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October 15, 2004
TT: Sometimes it's bad to be the king
I reviewed Richard III, Bryony Lavery's Last Easter, and the Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Craig Lucas' Reckless in this morning's Wall Street Journal.Richard III is a bit of of a one-man show, but a good one:
Peter Dinklage, who has never before played a major Shakespearean part, takes on one of the biggest, juiciest ones in the Public Theater's new production of "Richard III," and emerges cum laude, if not quite summa. At first glance it may look like a piece of trick casting, with Mr. Dinklage, who is a dwarf (his word), playing the hunchbacked killer-king who'll do anything to anyone in order to get ahead. But the star of "The Station Agent" is no theatrical stuntman. He's a magnetic, eye-grabbing actor who just happens to be four-foot-five, and when he strides from the wings, glowers into the middle distance and announces that "I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion...am determined to prove a villain," you can all but hear the audience shuddering with prospective dread....
To be sure, his inexperience in classical repertory can't be overlooked. He's not always comfortable with Shakespeare's verse, which he sometimes articulates overcarefully, and the upper register of his dark, grainy bass-baritone voice is barely developed. (If you want to hear what a real classical actor sounds like, take note of Isa Thomas' awesome Queen Margaret.) Perhaps his performance is best regarded for now as a work in progress--but oh, the places he'll go!
Unlike most of my critical brethren, I gave a rave to Last Easter:
Bryony Lavery, the British playwright who hit the jackpot last season with "Frozen," crapped out when she was accused of plagiarizing part of that mesmerizing play about a serial killer. (A settlement is reportedly in the works.) Undaunted by the hullabaloo, MCC Theater is now presenting Ms. Lavery's "Last Easter," the printed script of which anxiously credits every possible source, up to and including "the wonderful jokers who told me all the jokes." No matter where she got the jokes, "Last Easter," which runs through Oct. 23 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, is thoroughly watchable, acted by a fine cast and given a pitch-perfect staging by Doug Hughes (who also directed "Frozen").
Like "Frozen," "Last Easter" is a problem play that uses its hot topic--euthanasia--as a means, not an end. It's about June (Veanne Cox), Gash (Jeffrey Carlson), Leah (Clea Lewis) and Joy (Florencia Lozano), four theatrical types who communicate exclusively in brittle, witty repartée, a mode of discourse inadequate to the news that June is dying of breast cancer. Ms. Lavery's interest is in what happens to her flippant characters when they're forced to grapple openly with emotions they'd rather smother, and she writes about their struggle with a barbed wit that chops away much (though not all) of "Last Easter"'s potential sentimentality...
Everybody is good in "Last Easter," but I want to single out Clea Lewis, who endows her adorable-sidekick part with freshness and charm. Winsome can be irksome, but not when Ms. Lewis is dishing it up.
Reckless, alas, got the back of my hand:
Mary-Louise Parker plays Rachel, a revoltingly cheery housewife given to "euphoria attacks" whose husband (Thomas Sadowski) hires a hit man to kill her on Christmas Eve (I would have done the same thing), thus forcing her to keep house with Lloyd (Michael O'Keefe), a social worker whose wife Pooty (Rosie Perez) is pretending to be a paraplegic deaf-mute. The ensuing hijinks are played for screwball comedy, and I heard a certain amount of laughter ricocheting around the theater, so somebody must have found them funny. Alas, I wasn't on Mr. Lucas' wavelength, nor did I respond to his predictable swerve into phony profundity at play's end. Instead, I just sat there and squirmed....
No link. To read the whole thing, go out and buy the damn paper (or click here for a shortcut).
Posted October 15, 2004 12:05 PM
