Month: June 2019

My mind reels at the logistics. Six actors perform different roles in what has to be more than a dozen different vignettes. The actress playing the aunt in one piece might be the six-year old daughter in the next. The actor playing a cantankerous grandpa will also play a furniture restorer in another piece. And it all takes place in the same dining room. The characters and their attitudes toward the elegant furniture and fine china change from sketch to sketch. How those six actors keep each character distinct in their heads seems incomprehensible. But they do carry it off, with panache and crisp, joyful energy.

Playwright A. R. Gurney embraces the dining room as a touchstone to explore family dynamics. Whether it’s a room that’s rarely used (appropriated as an “office”) or religiously set for supper each evening. The episodes are sequential, in the sense that the setting progresses chronologically. There is no connection between the episodes themselves. By the time we’re nearing the end of The Dining Room. Characters discuss marijuana, lesbianism, and other relatively contemporary topics. There’s a kind of audacity Gurney brings to this show, and it moves quickly, we barely process one vignette before the next one begins. Considering the topic, it would have been easy to make this drama cloying and quaint. But Gurney has too much respect for us, to indulge in pandering.

As I suggested before, this is a demanding script for the players, turning character changes on a dime. Director Stefany Cambra orchestrates this impressive cast (John Daniel Pszyk, Ryan Maffei, David Helms, Rose Anne Holman Dayna Fries, Ashley Ottesen) with smooth mastery and filled with poignant, introspective moments. So much of The Dining Room creates familiar, recognizable sketches, and daring choices. Cambra and her crackerjack cast move with confidence, fully involved, with intuitive pacing. This is a splendid, profoundly human, drama with memorable, and silly, amusing moments. Make a point of seeing it.

Resolute Theatre Project presents The Dining Room playing 14th-23rd, 2019. 11888 Marsh Lane (Amy’s Studio of Performing Arts) Dallas, Texas 75234. www.resolutetheatreproject.com.

A chilling experience in the fanciful, violent and deranged, Reykjavik is a series of episodes involving sexuality of same gender partners. Whether or not this is a commentary on the homocentric universe is difficult to say. It is set in Reykjavik, Iceland. Dark, frozen milieu? Certain thematic threads emerge. The supernatural. Violence and/or danger. Deception. Anger. In the first brief narrative three men and a woman (passed out drunk) occupy a booth in a nightclub so loud that dialogue is projected on a screen behind them. The mark (James) is about to be drugged and seriously abused. James tells a story about the disappearance of his older sister. The drunk woman declares that she is magic. And honestly, whether or not you’re looking for a temporary sex fix, on some level, we are always hoping for magic.

Each sexual encounter carries a sinister subtext, a lack of respect and frankness. In this regard, Reykjavik suggests other shows, such as Hello, Again and Closer. The difference is that playwright Steve Yockey imbues each episode with a fairy tale sense of the inevitable and secular miracles: the stranger forever just on the perimeter of your attention, crows watching a couple’s lovemaking and sending them messages. In several encounters blood, thick and profuse, erupts. A sense of improbable probability suffuses the play. For all its strangeness and chilling scenarios, it feels recognizable. The bizarre narratives are nonetheless familiar. Which, of course, only serves to get Reykjavik under our skin.

Kitchen Dog Theater continues to present remarkable, overwhelming, sharp theatre that challenges, surprises, frightens and delights. You find your seat and you have no idea where you’re going to end up, by the time the actors take their bows. Just like any other kind of literature, theatre that submerges us in the realms of dreams (hallucinations, the unimaginable, a mashup of intensity, chaos, dread) is a gift. A grace. Kitchen Dog is fearless and wise enough to make their shows visceral, not that the intellectual isn’t there. But so much of the dialogue, the unspoken feels cunning, implacable. If you are up for a sacrament of the broken, ferocious world. If you’re aching for a drama that is like no other. Do not miss Reykjavik.

Kitchen Dog Theater presents: Reykjavik. Playing June 6th-30th. 2600 North Stemmons Freeway, Suite 180, Dallas, Texas 75207. (214) 953-1055. www.kitchendogtheater.org

Consisting of two one acts by Caryl Churchill, Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? / Here We Go explores nationalism and the allure of alphas and how we process death, respectively. Explained by director Alex Organ in the program notes, the two should not be taken as operating in tandem, or a single context, but autonomous and distinct.

Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? somewhat suggests an S & M, B & D connection between Sam (a country) and Guy (a man). It conflates loyalty and submission with patriotism. We find Sam and Guy in a state of post-coital intoxication, when Drunk Enough opens. Their chemistry is amiable enough. Their conversation has the feel of young boys, extolling the exhilaration of battle strategies. Gradually though, Sam (the alpha) becomes more dominant. With an unsettling, zealous gleam in his eye, he pronounces a litany of specific annihilations, atrocities, collateral civilian deaths. Guy goes along as best he can, but whenever he interjects a note of humanity, or hesitation, or alleviation, Sam threatens to walk away. He gets angry. Before long, subtle elements of restraint, torture and degradation take over. Love is no longer about love, it’s about surrendering to the will of the stronger party. It’s about conceding trust against better judgment. Churchill depicts the withholding of care and validation from the dominant male as the means to gain leverage.

Here We Go is Churchill’s reflection on what it means to be mortal. (Divided into three parts: Here we go, After, and Getting there.) We hear guests at a funeral, gossiping and remarking on the life of the deceased. No one seems especially solemn, even when each one places a single flower in a vessel, and briefly explains the circumstances, when their time arrives. Then we watch and listen as the deceased gropes his way through the next realm after death. He delivers an ongoing, fragmented monologue, as he tries to sort through the sensations of his posthumous experience. It’s not particularly comforting.

Finally we bear witness as a caretaker dresses and undresses the deceased, surmising this is something he cannot do on his own. Each time the ritual is repeated, it seems to be harder and harder on this elderly gentlemen. A passive struggle, if you will. The caretaker hums a tune, applies herself to the task, slaps at his hand, if it gets in the way.

There are certain patterns in these narratives. When characters finish one another’s sentences, there’s an urgency, a kind of intrusion. One cannot express a complete thought before the other jumps in. Is there a need to connect? An imperative to hurry things along? In both Drunk Enough, and Here We Go, we seem to occupy a secular vacuum. Even when God is mentioned (is He mentioned?) He doesn’t seem present or at least sentiently acknowledged. There’s a buffer, an equanimity to events. Yes, certain points in the story are salient, but we gather this through content rather than attention Churchill brings to them. It’s as if she imbues the human experience with a different texture. The drama stirs in the unspoken.

Second Thought Theatre presents Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? / Here We Go playing June 5th-29th, 2019. Bryant Hall at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd, Dallas, Texas 75219. 866-811-4111. info@secondthoughttheatre.com

How do I explain? The Play That Goes Wrong is The Murder at Haversham Manor which is a drama performed by a British touring company (The Cornley University Drama Society) and due to a series of predictable and unpredictable mishaps (the space larger and unfamiliar, the cast gets sick the night before) the production goes horribly, ridiculously awry. So (stay with me, here) the comedy at The Winspear is a play within a play, in which the actors play actors. And crew. I think. There are several ways to look at this. The previously mentioned problems are included in the program notes, so you might or might not know this going in. For those of you who don’t remember, Murphy’s Law predicted: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” This is just as good an explanation as any. Another might be to think of The Play that Goes Wrong as Frayn’s Noises Off without any backstory, to speak of.

Before the play even commence, two of the stage hands are out in the audience, shouting, searching for a dog that has, apparently, gotten loose. Next we notice the stage manager’ having trouble getting certain objects to stick to the wall, and stay there. At the show’s opening, a corpse is discovered on a sofa in the study, but they’re having trouble transporting it to another room. The door connecting the study to the rest of the manor keeps getting stuck. Sneaking around the parameters of the set or climbing through the window, only prove to be temporary solutions. One of the actors is knocked out, stone cold, so the stage manager must take over, working with script in hand. Snow is evoked with a careless toss of enormous flakes that are not even remotely convincing. At one point, “Chris Bean” who plays “Inspector Carter” implores the audience to “stop laughing at us” (this is, after all, a murder mystery). Which only makes us laugh all the harder.

The simple reason The Play That Goes Wrong succeeds so phenomenally, is the mad-genius script (by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields) with so many intentional problems, accidents and acts of God, minute to enormous. The mishaps are the plot! The cast’s dogged determination to soldier on is what keeps the action moving. No rational troupe would push back at such miserable misfortune for more than an hour, refusing to accept defeat. Please forgive the cliche here, but just when you think nothing else can go south, it most assuredly does. Lewis, Sayer and Shields have booked us passage on a ship that sinks for a very long time. Yet it remains animated and surprisingly punchy. I mean, it’s pretty much a one-gag show: 99% slapstick, like the poor salesman who doesn’t realize the dog doesn’t belong to the kid on the stoop. If only the poor “cast” of The Play That Goes Wrong could figure out that they’re doomed from the start, they might leave early. Thank God they don’t. And neither do we.

AT&T Performing Arts Center presents The Play That Goes Wrong, playing July 11th-16th, 2019. Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St, Dallas, Texas 75201. 214-880-0202. www.attpac.org

Written by Dave Malloy and three other performers cast in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (during a night of board games and bourbon) Ghost Quartet is an intense, yet freewheeling adventure into the depth of storytelling on the level of subconscious fracas and dreams. Falling somewhere between the spontaneous talent show you might stage among friends (when the evening lasts long into the raw hours) and the familiar barn show thrown during summer stock, Ghost Quartet is strange, playful, rough, absurd, melancholy and peppy as a calliope.

Familiar narratives are interwoven with each new song, introduced as cuts from a thematic music album (think Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or The Who’s Tommy) each one with a different attitude, angle, diction, and salient instrument. Imagery is used from: Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Pearl White and Rose Red, Scheherazade, 2001 A Space Odyssey…. There are overlaps and repetition. Scenes that vary in tone and approach. The two men and two women we see visiting so casually onstage, turn out to be the musicians and performers.

When you enter the theater, the first thing you notice is the very comfortable furniture: easy chairs, sofas, very cozy and welcoming. A member of the theatre company makes a point of greeting you and putting you at ease. During the performance, samples of good whiskey were offered. (They could have started with the Maker’s Mark!) Instruments are handed out. Great care is taken to help us feel relaxed, involved, participants in the realization of the piece, a member of a small community consisting of cast, crew and audience. There’s a personality to the way each piece is interpreted and expressed, that feels notably informal. Plainspoken?

Ghost Quartet reveals a myriad of thematic threads. Ferocious bears. Sisters who sometimes betray one another. Alcohol as celebration and truth serum. Those who deny the existence of God, yet cannot get past His absence. As I have noticed in the past, IMPRINT delights in bringing fresh vision and unorthodox endeavors to the stage. If I have noticed a pattern, it’s the desire to actively engage, surprise, dazzle and entice. Ghost Quartet submerges us in the sacred, the woeful, the gleeful, the devastating and unnerving. Whether it plunges us into darkness or entrances with its penchant for serpentine narratives. Whatever touching, sparkly prestidigitation it may bring our way, we are in for a breathless ride.

Imprint Theatreworks presents Ghost Quartet by Dave Malloy, playing May 31st-June 15th, 2019. Bath House Cultural Center. 521 E Lawther Dr, Dallas, Texas 75218. 214-670-8749. www.imprinttheatreworks.org