Kate Mulley

courtesy of Theatre Communications Group

This week was my turn to write the Play of the Week at the Drama Book Shop. Here’s my pick. I’ve seen both plays here and in Edinburgh, so it seemed like a good choice. I also found Enda Walsh completely lovely and charming when I met him at the NHB office and during the talk-back after The New Electric Ballroom last month.

I currently have a stack of plays from the library that I need to read, Caryl Churchill’s Plays 1 (I’m much more familiar with her later plays), Theresa Rebeck’s Plays II, Other People by Christopher Shinn and The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane. I also have a stack of plays that I own and still haven’t read. This sort of thing was easier when I was doing a Masters and didn’t have a full-time job.

Three nights, three very different shows.

Wednesday night I saw Creature at the Ohio Theater. It’s a co-production between Page 73 and New Georges, two new writing groups/companies in the city and it’s a fascinating piece of work. I was thoroughly engaged by the play, even when I didn’t understand what I was watching. It’s about a woman at the turn of the 15th century who has visions of devils and Jesus and tries to reconcile these experiences with her role as wife and mother. It’s a very modern play, despite its setting, and the deisgn and performances were really outstanding. I personally found the end a little abrupt (something that I’m especially aware of because I think I’m inclined to that too), but very much enjoyed it.

Thursday night was the Superhero Clubhouse benefit for their new play Neptune. I had a few friends involved in this production and despite its location in Long Island City (which to be honest isn’t actually that hard to get to), I was excited to see their new show. It’s a very charming musical about water, a man who slowly turns into a fish, a whale trying to get to London so she can meet Prince William and people who try to save the world from destruction. In a nutshell. I found it moving and captivating. Last performance is tonight.

Then Friday I finally saw the production of Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre. I don’t think I’ve seen it before, and it was a great production of it to see. I had a seat “onstage” which was tiny and while I occasionally had to turn around to see what was going on behind me, it was cool to be so close to the actors in such a bare bones production. I can’t really think of anything negative to say about it. There’s a really incredible moment in the third act that I don’t want to spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it and would like to (it runs through January) and I left appreciating the play and Thornton Wilder more than I did before seeing it.

Yesterday provided some theatre of its own as I went to the Harvard-Yale game in New Haven. What a spectacle! Like street performance, but no one knows they’re performing. It’s always interesting to attend these things as an outside observer, because it makes you feel more like an audience member than a participant.

Yesterday afternoon I caught the matinee of Circle, Mirror, Transformation, the Playwrights Horizons show that has been extended twice. It’s about an acting class in a town in Vermont and totally brought me back to the good old days of Acting I my freshman winter. It’s a lot of lying around, becoming self-aware and on stage it was surprisingly compelling. Because it’s a play about “the craft”, but also about laypeople who want to learn how to act, it’s a very inclusive play. The characters range from a slightly awkward teenager who dreams of playing Maria in West Side Story (who was basically me, she even had my birthday!) to the husband of the teacher. The characters spend 6 weeks with one another and go through the process of self-discovery that acting classes can wring from you. It was an ultimately satisfying piece of theater that showed some real honesty and humanity and made me laugh pretty consistently from beginning to end.

Tonight I just saw a workshop at the Guggenheim of a piece by Ariana Reines called Miss St’s Hieroglyphic Suffering. It was one of those pieces that I read the blurb about beforehand but didn’t really think I needed to and then thanked god that there was a talk back with the writer, who explained it so well and so hilariously that I enjoyed the evening much more once it had been contextualized. Miss St was an schizophrenic asylum patient written about by Karl Jung and the performance was a monologue taken from his recorded notes of her ravings and Reines’ own fleshing out of that. She also did a reading of some of her poetry and there was a charming reception in the Guggenheim foyer with delicious cookies and chardonnay that I forced down (two glasses).

I believe both of these writers are women in their late twenties. This sort of thing used to make me jealous, but more and more I’m just glad quirky females writers are represented and successful. And maybe I’m more at peace with my own career choices/trajectory.

Thursday night I saw a marionette version of Twelfth Night at La Mama. 16 marionettes, 3 tea trays and lots of enviable dishware (there was one particular samovar that I would not know what to do with, but would still like to own). We were given binoculars before the show started, but I found I used them about half the time. The puppeteers occasionally played scenes and parts themselves, which was distractingly meta-theatrical, but oftentimes, amusing. Ultimately, I laughed quite a bit at their interpretation of the play, but was more impressed with how clever the play itself is as opposed to the decision to use marionettes. It was a case of great idea, ok execution. So Shakespeare wins this particular battle with a company adapting his work, as opposed to his battle with Punchdrunk, which I think Punchdrunk wins. Sorry, Shakespeare, you didn’t really anticipate the whole site-specific performance art movement.