Theater Review

Up on the Roof

Things are not helped by Trip Cullman’s appalling direction. Tried-and-true older actors Larry Bryggman (Dad) and Leslie Lyles (Mom) manage to clear the hurdles; the others fall both forward and backward. Most victimized is Anna Paquin (Sis), whom Trip has speaking her lines so trippingly that an Olympic sprinter couldn’t catch them, and whom the costumer, Alejo Vietti, has gotten up in hooker attire, including fishnet stockings with holes big enough for a carp to swim through.

O for the good old lives of quiet desperation! Weitz’s loudmouthed desperadoes are topped only by Michael Friedman’s ugly, eardrum- violating music. Weitz, who was partly or wholly responsible for such movies as Antz and American Pie, should be deported back to Hollywood, which deserves him.

I’ve never understood Howard Korder’s appeal, and with Sea of Tranquillity, he sinks even lower than usual. Two Easterners, a guilt-ridden therapist and his floundering writer wife, have moved to Santa Fe and become embroiled with an array of oddballs, each drearier than the next. He loses patient after patient—one accuses him of rape, another seduces his wife, who develops a rash that leads to severe nosebleed that leads to lameness and, apparently, cancer, and leaves him. Abandoned by all, he and the alleged rape victim hunker down to a shared smoke. The writing wanders off into a desert of etiolated absurdism and rampant Mametism; people speak in incomplete sentences, sentence fragments, and even with words cut in half. Dylan Baker, Patricia Kalember, Betsy Aidem, and Lizbeth Mackay deserve better; some of the other actors don’t; all sink into a sea of futility. Too bad about Santo Loquasto’s attractive set being wasted on this meaningless play.

There are only two justifications, both arguable, for rewriting a classic play: obsolete language or obscure references. Neither obtains in The Seagull; after more than a century, Chekhov remains funny, wrenching, and crystal clear. There is scant excuse for Regina Taylor to transpose the play, retitled Drowning Crow, to South Carolina’s Gullah Islands, its language cloudier, its subtleties flattened out. Some of her equivalents are clever, e.g., the Negro Ensemble Company for the Moscow Art Theatre; others not, like Trigor for Trigorin, which provokes a horse laugh.

But even the change of bird is harmful. For crazed Nina to go around saying “I’m a seagull” is pathetic; for her avatar Hannah (mishandled by Aunjanue Ellis) to keep moaning “I am the crow” is wrong in both sound and overtones. But almost everything about the production misfires: Good actors like Alfre Woodard and Peter Francis James emerge uncompelling, the excellent David Gallo has designed inappropriately cutesy sets, the always-impressive video designer Wendall K. Harrington adds to the cutesiness, and the able director Marion McClinton has either caused this or let it happen. There is music and choreography about which the less said the better.

Although it appears in the program sans capitals, Sarah Jones’s one-woman bridge & tunnel is capital entertainment. In the format of a poetry slam, Jones impersonates a Pakistani host and ten contestants, some not even pretending to be poets but needing to unpack their chests. Of ethnicities ranging from Haitian to Chinese, from Baltic and Russian Jewish to Jamaican and Dominican, from Hispanic to Vietnamese, etc., all of them are made to matter. Jones’s accents are mostly right, but her diverse body language and multifarious material are always spot-on. Much of it is good-naturedly funny, quite a bit of it serious and even touching. Though in the tradition of Whoopi Goldberg and Anna Deavere Smith, Jones comes across more humane, more selflessly all-embracing. Her props are minimal, and I can’t imagine that her director, Tony Taccone, needed to do much. The honors and awards that have come this 29-year-old’s way seem to me unusually well deserved.