A Few Shows...

Wow, have I been a bad blogger. I'm not sure what happened, but I've seen several shows since I last wrote - so here's a brief re-cap of each of them.

Anon
Anon is a new show at the Atlantic Second Stage - and it's actually the first production on this new stage. What a great space it is - let me tell you, fantastic! The playwright, Kate Robbin, was a writer on Six Feet Under, a theme you'll see repeated in one of the shows below (All That I Will Ever Be) - although this show is much better than the other. The show focuses around sexually-addicted men and the women that are in relationships with them. Two couples are the main focus - Trip and Alison, and Trip's mother and father - and each relationship is a disaster. Trip meets Alison when she comes over as a pet psychologist to try and help his ailing cat. The two share an instant chemistry that day and begin their relationship. Things start to go really wrong when Alison learns of Trips addiction to Porn, and his open admission of no longer being attracted to her. Cut to Trip's parents - his Dad's been constantly cheating on his Mom for years, and she's yet to leave him. Really healthy, huh? Between these two stories, monologues from ten actresses are interwoven, giving us a glimpse into all kinds of terrible relationships with sexually-addicted men. I really enjoyed the play - right up until the ending. I'm a big believer in a good ending - to anything really, be it a book, play, movie, etc. This show just didn't have any big punch at the end - and I needed a bit more resolution. I think it's got a lot of potential so hopefully it can have that played out in another production.

All That I Will Ever Be
I've written in the past about how much I really love New York Theatre Workshop. I really do love mostly everything about it. It's too bad that this time around, I loved everything about my experience there - except the play that I saw. With Alan Ball, the esteemed writer of Six Feet Under and American Beauty, I thought to myself - really, how can this go wrong? But it did, and it's too bad - because it's not too often that a well-hyped new play comes about from an American writer. The play follows the story of a shape-shifting man playing the roles of a cellphone salesman and male hustler. This man, who we know mostly as Omar, changes his name and nationality several times as the story unfolds. We see Omar actually let his guard down to begin a relationship with the down-and-out LA slacker, living on his Dad's money. Blah blah blah ... problems ensue and Omar starts to give away more and more of his identity - only not to Dwight, but to his other Clients. After two and a half hours - of dialogue that can mostly be cut - we get not real resolution and all of this talk amounts to not much at all. I walked away feeling like I'd seen this before - in all the shows of the past two years, Little Dog Laughed, The Scene, etc etc...this play didn't bring anything new for me to think about. So - I guess NYTW can't get them all right - that'd be just asking for too much.

No Great Society

The second show I saw at NYTW (at their smaller East Fourth Street theatre) was an extension of a piece that played earlier at PS 122. The hour-long show splits into two parts, both showcasing and reinventing Jack Kerouac's television appearances. The first is The Firing Line show, in which Buckley (Ben Williams) hosts Kerouac (Susie Sokol) on a panel with Lewis Yablonsky (Vin Knight), a sociologist who wrote a book about hippie culture, and Ed Sanders (Scott Shepherd), a musician, poet and radical. What a combination. What's great about this panel (which is to define Hippies) is that it never really gets anything accomplished. None of the guests really define hippies and Kerouac spends the show in a drunken (and hilarious!) stupor.

The second part of the show, Steven Allen's radio talk show - Kerouac reads selections from two of his works and lots of craziness ensues. I got a bit lost in this segment - and honestly could have just stood to see more of the first part. I was laughing hysterically, especially when Kerouac falls out of his chair and begins stroking his co-panelist's shoe (the uptight sociologist no less). Susie Sokol is brilliant in her interpretation of Jack Kerouac. I read in her bio that she's a second grade teacher - what a fun class that must be! As for this type of experimental theatre - I can take it or leave - but I think I'll take this one.