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May 17, 2005
TT: While you can
Two off-Broadway plays I liked very much are closing very soon. If you haven't seen them, do:- Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire closes May 22. Here's part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal:
Heather Raffo, the Iraqi-American playwright and performer of "Nine Parts of Desire," directed by Joanna Settle and now playing Off Broadway at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports. Yet her beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force and compulsion: It is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful.
Ms. Raffo's enigmatic title is explained in her epigraph, a maxim of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, founder of the Shia sect and fourth leader of the Islamic world after Mohammed: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." The nine characters she portrays are based on a large and diverse group of real-life women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a left-wing political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of 'N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade, and she evokes their dissimilar personalities (and appearances) with a precision reminiscent of Jefferson Mays' high-wire acts of multiple impersonation in "I Am My Own Wife." Each one is wholly believable, but not in the straight-from-the-transcript manner of such exercises in theatrical polemic as "Guantánamo." We believe in their reality because Ms. Raffo inhabits each one so fully, both as actor and as author, and because we never feel, not even for a moment, that she is making them tell us what we--or she--want to hear....
- Shockheaded Peter closes May 29. Again, here's an excerpt from my Journal review:
An actor who looks not unlike a freshly exhumed corpse strolls onto the stage of what looks very much like a blown-up toy theater. He fixes a fishy-eyed stare upon the hushed audience...and stands there. And stands there. Finally, to the sound of nervous titters, he speaks. "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," he intones in a voice of ripest ham, "I am the grrreatest actor that has ever existed!" Then he leaves.
Welcome to "Shockheaded Peter," now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the "Struwwelpeter" stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children's show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating "Shockheaded Peter" to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams. On the other hand, it may be that I simply don't know enough kids, for the audience at the preview I attended was full of perfectly adorable tots who showed no visible signs of being traumatized by the hijinks on stage.
Fully grown attendees will note that "Shockheaded Peter" owes much to Edward Gorey, though it's not literally derivative of that past master of the macabre. As much as anything else, it's an affectionate parody of turn-of-the-century mustache-twirling melodrama. The set contains enough doors (and trap doors) to furnish at least two French farces. The songs, written by Martin Jacques and performed by the Tiger Lillies, a trio of demented-looking Brits, are--well, creepy. The ensemble cast is fab, with top honors going to Julian Bleach, the cadaverous master of ceremonies, who informs us at one point that "I was trained in London, you know." No doubt, but I wouldn't be surprised if he got his graduate degree from the Peter Lorre School of Drama....
Don't dally--time is short.
Posted May 17, 2005 12:01 PM
