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June 18, 2004
TT: When bad trips make good theater
It's Friday, but I'm in Washington (and in a blessedly iBook-free state), so Our Girl in Chicago has been kind enough to post my weekly Wall Street Journal theater teaser for me, bless her.Anyway, I reviewed two plays this morning, Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, a new play by the author of Intimate Apparel, and Charlie Victor Romeo, an off-off-Broadway performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six airplane crashes.
Fabulation is terrific:
Unlike the simple, poignant "Intimate Apparel," "Fabulation" is a sardonic look at the complicated life of Undine Barnes Calles (Charlayne Woodard), a credit-card-carrying member of the black bourgeoisie whose husband empties out her bank account and blows town, leaving her broke and pregnant. Undine, we discover, is a hoity-toity Dartmouth grad who changed her name from Tameka Jo Greene, disowned her working-class Brooklyn family and started "my very own fierce boutique PR firm catering to the vanity and confusion of the African American nouveau riche." Now she makes the long journey home to Brooklyn, scared to death and fumbling to figure out her next move.
The sassily appealing Ms. Woodard leads a spot-on ensemble cast, and Kate Whoriskey, the director, puts them through their paces like a team of thoroughbreds. What lifts "Fabulation" well above the level of a don't-get-above-your-raising soap opera, though, is the shiv-sharp wit with which Ms. Nottage hacks away at the clichés of the genre. Despite some inconsistencies of tone, "Fabulation" mostly manages to keep its satirical balance, and the results are so smart and funny that you don't really mind a too-predictable last-minute plunge into sincerity....
If possible, Charlie Victor Romeo is even better:
It's a low-budget, unabashedly unglamorous affair. You stroll into a grubby black-box theater (talk about ironic!) in which a nondescript mock cockpit is placed at center stage. The house goes dark and a slide flashes on a screen overhead, telling you the flight number and date and how many people were on board, followed by a stark description of what went wrong: ICING. EXPLODING ENGINE. MULTIPLE BIRD STRIKES. Then the lights come up and all hell breaks loose.
Not always at once, though. Instead, you might find a pilot and co-pilot chatting away agreeably, flirting with a flight attendant, griping about this or that minor nuisance. But sooner or later-always without warning-something terrible happens, and in an instant the theater becomes a sweatbox. You watch in horror as the crew scrambles to save the ship while alarms beep and buzz, the radio crackles urgently and passengers scream on the far side of the cockpit door. Sometimes the crisis is protracted, sometimes shockingly brief (one flight lasts for just a minute and a half). Then the theater is filled with the clamor of a crash landing, abruptly cut off by a sharp click as the house goes black. After a seemingly endless pause, the slide shown at the beginning of the flight is flashed on the screen again, this time with an additional line at the bottom: NO SURVIVORS. NO SURVIVORS. 4 SURVIVORS. NO SURVIVORS....
No link, either, so to read the whole thing, buy today's Journal, where you'll find me in the "Weekend Journal" section, cheek by jowl with all manner of good things.
Posted June 18, 2004 12:06 PM
