ASHVATTHAMA

THE CONNELLY THEATER

It is darkly ironic that the sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita, the “Divine Song of God,” might be best known in the West for furnishing Robert Oppenheimer with his famous response to the first atomic weapon test at Los Alamos: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The Bhagavad Gita itself is just part of the Mahabharata, “the Great Book of India,” which details the events and aftermath of a devastating war. Epic Actor’s Workshop and playwright Manoj Mitra have taken a single episode from this dauntingly vast work – it’s three times the length of the Bible – and dramatized it.

“Ashvatthama” concerns a horrific act of revenge taken by a handful of warriors from the defeated army.The play is performed in Bengali, with English supertitles (by Titus Raha) projected onto the now white, now blood-red moon low in the sky of Ashok Vanjari’s simple set.

The staging is deliberately flat, and the acting earnest. Sakti Sengupta (who also directed) plays the feckless Kritavarma, whose despair at defeat makes him partner to the ruthless act of revenge. The venerable Mahmood Dulu is Kripacharya, the elder whose counsels for peace go unheeded. The fiercely featured Golam Sarwar Harun plays the roaring title role, a kind of combined Othello/Iago. He feels impelled to avenge his ambushed and dying king (a largely silent part played by Ajoy Ghosh), yet he resents the king for failing to promote him to general.

This frustration helps shape his rage into a diabolical plan: to slaughter the victorious army’s generals as they sleep. In the panic and darkness of the raid, however, Ashvatthama mistakenly beheads only their servants and infant children. Fearing retribution, he readies “the ultimate weapon,” which will destroy the body and spirit of all life on earth. This prompts the arrival of the great god Arjuna, armed with his own weapon of prodigious destruction. They hurl them simultaneously, with unexpected consequences.

One could ask for more variety and pace in the staging, and certainly more finesse in the technical execution of light and sound. But Mr. Sengupta and Mr. Mitra seem determined to keep anything slick from getting in the way of the text: no poetry but the old words, the stark and terrible arguments men continue to make to justify atrocity.

With a refreshing and admirable grace, this frees us to draw any parallels to current world events, if we will. May I suggest a command performance at the Republican National Convention?

– T. Ryder Smith, actor,
‘King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe,’ ‘She Stoops to Comedy’

THE ADAMS CONGLOMERATE HIGH SCHOOL DRAMA CLUB PRESENTS : TALES OF THE 8TH GRADE !!

PLAYERS THEATER

Eighth grade. 1987. It was a time of scrunchies, stonewashed jean skirts, and, as presented by a talented group of drama students at Adams Conglomerate High School, getting raped by your homeroom teacher. This production is a shockingly hilarious and amazingly shameless version of the eighth grade experience appearing at the Player’s Theater.

The play is based on a real book, “Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel,” written 17 years ago by then-13-year-old Tara Ariano. In the program, she admits that the book is “quite awful … let us all revel in my incompetence and lameitude.” But adapter/director Brad Akin has succeeded brilliantly at turning the book into a play-within-a-play that captures all the comic awkwardness of teenage life. Despite the fact that a couple of plotlines veer into dark subjects like pedophilia and kidnapping, it is impossible not to revel in this show.

Invoking “Waiting for Guffman” via “The Baby-Sitters Club,” the play begins with the high school drama teacher (played with commitment and accuracy by Lauren Felt) welcoming the audience – “the Adams Conglomerate family” – to the show. The “students” then present short scenes and songs ranging from familiar teen angst (a girl singing to herself in the mirror about how she’s too ugly to ever be loved) to the disturbing but somehow funny: Another girl sings about how she wishes she wasn’t being raped right now by her teacher, but concluding that she must “accept that it’s a ritual of her life.”

It’s the details of the performances that make this production so successful. Deliberately bad acting is incredibly difficult to execute, especially when playing a 14-year-old. Under the inventive and witty direction of Mr. Akin, many of these actors perform like masters. Especially hilarious are Martha Marion, who plays Brandon and comes near to stealing the show with a laugh that’s its own punch line, and Ryan Harrison, as her awkwardly smooth “main squeeze.”

In the songs, choreographer Joanna Rudnick and composer Michael Mahler find ingenious ways to show teen angst expressing itself onstage. The production deftly sidesteps the pitfalls of “bad teen drama” by embracing it with open arms, fully committing to the black comedy that is eighth grade.

– Marin Ireland, actor, ‘The Harlequin Studies,’ ‘Where We’re Born’

GRACELAND

THE CONNELLY THEATER

Donald Steele’s “Graceland” is a feel-good fable, a contemporary pilgrimage to Elvis Presley’s Graceland. The play is most interesting when it explores how Elvis functions in our culture as a kind of postmodern saint. Trips to his home – the Gold Room, in particular – can and will work miracles.

The story follows Janelle, a young woman whose mother has been in a coma for an indefinite length of time. Janelle promises her a trip to Graceland, even though she won’t be able to experience the King’s home with her own senses. Janelle and her sweet, unemployable husband, Tom, are working out their own marital ups and downs when she reveals her plan to take this trip.

We next meet Lana Turner, a wannabe psychic Elvis impersonator (stunningly portrayed by Ellen Dolan), and her daughter Donnie-n-Marie, who just wants to be liked by sorority girls. (“My name is Debbie,” she insists.) All their stories move towards an inevitable meeting. I won’t reveal plot details, but the four are changed forever by encountering one another in the shadow of the home of the King.

As directed by David M. Pincus, the play is at its most engaging when it focuses on the traditional aspects of a pilgrimage: what it means to make this kind of journey, and what one learns about oneself from its travails and benedictions. It’s in the second act where the play really starts to find itself. (The first act feels a bit like, “Yes, but are we going to go soon?”)

Some obstacles feel contrived, like Tom’s confession, “I lost all our money,” or questions of marital stability that arise as Janelle considers what it will mean to let go of her mother. The play doesn’t need these generic obstacles. It has a magic of its own, which might open up a more nontraditional route. Still the play is funny and moving. It seems to come from the heart, and Ms. Dolan’s Elvis impersonation (and costume, thanks to designer Kat Martin) is a treat.

Some questions remain. (Do they let you take comatose patients out of the hospital? I thought Janelle would have to break her mother out of the joint, a la “Kill Bill”). But they’re ultimately put aside in favor of joining the characters on their sweet and well intentioned quest for healing.

– Brooke Berman, playwright, ‘Sam and Lucy,’ ‘The Triple Happiness’

ELLEN CRAFT

MICHAEL SCHIMMEL CENTER FOR THE ARTS

Billed as a true story, “Ellen Craft” feels like an old tale passed on, shifting its shape with each telling. The ambitious new opera transports us back to the early 19th century, south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The story seeks to engage us with the daily life of a plantation, and the divisions of power there. Ellen’s mother was a slave, her father a white slave owner. At 16, alone and motherless, she is given to her father’s wife as a birthday present. But her life is already a contradiction. She has the white skin of her master but is a slave by birth. She is filled with hatred for the world she represents visually. This hatred motivates her to wear the disguise of a white man, and seek her freedom.

Librettist/director Sherry Boone is determined to make us feel the anguish of a slave in a white man’s world. Lest we forget the source of Ellen’s anger, images of her mother’s capture and torture (for attempting to escape) are repeated throughout the show.

At the heart of the opera are challenging questions of identity. Transformation is treated as a means of survival, while the constant refrain of “I know who I am” demonstrates the power of self-knowledge. I am reminded of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “The America Play,” in which a black man plays Abraham Lincoln in a sideshow.

For Ms. Parks, identity is always a performance, and the theater is the place where this can be made most evident. But “Ellen Craft” doesn’t take advantage of the role-playing, identity-shifting aspects of theater. Ellen (played by the energetic Linda Dorsey) costumes herself to pass as a white man. But the show’s further attempts to explore the frame of theater – such as using minstrel show movements, or placing the cast onstage as silent witnesses – seem out of place in the show’s epic sprawl.

The libretto consists mostly of solo performers singing internal monologues in turn. The diversely talented cast lends texture and subtlety to what would otherwise become predictable. By infusing the music with jazz, gospel, and the blues, composer Sean Jeremy Palmer begins a dialogue between 19th-century history and the 21stcentury audience. If only the staging did the same.

– Louisa Thompson, designer, ‘The Distance from Here,’ ‘[sic]’

GORK !

THE NEXT STAGE

In “GORK!”, a new one-woman docudrama, writer/performer Autumn Terrill uses video footage and inspired character-channeling to introduce us to Adam (aka Gork), her real-life, mentally disabled foster brother. Abandoned as a sexually abused infant on an Iowa doorstep, Adam was adopted by the kind-hearted Terrills and raised in an already congested household. Autumn was his closest sibling.

Ms. Terrill chronicles the ups and downs of her foster brother’s youth with an infectious, hyperactive gusto. Occasionally the show smacks of strained silliness: In the intimate, incredibly cramped space, you at times feel as if you’re being held hostage by someone with, well, ADD.

My hunch is that this is Ms. Terrill’s point, and she makes it. Largely through vocal gymnastics and exaggerated gesticulations, she conjures up her parents, various siblings (with similar names, like Damon, Devon, and Roman), as well as Adam’s mentally disabled friends Emily and Chuck.

She deftly avoids sentimentalizing Adam’s condition, drawing him as a complicated, at times sexually irreverent individual: He has the curious, sometimes hilarious proclivity for wanting to expose himself to his doctor. Other comic episodes include Damon chasing Adam up a tree with a chainsaw, the family car running out of gas on the way to Mount Rushmore, and the origins of Mother and Father Terrill’s respective nicknames of “Cracky” and “Dumbs–t Ugly F–er.”

But Ms. Terrill’s piece also hits some serious notes, as when Adam endures a constantly changing diagnosis. At one painful moment, her parents decide they’ve had enough of him, and drop him off at an assisted living facility.

“GORK!” raises pertinent questions about familial responsibility and tolerance for the mentally disabled. It sometimes doubles as a well-intentioned but cloying public service announcement for ADHD and autism. While I was certainly moved as I got to know Adam, I could have done without the show’s proselytizing. Ms. Terrill is at her best when she lets her brother’s story do the work for her.

– Adam Rapp, playwright, ‘Stone Cold Dead Serious,’ ‘Blackbird,’ ‘Nocturne’