Review: Love is a ‘Strange Country’

Tiffany (Vanessa Vache) has a lot on her plate on the weekend of July 4^th. She needs to organize a recommitment ceremony of her parents and bring her brother Darryl (Sidney Williams) to the event, which he resists with all his might, remaining in his depressed and constantly buzzed mind. Tiffany’s girlfriend, Jamie (Bethany Geraghty), tags along but her high sensitivity to the mess in the apartment and siblings arguing makes her a terrible help. So here we are, in a small town in Bell County, Texas, trapped in the apartment with three lost souls, watching them help and terrorize each other, and it’s not always clear who’s doing which.

Photo by Hunter Canning

Strange Country, produced by New Light Theater Project and Access Theater, is a play written by Anne Adams. She created three complex characters whose state of being is stagnation yet there is a constant movement in the show, which makes it very engaging. Feisty Tiffany, portrayed by Vanessa Vache, is like a shot arrow, she has a goal in front of her and she is pushing hard to get there. She is very active on stage, constantly cleaning and packing, smoking, and firing inspirational lines. Her disturbed other half, Jamie played within a broad emotional range by Bethany Geraghty, is the one who stirs the sibling’s lives. The real dark horse in the play is Darryl, brought to life by Sidney Williams. His performance is evenly mellow on the surface throughout the show, yet he seems like a different person by the end.

Three wonderful actors directed by Jay Stull have an amazing chemistry and play off each other very well. Every pause is in its place and even when we are left alone, looking at the stage that everybody left, the anticipation is charged with possibilities. The single set designed by Brian Dudkiewicz is a scarily realistic looking apartment with junk crammed everywhere, faded wallpaper, and a greasy lazy-boy. The interior portrays Darryl’s emotional state very well. The lighting design by Michael O'Connor creates seamless transitions between different times of the two days over which the story is unfolding.

Alcohol and drug abuse, violent temper, broken marriages and children in custody of the ex spouse without visitation rights - Darryl and Jamie have a lot in common. While Tiffany is running around trying to make everything right, the two “most screwed up people in the world” are bonding. Adams doesn’t give us a straightforward answer if they are helping each other or ruining each other’s and theirs futures. Much like in life, there is no black and white, there is a constant struggle for truth and happiness, even if it hurts other people.

Strange Country is running through August 13^th, Wednesday – Saturday at 8pm. Access Theater is located at 380 Broadway on the 4th floor (at White Street). Tickets are $15 at 630-632-1459 or strangecountry.brownpapertickets.com.

Review: ‘Then She Fell’, the house haunted with desires

The life, works and myths of Lewis Carroll laid the groundwork for Then She Fell. Written, directed, designed and choreographed by Zach Morris, Tom Pearson and Jennine Willett, the show first opened in New York in 2012 and has been on the list of the unique and most popular theater attractions ever since. This piece of sight-specific immersive theater by Third Rail Projects invites only 15 audience members per performance, which makes the experience very personal. You have to be curious and brave enough to jump down this rabbit hole, but if you do, you will be rewarded with a journey full of theater magic. 

photo by Darial Sneed

When you enter the Kingsland Ward “hospital facility” in Williamsburg, one of the staff members gives you a set of instructions and checks your ID. You are invited to the waiting area where a nurse checks your belongings, hands you a vial of dark herbal elixir and a set of three keys. According to the facility rules, you are welcome to investigate locked cabinets and dark corners of the rooms but not allowed to open any closed doors.

As the Doctor (Charley Wenzel) does the introduction, members of the audience are being pulled out of the room in groups of as many as four and few as one. Hospital staff and characters inspired by “Alice In Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” inhabit the house and lead you from one room to another. With the help of the original music and sound design by Sean Hagerty and the lighting design by Kryssy Wright, the audience is transported to a zone of the unconscious where dreams and desires meet.

The order of the scenes is different for everybody. I start my journey alone with Alice (Julia Kelly) in her walk-in-closet. She shows me her doll collection and asks to select my favorite one. She asks me when was the first time that I fell in love and if I ever had to tell a person that I don’t love them even if I did at least a little bit. She asks me to brush the back of her hair.

This extreme artistic device of putting you in the scene by making you speak, do things or simply make a choice provides you with a different kind of theater experience. It certainly engages you and doesn’t allow the mind to drift away. It also makes the fourth wall thin and fragile especially in the moments when the actors are piercing you with their eyes. The effect gets only stronger when you are alone with the person in a tiny room. For me, the main event of the evening became the gaze that cast members wear, as though part of their wardrobe. This calm and steady staring is disarming and paralyzing. It has a seducing intensity but there is no object and no subject of desire, just the gaze. This is the gaze returned from the mirror.  

There are scenes where you are invited to assume the position that is more familiar for a theatergoer, the position of a voyeur. I’ve been told to wait in the hallway by the Doctor’s office. The door is open and I see the Doctor going through her paperwork and cabinets filled with files and tools. As she does it, she dances around the room, on the cabinets, chairs and window cell.

Then She Fell contains numerous beautifully choreographed scenes such as this one, where dancers give the space new dimensions by employing every single surface in the room. Sometimes they literarily turn the space upside down and outside out making the familiar architectural and interior objects look like M. C. Escher’s drawings. The most spectacular illustration to my words is a duet of Lewis Carroll (Samuel Swanton) and the second Alice (Kim Savarino) on the staircase where the dancers were going up sideways, almost parallel to the ground, using the space between the staircase and the wall.

There are other stunning visuals in the show, a lot of them build around the mirror as an object and as a metaphor of duality. I could watch the hypnotizing dance of both Alices with a semi-translucent mirror between them forever. Then She Fell engages not only your sight and your hearing, but also your smell and taste. You are offered a vial of alcoholic potion here and there, occasionally a fruit, a tiny cup of tea.            

The connection between the hospital entourage and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s (aka Lewis Carroll’s) story remained a mystery to me. As I was guided through the rooms and hallways of the three-story house, it seemed like two worlds exist in parallel universes and you are standing in the doorway between them. Are the characters of the novels patrons of the hospital? Are you the patient that is hallucinating the imaginary romance between the writer and his 11-year old muse? The best way to find out is to jump down the rabbit hole. After all, Then She Fell is a mirror held to you, and everybody sees something different in there.      

Then She Fell by Third Rail Projects runs Tuesday - Sunday at 7:30pm & 10:30pm.  Tickets are $95 - $200, available at www.thenshefell.com through September 25. Private events are also available; visit the website for more information. The Kingsland Ward at St. Johns is located 195 Maujer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For more information call 718-374-5196.

Review: Bloody family secrets of ‘The Red Room’

Set on Thanksgiving, The Red Room, a new play by Morgan McGuire introduces us to one disturbed family for which this day carries a different meaning. Three Hodges siblings are visiting their parents Gerald (Thomas F. Walsh) and Jeannie (Sheila Stasack) in Northern California anticipating the sentencing of the murderer of their brother Tommy. The tragic event that happened four years ago still haunts the family and is about to bring more pain and destruction.

Photo by Michael Bernstein

Two sisters, older Kate (Meghan E. Jones) and younger Ceeci (Jessica O’Hara-Baker) hold opposite opinions on justice and forgiveness, which fuels the main conflict of the play. But even before the painful past and the tragic present enter the room, the atmosphere is very unsettling. The homey living room designed by Christopher Bowers is put together with much love and attention to detail. A wooden staircase leads to the unseen upstairs, and the old-fashioned furniture looks inviting. As we “zoom out” we see that the stage is a stand-alone construction with its edge lit red, its posts buried in a sea of documents. The walls are tiled with the same documents creating the space of a mad researcher.     

Patrick’s (Michael Kingsbaker) foreplay with his wife, Kate, is interrupted by the arrival of Ceeci and her boyfriend (Rob Brinkman) accompanied by John (John DiMino), the youngest in the family. The chatter rises up as multiple people start talking at the same time. It becomes especially hard to hear what anybody is saying when the baby monitor goes on. The longer Kate ignores her baby’s cry, the more irritation it causes the members of the family and the audience. A scene follows this supposedly hyper-realistic situation of overlapping dialogues where John talks on the phone “outside,” located in the foreground, but we only see him moving his lips. I don’t know which director’s decision threw me off more; the silent phone call or the cacophony.

Probably the only time when overlapping dialogue is appropriate and well orchestrated by the director, Jenny Beth Snyder, is the visit of Melissa (Orisa Henderson), the Deputy District Attorney. This is one of the most intense and nicely timed dialogues I’ve heard in the theater lately. As Melissa is trying to explain the importance of the presence of the family during the sentencing, Kate, who is obsessed with revenge, is constantly interrupting. In her usual manner she is trying to overpower everybody in the room but suddenly meets a firm resistance from her younger sister, Ceeci.

Meghan E. Jones delivers a heated performance with quite a few explosions as her anger shakes the air in the room. Her pregnancy adds an edge to the character, making it more complex and three-dimensional. The aura of purity and meekness that stereotypically surrounds a pregnant woman is shattered to pieces by Jones’ aggressive and violent energy. Her mimicry and gesticulation is sharp and exaggerated in the moments of the argument when she is not speaking, which provides a statement as powerful as the opponent’s.

The intrigue of the The Red Room’s plot is built on revealing the facts of the past. A tragic event triggers the conflict to explode. The sadness and ugliness in the family is brought to the surface as we see Hodges’ deal with it. The problem is that from the very beginning the sad and ugly was too close to the surface both in the text of play and the performances. I was numb by the culmination. The same goes for the printed documents in which the stage is sinking. It’s already there, right in your face, so when the two younger siblings finally address it towards the end, there is no wow-effect for which the changing lighting (Joe Cantalupo) and ambient music (sound design by Aidan Meyer) call.   

             

The Red Room is produced by The Shelter Theatre Company. The show runs through July 30th, Thursday - Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. TGB Theatre is located at 312 West 36th Street, between 8th & 9th Avenues. Tickets are $18, available at 212-352-3101 or www.theshelternyc.org.