Absurdist Play Starts Funny Ends Dark

Laurie Jerger and K. Brian Neel in I Never Betrayed the Revolution (Truman Buffett)

I Never Betrayed the Revolution

West of Lenin

Through November 23, 2014

AJ Epstein directs a world premiere play that is absurd and deceptively simple. Playwright Christopher Danowski, a longtime associate of Epstein’s, writes short, simple, slightly humorous (at first) scenes of a pan-Slavic citizenry restive and oppressed by its government in I Never Betrayed the Revolution. We’re (overly) helped by scenic descriptor cards presented by a dour-faced, eyes black-lined, Kate Kraay, who exemplifies the severity of their mood. While the play could use more polishing, it has something important to say about governing.

Chris Dietz is a political poet, Letkov, whose subversive writing causes his disappearance from his love, Daleka (Laurie Jerger). She and Henryka (Susanna Burney) and Josef (Matt Aquayo), Alina (Ty Bonneville) and Januscz (Andy Buffelen) keep the faith and long for a world that is free. They want food, security, and the ability to have or at least grow what they need. Isn’t that what we all want, essentially?

K. Brian Neel is General Chuchelow, played as a haphazard, Funky-Chicken-dancing, crazy administrator who loves his desk, but is under the power of unseen governors. He exemplifies the Peter-Principle-executive (rising to his level of incompetence), easily deposed and just as easily, eventually returned to power.

Blood Countess: Sophisticated, bloody fun (Annex)

Terri Weagant and Sarah Winsor in Blood Countess (Dangerpants Photography)

Blood Countess

Annex Theatre

Through November 22, 2014

A real live flesh-eating noblewoman is the subject of Kelleen Conway Blanchard’s latest production at Annex Theatre. Blood Countess is a poetic and evocative telling of Elizabeth Bathory’s life, from her childhood, marriage to a fellow sadist, up to her final captivity and end.

Blanchard wouldn’t write just any kind of biography, though. She picks key moments in a life to dramatize with effective dialogue and unique characterizations. Mary Murfin Bayley as the Mother is venal, crazy and abusive…Apple meet Tree.

Terri Weagant in the title role displays a full range of emotions and facially transmits all kinds of information through her expressions: dislike, bordering on hate for her mother, longing to be accepted for herself, developing awareness of her own powers and desires, and progressing into a raging, crazy and megalomaniacal fully grown woman.

Girls do love their horses! Playing off stereotype to great advantage...

Sascha Streckel and Horse Girls (Dangerpants Photography)

Horse Girls
Annex Theatre
through November 19, 2014

Young girls fall in love with horses. That is so ubiquitous it's almost more than a stereotype. Do young boys do the same? Not being one, I just don't know, but having three younger brothers who did not seem to be gaga about horses, while I was, my small sampling indicates, "no." Not that boys dislike horses, but girls seem to obsess about them.

This stereotype is on full display with Horse Girls by Jenny Rachel Weiner at Annex Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. A large cast (for a one-bedroom show) of seven young women takes the reins and gallops away with the script. (I just can't not do this.)

Review: The Case of the Disappearing Laughter ("Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" at ACT Theatre)

Pamela Reed, R. Hamilton Wright and Marianne Owen (Chris Bennion)

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

ACT Theatre

Through November 16, 2014

The reviews from New York productions of Christopher Durang’s new play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike pretty universally call it funny and even more. “Few Chekhov-inspired shows make you laugh out loud, and repeatedly at that. In fact there’s probably just one such rare bird on the planet,” says the New York Post.

So, if the current production of Durang’s play at ACT Theatre is not so funny, even with a cast one might expect truly humorous acting from, what might be the problem? This production has a few laughs in it, from time to time, but one does not experience an audience as the New York Times did … “The theater erupts in booming gusts of laughter that practically shake the seats.” Your faithful reviewer did not see any kind of indication of that in the slightest at ACT Theatre for the entire evening.

Carla Ching, playwright of "Fast Company," talks about the play, the Kilroys, writing for television

Brad Walker, Mariko Kita, Sara Porkalob, Kevin Lin in Fast Company (Roger Tang)

Fast Company

Pork Filled Productions 

Theatre Off Jackson

November 1-22, 2014

Pork Filled Productions’ next play opens this weekend. Fast Company is by Carla Ching and is about a Chinese American family (specifically, as you’ll see her talk about below) of expert con artists, grifters and thieves. It portrays, with comedy and drama, the ins and outs of family dysfunction, even within a family criminal enterprise.

Ms. Ching is a playwright and also a staff writer on an edgy, current and very diverse tv cop show, Graceland. (Well, it’s federal agents, but that still basically makes it a cop show.) I talked to her about her play and writing for television and her involvement in The Kilroys, the group that made headlines this year when they collected a list of 46 plays written by women that theaters could use nationally if they wanted to increase the amount of women playwrights on their production schedule.

First up, her play, which is having its third production via Pork Filled, after having outings at South Coast Rep and Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. EST commissioned the play. Carla has worked with director Amy Poisson on tweaking the script so this script is not the same as either other production.

Review: Thalia's Umbrella's beautifully rendered Fugard production

Pam Nolte, William Hall, Jr. and Terry Moore (John Ulman)

A Lesson from Aloes

Thalia’s Umbrella

(at Taproot Black Box)

Through October 26, 2014

Athol Fugard may not be a name you know well, or at all. However, he has earned his reputation well as a prolific playwright hailing from South African and often writing about people enmeshed in the consequences of their political and social systems of Apartheid. His beautifully written play, A Lesson from Aloes, is being produced by Thalia’s Umbrella – a company created by theatrical veterans Terry and Cornelia Moore to produce plays they feel an especial kinship with.

This three-hander, starring Terry Moore, Pam Nolte and William Hall, Jr., is a play you must pay careful attention to. The layers are geothermic (if you’d rather, we could go back to onions, though that’s boring), and call for careful mining. Moore and Nolte are a white couple, Piet or Pieter and Gladys, who had found fellowship and common cause with the black movement toward freedom and equality. But we meet the two of them after some difficult events.