Culture Surfing

CHILD’S PLAY: Co-writer/director Christian Danley and his son, Benjamin Danley

Griefers, the world premiere comedy at Dad’s Garage Theatre’s Top Shelf space, follows two men in their early 30s who take more satisfaction from video games than their real lives. They particularly enjoy blasting bad guys in “first-person shooters,” which the glossary in the play’s program defines as “A very immersive style of gameplay that makes you feel as though you are inside the game.”

Immersiveness turns out to be one of the most effective weapons in Griefers’ arsenal, as writer/directors Christian Danley and Randy Havens show more insights into online behaviors than most other pop dramatizations in our instant-messaging, blogtastic virtual culture. For instance, the film Funny People from Judd Apatow (whom Griefers gently mocks) includes a scene at the MySpace corporate party and plenty of trash-talk at Facebook’s expense. But the film pays lip service to the popularity of social media without really exploring the psychology behind it. Films and many plays view online life over the shoulder of the user, while Griefers, however imperfect, really plugs the audience in.

Danley and Havens play old friends Barry and Keith, who spend most of their spare time together shooting zombies and other antagonists. “Together,” however, is a loaded concept, given that they physically remain at their separate homes: Their avatars hang out and shoot the breeze in virtual space, like pals chatting at the pool table of the neighborhood bar. Griefers cleverly gives the actors toy guns and places them before a projected backdrop of, say, “Jungle Murder,” and features amusing “action scenes” of Barry and Keith getting caught up while the undead shamble toward them.

Continue Reading “Griefers at Dad’s Garage”

(Photo by Stacey Bode)

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Mention to people that you’re reading a biographical novel about Cicero, the famed Roman orator and politician, and they might treat you like Sir Highbrow Von Ultramind. In fact, Robert Harris’ Conspirata reads like a guilty pleasure despite having the trappings of a  literary tome. Published Feb. 2, Conspirata turns out to be such a page-turner, it’s like you’ve got the dust jacket of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire concealing the kind of gripping thriller you’d buy at an airport.

Titled Lustrum when first published in Harris’ native England, Conspirata follows on the heels of Imperium, the first book in the author’s planned Cicero trilogy. Cicero’s personal secretary, confidant and lifelong slave Tiro narrates the books (and holds a more modest place in the history books as one of the inventors of shorthand). Imperium traced the rise of Cicero’s political fortunes, first through a legal case that challenges the Roman power structure, then through his election to consul (the one-term head of the Roman Senate). One half courtroom drama, one-half breathless political campaign, Imperium explored the corruption that undermined the egalitarian ideals of the Roman Republic.

Continue reading “Conspirata turns Roman history into political page-turner” »

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The Center for Puppetry Arts disinters its terrific 2007 production Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, so I’ll bring my original review back from the dead as well.

Tales of Edgar Allen Poe inadvertently reveals a secret that our English teachers have held for generations. How do you trick students into learning about American literature? Scare the bejesus out of them with Poe’s grisly stories. There’s nothing like a dismembered corpse or a premature burial to seize a classroom’s attention.

Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, adapted and directed by Bobby Box, serves as a spooky and smart introduction and deconstruction of the tortured poet’s works. “The Raven” opens the show, and the narrator’s references to his lost Lenore lead to excerpts from Poe’s “Lenore” poem. The pleasant silver bells of “The Bells” find echoes in the bell-tipped hat of the gesture Fortunato, the victim in “The Cask of Amontillado,” and so on.

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DADDY DEAREST: John Leonard Smith (Allan Edwards, seated, center) recruits Stanley (Christopher Ekholm, standing, center) to keep his two baby mamas (Holly Stevenson, far left; Wendy Fulton-Adams, far right) from meeting.

In Theatre in the Square’s British comedy Caught in the Net, high schoolers Vicki Smith (Kate M. Dorrough) and Gavin Smith (Nick Arapoglou) hit it off when they meet online. The flirtatious teens can’t wait to meet in person, but have no idea that Gavin is, as the expression goes, a brother of another mother. Cab driver John Leonard Smith (Allan Edwards) is father to both of them, having maintained two separate families in the London boroughs of Wimbledon and Streatham for nearly two decades.

John realizes that if Vicki and Gavin meet, the results could be incest or the exposure of his bigamy, so he struggles to keep the unwitting relatives apart. Playwright Ray Cooney specializes in stage farces and constructs episodes of escalating absurdity with clockwork efficiency. Co-directors Alan Kilpatrick and Jessica Phelps West rev up the material until it rockets along, even though Caught in the Net doesn’t transcend the genre’s inherent silliness.

While John rushes back and forth between the two households, he drafts his Wimbledon lodger Stanley (Christopher Ekholm) to keep the young people and their mothers (Wendy Fulton-Adams and Holly Stevenson) from meeting. Stanley only wants to take his doddering dad on holiday, but he unexpectedly becomes the butt of most of Cooney’s jokes. With John offstage for long stretches, Stanley must maintain inane deceptions, including the false impression that young Gavin is his rent-boy.

Continue Reading “Caught in the Net teaches how-to lesson in necessary farce”

(Photo by MJ Conboy)

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Caution: Play may contain no scene like this

If you’re the kind of theater-goer who loves a good mystery and likes to deduce whodunit, I strongly advise you not to open the program of Mindgame at Onstage Atlanta. If you’ve seen such stage thrillers as Sleuth and its imitators, you can pretty much figure out all of Mindgame’s twists within about 30 minutes if you know the size of the cast and the length of the play. Mindgame has more problems than simply being too easy to figure out, though.

The play depicts True Crime writer Mark Styler (Charlie Miller) on a visit to a hospital for the criminally insane in rural England. He hopes to arrange an interview with “Easterman,” England’s most notorious mass murderer, but the hospital director, Dr. Farquar (Darrell Wofford), proves uncooperative, claiming to have never heard of Styler, despite their scheduled appointment. In their conversation, Styler explains his fascination with serial killers, especially Easterman, who attains a larger-than-life mystique. His stay in Farquar’s office becomes increasingly strange, from the out-of-nowhere sirens and bursts of amplified Muzak intercoms to the presence of a decorative skeleton in the office of a psychiatrist.

Continue reading “Mindgame’s flaws put Onstage Atlanta in straightjacket” »

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The New Yorker observes the death of Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger by offering free on-line versions of 12 of his stories published in the magazine, including the originals of “Franny” and “Zooey:”

“A Perfect Day for Bannanafish” (January 31, 1948)

“Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” (March 20, 1948)

“Just Before the War with the Eskimos” (June 5, 1948)

“The Laughing Man” (March 19, 1949)

“For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” (April 8, 1950)

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” (July 14, 1951)

“Teddy” (January 31, 1953)

“Franny” (January 29, 1955)

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (November 19, 1955)

“Zooey” (May 4, 1957)

“Seymour: An Introduction” (June 6, 1959)

“Hapworth 16, 1924” (June 19, 1965)

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Best known for playing African-American Southern belle Whitley Gilbert on the sitcom “A Different World,” Jasmine Guy is rapidly turning into a ubiquitous presence in Atlanta theater. In just over a year, she’s appeared in Swimming Upstream, Miss Evers’ Boys and Blues for an Alabama Sky at True Colors Theatre. She’s currently directing Janece Shaffer’s Brownie Points for Theatrical Outfit, playing Feb. 3-28. Born in Boston but raised in Atlanta, she talks about keeping busy in her hometown.

On Blues for an Alabama Sky’s opening night, Kenny Leon introduced the show and mentioned you’d soon be directing For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide. He said “We’re putting Jasmine Guy to work!“

Absolutely! And they did! Once I decided to move here, Kenny told me, “OK: Miss Evers!” So I read it and did that, and then the others. Getting all those roles was like divine intervention; it’s like falling into this kind of rhythm. It really felt right to be back in Atlanta, which has reconnected me with my art. Coming here reconnected me first with my family, then with my art, now my business, since I have to line up work.

Why did you decide to move here?

I wasn’t working enough in L.A., and kept leaving L.A. to work. When my daughter was younger, I had no issue with taking her out of preschool, since I know my colors and my ABCs, and could teach her those. But once she got older – she’s 10 years old now – I had to decide what’s the best lifestyle for her. Atlanta is easier for transportation, money, food, rent, jobs. And I found it more loving, more embracing. Because I grew up here, I knew what will happen for a young person who lives here. I found L.A. to be a more separate city, and I hated that separation. I want her to grow up around all kinds of people.

Continue Reading “Speakeasy with Jasmine Guy”

(Photo by Whitney Brown)

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A LIFE "WELL-USED": Frank Manley

When Frank Manley arrived at Emory University as a student in 1948, he had no ambitions of becoming a writer. “I wanted to do something that would use my life well, that would fill my life with interest and enthusiasm,” he told me in a 1998 Creative Loafing interview.

Manley died on Nov. 9, 2009, at the age of 79, and his friends and colleagues attest that Manley lived an enthusiastic life that brought out the enthusiasm of others. His poetry, prose, plays and scholarship earned Manley multiple honors, including two Georgia Author of the Year Awards; two Guggenheim Fellowships; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; and first prize at the 1985 Humana Festival of New American Plays for his play Two Masters, which starred Kathy Bates. At the time, the Boston Globe’s Kevin Kelly wrote, “Frank Manley has the uncanny ability to dramatize scenes that, at first, seem alien and almost incidental, only to reveal themselves as universal.”

Ironically, given Manley’s achievements, he became a writer gradually. He majored in Renaissance literary history at Emory, and after serving in the U.S. Army, earning a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and teaching English at Yale University, he returned to Emory in 1964, where he taught until his retirement in 2000. He turned to verse in the late 1960s in response to that decade’s social and political upheaval. “I began to write poetry to create a small world of clarity and order at that time,” Manley said. He began writing short stories and plays in the ’80s, and published works such as the anthologies Within the Ribbons and Among Prisoners. His novels include 1998’s The Cockfighter and 2002’s True Hope.

Continue Reading “Emory University pays tribute to the late Frank Manley”

(Photo courtesy Emory Photo/Video)

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UNACCOMPANIED MINORS: Chuck (Jeremy Cohen, from left), Barbara (Rebecca Blouin), Ubazz (Steve French), Roscoe (Lawrence Clayton), Julia (Neda Spears), and Milton (J.D. Goldblatt) in the a cappella musical 'Avenue X'

Hey nonny ding dong, alang alang alang / Boom ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-ay!

The Alliance Theatre’s a cappella musical Avenue X affirms that doo-wop music can be as catchy as it is corny. The sight of scatting white guys swaying in unison may induce unwelcome flashbacks to “Uptown Girl”-era Billy Joel – until you catch yourself snapping your fingers and tapping your feet in time.

By staging a musician-free musical, the Alliance Theatre might launch an a cappella resurgence, assuming one hasn’t started already. Horizon Theatre’s Black Pearl Sings, opening in March, showcases the African tradition of a cappella music. Whether through Avenue X’s old-school doo-wop and R&B tunes, or through more contemporary variations, the a cappella musical style seems perfectly in tune for our times, especially in live theater.

The financial advantages are obvious. In a lean economy, musicals with huge casts become prohibitively expensive, but imagine the savings when the cast is the band. In 2004, the Alliance’s Susan V. Booth directed a pared-down My Fair Lady with two pianos and a cast of about 10. Avenue X, which features no musicians and a cast of eight, carries the less-is-more aesthetic even further.

Plus, a cappella performance brings its own kind of drama. A unique energy and excitement accompanies singers unsupported by backing musicians, as if they’re performing without a net. Arguably, a cappella diminishes the artificiality of the musical format. In Avenue X, it feels more natural when characters break into song at park benches or kitchen tables, since there’s no invisible orchestra providing fanfare.

Continue Reading “Does Alliance Theatre’s Avenue X anticipate an a cappella trend?”

(Photo courtesy Alliance Theatre)

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Didst thou know of the waggish scholar who, enamored of the compleat works of The Brothers Coen, did translate the folio of The Big Lebowski in manner befitting Elizabethan scribes?

THE KNAVE:  Let me not to the marriage of false impressions deny impediments. I am not Master Lebowski; thou art Master Lebowski. I am the Knave, called the Knave. Or His Knaveness, or mayhap Knaver, or mayhap El Knaverino, in the manner of the Spaniard, if brevity be not in thy soul nor wit. A Knave by any other name would abide just as well.

In faith, ’tis a document of much merriment. Such fair report hath reached the ear of Ye Olde Shakespeare Tavern, which humbly bids groundlings and gentlefolk to partake of  yon “online survey.” Should the kingdom shout “Aye!” in resounding force, consider will the Tavern to stageth a “reading” of The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski to fill the coffers of an honored cause. Forsooth, the Knave abideth.

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INFINITE TEST: Researcher Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson, left) and Subject #20, Ryan (John Krasinski)

Supposedly, once you hear the name Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, you need never read the actual book. The film Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a different dissertation on male-female dynamics, similarly loads most of its content into its title. “The Office’s” John Krasinski wrote, directed and co-stars in his adaptation of the book by the late David Foster Wallace, but wastes his cast’s manpower on themes that could fit on the average tweet, with letters to spare.

Wallace presented his short stories as interview transcripts. Krasinski’s framing device is a recently dumped graduate student named Sara (Julianne Nicholson) researching the beliefs and feelings of ordinary straight guys, whose hideousness emerges in their attitudes toward women. A few inspire laughs, like the poor sap who blurts a ridiculous epithet at intimate moments, or Will Forte’s list of what he loves about women, which sounds so clichéd, you wonder if he’s ever had a girlfriend. With most of the subjects, however, hostility and predatory sexuality lurk barely below the surface, like a pale copy of Neil LaBute’s work.

The film cuts between the interview room and Sara in her real life as she hears (or imagines) similar speeches, such as the two cater waiters discussing what women want; a skeevy businessman (Christopher Meloni) recounting a callous seduction at an airport; and a wheedling neighbor (Will Arnett) talking to his girlfriend from the other side of a door. Few of these vignettes rise above the level of acting exercises, proving so brief, the performers never get to convey more than one dimension. As one of Sara’s students, Dominic Cooper resorts to embarrassing histrionics as he argues about his “provocative” essay.

Continue Reading “Hideous Men transcribes interviews with jerks”

(Photo courtesy IFC Films)

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EYES WIDE SHUT: Dr. Phillip Malaad (Maurice Ralston, left) with trance patient Azmera (Naima Carter Russell)

In an old “Saturday Night Live” fake commercial, Jon Lovitz played a hypnotist called “The Amazing Alexander,” whose audiences and critics alike intoned the testimonial, “I loved it! It was much better than Cats! I’m going to see it again and again!”

Just because I loved Aurora Theatre’s hypnotism play Tranced – and, indeed, found it much better than Cats – don’t assume that some mesmerist put the whammy on me. The Lawrenceville playhouse probably has never produced such a fresh, complex script as Tranced’s regional premiere. It’s the kind of provocative new work usually staged at Horizon Theatre or the Alliance Hertz Stage. Tranced’s intertwined dynamics of hypnotherapy, journalism and geo-politics run the risk of alienating the theater’s audience, who’s accustomed to more old-fashioned musicals, comedies and whodunits. Creatively, at least, Tranced delivers spellbinding results for Aurora.

“You can see a lingering trace of everywhere if you stare long enough in my face,” announces Dr. Phillip Malaad (Maurice Ralston), a lauded hypnotherapist, whose polyglot upbringing hints at the play’s global scope. Despite his international background, he considers his modest Washington, D.C., office home. Phillip receives a new patient, Azmera (Naima Carter Russell), a proud African graduate student who suffers from panic attacks that interfere with her studies. Phillip’s trancing techniques tap into suppressed memories from Azmera’s (fictional) home country of Guyamba, where she witnessed horrors she doesn’t consciously recall.

Continue Reading “Aurora Theatre’s Tranced is mesmerizing”

(Photo courtesy Aurora Theatre)

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Will Forte’s recurring “Saturday Night Live” character MacGruber is one of those pop references that I recognize, even though I’ve never seen it. (Nope, not even the Super Bowl ad.) That said, the extra raunchy “red-band” trailer for the upcoming MacGruber film looks to be a decent parody of action-movie clichés. The sets, serious soundtrack music, and presence of Powers Booth make it look like a riff on “24,” while Val Kilmer plays the bad guy, Dieter Von Kunth. At the very least, it looks a lot better than Get Smart.  MacGruber is scheduled to open April 23:

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ALL KID NO PLAY: Kindergarten math students in The Providence Effect

Thanks to films like Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver, the “inspirational teacher” movie genre has become one of Hollywood’s most predictable formulas. The Providence Effect proves that educational documentaries can succumb to clichés just as easily.

Director Rollin Binzer presents the remarkable achievement of Providence St. Mel, a K-12 school on Chicago’s West Side. For decades, the school has taken impoverished students and turned them into college material, with 100 percent of the graduating seniors accepted to college. Founder and former Principal Paul Adams III makes an ingratiating, no-nonsense spokesman for the school. In less than three decades, Adams went from being blacklisted from the Alabama educational system for participating in the Civil Rights Movement to being praised by then-President Ronald Reagan for Providence’s success rate.

Adams extols the Providence approach to teaching, but the specifics come across as both vague and obvious: Employ competent, passionate teachers; get the students’ attention; and enforce discipline and accountability among young people and faculty alike. Perhaps a documentary that set up a sharper contrast between the institutional sclerosis of some public schools could have had a stronger punch. One of the documentary’s final titles says, “All profits from this film will be reinvested in education and the Providence Schools.” That could explain why the film takes excessive pains to avoid offending anyone, and reserves its harsh words only for “poverty” and unspecified gang-bangers.

Continue Reading “The Providence Effect stands, doesn’t deliver”

(Photo courtesy Dinosaurs of the Future)

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