October 23-29, 2003

theater

The food of love: Nicholas Hormann, T. Scott Cunningham and Tina Benko get ready to chow down.

Wing Men

Tom Stoppard's brilliant play is a challenge to both players and audiences. At one point, Rosencrantz (or maybe it's Guildenstern) says, "Operating on two levels are we?! How clever!" Clever doesn't begin to cover it, nor are there just two levels, but two will do for starters: Hamlet's minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, summoned to court to spy on Hamlet, are now the major characters, center-stage, while Shakespeare's play continues offstage, elsewhere, intruding into this play from time to time. Mainly our two guys are stuck with nothing to do until they are swept up into the Shakespearean action again. This play isn't just about how tragedy looks from the wings, it has made the wings the stage, celebrating the bit player, the throwaway part, the role of contemporary man.

Stoppard is in Beckett's debt as well as Shakespeare's. One of Waiting for Godot's many offspring, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is about everybody's having missed the tragedy boat; there is nothing to be done but wait around. Stark raving sane is, for Stoppard, as close to the heroic as they get, helpless to control their fate, coping like crazy, confused about where they are, what is expected of them, why they are there -- just as we all are. This is a very funny and a very serious play.

As the icing on this many-tiered cake, Stoppard has pointed out elsewhere that when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get to England, the king who executed them would -- chronologically -- have been Lear. And that's what happens when you get sandwiched between two tragedies.

This production, under Aaron Posner's direction, lacks the necessary speed and sparkle; it's as though he doesn't trust the audience to get the tiny puns, the nonstop witticisms, the literary allusions, the big ideas. It is, of course, a smarty-pants play, as Stoppard's always are, and the confusion inherent in the structure is made worse by the costumes (Rosemarie McKelvey), which are not only unflattering but inappropriate -- they give no clue about historical period (theatrically or realistically); Ophelia looks like a teenage tart badly dressed for a prom, Hamlet looks like something out of the Monty Python show and the roving band of tragedians looks like a South Street Halloween party. All the actors seem, inexplicably, to be using the upper register of their voices, making all the dialogue sound thin and shrill.

Ian Merrill Peakes and Scott Greer turn in charming, solid performances in the difficult title roles, although their faces and gestures of bewilderment grow repetitious -- they remain, perhaps, too unenlightened. Lee Sellars as The Player lacks the grandeur of a tragedian -- another wrong-headed sacrifice of tradition and style. Everybody dies nicely.

ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
Through Nov. 9, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122

Winter of Our Content

"I love it here!" exclaims pretty Ariel as she glimpses the dazzling, inviolate wintry whiteness of boyfriend Jonathan's family cabin. Indeed, she -- and everybody else in Wintertime, Charles Mee's delicious comic valentine of a play -- "loves" just about everywhere and every way.

Ariel and Jonathan have escaped for this romantic weekend to what they expect will be an empty house. No such luck: His mother, Maria, is there, too, along with her slimy Eurotrash man-toy, Francois. Eventually, Frank (Jonathan's father and Maria's husband) arrives, with Edmund, Frank's male lover, following just behind. (Bertha and Hilda, a Laurel and Hardy-ish lesbian couple from down the road, show up, too.)

The multiple pairings in Mee's play (and there are more than the four mentioned above, since nothing is ever as tidy as it seems) show us love in all its infinite weirdness. There's the rhapsodic but easily battered love of youth. There's bickering, sardonic middle-aged love. There's straight love and gay love, the sanctioned love of marriage and the illicit thrill of adultery. (It is typical of Mee's fine attention to detail that Wintertime is set between Christmas and New Year, thus aptly bookending the revels with celebrations sacred and profane.)

And that's all the plot summary you'll get from me. To say more would spoil surprises, but take my word for it: Wintertime is sometimes touching, often trenchant and nearly always funny. Mee's language is a joy in itself, full of extended arias and spiced with clever aphorisms. Director David Schweizer has his crackerjack cast deliver it all with breakneck virtuosity. The production is a veritable toy chest of cleverness, including an uproarious tableau that I shouldn't reveal -- oh, let's just say what's love without a moon? Not all of the show works, and like its natural namesake, Wintertime goes on a bit longer than we'd like. But much of it is delightful.

It seems also to be the play of the season: In addition to this production (which McCarter shares with New York's Second Stage), it's scheduled (in a completely different version, to be directed by Jiri Zizka) at the Wilma in March. No problem there: Wintertime is certainly enjoyable enough to see twice!

WINTERTIME
Through Nov. 2, McCarter Theatre, 91 University Pl., Princeton, N.J., 609-258-2787

A Winning Hand

In Lincoln's hands, blacks are winners. In Booth's, they're losers.

It&Mac185;s not what you think. The Lincoln and Booth of Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama, are African-American brothers, two-bit hustlers living on the margins. (The names are a sardonic joke bestowed by their father. He later abandoned the boys, as did their mother.)

Booth is a low-rent thief and three-card monte dealer. Brother Lincoln also excelled at the card con (the blacks are, of course, spades and clubs) but gave it up for an even odder job: Dressed as, well, Lincoln (beard, stovepipe hat, white face paint), he is a living arcade game, with customers re-enacting his assassination.

As the title suggests, Topdog/Underdog traces an ever-shifting landscape of one-upmanship. Partly it is played out in the cards, as the more expert Lincoln offers a high-stakes challenge to his novice brother. Their variable luck is etched still more deeply in personal history: absent families, cheating wives and girlfriends, and so on.

Parks' play is a series of nesting boxes rich in American iconography. Some of it is, of course, related to history and politics, but perhaps less than you might expect. Topdog's overarching motives -- brother against brother, the legacy of parental sins, macho turf wars fueled by failures with women -- belong to a larger and more colorblind world of drama.

Part of what seems to light Parks' fire is a love of pure theatricality. Many of Topdog's most memorable moments belong more to vaudeville than traditional playwriting. There's an eerie shadow play of Lincoln's death throes, Booth's joyous striptease dance wherein he reveals a veritable closetful of stolen outfits, the monte games themselves and more. (One way of looking at the murder of Lincoln at Ford's Theatre is as the ultimate hard-luck, that's-showbiz story.)

It's not always clear, though, what Parks is after. The image of a black Lincoln impersonator is one she has used before (and frankly, with more powerful resonance) in her The America Play. Topdog is riveting in its breathless, moment-to-moment energy, but less effective in the aggregate. The play's abstractly poetic first act promises a level of depth that the second act -- more conventionally melodramatic -- doesn't quite deliver.

That said, Topdog never fails to entertain and intrigue, and to ask (if not entirely answer) provocative questions. The PTC production is smartly directed (by Leah C. Gardiner) and very well acted (by Billöah Greene as Booth, and especially Seth Gilliam as Lincoln). These two performers may not throw quite the sparks as the already legendary Broadway cast (Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright), but they have an electricity of their own.

TOPDOG/ UNDERDOG
Through Nov. 16, Philadelphia Theatre Company at Plays and Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700

Bland Marquis

This is the second production by Belligerent Muse, and having missed their raved-about Interview: A Fugue for Eight Actors, I was looking forward to seeing this new company. In a bold and weird move, they chose to produce a nearly forgotten play by the Marquis de Sade, called The Madness of Misfortune. The evening begins stylishly enough (if you go in for this sort of audience-involvement thing) as we are announced to a receiving line and invited to have some red punch ("The Master has put something special in it"). There is dancing. The Marquis (Seth Reichgott) struts around with terrific bearing in leather pants. It’s downhill from there.

The thing is, people confuse plays about Sade with plays by Sade. The decadent French aristocrat who spent much of his life in prison wrote the graphic, sexually perverse novels (Justine is the most famous/notorious) that gave his name to sadism. But alas, and not to mention alack: His drama is cloying rubbish, full of sentimental scenes and cliche language. He explains that women in distress turn him on, and this play makes the old silent movie The Perils of Pauline look sophisticated -- and this play isn’t silent, not by a long shot, more’s the pity. And not only do the characters talk flowery nonsense about Virtue and Poverty and Honor, but they sing. And since only one of the four actors (Dee King) can carry a tune, this hardly redeems the evening.

Director John Franceschina adapted the play, adding, to juice up the otherwise dreary proceedings, the character of the Marquis himself along with a bunch of androgynous, tuxedoed lackeys to paw him and each other while we all watch the melodrama. Franceschina also wrote the music for piano, cello and oboe, played to great effect by an excellent trio; unfortunately, he also wrote a bunch of drippy songs with greeting-card lyrics.

I am astonished to be able to report that a show that involves wrist-slashing, two women making love, executioners in black shiny zippered-up-the-back bikinis, two occasions of masturbation to orgasm and various other hoo-ha is, simply and stupefyingly, boring.

THE MADNESS OF MISFORTUNE
Through Nov. 1, Belligerent Muse at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St., 215-925-9023