Lucy Shelby and Ariel Lauryn form a wacky comedy duo in WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT (photo by Christopher Duggan)
The Tank
151 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves., eighth floor
May 12-14, 21-23, $15, 7:00
www.thetanknyc.org
Ariel Lauryn and Lucy Shelby make quite the comic duo in their screwball farce Whether We Like It or Not. The two-woman show was first presented at Dell’Arte International and then at the New Orleans Fringe and now can be seen in an updated version as part of the Tank’s Flint & Tinder season, a program that focuses on physical, risk-taking theater. In the chaotic sixty-minute comedy, Lauryn, as straight man Stella, and Shelby, as the campy Blanche — yes, they are childhood friends named after the two main female characters from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire — channel such dynamic duos as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lucy and Ethel, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Carol Burnett and Vicky Lawrence. It’s Stella’s birthday, and Blanche has a big surprise for her — she has gathered many of her friends, relatives, and professional colleagues in a black-box theater where the two women are going to do a reading of Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother. Of course, Stella is not quite prepared for a This Is Your Life moment, especially with her hated ex-husband in the audience, as well as a high-profile Broadway producer. But Blanche, the spokesperson for a national insurance company, is putting on the show to make sure that Stella continues her acting career; she suspects that Stella might otherwise give up on what she loves doing so much and return home to Indiana, wagging her tail between her legs. However, Stella has no such plan, refusing to put the kibosh on her dream, and as the evening goes on, the two women make some rather serious revelations that threaten their friendship.
Lauryn and Shelby, who created the show together, do a terrific job of improvising as they slip on props, trip over dialogue, and use a wrong name; no matter what happens onstage, they just keep going in impressive fashion. Also fashionably impressive are their glittering costumes, which evoke Monroe and Russell. Although the show is not interactive, it does have immersive qualities, as Stella and Blanche identify specific audience members as characters from their lives, either from their hometown or from the New York City theater community. At one performance, when a cell phone in the seats went off, it turned out to belong to the audience member they had labeled “Oscar,” an agent, and Shelby cleverly worked in an ad lib about how he should answer it because it might be about a job for her. It’s all rather silly yet endearing, occasionally overly ridiculous and sometimes inexpert, but still a lot of fun. Plus, there’s cheap popcorn, beer, and wine available before the show to get you in the right mood for all the wacky shenanigans.
“Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy,” Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) tells her rather boring husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), as he returns to his crossword puzzle one night. “How can I possibly say that?” she then thinks to herself. “‘Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy.’ If only it were true. Not, I suppose, that anybody’s ever perfectly happy, really. But just to be ordinarily contented, to be at peace. It’s such a little while ago really but it seems an eternity since that train went out of the station, taking him away into the darkness. I was happy then.” In David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of the greatest romantic films ever made, Laura, a housewife and mother, can’t stop herself from falling for dapper doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who is also married. As they explore a potential physical relationship, Laura is wracked with guilt, especially as she keeps bumping into nosy gossip Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey). But the two potential lovers are so drawn to each other, filling the holes in each other’s lives, that they consider risking all they have for just one more moment together. Winner of the 1946 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Brief Encounter is told in flashback in Laura’s voice as she goes over every wonderful and terrifying detail in her mind while contemplating whether to spill the beans to the generally oblivious Fred. Written by Noël Coward based on his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, the film features terrifically subtle performances by Johnson and Howard as the daring couple; you can’t help but root for them, despite the possible consequences. Lean, who earned the first of his seven Best Director Oscar nominations for the heartbreaking film, keeps things relatively, well, lean, getting right to the point in less than ninety minutes; he would go on to helm such sprawling epics as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India before his death in 1991 at the age of eighty-three. Brief Encounter is screening May 15 and 16 in Film Forum’s one-week, thirteen-film tribute to the one and only Coward, consisting of movies he wrote, appeared in, or were based on his writing, from such beloved classics as Blithe Spirit, Private Lives, and Cavalcade to such lesser-known fare as The Astonished Heart, Tonight Is Ours, and Boom!
In 2010, French writer, actor, poet, and filmmaker Michel Houellebecq won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel The Map and the Territory. The controversial Houellebecq — who has been accused of plagiarism, misogyny, and inciting racial hatred — then went missing in 2011, failing to show up for a book tour in Belgium and the Netherlands. As it turns out, the novelist merely forgot about the readings and claims he was unreachable at the time, by either phone or e-mail. But writer-director Guillaume Nicloux tells a far more entertaining story in the absurdist black comedy The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, which imagines that he really was taken hostage and held for a never-specified ransom. Even better, Nicloux got Houellebecq to play himself in the film, spoofing his image as an intellectual recluse. The fictionalized Houellebecq is taken captive by Mathieu (Mathieu Nicourt), Max (Maxime Lefrançois), and Luc (Luc Schwarz), who eventually bring him to a country house owned by elderly couple Ginette (Ginette Suchotzky) and Dede (Andre Suchotzky), where Houellebecq is almost always handcuffed and chained to his bed at night. His kidnappers engage him in literary discussions, talk about bodybuilding, bring him books to read, drink wine and smoke cigarettes with him, and even procure female accompaniment (Marie Bourjala) when he asks for it. The real Houellebecq (Platform; H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life) plays his fictionalized self with a deadpan comic turn worthy of Buster Keaton, never letting on whether anything that is happening is even the slightest bit true to who Houellebecq actually is. Nicloux (The Nun, Valley of Love) keeps the audience guessing all the way about the characters and their motives, but don’t expect any simple answers or trite resolutions. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is screening May 10 at 4:00 and 7:30 in FIAF’s “Creative Encounters” CinéSalon series, with the later show introduced by Albertine Books deputy director Tom Roberge, who has admitted to his 
