What I Saw Off-Broadway This Month — Reviews

Senior Critic Joey Sims has been busy catching up on theatre around town. His latest roundup of productions:

LOBSTER

Among the sharpest and wittiest plays I’ve seen all year, Kallan Dana’s Lobster is an exhilarating treat. The premise is wonderful: self-serious high school student Nora (Cricket Brown, severely funny), in mourning following a break-up, recruits three unsuspecting students for a guerrilla production of Sam Shepard & Patti Smith’s coke-fueled absurdist work Cowboy Mouth.

Dana’s play owes a debt not only to Shepard & Smith, but also Chekhov, Beckett and Baker—certainly Lobster echoes Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation a bit too directly in its structure. But Dana also leans more surreal, peppering the high school action with monologues from the students’ adult selves, reflecting back; then sending the play haywire with a late-night lovers confrontation that may or may not be really happening.

Originality isn’t the thrill here, but rather execution—Dana’s text is packed with expert laughs and devastating blows, while Hanna Yurfest’s tight production finds the desperate longing behind every cruel barb. And the cast—rounded out by Coco McNeil, Sarina Freda, Felix Teich and Annie Fang—is beyond excellent, mining subtle poignancy from their adult reflections on the hazy, crazy confusion of teenage fear, lust and rage.

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FIVE MODELS IN RUINS, 1981

On Afsoon Pajoufar’s gorgeously surreal set, four models have gathered within the crumbling remains of a once opulent home. (The fifth never arrives.) Plants and shrubbery surround them, in place of walls; one room seems to bleed, strangely, into the next. It could be day or night, and while the play’s title tells us we’re in 1981, the present day feels just as plausible.

All of this strangeness is deliberate in Morgan Green’s dreamlike staging of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s intriguing new play Five Models in Ruins, 1981. The play’s narrative center, to the extent that it has one, is Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel), the distracted photographer leading this shoot. But Roberta is a mess, and Marvel spends much of the play wandering in aimless circles. 

The play does the same, which is not really an insult—the aimlessness is conscious. The models chat away, sharing war stories and reading each other for filth, and they are enjoyable company for a time. Maia Novi is especially hysterical as Tatiana, a sharp-tongued Russian firebrand. The lack of plot is fine, but without much tonal variation, the play grows very hazy.

Five Models jolts back to life once the source of Roberta’s malaise is finally revealed and Marvel gets to let loose. A dose of energy also arrives in the late arrival of Roberta’s make-up artist and confidante Sandy, imbued with wit and sharp discernment by Madeline Wise in a knockout off-Broadway debut.

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HOLD ME IN THE WATER

Gently tender but brutally honest, Ryan J. Haddad’s new solo work Hold Me In The Water feels like it has no right to land as powerfully as it does. On the surface, this is a modest tale, a chronicle of Haddad’s intense connection with a kind but elusive new man. Could this connection turn into something real? Or is this gorgeous, confusing creature simply too good to be true? 

The magic of Water lies in the delivery. Haddad is a truthful, open-hearted storyteller, offering up his flaws and insecurities without hesitation. He pitches the humor with precision, dryly restrained but with occasional flurries of camp. Recollections of even a fairly standard date night become captivating reveries in Haddad’s hands. 

Late in the play, Haddad steps outside of that story and underlines, a bit needlessly, his key points about dating and disability. The central question of whether we would date, fuck or love a disabled person with the passion here described is already put forward by the story itself.

But it’s a good question all the same, one that speaks not only to disability but essential questions of decency, empathy and simple kindness.

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I’M ASSUMING YOU KNOW DAVID GREENSPAN

“The reason people don’t come to theatre,” insists Sierra (David Greenspan), one of three women at the center of Mona Pirnoit’s ingenuous new work I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, “is because theatre is annoying.” 

Pirnoit’s play should, by all rights, be very annoying itself. A hilarious, expertly crafted one-person show about the wonders and pitfalls of a life in artmaking, this Atlantic Theater Company premiere (now closed and Atlantic Stage 2) chronicles three 30-something writers getting together for a play reading and debating their futures. All of them, of course, are played by David Greenspan. 

The genius of I’m Assuming You Know…lies in committing so thoroughly and completely to its inside baseball-ness that it somehow circles all the way back around to universality. Prinoit’s gags could not be more insidery—jokes about the Sloan commission and Lauren Gunderson abound. Yet at its core, the play strikes at deeply relatable questions: the lure of compromise, choosing comfort over toil, and how we live with ourselves. 

Holding it all together is Greenspan, that marvel of a man, who is here at the height of his theatrical powers. Carefully calibrated to lean less mannered than some of his more pastiche-y work, his delivery here is effortlessly funny yet achingly sincere. Greenspan is never mocking or commenting upon these fully fleshed out women—he only communicates their truth. 

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IRISHTOWN

The world premiere new play Irishtown features one truly great gag, a single hilarious extended sequence that nearly makes up for a plodding overall experience. Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s undercooked comedy starts off on a great premise: rehearsals at The Irishtown Players, an acclaimed Dublin-based company, descend into chaos after their resident playwright Aisling submits a dark, experimental legal drama that’s “not Irish enough.” Among the problems: the play is set in Hertfordshire, England; it features nothing in the way of poverty, starvation or rolling hills; and (gasp) it has a happy ending.

It’s a genius premise, but Smyth devotes much of the play to satirizing theater’s more general pretensions: self-serious artists, egotistical actors, passive-aggressive battles in the rehearsal room. That is all well-trodden territory, and Smyth doesn’t have much new to add.

Still, Smyth’s evident talent does come through in one riotously funny set of monologues, the highlight of the evening. Each performer takes turns improvising a more classically “Irish” speech for their alternate play—only to all find themselves, one by one, circling back to horribly intense tales of sexual assault that echo Aisling’s original submission. It’s a brutally macabre gag, performed to perfection.