Yankee Wives

   Okay, I admit it.  Right up until the start of the play I was checking my cell phone for the score of the game.  Yankees-Red Sox in a year when New York needs every win it can get to stay in the race makes for drama.   Earlier in the week it had occurred to me how much the last month of the season to a baseball fan whose team is in the run resembles one of those hit series that have taken over television where fans tune in because they must see what happens next.    Until this play, I’ve never really thought about the wives of the players.

     I was about to be introduced to five women, and then a sixth.   I don’t think I’ve seen many productions of any kind in which the entire cast is of one sex, except maybe for POW films where an escape is being planned.   The only male presence for the next few hours would be the disembodied voice of the announcer – unreal and distant from the action happening between and among the women, as distant as their offstage husbands.

     I say “between and among” because conflicts happened to pairs and then the group reacted, just like in real life.  There are secrets but nothing stays secret for long, just like in real life, and there is a transformation that takes place.   I’m not being flip when I say that changes in hairstyle signaled that a change had happened to the character on the inside.

     The play takes place in a locker room, which is metaphorical, at least more metaphorical than the seating section for wives in the stands.  

     The sixth woman who stepped on the stage, the rookie wife, Wyla, played by Eliza Simpson, stole the show for me.  To be fair to the others, all excellent in their roles, her character is written to do that.    Their historical conflicts, their hierarchy, their way of interacting for what we fell is years set the stage for her arrival.

She is awkward, innocent to a point, untutored, easily awestruck and absolutely genuine.   She completely embraces the role.  She handles the comedy very well.  The best compliment I can give is that you instantly feel that that you know her.

     Samantha Strelitz as Pam, the Olympic swimmer with a record of athletic success all her own but whose husband can’t hit the curveball, conveys well that combination of paradoxes that makes up a real person.  To say more would be to give way too much. 

     Chudney Sykes, as Marceline, wears well the trappings of her role – she is the wise one, mature, forgiving, always steady.   Jennifer Laine Williams as Sally is the convincing Queen of the locker room, disciplinarian, keeper of the faith, will she ever see another way?   Cristina Marie and McKenna Fox as the duo of Connie and Ronnie anchor the action with a comedic, matter-of-fact routine.

     “I wish every woman could have a baseball card of her husband,” says the rookie wife early in the play.  By the end of the action, you might conclude that the women have come into their own… maybe the husbands should have baseball cards of their wives.

     At intermission, when I checked my phone, I was distressed to see that the Red Sox had a 4-2 lead.  At the end of the play, I walked briskly from 26th Street to Penn Station, troubled that the score was now 7-2.   Thirty minutes early for the next train, I sought out the bar where I watched, hope against hope, the home team roar back to a 7-7 tie.   

Sitting in the train, moving in and out of the tunnels, gaining and losing connection, my cell phone told me that we were ahead 8-7, then that it was tied 8-8. 

Arriving in my town, I walked to the bar near the station and watched the final unraveling, only me and the bartender.  He was pessimistic about our chances and he was right.  We lost 9-8, a heart-breaker.

    “I’d better go,” I said to him.  “I have a review to write.”

Play runs through 9/15.  Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 West 26^th Street. More info www.yankeewives.com

Playwright/Director David Rimmer. Set design by Allison McGrath, Lighting design by Ian Edward Smith. Costume design by Ramona Ponce. Sound design by Matthew P. Morris. Fight choreography by Dan Renkin. Produced by Group Theater Too.

Einstein

This is a play about history, science, philosophy, obscurity, celebrity, but mostly about change, the kind of revolutionary change that defined the modern world for better and worse, and how it sprang from the imagination of a single man. 

     Richard Kent Green is an excellent Einstein.  He is the only actor who does not play more than one part in this performance.  In a subliminal way this reinforces our focus on him as a singular figure at the center of his own self-conscious history; around him other people swirl, come into existence and disappear; they are the actors in his life.

     In 1962, Thomas Khun wrote a book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” It would be considered an important book if it had done no more than plant the meaning of one word in our minds – paradigm.  

     There are changes all the time but only extremely rarely is there a change in paradigm, an entirely new, more accurate explanation of reality.  Einstein’s discoveries, conducted in the laboratory of his mind, changed the paradigm. 

     The play opens with Einstein sitting on a park bench, wishing he could have a conversation with Newton, centuries his predecessor.   Instead he gets his good friend Besso, who appears out of nowhere, wearing a straw hat and holding a cane, sunny in disposition, chaplinesque in his movements.  He cares about Einstein.  One off-handed comment transforms Besso into an accidental muse, giving Einstein the kind of insight he might have hoped for from Newton.

     The choreography is subtle and impressive.  Ideas dance in and out of Einstein’s mind.  Conversations among three people about a fourth who stands silently by, outside of the action, are overheard by this person we can tell from his or her facial expression.   It is an effective way to get across that conversations people have about us will eventually reach us, if not the actual words, then the feelings they express.

     Even more impressive, is the moving image of what it means to become famous, sparingly and beautifully rendered.  An Einstein solitary in his thought until his theory wins popular attention, is suddenly set upon by a flock of reporters who swarm around him like pigeons.  He drops the bread crumbs of a few words, an answer to a question, then moves downstage and they reassemble around him, the center of their temporary universe.

The lighting is also to be complimented, and the venue, a theatre within a church – what better for an exposition on such fundamental subjects – the structure of the universe, light, matter, energy.

     Grant Kretchik who plays Besso demonstrates admirable range when we meet him later as the atomic scientist Neils Bohr, urging a reluctant and ultimately uncooperative Einstein to address a gathering of younger physicists who look up to him.  His own theories have led them in a direction he finds unpalatable – quantum mechanics – which crudely described posits a different structure at the atomic level than is evident thanks also to Einstein’s theories in the large-scale universe.  Einstein will have none of this or the uncertainty principle on which it is based.  For Einstein, if a theory is probabilistic that is because the answer has not been found.  He stubbornly persists in his search for a unified theory, as he will until his death.  Repeatedly, he will reject the work of others.

     This is not a play just about science.  It’s about a human being at a certain point in history; as much as it is about the changes he effected, it is also about things that he could not change, and about irony.

     The irony is that Einstein, the man, while expressing great empathy and love for humankind could, by his own admission, not love individual human begins.  He felt passion only for science and causes.  He is also caught up in history – the persecutions of Nazi Germany and McCarthyism; the fateful letter to Roosevelt that saves the western democracies but unleashes the possibility of what he calls a chain reaction of death, his Faustian bargain, a pacifist, father of the atomic bomb.

     All of this is here and much more as the years projected above the action unfold – 1905, 1919, 1927, 1932, 1942, 1945, 1955.

     The actors are all remarkable.  They reappear creatively in new parts to the delight of the audience, demonstrating their skills and advancing the story. Take Jill Catherine Durso who plays the mistreated Mileva, Einstein’s first wife, whose work on the mathematics of his early theory went forever unrecognized, the mother of his first daughter in whom Einstein expressed no interest, maligned as below him by his parents, cheated on by him as will be his wont throughout the play, also with his second wife – this actress not only plays Mileva, but the women with whom he has dalliance, an interesting concept.

     If you have an interest in Einstein, history, science, imagination, humanity, modernity, human failings, genius, or how great acting can bring  all of this to life, see this play.  I can’t help but end with a paraphrase of my favorite Einstein quote, even though it is not in the play:  “I don’t know which weapons will be used to fight World War III, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” 

Slaughterhouse Five: the Play

This is a brave attempt to do the near impossible – and it succeeds in what audiences appreciate most – humor.   

      But Vonnegut’s humor is of the darkest variety, and getting across that darkness and still getting people to laugh at it is not so easy, especially in a play, where for the most part your only tools are words.  Slaughterhouse Five, the novel, has always seemed to me like a 200-page thesis on two lines of poetry from Byron:  “If I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘Tis that I may not weep.”  Billy Pilgrim, the central character, weeps often, and alone.  It’s one of two things he does alone; the other is time-travel.

      Let’s not forget that the venue for this play is a theatre at 21 Clinton Street in Lower Manhattan with the name “Celebration of Whimsy.”   This play focuses on the whimsy of time travel.  The humor spills out of the sudden shifts of venue, sometimes kept secret from the other characters in the play, which elicits laughter.    This is the story of Slaughterhouse Five told from the viewpoint of the Trafalmadorians , inhabitants of Billy Pilgrim’s other-worldly destination, who believe that everything is how it is and how it will always be.  The Trafalmadorian character in the play is a disembodied, voice beautifully rendered by Lena Hudson.  The audience broke into laughter often.

     Before seeing this play, I re-read Slaughterhouse Five and watched the movie once again.  What struck me is its thorough relevance to today, as if in handing us the book Vonnegut conveys one of Billy Pilgrim’s “memories of the future.”   The Trafalmadorians explain that war has always been with us and always will be… but that’s at a distance from earth, as Vonnegut tells us, of 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles.  Up close, it doesn’t seem so natural.  This number of miles may approximate the distance between those who experience it first-hand and those who never do. 

      In an interview on the director’s cut of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman waxes on about some of the differences between a play and movie.  In a movie you can just shift the scene; you can burn down a building to change the action as he does in that film.  David Mamet in On Directing Film tells us that the best films tell a story through a series of images, like those in a dream, like Billy Pilgrim’s flash-backs (today we call it PSTD).  Slaughterhouse Five, the movie, shows us a bombed-out Dresden, reduced to flames and rubble.   It shows us piles of dead bodies deliberately torched by soldiers with flamethrowers because there are too many to bury, and it is the only practical thing to do.  The book gives us these vivid images, too.  Not so easy in a play.  So we get lots of humor without all the horror.  So it goes. 

     Jamie Efros is a suitably bewildered Billy Pilgrim, confident only when reporting on the Trafalmadorian fourth dimension.  Anni Weisband embodies Montana Wildhack’s sexy attitude.  Christopher Travlos is convincing even though too young for both of his roles – the unfortunate Edgar Derby and the wise Eliot Rosewater.  Since Rachel Berger looks much better than the physical description of her Vonnegut gives, she has to persuade us through annoying behavior that her choice as Billy’s wife was an unlikely one, which she accomplishes.  Daria Tavana is the playwright; Jenny Beth Snyder is the director.  

     For complete production info: http://www.truefalsetheatre.org/blog/