2012 theater in review

[gaussjordan]

I've been delaying this too long and it's already February, so here it is. The plays I saw in 2012, in chronological order:

1. The Book of Mormon - I finally broke down, picked a date a few months in the future, and paid $312 to sit in the fourth row. While not matching my own style of humor, I must admit that the show was very well done. If you like South Park, you'd like The Book of Mormon. Still, it had a bit too much awkwardness-based humor for me.
   
2. Russian Transport - A decent but unexceptional play about Russian immigrants living in the greater NYC area and about human trafficking.
   
3. These Seven Sicknesses - An awesome play! This was almost the best play I saw in 2012. It was a five-hour combined version of all seven surviving plays of Sophocles (Oedipus, etc.), performed at the tiny Flea theater in Tribeca.
   
   My favorite moment was when Electra stamped on a giggling Tickle Me Elmo toy, shortly before making out with her brother Orestes and murdering her mother Clytemnestra. The show wasn't 100% faithful to the original Greek version, I suppose, and definitely had a lot more blood than would have been seen onstage in a traditional production. Interestingly, the show made the choice to remove all direct mention of the Greek gods, focusing instead on the human characters and how their stories flow through multiple plays.
   
   After watching the seven plays together, it's hard to imagine that they're ever performed separately. They have many shared characters and story lines among the plays. The Theban plays feature Oedipus and his daughter-sister Antigone and together form a complete story. (Yes, "daughter-sister", "father-brother", etc. was how Oedipus's family referred to one another in the play.) Three of the other plays are loosely connected by Heracles and his bow. The last, Electra mostly stands alone, but is tangentially connected to the others by way of the Trojan War.
   
   The show included two intermissions, during which the cast served dinner and desert and chatted you up. I talked with several of the cast members, who all asked me if I worked in theater or knew anyone in the show, as though that would be the reason I was there. (I was actually there because of the strong recommendation of The New York Times.)
   
   As much as I enjoyed the production, there's an interesting side question of scale. The theater was tiny, probably only holding 70-odd people, and there were only 12 performances in the original run. (The show was later re-staged for a month.) While chatting with Katherine (Antigone), I asked her how much she rehearsed for the show. She said that she spent 30 hours a week for 6 weeks. There were 38 cast members listed on the program, who presumably also rehearsed for 6 weeks. Antigone was probably the most time consuming role, but that still doesn't even include the crew. Overall, it seems likely that more time was spent producing the show than was spent consuming the show. This probably relates to how the excellent cast of aspiring actors wasn't paid. I enjoyed the show and the small, intimate experience very much, but it's a pity that more people didn't have the opportunity to experience the show.
   
4. How I Learned To Drive
   
5. The Lady From Dubuque - An absolute worthless Edward Albee play performed by the Signature Theatre Company. The name comes from the founder of The New Yorker magazine who declared that the magazine "...is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque". I had such high hopes for Signature Theatre's work, after having seen their excellent production of Angels in America last year. I have no idea why people would like this play. I can see why the original run of the play was closed after only 12 performances.
   
   Basically, in the first half of the play, there's a gathering of friends all of whom are really mean to one another. One of them, Jo, is slowly dying of a terminal illness. In the second half, an old white lady claiming to be Jo's mother from Dubuque arrives with a black man. Jo's husband doesn't believe her. The friends arrive, don't understand why Jo's husband doesn't believe her, and physically restrain Jo's husband. Jo, in pain, gives no clear indication as to whether the old woman is her mother. The play ends.
   
   The most interesting thing about this play was seeing the new Signature Center, a $66 million theater complex designed by Frank Gehry for a good but relatively small theater company which charges $20 for tickets. It felt very much like seeing a play in the Stata Center, with the same chairs, sound baffles, and wood and concrete slanted walls.
   
6. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind
   
7. Futurity - A musical about a soldier in the American Civil War who (anachronistically) corresponds with Ada Lovelace about the construction of a mechanical "steam brain" which would bring peace. I quite enjoyed it as a song cycle, but it was only so-so as a play. The cast were mostly musicians, which showed in the ways you'd expect. The percussion was wonderfully creative and really excellent.
   
8. Lost in Yonkers
   
9. The Foreplay Play - A play taking place inside a private apartment in Brooklyn about a foursome, or rather, about the awkward prelude to a foursome.
   
10. The Electric Lighthouse - A play by the same Bats company who produced These Seven Sicknesses. It was set in London and focused on the lives of people centered about Electric Cinema movie theater in Notting Hill in London. (I wanted to see a movie at the actual Electric Cinema when I visited London in July, but it was closed for repairs due to a fire.)
    
11. Cock - A play about a woman and a man fighting for the affections of a man who seems incapable of making a decision. The production built a large, steep, circular wooden seating structure so as to resemble cockfighting arena.
    
12. One Man, Two Guvnors
    
13. Peter and the Starcatcher - A musical about how Peter Pan became Peter Pan. It was a bit too "Broadway" for my taste, but quite good.
    
14. Noises Off
    
15. The Mousetrap - A long-running mystery play by Agatha Christie. It's something of a stereotypical thing for American tourists in London to see. Nothing special, but fun.
    
16. Crash of The Elysium - A Doctor Who themed experience in Ipswich, England by Punchdrunk, the same theater company, specializing in immersive theater experiences, who did Sleep No More. This was almost exactly like being inside an episode of Doctor Who. At the beginning of the show, the audience gets drafted into the military to protect Earth from a dangerous alien menace lurking inside a crashed spaceship. The show mostly involves running around from place to place, finding simple clues at each location to further the plot, all while being chased by monsters which always appear just before you're ready to leave for the next location. The show was originally intended for kids, but they opened it up for "after dark" performances partly for adults as well. I suspect that I stole some of the fun from the kids by being cleverer than they at figuring out the clues, but I regret nothing. At the end of the show, I got a silly note from The Doctor, thanking us for saving the world (and him). The show was totally worth the special trip I made to England to see it.
    
17. Triassic Parq - A silly musical about transsexual dinosaurs, basically Jurassic Park from the perspective of the dinosaurs. (In Jurassic Park, all of the dinosaurs are supposed to be female to prevent them from breeding, but they were created by using frog DNA to "fill in the missing parts" of dinosaur DNA which allowed them to change gender to male.) The characters included "T-Rex 1", "T-Rex 2", "Velociraptor of Faith", "Velociraptor of Science", and "Velociraptor of Innocence". A few of the other audience members and I were actually requested to sit onstage and we had to avoid embarrassing scratching for the duration of the show.
    
18. The Bad And The Better - This year's play by one of my favorite theater companies, The Amoralists, whom I saw last year in HotelModel. This was a film noir-style play about some cops, anarchists, and property developers around New York City. The New York Times described it as "Chinatown-on-Ritalin", which is a perfect description. There were some lovely lines, of which my favorite was "whoever circumcised your penis was an artist". First half quite funny, second half quite violent.
    
19. Tribes - A young man was born deaf and has grown up in a disfunctional hearing family. A lot of his family's rapid fire bickering is lost on him. Then, he meets a girl who was raised in a deaf family and who teaches him how to sign. His family feels threatened by sign language as taking him away from them. This play was in the nice, small Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village. The stage is a family kitchen and dining room and sitting area with the audience on all four sides. The set was perfect and felt very open, with the cast and action occurring around the space and the actors turning to face one another and lip read around the dining room table. The writing was sharp and frequently funny and the cast was quite good.
    
20. The Material World - A very strange musical, which no doubt made less sense because I nodded off during the play. An old woman reflects on her childhood as a 16-year old aspiring Communist revolutionary living in New York City. Madonna and Britney Spears are there, somehow, giving the show its name and much of its music.
    
21. The Lion King - I got willingly dragged to this big Broadway musical.
    
22. Pulp Shakespeare - A play at the New York Fringe Festival which I went to with fclbrokle which purported to address the question "What if Pulp Fiction had been written by William Shakespeare?". The result was basically Pulp Fiction with the cast wearing vaguely Elizabethan and talking in iambic pentameter.
    
23. Magic Trick - Another play at the New York Fringe Festival by the same group CAPS LOCK THEATER, who did The Foreplay Play. This play was about a paraplegic women and her boyfriend who try to take home a burlesque dancer for a threesome. The same night, the woman leaves her boyfriend in the middle of the night with no message and moves in with the dancer. Burlesque ensues.
    
24. The Pied Pipers Of The Lower East Side - A play about a Bohemian utopia falling apart, by The Amoralists. This was a re-staging of what is possibly their signature work.
    
25. Independents - A coming of age story on a boat.
    
26. Canon in D Minor - A play about dealing with a friend's suicide.
    
27. 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche
    
28. Metamorphoses
    
29. Spirits to Enforce - Something something The Tempist something. Basically, all of the characters in The Tempist (or maybe just spirits on the island pretending to be the human characters?) have been protecting the island for centuries from Caliban as superheros and they are now conducting a telethon to raise money for a superhero production of The Tempist. It didn't make sense to me at the time either, but that may have been because I was sick and dosed off at a couple points. The entire play consists of the cast sitting facing the audience and talking on their respective phones.
    
30. The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart - This was the most fun play I saw in Chicago. It was performed by the National Theatre of Scotland and is a fun mix of music, theater, and party drawing on border ballads, the supernatural, and other historical and modern folk traditions of Scotland. Everyone is sitting at wooden tables with free whiskey. The action happens all around. Scenes often take place between characters on opposite sides of the space. Scene transitions take place by lighting up an actor on the other side of the stage. Before and during the show, the cast play folk music interspersed with modern songs like Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head". Much of the dialogue is in verse, for some small reason which is explained near the end. There was quite a bit of audience participation. One of the actors used one of my theater companions and his voluminous hair as a motorbike.
    
31. The Iron Stag King - The first in a new trilogy of plays by The House Theatre. It's a high fantasy play. The first half was pretty standard fantasy fare - a hero's journey and all that - but the second half got quite a bit more interesting. There are several characters trying, either explicitly or implicitly, to create the story that they're characters in. That is, they have a narrative that they want, rather than just a set of outcomes. My favorite Chicago theater critic and her father had roles in this play.
    
32. Jitney - A loving depiction of an African American community in Pittsburgh in the 1970's. The play takes place in the storefront of an unlicensed taxicab (or "jitney") business. The plot is not complex and the characters are not deep, but they are well drawn as real people and not flat stereotypes. I most enjoyed it for drawing a picture of a community which I would otherwise never see.
    
33. The Skriker - My description can't possibly do this play justice. This was a tiny performance by Red Tape Theatre, my favorite Chicago theater company. No performance of theirs that I've been to has had more than 10 or 15 people; there were more cast and crew members. They converted a large open space in a church into a series of compartments with sliding walls for a very creepy play. During the play, you walk into new scenes as walls open up in front of you and close behind you. One reviewer described it as "promenade", but it doesn't feel so linear when in the middle of it, partly because the walls are always closed off between scene changes and you don't know which wall will open up for the next scene change. The characters comprise broken humans and malicious fairies, the latter of which will approach you and bite off their lines while staring at you in the face.
    
34. The Old Man and The Old Moon - This was my favorite play of 2012! It was performed by a new theater company, PigPen Theatre Co., most of whose members are friends who had just graduated in the same year of the drama program at CMU. They had decided to move to New York City and start a theater company, which sounds like a huge amount of fun! Anyway, their show was really, really good. It was an imaginative "play with music" about an old man who is responsible for "refilling" the moon with light but who leaves his job to go look for his wife who left to see the world. The group did some lovely special effects with shadow puppets to show cities and a title sequence. This was a really beautiful play. I am very much looking forward to seeing the next play by this group!
    
35. Author Directing Author
    
36. The Heiress
    
37. Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 - This was a fun play. Think of a cabaret-style musical version of Anna Karenina with free vodka and you'll get the general idea.
    
38. The Mystery of Edwin Drood - An adaptation of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel of the same name. The title role was played by a cross-dressing actress. Because the novel was never finished, the audience gets to vote on whodunit, with the cast soliciting your vote before the show starts. I was particularly impressed that the audience got to vote on a pair of characters for the romantic subplot, and the actors had to act out a brief romance at the end. I imagine that they rehearsed some or all of the pairings at least a little bit, but the total number would seem to make it at least somewhat spontaneous.

Favorite plays:

1. The Old Man and The Old Moon
   
2. These Seven Sicknesses
   
3. The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
   
4. The Skriker
   
5. One Man, Two Guvnors