Category — Off Broadway

“Tokio Confidential’s” unlikely combination of styles

You see all kinds of theatre in New York, but you don’t see that much Noh, the classical Japanese form that uses ritualized music, movement, and costumes to depict warriors, ghosts, and other epic folk. Playwrights like Brecht and O’Neill have been intoxicated by Noh and incorporated elements of it into their own work, and beginning on Sunday, audiences will have a chance to see how Noh blends with a traditional musical.

Presented at Atlantic Stage 2, Tokio Confidential might seem familiar and strange all at once. On one hand, it tells the relatable story of Isabella Archer (Jill Paice), a Civil War widow who tries to overcome her grief by traveling to Japan. Thanks to a surprising relationship with a tattoo artist and a personal decision to turn her body into art, she undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation that releases her from the past. Give or take a tattooing scene, this story should resonate with fans of everything from Gypsy to Hairspray to Grease.

But then again, there are no warrior ghosts haunting the kids at Rydell High, and the songs in Hairspray don’t suggest the lush, contemplative style of Japanese music.  That’s what makes Tokio Confidential so striking.

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“CQ/CX” mines the metaphors in Jayson Blair’s story

In his incendiary interview with The New York Observer, Jayson Blair is quoted as saying: “So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.”

For Gabe McKinley, a similar scenario was true as he wrote CQ/CX, now playing at the Peter Norton Space in a production from the Atlantic Theater Company. In order to dramatize the Blair scandal, McKinley had to distance himself from facts about the former New York Times journalist who plagiarized and fabricated stories. Instead, he focused on telling a larger tale about a media disaster that rocked the world’s trust in a top newspaper.

“It’s important to remember that as a playwright, sometimes getting away from the facts, you actually get closer to the truth,” McKinley says. “I definitely took the step of moving some of the characters away from real people. The show became something of its own. It’s not a historical document; it’s a play.”

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Sam Gold challenges expectations of the classic play

It’s tempting to dismiss Look Back In Anger, to say, “I get it. Realism. Kitchen sink. Angry young man.” But with his current revival at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, director Sam Gold wants to blow those assumptions apart.

That’s only fitting, since John Osborne’s play has always been about subverting the familiar. When it premiered in London in 1956, British theatre was lousy with boulevard comedies and polite drawing room dramas. Look Back in Anger, however, delivered Jimmy Porter, an intelligent but frustrated working class sweet seller who lives in a squalid apartment with his friend Cliff and his upper-middle-class wife, Alison. The British class system oppresses these people, and in turn, they oppress themselves with an endless cycle of insults, apologies, kisses, and arguments.

It’s hard to overstate how shocking this was. According to legend, audiences gasped when they saw Alison’s ironing board, since the tools of the working class were never part of the theatre. Many people hated the play for being uncouth and furious, but critic Kenneth Tynan called it a “minor miracle” for just these reasons. Soon enough, it inspired a wave of “angry young man” dramas.

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The actress fights her impulses in The New Group’s latest play

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles
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She’s a character you want to shake some sense into. As she moves through Russian Transport, Erika Sheffer’s world premiere play at the New Group, Diana behaves like someone who’s in control of her life and her family. A Russian immigrant who helps her husband run a car service, she’s gruffly charming as she barrels over everything, insisting that it’s Chinese food for dinner and threatening to kill her children if they don’t sit down right now.

Still, Diana can’t see that her family’s imploding. Her brother Boris, fresh off the boat from Russia, arrives with dark plans for his time in America. He changes everyone’s lives, and even though Diana’s partially aware of what he’s doing, she misses the most important details.

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A theatre makes an asset of its unusual space

Actors have clambered up it. Paintings have hung on it, as have flags and bunting. It has been a fence post, a ship mast, a tiny house and (on numerous occasions) a tree. No matter what it is, though, the pillar looming in the downstage right corner of the Irish Repertory Theatre’s stage is always the elephant in the room.

“It’s an old friend by this point,” says artistic director Charlotte Moore, who has wrangled with the pillar on dozens of occasions. “When you design for this space, that’s where you have to start.”
Luckily, she and her producing director, Ciarán O’Reilly, use the same designers repeatedly, among them James Morgan, Tony Walton and Klara Zieglerova.

A pillar in the far corner would attract little notice in most theatres, but the odd configuration at Irish Rep’s cozy Chelsea venue draws attention. At stage right, where actors typically can exit into the wings, there’s a small side pocket of additional seating. These 40 seats—”the jury box,” Moore calls them— make the pillar seem to be dead center in the stage.

She and her set designer, Antje Ellermann, have gone the tried-and-true route of turning the pillar into a tree for their acclaimed revival of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, which closes Jan. 29. “We often set up ladders next to it,” Moore says, “and this time we have Gerry Evans, the ne’er-do-well in the play, climb up it at one point.”

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