BOOK - "Talk Talk"

Be it the sublime adventure of Water Music or the historical misadventure of The Inner Circle, there is something improbably charismatic about T. C. Boyle’s writing. This x-factor makes him easy to get into, even when he shows off his eclectic vocabulary (“a hard irreducible bolus of hatred”); Boyle’s books have bounce. They roll, they lilt: there’s a bit of the whimsical Irish writers in them. In Talk Talk, words have to do even more—one of the three main characters, Dana Halter, is deaf, and though Boyle never deviates from his neo-classical narrative, he works the silence into images that remind the reader­ just how good he is.

“The yellow there darkened to gold, to honey, to a deep hungering sepia as the killer in his mask flailed the too-white blade at his victim, the heroine in her midnight-blue teddy, who could only run and crouch and hide, bare-legged, her painted toenails gathering in every particle of light as if to shut the camera down. Dog barking, the caption read.

Glass breaking.

A quick close-up of the victim, her makeup smeared, eyes dilated with terror.

Sobbing continues.”

Though this scene is from a TV that Dana focuses on to avoid the harsh accusations of her lover, Bridger Martin, the true plot of Talk Talk is more frightening than that of the film. In the frenzied first part, Dana is jailed for crimes she has not committed, jostled out of her normalcy by the actions of a man who has stolen her identity. What’s more horrifying than this violation is that William “Peck” Wilson, this cool-as-a-cucumber thief is an enjoyable, sometimes likeable character. It’s a harsher dichotomy between lives than in The Tortilla Curtain, and Boyle definitely chooses a side in Talk Talk, but aside from fits of anger, and the fact that he’s ruining people’s lives, Peck could just as easily be the protagonist.

This is a thriller though, so Boyle doesn’t wax too philosophic. When the police refuse to help (identity theft being a “victimless crime”), Bridger and Dana go cross-country to track down the villain. They’re a little too good at it, but the car chases, the narrow escapes, and the double-sided narrative justifies all the coincidence. This refusal to linger with digressions does wonders for the pacing (e.g., though Boyle has fleshed out Dana’s story, Wild Child, into a novel, he wisely chose to publish it separately).

As a result, Talk Talk is Boyle’s most accessible novel. Set in the suspenseful present and written in the beach-reader’s cadence, the novel has something for everyone: a high-speed car chase, prison melodrama, and the woes of the working class. Shifting through these hot themes, it’s hard to imagine a reader not relating to some aspect of this novel and harder still to imagine someone unbothered by the apparent ease of identity theft. And through all this, Boyle’s writing is still rich, still taut, and still exciting. Even plunging into the steady riggings of the thriller genre, the pages abound with unusual nuances and flourishes.

“She was at a disadvantage, because it took both hands to compress a twelve-inch submarine sandwich and keep it from disintegrating into its constituent parts, but she was game.”

However (though this is typical of Boyle), Talk Talk lacks a fitting resolution to its dramatic climax. This is the author’s style: to leave the audience hanging on the realization that life only ties itself up neatly in death, (and even then, there is always something left behind). This particular ending seems more appropriate for one of Boyle’s shorts: it doesn’t capture the gist of the novel; it says very little of the relationships between the characters, and less still for the changes in their lives. That is the sole disappointment of Talk Talk: that there is, in the end, nothing more to it than talk.

MUSIC - Persephone's Bees, "Notes from the Underground"

Notes from the Underground is some damnably overzealous pop, slickly performed by Persephone’s Bees, but lacking the training necessary to balance such ambition. It’s all catchy, but since most of it’s slightly below average, this infection is more a plague than a blessing. Singer/songwriter Angelina Moysov shows plenty of promise—she uses enough of her Russian accent to make it a seductive tool, and her Russian folk-pop song “Muzika Dyla Fil’ma” is easily the best track on the album. Now if only someone could find a vaccine for her distractingly cloying pop….

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

MUSIC - The Lovely Feathers, "Hind Hind Legs"

One-two stepping between the slow eccentricity of Modest Mouse and the enthusiastic backbeats of OK Go, The Lovely Feathers make for one hell of a dazzling peacock. Let them preen; let them gloat. Perched atop a throne of nonsense lyrics, carried by an always-warbling pitch, and squawked in an often-breathy daze, their CD, “Hind Hind Legs,” doesn’t have a dull moment. This is a dazzlingly silly band, but their feathers aren’t the only lovely things about them.

Read on at [Silent Uproar]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: The Burning Cities Project"

The Dreamscape Theater has just landed on the "it" list for notable companies. Their contribution to the Fringe Festival is The Burning Cities Project, a dramatic ensemble piece conceived and assembled by Brad Raimondo. This is Play With a Mission: to define and understand tragedy. And not Hamlet-level tragedy: we're talking Holocausts and Hiroshimas, Dresdens and Pompeys (and, of course, 9/11). Director Jennifer McGrath has assembled a diverse cast to populate this fractured world, and she guides them expertly through spoken word, movement, fragments, modern dance, dark comedy, avant-garde, and a political rant. Between each piece, an actor speaks directly to the audience about the purpose of the show, as in The Laramie Project, and on the whole, it's a moving evening.





In "Vulcanalia," one of the serio-comic pieces, Mark Lindberg gives Laura Moss's presentation on Pompey a hard time.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Never Swim Alone"

Bravo, Daniel MacIvor, and I don’t mean the military letter that comes after Alpha and before Charlie. Never Swim Alone is a technically perfect, dazzlingly verbal, low-budget show that solidifies the Fringe as a showcase of pure talent. While not a theatrically daring piece—it has a cast of three, no set, and two props—but by investing all of its energies in a story, a particularly moving story, it has all the thrills you can expect of the theater.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Absolute Flight"

In a world that already has shows as hilariously full of self-loathing as Who Wants to Be a Superhero, do we really need parodies of reality TV like Absolute Flight? Sure, why not? "Reality" is a simple, painless device that brings disparate characters into close proximity, complete with pre-installed motivations--in this case, the right to be dropped from a plane while buckled into some wings, i.e., to fly. All the author needs is some playful banter and a twist or two and a play is born.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

<---- The women of Absolute Flight, Marishka Phillips, Effie Johnson, and Amy Landon, will make you soar.

Photo/Sam Rosen

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Garbage Boy"

It's hard to distinguish Christopher Millis from all the garbage strewn across the stage. Given the lifeless delivery of his plotless piece, Garbage Boy, all that detritus of memory does about as much for the audience as the faintly sketched scenes (which is to say: not much). I don't mean to be overly harsh, but Millis, a hard-working poet, is out of his element, and his director, Ashley Lieberman, has done nothing to make him more comfortable in it. This one-man play fails at being personal and at being poetic; Millis has cut himself off from his strength. Onstage, he rambles, ambles, and fidgets. It's hard to watch. Given his soft voice, it's hard to hear, too.

It's a bit ironic that a man as solid as Millis winds up being so vapid onstage. The poet looks like a real tough guy, from chiseled arms to an intimidating baldness to his wisp of a goatee, a line that almost looks like a middle finger of hair across his chin. As the audience enters, Millis sits behind a typewriter, composing the poem that bookends the show. That piece is good, but, like the majority of scenes and narratives, it doesn't fit anything else. The central narrative is about Millis's search to uncover his family's secret history, but he draws only the dramatic thrust of a horrific accident--there's no feeling of resolution or connection.

To be fair, Lieberman is the theater professional. The dramatic failures lie with Millis, but given the lack of theatrical energy to compensate or balance out the evening . . . did Lieberman even show up for rehearsals? Was she counting on the author's natural eccentricities to make the night more "real"? Is it possible that she actually advised, condoned, and sanctioned the trivial bits of detail and poor blocking that only serve to illustrate how much Millis isn't an actor? Did she think that adding unnecessary sound effects would distract from those pressing problems? (In this, she was actually right. The sound effects are distracting. The sound effects are also now a pressing problem.)

For whatever reason Garbage Boy is still being performed--I can't imagine this as cathartic for anybody--I certainly hope they clean it up soon. Right now, it just stinks (pun intended).

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Americana Absurdum"

God bless America, home of non-sequiturs and overzealous greed, and also, as we're reminded in Brian Parks' Americana Absurdum, rabid pursuits and hyperactive life. Parks' piece dials way past eleven, running on the fumes of an ever-elusive America. Split into two identically styled one-acts titled Vomit & Roses and Wolverine Dream, the evening is an explosive satire of America, as fast, furious, and inane as our culture.

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

MOVIE - "American Gun"

Crash was the big Hollywood salute to the racial divide in America. American Gun is the small independent response to the gun crisis. Both films take a patchwork approach towards identifying the problem, coming at different perspectives from all angles—but whereas Crash needed closure, American Gun accepts the less satisfying but more realistic ending. Aric Avelino is to be respected for this choice; his film comes across at times as gritty as Soderburgh’s Traffic—at other times it seems as obtuse as Gus van Sant’s Elephant. These are both excellent qualities for his film, and the different scenarios allow Avelino to paint a disturbing picture of the real America.

There are three central stories, each of which breaks apart into a series of dramatic vignettes. The first, set in Ellisburgh, Oregon, looks at the aftermath of a school shooting at Columbine stand-in, Ridgeline. This is Avelino’s preferred medium: the prelude and coda of violence, and the pressure that an implied threat places on a community. We see, in the opening credits, snippets of the shooters from a video camera: after that, we see an interview with the mother of one of the two shooters, Janet Huttenson, in which she is accused of negligence (to put it politely). As Avelino pulls back, we also meet Janet’s other son, David, who is not exactly the most popular kid in the neighborhood. Much of the drama comes from the tension between mother and son, as both find themselves unable to communicate with the other. We also meet Frank, the first responder on the scene, a tough police officer who is struggling to keep his emotions under control. By the way, all of these events take three years after the initial shooting. It’s just one more reminder of Avelino of how long tragedy can linger and scar a nation.

The second, set in a tough public high school in Chicago, Illinois, looks at the dilemma of a smart student trying to make good without being killed, and also at the cost the principal of such an environment must pay. Led by outstanding performances from both Forest Whitaker and Arlen Escarpeta, these scenes force the conventional teachings of polite society to come to terms with the harsh realities of the unprotected streets. Avelino’s film is not meant to justify or condone gun culture, but these segments do cast an ugly shadow on the blindly adamant anti-gun enthusiasts who probably never worked the late shift at an inner-city gas and liquor store. At the least, American Gun is a conversation starter.

The final city, Charlottesville, Virginia, is the most subtle, but probably of most relevance to the type of person who might view this film. Nothing bad ever happens in White Suburbia, that being the point of White Suburbia, and under Avelino’s eye, nothing bad overtly happens. To the casual viewer, a girl is just thrown against a wall when trying to stop some frat boys from taking advantage of her drugged-out friend. But as the camera remains on her, we can see the crack below the surface, the ugly truth that comes from even the slightest brush with danger. Avelino spends the least amount of time here, but that’s because the implications are clear: we built a world where people need guns to sleep at night.

If some of the individual compartments seem sensationalized, like a confrontation on the front lawn between Janet and her accusatory neighbors, they are balanced by the subtle and often inexplicable moments of grief that penetrate the picture, most of which come from Whitaker’s shaky exterior and lingering gaze. The whole cast is outstanding, and it’s a real surprise that Marcia Gay Harden didn’t walk away with an award for this film.

American Gun isn’t trying to be clever, and it’s not trying to solve the problem. But by illustrating the myriad chambers, if you will, of this loaded gun of a topic, Avelino has put together a sleek and efficient way to deliver this film. Not with a whimper, but with that long foreshadowed bang—one hell of a bullet of a movie.

BOOK: "In Persuasion Nation"

And the moral of the story is, don't write novellas. But I suppose I should backtrack a little bit first. Our tale begins earlier this year, when George Saunders published his brief and fabulist political satire, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. That book, while intriguing, carried on a joke so long that a metronomic pallor overtook Saunders' normally wicked wit. Thankfully, Saunders' new collection, In Persuasion Nation is a return to his sharp, trenchant form. For good or ill, Saunders is our generation's Jonathan Swift, and while his stories are more aimed at today's constant commercial consumerism rather than war or famine, Saunders has Americana cold.

"I CAN SPEAK!(TM)," the first such story, is a sharp barb at how our culture views babies--not for eating, mind you, but for using, as much a product and consumer as their parents. Written in the form of a letter from a product representative to an unsatisfied client, this short segment delivers a one-two punch when it confesses a blatant truth: America hates caring for babies. So wouldn't it be great, asks the story, wouldn't it be natural to want to put a mask over our children's faces that could make it seem as if they were talking, as if they could do more than "glub glub glub" and suck feces off their thumbs? Would that make us love them more? Blunt and subtle at the same time, most of Saunders' material will have you readers double-taking at the page in mirthful horror; really, what won't he say next?

Certainly he wouldn't dare to address cruelty to animals in drug testing ("93990"). Surely he wouldn't insult the crude yet efficient power of the dumb, dumb commercial ("In Persuasion Nation"). Well, there's no way he'd manage to show how reality TV and our fascination with the obscene has overtaken family values ("Brad Carrigan, American"). No, he wouldn't go there.

Among the many things George Saunders "won't" do, one thing that has eluded his past collections has been a genuine sense of connection with the characters. His work is so fixated on the satire and the story that the characters are usually all the same. While that's still very much the case here--Saunders has a very distinct narrative voice--two of his early stories, "My Flamboyant Grandson" and "Jon" manage to find that emotional drive, too. Set in the very near future (where all of Saunders' stories transpire), these are tales of characters who break through the trappings of culture and the cult of Capitalism to find love and acceptance of others. That may not be very American, I know, but it's nice to see that even a post-modern verbal pugilist has hope for us all.

Back on the writing front, Saunders is a very exciting verbalist. He has short, rapt sentences, and his grammatical inconsistencies are representative not of his own shortcomings, but of America's worsening hold on language. Everything is geared for the ADD-riddled audience, and everything is fast, fast, now. "He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook." That could be a story right there; instead, it's part of a larger piece on the rise of violence as a tool to sell products, and its saddening success.

Here again: "In the van I do a Bad Feelings Acknowledgement re the reburial. I visualize my Useless Guilt as a pack of black dogs. I open the gate, throw out the Acknowledgement Meat. Pursuing the Meat, the black dogs disappear over a cliff, turning into crows (i.e., Neutral/Non-Guilty Energy), which then fly away, feeling Assuaged." How inventive, how coy . . . how much you want to bet we see some new-age philosophy similar to this next year? And this line of thinking isn't even what the story "CommComm" is about, it's just a digression that reads like a meal.

The closest parallel I can find to George Saunders is the playwright, Greg Kotis, whose over-the-top antics drill the senselessness of America into even the most obtuse audiences. Saunders, working in a less-active medium, has the opportunity to be subtler, but both find a balance of slapstick and ghoulish urban fantasy. Though a few of George Saunders' stories in In Persuasion Nation seem a bit one-linerish ("93990" and "My Amendment"), they're still great reads, reads which take that one step beyond simple commentary along the lines of Dave Barry to actually subvert and convert our brain-dead America right back. The fight is on, and it's funny. So grab a banana peel for America: pick up a copy of In Persuasion Nation today.

MOVIE - "Lonesome Jim"

A precarious anti-hero who's been beaten to a nervous breakdown by his older brother; an overly sweet heroine who doesn't match the hero; crazy drug-addled friends, medicated relatives; a precocious little boy – yup, Lonesome Jim is an art flick. Under the guidance of Steve Buscemi, who directs like he's making the unpretentious version of Garden State, this lo-fi love story strips the stigma from artsy films by relishing in the awkward moments of life itself. Buscemi knows what he's doing with his beautiful long, wide shots of Goshen, Indiana; his makes his work too real to be pretentious – these are not impressionistic swoops of landscaping; they're hard, grainy textures of the land itself. This style more than meshes with James C. Strouse's minimalist script and is a work that relies more on environment than text, one that allows much of life to be, as it always is, implied.

Read on at [Film Monthly]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Only A Lad"

Clockwise from L: Jenny Weaver, Joey Calveri, Eric Shelly & Barret Hall.

Photo/Andrew Loschert

As the story (or at least the author's note) goes, writer Andrew Loschert, fresh out of grad school, got the idea for Only a Lad while listening to the Oingo Boingo Greatest Hits CD. His idea was sound (no pun intended): use the narrative-driven eccentricities of Danny Elfman's '80s rock band and make a musical out of it. The concept was in the right key too: a good-at-heart gangster who just happens to be different from the "cool cats" gets framed for murder and must find a way to save himself and reconcile his spirit. The thematic nature was there too: if we've learned nothing else from VH1, it's that America Loves the 80s. So what went wrong?

Read on at [New Theater Corps]

[For more Fringe coverage, read the masterful musings of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Letter Purloined"

The intricate elegance of Letter Purloined deserves a review written in twenty-six lines which can be read in any order. It should be a metacritical review, one that constantly refers to the structure of the piece itself, using wonderfully oblique metaphors like golf. It should also serve as a form of psychotherapy, drawing on the sex dreams of Freud, the language of Derrida, and the works of both Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare. Of course, this would require a lot of work on my part -- and a near-genius capacity for post-modernism. For this reason, I prefer to just highly recommend David Isaccson's Letter Purloined and to extol the talent of Theater Oobleck, the group that performs it, sans director.

The plot applies the mash-up philosophy of albums like "The Gray Album" and runs two concurrent beats: Poe's detective story about a stolen letter and Shakespeare's classic tragedy of a certain Moor (and we don't mean a dock). In this version, a sinister minister named Ogai frames General Cassio by stealing a letter sent from him to King Navodar's wife, Queen Diri. It's best if you're familiar with the conceit: the show is performed in a random order every night, and figuring out the twists and deviations is great fun for the bohemian surveyor. The one annoyance is that Cassio speaks as if he's a Casio keyboard. Get it? The joke doesn't stretch for the two-plus hours of the show, even though Colm O'Reilly is a good imitator; thankfully, characters and transitions clarify his subtext often enough for story to still work.

There's so much other stuff to praise though: Isaccson (who also plays the insecure, soft-spoken king) manages to make difficult literary theory not only comprehensible but funny, and just wait until you see how he incorporates psychoanalysis into Queen Diri's manic and overwhelming personality. The actors also deliver this purposely convoluted story with full bravura and intonations of significance.

Aside from being a novelty, a show that can boast of cramming Kofi Annan and Lacan into the same breath, Letter Purloined is also a rich, deep metadrama. It's intellectual, it's not very sexual, and it's not full of over-the-top action: it is the anti-Fringe Fringe show. It's also a must-see, and I certainly hope this play finds producers willing to take it to the next level.

[For more Fringe coverage, read the calligraphic criticisms of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: Minimum Wage"

Minimum Wage: Blue Code Ringo is an infinitely catchy, abundantly energetic, absolutely ridiculous, half-musical half-improv Frankenstein's monster of a show. It's great fun, but for a show that's four years old, it's remarkably unpolished. The music, co-composed by Jeff & Charlie LaGreca with Sean Altman (the witty a capella punster, formerly of Rockapella), is so crisp and delightful that it seems unfair to match it with poorly staged multimedia presentations (interruptions, really). Or maybe it's just that Jeff LaGreca's beatboxing talent is so good that it actually makes everything else less interesting (in particular, a scene about the uses of the spatula that devolves into a D&D-inspired "swordfight").

But you know what? They've got the heart, and the darkly comic wit, to succeed. They've also got an utter disregard for inhibition; this brings the sometimes mediocre staging to a simmering temper. Suzanne Slade goes all out when shaking her booty with danger, Tony Dassaunt's deadpan "Kooky, the Happy Burger Clown" is fantastic, and William Caleo, who plays the slapsticky-Altman role, pulls faces like no other. Charlie LaGreca, who plays the diminutive nerd Orwell, is tremendous in his own right: he plays his character so seriously that when he departs from the norm, as in "Connecticut," you can't help but giggle.

The plot, by far the least important thing, involves the cast training you, the audience, to become new employees of the Happy Burger franchise (where you can rise to the middle), and serves as little more than an excuse to impart anecdotal wisdom (through songs) about love affairs with grills, or what to do when you start hallucinating about psychopathic french fries. It works to get through the show, though the real justification is in the way the cast interacts WITH the audience, most notably in their innovative finale, "Balls!!"

The playful simplicity of the project is reminiscent of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but the lack of character development keeps the production too reliant on sheer energy. This is fast food theater that happens to be about fast food--but unless drinking Red Bull causes you to hallucinate a really good vocal a capella group, Minimum Wage is still worth watching.

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Players Theater (115 MacDougal Street)
Performances: FRI, AUG 18 @ 7:30; WED, AUG 23 @ 4:30

[For more Fringe coverage, read the right-on writings of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "FRINGE 2006: The October Sapphire"

A depressed genie, three furies, a male nurse with a "lithsp," an overly cheerful and hyperactive social dunce, a murderous nephew with a penchant for arsenic and chocolate, a crazed old maid who pleasures and is pleasured by the lovesick monster in her closet, and yeah, the monster in the closet. Throw enough things at the wall, and something's bound to stick: welcome to the Fringe. Welcome also to The October Sapphire, a play by Nick Coyle that tries so hard to be eccentric that it forgets to be anything else (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).

If you believe that going to the theater is first and foremost supposed to be shocking, that is, if you're of the camp that loves raunchy puppet humor, forced or not, this is a good start for you. If you're, say, a suicidal transvestite midget child actor who succumbs to the more is more philosophy, The October Sapphire has enough laughs and indomitable spirits to rise to the occasion. But as for that smidgen of meaning, that deeper sense that justifies the madness: I'm afraid this "gem," on closer inspection, is roughly the same kind you'd find in one of those twenty-five cent toy-vending machines.

There are some standout performances from Hetty Marriott-Brittan, who plays the hallucinating matriarch of the house. While her character may be oblivious to everyone around her, the actress has such keen rhythm that she seems literally animated, as if she might, at any moment, burst out with an "Eh, what's up, Doc?" type moment. Simon Greiner, who provides the voice and mannerisms of his puppet, Pesto, could easily be in Avenue Q, and it's his irrepressible charm that gives the "real" actors such leeway. But the actors stuck playing the genie and his posse of Furies have nothing to use that leeway for and simply suck up stage time, and other actors, like Ben Harrison and Claudia O'Doherty grow more and more annoying as their caricatures balloon up and overwhelm them. Nick Coyle's script peters out too, caving in completely to over-the-top shock which is more like under-the-radar schlock.

Here's where the dialogue ultimately winds up: "I'll bet you've never woken up to think: have I just killed someone, or is this just another miscarriage?" No, I haven't. My question after the shock of The October Sapphire wears off: should I have?

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The Harry DuJour Playhouse (466 Grand Street)
Two Performances Left: THUR 17 @ 6:45, FRI 18 @ 4:15

[For more Fringe coverage, read the crisp scrivenings of Ludlow Lad.]

THEATER - "Marco Million$ (based on lies)"

PICTURED:
(Clockwise from top left ) Rodney Gardiner, Tom Ridgely,
Hanna Cheek, Kevin Townley and Arian Moayed.
Photo courtesy of Andy Criss.

Marco Million$ (based on lies), Waterwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s little-known play, is a drama wrapped in slapstick surrounded by vaudeville drowned in cabaret. It is also an excellent example of how to refurbish and contemporize a stolid piece for a hipster crowd.

The plot hews closely to O’Neill’s, but the emphasis is now laugh-a-minute humor, a point occasionally taken too “seriously” by the troupe. Some jokes go a little too far, like in a poetry slam inspired by the far-more cultured II.iii of O’Neill’s play. (Black Jack the Vicious recounts his love for a bunkmate who “uncorks my scuppers/and pierces my billowing jib/8½ fathoms with his yardarm/I can feel it in my rib.”) Some don’t go far enough: two mock-1930s-film newscasts serve as summary of I.ii (Marco receives a papal commission to seek out Kublai Khan) and II.ii (Marco’s party prepares to escort Khan’s daughter, Kukachin, back to their Italy). Neither is particularly funny, and they serve only to point out how much of O’Neill’s work is riddled by exposition and superfluity. It’s not the sort of reminder you want in an otherwise-upbeat modernization.

Luckily, the players of Marco Million$ are hit-and-rarely-miss. Wallowing in flamboyance (especially Kevin Townley), they wend their way through so many accents, characters, and scenes that it’s hard to be less than impressed. Though the production is at heart quite sophomoric, it has such indefatigable energy that the show remains constantly captivating. Any unevenness can be attributed to the fact that all five cast members contributed to the script, and more so to the unevenness of O’Neill’s own script, which, in epic tedium, spans twenty years. In Waterwell’s hands, the play becomes such fun that we don’t mind that these good ol’ boys can’t sing in harmony, or that their waltz is a bit clumsy. Their instinct and rhythm is spot on (so is their tango). The scope is ambitious enough to make scenes good even when they’re not, and shining stars like Rodney Gardner, who plays a Mafioso Kublai Khan, eclipse the rough spots with their brilliance.

As for stars, director/actor/writer Tom Ridgley is a supernova. The troupe jests about the difficulty of transitions, but under Mr. Ridgley’s eye, they’re just another opportunity for a jest. Stale blocking? Now you jest. From Matrix-styled shifts in camera aboard a merchant ship to umbrella-fashioned boats to the piquant, zesty lighting (Stacey Boggs’s design), Mr. Ridgley keeps us rapt for a hundred minutes straight.

Marco Million$ also ends up a surprisingly faithful staging of O’Neill’s work. For all the clever emendations and boffo riffs, the closing minutes get to the heart of the story: greed wins and love suffers when the powerful face the emotionless. With the bluesy gospel finale’s condemnation of “the avaricious [who] relish in good fortune” we are reminded one final time not to applaud for Mr. Polo: “just throw money.” That cool critique of capitalism’s emotionless glamour is no joke.

MOVIE - "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby"

Stupid is as stupid does, and in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, stupid does 200 m.p.h. And in that driver’s seat, looking comfortable and even—at times—suave, is Will Ferrell (as Ricky Bobby), a picture-perfect model of stupid. Alongside him is John C. Reilly (as Cal Naughton, Jr.), who plays the dumber (but just as talented) version of Ferrell. The only person who doesn’t look comfortable is Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the villanous French Formula 1 racer, Jean Girard, recruited to take Ricky Bobby out. Trapped in a preponderance of over-the-top negatives, Girard’s accent is mangled worse than Inspector Clouseu’s, his mannerisms are rigid and monotonous, and the fact that he’s gay just seems more like an acknowledgement of America’s own homophobic tendencies than a joke: it doesn’t work. Writer/director Adam McKay (of Anchorman legend) stretches these French-related jokes too far: they’re as repetitive as, say, racing a car around an ovoid track 500 times.

[Read on] at Just Press Play

MOVIE - "13 Tzameti"

First-time director Gela Babulani has created the cinematic equivalent of the shot not heard round the world in "13 Tzameti" – a chillingly taut drama where the empty click of a gun is just as potent as the shot itself. Once Babulani gets beyond his initially teasing camerawork and transforms his protagonist, Sebastien, from a financially-strapped immigrant in rural France to an accidental contestant in the illegal world of a high-stakes Russian-roulette tournament, we have an effective bit of suspenseful noir on our hands.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

THEATER - Anais Nin: One of her Lives

As is too often the case, fact is rarely as fanciful as fantasy. Most of playwright/director Wendy Beckett’s drama Anaïs Nin: One of her Lives is imagined or extrapolated from Nin’s erotic diaries, Anaïs’s character is filled with understanding, not passion, and seems unable to live off the page. One of her Lives is not a bad play, but it is an awkward one, a series of loose, drifting encounters in 1930s Paris between Nin and the far-more interesting Henry and June Miller. The presentation of this material isn’t original: the 1990 film Henry & June used similar details, and Beckett doesn’t bring enough theatricality or insight to Nin to justify the work on that level. Where it shines is as a literary passion play, climaxing in a slow, sexy seduction between Henry and Anaïs's recitations from their journals. But words only get you so far . . .

In this case, Beckett paints herself into a corner with the sub-plot she’s erected (perhaps to distinguish this work from other adaptations). Nin’s abortive sessions with the psychologist Dr. Rank (not the Chekhovian one) abound in cryptic and meaningless riddles and the dreamlike encounters between Anaïs and her parents remain dreamy and without substance. Though we learn that one sequence beween Anaïs and her long-gone father is real, there’s nothing to draw from the scene itself, which is the real problem with the play itself: a lack of resolution.

Why focus on Anaïs Nin? She may be an erotic woman in her diaries (and certainly has a fully encompassing sexual history), but the character that Beckett constructs is a little girl prone to giggling uncontrollably or weeping tragically, without any real sense of self or being. Alysia Reiner and David Bishins, who excellently portray the Millers, upstage her without even saying a word. This fits in June’s case, as she’s an explosive personality who sucks in and destroys the people around her, but for Henry, presented here as a gruff yet gentle skirt-chaser, their physical relationship never smolders, only their words.

Angela Christian, who plays Anaïs, is cheated by a flimsy and quieting French accent that minimizes her at every turn. She has a great command of her body (which probably comes from her experience in musical theater), but nowhere to take it—hence all the spurts of pacing back and forth. There’s drama at the heart of this love triangle, but Beckett’s play doesn’t capture it: the whole construct, from the calligraphic walls to the book-stacked set, is too chaste and Anaïs Nin sorely needs of some vulgarity.

BOOK - "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

While discussing the industrial organic (an oxymoron realistically, but not legally), Michael Pollan, in his new book The Omnivore's Dilemma, connects browsing Whole Foods to Barnes and Nobles. Both sell attractive products that hook you in with clever designs and jacket quotes—the ones from Whole Foods just tell a different type of story, a story of happy farms and happy animals. Pollan calls this sales pitch Supermarket Pastoral, but then wonders, as he looks at how people manage these farms, at the rather lax standards on the governmentally owned word "organic," and at the battle between Big and Small Organic, whether their brand of "cutting edge grocery-lit" is more fact or fiction.

Well, as anyone who has ever read a non-fiction expose on the food industry before, most of what you believe about food turns out to be as fabricated as the synthetic (and sometimes "natural") ingredients. As it turns out, Pollan has invented a type of grocery-lit, one that likes to perambulate across aisles on historical fact, innovation, and digression. Unlike these corporate food writers, as much manipulators of the sentence as of meat, Pollan's heart really is in the right place, and though his book has a lot of repetition, it's surrounded by solid fact and enjoyable—often mellifluous—writing. I haven't been so thoroughly disgusted yet entertained since reading excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Pollan, who is prone to extending metaphors, is also a fantastic imagist, and his combination of the two is what makes him a thrilling journalist, one of the few people who can make nonfiction crackle. For instance, take his first impression (albeit fifth or sixth draft) of a farm he visits in the industrial chapter:

"A sloping subdivision of cattle pens stretches to the horizon, each one home to a hundred or so animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that, it eventually dawns on you, isn't mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedyard's thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of a teeming metropolis of meat."

Is that Americana or what?

It's a pleasure following Pollan as he dissects the origins of four distinct American meals, from McDonald's "nuggets" (a food group all to itself) to Whole Foods to Polyface farm to physically hunting and preparing each item himself. (Pollan calls this last one “the perfect meal.”) This enjoyment makes his actual findings easier to digest: for example, we have not only transformed grass-eating ruminants into a bunch of corn-munching pieces of steak, but this process has increased the risk of our meat carrying a disease that our acid-riddled stomachs can't break down. “The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.” We recklessly use cheap corn at the cost of our soil, our increasingly indebted (and subsidized) farmers, and ultimately, our health. I take it back: it's plenty hard to digest; it's just not hard to swallow (and that, in a nutshell, is the problem with America's eating).

Pollan’s a reliable and knowledgeable journalist when it comes to all this data. He’s been covering food-related trends for years now, and his “grassroots” experience allows him to easily convey complicated facts about biomechanics or the benefits of a perennial ecology (not to mention what, exactly, that is). He’s also quick with a metaphor or parallel for every situation; rather than rely solely on quotes, he works as much from a storyteller’s perspective as from his characters, and his embellishments are light and sculptorly. Who else would compare the evolution of plant pesticides to how European nations acted during the cold war? Who’d describe bits of deadly nightshade, avoided by the natural intelligence of ruminants, as “forlorn florets of cauliflower languishing on a picky child’s plate”?

When it comes to conclusions, Pollan occasionally leaps beyond his facts. His simple questions (e.g., is organic food better? Worth the extra cost?) ramble to digressions (“better for what?”) and eventually conclude that while the industrial-organic food of Whole Foods is usually tastier and healthier, it is no more sustainable—the whole point of going organic—than a conventional TV dinner. (It is, however, a contradiction that is “possible to live with” and “sometimes...necessary or worthwhile” to hold.)

This is a flaw of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and other tell-alls): a lack of solutions, an abundance of critiques. (It’s easy to talk about our efficient inefficiency.) After exploring the beauty of a sustainable farm that practices polyculture and true organic practices, Pollan pinpoints what led to the favoring of “a biologically ruinous meal based on corn,” but doesn’t offer an economic recourse. Then again, that’s not really his job: you wouldn’t expect a author of a cookbook to make the dish for you; you can’t expect Pollan to reorganize agribusiness for the government. (I’d be willing to let him try.)

In the third and final segment of his book, Pollan forgoes making conclusions, and instead illustrates the trials and tribulations (and satisfactions) of hunting wild Sonoman pig and foraging through back forests for mushrooms (which includes a short digression on the “lunar energy” and so-called mystical properties of the fungi). Here, the prose flows away from facts to observation, to “hunter porn.” But these segments—which relate a more-primal experience that most of us are unfamiliar with—are as engrossing as they are irrelevant, since it’s a given that most people don’t have the resources, leisure, or ability to hunt and forage their own food anymore. (Even the author’s no expert, and relies on the expert opinions of his entertaining guide, Angelo, to overcome his crippling mycophobia and his lack of familiarity with rifles.)

We live vicariously through Pollan’s pictures instead:

“With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a rounded bloack form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge black pearls.”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a thoroughly engrossing and exciting read, the type of non-fiction that has social relevance that doesn’t come at the expense of personal exuberance. And wherever the book might linger too often in stark fact, the narration is driven by the underlying conceit: “It is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price.” This book is a rich literary meal that you can’t afford not to finish.

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[Note to the publisher: I don’t recall ever reading a book with so many typographical errors. Granted, I spend a portion of my days proofreading—I’m more disposed to notice these things than the average gadabout—but consider placing more care in your editing so as to avoid things like: “...though it may be that animals like us that eat morels do help them disperse their spores as we move then [sic] around on the way to our plates.”]

CONCERT - Muse at the Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC, 8/3/06

Think of the Rapture. Think huge piercing walls of light, think stereotropic shimmers careening off fans, think of a multimedia kaleidoscope revolving around four giant, baroque test tubes, then think again. A chord, a slow ebb, a beat, a rhythm, a pulse . . . and then a wail. Matthew Bellamy, howling just a little louder than his guitar, trying to get the images into our eyes even as he pumps the music—loud reverberant chunks—up our soles, through our spines, into our souls. There’s Chris Wolstenholme, stage right, holding everything down with a bass guitar and an occasional chorus. Dominic Howard, center, seated on a monolithic throne of drums and poised to strike. And bonus performer, Morgan Nichols, lurking behind Matt, but not with the sinister vibe that some of the Muse songs convey; he’s there to maintain the samples and to play the keyboard. And then there’s you, bathed in this radiant light, this luxuriant sound – yes, think of the Rapture.

This particular miracle comes with a name – “Butterflies and Hurricanes” – and if you’re not adequately prepared, has the potency of a curse to boot. Until you’ve seen this song live, you haven’t heard Muse. And once you’ve been cowed by the brilliance, it’s hard to go back to the processed sound of a monochrome CD, spinning silently in its little shrine. Following the overall Muse formula, “Butterflies and Hurricanes” begins with a soft, foreboding lull, a slow sinking that, after a minute, you suddenly realize has started, impossibly, to rise. The CD its from, Absolution, can’t adequately capture the surge in energy, but it's even worse at translating the song’s unusual bridge. After reversing into a neo-classical instrumental section, it fades out in a twinkle of staccato keystrokes, only to return, seconds of silence later, with Matt on the piano. In the midst of a rock concert, amidst sweaty, crowd-surfing fans, an instrumental homage to classical music has taken center stage; what’s more, it’s crawled under your skin, and the nuances tickle your body like a sudden, delightfully delusional fit.

It’s 10:00 in the Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC. I don’t have children, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t know where they were. Muse has been playing for an hour (long enough to blot out all but the knowledge that the openers, The Cloud Room, were terrible), and they’ll play for another forty minutes. There have been ballads, there’s been fight music, there’s been their darkly fantastical alternative rock, and there’s been a lot of Matt, working the guitar as much as the stage, scrooning (screaming + crooning) a slick, solid sound from a world born of synthetic harmony and angry guitars. I’m blown away by the lush, vibrant feeling rising once more through my bones as we segue into “Feeling Good,” a sultry mix of lo-fi jazz and hard rock, and yes, I think, I am feeling good. How could I not?

(The next day, listening to my Muse collection, the recordings seem tame. “Hysteria,” which brought the whole audience at least three feet into the air with its rocketing line of guitar shreds, now seems once removed, more intellectual than emotional. “Stockholm Syndrome,” which erupted through my body, seems quiet even after I turn the knob on my stereo to the max. Live, I remember the trippy electronic chorus actually tripping people up, the guitar’s jagged lead back in to the meat of the song made the comatose wake up. Give me a few days—let me wash the raw feedback from my brain—and I’ll be fine with this silvery imitation. But let me think of the concert instead.)

The point of this tour is presumably to help bolster sales of the new Muse CD, Black Holes and Revelations, which hasn’t gotten overwhelmingly favorable reviews. Well, I didn’t like the CD at first either, but as I said earlier, they weren’t listening to Muse properly. Performed live, crackling across that fourth wall with the intensity of stagecraft and the wit of their songsmithery, it’s a great album. “Take a Bow,” an opening number for the album and this tour, builds from an oscillating series of synthesized notes to at last proclaim, in breathy tones hurdling over a wall of guitar strokes, “Burn/you will burn/you will burn in hell/yeah you’ll burn in hell/burn in hell/burn in hell/burn in hell for your sins.” In concert, it’s like watching Muse summon the devil himself to punish an unnamed but corrupt, charismatic leader of a free country who brings death and destruction to all he touches.

With the exception of “Starlight,” the album’s title track, all of the new songs on this tour are great to watch. “Starlight,” incidentally, isn’t bad—it’s just outclassed by the rest of the concert on account of being too cute, and being too similar of a ballad to their older work. Their best new song, “City of Delusion,” which counterposes a sterling trumpeter against a swooping violinist, was unfortunately not performed, and this exposes the one flaw of the set list: an overemphasis on high-octane established hits, and not enough time with their more exotic and experimental work, or slow songs, like “Ruled by Secrecy.” Instead, they performed tracks like “Supermassive Black Hole”—their first single, which is close to being a progressive pop-rock song, and owes much of its beauty to Gorillaz—and an adapted version of “Knights of Cydonia,” their fight-music finale. With the use of the projector screens, the audience rose to their feet, screaming the chorus: “No one’s gonna take me alive/the time has come to make things right/you and I must fight for our rights/you and I must fight to survive.” (As opposed to their performance of fan-favorite “Time is Running Out,” which had us belting the chorus anyway.)

Muse has reached a point where it has amassed enough certified hits to make their tours a preview of their eventual “Greatest Hits.” It’s a little stunning to realize that, solid as this show was, it still left out plenty of great hits, like “Hypermusic” (a perfect eponym for both the song and what Muse performs) and “Space Dementia.” One only hopes that future tours will not be needlessly reliant on their new CD (though it’s hard to say that a song like “Invincible” is a crutch so much as a blessing) and that some of the popularly bland hits like “Plug in Baby” will be excised in favor of more varied songs like “Screenager.”

But hey, I understand the desire to fill a large space with energy, only energy, and nothing but energy, so help them God. And Muse has a sterling bankroll of older hits like “New Born” and “Tsp” that could carry them for the next seven years, even if they never released a new CD. But if this concert is any indication of Muse’s strength and solidarity—how Matt keeps his throat from exploding is a mystery—this Liverpool trio will keep producing their eclectic and increasingly ambient music for fans for years to come. But why wait years? See them now, and then mail your moot CDs to me.

THEATER - "Everythings Turning Into Beautiful"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Meet the next genre of theater: the jukebox drama. In The New Group’s new production Everythings Turning Into Beautiful, it’s Seth Zvi Rosenfeld’s dialogue that seems cheesy and the songs by Jimmie James that get to the heart of things. The two actors—Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba—also seem more at ease when singing. That comes as no surprise, considering that Rubin-Vega’s claim to fame was originating the role of Mimi in Rent and that Yoba’s attempts to tone down his character mask his talent, something he doesn’t have to worry about when “performing.” Without the music, this would just be an average play about average life—with the music, it is able to liven the tedium long enough to reach the more engrossing second act.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "The Maternal Instinct"

Though prone to excess and flaky exposition, Monica Bauer’s play, The Maternal Instinct, is beautiful more often than not: a bittersweet story for anyone who’s ever wanted a baby, and anyone who’s ever been afraid of them. Sarah is the former, her wife Lillian is the latter, and Fred...well, Fred’s the only friend of the family with sperm. Their desires and frustrations are the subject of the next ninety minutes, and with the exception of the comedic sections (played too much for laughs), it’s an interesting hour and a half.

Even the play’s two cumbersome subplots manage to entertain, one intellectually, the other emotionally. The brainier of the two is about Lillian and Fred’s science experiment, an attempt to reprogram (i.e., remove) the maternal instinct. It’s a success—mice are tearing their children apart—except that Mother Courage, a lab mouse, is, by force of will, protecting its young. Dramatically, the scenes are flat, but they do re-enforce Lillian and Sarah’s situation: animals (of which people are a subset) often behave in unpredictable ways. As for the visceral subplot, Lillian, Fred, and Sarah all encounter Terry, a drunk, pregnant, semi-mute superfluity (no matter how well Elise Audrey Manning manages to portray her). These scenes are as repetitive as Terry’s one-word vocabulary, but they end up being cloyingly charming.

The Maternal Instinct rises above these tangents: the cast cushions the rocky portions of the script, and the shining moments of the text compensate for the clumsy simplicity of director Melissa J. Wentworth. Karen Woodward Massey’s performance as the conflicted Lillian makes up for any other flaws, like the lack of a real set or a faulty lighting design—substance trumps appearance any day of the week. Bauer’s play, trapped in the midst of a fringe Fringe Festival at WorkShop Theater, is proof that a good play can overcome adversity. If it makes some necessary revisions to pacing and plot, it can overcome competition, too. The Maternal Instinct deserves to come to term; now it just needs a little help from a qualified midwife.