this week in theater

NOTHING ON EARTH CAN HOLD HOUDINI

George Demas plays master prestidigitator Harry Houdini in Axis Company world premiere (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Axis Company
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Thursday – Saturday through April 5, $30-$0, 8:00
212-352-3101
www.axiscompany.org

In 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of his short-term friend and colleague, “Who was the greatest medium-baiter of modern times? Undoubtedly Houdini. Who was the greatest physical medium of modern times? There are some who would be inclined to give the same answer.” That dichotomy lies at the heart of Nothing on Earth Can Hold Houdini, in which Axis Company artistic director Randy Sharp examines the unusual relationship between magician and mysticism debunker Harry Houdini and spiritualism believer and Sherlock Holmes creator Doyle, brought together by a 1922 contest sponsored by Scientific American to find a true clairvoyant. In the eighty-five-minute one-act play, running at Axis’s home stage at One Sheridan Square through April 5, Doyle (Spencer Aste) and Houdini (George Demas) are essentially seeking the same thing; both men want to contact a dead relative through a medium, Doyle desperate to converse with his beloved son Kingsley, Houdini determined to speak again with his dear mother. But while Doyle is convinced that there is no death, that there is an afterlife, Houdini aggressively seeks to discredit potential fakes, such as Ralph Grimshaw (Brian Linden), who appear to be in the spirit game only for the money and fame. Doyle also believes that Houdini himself has special powers, telling him, “Let us see if you are able to ‘self-liberate’ from the ironclad manacles of disbelief,” while Houdini insists that there is no otherworldly magic to what he does: “I am not a shape shifter, medium spirit contactor, automatic writer, ghost fairy photographer, or anything of that nature,” he tells his mechanist, Jim Collins (David Crabb). To settle their differences, Doyle and Houdini participate in a demonstration in which popular medium Margery “Mina” Crandon (Lynn Mancinelli), with the help of her husband, Leroi (Brian Barnhart), will attempt to prove once and for all that the spirit world exists. “You are a shining example of an enlightened conduit to the beyond,” Doyle pronounces, while Houdini explains, “We shall expose her to the Scientific American League of Shills and Collaborators for all the good it’ll do me.”

Mina Crandon (Lynn Mancinelli) gets in the Margery Box while attempting to contact the great beyond (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Demas has a ball as Houdini, the pompous, conflicted mama’s boy in a ratty old jacket and pathetic shoes, sporting a hairstyle that is nearly a character unto itself, and Aste is solid as the dapper Doyle. But Sharp, who created an intoxicating atmosphere for her previous Axis production, the postapocalyptic Last Man Club, never achieves much of a flow with Nothing on Earth, which is constrained by a disjointed narrative and sudden, confusing plot jumps. Too many elements get lost in the dark, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps. But individual scenes excel, making Nothing on Earth a mixed bag of tricks.

(The March 29 performance will be followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and crew and historical consultant William Kalush, author of The Secret Life of Houdini and executive director of the Conjuring Arts Research Center on West Thirtieth St.)

THE OPEN HOUSE

A severely dysfunctional family is stuck in its ways in Will Eno’s black comedy at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through March 30, $25 through March 23, $75 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In Title and Deed, the first of his three plays as part of the Signature Theatre’s Residency Five program, Will Eno explored the concept of home and finding one’s place in a community. In his follow-up, The Open House, it appears that home might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Or is it? “Why are we like this?” the daughter (Hannah Bos) calls out as an unnamed family bickers over just about everything. The wheelchair-bound father (Peter Friedman) is a brutally vicious man, aiming acerbic and mean-spirited barbs at his grown daughter and son (Danny McCarthy), mild-mannered brother (Michael Countryman), and ditzy wife (Carolyn McCormick). It’s so acrimonious and loveless that the beloved family dog has run away. But with a sly nod to Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, the play takes a major turn in the second half, one that builds to an unexpectedly satisfying climax. Directed by Oliver Butler (Cape Disappointment, You’re Welcome), Eno’s story takes place on Antje Ellermann’s family room set, the front of which has been torn away, welcoming the audience to the vitriol and strangeness that reside within — but which shifts dramatically in the second half of the eighty-minute play, when it becomes the kind of open house potential buyers stop by to consider whether this might be the next step on their personal journey toward finding home and happiness. Eno (Middletown, Broadway’s new The Realistic Joneses) has a firm grasp of the bathos and pathos of this hysterically dysfunctional family, employing razor-sharp dialogue to quickly establish the characters and lay the groundwork for their pending fate. The Open House is another savvy, perceptive work from an extremely clever and creative playwright, a true rising star.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: MY MOTHER HAS 4 NOSES

Jonatha Brooke gets personal in poignant one-woman show, MY MOTHER HAS 4 NOSES

MY MOTHER HAS 4 NOSES
The Duke on 42nd St.
229 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through May 4, $55 – $75
646-223-3010
www.4noses.org
www.dukeon42.org

Three and a half years ago, singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke put her career on hold as she cared for her mother, a poet and clown who had contracted Alzheimer’s. She has turned that experience into an album and a poignant new one-woman show, My Mother Has 4 Noses, which her failing mother encouraged her to write. “Almost daily she would say, ‘Boolie [my nickname], that’s good!’” Brooke explains on the show’s website. “‘Are you getting this down? We should make a play out of it!!’” Brooke, who has released such records as 10 Cent Wings, Steady Pull, and Careful What You Wish For, adds, “My Mother Has 4 Noses is my story, but it’s everyone’s story.” Among the songs Brooke wrote for the show are “My Misery,” “Superhero,” “Scars,” “Time,” “How Far You’d Go for Love,” and “What Was I Thinking?” all of which you can sample here.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Directed by Jeremy Cohen, My Mother Has 4 Noses is running at the Duke on 42nd St. through May 4, and twi-ny has four pairs of tickets to give away for free for performances through March 30. (Saturday matinees in March will be followed by a talk back with Brooke and various specialists on dementia and caregiving.) Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite play or movie about a mother and daughter to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, March 17, at 12 noon to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; four winners will be selected at random.

CHARACTER MAN

Jim Brochu looks back at his long life in musical theater in CHARACTER MAN (photo by Carol Rosegg)

30th Street Theatre at Urban Stages
359 West 30th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through April 6, $35
212-868-4444
www.jimbrochu.com
www.urbanstages.org

Award-winning actor and playwright Jim Brochu pays tribute to the Broadway character actors of old in his charming one-man show, Character Man. Brochu, who won a Drama Desk Award for his previous solo presentation, Zero Hour, in which he portrayed Zero Mostel, this time tells his own story, about growing up in the theater surrounded by such character actors as Jack Gilford, Lou Jacobi, Jack Albertson, George S. Irving, Barney Martin, Jack Klugman, Robert Preston, and his mentor and longtime friend, two-time Tony winner Davy Burns. As Brochu shares intimate tales of his childhood and career, with a focus on his relationship with his father — including how Joan Crawford almost became his stepmother — old photos and video appear on three screens hanging from the ceiling. Brochu moves across the small stage, relaxing in a red theater seat (that matches his tie and pocket square), sitting at a dressing-room makeup table, or walking to the back, where he mimics selling orange drink at the Alvin Theatre, his first job in show business. Each vignette features a related Broadway tune accompanied by Carl Haan on piano, among them “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “(Ya Got) Trouble” from The Music Man, the haughty “The Butler’s Song” from the ill-fated So Long, 174th Street, and, perhaps most appropriately, “Mr. Cellophane” from Chicago, in which he sings, “And even without clucking like a hen / Everyone gets noticed, now and then / Unless, of course, that personage should be / Invisible, inconsequential me!” Such is the character man’s fate, never to be the famous star, although Brochu has crafted a witty and poignant little musical memoir that deservedly puts him front and center. Character Man continues at Urban Stages through March 30; there will be post-show spotlights the next three Wednesdays, looking at David Burns with Sondra Lee and Lee Roy Reams on March 12, Jack Gilford and Zero Mostel with Joe Gilford and Josh Mostel on March 19, and current character actors with Richard Kind and Tony Sheldon on March 26.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Cleopatra (Joaquina Kalukango) and Mark Antony (Jonathan Cake) seek love in war-torn Saint Domingue in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Shakespeare adaptation at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. below Astor Pl.
Through March 23, $40-$80
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

There’s a brief synopsis in the program of the Public Theater’s new presentation of Antony and Cleopatra, but that won’t help you make sense of this ill-conceived production. A collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Ohio State University and Miami’s GableStage, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s adaptation moves the tale of romance and power to eighteenth-century Saint Domingue, the Caribbean colony that would soon become Haiti, although you wouldn’t know it from Tom Piper’s set, mostly a bare stage with a series of Roman columns that block at least part of the action from nearly everyone in the audience. At the back of the stage, a small pool reflects light onto a sky-blue wall, while above a four-piece band contributes Haitian music. Jonathan Cake (Medea, Cymbeline) as Mark Antony and Joaquina Kalukango (Hurt Village, Godspell) as Cleopatra lack any chemistry as he attempts to maintain his alliance with Octavius Caesar (Samuel Collings adding Napoleonic touches) by marrying Caesar’s sister, Octavia (Charise Castro-Smith), which angers Cleopatra, her maidservants, Iras (Castro-Smith) and Charmian (Sarah Niles), and her eunuch soothsayer (Chivas Michael). But when Antony returns to Cleopatra, trying to have it both ways, yet more battles await, both personal and political. Public Theater artist in residence McCraney (The Brother/Sister Plays), who is credited as director and editor, drains the story of any passion, moving along the plot in a tedious, procedural manner, with Chukwudi Iwuji, the standout performer in the show, playing the narrator as well as Enobarbus. Bringing together a cast of actors from the United States and the U.K. portraying characters from Rome and the French Caribbean leads to further confusion as different accents fly off in all directions, leaving the audience to wonder just what it’s all about.

LOVE AND INFORMATION

Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between MacDougal St. & Sixth Ave.
Extended through April 6, $65-$85
www.nytw.org

The theater community has learned to expect the unexpected from British playwright Caryl Churchill, whose cutting-edge works have been showing up without warning in the in-boxes of artistic directors and company producers for decades. The seventy-five-year-old writer of such award-winning plays as Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and Serious Money redefines live storytelling yet again with her latest, Love and Information, just extended through April 6 at the Minetta Lane. The New York Theatre Workshop production is a series of snapshots relating the state of the world today, examined through the gathering, processing, and utilization of information among married couples, lovers, family members, professional colleagues, and best friends. The 110-minute intermissionless play consists of seven thematic sections, each one made up of funny, poignant, abstract, surreal, visceral, and potently recognizable vignettes that last between five seconds and five minutes; although the script gives them such mostly one-word titles as “Lab,” “Message,” “Secret,” “Torture,” “Irrational,” “Dream,” and “Recluse,” they are not identified onstage or in the program notes. The short dialogues take place in a white cube with a grid of some twenty-five thousand squares on five sides (calling to mind a human brain), opening only to the audience. In between each of the fifty-seven bits, in which fifteen actors portray one hundred different characters, the stage goes completely dark, bordered by a row of very bright lights around the edge, as the performers change costumes at lightning speed and the sets, which usually include a single element, from a chair or a bed to a table or a couch, are magically switched. It’s a kind of short attention span theater that evokes a more serious, though still playful, Laugh-In and Robot Chicken as the skits just keep on coming, seamlessly directed by longtime Churchill cohort James Macdonald, separated by the pitch-black accompanied by sounds, from familiar tunes to random found noises, that further one of the central themes, memory.

The tone is set from the very first vignette, in which a man is begging a woman to tell her a secret she is hiding from him. “Please please tell me,” he implores. “I’ll never tell, no matter what,” she responds, but eventually she whispers it in his ear so the audience can’t hear it. “Now what?” he repeats several times, a question that not only leads to the rest of the play but gets right to the point of what people do with information — first they want it, then they’re not always sure what to do with it. Later, a woman gets technical with her partner, saying, “What sex evolved to do is get information from two sets of genes so you get offspring that’s not identical to you. . . . So sex essentially is information.” He replies, “You don’t think that while we’re doing it, do you?” to which she says, “It doesn’t hurt to know it. Information and love.” Churchill and the immensely talented cast, which includes standout performances by Karen Kandel, John Procaccino, Kellie Overbey, Phillip James Brannon, Zoë Winters, and Randy Danson, take on science, religion, emotions, fanaticism, censorship, mathematics, pain, technology, and human relationships of all sorts in clever ways, constantly surprising the audience with each new piece, although the show is probably too long by about twenty minutes, but that’s only a minor quibble. In one of the longer sketches, a man and a woman are on a picnic date, and she describes in graphic detail how her job involves cutting the head off a chicken and slicing its brain for study, a worthy metaphor for what Churchill is doing on multiple levels with Love and Information.

KUNG FU

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE second runner-up Cole Horibe makes New York stage debut as Bruce Lee in new David Henry Hwang play (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through April 6, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang concludes his Signature Theatre Residency One year with the world premiere of Kung Fu, a flashy but flat portrait of martial arts master Bruce Lee. Hwang (M. Butterfly, Chinglish) focuses on Lee’s (Cole Horibe) life in America, after he was sent there in 1959 by his father, Chinese opera performer Hoi-Chuen (Francis Jue), because of his penchant for street fighting in Hong Kong. Still in high school, Lee starts teaching martial arts — a defensive style he calls “fighting without fighting” — in a room above the restaurant where he works for Ruby Chow (Kristen Faith Oei), but he has dreams of making it big. When classmate Linda Emery (Phoebe Strole) comes to study with him, Lee immediately falls for her, and soon she is pregnant and they get married. Determined to succeed, Lee is hired to play Kato on the short-lived television series The Green Hornet, but he wants to break out of stereotypical, subservient Asian roles, developing a Western built around a wandering kung fu warrior and going to India to make a film with one of his more famous students, James Coburn (Clifton Duncan). But things don’t quite go as planned, leaving him to reconsider his life in Hollywood.

Bruce Lee (Cole Horibe) teaches his son, Brandon (Bradley Fong), in KUNG FU (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hwang initially intended Kung Fu to be a musical, and it shows. There are several exhilarating set pieces in which Horibe, a So You Think You Can Dance second runner-up making his New York theater debut, and the cast (most of whom take on multiple characters) incorporate martial arts into exciting dance numbers choreographed by Sonya Tayeh (the fight scenes are directed by Emmanuel Brown, who also plays Marcus), including one eye-popper featuring bold yellow and blue Chinese opera costumes by Anita Yavich. But the dialogue is static and repetitive, filled with genre clichés, offering no real insight into who Lee really was, and there’s little sense of time and place. Hwang was far more successful blending movement and story in The Dance and the Railroad; unfortunately, this new work has more in common with his stale revival of Golden Child, both of which were part of his Signature residency. On film, Lee proved to have fists of fury, but onstage, this Lee lacks sufficient kick.