LIZA WEISSTUCH

Lonely hearts night

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:16:47 GMT

The Magnetic Fields at Somerville Theatre, February 14, 2008
Merritt had a tummy ache from dinner at Porter Exchange. (“So don’t fuck with me,” he warned.)

Primary colors

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:43:24 GMT

It’s the political season on area stages
Now that the holiday hubbub is behind us, we have no dreams of white Christmases or visions of Sugar Plum Fairies to warm a theatergoer’s heart.

BOMBS AWAY: The American Repertory Theatre brings Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen to Cambridge.

Now that the holiday hubbub is behind us, we have no dreams of white Christmases or visions of Sugar Plum Fairies to warm a theatergoer’s heart. Enter primary fever to heat things up. With the election year upon us, it seems the candidates’ issue-laden chatter — not to mention their none-too-subtle aspiring to power — will be reflected on area stages.

Merrimack Repertory Theatre takes a satirical look at the primaries with the regional premiere of THE MISSIONARY POSITION (February 7–March 2), Keith Reddin’s lampoon of the sparring between a chief fundraiser and a religious adviser on the campaign trail. Politics shifts to the background but is no less influential elsewhere. Next week, the American Repertory Theatre opens COPENHAGEN (January 5–February 3), Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning play offering multiple speculations about a visit German physicist Werner Heisenberg paid to his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr, in 1941. A world war and other considerations have pitted the old friends against each other in a race to create the atom bomb.

Beltway chatter — that of the Reagan era — is a baseline in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning epic ANGELS IN AMERICA (January 18–February 16). Boston Theatre Works presents the two parts of Kushner’s “gay fantasia on national themes,” Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, in repertory at the Calderwood Pavilion under the direction of Jason Southerland and Nancy Curran Willis.

BREAD AND PUPPET THEATRE once again takes on the Big Themes — Guantánamo and other post-9/11 shenanigans — with its papier-mâché politics in its updating of Dante, The Divine Reality Comedy, and the more kid-friendly Divine Reality Comedy Circus, both coming to the Boston Center for the Arts (February 7-10).

Next issue on the political agenda: gay marriage. SpeakEasy Stage Company muses on the issue when it gives SOME MEN its New England premiere (February 29–March 29). Tony winner Terrence McNally’s play is an exploration of gay history, prompted by the occasion of a gay wedding. Zeitgeist Stage Company also casts an eye on gay culture with Matthew Todd’s dark comedy BLOWING WHISTLES (January 18–February 9), which considers relationships in a liberated society where a hook-up is just a mouse click away.

Politics gets the academic treatment in the Huntington Theatre Company’s area premiere of THIRD (January 4–February 3), by the late Wendy Wasserstein. The Pulitzer-winning writer’s last play hinges on a showdown between a liberal New England college professor and a conservative jock student, one that provokes her to reassess her own ideas about politics, Shakespeare, and life.

Glitter but no glam

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:14:18 GMT

Electric Warriors Glamstravaganza at Great Scott, Decemebr 8, 2007
Billing a show as a “Glamstravaganza” sets up some specific expectations: glitter, light shows, epic anthems, stylish sleaze, full-length knitted body stockings, more glitter.

Cheerleaders of the pack

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:21:31 GMT

The Go! Team, Paradise, October 25, 2007
There’s one thing the Go! Team’s cheerleading frontwoman, Ninja, does not like to do: walk.

Bye-bye blarney

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:24:28 GMT

Brendan introduces the American Ronan Noone
Ronan Noone is flummoxed.

Ronan Noon

Brendan| Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston | October 12–November 17 | $15-$50 | 617.266.0800

Ronan Noone is flummoxed. He’s not sure why the focal point of the poster for his new play is a glass of whiskey. It looks like the poster for a dyed-in-the-wool Irish play. Whereas Brendan, which is set for its world premiere by the Huntington Theatre Company, marks a shift for the Irish-born scribe whose Ireland-set dramas have all premiered in Boston. The playwright here is exorcising his Irish ghosts.

“It’s a comedy,” Noone explains. “I know people expect profound, life-changing works. Theater seems to be carrying that noose around its neck. I believe in entertaining and comedy and at same time showing how people find their social graces. People are going to see that poster and think: it’s fucking Conor McPherson going on again, all the ghosts coming in again, a fucking Irish guy drinking alone again. I wrote a comedy — there are no pedophiles, just a good-hearted prostitute and fun-loving people, a few Americans coming to terms with America. People’ll come out clicking their heels.”

Noone’s best-known work, the Baile trilogy, does features hard-bitten, hard-living Irish characters on their native soil. His latest plays, however, focus on those navigating life in a new country. Brendan is the story of an immigrant who receives devastating news from home that throws a monkey wrench into his already challenging plans to find companionship and learn to drive — dual aspirations that director Justin Waldman sees as a stripped-down American Dream. “Instead of a big house,” says Waldman, “he just wants a car and someone to talk to.”

Although Brendan is the first of Noone’s American works, The Atheist, which is about a corrupt Kansas journalist, found its way to the stage earlier — in New York, in London, and, earlier this season, at the Huntington. Both plays got their start as part of the Huntington’s annual Breaking Ground Festival of new-play readings. Noone, who moved to Boston in 1994, calls Brendan his “transition” play. The language and the rhythms have diverged from the traditional framework he’s worked within, not least because his own perspective has changed.

El Triunfo

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:48:15 GMT

A real winner
The more high-end restaurants that open in a concentrated area, the harder it becomes to find a decent meal that doesn’t break the bank.

Hot Tomatoes

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:45:12 GMT

Some like it hot
Since they opened in March, the crew at Hot Tomatoes has been going through cases — yes, cases — of tomatoes every day.

Endurance act

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:20:40 GMT

Backstage at the Boston Theater Marathon
Playwright Janet Kenney was wearing a tiara and serving as a kind of royal den mother when I checked in at the Calderwood Pavilion Sunday for the Boston Theater Marathon.

Robert D. Murphy and Kelly Lawman in Garry Garrison’s Storm on Storm

Playwright Janet Kenney was wearing a tiara and serving as a kind of royal den mother when I checked in at the Calderwood Pavilion Sunday for the Boston Theater Marathon, the ninth annual 10-hour assault of 10-minute plays. “There’s coffee, tea, water, and everything you need over there on the table, and if there’s anything you need that you don’t see, tell me and we’ll get it,” she said as she greeted actors throughout the day and collected and dispatched each hour’s batch of performers to the green room at the 50-minute mark. “Your majesty, I will go forth and conquer,” said Brian Quint of Way Theatre Artists, laying his hands on her tiara as he headed backstage with the flock of performers for the 2-to-3-pm slot.

Whether they’re actors or audience members, most folks come to the BTM — which is produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre as a fundraiser for the Theater Community Benevolent Fund — for just a short stretch. A few, though, are there all day: the tech folks, committed volunteers like Kenney, and BPT managing director Jacob Strautmann and artistic director Kate Snodgrass, who breezed into the check-in, grabbed a Double Stuff Oreo, and fled back to her announcer’s box in the theater. Around 1:15 pm, Strautmann dispatched a pizza order for the guys managing tech in secluded booths. “This is the most important thing we do all day. Some of those guys don’t leave the booth — except maybe for a few minutes on top of the hour for a bathroom break.”

Meanwhile, the upstairs green room — and subsequently, the stage — played host to a parade of hookers, hillbillies, hustlers, nuns, clowns, degenerates, and sundry lost, lonely souls. They carted boxes, trash bags, roller skates, rifles, faux chain mail, and tennis rackets. A few of the actors and directors delved into Kenney’s black-tie-banquet-inspired basket of moisturizers, pain relievers, and lozenges. They nibbled on Chips Ahoy and Cheez-Its and shared strategy.

“I have rules for doing the Marathon — virtually all of which I’ve broken,” confessed Vincent E. Siders, director of Ed Bullins’s Mitch’s Blues. “Two cast members, no props, and no cues. I’ve got five cast members and tons of food. I’ve only got two cues, though. I’m happy about that.”

Jeremiah Kissel was sporting Elizabethan threads and an artificially bloodstained eye. Someone nearby exclaimed, “You must be Shakespeare over there.” “Christopher Marlowe,” he corrected with a glower, clearly getting in character for his role in Robert Brustein’s Enter William Shakespeare.

My Diner

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:51:00 GMT

Yours, mine, and ours
Telling anyone about My Diner is bound to trigger a round of Abbott and Costello–like jousting.

Close quarters

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:39:03 GMT

The Theater Offensive’s Surviving the Nian ; Devanaughn’s [sic]
Surviving the Nian is a love story, a cultural study, and a sprawling musical in the tradition of a home-for-the-holidays play — sort of.

Games people play

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:36:50 GMT

The Conquest of the South Pole; Memory House
They’ve lost their jobs, and pinball and schnapps aren’t cutting it as amusement any longer.

Demeter’s daughter

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:10:30 GMT

Noah Haidle keeps mum about Persephone
This preview was almost never written.

Noah Haidle

This preview was almost never written. I was sitting in a South End coffee shop with Noah Haidle after a rehearsal of Persephone and he made a quip about cancer. A gulp of coffee went down the wrong way and got trapped in a rising bubble of laughter, and I thought it was the end. He munched on salt-and-vinegar potato chips and waited for my spasm to subside.

Haidle’s deadpan sarcasm has an effect on people, in life as in his plays. But to hear him tell it, that’s not his intention. He says what he needs to say, he explains, and if people react, so be it. At 28, he considers it “amazing” that his career as a playwright has lasted three years. “I don’t have any underlying motive in anything I write. I think a play is like a math equation: you set up a problem and you solve it. There’s no ‘agenda.’ Nothing I have to say about anything is very interesting. My last objective in the world is to be provocative.”

Claims of an antiseptic approach aren’t what you’d expect from a writer whose breakout play, Mr. Marmalade, is about a four-year-old girl with an abusive businessman as an imaginary friend. In Persephone, which gets its world premiere this Friday courtesy of the Huntington Theatre Company after being read at last spring’s Breaking Ground Festival, the title character is a statue. We meet this representation of the goddess Demeter during the Renaissance, as she’s being created by a Venetian sculptor. Flash forward to today, when she stands in an American park, getting eroded by acid rain and pigeon shit as she bears witness to encounters both humdrum and horrific.

Haidle isn’t particularly interested in talking about the work, except to say that the idea emerged one day when he was in Bryant Park and noticed a statue of Goethe. “I thought I’d be a little depressed just watching the kids go up and down all day.” But he’s either the most nonchalant working playwright alive or his own best publicist. By not revealing specifics, he piques your curiosity.

So how does he respond to the angry letters he’s received about past plays? Or the laudatory ones? They’re “gratifying,” he says. But that gratification is a mere by-product of his job, which is to solve a problem, tell a story, and not be boring. His interest in philosophy seems to figure into this calculation; it was his major at Princeton. But his background does not. Haidle hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan, which he considers plenty boring. “Biography,” he declares, “has no pertinence to anything I do.”

Coming up Daisey

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:24:14 GMT

Invincible Summer and Monopoly! head for Cambridge
Mike Daisey has a blog. But unlike millions, Daisey also has an archive that goes back to 2001.

Mike Daisy

Mike Daisey has a blog. So do millions of other people. But unlike those millions, Daisey has an archive that goes back to 2001. (That’s before Gawker!) He posts excerpts and links to everything that interests him. Subjects range from the FBI’s breach of the Patriot Act to David Eggers to gadgets to the decline in confession among Catholics.

“It was intended to be unfiltered,” he says over the phone from his Brooklyn home. “I make it a point not to edit, just to post things. Over time, it starts to assume its own personality. It’s funny how things transmute into art. . . . I follow a lot of open-source things, and I think it’s interesting to disclose an on-line version of the internal stream of things.”

Daisey’s monologues work the same way. In Invincible Summer and Monopoly!, both of which he’ll perform here courtesy of American Repertory Theatre, he takes seemingly incongruent topics and mixes them with personal experiences to create the dramatic equivalent of a classic cocktail: there’s a balance of strong, sweet, and sour components and a few dashes of bitters. Invincible Summer, for example, mixes 9/11, the history of the New York subway system, the performer’s move to Manhattan, and memories of his parents’ deteriorating marriage. Most monologuists work from a script; Daisey has only an outline. Each night the same story emerges differently; he could be a hip-hop artist freestyling, or a Baptist preacher.

This approach dovetails with his belief that too much exposure to something shocking, like the images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, has a desensitizing effect. “Sometime when you play an image like that over and over, you can turn it into porn, drain it of all meaning. There’s a demonstration aspect to showing your life on stage. If I clearly outline what happened to me, people feel like they can talk about what happened to them. . . . Nothing I can think of has been so well documented and had so little synthesis. . . . I think that’s why there’s weariness with the phrase ‘9/11.’ People just shut down.”

That also happens with corporate supremacy, a focus of Monopoly!

It’s a man’s world

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:58:40 GMT

Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s all-male Titus Andronicus
It’s hardly Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work, but in the Bard’s early career, Titus Andronicus was one of his most popular plays.

John Kuntz and the Goths

It’s hardly Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work, but in the Bard’s early career, Titus Andronicus was one of his most popular plays. Chalk that up to the same plot elements that draw crowds to everything from mobster blockbusters to sci-fi slaughter fests — vengeance, gore, fatal jealousy, twisted families.

“Elizabethans loved a gory revenge tragedy,” says David R. Gammons, who’s directing the show for Actors’ Shakespeare Project. “There’s an unease among scholars [toward Titus]. They’re leery of the feeling that it’s a popular piece as opposed to profound. Like horror movies and soap operas, it appeals to our baser instincts in wonderful ways. It forces us to confront the dark places our psyches go. It allows us an opportunity to think about grief and how we grieve. Its violence grows out of grieving.”

Although Titus seems like a bloodbath, it’s the recurring imagery of tears that strikes Gammons — especially given that Tamora is a woman and it’s the men who shed most of the tears. The Queen of the Goths (who are vanquished by the Romans) is so brutal — not least in encouraging rape — that some women in the company were uncomfortable about playing the role. So evolved the idea to stage the play with an all-male cast.

Such casting was, as everybody who’s seen Shakespeare in Love knows, de rigueur in Shakespeare’s time. But these days, all-male casts often signal an element of camp. For Gammons, staging the production as it would have been done in 1590s London helped him and the company better understand their roles as contemporary theater makers. But the troupe has been confronted with the intricacies of gender politics, which are more complex now than then.

“We want to play the truth of femininity of the [female] characters,” he says. “It’s not fake boobs and wigs, but we had to differentiate men from women. We asked: what if we determine another vocabulary for ways in which men differentiated from women visually? I imagined them an inversion: what if, in world of Titus, men have hair and women don’t? It became an idea how to make it clear off the bat how this body is different from that.”

Spring stages

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:21:46 GMT

From hoofers to Mormons and more
As we recover from turning the clocks ahead and making our day’s journey into night a bit longer, area stages are taking a cue from Mother Nature.

INVINCIBLE SUMMER: Mike Daisy moves to NYC.

As we recover from turning the clocks ahead and making our day’s journey into night a bit longer, area stages are taking a cue from Mother Nature and bursting into bloom. The next few months offer a garden variety of musicals, new plays, and stalwarts.

Even the preening and singing of the birds returning North will be eclipsed when Chita Rivera shimmies into the Colonial Theatre to tell her life’s story — in song and dance. The sassy septuagenarian hoofer appears courtesy of Broadway Across America/Boston in CHITA RIVERA: THE DANCER’S LIFE (May 1-13). Written by four-time Tony winner Terrence McNally, the musical chronicles Rivera’s rise from aspiring dancer to Broadway legend.

Less razzle-dazzle but no less compelling is Steven Fales’s life story, which Boston Theatre Works brings to the Boston Center for the Arts in CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY (April 26–May 19). Fales wrote and performs the show, a comic account of how a Midwestern boy and exemplary Mormon came out, was excommunicated, and landed in New York as a high-end call boy.

American Repertory Theatre brings Mike Daisey to Zero Arrow Theatre to tell a very different story of relocating to New York. In INVINCIBLE SUMMER (April 4-29), the Off Broadway darling recounts the culture shock of moving from Seattle to Gotham. Everything only intensifies after 9/11.

SpeakEasy Stage Company draws your attention to a more Southern locale in crisis in the Boston professional premiere of Alfred Uhry & Jason Robert Brown’s PARADE (May 12–June 16). It’s a grand-scale musical based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn Jew who moved to Atlanta and in 1913 found himself accused of murdering a 13-year-old girl. But if you think lynching sounds bad, wait till Actors’ Shakespeare Project breaks out the plasma for the Bard’s early bloodbath TITUS ANDRONICUS (March 29-April 22).

Tensions run high in SouthCity Theatre Company’s production of Naomi Wallace’s ONE FLEA SPARE (March 16-25) at Devanaughn Theatre. Set during the Great Plague of 1665, the play examines the class differences and desires that emerge when a British couple are quarantined with a sailor and an orphan girl. Housing circumstances also trigger interactions in Devanaughn’s own production of Melissa James Gibson’s [sic] (April 19–May 6), in which a frustrated editor, a misemployed composer, and an aspiring auctioneer living in the same building navigate urban life. Think Friends reimagined with sharp but underemployed downtown-artist types.

Pawns in a plot of horror

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:22:39 GMT

Leslie Epstein's King of the Je ws on stage
When Leslie Epstein’s novel King of the Jews was published in 1979, it was hailed as ambitious by all and deemed controversial by many.

Sweet Tooth Boston’s Mom’s Cinnamon Bun

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:20:19 GMT

A twister blows in
Spirals are the shape of marvel.

Grace notes

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:19:35 GMT

Sacred Hearts , States of Grace
Among the shows that open each season, a few stand out like a pair of stiletto heels spotted in a swarm of rubber-soled footwear.

A winter’s tale

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:16:26 GMT

The season ahead on area stages
Even as the family drama of your holiday comes to a close, there’s no need to don a kerchief and settle in for a long winter’s nap.

ALMOST, MAINE: “A charming midwinter night’s dream” from SpeakEasy.

Even as the family drama of your holiday comes to a close, there’s no need to don a kerchief and settle in for a long winter’s nap. The windows may be frosty, but the city’s stages are in full bloom. The season gets off to a lush start with Noël — Coward, that is. The outdoor Publick Theatre comes in from the cold with the writer’s 1932 comedy about a ménage à trois, DESIGN FOR LIVING (January 4-27 at the Boston Center for the Arts); Lyric Stage Company of Boston honcho Spiro Veloudos directs the once scandalous cocktail of wit and worldliness. Meanwhile, Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin helms a masterpiece by a literary leviathan of another era, Anton Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD (January 5–February 4 at the Boston University Theatre). The production features a new adaptation by Richard Nelson and multiple Tony nominee Kate Burton as Madame Ranevskaya. (Iris Fanger’s preview is on page 18.)

Other theatrical titans are making appearances in Boston this winter. Olympia Dukakis reprises the role she played on Broadway in Martin Sherman’s ROSE (presented by the Celebrity Series January 16-21 at the Calderwood Pavilion), a one-woman show in which a Holocaust survivor recounts her experience in Ukraine and the Warsaw Ghetto and then looks back on her older years in Miami. Two-time Tony winner Cherry Jones, a founding member of the American Repertory Theatre, pays a visit in the role she originated in John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning DOUBT (February 6-18 at the Colonial Theatre). This one’s the story of a school administrator, a nun, who seeks the truth about a priest she suspects may be molesting children. Truth is also what the characters crave in SACRED HEARTS (January 26–February 17), which Zeitgeist Stage Company is presenting at the BCA. The tender comedy is set in a Canadian village where faith and reason collide when a Virgin Mary statue seems to move on its own.

Faith plays a part in Leslie Epstein’s KING OF THE JEWS (February 21–March 10) as well. Boston Playwrights’ Theatre presents this dark comedy about the Judenrat, the council of elders who governed the ghettos of Poland. In the play, which Epstein adapted from his 2003 novel, they struggle with the question, as he puts it, “Should Jews collaborate with evil to rescue their own people?” The American Repertory Theatre steps up to the adaptation plate when it brings British director Neil Bartlett to Cambridge to re-create his staging of Charles Dickens’s OLIVER TWIST (February 17–March 24 at the Loeb Drama Center). A hit in London, Bartlett’s adaptation evokes Victorian music halls tinged with Skid Row seediness.

West Side Kitchen

LIZA WEISSTUCH — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:31:43 GMT

A new golden oldie
West Side Kitchen is part diner, part Norman Rockwell luncheonette, and entirely cozy.