Orlando Explores Changing Gender and Time

Classic Stage Company's production of Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf's novel, is conventional Sarah Ruhl adaptation. By conventional Sarah Ruhl, I mean entirely unconventional storytelling. Eschewing traditional limits of time and gender, Orlando tells the story of a Seventeenth Century English nobleman, Orlando, who wakes up one day to find that he's actually a woman. After the transformation, every now and then Orlando also finds herself in a different century. Trying to convey the idea that human identity shouldn't be restricted to the period or gender that we're born into, Woolf's novel was an homage to her progressive friend, Vita Sackville-West.

Ruhl faithfully brings Woolf's post-modernist concepts to the stage. Supporting Orlando (Francesca Faridany), Ruhl has created three male ensemble characters who take on different roles. The actor with the most speaking parts, David Greenspan, plays a Queen who favors Orlando in the Seventeenth Century. He then morphs into a man playing a woman to woo the female Orlando in the second half. All three Ensemble members and Orlando narrate their actions as they perform them to advance the plot. For example, Orlando describes how he ice skates with his love interest, Sasha (Annika Boras), as they mime ice skating.

The first half of the play takes place in the early Seventeenth Century, letting the audience get well acquainted with Orlando before the gender/time-bending shenanigans begin. Orlando lays on the grass in the opening scene, trying to compose a poem. His rhyming "green" with "green" shows us that he still needs to get in touch with his inner artist. This quest to find himself essentially guides the rest of the play.

A story that's so much about the inner life of its eponymous character needs a strong actor. Francesca Faridany fulfills the role well. Known for playing gender-bending parts--I last saw her as Rosalind in All's Well That Ends Well--Faridany gracefully transitions from male to female here while retaining one personality. She convincingly plays a former man puzzled by the new constraints on his life. At one point, Orlando describes her newfound role of pouring tea and asking men how they would like it. While she doesn't seem to mind her new role, it makes us wonder how much of the gender roles that we adopt is actually acting. The one drawback of casting Faridany is that she reminds us a lot of Tilda Swinton in the film Orlando. They both have red hair and channel a certain androgyny. Happily, Faridany brings a more playful demeanor to Orlando than Swinton.

While leaving some loose ends open, Orlando is not really about plot, but about mood. Ruhl covers four centuries skillfully, retaining Orlando's consistent character throughout. The audience is left with a warm fuzzy feeling despite its liberal use of metaphysical hijinks.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: An Emo Musical

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (or BBAJ as fans are already dubbing it) is a musical that could have been written by emo comparative literature and history graduate students. History dominates the musical's content while comp lit guides its structure. On the history side, BBAJ is ostensibly about the rise of Andrew Jackson (Benjamin Walker), the seventh president of the United States. It includes some accurate, yet little known facts. Did you know Jackson's wife was technically still married when the two of them got married? The characterization of John Calhoun (Darren Goldstein), Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay are more amusing for those who remember them via AP US History. Van Buren and Clay are Yankee fops while Calhoun just cares about owning slaves. Most of the narrative history is presented by the storyteller (Kristine Nielsen), who appears to be a contemporary history teacher.

On the comparative literature side, BBAJ is one long, self-aware metaphor. It's super meta in that's it's cognizant of being a story about the Nineteenth Century told during the Twenty-First. Walker as Jackson talks directly to the narrator. Songs make references to Twentieth Century thinkers Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag. The lyrics helpfully tell us "she hadn't been born yet." On top of this, the production also parodies the emo sensibility. Whenever Jackson loses an election, or something doesn't go his way, he crosses his tight-legged jeans, tucks himself into his jacket and sulks in the corner. He and his wife Rachel initially bond over a bout of blood-letting. At one point, after Jackson's first failed presidential run, Cher's "Song for the Lonely" comes over the speaker system. A disco ball is busted out while Walker mimes slitting his wrists for several minutes.

Subtlety is not the goal here. Through such ribald storytelling, we are hit over the head with the comparisons between Jackson's presidential and current events. "Populism, Yeah Yeah," the opening number, draws parallels to the Tea Party. Jacksonites complain that Washington DC only represents Northeastern elitists while leaving frontiersmen like Jackson to fend against the Indians by themselves. Later, Jackson loses the election through the "Corrupt Bargain," which gave John Quincey Adams--"I should be president because my father was"--the presidency for promising Henry Clay Secretary of State. When Jackson emerges from political exile, going on to win the election of 1828, he finds that populism may not be the best strategy. After all, people voted for him so that he could make decisions for them. The question over the merits of direct democracy Jackson's final conflict.

Unfortunately, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson loses momentum in its final moments. It simply suggests to the audience that there are downsides to populism without exploring it further. Jackson also commits his most treacherous actions towards Native Americans towards the end with a bit of forced self-reflection.

Now playing at the Bernard Jacobs theatre after premiering Off-Broadway last year, BBAJ draws crowds of young hipsters dressed up for a rock concert. Much of the musical does sound like a rock show. As opposed to other contemporary "rock operas" like Next to Normal, the music here is not continuous. Indeed, the soundtrack is only a little more than 30 minutes. Instead of telling the story, the songs here seem to serve as interludes that are an excuse to blare loud music and turn on low-level, colored house lights. While lacking depth, this style is highly entertaining.

Benjamin Walker's commanding presence as Andrew Jackson is the best part of the BBAJ. He hams up the emo parts unselfconsciously. Though he doesn't have a great singing voice, he does have a powerful one. His speeches and jokes truly endear Jackson to the audience. But at the end, we are still left to decide Jackson's legacy as either one of the greatest presidents of all time, or a murderer.

Time Stands Still is Far from Static

Two restless souls--he a foreign correspondent, she a photojournalist--come back to their Brooklyn apartment after she gets hurt on the job in Donald Margulies' new play Time Stands Still. After a successful Broadway run through Manhattan Theater Company in the 2008-2009 season, it is now back after a summer hiatus. Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) has just woken from a coma after a roadside bomb flung her from her car, simultaneously killing her translator, Tariq. Wearing a leg brace and facial scabs, she limps around the apartment while her partner Jamie attends to her. But Sarah is also quick to shrug off special treatment, allowing her editor Richard (Eric Bogosian), and his new girlfriend Mandy (Christina Ricci). When they ask about the explosion, Sarah replies, "Occupational hazard," in a typically practical manner.

After the first two scenes, we may feel that we have all four of these characters figured out. Sarah is a cerebral world-saving workaholic; Jamie is her perfect counterpart as a romantic journalist; Richard is suffering from a midlife crisis, which involves getting together with Mandy, an unintellectual event planner.

Slowly, through incremental, well-paced steps, Donald Margulies reveals the back story behind Sarah's stoicism and Jamie's obsequiousness. Margulies peels back the layers of their personalities to reveal that things aren't as simple as they first appear. Margulies has mastered the art of exposition through convincing dialogue. It's not surprising that Time Stands Still earned him a Tony nomination for best play last year. Just like how a real couple might not dive into everything that they did while apart for work, it takes Sarah and Jamie some time to warm up to each other here.

When they do, things they want to say to each other seem to explode out of their mouths. Jamie proposes they get married after eight years of living together. He claims it's a good idea for hospital visitation rights while giving off the hint there's something lingering beneath the surface. Perhaps it's Sarah's affair with her translator, Tariq, which she reveals in the next line. Perhaps it's Jamie's own breakdown after seeing children explode in front of him, causing him to leave Sarah with Tariq in the first place. Is Jamie trying to redeem himself? Is he just insecure? And where does Sarah's hesitancy come from?

Margulies provides the answers to these questions in the second act without hitting the audience over the head with the characters' motivations. There are no sudden epiphanies or revelations. Rather, the characters figure themselves out at the same time as the audience. Sarah and Jamie realize that their real problem may be that they simply want different things. Jamie, to settle down, but Sarah to keep traveling. At the same time, Sarah's starting to question her own motives for her profession.

In one of the most moving monologues in the play, Sarah tells Jamie how she kept shooting film despite a woman's protests after an explosion in Mosul. "What I did was so wrong it was indecent...They didn't want me taking pictures. That was a sacred place to them...I live off the suffering of strangers." Meanwhile, Mandy is the perfect counterpoint to Sarah's worldviews. Looking at Sarah's pictures, Mandy starts to get upset. "Why didn't you help them?" she wants to know. Indeed, why don't we help the millions of poor people in the world, is one of the questions Time Stands Still asks us to consider. But the more important one is how does our answer to that question effect our relationships?

Belle and Sebastian in Brooklyn

The rain held off for Belle and Sebastian's first stop in the US Thursday night in Brooklyn. Taking place at the Williamsburg Waterfront in a paved lot that overlooks the East River, the show was surprisingly packed for such dreary conditions in an outside venue. Indeed, earlier, people had been selling tickets for the show at half price on Craigslist. But there a couple thousand of us were, ready to hear Belle and Sebastian at their first live North American performance in four years. What was not surprising was that the show was packed with older people--by which I mean not in their twenties. This wasn't too surprising because Belle and Sebastian has been around since the 1990s.

These older concertgoers had a good time rocking to Teenage Fanclub, the opening act. Sounding like a classic rock band straight from the Seventies, the Scottish band crooned out conventional, yet pretty sounding love songs. "I don't need much when I still have thee," to a warming effect as the winds howled behind them.

Soon, Belle and Sebastian took the stage to raucous cheers. Unfortunately, the audience was kind of subdued by the song, "I Didn't See it Coming," from their new album "Belle and Sebastian Write About Love," which doesn't come out for another week in the States. (Due to some unfortunate paving, the floor space of the Williamsburg Waterfront is kind of slanted away from the stage, rendering it a challenge for me to see throughout the show. But this is no reflection on Belle and Sebastian). Luckily, the band made it up to us by following the new song with the more familiar "I'm a Cuckoo." We were relieved to discover that the rest of the set consisted mostly of songs from "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" and "If You're Feeling Sinister," their two most popular albums. They also threw in "The Boy with the Arab Strap," honoring a request, as well as a b-side from "Push Barman to Open New Wounds." Belle and Sebastian's live versions of many of their songs also added a bit extra. "Lord Anthony" departed the most from its album version as Murdoch slowed down the pauses in the song even more to build tension. The contrast between the acoustic beginning and the drum-infused ending truly revealed the energy of the song. The sound mix overall was perfection, allowing us to hear Stuart Murdoch sing his own lyrics even through the heavy winds.

Although they played eighteen songs total, the concert lasted nearly two hours because Belle and Sebastian expertly filled some time with well-chosen dialoguing. At one point, the guitarist Stevie Jackson, took the time to teach us some vocals of "I'm Not Living in the Real World." Later, the band took a break to throw toy footballs to children who were dragged to the concert by their parents.

Finally, Belle and Sebastian closed with a short encore consisting of two songs from "If You're Feeling Sinister." While the concert provided a good sampling of songs from the new album, it was more successful at invoking the first time you discovered Belle and Sebastian and fell in love with them.

Many Laughs but Few Thoughts from La Bete

David Hirson's La Bete got off to an inauspicious start when it first premiered on Broadway in 1991. After a few previews, it only made it two twenty-five performances. Perhaps this was because it's entirely in iambic pentameter and set in Seventeenth Century France. But now, it's going for its second Broadway run after a successful West End revival. Its run was so successful that the producers brought it straight to Broadway this fall without a break. La Bete made it to everyone's most anticipated fall theatre list from New York Magazine to Vogue.

Sitting in the last balcony row of the packed Music Box Theatre during a recent weekday performance, the laughter all around me affirmed the show's newfound popularity. People seemed to love the nearly forty minutes worth of jokes and play on words that opened this two hour production. Indeed, there is something delightful about the cognitive dissonance of hearing contemporary, dirty jokes in a play told in rhyming iambic pentameter set three hundred and fifty years earlier in France. Maybe it's because it makes us modern audiences feel smarter. Also making us feel smart is the whole irony of a play about plays.

The farcical gist of La Bete is that the esteemed playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce) gets a new player, Valere (Mark Rylance), foisted on him by his patron, the Princess (Joanna Lumley). Elomire is a man of ideas who writes "serious" plays. He has no tolerance of vulgarity for vulgarity's sake. Just look at him working when the play opens. Surrounded by a huge library of books, we see him scratching away with his quill in a somber corner desk. His solitude is quickly ruined by Valere, the Princess's recommendation who looks like he has been sleeping on the street. Valere quickly launches into a monologue about his thoughts on art as he tries to persuade Elomire that he's the perfect addition to his acting troupe.

Mark Rylance's Valere is the main reason to see La Bete. His 25 minute opening diabtribe comes off as what a naturally self-absorbed person would say. Without skipping a beat, he goes from asking Elomire if he's talked too much about himself right back to talking about himself. If ADD had been diagnosable in the Seventeenth Century, Valere would have had it. Valere flits from Cicero to The Bible as topics of conversation. Rylance uses his body--in addition to words--to produce a comic effect. Before Valere's arrival, Elomire warns that Valere spits as he speaks. Sure enough, Rylance arrives eating and spitting simultaneously. After all this food, Valere develops some gas. He finally relieves himself in Elomire's bathroom, straining and talking through a half-open door.

However, once Rylance's performance is over, things get serious. The Princess shows up to order Elomire to accept Valere. Except, you see, Elomire, the Princess, and Valere all have different ideas of what "art" ought to be. Hirson gives the Princess and Elomire lengthy speeches where they spell out their different beliefs. Though delivered in iambic pentameter, this part is quite unsubtle and boring. Elomire and the Princess state the positions that you'd expect from a wealthy 17th Century patron and a well-known 17th Century playwright.

Less boring--but still cliched--Hirson allows Valere to perform a play within a play that spells out his beliefs about the state of art in 17th Century France. Again, no surprise here. His play seems to criticize the formal artistic establishment. Finally, only in the last ten minutes of the play does Hirson introduce a key point of tension: Will the troupe's players go with Valere or with Elomire? Though the troupes make a pretty clear decision, the audience is left with an unclear message. Hirson does not spend enough time explaining either actors' opinions or art or where these opinions come from. This leads to an abrupt, and somewhat unsastisfying ending. Luckily, we are consoled by the remembrance of the first half of the play and its clever laughs.

Angry Little Foxes

Foxes are hungry, gnawing creatures. Constantly looking for ways to get ahead, they are also very practical. Jonathan Franzen even alludes to a fox chewing his own leg off to escape a trap in his novel, The Corrections. We can imagine foxes eating their own young if they have to. The Hubbards in Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes, fit this stereotype perfectly. The loud, chilling music that opens The New York Theatre Workshop's new production--under the direction of Ivo van Hove--reflects the violently loud, chilling ways in which the Hubbards use people to advance their own class ambitions.

The Hubbard men, Benjamin (Marton Csokas), Oscar (Thomas Jay Ryan), and Oscar's grown son Leo (Nick Westrate) seem to stalk and glower over the Hubbard women in the opening scene when the whole family celebrates a new deal they've struck with a Chicagoan businessman. This deal will turn the Hubbards' $225,000 investment into millions. Regina Hubbard Giddens (Elizabeth Marvel), Oscar and Ben's sister, is giddy with excitement. Van Hove's excruciatingly tactile production has a drunk Regina scratching the velvety carpets and walls with her entire body as if she expects the rich velvet to increase her own worth. Birdie Hubbard (Tina Benko), Oscar's wife, indulges Regina by listening to her dreams of living in a big city like Chicago.

Regina and Birdie's reveries are soon dispelled by the Hubbard men. They are moody because the deal isn't quite complete yet. Benjamin and Oscar still need Regina's share of the initial investment. But she being a woman, and this being the South, they need her husband Horace to officially hand over the money. Sadly for them, Horace (Christopher Evan Welch) is resting up at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland. Her brothers' demands stop Regina's daydreaming in its tracks. She immediately falls under their--or, more accurately, Ben's--spell, and joins them in conniving to get Horace's money. Mimicking her brothers' control over others, Regina has no qualms about manipulating her teenage daughter Alexandra (Cristin Milioti) to compel Horace's return. How far Regina will go to secure her fair share of the Hubbard fortune, and what consequences she'll suffer in turn form the central drama of the play.

This tension has been played out regularly since The Little Foxes first premiered in 1939. Revived several times on Broadway with a 1941 Bette Davis movie as well, the story of the Hubbards has survived the Twentieth Century. Hellman's script holds up even ten years into the Twenty-First Century for its exploration of the timeless American tragedy of constant striving. Ben, Oscar, and Regina repeat throughout that there are two types of people in the world: those who get ahead, and those who watch. Its clear that the Hubbards are in the first camp as we learn about Oscar's careful scheming to marry the most blue-blooded girl in town. According to Birdie, "My family was good....Ben Gubbard wanted the cotton and Oscar Hubbard married it for him. He was kind to me, then...Everybody knew what he married me for. Everybody but me."

Like all the other stories, Benko recounts this in a forlorn, matter-of-fact manner. In contrast to the violent physical action, the actors have more sober direction in line delivery that leads to devastating results. A line in Hellman's original play that calls for Regina to scream " I hope you die!, I hope you die soon!, I'll be waiting for you to die!" at Horace is delivered here by Marvel softly as she strokes her husband's head, as if she's actually putting a curse on him. This is indeed the more chilling option.

Initially set in the early Twentieth Century American South when the last of the plantation class was being overtaken by carpetbaggers and industrialists, The Little Foxes could be easily transported to the post-Lehman world where people are once again unsure of their fortunes. But one problem with van Hove's production is that it's temporally confused. On the one hand, a LCD monitor that's used to project the upstairs happenings suggest a modern day setting. On the other hand, the abundant use of the N word, the allusions to trains and cotton suggest the last century.

Since I saw the production in its first preview, there were a few technical glitches as well. The music during scene changes was a little overdone. The final scene ended abruptly when the music swelled to a sudden cut out. I'm hoping they've turned that into a slow fadeout by now. Nonetheless, the "van Hove treatment" makes The Little Foxes an intense viewing experience for modern audiences.

Trust: Don't Trust Those with Trust Funds

Trust, this season's mainstage opener at 2nd Stage Theater, begins on a spare stage. Large and embossed with some kind of metal, it feels like a dungeon. The only item present is a weird contraption hanging from the ceiling. Harry (Zach Braff) wanders on to the stage, just as surprised by these tools as we are. It's his first visit to a dominatrix, and he doesn't know what to expect. What he finds out is that the he is not a huge fan of dominatrix activities, and that dominatrixes are just like normal people. Indeed, Mistress Carol turns out to be Prudence Teller (Sutton Foster) from Harry's high school class. The power roles switch -- the first of many such switches -- as Harry reveals that he knows Prudence's real name.

Harry, it turns out, is quite an accomplished businessman who sold an internet start up for $300 million. He tells Prudence that he's looking to be dominated "on a whim." Perhaps he was bored. The writer Paul Weitz, who is better known for his screenplays (In Good Company), turns this potentially cliched idea of a rich man bored by his own wealth into a deeper character study in Trust. Prudence and Harry, both easily typed upon first meeting as a person who needs to dominate because of daddy issues and a person who needs to be dominated because everything came too easily to him, may actually be just the opposite.

Indeed, Harry, who appears to have an "aw-shucks" quality about him, immediately asks Prudence to help him manipulate his wife. Harry invites Prudence over to help him evaluate his wife without telling her that she's a dominatrix. Is Harry just a thoughtful husband, protecting his wife, or a controlling one?

Prudence does an odd 180 soon after. In one of the next scenes, Prudence asks her boyfriend, Morton (Bobby Cannavale), for rent money. He has just come back from gambling and hands her all his cash. When this isn't enough, she demands the balance. Morton immediately flies into a rage, twisting Prudence's body by her hair, and wrestling her down for some anger-fueled sex. "You love me," Morton repeats. Prudence seems to give in quite easily, making us wonder if she actually enjoys being dominated in this way and losing control over situations.

Prudence and Harry's significant others are just as complicated as their counterparts. Harry's wife Aleeza (Ari Graynor) is more than just a depressed housewife who hasn't accomplished anything. As we get closer to the truth of why she hasn't accomplished anything with her painting, we learn that Harry has played a bigger role in her apathy than it may first seem. Similarly, Morton is a book smart person--"I got a 1560 on the SATS"--who now spends all his time sitting around, trying to make a quick buck.

However, there's no time to develop sympathy for these characters. Although the characters are more complicated than they first appear, Weitz doesn't really reveal their depth until the end, when--in fits of genius--the characters figure each other out. The figuring out, however, felt like an exercise in hide the ball. Like Agatha Christie forcing us to try to figure out her killers' motives all the while hiding vital information from us until the end, Weitz makes each of his characters a therapist for another one, revealing their motivations to themselves and to us. For all the flaws of this style, however, it does make for delicious voyeurism.