By Doug Strassler

Of all the scenes that will emblazon themselves upon the heart, as many in Sans Merci, the deeply affecting new Johnna Adams play that just opened at the Fourth Street Theater, will, the one that lingers the most is a silent one. It’s an emotional excavation of sorts, as two women linked by a third, absent one, comb through Tracy, the missing woman’s, things. One is Tracy’s mother, Elizabeth (Susan Ferrara), sorting through a knapsack of personal items; the other, Kelly (Rachel Hip-Flores), is sorting Tracy’s clothes on the couch. And without saying a single word, Ferrara and Hip-Flores conduct one of the most moving duets to be found onstage.

Merci traces how the woman got to this point, at both the micro and macro level. College students Kelly and Tracy (a winning Alisha Spielmann) were traveling in a Colombian village to help the U’wa Indians organize against an American oil company when they were attacked. Tracy was killed, and Kelly was left to detail with brutal physical and emotional scarring. Several years hence, Elizabeth, struggling in her own way, has shown up – uninvited – on Kelly’s doorstep to have some questions answered.

What I love about Adams’s script is how often it avoids cliché. Elizabeth and Kelly don’t hold on to dialogue that might be delivered at a more climactic point, because that isn’t how human beings talk; instead, they say what they need to say in the moment. Merci is further helped by top-nothc direction from Heather Cohn, who has demonstrated in previous Flux Theatre Ensemble works an uncanny ability to work within the limited space and resources of Off-Off-Broadway without sacrificing the emotional arc of her story nor the professionalism of her richly talented cast.

All of which is assuredly on display in Merci, which, true to its title (derived Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”), does not hold back. In fact, even in the overwritten portions of the play, Cohn’s cast of three comes through. I wish Spielmann had a bit more flashback material with which Tracy could befriend and become intimate with Kelly, but she makes every moment count, allowing the audience to see this young, repressed girl’s eyes opening up to new worlds and possibilities. Hip-Flores is also strong and moving throughout, carefully navigating the play’s transitions between her younger, more carefree self and the older, grief- and guilt-stricken one locked in a tug-of-war with Elizabeth. Ferrara, meanwhile, is a revelation. Every moment of stillness is as rich as her every line of dialogue, which ache with hurt and a lack of understanding. (Janie Bullard’s sound design and Kia Rogers’ lighting design also help with establishing both mood and setting, of past and present.)

Merci – which ran for nearly two uninterrupted hours on the night I saw it – could stand a little trimming; Adams doesn’t always seem to trust her own audience to intuit the strength of Tracy and Kelly’s connection, even in death. But when this stark material works, it works wonders. Healing may be impossible, Merci says, but Adams’ script, and the masterful production Cohn has wrung from it, Cohn’s masterful production that comes from it, show what we need to hold on to in life to cope with loss.

Sans Merci
Fourth Street Theatre, 83 East Fourth Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue). www.fluxtheatre.org

By Doug Strassler

Photo by Ayumi Sakamoto

Real-life married couple Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughn conceived of A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia), an integrated work of performance art about the trials and tribulations of marriage. The show utilizes the entirety of HERE Arts Center – including hallways, dressing rooms, even restrooms – and such forms as video, sculpture, and drawings to document modern married life as they know it. New York Press discussed this irreverent show with the two.

How and how long ago did you two meet?

JM and NV: We met in 2006, working when Nick started working with the TEAM as a designer and Jake as a performer/writer. We still both work with the TEAM but we started making our own work together in the fall of 2007. Our first installation, at Pittsburgh’s Future Tenant Gallery, was created as a partner piece to the environment that we co-designed for (S)even, choreographed by Pavel Zustiak (Palissimo) for Pittsburgh’s LABCO Dance. That was where we started laying the groundwork for the collaboration that has continued until now.

What led you to determine to do a multimedia performance about marriage?

JM and NV: It’s sort of a two-part question, so . . . addressing the second part first, I don’t think we initially set out to make a piece about ‘marriage.’ When we actually started this project it was called Vietnam, Texas, and was about the oddity of the suburbs, of these strange isolated enclaves that are so deeply tied to the American Dream. And the deeper we got in the project, the more we realized that essentially we were trying to understand our place within that iconography, and that our ‘frame’ on the whole thing, as a same-sex married couple was really at the core of the work. Since then, the project has continued to develop and we’ve sketched out the beginnings of A Marriage: 2 (West-er) and A Marriage: 3 (50 States), each of which take on other particularly American iconographies.

As for the multi-media performance, I think all of our work develops in some way tangentially. We’ll start working within a given form, say, cut paper or print making, and as we work through ideas, suddenly we’ll find something that doesn’t fit anymore, and really demands to be handled as a video piece. Then working through that idea we’ll stumble across something else that really works better as a live performance, or a sculpture. Ultimately, we’re trying to make material/media decisions based on the content, which by its very nature ends up as a multimedia performance.

Could you explain a bit more about what HEREart does, and how you have found the many artists with whom you have worked?

JM and NV: We should differentiate between HERE, HEREart and HARP. HERE is this amazing arts center with a mission to commission, develop and produce hybrid performance work (theater/music/dance etc.). HEREart refers to the visual arts programming at HERE (including a stand-alone program of gallery exhibitions) and HARP is the HERE Artist Residency Program, which is a 1-3 year residency that supports the development of new hybrid work.

A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia) is a confluence of both the performance and the gallery programming. As HARP artists for the last three years we’ve been surrounded with a community of some of the most adventurous, exciting, and boundary pushing artists in New York, and that community and the feedback we’ve gotten from being a part of it has had a tremendous influence on our work.

How much of the “story” of the performance is autobiographical, and how much is fictional?

JM and NV: It’s handy that you put “story” in quotation marks, because there is no traditional narrative in the performance events that go along with the exhibition. There are several narrative strands in the rest of the installation (video works, some sound installations) which are mostly derived from the writing of Jessica Almasy and collectively paint a portrait of one fictional cul-de-sac, and in one video piece in particular you’ll see Jake and I trying on these identities, sort-of wearing them like clothing. There are also some documentary elements in the piece, including a series of interviews we conducted with some seminal queer performance artists and active participants in queer issues, as well as an accumulative sculpture created by reading the entire 13 days of testimony from Perry v. Schwarzenegger into plastic bags.

That said, the performance work while non-narrative is autobiographical in that (while abstract) it attempts to invite viewers to look through our eyes at the iconography of the traditional “American Dream” and it’s our hope that we present ourselves in a very direct and honest way. We like to talk about it as if we’re inviting the audience into our ‘workshop’ as we attempt to figure out how we fit into the American Dream.

Do you find there are specific challenges to same-sex marriage that differ from male-female marriage? What might they be?

JM and NV: I don’t know exactly if ‘challenges’ is the right word, but there seems to be a difference. One point of discussion that’s come up multiple times with multiple people is that same-sex marriage is (or could be positioned as) a direct attack on ‘traditional’ marriage, in that it suggests a partnership that is, by it’s very nature, free of the baggage of gender roles, resulting power structures, property implications and all the other questionable aspects of ‘traditional’ marriage. That queer marriage actually has the potential to reinvigorate and redefine straight marriage for the better.

Having just written that, there is a danger (challenge?) in the Marriage Equality debate though. There’s a danger in (and I/we say this as a married couple) buying into a system blindly. As Lisa Kron so eloquently says in the interviews section of the piece, (and we paraphrase here) it is a cause of concern when right wing politicians are suddenly jumping on the bandwagon of Marriage Equality as a sort-of token while simultaneously trying to dismantle the voting rights act. I think we have to remain vigilant to keep marriage equality from subsuming/coopting broader human rights issues.

Further information can be found at http://here.org/shows/detail/1165/.

Actors Don DiPaolo and Neil Holland and director Sam Helfrich, of theater company Knife Edge Productions, reunite after 2011’s successful run of the Stephen Belber show Tape with the new production of Owned. Penned by another major playwright, Drama Desk nominee Julian Sheppard, Owned takes a look at two down-on-their-luck bartenders (played by DiPaolo and Holland) who make a play for the brass ring. The play opens at TBG Theatre on April 26. New York Press spoke with all four members of the creative team about Owned, staying truthful to material, and the importance of working with friends.

NYP: Where did the idea for Owned originate?

NH: After the success Don, Sam and I had collaborating with each other on a revival of Stephen Belber’s Tape, we knew we made an amazing team and wanted to work together again. We decided that the next step would be to work on a brand new play. After interviewing several playwrights and reading their plays, we decided that Julian Sheppard was a great match for us, and commissioned him to write us a play.

JS: I wanted to find a venue for Neil and Don to be comfortable, to be buddies, but to have room for real conflict. I had landed on it wanting to be some kind of work-a-day job, but wanted to stay away from a “day job” conceit. The last thing I wanted to do was write a play for two actors who were working day jobs while being struggling actors. I had been batting around a bar scenario as one of the possibilities, when a friend of mine told me a story one night about an old friend of his who had been a bartender, and whom had gotten involved in buying a bar and some things that had gone haywire and mistakes that had been made… and it really gave me focus.

 How long did it take to work on it?

JS: I think I started writing early 2012. I had to go on and off a little bit because of other projects, so the first draft took a little longer than it might have otherwise. From there, we did a couple of very useful readings, in the fall, and then again late winter, which prompted rewrites. One of the pleasures of this process – and lures of the project to begin with – was that we didn’t do endless development and there weren’t workshop hurdles to jump through. We had to raise the money – but the play was going to be produced. That was a tremendous motivator and a very freeing feeling.

How much of the play echoes your actual beliefs in modern life and people’s status in it?

NH: A good amount. Julian spent a good amount of time getting to know each of us. We talked a good amount about what issues we are sensitive to, and different aspects of our lives. So, in many ways I can see myself in this play. Not necessarily in direct parallels, but there in very obvious ways to me nonetheless.

DD: These people are people I know and see. They are real people that are just trying to survive and get their piece of the pie. Like all of us.

SH: I think more than echoing my personal beliefs, the play is an accurate and poignant depiction of contemporary characters who feel authentic and whose struggles and shortcomings – and their attempts to overcome them – are easily identifiable.

JS: I think there are certain things that are hard to escape; I also think class creates sometimes invisible rungs on a ladder that can appear much higher than it seems when you start climbing it. However, the problems the characters face and the crises for them in the play are ultimately matters of personal flaws and not societal. All the characters Have opportunities to escape the failings they’re afraid they’ve inherited. Whether or not they’re able to is up to them, and not how their statuses are constructed.

Without giving too much away, do those of you involved with the show think you might react similarly to these characters given their circumstances?

NH: Yes and no. There are certainly many aspects of the play in which I probably would have similar reactions. Probably most specifically when it comes to my character’s reaction to some things he is feeling regarding the female character [played by Susannah Hoffman]. And for me, that is actually pretty cool, because it is something I am aware of in my own personal life and am trying to work on.

DD: I would say yes. For me they are familiar emotions and circumstances. Everyone is trying to find their place in this world.

SH: For me as the director, what I admire about the play is that the characters are complex and not easy to categorize (i.e. good/bad, dumb/smart, naive/worldy, etc). All of them, even the youngest, have already made many mistakes in life, which makes them very human and sympathetic, and it will be a mystery to discover who each individual audience member most relates to among the three.

How much fun was it to create and recite this dialogue?

JS: At the risk of being glib, so much fun. It was a treat writing for two specific actors, and incorporating their rhythms, habits, perspective and life stories into the play. From the beginning it made the dialogue pop and flow for me. I could always imagine Don and Neil saying the lines, so I had a kind of automatic litmus test for if it ‘felt’ right.

NH: Reciting the dialogue was a blast. I have some great lines, some great monologues. To just be able to play and discover new things, new meanings, in every rehearsal is exciting.

DD: Learning dialogue is always a process that isn’t always fun but once you learn it, it’s like having hand cuffs taken off of you. You’re free and the fun really starts and it makes the process all worth it.

Things escalate very quickly in Owned. How challenging is it to ratchet up the tension?

NH: It’s not easy. For me, it’s just about personalizing it and making it as specific and real for myself as possible. Sam is fantastic at setting things up and really finding the ways to dramatize the tension, which really helps me as an actor.

DD: Great question. It’s challenging to make it real and believable. I always go back to life. If it looks or feels similar to what I’ve experienced in real life than I know I’m on the right track.

SH: The challenge for me has been to communicate to the audience just how important the events of the play are to each individual character, so that the audience experience is one of believing in and feeling for characters who, in this moment, are living the most extreme moment of their lives – the moment in which your dream either comes true or
it doesn’t.

And is it easier to deliver some of these exchanges being real-life friends who have worked together in the past?

NH: Absolutely. Don and I are very good friends. We’ve known each other for nine years now, dating back to when we first met at The William Esper Studio. So there is a good amount of comfort and trust with each other. We know we have each other’s back, and that just really allows us to go for it with no fear.

DD: Definitely. Neil and I are such good friends and we have worked together before so it’s very comfortable but not in a lazy way. He is so good that I’m always surprised by him and this keeps it fresh. I think Owned can be a great American play that stands the test of time. A play that will be done for years and have its scenes be done
throughout acting classes. Which is always a good sign of a great play.

Tickets for Owned can be purchased at www.knifedgeproductions.com.

Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

Daniel Talbott’s ‘Slipping’ is the first LA production for the NYC company

The Off-Broadway theatre community isn’t a geographical location as much as a mental one, a notion that Rattlestick Playwrights Theater has embraced wholeheartedly as it expands its base all the way from New York’s West Village to Hollywood.

Slipping, the well-received play written and directed by Daniel Talbott, runs at the Lillian Theatre through May 5, marking the first Los Angeles production for the Obie-winning New York company. The goal is for Rattlestick – a compendium of well-trained artists unafraid to explore truths in challenging, occasionally controversial works – to further the creative dialogue between its members and the entertainment community-at-large.

“Rattlestick is not only thrilled to bring some of its innovative New York productions to Los Angeles audiences,” says Rattlestick Artistic Director David Van Asselt, “but we are also seeking to collaborate and intercross with the remarkable entertainment communities in Los Angeles.”

This isn’t the first instance of Rattlestick spreading its wings. Just last summer, Talbott – one of Rattle stick’s literary managers – wrote Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, which was performed at the American Conservatory Theatre’s Costume Shop in San Francisco. “Los Angeles is a vital city,” Van Asselt explained, “open to experimentation and full of creative mavericks. We are very interested in exploring that, opening up a line of communication, and seeing what’s possible.”

In transporting Slipping, Rattlestick has carried over one of its more storied homegrown productions. It is an unconventional but emotionally trenchant work about Eli (Seth Numrich), a malcontent gay teen adjusting to a new life in Iowa with his mother, Jan (Wendy vanden Heuvel) after enduring a tragedy back home in San Francisco. Each thread of hope of starting anew – embodied by naïve, confused shortstop Jake (MacLeod Andrews) – is entwined by paralyzing memories of a past love, Chris (Maxwell Hamilton), which haunt him.

One of the distinguishing characteristics between Slipping and other shows is just how clear-headed it is, even as it suggests a world of dualities. While Eli’s pain is portrayed in an elliptical fashion (Leigh Allen’s lighting and Janie Bullard’s sound design aid these transitions immeasurably), slowly letting the audience understand both how Eli’s tough outer shell was formed as well as how Jake might be able to crack it, Talbott empowers his characters, who each speak in dialogue that flirts with poetry while remaining both realistic and individually character-appropriate. The playwright also never condescends or punishes his characters for behavior that might appear cruel or self-serving. All four of his characters make believable choices that the audience intuits on a mental level, even if some of the motivations remain enigmatic in the moment. And the result is a work that looks at human folly at its most heartbreaking, but also amusing.

Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

And at the preview performance I caught at the Lillian, Slipping gets the production Angelinos deserve. Talbott’s staging was taut while allowing plenty of space to let his actors perform their characters’ internal hopscotch. While Numrich and Andrews reprise their roles from the 2009 New York run, Brett Donaldson essayed the role of Eli at my performance, and the young actor had a kung fu grip on the teenager’s complexities. He’s brave enough to push against audience sympathy at all costs, trusting that the play itself will fill in more of the character’s inner hurt. In fact, Rattlestick’s family will only continue to increase out west, as Wyatt Fenner will take over the role of Eli for Numrich, himself a Rattlestick regular (and star of such Broadway shows as Golden Boy and War Horse) who departs for a West End revival of Sweet Bird of Youth opposite Kim Cattrall.

Though Slipping is, of course, no one-man show. Hamilton walks the line between sleazy tease and stunted teen as Chris, putting Eli in situations that feel simultaneously dangerous and exciting for the young man. Their scenes together illuminate the way human damage is both learned and taught. Meanwhile, Jake balances out the other side, depicting how clumsy but enticing young crushes can be, and Andrews is pure genius at contrasting the more fun, freer side of young love to contrast with the cost that Eli bears. Vanden Heuvel offers a master class in subtle nuance as Jan both grieves and recovers in her own way. John McDermott’s clever set design also shows how one’s home can be both a place of refuge and of demons.

Quirky, challenging, and full of riches, Slipping isn’t your typical traveling show. Which makes it all the more appealing a choice to help Rattlestick as it establishes a bicoastal presence.

“We’re excited to bring Slipping to the West Coast and believe Los Angeles audiences will really respond to this material,” Van Asselt said. “Talbott’s writing is vital, wise beyond its years and unafraid to give us characters who are fierce, passionate, and yet with an underlying core of honesty and sincerity in an age when jaded cynicism is de rigueur.”

For more information about Slipping, please go to http://www.rattlestick.org/rattlestick-la/

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Helen, we soon learn, has reason to be cruel to Evan, although he needs to be reminded of why as much as the audience must be schooled in the explanation. This may not sound like a particularly sturdy basis for a piece of entertainment, but if I have described People as a modest show, please understand that there is nothing slight about this extraordinarily well-crafted play about small hopes and disconnected lives. Moreover, itt it is a production made all the more rewarding by director George Perrin’s perfectly attuned instinct for both story and his powerful acting duo’s sensibilities.

I’ll go ahead and explain. As a teenager, Evan was part of a more popular group of students that bullied Helen’s son, Jack (“Jack Hughes” was misinterpreted – or was it?! – as “J’accuse”). In one particular incident, the boys humiliated young Jack severely. But by revealing this initial connection, I have spoiled nothing in this show, presented by Scotland’s Traverse Theatre Company. Harrower, best known for the controversial Blackbird, provides the inverse of that show, in which a young woman (a girl) encounters the older man with whom she shares a poignant personal history. And in doing so, he again shines a light on the things that haunts us, questioning which sins are worthy of redemption and which are not.

Evan has returned to Helensburgh following a turn as a nurse in war-ridden Pakistan for the re-marriage of his two divorced parents, and has done so a bit worse for wear. He, too, has now suffered, victimized by terrorists in Pakistan. Helen has sunk into her own pit of despair and since a traumatized Jack has fled his childhood home, rejecting her house and (never-seen husband). And yet both characters in this two-hander soldier through hard times the way people generally do in life – by not talking about, and with humor, as can especially be seen in Harrower’s opening scene, when a rigid Helen refuses Evan early check-in to her clearly vacant lodging establishment.

Perrin’s staging of Harrower’s blueprint leaves is equal parts economical and elliptical. As both Evan and Helen retreat to places hidden in the corners of their own mind, we’re treated to further information from the past, explaining to us just how it nips at the present. And while People, conceivably, takes place in realistic fashion, it also works as a kind of dreamscape, thanks especially to Tim Deiling’s masterful lighting design and Scott Twynholm’s music and sound work. Ben Stones’ utile set design, like the show itself, also appears slim but reveals itself to be suggestive of a great deal more. And Perrin wrings great truth from the sublime Duff and Scott-Ramsay, two performers who give their all and still manage to give us something to mull over by play’s end. What’s a good trip if you don’t leave with a souvenir?

Good With People
59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street; www.59e59.org. Through April 21.

Among the Goliaths storming the New York City boards this year – Tony winners like Douglas Hodge, Shuler Hensley and Nathan Lane as well as marquee names like Alec Baldwin and Tom Hanks have or will graced the stage this season – one David has demonstrated remarkable staying power. In an understated, heartfelt performance that has drawn raves from critics and audiences alike, Ari Brand has become the toast of the town for his leading performance in Gordon Edelstein’s My Name is Asher Lev, currently playing the Westside Theater.

It’s a nice reversal for the humble Brand, whose career logline until earlier this season was, unfortunately, defined by a performance that never took place. Cast as an understudy in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, one of two plays (the other being Brighton Beach Memoirs) to run in rep as part of a Doc double bill, the production closed in its infancy, before anyone in his production ever even had a chance to bound to Broadway.

While other roles followed, including a memorable 59E59 gig as a jitter-filled groom in A.R. Gurney’s Black Tie, it’s his performance as the title character of Asher Lev that has proven to be the performer’s breakout. Brand demonstrates uncommon sensitivity in Aaron Posner’s adaptation of the Chaim Potok novel about the culture clash between a young artistic prodigy and his Hasidic family (his father is portrayed by Mark Nelson and his mother was originated by Jenny Powers; Ilana Levine has recently taken over the role) and community in 1950s Brooklyn. Unlike The Neil Simon Plays, the response to Asher Lev has been nearly rhapsodic. The show, which began last year in a limited engagement at the Long Wharf Theatre, has announced yet another extension, now running through September.

Which gives more audience members the chance to share Edelstein’s intimate experience. “The house lights are up in the beginning, and I can pretty much see everyone,” Brand says. “I feel connected to every single audience at every single show. It is a foreign world to almost all of our audiences. It’s essential that the audience understands my character and is engaged with the story.”

It’s a foreign world, but one with emotional connections to all walks of life. Poised and perceptive, Brand recognizes why the play seems to have such widespread appeal. “This story particularly was important for so many people of so many different backgrounds,” the actor explains. “It’s a story about growing up, coming of age and figuring out who you are, about teenagers trying to find their identities. It’s kind of amazing how many people have found the book. You expect Jewish people to, but we know there is a pastor from a black church recommending the show to the members of his choir. It speaks to gay black men in the South, to Mormon women. This is about a boy who is in deep conflict about his identity and what he knows himself to be – it’s a really universal story.”

However, Brand experienced none of his alter ego’s conflict growing up the child of two musicians in Greenwich Village. “I’ve never been in an Asher Lev situation,” the actor says. “I’ve always been privileged to have the support of a core group of people, including my family.”

In fact, if Asher Lev has any personal resonance for Brand, it’s because of how it parallels the life of his father, a concert pianist who passed away when Brand was six. “I’m much more telling my father’s story than my own. He was raised Orthodox in Jerusalem. He had a lot of conflict with his father about the restrictions that came along with being an Orthodox Jew and ended up leaving home to come to New York in the 1960s.

“Asher Lev is an only child, that’s a significant thing,” Brand adds with a laugh. “Maybe if he had had a brother who became an emissary, it might have been a little bit easier for him.”

Music was Brand’s first inspiration as well, and remains so. “I went to St. Ann’s, a progressive, arts-focused school,” he says, and acknowledges playing the guitar, drums, and bass and participating in chamber groups, classical and jazz bands. He also currently plays in a band called the New Facility. “But in college I realized that I loved being onstage and was encouraged to audition for department shows and friends’ shows, and it clicked. I realized that I loved what I was doing.” A friend’s mother helped him get an agent.

Brand is that most refreshing kind of talent, one that is both gracious and grateful. In fact, the more the actor speaks about his career to date, the more he uses the word “lucky.” He’s clearly appreciative for all of those around him (including his girlfriend, a doctoral candidate in Sociology at NYU) and for each of his opportunities, especially the current one. “It’s every actor’s dream to have your regional theater production move to New York for a commercial run.”

More information about My Name is Asher Lev can be found at http://www.asherlevtheplay.com/.

In The Aliens, the last original play of Annie Baker’s to run in New York, the playwright employed what I refer to as the “gotcha moment.” At one point, a character breaks from the measured, elliptical style with which he, like all the others, have been speaking, slowly clueing the audience in to who they are and why they are the way they are, with a blunt confessional statement that turns everything on its head. It is not a stunt, because all that has preceded it and all that follows has been earned. Used once, it packs a visceral wallop. But used several additional times in The Flick, Baker’s latest play which just opened at Playwrights Horizons, this device has now become one of the writer’s hallmark effects, and its overuse, among other choices employed in this play – a well-intentioned misfire that is equal parts promising and frustrating – suggest that Flick has not yet arrived at the final cut stage.

With just three original plays under her belt – Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation, and Aliens – Baker catapulted from promising voice to important talent in an instant. Her singular gifts lie in her observations, usually set somewhere in the small-town New England where she grew up, of socially stunted and broken people. In addition to that gotcha moment, she also employs devices like the awkward pause, hesitations, and repetitions to reflect the tentative and quirky links formed among strangers and the inherent but subtle power structures built within such relationships. Her plays, staged by the ubiquitous and similarly intuitive director Sam Gold (they also teamed up on last summer’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep), have hit the sensitive bull’s-eye on the intersection between the humor and heartbreak of human folly.

Baker introduces characters similar to the ones we’ve met before in her world in Flick, whose title comes from a run-down movie theater in Worcester County, Massachusetts. There’s Sam (downtown stalwart Matthew Maher), the 35-year-old nebbish who resents that 24-year-old Rose (Louisa Krause) gets the privilege of running the projection booth at the same time he quietly pines for her, and Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), the 20-year-old cineaste who has taken up work at the Flick while on a sabbatical from Clark University, where his father is a professor. He’s a purist who has been drawn to the local theater because it is one of the remaining few houses to use a 35-millimeter projector, as he hates the trend of digital moviemaking. (The marvelous set designer David Zinn has fashioned the theater in all its dilapidated glory.)

Baker has buried plenty of golden nuggets here among the threesome’s quotidian chores as theatrical custodians and concessionaires. As Sam and Avery bicker over which films from the last decade matter (the former declares Avatar a masterpiece; a horrified Avery avers that there has been no such thing such Pulp Fiction), their subtle verbal and non-verbal tics shade in volumes about what draws each of these outcasts to the Flick. And as the grungy Rose overshares details of her own life to Avery, we learn she isn’t even aware of him after a while; she just craves an outlet.

Flick is a departure from Baker’s earlier catalog in ways big and small. It’s certainly epic in length, if not in ambition, as we’re alerted from the get-go by a musical interlude that runs several minutes in length. And Baker’s rhythmic sensibilities are bar none. But Baker seems to think she has accomplished more than meets the audience’s eye. The fundamental flaw in Flick – and despite the play’s attendant nuance and riches, this is, sadly, both a flawed play and a flawed production in its current form – is that none of the relationships between the three main characters is strong enough to support the themes of loyalty, betrayal and connection for which Baker strives for by play’s end. (Alex Hanna also appears as a couple of minor characters). Several of the play’s most noteworthy, illuminative moments – a one-sided telephone conversation, an impromptu hip-hop dance, several revelatory monologues – stand out as solo sequences rather than reflect any real sense of bonding.

In other ways, Baker seems to distrust her own narrative abilities, and Flick, which runs three hours and fifteen minutes (including just one hurried intermission), suffers from this lack of economy. A first act sequence in which Sam reacts to Rose’s surprising invitation of Avery to a film screening that’s a de facto date is priceless, benefiting from a perfect tableau on Gold’s part, and providing all the shorthand an audience needs about how each character feels; a subsequent scene in which Sam tries to explain his feelings to an unreceptive Rose feels, labored, amateurish and melodramatic. It’s unnecessary and slows down this overlong show. So, too, do late scenes involving the Flick’s transition to a modern, digital cineplex. Simply seeing characters in an ugly new corporate uniform (the busy Zinn’s costume design is appropriately unflattering for all characters involved) implicitly informs the audience what Baker’s characters go on to belabor. This is unfair. You don’t have to cater to the lowest common theatergoing denominator, but if you plan to tax audience patience, the rewards should pay off in dividends.

Flick is also physically clumsy. Gold obscures too much interaction in the upstage projection booth. And while Baker has peppered the play with myriad film-title-dropping, it’s hard to be sure whether they are random references thrown in or if they are carefully chosen films meant to elucidate her characters. What, for example, does Pulp Fiction specifically mean to Avery? We never learn. Why, too, does he whistle “Le Tourbillon” from Jules and Jim? It takes more than scribing two girls and a guy to earn comparison to that masterwork. In Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, two earlier Playwrights Horizons shows that stand out as highlights of the current theatrical season, entwined literary references to mythology and Moby Dick, respectively, in a far more essential manner.

The cast, however, refuses to be weighted down by Flick’s narrative ambiguities. With perfectly understated physicality, Maher, an alum of this summer’s Vanya, telegraphs his frustration as one of those nice guys who seem invisible to most, and his humor emanates naturally from Sam’s disappointments. Krause is a perfect fit for Baker’s material, nailing every cadence of Rose’s lost, mercenary soul. And with a perfectly calibrated clipped delivery, Moten makes an incendiary New York stage debut. His Avery, still at a loss as to how to properly arm himself against a world of hurt and disregard, is heartbreaking.

And yet for all the careful emotional spelunking done by this superlative cast, Flick leaves their characters lost at sea, intuiting a tighter bond among these three merely coexisting souls than truly exists. For all the film titles thrown about, Baker has omitted the one that unfortunately, feels the most apt: Being There.

The Flick

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. www.playwrightshorizons.org Thru April 7.

Photo by Hunter Canning

I’m not sure who has it worse in Trevor, the latest Lesser America comedy to nestle into downtown’s Theater for the New City: is it Morgan Fairchild, that B-list sex kitten of yesteryear, or Trevor, the animalistic former child star whose quest to be rediscovered drives the play?

It’s neither fair nor even accurate to describe Trevor as “animalistic,” really, as the central character in Nick Jones’ clever, subversive comedy is indeed, an animal. He’s a chimp, not a man, despite his resemblance to Steven Boyer, the terrifically malleable actor (as anyone who has seen him in such works as Hand to God and The Ugly One can attest) playing him for both laughs and pathos. I haven’t just spoiled anything, either. One learns early on about Trevor’s true nature. And Jones is right in providing such a disclosure upfront, as there are plenty of other gifts to be found in Trevor, lovingly nourished by director Moritz von Stuelpnagel.

It’s likely that most actors will relate to Trevor, as the struggle for work isn’t limited to any particular series or phylum. When he was younger, Trevor was a successful animal performer, traveling the live appearance circuit and starring in popular commercials, as well as a TV sitcom alongside Ms. Fairchild. But like with so many child stars, the aging process hasn’t been easy on Trevor, who lives at home with his “mother,” Sandra (Colleen Werthman) and stews in the memory of what he used to be, even as fellow chimp actor Oliver (an on-the-beat Nathaniel Kent) continues to prosper. Poor Trevor wants to work and be adulated once more, but alas, hardly anyone comes calling for the simian.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that Trevor is, you know, an animal. This is starting to cause trouble in the neighborhood. His neighbor Ashley (a wonderfully frustrated Amy Staats), a new mother, objects to the fact that Trevor drove himself to a local Dunkin’ Donuts to apply for a job. Sandra is rendered relatively ineffective as both manager and caregiver. She occasionally puts Trevor in a cage, though Ashley argues that he should spend all of his time there, as he is an unpredictable threat – and some of Trevor’s instinctive responses to situations, as employed by an indefatigable Boyer, support her argument. But then again, Trevor can often function like an independent adult.

Jones’ script sounds silly, but as with all productions from Lesser America, still a very young company, Trevor gets a layered production, buoyed by complex scenarios and a completely committed cast. Trevor has life dreams, but is hampered by himself and by others. Sandra wants the best for him, and is sometimes blinded by her confused love (Werthman, like Boyer, never condescends to cartoonish acting and instead creates real empathy). No one can effectively reach each other – Trevor even fails to recognize an Animal Control employee, mistakenly identifying him, Norma Desmond-style, as a TV producer. Stuelpnagel is a perfect match for Jones’ voice, which sometimes plants tongue in cheek but still finds a way to home in on universal concerns.  A streamlined show, Trevor toes the line between mordant humor and self-seriousness with aplomb. Sometimes it takes a chimp to shed real light on human nature.

Trevor

Theater for the New City. www.theaterforthenewcity.net. Thru March 17.

Bodega Bay

Elisabeth Karlin’s play is an oddly comic hybrid of Flirting with Disaster and Winter’s Bone. Louise (Susan Louise O’Connor), is essentially an invisible woman, unattached and living in Staten Island with her brother Scottie (Brian McManamon) and whichever girlfriend he seems to have at the moment. We meet her as she has just bitten the bullet, opting to put her meth0addicted brother into a rehab clinic. But she meets funds, and sets out on a quest to find the mother who disappeared from their lives years earlier.

Bodega sends Louise’s Alice own the proverbial rabbit hole. With the help of a detective played by the wonderful Gerardo Rodriguez, Louise embarks on a cross-country trek to track down her mother, encountering a variety of eclectic ciphers who may possess clues as to her mother’s whereabouts, with a cast that also includes Peter Brouwer, Nancy Rodriguez, and Rae C. Wright essaying multiple roles, and director Sturgis Warner succeeds at always plugging deeper than caricature. Bodega is an oversize show for a theater as compact as the Abingdon – kudos to the cast for working within such a tight space and for never losing focus despite the distracting sound of plumbing coming from above. It’s the magnificent O’Connor, though, who carries Bodega and shades in all sorts of trepidation and joy as Louise learns more about herself. In the span of a mere two and a half hours, O’Connor transforms Louise from milquetoast to miracle worker. That’s quite a journey indeed.

Abingdon Theater, 312 36^th St. http://www.abingdontheatre.org/season/default.aspx. Through February 17.

Collision

I don’t pay much attention to pre-show hype. All the better to focus my review solely on what I what I see and not what was meant to be. But circumstance has made it nearly impossible to avoid the fact that Collision, Lyle Kessler’s new play being performed by The Amoralists at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, was intended to be more of a black comedy than the drama it now purports itself to be in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Either way, however, the show, directed by David Fofi and starring a superbly on point cast, offers plenty of commentary on the power of entitlement.

James Kautz is Grange and Nick Lawson is Bromley, two new university roommates, and it’s clear almost immediately that the seemingly laidback Grange knows just how to manipulate people into giving him what he wants, regardless of how little the end result may mean to him. Before long, Grange has bled his personality all over Alfred Schatz’s cleverly designed dorm room set and achieved guru status, amassing a small group of followers that include Bromley as well as sexually liberated fellow student Doe (Anna Stromberg) and philosophy professor Denton (Michael Cullen). Kessler’s commentary on the power of navel-gazing when it goes unchecked is astute and full of human comedy. Kautz is magnetic, dripping danger beneath Grange’s charismatic eagerness without being overly transparent – he recalls the young Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd. His co-stars also humanize what on the page could have been mere clay characters. It’s in the last twenty minutes, though, that the play sputters into something else that we might have seen coming but didn’t necessarily need. With a cast this good, Collision doesn’t need to end with a bang to end with a bang.

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place. www.collisiontheplay.com. Through Feb. 17.

The Vandal

Hamish Linklater has already demonstrated a wide range as an actor on the stage and small screen but he now reveals potential as a playwright as well with The Vandal, which just opened at the Flea Theater. Well-structured but with a substantially disappointing payoff, Vandal, directed by Jim Simpson, recommends Linklater as a promising student but one perhaps not quite ready for his diploma.

An unnamed Kingston, NY, woman (Deirdre O’Connell) waits alone at a bus stop until an imposing teen (Noah Robbins) bugs her with questions and then asks her to buy him some beer at a liquor store run by Zach Grenier. The first few reveals of Vandal are promising, exciting even. The incisive way the three characters can see through one another suggest a palpable energy that runs through the Flea and sends it down a path that lets us know we are in for more than just a rehash of The Zoo Story. Eventually, however, all three of these enigmatic fellows turn out to be in support of a story full of trickery, and that’s a shame, because Simpson’s actors do such a sterling job of grounding their parts in realism. O’Connell aches with the weary reserve of a woman just trying to get through life untethered. Grenier’s no-nonsense combativeness belies a tender heart. And Robbins toes the line between invasive youngster and intriguing soul quite admirably.

Equally admirable is David M. Barber’s set design, making deceptive use of the small stage space and casting a different tone on each of Linklater’s scenes. But for a show that starts off so ominously, the final taste is a little easily digestible. Like the residue from Boy’s Cool Ranch Doritos, Vandal should linger a bit longer.

Flea Theater, 41 White Street. www.theflea.org. Through Feb. 17.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Of all the many hard-hitting statements made by Martin Moran in All the Rage, the life-affirming one-man show authored by and starring the performer and which opened last night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, one statement stood out among his descriptions of those who have somehow been victimized or found themselves on the downside advantage. At one point, the engaging performer mentions that he is over fifty years old. And I was struck. Though it has no big set changes or intricately choreographed scenes, Rage is indeed a rigorous workout, and Moran guides his audience through the show with ease and a calming conviction that requires a kind of inner energy that not even most marathon runners half his age possess.

Not that Rage feels long – in fact, Moran’s reflective biography flies by as directed by Seth Barrish. It’s as riveting as was his first one-man show, The Tricky Part, also directed by Barrish.  Rage is not a sequel but in many ways an emotional catch-up piece to that 2004 Obie-winning work. That first show addressed the effects endured by Moran as a result of sexual abuse at a young age. Moran doesn’t avoid discussing those elements of his past, but he applies the lessons learned from his experience (and subsequent therapy) to other areas, both mentally and geographically. Moran’s current tale finds him facing a miserable stepmother in Las Vegas, a hermetic brother in the Denver of his youth, and even to South Africa. If it sounds like this show might be all over the place, fear not: the masterful Moran is very much in control at all times of his coherent show.

Barrish has staged Moran as though his audience were students in a classroom or (perhaps self-help?) lecture being taught by Moran. Set designer Mark Wendland has fashioned a desk, globe, blackboard, map, and overhead projector for the performer to use as tools illustrating his whereabouts for his stories. There all also lamps near these aides. In a noticeable but undistracting touch, Moran keeps turning off each lamp the second he is ready to move on from a specific anecdote. While this certainly cuts down on heat – and perhaps onstage electric bills – it also adds to the comforting feel of the show. (Russell H. Champa also designs effective lighting that cannot be operated onstage.) Despite the probing nature of Rage, Moran is like a post-modern Mr. Rogers. He may be taking us along scary terrain, but we are always assured that we will remain safe.

As Moran explains, his journey begins after a nasty confrontation with his stepmother at the funeral of his father sends him on a quest for greater purpose. He hilariously recounts how feeling a little empty weighed on him while performing on Broadway in Monty Python’s Spamalot and eventually led him to volunteer as a French-to-English translator for Siba, a refugee from Chad. Siba, who has undergone torture by guerillas and been separated from his family, knows of a kind of pain that pierces even deeper, some might argue, than Moran’s has. Moran relays the many lessons that Siba teaches him about acceptance and forgiveness, and how he applies those lessons in his own life, often with surprising results. Barrish lets his performer stroll out to sea without getting caught in any undertow; none of Moran’s tangents are actually that. What they are are chapters in the story of Moran’s continuing search for personal growth and self-actualization. And what they also are, more often than not, are quite hysterical.

What Rage also is, contrary to title, is a very measured show. Moran is wholly involving. He is generous with personal information without being self-aggrandizing. And he knows how not to cross the line into territory that might feel too personally threatening to his audience.  In All the Rage, Moran hits on universal feelings of loss, loneliness, confusion and anger. But his story remains, intoxicatingly, very much his own.

All the Rage

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, www.ticketcentral.com. Through Feb. 24.