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Theater
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: If She Stood
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Painted Bride Art Center
ATTENDED: Fri., April 26, 8 p.m., Painted Bride Art Center
CLOSES: Sun., May 5
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: If She Stood considers a small band of women who used personal and collective action to upend their world.
WE THINK: Ain Gordon and Nadine Patterson’s If She Stood is an ambitious look at the founding of the 19th century abolition group the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, but one ultimately bogged down by experimental pretensions. Nonlinear and narrative-defying, the one-act play features four women musing on issues of racism, sexism and activism. Though inspired by a specific historical moment, If She Stood’s characters speak mostly in broad, poetic abstractions that render a clear understanding of the play’s context incredibly difficult. This difficulty is almost certainly intentional — perhaps meant to mimic the impossible situation faced by these courageous but marginalized women — but it’s more exhausting than it is effective. And metatheatrical moments like the fourth-wall-breaking acknowledgement of the room’s dimmed lights, or a character’s uttering of the line, “I hate realism,” feel like little more than self-consciously clever flourishes.
That being said, Janis Dardaris, Melanye Finister, Kim Martin-Cotton and Stacey Sargeant do offer admirably impassioned performances. Emotion is undeniably palpable throughout If She Stood, even if the cause of that emotion is often rendered inscrutable by the play’s challenging language.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: A blast from the South's past.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Countdown to “BOOM” We All Fall Down
GENRE: Theater/Dance/Song
GROUP: Kariamu & Company: Traditions
ATTENDED: Sat., April 27, 1 p.m., Temple Performing Arts Center
CLOSED: Sat., April 27
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham Alabama on September 15, 1963 was an unprecedented act of “domestic terrorism” long before the term would ever be applied. Countdown to “BOOM” We All Fall Down captur[es] the music, the look, the feel and the movements of a Sunday morning in the South.
WE THINK: The highlight of Kariamu & Company’s Countdown to “BOOM" is a beautiful scene of four mothers preparing their daughters’ hair before church while struggling to explain why the world is such a cruel place. The production works best in this intimate little moment, as parents try to ready their children for the harsh realities of the world without draining them of hope. We are made to feel their reality, rather than just being shown it.
The production is disjointed and not concerned with linear narratives, which is confusing at first but works better as the scenes unfold. Countdown falters when it tries to convey the Civil Rights-era South with too heavy a hand. The montage of still photographs and newspaper clippings that accompany almost every scene can distract from the actual performers and lose their power due to overuse. But the dancing, which is less prominent than expected, is stunning.
–Jake Blumgart
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Their parents must be so proud: Kids sing about civil rights movement.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Time Machine: The Lost Hour
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Philadelphia Young Playwrights
ATTENDED: Wed., April 24, 7:30 p.m.
CLOSES: Fri., April 26
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION:”... a multigenerational journey that careens through then, now and next. Boundaries blur, the audience takes part and histories revise in the doing.”
WE THINK: At last, a show that really lives up to the science-fiction promise of PIFA's time machine theme! Short plays written and performed by area high school students, supported by UArts students and professional designers, and directed by David Bradley — a "multigenerational ensemble" — link together in a fun adventure about "a pocket in the universe" where people receive a lost hour to complete a special task. Timekeepers in snazzy white coats by designer Alison Roberts enforce the time rules, including my favorite, number 13: "break all rules in the name of love."
The plays range from poignant romance to social satire, supported by a large ensemble who also request some fun audience participation. Bradley's in-the-round staging on Maura Roche's fun set somewhat overcomes the Innovation Studio's sightline problems, and provides a large playing space.
We don't forget that the writers and performers are high school students — cheerleaders, cell phones, and angsty love come up more than once — but their earnestness is part of The Lost Hour's charm. These cleverly connected plays have meaningful things to say about Time, about what it is and how it affects us, and they express these ideas with heart and style.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Prima! Rufus! Judy!
YES WE KNEW THIS DAY WOULD EVENTUALLY COME. It will have been, like, more than three years since it opened on Broadway next summer, but the Kimmel's website just got updated with a listing for The Book of Mormon running at Forrest Theatre from July 29-September 7, 2014. (We knew that RSS subscription would eventually pay off.) It's awesome news: This musical is truly great, and we definitely don't know that because we downloaded a Broadwaycam pirate tape and watched it enough times to even be able to sing along with the "Fuck you, God" song. And now... waiting a year. Hello!
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: That Time
GENRE: Theater/dance
GROUP: Tongue & Groove, RealLivePeople(in)Motion
ATTENDED: Sat., April 20, 8 p.m., Kimmel Center
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Tongue & Groove is a critically acclaimed theater ensemble that spontaneously performs unscripted scenes and monologues inspired by personal information anonymously submitted by the audience . . . Especially for PIFA 2013, T&G is collaborating with dance company RealLivePeople(in)Motion, an ensemble that is similarly catalyzed by the audience’s true stories.
WE THINK: Tongue & Groove continues to evolve, tweaking its improv format to fit PIFA's time-machine theme by prompting audience memories about moments in our lives we would like to return to, shared anonymously on Post-it notes stuck to a timeline (write clearly, please!). Mine — the morning of my first wedding in November 1989, to follow my impulse to run away and thus spare myself a year in hell — was not chosen, but audience reactions made clear whose were.
Bobbi Block's talented long-form, realistic improv-ers are smartly teamed with RLPiM, dancers in street clothes who likewise explore real life. Actors dance and dancers act together successfully in the T&G style of creating genuine, rich relationships in an instant and finding humor in human behavior rather than punch lines. Using a variety of formats and styles (monologues, domestic scenes, inter-generational conflicts, instant message exchanges), the hour-long show I witnessed blended stories united by their complex emotional levels: I laughed heartily, yet felt tears rising by the end.
Working against the performers, it must be said, was the ironically named Innovation Studio, which stifles innovation. Whoever chose the high-backed plastic chairs and didn't provide risers apparently never sat in a theater before: in the second of five rows, I couldn't see performers on the floor unless they stood, and I watched through a picket fence of heads. Even the back row of high chairs had trouble, but in the fourth row of normal-height chairs — which would feel close in any of the city's much less expensive but more sensible small theaters — the conditions are miserable. Moreover, shifting for a better view makes the unsteady chairs creak and squeak, producing a steady undercurrent of the-locusts-are-coming sounds. Artists must either build a stage on the beautiful hardwood floor or limit their choices and punish their audiences. How can the Kimmel Center lead us into the future when its designers learned nothing from the past?
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Five too-short plays about the future.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: FutureFest
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Luna Theater Company
ATTENDED: Sat., April 20, 8 p.m., Adrienne Theater
CLOSES: April 27
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Luna Theater Company journeys to the future with their second annual play festival, FutureFest. The world premiere of five one-act plays, FutureFest explores how our visions of the future inform our understanding of ourselves and world today.
WE THINK: In keeping with PIFA's time-machine theme, FutureFest offers five vignettes about possible futures. It’s hard to imagine such a premise without the dystopian societies and Dickian virtual realities we’re used to, and the festival definitely delivers in that respect. There are androids, post-apocalypse scenarios, marriage-counseling simulations, artificial organs and even “head sex,” which is much better than that sweaty, smelly, “real sex” we have now.
Oddly enough, it’s the show’s vignette format that makes it hard to sit through. Sci-fi inventions tend to work best when properly introduced, and then demonstrated more thoroughly, in a longer format, like a novel or feature-length film — enough time for a little world-building. At least three of the stories here attempt to pack so much unfamiliar terminology into so little digestion time that a lot ends up being incomprehensible.
Still, Luna makes good use of the space, piling a lot of post-apocalyptic junk onstage and colorful TV installations in the wall that give the show a more cohesive visual feel. The performances are spot-on, as well. Whether they’re playing familiar types or bunnies that create universes, the actors know exactly who they are and what they want, even if the audience isn’t so sure.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Philadanco addresses the Big Bang.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Vainglorious: The Epic Feats of Notable Persons in Europe After the Revolution
GENRE: Theater/Exhibition
GROUP: Applied Mechanics
ATTENDED: Sat., April 13, 7 p.m., Christ Church Neighborhood House
CLOSES: April 13
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Factions clash and empires rise and fall…Twenty-six of the shiniest rising stars in the Philadelphia scene join forces to create a dazzling new depiction of a potent historical moment: the great sweep of the Napoleonic Empire in the wake of the French Revolution.
WE THINK: What’s history? Well it ain’t neat. Thus the dramaturges of Applied Mechanics arm you with a flow chart of events, divide the 26-person cast into teams (team Napoleon, team Germaine de Staël, etc.), zone a small gym and its two balconies into parts of the world, and turn you loose to roam, interact, even get some wine and linzertorte if you’re in the right place at the right time. But the play punishes you for your curiosity or fidelity: The more you walk around and see, the less you see. The less you walk around and see, the less you see.
What’s history? Symbols. Thus the tormented spirit of the age, Beethoven, lives in isolated anguish, hardly touching any of the other important personages until one of his concerts turns into a vision of him resentfully conducting Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation. Thus team Talleyrand is composed of five actors playing the same character, a division of self that is not Freudian but political. The Talleyrands appear everywhere, first serving Napoleon, then stripping him of medals and bicorne and finally carving his Europe into pieces.
What’s history? Word and deed. Thus physicality takes on as much import as the English and French dialogue, and battles become dances with snap bangs being thrown, sex is a panting, ass-slapping ritual, and invasions are air-pony Monty Python gallops. With the coordination of director/ringmaster Rebecca Wright and designer Maria Shaplin, such critical moments come to the fore without usurping the sprawl of the play.
What’s drama? The art of the showdown. And for one moment near the end, all the sound and fury of this perpetual motion machine stops, concentrates itself as if it were trying to engineer nothing but this instant all along, and we get Mary Tuomanen’s absorbing Napoleon – just seconds ago within my arm’s length on Elba, desolate and repeating “Josephine, Josephine, Josephine” – restored from exile and confronted by his old troops who are being exhorted to “fire!” The entire hall goes quiet and he utters a line which might as well stand in for the myth of celebrity from that time till now, “You know me.”
What’s history? A Vainglorious tragic-comedy, a flawed inspired play.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Gastronomy lessons from the Founding Fathers.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Animal Animal Mammal Mine
GENRE: Dance/theater
GROUP: Penn Dixie Productions
ATTENDED: Sun., April 14, 8 p.m., Underground Arts
CLOSES: April 20
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: A devised theater piece that grows out of extensive interviews with women who have inherited the technology of the 60s. It weaves these characters together with dance, projections, and the breathtaking hybrid sculptures of Martha Posner.
WE THINK: Writer-director Anisa George concocts a fascinating adventure, based on conversations with women about reproduction that were expansive enough to explore concerns about climate change and the nature of life itself. As with other works of this style (think Pig Iron Theatre Company, New Paradise Laboratories, Applied Mechanics, and anything staged by Mark Lord), we're embraced by a dizzying variety of fascinating images, action, and sounds — most of them showing low-tech innovation, like Martha Posner's wearable sculptures — from an on-stage glacier and menacing animal activists to the giddy thrills of actresses singing while circling the audience on bicycles and discovering their capacity for flight.
Set designer Amy Rubin uses Underground Arts' basement space well, surrounding us and a deep, sea-blue playing area with eerie bare trees. Often funny while also surprisingly moving, Animal Animal Mammal Mine makes the question of bringing children into an ailing world real and personal, and balances that worry and cynicism with a hopeful message about life's resilience.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: An elephant on trial. No, like, literally, in a courtroom.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Trial of Murderous Mary
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Aaron Cromie & Gwen Rooker
ATTENDED: Fri., April 12, 8 p.m., Kimmel Center
CLOSES: April 20
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The Sparks Family Circus comes to [a small coal-mining boomtown in the Appalachians], led by Ringmaster Charlie Sparks and featuring his beloved five-ton elephant, Mighty Mary, “the largest living land animal on Earth." ... The sad, bloody fiasco that follows threatens to derail the circus permanently.
WE THINK: Cromie is circus owner and ringmaster Charlie Sparks, while Rooker, Dave Johnson, Sarah Gliko and Erin Carney play multiple roles and instruments in this powerful play with music. They charm us with earnestness as performers in a circus that traveled the country dazzling small-town crowds until their elephant handler retires, replaced by an inexperienced fumbler who causes Mary to panic in a parade.
Whipped into a frenzy by rumors and lies spread by opportunistic journalists, the town wants Mary to pay for killing her incompetent master. The mob's ignorance and ugliness are portrayed using the same well-crafted methods that amused us earlier: clever songs, vivid caricatures, and shadow puppets. One might wish for more about Mary — both her majestic size and her apparently gentle disposition — but her fate requires no embellishment: The raw facts of her trial (yes, they prosecuted an animal in court) and her cruel fate are emotionally forceful enough.
"Murderous Mary" tells a story that feels contemporary, though it occurred a century ago. Media exaggeration, mob panic, and cruelty to animals are far from extinct.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Before/after photos of Berlin.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Hand of Gaul
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Inis Nua Theatre Company
ATTENDED:Wed., April 10, 7 p.m., Off-Broad Street Theater
CLOSES: April 28
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: When French soccer superstar Thierry Henry single-handedly knocks Ireland out of the 2010 World Cup with an unchecked foul, three fiercely proud (albeit not overly bright) Irish fans decide to avenge their team.
WE THINK: Jared Michael Delaney's new play is a barrage of ridiculousness. Delaney, Adam Altman, and Harry Smith engage in non stop non sequiturs, arcane movie references, and Three Stooges-style violence. They pull together enough to hire a hit man — Le Falcone (Damon Bonetti), an English-mangling Belgian with a pencil-thin moustache also obsessed with Henry — to avenge Ireland's stolen honor.
This would be enough for great fun, but director Tom Reing adds witty live accompaniment by Langabeer & Machiz on guitar, bass, accordion, drums, banjo, penny whistle and saw, plus video by Janelle Kauffman of hilarious dueling press conferences from Irish president Mary McAleese (Megan Bellwoar) and French president Nicolas Sarkozy (Leonard Haas) — AND convenient pop-up facts about soccer, beer, and bad movies. Some of J. Alex Cordaro's fight choreography is rendered in gloriously silly slow motion. Delaney's script is boldly politically incorrect (the debate about national slurs is outrageous), yet concludes with a constructive moral.
The Hand of Gaul is performed with a comfortable looseness, a knowing wink to the audience that the cast is having as much fun as we are. I can't think about it now without shaking my head and laughing.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Parents with cameras disrupt a solemn Holocaust play.
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