Opening nights in Pittsburgh and Manhattan: 'Metamorphoses' and 'Aristocrats'

NEW YORK, Monday --

As luck would have it, I was at three opening nights over three days, and two of the parties.

You probably think that's normal for a theater critic, but I frequently don't get to opening nights, attending instead the final preview (at the Pittsburgh Public, for one) or later during the opening weekend, as schedules permit. It may even be that I'll get to more openings now that I'm going to theater less often.

The first party was Friday for "Metamorphoses" at the Public. The play itself was a lot of fun, as you can see from Bob Hoover's appreciative review. (I plan to say a few things about it myself in the days ahead.) But so was the party, in large part because of a large, luscious array of Greek food -- that, because while Ovid was Roman, the stories he re-told were predominantly Greek, and of course artistic director Ted Pappas is Greek, as well.

I talked to lots of people, both theater people and civilians, but I can't call them all to mind because I'm writing a couple of days later, and last night's party here in New York is uppermost in my mind. As to the third opening, that was Saturday in Pittsburgh for Kuntu Rep's "Clean Drums." A sprawling musical, it ran long, so I had to tear myself away before its party got going (I did grab a piece of spicy chicken on the way out), to rush home and pack for an early morning flight.

The flight was to NYC for tonight's Theater Hall of Fame induction. But I came early Sunday to see the Bridge Project's very fine "The Cherry Orchard" at BAM in the afternoon and head straight back into Manhattan for the opening of Brian Friel's "Aristocrats" at the Irish Rep. That was the other party, and it boasted not only the cast and theater patrons but others such as designer extraordinare Tony Walton and wife and the two best-known McCourt brothers, Malachy and Frank.

I first encountered the two McCourts in 1985, when the late, admired Tom O'Donoghue brought them to the Blarney Stone in Etna to do their two-man show of story and reminiscence, "A Couple of Blaguards." That's so long ago Frank was known simply as actor/activist Malachy's brother, before he became famous as the author of "Angela's Ashes." In fact, I remember writing that he certainly wasn't the performer of the two -- but critics' memories of their own reviews are probably no more to be trusted than actors' memories of their own performances, so don't hold me to it.

Anyway, when I brought it up last night, they instantly recalled their time in Pittsburgh, not to mention Tom, a lovely man whom they ceremoniously adopted as the third blaguard.

They also remember performing one night for a Blarney Stone audience of three, one of whom may have been a busy fly that intruded in inopportune ways. (I could swear I was one of the three, but there's that memory.) And Frank told a story about Tom's chef at the time. Part of their deal was to get dinner each evening, but the chef apparently regarded them as hired help, at best, so he wouldn't give them a potato. But then he came to see the show, and the next evening they got their potato after all -- maybe one of the most appreciated reviews they ever earned.

In 1999, Frank was back in Pittsburgh to help honor Tony O'Reilly and the opening of the O'Reilly Theater. I asked him about O'Reilly, but he said he doesn't hang out that much with millionaires. "We prefer billionaires," joked Malalchy. Malachy also said the third McCourt brother is writing a memoir. Frank reminded him there are four McCourt brothers, but this would be the third to write a memoir, Malachy said he meant -- the fourth has said he won't write his until the other three are dead.

I was at the play and party with Gwen Orel, Pitt PhD and former PG stringer who covered the 2008 Tony Awards for the PG so well. After working for theaters in Alabama and New Jersey, she's now a free-lance theater and music writer in NYC, with recent stories in the N.Y. Times, Time Out and elsewhere. She knew some of the actors from interviews, especially Ciaran O'Reilly (no relation to the millionaire), who was in fine, friendly form, having just given such a good performance as Eamon.

Rufus Collins, who plays Tom, the American researcher in the play, had fond memories of two plays at the Pittsburgh Public, "Dinner with Friends" (2002) and "Spinning into Butter" (2001). He asks to be remembered to good friends Hilary Masters and Kathy George.

There's another party tonight, after the Hall of Fame. It makes it hard to keep on the annual January diet.

Cup-A-Jo explores 'The Body Beautiful'

THIS WEEK'S THEATER: The Public Theater's "Metamorphoses" opens tonight, after a week of previews, and City Theatre's "The Seafarer" began previews yesterday, with the opening next Wednesday. Also opening this weekend are Rob Penny's "Clean Drums" at Kuntu and Lanford Wilson's "Hot L Baltimore" at Point Park. And there's an octet of new playlets at Cup-A-Jo, just through Sunday - review below.

"Jersey Boys": I still owe you some thoughts about the popular show at the Benedum (through Feb. 1). But I've just done a podcast interview with Graham Fenton, the CMU grad who is the alternate Frankie Valli -- he does two performances a week. The link is under the green comedy mask on the Theater page.

REVIEW: "THE BODY BEAUTIFUL"

Cup-A-Jo, aka Joanna Lowe, and YIV Ltd., aka Your Inner Vagabond and World Lounge in Lawrenceville, have joined forces with five actors to present a 100-minute gathering of eight new playlets exploring our feelings about our bodies. They call it "The Body Beautiful," but this is far from the 1958 musical by that name or the 1935 play set in a burlesque theater, ditto. Here, the name is appropriated as an ironic announcement of the evening's theme, which is that we're very conflicted, embarrassed and obsessed over our bodies.

Which to my mind is also the evening's main problem: too many pieces baldly announce their point of view, coming across more like tracts on body obsession than convincing dramas with something for us to discover. Witness that each play is assigned its part in the overall theme with a "body" heading, i.e. The Body Critiqued ... Confronted . . . Desired ... Loved ... Conflicted ... Simplified ... Perfected ... and Unveiled.

OK, plays legitimately come in many modes. But this evening is more about ideological intent, declaring a point of view about social programming, than art. Granted, the playlets are small, averaging just over 10 minutes each, so it would be hard to create characters and situations with dimension in which to find drama. But some do just that, especially the evening's final two, Joseph A. Roots' "Just the Smallest Cut" and Chris Gavaler's "The Body Unveiled." It helps that the acting and director Lowe's choice of style seem strongest in those two, but maybe it's the other way around - stronger scripts creating better acting.

"Just the Smallest Cut" is a farce set in a future where women's breasts have become verboten sites of disease, surgically removed in young. A young curator is about to take an electric sander to remove the breasts of a classical nude, when she's interrupted by a breast-nostalgic friend and a gun-wielding pro-breast activist who reveals (literally) that she still has hers. Rachel Shaw's comic fluster as the curator is especially delicious.

That's one flash of nudity, but we get the full monty (though not full frontal) in "The Body Unveiled," a very funny account of a man taking his girlfriend's place as a nude model and gabbling non-stop as the matter-of-fact female artist waits for him to reluctantly strip down and get to work. Rob Gorman is a hoot as the would-be model, chattering frantically to delay the inevitable.

It makes sense that these two plays come last, since they finally give us a flash of what the evening has been about. To avoid nudity would have been craven.

While Lowe and her actors get the style right in those two, style is the problem with a third promising playlet, Robert Isenberg's "Pin-up," an exchange between a male artist of fantasized pin-ups and his novice female model (here dressed in a pitch-perfect 1940s dress thanks to costumer Leah Klocko). For his mode, think Vargas or the other masters of glamorous "Playboy" fantasies. This artist, however, is disgusted with his exploitation of the female body, because of a back-story that's never very clear. But nothing beyond that dress ever sets the play in the ‘40s, as it must be to make any sense of the situation.

One of the attractions of the "The Body Beautiful" is the site. YIV is a large coffee shop/café with lots of oriental carpets, pillows and banquettes. An equally large rear room, even more opulently strewn with carpets and pillows and with a corner platform, is the performance space. It's probably more used for music, with the platform set far away from the seats. (With a bigger audience, that wouldn't seem so odd.) Lowe could have used it better, moving the playlets around the room.

Roots does that effectively, this time as an actor, in F.J. Hartland's "Fact or Fiction," a monologue by a fat man (Roots doesn't really qualify) about finding love. He just grabs his chair, has the house lights brought up and sits down close to the audience, which is in keeping with the monologue's tone of self-deprecating banter and confession.  

Gayle Pazerski's "Snap, Crackle, Pop," a contrast between a wait-loss hysteric and a friend relaxed about the pleasures of a Rice Krispies bar, never establishes their relationship or finds its rhythm. Alyssa Herron's "Zombie or Vampire?" plays with attitudes toward disability and James Michael Shoberg's "So Much to Hide" is a quasi-dance piece about self-loathing in which Fair Woman mirrors Plain Woman (which actress Diana Iff is not).

The eighth piece is a short video, Eric Sipple's "Pretty Girl," in which an experienced female detective and her novice male partner examine a dead woman's body for clues, articulating mixed attitudes as they do. There's a ninth piece, too, a series of video interviews about self-image, projected during the intermission and after the show.  

No one who's thought about the body in relation to self-image, social pressure and the great male-female divide will find anything new or deep in "The Body Beautiful." But a few of the plays succeed on their own terms, and it's fun to watch the ensemble of five (Shaw, Gorman, Roots, Klocko and Ifft) morph their ways through several roles each. And the drinks and sweets available are great. Chalk up another attraction for Lawrenceville.  

"The Body Beautiful" continues through Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. 3 pm, at 4130 Butler St. 

Young Playwrights II: Coming Back for More

Lest you think that all I got out of last week's ninth annual Young Playwrights Festival at City Theatre was the joy of young talent and all that good stuff, I have to admit that the snazzy new scarf you may see me sporting was courtesy of American Eagle, which gave them to the student matinee audiences. So maybe that's a new theater rule: worm your way in with the student matinees, because you never know if there'll be freebies on offer.

Not that the YPWF needs extra inducements -- especially this year's best program, something new (as explained yesterday), an added bill of plays written by YPWF alumni. They were an invited group, but limited, I gather, to those still in high school here rather than those who've gone on to college. This new wrinkle in the YPF was funded by RAD -- our tax dollars doing something we can believe in.

The same ensemble of 10 was involved as in the middle and high school plays, so it's time to list the seven younger folks who joined the pros, Mertz, Connors and Dukes (see yesterday): Kenya Alexander (CMU), Frank Capello (CMU), Ashley Coney (Point Park), Dina Desmone (Point Park), Quantia Mali (Penn State grad), Peter Moses (CMU) and Lichelle Sade (Point Park). For these plays, the director was CMU's Anya Martin.

As I explained yesterday, the middle and high school plays were given readings. But for three plays the alumni got full staging (no costumes and just a few pieces of furniture for sets), with two readings added for good measure. Martin continued the practice of having stage directions and even some other authorial notes read aloud, for the full stagings as well as the readings. It all came in at about an hour and 50 minutes, a nice compact evening.

The readings were "Rarae Aves" by Hannah Trivilino (Mt. Lebanon HS) and "Miners: A Pittsburgh Story" by David Jimenez (Shadyside Academy). The first lost little by being read, since it's basically a dialogue between two disaffected young people, nerds, you might say, escaping the world on a hilltop, where they meet. He's a musician reduced to wedding singing, and she's escaping her life to commune with nature. The dialogue feels stilted, but actors Moses and Alexander provided natural life plus some comic eccentricity.

The "Miners," it turns out, are a Pittsburgh baseball team, worse than the Pirates but rallied by a gruff Hispanic skipper (Mertz) to a comeback win, proving that all we need is hope. What I most enjoyed was the use of the girls as a reactive crowd, and the way the director had everyone chime in with reactions, almost like an offstage chorus.

"Iron City Phoenix" by Laura and Rebecca Shute (Beaver HS) is about a young man (Moses) who has given up his art dreams. His old teacher tells him you're only as ordinary as you let yourself be, but he finds himself in a funk very late one night on the Clemente Bridge. There he sees a bent and elderly couple waxing romantic and poetic over the dawn -- and the play ends with him starting to sketch again. It's a little like a sermonette, perhaps, but it has feeling.

"Building Bridges" by Tessa Kaslewicz (CAPA) also finds its heroes down by the river. An 11 year-old boy (Capello) goes there to seek refuge from his angry father (Mertz), who's demanding almost to the point of abuse, and meets a homeless man (Dukes). Inevitably, this chance meeting ends up changing both the homeless man and the father, who finally opens up to his son and even admits to having loved art before his wife died. (Art as an alternative path that nurtures or signals personal development showed up several times in the YPWF.)

My favorite play of the festival was "No News Is Good News" by Margaret Saunders (Fox Chapel HS), all about a brainy new editor (Capello) of his high school paper, "The Buffalo Blowhorn," who gets a lot of attention but ruffles a lot of feathers, too. It's an energetic comedy in which a jock is discovered secretly writing poems in a bad English accent and the cheerleader is a secret rapper. And is this the play where the actor reading stage directions got actively involved, to great effect? Whatever, the play benefited from slyly funny acting by all concerned.

Considering that the whole three-show YPWF program, with eight readings and three stagings in all, was put on with relatively little rehearsal, it's a wonder the acting had as much invention as it did. It's great that school kids are writing plays, but it's also great to see our two major undergraduate theater programs turning out actors with such promise.

Next up: something on "Jersey Boys."

Young Playwrights Festival lit up the dark days last week

City Theatre's Young Playwrights Festival (last week) is one of Pittsburgh's signature theater programs, forming with the CLO's Gene Kelly Awards and the Public Theater's Shakespeare Monologue Contest an annual trio that encourage the creativity of middle and high school students. In other words, they aren't just competitions, though there are awards along the way.

All three also have a high pleasure quotient -- both for the students, I assume, interlaced with whatever frustration and growing pains are involved in taking creative risks, and for us, in the watching. And all three provide some of the more heartfelt theater evenings of the year, every year.

With City's YPWF, there's competition only in that the six plays showcased were selected from 175 scripts submitted, all part of a process involving workshops and development with guest dramaturgs. The result is usually two separate, simply staged performances, one for high school plays, one for middle school. But this year those programs were restricted to readings, to make room for a third, in which YPWF alumni playwrights were invited to return with new scripts. Those were the plays that got the full performances -- more about them tomorrow.

In addition, there were all sorts of student workshops and discussions, all under the direction of City's enthusiastic new director of education. Kristen Link.

Middle School Plays

Middle school plays often feature a sweet unselfconsciousness, and this year's trio was no exception. "Picture Day" by Emily Valley (Keystone Oaks MS) is a parable about a girl obsessed with appearance to the point of neglecting and even hurting her friends. "Appreciation" by Kelsey Miller (Rogers CAPA) is a programmatic piece about a couple of girls who take a "Twilight Zone" trip back in time to discover that the Hill District was once a vibrant city within a city. Both end with obvious lessons learned.

But I was most taken with "Prove Him Wrong" by Ellen McCague (Rogers CAPA), a drama about a laid-off worker who finally learns to talk to his wife and express the dreams he's kept hidden under a macho disguise and ask her help to realize them. But as she points out, he hasn't become so sensitized that he's willing to extend her the same freedom. The play poses more questions than it settles, not a bad thing to do.

High School Plays

The selfconsciousness that sometimes shows up in high school plays comes from the natural attempt to reach farther, often by imitating ambitious models. But I didn't feel much of that this year, as all three plays showed an independent sense of self.

"Brother Have I Loved" by Leah Friedman (CAPA) is set in an unusual tea leaves-reading shop where you can cancel emotional pain by renouncing the ability to feel. A wounded young man meets the eccentric proprietor and an irritating young kid who steals people's mail in search of emotion missing in his life. It's an ambitious parable, even though there's no surprise that the young man ultimately chooses to keep his pain, realizing that it's the necessary dark side of love.

"Eight Poems About Perry" by Sarah Rogers (Woodland Hills HS, now at Fordham) is about a young man's cloying manuscript, "Letters from the Heart." His effusions are pretty banal, and his self-conceit about them is off-putting. But how should his friend respond to this bad art? The play is really about the dimensions and responsibilities of friendship.

The crowd pleaser of the trio was "Sense and Senselessness" by Eli Diamond (Peters HS, now at CMU), a series of vignettes about the eccentric clients in a psychologist's office. The most ambitious and entertaining twist was a sort of deus ex machina, a conceited dancer who enters whenever the psychologist is at her wit's end to confound the difficult client. Played by the outrageously funny Doug Mertz, this self-confessed god of beauty turns out also to be a Rensaissance man, as he shows with an impromptu concert.

Both sets of plays were directed by City's associate artistic director, Stuart Carden, most of whose work (and not just because there was a short rehearsal period) had to go into working with the young playwrights. He knows that the chief job is to give the play a hearing, to make the playwright the primary focus. City provided a capable and varied (half black, half white) acting ensemble of 10, mainly Point Park and CMU acting students but led by the more mature Mertz, Bridget Connors and Garbie Dukes. Kudos to them all for their energy and spirit.

More to come. 

Happy New Year, looking backwards and forward

THIS WEEK'S THEATER: I'm looking forward to the tour of "Jersey Boys," which opens tonight for previews and Friday for critics, running through Feb. 1; and City Theatre's Young Playwrights Festival, this year offering three programs: middle school readings (Sat and Sun 1 pm); high school readings (Sat 3 pm and Sun 6 pm); and something new, the YPF Alumni  Plays (Fri 7 pm and Sat 6 pm).

And now, Happy New Year to all! (Happy Barrack New Year, as some have been saying -- but doesn't he start with about the highest possible degree of difficulty?)

This is my first On Stage posting since I announced in December that I'd taken the PG's generous buyout offer, but as I said then, I continue to contribute to the PG part-time, by writing this On Stage Journal and reviewing or previewing in the paper proper as much as once a week. I'll also continue to lead the PG theater tours to New York, London and the Canadian theater festivals. My new title is senior theater critic, which I like a lot better than "emeritus," since I am going to stay engaged. I'm also going to continue to do my Thursday morning theater spot on KDKA-TV's Pittsburgh Today Live.

And I'm still teaching at Pitt. This term, it's my course in August Wilson; next fall, it'll be Shakespeare, then August Wilson again. As you see, I've decided I only want to teach the best.

Today, I want to thank the many who sent me kind messages about my 25 years as theater editor and critic. That's one of the reasons I haven't posted here for so long: there were all those messages to answer (I haven't yet replied to them all), then I had a couple of decades of clutter (some precious, some not) to clear out of my PG desk, file cabinets and bookshelves, and then Mary and I headed off to visit our children and grandchildren for the holidays. Now I'm back, adjusting to a new rhythm of life, just as busy but without the 6 to 8 (or more) PG deadlines every week.

What surprised me about those kind and supportive messages was how many came from people I don't know. I expected to hear from friends and theater people (many people are both), although even there I was surprised at the volume; but I was especially touched by hearing from so many readers. Of course you always assume there are people out there reading what you write, but usually you only hear from people you know, and gradually you learn to write mainly for yourself, trying to make sense of what you've seen. So hearing from previously silent readers has been a huge pleasure.

I'd like to share some of the things people have said in all those messages, but they've been so kind, it would appear immodest. (Even saying this is immodest enough.) Maybe as I re-read them, in order to respond to those I haven't yet, I'll find some way to gather the most interesting excerpts, praise aside, and post them here in the weeks ahead.

Special thanks also to the several people who sent letters to the editor about my retirement, published in the Weekend sections of Dec. 19, 24 and 31. They were from both regular readers and theater pros, as well.

As to the PG's theater coverage, you'll have to allow some time to let the dust settle. The buyouts have reduced the staff, so it'll naturally take a while to refigure beats and responsibilities. In the meantime, the theater beat will probably be a joint concern, led by the current arts & entertainment editor, Sharon Eberson. Theaters should send their requests for coverage to her (seberson@post-gazette.com), and their listings material to listings editor Rosa Colucci (rcolucci@post-gazette.com).

But since I'm continuing to be involved, please keep me informed as well -- I still have my PG email, crawson@post-gazette.com. And Happy 2009!