A Dazzling Finish to EST's Marathon
Whimsy is the top note in the last of the three series that make up Ensemble Studio Theatre's 2008 marathon of one-act plays, an installment that feels somewhat less firmly anchored than the first two but finishes with a soft, exquisite dazzle.
Jen Maufrais Kelly
Jackie Chung and Alexis Camins in Michael Feingold's 'Japanoir.'
The program begins with Frank D. Gilroy's sitcom-ish "Piscary," in which a guy (Mark Alhadeff), mere weeks before his wedding, dumps his fiancée (Diane Davis) on grounds of intellectual incompatibility. Based on his 57-13 record of Scrabble victories against her, he's come to the conclusion that he's smarter than she is. "Suppose I told you most of your fifty-seven victories were a gift?" she asks him, then proposes to prove it by playing one more game for keeps: Whoever wins gets their apartment and everything in it. The premise is cute (and the title of the play is a handy Scrabble word), but Ms. Davis's grating performance, juxtaposed with Mr. Alhadeff's relaxed, funny turn, throws the relationship dynamic out of balance, inadvertently enticing the audience to root for the breakup.
Every drug-addled flower child's nightmare vision comes to life in Lewis Black's playful "In Between Songs," which opens on Chaz (Jack Gilpin) and Ed (David Wohl), a pair of comfortably bourgeois 50-something men in business attire, sitting around the living room, listening to Bob Dylan and getting ferociously stoned off some weed they bought from a colleague in marketing. Fellow boomer Grace (Cecilia DeWolf), meanwhile, is in the kitchen, cooking something to feed her munchies. "We should really call someone and tell them what we're feeling right now," she says when she emerges. Like so many stoner conversations, this one goes on too long, but it has its moments of helpless hilarity. All three actors are strong, but casting the exceptionally straitlaced-looking Mr. Wohl, who played the dean in the movie "Revenge of the Nerds," was a stroke of genius.
The first half of the program ends beautifully with José Rivera's 1994 "Flowers," a sweet, surreal meditation on adolescence, sexuality, and mortality. On her 12th birthday, Lulu (Flora Diaz) comes down with a raging case of acne, whose cosmic meaning she is desperate to discern. Soon the bumps transform into "tubes of flesh," which she takes to be God's punishment for her vanity, and when they morph into hibiscus, she believes she is cursed. But her worshipful little brother, Beto (a flawlessly nuanced Raul Castillo), sees an "unearthly beauty" in the flowers. "Look at the way they curve," he tells her. "They grow magnificently out of the topsoil of your face." There's lyricism in them, he says. There's lyricism in this play, too.
Most of the program's second half is occupied by "Japanoir," which its author, Michael Feingold, describes as "a cinematic play in one act." Mr. Feingold, the thoughtful longtime chief theater critic of the Village Voice and a skilled translator of plays, here has teamed up with an accomplished director, Richard Hamburger, and the evening's largest cast to stage what he calls, in an author's note, "a Westerner's fantasy/meditation on Japanese film." The play intercuts snippets of an interview with a director (Steven Eng) and scenes from two of his movies, one about love, the other about money. What emerges, unfortunately, is a muddle. "Theater is life," the film director tells his interviewer (Leslie Ayvazian). But "Japanoir" can't seem to breathe.
The series ends with Jacquelyn Reingold's "A Very Very Short Play," a sparkling fairy tale of longing and possibility set on an airplane in midflight. Roger (Adam Dannheisser), a nervous flyer, vents his anxiety by talking, and talking, to Joan (Julie Fitzpatrick), the woman in the next seat, who's trying to read. "I'm sorry to ask, you look so content so calm so reasonably relaxed I'm sorry to ask," he begins, sounding somehow like a Billy Collins poem. She resists, but he woos her with a cream puff, and they fall in love — though she is 1 foot tall, and he is 12-foot-8. Ms. Reingold has written an odd, enchanting music box of a play, and impeccable performances by Mr. Dannheisser and Ms. Fitzpatrick make it the perfect marathon ending.
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