Prodigal Son

John Patrick Shanley returns to the Manhattan Theater Club with the play Prodigal Son, written and directed by him. His play Doubt: a Parable opened in November of 2005 in Manhattan Theater Club, was transferred to Broadway, toured around the country and the world and brought his author many rewards including Pulitzer Prize fro Drama and Tony Award for Best Play in 2005. The play was adopted for the screen and made into a movie in 2008, Doubt, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis.

Prodigal Son continues to explore some of the topics of Doubt. It’s an autobiographical coming of age story about a troubled youth in a religious educational facility, Thomas More Preparatory School in New Hampshire in the mid 60s.  It starts with Jim Quinn (Timothée Chalamet) arriving to school and talking to its director Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry, who starred in Doubt on it’s national Broadway tour).

Jim is a sharp 15-year-old who is outspoken, very well read and passionate. He is also a troublemaker as he constantly starts fights with fellow students, steals and argues about God in religion class. Carl Schmitt has the opposite temper: he is a very reasonable and calm man, who is fearful of God and always follows the rules.  His wife, Louise Schmitt (Annika Boras), accuses him of choosing the path of idealism because of his laziness, “You don’t have to decide anything because ideals do things for you”.  Confronted with Jim, Carl will be forced to make decisions which will affect the young man’s life, and which will “make him,” in the words of Jim. And as much as we root for the young troublemaker, we also pay close attention to the emotional journey of the school director, which might seem very subtle but is equally painful and important for the play.        

In the conversation Carl has with one of his stuff members, Allan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard) he mentions that he saw Birds by Hitchcock recently and was terrified by it. The idea of unreasonable, uncontrolled forces of nature turning against people reminds us of the wild personality of Jim, which Carl tries to tame. That’s why he asks Allan, known for being friend and mentor of troubled students, for help. Both the director and professor had their personal mental wounds: Nikola, one of Allan’s students, was trying to commit suicide, for which the professor still blames himself; Carl accidentally killed his son and can’t forgive himself either. How Jim will turn out suddenly becomes a very personal matter to both of them, Jim becomes a symbolic, biblical “Lost Son” for both.

Timothée Chalamet makes a brilliant Jim. He starts out intensely and as the play progresses he fills more and more room with his witty and poetic talk which reaches it’s climax in the dialogue with the school director during the final exam. This is the kind of performance where you truly believe that this fictional person exists and breathes the same air as you do. The magical moment when the text of the play, the character, and the actor merge together while supporting each other, bring the words to life. Every little detail starts to shine and seems meaningful: the crooked tie, the way Timothée walks and hunches slightly.

The costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser were good in the sense that they didn’t destract from the actors. Prodigal Son takes place from 1965 to 1968 and at first I was slightly disappointed when I didn’t see more period specific designs and styling. With the exception of Mrs. Schmitt, everybody was dressed and groomed in a rather modern way, which I came to appreciate later in the play. I am glad the creators decided to go timeless rather then time-accurate in costume designs.

Scenic Design by Santo Loquasto had the same clear and timeless look to it. The majority of the scenes were happening in small, minimalistic sets, which were rolled into the middle of the stage and then rolled away. It all was tied together with the ark in the background and a “doll house” model of a school in it. Bare trees on both sides of it made the stage smaller and cozier providing a feeling of lightness and openness at the same time. Loquasto managed to achieve an atmosphere of a private school in New Hampshire on top of the mountain: you feel trapped in a doll house but at the same time you are surrounded by a great and massively open space, and the beautiful powerful nature.

The sound design by Fitz Patton and original music by Paul Simon gave the play its smooth flow. Music and sound effects were mostly used between the scenes but were much more then just transitions filling pauses. They carried the mood and felt more like the 60s than the visual elements. They were subtle enough to not draw attention to themselves but pronounced enough to be noticed and admired. Like the time when an instrumental piece reduced to just it’s tempo of a ticking clock, lights come up and we see Carl in his office. The massive grandfather clock behind him is soon to stop and he has to rewind it, which starts the scene.

Prodigal Son is worth seeing for good performances, especially that of the talented Timothée Chalamet. It may lack dramatic moments (all of them are happening towards the end and are a little bit jammed together) but even the quiet scenes are charged with energy like a taut spring. The show is very clean visually and feels like a gulp of a fresh mountain air.  

I and You

American Theatre Magazine named Lauren Gunderson one of the most produced playwrights in America in 2015, her play, I and You, received the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award in 2014 and was produced in over 20 theaters nationwide. New Yorkers will have a chance to see this critically acclaimed play in Theater 59E59 directed by Sean Daniels.

I and You opens intensely when Anthony (Reggie D. White) comes to Caroline’s (Kayla Ferguson) bedroom to finish a school assignment on Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Caroline spent months out of school because of her medical condition because of which she is in desperate need of a liver transplant. She communicates with her mother via texts and is not in the mood to spend time with any human being. Anthony is patient and persistent as he passionately talks about “Leaves of Grass” and is eager to share the beauty of the poetry with his partner for the assignment. Besides, the due date is tomorrow.      

Teenagers share their thoughts on family, music and death while bonding over this poster presentation. Caroline is skeptical at first but soon she starts to really appreciate Whitman’s poetry and to trust Anthony with her fears and dreams. At some point she feels so comfortable around him that she puts on her favorite song, jumps onto the bed and starts playing air keyboard. This strong moment of fun and trust is followed immediately by a spasm of intense pain, after which Caroline panics and hides under the blanket yelling at Anthony to stay and to go and then again to stay. This moment of weakness only brings them closer together.

This one-set, two-character play would be a typical adolescent story about friendship and love and fear of death if not for an unexpected twist in the end. I won’t reveal it because some of us like to be surprised at the theater. Some of my friends who I went to see the show with told me that because of this twist in the end they liked the show that much better. I can see how it might work: slowly escalating narration takes a huge jump and right before the end the “eject button” is pressed and a viewer who, might be falling asleep by this time, is thrown out of his comfortable chair, metaphorically speaking.

I and You is a smoothly constructed Trojan horse bearing a secret inside but it’s also a one trick pony. You leave the theater still under the strong impression of the sudden reveal. But was the journey to it that enjoyable? Did I laugh? Not much. And it wasn’t the case where everybody is falling of his or her chairs laughing and I’m sitting there with a straight face, but that nobody was laughing out loud. Neither did I feel particularly moved or nostalgic for my teen years. Even though the dialogues were dynamic, very well paced, and both actors were good, I still had trouble connecting to the play.                  

The Changeling

The Red Bull Theater, where The Changeling is performed, specializes in the plays of Shakespeare and other authors of the Jacobean period of English literature (1558-1625). This is their twelfth season and I am already looking forward to the next productions. I don’t remember the last time when heavy, ornate Elizabethan English was so light on the ears and it allowed me to dive to the core of the story.

This is a story of love and madness, the main heroine of which, Beatrice-Joanna, portrayed by beautiful Sarah Topham, falls in love with Alsemero (Christian Coulson) days before the wedding with her fiancé Alonzo (John Skelley). She asks her father if the wedding can be delayed and pays De Flores (Manoel Felciano), her father’s servant, to kill Alonzo. De Flores is madly in love with Joanna and is ready to do anything for her; even commit a crime. Joanna despises him and every time she sees his face covered in burns she fills with anger and shows us another side of her nature – a neurotic, manipulative madwoman which she becomes more and more as the play progresses.

De Flores repels Joanna so much that she doesn’t want to take her own glove after she dropped it on the ground and the servant picked it up. She furiously tears off the second glove, tosses it to him and storms out. De Flores is left alone with an object from his love. He pulls one glove on his right hand and sniffs the other one with desire. This scene describes perfectly strong affections that one has for another. And even though these affections have different signs of polarity, the essence of these passions is the same, which will bring them together and kill them tragically. 

There is a second plot line to this play, which takes place in a madhouse. It has a comedic tone to it, which balances out the drama in the castle of Joanna’s father, Vermandero. Isabella (Michelle Beck), the wife of doctor Albius, is desired by two young men – Antonio (Bill Army) and Pedro (Philippe Bowgen) who pretend to be madmen in order to get closer to her. Isabella is flirty and giggly with her admirers but she never commits adultery while Joanna sinks deeper and deeper in sin.

To my deepest disappointment Michelle Beck didn’t bring up the character of Isabella to the fullest. She seemed slow and flat yet there is so much potential in this playful and foxy part. Her stage partners, Christopher McCann playing doctor Alibius and Andrew Weems playing Lollio, employee of the doctor, were more successful as comedic elements. Their costumes and manner of speaking to each other aided the comedy, especially when facing the audience instead of each other. The madhouse part of the ensemble seemed uneven and poorly fitted, as if they belonged to casts of different productions but were stitched together by a skillful director.

The minimalistic, entirely black set was beautiful. Three windows with reflecting mirror surfaces in the far wall were transformed into the windows of cells that housed the fools in the madhouse. The simple scenic design by Marion Williams was utilized to it’s fullest and gave actors the freedom to form a sophisticated layout of different places and keep their performance dynamic.

Costumes by Beth Goldenberg were a mixture of modernity and 17^th century nostalgia. Some of them were more memorable than others: the costume of the doctor in which he looked like one of his fools, the animalistic masks of fools, and finally Joanna’s gloves from the scene with De Flores described previously. The gloves were made of lace on the outside and leather on the palm, mirroring Joanna’s double-sided nature. The elaborate and eclectic style of Goldenberg’s designs gave the period play a modern flavor and played well against the black canvas of the stage. The costumes were mostly monochromatic that, combined with the blackness of the set, made the appearance of blood in murder scenes more dramatic. There was a scary realism in these abundant streams of blood.

The Changeling is a great play by itself and the Red Bull Theater Company succeeded in bringing it to the modern viewer. It truly felt like the text itself was the center jewel in the beautiful crown of this production.         

The Accidental Pervert

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According to the program, The Accidental Pervert is a show with quite a history. The first performance was in 2005 and since then it had multiple runs in different theaters in New York, as well as clubs and bars around the country. It was performed in Panama, Malta, Switzerland and Norway. It’s going to have a full production run in Germany, Austria, Estonia and Norway in 2016.

I didn’t know all of that when I decided to go. I purposefully try not to set my expectations too high. One person shows are especially risky and are easy to dislike. If the actor doesn’t hit the right emotional note the mistake is more noticeable than in ensemble. And Andrew Goffman just wasn’t hitting it at all.

We enter Thirteenth Street Repertory Company located in the cellar of a brownstone and find ourselves surrounded by the atmosphere of old school off-off-Broadway theater. Antique tickets booth reminiscent of a mechanical fortuneteller booth on Coney Island, the art in the foyer by Lou Patrou, a little bar, a restroom the size of the locker – everything screams “west village” and suddenly feels like home.

Robert Vest poses as a host greeting everybody personally and entertaining a group of Russian ladies who came early. He continues his act on stage prior to the show to “warm up” the audience with some rather vulgar jokes about front and rear exits of the theater pointing at his anatomy accordingly. My friend and I are getting suspicious while taking seats in the second row. It turns out that it wasn’t an unnecessary precaution, the girl who was sitting in the first row in front of me got a lot of winks and comments and practically a lap dance at one point.

Now I must say that I feel very uncomfortable when my presence as an audience not only gets acknowledged but when the performer constantly and actively demands my attention and my approval. Obviously a performer depends on his audience, especially in comedy. But never, not even on a stand up comedy night, was I forced so badly to smile and clap politely at the jokes I didn’t like much. But I was smiling and occasionally clapping because of the pity I felt for Andrew Goffman. Fake smiling made me yawn which resulted in more awkwardness and discomfort. Newer has a show seemed so long and unbearable! 

It’s a story about an 11 year old boy discovering his dad’s collection of XXX VCR tapes, which started his obsession with porn. He goes on about his early masturbation experiences and sexual fantasies about his housekeeper for a while. Saying the names of the porn movies, which are rephrased names of non-porn movies and books, seems to make Goffman the happiest. He would say “Star Whores” and make a long pause for audience to laugh. If nobody made a peep he would say something like: “Come on, this was a good one!”

An 11 year old kid obsessed with masturbation trapped in the body of an aging man – that’s what the character of Andrew Goffman is. And even as the story progresses to wild college sex experiments with an Italian woman named Dena and his experience of being a husband and a dad, we are still listening to a little bastard who, more than anything in the world, likes to rub his penis. There is a “character arch” and supposed transformation into the grownup man who realizes that he feels content with his wife and his daughter and doesn’t need porn anymore. But it didn’t show in the performance of Andrew Goffman. We hear the voice of a self-centered demanding child until the very end.

Goffman seemed worn out. It appeared he couldn’t keep up with the upbeat tempo of the show, which was unnecessary and exhausting, not only for the performer, but for the viewer too. You can’t have only high peaks in your show, you need to lead to them gradually and give it some time afterward to build to the next emotionally charged moment.  The Accidental Pervert was all over the place and felt very unbalanced. The childhood part seemed disproportionately long while the “serious” and “sad” parts of his adult life, like the death of his farther or marriage, seemed scrunched together.

There was a bright moment to my experience with this show though. There were some minor technical malfunctions with the lights and sound effects which caused, what seemed to be unscripted, jokes about how low-budget this production is and how badly this theater needs some cosmetic repair.  These moments were like a gasp of a fresh air and came as a relief to me. The hope was raised in me that Andrew Goffman is sane and maybe even not hopeless.

I want to think that he is just tired of being trapped in this set cluttered with Kleenex tissues, VCR tapes and other sentimental junk; tired of these old, not so funny jokes in a mediocre play. Well, I’m not sure if he is tired of it, but I sure was.