Superfluities Redux

What with theatre blogs appearing and disappearing all the time, it's hard to keep track of new ones, but I do want to welcome Dominic Cavendish, Aleks Sierz and the other fine writers at the new blog just launched by the indispensable UK site theatreVOICE. Editor Cavendish and The Stage critic Mark Shenton (who also contributes to the Guardian theatre blog on occasion, along with myself and a host of others) have already made notable entries in just the past few days; so we raise our glasses to them and look forward to seeing what comes of their adventures on the blogosphere.

Beware the Gods Who Judge and Love:
F. Murray Abraham and Mark Linn-Baker in Almost an Evening
(See entry for 29 March)
Photo: Ari Mintz

UPDATE: Tomorrow (Friday) night, 28 March, the Metropolitan Opera will Webcast the final live performance of Tristan und Isolde this season. Says the email:

The performance begins at 7.00pm Eastern time; click here to access the Webcast.

Between posts on this blog, I've been scurrying around, reading a few others. For a cross-Atlantic look at the "value of theatre" discussion, take a look at Chris Wilkinson's precis in today's Guardian; and Mark Armstrong spotlights what appears to be an off-hand but ill-advised comment about American playwrights and their significance, whatever that means, from the new director of artistic development at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Jerry Patch. Of interest, in a dour sort of way.

There's about two months left in the official 2007-2008 theatre season; then comes the theatre festival season, which isn't the same thing but tends to get just as hectic. But there's life in the old girl yet, as a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest, will attest:

Saturday, 29 March: Fans of the Coen brothers may wish to consider Almost an Evening, three short plays by Ethan Coen, currently running through 1 June at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker. Like some of his films, the descriptions of the plays at the Web site are coy ("Someone waits somewhere for quite some time," goes the entire synopsis for Waiting; in Debate, we're told, "Cosmic questions are taken up. Not much is learned"), but with a cast that includes F. Murray Abraham, Mark Linn-Baker, Mary McCann and Joey Slotnick, one can hope for at least a bright diversion.

Sunday, 30 March: Alison Croggon takes some time off from theatre blogging and presiding over the land of Pellinor with the online publication of her latest chapbook of poems, Torque. "And, as all poetry ought to be, it's free," she notes. You can download Torque, in .pdf format, here, at the Ahadada Books Web site.

Monday, 31 March: The Segal Center welcomes Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman of The Civilians, who will discuss their new historical cabaret Paris Commune, opening at The Public Theatre for a three-week run beginning on 4 April. The show was developed from primary source materials about the 1871 working class uprising. Daniel Gerould moderates tonight's discussion, which begins at 6.30pm; excerpts from the show are also promised. Admission is free; the Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street.

Tuesday, 1 April: Order up your tickets for God's Ear, Jenny Schwartz's 2007 play about a family coming apart at the edges following the death of a child, which moves to the Vineyard Theatre with director Anne Kauffman and many of the cast of last year's New Georges production intact. God's Ear opens on 9 April and runs through 18 May. My review of the New George's premiere – positive, with just a few reservations – is here. And the text of the play is also available, published by Faber & Faber.

Thursday, 3 April: A party follows tonight's 8.30pm opening of Annie Dorsen's Democracy in America at PS122, 150 First Avenue. Okwui Okpokwasili, Philippa Kaye and Anthony Torn perform a show devised from purchases made by the public via a Web site earlier this year. Can money buy happiness – or, at least, an engrossing evening at the theatre? We'll find out.

Friday, 4 April: Downtown theatre types know him better as an impassioned publicist for Richard Foreman, the Blue Man Group and others, but give Manny Igrejas his due as a playwright himself tonight. His Kitty & Lina at manhattantheatresource, 177 Macdougal Street, looks at the relationship of two New York women, one a wide-eyed actress and the other an immigrant from Portugal. It runs through 26 April.

The Break-Up by Tommy Smith and The Happy Sad by Ken Urban. Directed by Sherri Kronfeld. Set design: John McDermott. Sound design: Brandon Wolcott. Light design: Ben Kato. Costume design: Erin Elizabeth Murphy. With The Bats: Felipe Bonilla, Havilah Brewster, Jane Elliott, Pete Forester, Tom Lipinski, Stephen O'Reilly, John Anthony Russo, Annie Scott and Ronald Washington. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission. At The Flea Theater, 41 White Street. Reviewed at the 24 March performance. Runs 6 March-7 April 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania.

Seven young New Yorkers cope with loss and love in Ken Urban's short entertaining comedy

Only disconnect:
Stephen O'Reilly and Annie Scott
in The Happy Sad
(Photo: Joan Marcus)

In Ken Urban's short new comedy, a "musical" of sorts written for The Bats, the young resident company at the Flea Theater, seven young men and women from across a range of careers and sexualities pair off, break up and get together again as slowly they come to terms with adult life as a series of losses and momentary pleasures. Beneath their La Ronde-like pairings and departures, they also discover that they so far lack a language for the melancholy that affects them: not the poetry of everyday speech but the poetry of The Hallmark Company just touches their sadness. But it is a comedy, and there's light here in most of the relationships, even those that fail, and so some hope.

I don't want to claim too much for the play – it's a relationship comedy, tentative love among the ruins of popular culture, an American comic genre that may have begun with David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and continues on with Chris Shinn's Other People (everybody in New York seems to have one of these plays in them; I've even done one myself), and Ken's entry here is winning and entertaining, not least because of the attractive and earnest cast. Among the standouts are Annie Scott's bi- and cheerfully- curious Annie, Stephen O'Reilly's wounded and tentative Stan and, especially, Havilah Brewster's Mandy. As the only one of the characters sexually inactive through the play (and coping with the death of a parent), Mandy is on the edge of realising an adult life of solitude and frustration; Brewster catches her fear and terror quite memorably. Ken's simple songs, performed here a capella, have an affecting schoolyard innocence, especially a trio rendered by the three women in a health-club sauna.

The simple production in the small downstairs theatre at the Flea by Sherri Kronfeld is effective, if a little prop-happy: once again, the audience is prompted to admire the touches of naturalistic authenticity in what is, essentially, a bare-stage show (look! real salt-and-pepper shakers!), a disheartening trend that detracts from the stars of the production, which should be the language and the performers. That said, a word for Erin Elizabeth Murphy's costume design, too, which brings a little more style and panache than usual for a contemporary play.

The evening is preceded by a ten-minute curtain-raiser, Tommy Smith's The Break-Up. Like Aaron, I have nothing to say about it.

Spring is vaguely approaching New York – there are still few buds on the trees, and the temperatures are only slowly creeping upward – but there's still business to attend to, and in the thick of it. Light posting is the order of the day, especially after rolling in at 1.00am on a school night yesterday.

More to come. But: yes, by all means drop on down to the Flea Theatre to check out Ken Urban's The Happy Sad, running through 7 April. Compared to Ken's work with his own Committee Theatre Company, it's something of a trifle, but the Bats, the Flea's resident company of young performers, are game and winning.

Deborah Voigt, it turns out, was indisposed and absent from last night's performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Met, but it was her loss. Janice Baird made a fine Isolde, and held her own against the brilliant Ben Heppner as Tristan and Matti Salminen's deeply affecting King Marke. Best of all was James Levine and the performance of the Met orchestra; the Met arguably boasts the finest orchestral ensemble in New York (which makes it one of the best in the world), and their rendering of one of the greatest achievements of Western music and drama was stunning and, as it should be, exhausting. More to come on Dieter Dorn's production, a marriage of Beckett and Appia, this weekend.

Many years after his notorious break with Wagner (well-examined in Bryan Magee's indispensable The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy), Friedrich Nietzsche said of the opera, "Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan – I have sought in vain, in every art." Only a fool would argue with Nietzsche. Radio and HD-cinema performances of this production of Tristan seem to have run their time in the U.S. this season, but my European and Australian readers may still be in luck, with performances running in April.

Glossary: Notes from a conversation with a playwright. At home, we read Shakespeare with a dictionary by our side, or from a fully-glossed edition (unless, perversely, we have availed ourselves of an edition deliberately unglossed, in an attempt to recreate the theatrical experience of these plays). But when we go to see Hamlet, King Lear or Twelfth Night in a theatre, we leave the dictionaries at home. Somehow, precise definitions for archaisms or unfamiliar words in Shakespeare's plays are unnecessary when we hear them from the mouths of actors and actresses; we enter into the imaginary worlds of the plays through the sounds of the words, not their definitions. We are drawn by the words' poetry – specifically, their sound and music, in which experiential definition inheres on the stage – and not their empirical, symbolic equivalances provided to us by a glossary. A consequence of time is that language, the meanings of words, changes radically; a consequence of timelessness is that this same language, sounds from our mouths directed at another, retains its music.

Shakespeare and the Greeks knew that plot was little more than a hook to hang a play on. Notoriously, Shakespeare devised few original stories, relying instead on Holinshed, Plutarch and Ovid; the Greeks devised their plots from the Homeric epics and other traditional stories. (In our own time, Brecht similarly scavenged from the past.) But Shakespeare and the Greeks were after more than a good story, or even more than any story, so many of these stories defying lucid straightforward narrative; the Jacobeans, especially, created plots which are hopelessly convoluted, ill-constructed, and the machinations of Shakespeare's history plays are frequently beyond logical explanation. Interestingly, narrative itself as we conceive it is anchored in the three a priori assumptions of the phenomenal world as outlined by Schopenhauer and Kant: time, space and causality, the basis of sufficient reason. A place in time (be it the 24 hours of the Aristotelian play or the dozens of years of A Winter's Tale), a place in space (Illyria, the stage before us) and plot (one thing happens because another thing has happened just before it).

But what of those plays, constructed in language, that seek to limn the noumenal, the world that lies beyond the sufficient reason of the world of appearances? A language directed towards the pushing-forward of narrative, a language and structure that limns rational story and not irrational sensibility, remains the prisoner of sufficient reason and therefore of the phenomenal world. Language put to this use, as Schopenhauer and Kant remind us, is impossibly limited when attempting to elicit the noumenal pulse that lies beneath the phenomenal appearance. So language must become lyric, poetic: theatrical and tragic language aspiring to the condition of music, that form that confronts us most with hints of the noumenal.

The condition of our theatre: "But this is the kind of literary play in which the actors seem secondary to the words. You suspect that it might be better read than performed," says one critic. "Superb dialogue," says another, but it gets "the texture right at the cost of content." Which is to say, perhaps, narrative significance.

Plot and narrative are everywhere: film, television, newspapers, novels, short-stories, comic books, video games, even figurative painting and sculpture. Story is necessary, but perhaps one must think of it as a necessary evil, the occasional poison that nonetheless has healthy effects on the body. For it's not the story that counts, but the language that the story elicits from the dramatist: the poetry that touches the noumenal lying within the phenomenal. The story can just as well come from a Lifetime movie-of-the-week as the Iliad. But in whatever realism that desiccates American theatre now, it's a rational realism (one must be clear to provide a map for the audience, god forbid they try to write one in their own imaginations) that denies the place of the irrational music that touches the thing-in-itself. Our critics (and most of our theatre practitioners as well) seem to believe that poetry has no place on the stage: it should stay in books, as ink-on-paper, where it belongs. In this conclusion, the possibilities of language in the theatre, and the theatre itself, remain castrated.

Ah, he has been gone for three decades now (the thirtieth anniversary of his death was this past 11 March), and watching him today you get the feeling that the sky was bluer, the grass greener, the polyester brighter in Claude François' world. He was one of France's great pop singers and the author of "Comme d'habitude," the French original of "My Way." In his memory, then, the infectious "Chanson populaire," from a 1977 TV appearance – he is accompanied by his backup dancers, the Clodettes:

I excitedly await Cloclomania, the theatrical extravaganza about his unique life (was he a "tortured genius"? and no irony or sentimentality here), and welcome the commission for the book of the musical. Until then, the song will stay with you all day. I promise.

Irony and sentimentality. It is perhaps no surprise to find, within a two-day period, the theatre blogosphere engaged in both a peculiar brand of self-defense and an examination of American drama's current obsession with a quite bearable lightness of theatrical being. Discussing Helen Shaw's unfortunate coinage of the term "realist whimsy" in a recent Time Out New York review of Hello Failure, Garrett Eisler concludes:

Call it the Kushner Syndrome: metaphor in the American theatre was first exemplified for this generation of playwrights when a saucy angel crashed through Prior's ceiling at the end of the first part of Angels in America in 1991. It was a far cry from slow-witted Tilden's dragging onstage the corpse of a baby at the end of 1978's Buried Child by Sam Shepard – this latter a darker side of American surrealism of the time (a coup de theatre more exciting and invigorating, because utterly lacking in irony and sentimentality, than the surprise of a clumsy theatrical angel or the unexpected appearance of Ethel Rosenberg's ghost), the former its sunnier expression.

Since then American playwrights have wished to be on the side of Kushner's angels. Shepard's metaphorical gesture would not sustain the calls of "More life!" that ended Angels in America; in optimism there is comfort, but it is every bit as simplistic as the label of pessimism, and to the tragic consciousness hopelessly blind.

The theatre needs to see again those expressions of life that irony and sentimentality do not sustain, the irony and sentimentality that render theatre a sunny playground instead of the ecstatic nightmare of insight. They skirt those expectations of comedy and tragedy because they deny the piercing edge of the non-ironic expression (facile, jokey irony means never having to say you're serious), the refusal of easy sentiment. They cuddle innocent sentiment as if it were a tattered teddy-bear, an embarrassing refusal to give up childishness. As expression of ecstasy, jointure and nightmare, the language of mature eros and tragedy is itself a dramatic event: the surprise that language, written or spoken, affects our bodies at least as deeply as the touch of a hand upon flesh. Our plays today look. But they do not touch.

Sometimes the longest way 'round is the shortest way home, and nowhere is that more true than at the JFK baggage carousel. However, I'm back in New York after a short trip to France – more musical than theatrical, perhaps. But I return having been introduced to the composer Gérard Grisey (whose work I hope to discuss here in a few days; an interesting interview with Grisey, who died in 1998, is here), visited the delightful small city of Caen, and (in Paris) made a small but moving pilgrimage. He rests; he rests.

In the meantime it seems I haven't missed too much in terms of theatre. Some things follow you around. In Caen, for example, posters are proclaiming the local premiere of Marius von Mayenburg's Eldorado – his work seems to be presented almost everywhere except the United States these days. An odd kind of disciplinary self-justification seems to be the order of the day in the American blogosphere. In the meantime, shows go up and down, are postponed and – in one particular case – weirdly cursed. I'm crossing my fingers that Heppner and Voigt will be in good health next Tuesday, when I'll be there. I'm engaged in my usual preparations. You'll get a full report.

David Mamet today in the Village Voice explains why he is "no longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (not that he ever was a liberal in the first place, brain-dead or otherwise, whether he considered himself one or not; he's always seemed to me a testosterone-fuelled laissez-faire type; the admiration and affection he displayed for the characters he created in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross always outweighed any putative critical stance towards those characters or the ideologies that drove them). No surprise there. And Sarah Ruhl this week in the New Yorker gets the full-on attention of John Lahr, speaking of admiration and affection; knowing the demographics and editorial slant of The New Yorker, no surprise there either.

Hans Holbein:
The Body of Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521)
(See entry for Julia Kristeva's Black Sun below)

I'm on my way out of town for the next week or so. While I'm gone, you're encouraged to see Kristen Kosmas' fine Hello Failure at PS122 and The Break-Up/The Happy Sad at the Flea; also at PS122 is Kevin Augustine's Bride, which begins performances this Sunday, 16 March.

I've received an email or two recently about some of the more theoretical writings on Superfluities Redux, especially the "95 Sentences" and the Organum. Most of the comments have regarded the difficulty and density of some of these texts, for which I offer no excuse; the struggle I have with these ideas is a part of my writing about them. But I thought, as background, I might offer a short list of books on my bedside table, which inform my own writing. It might (or might not) be useful to someone else; I regard them all as having unique implications for drama, tragedy and theatre:

Julia Kristeva's Black Sun. A frequent criticism thrown at contemporary tragedians is that they are pessimistic or dour; Kristeva's study of depression and melancholia nonetheless argues that there is a unique, necessary beauty in the confrontation of loss and catastrophe. Read alongside her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, which implies an extension of the work of Georges Bataille into the contemporary psychoanalysis (and subsequent philosophy) of Lacan, it is hard not to be led directly to the theatre practice of Howard Barker and Sarah Kane -- often painted as pessimists or miserabilists themselves. But they are not. Kristeva demonstrates why.

Howard Barker's Arguments for a Theatre seems to have a permanent place on that bedside table, as indispensible inspiration. Today this attracts me, from the essay "Honouring the Audience": "A new theatre will be over-ambitious. It will not settle for anything less than a full company of actors. The stage should swarm with life. No new writer should be taught economy, no matter what the economy demands. The new writer should be shown that the stage is a relentless space and never a room. If the new writer is taught economy the theatre will itself shrink to the size of an attic. It is probably time to shut the studio theatres in the interests of the theatre." But, at the same time, the tension between this idea and the work of Harold Pinter, which is all about a few people in small rooms and which I'm also re-reading, is fascinating rather than contradictory to me.

The poems of Baudelaire are the starting-point of modernism, but hardly its end-point. In fact, Kristeva's work also extends Baudelaire's project into the novels of Céline, Burroughs and beyond -- from modernism into what is often labelled post-modernism. Apart from demonstrating the uselessness of these distinctions, Baudelaire remains an urban contemporary.

And, along with Barker's essays, on that table semi-permanently there are these and these, not to mention this. And, although it's been missing from this blog for a while, this is ever in easy reach.

Transatlantic: Caryl Churchill, Ty Burrell and Stephen Dillane
in rehearsal for the Royal Court Theatre production of
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?
(Photo: Stephen Cummiskey)

Your correspondent will be winging his way to France for a few days later this week, which means posting will be light here (for a different reason, however, than the recent light posting). But in the meantime, here is a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:

At the Public Theater: Previews have begun for Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, the latest from Caryl Churchill. It's a two-hander directed by James Macdonald, who helmed the Royal Court premiere last year, though there's a new cast for the New York staging (Scott Cohen and Samuel West); the play is an allegory about the foreign policy relationships between Great Britain and the United States (the characters are named "Jack" and "Sam"). The show runs through 6 April; tickets and schedule information here. (I note, by the way, that the general admission price for Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? is $50.00 for this two-person play; it runs 45 minutes, which makes it, on a play-per-minute basis, one of the most expensive shows on the boards this month.)

At RADA: Speaking of British playwrights, my London readers will want to make their way to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art this week, where Wrestling School associate Melanie Jessop is directing Howard Barker's Ursula, beginning Tuesday, 11 March, and running through 22 March. Consider it a prelude to the opening of Barker's new play, I Saw Myself, a drama about the role and responsibility of the artist in society, at RADA's Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre in April.

At La MaMa ETC: Theodora Skipitares directs a puppet-production of Euripides' Medea, which opens on 13 March. Skipitares has in the past created an adaptation of Iphigenia; per the Web page for the show, Medea "features puppets, created by Cecilia Schiller and Skipitares, in various styles: colored shadow puppets, small rod puppets, as well as realistic life-size figures operated by actors; along with the use of video and live music, and a chorus represented by gigantic heads worn on the bodies of female performers." Medea runs through 30 March; tickets and schedule information at OvationTix.

At the Cherry Lane Theatre: In previews this week is a new production of Edward Albee's The American Dream and The Sandbox, directed by the playwright and featuring a stellar cast that includes Judith Ivey, Myra Carter and George Bartenieff. This marks a return to ground zero, in a way; the plays were originally produced at the Cherry Lane in 1961/1962, just prior to the phenomenal Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It's part of a continuing "Albee season" of sorts, which started with the McCarter Theatre production of the playwright's newest comedy, Me Myself and I, and will continue later this season with the premiere of Occupant, Albee's play about sculptor Louise Nevelson, at the Signature Theatre. Tickets for The American Dream/The Sandbox are available from Telecharge.

Elsewhere on the Web: Christopher Shinn speaks to Jarrett Dapier in a new interview for In These Times, "A Playwright's Traumatic Vision". Chris discusses growing up gay in Bill Clinton's America, gives a brief glimpse of his latest work, and discusses the role of the artist in the theatre:

Read the whole interview here; thanks to Mark Armstrong for calling it to our attention.

On the necessity of throwing bricks: Finally, there's been a little whizbang about theatre criticism both here and in Australia lately. Having waded through this mucky swamp before I'm not going to do it again, but I did want to note the following thoughts about the health of theatre criticism in the United States from Eric Bentley. It's from the foreword to a 1955 reissue of his 1946 book The Playwright as Thinker and does not appear in the current edition, but it seems to me his viewpoint is still timely, even fifty years later:

Hello Failure by Kristen Kosmas. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. Set design: Sue Rees. Sound design: Leah Gelpe. Light design: Garin Marschall. Co-producers: Shady Lane Productions. With Matthew Maher (Horace Hunley), Maria Striar (Netta), Joan Jubett (Kate), Kristen Kosmas (Rebecca), Michael Chick (Shlomy), Tricia Rodley (Gina), Janna Gjesdal (Valeska), Benjamin Forster (Voice of Japanese Teacher/Tim), Aimée Phelan-Deconinck (Karen) and Megan Hart (The New Girl). Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. At Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street. Reviewed at the 6 March performance. Runs 6-22 March 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania.

Kristen Kosmas' story of seven submariners' wives marries Chekhovian realism to a language reminiscent of Gertrude Stein for one of the best new plays of the season

Saving the drowning women:
Playwright Kristen Kosmas as Rebecca
in Hello Failure

After an eleven-hour day at work yesterday I was tempted to just head home for an evening with Gordon Ramsay, but instead I felt drawn to get to a theatre -- any theatre -- to remind myself why I was working so long and hard at my day job in the first place. So I took a chance, made it up to Performance Space 122 and handed over my $18.00 to the box office staff just in time for the 8.00pm curtain of Kristen Kosmas' new play Hello Failure, mainly curious to see a very rare straight, text-based play at a venue that spends most of its season presenting less mainstream forms of theatre.

Based on Hello Failure, I hope they do it again and again and again. Kosmas' play is one of the brightest lights of the season. Though my regular readers know that I resist writing anything that could be constituted as a pull-quote, I'll offer a few here before considering the play itself: Kosmas is one of the most exciting and accomplished new voices in the American theatre. Though small in scale, Hello Failure is rich in imagination and lyricism, and the ten performers deliver Kosmas' musical text with flair and panache. And it deserves a nice long run.

Realism is far from a dead thing in the theatre, and American playwrights are particularly drawn to it, especially that domestic naturalism exemplified by Chekhov: the discovery of universal forces beneath the everyday events and discourses of seemingly undistinguished individuals. Following an overture of sorts performed by the entire cast, the play wanders through the course of a day spent by six women gathered together in a conference room: a support group for the wives of submariners, who (in an all-volunteer Navy, you understand) have chosen to submerge themselves beneath the oceans for months at a time, leaving their wives and partners in a peculiar state of in medias res until their return. As in Chekhov, there is a thin plot: one of their regular number, Rebecca (performed here by playwright Kosmas), who seems to be having a breakdown in her bathroom, has not arrived; a "new girl" (Megan Hart) is joining the group for the first time. And I give nothing away when I say it all ends without resolution, but with, if not hope, then a determination to go on.

Hello Failure's obvious Chekhovian forebear is Three Sisters, but the linguistic mother of it all is Gertrude Stein. Comparisons are always odious, and Kosmas has a unique, idiosyncratic voice all her own that avoids both baroque affectation and naturalistic reportage such as common slang, but the influence is there. Asked to describe his life in three words and an object, one character responds, "Water. Water. Water. A glass of water," a fully Steinian construct. And because her language is elemental, Kosmas is able, without stretching too far, to locate common language within common physical elements. Water and air are the two controlling images of the play: Michael Chick as Shlomy, with whom one of the characters may or may not be having an affair, delivers a wonderful aria on his dead brother, who had been fascinated by both water and air.

I use the word "aria" advisedly. Director Ken Rus Schmoll seems to have cast his performers in part for the timbre of their voices: as the six women in the conference room spend the day together, their stories are told as solos, duets, trios and quartets (there are a number of especially effective duets between Joan Jubett as Kate at stage right and Kosmas, trapped in her bathroom at stage left). Language itself then becomes key, this particular issue focusing in Aimée Phelan-Deconinck's Karen. Feeling desexualised, she decides to learn Japanese in an attempt to reconnect with the world and her body through a new, unfamiliar discourse -- an attempt which fails with a particularly comic coup de theatre that I won't disclose here.

Hello Failure is an uncommonly rich play, which avoids the self-consciously wry and kooky, gratuitously coy and winsome Surrealism Lite that seems to infect many new American playwrights. Among the remarkable crop of young playwrights currently at the margins of the mainstream theatre (hence this play's production at the decidedly non-mainstream PS122), Kosmas' play resembles the work of Jenny Schwartz, whose God's Ear opens for an off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre later this spring. But Kosmas trusts her language and performers more, avoiding the sometimes melodramatic reaches of Schwartz's narrative.

The spare design of Sue Rees (sets), Garin Marschall (lights) and Leah Gelpe (sound) focuses all the audience's attention on those wonderful words of Kosmas', as it should. A fine ensemble cast also features Matthew Maher as the ghost of submarine inventor Horace Hunley (maybe), Clubbed Thumb's co-founder Maria Striar as the uptight professional Netta, and Tricia Rodley a delightfully spiky Gina. But really, singling out individual performances here detracts from the extraordinary ensemble work. A fine downtown cast in a terrific new American play -- one more pull-quote, then, for the road. You can see it at PS122 through 22 March.

Illusions of authenticity. The affection most people have for effective storytellers, who convince even while they fictionalise, is not value-free. A recent event in the literary world does not fail to call into question those advocates of storytelling whose highest desire is to sweep an audience into the storyteller's trust, whether they do so offering self-characterised fiction or self-characterised fact. A blogger notes that "We are all suckers for a good story," to which one can respond:

Critical thinking invites the exploration of the stage, permitting the exercise of our own imaginations rather than the hijacking of our imaginations by others, and the assumptions behind the well-made story and our absorption in it. There are more difficult stories that resist our desire for absorption in an easily-digestible phantom of authenticity: a soldier bursts into a Leeds hotel room, a corpse is bound to a criminal as punishment for her crime. These reach the status of poetry, beyond the comprehension of traditional narrative. They reach a truth that is alternative to that of a well-made story. And they defy illusion, in turning to the unexplored irrationality of the inner self. Audiences are more than capable of this exercise. We dishonour them if we do not invite it.

If you're in the East Village tomorrow night and haven't yet had the chance to see Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, which I wrote about here, please drop by and say hello. Immediately after the Tuesday 4 March performance I'll be sitting down with Mr. Foreman himself to host a post-performance discussion of the play; I'll try to get a few questions of my own in there, but mostly it's a chance for the audience to pitch their own two cents at Richard. I'll collect the pennies from the floor afterwards. The discussion is free (included in the $25.00 admission to the show) and open to the public. You're more than welcome to join us.