Coyote on a Fence
by Bruce Graham
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com
Crime and capital punishment are center stage in Bruce Graham's Coyote on a Fence, an engrossing drama that deliberately raises more questions than it answers.
The Alliance Theatre Lab production, one of the troupe's most powerful and polished shows to date, sends its audiences back out onto Miami Lakes' Main Street pondering forever-incendiary issues: justice, vengeance, the legal system, racism and the ``why'' of horrific crimes.
Graham's play focuses on a pair of Texas death row inmates. John Brennan (an intense, engaging Travis Reiff) is an educated man who once worked at the prison as a drug and alcohol counselor. Opposed to the death penalty, adamant about his innocence, he has created a prison newspaper to push his views and humanize those who are executed.
John's new next-cell neighbor is Bobby Reyburn (Mark Della Ventura), a slow-witted, cheerful man with a ruined eye and a damaged hip. After a horrific childhood -- his mother was an alcoholic prostitute, and the hip injury came from a gang rape when he was 12 -- Bobby embraced the acceptance he found in a community of white supremacists. His crime: torching a black church with 37 people trapped inside, 14 of them children.
Feeling that justice will be served when Bobby, who spews repulsive pronouncements about blacks and Jews, keeps his date with the executioner would be easy. But Coyote on a Fence doesn't settle for easy. Both Graham's writing and Della Ventura's masterful performance keep the play from becoming a clear-cut study of guilt and innocence.
Also part of the drama are a prison guard (Kirsten Upchurch), whose drunken conversations with an unseen journalist in a bar reveal the emotional cost of maintaining her tough-gal exterior at work, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter (Jehane Serralles) who has decided to write about John and his appreciative obituaries. Both women play their parts well, but casting Serralles in a role written for a male brings a slightly creepy dimension to her initial scene with John, who asks about her marital status then wants to see a picture of her 5-year-old daughter.
Working on Mike Stopnick's set, with its lived-in cell for John and barren one for Bobby, the cast and director Adalberto Acevedo take the audience on an intense, difficult, thought-provoking journey.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
Jehane Serralles, Mark Della Ventura, Kirsten Upchurch, and Travis Reiff/photo by Roger Martin.
Bobby Reyburn has a can of gas and a match. He burns down a church. With 37 people inside. Naturally God told him to do it. What a monster is Bobby. Well, no, not really. Not as played by Mark Della Ventura in the Alliance Theatre Lab's Coyote on a Fence by Bruce Graham.
Della Ventura, fascinating as Bobby, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who hates Jews and Blacks, was gang raped so badly he walks with a limp, sees out of only one eye, is uneducated and ignorant, and was birthed by a prostitute. And of course he desperately wants to see his name in the prison newspaper. The prison being in Texas and his cell being on Death Row next to long-time con John Brennan, editor of the aforesaid prison paper.
Brennan, played by Travis Reiff, is an almost celebrity, his writings on the deaths of his Death Row fellows and his arguing for the abolition of the death penalty having brought him to the notice of the BBC and the New York Times. He's an educated man, plays chess by mail, writes on an old typewriter without a ribbon (carbon paper), reads and tries to tell the world he is innocent of shooting a man in a drug deal. Travis Reiff is a grounded actor whose stage weight is always there. No missteps here as John Brennan.
Brennan is the arrogant King of the Row and then suddenly the seemingly innocent Bobby Reyburn is put into the cell next to him. Reyburn changes Brennan's disdain to forbearance and then, ultimately, friendship. See them playing catch in the exercise yard.
There's a Greek Chorus at work, too, in Coyote on a Fence. Kirsten Upchurch, as prison guard Shawna DuChamps, sucks beer from a bottle, willingly uses her baton, and protests a little too much that she's not worn down by all the years and all the executions. She just goes home to bed at night and forgets all about the prison life. Right.
New York Times reporter Samantha Fried, played by a just right Jehane Serralles, meets Brennan in the prison. She wants to write about his life and ideas but the interview ends badly with Brennan, cuffed, on his knees and being choked into submission by a baton across the throat as DuChamps screams for respect.
There's no doubt this is a political play but this is forgiven and forgotten with the force of Adalberto Acevedo's direction and the performances of his cast.
Mike Stopnik designed the realistic set (check out the ingenious exercise yard). The equally good sounds and lights are by Howard Ferre and Will Cabrera.
A note here about the Main Street Playhouse where the Alliance Theatre Lab is presenting Coyote on a Fence through June 27. It's a small, intimate black box with raked seating in Miami Lakes at 6766 Main Street. There are good restaurants within walking distance and free parking nearby. For more information call The Alliance Theatre Lab at 305.259.0418 or visit www.thealliancetheatrelab.com.
Orphans
by Lyle Kessler
Miami Herald
'Orphans' examines the primal need for connections
Kessler's three-character tragicomedy, a staple of edge-loving theater companies ever since Chicago's Steppenwolf staged it to great acclaim in 1985, owes much to both Pinter's mysterious The Caretaker and Shepard's volatile True West. When done well, Orphans becomes both a vehicle for bravura acting and a multilayered examination of the primal need for connection.
The Miami Lakes-based Alliance Theatre Lab has just opened an engrossing, accomplished production of Kessler's play. Director Adalberto J. Acevedo effectively explores the script's many emotional colors -- whimsical humor, explosive violence, long-buried need -- with a trio of actors who impressively deliver both the charged and tender moments in the play.
Acevedo's artfully lived-in set and deft sound design, Skye Whitcomb's emotion-underscoring lighting and Jennipher Murphy's costumes (which tell their own story of change) effectively serve the story, drawing us more deeply into the dysfunctional universe of two long-orphaned brothers and the stranger who changes everything.
Phillip (Justin McLendon), the younger brother, is a housebound, uneducated savant whose only ties to the outside are the world according to television and the life-sustaining ``care'' provided by his older brother. Treat (David Sirois) is a violent, volatile thief whose daily haul has supported both brothers since childhood, when their mama died and their daddy ran off.
Inside their messy North Philadelphia row house, Treat indulges his brother's dietary obsession (StarKist tuna with Hellman's mayonnaise on toast), then alternates between playfully chasing Phillip and pounding him into the floor. How the brothers have managed to live this way is a question Kessler chooses to leave a Pinteresque mystery.
When Treat brings home a drunken businessman he intends to rob, everything changes. Harold (Travis Reiff), a Chicagoan who reveals that he too grew up an orphan, feels an emotional connection to his often-furious captor. He sets about altering the brothers' lives, to everyone's mutual benefit, leading to an emotional breakthrough at the play's end. But that growth comes at a heavy price.
Alliance's Orphans cast digs into Kessler's characters with obvious relish. Sirois' Treat is the personification of frustration, explosive anger and unacknowledged need. Reiff's often-jolly Harold is a manipulator whose emotional tool kit includes his own brand of menace. And McLendon's childlike Phillip provides both plentiful laughs and utter sweetness.
Orphans has been around a long time, since before a 24/7 connectedness could penetrate even a world as self-contained as the one inside the brothers' row house. But as Alliance's production demonstrates, the mystery Kessler conjures and the emotional truths he explores haven't become dated at all.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
Miami New Times
Alliance Theatre Lab's Orphans gets loving treatment
By Brandon K. Thorp
It's not easy to be funny when you're choking on your
necktie. It's not easy to project ephemeral things such as character,
motivation, and soul when you're bound, gagged, and tied to a chair. Travis
Reiff does that and more as Harold, a criminal of unspecified type and soon-to-be
father figure to orphans Treat and Philip.
You can tell almost everything about Reiff's character from the way he
wiggles around in that chair — glancing about the room, seeing everything,
making good-humored noises, and evincing less rancor at his captors than an
honest, if calculating, interest in the strange turn his life has taken.
And how did it happen? He was drunk in a bar, apparently — whether he was actually
drunk is a minor mystery that theatergoers can wonder about postshow — when he
was taken home by Treat (David Sirois), a grown orphan and stick-up artist who,
for whatever reason, allowed the man into his house. That house is shared with
Treat's younger brother, Philip (Justin McClendon), a shut-in innocent with all
the world-wariness of a manic 12-year-old. At some point, after Harold seems to
pass out, Treat decides it might be worth looking in the man's briefcase. There
he finds stocks — lots and lots of stocks worth lots and lots of money. So now
Harold is tied to a chair, and the orphan brothers want to hold him for ransom.
It's an interesting situation, and most theaters would flub it, because this
interesting situation is meant to segue into a yet more interesting and vastly
more complicated one. Soon Harold is employing his captors, and his
captors are slowly coming to think of him as a weird combination of father,
mentor, and savior. This isn't P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. Though funny, it's
not supposed to be a comedy. We're supposed to take this stuff at face value,
be moved by it, be enamored of it — coast along on its weird eddies of human
emotion and see where they take us. It's a delicate operation.
Overacting is a very real danger here. Consider: Treat and Philip are alone.
Motherless. Fatherless. Ignorant of the ways of the world. Treat has hard-won
street smarts and not much else, and you get the sense he'd be a sweet kid if
life hadn't put him in such a wretched position. As it is, he tries hard to be
hard. Meanwhile, Philip, the shut-in, is a naif with a heart of gold — allergic
to everything, illiterate, liable to spend a day staring out the window,
falling in love with the nicely dressed passersby, and in the evening
recounting their visages to his brother, who listens gamely and tries to humor
the boy while mulling over grimmer, more adult concerns.
The sheer preciousness of it all is an invitation to ham, but the brave
actors of the Alliance Theatre Lab resist. They give Kessler's old script a
loving treatment, as intimate as the tiny theater's warmly lit stage.
There is very little bombast in this Orphans. There is, rather, a quiet
sense of filial devotion struggling to assert itself beneath Treat's put-on
violence. "It's amazing how people stop struggling once there's a little
blood," notes Treat, sounding more than anything like a lost kid in need
of a hug.
He will soon be offered one. Reiff's Harold steps into the orphans' home
with such an inflated sense of paternalism he's more like a cartoon than a dad.
Charmed rather than scared by Treat's swinging of a switchblade, Harold views
the snarling young thug as a kind of puppy. Harold's presence in the house
feels like a big, creepily misplaced embrace. His warm, booming voice is like
an aural tongue bath.
So they form a kind of family. And just as Treat took the abuses of the
world so his younger brother wouldn't have to, now Harold, Christ-like, will
bear the abuses for them all.
That this is so moving has less to do with the tricky script than with
bravura performances from all three leads, particularly from the young
McClendon. His whole performance is a great, big hope engine. In the early
scenes, he expresses such clear and unforced joy at the arrival of a new jar of
Hellmann's mayonnaise — his favorite food, which he has slathered atop StarKist
tuna sandwiches every day for years — that you can almost see how such niggling
pleasures could sustain a life, could make it worth living. McClendon suffuses
his character with such a wholesome sense of humanity that when he begins, at
Harold's urging, to expect more from life, his growing experience of the world
reaches the audience like the breaking of a long-awaited dawn. If you want to
see something recklessly, gustily beautiful in a theater, see this.
Miami Artzine
by Roger Martin
..and so were other audience members, such was the power on stage at The Alliance Theatre Lab's Friday night performance of Orphans, written by Lyle Kessler.
Adalberto Acevedo directed and Justin McLendon, Travis Reiff and David Sirois performed at such a pitch that “I laughed, I cried” became the truth once again. Rocketing around the stage, leaping furniture, slapping, tripping, wrestling, slamming into walls and onto table tops, Sirois as big brother Treat and McLendon as little brother Phillip create the perfect “you're the stupid, sickly little brother who can't read and can't leave the house, and I'm the big brother who's protecting you by beating you down.”
And then Treat, who 's putting food on the table (mayonnaise and canned tuna) by cutting people and stealing their jewelery and wallets, brings home a drunk he's met in a bar. It's Harold, played by Reiff. Treat ties him to a chair and poor little pajama clad Phillip (he wears a batter's helmet when he feels threatened) looks at Harold with such delight we swear he's just been given a new puppy. His smile lights the theatre.
Harold is a Business? Man from Chicago who is part Colonel Stoopnagel, Senator Claghorn, Jubilation T Cornpone and Foghorn Leghorn (Google 'em). And a sweetheart, kind and generous. Sometimes. Sirois' Treat is a punk, see him preening in his new suit, foul-mouthed, manipulative and fearful. But when he cries, we cry with him. McLendon's Phillip is a jitterbug, hysterical at times, viz his singing black man, and cunning as a native dog. Harold changes Treat and Phillip, not much of a plot, really, but how he handles them and they him, is fascinating. Which I guess is all you need.
Adalberto Acevedo designed the set, a messily cluttered living room that pulls us in, and the very effective sound, and Skye Whitcomb designed the excellent lighting for Orphans, a well presented, well acted and well directed show.
by David Mamet
Miami Herald
Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago a pleasure for audience
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago is a play of a certain era: early Mamet, post-sexual revolution, pre-AIDS.
Written
in 1974, the play flits from one short scene to the next, providing a
snapshot of twentysomething big city ``romance'' and serving as a
window into the younger Mamet's mind. This is a work that is funny,
foul-mouthed and more than a little misogynistic; still enjoyable, but
a harbinger of better things to come from a talented playwright.
The
Miami Lakes-based Alliance Theatre Lab is winding up its year with a
time-tripping performance of Sexual Perversity. The preshow music is
vintage Marvin Gaye, setting a sensual mood as only he could do. The
costumes, such as one guy's three-piece suit and wide tie, also say
'70s. The rest -- the attitudes, sexual come-ons, fast physical
intimacy among strangers -- is classic Mamet.
Sexual Perversity in Chicago follows the romantic fortunes of two guys and two gals.
Bernie
Litko (Travis Reiff) is -- to put it succinctly -- a pig. Perpetually
on the prowl, he sees women as things to be chatted up, slept with and
physically discarded, though they'll linger as the subjects of Bernie's
graphic tales of his sexual exploits. Bernie's work buddy Danny Shapiro
(David Sirois) seems to be a more evolved type, and he jumps into an
actual relationship. But it's not long before this Mamet man reveals
that, just under that sensitive surface, he's not so different from
Bernie.
Danny's squeeze is Deborah Soloman (Bertha Leal), who
jumps into bed and a live-in relationship without much more thought
than she'd give to buying a new dress. Not smart. Her tart-tongued
roommate, kindergarten teacher Joan Webber (Jehane Serralles), doesn't
much care for Danny (or any guy) and can't wait for the inevitable
breakup to crow, ``I told you so.''
Director Adalberto J.
Acevedo keeps the play hurtling forward as he turns actors who weren't
born when the play was written into spot-on interpreters of Mamet's
crude, fast-paced battle of the sexes. Reiff runs wild with Bernie's
outsized vulgarity, Serralles gets Joan's frostiness, and Leal finds
Deborah's empathetic vulnerability. Sirois does wonderfully layered
work as Danny, sliding from decency to nastiness so convincingly that
you feel as let down as Deborah does by a good guy gone bad.
Though
Alliance still needs to raise its game when it comes to design work,
its production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago gives four talented
young actors the chance to take a walk on the wild side through Mamet's
outrageous, R-rated world.
Miami New Times
A Healthy Blast of Filth
Sexual Perversity in Chicago takes a stand for sexual normalcy in Miami Lakes.
By Brandon K. Thorp
Published on November 10, 2009 at 2:39pm
Details:
Sexual Perversity in Chicago By David MametDirected by Adalberto Acevedo With Bertha Leal, David Sirois,Jehane Serralles, and Travis Reiff Through November 22 The Alliance Theatre Lab; 6766 Main St., Miami Lakes305-259-0418; thealliancetheatrelab.com
The sexual perversity showcased in Sexual Perversity in Chicago is neither very Chicagoan nor very perverse. That is, if you judge perversity by things done rather than things thought about. But like most people in Chicago and elsewhere, Deborah, Danny, Joan, and Bernie — the denizens of this David Mamet joint — think about sex a lot more than they have it, and the less they have it, the weirder their thoughts about it become.
This may not have been Mamet's original point in writing SPC in the early '70s, but that's the play's most obvious message during its run at The Alliance Theatre Lab. SPC's first, ludicrously entertaining scene has Danny and Bernie (David Sirois and Travis Reiff, respectively), seemingly all jacked up on something or other, hashing over Bernie's sexual encounter of the night before. He's in a bar and this knockout is trying to buy cigarettes, only she forgot her money in her hotel room. So Bernie does the decent thing and offers to spot her, after which she invites him to the room for payback. They somehow wind up in the shower, and Bernie's soon doing her in the legless-doggy position on the bed. She instructs him to yell "BOOM!" every 30 seconds or so and calls in a friend to provide military sound effects — machine guns, dive-bombing planes, the whine of incoming artillery. When she lights the room on fire with a tub of gasoline — intentionally, to intensify climax — Bernie makes a run for it and bumps into the fire department in the elevator.
There is a pause after Bernie finishes his story, during which he stands there, panting, wild-eyed and scared, as we and Danny reflect on the deeper implications of all he's said. Then Danny says with a sigh: "Nobody does it normally any more."
Bernie's story was bullshit, of course, as is nine-tenths of everything that comes out of his mouth. We learn this by and by, and in a more staid production we may ponder what deep traumas in Bernie's youth have rendered him incapable of telling the truth, or of having good, sane sex in adulthood. (Or even good, sane conversations.) But I think director Adalberto Acevedo was having too much fun to worry about such somber things, and this version of SPC provides no time or space for them. This production is about antics and four actors' transcendent ability to get wild and dirty and crazy onstage.
SPC's story is skeletal, just a lift-off point for the sex rants Mamet puts in his characters' mouths. Basically, Danny and Deborah (Bertha Leal), two lost young Chicagoans, manage to overcome their sexual hangups long enough to initiate a relationship, but not long enough to really fall for each other before their union crumbles. Bernie and Joan are less nimble, their hangups more well-hung, and they resent the couple's successful acquisition of sex partners and mates. Joan (Jehane Serralles) spends the play saying terrible things about Danny, whom she hardly knows, and Bernie spends much of the play trying to hide his resentment and support his buddy, but ultimately can summon nothing so much as passive aggression.
Forget the story, though. The deep pleasures of this SPC — and there are many — come from individual moments of dramatic ingenuity that have nothing to do with Mamet's vision or anything else. Consider Jehane Serralles' amazing acid tongue, so potent it might burn holes through her lovely cheeks before the run is over. When at one point Danny — rightly — suggests she jam a lamp up her ass, she cools down and sucks the heat out of the room with a subtle movement of her head. "That's very telling," she says, with a slow-spreading crocodile smile, in a voice as managed as a controlled demolition. "On your suggestion, I'm supposed to rend and torture myself anally." In this moment, her character looks more comfortable than in any previous scene, as though she's settling into a role for which she's long prepared and "truly" relishes: a front-line combatant in a gender war.
Another pleasure: Travis Reiff's fantastic over-the-top misogyny and sexual angst. They make him difficult to share a room with but delirious fun to watch. Witness his breakdown as his Bernie tries to congratulate Danny on his new romantic venture. By the time Bernie forces himself to say, "You are one fortunate son of a bitch," he's so upset that he might as well be saying, "I've just discovered my family dead in the basement." The disconnect between the words and the quavering, loathing-filled mouth that says them is scary and mesmerizing.
But the greatest pleasure, and the best bit of acting, in Acevedo's SPC comes during Danny and Deborah's courtship, in a scene on a bed in Danny's apartment, as they talk to each other in cutesy little-kid voices and Deborah squirms around on Danny's lap. I couldn't tell what they were saying — the audience was laughing too hard at whatever it was — but watching their faces was enough. I don't know if I've ever seen two actors better capture the euphoria of fresh infatuation as it really is. The infinitely knowing smiles of fresh cohabitants, luxuriating neither in each others' words nor even their real personalities, but simply their presence; the presence of this new person who, for inexplicable reasons, has deigned to open their thighs and heart. You see all of this on their faces, and on Deborah's especially. They are thinking and feeling their parts, moment by moment. It's a revelation.
Acevedo and his actors lack the kind of hangups that severely restricted Mamet's characters. Their philosophy of playmaking is more libertine — more "if it feels good, do it." It's a philosophy that many have mouthed, but few have ever lived up to. Certainly, it's one that has never sufficed for Mamet or his creations. I say fuck 'em. SPC feels great.
Edge Miami
by Michael Martin
EDGE Contributor
Tuesday Nov 10, 2009
It is true that big things often come in small packages. Such is the case with the Alliance Theatre Lab’s current production of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago now playing at the intimate Main Street Playhouse in Miami Lakes.
A powerfully talented cast of four justly portrays Mamet’s characters from one of his earliest works. The explicit language sounds less shocking today than when the play was first produced in 1976, however Mamet’s deftly defined battle of the sexes still rings true with many present day couples.
Not unlike the 70s television show, Love American Style, the script contains a vast amount of quick vignette scenes. Often, a large amount of blackouts causes annoying disruption on behalf of an audience. Mamet’s keen flair for writing, however, leaves a sense of yearning for the next scene to be lit.
The author’s characters become so well defined, thanks in large part to the superb cast, that an air of eagerness soon permeates the confines of the theatre space as the audience anxiously awaits any new developments.
Bernie Litko (Travis Reiff) and Danny Shapiro (David Sirois) are best friends and work colleagues. Though the pair bond through shared stories of their adventures as single men trying to conquer the unassailable mount of complexity known as "woman", their approaches to dealing with the opposite sex vary widely.
Deborah Soloman (Bertha Leal) and Joan Webber (Jehane Serralles) are roommates, and likewise profess different ideologies when it comes to dealing with the human male species.
What really works here is director Adalberto J. Acevedo’s keen casting. Each actor infuses their character with realism, allowing the audience to easily relate to their characters’ individual plights.
Reiff masterfully commands the stage from the start. His clever use of tone and body language allows us to discover a Bernie that is wrought with insecurity issues, which the character continually attempts to conceal with manifested bravado.
Sirois likewise utilizes a suave naturalness to his tone that convincingly produces a likeable Danny despite his crude treatment of girlfriend Deborah during their breakup.
Leal exudes a perfectly coquettish behavior for her Deborah, who’s claim that she has lesbian tendencies may in fact be more a political stance rather than a sexual preference.
Serralles contains the unique ability to present the likeable bitch in her rendition of Joan, a woman who views herself as scorned by men so often that she has since adopted an unwavering bitterness concerning the gender.
Reiff is also credited with sound design. The spectacular choices of 70’s music that plays between each short scene perfectly add in creating the set time period for the piece. Amy Spadafore intelligently dresses the confined space to portray the required different locales, accompanied by Skye Whitcomb’s focused lighting that highlights these variances.
Overall, Acevedo delivers a production wrought with convincing talent and justly serves David Mamet’s original intent.
Sexual Perversity in Chicago continues through November 22 at Alliance Theatre Lab, 6766 Main Street, Miami Lakes, FL. For more information, visit the Alliance Theatre Lab website.
Michael Martin has been an active member of Actors’ Equity for over 20 years. As a professional actor, he has toured many parts of the US and the world. Originally from St. Louis, he now resides in Miami
Strange Snow
by Stephen Metcalfe
Miami Herald
Strange Snow will warm your heart
Alliance Theatre Lab returns with a haunting production of a play about damaged souls finding hope.
By Christine Dolen
Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow has a history in South Florida theater.
The powerful 1982 script about two damaged Vietnam veterans and a lonely woman was first staged here in 1990 by Acme Acting Company, then one of the region's edgiest small theater companies. When Acme's Juan F. Cejas became artistic director of the Florida Shakespeare Theatre (the company that evolved into GableStage), he opened the troupe's new space at the Biltmore Hotel with another production of Strange Snow in 1996.
That Acme connection continues with a fine new production of Strange Snow by the Miami Lakes-based Alliance Theatre Lab.
Artistic director Adalberto J. Acevedo, once a member of the Acme company, has relaunched Alliance after a long hiatus with a tender, stirring staging of Metcalfe's play. The show kicks off an ambitious June for the company, which will follow Strange Snow with the first South Florida production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. That solo show, about an idealistic young American's death in the Gaza Strip, stirred such controversy when Plantation's Mosaic Theatre announced it in 2007 that Mosaic dropped the show.
If its artful Strange Snow is any indication, the reorganized Alliance has the mojo not only to stage Rachel Corrie but to pull it off.
Though Strange Snow deals with men who served in Vietnam, it is anything but a dated play.
One of the veterans, a garage owner nicknamed Megs (Andy Jean-Gilles), shows signs of manic depression. His war buddy David (Cliff Burgess) is a full-on alcoholic. Both men are clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor guilt. These terms aren't used in the play, but they describe these foundering men in ways that many an Iraq War veteran would understand only too well.
What makes Strange Snow more than a study of the hellish aftereffects of war is the presence of a third character. Martha (Jennifer Toohey), David's sister and roommate, is a single teacher whose idea of a great evening is nibbling away at fudge as she grades papers. Her life is one of numbing routine -- the papers, gathering her brother's empties, dealing with a piercing loneliness even when David is there -- but dreams of romance still smolder within her.
When Megs shows up to take her brother fishing, pounding on the door at the crack of dawn one day, the skittish Martha is scared of this stranger David has never mentioned. But over the course of a long day and evening, history and fears and truths get revealed. And for all three characters, sparks of hope point the way to a reengagement with life.
Acevedo, who establishes the era with songs by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Donovan and others, draws a trio of terrific performances from the Strange Snow cast.
At first, Jean-Gilles is so full of manic energy and forced laughter that Megs' designed-to-charm comments register as too frenetic. But when the mask cracks and the actor reveals the wounded soul beneath the buoyant banter, he becomes deeply affecting.
Toohey's Martha is heart-breaking, a woman whose controlled life breaks open to allow years of girlish romantic longing to surface. And Burgess, though playing the angriest and least sympathetic character, expertly digs down from David's benumbed surface to the man's broken heart.
Strange Snow, running just through June 14, is a simple yet layered play, one full of anger, regret, longing and the possibility of redemption. Though its three characters have been living lives that feel like one long winter, what they discover together -- and what Alliance achieves in its production -- will warm your heart.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea
by John Patrick Shanley
Miami Herald
A celebrated playwright's talent shines in the Alliance production of an early work about the healing power of love.
By Christine Dolen
Love hurts. For Danny and Roberta, right-around-30 working-class people from the Bronx, it hurts as much as the rest of life. But in John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, love does more: It begins a much-needed healing.
The Bronx-born Shanley, who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in drama for Doubt (a play that will inaugurate the Caldwell Theatre Company's $10-million Count de Hoernle Theatre in Boca Raton next weekend), got his start as a playwright in the early 1980s. He became a certified hot writer when his 1987 Moonstruck screenplay won the Oscar, but his talent and style were already clear when he crafted Danny and the Deep Blue Sea in 1983.
The Alliance Theatre Lab, a small professional company that performs at the Main Street Playhouse in Miami Lakes, has just opened its season with a minimalist -- yet potent -- revival of Shanley's early play.
The drama, which premiered at 1984's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (with John Turturro as Danny), is a volatile yet hopeful pas de deux for a man and a woman knocked around by life.
ANGER PROBLEM
Danny (Travis Reiff) has an anger problem the way Hollywood party girls have a sobriety problem. He moves through the world ready to explode, ready to pound on anyone and everyone. His co-workers call him ``the Beast.''
Roberta (Jennifer Toohey) is drifting through her days, leaving the raising of the 12-year-old son she had as an unmarried 18-year-old to her parents. She has a secret, one involving her father; it torments her, ruining her sleep and killing any wisp of self-esteem she might have had.
The two meet in a crummy bar, Danny just in from his latest fight. He has an open wound on his forehead, a cloth wrapped around his aching, bloodied hand. He exudes antagonism. Not the kind of guy a woman would try to chat up.
But Roberta does.
So begins an unlikely relationship that will take them through the night and into the new day. Their torments play out through shared stories, confessions, violence. But each has a romanticism buried under the layers of emotional scarring. And that plays out, too.
BARE-BONES STAGING
Alliance artistic director Adalberto J. Acevedo has given Danny a bare-bones staging: A wooden platform with the audience on either side serves as the barroom floor and the little room where Roberta lives. A couple of tables and a few chairs, a mattress, a bottle of wine, a doll dressed as a bride -- that's it, as far as props and ''furniture'' go. But with Reiff and Toohey as his actors, Acevedo doesn't need more.
Reiff makes Danny's volatility genuinely dangerous, while still communicating the character's damaged soul and, finally, his tenderness. Toohey matches his toughness and vulnerability. Both let you know that, as far as long-term redemption goes, this may well be an early Bronx fairy tale from Shanley.
But for this night, from this play, salvation seems possible.
Miami New-Times
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea rubs your face in life's icky contradictions, and you love it.
By Brandon K. Thorp
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was a last-minute addition to the Alliance Theatre Lab's season. It was an economics thing, apparently. Danny's got two actors and almost no set, so it's easy to produce. Actually it's probably easy in all respects: easy to direct, easy to star in. John Patrick Shanley didn't flinch while writing Danny more than 25 years ago. It feels like the work of a young playwright greedily plundering the darkest depths of human potential, in love with his own ability to say things other playwrights didn't say and illuminate situations uglier than most playwrights would dare examine. The protagonists, Danny and Roberta, are candy for actors and directors eager to show how hard they can punch. Yet Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is, among other things, about a woman whose life may have been ruined when she gave her father a blowjob. So no matter how easy it is to stage, a play like this one shouldn't be easy to watch. Yet it always is, and that might be a problem.
A weird problem. To point it out is to grouse about having too much fun. Aside from sounding curmudgeonly, the gripe begs the question: If you aren't going to the theater at least partially to have a good time, why go at all? To explore human nature? Plenty of folks will say so, but Danny might give the lie to that noble idea. Blowjobs for daddy, lives in tatters, a dude who can't stop fistfighting and might have killed somebody ? Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is about all of this, but it's more funny than sad, and that's nuts.
The play begins as a fly-on-the-wall view of two very broken people sitting at a bar. Roberta forces Danny to chat. He doesn't want to - he's more into bloodying than bonding - but it happens. Danny goes home with Roberta; they have sex. The next morning, they have to deal with each other, to bring the previous night into sync with their ordinary lives.
Dramatic, right? But what gives Danny its spark and keeps eyes glued to the stage is how entertainingly fucked up its protagonists are. Sure, we all have our own little traumas; we all know somebody who's worse off than we are, but even that person is a paragon of mental health next to Danny and Roberta. They are somehow a source of delight and mirth.
Danny enters the first scene a mess: His jeans are torn, his hands bandaged. He's not even sure he wants to talk about it with Roberta - he's half-convinced he'd rather break her nose - but he goes with it, maybe just for a change of pace. The other night, he relates, when brawling with a bunch of guys at a party, he pounded a man nonstop for 10 minutes, even after the man had stopped fighting back. Danny continued to stomp on his chest, and heard something break. Now he thinks the guy might be dead. This is heavy, even for Danny, who is at least partially aware he's got problems.
Roberta seems to relish the opportunity to chat with somebody damaged enough not to judge her for her daddy issue. Danny is the first person she's ever told. The greed with which she goes after the reticent stranger is scary. When he finally assaults her, after much provocation, she responds to his chokehold by croaking, "Harder!"
There's real pleasure in all of this, but it's a pornographic pleasure. We shouldn't watch. We should avert our eyes.
Happily there is also dramatic pleasure, technical and aesthetic. It's rare to see a perfectly cast actor at work; Travis Reiff couldn't be better. He's not a big guy, but here he's almost hulking. He's twitchy but muscular, like an angry pig rooting around for something, and also human. No matter what his body and face are up to, his eyes always communicate a trapped native intelligence horrified by what it's been forced to witness. As Roberta, Jennifer Toohey is almost as good, animated by need and the sudden exhilaration of meeting somebody who might understand her, and whom she can understand.
Watching such damaged people enacted so convincingly by good actors might be pornographic, but there's something kind of wonderful about it too: It allows the dregs to seem human. If you were in the bar with Danny and Roberta, you wouldn't talk to them ? you'd move to a distant table or leave the place. At the theater, you stick around and watch, and mortification gives way to compassion (though, thanks to Shanley's instinctive dislike of the maudlin, never to pity). The wretches in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea don't afford us any of the aforementioned guilty, smug self-satisfaction ordinarily derived from encounters with very damaged people. The play lets us see too much of Danny and Roberta for that.
The exposure makes us hope they'll find some way to help each other, and makes us believe they can. That's nice for us, them, and everybody. If we are titillated by blood and guts, that doesn't mean we can't be better people.
Burn This
by Lanford Wilson
The Miami Herald
Alliance Theatre Lab puts on a winner
By Marta Barber
Ever since Burn
This opened in 1987, Lanford Wilson's funny and emotional play has
attracted big-name actors such as John Malkovich, Joan Allen, Catherine Keener
and Edward Norton to play the lead roles of Anna and Pale.
Anna, a dancer with a quiet and artistic soul, and
Pale, a volatile brute, are the proverbial opposites with a strong attraction.
The roles are an actor's dream, with just the right amount of grip to prove
you've got the right stuff.
Alliance Theatre Lab, the Miami Lakes company that
just finished its first year of operation, has cast the talented Elise Girardin
and Travis Reiff as Anna and Pale, and they sizzle.
Anna is mourning the loss of her roommate, Robbie,
who died in a freakish boating accident along with Robbie's lover, Dom. Anna's
longtime lover, Burton (Robert Younis), has come to her Manhattan apartment to
console her.
Burton, a sci-fi screenwriter, is rich and dull,
and his marriage proposals have long been ignored.
Anna's other roommate is Larry, a gay ad executive
played hilariously by Christopher Kauffmann.
Pale, Robbie's brother, storms into the apartment a
month after the funeral, claiming all of Robbie's belongings. The rest is,
well, if not history, fodder for two hours of exhilarating, funny theater.
Directed by Adalberto Acevedo, who is also the
artistic director of the company, this production of Burn This blends well the play's intense
dramatic moments and its almost continuous humor.
Because of Kauffmann's perfect comedic timing and
delivery, the director leans on the lighter angles of the play, making sure
you're not overtaken by its heavier side. Thus you miss a bit of the fact that
both Anne and Pale are going through inner struggles.
Girardin, a professional dancer, is ideally suited
for the role, and her native Australian accent is not even noticed. Reiff is
just a bull in his role as the vulgar and provocative Pale, and contrasts
perfectly with the soft Anna.
If there is one weak spot in the cast it is Younis
as the bland Burton. But the role is also meant to blend in.
Designed by Rachel Finley, the set, which occupies
a large portion of one end of the black-box space, is simple but well utilized.
Alliance Theatre Lab is obviously a company with a small purse, but with Burn This it proves it has a large heart.
