Ethan Lipton’s new cabaret piece, The Outer Space, could pass muster as a one-man musical—or four-man musical—since saxophonist/keyboardist Vito Dierterle, guitarist Eben Levy and bassist Ian M. Riggs are on the compact Joe’s Pub stage with him.
I guess it’s a musical for not being a random collection of songs lyricist Lipton has written with others but a series of songs relating to a story he’s telling on which he collaborated with his musicians.
A married couple with no given names (unless I somehow missed them) buys a battered spaceship and, at odds with each other, travels about the universe for a while. The rift is due to her being comfortable with their chosen journey and his being uncomfortable.
If you haven’t already figured out what Lipton is up to, I just as well might tell you. Lipton, outfitted in designer-costumer David Zinn’s space suit—as are Dierterle, Levy and Riggs—is offering an allegory of marriage. He’s letting us know that enduring marriages, as is often noted, are hard work.
This is hardly a new bulletin from the cosmos, but the low-key Lipton is pleasant company, and so is his stream of ditties. A particularly good one (no song list in the program) is about one of the pair preferring a new set of problems to an old set—thus underlining Lipton’s basic belief in acceptance of what you can get in life as opposed to what you might wish for but not get. Call it his personal theory of relativity.
As Lipton croons them with edge, the songs do tend to blend into each other, but the playing and the arrangements are, uh, stellar. Every once in a while, the trio gets a salty musical break, and they’re all enthralling.
Leigh Silverman is listed as the director, but this isn’t the biggest challenge the buy helmer has ever faced. Aside from Lipton’s moving aside when the musicians’ take focus, he remains center stage, occasionally bopping coolly.
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Are you familiar with the Omega Kids graphic novels? If not, you’re giving yourself away as a member of an advanced generation. Fear not. Neither was I in on the ground floor, but I’m slightly au current now that I’ve sat through the 85 minutes of Noah Mease’s Omega Kids.
These kids are graphic-novel inhabitants of a dystopian world common to these enterprises. These kids—featured in an Omega Kids edition placed on seats of the 30-capacity Access Theater 15-feet-square box in which the play unfolds—are not, however, the play’s true protagonists.
The kids we get to see are Michael (Will Sarratt) and Michael (Fernando Gonzalez), two young teachers spending the night together at the Gonzalez/Michael’s apartment after a day together at a conference.
As they laze about on the wall-to-wall carpeting, their nervous gab is mostly taken up with Sarratt’s Michael attempting to hook Gonzalez’s Michael on the great charms of the graphic series. That obsessed fellow just can’t get enough of the violent plot’s twists and turns. On and on he goes, sometimes setting aside the copy he has at hand to return to it before only a minute or two has passed.
But guess what! Parsing Omega Kids XIII isn’t what’s going on here. Mease intends his Omega Kids text to disguise the subtext. The situation becomes evident within a short time after Michael and Michael begin continually shifting positions on the carpet as they shoot the breeze.
That breeze is severely charged. What’s actually transpiring is a prolonged flirtation. Gonzalez’s Michael, a self-announced gay man, and Sarratt’s Michael, a closeted gay man, are extremely interested in each other, and the suspense here is if and when they will declare themselves.
Whether they do or not—all the while Sarratt and Gonzalez are completely submerged in their roles, under Jay Stull’s direction—won’t be revealed here. What will be disclosed is that playwright Mease prolongs the cat-and-mouse activity longer than he needs to get his message across.
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There’s merit, and then there’s meretricious. To read Jen Silverman’s bio in the program for The Moors, you’d conclude she must have plenty of merit to have earned the recognition she’s achieved all over the place in her young career. To name only a few of her abundant citations, this very play has already had an acclaimed (at least in some quarters) Yale Repertory Theatre production, and Silverman has a two-book Random House contract.
Okay, well and good. Then there’s The Moors, before your very eyes at the Duke. To get right to the point, it’s noting short of meretricious. The title suggests a few subject-matter possibilities. It could be about actual Moors. It could be about a family called Moor. Or it could be, given the moors it conjures, about the moors-dwelling Austens Emily, Charlotte, Anne and Bramwell.
Since so many contemporary writers are taken—for good reason—with the driven moors scribblers, the play does turn out to be a spin on the three English sisters and brother, who aren’t longing to get to Moscow, or even London, but are content to imagine fictional worlds of their own.
Silverman is cagey, however. The only Austen mentioned by name is Bramwell, who doesn’t appear. He’s called Branwell here, but close enough. Only two sisters make themselves available---and are named Huldey (the usually terrific Birgit Huppuch) and Agatha (Linda Powell).
The other women on view are Marjory (Hannah Cabell), who plays both a maid and a scullery maid, Emilie (Chasten Harmon) as a governess and Moor-hen (Teresa Maria Lim as an actual moor-hen). Lim’s scenes are with Mastiff (Andrew Garman, as an actual mastiff).
Don’t ask what Moor-hen and/or Mastiff have to do with anything going on here. Also don’t ask why Marjory has typhus and coughs brazenly whenever she’s one of the maids but not the other. Apparently, this is Silverman’s idea of humor.
It’s sufficient to know that The Moors, directed by Mike Donahue with gritted teeth, is an insultingly bloody Gothic travesty of the Austen lives—perhaps influenced by Seth Grahame Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Maybe Silverman intends to lodge strong statements about contemporary female liberation. If so, she’s fallen far short of her target.
A page in the program notes that Silverman is also a cartoonist and includes a cute drawing of a character she dubs “Sad Panda,” who can be followed on Instagram. Maybe she should stick to the cartooning for a while and spare audiences any more of these stage abominations. Otherwise, she runs the risk of transforming all of us into sad pandas.