Since I suspect some producer types are among the guests here, I hope it's ok to essentially reproduce a post from All That Chat about the whole Series B of the evening at 59E59.
Series B seems to have gotten the kind of reviews where different critics are totally loving different pieces, and all of the pieces have gotten some nice comments from the critics so far. [except for Backstage's critic, whose review came out with great speed and little analysis - incredibly, while he found something to enjoy in all of Series A, the Backstage critic perversely is on his own, so far anyway, in finding none of the pieces in Series B to his liking, even with the great diversity among the pieces, but the review did come out quickly, I'll say that for him].
But given my bias towards Skip and Plaisir d'Amour, here are some quotes about series B that just happen to be handy
PEOPLESPEAK
Aaron Riccio on Theater Talk’s New Theater Corps: “PeopleSpeak operates the same way: the play very comically opens with Siobhan (the excellent Sherry Anderson) getting interrupted mid-suicide by a call from her mother (the persistently creative sort who sends musical affirmations by mail), but then using that dark comedy to turn the mirror back on our isolated, text-heavy cellular world. Even when things go overboard, with a friendly waiter (the comic Nick Westrate) "channeling" an overly moral spirit to neatly bring the play to a close, the energy is buoyant enough to keep things afloat.”
David Barbour, L&S Online: "Can't people go one second when they're not on the phone?" wonders the beleaguered heroine of PeopleSpeak. Apparently not, if you're going by this fast and funny farce, the highlight of Summer Shorts Series B. It begins with Siobhan, a middle-aged "permanent temp," about to blow her brains out. (We never learn the details of the tragedy that has left her suicidal, but it apparently involves credit-card debt, infidelity, cancer, and AIDS.) Before she can pull the trigger, however, she's interrupted by a call from her mother, who quite reasonably points out that Siobhan's problems could be worse -- after all, she could be like the human torso in the circus. "At least she has a job she likes," notes Siobhan.
Her effort at self-annihilation thwarted, Siobhan heads to a Village café, where she has to deal with Cassie, her staggeringly narcissistic employer. ("You are an ox. You are a great big strong ox. And I mean that in the nicest way," Cassie says, offering her own peculiar brand of comfort.) Serving -- or rather, not serving -- them is Brian, a waiter, who is so busy relating the details of his sex life, via phone and text message, that he has no time to deliver food or drink. ("Put your hand down or I will call you out like you're a number in a bingo game," he warns one starved customer.)
And so it goes, as Siobhan works through multiple self-help tomes, reading out "affirmations" ("I deserve to take up space") and worrying about her medication wearing off, while everyone around her is on the phone, blabbing, in the language of pop therapy, about him or herself. The playwright, John Augustine, is the life partner of Christopher Durang, as well as his co-star in the cabaret act Chris Durang and Dawne; he shares Durang's impatience with spurious positive-thinking gurus like Louise Hay, but he has his own special knack for wild twists -- including the mortifying hidden link between Cassie and Brian -- that keep the plot bubbling along.
The action could be trimmed by a few minutes -- the fun thins a bit when Brian starts channeling advice-giving voices from the beyond -- but, under Robert Saxner's limber direction, PeopleSpeak provides steady amusement throughout. As Siobhan, Sherry Anderson (another member of Dawne) has a thousand-and-one facial expressions suitable for signaling moral outage, and Patricia Randell is a garrulously funny Cassie. But it's Nick Westrate who has a mini-triumph as Brian, doubling also as a leering construction worker, a text-messaging cab driver, the operator of a donut kiosk, and another customer in the café, who gets out while the getting is good.”
PLAISIR d’AMOUR
Variety: “Terrence McNally and Skip Kennon's lovely little musical comedy "Plaisir D'Amour," which makes excellent use of "Avenue Q" vet Stephanie D'Abruzzo as Ruth and Jonathan C. Kaplan as her partner Sam. It feels odd to call a 30-minute show an extravaganza, but that's the most fitting word. ... But the prize goes, no contest, to "Plaisir D'Amour," mostly because of the amazing synchronization of all its disparate elements. It's not any one song that makes the brief show (really a mini-opera) such a treat. It's lyrics like Sam's internal "Go up and chat with her; be charming and be chipper," while Ruth thinks "He could just be a lieder-loving Jack the Ripper" underneath the strains of the singer (Rita Harvey) they're both pretending to listen to, crooning in French about the pleasures of love.”
David Finkle on theatremania.com: “Plaisirs d'Amour, which takes its cue from the traditional French ditty but doesn't reprise it, begins with early-stage love pleasures and advances and moves on to the inevitable disillusioning phases that McNally obviously believes speedily follow. Ruth (Stephanie D'Abruzzo) and Sam (Jonathan C. Kaplan) meet cute at a recital where a soprano (Rita Harvey in the first of several roles) is holding forth on love's vagaries. Thereafter, the couple marries, raise children, indulge infidelities and, years later, reach a convincingly realistic conclusion about their relationship. The piece will strike some inveterate theater fans as a variation on Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, but McNally and Kennon's lovely melodies and deft lyrics make the enterprise decidedly appealing, as do the accomplished actor-singers (who also include Neal Mayer in a range of supporting roles).”
Aaron Riccio on Theater Talk’s New Theater Corps: “Of course, the real reason to see either series is for Roger Hedden's Deep in the Hole (Series A) or Terrence McNally and Skip Kennon's mini-musical Plaisir D'Amour (Series B) ... outstanding performances from Stephanie D'Abruzzo and Jonathan C. Kaplan as they chronicle a relationship from the desperate single life to the troubled married life and eventually, with their own children now married, to the comfortable afterglow of a once passionate life … does for a transient comedy what Prelude & Liebestod did for drama.”
ON ISLAND
Variety: “What's nice about the piece, aside from Jorge Cordova's turn as the concerned older brother, is that the writer has fully developed characters in mind and knows exactly how they talk and where he wants to go with them.”
David Finkle at theatermania.com: “Anyone who saw Domitrovich's Artfuckers this past year will probably be unprepared for the gentle sagacity of On Island. Greek groom-to-be George (Anthony Carrigan) is getting cold feet before his marriage to the Jewish Sandi (Lisa Birnbaum) on a Martha's Vineyard beach. So he's retreated with brother Leo (Jorge Cordova) to work through the qualms that threaten to overwhelm him. There's much fraternal love here, and when cooling-her-heels-at-the-altar Sandi arrives to get to the delay's bottom, there's even more genuine love circulating on the symbolic sand. Never mind that the glue binding the about-to-be-newlyweds and brother Leo seems to hinge on their shared affection for cult-movie Airplane! These churning Edgartown waters run deep, especially as expertly guided by director Mary Catherine Burke.”
Aaron Riccio on Theater Talk’s New Theater Corps: “Michael Domitrovich's On Island (Series B) also makes a nice go of it: while his groom-with-cold-feet plot is nothing new, Leo's attempt to help his brother, George, feel more comfortable about marrying Sandi, especially in the honest recounts of their childhood memories, sells the piece.”
OUR TIME IS UP (the short curtain-raiser)
Variety: “Reddin's play, about a precocious kid (Clara Hopkins Daniels) who turns the tables on her analyst (Janet Zarish), has some real lightness to it; "Time" isn't an entree but it could be a nice appetizer.”
David Barbour, L&S Online: “Callie, a teenager, has been sent to Sharon for analysis because her parents are worried about Anna, her imaginary friend. Anna may be a symptom, but she apparently has an encyclopedic knowledge of Freudian and Jungian theory, and, in minutes, Callie has Sharon in tears, disclosing her ambivalent feelings about her father. It's the kind of thing you might have seen on The Carol Burnett Show 30 years ago, but it has a few laughs, thanks to Janet Zarish's quick-on-the-trigger emoting as Sharon and Clara Hopkins Daniels' skillful underplaying as Callie. Billy Hopkins' direction handles the material with a light touch.”
