Learn the "Secrets of the Trade" at 59e59

For a play that's about the theater, Jonathan Tolins' Secrets of the Trade is surprisingly cinematic in its scope and narrative devices. Tolins' play -- which probably includes some autobiographical elements -- is a coming-of-age story about a theater-loving young adult named Andrew Lipman (Noah Robbins) who matures under the influence of a legendary stage director, Martin Kerner (John Glover). The play checks in with Andrew in mostly two year intervals from the age of sixteen when he first writes Kerner to ten years later. Andrew's initial fawning admiration for Kerner sours into a love-hate relationship as Kerner simultaneously educates and disappoints Andrew over the years.

In addition to the fallen-idol trope, Tolins integrates the anguished-parents trope as well. Peter and Joanne Lipman are the supportive parents who yearn for Andrew's admiration even as he comes to value Kerner's approval the most. Mr. Lipman suffers the irony of pushing his son to write to Kerner only to find himself losing to Kerner in the battle for Andrew's affection. The climax of the Lipmans' struggle with their son occurs after he has graduated from college and produces an avant garde autobiographical play that portrays his parents as suburban buffoons who don't understand their son. Mr. and Mrs. Lipman also represent dried up hopes. Peter Lipman had the chance to work with a famous architect and gave it up for his family. Joanne Lipman was a dancer in "her other life," who now only has memories of her performing days. Their performances make us think about our own processes of growing up and severing parental ties.

The New Yorker describes Secrets of the Trade as a comedy, and it does have many funny lines. The cynical assistant, Bradley, is played perfectly by Bill Brochtrup, who offers moments of comic relief as he alludes to Kerner's inner diva. But ultimately, Tolins is trying to illuminate the difficulties of growing up in an uncertain age.

The age here is the Reagan era. We're not so-subtly told that it's Reagan by the crackling radio at the beginning projecting the voice of an NPR announcer who says that Reagan has just won. While the Reagan era is irrelevant for the first half of the play, it takes a more prominent place in the viewer's mind once Tolins explores

The current Primary Stages production of the play at 59e59 Theaters benefits from a cast of seasoned actors. Amy Aquino, a regular on television, plays the aggrieved Jewish mother competing for her son's affection convincingly. She deadpans in the appropriate places and inspires the most sympathy in her snarky moments. Aquino's success isn't surprising since she was in the premier cast in LA's Black Dahlia Theater.

A Little Night Music

In A Little Night Music, Bernadette Peters doesn’t look a day over her 1985 self from Sunday in the Park with George. Peters, replacing Catherine Zeta Jones, plays Desiree Armfeldt, a middle-aged actress who seeks to rekindle a relationship with an old love after they see each other during one of her plays. But Desiree has two obstacles. First, Fredrik Egerman is now married to an eighteen year old, Anne. Second, Desiree has another lover—a married dragoon with a huge ego. Desiree’s decision to seek Fredrik’s affection takes her through the recesses of her memories, embracing nostalgia at every moment. The audience is along for this walk down memory lane. Peters’ strong, yet aging voice, is perfect for the role. We can hear all her regret in her wizened rendition of “Send in the Clowns.” She pauses at just the right times, and sheds real tears when she thinks she is losing Egerman. “Aren’t we a pair? Me with my feet on the ground; you in midair,” she reflects.

Desiree is not the only nostalgic character in A Little Night Music. Her mother, Mrs, Armfeldt, is played by the fabulous Elaine Stritch. In “Liaisons,” she hilariously recollects her past lovers—most of whom are now dead—and asks where they are now. It makes us wonder where our long lost friends are as well.

A Little Night Music builds a serious theme in that typically Sondheim way: through song lyrics and less through the libretto. Sondheim is a master of telling stories through multi-part songs with overlapping lines. The last song of the first act, “A Weekend in the Country” has each character revealing their motives for spending a weekend at Mrs. Armfeldt’s as the invitation is passed around. We learn that the dragoon is scheming to toss out Fredrik, while Anne schemes to keep an eye on her husband. The piece predicts the ensemble title song of Sondheim’s later musical, Into the Woods. That ten minute first number introduces all their characters and situations entirely in song, without a line of plain dialogue.

At the same time, A Little Night Music is not one of Sondheim’s masterpieces. While its music is consistently interesting, its shortfalls lie in its plot. Many of the songs seem only tangentially related to the plot. While “Liaisons,” advances the show’s themes, it doesn’t really advance the plot. A solo piece in the second act, “The Miller’s Wife,” sees Petra, the Egermans’ maid, preaching about enjoying one’s youth before settling down and getting married. But this is Petra’s seemingly only purpose in the show. Though she serves as a contrast to the virginal Anne, she doesn’t add anything to the texture of the show, even from an instrumental perspective.

The main thing preventing A Little Night Music from being great is its sudden ending. The tone shifts dramatically in the last ten minutes of the production, leading the audience to question the entire show that it just saw. When two characters run off together, throwing two others together, the theme of regret and a life poorly lived are completely gone as four characters begin seemingly new lives.

Chances, though, are that few people are seeing A Little Night Music for its plot or lessons. We're there to see Bernadette Peters. Her singing is remarkable, but her acting is a bit detached. It's as though her real-life role as a middle aged stage actress makes her character blend together with her real-life self. Desiree is difficult to separate from Peters. Still, Peters' nasal voice is perfect for deadpanning memorable lines from "You Must Meet My Wife" and other songs. A Little Night Music is overall quite memorable, even if mostly because of Peters' star power.

Wolves: A Metaphor for Love

Wolves is a play about 30-year old angst in New York City that grows into a play about 40-year old angst in New York City. It transforms from a play about growing up to a play about growing old. But it's a transformation with some rough patches.

Wolves opens with a couple driving home from a party. We can tell that Caleb (Josh Tyson) and Kay (Elizabeth Davis)'s relationship is on the rocks from their stifled car conversation. Flashbacks between them in the car and the party help fill in the gaps. Caleb is a former college football kicker who is now an unemployed writer. Delaney Britt Brewer's script doesn't reveal what Kay does for a living, but her elitist breeding comes across in the insecurities that Caleb expresses to Kay's friends during the party. "Where did you go to school?" Roslyn (Sarah Baskin) asks him. "Just a lower state school. One step up from a community college...One step down from KFC." Needless to say, Kay doesn't appreciate this self-deprecation, and confides to Ros that she's turning into her mother, with a permanent frown plastered to her face. In the midst of all this, Caleb gets hit on by a twenty-one year old who encourages him to take ecstasy. Back on the drive home, the combination of drugs and repressed emotions causes Caleb to hit a wolf. A debate ensues as to whether or not they should kill the wolf. Kay wants them to kill the wolf cause it's in pain, while Caleb can't bear the thought of killing a creature with "love in its eyes." The disagreement leads them to confront their own love for each other. (The wolf is a metaphor for love--get it?)

As you may have guessed, the wolf metaphor continues throughout the play's three (short) acts. In the second act, our attention shifts to Julie and her brother Elliot as they wait to throw their mothers' ashes to the wind. Julie is struggling with a recently ended relationship with Sasha, a woman who now "wants a family," who is now with the Caleb of the previous act. A hallucination involving a wolf suggests that she is afraid of love. The third act shifts back to Caleb--now with Sasha. They have a daughter named Wolf, through whom they speak to each other. This section is the most originally thought out. Wolf sits on a spinnable miniature house and reads out loud from pieces of paper that represent notes that Sasha and Caleb have supposedly written to each other. Unfortunately, the wolf metaphor is quite transparent--as are all the characters' feelings. They use elegant, yet improbably sentences to explain their feelings. For example, Caleb compares the phrase "I love you" to wall paint when he confronts Kay.

Staged in the intimate, 56-seat Theater C at 59e59, a major advantage is that there are only good seats in the house. However, the close-up look also magnifies the fact that Wolves takes on slightly more than it can chew. It could have done without the middle act. Neither Elliot nor Julie's characters are given enough time to develop. In fact, Brewer seems to take a shortcut by devoting a large portion of Julie's time to a hallucinatory scene. At the same time, I'd rather see a relatively obvious play than a willfully obscure one.

Next to Normal Provides Deep Catharsis

By intermission, there was nary a dry female eye surrounding me in the audience of last night's performance of Next to Normal at Broadway's Booth Theatre. It wasn't surprising that Tom Kitt's musical about the effects of a mother's bipolar on her family and self would have such an effect. After all, it did win the 2010 Pulitzer for drama, an accolade that is seldom bestowed on musicals. But Next to Normal is not your typical musical. It doesn't seek to transport you away from your problems to Oz, or the African jungles. Nor does it allow you to indulge in your favorite artists such as Frank Sinatra, Franki Valli, or even Green Day. Rather, Next to Normal forces audiences to dive inward and plumb the depths of their own emotions. In this way, it's more similar to a play than a typical musical.

Next to Normal is set in a typical American suburb during contemporary times. It opens with a "Just Another Day," where the mother, Diana (Marin Mazzie), sings "They're the perfect loving family, so adoring/And I love them every day of every week." Of course, this is the first sign that they're not the perfect loving family. The opening number ends with Diana making sandwiches on the floor. Her daughter Natalie (Meghann Fahy) storms off to leave her dad (Jason Danieley) to deal with this latest outburst. But this is no Desperate Housewives cliche of the soccer mom driven crazy by an boredom and routine. We soon learn that the source of Diana's angst is her son's death--sixteen years ago. She now imagines her son (Kyle Dean Massey) as a seventeen year old stomping around the house.

The major plot here, then, is how Diana treats her illness, and whether or not she can let go of the major cause -- her imagined son. Along the way, York also incorporates criticism of the medication of mental illness.The darkly funny piece entitled "My Psycho-pharmacologist And I," follows Diana through seven weeks of trying drug cocktails. In the background, the other characters sing "Zoloft and Paxil...Xanax and Prozac...these are a few of my favorite pills!" After seven weeks Diana tells the doctor, "I don't feel like myself. I don't feel anything," to which the good doc replies "Patient stable.

But Next to Normal is not a groundbreaking critique of the pharmaceutical industry. Its strength lies in its emotional depth and clarity. The two major relationships are between Diana and her husband Dan, and between Diana and Natalie. Diana's husband has been supportive all these years, but now must confront the fact that he may be enabling his wife. The chemistry is palpable between real-life couple Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley throughout. Most poignant is a duet in which Dan explains why he's stayed with Diana through all these years of mental illness. It's entirely believable by this point that a husband would stay so steadfastly by, driven by a complex mixture of love and commitment. The duet asks audiences to think of their own commitments. Is there anyone you would stay by through decades of mental illness?

The relationship between mother and daughter is rarely explored in this way in musical theater. Natalie has essentially been ignored for her entire life as her mother obsesses over her dead brother, and her father obsesses over her mother. Now when her classmate Henry (Adam Chanler-Berat) wants to date her, she cannot handle all the attention. How Natalie juggles her hatred, and her longing for her mother at the same time is beautifully shown through her defensive persona. Natalie is given many sarcastic lines, which Fahy delivers well. It's enough to remind the audience of their own insecurities as well.

Next to Normal has been criticized for being too serious. This is a good thing. I hope that this production's seriousness will inspire more thinking-person's musicals on Broadway.

Bachelorette: Partying Gone Awry

Last night I attempted to see Bachelorette at the 2nd Stage Theater. Due to lack of internet and thus, lack of planning, I arrived 30 minutes late to this 90 minute production. Sweaty and embarrassed (I had gotten the time and location wrong), the production did a great job of taking my mind off of my travels, and throwing me right into the story. The set up was pretty clear. Becky is getting married, and she has invited her maid of honor, Regan (Tracee Chimo) to use her hotel room on the eve of the wedding. Unfortunately for Becky, Regan has decided to invite two of Becky's ex-friends, Katie and Gena. While Becky's still out doing night-before activities, the three remaining girls take the opportunity to party in the hotel room. Soon, the combination of alcohol, pot, and other drugs drive the girls to destroy the room, and to call each other out for previous misconduct.

I entered the theater right when Regan, Katie, and Gena decide to play with Becky's dress, tearing it as a result. Then a blame war resumes in which each tries to prove how the other is a worse person, and therefore more responsible for destroying Becky's room. Regan brings up Gena's abortion while a hurt Gena can only dejectedly reply, "Why did you say that?"

The answer to this question is slowly revealed over the next hour as Regan takes a center role. After the next scene change, we see Regan and Katie (Gena had gone to find a tailor for the dress) re-entering Becky's hotel room, each with a guy in tow. Regan's conversations with her guy Jeff (Eddie Kay Thomas) raises questions about Regan, such as why she is hooking up with other guys when she has a boyfriend. Why does she think her job, reading to child cancer patients, is "boring?" Meanwhile, Katie (Celia Keenan-Bolger) discusses her former prom queen status with her guy Joe (Fran Kranz). She reveals plenty of secrets while in her drunken stupor, inviting audiences to reflect on their own moments of inebriation.

Though there are many plays about late night conversations leading to "meaning," or revelation, there aren't many that do this convincingly. The dialogue in Bachelorette is natural, even in the most unsurprising moment, when one character reveals that one of their friends died of alcohol poisoning--a death that they've always felt some responsibility for. The naturalness of this story can be attributed both to the superb acting and the diction. The characters are supposed to be in their late twenties, and they believably speak like today's twentysomethings. The playwright, Leslye Headland, avoids the forced "dudes," and instead gives her characters an appropriate blend of wisdom and forced casualness. Regan interrupts her conversations to check her phone. "Ugh...I can't believe these guys keep texting me," she remarks while obviously delighted by the attention.

While the drugs and revelations are not particularly disturbing, the final confrontation between Regan and Becky is. This ten minute climax towards the end is worth the entire ninety minutes of the production. As Becky tries to understand the damage done to her hotel room, you can see Regan scheming to turn this into Becky's fault. The two then torture each other in a battle of saying the most hurtful things possible. In the end, you get to decide who wins.

One Day: Best Beach Read of 2010

It's not often that a cover of a nearly-kissing-couple reveals a profound novel underneath. David Nicholls bucks the trend by combining breezy language and fast-paced storytelling with epic themes and deep character portrayals in his new novel One Day.

One Day is quite gimmicky on the surface. It's about a boy (Dexter Mayhew) and a girl (Emma Morley) who have a one night stand the evening of university (they're British) graduation on July 15, 1988. The book then checks in with the two of them on July 15 of every year for the next twenty years. But the way Nicholls does this sets it apart from typical chick-lit fare. Instead of contriving a meeting every year, say at a wedding or randomly bumping into each other at a restaurant, Nicholls deliberately checks in with them each July 15, using the opportunity to fill us in on their lives the other 364 days of the year. Nicholls makes clear that Dex and Em are part of each others' lives year round. Instead of filling us in on their lives through removed third-person omniscient, he spends equal amounts of time communicating in Dex and Em's respective voices.

Through this method, we get two fully realized characters. One chapter set in the early Nineties begins with Dexter's voice: "These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another. Old fashioned notions of a.m. and p.m. have become obsolete and Dexter is seeing a lot more dawns that he once used to." A couple pages later, Nicholls switches to Em: "Emma Morley east well and drinks in moderation. These days she gets eight good hours sleep then wakes promptly of her accord just before six-thirty and drinks a large glass of water." These sentences don't simply fill us in on the characters' lives, but do it in such a way that shows what the characters think of themselves. These are thoughts that they would have believably used to describe themselves.

Sure, the characters each do a few things that make you want to roll your eyes, but their big decisions are recognizable to all. Immediately after the one night stand, for example, Dexter does a stint of world traveling, going from country to country "teaching English," but also bedding various women. He is then saved from the nomadic lifestyle by a television gig, becoming rich and more dependent on drugs in the process. Though this screams cliched rich-kid story, Nicholls excellent portrayal renders Dexter as a real person who needs to reconcile luck with success. In one passage, Dexter muses on how to "dump" his friends for more successful, attractive friends. Even if you haven't faced this specific problem, everyone can relate to the idea of outgrowing acquaintances. Meanwhile, Em must ask how to find the courage to do what she really wants as she endures a thankless job while yearning to be a writer.

Though Dex and Em eventually grow out of their twenties, the early twenties is a great time to read this book. From my perspective as a recent college grad, One Day provides perspective on how one's priorities change through the ages. Obsessed with success and being other people when their young, the characters learn to appreciate family and themselves over time. In this sense, it reminds me of a much more serious book, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, that follows two sisters from the 1950's through the 1980's. The difference is that One Day is written in a way that's conducive to the beach.

Nicholls provides some acute social commentary throughout. From the beginning, he makes fun of Emma's type even as he creates her. Looking around Emma's progressive, hipster-ish room during the one-night stand, Dex notes that "the problem with interesting girls is that they were all the same." Later, Nicholls jabs at overblown weddings:
"They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations."

Current events from 1988 to 2007 take a backseat in this book. (There's no mention of 9/11, but some discussion of the subsequent war). While the cultural references--"I have tickets to the London premier of Jurassic Park"--might attract audiences of a certain age, they are entirely gratuitous. Though the situations could have only occurred in the late 20th century and first decade of the twenty-first, the story of two young people figuring out their lives is timeless.