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.