Arts Independent

Steeplechase by By Chris Nelson

Reviewed by Robert Viagas

A young woman goes on a rocky lifelong voyage of experimentation and self-discovery in Steeplechase, Chris Nelson’s offbeat but fun new “dark comedy” being presented at the Hudson Guild Theater as part of New York Theater Festival’s Summerfest 2019.

The play draws its perfect title from two sources: a ride at the old Coney Island amusement park that featured mechanical horses running along a track, and an Olympic obstacle course race. Despite the similar names, the first race always delivers its riders to safety, while the second is full of hurdles and potential pitfalls. Viv (Ariel Lauren), the central character of the play, is always searching for the first experience, but all too often winds up with the second.

Raised near Coney Island, Viv becomes addicted to drugs, addicted to abusive men, and addicted to the kind of pain that comes from feelings of worthlessness. Despite her repeated rejection of an actress (Allison Pappas) who plays her yet-unborn daughter, Viv finally wearies of the heartbreaks and humiliations of the high life and settles down with a dull but sweet guy who actually cares for her, and finally embraces the little girl, along with a traditional family life. In many ways, the play resembles a modern-dress version of the musical Pippin.

Nelson’s script treats the subject with a knowing humor that often breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges the audience. Director Maridee Slater’s fluidly kaleidoscopic staging keeps Viv and the story sprinting along from hurdle to hurdle. When she needs to bring in Viv’s mom ex machina, Amy Laird Webb comes crawling up to the stage literally over the backs of the audience, like some monster from the id.

The nine-member cast also includes Valerie Redd, James O’Hagan-Murphy, Amy Laird Webb, Rob McDermott, Joel Reyer, Schuyler Van Amson, Tyra Hardy, Cristina Lucas and Allison Pappas. Costume design is by Corina Chase. Lighting and set design are by John Salutz. Moody original music is provided by Mitch Wells, who leads the cast in a pre-curtain freestyle dance.

Steeplechase is playing a limited run through August 25 at the Hudson Guild Theatre in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Sea Wall/A Life
by Simon Stephens and Nick Payne
Reviewed by Robert Viagas

Parents, children and the incredible fragility of life are the subjects of Sea Wall/A Life, a pair of deeply dramatic monologues by Simon Stephens (author of Tony winner The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) and Nick Payne, as performed on Broadway with master class brio by Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge.

So many plays and films deal with family dysfunction for dramatic or comic effect. After all, conflict is the soul of drama. But these two plays find their drama in a pair of deeply loving families. The enemies are literally birth and death. These are plays about the unbearable preciousness of our closest relatives, and the agony associated with gaining and losing them. Though written by different authors, the two playlets are very similar in feeling.

In Payne’s Seawall,a moment of inattention has dire consequences. Sturridge plays a man who led a fairly colorless life until the birth of his daughter. The child in question comes alive in Payne’s exquisitely detailed script, related by a master storyteller. She is so innocent and adorable, that you just know some dreadful fate awaits her. That dread is the only overtly manipulative note in an otherwise glowing and harrowing play.

Stephens’A Life is more complex and creative. Gyllenhaal plays a man reliving the two most emotional nights of his life, the night his father died and the night his daughter was born.

At first it seems like they both happened the same night because he tells the stories overlappingly. But it gradually emerges that the events converge in his memory. Gyllenhaal conveys every emotion of the twin situations—the joy, the fear, the grief, the anticipation—and combines memories of his father with his expectations for his child. Both stories wind up in different wings of what is apparently the same hospital, and we pace with him and share his apprehensions and hopes as he waits for his life to be changed forever.

Presented on a nearly bare stage, Seawall/A Life is a double dose of raw storytelling. Walking out of the show and audience member was heard to say “Now that’s Broadway.” He said it about two one-act plays with no singing, no tap-dancing, no flashy costumes nor confetti cannon. In fact, little more than the proverbial two plans and a passion. That passion is love. Family love—the most fraught kind.

Directed by Carrie Cracknell, Seawall/A Life is playing a limited run at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway.

Back by Matt Webster

Reviewed by Robert Viagas

If you could go back in time with just ten precious seconds to fix the biggest mistake of your life, would you be able to do it? Would you still do it if it meant you would forever lose everything that happened since then in your current life?

These are the two burning questions facing Leah and Derek, the would-be couple at the heart of Back, Matt Webster’s fascinating science-fiction conundrum of a drama, presented as part of producer Ken Davenport’s RAVE Theatre Festival.

The sci-fi at element never overwhelms the emotional core of the story. Playwright Webster co-stars with Terra Mackintosh as a pair of lifelong friends and occasional lovers who do emotional dances around each other. The attraction is plain, but somehow even the warmest moments somehow turn into arguments. Despite how articulate both of them are, they are failing to deal with the central issue of their relationship.

Most of their arguments involve their failed dreams. Leah wanted to be a doctor, but a she was at the wheel in a car accident that killed a friend, and now her life seems to be a downward spiral. Derek dreams of success as an actor in New York, but apart from a fondly-remembered underwear commercial, his career is a bit of a bust. He longs for Leah to join him in the city; she longs for him to return home. Something always gets in the way of a stronger connection between them, and her solution is to use the “Back” option, leap back a decade and start over. To Derek, however, Backing is tantamount to suicide, since you disappear from this thread in the multiverse forever.

Derek finally realizes that he is not living in Leah’s original life, but in one of her failed Backs, and can think of only one way that he might undo all their mistakes, false starts and dead ends. But he knows the plunge will have its cost.

Beautifully written and acted, with genuine mystery and adult romance at its heart, Back plays like an especially intelligent episode of Black Mirror, though with a minimalist charm of its own.

The production features lighting design by Greg Solomon, which simply and effectively conveys the sense of going Back on the intriguing rectangular set designed by Tim McMath.

Directed by David Perlow, Back is playing a limited run through August 23 at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St. in Manhattan.

Dandelion: An Original Musical

Music and lyrics by Colleen Francis, book by Jessica Francis Fichter and Sean Riehm, additional music and lyrics by Bill Zeffiro

Reviewed by Robert Viagas

To go to college or not to go to college? That is the question confronting the title character of the new musical Dandelion, which was presented in a one-night-only 75-minute concert version at Feinstein’s/54 Below in Manhattan. It’s a question confronting many young people, but for Jane (Hailee Beltzhoover), the stakes are considerably higher.

Jane’s mom (Colleen Francis, also the show’s composer-lyricist) has multiple unhealthy issues. She is mentally ill and alcoholic, and she has a contentious relationship with her ex, Jane’s dad. The mom is needy and dependent and, while there is a part of her that understands it is Jane’s time to head off to college and start her own life, she also oppresses Jane with guilt to remain her perpetual caretaker. Jane is torn.

As presented in its truncated form at 54 Below, this lite foray into Next to Normal territory displays a great deal of promise but still needs sharpening, focus and, above all, its own distinctive voice.

In addition to a performance that paints heartbreakingly vivid picture of the mom’s struggles, Francis has composed a musically diverse score that shows her skill at soul, folk, gospel, and above all, country. The choice of style often seems arbitrary, however. A lot of the songs play like pop rather than theatre songs: the character is at the same place at the end of the song as at the beginning.

The best songs reflect the various conflicts of the story. “Get Your Shit Together” is a snarling fight song between the mother and her ex (Adam James King). Jane and her BFF Gabbie (the funny and endearing Lillie Ricciardi) contemplate the non-academic joys of college life in “North.” “Stay” is the mother’s cri de coeur.

To dramatize the conflict within the mom’s head, Dandelion uses an Inside Out-style quartet to voice her Depression (Allison Sike), Control (Miranda Lane), Rage (Brianne Wylie) and Paranoia (Adam James King). At least that’s what it says in the program. They are not as well defined in actual performance, and seem just like a regular chorus. Much more can be done here to make the show interesting and special.

Because Jessica Francis Fichter and Sean Riehm’s libretto was presented in highly condensed form in the showcase, we also didn’t get to see the character development of the brother, Jordan (Brenden McDonald), who is introduced as not caring about his mother with a funny country song (“Sucks to Suck”) but makes an abrupt transition in Act II. Also, as presented, the story starts promisingly, then goes around in circles for a while as Jane decides to go to college, then decides to stay home with her mother, then college again, then mother again, etc. However the issue is settled in a very satisfying way that was skillfully set up in the first moment of the show.

There is a lot here. The writers should keep striving to find that voice and make it sing out.

Directed by librettist Jessica Francis Fichter, with music direction by Neveda Lozano, Dandelion: An Original Musical played a single performance at 54 Below in Manhattan on August 14, 2019.

2071 by Duncan MacMillan and Chris Rapley

Reviewed by Robert Viagas

There’s a lot of talk about the upcoming 2020 presidential elections, and sometimes those in 2024 as well.

But America as a culture—once upon a time enthusiastic about the future—now rarely collectively thinks about or plans for what our world will or should or could be like in the late 2020s, let alone the 2030s or 2040s, where many of us, our children and our grandchildren will be living. Perhaps it has become too scary to contemplate.

It takes an author from Great Britain, Chris Rapley, to jolt us into thinking hard about that future in his theatrical monologue 2071. And it is indeed scary. Human activity, especially the burning of coal, oil and other carbon-based fuels, is driving up the temperature of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere in ways that are already being felt, and which, if not checked, will create flooding and violent weather in the decades and centuries to come. Rapley, as impersonated Off-Off-Broadway by actor Robert Meksin, asks us to contemplate that future anyway, so that perhaps, if we wake up and act wisely, it won’t be quite so scary in the end.

Presented successfully in London in 2014, and now hosted in it U.S. premiere by the environmentalist theatre group Ripple Effect Artists, the 90-minute solo show tells a compelling story, though it is weighted down with statistics. The word “percent” makes up a way-too-hefty “percentage” of the script. Rather than focus on the real-life impact of these changes—that global warming will raise sea level to the point that the 29^thStreet location of the theatre could soon become waterfront property, or that our most productive farmlands could turn into desert, or that summertime temperatures in New York could regularly bake in the 110s—the script harps on the fact that average global temperatures could rise one to three degrees—which makes it sound to the layman’s ear like no big problem (though it certainly is).

Not helping is Meksin’s schoolmarm-ish delivery that robs this drama of its drama. The bottom line is that humanity is indeed very quickly running out of time to return the planet to normal weather patterns, and that radical changes in the way we generate energy and grow our food will be required—immediately—if we want to bequeath a better world to the people of 2071 and beyond. That’s the story 2071 wanted to tell in a theatrical way, but lost in its dry, symposium-like format.

Directed by Carin Zakes, 2071 is playing a limited run through August 11 at the Episcopal Actors Guild at 1 East 29^thStreet in Manhattan.