Monday, July 5, 2010

Lieutenant of Inishmore at the Mark Taper Forum, July 2010

Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" at the Mark Taper Forum, 7-4-10:

McDonagh's splatter-comedy is certainly edgier and messier than any other Taper show I can recall in recent memory, though its uniformly dim-bulb characters and willingness to go for the most obvious and cheap, albeit inordinately grisly, jokes make this a decidedly empty...for lack of a better term, "Jacobean COMEDY." The cast is certainly committed and fearless and kudos to the crew who have to clean up after every performance. I suspect you've got a show here that will skew younger and be very popular with the hip horror-comedy crowd, of which I'm normally a proponent (nobody loves as good cat brains dribble more than me). I guess I just hoped there'd be a moment when McDonagh would opt for something just a little more resonant or provocative rather than just settling for a compendium of dumb -- often VERY dumb -- jokes that would be considered racist in their treatment of its characters who are, to a man and woman here, unrepentantly dim. And to what end? So they can serve as unwitting pawns in a theatrical exploration of the comic possibilities of torture, dismemberment, psycho-pathology and splatter-core.

If younger audiences are drawn by the specter of Chris Pine having a jolly good time chewing up the scenery, I suspect the amoral Tarantino crowd will have a field day with this show. But if one is tempted to think about what it all amounts to after the fact, one begins to suspect it's plenty of sound, blood, guts and fury signifying not much.

For all the rumination about how "important" and intellectually challenging the Taper's previous production, "Bengal Tiger" might or might not have been, this is the antithesis: bloody stupid fun that seems hell bent on proving the Irish underbelly is beyond both hope and redemption. Do I buy that? No more than I buy the moral vacuum at the heart of Tarantino's cinematic entertainments for hedonistic hipsters, which is what McDonagh seems intent to emulate. Afterwards, I couldn't help asking myself why the comic grotesqueries of Tracy Letts' equally violent "Bug" and "Killer Joe" seem so much more theatrically satisfying. The reason I came up with is that Letts (at least in those two early -- and vastly superior to his ponderous later -- plays) didn't just settle for cheap laughs, loud guns and buckets of blood. The behavior of his characters found resonances in our greater cultural dilemmas. By contrast, McDonagh seems content to wallow around in this odd blending of Neanderthal sentimentality and savagery that settles for one dumb (and only occasionally funny) joke after another.

Well-performed, stylishly produced theatrical junk food is still, when the stage blood has all been mopped up, nutritionally empty. So, in the end, for all its messy bravado, this is just another adamantly shallow "entertainment" that encourages little or no substantive food for thought...

Monday, January 18, 2010

Project: Wonderland

It's been about 13 years since I first saw Robert Prior's inventive and whimsical Fabulous Monsters production of "Project Alice" at Glaxa in Silverlake. So many years later, this visionary director has brought back a fuller, more ambitious and re-imagined rendition of his take on Lewis Carroll's classic in "Project: Wonderland," the first must-see show of 2010. It's fairly simple conceit, Lewis Carroll becomes Alice as he hallucinates the source material for "Through the Looking Glass," becomes a jumping off point for one theatrical vision after another, ably manifested by a talented and energized cast, an abundance of inventive costumes, puppets, live music and choreography. All this is anchored by the Lon Haber's clever and winning performance as Carroll/Alice. The real star here, though, is director Robert Prior and his vivid love of theatrical pageantry, spectacle and whimsy. Staying surprisingly true to much of Carroll's original text, Prior and his team of designers and collaborators have crafted a show filled with images and moments that linger long after the performance. There is no great message here, only ample evidence that an inspired theatrical artist collaborating with a talented ensemble and team of resourceful designers can still create a sense of awe and...wonder.