THEATER: Job

Photo/Hunter Canning

It doesn't feel particularly ambitious or adventurous of Thomas Bradshaw to adapt the biblical story of Job to the stage -- even the title, Job, is straightforward, and there's material excerpted straight from the New International Version of the Bible -- and yet it's certainly within his shock-theater wheelhouse, with each new deprivation graphically brought to life by director Benjamin H. Kamine in the Flea's intimate downstairs theater. If there's a somewhat paint-by-numbers-like approach to the material, which skips between Job's classically themed and God's contemporary, comic scenes, it's at least been painted with vibrant colors, thanks to a committed cast -- in particular a gleefully against-type "Uncle" Satan (Stephen Stout) and soulful Job (Sean McIntyre) -- and some clever staging, which includes not only Michael Wieser's compelling fight choreography but also Joya Powell's tribal dance sequences and Justin Tyme's dirt, bone, and blood makeup and special effects.

There's also an interesting effect in the way Job has been compressed into running a little under an hour while at the same time featuring expansive scenes of violence, as when Job's son Joshua (Jaspal Binning) strangles and then rapes his sister Rachel (Jennifer Tsay). (For an example of Bradshaw's "humor," note that two villagers later comment that this wasn't technically "rape," as Rachel was already dead at the time.) Given the story's use as a scared-straight parable about god's mercy and vengeance, I can tell you that Bradshaw's unyielding physical version seems far more effective than the page's limp warnings.

Still, while Bradshaw interjects a little modern humor and opinion into the proceedings, thanks largely to the conversations between a clearly flawed God (Ugo Chukwu) and his bickering children Jesus (Grant Harrison) and Dionysus (Eric Folks), the majority of the show is dominated by the sight of one man's suffering. Job succeeds, then, on its own merits, but that may be a Pyrrhic victory for downtown audiences looking for a little more depth and insight in their dramas.

The Break-Up and The Happy Sad

Photo/Joan Marcus

Ken Urban's new one-act, The Happy Sad, is as bipolar in tone as it is in title. At times, it is quirky (characters do not break into song so much as they deliberately pause the action and drift into a reverie) and at others it is profoundly honest (scenes between Marcus and Aaron seem particularly exposed and raw), but it is never wholly comfortable within its own skin. The play is almost chitinous, the way the scenes crinkle half between one world and the next: what begins as a seemingly simple roundelay of scenes (Stan and Annie break-up in Aaron's diner, Aaron and Marcus talk about love, Stan and Marcus have sex) slowly begins to collapse, starting with Annie's friend, Marcy, who is having a nervous breakdown in the wake of her father's pending double-amputation and her mother's mental retreat into the world of greeting cards (a bit too imitative of Jenny Schwartz's God's Ear, for that device not nearly as substantive here).

Along the way, we also briefly meet Alice (Jane Elliott) and David (John Anthony Russo), two incredibly vague characters/rebounds (Russo does squeeze the dry, narcissistic role for all its worth), but the play is ultimately unsatisfying. Annie notes, "I think there's more to comedy than just, I don't know, laughing. Think of something really painful in your life. Make it really raw. Make it funny." As such, there's a lot of promise in The Happy Sad. For instance, the way Havilah Brewster handles Mandy's collapse, it's as if her smile is made of silly-putty, and she has to keep holding it up, lest it slip permanently, along with the rest of her body, into a frown. The same can be said for Felipe Bonilla, who plays Marcus with such unflinching maturity that we understand the hurt that makes him cheat on Aaron: "I need something," he explains, half-drinking, half-throttling a beer. "Something that's mine sometimes." (Pete Forester, as Aaron, is the ideal scene partner for egotists: he gives plenty to everyone else in the scene without ever being strong enough to grab the audience's attention.)

Stephen O'Reilly and Annie Scott, who play Stan and Annie, are good actors stuck in leaden roles (I'm giving O'Reilly the benefit of the doubt that it's just a badly written opening): however, if there's vulnerability beneath Stan's headphones or Annie's nest of hair, it never shows. And that's what Ken Urban struggles most with in his play: showing the truth beneath his tacky, stylistic trappings.

(As for Tommy Smith's ten-minute The Break-Up, which precedes Urban's play, I have nothing -- nothing -- positive to say. Sorry.)

Offending the Audience

Photo/Max Ruby

The bad news is that after forty years, Peter Handke's play, Offending the Audience, no longer does so. The good news is that after forty years, Peter Handke's play, Offending the Audience, no longer does so: instead, it's an lively bit of non-theater that's been stripped down to negations and contradictions, and then dressed back up in turtlenecks and flawless dictions. In fact, it's so elegant that it's rarely shocking, unless you're surprised to find what could very well be a mixed-gender group of Deal or No Deal models speaking lucidly about the world of the stage that they are deconstructing: "We have no need of illusions to disillusion you."

But for a mob of 21 young actors -- playing themselves as they play with Handke's words -- they don't do much to smash through our staid conventions. They stand in place a lot, or sit, parallel to us, on a long bench across the wide-screen space of the Flea's underground theater. When they come up to the knee-high divider between us and them, they only occasionally cross it, and though they make eye contact, most of the crowd responded in kind, enough to the point where it actually seemed to unsettle some of the actors -- a few refused to acknowledge us at all, throwing their insults away on empty chairs instead. (Not that they weren't ever successful; I think I did fairly well matching Ronald Washington's gaze considering he was inches from my front-row face, but I eventually flinched.) Perhaps director Jim Simpson meant for this to happen: perhaps this unoffensive bit of play (that is not, they repeat, not a play) is meant to break down our barriers by not breaking them down. It is, after all, a play of contradictions.

The biggest and most delightful reversal is that all this talk of inaction is brought to life in a wonderfully active way: the actors trill their lines, merge powerfully together as a Greek chorus, and all look extremely attractive while doing so. Out of respect to the hard-working cast (and as practice for the few cast members who seem flat), I recommend that you stick around for Act II. If you can get past their intimidating wall of silence, you'll realize at last that once all the fun and games are over, the essential truth of the show -- that audience and actor are intrinsically no different -- shines through. That is, we may be "Merovingian dark agers," or "bimbos and bimbets," hell, even "killer pigs," but then again, so are they. So are we.

PLAY: "Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations)"

Photo/Richard Termine

Will Eno's an excellent solipsist, and that helps him to be a great monologist, a writer of such specific dialog that he can trick the audience into soul-searching his every word. With Thom Pain, he found a droll enough actor in James Urbaniak that we wanted to drown in his reflexive thoughts and engage with his double-talk; but his new collection of short plays, Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations) eschews specificity of thought for grasping meditations on mortality, and while Brian Hutchison and Marisa Tomei are able to tone themselves down, for them, it seems reductive. Worse still, the five short plays that make up the show are redundancies of each other, starting with the excellently fresh "Behold The Coach, In a Blazer, Uninsured," and ending with the dismal "Oh, The Humanity," in which the characters dismiss the artifice of the stage as a cruel reflection of life ("And these are chairs. And that's it. And I don't know who I am.") but offer nothing in return.

While Oh, The Humanity seems a bit like laziness on the writer's part, I will say this: he's good at his shtick: "Don't speak your mind," says Coach, "and certainly never your heart." With these two useful dramatic narratives out of the way, Eno divulges information through the language itself, like David Foster Wallace, who calls himself, at times, a meta-belletrist. That's an accurate genre for Eno, who turns cadences into heartbeats. For instance, Coach frequently doubles himself (not pleonastically, as he thinks, for the excess of words are necessary to punctuate his doubt): "grown in-grown," "I don't know. In general. And, in particular, in particular," or "An endless gorgeous gorgeous endless loss. Which now is now over. And we have how many more left left to us to lose?" And yet, we are too often being told that this is a pitiable man; very rarely do we actually see it or actually feel it. The poem he reads ("My love is like a sunset, stunning, and then over,") reeks of a pretension that doesn't fit the coach, and even he aches for "a gentle little rhymey poem for the old boy with the clipboard and whistle."

From here, it's more of the same: "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rain" has a Lady and Gentleman overconfessing to the camera ("I am not, as I look around myself, currently bleeding"), getting laughs and sympathy from their eccentricities, not their actual characters, and in "Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently," a cry for help is politely phrased under the diplomatically removed commentary on an airline crash ("Gravity, we trust, was a factor"), and our unshakable hero looks for hope in the little things. (She doubles herself as well: "This was, by the way, an experienced experienced crew.") Even "The Bully Composition" is partly muted by Eno's style, although here the photographer and his assistant are at least being more direct, calling for us to be "more mortal, as much as you can stand," so that their own professionalism is at least an opportunity for us to feel, for us to make some discovery about ourselves. But Eno doesn't follow the same guidelines he sets out for us: "We should try and learn to look at each other harder," he says, but never actually looks at us for we are secondary to what he has already decided to exclaim. That's why the final piece, "Oh, The Humanity," comes as a real irritant: Eno acknowledges the space, acknowledges the audience, and then dismisses it. He's busy conjuring up a mystery, the one caused by "the relations . . . not between things."

So far as an evening at the theater goes, Oh, The Humanity is a pretty artificial one, and if it manages to peer for a moment into our souls, that's only because it speaks so eloquently about the things that we don't know how to say (even though this would never be the way we'd say them). We get Eno's delightful pleonasms, but like Coach, we want a gentle rhymey poem.

PLAY: "Seating Arrangements"

The Bats are to acting as the New Theater Corps would like to be for criticism: a local repertory company of upcoming talent who all share a passion and enthusiasm for the arts. On that basis alone, may The Flea, which hosts them, receive all the grants it needs, and many charitable donations. One such grant, from the Danish Arts Council, has brought the best out of what the Bats can offer with their young blood, as well as what The Flea can offer as a welcoming theater: in this case, Pold Worm Jensen's seating ARRANGEMENTS, or the most fun you can have at a banquet (that isn't really a banquet). Which makes sense when you consider that the play is based on Babette's Feast, but not at all about that famous short story-cum-film, save as a jumping off point for the actors, jumping in and out of characters in a semi-futurist style.

Since June 2007, Erik Pold (joined by set designer Stine Worm Sorensen and dramaturge Allan Richardt Jensen, all from Denmark) has been working with eight of the Bats to piece together a celebratory and revelatory piece about the values important to them -- not the modesty meets extravagance of the 1881 feast (these actors have great imagined lives, but as they confess, are mostly all without health care), but about their discomfort. In a stylized formality, these actors riff off the original material and jump into telling their own stories, the only ones they really and truly can, be that a hyperbolic rant against Donald Trump's SoHo zoning, or about recent immigration legislature.

Some of these brief conversations are paradoxic: a comfortable actress speaks about being uncomfortable having to discuss her Mormon roots (Jane Elliot). Some are familiar: an actor talks about how his repressed past in Ireland kept him from being who he truly was, until he found himself able to be persecuted for it in America (Donal Brophy). Some actors rap (Bobby Moreno), sing (Max Jenkins), or violin (Sylvia Mincewicz) through their frustrations, joys, and pains. Whatever the form, whatever the topic, it is all entertainingly intimate, not shared across a stage, but from plated seats beside you at the table. (Well, OK, if you're not early enough to snag a seat, you'll have to watch from a more formalized seating arrangement.)

Occasionally, the play is too formal; it would've been nice to see looser transitions, more natural moments of spontaneity, and more genuine conversation outside of the larger "numbers" that make the actors leap from their seats in outrage. At the same time, Pold keeps the "food" fresh by playing enough with blocking and lighting to make those events theatrical, yet personable. (I, for instance, was Riccardo, Assistant Sector Manager for a moment.) The thoughts are not unified, nor even complete, but the actors are, and I'll take the honesty of their clamor over the dissembling glaze of some flimsily commercial play any day.

PLAY: "I.E., In Other Words"

Oh, it would be so easy for me to just say [insert exclamatory rave] for I.E., In Other Words and be done with it. But although Mark Greenfield's inventive epic (yet intermissionless) fable is filled with characters who speak in the postmodern ("Abrupt interruption," "Clearly fake pleasantry to you," or "Oh, Sam dot dot dot"), it's more a clever shorthand than an excuse to back out of writing. Between the excellent ensemble (The Bats, the Flea's young resident company) and the tight direction of Kip Fagan, the show is a rollicking absurdity, as much musical as Adam Rapp's recent Essential Self-Defense and as bitterly metadramatic in atmosphere as Urinetown, right down to the use of places like Localtownsville and Citycity. Even Michael Casselli's set design is modish, a long curtain that unfurls across the basement theater like a hip skin for one's iPod.

Sam (a resolutely charming Teddy Bergman) is looking for fame so that he can win the heart of his fickle, cucumber-eating sweetheart, Jen (the sweet Elizabeth Hoyt), and her father-figure, Uncle Pop. His journey takes him from the sunny countryside and its villainous Pete Shemp (Jaime Robert Carrillo) to the gloomy cityscape, and from the yokels to the ethnic stereotypes. Not every joke works, but they aren't given enough time to fall flat on their face: the play has thirty-three characters (played by fourteen actors) and is only ninety minutes. So we'll get to meet the disco-dancing Good Cops in the same breath that we encounter Nathaniel, the sort of cell mate who would rape you, if he didn't find it so cliche. Actors also have the opportunity to play a wide variety of hammy hipsters, like Kelly Miller, who kills as a semiotics instructor, or Kina Bermudez, who is welcome to bring pies on stage any time.

The show is a long way from being crisp (the sound cues were way off, although the actors played them off for laughs), and some of the musical numbers falter (intentionally, for some). But when it comes together, as with Jen and Sam's overlapping letter-writing duet about the expositional passage of time, there's something thrillingly trendy about it. And when the going gets weird, the going gets good: who wouldn't laugh at the pointed question "You got something against ghosts fucking?"

I.E., In Other Words, you should go and see this show while it's still fresh off the funny farm. Good ideas, good execution, and the always intimate Underground of the Flea make for one great evening of theater, no matter how you parse it.