PAX East Tomorrow

For those of you interested in that sort of thing... you'll note a new box over on the right there. I'm spending the day at PAX East tomorrow, so I've set up a little photo depository. I can't promise a ton of pictures, or that any of them will be any good, but if you're not at the show and you want to see what I'm looking at, take a peek over there.

Becky Shaw @ Huntington Theatre Company

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo

Directed by Peter DuBois

Seen Friday, 3/12 @ Huntington’s BU Theatre Mainstage

Becky Shaw is funny. In a really, really mean way. Which of course makes it worlds funnier than it would be if it were nice. This is about the least politically correct play I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s entirely to the benefit of the play. If you decide to write a mean-spirited comedy, you have two choices: you can either play the cruelty for a bit and then allow your characters some revelation that forces them to change their ways, or you can commit to it and… for lack of a better term (cause Tropic Thunder introduced the BEST EVER term), go “full retard” and keep your characters as mean-spirited as any ever written in entertainment. Gina Gionfriddo is committed, and for that, I thank her.

That’s not to say that the characters aren’t likable. Far from, actually. Walking out of the show, my fiancée and I both agreed that Max (Seth Fisher) was by far the most abhorrent character in the show, and yet we both loved him. He says awful things. By most people’s definition, he does some awful things. But he’s just like anyone else (OK, he’s just like me) except he’s got no filter. He says what he thinks, no matter who those comments might end up hurting. It may make him look like an awful person, but even that’s not exactly black and white, because he is fiercely loyal and dedicated to the Slater family, no matter what. He’s certainly not the nicest person in the world, but does he really have to be? He knows what is important to him, and fights for it. I don’t think anyone can fault him for that.

The story starts out in a New York City hotel room, where Max has brought mother and daughter Susan (Maureen Anderman) and Suzanna Slater (Keira Naughton) together to discuss the family’s finances following the passing of the family patriarch. Apparently Suzanna’s dad wasn’t quite the businessman everyone thought him to be, especially in his later years, and now the family is more or less broke. That sets up both ladies for a bit of culture shock as they need to move away from the privileged life they had previously led. Susan gets by with her new twentysomething boytoy Lester (whom we never see), while Suzanna – much more affected by her father’s death – takes comfort, at least for one night, with Max. Max is as close to being family as one can be without blood or marriage, but that doesn’t stop them from distracting themselves from the financial disaster the Slaters are facing.

Fast forward a bit, and we find Suzanna married to someone who is not Max – a sweet guy named Andrew (Eli James) that she met on a group ski trip. Four months and a quickie wedding in Vegas, and the happy couple are now living in suburban Rhode Island and just barely making ends meet. Suzanna thinks it’d be a good idea to set up Max with a girl from Andrew’s office, so a double-date is planned and Max arrives to dryly deride everything about Suzanna’s now-“pedestrian” life. Enter Andrew’s coworker, the sweet, apparently-naïve Rhode Island girl who gives the play its name. Saying Max and Becky hit it off would be… inaccurate at best, but they end up heading out on their own for what turns out to be the worst. First date. Ever. From there, we get to watch as friendships, marriages and all thresholds of sanity are tested in every which way, and along the way no one is spared from being the butt of a brutal joke.

And it works so well. The jokes, particularly the ones at Becky’s expense, are well-executed and perfectly timed (and, by the end, REALLY well-deserved). In fact, the cast as a whole has a really good rhythm going. Max and Suzanna in particular work exceedingly well together. There’s a perfect mix of familial, platonic love and blatant attraction, and the history there is made clear enough from the beginning of the show that the combination never tips into creepy territory. These are best friends who will always be best friends, but even that can’t stop Max from displaying his clear adoration of Suzanna. He’s protective of her and her family to a fault, especially where it concerns her husband, but that’s a shield that doesn’t apply to him. He will often dump all over Suzanna and her decisions, always in hilarious fashion. Fisher and Naughton hit their marks just right and sell everything about their relationship with a tone that allows the audience to appreciate and relate to that particular brand of love, even as Max says something awful about Suzanna’s life choices. Though it may not seem so at first, this story is about the two of them and how they grew up together, with the ultimate lesson being that sometimes you need to make a tough choice in order to point your life in the right direction, even if that direction moves you into territory that isn’t as comfortable or as safe as the way you’ve lived in the past.

The rest of the cast is equally fun. Anderman doesn’t get nearly as much stage time as the others, but she makes every moment worthwhile, particularly when discussing her late husband and his alleged indiscretions. It’s a brutal take on a high-society woman who took a tough fall but has thus far refused to acknowledge it ever happened. In parts she reminded me of Martha Rodgers on ABC’s “Castle,” which is a good thing – just the right mixture of upper-class grace (even if the legitimacy is questionable) and a biting tongue that spares no one in her life. James’s Andrew initially comes off as the weakest of the bunch, but you quickly learn that it’s not an issue of performance, but the result of a deeply flawed and naïve character who’s wishy-washy because he doesn’t really have any idea what he wants in life. For better or worse, he’s stuck with Suzanna, and we get to watch him work out if that’s really what is best for him in the long run.

And then there’s Becky Shaw. She doesn’t really come into her own and show all the cards in her hand until into the second act, when she meets up with Max for the first time since their disastrous date – a meeting that she seems to need, but Max wants absolutely no part of. Wendy Hoopes puts Becky through a transformation so brilliant, so devious and so… mean that for the first couple minutes it seems out of character, only because her persona in the first act was so beautifully sincere and believable. But once you figure which personality is really Becky, it makes the whole change so rewarding, and suddenly turns Becky not only into a fascinating character to watch but also into a very worthy foil for Max, and in the final scene leads to some of the most hilarious interactions I’ve seen onstage in a long time. It doesn’t matter how you look at it… one way or another there is one constant about Becky Shaw: the bitch is crazy, and the show is better because of it.

What I found interesting and unique about the script is how we come to realize Becky is nuts. On face value, the show isn’t all that unique – it’s a couple different standard “slice of life” stories wrapped into one package – but the presentation is the difference. Where a lot of other plays of the type do most of their communication through open discussion of feelings and emotional processes, Becky Shaw says a lot more through everyday marital arguments and family quibbles. In fact, the people who are much more verbally open emotionally are at best seen as weak (Andrew) and at worst called (and proven to be) completely freakin’ insane (Becky herself). Whether or not it was Gionfriddo’s intention, the derision of a character like Becky Shaw provided me with a nice little piece of theatrical parody which made her character progression all the more enjoyable. Even independent of Becky, scattered throughout the show are a couple beginnings of emotional diatribes and stereotypic overshares that are swiftly mocked as ridiculous. Naturally, most of the mocking comes from Max, ironically the only character who could probably use a proper examining of his feelings).

The technical aspects of the show are extremely well-managed, if not groundbreaking. Peter DuBois’s directing is nice and relaxed; nothing ever felt forced or seemed to get in the way of the very conversational dialogue style the cast managed so well. The sets were nicely functional, and did well to distinguish between the personalities in the show (see Andrew & Suzanna’s Rhode Island apartment vs. Susan’s Floridian sitting room). One piece that did stand out nicely was the music choices, pretty much used only during scene changes, but the sound nicely matched the modern, urbanite style some of the characters so desperately clung to.

Ultimately, though, the show is held together wonderfully by the cast and the writing. Gionfriddo’s got a pretty damn funny show, and on the nose delivery from the entire ensemble makes it a pleasure to watch. It’s maybe not for the faint of heart – these are “real people” who use real language (many words have four letters), which has never bothered me, but I was happy to find myself giggling along with a good portion of the audience, many who looked to me to be prime examples of the Huntington’s subscriber base (twice my age, and probably twice my income to match). Either the crowds in Boston’s traditional theater scene are loosening up a little bit, or Becky Shaw is just a damn funny show no matter who you are; I know the latter is true, but I’ll hold out some hope for the theatergoing regulars as well.

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets

Directed by Daniel Fish

Seen 3/5/10 at American Repertory Theatre, Loeb Drama Center

There’s nothing wrong with ART’s production of Paradise Lost. It hits all the points it tries to hit, and very easily draws the intended parallels between the 1930s that Clifford Odets writes about and today. It’s also not particularly difficult to imagine a family today having struggles and setbacks of the Gordons; you hear about them in every human interest story on the nightly news, or any time a politician needs a story about “Main Street.” It’s all very believable, all very timely. And all that might even work against the production, because by the time the curtain falls for the final time, it just might not be that interesting to watch anymore.

The story revolves around the Gordon family: Leo (David Chandler), who runs a handbag manufacturing business with a business partner; his wife Clara (Sally Wingert), a driven matriarch who very clearly runs the family; their older son Ben (Hale Appleman), a former Olympic runner who hasn’t really found his place post-Olympics; their daughter Pearl (Therese Plaehn), a quiet piano prodigy; and their younger son Julie (T. Ryder Smith), a financial superstar who has become sickly for reasons unknown. Coming in and out of their lives are an assortment of neighborhood characters that are vague enough to be found anywhere, but specific enough that the audience can point to any of them and say, “I know that guy!” Through three acts we watch Leo’s business spiral, Julie’s health get worse, Ben deal with an uncertain future, and Clara fight to hold everyone together and survive as a family. It’s a pretty stereotypic post-Great Depression story that has gained new relevance in light of the world's recent economic issues.

If I had to choose, I think I’d have to place blame on some design and directorial choices, and maybe on myself for believing too much hype about the director. Director Daniel Fish has a reputation for doing some crazy things, but I feel like that drive only made it about halfway through the production. The design is fairly abstract, and at face value pretty cool. One of the best elements is the use of video projected onto the backdrop behind the performers. Sometimes it’s used for atmospheric effect – the entire cast starts the show by watching the end of a movie together – but most of the time it’s used with live video to give the audience a different perspective on the stage action. That’s especially beneficial because a good deal of the action in Acts I and II take place significantly higher than the audience if you’re seated at floor level, as I was. It’s useful to get a better view of what’s going on off on stage left when the actors themselves are obscured by the dining room table. There’s a particularly good use in Act II as things start to fall apart for Leo Gordon and his business partner. Without spoiling anything, Leo’s partner introduces him to someone who can potentially “fix” their business in a particularly insidious way. The fixer is played by T. Ryder Smith, who also happens to play Leo’s son Julie, but there’s a nice negative filter used on the projected video that allows Smith to portray a much more treacherous nature that he had on his own as Julie, which furthered the distinction between the characters and added to the treacherous atmosphere of the scene.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the technical elements fell a little flat for me. At seemingly random times throughout the play, characters would pick up wireless microphones and use them for dialogue. There are some times when it was very helpful – again with the moments when you couldn’t quite see what was going on over near the wings or upstage – but many times they were used when actors were front and center, and their dialogue didn’t really strike me as needing to be accentuated in that way. It’s very possible I missed something, but it just didn’t work for me.

It also struck me as odd that Fish had all of these out of the box technical elements at work, but his staging itself was very straightforward. There are some seemingly clunky blocking decisions - characters staying onstage long after they should have left, and it isn't clear if their physical presence places them in the scene, or if they are there representing something more abstract. Again, it just doesn't quite mesh with the otherwise relatively straightforward staging. Again, there’s nothing wrong with traditional blocking combined with abstract design, but it seemed to me to draw more attention to what was out of place – the design – than it drew to the story being told. The story is very timely, so one would think you’d want the focus there. It almost seemed as if the ability of the story to draw relevant parallels was taken for granted, and so the creative focus moved elsewhere, but all it did was draw attention off the story and performances, which should have been the stars of the show.

And if you’re paying attention, there are some shining stars here. Clara Gordon, Leo’s wife, is brilliantly portrayed by Sally Wingert. Her performance is very engaging, but it’s also a credit to Odets as well; this is by all definition a modern woman in the 1930s script, something Wingert accentuates with a ferocity that no one else on stage can match. She’s got the independent, speak-her-mind attitude of a flapper out of the ‘20s mixed with an undying dedication to her family that truly convinces the audience that if anyone can keep a family together in light of all the crap thrown at the Gordons, it’s Clara.

Also of note is Karl Bury as Kewpie, Ben Gordon’s best friend who turns out to be not so good for him. Bury has a history on Showtime’s “Brotherhood” and HBO’s “The Sopranos,” both of which he channels for Kewpie’s small-time con personality. He strikes a good balance of clearly being terrible for Ben and this family, but also clearly caring about them. It’s a tough note to hit to put someone you claim as your best friend directly in harm’s way without degrading the friendship to nothing, but Bury does it well, and his guilt in the final act over what happens to Ben is a genuine as it is well-deserved.

Leo’s business partner Sam Katz (portrayed by Jonathan Epstein) and his wife Bertha (Adrianne Krstansky) also rise to distinction thanks to a particularly potent breakdown in the second act. It struck me through the first act that Sam was probably in the most “real” situation in the show, trying to keep Leo’s floundering business afloat, but once you hit the end of the second act you realize that Sam is on much more unstable footing than the Gordon family; the Katz family spiral is much more accelerated and precipitous than the Gordon family’s, and the Katz demise, while in less focus, has as strong an impact as the main story.

The rest of the cast is a little more muddled, though no one is out of place. I’m not sure if the issue lies in performance or writing. At various points throughout the play everyone is given their moment of focus, but there’s such an overwhelming malaise that hangs over the script that it takes a spectacular performance to break through that and be noticed.

The malaise is not misplaced – both the period of the setting and the modern time it alludes to deserve a melancholic attitude. And hope does fight through in the end – once again in the hands of Wingert’s Clara, who stubbornly (in a good way) INSISTS on maintaining her family’s pride, however damaged by tragedy and circumstance it might be. There’s no doubt why ART and Fish chose to preset Paradise Lost now in 2010, but some weakly-written characters and questionable design choices hold it back from being the poignant commentary it might otherwise be.