Lewiston/Clarkston

B- (Lewiston C+/Clarkston B+)

These two separate but thematically related plays by Samuel D. Hunter (The Whale, Pocatello) are being presented together for the first time at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Each involves a descendant of Lewis and Clark trying to find meaning by retracing the steps of their forefathers. Both have a scene set on the Fourth of July. 

In the first play, Lewiston, we meet Alice (Kristin Griffith; Animal, Da), a crusty older woman who has sold off most of the ranch that had been in the family since 1850 and is barely hanging on. The few dollars she earns from her roadside fireworks stand are supplemented by the Walgreens earnings of her 50-ish closeted roommate Connor (Arnie Burton; The 39 Steps, Machinal). She is planning to sell her remaining land to the developers of Meriwether Terrace, the condo estate going up next door. The unexpected arrival of her estranged granddaughter Marnie (Leah Karpel; The Harvest, Pocatello), whom she has not seen in over 15 years, disrupts these plans. The abrasive, condescending Marnie has sold her share of an urban farm in Seattle and wants to buy what’s left of the family property. Marnie likes to play the tapes her late mother recorded during her hike following Lewis and Clark’s steps to the Pacific. The three reach some kind of equilibrium. I found the characters less fully developed than I would have liked and their motivations less than clear. 

For the second play, Clarkston, Hunter, affectionately nicknamed the Bard of Boise because all his plays are set in Idaho, actually moves the setting across the border to Washington State. Jake (the ever youthful Noah Robbins; Brighton Beach Memoirs, “Master Harold”…and the Boys), a distant descendant of William Clark, is a recent arrival in town who has taken a job as night stock boy in the local Costco where he is being shown the ropes by Chris (Edmund Donovan; The Snow Geese), an amiable employee also in his 20’s. After graduating Bennington with a major in post-colonial gender studies, the privileged Jake has suddenly left home to follow the historic trail to the Pacific. He has stopped short of his goal to earn some money before pushing on to the ocean. Jake tells Chris that he has recently been diagnosed with early Huntington’s disease which will probably kill him before he reaches 30 and shortly after his diagnosis was dumped by his boyfriend. It turns out that Chris is furtively gay and the two begin a relationship of sorts. We next meet Chris’s mother Trish (Heidi Armbruster; Time Stands Still, Disgraced), an allegedly recovering meth addict, from whom Chris has desperately been trying to cut the cord. The climactic confrontation between mother and son is gut-wrenching. Chris and Jake find a way to comfort each other, at least for the time being.

As usual, Hunter is very compassionate toward his characters, all of whom must struggle for freedom, whether economic or sexual or from addiction. His look at life in the new West is a bleak one.

For this production, Rattlestick has gutted the theater. Dane Laffrey (Once on This Island) has designed two different performance spaces. For the first play, the audience of 51 sits on three sides of the action with a fireworks stand on the fourth. For the second, seating is in two longer facing rows with Costco shelves on both short sides. The costumes by Jessica Wegener Shay (A Kid Like Jake) are appropriate to the characters. The actors are all superb and are so close that you can practically touch them, a proximity that magnifies your connection. Between plays, the audience shares a communal meal during the 45-minute break. You can order barbecued chicken or tofu or bring your own food.

At three hours 45 minutes, it’s a very long evening, especially sitting on barely padded metal chairs. I felt that the direction by Davis McCallum (Pocatello, The Whale) was more than a little sluggish. Each play is 90 minutes, a full evening by today’s standards. I would have preferred skipping Lewiston and just seeing Clarkston, which I felt was clearly the better play.

"Master Harold" ...and the Boys **** A

A superb revival of Athol Fugard’s 1992 masterpiece, directed by the playwright, is the latest offering at Signature Theatre. In this semi-autobiographical work, Fugard portrays a critical moment in the longtime relationship between Hally (Noah Robbins), a 17-year old Afrikaaner, and two black employees of his family’s business, the wise Sam (Leon Addison Brown) who has tried to be a mentor to Hally and the impulsive Willie (Sahr Ngaujah). Hally’s father, badly injured in WW II, is an alcoholic. His mother has been forced to be the family breadwinner, first by operating a boarding house, since then by running a tea room. The lonely, seething, embittered Hally has turned to Sam and Willie since early childhood for companionship. When a telephone call from his mother bodes ill for Hally’s future, he lashes out at the only people he feels any control over. There are lighter moments of Sam and Willie preparing for a dance contest and of Hally recollecting happier times, but the play builds inexorably to its lacerating climax. Every aspect of this production is top-notch. All three actors fully inhabit their roles, the realistic set by Christopher H. Barreca is excellent, Susan Hilferty’s costumes are fine and Fugard’s direction is, as one would expect, assured. I could quibble that the play’s metaphors are occasionally a bit heavy-handed, but it is indisputably a modern classic. I highly recommend seeing it. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes; no intermission.

Punk Rock *

When I saw two previous plays by Simon Stephens (Harper Regan [http://bobs-theater-blog.blogspot.com/2012/09/harper-regan.html] and Bluebird [http://bobs-theater-blog.blogspot.com/2011/08/bluebird.html}) at the Atlantic Theater, I thought his work was moderately interesting. When I saw his adaptation for the stage of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time [http://bobs-theater-blog.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-curious-incident-of-dog-in-night.html], I thought his work was brilliant. Therefore, I was looking forward to seeing the New York premiere of this 2009 drama, which received almost unanimous raves from the London critics. To say I was keenly disappointed with this MCC production would be a major understatement. Those who wish to avoid spoilers should stop reading here. One London critic described it as The History Boys meets Columbine, a comparison that is an insult to the former. Both plays are about the stress of English public (i.e. private) school students preparing for their A-levels, but all resemblance ends there. The teenagers in this play are all stereotypes: Bennett (Will Pullen), the bully; Cissy (Lilly Englert), his compliant girlfriend; Tanya (Annie Funke), overweight and usually overlooked; Chadwick (Noah Robbins), the bullied nerd; Lilly (Colby Minifie), the new girl with a dark secret; William (Douglas Smith), the troubled boy with a casual relationship to the truth who wants to date her; and Nicholas (Pico Alexander), the handsome jock that she prefers. The author puts them together in a pressure cooker and we wait to see who will explode. The final scene introduces the lone adult character, Dr. Harvey, played by David Greenspan, who, for once, manages to avoid his usual excesses. In a country where school shootings were not almost weekly occurrences, perhaps the play seemed more profound. For me it seemed merely extremely unpleasant and tedious. I will grant that the young cast is very good. The dialect coach Stephen Gabis got excellent results from them. Director Trip Cullman has not helped the play by tarting it up with the actors running around in animal masks between scenes. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes; no intermission (wise decision).

The Vandal ***

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Actor Hamish Linklater's (School for Lies, Seminar) debut effort as a playwright is now at The Flea Theater. Deirdre O'Connell (Circle Mirror Transformation, In the Wake) plays a withdrawn woman waiting for a bus at a stop in Kingston, NY near a hospital and a cemetery. Noah Robbins (The Twenty-Seventh Man) portrays a loquacious, philosophical 17-year old boy who pesters her until she agrees to buy him beer at a nearby liquor store. The somewhat menacing man who owns the liquor store, played by Zach Grenier (33 Variations, The Good Wife), claims to be the boy's father. In each of four scenes in which the characters exchange self-protective lies, the woman appears with either the boy or the man. There is a big reveal near the end that changes your understanding of all that has preceded. The actors are all top-notch and the dialog flows effortlessly. Clearly Linklater has a love of words and a talent for giving actors a chance to shine. A lengthy monologue in praise of Cool Ranch Doritos may not sound enticing, but it drew applause. The set by David M. Barber is modest, but efficient. Claudia Brown's costumes are fine. Jim Simpson's direction is smooth. The play seems a bit slight and the ending a bit flat. Nevertheless, Linklater shows a lot of promise and I look forward to seeing his next effort. Running time: 75 minutes.

The Twenty-Seventh Man **

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I might have liked Nathan Englander's adaptation of his own short story, now in previews at the Public Theater, better if I had not read the story when it first appeared.  In it, we meet four Jewish writers in a Russian jail. As part of Stalin's purge of Jewish intellectuals, 27 Yiddish writers have been rounded up and imprisoned. All are established authors except for one innocent young man who writes but has never been published. His inclusion, the apparent result of a bureaucratic error, must somehow be justified by the prison head. Yevgeny Zunser (Ron Rifkin) is a very old writer, once revered, now neglected. Moishe Bretzky (Daniel Oreskes) is an alcoholic sensualist who voluntarily gave up the chance to live abroad. Vasily Korinsky (Chip Zien) has been Stalin's loyal toady and thinks that will protect him. Pinchas Pelovits (Noah Robbins) is the young innocent whose greatest joy is to write something every day. Byron Jennings plays the "agent in charge" and Happy Anderson is a guard. The older writers bicker about their literary reputations while Pinchas, lacking pen and paper, commits to memory his final story and recites it for his cellmates. For me, the tale was far more powerful on the page than on the stage. Somehow the characters seemed less vivid in the flesh than they were in my imagination. The unevenness of the acting is a problem. Rifkin and Zien are very good, Oreskes and Jennings are alright, but Robbins is woefully inadequate in the difficult role of Pinchas. The simple sets by Michael McCarty are effective. With one exception, Katherine Roth's costumes are fine: Bretzky does not look nearly unkempt enough. Barry Edelstein's direction is unobtrusive. I suspect that the play will work better for those unfamiliar with the story. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes without intermission.