Town Criers
Mind's Eye takes a new look at an old story.
STEVE WALKER
Because its themes of life, love and death don't offend anyone and because it has sixteen speaking parts, a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town is staged at some point in nearly every high schooler's academic career. There's a juicy ingenue role in Emily, a role for the jock with acting chops in George, and a menagerie of townies from eight to eighty years old, so even the geekiest thespian stands a chance of stage time. It's an all-purpose booking play — the Pam of dramatic literature.
What Mind's Eye Theatre does with the play is novel, though, and occasionally moving. With chutzpah and no small talent for how to stage a scene, director Christopher King takes Wilder's portrait of a typical small, rural town — Grover's Corners — and makes it newly relevant. He's updated the action from 1901 to 1981, and that gives the play something approaching plastic surgery. Now it's a Kennedy who is said to have spoken on the steps of City Hall, not some powdered-wigged dinosaur, and Mr. Webb, the town newspaper editor, cuts his hand slicing a bagel. If the contemporary references weren't so effortlessly incorporated, you'd want to laugh the cast off the stage and hoot Mr. King out of town.
But the play's classic arc and archetypes — the life cycle of a town with a village drunk, a kindly doctor, saintly mothers, et. al. — haven't gone out of style just because the play was written sixty years ago. Grover's Corners is still in New Hampshire but is also, as King explains in the grammatically choppy program notes, one of those rural enclaves that might go to its death fighting Wal-Mart's world domination. Pop culture gets there about two years after the fact, and the kids who go away to college tend to come back, as made obvious by a seventeenth-century town cemetery whose headstones are etched with last names that still show up in the twice-weekly Sentinel.
King opens the show with a balladeer, J.D. Wright, who has written three original pieces and continues to strum in a corner throughout the show. (He closes out his solo spots in the tragic third act with John Prine's "Humidity Killed the Snowman.") We meet the editor's family, including Emily Webb (Jennifer Coville), and the Gibbs family next door, where George (Aaron Couser) pines away for Emily's Juliet to his Romeo. Our Town has something similar to and just as charming as that play's balcony scene: the scene in which Emily and George climb ladders to imaginary upstairs bedrooms and speak lovingly across their lawns in the flattering moonlight.
It helps that Coville and Couser are decent actors, and they are matched by the elementary-school-aged Caroline Bell as George's sister (she's the perfect little pest),and Adrian Alexander as Mr. Webb (the only actor who even halfway succeeds at a New Hampshire accent). Doug Thompson is charismatic as Officer Warren, and the town's matriarchs are well played by Juju Johnson and Angela Elliot. The production suffers an equal number of misfires, though — especially in Judy Brewster's grotesquely flirty Professor Willard (she nearly does a strip tease as she relates the town's geological strata) and Tyler Heavey's overly pickled choir director.
King's staging, however, is something to be seen. In the funeral scene, the town's dead converse while sitting barefoot in black-draped chairs. When Emily and George first declare their love in the town malt shop, they start with his fingers barely touching her knee and end with arms entwined and foreheads magnetically welded together. And when George abruptly pulls away, Coville places her palms on her stomach — you can almost feel her butterflies. A moment like this can freshen up all of a play's chipped paint.
Droog Awakening
Mind's Eye Theater's new show punches like Clockwork.
STEVE WALKER
The most shocking film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar was Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick's stylized adaptation of Anthony Burgess' cult novel about a society's love-hate relationship with violence — "ultraviolence," it's called — didn't win in 1972, but the fact that it made the cut says a lot about how astutely the Academy followed its conscience toward something artistic yet repellent.
With their unsettling and provocative mounting of Burgess' own stage version, director Christopher King and the Mind's Eye Theater company prove themselves a daring local troupe willing to be disturbing. The production is a ballsy ballet orchestrated for those who think violence has lost its punch.
King directs his cast of 28 with a rare and outrageously willful eye. Limited only by his modest budget, he pulls off large and fiery ambitions. The play begins with the entire cast in a production number set to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" — but Tori Amos' torchy version, in which theentertain us refrain is more seductive than demanding.
Lost in their own sick voyeurism, Alex (the sinewy and scarily perfect Ian Miller) and his droogs (Burgess-speak for homies) whip up a maelstrom. Sticking to their motto — "Destruction is our ode to joy" — they bludgeon a homeless man to a pulp and then gang-rape a woman while her husband looks on. Alex, fifth in line, glibly asks the victim, "Still with us?"
He gets caught by the police and institutionalized with a team of government researchers hoping to turn Alex's thirst for violence in on itself. Through a series of aversion-therapy techniques that eventually cause him to wretch when he witnesses brutality, the state makes a lamb out of a vicious lion. His conversion is used by a politician (Darren Sextro) to suck up voters, and social order is restored. Or is it? Aren't those Alex's former droogs now wearing police gear?
The production is jam-packed with theatrics that contribute to Burgess' vision of a world gone mad. Bits of Beethoven are scattered throughout the show alongside samples of Nine Inch Nails. But the troupe also performs songs composed by Burgess; he wanted to write a musical — a West Side Story for the strong of stomach. One of these songs, "Discipline," plays over an anal rape while Alex is incarcerated; it's like "Gee, Officer Krupke" crossed with a sadomasochistic porn film.
Cast members all wear bar codes on their clothing or skin; there are too many actors to mention individual achievements, other than to say that they're all in synch with King's intent. The design side of the show is equally accomplished, including Justin Zimmerman's visceral fight choreography, Tamara Kingston's dutiful dialect coaching, and Jeff Mace and Julie Allen's set design. The latter includes computer guts and silver ventilation tubes welded together in gleaming piles, and a cherry-red sofa scarred with duct tape. Their work implies that nothing has been spared a good lashing.
King is as skillful with one person onstage as he is with the full court, though there are places where a bigger budget would have helped. Scenes of Alex's scientific immersion in violent images, for example, could have used videos or slides of quickly edited mayhem. Why spare us when Alex has been so unsparing?
Mind's Eye has been hit-or-miss in its relatively short lifespan, but the company brashly takes its place among the local heavyweights with this show — one that's as eerily topical as it is artistically euphoric.
Maybe We're Crazy
L. Haber
From the mind that created the internationally popular ‘Clive Barker’s Books of Blood’ and the movie ‘Hellraiser’ comes another of Barker’s successes, CRAZYFACE. The downright madness of this three-hour play is performed by a cast of over 30 of the finest members of the local BrainSpunk Theater group.
The show documents the ludicrously long journey of a foolish boy named Tyl Eulenspiegel who casually goes by the nickname Crazyface (Eric Scott Evans), during the tumultuous days of the Inquisition in a European landscape dusted with the most violent and nutty of characters.
The hellish journey begins with Crazyface, Crazy’s mother Ella (Nancy Segal), and three sister-in-laws, (Alexa Smith, Melanie Matthews, and Kara Boland), who were all once involved with Crazy’s older brother Lenny (Joel Dickerson). Alluding to previous whereabouts of always being on the run, Ella proclaims that she wants to put down roots in the crews’ newly found destination, just as Crazyface is being wrongly accused of stealing the homemade “wings” from a town fool, who had just used the devices to jump from a church balcony. Though the fool claimed to have flown before perishing, Crazy has no time to waste in taking metaphorical flight to a new place before he is captured for breaking the law.
On his own journey of coincidental mania, Crazyface is never technically solo, because he is followed around by the voices, or “angels” he has always heard and interacted with-the very reasons why the people he meets call him “crazy.” The taunting and sassy angel to accompany him on this journey, acted adorably by Aaron Palmer, never exactly leaves Crazyface, as he meets a man from Spain who gives him a little box containing, “So little a seed, so great a power.”
Crazy then encounters an Englishmen, a Frenchman, an Italian solider, a band of female bandits who snatch his clothes, and, eventually, a band of wedding-crazed pig breeders. At this point, a confused audience only becomes more confused as the meandering wanderings of Crazyface continue, and the King of Spain (Cynthia Evans/Geoff Bruen) and company, discover he is holding a precious gift that belongs to them.
A scene of complete destruction and set-smashing pandemonium unexpectedly confronts Crazyface with Lenny, who was recently released from a Spanish torture cell by the King’s hilariously twisted Priest figure (Abdel Pena). Lenny was tasked to find Crazyface, and return with the special seed-holding box, and more.
As a “half-wit” on “the road to Rome” with nothing to lose, Crazyface sure shows the audience that to outwit oppressors, they might just have to succumb to the craziness that surrounds the everyday, and take unexpected solutions to new heights. As Barker through the means of Crazyface puts it, “The right wind can take you anywhere-anywhere you want.”
A Seasonably Spooky Treat
L. Haber
Adapted to the stage by Andrew Leslie from Shirley Jackson’s cornerstone horror novel, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is a seasonally spooky treat brought to audiences by Philadelphia’s BrainSpunk Theater. While troubled woman Eleanor Vance (Layne Marie Williams) and sensory perception specialist Theodora (Mahogany Walker) agree to stay at a notoriously haunted house, the house reveals more than slamming doors, misplaced objects, and cold drafts. Rich with sorrowful history and tales of death and failure, “the fascinating secrets of Hill House” find mysteriously chilling ways of helping the guests to relive the past, all under the supervision of curious researcher Dr. Montague (Charles Michael Bendas), heir to the house Luke Sanderson (Seth Linehan), and unfriendly housekeeper Mrs. Dudley (Catherine Deremigio-Fichera).
The labyrinthine dialogue may not be the most exciting to listen to, as every actor in this show voices complicated and intricate lines at an impressively and almost incomprehensibly fast pace. The set, adorned perfectly with Victorian paintings, vintage furniture, and elegant artifacts, snakes audiences into a terrifying encounter that Eleanor and Theodora have with a laughing, evil entity who seems to mock their fear.
After the scariest and most thrilling scene of the play, the characters decide they must stick together in order to continue Dr. Montague’s mission, and fully protect themselves. The main parlor becomes the unlikely group’s “center of operations”, and although the idea of sticking together seems necessary in theory, Hill House’s tenants grow impatient and annoyed with one another.
Just after another good scare and a strange message appears in the upstairs hallway written in chalk, Dr. Montague’s pushy wife (Kris Andrews) and snobby pal Arthur Parker (John Schultz) show up to further confuse the situation. Mrs. Montague attempts to communicate with the spirits of Hill House through a special tool in a way most unpleasant to everyone except Arthur, who delivers some of the quippiest jokes of the show while hitting on handsome Luke.
After an eerie incident in the ominous “stone tower” puts an unknowingly entranced Eleanor in great danger, the other guests decide that she must vacate Hill House before the conclusion of Dr. Montague’s experiment. Having “fallen under the spell” of the murderously enchanting house, Eleanor is desperate to stay. Though the unseen ending is totally anticlimactic, it is true to the original story of Hill House, and is, indeed, an ending. Do not expect to be truly rattled, but do expect to be told what is considered one of the most revered scary stories of all time, during ‘The Haunting of Hill House’.
Mind's Eye takes a new look at an old story.
STEVE WALKER
Because its themes of life, love and death don't offend anyone and because it has sixteen speaking parts, a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town is staged at some point in nearly every high schooler's academic career. There's a juicy ingenue role in Emily, a role for the jock with acting chops in George, and a menagerie of townies from eight to eighty years old, so even the geekiest thespian stands a chance of stage time. It's an all-purpose booking play — the Pam of dramatic literature.
What Mind's Eye Theatre does with the play is novel, though, and occasionally moving. With chutzpah and no small talent for how to stage a scene, director Christopher King takes Wilder's portrait of a typical small, rural town — Grover's Corners — and makes it newly relevant. He's updated the action from 1901 to 1981, and that gives the play something approaching plastic surgery. Now it's a Kennedy who is said to have spoken on the steps of City Hall, not some powdered-wigged dinosaur, and Mr. Webb, the town newspaper editor, cuts his hand slicing a bagel. If the contemporary references weren't so effortlessly incorporated, you'd want to laugh the cast off the stage and hoot Mr. King out of town.
But the play's classic arc and archetypes — the life cycle of a town with a village drunk, a kindly doctor, saintly mothers, et. al. — haven't gone out of style just because the play was written sixty years ago. Grover's Corners is still in New Hampshire but is also, as King explains in the grammatically choppy program notes, one of those rural enclaves that might go to its death fighting Wal-Mart's world domination. Pop culture gets there about two years after the fact, and the kids who go away to college tend to come back, as made obvious by a seventeenth-century town cemetery whose headstones are etched with last names that still show up in the twice-weekly Sentinel.
King opens the show with a balladeer, J.D. Wright, who has written three original pieces and continues to strum in a corner throughout the show. (He closes out his solo spots in the tragic third act with John Prine's "Humidity Killed the Snowman.") We meet the editor's family, including Emily Webb (Jennifer Coville), and the Gibbs family next door, where George (Aaron Couser) pines away for Emily's Juliet to his Romeo. Our Town has something similar to and just as charming as that play's balcony scene: the scene in which Emily and George climb ladders to imaginary upstairs bedrooms and speak lovingly across their lawns in the flattering moonlight.
It helps that Coville and Couser are decent actors, and they are matched by the elementary-school-aged Caroline Bell as George's sister (she's the perfect little pest),and Adrian Alexander as Mr. Webb (the only actor who even halfway succeeds at a New Hampshire accent). Doug Thompson is charismatic as Officer Warren, and the town's matriarchs are well played by Juju Johnson and Angela Elliot. The production suffers an equal number of misfires, though — especially in Judy Brewster's grotesquely flirty Professor Willard (she nearly does a strip tease as she relates the town's geological strata) and Tyler Heavey's overly pickled choir director.
King's staging, however, is something to be seen. In the funeral scene, the town's dead converse while sitting barefoot in black-draped chairs. When Emily and George first declare their love in the town malt shop, they start with his fingers barely touching her knee and end with arms entwined and foreheads magnetically welded together. And when George abruptly pulls away, Coville places her palms on her stomach — you can almost feel her butterflies. A moment like this can freshen up all of a play's chipped paint.
Droog Awakening
Mind's Eye Theater's new show punches like Clockwork.
STEVE WALKER
The most shocking film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar was Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick's stylized adaptation of Anthony Burgess' cult novel about a society's love-hate relationship with violence — "ultraviolence," it's called — didn't win in 1972, but the fact that it made the cut says a lot about how astutely the Academy followed its conscience toward something artistic yet repellent.
With their unsettling and provocative mounting of Burgess' own stage version, director Christopher King and the Mind's Eye Theater company prove themselves a daring local troupe willing to be disturbing. The production is a ballsy ballet orchestrated for those who think violence has lost its punch.
King directs his cast of 28 with a rare and outrageously willful eye. Limited only by his modest budget, he pulls off large and fiery ambitions. The play begins with the entire cast in a production number set to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" — but Tori Amos' torchy version, in which theentertain us refrain is more seductive than demanding.
Lost in their own sick voyeurism, Alex (the sinewy and scarily perfect Ian Miller) and his droogs (Burgess-speak for homies) whip up a maelstrom. Sticking to their motto — "Destruction is our ode to joy" — they bludgeon a homeless man to a pulp and then gang-rape a woman while her husband looks on. Alex, fifth in line, glibly asks the victim, "Still with us?"
He gets caught by the police and institutionalized with a team of government researchers hoping to turn Alex's thirst for violence in on itself. Through a series of aversion-therapy techniques that eventually cause him to wretch when he witnesses brutality, the state makes a lamb out of a vicious lion. His conversion is used by a politician (Darren Sextro) to suck up voters, and social order is restored. Or is it? Aren't those Alex's former droogs now wearing police gear?
The production is jam-packed with theatrics that contribute to Burgess' vision of a world gone mad. Bits of Beethoven are scattered throughout the show alongside samples of Nine Inch Nails. But the troupe also performs songs composed by Burgess; he wanted to write a musical — a West Side Story for the strong of stomach. One of these songs, "Discipline," plays over an anal rape while Alex is incarcerated; it's like "Gee, Officer Krupke" crossed with a sadomasochistic porn film.
Cast members all wear bar codes on their clothing or skin; there are too many actors to mention individual achievements, other than to say that they're all in synch with King's intent. The design side of the show is equally accomplished, including Justin Zimmerman's visceral fight choreography, Tamara Kingston's dutiful dialect coaching, and Jeff Mace and Julie Allen's set design. The latter includes computer guts and silver ventilation tubes welded together in gleaming piles, and a cherry-red sofa scarred with duct tape. Their work implies that nothing has been spared a good lashing.
King is as skillful with one person onstage as he is with the full court, though there are places where a bigger budget would have helped. Scenes of Alex's scientific immersion in violent images, for example, could have used videos or slides of quickly edited mayhem. Why spare us when Alex has been so unsparing?
Mind's Eye has been hit-or-miss in its relatively short lifespan, but the company brashly takes its place among the local heavyweights with this show — one that's as eerily topical as it is artistically euphoric.
Maybe We're Crazy
L. Haber
From the mind that created the internationally popular ‘Clive Barker’s Books of Blood’ and the movie ‘Hellraiser’ comes another of Barker’s successes, CRAZYFACE. The downright madness of this three-hour play is performed by a cast of over 30 of the finest members of the local BrainSpunk Theater group.
The show documents the ludicrously long journey of a foolish boy named Tyl Eulenspiegel who casually goes by the nickname Crazyface (Eric Scott Evans), during the tumultuous days of the Inquisition in a European landscape dusted with the most violent and nutty of characters.
The hellish journey begins with Crazyface, Crazy’s mother Ella (Nancy Segal), and three sister-in-laws, (Alexa Smith, Melanie Matthews, and Kara Boland), who were all once involved with Crazy’s older brother Lenny (Joel Dickerson). Alluding to previous whereabouts of always being on the run, Ella proclaims that she wants to put down roots in the crews’ newly found destination, just as Crazyface is being wrongly accused of stealing the homemade “wings” from a town fool, who had just used the devices to jump from a church balcony. Though the fool claimed to have flown before perishing, Crazy has no time to waste in taking metaphorical flight to a new place before he is captured for breaking the law.
On his own journey of coincidental mania, Crazyface is never technically solo, because he is followed around by the voices, or “angels” he has always heard and interacted with-the very reasons why the people he meets call him “crazy.” The taunting and sassy angel to accompany him on this journey, acted adorably by Aaron Palmer, never exactly leaves Crazyface, as he meets a man from Spain who gives him a little box containing, “So little a seed, so great a power.”
Crazy then encounters an Englishmen, a Frenchman, an Italian solider, a band of female bandits who snatch his clothes, and, eventually, a band of wedding-crazed pig breeders. At this point, a confused audience only becomes more confused as the meandering wanderings of Crazyface continue, and the King of Spain (Cynthia Evans/Geoff Bruen) and company, discover he is holding a precious gift that belongs to them.
A scene of complete destruction and set-smashing pandemonium unexpectedly confronts Crazyface with Lenny, who was recently released from a Spanish torture cell by the King’s hilariously twisted Priest figure (Abdel Pena). Lenny was tasked to find Crazyface, and return with the special seed-holding box, and more.
As a “half-wit” on “the road to Rome” with nothing to lose, Crazyface sure shows the audience that to outwit oppressors, they might just have to succumb to the craziness that surrounds the everyday, and take unexpected solutions to new heights. As Barker through the means of Crazyface puts it, “The right wind can take you anywhere-anywhere you want.”
A Seasonably Spooky Treat
L. Haber
Adapted to the stage by Andrew Leslie from Shirley Jackson’s cornerstone horror novel, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is a seasonally spooky treat brought to audiences by Philadelphia’s BrainSpunk Theater. While troubled woman Eleanor Vance (Layne Marie Williams) and sensory perception specialist Theodora (Mahogany Walker) agree to stay at a notoriously haunted house, the house reveals more than slamming doors, misplaced objects, and cold drafts. Rich with sorrowful history and tales of death and failure, “the fascinating secrets of Hill House” find mysteriously chilling ways of helping the guests to relive the past, all under the supervision of curious researcher Dr. Montague (Charles Michael Bendas), heir to the house Luke Sanderson (Seth Linehan), and unfriendly housekeeper Mrs. Dudley (Catherine Deremigio-Fichera).
The labyrinthine dialogue may not be the most exciting to listen to, as every actor in this show voices complicated and intricate lines at an impressively and almost incomprehensibly fast pace. The set, adorned perfectly with Victorian paintings, vintage furniture, and elegant artifacts, snakes audiences into a terrifying encounter that Eleanor and Theodora have with a laughing, evil entity who seems to mock their fear.
After the scariest and most thrilling scene of the play, the characters decide they must stick together in order to continue Dr. Montague’s mission, and fully protect themselves. The main parlor becomes the unlikely group’s “center of operations”, and although the idea of sticking together seems necessary in theory, Hill House’s tenants grow impatient and annoyed with one another.
Just after another good scare and a strange message appears in the upstairs hallway written in chalk, Dr. Montague’s pushy wife (Kris Andrews) and snobby pal Arthur Parker (John Schultz) show up to further confuse the situation. Mrs. Montague attempts to communicate with the spirits of Hill House through a special tool in a way most unpleasant to everyone except Arthur, who delivers some of the quippiest jokes of the show while hitting on handsome Luke.
After an eerie incident in the ominous “stone tower” puts an unknowingly entranced Eleanor in great danger, the other guests decide that she must vacate Hill House before the conclusion of Dr. Montague’s experiment. Having “fallen under the spell” of the murderously enchanting house, Eleanor is desperate to stay. Though the unseen ending is totally anticlimactic, it is true to the original story of Hill House, and is, indeed, an ending. Do not expect to be truly rattled, but do expect to be told what is considered one of the most revered scary stories of all time, during ‘The Haunting of Hill House’.