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Friday, October 21, 2005
UNSCRIPTED: a new theater blog
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
* Where the theater community comes to read and riff *
YOU found it! You found the new Atlanta theater blog we’ve been teasing you about in print editions. Welcome to the AJC’s exclusive interactive playground for news, information and commentary about plays around town and the personalities who put them on.
I’m Wendell Brock, theater critic of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and for ages now I’ve wanted to do a regular column to augment our daily performance art coverage, which I believe is the most comprehensive in the city. Well, here goes.
You may already read our theater reviews online. Now you’ve gotta check in for flashes about local and national theater that you might not find in the paper.
Juicy chatter. Delicious tidbits. Hot news items. Really useful show info. Links to other good stuff and cool blogs. In short, observations that we don’t always see fit to print but that the theater insider will find essential.
Now don’t be shy. No blogflowers, please. We want you to tell us what you think. Share your opinions and insight. Talk us up. Tell everybody you know. Our one request: When you post a comment, please keep it CLEAN, keep it LEAN, and DON’T BE MEAN.
Blog-o-matic for the people. Now everybody can be a drama queen. Bring it own.
COMING SUNDAY NIGHT: THE SUZI BASS AWARDS
HAVE YOU HEARD? Atlanta is getting its own Tony Awards.
The Suzi Bass Awards, our town’s first professional theater honors, will be handed out Sunday night (Oct. 23) at the 14th Street Playhouse. By all means go and support your local thespians. It starts at 7 p.m. and it’s only $12.50.
But for those who can’t make it, we’ll file a live report after the big shindig. (A print version will run in Tuesday’s Living section.)
Performance honors for the 2004-2005 season are being awarded in four categories. (See below for details).
The 2005 Spirit of Suzi Bass Award will be given to a theater professional who “mirrors Suzi Bass’ longtime embrace of professionalism in the theater.� Bass was a much-loved Atlanta performer who died in 2002. (The 2004 Spirit Award was given to True Colors artistic director Kenny Leon back in April.)
In the performance categories, Marietta’s Theatre in the Square leads with nine out of 20 nominations, including three nods for “Mahalia� (a re-mount from 2003) and four for “The Diviners.� The Alliance Theatre and Horizon Theatre follow with three nominations each. Jewish Theatre of the South and Theatrical Outfit received two. Georgia Shakespeare got one.
Interestingly, some of the city’s best theater companies weren’t represented at all. (7 Stages, Actor’s Express, The Center for Puppetry Arts and Synchronicity Performance Group, to name a few.) That said, I’m glad to see the Suzis taking shape. The theater community needs to come together to recognize excellence among its peers.
So without further a’blogging, here are the nominees:
OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION
“Mahalia.�
“The Color Purple� (Alliance).
“The Diviners.�
“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.� (Alliance).
“The Syringa Tree� (Horizon).
OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR
Alan Kilpatrick, “Take Me Out,� Theatre in the Square.
Alan Kilpatrick, “The Diviners,� Theatre in the Square.
Carol Mitchell-Leon, “Mahalia,� Theatre in the Square.
Jessica Phelps West, “Fiddler on the Roof,� Jewish Theater of the South.
Lisa Adler, “The Syringa Tree,� Horizon Theatre Company.
OUTSTANDING FEMALE ACTOR
Bernardine Mitchell, “Mahalia,� Theatre in the Square.
Carolyn Cook, “The Syringa Tree,� Horizon.
Jill Jane Clements, “The Foreigner,� Theatrical Outfit.
LaChanze, “The Color Purple,� Alliance.
Marianne Fraulo, “From Door to Door,� Jewish Theatre of the South.
OUTSTANDING MALE ACTOR
Chris Ekholm, “The Diviners,� Theatre in the Square.
Chris Kayser, “The Comedy of Errors,� Georgia Shakespeare.
Chris Moses, “The Diviners,� Theatre in the Square.
Dan Triandiflou, “The Foreigner,� Theatrical Outfit.
Travis Young, “Take Me Out,� “Theatre in the Square.
For tickets: 404-733-5000.
See you Sunday night!
Wendell
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‘A Number’ and ‘Sleepy’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEWS. “A Number,” 7 Stages. Through Nov. 6. “Sleepy,” Dad’s Garage. Through Nov. 5.
In Steve Yockey’s world premiere “Sleepy,” a man sees a mirror image of himself get into a taxi and disappear. He wants to know who this person is, and as he tries to find out, he becomes engulfed in a group of passers-by who keep confusing total strangers for old friends.
In Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” a young man discovers that he has been cloned, and as the play unfolds, he and the “others” denounce their biological father for the fatal soul disorder that he has spawned.
Just in time for Halloween, Atlanta theatergoers are being treated to a pair of hourlong shows that reflect on notions of identity in strange and disturbing ways. These disparate dark comedies make fascinating bedfellows for exploring ideas about dreams and consciousness, the inner and outer selves and the shadowy no-man’s-land between science and spirituality, love and obsession, madness and memory.
No surprise that British dramatist Churchill delivers a spellbinding play. Tony Kushner calls her the greatest living playwright in the language. 7 Stages wanted to do “A Number” last season, but some guy named Sam Shepherd took an interest in it and ended up appearing in the off-Broadway production.
What’s exciting here is that director Joe Gfaller and his first-rate team of actors and designers have turned “A Number” into one of the most essential and electrifying tickets of the fall season, and that the Little Five Points theater has programmed a veritable Churchill festival, with “Far Away” opening Oct. 27.
Meanwhile, just a few blocks away at Dad’s Garage, director Kate Warner inaugurates her first Top Shelf series with a cycle of short, interconnected plays by Yockey, a 28-year-old Atlanta writer who’s proving to be one of his generation’s most promising home-grown talents. (“Help!” —- an ensemble-generated piece he scripted for Out of Hand Theater —- recently played the New York International Fringe Festival.)
In Yockey’s sweetly named “Sleepy” —- that’s the blanket title for his four one-acts —- he constructs a landscape of psychological edginess from the most prosaic images. Couples wear pajamas and drink milk in the middle of the night, just like your average insomniacs. Yet somewhere in the distance, a bell tolls, and shaded figures lurk on the beveled edge of illusion and reality. Yockey’s regular Joes and Janes are haunted by nightmares and auras and exist in a Borgesian labyrinth of panic, fear and compulsion.
In “Aquarium,” the strongest of these shorts, a young woman (Alison Hastings) has a weird obsession with jellyfish that’s linked to the coldblooded murder of her parents, which she recalls with the innocence of a trusting, bleary-eyed child. “Milk,” the weakest of the tales, is about a one-sided breakup and its attendant visions and fantasies; it features Lauren Gunderson and Joe Sykes as the doomed couple. “Headphones” describes a case of unrequited love that escalates in hair-trigger fashion from clandestine confession to murderous rage. (Hastings plays the girl in headphones, Rachel Craw her shy companion.) Matt Myers turns up in “Hotel,” as the character who creates havoc when he casually bumps into himself.
Yockey’s fastidious craftsmanship is both the blessing and the curse of his slender, elegant conceit, which ultimately feels like an unmade bed. Deliberately chilly and bewildering, these ironic studies go full circle in structure and raise trenchant spiritual and philosophical questions, but they leave you thinking that the writer has written himself into a clever dead-end.
The idea of the twin (or triplicate) self is exploited with riveting, clinical precision in “A Number.” Whereas “Sleepy” is a series of constantly opening doors, “A Number” forces us to look through a single domestic keyhole. But even as the screws are tightened, the tone is deliberately murky. In neither story can we quite connect the dots.
Churchill’s tale has the rhythmic patter of Beckett and the indelible imprint of Greek tragedy. In allowing his son’s DNA to be replicated without considering the consequences, a father (Larry Larson) has done a terrible deed. The gods are angry, not to mention the three sons. Justice and revenge must be meted out.
Larson plays the dad as scared, untrustworthy and somehow grief-stricken. At one point, he says the mother committed suicide; later, he says she died in a car crash with the original boy. As the damaged offspring, John Benzinger sketches a series of personalities that go from shocked to violent to detached. “Don’t they say you die if you meet yourself?” says the first son, posing a spiritual question that proves prophetic.
Set designer Kelly Allison has walled the tiny square set in gleaming white tile and appointed it with Mies van de Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs and Eileen Gray’s chrome and glass tables. As we have come to expect from Gfaller (who directed 7 Stages’ “Boston Marriage” earlier this year), every “t” is crossed, every “i” dotted. He’s a young director with exceptionally smart taste.
In “Sleepy” and “A Number,” we are twice thrilled. For once, seeing double pays off. How cool is that? Â
THE 411: “A Number” 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Also 6 p.m. Wednesday and Nov. 2, noon Thursday and 9:30 p.m. Nov. 4. Through Nov. 6. $20-$25. 7 Stages, Back Stage, 1105 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, www.7stages.org.
“Sleepy” 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Through Nov. 5. $15. Dad’s Garage, Top Shelf Theatre, 280 Elizabeth St., Atlanta. 404-523-3141, www.dadsgarage.com.
THE VERDICT: A chilling double feature.
