GayMardiGras.COM • GayNewOrleans.COM • April 28-May 11, 2009 • The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM • 11
Short Takes at Le Chat Noir
W
hile best known as an actress, Tony Award
winner and former New Orleanian Mary
Louise Wilson (One Day at a Time, Grey
Gardens) adds to her authorial oeuvre with Short Takes, an
evening a brief comedies recently seen at Le Chat Noir.
In these six playlets, Wilson displays an uncanny ear for
defining characters by their patterns of speech. Taking to
heart the old dictum “Write about what you know,” four of the
six scenes involve theater folks, yet Wilson uses a sprinkling
of absurdism to prevent her pastry-like offerings to bog
down into anything close to meat’n’potatoes realism.
Clare Moncrief and Carol Sutton in Short Takes
(Photo by Nick de la Rua)
trodding the boards ...from 11
song Friends that, with nuance, depicts
two buddies over a lifetime, very nicely
performed by Leslie and Tara.
O is for Orchid Restaurant, a few
doors down from Attractions Salon, where
an outrageously good Thai meal can be
had for a very reasonable price.
P is for Pretty Young Men, a song in
which three women discover how much
fun a Chippendales-like show can be,
done perkily and perfectly by Becky, Dana
& Francine.
Q is for quality which Alice had in
excessive quantity.
R is for the role reversal in Anne
Meara’s Hot Lunch in which an attractive
woman (Dana) put a randy, rowdy con-
struction worker (Becky) in his place. Rockin’ good!
S is for Scott Sauber’s simple but effective lighting that suggested a spectrum of moods from serious to silly.
T is for Tara Brewer, a tremendously talented triple threat singer/
actress/dancer whose terpsichorean touches took full advantage of
the tiny playing area.
U is for the unusual venue and the unquestionably fine time that
was had there.
V is for the valuable contributions of percussionist Travis Henthorn
and bassist Jimmy Williams.
W is for Winnie (Wicked) Holzman’s witty lyrics for Bluer Than
You, in which three women try to outdo the others with their tales of
woe, wonderfully warbled by Francine, Tara & Leslie.
X is for X gene, multiple pairs of which made this show xtremely
successful.
Y is for Y gene, clearly not as necessary as you might think.
Z is for zoom right over to whatever venue this zesty show is in
should it be remounted in any zip code near you!
In Deer Play, a distinguished actress (Clare Moncrief)
who has forsaken the stage for gardening, tosses off
mouthfuls of multisyllabic plant and flower names, makes
like a mad King Lear, and is eventually seduced by a deer.
While I’m not sure if Deer Play was meant to be an absurdist
riff or a send-up of such plays often seen off-off-Broadway,
Wilson offered wry commentary on people who don’t listen
to what others say.
Often, Wilson’s characters don’t realize the absurdity of
their own tales. In The Professional, Jamie Wax portrayed a
hack actor who always gets himself in trouble by proffering
unwanted advice or, once, playing the Fool got “all the laughs
in King Lear.” By not overplaying this tedious man’s obnoxiousness, Wax became his own tragic fool.
In Rave, Tracey E. Collins balanced the pride and basic
decency of an actress starring in one production with her
mounting jealousy of another actress receiving even greater
acclaim for her performance in a heavy drama. “You can’t
beat a cancer play,” Collins stated with an undercurrent of
admiration and bitterness. “Nude and bald—that’s acting!”
With Rave, Wilson delivered the most satisfying of her “short
takes” as it seemed to be going in one direction and then
made a 180º turn into completely unexpected and hilarious
territory.
Lost, a tale of two forgetful friends, made a welcome
return after being part of last year’s New Plays Festival at
Le Chat. The pair’s further adventures in Lost in Paris was
also cute but its reliance on standard cliches about rude
Frenchmen seemed like a bit of laziness on Wilson’s part.
Last in the line-up, Road Work, a behind-the-scenes
look at a contentious group of actors touring in a ridiculous
Irish-themed play, was the least successful of the bunch;
while I could buy the various actors’ backstage peccadilloes, it was a bit unfocused and the ending was too pat.
With an invisible hand, Director Carl Walker guided his
cast to finely calibrated performances. Stand-outs included
Collins in Rave, Wax in The Professional, Moncrief in Deer
Play, and she & Carol Sutton reprising their roles in Lost.
Wilson certainly knows how to spin an engaging tale
and, with her wildly successful Full Gallop portrait of Diana
Vreeland, proved she can sustain one over an entire evening.
If some of the self-styled “quickies” of Short Takes were little
more than sketches, they whetted my appetite for fuller,
deeper and grander works from the overflowing imagination of Mary Louise Wilson.
One-Act Play Festival/The Trojan Women
at Loyola University’s Lower Depths
Theater/Marquette Theater
L
oyola’s One-Act Play Festivals can be hit or
miss affairs. Spring’09’s Evening A was all hits.
(Evening B had not yet been seen at press time.)
[continued on 14]
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David Wagner, PhD, LPC, NCC, CHT
trodding the boards ...from 12
Caryl Churchill’s Not Not Not Not Not
Enough Oxygen, originally a radio play,
takes place in a post-apocalyptic totalitarian society. Mick, a 50something man,
and Vivian, his 30 year old girlfriend, wait
in his small apartment for his son Claude,
some sort of pop superstar with millions
to spare. They hope he’ll help them move
to a nicer home. Claude arrives, yet their
dreams remain unfulfilled.
Oxygen combines Churchill’s
needle-sharp use of language as in Blue
with Far Away’s dyspeptic view of humanity. Director Helen Hutka brought this
challenging script to life with an amazingly
mature production that captured the
rhythms of the words and found just the
right emotional pitch.
Andrew Chau was a forceful, magnetic presence as Claude investing him
with quiet charisma. Melanie Ziems made
Vivian believably breathless and her involvement with an older man understandable; with her sing-songy speech pattern,
rarely have I seen a woman/child realized
and sustained so fully. When Vivian experienced a panic attack, Chau and Ziems’
duet of him simply trying to quiet her was
mesmerizing.
While one could’ve asked for a little
more lyricism in some line readings, Chris
Bohnstengel, who seems to be Loyola’s
go-to guy for older characters, nailed Mick’s
emotional core.
Not only did Joshua Smith compose
a score worthy of Chopin but he played it
beautifully offstage. Adam Alonso’s
shabby/chic costumes, Lauren Perry’s apt
hair and make-up design, and Patrick
Anthony’s haunted lighting all enhanced
the text without being ruled by it.
Steve Martin’s quirky discourse on
love The Zig-Zag Woman was wittily staged
by Andrew De La Pena with an original
prologue that neatly introduced it. If his
actors tended to knock over props, that
was a small price to pay for the enthusiasm and energy they brought to this humorous piece.
With her marvelously expressive face,
Kayla August perfectly embodied the type
of person to whom you hope Martin’s bon
mot, “Love is a promise delivered already
broken,” will not apply. As a grandiloquent
cowboy suitor, David Hanks displayed
great comic sense. And despite his blondhaired, blue-eyed porn star good looks,
Braden Piper radiated a straightforward
sweetness; we rooted for him and August’s
Zig-Zag Woman as they went off arm in
arm.
Walter Wykes’ The Father Clock is
about creativity and theatricality and choice
and purpose and totalitarianism and I’m
not sure what else. It goes on a bit too long
but Director Patrick Anthony and his cast of
three did a fine job of playing it for all it was
worth, holding our interest and preventing
it from turning into the campiness it could’ve
been.
Sporting a feather duster hairstyle,
Adam Alonso is a natural clown/mime
who, like Bill Irwin, can play drama as well,
switching instantaneously between the
two. As Alonso’s fellow actor in this hermetic world, Priscilla Jenkins likewise
alternated between robotic gentility and a
tough, cool ironic stance. Sasha Halliday,
new to the stage, held her own as the
enigmatic Stage Manager who has an
epic breakdown that led into a bizarre
labor and birth. All were very, very good.
Noah Adams composed and played a
tantalizing score that enhanced Clock’s
otherworldliness.
Meanwhile in March, Loyola presented The Trojan Women directed by
Albanian Arben Kumbaro. It was a solid
but certainly not radical reinterpretation of
Euripides’ grim tale of the price of war
despite its Katrina overtones.
Kodie Bowen gave a committed performance as Hecuba but needs to learn
that intensity does not always equal volume or “acting”; she was best when she
uttered the simple descriptive phrase “I
will hug my rags” as she looked into the
future with quiet solemnity. Brittany
Chandler’s Andromache, while given to
some overemoting, seemed to have a
much deeper connection with what she
was saying; I’d be interested in seeing her
in Shakespearean roles. As Cassandra,
Rodney Culotta, RPh
OPEN
9am-5pm Mon.-Fri.
9am-12noon Sat..
Adrienne Burns mercifully lightened up
the tragic proceedings.
Geoffrey Hall’s simple set had some
special effects up its sleeve. Joseph Shirley
and Erica Johnson did an extraordinary
job of playing Dr. James Walsh’s evocative score.
Though an antiwar message is always welcome, with all due respect to
Albania, however, on the basis of the OneAct Fest, Loyola need look no further than
its own student body to find directors for
future productions.
Turning of the Bones
at the Convergence Center
for the Arts
J
an Villarubia’s Turning of the
Bones is both a portrait of a
1950s Southern family, its black
manservant Cashmere and the bonds
between them, and a memory play as the
family’s daughter, now grown, tries to discover what really occurred all those years
ago. Some events are presented as they
happened, some as characters wished
they had. What someone remembers
about another person, may not be true.
That Villarubia chose to include some
surreal and some absurdist touches was
fine. The mostly presentational style, however, robbed Bones of the conflict required
for an audience’s involvement. Watching
it, I kinda felt like someone I sorta knew
was telling me all about their wacky family;
it was interesting but not dramatic. Or as
Cashmere, the ostensible crux of the play
says to his former ward, “This is about you
and your family, not me.”
Ashley Sparks’ direction took a styl-
ized approach as did Jeff Becker’s black
and white set. Donald Lewis, Jr. brought
dignity to Cashmere except when liquor
got the better of him. Avoiding caricature,
Claudia Baumgarten employed humor
and truthfulness in her portrayal of an
older aunt. And as the soft-spoken materfamilias, Angela Papale’s face lit up whenever she played the ukelele singing ditties
written by Villarubia’s late mother.
Swing!
at NOCCA’s Lupin Hall
U
nfortunately, so few worthy,
large-scale musicals are be
ing created these days that
the estimable folks at NOCCA had to resort to Swing! for its spring musical theater production. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Swing!, a jukebox show
featuring jazzy standards from the 1940s
& ‘50s. But after such Ambie Award-winners as Side Show, Floyd Collins and
Tommy, it’s clear NOCCAns are capable
of so much more.
Other than Bli-Blip, delightfully done
by Emily Schexnaydre and Ethan Andersen,
and Michael Moore’s joyful I Got a Gal in
Kalamazoo, the first act was a little too
much of the same thing for me, occasionally falling into cruise ship blandness. The
second act, however, scored with the tapping of Caravan; the cute Dancers in Love
with Justin Henry amusing as an old man;
Cry Me a River featuring the powerful voice
of Sarah Jackson accompanied by trombonist Tyler Ginsberg; Blues in the Night
sung by Ximone Rose, another great voice
with a distinctive personality, and enacted
[continued on 16]
14 • The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM • April 28-May 11, 2009 • Official Gay Easter Parade Guide • GayEasterParade.COM • SouthernDecadence.COM
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