February
House
Starring Stanley Bahorek, Ken Barnett, Ken Clark,
Julian Fleisher, Stephanie Hayes, Erik Lochtefeld, Kacie Sheik, A.J. Shively,
Kristen Sieh
Music and lyrics by
Gabriel Kahane; book by
Seth Bockley
Directed by Davis McCallum
Performances began May 8, 2012; opened May 22; closes June 17
Directed by Davis McCallum
Performances began May 8, 2012; opened May 22; closes June 17
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY
publictheater.org
Medieval
Play
Starring Anthony Arkin, Heather Burns, Tate Donovan,
Kevin Geer, Josh Hamilton, Halley Feiffer, John Pankow, C.J. Wilson
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan
Previews began May 15, 2012; opened June 7; closes June 24
Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd
Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
Rapture,
Blister, Burn
Starring Amy Brenneman, Beth Dixon, Virginia Kull,
Kellie Overbey, Lee Tergesen
Written by Gina
Gionfriddo; directed by Peter
Dubois
Previews began May 18, 2012; opened June 12; closes June 24
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West
42nd Street, New York, NY
playwrightshorizons.org
 |
| February House (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The
ingredients are in place for a mature, serious musical: a fascinating story of
colorful (and real) celebrities living in a Brooklyn boarding house during
World War II. But February House, despite its pedigree, meanders when it should
be tautly focused.
The
frustrating result has a culprit: Seth Bockley’s book, which strains for
significance, but is a cut and paste job that brings together the house’s inhabitants—editor
George Davis, authors Carson McCullers and W. H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten
and his lover, tenor Peter Pears—and reduces them to uninteresting caricatures,
none of whom get enough stage time to be anything more than cartoon versions of
the actual people.
It’s
a shame that two other famous occupants of the house, author/composer Paul
Bowles and his wife, writer Jane Bowles, have been erased from the show: they’re
as worthy as the others. If the objection is that the Bowleses would have made
the onstage population too crowded: since the characterizations are superficial
anyway, what’s another two?
Gabriel
Kahane’s music, while accomplished, only occasionally lives up to the drama’s
and characters’ demands. That Kahane isn’t in Britten’s league—even the “young”
Britten (or Benjy, as he’s called)—is obvious; perhaps that’s another reason
why Bowles was omitted: two superior composers onstage are too much for Kahane
to go up against.
The
performers don’t get a chance to create real characters, although Kristen Sieh’s
McCullers and Erik Lochtefeld’s Auden come closest. And too bad that Britten
and Pears are reduced to a Laurel and Hardy tag team by Stanley Bahorek and Ken
Barnett, including a badly misconceived Act II curtain raiser, the unfunny “A
Certain Itch,” concerning an infestation of bedbugs.
 |
| Medieval Play (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Kenneth
Lonergan’s messy but affecting character-driven explorations of contemporary individuals—which
have populated his plays (This Is Our
Youth, Lobby Hero, The Starry Messenger) and movies (You Can Count on Me, Margaret)—are jettisoned for his latest stage
work, Medieval Play.
This
amusing but overlong farce has some good moments, but there are too many
stretches where Lonergan simply treads water. It opens as two knights discuss their
part in the ongoing Hundred Years War, with profanity and modern observations
butting heads with a farcical attitude, and the rest of the play follows suit.
Zany, sometimes funny horseplay, even zanier and sometimes very funny dialogue,
and enough wall-to-wall anachronisms to make one think that Lonergan overdosed
on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Love
and Death and real old Saturday Night
Live sketches.
Lonergan
overplays his hand by too often having his characters talk about the absurdity and
insanity of war, obviously mirroring our own era: even if he allows the
delightful Heather Burns to narrate with winks to the audience about how hugely
inconsequential the whole thing is, it starts to wear thin long before the curtain
comes down.
As
director, Lonergan (who stages the physical comedy quite effectively) has smartly
cast real actors as his lead knights: Josh Hamilton and Tate Donovan never ham
it up as, say, Nathan Kane or David Hyde Pierce would, all the better for the
comedy to percolate. Walt Spangler’s cartoonish sets, Michael Krass’ cute
costumes and Jason Lyons’ clever lighting keep Medieval Play on the right path when its author wanders far afield.
 |
| Rapture, Blister, Burn (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Gina
Gionfriddo—whose last play was the unwieldy dark comedy Becky Shaw—returns with Rapture, Blister, Burn, which has
the same strengths and weaknesses, although its characters’ motivations are
somewhat more believable.
Catherine
and Gwen, now in their mid-40s, had gone their separate ways after grad school:
Gwen married Catherine’s boyfriend Don and is raising two sons; Catherine became
a feminist writer and theorist famous enough to appear on Bill Maher. Catherine
has returned home to care for her mother, who had a heart attack, and when she,
Gwen and Don start catching up, it’s obvious nobody’s happy: homemaker Gwen
finds her porn-watching husband—dean of a local high school—insufferably lazy,
while Catherine feels that maybe she wrongly let Don go to Gwen many years ago.
Gionfriddo
definitely has the pulse of her female characters’ shattered hopes and dreams, demonstratively
shown in the Act I scene where Catherine, Gwen, Avery—Gwen and Don’s 21-year-old
fired babysitter—and Alice, Catherine’s mom, talk about feminist and
anti-feminist writings of the past few decades. But what begins as a shrewdly written
and bitingly intelligent scene of women pointedly discussing intellectual
matters soon degenerates into academic speechifying.
So
it’s worrying that Gionfriddo actually lets her polar-opposite women switch
places in Act II: Gwen goes to New York with her theater-loving teenage son and
lives in Catherine’s apartment, while Catherine and Don start carrying on as if
the two decades since their breakup never happened. It’s not that these people
wouldn’t behave like that—although they probably wouldn’t—but that Gionfriddo
never makes it believable that they would. Similar to her haphazard plotting
and characterization in Becky Shaw,
the people in Rapture, Blister, Burn are
mere author’s pawns, lessening their dramatic—and comedic—impact.
Glaringly
obvious too is Lee Tergesen’s turgid Don: sure, he’s supposed to be anything
but a catch now, but there must be something in this unambitious and plainly exhausted
man that causes a spark in his old girlfriend. But Tergesen plays Don so flatly
it’s impossible to see what either Gwen or Catherine ever saw in him.
Happily
compensating are Amy Brenneman’s Catherine, a shrewdly expert mix of heady intellect
and emotional messiness; Kellie Overbey’s Gwen, a level-headed, extraordinarily
ordinary woman; and Virginia Kull’s Avery, the playwright’s hilariously catty mouthpiece.
Peter
DuBois efficiently directs on Alexander Dodge’s sharply defined set, but Rapture, Blister, Burn—a discordant title
that paraphrases a Courtney Love lyric—ends tepidly rather than searingly.
February
House
Performances began May 8, 2012; opened May 22; closes June 17
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY
http://publictheater.org
Medieval
Play
Previews began May 15, 2012; opened June 7; closes June 24
Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd
Street, New York, NY
http://signaturetheatre.org
Rapture,
Blister, Burn
Previews began May 18, 2012; opened June 12; closes June 24
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West
42nd Street, New York, NY
http://playwrightshorizons.org
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