The Right Stage for Development

“Manic Flight Reaction” has had the full gamut of pre-production massage – workshops, readings, the whole deal. But in the production now at Playwrights Horizons, it seems clear that playwright Sarah Schulman isn’t listening to the consensus. The audience concluded that her work isn’t done: The moment the piece turned from a quirky, tense setup into a dramaturgical morass was a palpable one. Her jokes fell flat. Her monologues made people shuffle in their seats. And for the sensitive playmaker, those responses could prove fantastically useful.Judging from the text itself, though, it seems Ms. Schulman would refuse to find any criticism of her play “constructive.” At every turn her writing is thornily defensive. The central character stiff-arms any yawners by making the accusation that “Homosexuality makes straight people very bored. After all, it’s not about them.” (An informal poll had players from both teams looking for the exit.) And, later, a dimwit considers becoming a playwright, the better to be surrounded by narcissistic idiots. Ba-da bum.The play isn’t so much veined with cynicism as it is riddled with it: Ms. Schulman clearly starts from “outraged” and moves up the scale to “spittle-flecked” when she writes. What makes the play such a dud is she does it with a vocabulary almost exclusively consisting of the words “truth” and “love.” By the end of the two-hour show, those words have entirely lost their meaning – you can’t coat barbed wire with cotton candy.Margie (Deirdre O’Connell) is actually supposed to be a specialist in “truth.” A relocated New Yorker now teaching “the history of consciousness” at the University of Illinois, she presents herself as a jolly, bisexual hippie who never gave up on the movement. Her daughter, the vapid Grace (Jessica Collins) can mimic her mother’s obsession with honesty, but clearly has no actual interest in it. That she reserves for her pointless, but rich, boyfriend Luke (Michael Esper), and pop-culture magazines.Margie, the standard bearer for candor, has secrets. Her first lover, Cookie, has married a Republican and kept her lesbian past hidden, and Margie’s mother intentionally flew a plane into the ocean in the 1907s. Naturally both skeletons pop out of the closet, just in time for some rambling, empty, mealy-mouthed reconciliations. The play can’t find a tone, insults our suspension of disbelief by ignoring the rules of the real world, and actually makes Ms. O’Connell look bad. I would have thought that a patent impossibility, but no actor could flail out of this swamp gracefully.Director Trip Cullman tries to temper the vitriol, treating all Ms. Schulman’s creations as real people. But the text fights him: Ms. Schulman hasn’t written humans; she has written monsters. Had Mr. Cullman steered into the skid, bypassing his usually gentle, quirky tone for something much darker, “Manic Flight Reaction” might not have inspired the urge to, well, flee. It’s a shame that at this stage of development, Mr. Cullman and Ms. Schulman may consider their work finished. For the play to have a chance at working, though, they would both need to climb back in that cockpit.***Speaking of a “stage” for development, boy, has Ping Chong ever found the wrong one. His “Cathay: Three Tales of China” washed ashore at the New Victory, where his colorful puppets can reel in audiences full of children. That would be super, if only his piece didn’t mention rape, detail a main character hanging herself, blow apart an 8-year-old girl in a bomb attack, and show newsreel footage of soldiers shooting point blank into rural China. After rejecting the idea of throwing myself in front of the children in my row, I tried to separate the piece from the venue. But even if “Cathay” if it weren’t drilling nightmares into a thousand tiny minds, IT would only barely be tolerable.A onetime “outsider artist,” Ping Chong now clearly relishes the ability to create high-priced spectacles. His work these days marries computer projection (here done with elegance by Ruppert Bohle) to traditional forms of puppetry, throwing in everything from Balinese shadow work to Bunraku. The “performances” outstrip the piece at every turn: a four-foot doll manipulated by rods manages a scarf dance that would stump most humans and one “bird’s-eye-view” scene simply exists to exhibit puppeteers’ sheer joy in executing it.Unfortunately, the eyes feast while every other sense starves. The text, after a promising beginning, quickly slides into gloppy “fairy-tale” speak and molasses-slow digressions. Everything drags, forcing the ornate design to work against the already non-existent momentum. Indeed, Ping Chong’s images might actually be served best by silence, letting us drift into a trance with his lovely puppets. But instead, by insisting on conventional storytelling with his drippy text, he prevents us from dreaming even as he puts us to sleep.“Manic Flight Reaction” until November 20 ( 416 W. 42nd Street, between Ninth and Dyer Avenues, 212-279-4200).“Cathay: Three Tales of China” until November 13 (209 W. 42nd Street, 212-239-6200).

The Right Stage for Development

The Right Stage for Development

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