Nick&Jeremy, Cleveland Public Theatre

This review is an experiment, a daring cutting-edge venture. To participate you have options:

A) Read the entire review as written.

B) Read only the plain-type paragraphs for a rave.

C) Read only the italicized paragraphs for a pan.

D) Read any of the paragraphs you want, in any order, to create your own unique review experience.

Please put on your lab coat and safety goggles. Ready? Here goes:

Did you ever notice that every driver who drives faster than you is a reckless jerk, and that every driver who drives slower than you is an ignorant pus-wad? That format is the core of observational humor, and it’s how the fascinating devised play, Nick&Jeremy, is structured.

This show, now at Cleveland Public Theatre and co-produced by Theater Ninjas, is like high-level observational humor without the punch lines. Sure, there are some occasional laughs, but many of the philosophical queries (Who am I? How long can you remember the universe is inside your head?) come across as blindingly sophomoric.

Created and performed by the eponymous Nick Riley and Jeremy Paul, the evening is a casual assemblage of thoughts and musings (ie. Did you ever have the urge, while standing on a high bridge, to throw yourself off? Did you ever want to write a letter to your younger self?). These forays try to gently pry apart the differences between imagination and reality. between personal awareness and universal interconnectedness.

Philosophy is fine, as far as it goes. But there’s a reason plays by real philosophers, such as Sartre and Camus, feature actual characters and real (if sometimes obscure) plot lines. The theatrical experience demands genuine characters and conflict, not just two guys hanging out who get along great and, you know, totally get where the other is coming from.

By avoiding the traditional trap of crafting two fully formed characters, Paul and Riley are able to isolate particular queries without the additional baggage of backstory and exposition. Utilizing two turntables for incidental music, a mic, and a drumset, the two performers weave various layers of sound into their mystical mix.

In the absence of conflict, N&J gives us the two guys sitting at a coffee shop table asking each other the kind of questions over-caffeinated, self-involved young dudes contemplate (with the notable absence of sex talk). Then they take turns expounding on microscopic “wonders,” such as somehow intuiting a distant friend is calling when the phone rings. Golly, Mr. Wizard! How did that happen??

This compelling ride begins and ends with the performers interacting with the audience, shaking hands and sharing thoughts. These moments allow the play to take off and land in a smooth and less artificial way than most plays, providing a seamless entry and exit from the heady, intellectually challenging material.

By utilizing some grip-and grin activity before and after the show, the performers pretend they’re not really different than the audience when, in fact, they are. This is the reverse of audience participation and leads to some cornball exchanges that feel excruciating (“And where did you come from tonight? Akron? Wow.”).

So, does Nick&Jeremy succeed in exploring the differences between consciousness and reality? That is hardly the right question. Better to ask if this show expands your ability to see inside yourself, and outside yourself into the greater world, with a new sense of specificity and curiosity. And the answer to that question is a definitive yes.

Since Nick&Jeremy doesn’t provide characters who have anything at stake, other than a poorly brewed espresso, the audience feels no need to involve itself in this enterprise. And so it ends neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with a shrug.

This review experiment is now concluded. On your way out, please put your coat and goggles in the proper bins for sterilizing. And should you find yourself vexed that this review never adopted a definitive point of view…well, yeah.

Nick & Jeremy

Through April 13 at Cleveland Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Avenue, 216-631-2727

        

         

Good People, Cleveland Play House

(From left: Zoey Martinson as Kate, David Andrew macdonald as Mike and Kate Hodge as Margie.)

Sometimes a bland title can hide a funny and even gripping show, and such is the case with Good People now at the Cleveland Play House.

Written by the talented playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, this deceivingly amusing script tracks the travails of divorced Margie Walsh. The “g” in Margie’s name is hard, just like her life—this lifelong resident of hardscrabble South Boston loses her clerk job at a dollar store, fired by neighborhood buddy Stevie within a couple minutes of the curtain rising.

With a handicapped adult daughter at home (the unseen Joyce), and landlady Dottie hinting at throwing Margie out of her apartment, Margie needs some cash fast. So her pal Jean plants the idea of Margie hitting up old high school squeeze Mike for a job, since he’s now a successful doctor living in a cushy Boston suburb.

So far, this seems like a serious drama, but in this playwright’s hands the laughs come fast and furious. Sure some of the set-ups are a bit contrived, such as the rat-a-tat straight line/punch line conversations taking place at a Bingo hall where these Southie friends go for recreation.

But once Margie wrangles a grudging invitation from Mikey to attend a party at his house, the sparks start to fly. After an applause-inducing set reveal, we see Margie interact with Mikey and his Georgetown-bred black wife Kate on their own cosseted turf.

As race and class lines overlap and collide, the heat builds up to a fine simmer. And no one comes out of it exactly smelling like a rose.

Under Laura Kepley’s adept direction, the CPH cast is generally excellent, finding all the humor and landing some real shivers along the way.

As Margie, Kate Hodge is a feisty bundle of nerve and sinew as she fights engagingly to stay afloat in her capsizing life. But she never quite captures the suffering, desperate side of her character, often smiling a bit too easily and not fully conveying the enormous stress that Margie is under.

The members of her Bingo posse are all on point, with Elizabeth Rich as the washed out but emotional Jean garnering the most laughs. But Denny Dillon as crabby Dottie and Patrick Haley as intent, well-meaning Stevie each have their moments.

David Andrew Macdonald hits a nice blend of sophistication with a dash of Southie temper as Mike, and Zoey Martinson’s Kate is splendid—showing hospitable warmth and then flaring up when she cops to Margie’s admitted deceit.

Unfortunately, the play ends one scene too late, as the playwright seeks to put a happy gloss on Margie’s life. It would have been so much more telling to end a couple minutes earlier, on one of Margie’s defiant wisecracks.

Still, Good People is good show. Often very good.

Good People

Through April 14 at the Cleveland Play House, 1407 Euclid Avenue, 216-241-6000

The House of Blue Leaves, Beck Center

(Robert Ellis as Artie and Juliette Regnier as Bananas.)

Back in 1966, when John Guare wrote The House of Blue Leaves, it stood as a dark and hilarious indictment of America’s obsession with celebrity. In the decades since then, our cultural fixation has only grown—now to the point where there’s a primetime TV show about D-list celebrities jumping off diving platforms.

When reality continually mocks itself, what chance does irony have? Actually a pretty good chance, when a show is as well directed and acted as this version of HOBL at the Beck Center for the Arts.

This is a play that’s chock full o’ nuts. These include. but are not limited to, a Queens zookeeper (Artie) who aspires to be a songwriter in Hollywood, his wife who is nicknamed Bananas (because she is), his AWOL son (Ronnie), and his hot-to-trot girlfriend (Bunny) who stokes his dreams and wants to run away with him. And it’s all happening on the day the Pope is visiting New York City.

It seems like a farce, and often plays like one, but this is a tragedy of substantial proportions. This juxtaposition is where Guare’s genius resides, and where director Russ Borski finds all the right notes to play, unlike his musically challenged protagonist.

Robert Ellis is a near-perfect Artie, glowing with the promise of an impossible career in Lala Land while dealing with his mentally scrambled wife. And Juliette Regnier is simply hypnotizing as Bananas, staring out from under her flat hair and registering a plethora of emotions that can change in a nanosecond. Her Bananas is a fully realized, deeply layered character that gives the production much of its heft.

They are supported by many other fine performances. Carla Petroski is a funny Bunny, mixing her praise of Artie’s compositions with doses of truth that keep him off balance. And Nicholas Chokan, in the small but vital role of Ronnie, jolts the stage with electricity when he appears—crafting a fearsomely psychotic dude who almost makes Travis Bickle seem like a boy scout.

The second act revolves around Artie’s childhood friend, famous film director Billy Einhorn, who shows up after his girlfriend, starlet Corinna Stroller, stopped by the apartment with a gift for Artie. Todd Hancock and Christine Fallon handle these roles with aplomb, as do the three nuns (Patricia Walocko, Hannah Storch and Tali Cornblath) who show up to watch the Pope on TV.

Kudos to Beck for producing this show, which doesn’t come roaring in with huge box office potential. Those who do attend will be well rewarded: this is a captivating and often challenging production with characters you won’t soon forget.

The House of Blue Leaves

Through April 21 at the Beck Center for the Arts, 17801 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood, 216-521-2540

Struck, Cleveland Public Theatre

(Brett Keyser and Tannis Kowalchuk)

“It’s a rare and wonderful opportunity to find out what is true.” If that line were spoken in most plays, you’d imagine happy and transformative event.

But in Struck, now at Cleveland Public Theatre, it is intoned in reference to a stroke suffered by Tannis Kowalchuk, who is one of the two performers on stage, along with Brett Keyser.  A third person, Kowalchuk’s real neurologist Allison Waters, appears in video form.

Having recovered remarkably rapidly from the brain event that brought her down in 2011, Kowalchuk has collaborated on this devised work with the NACL Theatre in the Catskills, NY, where she is the co-founding artistic director. And it is being given its world premiere at CPT, where both Kowalchuk and Keyser have appeared before in highly successful productions.

Struck explores this “cerebrovascular accident” from the inside out, utilizing captivating and often startling digital video effects projected on an ever-changing scrim-screens that are pulled across or dropped into the playing area.

Since there is nothing linear about a stroke, which in Kowalchuk’s case meant losing the ability to identify common objects along with other functions, it calls for a non-linear presentation.

And Struck is all that as Kowalchuk, playing the 45-year-old Katherine, interacts with Brett Keyser who plays various roles including Katherine's husband and an angel who is either guiding her towards death or back into the light. Or maybe both.

That’s just a sample of the brilliant contradictions and tantalizing questions presented in this lushly layered production. Working within a small space defined by a rectangular metal structure, flanked by audience seated on the long sides, the actors weave a story from bits of fact and waves of imagination, hallucination, and whatever else you call the brain’s activity when it’s whirling out of control.

Much of the activity takes place in Iceland, where Katherine’s grandparents lived and where she spent time. The cold, blue light of Iceland serves as a telling metaphor for where Katherine’s brain has landed, in a foreign yet beautiful place where words are unintelligible but love and concern seem within an arm’s reach.

There is also a parallel story told surrounding the myth of Persephone, the goddess of Spring growth who escapes from the underworkd. The story of Katherine is a story of escape, but also a tale of the wonders that are experienced when one is taken helplessly into an altered state.

Director Ker Wells and more than a dozen artists and entities have combined their talents to fashion this visceral as well as intellectual experience. And even when you’re not sure what’s going on, there are enough touchstones to keep you grounded and moving forward with the players.

This culminates in a good place, joyously rendered by Kowalchuk when she dons Icelandic celebratory garb, emerging and discovering renewal and a spiritual awakening. However, there isn’t a mawkish or maudlin moment in the mix.

If theater can be truly immersive—employing light, sound and movement in continually surprising ways—then Struck is the perfect example. And just like the fuzzy basal ganglia that floats above the set, activating and pulsing in different colors, your synapses are going to light up in new and different ways when experiencing this amazing event.

Struck

Through April 6 at Cleveland Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Avenue, 216-631-2727

Side Effects May Include…, Dobama Theatre (Touring Show)

(Andrew J. Pond as Phil.)

A sense of humor helps most of us get through difficult times. And that must be especially true for stand-up comics who face daunting family issues.

Such is the case for Clevelander Marc Jaffe, an early writer for the Seinfeld show and husband of Karen, a physician afflicted with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. His largely autobiographical play, co-authored by another Clevelander, Eric Coble, in on tour with a weekend stop at Dobama Theatre.

Side Effects May Include… has its sights set on showing how a devastating condition such as Parkinson’s, which is progressive and incurable, has many far-reaching impacts on the person with the disease and many others around her.

From this standpoint, this one-person play works well, as the script touches on various aspects of life as it swirls around the every-changing eddies of the relationship between Phil and Maggie.

And there are some genuinely funny moments. After listening to a long list of the possible side effects from a primary Parkinson’s medication—from skin rash to sudden death—the announcer then cheerily suggests: “Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you.” We’ve heard that line a million times and never realized how idiotic it sounded.

However, those moments of laughter and clarity are bookended by less successful elements. The opening 20 minutes moves slowly as Phil, a stand-up comedian, muses about his moribund sex life. And the second act is almost totally devoted to analyzing just one pharmaceutical side effect, Maggie’s increased libido.

We watch Phil try to deal with this happy accident, eventually taking hard-on pills to keep up with his increasingly horny wife and then dealing with the dicey results. There are some chuckles here, but the connection to Parkinson’s fades away until a late interaction with Phil and Maggie’s young daughter brings us back.

Solo performer Andrew J. Pond, under the direction of Wayne Mell, handles a variety of smaller characters with a sure hand and well-differentiated character voices. But as Phil he curiously seems less than fully present, which softens the impact of some of the humorous asides. Indeed, when part of the set fell apart by accident during one of Phil and Maggie’s romps in bed, Pond sparked to life with witty ad libs that had a fresher delivery than many of his scripted takes.

Jaffe and Coble are definitely on to something here, in a play that first appeared at Cleveland Public Theatre in their annual Big Box play development series. In particular, some of the most touching and wryly funny moments happen in the last half of the first act, when Phil and Maggie are just starting to deal with the disease.

That’s where this play stakes out new ground, and one wishes there were much more of that material and fewer limp (ha) penis jokes.

Side Effects May Include…

Through Sunday, March 24, produced by Madkap Productions at Dobama Theatre, 2340 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights. Tickets can be purchased at: www.madkapproductions.com or www.brownpapertickets.com

Next to Normal, Beck Center

(Left to right: Chris McCarrell as Gabe, Katherine DeBoer as Diana, and Scott Plate as Dan)

Now that we’ve proven that there is no subject too awful to write a musical about (see: serial killers and people on roller skates pretending to be choo-choo trains), the challenge becomes mounting such shows in ways that thoroughly involve the audience.

In Next to Normal, the show about a woman with bi-polar mental issues, Beck Center goes a long way towards that goal. With stellar performances in the two lead roles, one feels the visceral despair of afflicted Diana and her husband Dan as they struggle to maintain a “normal” life.

It is only in a couple of the smaller roles where the performances don’t measure up and the entire picture of a family in crisis becomes a little blurry.

With music by Tom Kitt and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, NTN has become a favorite of many theaters, even with its dicey topic. Indeed, it was only a few weeks ago that Lakeland Civic Theatre put on the same show, and splendidly so.

This Beck production, directed by the estimable Victoria Bussert, is a collaboration with the Baldwin Wallace University Music Theatre Program. And the music, under the direction of Nancy Maier, is virtually spotless. Strong voices throughout carry the virtually sung-through story along, with complex overlapping passages handled with professional élan.

And the music is enhanced by the performance of Katherine DeBoer as bedeviled Diana. Whether she’s in a manic state slapping sandwiches together on the floor or hallucinating about her son Gabe, DeBoer is fully present at all times in Diana’s distorted and whirling mind.

She is matched by Scott Plate as her husband Dan, dutifully and lovingly trying to keep Diana moving forward while questioning himself along the way. Plate’s rendition of the Act One closer, “A Light in the Dark,” is tender and shattering.

Also excellent is Chris McCarrell as Gabe, displaying an edge and a refusal to be ignored that gives his mysterious character extra punch.

Less successful is Caroline Murrah who tries too hard as over-achieving daughter Natalie. Murrah lacks the dull-eyed stare and the hollow affect where high-functioning but tormented teens often live.

Natalie is supposedly rescued by a fellow outcast, classmate stoner Henry, but from his posture to his speaking voice, Ellis Dawson conveys pretty much the opposite vibe of a slacker kid addicted to giggle weed. As a result, some of his lines, which are intended to be ironic and funny (“Can I see Natalie? I need help with homework.”) seem oddly truthful.

Phil Carroll adds some nice moments as Diana’s docs, but doesn’t make these pill-pushers as menacing (quietly or overtly) as they might be.

Production designer Jeff Herrmann has designed a fascinating two level set with multiple staircases, tilting platforms and surreal medicine cabinets arrayed with plastic pill bottles that comments the play's theme while maximizing the small Studio Theater space.

But most importantly, director Bussert brings the poignant story of Dan and Diana, and Gabe, front and center, making this Next to Normal a powerful and memorable experience.

Next to Normal

Through April 21*at Beck Center, produced in collaboration with the Baldwin Wallace University Music Theatre Program, 17801 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood, 216-521-2540

 * Not a typo, this is an eight-week run!