Hellhound on My Trail
Theater Schmeater
Through April 16.
Fission
Live Girls! Theater
Through April 3.
Twilight Zone: Live!
Theater Schmeater
Through April 16.
Linked short stories may be all the rage in the publishing world, but theater has been slow to catch on. Which is a shame, really. A book of linked stories makes you suspect that the writer was simply too lazy to write a novel. A play with three separate but linked acts, on the other hand, is an ingenious thing. It doesn’t matter if the second act of Hellhound on My Trail sags slightly (it does) or if the third act is marred by cliché (it is), because each segment ushers in a new set of characters and conflicts to distract you from the previous act’s shortcomings. And the play’s shared backstory minimizes the exposition that would have made a trio of one-acts drag.
Hellhound is the first in a three-play cycle by Denis Johnson (whose 1992 collection Jesus’ Son was on the leading edge of the linked-story vogue). The action takes place in a retro-futuristic America–geographically familiar but governed by a Soviet-style bureaucracy–where members of the Cassandra family (played by anxiety-ridden Kate Czajkowski in the first act and frantic Roy Stanton in the third) seem to have had trouble adjusting to the new order. They’re in constant danger of being crushed by the grinding gears of official proceedings and unofficial corruption. Other citizens get off on the sheer absurdity of their work. Rebecca M. Davis, in the role of a fully assimilated sexual-misconduct investigator, veers hilariously between supercilious interrogation and full-throated friskiness.
Director Rob West runs slipshod over the script’s tense moments, feverishly anticipating the laughs before they arrive. When Czajkowski throws her head back and gulps down pills in a waiting room, she’s clownish instead of furtive. And Stanton bounds out of bed with such buoyancy, it’s more than a little difficult to believe he’s recovering from a week-long, amnesia-inducing bender. But when the lunacy of Johnson’s dialogue finally kicks in, Hellhound is truly delightful. The first act’s high-decibel climax alone is worth the price of admission.
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Fission tells the story of Lise Meitner, the Viennese physicist who, in collaboration with chemist Otto Hahn in Berlin, discovered and explained nuclear fission. In 1944, Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his part in the discovery, while Meitner’s contribution went unrecognized. Recent research suggests that, though sexism and racial prejudice certainly played a role in this omission–Meitner was born into a Jewish family–she was also somewhat complicit in Hahn’s attempt to hide her role in the collaboration.
Molly Best Tinsley’s play speculates elegantly on the psychological explanation for this shyness in the face of history (though she exaggerates Meitner’s bullish refusal to leave Germany by neglecting to mention that Meitner had converted to Christianity as a young woman). Michelle Lewis’ Meitner is utterly absorbing as a hunched, driven woman in a hostile world. For the most part, director Katjana Vadeboncouer makes do with the cramped Live Girls’ performance space, and the resulting production is intimate and affecting–an epic story told on a human scale.
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The newest crop of Twilight Zone adaptations at Theater Schmeater is good, campy fun, but you’ll leave the theater feeling slightly unclean. The second episode, about an alien who blends in with the customers at a diner, is exactly what you’d expect: ridiculous plot, slightly wooden ensemble acting, cheesy twist ending. The first episode, entitled “The Invaders,” is where things get authentically, comically unnerving. Lisa Klosowski, in a role originated by Agnes Moorehead, plays a woman “in one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying.” A flying saucer touches down on her rooftop, and suddenly she’s beating off a swarm of itty-bitty space invaders (the amusingly clunky marionettes and bunraku puppets are by Rob D’Arc). The slapstick battles help distract from the fact that Klosowksi hasn’t uttered a single word of English, instead favoring a steady stream of fearful, feral grunts. When the trademark ironic ending clears up that little discrepancy, it’s amusing–but I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed at how easily my urban condescension led me astray.
