Category: Theater

Mike Nichols keeps the opening moments of Death of a Salesman quiet, soft, and slow, all the better to set off the fireworks to come. The performances here set a reference standard for Arthur Miller’s iconic work, though we do miss the scrim effects specified by the text. Andrew Garfield gives us a grittier, more street-wise Biff Loman; Molly Price does comic va-va-va-voom as The Woman. Philip Seymour Hoffman is grounded, stolid as Willy Loman as his American dream breaks apart under his feet. He is a bear at bay—until his closing beat, when he sprints to escape.

With one arguable exception, the underscoring by Alex North and Glen Kelly works very well here, giving the piece a bit of Tennessee Williams flavor. The compact set by Jo Mielziner keeps the playing spaces contained; for once, the Lomans’ kitchen is the size of a real kitchen for a house built in 1920.

What resonates with today’s audiences, evidenced by sympathetic chuckles, is the play’s critique of postwar consumption-driven economics; planned obsolescence is planned obsolescence, whether it’s a refrigerator that wears out just as the last installment payment is made, or today’s electronic gadgets with their forced upgrades. Willy Loman’s boss Howard (the wired-up gearhead Remy Auberjonois) would be less reprehensible were he pushing paperwork in his interview with Willy, rather than futzing with his new wire recorder.

• Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, directed by Mike Nichols, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

Harold Pinter is perhaps at his most Beckettian in The Caretaker, particularly in the character of the shabby, smelly old man Davies (Jonathan Pryce, approaching statesman status). Director Christopher Morahan pushes the comedy as far as it will go, with a who’s-got-the-bag sequence that owes a little to Chuck Jones. Alex Hasselll as Mick delivers Pinter’s signature brooding menace, while Alan Cox gives us an understated gem of a monologue for damaged Aston, lit by an exquisitely gradually tightening pool of light designed by Colin Grenfell.

Extra-live acoustics in the work-in-progress BAM Harvey Theater at times rendered Pryce’s dialect too murky.

• The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter, directed by Christopher Morahan, BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, N.Y.

War Horse is a masterful piece of ensemble theatricality. This simple story of a boy and his horse Joey is told with live actors and bunraku-inspired puppets, augmented by a series of projections against a screen that resembles a torn scrap of paper.

The trials of Joey, acquired by the English army for service in the last major war in which cavalry was used (the so-called Great War), are our entry into an account of the inhumanity of that war — hence, as told here, this is not a piece that younger attendees will have the patience for.

This is the sort of puppetry that works because you’re always aware of the machinery, so a change to the fabric covering the horses’ bodies tells us all that we need to know about their condition.

If the acting and the musical underscoring are at times melodramatic, the work knows that its most touching effects are the simplest ones: a paddock established by four actors holding staffs; fallen bodies on a battleground transformed into a graveyard’s mounds by the arrival of the women they left behind, in chorus; the twitch of a horse’s ear or the heave of a foal’s chest; wagon ruts established by rumpled scraps of cloth laid on the deck. Perhaps most dramatic is the death of Joey’s rival-turned-compatriot, the horse Topthorn. When Topthorn goes down, the puppeteers detach themselves from his armature and back offstage quickly, his departing life force briefly become personified.

• War Horse, based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, adapted by Nick Stafford, in association with Handspring Puppet Company, directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, Lincoln Center Theatre at the Vivian Beaumont, New York

1st Stage delivers a clean, tight rendering of Leight’s memory play on the twilight of jazz bands. Patrick Bussinck gives a street-wise, wry reading to the narrator Clifford, one that’s much more connected than previous portrayals I’ve seen. Lee Mikeska Gardner makes the character arc of Clifford’s doomed mother Terry more distinct, albeit with a softened New England dialect. Director Michael Dove suits the play’s multiple locations to 1st Stage’s friendly space, using the house’s central aisle for entrances and conjuring a jail cell from two chairs. The atmospheric lighting by Stephanie P. Freed, relying on floor lamps and wall sconces to give us a cramped rent-controlled apartment or a downstairs jazz club, is exceptional.

• Side Man, by Warren Leight, directed by Michael Dove, 1st Stage Theatre, Tysons Corner, Virginia

Drag performer Joey Arias dresses up her cabaret act with inventive scrim projections and other effects by Basil Twist. Alas, Twist’s vintage puppets have more engaging personality than Arias’s persona. Unfunny banter, and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a gag based on a hand job. Arias does display some vocal skills, as well as an overworked deep squat move. She makes some wholly peculiar music choices, like George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” and the opening number, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s bombastic “Kashmir.” If the objective is something north of The Rocky Horror Show, what is realized is more like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

• Arias with a Twist, by Joey Arias and Basil Twist, directed by Basil Twist, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Sarah Marshall is monumental in the role of Big Hog in Jason Grote’s Civilization (all you can eat). It’s a fable (with more than a little debt to Orwell’s Animal Farm) in which most of the desperate, lonely people of its overlapping subplots are on the way down, while the hogs are are the way up. Grote usually dreams big, and here he swings from a scene watching the stars to a painfully frank confession at an open mic night. Daniel Escobar handles the latter with a deft touch, as he speaks of walking the waste paths of the city, noting every bit of trash along the verges.

All these scenelets make for a lot of scene transitions, and director Howard Shalwitz manages them skillfully. Nearly all the action takes place along a narrow strip downstage of a two-story barn wall marked with faded painted advertisements. Actors and set pieces always move on from stage right and go off to stage left, and the one-way movement begins to suggest a treadmill. And here’s something you don’t see much any more: the coffee shop tables, chairs, and people brazenly roll into view while the previous scene is still playing. Choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning contributes a fun dance with shopping carts for another scene change.

But it’s Marshall who’s the star. As the piggie who went to market and came back with a thousand-yard stare into our future, she will put you off your bacon for a while.

• Civilization (all you can eat), by Jason Grote, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Forum Theatre offers a thoughtful comedy that follows the link between the words we use and the world that they create. George, a professional linguist (the multi-colored monologist Mitchell Hébert), preserves dying languages on tape, tracking down their last native speakers. Unfortunately, at home, relations with his wife Mary (the rock-steady Nanna Ingvarsson) are less successful: incapable of converting his love to words, George’s emotions are bracketed by quotation marks.

One of George’s interview subjects explains forcefully to him that the decay of a spoken language does not lead to the disappearance of a way of life; rather, it is the other way around, the disappearing world causing the language’s vanishing. And yet playwright Julia Cho leaves the question for us to decide, as the play often suggests the contrary, especially on the micro scale. George and Mary’s communication gap is neatly echoed by the argument between interview subjects Alta and Resten, a married couple and the last speakers of a vaguely north-central Eurasian tongue known for its musicality; their spat culminates in a mutual silent treatment. Covering several ensemble roles as well as those of Alta and Resten are Kerri Rambow and Edward Christian, and they do a fine job with each of them.

The play is enlivened by a few quirky breakings of the fourth wall, most notably the group Esperanto lesson that opens the second act.

• The Language Archive, by Julia Cho, directed by Jessica Burgess, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Time Stands Still is not a play that will wrap everything up for us in a tidy package, that will tell us what we need to know and feel about putting your life and values in danger to do journalism in a war zone. Rather, this comedy-drama requires that we do the work ourselves, guided by what the characters do and say: Sarah and John, together for eight years as foreign correspondents, and their friends Richard and Mandy, a May-December pairing that ultimately bears fruit and happiness. And they do not always express themselves consistently: photographer Sarah (the deeply resourceful Holly Twyford) especially, who shields herself from atrocity with her camera lens and a workmanlike defense that taking pictures is “doing my job,” and yet is shaken by a bleeding woman in a market, victim of a bombing, who smears blood on Sarah’s lens, crying “no pictures!”

It will come as no surprise that Sarah begins and ends her journey on the reporter’s side of the mental barrier that divides her from the civilian, despite her life-threatening injuries from a roadside bomb attack. What’s perhaps more interesting is the move to the nurturing center taken by her partner James (the funny, solid, loving Studio newcomer Greg McFadden), even if it does entail a retreat to pseudo-scholarly writing about pop culture and celebrity interviews for Vanity Fair. And let us not overlook Mandy (played by Laura C. Harris with serious depth), who begins the play as the earnest, pretty young thing girlfriend, a figure of ridicule by Sarah and James (Sarah’s look to Richard when Mandy feels it necessary to define “pro bono” is genius) and becomes a grounded, articulate voice for getting on with the task of living here and now.

John McDermott’s lovely live-in New York apartment set on the Metheny’s thrust stage at times presented a blocking challenge; a character would come to the extreme lip of the stage for a monologue with no reason to be there except to talk to us. And I had the feeling that occasionally light spill into the audience was a source of actor distraction.

The piece is one of Donald Margulies most accomplished, unified works, an equal to his Dinner with Friends (albeit with fewer working kitchens required).

• Time Stands Still, by Donald Margulies, directed by Susan Fenichell, The Studio Theatre Metheny Theatre, Washington