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Hip Pocket Theatre walks tightrope with 'Salome' Posted Saturday, Sep. 04, 2010 By Mark Lowry Special to the Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH -- A band of circus performers can be an odd lot, a mix of attention-hungry clowns, demanding bosses, ego-driven daredevils and aerialists whose moves blend precision and sensuality. But they all have one big thing in common: They're all misfits in a world that places so much emphasis on normalcy.
Put all those elements in one performance, and it can be thrilling one minute and creepy the next, peppered with amusing and erotic interludes.
All those aspects work for Oscar Wilde's most scandalous play, Salome.
It comes together magically in David Yeakle's adaptation of the 1891 script, set in a circus milieu, for Hip Pocket Theatre.
In Yeakle's vision, the virginal temptress Salome is an aerialist (Mimi Kayl-Vaughan), her stepfather, Herod, is Ringmaster (Thad Isbell), mom Herodias a retired aerialist (Susan Austin), and Jokanaan, the character based on John the Baptist (Richard Rangel), is a caged wild man. Narraboth is an animal trainer (Paul Logsdon), and Naaman, the executioner, is a knife thrower, sharpening his blades throughout the show (and played by Grover Coulson).
Around them, strongmen, contortionists and clowns create that sense of whimsy and awe that can best be captured under the big top.
The show uses original music (by keyboardist Justin Sherburn), and oddly, a foursome of readers who speak the lines of the play, while most of the actors mime the action.
Following a link furnished by DA! Theatre Collective:
nytheatre.com review Martin Denton · August 18, 2010
If you know a young person—between the age of, say, 3 and 10—who has never yet been to the theatre, then my advice is to quickly take him or her to Heron & Crane at the New York International Fringe Festival. (It only runs until August 21, so do this now!) I cannot think of a better way to introduce a child to the magic and energy of theatre than via this delightful show. And of course, kids who already know how cool theatre is are going to get a charge out of it, too.
That, certainly, was the verdict at the performance I attended: the two dozen or so small fry in the audience were engaged from start to finish, smiling and really participating because this is an interactive show that really means it. (The parents/grown-ups seemed to be having a hoot, too.)
Found on-line, Charles Isherwood's examination of the art and the commercial realities of two-actor plays, especially those currently playing in New York:
Two-Handers With Plenty to Applaud
by Charles Isherwood, May 5, 2010
. . . Two-handers, as two-person plays are nicknamed in the trade, have a respectable history and a particular appeal — and not just for acting classes. The form could be said to date back to the Greeks. Perhaps exhausted by all the one-man tragedies he had been enduring, Aeschylus decided it was time for some innovation and added a second actor to the mix in 471 B.C. (There was also the chorus of course.)
For much of the rest of theater history, more was considered more, and the Shakespearean model of amply filled stages held sway. But minimalism was a hallmark of modernist theater of the mid-20th century, which pared away much that was deemed inessential to depict the human experience to its essence. Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is fundamentally a two-man play, with a few guest stars. Another of his masterworks, “Happy Days,” contains just two characters (really one and a half). Ionesco wrote brilliant absurdist pas de deux in “The Lesson” and “The Chairs.” (Each has a walk-on for a third character.) Harold Pinter and Jean Genet also experimented with the form, and Edward Albee’s career ignited with “The Zoo Story,” about a fraught encounter between two men on a park bench.
So it’s not just about economics, even today, but about the particular allure of seeing drama that’s taut and tight, cut to the bone. On some level many (if not most) two-handers are fundamentally about the problem of intimacy, the primal human need to connect with another, and the sorrows and satisfactions arising from this drive apparently hard-wired into the psyche. Their potency arises from our recognition of this universal urge, conscious or not.
Written and performed by Mike Daisey Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory At Richard Christiansen Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln (map) Through May 2nd | Tickets: $25 | more info
reviewed by Catey Sullivan
“You should not have come here,” begins Mike Daisey in his one-man tour de force of nature, How Theater Failed America. For one thing, he continues, the title of the show sucks – ( “What is this, a fucking film strip?”) For another, Daisey’s simultaneously bleak and brilliant autobiographical walk down the memory lane of his career will outrage the politically correct. It will also send those who view theater as a sacred, noble art spiraling and screaming down a wild rabbit hole of profane realty. (Spoiler alert: Those who want to cling to the myth of “community” in theater should stay home and stick to their Twitter confabs.) It’s fair to ask why anyone other than out-of-work actors (which is to say – more or less – actors) should give a whit about the death of theater or about Daisey’s scathing monologue. Will the grid go dark if all of the world’s liberal arts grads collectively decide never to mount another revival of A View from the Bridge? Does the world’s well-being rest on an endless cycle of revisionist Ibsen? Of course not. Yet this is where Daisey’s explosive and formidable talent becomes so gloriously apparent. Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, How Theater Failed America will be powerfully entertaining even to those who could not care less about whether Becket and Brecht vanish from the face of the earth, washed away by the likes of “The Little Mermaid”. As for those with a vested interest in the arts, they will find themselves repeatedly shocked and undeniably entertained by the galvanizing candor of Daisey’s observations. The man articulates truths that just aren’t spoken aloud and in doing so, breaks what often feels like a conspiracy of silence among artists. (Question the existence of “community” in local theatrical circles, and you’ll all but be accused of heresy.)
Weaving deeply personal stories into the context of the arts in the 21st century, Daisey hits the audience with a barrage of blazing immediacy and devastating honesty. While it’s autobiographical, Gregory’s direction excises the piece of all self-indulgence and paces it so well the two-hour run time feels like 15 minutes, This is a story about MIke Daisey’s life in the theater, but it is also a story about life in general in all its dazzling, manic absurdity and free-falling despair. Read more at Chicago Theatre Blog. . . .
