Culture Surfing

A LIFE IN THE THEATRE: Robert (André De Shields, from left) and John (Ariel Shafir) discuss their lives as actors.

In David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, veteran actor Robert (André De Shields) asks rising newcomer John (Ariel Shafir), “Could you perhaps do less?” in one of their scenes together. Theater professionals and fans will immediately recognize the insult, scarcely disguised by the veneer of politeness.

“Doing less” isn’t a goal of the Alliance Theatre’s production of Mamet’s thorny bouquet to thespians and stage lovers. Challenged to expand an intimate two-actor drama for the Alliance mainstage, director Robert O’Hara turns the show, in part, into a satire of contemporary theatrical spectacle in which more is less. Many scenes take place in the actors’ dressing room, but in this spare-no-expense version, the dressing room set elevates out of the floor.

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(Photo courtesy Alliance Theatre)

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BRUTUS SQUAD: Brutus (Neal A. Ghant, left) and Cassius (Joe Knezevich)

When the Roman conspirators bathe their hands in the blood of Julius Caesar’s title character, the scheming instigator Cassius wonders how history will judge them. “How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown?” reflects Cassius, played by Joe Knezevich in Georgia Shakespeare’s new production. Cassius, however, thinks that’s a good thing.

He perceives himself, Brutus, and their cohorts as “the men that gave their country liberty,” and their bloodbath as a timeless image equivalent to American paintings of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence.

Shakespeare fully intended his audiences to recognize the irony of Cassius’ meta-moment, but might not have expected that his lofty dramatization would be staged down the centuries, often with diverse interpretations. Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar in 1599 partly to express concerns over a possible civil war in the event of Queen Elizabeth’s death. In 1937, Orson Welles commented on Mussolini’s regime with his famed “Italian fascist” interpretation. In 2001, Georgia Shakespeare took inspiration from the assassination of Louisiana governor Huey Long for a stunningly creative production that featured Mardi Gras parades and racially charged lynchings.

Continue reading “Georgia Shakespeare returns to scene of the crime with Julius Caesar“

(Photo by Jennifer Hofstetter)

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SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Jon Carr (left), Stacy Melich, Chris Blair, Gina Rickicki, and Matt Horgan

The funny folks at Dad’s Garage Theatre seem more likely to read the Onion than the Wall Street Journal, so the economic themes of The Dad’s Garage Going Out of Business Show push the company a bit outside its comfort zone. Curated by Matt Horgan and written by “the Dad’s Garage artistic family,” the evening of sketches takes inspiration from the current economic slump and builds gags around corporate layoffs, mortgage loans, unemployment applications and the state of the dollar. Horgan even wears a giant foam greenback to play “Dollar Bill” as a sickly kvetch with one foot in the grave.

Despite tearing the premise from today’s headlines, the company’s execution feels slightly old-fashioned. Some sketches rely on predictable targets and highly familiar ideas, including a George W. Bush impersonation, happy-talk newscasters, a riff on an old “Schoolhouse Rock” tune and a “We Are the World” parody called “We Are the Rich.” A video spoof of “Girls Gone Wild” gets plenty of laughs, though, and a piece with a financial consultant (Gina Rickicki) trying to help a spendthrift board game mascot (Horgan) only suffers from its similarity to another sketch from the playhouse’s Fingertips last summer.

Continue reading “Dad’s Garage sketches a familiar Business model”

(Photo by Linnea Frye)

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THE LIFE AQUATIC: Jules (Topher Payne, from left), Barbara (Shelly McCook) and Jo (Eve Krueger)

Aurora Theatre’s comedy boom gives new meaning to the expression “I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last person Earth.” Directed by Joe Gfaller, boom begins with an unimaginably lousy date that somehow manages only to get worse.

Jo (Eve Krueger), a young journalism student, responds to a Craigslist ad promising a no-strings-attached hookup. Meek marine biologist Jules (Topher Payne), who placed the ad, shies away from Jo’s sexual aggressiveness, and eventually reveals that he’s both gay and a virgin. When Jo asks how he knows he’s gay if he’s never been with anyone, Jules replies, “The non-randomness of the erections.”

Nodding to the aquarium in his underground lab, Jules explains that his examination of fish behavior patterns has convinced him that a cataclysmic event is nigh. He and Jo could end up as the last two people on Earth, although Jo accuses him of engineering a “Cormac McCarthy meets Road Warrior meets ‘Survivor’” fantasy. Krueger and Payne prove well-cast as the mismatched couple, but the comedic action doesn’t quite crackle in the play’s initial section, which unfolds like a “Kids in the Hall” sketch.

Continue reading “Aurora Theatre opens new play series with a boom“

(Photo courtesy Aurora Theatre)

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LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME: Marianne Fraulo (left), Tom Thon, Mary Lynn Owen, Cara Mantella and Will Bradley in Third

Professor Laurie Jameson exhorts her students to challenge the dominant power structure and antiquated ways of thinking at the outset of Wendy Wasserstein’s Third. Played by Mary Lynn Owen, Laurie doesn’t quite realize she belongs to the dominant power structure as a lauded literature professor at a Northeastern college, the kind of liberal bulwark that boasts America’s first transgender dorm, but no fraternities.

Laurie must confront her own complacency and preconceived notions with the enrollment of a new student, Woodson Bull III (Will Bradley), a college wrestler who prefers to go by “Third” and aspires to be a sports agent. Laurie quickly pegs him as a Young Republican jock-type born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The beginning of the play, directed by Lisa Adler at Horizon Theatre, coincides with the U.S. congressional vote to authorize the Iraq War. Third reminds Laurie of all the reasons she hates George W. Bush. His paper on King Lear sets off an academic scandal that causes the professor to badly misunderestimate the student.

Continue reading “Horizon Theatre’s Third skewers academe’s liberal prejudice”

(Photo courtesy Horizon Theatre Company)

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TUNE UP: Berger (Warren E. Ullom IV, from left), Claude (Jacob Wood), Hud (Chris Love) and Sheila (Naomi Lavender)

Pop culture seems to be experiencing a collective acid flashback to the late 1960s. The film Taking Woodstock and other commemorations marked the 40th anniversary of “three days of peace and music.” Video games and digital music restoration have conjured up Beatlemania for a new generation. And the musical Hair, which put a starry-eyed face on the decade’s counterculture, has opened 7 Stages’ 30th anniversary season after a popular Broadway revival earlier in 2009.

The retro-vogue for flower power may be driven by more than just nostalgia for tie-dye, free love and readily available hallucinogens. The current revival comes at the end of a traumatic decade marked by terrorism, war, economic collapse and bitter political partisanship. Harking back to Hair or Yasgur’s farm (or even 1972’s Jesus Christ Superstar at the Alliance Theatre) expresses a longing to rekindle hippie idealism, the feeling of being at the dawn of an era when “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.” That the Age of Aquarius turned out to be so short-lived only adds to its poignancy.

Continue reading “7 Stages’ Hair sprouts ’60s idealism in Little Five Points”

(Photo by Abby Gaskins)

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WHAT WOULD DANIEL DO: Daniel Thomas May (front) takes the helm of Tom Key's Cotton Patch Gospel

Jesus is hot! Just a few months after the Alliance Theatre recast Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar through the prism of contemporary gospel music, Theatrical Outfit’s Tom Key oversees the second coming of Cotton Patch Gospel.

Cotton Patch Gospel has been a local theater mainstay for decades. The bluegrass treatment of the New Testament premiered in 1981 with the book co-written by Key and Russell Treyz, and music and lyrics by Harry Chapin. For years, Key has played the show’s narrator, who not only recounts the story but acts out the vast majority of the parts. For the new version, co-produced by Theatrical Outfit and Georgia Ensemble Theatre, Key passes the lead to an actor of a younger generation, Daniel Thomas May. A busy Atlanta actor, May rarely performs in musicals but he meets the demands of Cotton Patch Gospel’s songs and shepherds the show to fresh heights at the Roswell playhouse.

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(Photo by Cristopher B. Kettrey)

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SAY IT AIN'T SOW: Norman Vincent Peale (Wade Benson, left) and Big Edie (Kathleen McManus)

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde wrote, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.” The stage musical Grey Gardens emphasizes the tragic transformation of “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale by casting the same actress as both Little Edie and her mother at high and low ebbs of their family fortunes. Both women share a love of music, but in Grey Gardens, the convention of breaking into song at times emphasizes their tenuous grasps on reality.

Big Edie and Little Edie are iconic women — in an eccentric, cautionary fashion — as the subjects of Albert and David Maysles’ documentary Grey Gardens, which has drawn an enormous cult following since its release in 1975. The Edies were the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, but in the early 1970s, they lived in squalor and self-delusion at the once-proud family estate, Grey Gardens. They could’ve been characters from a Tennessee Williams play, and added scandal and a hint of madness to the Kennedy family mystique.

Continue reading “Complex family drama grounds Grey Gardens“

(Photo courtesy Chris Ozment Photography)

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POTION CONTROL: Dr. Eggerton (Jay Allan, left) and Legs Benedict (Khalid Hill)

No one can sell health care like Dr. Arthur Eggerton. In the Flying Carpet Theatre Co.’s The Medicine Showdown, Dr. Eggerton (Jay Allan) commands the kind of traveling medicine show that toured America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Eggerton frequently launches into flamboyant spiels about the healing properties of his elixir, “a tonic of roots, barks and herbs” that’s good for whatever ails you.

Modern audiences can chuckle at Eggerton’s gobbledygook about how the elixir “re-ionizes the animolecules of your blood” and combats arrhythmia, the source of all disease. We can also recognize how Eggerton’s clientele might be swayed by the impressive-sounding jargon: It’s not that much of a leap to consider modern-day medical lingo and how little you may actually understand of your doctor’s diagnosis or the scientific explanations of pharmaceuticals on TV commercials. In the midst of a national debate over health care reform and worries about the H1N1 flu, The Medicine Showdown’s medical anxieties arrive like a perfectly timed prescription.

Continue reading “Medicine Showdown’s snake oil goes down easy”

(Photo by David Gochfeld)

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Theatre in the Square’s Southern comedy The Savannah Disputation bears little resemblance to the disturbing drama Doubt, but both rest on similar foundations. John Patrick Shanley’s hit play-turned-Oscar-nominated film used a 1960s church scandal to consider the dangers of blind faith and the virtues of doubt.

The Savannah Disputation tells a considerably lighter story, with bickering, mismatched characters and contrived confrontations suitable for a TV sitcom. Yet the comedic efficiency of Savannah-based playwright Evan Smith supports a deceptively thoughtful discussion of the complexities of religious belief. The opening play of Theatre in the Square’s 28th season, The Savannah Disputation supports the Marietta playhouse’s solid track record for pleasing audiences without pandering to them.

The play takes place at the home of two Catholic spinsters: divorced, crotchety Mary (Judy Leavell), and meek, never-married Margaret (Nita Hardy). Mary proves to be both a devout church-goer and a holy terror with a litany of complaints and putdowns for fellow parishioners and passers-by. In contrast, Margaret is well-meaning but wishy-washy and seems to have a mysterious health ailment (a point the play doesn’t overemphasize). Leavell’s hard-charging hostility finds a fitting foil in Hardy’s benign, ethereal approach.

Continue reading “Witty Savannah disputes the value of your own personal Jesus”

(Photo by MJ Conboy)

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MAKING WAVES: Bernardine Mitchell in A Cool Drink a Water at Horizon Theatre

Thomas W. Jones II seems to have found a summer home at Horizon Theatre. The actor/director/composer co-founded Jomandi Productions in the late 1970s, but left the Atlanta-based African-American theater company in 2000. In the past decade, however, Jones has frequently collaborated with Horizon on summer productions that coincide with the National Black Arts Festival, including his world premiere musicals Two Queens, One Castle and Three Sistahs.

Jones takes to the Horizon stage to co-star in his latest world premiere, A Cool Drink aWater. A non-musical play, Water nonetheless presents a kind of jazz improvisation on themes that Lorraine Hansberry explored in 1959 with her landmark African-American drama A Raisin in the Sun. Andrea Frye directs the oft-engaging comedy/drama that seems more confident with the comedy than the drama.

Continue reading “Cool Drink’s comedy comes at drama’s expense”

(Photo by Allie Bartelski)

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THE TIES THAT BIND: Zachariah (Kenny Leon, left) and Morris (Tom Key)

It can be challenge for present-day audiences, especially younger ones, to put Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid play Blood Knot into context. The United States and South Africa both currently have presidents of color, but Fugard debuted the two-actor play in 1961, even before Nelson Mandela began his 27-year prison term on Robben Island. At the time an act of political defiance, Blood Knot illustrates the pernicious effects of institutional racism even as it insists on the existence of a brotherhood of man that transcends skin color.

David H. Bell directed Blood Knot for Theatrical Outfit in 1998, and this summer, the company and True Colors Theatre have teamed up to bring back the production’s two stars, Tom Key and Kenny Leon (the respective theaters’ artistic directors). The 1998 production crackled in the close quarters of 14th Street Playhouse’s second theater, while the current one, directed by the Alliance Theatre’s Susan V. Booth, proceeds at more of a low simmer (based on viewing the final afternoon preview before the play’s official premiere that night).

Continue reading “Blood Knot finds the frayed places of brotherly bonds”

(Photo by Brian Steely)

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PAIN AND SUFFERING: Titus (Chris Kayser, left) and Lavinia (Sarah M. Johnson)

Before I saw Richard Garner’s production of Titus Andronicus, a thunderstorm rolled in and proceeded to rage and rumble outside Georgia Shakespeare for nearly the entire show. After Titus Andronicus ended and the house lights came up, the audience responded with a collective sigh of relief and nervous laughter. It was both the right environment and the right response to Shakespeare’s most notorious play, a ritualistic bloodbath nearly impossible to take seriously.

Yet Garner and company do manage to take Titus Andronicus seriously, presenting its grisly, wrenching effects and demented situations as credibly as they can. Garner, Georgia Shakespeare’s producing artistic director, offers no cerebral deconstruction of the play like Julie Taymor’s screen version of Titus, or use of the script to justify a series of wild effects like Nancy Keystone’s memorable 2003 production of another weird one, Cymbeline. Venturing where angels fear to tread, Garner and his actors stage a Titus that’s surprisingly compelling, if thematically underwhelming.

Continue reading “Shakespeare crafts torture-porn in weirdly compelling Titus Andronicus”

(Photo by Bill DeLoach)

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HAND JOBS: Erin Burnett (clockwise from top), Steven Emanuelson, Rene Dellefont, Amber Nash and Scott Warren

Fingertips, the peppy evening of short plays at Dad’s Garage Theatre’s Top Shelf directed by Matt Myers, sports the subtitle 21 Short Works Inspired By Our Favorite Band. The show’s program and publicity rather coyly withhold the identity of its musical muses, perhaps for arcane legal and copyright reasons. At the risk of letting the band out of the bag, I’ll identify Fingertips’ inspiration as John Flansburgh and John Liddell, aka They Might Be Giants.

Specifically, Dad’s Fingertips riffs on the song of the same name, which They Might Be Giants originally recorded for its 1992 album Apollo 18. The original “Fingertips” consists of 21 mini-songs, most of which are under 15 seconds long. Conceived by Amber Nash, who’s also part of the cast, the world premiere offers an album of short plays that correspond to “Fingertips’” component songs.

Continue reading “Fingertips‘ funny shorts stand on the shoulders of Giants”

(Photo by Linnea Frye)

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