Boys and girls together in Reasons to Be Pretty.

Fans of gender parity should be thrilled about Neil LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty (at SpeakEasy Stage through April 2). The famously misanthropic playwright has written female monsters before, I suppose, but none that matches up with popular modes of femininity in quite the same way his long gallery of male assholes has mapped the culture's idea of masculinity.  Indeed,  here LaBute pulls off something like the hat trick he managed in Fat Pig - where he dared the audience to honestly disagree with the cruel standards of beauty his handsome hero's world espoused. In Reasons, his female lead - named "Steph" - throws tantrums so severe, and so comically cruel, that when a character describes her with the c-word, my guess is every guy in the audience silently agreed; and yet you could sense the women in the crowd - well, they didn't think she was so bad.  Not even when she hollered like a five-year-old and broke things; not even when she struck the supposed love of her life in the face.  And yet ten to one, the boyfriends who watched it all in horror went home and told their girlfriends that yeah, they could kind of sympathize with her. You have to hand it to him - when it comes to audience-baiting, with Reasons to Be Pretty, LaBute has penned another beaut.

Meanwhile, as a gay friend of mine put it, why not call this play Reasons to Be Gay?  (Or as another quipped, "Or how about a Ryan Landry version called Reasons to Be Pussy?") To those of us with little interest in women as sex objects, the play certainly operates as a kind of SOS from the edge of a gender war we've only observed from the sidelines (if with mounting horror).  Not that there's any way we could help; and not that the emergence of this kind of harridan has gone unremarked in pop culture; late-night comedy, slapstick frat movies, and, yes, the Gold Dust Orphan shows are filled to bursting with similar gorgons.  Yet these characters are almost inevitably caricatures - cartoons undercut with irony, a form of cultural venting with no real weight behind it.  LaBute is different; he serves his female trouble up straight, no chaser.

Gisele Bündchen: the problem

Of course you could argue that "Steph" (who's a hairdresser) has been driven to violence, emotional and otherwise, by our culture's obsession with body image - like so many LaBute characters before her.  Indeed, what sets off her first tirade is a phone call from BFF "Carly," who has overhead Steph's boyfriend Greg describe her face to his buds as "regular" - although in the following context: "Okay, Steph's face may just be regular, but I love her more than anything," or something like that.  In short, Greg's a nice guy who cares for his girl, but who also knows he hasn't bedded Gisele Bündchen (at right).  And he's okay with that.  (After all, Gisele is taken.)

Not for Steph the mature comforts of romantic realism, however. Indeed, no bull ever reacted to a red flag as she does to the word "regular." Soon poor Greg is out in the cold, clutching copies of Nathaniel Hawthorne to his chest (though a college drop-out, he's still a reader) as he shuffles back and forth to his dead-end job, which seems to consist of stacking big crates in even bigger cages.

Prowling those cages with him, however, is more female trouble - "Carly" is Greg's co-worker (she holds court in the lunchroom in a guard's uniform, just so we know which gender has policing authority these days). And with the arrival of lovely Carly and her horndog husband, "Kent" on the scene - both of them quite pretty, btw - Reasons to Be Pretty begins to move beyond the horizons of Fat Pig and The Shape of Things, and get a little deeper and more ambitious than the average LaBute play.

One reason to be pretty. Photos by Craig Bailey.

For this time around, the playwright has in mind the construction of a set of interlocking variations on his usual themes. In the past, LaBute has been content to reveal how our culture of beauty victimizes those who lack it - a woman is spurned, or a man is humiliated; then he rings down the curtain. But Carly and Greg struggle just as Greg and Steph did with the "problem" of beauty - even though both of them are, indeed, beautiful (and know it). But beauty, it turns out, isn't pretty - and what's more, it's a double-edged sword. For Kent has been cheating relentlessly on Carly, with a woman even more attractive - in fact, he has finagled a move to a different work shift to give him more time to pursue his extra-curricular activities.

So even as Steph has thrown aside a worthy man who can see through the blandishments of beauty, so Carly is clinging to a cad precisely because she, too, is in its thrall. The question for Greg is: as his buddy-buddy intimacy with Kent has given him the inside scoop on his affair, should he violate the norms of gender loyalty, and give Carly the same wake-up call she gave Steph - only this time with a dose of truth far more crushing?

It's actually a rather interesting moral quandary - and a common one, too; who among us hasn't struggled with some minor variation of it? And LaBute skillfully teases it out to a satisfying climax (complete with fist-fight, here staged, ironically enough, by Angie Jepson, who plays Steph, and is also a fight choreographer). At the same time, the playwright seems unsure what to do with Steph once she's served her purpose as catalyst; he keeps bringing her back on, in scenes that linger but basically go nowhere, because for some reason he's unwilling to allow the scales to fall from her eyes (even when she hears the truth about Carly).

As Steph, Angie Jepson can't quite triumph over this lack of arc - nor does she suggest the depths of insecurity (and thwarted love for Greg) that might inspire a twinge of sympathy even among the boyfriends in the audience.  But Jepson has always given great spitfire, and she certainly crackles on here.  Meanwhile, as Greg, Andy Macdonald looks and sounds just right, but likewise doesn't really suggest the torch for Steph that he claims to be carrying; once caught up in conflict with Kent, however, Macdonald grows quite compelling.  Danielle Muehlen's Carly likewise grows in stature as the play progresses, even though its slightly schematic natures forces her into some hairpin emotional turns.  Meanwhile, as Kent, Burt Grinstead struts and preens with show-stopping confidence - but even he, I think, could tend a bit more to subtext; the cocky Kent is at heart a rather cowardly weasel, and I think he'd rather die than let anyone know that.

Paul Melone's direction was (as usual) strong and slick - although as noted, there are deeper notes to be sounded here and there than the cast seems to realize.  Meanwhile Eric Levenson's set design cleverly blended together work, home and play (just as they're all blended together for the characters), and Jeff Adelberg's lighting was appropriately industrial; the entire physical production, in fact, held to SpeakEasy's usual high standard.  That and the solid acting on offer are more than enough reasons to see Pretty.

Nein!

Timothy John Smith and the women of Nine.

I've only seen Nine once before, in a mediocre community production many years ago; I didn't care for it much back then.  But after seeing SpeakEasy Stage's sleek new version (at the BCA through Feb. 20), I have to admit I've changed my mind. Now I hate it.

Perhaps it takes a great production to confirm one's suspicions that a particular play or musical is mediocre (in talented hands there's no place for the material to hide).  But I really should have been sure of the truth about Nine long ago - and anyone who admires its inspiration, Frederico Fellini's psychological fantasy 8½, should be warned to keep a safe distance.  For the musical is transparently designed for people who either haven't seen, or haven't understood, that iconic Italian director's seminal 1963 masterpiece.

If that's the case for you, then you may enjoy the show, for it's a standard-issue set of late-Broadway gay-Jewish conventions: serviceable songs and predictable "adult" jokes arrayed in something like a revue.  That's right - it's a gay, Jewish revue about a straight Italian Catholic.  Go figure. But at least it showcases a bevy of Boston's loveliest and most talented female performers, each of whom gets one of those serviceable songs (or two), and knows how to sell it.

Therefore it's easy on the eyes, and the ears - unless, of course, you can feel the shadow of its source looming over it.  Because then the whole thing seems like a travesty.  I'll admit Nine does hold some interest for me, but only in a single way - as was the case with The Blue Flower before it, you can tell its creators (Arthur Kopit, Maury Yeston, and director Tommy Tune) labored under the delusion they were creating an homage.  Yes - they "loved" 8½, too - and that's what's a little scary, frankly; for how could they "love" something they seem to want to destroy?  (Although the old saw that love is blind may apply doubly to the world of art, I suppose.)

Aimee Doherty in Nine.

To those behind the pointlessly-retitled Nine, it seems 8½ may have been a grand meta-cinematic experiment (it's a film about its own making, or rather un-making), an investigation of one director's creative block, and a stunning visual fantasy (see clip below if you doubt me).  And it may have even featured a ravishing score by the great Nino Rota. But somehow it still demanded improvement.  Its creator, Fellini - or his alter ego, "Guido" - may, at the end of his psychological carnival, have told the many women in his life (and beyond them, the vast, needy audience they represented) that they must "take me as I am, if you want me."  But Kopit and Weston have other ideas - in their eyes, what Guido needs is to grow up.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that if Fellini grew up, then there'd be no more Fellini.  And therefore no more movies like Nights of Cabiria or La Dolce Vita.  Perhaps that's why their advice is precisely the prescription the director didn't take in the original film.  But then Kopit and Weston don't really have that much interest in the original film. They drop almost everything they can't approximate with an all-female cast (their concept is basically a replay of the notorious "Guido's Harem" scene, below); thus the death of Guido's father, his relationship to the Church, and even the wild climax at the set of the movie he's "supposed" to make (tellingly, it's a launching pad for a spaceship that hasn't been built) never make an appearance in Nine.  And more's the pity, because without them, the musical has no depth or texture.

It doesn't even have any really good songs.  From Nino Rota to Maury Weston - ah, what a falling off was there!  I still remember Rota's melodies, from years ago - but while Weston quotes a few of them here and there, strangely, it does him little good; I can' remember his score even though I only heard it about a week ago.


The director who wouldn't grow up takes a whip to the women who want him to in 8½.

Oh, well, the good news is that at least Nine means a lot of Boston's best actresses have work, and it was great to see local stars Aimee Doherty (above left), Cheryl McMahon, and Kerry A. Dowling carry on at their usual high level, even with lesser material.  Meanwhile comedienne Maureen Keiller got to shine in the kind of number we haven't seen her in for ages ("Folies Bergere," seemingly borrowed from La Cage, which I think premiered the same year).  It was also great to welcome back the gorgeous Jennifer Ellis - where has she been? - as well as watch newcomer Shana Dirik dazzle the  SpeakEasy crowd the way she's been dazzling the Metro Stage crowd for years.  There was also a very poised turn by Erik March as the younger Guido, and nice moments around the edges by Santina Umbach, Amy Jackson, and McCaela Donovan.

Alas, Donovan sort of typified what was wrong with the production's vision of Fellini's women, though - she was far too svelte, and not nearly zaftig enough (and zaftigity is important to Fellini). And for once, I was a bit disappointed in the reliable Timothy John Smith's Guido - he channeled little of the suave urbanity the part should have. But then the role had been shorn of its real reason for being - Guido's writer's block (in Nine you can barely tell he's desperately trying to find inspiration for a film).  And while the production's design was sumptuous, its visual cues seemed slightly wrong - the dark set suggested not at all the glamorously arid modernity of the film, and Seághan McKay's projections - amazing as they were - likewise only rarely quoted the director's visual language. Meanwhile Charles Schoonmaker's striking costumes didn't really conjure the fashion atmosphere of the early 60's (which Fellini's movies helped define). But maybe all these talented designers had simply picked up earlier than I did on the fact that Nine ain't 8½. Not by half.

Home(less) for the holidays

The talented performers of Striking 12 hardly strike out, but . . .

I'm of two minds about Striking 12, the musical update of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" now playing at SpeakEasy Stage.  On the one hand this little show marks an intriguing, yet natural, step for SpeakEasy from the stage to the club (above), and as it glitters with confident polish (like so many of this company's productions), on the surface it seems to be just what it wants to be: a smooth and smart piece of alternative holiday entertainment.

But on the other hand, that's everything it shouldn't be.  For this is a version of "The Little Match Girl," one of the most tragic of Andersen's fables, in which an innocent little girl freezes to death on New Year's Eve, in the snowy gutter of a city street, because she can't sell any matches - and because if she returns home without money in her pocket, she knows her father will beat her mercilessly.  Utterly calm in its attitude toward the self-absorbed partiers who ignore the barefoot child in the snow, the tale even features one of Andersen's most fiendishly heart-rending devices: the girl, delusional from cold, starts to strike her matches because in their light she imagines she sees the soul of her departed grandmother; only as the vision grows warmer and closer, the matches run out one by one, and we know she is step by barefoot step growing closer to her own frozen destruction.

To be honest, you can be horrified by this manipulative little tale in more ways than one; but however you may feel about its intense pathos, it's hard to square its mood with the lightly ironic modes of adult-contemporary rock.  But that's just what authors Brendan Milburn, Valerie Vigoda (of the pop trio GrooveLily) and Rachel Sheinkin (of Putnam County fame) have tried to do; they've actually attempted to build a smooth holiday show of easy listening around the famous story of a little girl who freezes to death.

I know.  It's just too weird for words.  What's weirder still is that the production almost succeeds; for much of its length, you half-buy Striking 12, because the lyrics of the various numbers are so witty and up-to-the-minute, and you keep thinking the authors may just be clever enough to swing an ending that pulls together the quirky humor of their best material with the gonzo horror of Andersen's.

But it turns out they can't.  Striking 12 basically ends with a friendly shrug along the lines of "Whoa, dude, too bad about that little match girl, huh.  That just wasn't right!"  Uh-huh.  The hero of the show - who's been in a lonely funk on New Year's Eve (which drove him, oddly enough, to pick up a volume of fairy tales) - simply decides, after pondering the story, to hook up with the girl who dropped by to sell him "Seasonal Affective Disorder" lights (which are kind of like matches, get it?).  And then, much like some bad Hollywood romcom, Striking 12 fades out with the promise of romance somehow subbing for actual social engagement.

Ugh.  Somewhere in heaven, you know the Little Match Girl is feeling burnt.

And alas, the music, though well-crafted, is "funky" yet undistinguished, and so confidently glossy it makes you feel as if you were trapped in one of those dreadful annual WGBH fundraisers - think "Celtic Woman Does Copenhagen," where the beaming hosts keep reminding you they're not turning this crap off until you send in all your money.

Still, there are those witty lyrics to consider.  I'm guessing Sheinkin's behind a lot of them, and they do accurately chart the anomie of the millennial-yuppie class - you know, the guys who "fix your printer" at the office, then go home to brood and watch Law & Order (the L&O "Christmas special" imagined here is a scream, with lines like "Mommy, why is Santa bleeding from the head?").  There are traces of deeper feeling in the script, I admit; Striking 12 gets at the sense of emotional ambivalence that New Year's revelry is designed to hide - time is passing, and everyone's older but not much wiser.  Our hero has just gone through a rocky break-up, in fact - so when he sings "Everything's red and green, but I'm feeling blue," and wonders aloud "What is there to celebrate?" we have to agree, "Not all that much."

The only problem is that his problems can't hold a candle to the Little Match Girl's, and the musical can't really get over that enormous thematic hump - thus the show inevitably falls into precisely the same empty optimism it cleverly skewers for its first two-thirds. The script reaches its weirdest moment when pondering its own conceptual dilemma in an admittedly funny tune about how "screwed-up people make great art" - which somehow operates as unconscious self-critique.  Yes, Hans Christian Andersen was a weirdo - that doesn't mean the cruel injustices he wrote about didn't (and don't) exist, I'm afraid. Still, it's true that much (though hardly all) great art has been produced by emotional and psychological freaks of one type or other.  Which I guess is why, the creators of Striking 12 seem to be hinting, their musical can't succeed artistically - they're just too together to make great art (and they know it).  If self-awareness were the highest artistic virtue, I guess Striking 12 would count as Shakespeare.

Still, as I said, there are plenty of entertaining moments on the journey toward this bummer of a happy ending.  The show requires a trio of triple threats - its performers have to sing, act, and play instruments, often simultaneously - but the talented José Delgado, Zachary Hardy, and Erikka Walsh pull off this hat trick easily, perhaps almost too smoothly, before a striking set of projections by Seághan McKay. First-time director Scott Sinclair - SpeakEasy's new marketing associate - directs well enough, although in the way, I'm afraid, that you'd imagine a marketing associate would: cleverly, but without a sense of the full quirkiness of the material (several moments I think should read as more Putnam-County-flaky than they do here). There's no weak link in this ensemble, but I'm guessing drummer Zachary Hardy comes closest to the emotional profile of GrooveLily - ironic, a little goofy, and with a healthy sense of self-parody.  He's the kind of guy who, considering he's hardly the focus of "The Little Match Girl," wants to know why the trio can't switch to "The Little Drummer Boy" instead.  When they finally do launch into those rum-pa-pum-pums, you laugh out loud - but are also aware somewhere that at least in "The Little Drummer Boy," form and content are beautifully in synch. And nobody freezes to death.

Body language

A Jock Sturges photo of his muse, "Misty Dawn," whom he has been photographing in the nude since she was 3.

Is being politically correct kind of like being autistic?

That's the implied thesis of Annie Baker's Body Awareness, now at SpeakEasy Stage as part of a three-part Baker festival running through November. (I gazed into another side of this theatrical triptych, Circle Mirror Transformation, here, and will see the final panel, The Aliens, later this week.)  Though close enough in style to form a family, these theatrical triplets aren't quite identical; if one watched them in the sequence of their composition (that is, Body, then Circle, then Aliens), my guess is one would perceive Baker becoming more and more self-conscious almost scene by scene.

For she is a dramatist all but obsessed, like many millennials, with not being overly "dramatic." Indeed, in the notes to Body Awareness, the playwright expresses pain over even being heard: "Speaking is a kind of misery," Baker (probably) whispers to her interviewer.  "We're all kind of quietly suffering . . . trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe." She goes further about her own methods of revision: "If I can hear [myself] writing, like if there is thinly-disguised exposition or a nudge to the audience or some kind of obvious point made, I go back and change it."

I was surprised, then, to discover that Body Awareness is full of rather obvious points.  Indeed, despite Baker's mania to never seem "stagy," I often perceived melodramatic mechanics operating beneath the surface of her script; people enter in tears, or break down while on stage, etc.  But then Body is the first of Baker's so-called "Vermont Plays" (because they're all set in a fictitious "Shirley, VT"); the playwright was, indeed, far more carefully guarded in Circle Mirror, and I understand that The Aliens all but disappears down a rabbit hole of pauses and silence.  (Which may be why I've heard most folks prefer the structure, and relative accessibility, of Body.)


What struck me most about the play's staginess, however, is that it derives from a highly developed schema - unlike in Circle Mirror, Baker wants to quietly posit an argument here, and even a political metaphor, with the crunchy downside of political correctness in her sights.  Her two heroines, Joyce and Phyllis, are a thoughtful lesbian couple, dealing with a problematic son, Jared (from Joyce's earlier marriage), who clearly has Asperger Syndrome, but just as clearly can't admit that.  Absorbed in the Oxford English Dictionary, unable to sustain empathy even for those he loves - yet all the while sucking on an electric toothbrush like some kind of techno-teat - Jared can't even hold down a job at McDonald's, yet bristles with violence whenever he senses anybody might think he's "a retard." At 21, he's also quite hot to lose his virginity, a state his helicopter moms are humiliatingly aware of ("We're glad you're masturbating!" they assure him. "Just please don't run up the phone bill!")  Meanwhile, at "Shirley State," where she teaches, Phyllis has organized "Body Awareness Week," a sit-in designed to heal the psychological wounds inflicted by "the white male gaze," etc.

And who should step into this simmering situation but a white male who, yes, gazes.  Photographer "Frank Bonitatibus" (we won't speculate about that moniker, but see what I mean about Baker being stagy?) has made his reputation photographing females - even under-age females - in the nude; he's obviously modeled on photographer Jock Sturges (typical images, at top and left) the sketchy lensman who got his start doing pictures of girls in nudist colonies, but eventually graduated from softcore to the "art-lite" demi-monde. Sturges' oeuvre may be uninteresting intellectually, but its sexual pictorialism is lovely because the women are, and a consensus has developed around him that nobody has really been hurt by what he does (although frankly, some of the girls in his photos look none too happy, and of course there are claims of a statistical link between naturism and pedophilia). At the same time, as the notion that nudity can be "empowering" (via burlesque, etc.) has gained ground among young women, Sturges' work has become inevitably embroiled in the spray of the various waves that crash in the tide pools of feminism. Thus, if you easily confuse politics with art, you can be seduced into imagining (as I think, perhaps Baker has) that Sturges could be the genuine photographic article.

At any rate, once Phyllis gets a load of "Frank Bonitatibus," the sparks begin to fly - perhaps partly because Joyce (who after all once was into men) finds him kind of attractive. A showdown between rival forms of empowerment is soon in the offing, with Joyce edging toward stripping for Frank (who's giving Jared a little sex advice on the side) while Phyllis (short for "Philistine," perhaps?) slowly devolves into Andrea Dworkin as she issues intolerant ultimatums about sex, life, and art.

Richard Snee prepares to gaze at Paula Plum in Body Awareness.

Clearly Baker means us to see Phyllis as a kind of autistic academic, a feminist mirror of Jared; like him, she's unable to empathize with the "male gaze," and again like him, she's driven to near-hysteria whenever she has to deal with threat, or even change. Now I'm no fan of Phyllis's type (as Hub Review readers surely know), but at the same time I'm afraid I felt Annie Baker short-changes her Dworkin factotum - because she never gets a worthy antagonist.  Certainly Frank doesn't count as one; he's a pony-tailed Buddhist dude who likes women almost as much as he likes getting off on them; maybe he's horny, but he's obviously harmless - and so is Jared, a nervous boy who only wants to be a man. If all the guys in the world were aging hippies or man-boys with Asperger's, then we wouldn't have too much trouble with "the male gaze," would we - and we could write Phyllis off as a maniac. But of course that's not the case.

And how much more interesting Body Awareness would be as drama if Frank were a bit sketchier, a bit more of a pervy threat.  Or if Phyllis were able to simply score some points against him; but oh no, Frank's got a laid-back live-and-let-live answer to everything - so why can't Phyl just chill?  Even though sexual attraction kind of lacks empathy, when you think about it.  I mean isn't horniness like a mode of autism, too?

Of course limning these contradictions - or exploring why half of millennial girls seem to be starving themselves, while the other half are confidently showing their boobs on the Internet - would require Annie Baker to actually raise her voice, to stage a debate, to boldly declare that yes, she's really writing a play.  But she's never going to do that.  So we only get one brief feint, in a truncated conversation between Phyllis and Joyce, at the political issues her script raises.

But at least we also get, in Paul Daigneault's well-crafted and heartfelt production, a good deal of very good acting; the emotional issues at stake get a persuasive airing, even if the intellectual ones don't.  Center stage is the reliable Paula Plum, as the instinctive, wounded Joyce, giving another touching, delicately shaded performance that I'm sure will put her on a lot of people's short lists for yet another acting award.  And she's ably aided and abetted by Richard Snee - her husband in "real life" - as that smooth-talking Frank; together, they effortlessly conjure an intimacy that many actors could easily overplay.  Both regularly have their scenes stolen, however, by newcomer Gregory Pember, who makes poor, pained Jared into a quivering bundle of tics of such verisimilitude that they're genuinely pathetic and threatening by turns.  Only the talented Adrianne Krstansky falls a few steps behind, as the unlikable Phyllis - but then she's hamstrung by the part.  And Baker throws her so many curveballs in the final scene - in which Phyllis suddenly seems to repudiate everything she has stood for so far - that it's a wonder poor Krstansky isn't suffering from emotional whiplash by now.

Thus once again, I found myself at a Boston production of a new play that seemed slightly superior to the work itself (even Cristina Todesco's beautiful set - which recalls a kind of natural-wood cave, or maybe cage - seemed better than the script deserved).  This is beginning to feel like a trend.  Indeed, could the most ironic thing about this ironic millennial playwright's festival prove to be that the high quality of its acting outshines the quality of her writing?  OMG!

Coming attractions

It's Sister Sarah to the sexual rescue, ladies!

By now I think Sarah Ruhl's reputation as our greatest living figurehead playwright is assured, and if it's not, then In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (now at SpeakEasy Stage) pretty much seals the deal. As a friend who saw it in its failed Broadway run assured me, it is, indeed, better than Dead Man's Cell Phone or Eurydice. It's just not all that good. It's sometimes funny, but also both predictable and meandering; despite a national reputation, a MacArthur "genius" grant, and a slew of nominations for the Tony and the Pulitzer, Ruhl has yet to produce a play like American Buffalo or Curse of the Starving Class, or really any of the plays that made the names of America's great male playwrights.

But In the Next Room is still good enough to keep her nailed to the prow of a cultural barge that somehow includes the Ivy League, the Seven Sisters, Oprah, and the Times's Charles Isherwood (who I sometimes think should have stuck to writing about porn stars). And why? Because, as usual, Ruhl earnestly connects, not with any sort of personal artistic vision, but rather with the touchstones of the liberal arts college experience (her play is even derived from a book by a Smith professor). The uptight white women who can't function sexually, and the warm, black woman who can; the distant, inadequate straight guy, and the gay, flamboyant artiste; the clichés are all there, one after the other, straight from the campus coffeehouse.

I remember when I first saw Eurydice, I innocently fumed that it played like "meandering jottings" from some college girl's journal. Little did I know that was literally true (Ruhl wrote it while at Brown) - and what's more, that was the whole point. Another of Ruhl's "college plays" (Passion Play) has likewise seen regional productions all over the country, such is the nostalgic hunger for campus culture (especially as written by a woman) on our stages. Indeed, Ruhl's career is just one facet of a larger cultural movement I've written critically about before: the steady encroachment of the academy on the arts. Professors are no longer content to analyze our theatre; instead, they presume to direct it, via repertory houses and a farm system of new play development. To them, and their former students, Ruhl seems like a singular talent; but to a skeptic, she has rather obviously been manufactured by what I call the academic-theatrical complex.

Of course Sarah Ruhl has some talent - otherwise the ruse wouldn't work;  she just doesn't have enough talent to deserve a major reputation. There are flickers of genuine feeling in almost all her scripts, including In the Next Room. And I'll admit that this time, the playwright's usual dependence on twee "poetry" (of the kind that almost made Alison Croggon "fwow up") and her penchant for metaphysical abandon are both tamped way down. Ruhl sticks roughly to "naturalism," such as it is, as she recounts her re-imagining of the introduction of the vibrator to the Victorian domestic scene (a typical advertisement, at left). Nobody pops in from another dimension, or comes back from the dead, and none of the furniture talks. But in a way, the lack of metaphysical messiness only points up that the script is nevertheless still a mess. Shorn of her flights of "poetry," Ruhl's characters are all the more obviously trite (Victorianism, vibrators, and college girls - as Freud would say, it's almost over-determined). And her structure is lousy as ever; she simply lacks the discipline to make her scenes cohere and build.

Still, I'll admit that in some ways In the Next Room is re-assuring; if Ruhl suddenly produced a great script, we'd actually be in serious trouble (the academy - and the terrorists - would have won!). But by now I don't think she ever will. You can't make the old excuses of youth and immaturity for her (Ruhl is 36 these days, not 25), nor can you pretend that financial need has engendered haste in her writing (the MacArthur made Ruhl financially independent). No, she's got all the money and time that she needs. This is as good as she's going to get.

For many people, of course, it's good enough; they're happy to ignore the truly great female playwrights of our day (Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane), who are deeply original and difficult, to embrace the feel-good campus theatrics of Ruhl. That may be a bourgeois (or rather a "bobo") preference, but c'est la National Public Radio, ya know?

And SpeakEasy Stage, as usual, serves up a tastily sophisticated version of this superficial fare. Director Scott Edmiston provides a smooth surface to the production, and finds something close to the right tone of "sad" whimsy (which is no small trick). As he always does, he makes the play cute.  The director doesn't ameliorate the script's structural and thematic problems (he never does that), but at least he has engaged two of our best actresses - Marianna Bassham and Anne Gottlieb - as the Victorian ladies who discover the wonders of the clitoris, and go at the "little man in the boat" with the comic alacrity of Lucy and Ethel (above) in sweetly dirty scenes that are often a riot (the joke is all the funnier when they do each other, at left).  In supporting roles, Edmiston has also called back from New York the wonderful Lindsey McWhorter as Gottlieb's wet nurse (and her soulfulness takes some edge off the stereotypical vibrations of the role), and cast quietly intriguing newcomer Frances Idlebrook as the physican's assistant whose magic fingers get better results than any electrical instrument could.

The men fare less well - but then we get the idea they're supposed to; Ruhl almost never conjures convincing male characters (amusingly enough, her men are often cut from the same cardboard as Mamet's women).  The guys are there to serve as targets, and maybe take their clothes off. Still, the actors do what they can, and Derry Woodhouse strikes a nervous spark or two as Gottlieb's distant husband, and sportingly grits his teeth through the requisite stretch of SpeakEasy male nudity.  (Does this theatre ever feature naked ladies?  If they're not going to in a play about vibrators, I guess they never will!).

Still, I will admit - although I feel I'm a bit of a traitor to my own cause for doing so - that this isn't the best production of In the Next Room that I can imagine. Ruhl rambles so in the second half of her script that for her finale, she simply pulls a theme out of her play like a rabbit out of a hat; the drama turns out to be, in its final minutes, about men facing up to their fear of sexual inadequacy, and connecting with their women, even if electric puppetry can overpower the penis. Fair enough; and the production could, I think, have prepared us for this dénouement - but only if Gottlieb were even better than she already is. It's really up to her to deepen her characters' awareness of her situation, and thus the atmosphere of the play (she'd have to do it pretty much without Sarah Ruhl's help, though). Hard as this may be, that's the only way to shift the play's focus toward its final resting point, and maybe give it some real resonance as well. Till that happens, In the Next Room may give off fun vibrations, but will lack real electricity.

Talkin' trash

Mary Callanan, Kerry A. Dowling, and Santina Umbach, the ladies of the Great American Trailer Park. Photo by Mark L. Saperstein.

I don't have too much new to say about SpeakEasy Stage's shiny production of The Great American Trailer Park Musical. But then neither does it, so we're even. After the challenges of Adding Machine, you can't really blame SpeakEasy for just kicking back with this amusing little show, which is just as much a prefab vehicle as the "manufactured homes" parked around Jenna McFarland Lord's day-glo set (yes, there are plastic palm trees and pink flamingos, too). There is, I think, a kind of dark underside to the fact that director Paul Daigneault has assembled a top-notch cast to put this piffle over; I really wish all these people were out doing better things. But hey, you know? Whatever.

And I can't deny that the crowd I saw it with last weekend loved it, in the same way that rock nerds love Amanda Palmer and Catholics love Nunsense: the product has been designed to match their needs exactly, and so they clutch it to their chests. Many in the press saw beneath the plastic surface of Trailer nuggets of character and "real warmth," as well as genuine insights. Yeah, right. To me, this valentine to white trash rings a little false in its patronizing affection; its trailer park denizens aren't organizing tea parties or packing heat in public - instead they seem harmlessly marooned in the Clinton era, with their Budweisers and black babies and strippers-with-hearts-of-gold (tellingly, when they turn on the tube, Sally Jessy Raphael's still on it). These folks are, in short, the antithesis of the gay, urban, Obama-supportin' SpeakEasy crowd, and you could see the whole production as a kind of whiteface minstrel show designed to compliment its audience and dissolve their anxieties about, you know, "The Other."

That is, if you were feeling critical, you might feel that way.

But I'm not, so I'll only note that there should be at least a few new twists or cutting-edge jokes in this Soho-by-way-of-Park-Slope pastiche, and there really aren't. Maybe the software program that wrote it didn't have that capability. Nor are the songs exactly fresh (a clone of "It's Raining Men" actually makes an appearance). But you don't really mind, because the cast is so winning. Director Daigneault has hitched the great Leigh Barrett, Mary Callanan, and Kerry A. Dowling (who's in particularly fine form) to the show, and has also discovered delightfully ditzy newcomer Santina Umbach (above, with Callanan and Dowling) who just about steals every scene out from under her high-powered co-stars. There are equally strong turns from David Benoit, Caitlin Crosbie Doonan and Grant MacDermott - in fact, the whole cast. Everyone knows exactly what they're doing, and they do it very well. That I happen to think it wasn't worth doing, at least not by Boston's premier mid-size theatre, I'm sure many will feel is beside the point. Then again, in cases like this one, criticism itself is beside the point.

Adding Machine scores, but does it add up?

Adding Machine's view of cubeland. Photos by Mark L. Saperstein.

SpeakEasy's new production of Adding Machine offers reviewers a critical dilemma: how to praise the production while damning the play? For the show clearly represents what many consider Boston's most reliable theatre company firing on all cylinders: the cast is among the city's finest, the direction by (Paul Melone) is consistently imaginative, and the design - by Susan Zeeman Rogers (set), Gail Astrid Buckley (costumes), Jeff Adelberg (lighting) and Aaron Mack (sound) is brilliant, beautifully integrated, and often outshines everything and everybody else. It's hard to imagine a better production of this musical being seen in the Hub (and, judging from photographs, SpeakEasy's designs may actually trump those seen in New York).

But then there's the musical itself - or rather its source, The Adding Machine, by Elmer Rice, a piece of expressionist agitprop which was a sensation on Broadway in the 20's. It seems we're awash in expressionist agitprop these days (we just saw a retread of Machinal at the Nora, and Paradise Lost is losing its way currently at the ART), and I'm afraid Adding Machine only reminds us why, exactly, these theatrical elephants long ago found their way to the theatrical elephant graveyard.

This particular pachyderm is styled as a kind of fever dream about capitalism, mechanization and the question of free will - as well as bigotry, numerology, re-incarnation, and a whole bunch of other stuff. As you can tell from that laundry list, it's a mess thematically, but its central problem lies in the fact that source author Elmer Rice decided to design his play as both a cri de coeur against his hero's milieu, and against his hero himself.

Now this is a tall order, dramatically. Shakespeare and Chekhov pulled it off, of course (and if musicals are your point of reference, so did Sondheim) - but the trick to this kind of thing is a subtle, inflected view of both hero and milieu, and how they're tied together. Diatribes against one and then the other don't really work; they merely induce in the audience a form of theatrical whiplash.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

But diatribes are very much the order of the day in Adding Machine; the show's hero, "Mr. Zero," (the reliable Brendan McNab, looking both spooked and spooky) is portrayed as addicted to the mysteries of math, yet ground down by mindless routine at both his accounting job (where he labors in a literal trough) and at home (where his suffocating wife and her friends break into choruses of "Kike! Nigger! Wop! Fag!" at their cocktail parties).

As you can see, Rice painted with a broad brush, even for 20's agitprop, but in Adding Machine the musical, the original play's excesses are at least shrink-wrapped in a cool, post-minimalist score (by the talented Joshua Schmidt) that gives everything a strangely ironic edge, and often beguiles in its own metronomic way. Real melody always seems about to break free from Schmidt's harmonic "units," as it were - which neatly conjures a subtle sense of numeric imprisonment much like Mr. Zero's.

Still, Schmidt's tunes can't triumph over Rice's dramaturgy (or his cartoonish politics, with which you get the impression Schmidt and fellow librettist Jason Loewith agree). The pathetic Mr. Zero, always essentially a human adding machine, is replaced by an actual adding machine at work, and he responds, in a frenzy of indignation, by offing his boss. That's pretty much the only time he stakes out anything like a claim to his own humanity, however. Indeed, after the murder, he calmly returns home for dinner (this is one of the play's occasionally acute strokes), and is soon apprehended for the crime, convicted - and executed.

Ah, but his existential journey has only just begun. Rice (and his later librettists) take advantage of Zero's life on death row to tease out some intriguing questions about the troubling issue of free will - another inmate, for instance, is actually comforted by the knowledge he'll be punished forever for his crimes; that's not as worrisome as the moral doubt that would ensue if he weren't. But in the afterlife (brilliantly imagined here by designer Rogers as an iceberg of a shroud, below), it turns out all moral bets are off, and for a brief moment, Adding Machine seems about to come together thematically, and out of thin arctic air, it seems, dramatic stakes briefly materialize.


Is there sex after death? Brendan McNab goes from hero back to Zero in Liz Hayes's eyes in Adding Machine.

They don't last long, however. While roaming these frosty "Elysian Fields," Zero hooks up with Daisy (Liz Hayes), a young woman from work who not-so-secretly carried a torch for him - and even committed suicide to follow him upstairs, as it were. But even this kind of devotion can't shake Zero out of his conventional identity, or his pawn's-eye view of the world. Loving Daisy would require an independence of mind that he just can't muster, and even the suggestion that he rebel against the mystical rule of numbers outrages him. "What kind of dump is this anyway?" he cries in indignation, while the miserable Daisy is left with what may be the best line in the show: "I might as well be alive!"

So it seems that Mr. Zero actually deserved his fate, and even his job - so why did he look so depressed in Act I? But Rice and company aren't done with the flip-flops - in the finale, Zero's soul is put on the assembly line for re-incarnation, and suddenly he once again rages against the machine like a standard-issue romantic hero (even crying "Nooooooooo!" as he meets his doom). At this point, one has to admit that Zero has become little more than a rag doll, to be plopped on one side of the existential dilemma, then the other, at the whim of the playwright. And whatever sympathy we had with him has long since curdled into irritation with his creators, who keep reconfiguring the challenges that life (and death) throw him, only to reveal they're all zero-sum games anyway.

What's frustrating is that there probably is a third way out of the dichotomies of Adding Machine - surely, for instance, Zero's mystical attachment to numbers isn't really the same thing as bigoted convention, as the musical implies. (I think a few independent eccentrics, like say Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, would disagree with that assessment.) And surely there's a genuine tragedy to be found in his story - of a man so besotted with math that he was fooled into selling his soul to it. But Rice and his adaptors simply don't know how to tell that story.

Sadder still, you get the impression McNab and company would have known how to play that story, if it had been written. Surely they would have known how to sing it. There's not a weak voice in this crowd, but special mention has to go to the warbling of Amelia Broome, Leigh Barrett, and John Bambery. The acting is even more evenly excellent; clearly this will be nominated as one of the best ensembles of the year in the coming awards cycle, but I was particularly taken with not only the leads but the witty inflections of Sean McGuirk and Cheryl McMahon. You'd be well advised to catch all these local pros at the top of their respective games; just don't be surprised if in the end you feel Adding Machine doesn't really add up.

Babes Off-Broadway

The talented cast of [title of show].

It's hard not to like [title of show], the little musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical, which is now being presented in a smart, slick production by SpeakEasy Stage.

But it's also hard to like it a lot. Basically, it's the little show that could (it made it to Broadway, briefly), but isn't great, only pretty good.

Then again, I'm not really its target audience, even though it's gayer than the locker room at the Ice Capades. You see, I'm not a fan of artistic formats in and of themselves. I only like good plays, and good symphonies, and good ballets. I don't like the bad plays and bad symphonies and bad ballets just because they're plays and symphonies and ballets.

But fans of musicals seem to just looooove musicals, regardless of whether they're good or bad - the form speaks to them more than the content does. I find this syndrome very, very weird - and it's really kind of the antithesis of what I do as a critic. Yet I'm constantly being told that it's the new normal.

So, duty requires that I admit that if you are this kind of person, you will adore [title of show]. You will eat it up; indeed, you and the show will become as one; you probably already are as one.

If, however, you are only mildly narcissistic and insecure, you'll find [title of show] kind of a grind as it begs, borrows and steals its way onto Broadway, even though it's obviously an empty shell, stuffed with self-aware Chelsea attitude, but essentially tune- and plot-free. Things even get slightly irritating, as the cast "rebels" against the changes that soul-sucking producers keep suggesting, in a desperate bid to hang onto the integrity of their vision.

Only what "integrity" might that be? Because here's the not-so-secret about [title of show] - its concept is a [crock of shit]. The show's supposed hook is that everything about its own creation pops up verbatim in its own action, in "musical-vérité" style. “So everything I say from now on could actually be in our show?’’ composer Jeff Bowen asks writer Hunter Bell in an early scene - and dude, it's like that exact line shows up in the show! Isn't that awesome???

Only hold on a minute - everyone with a friend downtown knows that's not the case. [title of show] pretends to be the story of four faithful friends putting together a millennial Babes in Arms in just three and a half weeks, and then driving the show all the way to the Great White Way - only one of those original friends, "Stacia," left the show early due to other commitments, and wound up edited out completely, and replaced by "Heidi." So where does that put us vis-à-vis the "verbatim" dialogue, I wonder? Suddenly the meta's not really "meta" so much as good old-fashioned schmaltz at one remove.

But you know, even if it's a con job, the show is funny, and it's certainly of sociological interest, as it offers an almost clinical portrait of Gen-Y entitlement (and how manipulation of the Internet along with a strong dose of generational attitude can inflate a show's reputation). The creators of [title of show] can't really write a decent song (perhaps because Bowen wrote the lyrics weeks before the music, another fact elided in the script), but they can riff on the meaninglessness of pop culture (and their own lives) with the best of 'em.

Of course why, precisely, we should believe that their day jobs are making them "die inside," or that their internal critics (who you think kind of have a point) should be "vampires," is never explained - because that would be awkward - but these transparently self-serving tropes at least lead to some clever asides. Which is really the show's whole and only point. Still, what looms over the enterprise - even the show's brief day in the sun on Broadway - is that its creators wound up writing songs for Disney Cruise Lines, which sounds like a natural niche for them, and where I guess they're working on [title of boat]. Somehow, however, I get the impression that gig is not supposed to be soul-destroying, although I've no idea why not.

But I also have to admit SpeakEasy, and director Paul Daigneault, manage to sell the hell out of this musical's mild virtues. The company's four stars - Jordan Ahnquist, Joe Lanza, Val Sullivan, and Amy Barker - are all engaging performers, and if none are great singers or dancers, well they don't have to be. Lanza is the comic standout as Hunter (the writer gave himself all the show's best lines), although Sullivan, after perhaps bringing a bit too much weird to bear on the admittedly-weird "Susan," does give Lanza a run for his money once she's settled into her own brand of sardonic quirk. Barker offers a few more recognizably-human notes as the secretly-vulnerable Heidi (plus she's got the best pipes), while Ahnquist is the energetic engine of the group, and also looks the best with his shirt off.

What's most striking about the show, however, is its production. Eric Levenson's set, Seághan McKay's projections, Charles Schoonmaker's costumes and Jeff Adelberg's lighting all cohere into a sophisticated yet "casual" look that serves the material perfectly. So we get to feast our eyes on yet another SpeakEasy design triumph. And I don't mean that ironically.