The Burning House Group
Review: "Knock Knock"
Kate Sullivan's Top/Bottom Five
for 1997
by Kate Sullivan
THE TOP
1. Quills, Eye of the Storm
Set designer Dean Holzman gave
this show a dark, clever elegance, and Stephen
D'Ambrose located the fractured humanity in his character,
the Marquis DeSade.
Directed by Casey Stangl (and written by Doug Wright), this
show achieved all its goals:
Besides commenting articulately on the dangers of censorship,
it stood as a hunk of
finely wrought theater.
2. Jar the Floor, Penumbra Theatre
Granted, this was a revival,
like seemingly everything Penumbra's done of late. But not
having seen it the first time, I didn't know what I was in
for, and ended up getting socked
in the gut by a tight female ensemble (directed by Bette Howard)
and an unrelenting,
tough script by Cheryl West.
3. The Diary of Samuel Pepys,
Upstart Theatre
Craig Johnson culled a mostly tight, mesmerizing
script from Pepys's lengthy
Restoration-era journals and, through his winsome performance,
crafted an uncanny
time capsule. For a couple hours in the Bryant-Lake Bowl, the
past was alive and
winking back at us.
4. Blue Window/The Crackwalker, Hidden
Theatre
I can't say anything nice about The Crackwalker's script
(by Judith Thompson), but
Hidden Theatre's treatment was a triumph. Blue Window (by Craig
Lucas) was less
challenging in its subject matter but far more sophisticated,
delving delicately into the
silences between its characters. And Annelise Christ deserves
real recognition for her
role as Libby, the reluctant hostess.
5. Tie: Knock Knock,
the Burning House Group/Bus Stop, Jungle Theater
Randal Berger
was something of a revelation for me in Burning House Group's
slapstick
production of Jules Feiffer's rarely performed script. The
whole cartoonish package was
a wonderful jumble (and I loved the clunky hook-and-harness
mechanism that lifted
Joan of Arc in the air for her finale--talk about showing the
strings!).
Bain Boehlke's set for Bus Stop was almost excessively
realistic, and the company
found just the right cadences for this story about a group
of lonely people snowed in
overnight at a diner. A Midwestern story told by Midwesterners,
pitch-perfect.
THE BOTTOM
1. Death of a Pickle King, the Catchgate Group
No comment.
2. Dear James, Lyric Theatre
Dreadful blocking; weird, unneeded
characters; bad fake-Irish accents; a mess of a
script.
3. You Can't Take It With You, Guthrie Theater
A chestnut
on par with Arsenic and Old Lace. Onstage at the Guthrie. And
pretty poorly
acted, to top it off.
4. O Pioneers!, Great American History
Theatre
Either you know how to do a Swedish accent or you don't:
There is no middle ground.
This spare production evoked none of the riches in Willa Cather's
prose, and included
harsh, dissonant live music to further jar the ear.
5. Cinemamerica,
Theatre de la Jeune Lune
In fact, this piece contained my favorite
theatrical moment of the year: Barbra Berlovitz
Desbois's transcendent, endless soliloquy (written by Steve
Epp) about nursing Abe
Lincoln to his death; at its heart, there was a moment of suspended
light, when two
boys juggled fire and the gathered mourners jumped into the
air to the beat of a ragtime
tango. Other than that, one might kindly say that the show
did not fulfill its potential.
|
