Kate Mulley

This weekend I caught two plays that at first didn’t seem to have much in common, but in hindsight are very much about different takes on spirituality and religion.

The first was Rescue Me (A Postmodern Classic with Snacks) by Michi Barall and produced by Ma Yi Theatre Company. It’s a remix of Iphigenia at Tauris, a Greek play I’m not familiar with. Luckily, the production anticipates this lack of knowledge and provides a wealth of information in the program and an interval with snacks and a short Q&A session with a Classics scholar (it changes each night). But the text itself also does a great deal of explaining the story through metatheatricality and cartoons of off-stage characters on a stack of televisions downstage. Some of the technical wizardry is off-putting, some of it is clever and it occasionally moves the story forward. I felt that way about many aspects of the script as well. There were elements of true humor and wit, but also uses of fairly tired cliches (the one that bothered me the most-while still making me laugh slightly-was portraying Thaos, the ruler of Tauris, as Elvis– a trope that is put to good use in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but rarely works elsewhere).  The acting was, on the whole, quite strong, but my favorite part of the play was an ironic pas de deux between Orestes and Pylades, two men who have ventured to Athena’s temple to return her statue to Greece but have discovered that only one will live to return home. I found it to be the most contemporary and touching part of a play that was filled with a lot of contemporary references and images.

My other theatrical adventure this weekend was A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick by Kia Corthron. I’ve seen a good number of shows at Playwrights Horizons this season and this was by far the messiest. I usually applaud theatrical messiness, because I believe it shows an ability to take artistic risks and challenge the audience, but the messiness that I encountered in Crick seemed more dramaturgical than risky. The play follows an African man studying ecology and theology in the United States. In the first act he’s living with a woman who has taken him in after a church trip to Ethiopia and her high school aged daughter. Her son and husband drowned during Hurricane Katrina and she suffers from visions and hallucinations. The second act takes place seven years later when he returns to America, disappointed in his inability to accomplish what he set out to. But the play takes a circuitous route through religious fervor and expectations and baptism and reunited love and dream sequences. The political nature of the play also leans more towards preaching facts to the audience rather than creating dramatic situations between the characters, which I suppose is the burden of writing a character who is a preacher and an ecologist. The use of water as a metaphor is powerful, but isn’t enough to sustain a long play. Again the acting and design are very strong, but the play falls flat a little in its desire to tie too many story lines together with too many facts about water consumption in the world.

I believe I’m also being harsher on these plays now than I was while watching them. I sat through both plays and truly appreciated both of them. It’s only after dissecting them with other people who have seen them that I’ve refined my opinions. Both of them were solid pieces of work with very good elements within them, but the final product fell ever so flat.

Sunday I’m seeing Annie Baker’s new play at Rattlestick, which I’m quite excited about and Monday is the NyLon Fusion benefit, hosted by Paul Haggis and featuring Wynton Marsalis, which I have to say I’m a little more excited about (no offense to Ms Baker, whose work I really like). I’ve also been reading some good plays in anticipation of my next turn writing Play of the Week at the Book Shop. It’s quite a fierce competition amongst the staff to see whose play sells the best and I’m hoping for a dark horse victory. Will be sure to link to my review when it’s posted online.

I’m a little late posting about this, but I went to see Clybourne Park at Playwrights Horizons last week and really enjoyed it. I loved The Pain and the Itch when I saw it at the Royal Court back in 2007 and had high hopes for this new play by Bruce Norris. It’s a riff on A Raisin in the Sun. A couple is moving out of their house in Clybourne Park and they find out that a black family has bought the house. 50 years later, in the same house, a white couple hope to renovate and move into the same house. It’s a grim play, with lots of laughs and self-recognition. It plays with stereotypes effectively and efficiently and while I was surprised by what felt like an abrupt end of Act 1, by the beginning of Act 2, I understood its necessity to the structure of the play.

The cast was great, the direction solid, with constant banter, arguing and conflict. A lot of fun to watch and definitely lots of material for post-theatre discussion.

In non-theatrical news, Pierce Brosnan came into the book shop last week and rendered me cotton-mouthed. After he left the information desk, a customer asked if we got celebrities in the shop often, I said “yes, but this was our first Bond.”

I’m also just starting to get myself into my work for Nylon Fusion Collective. I’m both dramaturging their production of Fuente Ovejuna and starting a Writer’s Collective. Applications for the Collective were due today and we have two weeks to select the members. Lots of strong applicants makes it a tough job, but I’m looking forward to reading some plays, getting to know new writers and seeing how we can develop some exciting new work together.

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.