Tag Archives: Christian Coulson

THE CHANGELING

Red Bull Theater has revived Middleton and Crowley’s THE CHANGELING at the Lucille Lortel (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 24, $60-$80
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

A whole bunch of characters go to a whole lot of trouble to get laid in Red Bull Theater’s adaptation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling, but despite all the lust and violence, it ends up being a rather tepid affair. The classic play is set in Alicante, Spain, where the wealthy Vermandero (Sam Tsoutsouvas) has arranged for his daughter, Beatrice-Joanna (Sara Topham), to marry Alonzo de Piracquo (John Skelley). Instead, the strong-willed, fickle young woman has fallen in love with the dapper nobleman Alsemero (Christian Coulson), while Alsemero’s friend, Jasperino (Justin Blanchard), has the hots for Beatrice’s maid, Diaphanta (Kimiye Corwin). One of Vermandero’s servants, the disfigured De Flores (Manoel Felciano), harbors a secret affection for Beatrice. In the local asylum, guard Lollio (Andrew Weems), supposed madman Antonio (Bill Army), and apparent fool Franciscus (Philippe Bowgen) covet Isabella (Michelle Beck), the much younger wife of asylum doctor Alibius (Christopher McCann). As the wedding approaches, dangerous passions lead to subterfuge, mistaken identity, and murder, as blood spills and the body count rises.

Beatrice (Sara Topham) and De Flores (Manoel Felciano) battle lust and passion in Jacobean tragedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Part of Red Bull Theater’s “Season of Scandal,” The Changeling never seems to grab hold of the audience, unspooling more like a series of vignettes than a fully realized play. The company, which has had great success with recent productions of such other seventeenth-century works as Volpone and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, has previously staged Middleton’s Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy, also with founding artistic director Jesse Berger at the helm, but this time around there is not enough life in the revival. The dark, black set, by Marion Williams, features several platforms at the center, a mysterious closet where Alsemero keeps potions that, among other things, can tell if a woman is a virgin, and doors and mirrors behind which the asylum residents, dressed like strange animals, sometimes hover. The play, which has been turned into a 1974 BBC broadcast starring Helen Mirren, Tony Selby, Brian Cox, and Susan Penhaligon and a 1994 television presentation with Elizabeth McGovern, Bob Hoskins, Hugh Grant, and Sean Pertwee, explores the nature of sin, but ’tis a pity that this revival doesn’t take full advantage of all of the immorality, unable to balance the comic aspects with the tragic, the heartfelt with the absurd. (On January 18, Red Bull Theater will hold its next Revelation Reading, of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, directed by Craig Baldwin and with a cast that includes Bill Buell, Grant Chapman, Stephanie DiMaggio, David Greenspan, Christina Pumariega, Mirirai Sithole, David Ryan Smith, and Stephen Spinella.)

SWANN!!!

Jenn Harris, Jack Ferver, and QWAN take on BLACK SWAN at P.S. 122 (photo by Christian Coulson)

Performance Space 122
150 First Ave. at Ninth St.
March 10-12, $15
www.ps122.org

In his solo and company work, choreographer, director, and performer Jack Ferver has twisted and tweaked books, films, and plays in such experimental productions as Rumble Ghost (which reimagined scenes from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist), Cliterature and Camille vs. Ken, The Ophelia Project, and A Movie Star Needs a Movie. Last year, Ferver’s QWAN (Quality Without a Name) Company presented a staged parody reading of Richard Eyre’s 2006 romantic thriller Notes on a Scandal, and now they’re riffing all over Darren Aronofsky’s fabulously deep and cheesy piece of nonstop entertainment, the Oscar-nominated Black Swan. Ferver plays the role of bad girl Lily, who introduces good girl Nina (Jenn Harris) to her dark side as she and her mother (Queer as Folk’s Randy Harrison) struggle to convince choreographer Tomas (Christian Coulson) that Nina deserves the lead in a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Since Black Swan already has plenty of meta-parody in it, there’s no telling where Ferver might take it in this world premiere at P.S. 122.

Update: As at previous Jack Ferver productions, the audience filters into P.S. 122’s upstairs theater to find Ferver and company already onstage, in this case limbering up as if preparing for a dance. But once their latest production, SWAN!!!, gets under way, the five performers primarily stay seated on chairs arranged in a semicircle, reading from a hysterically tweaked script of Darren Aronofsky’s beautifully cheesy, Oscar-nominated thriller, Black Swan, written by Mark Heyman, John McLaughlin, and Andres Heinz. SWAN!!! is every bit as outrageously funny as you’d like it to be as QWAN (Quality Without a Name) pays wonderful homage to the film’s psychological depth and confounding craziness. Front and center is Jenn Harris as Nina, making wacky faces, speaking in a high-pitched voice, and approaching the audience whenever she has to throw up, which is often. Ferver, when he isn’t laughing at the antics of the others, nails the role of Lily, mimicking Mila Kunis to great effect. Christian Coulson’s French accent as womanizing choreographer Tomas gets ever-more over-the-top, as does Randy Harrison’s interpretation of Barbara Hershey as Nina’s overprotective mother. (Just wait till you see how they handle Mom’s obsession with painting pictures of her daughter, while the cake scene might have you rolling on the floor.) And Matthew Wilkas has a blast playing Winona Ryder, who is referred to throughout by the actress’s name, not the character she plays in the film, Tomas’s former prima ballerina, the deeply troubled Beth. (The several references to Lypsinka, however, fall flat, as apparently even this East Village crowd did not know — or care — that Lypsinka creator John Epperson plays the rehearsal pianist in Black Swan.) The cast also has a ball playing off the film’s instantly famous lesbian scene, which here becomes a riotous romp between Ferver and Harris, layered with laughs relating to gender identity and real and on-screen homosexuality. The low-budget SWAN!!!, which is also not afraid to toss in plenty of legitimately low-grade toilet humor — who knew Natalie Portman was such a fine flatulator — is an absolute hoot.

JACK FERVER: RUMBLE GHOST

Jack Ferver’s RUMBLE GHOST searches for the inner child within us all (photo by Liz Ligouri)

Performance Space 122
150 First Ave. at Ninth St.
Through December 12, $20
www.ps122.org

The 1982 frightfest POLTERGEIST has become part of the American zeitgeist, representing the death-in-life horror of suburban living, complete with child abduction by an evil creature from another dimension. That’s where writer-choreographer Jack Ferver, who has made critics and audiences uncomfortable in such works as DEATH IS CERTAIN, MEAT, and WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND FILLED WITH FEAR, found his inspiration for the hour-long RUMBLE GHOST, as he once again makes viewers squirm for a whole range of reasons. Fortunately, he also leaves them vastly entertained. As the audience filters into P.S. 122’s second-floor theater, Ferver and Christian Coulson are conducting a barely audible conversation, walking around and around the dark stage, populated by five unmoving figures. As the two men keep repeating the scene, their voices rise, and their journey continually shrinks; it is soon apparent that they are acting out the scene from POLTERGEIST in which Steve (Coulson) shows off their new house to his wife, Diane (Ferver). After each repetition, Ferver approaches the audience and pauses, as if to say, yes, get ready, because we’re going to do it again, and the audience, shifting in their seats, can’t help but think that they might be in for a whole lot more of this. After eight or nine trips, each more spatially confined than the previous (a clever way to evoke people’s familiarity with a movie they may have watched over and over and over again), the piece moves on, as the dancers — Benjamin Asriel, Reid Bartelme, Carlye Eckert, Michelle Mola, and Breanna O’Mara in addition to Coulson and Ferver — break off into experimental solos and duets as Carol Anne is sucked into a television set and a psychic (Eckert) is called in to try to find her. Save for two mirrors and two fluorescent lights, there are no other props or special effects, but Ferver is able to create tense — and funny — action playing off the audience’s memory of the film. If you’ve seen POLTERGEIST, you’ll be visualizing what is only being referred to onstage.

Just as Steve and Diane are about to go in after Carol Anne, the production shifts abruptly, as the seven players bring out chairs and sit in a circle for an Inner Child Work therapy session in which they all use their real names, ostensibly no longer in character. Ferver has brilliantly turned the movie family’s search for their child into the dancers’ search for their own inner child (while also equating a house with the psyche). By allowing the audience to watch this psychodrama, which is based on his personal experiences, Ferver once again evokes strong emotions ranging from the uncomfortable to the exhilarating, regardless of how “true” any of it might be. We are used to seeing performers perform onstage; we are not, however, used to seeing how they interact with one another offstage, and Ferver has playfully let us inside a rarely seen part of the creative process. Throughout RUMBLE GHOST, he continually surprises with his ability to challenge us by defying expectations, getting both into our faces and into our heads.