Intermission Impossible

What's the purpose of noise? In propaganda it's an effective tool. A barrage of information traumatizes us. It tests our will and patience. Noise and competing facts disrupt, confuse, and numb us until basic self care — not even preservation — becomes a mighty instrument of control. It's slow, low-impact torture, but the cumulative result is stunningly effective. I'm leading with this because weaponized information is a fact of modern life, and the major theme explored in Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan's recent adaptation of George Orwell's landmark novel, 1984. As the story veers away from Winston and Julia's secret, desperate romance in a broken, paranoid society, and jets down a tunnel of pure horror, this interpretation evolves into an academic lecture on the art and science of manufactured reality.

I appreciate the experiment and visual inventiveness but I'm not always sure what this latest interpretation of Orwell's cautionary tale hopes to accomplish. Projected fields of text against gray, Bauhaus inspired set pieces are as stunning, as the author's ever- prescient words: "War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery." There are moments when the  action on stage at Circuit Playhouse leans in the direction of dance, and all these layers create an environment that's visually remarkable but at odds with itself. It's difficult to`communicate how artlessness degrades humanity in an world made of overwhelming artistic gestures. As the long one act plays itself out, Carter McHann's tremendous, anxiety-core sound design proves almost too effective. It comes on strong but its ability to punctuate and frame the action gets lost in droning persistence.

Propagandists benefit when the crowd numbs out. Theatrical goals are different, so an immersive approach to torture techniques yields mixed results.

Stripping Orwell's story down to principal characters, with only a handful of secondary voices, robs us of any real opportunity to experience the soul crushing imbalance of  individuals flickering in and out of self-awareness inside a monolithic, fear-motivated society. There are glimpses when children rat out their proud, thought criminal parents, but the bigger picture is always out of focus.

For the most part, director Courtney Oliver wrestled this seemingly minimal, but spectacle-heavy show into a matter of substance and relative clarity. Her cast seems uniquely grounded, resulting in honest, humane performances led by Danny Crowe as the show's protagonist Winston Smith. Even when the text gives actors only a note or two to blow, they blow them fearlessly. Oliver's prudence is also evident in a stubborn avoidance of contemporary political tropes. She carefully navigates the storm of projected information and noise and lets the adapted work speak, more or less, for itself. 

Greg Boller goes sleazy as O'Brien, the inner-party member posing as a gateway to the resistance. Like a good sadist, he tells his victims exactly what he's doing while he's doing it. Boller's mic drop moment is painfully literal, but he delivers a solid crash course in gas-lighting and the mechanics of the long con. So much is made of "Room 101" and O'Brien's use of torture in 1984, but that's all endgame — last mile delivery. "We are the dead," indeed.

Adaptations give us a chance to explore specific narrative threads and shine new light through old windows. In this case, exposing the audience to low grade torture techniques by way of flickering or flashing light, grating inescapable sound, triggering imagery and making us all hold our pee through the intermission-free show, drowns out a more interesting theme struggling to escape a relentlessly bleak event's sadistic gravity: Are our heroes, villains, allies and enemies all fictional constructs? Have they always been? By the time this idea expresses itself in dialogue, we're, once again, too agitated to see the elusive bigger picture. Maybe that's also the point.

As historic text, 1984 mocks us, predicting a "black mirror" environment of compromised privacy, nationalism and weaponized mass-information. As a piece of contemporary theater, this version of the story is neither agitprop or entertainment. It's an experience. Whether it's pleasant or not may prove to be a subject of contention, and probably beside the point. 
   

Dead. "I'm dead." It's a thing we say now, on the internet, when things strike us as being uniquely funny. "I'm so dead," we say. Maybe we don't laugh, but it slays us nonetheless, as jokes have slain people throughout the ages in spite of laughter's reputation for being "the best medicine." "Dying of laughter" is an old idiom and the language of comedy is largely borrowed from the world of violence,mayhem, and harm. Comics "knock us dead." Audiences "bust a gut," and so on. And while I can't say Theatre Memphis' production of Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House "kills," exactly, it may stab you in the heart repeatedly with a scalpel. 

There's a moment near the top of The Clean House when Lane, a nondescript white doctor in white clothes in her nondescript white-on white-home, tells Matilde the Brazilian maid in her black livery, she's an "interesting person." It's not a complement. The nondescript white doctor, sympathetically revealed by Tamara Wright, didn't hire an interesting person, she hired a cleaning lady who needs to get to work whitening up the grubby space or get another job.  Ruhl's heart has never seemed larger than it does in this compassionate piece from 2006, but her metaphors have seldom been more ham-fisted either. Appropriating the kind of magical realism associated with certain strains of South American literature The Clean House essays the relative merits of tidying up. It's themes are Buddhist adjacent, showing how the noblest desire to order a chaotic world results in sadness. It's a sly and deceptively poetic play about embracing the messes we make in the hallway between love and death, and maybe a little self-serving in that regard. It's the kind of work that will likely divide audiences, leaving them delighted and warm on the inside or bored and baffled.

What shouldn't divide audiences is the solid vision put forward by director Leslie Barker's creative team, and a remarkable collection of thoughtful, lived-in performances

Ruhl's work and influence has grown so familiar that her trademark idiosyncrasies barely feel like idiosyncrasies at all. Still, time and quickly evolving perspectives may also make one of the play's more elegantly prepared storylines, a little hard for some to swallow. Lane's husband Charles, who's also a doctor, falls in love with Ana, an older, exotic mastectomy patient. He subsequently undertakes a brutal hero's quest into the arctic to save Ana's life and show the purity of his intentions. Although he's not Jewish, Charles claims personal exoneration from any  wrongdoing due to an esoteric Hebrew law regarding soulmates he heard about on NPR, and sincerely wants his jilted (and not having it) wife to rejoice and share in his newfound happiness. Sweetly portrayed by Chris Cotton, Charles is helpless — swept up in an overwhelming love spell he can't understand or control. It suits the play's tone, but tangos at the edge of current sensibilities regarding masculine misbehavior. 

The show revolves around Matilde, the cleaning lady who's depressed by cleaning. She's also in mourning for her parents, whose perfect love ended badly. Dad was the funniest man in his village in Brazil, and mom was his equal. When she died laughing at one of his jokes he took his own life. Now Matilde wants to be a comedian, and Ruhl's play functions like a preview of some future network sitcom she'll star in. Jaclyn Suffel's formidable in the role, leading us through the dreamy script like a modern day Sabina, the maid, and most memorable character from Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth. It's a mature, effortlessly commanding turn in a role that often demands the impossible. I'll get back to this in a minute.

A lot of The Clean House reminds me of Wilder and Skin of Our Teeth. No dinosaurs come tromping through the theater, but the story's no less magically weird or mythological in its depiction of family, or its focus on origins and eschatology.  Only this time, for Ruhl, it's all personal.

Matilde's inability to clean is balanced by Virginia's compulsion to straighten, dust, vacuum and organize. Virginia is Lane's sister. She's a damaged soul made of right-sized expectations, and she wants a relationship with her busy, distant sibling so badly enters into a bargain with Matilde to do the depressed maid's work, just to get a toe in the door. Virginia's tragic cheerfulness is stretched to the point of psychopathy, and Aliza Moran walks a tightrope in presenting a deeply silly character who's just a little too fragile to laugh at. It's the show's dilemma in a nutshell.

The Clean House's narrative strategy also reminds me, at times, of some of the more vexing routines devised by stand up comic Andy Kaufman who was always more prankster and performance artist than gag-man. It's a show about the power of jokes where all the jokes are whispered or spoken in a language most English speakers won't understand.  "It doesn't work in translation," Matilde explains at one point. Honest laughs happen throughout, but the literary force of dangling the play's jokes just beyond reach doesn't translate — and that's okay. Like Kaufman, Ruhl sometimes tests an audience's patience while she's resetting their expectations. This is why Suffel's performance is so key. As the show's narrator, she frames the important stuff, and ushers us through the rough spots even though she's sometimes armed with nothing but a brow crinkle or a little weaponized side-eye.

I've got to say, it's nice to see Christina Welford Scott set free, both as Matilde's mother who dies laughing, and as Ana, the "home wrecker," who thinks that sounds like a marvelous way to go. I sometimes think Scott — a local treasure if there ever was one — gets cast in some shows because directors see her in great roles, not because they see great roles in her. That's not to say she doesn't deliver in serious leading parts that call for lots of seriousness and crying. But Scott's capacity for real greatness is most evident when the challenges are physical and fun. Get this woman laughing or clowning or dancing lighter than air and she'll rip your goddamn guts out. Here she's cast as a classic "mysterious" femme fatale, but with a variety of subtle, deeply satisfying twists.  Her death (not a spoiler) is full of life, and hung all around with joy and agony.

I have a mixed relationship with The Clean House. I get tired of both its sense and its nonsense for long stretches. But the more I think about its individual parts, the more I find to recommend about the whole complicated dust bunny of a play — this morbid joke built on sixes not threes. So, I'm throwing caution away, embracing my messy feelings, and calling it a win for everybody involved. Well, everybody except for the poor guy snoozing on the front row. 

Or maybe he was just dead? 

Philip Ridley's Radiant Vermin is a comedy about a newlywed couple discovering the dream-home they've always wanted can be theirs, if they're willing to do what it takes. What it takes is both awful and potentially in the service of some grander, even more awful agenda. Think Whose Line Is It Anyway? meets American Psycho (but British), all rolled up in a gloriously ham-fisted metaphor for a related set of familiar urban plagues. 

Storytelling techniques eliminate the need for sets and costumes. Shocking events are shared directly with the audience via light narration and flashbacks, with three actors taking on all roles. Things come to a head in a climactic garden party from hell, when neighbors who've all recently moved into the almost mysteriously trendy area converge. With its terrific cast leading the way, Quark Theatre's creative team plays every note in this darkly comic aria perfectly, delivering surprise laughter and even more surprising flashes of tenderness.   
Michelle Gregory, Lena Wallace Black, and Chase Ring make up the tightest ensemble in town. They pull off an energetic balancing act that threatens to soar too far over the top, but stays just grounded enough for the human stakes to matter. 

What's the worst thing you ever did for security? Comfort? Luxury? Did you even know you were doing it? And who are the real rats? These are some of the questions at the core Radiant Vermin, a show that gets in its audience's face bit, while spoofing some contemporary British problems that sound awfully American.

Radiant Vermin is a kind of Macbeth for moderns exploring creature comforts, and how they help us manage guilt and other unpleasant feelings.  It asks us who the real rats are.


Radiant Vermin is at Theatre South through March 31. I cannot recommend it enough. More details are available here. 

"I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace — two are called a law firm — and that three or more become a Congress.” — John Adams opening remarks in 1776. The musical, not the year. 

Like the nation whose birth it celebrates, 1776 is an extraordinary creation — the most delightful musical stuffed inside the most contentious play, wrapped in an endlessly urgent history lesson more truthy than accurate. It's a miracle, of sorts, famous for containing the longest scene in any musical without singing, choreography, or a single note of music played. Also, like the nation it celebrates, 1776 is complicated, built on enough deception, prioritizing drama over all else, that it's probably a good thing to knock the dust off from time-to-time and re-evaluate.

Cecelia Wingate's known for staging monster musical extravaganzas. What surprised me most about her very fine production of 1776 for Theatre Memphis, was just how conventional it is, erring on the side of magnificent. The lush, 18th-Century costumes are so thoughtfully detailed they often say as much about characters as the actors wearing them. That's saying something given a mostly superb cast. Though it's hardly palatial in spirit, the gleaming, brightly-lit set works at cross purposes, making the emerging nation seem too solid and formidable — less the worn-out crazy quilt with no chance in hell of weathering the coming storm. We hear it's "hot as Hell," in Philly, but take away the fans and complaints, and not much else in the breezy space says so.

It seems critics can't write about 1776 these days without some comparison to its kindred Tony-winner, Hamilton. I won't do that, but will say that between the hotly-paced Hamilton and a faintly iconoclastic interpretation of 1776 staged by The Encores! in 2016, one might hope for a touch more currency and self-awareness.

I'm almost afraid to give John Maness another glowing review. People will think he's paying me. But Maness's growing reputation as a dramatic actor who vanishes into his characters, obscures the fact that he's always been a solid musical theater performer as well. When Hedwig and the Angry Inch finally made it to town, Maness took the title role and rocked it just right. Now older, and more furrowed, his John Adams is a firebrand, full of righteous fury — always just at the edge of caning somebody on the floor of Congress.

Adams' character — a blending of John and his second cousin Samuel — doesn't quite mesh with reality. Though he had adversaries in Congress (even among allies), the man from Massachusetts wasn't universally regarded as obnoxious and disliked until after his presidency. Independence was the popular choice in the year of our show, and Adams was a tireless, vocal advocate.  Maness translates the alleged obnoxiousness into impatience at the edge of impertinence, and, excepting turns by Lydia Hart's's Mrs. Jefferson and Kevar Maffitt's Rutledge, he's seldom the second most interesting thing on stage.

Wingate's 1776 — a story about uniting the American colonies to declare of independence — struggles a bit with antagonists. Though he has been absent from Memphis for a long time, I know Brian Helm to be a fine and committed actor who relishes physically demanding roles. As Dickinson, a patriot whose intellectual reservations are amplified for dramatic purposes, he's the face of opposition. As one of the show's two principal "bad guys," he makes the case for wealth, tradition, and security over independence, leading Congress's anachronistic right-wing through the song "Cool, Considerate Men."

1776 landed on Broadway in 1969, a year after the infamous televised debates between arch-liberal Gore Vidal and arch-Conservative William F. Buckley Jr. On the page, Dickinson's gravitas mixed with cool certitude calls to mind the latter, who once dryly claimed, "It's terribly hard to stand carrying the weight of what I know." Helm's more scheming and excitable interpretation is more reminiscent of radio pundits like the late Mike Fleming, or a stiffer Rush Limbaugh. It makes the debate at the heart of act one less dynamic, and more shrill than it might be, as he seeks to match and top Maness's Adams rather than own him. This less poised depiction yields the floor, and principle antagonist role, to the reliably excellent Maffitt,  who delivers a cooler, more self-sufficient vision of Rutledge, the pro-slavery representative from South Carolina whose eerie, musical lesson in triangle trade makes a case that implicates every man in congress with the shameful practice. But does it also implicate itself? The script? 50-years worth of audiences, swept up in light nationalism? 

Theater Memphis serves up charming, humanizing portraits of America's best known founding fathers like Ben Franklin (Jimbo Lattimore) and Thomas Jefferson (Sean Carter). It does a somewhat better job bringing in lesser known figures like George Washington's messenger and a hard-drinking representative from Rhode Island who never met an idea too dangerous to talk about. As Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson, Edna Dinwiddie and Hart show two distinctly different ways to keep the home fires burning while the menfolk, "Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve."  The ensemble is built on solid foundations, and the voices collected for this production blend gorgeously, lifted by a tight orchestra.

 When it comes to critique, it's sometimes said that "everything before the 'but,' is BS." Can't disagree. I'm sure regular readers sense a "but" coming and, of course, they're right. See, 1776 makes a virtue of compromise at any cost, and as we know, the cost was human bondage and chattel slavery. As considerate as the script may be, sounding bells over the struggle for common ground feels off in 2019, as the last campaigns of the American Civil War play themselves out in proxy battles over Confederate iconography. Where some may see currency in these debates, I tend to see continuity, and even affirmation. But — and you knew it was coming — I don't think we need to put 1776 away just yet. If anything, it's probably not revived as often as it might be. But (yes, another one) we know how the story ends. Furthermore, we know where it goes after it ends and where it goes wrong. So maybe in 2019, it might be more interesting to strip 1776 down than to dress it up.

To summarize: Great voices? Check. Good acting? Check. Profound wig game? Double check. Given Theatre Memphis's reputation for razzle dazzle, Ellen Inghram's choreography is uncharacteristically subdued. The acting is top-shelf, from Bill Andrews as John Hancock to Helm, whose questionable use shouldn't be mistaken for bad work. Songs stuck in my head for decades never sounded better, from the lusty, "He Plays the Violin," to the mournful "Mama Look Sharp." Maybe, like the nation whose birth 1776 celebrates, I was just expecting too much.