Verona and places it is something like a trailer park. The play is mounted in a fashion the theater has dubbed "promenade style," meaning the entire Cargill Theater has been converted into a set. Audience members mill about as the cast engages in bits of business, sunning themselves on the theater's floor, cooking onions on a hotplate, and, at one point, inviting audience members to keep a beach ball aloft. It's a deliciously low-rent set, with the walls hung with posters for rock concerts, and with various little hovels set up here and there. The house of Montague, as an example, has a dart board, an outside refrigerator (from which Romeo's father regularly takes bottles of beer), an oversized fan, and a dart board. All that's missing is a partially dissembled car on concrete blocks in the front lawn.

There's a shabby chic to this set that you also find in the cast. The young folks generally look like they've just come back from a rock concert, and they tend to favor very tight pants, sleeveless t-shirts, and vests. Juliet, played by Lindsey Alexandra Hartley, wears one of those blousy sun-dresses that used to be popular with hippie chicks, and she wears her hair under a silk scarf and wears rose-tited granny glasses; when music plays, she sways in place with her hands outstretched, looking, for all the world, like a girl you would find pressed up to the front of the stage at a Strawberry Alarm Clock concert, circa 1967. Mercutio has a droopy mustache and long hair, and, if the play had the budget, one suspects we would constantly see him racing around the stage on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The adults in the play, in the meanwhile, tend to look like aging hipsters in Florida, in straw hats and shiny suits and loud shirts with flyaway collars. In the meanwhile, a mandolin player and an accordionist wander around the set, providing a live soundtrack of vaguely gypsy airs, and, if the music is loud and driving enough, the cast members will invite audience members to dance.

So there is both a sense of fun in the staging of this production and a sleazy glamor to it, as though Sunset Strip costumers, armed with a budget of $300, decided to take every resident of the Krestwood Mobile Home Park to Ragstock and give them a makeover. Romeo, here played by Matt Rein, is still going to beg his own dagger for death at one point in the play, but he's going to look great doing it. This sort of visual panache even extends to the staging of the play, by director Greg Banks. During Meructio and Tybalt's deadly duel, cast members rush around and herd the audience away from the center of the stage, warning that there is going to be a fight. And what a fight! The two men go after each other with knives, baseball bats, and, eventually, dual meat cleavers, and the choreography is expansive and savage, consisting of hoarse taunts, sudden lunges, and then a lot of noisy confusion -- so noisy and confusing, in fact, that it looks as though Mercutio doesn't die from a blow from Tybalt, but instead from accidentally brushing against Romeo's drawn dagger.

Romeo and Juliet is a play that has confounded critics for hundreds of years, because it has no obvious overarching theme, but here, in this moment, Greg Banks seems to have found one. He might have glamorized the characters with their thrift store threads, but he deglamorizes their behavior. Romeo and Juliet tend to act like headstrong and shortsighted children in this show, and the rest of their family acts like bullies. Violence stupidly erupts and stupidly kills, and, when the titular lovers take their own lives at the end of the play, it is not a romantic moment but a moment of more blundering, as, if the hotheaded Romeo had just waited a little longer, rather than stampeding toward his own doom, the story might have had a happier ending. This production ends with both Romeo and Juliet's families chagrined by the idiocy of the events they have participated in, which has led, not to a great romantic tragedy, but to two children destroying themselves for no good reason at all. Dr. Phil would not be happy.

Romeo and Juliet plays through March 15 at the Children's Theatre Company, 612.874.0400.

Hitchcock Blonde

by Max Sparber
posted on Feb. 12, 2009 - 1:49am

Hitchcock Blonde by Terry Johnson, currently playing at the Jungle Theater, isn't what you would call a critical darling. I didn't read any of the other reviews before I went to see it, but I read them afterward, and they have the same complaints I did. The script is sprawling and overlong, in part because Johnson is obviously a playwright who has fallen madly in love with his own dialogue. Lines that could be short and sharp are long and blunted as a result. He tends to let his characters go and on, their words becoming increasingly purple as they speak, until finally they slip into a ceaseless torrent of useless orchidaciousness, as I have just done. He seems to give his audience no credit for intelligence, as when a character holds a movie tin filled with dust, and another character opines that she does not believe that to be just rotted film stock. Anybody who has been paying attention knows exactly what she thinks it is, but Johnson goes ahead and has her say it anyway, and then belabor the point.

As the play's title suggests, the subject is Hitchcock, and Johnson gives us two plays for the price of one. The first tells of a middle-aged college professor and Hitchcock scholar who has discovered what he believes to be a lost Hitchcock film. He uses this as an opportunity invite one of his students to his Greek villa to assist in the restoration process, but has designs on her that are far from academic. Additionally, Johnson tells a fictional tale of Hitchcock himself, who, in the play, is in the process of making Psycho. Johnson's Hitchcock has developed an interest in a body double from the notorious shower scene, and his designs on her are far from professional, but she has an agenda of her own that involves an abusive husband and a stolen knife. When I say we get two plays for the price of one, I mean that quite literally: Each of these stories could run as their own play and still fill an hour and a half apiece.

Let me go back and revise a sentence. The subject is not Hichcock. The subject is Hitchcock's interest in blonde leading ladies, and, more than that, his reportedly predatory and voyeuristic relationship with them. And here Johnson is in way over his head. The script replicates Hitchcock's reported misogyny but offers no real critique of it. Whatever bad endings Hitchcock planned for his blondes, he often put women onscreen who were at least as strong and as interesting as the male characters. Right up until her ghastly demise at the Bates Motel, Hitchcock treats Marion Crane as a sympathetic and rather gutsy character. But Johnson isn't as sharp in his writing. His females are as loquacious as the remainder of the cast, but tend to act like flibbertigibbets. The young student, as an example, spends much of the play sharply reprimanding the professor for his romantic aspirations toward her, but when she finally succumbs, she suddenly becomes a nymphomaniac, and desperately in love with the same man who repelled her earlier. And the abused wife -- well, Johnson makes an extraordinary lapse in judgement in allowing her tale to become something of a knockabout physical comedy. As black as Hitchock's sense of humor may have been, he recognized that violence was a grotesque act; in fact, he arguably lost some of his critical popularity in his later films, such as Frenzy, in which murder was shown to be an appalling and protracted spectacle.

But there are other pleasures to be had in the theater, even when a script isn't all it might be, and the Jungle Theater is especially good at providing those pleasures. They smartly have Joel Sass at the helm of this play, and Joel Sass knows how to direct a play, which is a rare skill. There is an abundance of people in this town who can move actors about on the stage and tell them to cheat out slightly to the audience when delivering dialogue, but there are very few people who can assemble all the various elements of a play so that it feels like a all the bits are supposed to fit together; Sass can. I know whereof I speak, by the way: I once played the gardener in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and the cast couldn't come to a consensus on how the play was supposed to be acted. Some of us thought it was a balmy period piece, and overacted accordingly, while others thought it was a drab contemporary affair, and underacted accordingly. The director was no help in this regard, being obsessed, instead, with where people stood on the stage, and so we wound up with a production in which half of the cast was doing one play and the other was doing another.

Sass knows where to put people on the stage, but also how to make the resulting play unified. And that's particularly important in Hitchcock Blonde, as it is a play with some notoriously difficult technical elements. For one thing, as the scholar and his student piece through the remains of the lost Hitchcock play, the frames are projected onto the stage. This could be gimmicky or distracting, and, further, the frames must look like Hitchcock might have lensed them, and Sass manages the difficult task of making these scenes feel inevitable. Of course the images are appearing onstage; how else to tell the story? And they do rather resemble Hitchock, or, at least, resemble a very old movie made in the 20s, with a striking blonde woman (played by Antonette Trussoni) in environments that, due to their noirish lighting, seem somehow menacing. There are a lot of little technical tricks to this play: a sequence, shot by Hitchcock, is projected as he is filming it; at another point in the play, a character appears naked in a shower, and this is represented by projecting a hologram of the woman onto pouring water. Sass not only succeeds at the technical aspects of these stage effects, but they work within the storytelling of the play, as extensions of the story being told, and this is a play where there is a real risk of such scenes coming off as stunts.

Further, Sass is good with actors, and The Jungle has always had its pick of some of the Cities' best. I have a mild criticism of both the female actresses, and I will voice them here, but let me begin by saying both bring much more to their roles than the script requires. The young student is played by Heidi Bakke, and she infuses her character with a jumpy, neurotic energy coupled with an unfeigned sensuality. She has short blond hair in the play, and I think she is supposed to be a Janet Leigh type, but she's a tougher and edgier character than Leigh was. Her professor is supposed to have been drawn to her because she is a Hitchcock type, but Bakke has found something else in the script -- hints of a troubled past and a tendency toward casual criminality -- that she plays up. While Leigh was nervous and skittish, Bakke is tough-talking and slightly dangerous. It's such an interesting performing choice that, in the second half of the play, when she goes boy crazy, it's a disappointment.

The abused wife in the Hitchcock narrative, in the meanwhile, is played by Mikki Daniels, and she has a much harder job, because she is given less to explore. Johnson gives her a lot of dialogue, but much of it feels crass and exploitative, such as a long monologue about her experiences being naked while filming the shower scene. There isn't much to her character beyond the fact that her husband beats her and she's supposed to be smart -- or so she tells us -- and it's not enough. Further, while both Bakke and Daniels' characters must take off their clothes during the play (the men, in the meanwhile, get to remain dressed in another example of how the play replicates cinematic misogyny without offering any real criticism), Daniels' onstage nudity is extended and intentionally voyeuristic. So she has a role that is both shallow and demanding. She affects a sort of high-strung smart alecky demeanor, and she delivers her dialogue as though she just can't stop herself from talking. She often looks terrified, and she has reason to be: not just because her husband sometimes uses her as a punching bag, but because everyone around her wants to use her, and get her clothes off, and give her very little back, including the playwright. Like Bakke, she's better than the role requires.

So my complaint about the actresses is going to sound trifling, and it is, but both affect accents that I found distracting. Bakke had to have an accent, as her character is English, but she speaks with an occasionally incomprehensible working class accent that I took to be Cockney. I don't recall if her character was supposed to be a Cockney or not, but the accent found within earshot of the Bow Bells in London is one of the hardest to imitate that's been produced by the British Isles, and she sometimes trips over it. The English only do regional or working class accents onstage when they must, in part because such accents were used as comic affectations for many years (Cockneys, in particular, were popular figures of fun in the Music Hall), and so even had Bakke mastered the accent, it still might have proven distracting.

Daniels also has an accent, a brassy East Coast one, perhaps from Jersey or the Burroughs of New York. In her instance, the accent sounds stagey, as though she weren't playing a character but a type -- the smartass blonde from 30s screwball comedies that pops their gum and snarls at men. As with Bakke, I found the accent distracting, although other audience member may not be bothered, or care.

There are two men in the play as well, and they deserve mention. Tom Sherohman plays Hitchcock, and he has the director's distinct physicality down. I'm not referring to the filmmakers awesome girth, although Sherohman plays that up, jutting himself out into a crescent shape, but also Hitchock's protruding lower lip and boyishly -- and devilishly -- darting eyes. He speaks in Hitchcock's drawled deadpan, and his performance is great fun. J.C. Cutler, in the meanwhile, plays the academic scholar with a yen for his students, and he's irritable and defensive for much of the play, but, like many academics, has a tendency to simultaneously be condescending and clueless. Cutler is saddled with Johnson's most irritatingly florid dialogue, and the actor does a neat trick with it -- he allows it to be irritating and pompous, and makes it part of his character. He's a very difficult man, but he has a real passion for Hitchock, and in the scenes in which he and his student peer at old frames of film and excitedly discuss the movies they love, he is enormously likable. For those moments, the play is as well, and then Cutler, and the play, get back to being both cocky and unexpectedly thick.

Hitchcock Blonde plays through March 8 at the Jungle Theater; 612.822.7063

Snowman

by Max Sparber
posted on Feb. 03, 2009 - 12:59am

Snowman, the latest play at the Open Eye Figure Theatre, takes place in a land filled with impossible, unexplained transformations. It is set in a vaguely Scandinavian town that is buried in snow, and has been for quite a long time, and will continue to be so, as far as anybody can tell, forever. With the snow came change: The opening scene of the play consists of a bawdy, chummy dialogue between two crows, who, it turns out, were once men. An elderly crone obsessively paints her house while sucking grotesquely on her fingers, which have turned to sugar. And, worst of all, many of the townspeople have just frozen where they stand, a fact that has allowed a puffing, foul-mouthed petty tyrant to take control of the town by virtue of the fact that he, with a mute, treelike assistant, has taken responsibility for removing the frozen bodies. This is the condition of the world at the start of the play, but playwright Kira Obolensky and director and designer Michael Sommers have one additional transformation to add into the story: the appearance of an unexplained and vaguely malevolent snowman on the edge of town, singing Brechtian dirges with alarming and nonsensical lyrics, with whom the townspeople grow obsessed.

That such a story can be represented on the stage seems impossible, and the stage at the Open Eye Figure Theatre is a particularly small one -- a man, lying down, could touch one end of the stage with his toes and the other with the top of his head. Sommers specializes in the impossible. He is sometimes known as a puppeteer, but that isn't quite right. He does puppetry, yes, and is superlative at it -- this show offers dozens of different sorts of puppets, from the crows that open the play, who look painted on flat sheets of pressboard, cut out, and then hinged together, to a scurrying mouse that consists of nothing more than a bit of fur tied to a wire, but is nonetheless capable of leaping about the stage with astounding abandon, repeatedly upturning a large soup bowl. But Sommers ' skills are broader than that -- he has a taste for all kinds of theatrical legerdemain, and Snowman is full of eye-popping stage effects. The way snow is represented, as an example. It often appears pouring out of an overhead drum, which is a time-honored trick for creating snow, although generally the drum is hidden from view and baffled to make no noise; Sommers does not bother with this, instead having the drum fully visible and clattering constantly. At other times, Sommers puts animated snow onto the stage using a projector, where it catches the cast and the set and drifts down as a glowing blizzard. There is a lot of inventiveness packed into this 50-odd-minute show, and only some of it is in the stagecraft.

Sommers was smart to work with Kira Obolensky. She's a writer who specializes in clever examinations of the fantastic. Perhaps her best-known play is Lobster Alice, a fictional rumination on an actual historic event: In 1946, Walt Disney brought Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali to his studio to work on a failed project called Destino. Obolensky used this tale as a jumping off point for the story of a young animator who is teamed with Dali, and who finds his life invaded, not merely by Dali's oversized personality, but by literal expressions of the surrealist imagination, such as the titular lobsters, which start to show up in unexpected places.

Obolensky can be a frustrating playwright, because she does not like to give away too much, and this play isn't terribly concerned with explaining itself. There is no specific reason the town is buried in snow. The play's various transformations are treated nonchalantly, as though having a woman's digits become sugar weren't something anybody should be surprised by. The snowman comes without warning and, later in the play, undergoes a climactic transformation of his own that is likewise unexpected and without clear cause. It may be a bit of a bother for audiences who demand that every little detail be explained and justified, but the play is something of a fairy tale, and anyone with a passing familiarity with their Grimm knows that such things are rather beside the point when telling a tale of the fantastic. The fantastic just happens, and the only really interesting thing is how people react to it.

Obolensky and Sommers give us four people, in particular. There are more, but these four are actually played by humans. The protagonist of the story, if it can be said to have one, is Freya, a young girl who narrates many of the play's events, and participates in some of the most important plot points. She watched her parents freeze one day, and is just barely managing to stay alive, thanks, in part, to food that appears without warning, perhaps smuggled to her by the mouse, mentioned earlier. She is played by Emily Zimmer in a remarkably matter-of-fact way. The character is too young for nuance, so she tends to just blurt out whatever she's thinking, often in argument with her younger brother, who is played by a grayish puppet that could be mistaken for a ghost, were it not so insistently alive. The puppet, for instance, carries a stick with him and uses it to prod the snow, just because he likes how it feels.

The remaining three human actors all play townspeople. Julian McFaul, in black top hat and darkly rimmed eyes, is the town's mayor, and he plays the character as bewildered and paranoid. The performance is comical, up to a point, but when the mayor sees the snowman as a political threat, he moves from bumbling to malicious in an instant. If he is the town's most powerful man, the least powerful is a drunk named Duncan, played by Lee Chriski, who drowns himself in mint schnapps while reciting drunkard's epigrams, such as "Every time I ask someone the time, I get a different answer."

The last human character is Gossmar, played by Elise Langer, but perhaps calling her character human is a stretch: She is the older crone with the sugar fingers, and she staggers about the stage, muttering to herself. She has an elaborate relationship with the snowman, which, as is typical of Obolensky, is not so much detailed as implied. But she fusses around the creature, rebuilding him when the Mayor destroys him. The snowman begins life on stage as an illustration, and then becomes a semi-animated projection, and then a knee-high puppet who dances a wild jig. Under Gossmar's care, the Snowman grows to an imposing size, and, as she circles him, wrapping him in a scarf she made, he suddenly reaches out to her, wrapping his arms around her in an unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, embrace. For all the imagination in the play's scripting and production, its best moments are these -- the moments when its fantastical creatures reveal themselves to be capable of small, intimate human gestures.

Snowman plays at the Open Eye Figure Theatre through February 28. Call 612.874.6338 for tickets and reservations.

The Turducken

by Max Sparber
posted on Dec. 19, 2008 - 5:58pm

The Bedlam Theatre has created a piece of dinner theater for their Christmas show, which they have named The Turducken, after a rather absurd holiday invention that consists of a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which, in turn, is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken, all of which is then filled with stuffing and sometimes sausage. Sometimes this whole monstrosity of bird meat is then deep fried.

As you might expect from a play named after such an absurd creation, the Bedlam's production, scripted by Josef Evans, is heavy on the ridiculous. They've decided to pretend to be a legitimate dinner theater in the midst of a meltdown. Their cast and crew are drunk and rebelling, and, to make matters worse, they are rebelling against a genuinely terribly idea for a Christmas play: a musical theater update of Anton Chekhov's morose drama The Seagull. The update is wretched and un-Christmasy, somehow managing only to retain the essential cruelty of Chekhov's text but mangling every other detail. For instance, The Seagull's relationship between the aging Soren and his actress sister Arkadina has here been transformed into a sibling rivalry between a former potato sack manufacturer who wants to start his own Renaissance Festival and his sister Wakadinga, who performs a Puke and Snot-style routine at the actual Renaissance Festival. The brother, MuckleJohn, is played by a woman, Maren Ward, and tends toward telling obtuse bodily function jokes and then playing a pan flute. The sister, Wakadinga, is played by a man, Don Mabley-Allen, and she speaks with a thick Russian accent (the only one in the play to do so) and carries herself like a mixture of Zsa Zsa Gabor and an ancient Gypsy in a horror film. One of them goes through gender reassignment surgery midway through the play and becomes a lounge singer. With this sort of script, who wouldn't get drunk and rebel?

This approach to theater can be quite exhausting, as the structure gives the company an excuse simply to mock genre conventions and to pass off bad work as a parody of bad work. To the Bedlam's credit, they are just too weird for that. Yes, there is some tweaking of our expectations in attending dinner theater, particularly in the form of a round-faced, bearded man in a green Santa coat with white collar and cuffs, a garland of leaves and berries around his shaved head. He is introduced as Grandpa Christmas, and is our Emcee for the night, and he is evidently very drunk (the whole show, we are told, is sponsored by a cheap beer, and characters are constantly seen holding tall cans of suds). As played by Jason Vogen, he has a grand, mellifluous voice and a bewildered and occasionally surly demeanor -- he opens the show with a Christmas song about the possibility of dying during the holidays, and occasionally weakly attempts to interact with the audience, which he informs us he is contractually obligated to do. "Where are you from?" he asks one person. Upon hearing the response, he blearily nods. "Many people come from there," he says, and then wanders away.

For the most part, the Bedlam steers clear of simply parodying the conventions of dinner theater Christmas shows, using The Turducken as an opportunity for inventive clowning, and this is one of their strong points. They have on hand some very, very funny performers. There is, for instance, a fellow named Christopher Allen, who plays a character named Bobby, who the play treats as though he is a genuine celebrity in the real world who has graciously agreed to participate in this musical Christmas play, and, as a result, has woven the story of his rise to fame into the revised Seagull. He's a thin fellow with a blond mullet, a nose ring, expressive eyes (and a taste for winking at audience members), and a tendency to just start screaming when he is upset, which is often. He prowls the stage, putting the moves on a tortured playwright (Jon Cole), looking like a junior high school boy who has learned his seduction techniques from watching repeats of Showgirls. I believe he is supposed to be the play's version of the schoolteacher Medvedenko from The Seagull, but, honestly, at this point, who can tell? Whatever he is supposed to be, Allen is outrageously funny.

If the play suffers from anything, it is, quite often, too scattershot in its approach to comedy -- the play never settles into a clear satiric groove, instead simply following every outrageous impulse that pops up. But this is praising with a faint damning. Perhaps sometimes The Turducken tosses out a scene that falls flat, or is simply incomprehensible (and there are a few of these), but if the resulting play can be frustratingly messy, it is also gloriously messy. There are a lot of Christmas plays around town right now, many of them annual productions, resulting in theater that has had all its rough edges smoothed down and every little detail perfected. Attending one of these is a bit like going to a formal Christmas dinner, and there is nothing wrong with that, but every so often you want to get a little drunk and a little crazy for the holidays.

The Turducken plays through December 21 at the Bedlam Theatre, 612-338-9817.

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