Heartache, Heartbreak, Hot Blood

Five Off-Broadway Plays for Fall

Indian Blood

Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters

A.R. Gurney’s Indian Blood is a delightful and warm-hearted coming of age story set in Buffalo in December 1946. Young Eddie, played with humor and heart by Charles Socarides, finds himself suspended from high school after sharing with his bored Latin classmates an illustration he drew, the subject of which showed all-too-anatomically-correct figures communicating all-too-blatant conjugal desires.

His artistic endeavor horrifies his straight-laced father (Jack Gilpin), who is incapable of exhibiting any semblance of a sense of humor; draws sympathy from his understanding mother (Rebecca Luker); evokes confusion from his domineering grandmother (Pamela Payton Wright); and elicits from his loving and down-to-earth grandfather (John McMartin is a gem!) more tales of the family’s Indian heritage, which is conveniently used to explain away any instances of "hot bloodedness."

Gurney has Eddie’s character break the fourth wall on several occasions, reminding the audience that they are indeed watching a play and not a movie, challenging the audience to use its imagination (like when the characters mime actions sans props) and requiring Eddie to set the scenes on an otherwise bare stage and to describe to the audience characters who would otherwise be present were it not for a limited theatrical budget. Mark Lamos’ direction is flawless in accomplishing all of this, and Stephanie Klapper is to be commended on assembling a perfect cast, which also includes Matthew Arkin, Jeremy Blackman, and Katherine McGrath.

Indian Blood is definitely on my “A” List of plays to see this Fall.

Barbara’s Blue Kitchen,

The Lamb’s Theatre

Barbara’s Blue Kitchen is a slice of life from a good old Southern diner, replete with down-home characters and good old country songs, which are, of course, filled with plenty of good old heartache. Barbara's in love with a womanizing Italian hairdresser. Her nephew, who has the misfortune of bearing his absent father's face, attempts in vain to win the love of his bitter mother. And the elderly woman from the retirement home across the street lost the only man she ever loved to a bad batch of spinach dip.

Lori Fischer stars in this basically one-woman show (Scott Wakefield plays the local DJ whose station is always on at Barbara’s). She plays about ten different characters, and she also wrote the songs, which sport such lyrics as “I’ll love you for a little while – I’ve got an hour to spare.” For all the fun, these characters are very real. Emotional pain is ageless, whether you’re a little boy doing his best to cope with a cruel mother or an octogenarian grieving the loss of her mate.

Throughout Barbara’s Blue Kitchen is the theme of blue butterflies, whose color you only see when they open their wings, and in the end, Barbara learns their valuable lesson. "I finally stood up for myself," she says, "and everything I wanted came walking through my door."

May you always stand tall enough to show the color of your wings . . . and fly!

Evensong,

Broad Horizons Theatre Company,

Mary Gage's Evensong is six people’s unrelated life stories, from childhood to old age, narrated by an ensemble cast (Mary Ellen Ashley, Arthur French, Donald Grody, Mikel Sarah Lambert, Pat Nesbit, and Lucille Patton) and directed by Lewis Magruder.

Considering all of the characters in Evensong grew up during WWII and came from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds, one would expect these stories to be, if not mesmerizing, at least interesting. Unfortunately, they are not.

One woman has an abusive, alcoholic husband, but eventually finds a loving man to marry in her middle age. Another woman fears she will never enjoy motherhood after experiencing two miscarriages, only to end up with 13 children. Still another harbors resentment against a sister for getting a dress that she had wanted; she later secretly elopes and is afraid to tell her parents.

A black barber is eventually able to buy his own shop and take classes in college. A 21-year-old man has his teeth extracted, rendering him unable to play the clarinet and too embarrassed to propose to the girl he loves. And one woman lives to be 101, relating stories of her upper class schooling by British teachers.

Perhaps the problem with this piece is the convention of having each character tell us bits and pieces of his story in rotation with the other five, making it a challenge to follow. Perhaps it’s because we never get too deeply involved in any one character’s life, getting only a cursory look into each.

Perhaps it’s because there’s no common bond or connection among any of them. Perhaps it’s because there is no action, no reenactments – just straightforward story-telling. In the final analysis, however, it’s simply because their stories aren’t particularly interesting.

You May Go Now,

Babel Theatre Project

Ah, nostalgia! Picture a typical 1950’s kitchen, complete with wooden spoons, hand-painted cabinets (intricately detailed by Set Designer Tristan Jeffers), and frilly aprons. Kind of makes you feel like you just walked onto the set of the 1950s sitcom, “Leave It To Beaver,” complete with an ultra-conservative mom (at least by 21st Century standards). She’s doing her utmost to teach her shy and exceedingly awkward daughter how to properly separate an egg and ice a cake – a lesson the teenager ashamedly fails in spades.

At this point in the action, I was all snuggled in for a romp down Memory Lane.

But mom reacts a little more harshly than one might expect to the cake thing. It turns out that something just isn’t quite right. Hey, wait a minute. Is this 1955 . . . or the present? Is this someone’s dream or some kind of a time warp? And just what are those strange creaks coming from upstairs anyway?

As the play unfolds through present-time action and flashbacks, the story gets ever more convoluted, the characters more mysterious, and the dream nightmarish until it ultimately morphs into a tale of family lies, imprisonment (psychological as well as physical), and passion. What started out like "Donna Reed" is intriguingly rewoven into...

To tell you that would spoil the puzzle. You'll just have to head down to the 45th Street Theater and figure it out for yourself -- and I highly recommend you do so. Bekah Brunstetter’s unique story, handled beautifully by a marvelous cast (Melinda Helfrich, Ginger Eckert, Justin Blanchard, and Ben Vershbow) under the impeccable direction of Geordie Broadwater, is really something to see.

An Oak Tree

Barrow Street Theatre

This is a play I just had to see, even at the risk of never being able to preform in it. Imagine a two character play in which only one of the actors has read the script. The other lands on the stage cold, with nothing more than an occasional mike in his ear to prompt him or a clipboard with some dialog typed on it, or his fellow actor telling him what to say and do from moment to moment.

This is An Oak Tree. I must admit, the idea of doing a show completely cold intrigued the actor in me, and I felt compelled to see it (although the "rule" is that once you see it, you can never perform in it). As a matter of fact, reading this review may constitute too much knowledge of the piece for a potential co-star. So, actors, read on at your own risk.

The basic plot of this 65-minute piece involves a hypnotist, who kills a young girl while driving his car (near an oak tree). One evening while performing, he chooses the father of the girl he killed as one of his on-stage subjects. Okay, there it is. That's the plot. The burning question I asked myself was, of course, 'Why is it imperative to this piece that the second actor have no clue what's going on?'

Tree has the hypnotist (Tim Crouch, also the playwright) telling the father character (the evening I saw it, Chris Eigeman played the part) what to say and what to do. "Say this." "Now move over here and say that." "That." At one point, Eigeman is told by Crouch to place his ear phone on, and then Eigeman is told where to walk and what to say by either someone offstage or by Crouch himself whispering into a microphone while standing three feet behind Eigeman.

What little plot we get into when Eigeman reads a page or two of script with Crouch is dampened immediately when Crouch begins giving him stage directions and dialogue again. If the story is important, it is interrupted constantly by the on-stage directions to the second actor. If the importance is in watching an actor get through an improv lesson, then the story (if there is one) merely gets in the way.

Okay, so now I’m watching it and I’m still saying to myself, “Why is it so important that the second actor have no clue what’s going on?” Actually, he was no different from the rest of the audience. I sat through what I felt to be an interminable 65 minutes and was still confused when I reached the subway – along with other theater-goers who were asking the same questions.

If that was the point of An Oak Tree, to create conversation, then it succeeded beautifully. There we were, all sitting on the No. 1 train, wondering what the heck we just saw, making new acquaintances, bonding in our perplexity. Tree is intriguing at best, and I applaud the producers for venturing into such an experiment. It had promise in its premise; it just didn’t work.