Olivia Jane Smith

Five reasons to see 'The Skype Show,' from Greencard Wedding, at The Brick Theater

Did you catch this fable of love and art long-distance at last summer’s New York Fringe Festival?…

So far away it’s hard to hear your voice: The Skype Show, or See You In August, at the New York International Fringe Festival

So far away it's hard to hear your voice: The Skype Show, or See You In August, at the New York International Fringe Festival

Whoever said absence makes the heart grow fonder didn’t get it totally right. Someone not so…

Theatrical drinking game? Audience wins

The Audience at Tiny Rhino, February 2012. Photo courtesy of Ugly Rhino.

Most drinking games of the…

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Debate vs. Debate Society: Which is the hotter ticket?

‘Blood Play’ from The Debate Society, as seen in Timeout New York. Photograph by Javier Oddo.

While…

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Still from David Levine's 'Habit' at Luminato, 2011, as seen on Galleristny.com

In an effort to write about more of the performances I see, I’m playing a new game called, “What can I say about this performance in 15 minutes?” On your mark, get set, go!

Tonight I watched David Levine’s “Habit” twice through, more or less. Which is to say I saw three people play out a thoughtful, muted kind of low rent soap opera. The circumstances—a love triangle involving two brothers, one of them a drug dealer, and a suicide-by-provocation—is the stuff of melodrama. The performances, thankfully, are anything but. It’s as if your neighbors led especially depressing and seedy lives and you couldn’t resist watching them through their windows for hours at a time (way better than TV!).

I found I couldn’t tear myself away after an initial viewing, wanting to see if things would play out differently the second time around. While the main action stayed true to form, the differences were in the details. Viv (Eliza Baldi)—the doomed dirty blonde love object of sensitive songwriter Mitchell (Brian Bickerstaff) and plaything of his brother, small town drug kingpin Doug (Ben Mehl)—changed from sympath to mean girl when she explained to Mitchell that the poem he’s so proud to have published was part of a scam to get him to shell out money for printing costs. Mitchell is numb the first time he is videoed by Viv for her semiotics class, answering her questions about his admittedly sorry circumstances in life (he’s just been fired from a job at Wal-Mart). The second time, he is in tears. Everyone snorts more pretend Coke the second time through. The conceit of Viv taking “real life” videos for her college course is a delicious meta-theatrical joke. At one point she admonishes Doug for playing to the camera: “You’re performing!” she sneers.

Clinging to the opening where a sliding glass patio door might have been, angling for a better view (the play is staged inside a drywall home set up inside the Essex Street Market, and we peer at it through openings where the windows would be), I found myself wanting to step into the scene with the actors. And when the show was over, I got to. I ran into my friend Tom Sellar, whose partner, Gideon, is among the show’s producers (though anyone would have felt free to wander in once the power was cut and the show ended, mid-scene, to enthusiastic cheers and applause). Ben Mehl told us about the brownies Brian had made “onstage” (at his pretend home) during the show. While Mehl loved doing the show, he said he was glad it was over now. (The actors are onstage nonstop for eight hours at a time, just like an office work day, as Tom pointed out.) Later I heard him tell writer and director Levine that the performers knew that in whatever direction they tugged the narrative, they’d find a way to make it work.

Tonight I saw Sarah Ruhl’s “Melancholy Play.” Not surprisingly, it made me a little wistful. Once you see this warm, funny, incandescent appreciation of an oft-spurned emotion (in an enchanting production at The Invisible Dog, in Carroll Gardens), you get the little joke 13P and Ruhl are playing. How more fitting to end this experiment in theater-making, which has become so beloved over the course of many years and shows, than with a play celebrating the bittersweet.

Endings are mentioned specifically in the course of the play as a frequent source of the sensibility from which it takes its title. And the play’s ending—in which its characters aren’t quite sure what they are anymore, but know that they’re together, and that that’s enough—also speaks of transformation, the phase 13P is now undergoing as it “implodes.”

Of course unlike the characters, the 13 playwrights won’t be together anymore, at least not as 13P. But transformed, they may be, by this experience of a new way of producing work. Their writings have surely felt transformative to those of us lucky enough to have seen some of these remarkable plays.

. . . and the first annual Obie Awards for yours truly. The best part of the night was seeing people in the balcony throw their hands in the air and cheer like they were on the 50-yard line as team theater scored touchdown after touchdown. The winners also said some great things in their speeches. This doesn't begin to provide enough context or do them or their accomplishments justice, but here are a few things that caught my ear nonetheless (and in no particular order, other than where I managed to scribble them down in my program): 

Susan Pourfar, of “Tribes” (above), on reading plays at home in high school and wondering, “How can I meet these people who are so articulate and smart and sexy? And now I get to meet them. They’re all here in this play.”

Lifetime Achievement Award winner, playwright Caridad Svish: “Theater begs ascension while reminding you to keep your ear to the ground and the beauty and the dirt.”

Gabriel Ebert, on collaborating with Marie Louise Wilson and Amy Herzog, among others, in “4000 Miles”: “Thanks for letting me be the lone, strange guy.”

Jim Fletcher, who won for “sustained excellence” for his work with Elevator Repair Service and the New York City Players: “Theater is about getting your ass in the room. . . . You did that, you got your ass in the room,” which prompted my theater-going but non-theater-making friend (see her lovely mug at the end of this post) to say “Gatz gave a shout-out to me!” He added of the collaborative process of making theater that in fact, just showing up, “It’s never enough. Something else from somewhere else comes along, and it’s enough.”

Steven Boyer, of “Hand to God,” of working at Ensemble Studio Theater: “I found a home and a sandbox to play in.”

The Debate Society, which won a $2500 grant: “Thank you to anyone who ever bought something at one of our benefit stoop sales.”

Linda Lavin, after bringing the chatty, exuberant audience to a hush: “I’m not silent so that you will be. I just want to be in the moment right now.” And on the dream of to “act and tell stories,” which she kept doing through career lulls, working for years without an agent: “It’s attained and it’s lost and it’s regained and it’s lost.” After calling herself “the oldest person in the room” and remarking on the abundance of youthful energy, she invited everyone to come to a show at the Red Barn Theater, in North Carolina, which she now calls home.

John Collins, on the Elevator Repair Service’s first Obie, for Sustained Excellence: “It was a tough 20 years in coming.”

Presenter Eric McCormack: “‘Hip threads,’ that’s what it says here [in my script]. Welcome to the Obies, 1972.”

Richard Maxwell, as read by his wife, in a letter: “Thank you to Eugene O’Neill for letting me not have to worry about the writing for once.”

Michael Feingold, on taking a moment to remember theater artists who have passed away this year: “No matter how much you reinvent yourself, you wouldn’t have a present without a past.”

Above, presenters Hugh Dancy and Leslie Odom Jr. They kept their introductory remarks to a minimum, but it was nice to see them both.

Self-portrait with fire extinguisher: Me (on the left) and my sister-in-law and frequent theater buddy Katherine, in the glamorous subterranean powder room at Webster Hall.

Originally written for New York Theatre Review.

You are in an open field, a new production from the Neo-Futurists billed as a “nerdcore musical,” begins, as the title suggests, in an open field (metaphoric as opposed to literal). It also ends in an open field. The middle takes place in an open field too.

Imagine that you’ve just started playing a now long-antiquated computer adventure game of the “Legends of Zelda” ilk. Your little avatar (long before that word became common parlance) is blinking there on the screen, all 100 pixels of him, and he’s waiting for you to tell him what to do. You could tell him to walk toward the mountain or talk to the old man in the pointy hat or swim across the stream.

It’s a lot like life—everyday we wake up in an open field, to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the presence of house cats, babies, plants, live-in boyfriends (in descending order of ability to care for themselves) or other commitments that might constrain one’s actions. And even then, we always have a choice. In the game of real life, ceasing to feed the baby in order to go hunt for the treasure might cause one to be arrested for child endangerment, but it’s a choice (albeit terrible) that one could make nonetheless.

You are in an open field draws such parallels between the video games we play for fun (sometimes obsessively) and the fantasy worlds they allow us to inhabit, and the Big Game of Adulthood, where we must make our way in a world that sometimes seems as daunting as having to dodge fireballs or jump off moving ledges or fight ninjas. Sometimes you get your ass-kicked and need to reset. Sometimes you really want to fly and it’s just not happening. Sometimes you find the treasure, and—oops—it’s not what you were expecting and you have no clue what to do with it. In the end, it’s all about the effort. Just by playing, you succeed.

I’ve just told you pretty much everything I gleaned from You are in an open field. It’s a nice idea for a musical. Unfortunately, even the most aimless adventure game player—or, in real life, the most passive person—has a clearer trajectory than this show. Steven A. French plays a character called “Actor” who arrives periodically in a wacky costume and goads the three main players to “Find the treasure!” or “Keep playing the game!” Toward the end, he storms the stage and says, “I’ve been trying to establish some kind of motherf---ing through-line for you people! I need some sort of arc! So that’s why I’m yelling!” Needless to say, he has not succeeded in his quest. You could subtitle the show, “Three performers who rap pretty well in search of any semblance of a story.”

Sure, sometimes life can seem a bit shapeless. But that’s why we have art, to give shape and meaning to our experiences and help us make sense out of them. You are in an open field actually does the opposite—not in message, but in its structure, or lack of one. This in turns robs the message, which has some meat to it, of a chance to make the impact it should. Any narrative would be the real treasure here.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of talent involved, starting with the three main performers, Kevin R. Free, Marta Rainer, and Adam Smith. Along with Eevin Hartsough, they wrote You are in an open field, and some of their lyrics (much of the show is rapped) are inspired. “We’re told to wake up in the morning and work finger to the bone/Play by all the rules constructed to make a happy home/Salvation only comes when you pull it from its roots/I do all the labor and I’m demanding all my fruits.” Worthy sentiments in clever rhymes. There is a lot more where this came from, perhaps too much. Final score: Lyrics, 100,000; Story, 100.

Kevin, Marta, and Adam—playing versions of themselves in true Neo style—pack a lot of energy into their performances. They seem to be having fun, and one senses they’ll loosen up and have even more once they get into their run. Adam especially seemed a little tense, but perhaps that’s his nonchalant straight-man to Kevin’s good-natured swagger and Marta’s earnest overachiever enthusiasm (she gives a shout-out to her Seven Sisters alma mater). The raps, peppered with 50-cent vocabulary (as in big words, not ones borrowed from the multi-platinum rap star) and big ideas about the meaning of existence, can be a little cumbersome, but mostly the performers make them smooth and intelligible. They certainly give it everything they’ve got. And the live music and songs, by Carl Riehl, are catchy.

French is funny in his taskmaster/sage role, running on stage wearing wall-to-wall carpet (actually a bathmat, he later explains) and a Burger King crown (separately, not together), as part of his various guises. Cherylynn Tsushima, a graceful figure in head-to-toe white, her face covered by her unitard so that she resembles a crash test dummy, has the dubious part of “Dancer.” This means she occasionally flits on to represent some video game nemesis, like a character called Kickball Steve, standing in front of a projection of an evil little animated face. Her role, which she performs nicely, is so dehumanizing that it’s a relief (and a nice touch) at the end when she is finally unmasked. (The projections are in evidence throughout, sometimes showing animated versions of our three main players, other times displaying a bright-colored electronic collage reminiscent of something from the spring high-fashion runways—Balenciaga, perhaps. I wouldn’t mention this except that we spent a lot of time looking at it during the show’s transitions, which need smoothing out and speeding up).

This brings us to an important cameo by Teddy Ruxpin. Remember him? (I didn’t.) The bear’s jaw moves in a way that is both hilarious and creepy, and here he has been re-imagined as a kind of soothsayer. Toward the end, he recites a quote from Tibetan Buddhist author Pema Chodron: “That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence . . .”. Ruxpin is a crowd-pleasing star and the Neo-Futurists know it, because they give him the last line of the play: “Such is life.” (It refers back to the show’s opening number: “Such is life, life’s a bitch then you retire/You pull up stakes and you take it even higher”). Yes indeed, Teddy Ruxpin, yes indeed.

I’d tell you the plot, but we’ve covered that already. So what happens for the show’s 75 or so minutes? Marta, Kevin, and Adam rap. Occasionally they battle the white figure, and there is a little dancing. They sit on their couch fort (on a nicely designed and underused set by Lauren Parrish and Chris Dippel, who also directed; the onstage band plays on (composer Riehl leads Scott Selig on bass and Patrick Carmichel on drums); French rushes in, gesticulates, and leaves; video versions of Marta, Kevin, and Adam wave at us from the projections; and Kevin eats in an imitation of Pac-Man (the Pac-Man shaped cookies available at the performance are excellent).

There is a lot of good material here. If You are in an open field 2.0 comes out, this time with a stronger arc, the Neo-Futurists might have something. As the show itself says, “Reboot, rethink, rename, reclaim—reboot!”

"You are in an open field" plays through May 19 at HERE Performing Arts Center.

Above, Scott Shepherd and the cast of GATZ. Photo by Joan Marcus via BroadwayWorld.com.

One of the primal pleasures of reading a novel—and one reason for the persistent letdowns of film versions—is seeing the story come to life visually inside your head. I think it’s one of the not-so-secret secrets behind the success of GATZ. This rendition of “The Great Gatsby”—every word of it—from the Elevator Repair Service, gives new meaning to the term “staged reading.” It is about to wrap up another successful run at the Public Theater before bringing this version of a great American novel to British shores.

The show’s initial run at the Public in 2010  saw Ben Brantley at the New York Times pronounce it one of the top theatrical events of the last decade. That is a lot to live up to, for any show, and the sold-out run, the pricey tickets (not really pricey at all when you consider all the hours of theater you are getting for the cost of admission), and its epic magnitude—what could possibly be so good that you’d want to sit tight for six whole hours of it?—creates a towering heap of expectations, so much so that even a show worth all that could buckle under the weight by the time we (meaning, me) finally get around to seeing it.

I missed it last year, but, thanking the theater gods for a second chance, I was determined not to miss it again. I got some help in this regard (not for the first time) from my wonderful next-door neighbor, who works at The Public (I lucked out in ways I could not have foreseen with my current apartment). So there I was on one of the first deliriously nice days of spring, heading into a dark room to hear and see the American fairy tale known as "The Great Gatsby."

Back to where I started: GATZ, for anyone who hasn’t seen it (go, go, go!), is set in a contemporary office of the ramshackle, drab species (as opposed to the gleaming, slick variety). At first this can be perplexing. At times it’s distracting. And then, suddenly, it’s magical.

The conceit defies logical sense. The idea is that someone’s computer is stubbornly refusing to show up for work. So, looking for anything with which to occupy himself, he (Scott Shepherd, whose performance is a marvel) picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby stashed at his desk and begins reading, out loud, at first without leaving his chair. The open office also contains a couch, another desk, a lone window that looks not onto the great outdoors but into a corridor that leads, presumably, to other companies’ equally shabby offices. Other co-workers wander in and out, sometimes acknowledging the reader with “what’s up with him?” glances and other times seemingly tuning him out.

There are fairly long periods during which we’re simply being read to, a hushed room full of children at bedtime. There are other moments when people come with papers for our reader to shuffle through, his office job intruding on our story, the two disparate worlds juxtaposed in ways that don’t seem to add any new layers of meaning to either (there are other times when they intersect quite cleverly).

But the show’s real coup de theatre capitalizes on part of what is so delicious about reading: As the words jump off the page and swirl around to form dazzling visual scenes that exist only in our imaginations, the office and its inhabitants become Gatsby’s glamour-drenched garden party; Nick gazing out over Long Island sound; Nick and Jordan’s carriage ride through Central Park on a summer night; an uncomfortably intimate impromptu party in a suite at the Plaza.

It’s not that the show unfolds only inside our heads, of course. We’re all there together, seeing the same actors inhabiting the same office set. But our imaginations somehow fill in the rest. More so than in more literal theater productions, one senses this is an experience both shared and also ours alone.

We never leave the office—and yet, just as we never leave our couch or beach chair or subway seat when reading a novel, we do. There are costumes—Daisy’s simple long white dress, Gatsby’s pink suit—but nothing close to what we’ll see in the upcoming film remake. Nothing realistically period or glitzy. No green vistas or mansions lit up like birthday cakes except the ones in our heads, shimmering in the air with each word Nick utters. The excellent lighting design is the biggest material contributor (if one can call light “material”) to the changes in setting and mood that feel so palpable.

Photo by Chie Morita for Metro.

Let me tell you about a place I visited a few weeks back. It was billed as all-but-abandoned. For a ghost town, it turned out to be a pretty happening spot.

The overwhelming drawback to “Centralia,” an Ugly Rhino production which ran back in March at the Brooklyn Lyceum, was its overpopulation. Centralia is a real-life Pennsylvania coal town, which at its peak boasted around 2761 residents (according to the show’s program). In 1962, a subterranean blaze spread through the mines, heating the earth from the inside-out and wreaking environmental havoc, including clouds of vapor that seeped up out of the ground.Most residents fled, but a few—including conspiracy theorists, the town’s mayor, and the stubbornly rooted—stayed put. Today the town is home to a population of two.

On a Saturday night in Brooklyn, however, its ranks can (and did) easily swell to 100 or so. Ugly Rhino took over the Lyceum’s top floor and tented off portions in order to recreate the domiciles of five stalwart Centralian families; Mayor Rea (Matthew Wise) and his wife (Kelsey Landon)—his take on the local situation gives new meaning to the expression “fire and brimstone”; Karen (Manini Gupta) and Amy (Anna Perczak), two twenty-something sisters, one of whom is determined to catch a husband—quite a trick in a town with only nine people in it; Nevin Porter (Michael Bernstein), who wandered into town and stayed to examine the science behind what’s percolating under the ground; Aaron (Dylan Kammerer) and Jed (Douglas Scarf), who run a kind of town museum, preserving what is left despite misgivings, both about the worth of their enterprise and the curiosity-seekers it brings to their doorstep; and lastly Evelyn (Leah Loftin), a fantasist whose yearnings finally sprout into wings. At the beginning of the evening, we’re greeted and given a sort of orientation to the town by a bartender from a neighboring burgh, Miss Trish (Sarah Hartley). Being a professional booze-pusher, she also gives us a drink, since cocktails, one for each room, are a defining part of our time in Centralia. Apparently being under the influence is an unofficial requirement for entry (as well as a great selling point with audiences, judging by the show’s turnout and the lines at the bar).

As Evelyn, Leah Loftin’s performance was the highlight of a visit to Centralia. It’s as if the blazes beneath the town have ignited a fire in her; her Evelyn glows with their feverish light. Of all the personages we meet here, Evelyn is at once larger-than-life and true to it. We can believe that this woman, a little like a tragicomic heroine out of Tennessee Williams (she’s an actress, what else), could fill the town’s void with her self-aggrandizing day dreams. When her overblown fantasies of stardom finally inspire her escape, it feels like a triumph, and a fitting climax to the event. What happens when she gets to the other side hardly matters. (It should be said that Miss Loftin is a friend, one who’s work I’ve had the pleasure of writing on before, in New Orleans, where we first became acquaintances.)

It’s hard to conjure desolation when you’re surrounded by dozens of chatty, cocktail-swilling Brooklynites. Worst is that the noise-level breaches the homes of our few and proud Centralians, since their walls are actually curtains, and even those stop far short of the lofty rafters of the Lyceum. The din was so intense the night I attended that it was hard to hear many of the actors, despite the living room set-ups, which mean that typically only a few feet separates audience and performer (if that).

Kate Valk in 'Brace Up!' (photo by Mary Gearhart)

Though it pains me to admit it, there are times when the thrills of the Wooster Group have eluded me. When I think back now on productions like “The Hairy Ape,” the more recent “Hamlet,” and several other pieces, I would like to think there were moments that captivated and astonished me (I’m sure there were). I just can’t remember them amid the noisy barrage of theater-as-expected being ripped apart.

So their current production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, of what are referred to as Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn, or “sea” plays, is startling in its quietness. Directed by Richard Maxwell in a collaboration with his New York City Players, “Early Plays,” as the show is billed, is a study in blunt impact, all the more brutal for being unsparingly direct. The effect is of throwing back a shot of whiskey and being punched in the jaw. The next morning, you won’t need aspirin or a slab of raw meat to take down the swelling, but you will still feel the pain of these characters’ harsh, hopeless lives.

I saw Brian Mendes in a production this past fall of Adam Rapp’s “Animals & Plants,” (part of The Amoralists’ “Hotel/Motel” double bill) and was stuck by his ability to seem simultaneously present and of another world. Here uses this same quality to great effect as Yank, a seaman not long for this life. His deathbed yearnings for the solace of connection, when he shares with his best friend his dream of their cultivating a farm together, are nothing short of heartbreaking. Maxwell creates the compressed feeling of a ship’s barracks by staging the scene back in the far corner of the stage, hemmed in by darkness, so that mostly what we see is Mendes’ face illuminated as if by a lantern. It’s like we were watching the whole scene through a window, immediate and far away at the same time. The main stage area is covered with glowering fog, and figures on the deck of the ship move through it as if already ascending heavenward, or descending into hell.

A few days after my voyage into O’Neill’s bitter seas I had another encounter with the Wooster Group, thanks to Anthology Film Archives’ film and video series of a impressive selection of their work. On a drizzly Saturday evening I attended a screening of “Brace Up!”, the troupe’s 2003 take on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” The video quality, when stretched to fill a big screen, was grainy, and the back wall of the stage—along which performers seem to be preparing for some variety of Japanese theater performance—was a wash. But the video had at least one distinct advantage, I would think, over watching the piece live: actors’ faces, shown via live video on small TV monitors during the actual performance, were pulled out and rendered larger in the film, giving us a better look at cinematic, extreme close-ups of their wonderfully alive, expressive faces as they intone Chekhov’s words. These little portraits—particularly of Sheena See as Olga and Anna Kohler as interloping in-law Natalya—are at once sincere and a little soapy, teasing the strands of melodrama out of Chekhov’s story of being stuck in the sticks.

“This way for our studio tour—you! You look like you have something important you want to say,” he coaxed me, in reaction to some facial expression I was unaware of having made. I was, in fact, a little baffled at being whisked into the Gob Squad’s “studio tour”—and so cheerily, at that—immediately upon entering the Newman Theater space at The Public this past Monday night. And he (he being Simon, one of the performers) was right: There were several unspoken questions that sprang to mind (though my lips remained sealed). Was this “studio tour” part of the performance? (Answer: Yes, sort of.) Did everyone in the audience go on the “studio tour”? (Answer: Yes, though I’m sure no one was forced, so if you ran in the other direction at their sunny invitation, you could likely escape.)

Hopefully there were few escapees, since it would be a shame to have missed this prelude. Almost the entire show took place with the performers behind screens that separated the “studio” from the audience. For the rest of the evening, we watched them and their goings-on projected live on video. So the studio tour pulled back the veil, letting us see how the whole operation worked before it began in earnest.

You might think this would demystify the performance, but instead it highlighted the power of the camera to transform and heighten, to somehow mystify and reveal at the same time. Talented and charming as the Gob Squadders are, it’s hard to imagine that the antics they pursue in their mundane, brightly lit “studio”—furnished with a cheap kitchen table, a mattress, a squashed-looking couch, all of which would likely have been at home in Warhol’s Factory—would have been quite so fascinating if they weren’t on film.

Which, I imagine—knowing next to nothing about the films of Andy Warhol—was his point in making the movies that serve as inspiration for this show, entitled “Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). Take anything; film it; it takes on a new life, transformed by the camera into something larger and more otherworldly than its flesh-and-blood self.

Another question I had in my mind when I encountered the flesh-and-blood Simon ushering me into “the studio” set up on stage, was, is this being filmed? I don’t know the answer, but it's probably yes; because later in the evening, several audience members became stars of the show. The studio tour may have been our collective “screen test.”

The audience participation aspect of the performance steals the show, and that is likely the intention. Of course, the Gob Squad makes the orchestration of all this look as natural as rolling off a mattress on the floor, pouring some vodka and lighting a cigarette. They manage to put their audience recruits so at ease that they feel comfortable kissing strangers (okay, maybe not that comfortable, but that is part of the delight for both spectators and kissers, or so we’d guess). Another audience member (a guy) poses, cheesecake-style, on the kitchen table, and a woman who admits to the entire audience (reluctantly) that she is 53 becomes a glowing, wide-eyed angel of the screen. Their “performances” are so seamless it’s tempting to think they are plants, but they also show the kind of genuine astonishment at being thrust onstage that is impossible to fake. I ask the guy after the show, just to make sure, and when he assures me he was just a dude in the opening-night crowd, I tell him he has a new career as a performer. “That’s what everyone keeps saying!” he says. A star is born—for 15 minutes, at least.

In pondering why the God Squad chose to mine Warhol’s films now, reality TV comes to mind (talk about the camera transforming the mundane into something people are clamoring to watch!). And as in reality TV, the Gob Squad performers veer from mesmerizing to dull as they stare into cameras, try to sleep, eat spoonfuls of mustard, try to have sex--all similar stuff to what Warhol had people do in front of a camera in his movies.

Simon, the charismatic narrator/ringleader of the evening, says something to the effect of, this moment was the crucible of modern culture, the moment we look back on and say, it all happened right then! Of course, doesn’t every generation of artists think exactly that about the one that came before? It’s like Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”: Gertrude Stein and Picasso aren’t good enough for Marion Cotillard’s character—she pines for the days of Toulouse-Lautrec.

I have a tendency, if pressed, to demur that overtly political art isn’t really my thing. So often, it can be boiled down to a treatise; you might as well read a good op-ed piece and leave it at that. If I can reduce a dance piece or a play or a painting into a pithy statement, a call to arms or a rallying cry—however compelling the cause—mightn’t I just as well read about it in the paper? Do I really have to see people dance about it? (I saw a modern dance once in which the young, sylph-like performers were improbably meant to represent glaciers in their dying paroxysms in a comment on global warming. Granted, the glaciers are getting smaller, but the dancers more closely resembled icicles, and in any case it was not an apt narrative for a dance, if you ask me!).

But I know that my knee-jerk reaction to art that carries a political message is really B.S. It’s not that I don’t like political art, it’s that I don’t like bad political art (or bad apolitical art either, for that matter). (And what do we really mean by political? Aren’t “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet” political in certain senses?)

So it’s especially good that I got to see Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” (thanks to my amazing next-door neighbor, who works at the Public—I promise to keep the volume down on my TV from this day forward, Maria!). Being in the theater always feels like a gift, and when it’s an actual gift, you start to worry that the glow of your gratitude will distract the people sitting near you as the house lights dim.

It’s not often that theater makes you literally gasp, makes your stomach clench and your blood run a little cold (I actually experienced an uncomfortable tingling in my extremities). And it’s even less often that when that happens, the story you’re being told is about something really going on out there in the world, at this very moment—at every minute of every day, in fact.

What Mike Daisey’s brilliant storytelling does is somehow lead us to a place where we experience horror on a visceral level in a way no chainsaw ever could produce (thank you just the same, Saw XV). The fact that this horror is being perpetrated by an enormously powerful and influential American company whose credo involves beauty, grace, elegance, whose products are almost universally fetishized—by Apple Computer—and that so many of us are in that sense complicit, does make it highly political. Daisey knocks Apple from its pristine tree, and we won’t ever look at the company’s gleaming, miraculous fruit in its immaculate packaging and temple-like stores in the same way again.

But the fact that we really feel this shock—in our guts—well that makes it art. One of the triumphs of Daisey’s show is that the story he crafts, and his telling of it, are so good—it’s horrible, and we may really not want to hear it. But on some level we enjoy it anyway (it helps that he is very funny).

A capsule review in The New Yorker asserted that the show is a lecture and should be billed that way, but Daisey is actually a consummate showman. He may not leap around the stage, or transform himself into characters á la another politically-oriented monologist, Anna Deavere Smith. But his gestures and the modulations of his voice are those of a masterful performer. If anything, he may be a little too masterful. While he works from notes, implying a level of play in his word choices and expression in any given outing, he seems so polished, so in control. Every hand gesture is graceful, precise, and has a certain weight, like a flight attendant conveying an especially important communiqué in sign language. His hands fan out before his face as he speaks of pictures spreading across a desktop computer screen; he sometimes gestures with seemingly every phrase. He mimics with voice and body a camera’s swishing snaps and the jarring staccato of an old dot-matrix printer. Every shift in tone, and every sure-handed movement, seem perfectly calibrated.

His careful choices extend to when to loosen up, to suddenly talk to us more directly, without the veneer of Performance. One of these times is when he jokes—quite possibly in response to The New Yorker—that maybe he isn’t even really an actor. I mean, he’s never even been on “Law & Order.”

Again, during part of what might be considered the climax of his story, he suddenly becomes more conversational, hushed, just a guy telling us about some bad stuff that, it just so happens, may irrevocably change the way we look at things we use, or at least see other people using, every day. He knows when he doesn’t need to perform at all, when simply confiding in us, as if we were having a beer with him, or sitting across a dinner table, is more than powerful enough.

Daisey is also a gifted writer, and there are some wonderful turns of phrase, like when he tells us that the icons on a pirated iPhone all stagger onto its little screen as if they’ve been out drinking in Kowloon. Of Apple he says, “If you control the metaphor of how we see the world, you control the world itself.” And of one of the predominant tendencies of our age—to sit in front of our computers and think ourselves well informed—“Until we take our eyes of our screens and really see something, we don’t know anything at all.”

Photo by Matthew Murphy

“Southern Comfort” immediately brings to mind images of a frat party at LSU, or, if you bring theater into the picture, maybe a Beth Henley play. Certainly not a musical about a tightly knit group of transgendered people—a self-identified family—living in rural Georgia.

I admit that I would never have sought out this production at CAP 21—which bills itself (in a slightly tongue-in-cheeky way, perhaps?) as “America’s Theatre Company” and whose mission is largely the development of new musicals and plays—if it hadn’t been for the capsule review I read in the New York Times’ Friday theater listings. (What can I say, I am one of those people who still worship at the Times altar.) This says something about the power of reviews, and which is why I read them and why I write them, too—even if the show isn’t good they stimulate interest in theater—or dance or movies or art or whatever. Hopefully they begin conversations. And maybe, as in this case, they lead you to something wonderful that you would have never seen otherwise.

This review was good, and so last Friday night I took the elevator up to the fifth floor of a building in Chelsea and found myself in what I’ll call A Clean Well-Lit Place for Theater—brand spanking new, or at least new looking. The space somehow seems cheery and inviting, not officey or corporate, which it could. It helps that all of the several staff people hovering around, despite their flurry of pre-show activity, couldn’t be any nicer.

So I get on the wait list—one thing CAP21 might do better at is updating its website, which as far as I could tell did not alert me that the show was sold out, or that it had been extended. I actually chose it over two other shows, all three of which I thought were closing that weekend. Turns out I could have seen “Southern Comfort” this weekend too (which is one reason I’m writing about it now, just in case anyone actually reads my Tumblr in this tender, nascent phase of its existence).

I barely squeaked in, as it turned out, and found myself in a seat on the stage—or the porch actually, of what I thought was a very impressive set design by James J. Fenton. There was a porch swing, a high picket fence decorated with folksy doo-dads as you walked into the theater, a scruffy tree that is the homeowner’s pride and centerpiece. It was quite a set for an $18 ticket. I feel like I’ve seen less detailed designs in shows that likely had much bigger budgets. The seat on the stage was kind of fun, except that it was hard to understand the words to the songs when people were singing with their backs to me.

The main recommendation of the Times write-up was that although this seemed like unlikely subject matter for a musical (it's based on a documentary film), it was quite moving. One thing I don’t like about reading reviews before I see something is that it can’t help but create certain expectations, which become a gauge for your experience—did it measure up, or disappoint, or maybe exceed what you’d been led to look and hope for? But in the end it doesn’t matter much, because whatever you experience—especially if it qualifies as emotional, or visceral—still belongs to you and you alone. It transcends whatever anyone else tells you you might feel. In fact I did begin tearing up a number of times during the show, and getting to feel something while seeing a live performance was no less magical or precious because the Times had warned me it might happen (nor could it happen based solely at their suggestion).

To me the most wonderful and surprising thing about this show—and I’m flaunting my own ignorance here—is that these characters really brought home to me in a new way feelings and experiences that are so deeply and richly human, that stuff we all have in common. It made me think of Shakespeare, though on the surface there is nothing here to conjure him up. When one of the characters sings about a time before he changed sexes, a time when “You didn’t know you, and I didn’t know me, and the truth wasn’t something everyone could see,” you don’t have to feel trapped in a body of the wrong gender to know exactly what he’s talking about. Yes, there is a difference in degree. But who hasn’t gone through a period when they felt they were hiding important parts of themselves from the world—or, for that matter, when they hadn’t figured out who they really were yet? Who hasn’t felt a disconnect between who they feel themselves to be inside, and how they think or even know that others see them? And who doesn’t yearn to be seen and known truly? To some extent we spend our lives trying to close the distance between inside and outside, how we feel and how others perceive us; in other words, to feel whole. “Southern Comfort” brings all this to mind so eloquently, thanks to book and lyrics by Dan Collins—I’m not sure I can imagine another group of characters who could communicate the same themes in such an honest, inspiring, completely fresh and yes, moving way.

The ensemble cast were all fine actors (the singing was more tenuous). For me, Annette O’Toole as the dying family patriarch, Robert, gave an especially convincing performance as a man who believes that it’s what’s in your heart, not between your legs, that matters. I also especially liked Robin Skye as Stephanie, a woman who grew up not talking to black people and then fell in love with “the best man” she’d ever met, who just happened to have been born a woman. But all the performances were good, including those of the onstage musicians and singers who bring Julianne Wick Davis’s charming score, inflected with a little Southern twang, to life.