Cassiopeia

The latest play at The Theatre @ Boston Court is a "Duet" called Cassiopeia. The play unfolds in haphazard fashion starting at the end, backtracking to the beginning and dashing in bits of backstory here and there. The narrative is a little fractured and may be a little less accessible to the novice theater-goer. The characters are what make the play come alive. Quiet and Odetta are polar opposites representing detachment and humanity. This is a welcome change from the more common duality of science vs. emotion. While Quiet is deeply steeped in science, he is also a very emotional character filled with hopes and frustrations. I greatly enjoyed the interplay both resonant and dissonant between the characters.
The set was another triumph by Boston Court. With every new function I find myself eagerly anticipating what marvel they will come up with next. This time we have a door large and imposing that seems to float a few feet off the floor center-stage back. leading up to this is a rift in the wooden floorboards that make up the rest of the stage. This rift serves as barrier and a location as the story unfolds. To either side are window-like walls that glow with little lights like stars. The backdrop is black and again lit with stars, this time forming constellations that come and go as the story moves between places and times. The third character, The Voice, provides another level of background acting as chorus and theme. She sings us from place to place and fills in for the other people that Quiet and Odetta must deal with. 
If it seems like I have been vague in my description, it is entirely intentional. The play is less about concrete things and more about contrasts and impressions. The hopes and fears of the two main characters. The contrast of separateness and togetherness that binds us all into each other.
I would recommend this to any playgoer who is ready for a challenging and thought provoking play.

EST LA's The Belle of Belfast

This is a play I was very happily surprised by, and it saddens me that I caught it at the very end of the run, as I would've have loved to have seen it again.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, really, as I didn't particularly know what it was about. I guess I wasn't expecting the humor. I didn't anticipate that the conversations between the characters and their reactions to one another would be so realistically funny. And there's no easier way to make me fall in love with a character than when they make me laugh.

I never realized how fantastic it is to stage conversations at a confessional. It's so clever! You get both actors facing the audience directly in an extremely believable why, and they are free to express surprise, disgust, anger, and so many other emotions in a way that allows us to see these reactions while the other person is oblivious to them.

This is a play, of course, about Belfast - a land caught between two cultures. A place where Irishmen desperately cling to their heritage in an area ruled by the English. A place where being Catholic and revolting against the English is considered patriotic - even at the expense of the lives of your own people.

"The Belle" is a highly sexualized seventeen-year-old girl who feels lost and alone ever since her parents died as collateral damage from a bombing. Her coping mechanism - besides drinking, smoking, etc. - is to deliberately make people uncomfortable and fabricate lies. The object of her affection is a Catholic priest who's also 18 years her senior.

It's not difficult to see why he falls for her: she's clever as to exclude great potential, but she's engaging in self-sabotaging activities, so all you want to do is hold her and make her happy to she can fulfill her potential. This, naturally, leads to the priest having a crisis of faith - a moment that changes the course of both their lives.

Developing a taste

So after posting a lot recently, I've come to realize that I've really started to develop a taste for the kind of theatre that I like.

It used to be that I liked all theatre: I enjoyed musicals, comedies, tragedies, etc. Chicago was my absolute favorite. And I loved Wicked, even though I had to make a point of separating it entirely from the book.

But I've come to accept that there are, in fact, things and performances that I don't enjoy ... and that's okay.

It's hard for me to not like a play. It's difficult for me to be critical because I know how much work and effort is put into a production, so I typically make an effort to try to like a performance, and I avidly look for positive things to say and feel about it. It's also part of my ethos as a person: I try to see the good in you, even when you give me reason not to. In fact, when I get a bad first impression of someone, I often catch myself playing devil's advocate with myself and reminding me that there are any number of reasons why a person could have been in a bad mood that day.

But there have been productions I've gone to lately that I just haven't enjoyed. And when that happens, I make a point of separating out the parts from the sum and focusing on the parts that I like.

But the fact of the matter is that the more plays I go to, and the more discretionaty my income gets, I'm bound to become more selective.

I've also grown to be critical about plays with subject matter I'm familiar with (e.g. Shakespeare and Greek mythology) - mainly because I can't help but to formulate expectations about them. (This is actually the main reason why I'll try to see the movie before I read the book: that way I maximize my experience, enjoying the movie and feeling like I'm getting more in-depth, insider's access when I read the book.) But this is okay as well. I didn't study these subjects extensively and write plenty of thoughtful essays on them just to relinquish my opinion.

So I need to learn to be okay with the fact that there are going to be productions with people I love in them that I ultimately dislike - and that's okay. Because that's art. And the same piece can't possibly mean the same to everyone.

So it's okay if I don't like Les Mis (yes, disgruntled imaginary readers, I can hear your non-existent gasps from here), and it's okay if I haven't liked a few plays lately. Especially because I do, in fact, like most of what I see, and I can't always bet on the right horse ... right?

RMT's A Bright New Boise

So I didn't quite now what to expect with Rogue Machine's A Bright New Boise, as I knew very little about it: it's name, that it takes place in a break room, and that the artwork had a cross in a grey landscape.

The play is about Will - a man who's come to town trying to find the son he gave up for adoption to make a connection with him. He gets a job at a Hobby Lobby, which is where his teenage son works, and he struggles to connect with this very troubled teen, who is naturally rattled by the sudden appearance of his biological father.

Throughout the play, we come to learn that Will is devout to his faith - his own faith, in which he believes in The Rapture. But his faith has been a little shaken since the Church he helped establish imploded after the Pastor's decision brought about a teenager's death. We see that Will struggles to remain attached to his faith because his belief is all he really has, and without it, life is "meaningless."

This play - as humorous as it is poignant - is really about connection. About feeling connected to your coworkers, to your neighbors, your community, your partner, your family - and to life itself. It's about the deeply rooted need within us to feel that we're a part of something.

Some people, like Will, need to feel connected with an almighty entity. Others, like Leroy, feel the need to connect through art - especially when that connection brings about an uncomfortable tension. And then there are people like Alex - people who just want to connect to something or someone.  

 

T@BC's Creation

It's not very often that I encounter a play where I want to both cheer on and yell at each and every one of the characters.

In Creation, the Theatre @ Boston Court's last theatre production of the 2012 season, I love each one of the characters, and I feel that I get to know them and understand them(where they're coming from, and what struggles they're facing) whenever they use direct address and give us that insight into what's going on. And then I watch them doing something or saying something, and I want to stop them, to make them realize what they have, but I also completely understand why they're making a different choice.

Creation is a play that discusses "creation" in the sense of artistic inspiration and execution as well as a discussion between religion and science. It's a play where scientists are asked to think like artists and vice versa.

It's almost a play about what we choose to believe and the events or moments that lead us to listen to one thing and stop listening to another.

The acting is so beautiful, so realistic with its incomplete sentences and derailed thoughts, that some moments make you feel uncomfortable, like you've just walked in on the characters, infriging on their privacy, or stalking them through the window, or reading their journal.

The language, allusions and metaphors are stunning and extremely clever, woven in so subtly that they seem natural.

The set design is beautiful, making you feel cold when the characters are cold, making you happy that you're inside when it's raining.

I think this is a good moment for me to stop and admit something: I was afraid to write this post. I actually skipped over it and started writing some of the earlier posts. I wasn't exactly sure why I was afraid to start writing about this, but I think I've figured it out now: Creation shows us that things don't last forever.

Especially abstract things, like beliefs and love. It shows us that one thing can happen on a given day and due to different brain paths or divine intervention you can essentially become someone else, someone with a different focus, who cares about new and different things.

And that's terryfing. 

The thought that one day a random (or is it?) event could change the course of my life.

I think about that first scene of the two main characters on the dock, of how real and wonderful their parternship seems, how in love they seem to be in that moment ... and to think that by the end of the play they've found something or someone else* ... that troubles me deeply and makes me hold back tears as I write this.

Kudos, Boston Court, for bringing us yet another play that makes us comfront our fears and challenges the way we view the world.

*Okay, maybe that needed a spoiler alert, but really all you have to do is look at the promotional artwork for the show to know something's gonna go awry with that couple.

 

ANW's The Doctor's Dilemma

I like George Bernard Shaw.

I didn't know about The Doctor's Dilemma, but I had definitely read Pygmalion and Saint Joan, and seen My Fair Lady on film and Antaeus's production of Misalliance. But A Noise Within's The Doctor's Dilemma really made me come to the conclusion that I've enjoyed what I've experienced of Shaw's legacy.

I love the humor. I love the evident class disparity, the tensions inherent in that disparity, and his commentary on the social, political and economic levels of his time. I love his portrayal of conceited successful men and their flaws.

A Noise Within put on a wonderful production with quality acting, costuming and set design, taking us from the pompous household of the newly nighted Sir Colenso Ridgeon to the romantic outdoor dinner party to the artist's messy and bohemian studio apartment.

What's also beautiful about this play is that it has a surface dilemma that is explicitly called out as such, but there are layers of other dilemmas happening simultaneously.

The main surface dilemma is about deciding which man's life is more "worth" preserving: the moral scumbag artist who has unparallel artistic talent and promise, or the good-natured, poor altruistic general physician whose career will never bring about any significant discoveries to the medical field. To me it seems that in these modern days, this would be a no-brainer: save the GP.

My reaction to this makes me question why I readily assume that's the right answer. Evidently in the early 1900s artistic expression was held in a much higher regard than it is today - a notion that saddens me to the very core as a patron of the arts and a lover of museums, books, and theatre. I get upset when I hear schools are cutting out music and theatre programs left, right and center because of the budget cuts, deeming art as a "nice to have" rather than a "must have."

Yet even as a patron of the arts, I'd still pick the physician's life - not only because he's an altruistic, morally upright character, but also because he, in turn, is doing more good for the general public than the artist or many of the other doctors in the play, for that matter.

Another dilemma, of course, is Ridgeon's own personal struggle: he's in love with the artist's wife, so to keep him alive means that she gets to continue living with a man unworthy of her, but to knowingly kill him by leaving him in the hands of a "lesser" physician in order to marry his widow is morally dubious and reprehensible.

A third dilemma is that of the medical practice itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations between the doctors and how each of them argued staunchly about how their particular medical approach was better than the rest. It made for delightfully predictable and comedic moments, but it also brought to the forefront an issue that was happening in Shaw's day. Shaw, as I learned just now, meant to expose what some doctors were doing at the time: they would make up diseases and procedures that were harmless to the patient, so they'd make the doctor a lot of money and wouldn't harm the patient - but it wouldn't cure them, either. I loved learning about that ethical dilemma.

I could go on about research and ethics and get into a whole dissertation on the Stanford prison experiment of the 1970s, but I'll stop myself now. :)

 

Impro Theatre's Chekov Unscripted

Probably one of the biggest reasons why I love theatre is that you never get the same show twice. It doesn't matter how many times we go see a play, each live show is different. Maybe the actor turned left instead of right. Maybe a prop fell. Maybe someone forgot their line. All those little things make each performance unique.

Well, this is especially true with Impro Theatre's Chekov Unscripted.

Here's how it works:

All the actors read Chekov plays and stories for three months. During that time, they get to know the language and understand the themes and the common tropes and plotlines that appear in his work. They dress up in appropriate garb, and when it comes to showtime, they ask the audience for two prompts, which the entire play will be based on.

Prompt #1 opens the first act, where they ask us to describe something in a field that the characters could be looking at from inside a house through a large window.

Coming back from intermission, all actors stand in a line and discuss who they think they are and who they might be in love with.

Then Prompt #2 opens the second act, where they ask you which 2 or 3 actors you'd like to see on stage first.

I went to see them twice, so I got two very different plays.

Cheese

A group of foreign exchanged students had purchased tickets that night. They looked to be teenagers, and they had actually gotten the date wrong and had wanted to see The Twilight Zone Unscripted. One of them suggested "cheese" as Prompt #1, as what a wonderful choice that was.

This gave the actors the ability to have discussions about the working class and the upper class by looking at the cheesemakers from outside the window. It allowed for wonderful comedic moments, where an artist makes a cheese bird for the woman he's in love with, which she then loses, and it gets eaten by the doctor.

At one point, one of the actors walked across the stage as though he was rolling a big wheel of cheese from one side of the room to the next.

When a student's phone went off in the middle of the performance, the actors all turned to the window, and one said, "Those unruly cheesemakers! They're singing in ringing tones! What gives them the right to sing?"

The students left at intermission, and when the Act II opened, the first line spoken was, "The cheesemakers have all gone!" The artist later stated that he was leaving to follow the cheesemakers - only after having crafted a life-size cheese ostrich.

So yes, this theme was heavily and humorously used throughout a play full of love triangles where love is either unrequited or unfulfilled. After all, love matters don't typically end well in a Chekov story.

The Lake

This play turned out to be a much more somber play of, again, unrequited love, but more than that, of characters who are insecure about their lives, their professions, and how these unfulfilled dreams lead them to sorrow.

At the very end, the play suggests that one of the characters has fallen into the lake, probably intentionally.

Given that the previous play was so funny, I kept expecting her to come back, drenched, saying or doing something comical. But she doesn't. The play ends like a truly Chekovian play, and it speaks wonders of Impro Theatre and how committed they are to the work they're doing, going wherever the story and the audience are leading them to work.