Reviewed
by David Spencer
At Manhattan Theatre Club, Ariel (Death and the Maiden) Dorfman's political allegory, The Other Side, flirts with surrealism in a manner best described as quaint. We open on a shack in a war zone, where the job of an old married couple (Rosemary Harris and John Cullum) is to collect, identify and bury the bodies of young soldiers so that, come peacetime, their relatives can have closure. Over the old couple's bed, on the back wall is a large portrait of their son, who ran away at an early age.
A sudden bulletin on the radio: after years of fighting -- impossibly -- peace! But just as the old couple start to celebrate, the back wall is bulldozed down by a young soldier (Gene Farber), who claims to be in charge of peacetime protocols. The shack is right on the renegotiated border between warring countries. The couple have individual ties to opposite sides, the soldier announces, and in martinet fashion, separates them, each to exist on his or her designated side of the house, with permission to go to the bathroom on one side, or the kitchen on the other, subject to negotiation.
Oh, and by the way: the old woman is convinced the soldier is their son.
Whether or not he is, is just one of the plot points the playwright makes and then decides to leave ambiguous by the play's end. To catalog all of them would be tantamount to a list of unconscionable "spoilers" (not that the slender story is all that much to spoil), but Dorfman's deciding to assign each element a degree of symbolic unresolve comes very close to being a parody of devices introduced by Ionesco and Beckett.
Under the direction of Blanka Ziska, the play is performed with an urgency matching its silliness, Mr. Farber seeming more stiff than strict, and veterans Cullum and Harris spinning pleasantly respectable variations on their personae, familiar from so much previous exposure on stage and in the media. It all seems like a strange literary exercise, removed without fanfare from a time capsule, only to be sent back once the limited run concludes...
If ambiguity is the game, best to go to one of its signature architects. At the Atlantic Theater on West 20th, there are two one acts by Harold Pinter as the title Celebration & The Room might indicate. Directed by Atlantic artistic Director Neil Pepe, the evening, in reverse of the billing, features Pinter's first play and his most recent.
The Room is vintage Pinter in that virtually all the indicia are present in its run down one-room flat. There's the roster of eccentrics -- the nattering wife (Mary Beth Piel), the ominously silent husband (Thomas Jay Ryan), the strange visitors (Kate Blumberg, David Pittu), the evasive landlord (Peter Maloney), the blind messenger (Earle Hyman) -- forming the undefined yet oddly deep relationships, and of course the elliptical dialogue and the pauses.
Celebration only brings a little of this to bear, around the edges of a plotless comedy about two sets of diners in a restaurant: two working class couples who happen to be a pair of brothers (Patrick Breen, Thomas Jay Ryan) married to a pair of sisters (Betsy Aidem, Carolyn McCormick); and a businessman (Brennan Brown) with his mistress (Kate Blumberg). Mostly it's just mischievously dialogued. And I suppose, if you think of it from a British perspective, it pokes fun at a dying class system, by putting low-class customers in a high-class establishment, to be fawned over by an expertly tactful owner (Philip Goodwin), a subtly neurotic hostess (Christa Scott Reid) and a waiter who turns name-dropping from an affectation to a pathology (David Pittu).
All in all, the evening is a fine Pinter primer for the uninitiated, and an amusing refresher for us veterans.
Charlotte Moore, artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, is usually, at her best, a proficient director of revivals and classics, getting the job done, often admirably, but never brilliantly...but with her current staging of Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, she has had something of a breakthrough, because it's very near perfection. Whether because she just happened to cast each role impeccably, or because she simply connected to play and players on a new level, this production is a must for academic accuracy and artistic triumph.
As the title slyly suggests, the profession of Mrs. Warren (Dana Ivey) is the oldest one, and it has allowed her to care for a daughter, Vivie (Laura Odeh) she has never really gotten to know. But now that Viv's come of age, there is more knowledge pouring in than perhaps either of them ever bargained for, as two of mom's old clients, a businessman (Sam Tsoutsouvas), and a reverend (Kenneth Gardner), plus a platonic friend (David Staller) -- the voices of commerce, religion and neutral reason, in the Shawverse -- drop by upon Viv's return from school abroad. Further stirring the pot is the fact that Viv's suitor, Frank (Kevin Collins) is the reverend's son.
There's not a performance that doesn't resonate as a Shavian ideal, not a performer who doesn't find a way to make the essential humanism idiosyncratic and memorable and not a moment that wouldn't serve as an object lesson in How It's Done.
Bravo!
A slightly more muted bravo, too, for Coronado by Dennis Lehane (author of Mystic River), which just ended a run at off-off Broadway's Invisible City Theatre Company -- which does its thing upstairs of a theatre memorabilia store in a narrow back room that seats 40-odd patrons -- I will say that it was one of the more worthwhile and striking plays of the season, worthy of an off-Broadway transfer and/or as many regional productions as it can rack up. At first it seems merely to eavesdrop on the conversations of three different couples in a bar, but slowly-slowly we start to realize we are watching a single mystery comprised of three different stories in parallel timelines, that have unpredictable yet inevitable connections.
The play's website, www.coronadotheplay.com will give the vital statistics to any looking for a riveting new American original to mount -- and also currently retains the names and bios of the Invisible's cast and creative team, all of whom turned in exemplary work.
I'm sorry time commitments forbade me uploading this review sooner. But here's hoping we hear from Coronado -- and Mr. Lehane, who has a very worthwhile theatre voice -- soon...