Another Re-Write: The Name of the Game

Citi Pond, the free-admission ice-skating rink in Bryant Park

My latest assignment for TONY was another blog post about things to do in the City if you're making last-minute plans.  I'm getting closer to what they're after, i think.  I threw in a little humor, since the events we were suggesting both had 1980's themes.  I referred to it as "that bygone era of perms and mullets" and later suggested that attendees "dig out those acid-wash jeans and slide on those leg warmers" .... well the powers that be liked my theme so much they chose to tack on "feel free to describe fellow gliders' (ice skaters') moves as totally tubular and bodacious"  Ummm--I think they're beating a dead horse by taking it another step further.  Where's the rhythm?  But what do I know? I'm happy to have some published by-lines!


Have a great weekend, Reader!

I Got Re-Written!

My first assignment for Time Out: New York magazine was simple enough: write a blurb for the "Own This City" blog to accompany some photographs of an event that had happened the previous weekend.

So I took it very seriously. I spent thirty minutes composing a grammatically sophisticated, positively informative pair of sentences that--I thought--had an arc of rhythmic flow and whose ending tied a verbal bow around the whole damn thing.  Reading it aloud seemed to echo, "and they all lived happily ever after..."  Here's my original text:

For all the grown-up decisions and sober dealings being made there Monday through Friday, Freeze Tag on Wall Street was organized to add innocent amusement and juvenile jubilation to the Financial District one weekend a year.  The sixth-annual event happened on Saturday January 21 and included freeze tag among other playground games that, for these adults, hearkened back to simpler times when negotiations and mergers were scarcely more complex than whom it was Red Rover would be asked to send over.


Well I got re-written.  I'm new to publishing, so I suppose this happens to everyone.  It doesn't offend me, and I realize I am not Ernest Hemingway.  And certainly the Copy Editors (or whoever changed some of my key words) know the voice of TONY better than I.  And I have yet to learn the varying tones and styles for the magazine's different media: blog, listings, reviews, recommendations, features.  But, I was very proud of my little couplet and the Associate Editor who gave me the assignment said it was "perfect" ... So imagine my shock when I read later on the blog the following posting:


Despite all the grown-up decisions and sober dealings being made there Monday through Friday, for one weekend a year the Financial District is the site of juvenile jubilation. During the sixth annual Freeze Tag on Wall Street, on January 21, adults taking part in playground games were transported back to simpler times, when negotiations and mergers were scarcely more complex than whom Red Rover would send over.


Though the general meaning has been retained, the music in my opening rhythm has been halted with the replacement of "for" with "despite."  Also they are not synonymous. 


My use of the (perhaps) sentimental phrase "hearken back" suggests a Norman Rockwell portrait.  Nixing it and inserting "transport back," (in addition being redundant) changes my idea to metaphor, and suggests not nostalgia, but time travel.  


And finally, I will admit that my closing phrase was wordy and winding.  Reaching the end of that sentence was like reaching the end of a maze.  But reaching the end of a maze is a triumphant moment!  With the simplified text, that moment of triumph retains all the glory of reaching the bottom of an escalator.  Sure, you're at your destination.  But so what?

WAIT A MINUTE...I have just dissected 2 silly sentences and addressed my grievances with professional opinions of my amateur attempts!  God, how self-indulgent can I get?  


My work has been streamlined, not simplified.  My re-write was not reductive.  It has been taken off its high horse and rinsed of its gaudy esoteric sheen.  I should be glad.  


This writing business is a learning process.  And I'm happy you've chosen to follow me on the journey.  

Theater Review: Coffee House, Greenwich Village

published 16 January 2012... and by the way, the first time I ever panned an actor's performance.  At first I was racked with guilt. But I'm a performer's critic: I not only criticized her performance, I offered her a suggestion (and remarked on her beauty).  

The Manhattan Repertory Theatre’s Winter One-Act Competition continues this weekend featuring, among others, “Coffee House, Greenwich Village” written by John Doble and directed by Olivia Harris. 

Two nervous strangers are set to meet for a blind date, premeditated via internet dating site, those modern matchmaking means now ubiquitous as Greenwich Village coffee houses.  Jack, played with anxious appeal by the likeable Nicholas J. Pearson, arrives first, with flowers and sweaty brow, hopeful he will soon find a soul mate.  Enter Pamela, played by Elizabeth Dilley, radiant as a young Bette Davis, but tentative here in her role as temptress. 

The playwright has woven a web of dialogue in which the characters appear by turns to fiercely dominate and then submit to one another through light, impersonal small-talk.  Pamela, in what at first seems like a bad joke by a jumpy girl on a first date, notes that women are like cats.  “We’re feline,” she says.  But as the story unfolds, we realize that men are not, in turn, canine: in Pamela’s world, they’re the mice.

Mr. Doble has constructed a story of Hitchcockian scope that in the one-act format feels rushed.  He has endowed the role of Jack with a range of comedic and emotional depth for the actor, which Mr. Pearson takes full advantage of.  However the role of Pamela still seems to be a mystery to both Mr. Doble and Ms. Dilley.  To be fair, she’s a mysterious character.  Still, I wish the actress had grounded herself more emphatically in Pamela’s sexual energy, since the only concrete thing we know of her is that sex is, quite literally, her weapon.

Alex Engquist (handsome, underused) plays the small but pivotal role of waiter in the coffee house who inexplicably never delivers the second round of espressos the couple asks for. 

What’s exciting about the transaction between Jack and Pamela is how quickly fantasy can turn to cold, cruel reality.  Also, the way their internet hook-up plays out like so many others in the Village everyday: foreplay, climax, followed by a hurried goodbye.

“Coffee House, Greenwich Village” by John Doble plays at 2pm today at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre located at 303 W. 42^nd St on the 6^th floor.  For more info visit www.manhattanrep.com

Theater Review: Righteou$ Money

published 16 January 2012

One-person plays present a unique level of responsibility for the featured performer.  To carry a play without the benefit of a supporting cast is a test of endurance, focus, and chops for the actor.  Ditto the playwright.  When there is no foil, no sidekick, no comic relief, no straight man-- no gay neighbor--you’ve only got one character: so he had better be an interesting one.  Wolf 359’s production of “Righteous Money” is an example of that sublime and uncommon marriage of good acting with good material. 

Written and performed by the excellent Michael Yates Crawley, “Righteous Money” is an acerbic social commentary and dark comedy that details the psychological undoing of its hero CJ, a television personality and Wall Street power player.

The tiny Red Room Theater has been made over as a soundstage, and we are the studio audience in this live broadcast of CJ’s nationally syndicated financial advice show.  As CJ holds court over his audience of minions, all the while insulting and belittling their very worth as human beings, we learn that he long ago gave up kindness, humility, and all traces of political correctness during his ascent to financial success-- and a TriBeCa penthouse. 

In one brilliantly absurd and telling moment he says to his followers, “When I look into your souls, I see a bunch of (expletive) idiots.”  CJ is so forthright and full of himself, he can without irony claim to look into people’s souls.  And when he then calls those people idiots, it is not so much an affront as it is a warning.  CJ is Ebenezer Scrooge but with mad charisma.

Today has just not been CJ’s day.  Not only was he awoken from sleep by the Occupy Wall Street protests outside his (floor-to-ceiling, soundproof) windows, but his assistant Nathan has also decided not to show up for work, and his guest for the evening, financial guru Suze Orman, is missing in action.  CJ is able to hold it together on the air, though, spouting his appalling financial guidance, and trying during commercial breaks to keep the show afloat.

He admits to sacrificing all emotions and the hope of ever finding love in order to focus all his energies on mounting his wealth.  This is not a fact he mourns; to the contrary, he advises that his audience follow suit.  Why waste time building relationships, after all, when time is money?  Why even bother with conversation when “words only matter if they’re spoken to a broker during trading hours?”

As he is a larger-than-life television personality, CJ tends to speak in hyperbole (“I am God, you barnacle.”).  But as he descends into madness, we see that he has taken every piece of his own callous advice and turned it into this rigid, heartless reality.  However, disclosures about his sex life, the intricacies of his relationship with Nathan, and his recurring Macbethian hallucinations in the teleprompter reveal that there is still at least a modicum of human feeling beneath the façade. 

“Righteous Money” lampoons consumer culture, greed, and lust for the material while showcasing a layered, tragic anti-hero.  It re-casts the American dream as a waking nightmare.  There’s even self-flagellation.  

Having toured several cities around the globe, Crowley and director Michael Rau bring it to New York with polish and style.  It is funny, engaging, and right on the money.  

Theater Review: Helen Keller on Vaudeville

published 10 January 2012

Helen Keller’s legend is part of the American consciousness.  Famously deaf and blind by her nineteenth month, she overcame the silent darkness that could have cursed her to a lifetime of lonesome misery and in the process became a global symbol of triumph over devastating circumstances.  Today, what most of us know about her is summed up in “The Miracle Worker,” that oft-produced play and film which ends with teacher Annie Sullivan’s breakthrough and little six-year old Helen speaking her first word. 

Michele-Leona Godin has written “The Star of Happiness:Helen Keller on Vaudeville?!” as an examination and celebration of Helen’s life beyond that childhood moment.  Godin employs the use of video and image projections (expertly curated and designed by David Lowe), her own vocal recordings, and thoughtful research to bring Helen to life not only as that icon of survival against the odds, but also as a real human being.

As Godin is a regular adjunct and occasional faculty at NYU, the evening aptly begins as an informative and engaging lecture on Keller’s personal history and significance in shaping modern society’s view of the disabled.  Suddenly, the mean and careless voice of what sounds like a hateful playground bully booms from the speaker, interrupting the talk with crass, malicious, and ,to say the least, politically incorrect jokes aimed at blind people, deaf people, and Helen Keller herself (of the Why-did-Helen-Keller-cross-the-road variety). 

The lone spotlight darkens.  An awkward discomfort descends upon the house as Godin appears to fluster and become frustrated at having to defend her subject against the cruel jeering.  (Awkward, too, because the audience was populated by a number of blind people on the night I attended.)  In the small, black box style Kraine Theater, in total darkness, hearing loudly and clearly these fragmented, hate-filled ramblings, one is transported into the experience of the disabled and victimized, the blind spectacle.  In that moment dripping with pathos Godin reveals her lecture as true performance art.

In the second act (there are three), Godin emerges in a shimmering gown and recreates Keller’s appearances on the Vaudeville circuit.  She answers the questions of curious onlookers and defends Keller’s detractors who call her a sell-out or a side-show.  Practicality, Godin reminds us, is the reason Keller took to the Vaudeville stage: “There weren’t many jobs available in 1920 to a deaf, blind woman.”  She goes on to further humanize her subject with clues about Keller’s sex life and reports of her rather voluptuous figure and how Vaudeville audiences responded to it.  One of the evening’s most revealing moments is the reading of a letter that Keller wrote at age forty-two to a would-be suitor.

The show features the song “Star of Happiness” (newly recorded by Christina B.) that was written for Keller’s Vaudeville act, and where the show gets its title.  (In one of many humorous moments, Godin does acknowledge how cheesy the title is.)  She also uses what she calls an avant-accordion, a device used to record elements of a song, loop them, and layer them right there on stage.  Though she had technical difficulties during the recording, the song nonetheless served as a reverberating and poignant soundtrack to the show’s final moments. 

By introducing elements of her own life into the story, Godin--who herself has a degenerative eye disease--has given the show a presence and urgency without which it could have descended into mere idol worship.  She channels Keller not through impersonation, but through her own experience, which forces the observer to confront his own ideas and perceptions of blindness, deafness, and what it means to fully live a life. 

  

My Fist-- uh, First-- Published Theater Review

published 8 January 2012 

Matt Wilson’s “The Ventriloquist Circle” is a camp surrealist murder mystery set in the world of fetish porn.  (That a play with this title is not a tale of madcap puppeteers and their voice-throwing hijinks will only be the first shock of the evening.)  Turns out, a ventriloquist circle is three or more fisters/fistees each performing that act on the next in a great big circle of transitive fisting.   Are you getting the image?

The play opens with porn star and impresario Cox The Milk Man (a handsome, near-nude Daniel Piper Kublick) phoning in a confession to his priest during a break from the filming of one such ventriloquist circle.  “How far can the arm be inserted before fisting becomes a crime against God?” he asks.  The play will go on to raise many more (and answer very few) outrageous questions about power, control, morality, lust and the ongoing fight for freedom from social constructs.

Both Wilson and director Kathryn Hamilton have structured the work as a send-up of the very industry it portrays.  The play is populated by caricatures, cardboard cut-outs of iconic American characters: the Lonely Housewife (a charming, funny Christine Bullen), the Milk Man, The Girl Next Door, and The Lumberjack.  Two police officers investigating the murder speak robotically, facing out into the audience as though reading from cue cards.  All the bad acting, strange dialogue and ludicrous plotlines that pornographic films are notorious for are on display here, except without the promised money shot to look forward to. 

The Milk Man turns up dead after a spontaneous threesome with The Lonely Housewife and The Girl Next Door.  The Lonely Housewife is questioned, and we find that she’s been making movies for some time with The Milk Man.  Somewhere along the way they decided that using cameras to record their “films” was a minor and unnecessary detail in production.  The detectives go on to learn that rather than producing real films, The Milk Man had simply been staging fetish sex scenes in random places and calling it a movie. 

Early in the investigation a horse (in bondage-style leather bridle and boxing gloves-cum-hooves) is introduced as a suspect.   It is presumed that the Horse is actually a person who has fetishized the animal to the point of living as a horse, at least in films.  But maybe they meant it to be a real horse.  Why Not?  In fact, that seemed to be a question the playwright must have continually asked himself throughout the creation of his play.  Why don’t we throw in a lumberjack and have him get mustard squirted all over his face.  Why Not?  Why don’t we write in an aerobic dance number with an instructor who’s physically incapable of removing his fuchsia unitard.  Why Not?  Why don’t we have the Milk Man return from the grave with a sausage pizza? Why Not?  Attempted Rape? Why Not? Gratuitous Nudity? Why Not?

As with porn, the plot is not really the point here.   "The Ventriloquist Circle" is an exercise in shock theatre that, at every turn (and lighting change), has its audience cringing at the thought of what could possibly happen next.  It is funny, silly and totally absurd.  Just sit back.  Relax.  Release your inhibitions.  You’re in for a total mind-fisting.

“The Ventriloquist Circle” plays Friday and Saturday nights in January at 9:30 at Dixon Place located at 161A Chrystie St. between Rivington and DeLancey on the Lower East Side.  www.dixonplace.org