SpeakEasy Stage

Rock & Roll Genocide: “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”

In what continues a very youthful streak for the SpeakEasy stage, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson pulls together a large, young cast into an oddly satirical rock musical on the life and times of our notorious 7th president Andrew Jackson. The show transforms the history and cutthroat politics of a nation just barely holding onto its nationhood into a sort of rock & roll biopic about a president who, at least here, made being president cool…and a little bit evil. Andrew Jackson is of course famous for founding the modern Democratic party (just not as we know it today), fighting for democracy and popular representation in Washington…and the mass relocation of Native Americans. The Trail of Tears is perhaps his greatest legacy.

The show is very much in the vein of the A.R.T’s recent Futurity in that it tries pretty hard to be cool and re-position the musical inside the genre of popular music. It’s a wild piece of performance, demonstrating both the theatrics of over-the-top satire and rock opera. So much that for the first few scenes I worried about what I had gotten myself into, but the wit of its book (Alex Timbers), its rapid pace and energy, and the charisma exuded Gus Curry as Old Hickory eventually won me over. The anachronistic jokes, historical caricatures, and gayification of James Monroe’s cabinet are hilarious, and the cast pulls off a pretty damn good slapstick fight scene.

Satirically, the show is rather nebulous and I’m not sure what slice of contemporary politics it’s supposed to engage with, although there’s clearly a parallel between the populist rock stardom of Jackson and our soon to be re-inaugurated president–at least back when he entered his current term. Or perhaps the parallel is with Romney’s affected populism. In the end, the show is certainly a presidential story like no other that, in this time of political uncertainty and antagonism, offers up a cracked-out look at a young nation still pushing violently onto a frontier far from Washington.

speakeasy stage boston bloody bloody andrew jackson

Gus Curry, Joshua Pemberton, Ben Rosenblatt, Tom Hamlett, and Gus Halsaver (Craig Bailey / Perspective Photo)

Two Talking Plays: SpeakEasy’s “Motherfucker with the Hat” and the Huntington’s “Good People”

If there are two hot tickets in Boston right now, they’re SpeakEasy’s The Motherfucker with the Hat and the Huntington’s Good People. That said, I think SpeakEasy’s show is vastly superior in just about every way that matters, particularly in how it balances its comedy with its seriousness. But really these plays are a lot alike and since they’re both young and come by way of New York, it feels like we’re in the middle of a trend in playwriting, production, and audience appeal.

I’m calling these shows talking plays because their narratives are really just vehicles for monologues that convey (melo-)drama and one-liners there to lighten the load of that drama. The settings of Good People are mostly places where people sit and talk; kitchen tables, bingo games, and a meeting with the boss at work. SpeakEasy’s show, centered largely around former addicts trying to live in sobriety, comes out of a culture of talk; the meetings, confessions, apologies, and storytelling of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In these two productions, the talk is well-written and spoken and keeps to natural rhythm and diction and, thankfully, it rarely reverts to the stale, overwrought, and over-thought “theatrical” dialogue symptomatic of many new plays. But action is minimal. Good People is mostly about a woman talking about looking for a job and going to a party she really doesn’t belong at. The Motherfucker with the Hat takes us along the emotional course of a relationship, but most of what happens, happens because back-story is revealed: narratively, when that back story is revealed to the characters, and dramatically, when that back story is revealed to us.

speakeasy the motherfucker with the hat

Jaime Carrillo, Maurice Emmanuel Parent, and Alejandro Simoes in SpeakEasy’s “The Motherfucker with the Hat” (Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo)

What’s most noticeably absent in all of this is character development. Or perhaps it’s there, it’s just “development” in the truest sense of the word–an unwrapping of that which has been previously concealed. The characters of these plays are static figures, who don’t change across a narrative arc, but are rather altered in how they’re perceived by an audience through bits of back-story the playwright pulls from his sleeve. It’s all so we can go “Ohhhhhhhhh, so those are his true colors.” This feels a little cheap, like the device of a mediocre TV writer looking for the easiest way to woo an audience.

Is this all bad? Not at all. For The Motherfucker with the Hat, I think it works. The characters are strong and well acted, particularly Maurice Parent as Ralph, the manipulative and bromantic AA sponsor of our protagonist, and Alejandro Simoes as Cousin Julio, his fey and protective cousin. Playwright Stephen Guirgis has a knack for introducing characters as light comic relief, then making them real by slowly incorporating them into the drama: a shrewish wife becomes a victim of infidelity, a homosexual caricature becomes an endearing friend and protector, and a bible-quoting AA sponsor becomes a kind of wolf in sheep’s clothing. All this transformation is accomplished by revealing back-story, sometimes through elongated monologues (that start to get a little tedious towards the end), that move perceptions and dramatic alliances around.

Much of the drama of this play about love, relationships, infidelity, and sobriety comes down to misunderstandings where characters lack the information to properly understand each other, and perhaps the will as well. In the audience, we’re very much in the same position, as our perceptions are shifted and toyed with. What’s clever, at least in concept, is that Guirgis lets every one of his characters take a shot at figuring one another out, reducing them to a character-attacking monologue. I’m under the impression that we’re supposed to walk away having learned a lesson along the lines of “people are more than one thing.” A little soft and trifling, yes, but the play ends on soft and elegant, tear-jerking note that I can’t help but be a sucker for.

With Boston’s inferiority complex, it’s no surprise everyone goes nuts for anything having to do with the city. The Huntington’s current production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, with its Southie setting, is no exception. While I appreciate the play’s specks of authenticity–the talk of dental work and credit card debt and dollar stores–I’m having a hard time getting excited over it. The cast is solid, but the comedy is stale, lacking in wit and the foul-mouthed raucousness that makes SpeakEasy’s production so great. Although the play “gets” Southie at some level, many of the lines are tame enough for network sitcoms. You might hear better ones just hanging out at a bar, which raises an interesting point. Both of these plays depend on an anthropological angle; the comi-drama of the way other people, basically poorer people (at least compared to those probably at the theater), live. Both playwrights have done well here, endowing their characters with enough warmth and humanity to avoid condescension. Well, except for two significant, but ancillary characters in Good People, who are really just there to drop jokes.

Nancy E. Carroll, Karen MacDonald, and Johanna Day in the Huntington’s “Good People” (T. Charles Erickson)

Good People starts simply enough; Margie (Johanna Day) loses her job at the dollar store and tries to find a new one by looking up her old high school boyfriend Mike (Michael Laurence), who’s now a successful and wealthy doctor. He kind of invites her to a party, where she plans to ask his well to do friends if they have anything for her. And here the play shifts into murkier territory, where a huge portion of it is just talk about Margie going to this party. With the whole story hinging on such a simple action, the play is almost like something minimalist squeezed into a traditionally scripted shell.

I won’t give away the rather ambiguous ending, but it turns out Margie, and maybe the whole neighborhood of Southie, has their secrets. And Margie’s garrulousness with Mike is really just a way to push his buttons, drawing out bits of back-story from their childhoods together, and showing us a different man than we thought we met. And eventually, she pushes those buttons so hard, that a whole other Mike is revealed–just as we eventually saw Ralph in SpeakEasy’s production in the light of his indiscretions.

Good People dishes out its political message with a heavy hand. It would be hard to miss its counter-argument against conservative doctrines of choice and will and getting what you deserve in a free market. Of course, this is less a political argument, than a choir-preaching fictional confirmation, there to please the folks who already agree with Lindsay-Abaire. There are some interesting little components and parallels, but they clearly aren’t what Good People is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be funny and compelling, but it just didn’t reach me like The Motherfucker did.

Still like those old time musicals: SpeakEasy’s “The Drowsy Chaperone”

Part satire and part testament to the magic and escapism of classic musicals, SpeakEasy’s production of The Drowsy Chaperone is a perfectly executed comic romp through what is both musical theater’s golden age and awkward adolescence. It’s difficult to leave the BCA not thoroughly loving the show, just as our narrator Man in Chair (Will McGarrahan) loves classic musicals for all their flaws and nonsensical plot points. Yes, The Drowsy Chaperone is a witty bit of satire, but mostly it activates the same endorphins as the 1920s musicals it satirizes do. And for those that will take the anemic plots and gratuitous song and dance routines of the classics over the talk-singing and pop fusion of today’s musicals, this is for you. The Drowsy Chaperone serves up all the lovable trappings–tap dancing routines, stock characters, sight gags–of the classics with some well crafted satirical wit from its meta show inside a show structure.

Our narrator Man in Chair (Will McGarrahan) begins by telling us from a darkened stage that he hates theater and wistfully imagines what it must have been like to go to a show and get the latest Gershwin. The lights come up revealing a nervous misanthropic musical theater nut (certainly more geek than queen), closeted away in a drab apartment with his mother’s records. Even if his tastes may run towards Gershwin, he chooses to play The Drowsy Chaperone for us, a little farce of a musical that collects a Latin Lothario, a shiny-suited producer with a screechy-voiced aspiring star in tow, an aloof butler, two corny mobsters posing as pastry chefs putting the squeeze on the producer, a Black Amelia Earhart, a flaky old dame, a young love-struck groom whose father has “oil interests,” the object of his affections, a vain Broadway star looking to settle down as a bride, her drunken chaperone, and their wedding planner in a big old house for the wedding of the young couple.

SpeakEasy Stage The Drowsy Chaperone

McCaela Donovan (center, as Broadway star Janet Van de Graff) and members of the company perform "Toledo Surprise" (Stratton McCrady)

With the record spinning, in a literalization of his imagination, the Man in Chair’s kitchen parts (thanks to designer Jenna McFarland Lord), revealing an appropriately campy set for this musical inside a play. With this wedding’s guest list, imagine the plot that ensues! McGarrahan, with an endearing and hilarious quirkiness watches ecstatically, his character sometimes offering us clever mockumentary like bits of backstage trivia to buttress the comedy that’s already there, in the wacky plot, wackier lyrics, some brilliantly rendered tap routines, and the pastry puns that soften the mobsters’ threats on the producer’s well being.

SpeakEasy has given us a well balanced production of this show that is both a celebration of musical theater and a mocking meta-satire of it. It mixes what looks to me like pure revelry of the form and culture with musical pastiche and gimmicks, like the action skipping when the record does…or the snarky number from another musical that goes “what is it about the Asians that fascinates us Caucasians” our Man in Chair accidentally plays when he puts on the wrong record.

Perhaps it’s this nameless Man in Chair character that’s the most delicate balancing act. For as much as he’s a guy with an endearing passion for musicals and capable of great joy while watching them, he’s a lonely shut-in who doesn’t even pick up his phone, much less go to the theater.

Speakeasy’s The Drowsy Chaperone runs through June 19th at the BCA. Tickets @ bostontheatrescene.com for about $50.

SpeakEasy Stage Drowsy Chaperone

Karen MacDonald (as The Chaperone) and Thomas Derrah (as Aldolpho) (Stratton McCrady)

Bros Before Hos: SpeakEasy’s “Reasons to Be Pretty”

For the first 15 minutes of Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty (in a production by SpeakEasy at the BCA through April 2nd) we wait to find out what Greg (Andy Macdonald) said over at his buddy Kent’s (Burt Grinstead) place to piss his girlfriend Steph (Angie Jepson) off so much that she starts tearing the pages out of one of his characteristic American Romantic classics. I’m not sure that we ever find out exactly what he said, but it’s something along the lines of “my girl’s face is regular (compared to that of Crystal, the new hottie at work), but I still love her.” Although I think LaBute’s script (as well as much of the production besides the costumes, especially Steph’s paunch flaunting outfits) doesn’t sync very accurately with the blue collar characters (Steph works at a Supercuts and everyone else at a grocery store warehouse), his dialogue is well and meticulously crafted–just for other people. Steph and Greg escalate the argument, as Greg jumps around on the truth and avoids coming clean until Steph begins to tear apart their small bedroom that looks a little too much like a faux dorm room dreamed up by a Target merchandizer for the back to school shopping season.

They break-up, which sets the rest of play in motion. Greg is heart-broken, but he’s already something of a broken man; a college drop-out stuck in a dead-end third shift job as a warehouse laborer. Steph drops in and out of the rest of the play, but their prospects never seem too hot and after watching the fight of the first scene, most audiences will want someone better for Greg anyway. The play re-orients itself in the warehouse break room where Kent, expecting that Greg will abide the bro code of silence, discloses that he’s cheating on his security guard wife Carly (Danielle Muehlen) with Crystal, the new office girl whom we never meet and who already got Greg in so much trouble just from talk. Carly, initially cold towards Greg, is oblivious to her husband’s infidelity, only slowly developing a feeling in the pit of her stomach.

SpeakEasy Reasons to Be Pretty

Andy Macdonald (as Greg) and Burt Grinstead (as Kent) (Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo)

Eventually Greg realizes Kent isn’t a very good friend after all, Carly wakes up and smells the other woman’s perfume, and Greg and Steph are finally able to have a conversation knowing that they’ve more or less moved on. The trouble is we never really get much of an initial state for these characters to move on from. We never see what Greg and Steph were like together and we don’t imagine that they could’ve been that great given their volatile break-up. We know Kent is an asshole long before he starts showing Greg nude pics of Crystal on his phone. We know that Greg and Kent don’t have much in common other than the same shift at work. And we know Carly and Kent’s marriage isn’t exactly a love story of the ages. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but the relationships could have been a lot more interesting and realistic. What if Carly drunk dialed Greg with a booty call? What if Carly took Kent back after discovering his trespasses? Even if there isn’t a happy ending for these couples, they still strikes me as pretty cut and dry. Which relationships, especially the interesting ones, never are.

As usual, SpeakEasy offers up a solid production despite the flaws of the text. I would’ve liked to have seen more grittiness in the male parts, particularly in the climactic fight scene that was styled with slapstick. The girls were better, Angie Jepson giving Steph her sassy insecurity and Danielle Muehlen portraying Carly with a dim-witted confidence that only comes with the ephemeral privilege of beauty. And I could’ve gone without Rick Brenner’s cheesy soundscape scene change interludes that attempted to pick up on the industrial feel of Eric Levenson’s warehouse shelving backed set and Jeff Adelberg’s lighting. They were like an electronic version of Stomp, trying to capture the rhythm of the the warehouse mixed with the recording from Steph’s answering machine.

SpeakEasy’s production of Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty runs through April 2nd at the BCA (527 Tremont). Tickets go for $50, $25 if under 25, and $14 student rush at BostonTheatrScene.com.

Baker in Boston: The Huntington’s “Circle Mirror Transformation” and SpeakEasy’s “Body Awareness”

The local press has been buzzing with news of Annie Baker, playwriting’s hot new thing, at least around here, with a three play festival (it’s not a trilogy) split between the Huntington, SpeakEasy, and Company One at the BCA through November 20th. I’ve caught the Huntington’s Circle Mirror Transformation and SpeakEasy’s Body Awareness, but not Company One’s production of The Aliens. (I’m not Larry Stark, you know.) This is unfortunate because, from what I’ve read, it seems to be the one of the three plays that pushes Baker’s trademark awkwardness and silent conversational ruts to the greatest extreme. Moreover, it received the most intimate staging in one of the BCA’s rehearsal halls. With the smallest cast and being set behind a coffee shop, out by the dumpster, the play, I’m assuming, demands the greatest level of physical intimacy of the three.

But Baker’s precisely scripted inarticulateness seems best served with a certain level of intimacy, notable missing from the Huntington production. Some might call Baker one of great new voices in theater, strange, because her language is not new, but rather familiar and mundane; so quotidian in its diction, stilted rhythm, and content that it strikes one as belonging not to a stage or a script, but to a voicemail, cocktail party, or the next cubical. When writing she actually reads lines into Garage Band on her Mac, playing them back to herself to ensure the authenticity of her characters’ tongue-tied speech patterns.

The three plays are set in the fictional town of Shirley, VT, the nom de guerre of Baker’s own hometown, Amherst, MA–the Brewer to her Reading, PA. Although Shirley possesses a quirky and basically irrelevant history described in the programs (it’s host of the Vermont Gourd Festival, was named for Lord Henry Shirley who tried to exterminate the Native American population with smallpox, boasts a small community of Cambodian refugees, was once a haven for nudists, etc.), it is by no means a Yoknapatawpha County.

The plays don’t overlap in covering their three very different slices of Shirley society. Actually, Baker (from reading her quotes) only continues to set plays there by default, succumbing to an internal temptation that probably has less to do with some far-reaching authorial intent and more with the fact that all these plays contain substantial autobiographical content–as is to be expected from a young playwright like Baker. Though, not so much, and not in such a way that anyone has to sit around with a cipher of her Amherst childhood. Baker’s too smart and not indulgent enough for that.

“Circle Mirror Transformation” takes on the intermittent structure of the syllabus of the under-enrolled community center acting class it’s set in, giving us a series of short scenes of acting games, bathroom breaks, and awkward pre- and post-class banter (sometimes it sounds like an ESL class for Shirley’s Cambodian refugees) that fade to black. I suspect some of the play’s popularity is owed to the fact that it is an inside play, poking fun at acting class exercises performed at the expense of actual acting, as hoodied teenager Lauren (an A+ performance by Maria Polizzano) observes.

Marie Polizzano (Lauren), Michael Hammond (James), Jeremiah Kissel (Schultz), Besty Aidem (Marty), and Nadia Bowers (Theresa) in the Huntington's "Circle Mirror Transformation," (T. Charles Erickson)

For a lot of non-theater people, the surface comedy of Baker’s theater game parodies might work better in a five-minute SNL sketch than a two hour play, but, as in an acting class where these games are meant to build relationships, cohesion, and emotional dexterity, these games are the basic narrative devices that drive the play. Without expressive or even very descriptive language and dramatic action (that doesn’t happen off-stage, as it usually does here), these histrionic trust falls tease much of the emotional content.

Baker’s theater games probably work out better for us than for the students. The only one who’s really set on improving her acting is Lauren, the taciturn Ally-Sheedy-in-The-Breakfast-Club-type in the back of the room, who’s looking to be cast in her high school’s production of West Side Story. Awkward divorcée Schultz (played gawkily Jeremiah Kissel, but gawky is a good thing here) is there to fill his emptiness and get out of his condo for a night, sexy NYC emigré Theresa (Nadia Bowers) has worked as an actress, but has given the vocation up to study acupuncture and Rolfing, and James (Michael Hammond) is only there because his granola-vore wife Marty (Betsy Aidem) is teaching it.

The class would lose its critical mass if one student were to skip or drop it, but we get the picture everyone here doesn’t have much else going on. Schultz is alone and smitten with his classmate Theresa, who’s getting over her NYC ex-boyfriend, Lauren obviously isn’t one of the popular kids, choosing to spend her evenings here rather than at the malt shop or something, James’ daughter won’t return his calls and, it turns out, his and Marty’s marriage isn’t exactly rock solid. Even though few of the play’s major dramatic events occur on-stage and during class time, they do happen around the class. At least two critics have pointed out the similarity with Chekov.

Jeremiah Kissel (Schultz), Marie Polizzano (Lauren), Betsy Aidem (Marty), Michael Hammond (James), and Nadia Bowers (Theresa) in the Huntington Theatre Company production of Annie Bakerís CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Now ñ November 14 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.

Jeremiah Kissel (as Schultz), Marie Polizzano (as Lauren), Betsy Aidem (as Marty), Michael Hammond (as James), and Nadia Bowers (as Theresa) (T. Charles Erickson)

The play strives for a 21st century realism with its language, plain Jane set (by Christine Todesco) and costumes of wrinkled khakis, hiking boots, and yoga pants (by Bobby Frederick Tilley II) (both did sets & costumes for all three plays), which can leave one a little bored, desiring a little more drama or comedy, beyond the theater game parodies. The play does chronicle a brief extracurricular relationship between Schultz and Theresa, but we know they’re not much a match from the beginning; she’s either out of his league or just rebounding. And the characters do source material from their own pasts to act out, or at least do some kind of exercise with. The juicy stuff doesn’t really come until the end, that’s marked by Lauren’s opening up/coming-of-age and Maria Polizzano’s own praise worthy performance.

The characters of SpeakEasy’s Body Awareness don’t struggle as much with getting their words out. After all, they’re from Shirley’s ultra-progressive academic side of the tracks. Like Circle Mirror is structured upon a class syllabus, Body Awareness happens over something called Body Awareness Week, Shirley State’s re-branding of National Eating Disorder Week. The play begins with the week’s MC Phyllis (Adrianne Krstansky), a stammering psychology professor, giving the opening remarks and offering some of the week’s highlights, including a dance troupe of Palestinian refugees, to an audience of Shirley Staters. Dancing Palestinian refugees is not, however, the kind of body awareness Baker is concerned with.

Most of the play’s action happens within the cosy, bookishly sophisticated (in spirit, not in value) home of Phyllis, her girlfriend Joyce (Paula Plum), a high school cultural studies (read: not social studies), and her too-old-to-be-living-at-home son Jared from her heterosexual days (Gregory Pember), an amateur lexicographer with a penchant for the OED and phone sex lines, who may or may not have Asperger’s.

A mother (Paula Plum) confronts her son (Gregory Pember) about some questionable credit card charges in a scene from the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of BODY AWARENESS, running October 22 through November 20, 2010, at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St. Boston. BODY AWARENESS is one of the three plays in the Shirley, VT Plays Festival, a landmark local collaboration among SpeakEasy Stage Company, Company One and the Huntington Theatre Company to produce the work of breakout playwright and Amherst, MA native Annie Baker. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600 or www.BostonTheaterScene.com. Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo.

Paula Plum (as Joyce) and Gregory Pember (as Jared) (Craig Bailey)

The narrative is a little more complete here than in Circle Mirror, relying less on character backstory and off-stage action, and the characters are more enhanced–Phyllis with her militant political correctness and Jared’s nervous ticks and attachment to an electric toothbrush–sometimes, it feels, the play is reaching a borderline state of parody, so that Baker can communicate her feminist thesis, that strikes me as a little simple and obvious. But, even when the characters appear to be acting as comic parodies (they are really funny), they don’t lose the realism and vulnerability that Baker achieved so well with the characters in Circle Mirror.

Although Jared has his problems, as a half-formed adult with an overly sensitive mother, and Phyllis really goes after him with a diagnosis of Asperger’s, the play begins in some kind of post-counter-culture progressive domestic bliss. (It’s clear that Baker doesn’t put much value in traditional family units.) The arrival of photographer Frank Bonitatibus (Richard Snee), brought in for a student center exhibition of his female nudes as part of Body Awareness Week, spices things up. Phyllis must have forgotten to Google his name after one of the Body Awareness Week planning committee meetings and agreeing to have him as a house guest, because she immediately finds him and his art offensive and misogynist.

So offensive, in fact, that to any reasonable audience, her reaction is disproportionate, rude, and irrational. Her own body issues, having to do with her own body and her possessiveness over Joyce’s (Joyce is the one doing all the cooking), who flirts with and wants to pose for Frank, become transparent. And her academic cant, Deepak Chopra quotes, and even her dog eared copy of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom become a thin surface membrane of a defence against her own unresolved issues which are, if Baker’s parallel serves us correctly, as deep and clinical as Jared’s–the 21-year-old virgin who works at McDonald’s and throws around the word “retard” enough that it would be offensive if he wasn’t, well…

Frank is an odd foil, with his new-age spirituality and hippy chill out man attitude, to this firecracker feminist. (Between the two plays, Frank is Baker’s only grown-up hippy who hasn’t at least partially grown up.) We’re not sure whose side we’re supposed be on…probably neither since Frank is the most parodic and Phyllis’ lines, hands down, earn the most eye rolls. It’s at least clear that Phyllis’ brand of cultural politics is bad and her resentment misplaced, but we all know that. Baker’s take on Shirley academe just isn’t that interesting, but aside from the this core “polemic,” the play is really good and really funny. Perhaps it’s just trying to take itself too seriously?

Adrianne Krstansky (as Phyllis) & Paula Plum (as Joyce) (Craig Bailey)

Adrianne Krstansky (as Phyllis) & Paula Plum (as Joyce) (Craig Bailey)

Todesco’s set has a few holes in it, but features a gorgeous installation of mahogany-colored panelling around the entire stage. Pember is thoroughly in character in every frustrated glare, nervous tick, and eccentric gesture; from shouting matches with his mom, to reading reading his condensed OED with a magnifying glass. Joyce comes naturally to Paula Plum–with great comic effect and chemistry with Snee–giving us a woman who’s experienced some trauma and some tragedy and has something suppressed inside herself that she wants to free, without the needs or wishes of others getting in the way for once.

Krstansky doesn’t provide Phyllis with very much vulnerability (besides that which we read into the character), nor are whatever emotional changes she undergoes at the end of the play (she does seem to come around a bit) made clear to us. While her actions are decidedly different, the process of arriving at those actions isn’t there. Krstansky does have an excellent and precise handle on Phyllis’ inarticulate and not-so-sophisticated language and delivers some beautifully clumsy and sincere monologues to her Body Awareness Week audience. As much as I like this play and as much as I love Krstansky (who’s actually really well cast for the role), the character itself feels incomplete.

The play begins as a very modern family portrait with Frank on the outside and ends in the same way, with Frank actually taking their family portrait–something he wouldn’t usually do, since Jared is a man and everybody has their clothes on. They’ve made up, brought together by some trouble Jared got himself into and, in a very dramatic and poetic gesture, are performing Shabbat with grape juice (no booze in this house) and an excerpt from Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, since Joyce doesn’t remember much from Hebrew school.

The Huntington’s Circle Mirror Transformation runs through November 14th at the BCA’s Wimberly Theatre; tickets are $25-$65. SpeakEasy’s Body Awareness runs through November 20th at the BCA’s Roberts Studio Theatre; tickets are $30-55.

A Trailer Park Pulls into the South End

We tend to think of The Theatre, almost any theater, as a progressive form that, because it’s artsy or “elite,” is going to be somehow ahead of the curve of mass media. But, I’m always amazed how slow on the uptake Broadway, or at least its regional exports, can be. SpeakEasy’s current show, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, despite its genre- and self-aware title, revels in the Blue Collar Comedy Tour humor that most theater goers would roll their eyes at, if it didn’t happen to be set to music at the BCA. As far as comic explorations into these ubiquitous semi-mobile suburban ghettos, the Canadian television mockumentary Trailer Park Boys is much more interesting, compelling, human, and, a lot funnier.

This white trash comi-drama sports a few clever production and plot elements, but never uses them to their full potential. A Greek chorus trio of Armadillo Acres’ leading ladies (Kerry A. Dowling, Santina Umbach, and Mary Callanan) lead us through the marriage crisis of Norbert and Jeannie Garstecki (David Benoit and Leigh Barrett), but the narrative device is used more for comic deviations and asides than anything else. Jenna McFarland Lord’s set of propane tanks, satellite TV dishes, pink flamingos, and lattice work includes a few massive plastic palms that frame the entire stage in lawn ornament kitsch, signaling that the lowbrow extends beyond the limits of Armadillo Acres (the show’s trailer park setting) and back into the musical itself, with disco numbers, set piece gags, and a protracted joke on flan. A very Shakespearean storm sets the plot’s resolution in motion (unfortunately the plot doesn’t rise to the metaphor), and a trailer’s wall rises to reveal its interior–kind of like the set-based anthropological study in Godard’s Tout va Bien. But, I’m probably pushing it there.

Jokes about husbands on death row, Mazola suntans, ditsy blondes, strippers, and tall boys come off lukewarm, as you squint to read the writing on Mary Callanan’s t-shirts. Duke (Grant MacDermont), a marker-sniffing psycho (though he proves to be relatively harmless) after his on-the-run stripper girlfriend (Caitlin Crosbie Doonan) makes light of real addiction. Take the music out of this musical, and it just might work with the same Jeff Foxworthy crowd it admonishes, as much as it tries to humor its liberal audience that’s used to living a world away from the likes of Armadillo Acres. We do get some solid local vocal talent pushing some catchy well choreographed routines, just not the social satire or drama I could see coming out of the subject matter. Dowling, Umbach, and Callanan all developed their characters well (even if they are cartoonish) and Umbach (just a Junior at Boston Conservatory) holds her own with the show’s more established talent.

The SpeakEasy Stage’s The Great American Trailer Park Musical @ the BCA through May 30th. Tickets: $30-$54.

Mary Callanan, Santina Umbach, and Kerry A. Dowling (Mark L. Saperstein)

Caitlin Crosbie Doonan and David Benoit (Mark L. Saperstein)

Add It Up: SpeakEasy’s “Adding Machine”

Never have I been afraid of numbers. I loved addition and algebra and equations: tidy rows of familiar digits, concrete answers. And then I saw Adding Machine: A Musical by Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith, based on the 1923 play Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, and I too began to fear numbers and their inhuman coldness.

Adding Machine tells the story of Mr. Zero (Brendan McNab), who after 25 years of adding numbers as an accountant, loses his job to the new-fangled adding machine. The musical opens on a black curtain with bars of blood red lights with numbers glowing like scratch marks in the background. The scenery is sparse, echoing the dutiful dullness of Mr. Zero’s life.

Mr. Zero walks through the opening scenes in a cloud of passive dismay. In the opening melody Something to Be Proud Of, Mrs. Zero (Amelia Broome) half sings and half yells her protests that her friends see plays and movies, while she cooks and cleans and never gets to go out. As she sings, Mr. Zero drags his feet into the bedroom, slowly gets undressed, and crawls into bed. As her voice screeches out her anger, he rubs his eyes, gets back out of bed, returns his suspenders to his shoulders, tightens his tie, and kisses his wife gently on the cheek. Everything about Mrs. Zero’s performance expounds her rage, as everything about Mr. Zero’s slouching mannerisms express his failure and resignation.

Numbers form the fundamental component of the play: from the characters names, to Mr. Zero’s profession, to the chorus of songs. In Harmony Not Discord, the rhythm of the song builds upon reading the totals off of receipts, slapping the papers to the table, and scratching the pen across the accounting ledger. This creates a halting and mechanical chorus as the noise slowly builds to music. This is then overlaid with the muttering thoughts of the accountants, stray hints such as “I want a beer” and “women make me sick.” The song gains further complexity through Mr. Zero’s fantasies of the company picnic, accidental hand brushes, asking for a promotion to the front office, and big screen kisses. All of these hint at the bleakness of their lives are revealed through a chorus of numbers.

(From left) Bob De Vivo, Leigh Barrett, Brendan McNab, Liz Hayes, David Krinitt, and Cheryl McMahon (Mark L. Saperstein)

That one song fully expresses the tedium of 25 years of adding numbers, and so, the audience shares in Mr. Zero’s meek excitement about asking for a promotion and jarring disappointment when he learns that a machine can do his job more cheaply, efficiently, and reliably.

So, when Mr. Zero is standing on trial and recanting his 25 years, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, 1 week of vacation litany that drove him to madness. He clasps his hands the wooden rail and counts to twelve with such calculated anger that his voice echoes in the room and the other actors shirk away from the sound.

Adding Machine, despite the raw anger and disappointment, is comedic in a way that is unexpected and uncomfortably true. Though Mr. Zero spends most of the play zombie-like and confused, at times even jumping a little when the other characters address him, he is shockingly happy in prison. The guard hands him a plate of ham and eggs and he accepts it and eats with such raw joy that the audience can only laugh.

In prison, Mr. Zero meets Shrdlu (John Bambery), who states that he cannot be an optimist, because he believes in God. His life also summarizes into a routine of numbers: 6 days of work and 3 masses on Sunday. For him, crime serves as a break from that routine. He expresses this in a gospel song, one part attrition and one part self-condemnation, with lyrics such as: “you will rot in the fires of hell for eternity,” sung in the joyous, clapping rhythm of gospel.

As the relative happiness both Shrdlu and Mr. Zero experience in jail wanes, and the surroundings again become familiar, the audience is transported to the Elysian Fields. Set designer Susan Zeeman Rogers uses billowy, white shrouds of fabric to create an afterlife that is stark, but tranquil. Even here, Mr. Zero soon becomes unhappy and chooses to return to a solitary room to enthusiastically play with his electrical nemesis, the adding machine.

Adding Machine, at its core, is jarring and mechanical and serves to reveal the quickly souring amusement of new experiences and the drawn-out tedium of daily existence. The lyric “In numbers, the mysteries of life can be revealed” is repeated throughout several songs. In that sense, the musical offers a portrayal of the world that is as black and white and uncaring as digits on a page. Whether using a pencil and ledger book or punching buttons on the adding machine the results for Mr. Zero will always be the same.

Brendan McNab, David Krinitt, and Bob DeVivo (Mark L. Saperstein)

Adding Machine runs from March 12th to April 10th, with evening performances Tuesday through Saturday and matinees on Saturdays and Sundays. Ticket prices are $30 to $54, with $14 student rush tickets available at the box office, one hour before the performance only. Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, (617) 933-8600. The SpeakEasy Theater Company.

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