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May 7, 2004
TT: One for three
No, I'm not here, nor am I blogging from my secret hideaway. I wrote this posting on Wednesday and stowed it with Our Girl for your Friday-morning delectation.As usual, I'm in The Wall Street Journal today, this time with reviews of Bryony Lavery's Frozen, Mark Medoff's Prymate, and Neil LaBute's The Distance from Here.
Frozen is brilliant:
Here's a phrase that makes my blood run cold: "That play deals with a lot of really good issues." I myself prefer plays that deal with life, not issues, but the two have been known to overlap on occasion, and it's not unheard of for a really good playwright to use a "really good issue" as the pretext for a voyage into the unchartable labyrinth of human motivation. More often, what you get is a pulpit-pounding sermon with a politically correct moral, but Bryony Lavery's "Frozen," which transferred to Circle in the Square this week after a successful Off-Broadway run, is the polar opposite, an issue-driven play that grinds no axes. It is superior in every way-script, performances, staging, set. If I had tonight off, I'd go see it again....
Prymate is awful:
Esther (Phyllis Frelich), a deaf-mute anthropologist, steals Graham (André de Shields), a gorilla with emphysema to whom she has taught American Sign Language, from a research lab run by her ex-lover Avrum (James Naughton), a heartless scientist who wants to infect Graham with HIV in order to find a cure for AIDS. Accompanied by Allison (Heather Tom), a sexy sign-language interpreter, Avrum tracks down Esther and Graham in the New Mexico wilderness, and...
You get the idea, right? Right. And The Distance from Here isn't much better:
Mr. LaBute, who customarily writes about upper-middle-class folk with too much leisure time on their hands, has chosen this time around to write about a bunch of working-class kids, their mothers, and their mothers' boyfriends. He explains in a program note that "The Distance from Here" is an attempt to "acknowledge a kind of person I've always known well but consciously and constantly marginalized. I never liked the way those kids dressed, or the music they listened to, or the way they talked, so from the beginning they were, in essence, dead to me....They knew, even at sixteen, that they had absolutely no hope in this life."
A lot of really good issues, yes? Well, maybe, if Mr. LaBute actually knew something about his teenaged losers and their hopeless lives. Alas, he hasn't a clue as to how they talk ("I feel you've been wronged"), just as his notion of fully rounded characterization is to make everyone on stage smoke cigarettes and say "whatever" at ten-second intervals....
No link. Whaddya do? Buy a paper! What does it cost? A dollar!
Posted May 7, 2004 12:48 PM
