A Small Fire Ignites

A very obvious metaphor lies at the center of Adam Bock's new play A Small Fire playing this month at Playwrights Horizons. Emily Bridges (Michelle Pawk), a middle aged woman who owns a successful construction company--and acts like she owns everyone in it--suddenly loses her sense of smell. She begins a quick decline that leads to blindness and other lost senses as well. At first brush, Emily's strange illness is only a tool to render her helpless, forcing her and her husband to reverse roles. Whereas Emily is used to being the breadwinning woman who speaks her mind, John Bridges (Reed Birney), who works in HR, must now be the strong one and care for his wife.

Despite this gimmicky proposition, Bock successfully shows the depth of an entire marriage over the course of Emily's decline. Emily and John's grown daughter, Jenny (Celia Keenan-Boger), plays the role of an outsider whom the marriage must be explained to. As Jenny changes her mind about her parents and their marriage, so do we. Early on, we see Emily berate Jenny about her upcoming marriage. Emily thinks Jenny's fiance is basically a joker who isn't good enough for her. Keenan-Bolger betrays a lifetime of resentment in each look she throws at her mother. Clearly the good cop, John explains why he has stuck with Emily through all these years of abuse when he is confronted by his daughter. "You should have left her," she implores. "I can't be alone," is his simple answer. Birney's delivery of this line is perfect. He seems to have thought about Jenny's question before, and now only briefly hesitates to tell her or not. He finally does get the words out, clearly and definitely.

Emily struggles with her own loneliness as she loses each sense that put her in touch with the rest of the world. It's understandably difficult for a seeing person to act like she's blind, and Pawk does not master the task. However, her body does show the growing inwardness of her mind. Vibrant and wholly present on stage in early scenes, she takes on a ghostlike presence in later ones as she seems to shrink into her baggier clothing. But when visitors come, Emily shouts as if to reassert her presence. Bock's dreamlike sequences for Emily are supposed to reveal her more to us, but are unnecessary. Emily stands downstage with her narration in voice over. Though blocked in a dreamlike way, we simply learn that Emily feels trapped, which is not really a surprise.

The most controversial scene in the play is a lengthy sex scene at the play's literal climax between Emily and John. John is completely naked, with careful blocking the only thing between us and his junk. Lasting several minutes, I sense that we are supposed to see Emily and John getting closer in this scene. Perhaps Bock wants to make us uncomfortable as a contrast to the couple's lack of inhibitions. But it probably could have been said with more clothes.

Eventually, we see why John cannot be alone, and why Emily and John may be a good match. In one scene, Emily admonishes Jenny to take care of her father because he does not know how to be strong on his own. Yet John also seems to be the best person to take care of Emily. He devises a mechanism by which to communicate with her once she is in deeper decline. The two have grown into each other over the years.

Black Swan: All Smoke and Mirrors?

Black Swan advertises itself as a psycho-sexual thriller, when it could just as easily be labeled a parable. The psycho sexual part--while drawing most of the male audience members at the screening I attended last night--was also the most disappointing.

The plot of Black Swan is laid out early on during a speech that the dance director, Thomas, gives his ballerinas in practice. Summarizing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, he foreshadows that this will be the story of a girl turned into a white swan queen who must find love to break the spell. When her double, the black swan, seduces the prince instead, the swan queen leaps to her death.

The camera's early, constant focus on Nina Salyers (Natalie Portman) introduces her as the swan queen. Tomas awards her the part of the swan queen after she shows him a dark side by biting him. But he still admonishes her to let loose, to tap into her dark side more vigorously. How is she going to do this? Can she make this transformation while remaining herself, the film seems to ask. Darren Aronofsky's camera follows Nina closely throughout Black Swan. He produces a shaky hand held effect focusing on the back of Portman's head wherever she goes. While this effect signals that everything we see is through Nina's eyes, our position as audience members still gives us the distance to interpret Nina's experiences.

So each time that Nina sees something mysterious--the words "Whore" strewn on the bathroom mirror, or a darker doppelganger who appears at inopportune moments--we are presented with a choice. Are these sightings for real or just figments of Nina's imagination? While the movie initially seems to suggest that there might be a scientific, Portman's strained expression and the audience's knowledge of schizophrenia also lead us to believe that Portman is simply seeing things that don't exist and is otherwise paranoid. Soon after Nina gets her role, an older dancer who has just been foisted out of the company, Beth (WInona Ryder), warns her that an up and coming dancer will soon be after her role. Sure enough, Nina starts to envision her double everywhere in addition to her competitor Lily (Mila Kunis) seducing the Thomas. We can only draw the conclusion that Nina was strongly influenced by Beth's words.

The problem, of course, is that if we write off Nina as a crazy person so early on, we can no longer buy into her struggle to tap into her dark side. Nina is already far gone. There's only the matter of watching her steep and quick decline. In contrast to movies about mental decline such as A Beautiful Mind, the well being of no one seems to be at stake here. We haven't seen Nina, while admirable in her discipline, is precisely as cold as Thomas says she is. Portman wears a furrowed brow in nearly every scene and rarely cracks a smile. Her peeling cuticles only exemplify her uptight demeanor.

Black Swan is still a memorable movie, if only for Aronofsky's direction. He gives us a terrifyingly physical glimpse into the body of a ballet dancer. We see Nina's cracked toenails, skin rashes and emaciated body.

Unfortunately, these shots only emphasize Nina's frigidity. With little character development at stake, Black Swan unfolds as a retelling of Swan Lake and little more.

Orlando Explores Changing Gender and Time

Classic Stage Company's production of Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf's novel, is conventional Sarah Ruhl adaptation. By conventional Sarah Ruhl, I mean entirely unconventional storytelling. Eschewing traditional limits of time and gender, Orlando tells the story of a Seventeenth Century English nobleman, Orlando, who wakes up one day to find that he's actually a woman. After the transformation, every now and then Orlando also finds herself in a different century. Trying to convey the idea that human identity shouldn't be restricted to the period or gender that we're born into, Woolf's novel was an homage to her progressive friend, Vita Sackville-West.

Ruhl faithfully brings Woolf's post-modernist concepts to the stage. Supporting Orlando (Francesca Faridany), Ruhl has created three male ensemble characters who take on different roles. The actor with the most speaking parts, David Greenspan, plays a Queen who favors Orlando in the Seventeenth Century. He then morphs into a man playing a woman to woo the female Orlando in the second half. All three Ensemble members and Orlando narrate their actions as they perform them to advance the plot. For example, Orlando describes how he ice skates with his love interest, Sasha (Annika Boras), as they mime ice skating.

The first half of the play takes place in the early Seventeenth Century, letting the audience get well acquainted with Orlando before the gender/time-bending shenanigans begin. Orlando lays on the grass in the opening scene, trying to compose a poem. His rhyming "green" with "green" shows us that he still needs to get in touch with his inner artist. This quest to find himself essentially guides the rest of the play.

A story that's so much about the inner life of its eponymous character needs a strong actor. Francesca Faridany fulfills the role well. Known for playing gender-bending parts--I last saw her as Rosalind in All's Well That Ends Well--Faridany gracefully transitions from male to female here while retaining one personality. She convincingly plays a former man puzzled by the new constraints on his life. At one point, Orlando describes her newfound role of pouring tea and asking men how they would like it. While she doesn't seem to mind her new role, it makes us wonder how much of the gender roles that we adopt is actually acting. The one drawback of casting Faridany is that she reminds us a lot of Tilda Swinton in the film Orlando. They both have red hair and channel a certain androgyny. Happily, Faridany brings a more playful demeanor to Orlando than Swinton.

While leaving some loose ends open, Orlando is not really about plot, but about mood. Ruhl covers four centuries skillfully, retaining Orlando's consistent character throughout. The audience is left with a warm fuzzy feeling despite its liberal use of metaphysical hijinks.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: An Emo Musical

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (or BBAJ as fans are already dubbing it) is a musical that could have been written by emo comparative literature and history graduate students. History dominates the musical's content while comp lit guides its structure. On the history side, BBAJ is ostensibly about the rise of Andrew Jackson (Benjamin Walker), the seventh president of the United States. It includes some accurate, yet little known facts. Did you know Jackson's wife was technically still married when the two of them got married? The characterization of John Calhoun (Darren Goldstein), Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay are more amusing for those who remember them via AP US History. Van Buren and Clay are Yankee fops while Calhoun just cares about owning slaves. Most of the narrative history is presented by the storyteller (Kristine Nielsen), who appears to be a contemporary history teacher.

On the comparative literature side, BBAJ is one long, self-aware metaphor. It's super meta in that's it's cognizant of being a story about the Nineteenth Century told during the Twenty-First. Walker as Jackson talks directly to the narrator. Songs make references to Twentieth Century thinkers Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag. The lyrics helpfully tell us "she hadn't been born yet." On top of this, the production also parodies the emo sensibility. Whenever Jackson loses an election, or something doesn't go his way, he crosses his tight-legged jeans, tucks himself into his jacket and sulks in the corner. He and his wife Rachel initially bond over a bout of blood-letting. At one point, after Jackson's first failed presidential run, Cher's "Song for the Lonely" comes over the speaker system. A disco ball is busted out while Walker mimes slitting his wrists for several minutes.

Subtlety is not the goal here. Through such ribald storytelling, we are hit over the head with the comparisons between Jackson's presidential and current events. "Populism, Yeah Yeah," the opening number, draws parallels to the Tea Party. Jacksonites complain that Washington DC only represents Northeastern elitists while leaving frontiersmen like Jackson to fend against the Indians by themselves. Later, Jackson loses the election through the "Corrupt Bargain," which gave John Quincey Adams--"I should be president because my father was"--the presidency for promising Henry Clay Secretary of State. When Jackson emerges from political exile, going on to win the election of 1828, he finds that populism may not be the best strategy. After all, people voted for him so that he could make decisions for them. The question over the merits of direct democracy Jackson's final conflict.

Unfortunately, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson loses momentum in its final moments. It simply suggests to the audience that there are downsides to populism without exploring it further. Jackson also commits his most treacherous actions towards Native Americans towards the end with a bit of forced self-reflection.

Now playing at the Bernard Jacobs theatre after premiering Off-Broadway last year, BBAJ draws crowds of young hipsters dressed up for a rock concert. Much of the musical does sound like a rock show. As opposed to other contemporary "rock operas" like Next to Normal, the music here is not continuous. Indeed, the soundtrack is only a little more than 30 minutes. Instead of telling the story, the songs here seem to serve as interludes that are an excuse to blare loud music and turn on low-level, colored house lights. While lacking depth, this style is highly entertaining.

Benjamin Walker's commanding presence as Andrew Jackson is the best part of the BBAJ. He hams up the emo parts unselfconsciously. Though he doesn't have a great singing voice, he does have a powerful one. His speeches and jokes truly endear Jackson to the audience. But at the end, we are still left to decide Jackson's legacy as either one of the greatest presidents of all time, or a murderer.

Time Stands Still is Far from Static

Two restless souls--he a foreign correspondent, she a photojournalist--come back to their Brooklyn apartment after she gets hurt on the job in Donald Margulies' new play Time Stands Still. After a successful Broadway run through Manhattan Theater Company in the 2008-2009 season, it is now back after a summer hiatus. Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) has just woken from a coma after a roadside bomb flung her from her car, simultaneously killing her translator, Tariq. Wearing a leg brace and facial scabs, she limps around the apartment while her partner Jamie attends to her. But Sarah is also quick to shrug off special treatment, allowing her editor Richard (Eric Bogosian), and his new girlfriend Mandy (Christina Ricci). When they ask about the explosion, Sarah replies, "Occupational hazard," in a typically practical manner.

After the first two scenes, we may feel that we have all four of these characters figured out. Sarah is a cerebral world-saving workaholic; Jamie is her perfect counterpart as a romantic journalist; Richard is suffering from a midlife crisis, which involves getting together with Mandy, an unintellectual event planner.

Slowly, through incremental, well-paced steps, Donald Margulies reveals the back story behind Sarah's stoicism and Jamie's obsequiousness. Margulies peels back the layers of their personalities to reveal that things aren't as simple as they first appear. Margulies has mastered the art of exposition through convincing dialogue. It's not surprising that Time Stands Still earned him a Tony nomination for best play last year. Just like how a real couple might not dive into everything that they did while apart for work, it takes Sarah and Jamie some time to warm up to each other here.

When they do, things they want to say to each other seem to explode out of their mouths. Jamie proposes they get married after eight years of living together. He claims it's a good idea for hospital visitation rights while giving off the hint there's something lingering beneath the surface. Perhaps it's Sarah's affair with her translator, Tariq, which she reveals in the next line. Perhaps it's Jamie's own breakdown after seeing children explode in front of him, causing him to leave Sarah with Tariq in the first place. Is Jamie trying to redeem himself? Is he just insecure? And where does Sarah's hesitancy come from?

Margulies provides the answers to these questions in the second act without hitting the audience over the head with the characters' motivations. There are no sudden epiphanies or revelations. Rather, the characters figure themselves out at the same time as the audience. Sarah and Jamie realize that their real problem may be that they simply want different things. Jamie, to settle down, but Sarah to keep traveling. At the same time, Sarah's starting to question her own motives for her profession.

In one of the most moving monologues in the play, Sarah tells Jamie how she kept shooting film despite a woman's protests after an explosion in Mosul. "What I did was so wrong it was indecent...They didn't want me taking pictures. That was a sacred place to them...I live off the suffering of strangers." Meanwhile, Mandy is the perfect counterpoint to Sarah's worldviews. Looking at Sarah's pictures, Mandy starts to get upset. "Why didn't you help them?" she wants to know. Indeed, why don't we help the millions of poor people in the world, is one of the questions Time Stands Still asks us to consider. But the more important one is how does our answer to that question effect our relationships?