OHIO STATE MURDERS, a play by Adrianne Kennedy

Ohio State Murders is a narrative monologue, told in a rarely changing monotone that builds with understated repressed suspense that requires total focus. Adrienne Kennedy has written it with the full intention that the drama dwells in your mind and imagination, a stylistic intellectual technique that tends to evolve in a static manner and limits or deadens true emotional catharsis.

It is given a full production with good actors, but it is essentially a one-act served up as a total evening’s entertainment, an irritant to a playgoer who forks out $75 a ticket and is on the street again in an hour.

The play utilizes characters who appear around the narrator, supposedly giving visualization and help in the telling of the story, but in actuality these actors essentially have little to do other than to walk around stiffly and say one or two insignificant lines. They could just as well be disposed of, and the storytelling could be offered entirely by the narrator who could sit on a stool or at or on a table.

The essential part of the story takes place in flashbacks to the 1950s. We’ve heard it before – intellectual white male literary professor in racist college takes advantage of black woman student who he deems is a writer of genius and who he eventually sacrifices for his own career and professional position (as well as guilt and shame), while she silently remains the puritanical, gentle, soul-suffering, struggling victim who is expelled from college yet must proceed with life even though destroyed. There are more specifics in the literature-focused story line than that, but the general theme is the inhumanity and violence of whites towards blacks and men towards women.

Why the white man kills the black babies one by one without killing the mother is another element left up to audience imagination. Nor is the white man drawn with a foreshadowing flaw, such as inherent frustration or failure, anger, jealousy, murderous or suicidal nature. Nor do we see one moment of real sexual attraction between man and woman – nor is it described, other than to hear that she goes to his room and in another sentence that she is pregnant. (The college grounds are meticulously described, pointing out invisible separations between black and white students.) We do not see the emotional pathos of a single woman left with baby twins or her struggle to care for or support them. What we see is a new mother entirely composed coming into a room carrying two babies and sitting in a chair. Most young mothers of twins are not so lucky as to be able to composedly sit in chairs for lengths of time. Assuredly, this play is not to be seen realistically, even though the author surely wants us to realistically relate to the theme.

Technically, we cannot make out the pictures of the slides that are thrown onto ceiling-high bookshelves -- no point in them anyway. The falling snow does not tell us much. The realistic set does nothing to enhance the storytelling.

The narrative words are supposedly what count in this play – you can become absorbed and, though the story is not new and does not project solutions, it does remind us of continuing major issues.

A FEMININE ENDING, a play by Sarah Treem


Sarah Treem, author of A Feminine Ending now playing at Playwrights Horizons in New York, has launched a theme dear to the hearts of many women but has constructed her play in such a surface and stereotypical manner that we merely watch it rather than empathize with deeply felt compassion.

The theme centers on conflicts of a modern young woman attempting to begin a career, in this case as a composer. Life interferes with pressures from earning a living, sexual desires, encountering marriage choices, the prospects of babies, and shouldering unresolved problems of parents.
She readily agrees to support boyfriend who is trying to make the grade as rock star by writing jingles for an advertising firm. He finally tells her each person must go it alone. Mother, absorbed in her own frustration (never fully delineated), lays her own problems on daughter. When father tells daughter to go ahead and write music, daughter cries out, "I haven’t got time!" Finally, daughter comes to the realization that women, in language and in actuality, have always been second and that it is her own fear of moving ahead that has encumbered her.

The confessional monologue method of characters speaking directly to the audience inspires unneeded words that do not really penetrate, and there is no real heightened dramatics in the dramatic scenes that makes us care. The characters are drawn so that we anticipate what they are to say. The subplot incident of the parent’s temporary broken marriage is not convincing, only confusingly unexplained. The ending, without a catharsis, again in monologue form, tells rather than moves us, and leaves us thinking "So what, who cares." It is unfortunate because this is an important theme that should be treated with depth of understanding.

The acting is overall adequate, though characters are never truly realized, except in one scene between mother and daughter. The direction includes smoothly wrought transitions for the most part, and the set is a bewildering mix of realism and stylized modern.

Night Over Taos, a play by Maxwell Anderson

Seeing Maxwell Anderson’s play, "Night Over Taos" at The Theatre for New City is a rare treat not to be missed. Estelle Parsons, the director, and Intar, the producers, are to be congratulated for presenting a work in a way that few dare to do in today’s theatre – a 25 multi-cultural cast in a 2-1/2 hour show in the style and spirit of The Group Theatre, our country’s earliest serious group of artists to usher in a modern American theatre. It’s refreshing to experience theatre like we did in the "good old days" when theatre was something more than one to five characters and the producer’s push is "let’s get them in" and "get them out" in an hour and a half so they can go home and pay the babysitter.

The playwright Maxwell Anderson emerged from The Group Theatre and is still considered one of America’s most eminent dramatists who brought verse drama back onto the stage, and "Night Over Taos" must be seen and appreciated in the spirit of the 30s; it cannot be judged in 21st century quick, clip, and move-on standards. It is essential to look and experience with the deeper awareness and understanding that we give to Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill.

What absorbs us is the atmospheric sweep of the story, the fictionalized, imaginative account based on an historic event largely forgotten, a window into the lives of Spanish conquerors giving their lives in a doomed attempt to hold onto Taos, threatened to fall to the Americans as has the remainder of New Mexico.

The raised rectangular stage with a high step creates confined living quarters in the power magnet, the hacienda, and the actors sitting on benches around the stage give the sense of class structure, of masters being eternally surrounded by illiterate Indian peons and slaves who not only serve them but watch them. That the acting is uneven is irrelevant because this production doesn’t pretend to compete with Broadway experience and budgets. The acclaim is in the use of a multi-cultural group who all give their all.

It is not often we have an opportunity to experience theater like this, and we should take advantage of it while it is here.

CRAZY MARY, a play by A. R. Gurney

It can be suspected that A. R. Gurney wrote Crazy Mary years ago and recently pulled it out of a drawer from under a pile of scripts that never got produced and finally did get it produced after he updated it with some humorous lines about President George W. Bush. That may not be true but the story line dates back to those days when the Pulitzer Prize winning Harvey by Mary Chase was a must-see on Broadway - that was in the 1940s. So Crazy Mary is a light comedy that can comfortably while away your time some afternoon when you have nothing to do.

There is nothing wrong with Crazy Mary playing at Playwrights Horizons except that the characters are stereotypical and the plot is somewhat unbelievable and predictable after the first 20 minutes. A controlling, domineering mother who needs money and her Harvard son visit their second cousin, "crazy" Mary, whom they haven’t seen in years in a private psychiatric institution in Boston. The mother’s secret motive is to gain control of Mary’s fortune. After some twists the son responds to crazy Mary’s awakening deep yearning for love, even though she used to be his mother’s best friend and probably 25 years older than him. The uptight Bostonian mother is shocked. And it goes on. It turns out exactly as you would imagine; the tragedy that occurs does not really surprise and the mother’s growth that comes out of it does not surprise, and satisfaction comes at the end. You will laugh at some of the lines, especially those about George Bush.

The acting is uniformly excellent, the direction good, the set tremendous. Actors include Sigourney Weaver, Kristine Nielsen, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Michael Esper, and Mitchell Greenberg. Jim Simpson is director.

THE ROMANCE OF MAGNO RUBIO, a play by Lonnie Carter, based on short story by Carlos Bulosan

The Romance of Magno Rubio at The Culture Project in New York City is the kind of drama that you always wish to see in theatre but almost never do – beautiful ensemble work, brilliant direction, an uplifting script that keeps you enchanted and surprised moment to moment in a story that could easily depress were it not that its heartbreaking social message is surpassed by its inspiring spirit of humanity and its unmatched, hopeful idealism. An Obie winner, it is being presented by the Ma-Yi Theater Company.

Reviewers have called the story a folk tale or a fable, and it is as well a metaphor for the betrayal of the American Dream. Magno Rubio is a 4 foot 6 inch Fillipino, a migrant farm laborer, picking beans, asparagus, citrus fruits, moving around the country with the crops as the seasons change. In his loneliness and grim life, he answers a lonely hearts ad in a magazine and launches a correspondence with Clarabelle, a blond 6 foot woman from Arkansas. She, promising to marry him, requests money for her sick mother, her brothers and sisters, and other interminable needs. Over years he complies with cash and gifts. His bunkmates make fun of him, and emphasize the impossibility of his fantasy; nevertheless he preservers, holding firm in his dream of marriage and true love. As the years pass, his co-workers have to come to admire him for his steadfast faith and never-wavering idealism. When the awful day of truth arrives he is overcome and despondent only for a moment, then rationalizes that his actions have after all enriched, have supplied not only himself but his fellow workers with the energy and hope that day to day filled a powerful hunger and need.

Interwoven into the story are vibrant exciting Filipino musical rhythms pounded out with bamboo sticks, guitar, mandolin, as well as verse, all of which brings about a spiritual sense of bonding and healing. It is so rare when all elements of a production come together to make a glorious unified whole. Loy Arcenas directs; Jojo Gonzales plays Magno Rubio. Bunkmates are played by Arthur T. Acuna, Bernardo Bernardo, Ramon De Ocampo, and Polo Montalban.

Carlos Bulosan, the author of the short story on which the drama is based, was short and brown as a coconut like Magno Rubio, a migrant who belonged to the first generation of 100,000 Filipino laborers whom American businessmen recruited in the 1920s and 1930s to work in the plantations of Hawaii, the Alaskan canneries and the farmlands of the West Coast. Always on the move, working long hours, subjected to racism and discrimination, he deeply understood the qualms of homesickness and the yearning for love and affection. As a youth he educated himself, spending hours in libraries, learning English and reading stories. In time he tried writing his own stories, sending them to magazines that always returned them, until finally he sent one to a magazine he’d never heard of – The New Yorker. This time a letter came back instead of his story. They would publish it. And they asked for more. From there he built his reputation as a writer of immigrant issues. During the McCarthy era he was blacklisted for exposing American inequities. He died in 1956.

BEYOND GLORY a solo drama-documentary written and performed by Stephen Lang

At the conclusion of his solo drama-documentary, actor/author Stephen Lang sits down on his old fashioned trunk that contains his costumes, looks straight into the audience and says simply, "Goodbye, Good Night." If he had been that simple and real in all eight portraits of soldiers he’d just performed, he should be given a double A plus. As it is in this slick production, he deserves a single A. Worthy to be seen, though the characterizations could be sharper and deeper, Beyond Glory is presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre, New York City.

Certainly we hear the stories of how eight men earned the Medal of Honor, the highest accolade our country can bestow on heroes in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, but we do not really get to the underpinnings of these men, do not "live" their dramas with them – we hear their feelings in the telling, but do not emotionally feel them ourselves. It seems a problem with both the set up of the script and with the extrovert characterizations.

The stories are edited from the book, Beyond Glory, by Larry Smith. The onstage set-up is Lang playing eight significant surviving recipients of the Medal of Honor who, one after another – years after the occurrence -- recall their story. Each speaks directly to the audience, as though we are friends who have asked them to talk about their experiences. Thus, of course, as every storyteller so often does when relaying something momentous to others, he/she offers a surface mixture but tends to remain silent on the real depth of feeling.

Among the stories covered are the only man who shot back at the enemy during the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, a Rear Admiral prisoner of war in Hanoi who was cruelly tortured and spent four years in solitary, an Arkansas cotton-picker who found war a game at which he could win, a marine who from his foxhole in Korea batted away grenades like baseballs, a black segregated into a black unit that was told upon entering the army, "Now it’s time for all you black boys to get killed," who survived to become the first black to receive the Medal of Honor, and a wounded Japanese American who received 17 transfusions of blood from black donors and concluded "We all bleed the same blood," and that being an American is a matter of mind and heart.

Stephen Lang diligently and admirably takes on gestures, accents, and expressions of each war hero, but through all he remains Stephen Lang – and Stephen Lang is totally likeable and excellent in all he does – but we could wish there were more keenly crafted differentiation between personalities and suspect that if he could have dug into the hearts of these men we would have had our hearts broken. Still, transitions between characters are smoothly accomplished by the blend of words and costume so that we are easily transported into each personage without weighty introduction or name or place setting.

The direction by Robert Falls is overall good but one can argue for more simplicity, more poignant pauses and reflection, rather than rushing along and attempting to make dramatic points like the jump on top of a trunk. The set with its backdrop of flashing slides of war in its various colors and the stage with its special circular raised raked floor are visually interesting, yet we wonder if this piece might have been better served with a "black box" stage without the distractions of bursting pictures, such as multiple boots stolen by the Japanese off dead American soldiers, or the kind of war pictures we now see everyday on TV.

RADIO GOLF, a play by August Wilson

The star of Radio Golf, the play at the Cort Theatre, New York, is the play itself. The acting is solid ensemble work but the actors shine because the characters and dialogue are incisive and genuine. The drama is well structured in the traditional manner, largely an African American male perspective, and it is politically and socially correct -- it makes its several valid statements under the fine direction of Kenny Leon. For whites it offers a wide window into the current black world today. For blacks it tells the truth, like it is –I say this because of the vociferous reaction of half the audience who were black and gave a standing ovation at curtain call.

Radio Golf is the last play – the tenth – in August Wilson’s cycle describing the African American experience in the United States; he wrote one play for each decade of the 20th century. Two of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize, Fences and The Piano Lesson. Wilson died of cancer in October 2005 at age 60.

It is 1997. Some African Americans have become successful, have entered the middle class and have taken on positions of importance and responsibility, while others have not been ready or able to move ahead, and suffer the consequences with humor, common sense and good natured resignation.

Harmon Wilks (Harry Lennix), upwardly mobile due to advantages inherited from his hard working father, has all the qualities and forces needed to be voted in as mayor of Pittsburgh. He is moving into the business passed to him from his father, the Bedford Hills Redevelopment, Inc. storefront office that will also serve as his campaign headquarters in the less than desirable Hill District because that’s where he grew up. His wife, Mame, (Tonya Pinkis) grew up there too, but she is appalled he would choose this locale, his roots, rather than into a more upscale environment.

Once Wilks becomes mayor, he intends to redevelop the entire community by constructing new buildings and stores. But he soon learns from one of the colorful neighborhood characters who walks in unexpectedly that he mistakenly bought a house illegally -- a house he’s intending to tear down in order to erect a high rise. This solid brick house with ornate décor represents the culture of the community and it turns out that it used to be lived in by his Aunt Esther and now belongs to that neighborhood character who walked in unexpectedly.

From there the plot thickens, contrasting the disparity between those who have and those who have not, pitting the values of community life and relationship against unprincipled moneymakers and ambition. Some blacks that are able to follow the path to money and leisure, are enabled to own cars and experience the subsequent vandalism and theft, to take up golf and even to become stars like Tiger Woods. "I want my kids to know what it’s like to hit a golf ball," submits Roosevelt Hicks (James A. Williams). That feeling, he says, is what it means to be a man. His pursuit drives him to align himself with whites who "use" him in developing a radio station on which he has a talk show on golf, while Sterling Johnson (John Earl Jelks), a "have not," tells a story about once coming into $165 and spending it all in one day. To his thinking this was a perfect day but he importunes, "A perfect day is the saddest day, because it comes to an end."

In the climax our hero is forced to choose between his inherent values and political ambition – a choice that costs his wife her one opportunity for a high-powered job and her wholehearted support of him. We become sensitized to the diverse reflexes of African Americans who are on the cusp of poignant change.