12:00 to 1:00 - Reviews

I will say, as a warning folks, the first hour of the marathon was inauspicious. I was a trifle worried after this first hour as I had managed to convince my friend Will to watch entire marathon with me and I was concerned that the plays presented in the first hour might be representative of plays witnessed throughout the rest of the day. Fortunately such concerns proved unfounded, but in general this was a rocky way to begin a full day of theater.

Also, I don't plan on writing as much about MOST of the plays as I attempted to do last year. I'll break this rule generally, but don't surprised if I only devote a paragraph or so to each show. 

And now without further much ado, onto the reviews!

Broken News by Robert Brustein - Sponsored by New Repertory Theater 

My friend Jake begged me not write this. Unbeknownst to me prior to writing this, Robert Brustein is a very big name. He founded both Yale Rep and the A.R.T. To say his influence looms large in New England, is to say that that upstart Google is a company to watch out for. He might not be our equivilant of Islam itself, but he's certainly one of the Goddamn five pillars. 

He also wrote a terrible play. A terrible terrible terrible play. Frankly, the worst of the entire day. Not only did he squander some of the greatest talents of the Boston theater community, (Jeremiah Kissel, Karen MacDonald, Michael Hammond, and Paul D. Farwell) but he did so with a script that was almost identical to the one he submitted last year. 

Here's a quote from my review of his last play, The Press Assesses the Gettysburg Address: 

The cast consists of Wolf Spritzer, Sean Inanity, and Greta Van Insufferable... The play overtly lambasts CNN (Spritzer reminds us constantly that this is only a break in their continuing coverage of the missing Malaysian flight, a gag whose repetition succeeds in killing its humor) and generally the blather of politico talking heads that infest cable news in all of its forms...  to my mind making the repeated point that pundits will twist anything to justify their own interests seems about as fresh an observation as noticing the earth revolves around the sun.

I could have written the exact same words to describe the one he wrote this year. But at least last year, he had the novel idea of transposing his talking heads to the 1860s, reacting to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This time around, he simply recycles the exact same tired material with the addition of a couple lame Boener/Boner jokes. It boggles my mind that this script could have been included at all, let alone attracted such luminaries to be hampered by the leaden script.

The only amusement to be found was Karen MacDonald's improvised laughing as Greta Van Insufferable which she preformed with a smirking grimace out of both sides of her mouth. An unfunny untopical train wreck of a play. I hope I don't get into any kind of hot water for saying this, but I do hope that next year the selection committee is more judicious when selecting scripts. There's no reason why the public should see the same unfunny piece twice two years in a row.

Orphans by Richard Ballon - Sponsored by Bad Habit Productions

A police officer is being hammered by his chief (ably if haltingly performed by Devon Scalisi and Peter Brown respectively) for not bringing in an elderly woman accused of stealing baby Jesus dolls from the nativity creches of homes and churches alike, every Christmas. The officer then recounts visiting the home to discover various rooms devoted to harboring the scavenged dolls. The woman is rescuing them, she tell him, from the crucifixion and his unloving father and the tale ends on a haunting magical realist note. 

The problem is that this would have been a fine and dandy short story, but it fails as theater. There's barely any conflict between the two characters, and the action only works as a story being told passively, not in the way it affects the two officers in the present. Both characters are just a conduit for the tale, which could be better recounted on the page and in prose. There is no reason why this had to be a play. Good story, yes. Good drama, no.

Game Face by Kimberly Holliday - Sponsored by Hovey Players

This is an interesting one. Two professional men, Steve and James (a solid James Bocock and more solid still Craig Ciampas) meet in the locker room for a pick up game. A mutual basketball buddy is absent due to the fact that his son was recently arrested for either selling or simply possessing prescription drugs. We soon discover that not only was it Steve's son who originally procured and sold the drugs from his own father's stash, but that it was Steve who called the police on his friend's son. 

While an interesting premise, the plot doesn't lead anywhere too surprising. Steve proves to be an unrepentant asshole and is astonished to discover that his and his son's behavior will be met with hostility. This is one of several plays throughout the marathon that probably could have benefited from an expanded time frame. Ten minutes is not a lot of time to naturally exposit this kind of gnarled back story, so the results seem rushed. 

Also it ends on a note of comeuppance as it's hinted that the there will be grave social repercussions for both Steve and his son, but those consequences seem ill-defined and vague. I honestly think the playwright just needed more time. But not a bad starting point for what we can hope would be an expansion.

Buzz by Susan Lumenello - Sponsored by Pilgrim Theatre

Hmmm... what to say? A scientist (played by Susan Thompson) harbors a secret dream to be abducted by aliens. So when one shows up out of the blue as she's vacuuming her apartment she's overwhelmed with excitement. Until she discovers that the morose alien in question (a twice begoggled Lorraine Grosslight) has gotten the wrong address and is there to retrieve her golf-instructing sister. Comedy ensues?

The characters are cartoons. Both equally unbelievable as truly motivated beings, and retreads of types we've seen before. The fact that Iris refers to herself multiple times as a "scientist" without ever specifying what kind of science she studies belies her cardboard cutout nature. Likewise Buzz, the alien courier's put-upon struggling writer reads as an unflattering mix of "Mary Sue"ism and Marvin the paranoid android from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's series. The result is both obvious and tiresome. Sorry. 

The Rags by William Orem - Sponsored by Marblehead Little Theatre

A public school teacher (Sarah Carlin) schedules a face to face appointment with her general practitioner (Chris Clark). Her doctor is adopting a new policy called "MD Gold", which is basically an upper tier service position that guarantees that those patients face time with their GP. And it only costs $4,000 a year, a sum which is prohibitive for our protagonist. So she spends the play plying every tactic in the book to appeal to her doctor's sense of decency, mercy, and eventually baser instincts.

The problem I have is a personal one. While I agree whole heartedly with the thesis of the play, I am just personally not a fan of polemics. The play is written entirely from the patient's point of view, painting her concerns and arguments as flawless and paramount. When the doctor says that without implementing the new policy they might face bankruptcy, the argument is thrown aside as a base lie, despite the fact that medical centers do routinely face budget crises. 

More than that, the doctor, played with an inhuman stiffness by Clark, is revealed not to just be an immovable face of a monstrous bureaucracy, but to be grossly corrupt as well. While it's poignant to what lengths the patient is willing to go to obtain adequate health care, the whole tale seems so weighted that it makes its own point hard to take seriously. A defter and more subtle examination of the commercialization of medical care might have proven more effective. 

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I know. It seems like a big old curmudgeon after these reviews, but please note that that's about to change. In general I did find many of the plays this year to be truly interesting and out right great. In fact the next play I really liked! Stay tuned for more reviews!