Cory's Weekend Roundup

You may have noticed I had quite the theatrical weekend.

Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, which I took in at the Thursday night critic's performance, is the last and best new play of the season. To call it dark would seriously understate the matter, but it's not the ironic, "man-is-evil" darkness you might expect. It's much simpler than that. Writers are a notoriously self-referential bunch, believing overtly that their lives are somehow interesting enough to merit in-depth exploration. McDonagh knows this--- and, you could say, means to condemn it--- so he's conjured up a world where telling a story is as dangerous as burying a little girl alive. And maybe he's right. If so, New York is in a lot of trouble.

I then caught the Saturday matinee of Daniel Goldfarb's Modern Orthodox. Since Daniel's a teacher of mine, I won't comment, except to say that my instinctive reaction immediately following the performance was to put the hard-working cast out of its misery and treat them to a warm bowl of Matzoh Ball soup.

Luckily, I was saved that night by the jolt of theatrical energy that is Thom Pain (Based on Nothing). Though it defies description in many ways, this one-man show--- written by Will Eno and performed by James Urbaniak--- walks the admittently thin line between an outlandish lecture given by the youngest, hippest professor you've ever had and the ramblings of a deranged bum in Washington Square Park. Eno has figured out that pretty much nothing that happens in theaters above or below 14th street has been shocking for years, and probably can't be anymore, so instead he celebrates the attempt and exalts in the futility. There's a moment that happens around the middle of the show where Urbaniak's Thom aprubtly moves out of the spotlight and over to the side of the stage. "Can I get some light over here?" he asks politely. He doesn't get it. Thom has the decency to remind us that we're all in the dark, but by the end, I didn't mind all that much, and anyway, there was nobody I'd rather spend it with.

And finally today, I tiptoed over to Studio 54 to see what's going on there these days. It turns out that Natasha Richardson, having, with Cabaret, gotten her Sally Bowles on the select list of Studio regulars, is now back as the infinitely more troubled Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Her voice soft and creamy, her accent dead-on, her body poised to crumble on cue, Richardson will, barring an earthquake, capture the Best Actress Tony this year, and deservedly so. She is not exactly matched by her Stanley, John C. Reilly. Having made a career out of slovenly failure on screen, his persona as a pathetic everyman so engrained that the audience did not recognize him upon his entrance, Reilly lacks the magnetism and sinister appeal that made Marlon Brando so indelible in the original. The star of this Streetcar, really, is its director, Edward Hall, who has accomplished such fine delicacy in the staging and design that I'd sit through just about anything he chooses next.