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Lawrence Hecht plays Schultz as a large, cynical, Hawaiian print-wearing Vegas manager. He's the most natural player onstage, and his character casually dominates Payne until the very end, when the hustler challenges him to a game of three-card monte for the club. Nothing about this situation is believable -- why does Payne even want the club? why would Schultz give it away? -- but the card game has real suspense, if only because Ken Sonkin (who otherwise can't find a human nuance in the figure of Jack Payne) really is a magician. He tosses his cards with the grace of a street hustler, telling Schultz to "follow the red queen" and giving quick glimpses of her until all three cards lie face-down on the table. (If anyone knows how hustlers and magicians make the right card vanish, by the way, please write to me care of this paper.) The sleight of hand is supposed to reflect back on Schultz's betrayal of Gina, a trick that might work nicely if the story were more original; but the script is too self-involved to reflect anything.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Comrades in Arms
Arms and the Man. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Allen McKelvey. Starring Amy Mordecai, Lisa Maher, Michael Ray Wisely, and Steven Patterson. Presented by the American Citizens' Theater at the Speakeasy Theater, 2016 Seventh St. (at University), Berkeley, through Aug. 31. Call (415) 564-9872.
Sick of seeing late-Victorian middle-classers frolic and stuff face while the underclasses snatch crumbs? George Bernard Shaw turned to writing plays, which he declared to be "a great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on the stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but a larger stage." Shaw's art-qua-social-reform came with a comedy-of-manners sugar coating but a tart filling to signal audiences to social inequalities.
Director Allen McKelvey of the American Citizens' Theater resurrects one such play, Arms and the Man, where artificial boundaries -- sexual, social, even national -- fall and humanity prevails. The story is straightforward. Passionate, beautiful, moneyed Reina Petkoff (Amy Mordecai) worries whether her at-home affectations -- nose powders and readings of Gogol -- can live up to the battlefield exploits of her fiance, Sergius (Steven Patterson). While bullets fly, gender roles shift, and Reina takes up a pistol against an intruder, Capt. Bluntschli (Michael Ray Wisely), from the enemy side; after dousing Reina's romantic notions of a gallant Sergius defending the innocents of their nation, Bluntschli professes his need for some hearty bonbons and some rest and relaxation. Anxious to be a good hostess, Reina provides that and more. Sergius returns full of pomp and glory to claim his bride. The war is lost and won and affections flop from side to side.
There are other characters, like Reina's duenna, Louka (Lisa Maher), who, cut from the mold of Ibsen's Dora, refuses to play by the phallocentric, master-servant rules of the game, declaring that she has her "own will." And there's the servant Nicola, who fronts contentment with his station in life to save money for the day when he can pull himself into the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. The play's full of such heavy Issues, but McKelvey's direction (balancing the didactic with the comic scenes) along with some excellent acting (as the performers move from serious resolve to cartoonish contortions) animate Shaw's dramatic spirit.
Memorably, when Steven Patterson rubs his hands and declares to Louka that even "higher love needs relief" and she tells him to get stuffed, he goes through a whole medley of body expressions: torso twisting, eyes crossing, cheeks squeezing, ears puffing. Of course, such tomfoolery can also interfere with the audience's empathy with the characters. Occasionally, the characters' too-quick emotional transitions, as when Reina careens from fearing Bluntschli to desiring him, leave us with little that resonates. All in all, however, the laughs abound and the frames that hold up the façades of social inequality topple down.
-- Frederick Luis Aldama
Heaven and Hell
Burning Down to Heaven. Written and performed by Jennifer Bowen. At the Marsh, 1062 Valencia (at 22nd Street), Aug. 5-12. Call 826-5750.
Anne Sexton died quietly in a purring Mercury Cougar in 1974, after a turbulent, half-sane life. ("To be neurotic is, to me, fairly normal," she once wrote.) She was a friend of Sylvia Plath's, who also killed herself, and belonged to a circle of New England poets that included Robert Lowell and Maxine Kumin. Jennifer Bowen is currently an undergraduate at Boston University, where Sexton taught for years, and she's written a one-woman play about the poet by stringing together real or probable scenes from her life. The play is over, after a brief run at the Marsh, and it was flawed; but Bowen's talent for transforming herself whenever she sent Sexton through one of her stormy fugues made it worth watching.
Burning Down to Heaven presented Sexton's timid beginnings as a poet at the age of 29 (after her first suicide attempt), flashed back to choice traumatic scenes from her childhood, and followed her career through poetry readings and the Pulitzer Prize and into the garage with the Cougar. The show's main problem was that it had no focus, no solid story line. Bowen simply ran through the different faces of Anne Sexton, more or less chronologically. I counted six faces: the little girl, the drunkard, the panicked and pill-mad housewife, the sex-crazed therapy patient, the poet, and the Brahmin sophisticate. The first three were stronger than the others. Some of the poetry-reading was precious, and the sex-crazed scenes felt overenthusiastic. It's true that Sexton conducted an affair with one of her psychiatrists during their sessions; but did she really flash her whole leg and pull on a red garter to seduce him? (I mean, where'd she get the garter?) I can't find anything in my Sexton biography to support this, so I think Bowen must have invented the garter scene to "dramatize" the poet's sluttish self, a strategy that worked crudely.
