Demonology
Next Stage at Richard Hugo House
Through April 20.
Last year, Hugo House took its theater off the rental
market—adding to the scarcity of stage space mentioned in the
column on the left—and chose two resident companies. As reported
in The Stranger last June, Hugo House passed over a few
favorites (including Annex Theatre and Strawberry Theatre Workshop) for
two relative unknowns: SiS, an Asian-American company, and Next Stage,
which had yet to stage anything. Demonology is its first play.
The results are middling.
Demonology, which premiered in New York in 1996, begins in
the regimented office of Joe DeMartini, a baby-formula executive who is
terrorizing a new temp (and, it turns out, new mother) named Gina. Her
hair is too wild, her demeanor too casual. When she bends over to find
a brush, her round bottom blows DeMartini’s uptight, corporate mind.
You can infer the rest of the polemic: Gina is feminine, fecund, a
symbolic threat. DeMartini begins to unravel, secretly chugging bags of
Gina’s breast milk and hallucinating. Then come acts of corporate
sabotage and the mystery: Is Gina a pro-breast-feeding guerrilla, or is
DeMartini undermining his own business?
Playwright Kelly Stuart has written a mildly amusing satire, though
it suffers from sledgehammer politics. (A representative line from
Skip, the office sleazebag, describing feminism: “Have you seen
Planet of the Apes, where the apes take over the earth?
Substitute ‘apes’ for ‘women.'”) But this inaugural production,
directed by Mark Jared Zufelt, shows some promise: Alex Samuels is
comically robotic as DeMartini and Maggie Brothers’s Gina is as easy
and unforced as breathing. BRENDAN KILEY
The Diary of Anne Frank
Intiman Theatre
Through May 17.
It’s impossible to discuss this staging without mentioning the
celebrity involvement, so let’s get it out of the way: Lucy DeVito, the
25-year-old daughter of Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, plays the
13-year-old Anne Frank. And she does it well. DeVito’s Anne is a
fidgety, talkative ball of hyperactivity, and not at all a saint. She
gets bored when the family holds religious ceremonies, and she’s
constantly at odds with her mother.
With one notable exception, the rest of the cast follows DeVito’s
lead. Stranger Genius Award–winner Amy Thone, as Anne’s embattled
mother, keeps a smart stressed-mom stance for most of the play, not the
Tragic Mother of an Antigenocide Icon that many actresses become. If
only Matthew Boston got that memo; his Otto Frank is flat and dead,
bringing a whiff of community theater to Intiman’s stage.
But at least it’s a gorgeous stage. The Secret Annex, designed by
Nayna Ramey, is a multilevel wooden construct, at once enormous and
claustrophobic. The sound design is also remarkable: The audience jumps
at a sudden pounding on a door or an unexpected buzzer.
You know how things are going to end. People are in tears. They give
it a standing ovation. And then they file out of the theater, right
past the little poster by the door, suggesting that they help end the
genocide in Darfur.
PAUL CONSTANT
Cabaret
5th Avenue Theatre
Through April 13.
Nick Garrison was born to play the emcee in Cabaret. He is
known for his preternatural ability to embody the feminine (the Glenn
Close part in Fatal Attraction at Re-bar, the nurse in
Loot at Intiman) and the not-quite-masculine (the mannish
woman Randee Sparks in his self-written solo work and, most of all,
Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch). He is a master of
improvisation, which you’ve got to be to play the emcee, since the
emcee interacts with the audience as if they (we) are sitting at tables
in a late-Weimar-Republic-era cabaret in Berlin. He has enough in his
repertoire, enough presence, to sustain being onstage almost
constantly, even walking through scenes he has nothing to do with. And
he can sing like a motherfucker.
But you can’t help thinking that, with his bald head and skeleton-y
pallor, Garrison would be more at home in the Sam Mendes revival of
Cabaret of a decade ago, in which everything was black, bleak,
stripped to a chilling bareness, right down to the cabaret girls and
boys in their underwear, who squirmed around on the stage in the former
Studio 54, their eyes sunken holes, their expressions all heroin-blank
and depraved. There is nothing depraved about this production of
Cabaret, to its detriment. The tables are red, the chairs are
red, the banisters are red, the pants are red, the jackets are red, the
ties are red, the suspenders are red, the feathers on women’s hats are
red, their dresses are red (with red sequins), their gloves are red,
the stripe on someone’s purple fedora is red, and the emcee’s pants,
jacket, vest, and top hat are red. We are supposed to be in the dark
heart of a distorting time, but the whole thing looks like a commercial
for strawberries. The production gives Garrison nothing to work with
and, in turn, his performance seems half-hearted. Tari Kelly, as Sally
Bowles, is a zero. But Suzy Hunt (as Fräulein Schneider) and Angie
Louise (as Fräulein Kost) are captivating.
CHRISTOPHER
FRIZZELLE
