CRITICS' GALLERY
"Bravo, NY!" by Dominic Orlando
Originally produced at Synchronicity Space last June
Samuel Beckett Theater on Theatre Row through February 28.
Directed by Karin Bowersock, with choreography by by Lisa Bleyer.
No Pants Theater Company’s latest production essays to present a slice of New York life on June 21, 1998, the centennial of the incorporation of New York, Brooklyn, and surrounding suburbs as the City of Greater New York. Although the show is billed as a comedy and the title might reasonably expect a show with this title to celebrate life in the Big Apple, nearly every character has some horrible experience or comes to a bad end as a direct result of living in New York.
Much of the play’s dark humor falls flat, as in the case of a newcomer who rents an apartment cheap because of a “roach problem”—and when did that ever happen?—which turns out to be an enormous cockroach that permanently occupies one of the rooms. Some of the writing is just strange: One character mentions that he comes from a small town in Delaware, “just 20 miles west of the Water Gap.” A cop presents his brother with a handgun for self-defense, pointing out that the gun is safe to own and use because “the serial number has been filed off.” Say what?
The upper classes are represented here by a Trump/Helmsley-like creature named Duncan Thyme (Dan Lundy) who is so concerned about polishing his image that the hires spin doctor Ben Graves (Frank Spinelli, whose name is also, somewhat mysteriously, the name of another character in the play, portrayed by actor Christopher Winfield). Thyme creates the Empire Awards, to be presented at a huge fete on Ellis Island. (Graves’ best shot, by the way, is a TV commercial with Mick Jagger singing—at any price—“Thyme’s on Your Side.”) The lower orders appear in the persons of Hap (Brendan Lieb), a sick man who becomes homeless because he can’t pay his rent in a Thyme building, then descends into insanity, and The Boy, a very young Hispanic lad who runs away from home to explore the city (played unconvincingly by Sara Kathryn Bakker, a thankless task for a tall blonde).
Nearly everyone else in Dominic Orlando’s play is a cater waiter (and most of these are desperate, wannabe actors as well), working for a company owned by Maurice Lumiere, an overweight faux-nobleman (Mark Poppleton) and his lover Boyd Harp (James Anderson), a failed dancer. Among the waiters is Robin Goodman (Daren Firestone), a struggling playwright/producer.
Unfortunately Orlando’s ambitious, sprawling play—with its many quick cuts from place to place and 26 characters played by 10 actors—severely challenges the resources of his company. With all the quick changes, it’s not always clear, especially early on, which characters are supposed to be on stage in any given scene. This is particularly true of actors who possess a distinctive physical stage persona, such as Lieb, who turns up first as Lumiere’s houseboy, then as the miserable Hap, and finally as a young man who’s recently inherited a lot of money; only plot developments convince us that these are three very different people. Similarly, David Dial mostly plays the waiter Darko; when he turns up as the minor character Arlene, you wonder whether Darko does drag in his spare time. The capable Mahasin Ali is fine as a new employee in the catering company, but when she appears as Thyme’s secretary or as a lah-de-dah museum executive, she comes across as someone doing stand-up imitations. But it’s a problem for others as well. The excellent Bakker plays both the girlfriend of Goodman and the wife of Graves, two similar characters, suggesting that Orlando intends the women to be generic. [Hammond] --John Hammond
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