Best of 2011: New York Theatre

It’s that time of year. Everyone — Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, David Cote & Adam Feldman — has posted their Top Ten of 2011 lists, and so while I’m a little late in the game for this, it’s time to give my own a go, along with a few special awards to select productions…

Top Ten Best Shows of 2011
(in no particular order)

Hello, Again at 52 Mercer Street.

Hello, Again

The Transport Group’s sexy revival of Michael John LaChiusa’s 1994 chamber musical inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde, didn’t wink-wink, nudge-nudge its way through the carnalities of couplings. About sex at its seediest level, this was a brazen production of one of musical theatre’s most under-appreciated and complex composers.

The Hallway Trilogy and HotelMotel

Ever a fan of the hyper-prolific Adam Rapp, two of his many productions share a spot on my list: One a hyper-ambitious triptych spanning a century in a single decrepit hallway and the other a reboot of the meandering and magically real Animals and Plants (in a doubleheader with Derek Ahonen’s Pink Knees on Pale Skin), these two works were chockfull of signature in-your-face Rapp: daring nudity, jolting language, shocking actions and of course, difficult and damaged, strangely compelling characters.

The Normal Heart on Broadway. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The Normal Heart

Equal parts hostility and heart, George C. Wolfe and Joel Grey‘s searing, minimalist production did exactly right by playwright-activist Larry Kramer by focusing on content over context with a spare, direct design that drew out the most staggering ensemble work on Broadway of the season. It marked an astonishing example of how truly worthy plays — even less than perfect ones like the preachy-passionate Heart — can endure over time.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

A dancer’s director, Rob Ashford slickly staged a blissfully bright Broadway musical with a full, fantastic orchestra; clever, beautifully executed choreography and a dynamic, dedicated cast. No wizardry there: just some luck, a lot of pluck and quite possibly the Happiest Boy on Broadway this year, Daniel Radcliffe (who, just this week, was replaced with — sigh — Glee star Darren Criss).

War Horse at Lincoln Center. Photo: Paul Kolnik.

War Horse

A boy and his horse and some awe-inspiring puppets combine to create the most imaginative, visionary and theatrically moving work of the season, garnering the Tony Award for Best Play. Quite naturally, it’s also become a Steven Spielberg film (and an inevitable Oscar nominee).

Good People

Even hardened anti-realism folks such as myself must acknowledge when the form is done well — and few contemporary writers do it better than David Lindsay-Abaire. The female-friendly playwright — his protagonists are almost always women — explored the hot-button American issue of class through intricate relationships and richly complex characters, without ever grasping for topicality.

The Book of Mormon

Praise be for Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone who offered up a well-made, very funny, minimally offensive, brilliantly performed, completely original Tony Award-winning Broadway musical about a pair of mismatched, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Mormons sent on a mission to squalid and violent Uganda. A bit of a musical miracle, indeed.

The cast of epbb's These Seven Sicknesses.

These Seven Sicknesses

Take 23 actors and a bevy of technicians and crew members; throw them in a super-secret Hell’s Kitchen loft; add a select audience, communal dinner and an endless supply of alcohol; mix in a 5-hour play cycle of Sophocles’s works and what you’d come up with is the most intimate, inclusive and enjoyable night at the theatre this year. If you aren’t yet familiar with Ed Iskander’s “theatre collective,” Exit, Pursued by a Bear, you should be. But if you haven’t yet experienced Sean Graney’s epic, clever and affecting take on Sophocles’s work, you still have a chance: The Flea Theater’s production of These Seven Sicknesses, also helmed by Iskander, premieres later this month.

Milk Like Sugar

The pregnancy pact plot is a tad bit Lifetime-y, but Greenidge’s punchy drama has power, and the playwright possesses a knack for language, effortlessly and hilariously fusing urban colloquy with lyricism. With such smart, hip and ambitious work, this talented playwright won’t be “emerging” for long.

Urge for Going at The Public Theater. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Urge for Going

The deceptively simple play follows Jamila, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl growing up in a Lebanese refugee camp, as she desperately attempts to escape the restriction of her desolate home. Beautifully complex and rich in both character and story, this production was a surprise from start to finish, and playwright Mona Mansour’s talent was the most wonderful surprise of all.

The Worst

Baby, It’s You!

This jukebox musical represented the most inept musical offering of the season. Baby, it’s decidedly not you.

Catch Me If You Can

As shallow and soulless as they come, the only person involved who emerged from this Pepto-Bismol-palletted aural attack with full dignity intact was the always stellar Norbert Leo Butz.

The Most Overrated

Punchdrunk's Sleep No More on West 27th Street.

Jerusalem

The success of Jez Butterworth’s hyperbolically praised “state-of-the-nation” play was, in actuality, due solely to the dazzling performance of one Mark Rylance.

Sleep No More

Wandering through the impeccably decorated five-story McKittrick Hotel with actors silently performing “scenes” from Macbeth was mildly entertaining for about an hour. As for the next three, well, I wouldn’t know: I preferred sleep, more.

The Best Drama Off-Stage

Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark

Lord knows the drama onstage was dismal — except when actors were falling from the sky, of course — but who didn’t love gossiping about this train wreck? C’mon, admit it: we all kinda miss Spidey, The Hottest Mess on Broadway.

The Best Marketing Gimmick

The Importance of Being Earnest

I still can’t stop laughing, and you know Wilde would approve.

Theatre Review: Asuncion

Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg makes his playwriting debut

Jesse Eisenberg is all geeky, nervous energy. Inexplicably unable to maintain eye contact, his gaze darts constantly, words tumbling out of his mouth in an uncensored torrent as he hunches over ever-so-slightly, as if desperately trying to disappear within himself. The only cure for his fidgety fingers is to forcefully shove them under his armpits as he crosses and uncrosses his arms in an attempt to shield himself from any kind of human contact.

As an actor, he’s a delight to watch — bounding across the stage with curls a’bouncin’, splaying his slender frame across a beanbag — even if his range seems narrowly defined (Zuckerberg’s strategic aloofness, Baumbach’s cold pretension). As a playwright… well, let’s just say he’s got potential.

Asuncion isn’t exactly his first play, but it is the only one that’s been produced (what I wouldn’t give to see his musical, Me Time!, for which he wrote the music and lyrics. Jack of all trades, this one). And it’s certainly not original in its premise: Edgar, an unemployed wannabe journalist who mooches off his ex-TA, Vinny — a (white) Black Studies PhD candidate — becomes absurdly suspicious of his brother’s marriage to a Filipina woman named Asuncion.

Eisenberg plays Edgar — he stands in for his own stand in? — who, from his seeming position of privilege, comically projects his white guilt liberalism all over the sunnily naive Asuncion, who he interrogates about about post-Vietnam Cambodia (she’s Filipina, remember?), all the while insisting his brother purchased her in the sex slave trade  – or at the very least as a mail-order bride. Why else would an “untraveled” white Wall Street-er marry a “poor” “Latina”? (There are just so many quotes going on here.) Despite Edgar’s inherent obnoxiousness, Eisenberg imbues him with a likable earnestness — to “protect” his country, to  bring Vinny lunch every day even if it means getting mugged by the young hooligans in the neighborhood, to be fun (he so desperately longs to be fun).

Justin Bartha and Jesse Eisenberg in Asuncion. Photo: Sandra Coudert.

While you may be rolling your eyes by now at the slim, stereotype-driven plot (which only implodes rather ingloriously in the second act), don’t worry — it’s not all that bad. The self-deprecating Eisenberg has a knack for the funny — there are moments of sharp, satirical insight, and the banter between Edgar and Vinny is quick-witted and creates a subtle, at times disturbing, spin on the overly popular bromance (view a few scenes of the play here). It certainly helps that Vinny is played by Hangover star Justin Bartha (who recently starred in Zach Braff’s painfully unfunny attempt at playwriting): unironically sporting Black Power tees and Afrocentric beads (hilariously spot-on costuming by Jessica Pabst), Bartha’s pothead Vinny soulfully drums his bongo, finds a way to drop Malcom X or MLK Jr. quote into any conversation and strikes up a charming rapport with Camille Mana’s Asuncion (which, of course, Edgar is exceedingly jealous of). He’s pompous, ludicrous and disarmingly likable — he’s also the more darkly complex character, carefully exposing shocking moments of liberal racism.

Not a whole lot happens in the weakly premised Asuncion, but it’s still largely enjoyable as directed at a fast and funny clip by Kip Fagan. Eisenberg’s ability to craft damningly humorous dialogue and complex relationships demonstrates his potential as a dramatist and showcases his already proven talent as an actor.

Now let’s see that musical.

Asuncion by Jesse Eisenberg
Presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater 
at Cherry Lane Theater
38 Commerce Street, New York, NY  10014
through December 18, 2011

Theatre Review: Milk Like Sugar

Kirsten Greenidge’s new play is neither milk or sugar –
It’s something altogether better

Full Disclosure: I saw Milk Like Sugar in its very first preview at Playwrights Horizons on October 13, but as this co-production with Women’s Project Theater and La Jolla Playhouse transferred from the latter where it received its world premiere in August, it doesn’t seem entirely inappropriate to review it. Even less so because it’s an entirely solid, engaging production.

Angela Lewis, Nikiya Mathis and Cherise Boothe

Sixteen-year-old Annie and her two spunky high school BFFs crave something more than the powdered milk that sits on their shelves — the milk that tastes sweet like sugar, but offers little sustenance. But these couture-obsessed girls in their leopard-print leggings and sparkly sweat suits (costumed perfection by Toni-Leslie James), with their slide phones and incessant sexting, have more interest in tattoos than textbooks. Their attempts to become strong like “lions” result in a pregnancy pact (remember when those were frighteningly fashionable?) and an inked flame on Annie’s hip that sparks a burning desire that only grows stronger as the tattoo grows more elaborate and all-consuming (and Justin Townsend’s lighting and Andre Pluess’s sound design, otherwise nicely effective, becomes wearily redundant).

If this sounds like an overabundance of metaphors, you’re likely right. Ambitious playwright Kirsten Greenidge packs it all into one play: developing womanhood, female bonds and familial issues, socioeconomic constraints, the escapism of evangelism, brand as status, etc. You can’t help but think that these girls — bubbly, pink-clad and already preggers Margie (a hilariously warm and vacuous Nikiya Mathis); aggressive and defensive alpha-female, Talisha (a fierce Cherise Boothe); the thoughtful, but conflicted Annie (Angela Lewis, both sensitive and stubborn) — may represent varying shades of the playwright herself. But of course that doesn’t matter: when the climactic confrontation explodes between Annie and her hardened, bone-weary “moms” (Tonya Pinkins, who, with a Marlboro perpetually hanging from her dry lips, is like a pot of water you watch in nervous fear of just when it will boil over and burn you), the universality of this tremendously detailed piece is made all the more apparent (who doesn’t have mom issues?).

This is not to say that this piece is merely by a woman, about women, for women: Tattoo artist Antwoine (a charismatic LeRoy McClain) and astronomy-lover Malik (J. Mallory-McCree, warm and charming) are central to Annie’s self-discovery, even as they discover themselves through the course of the piece. Sure, they could each use more of a resolution — as could Keera (a loveably awkward Adrienne C. Moore), whose self-denial about her own family and life happiness is funneled into religious escapism — but with so much else going on, and going on so well, it almost seems silly to nitpick. The subject is a tad bit Lifetime-y — and hey, been there, done that — but Greenidge’s punchy drama has power, and the playwright possesses such a knack for language, effortlessly and hilariously fusing urban colloquy with lyricism. Director Rebecca Taichman, with the help of Mimi Lien’s stark and slick set, for the most part stages both the humorous and heavy at a quick pace and top-40 soundtrack that even her ADD, teenaged characters could appreciate.

Unhappily, I couldn’t get the excessively-used Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)” out of my head for a full 24 hours after the show. Happily, though, neither could I forget  the top-notch cast and Greenidge’s smart, hip and ambitious work. This super-promising talent won’t be “emerging” for long.