Tag Archives: Chris Tyer

The Revolutionists Mixes Comedy and High Ambition

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Review: The Revolutionists @ Warehouse PAC

By Perry Tannenbaum

Badass. That’s how Lauren Gunderson describes all the women in her feminist fantasia, The Revolutionists. On the heels, high and low, of the touring edition of Suffs that premiered at Belk Theater, the Warehouse production of Gunderson’s 2016 script – with a second all-female cast in the same week – underscored one of the subtler achievements of the suffragists who aided the passage of the 19th Amendment 96 years earlier.

Men and women now openly admire all these badasses and cheer them on!

Cheers and laughter were high among Shaina Taub’s aims when she wrote and starred in Suffs as revered feminist Alice Paul. Gunderson feels compelled to diligently remind directors and actresses who bring her historical script to life that this is a comedy. Since all of her women are living during the apocalyptic Reign of Terror in 1793, midway through the French Revolution, the shadow of the fearsome guillotine looms large.

None of them supports that notoriously bloody revolution.

Charlotte Corday, the most badass, actually embraces the guillotine, the likely consequence of her intent to assassinate Citizen Marat, the radical newspaper influencer. Calling for the same liberté and égalité in her native Caribbean that have toppled the monarchy in Paris, Marianne Angelle, a free black spy, hopes to skirt the guillotine while opening the eyes of the Revolution to the hypocrisies of slaveholding and continued colonial power. And Marie Antoinette, “less badass” than the others, is desperately fleeing the chopping block, hoping to rebrand her clueless, free-spending, and heartless reputation on the fly.

They all converge on the feminist playwright of the day, Olympe de Gouges, in urgent need of her eloquence. Corday has the simplest need: a memorable exit line to proclaim at the scaffold, one that will resound for eons to come. Marianne could use a sharply worded manifesto – with a soft touch – that furthers the cause of her homeland. Marie merely needs a total rewrite and makeover: redemption, whether or not she deserves it.

What a godsend de Gouges is! When we first saw the comedy in 2018, produced at Camp North End by PaperHouse Theatre, it was easy enough to see Olympe as a rather transparent surrogate for Gunderson, shaping the comedy she ostensibly tailors for Marie. Directing that production, Nicia Carla decreed that her Olympe discard her quill in favor of an anachronistic BIC ballpoint, letting us perceive Gunderson’s guiding hand throughout.

Historically, it’s even more complicated: de Gouge really wrote a comedy in which she, a character in her own play, taught the downfallen Queen Marie a lesson. She also penned a manifesto, the courageously feminist Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, punching her ticket to the scaffold. From that perspective, it’s possible to see her, quivering and quailing here as she crafts her Reign of Terror comedy, as the inspirational fountainhead of Gunderson’s fantasia.

With no less than four subtitles: A Comedy, A Quartet, A Revolutionary Dream Fugue, and A True Story.

At the Warehouse Performing Arts Center up in Cornelius, director Reneé Welsh-Noel mutes the anachronisms and the wink-wink meta approach until late in the second act, when Gunderson explicitly decrees that the fourth wall must be broken. Welsh-Noel and scenic designer Chris Tyer utilize the larger space and richer theatre resources at the PAC to offer the playwright’s quartet multiple platforms to declaim, orate, stab, and achieve martyrdom.

One of these doubles as de Gouge’s desk or, if you will, the table in her salon. A glorified picnic table, to be honest. Even her highness deigns to sit herself at this humble furnishing, but a legit settee looms further upstage for Marie’s more regal lounging. Assuring fluidity between scenes, the remaining scenery is sparse: a jut of a snub mantle on the back wall, with a scattering of ornate picture frames.

Except four projections from Jessica Zingher, most of the other frames are blank. They all seem to float apart from the action, though they are preternaturally relevant – like a gallery of images in Gunderson’s mind or her surrogate playwright’s. Making the space more emphatically Olympe’s, sheets of writing paper litter the high-concept floor, a multitude of testimonials to her pathological writer’s block.

Maybe Tyer’s concept mystically correlates the excess of strewn paper below with all the jet blackness inside the empty frames above.

It certainly testifies to the intensity of action from Olympe that yields such a welter of messy futility: the frenzy of the times. Welsh-Noel seeks to keep a vortex of swiftly paced action swirling throughout the evening, spreading her actors across the wide space, amplifying confrontations, with them threatening and lunging at each other. Tension and urgency remain ridiculously high under the shadow of the guillotine. Like a comedy.

Costumes from Welsh-Noel and Zingher add spice and flair, flouncy and beribboned for Marie and continental ninja for Corday. By contrast, Angelle’s outfit pops with Afro-Caribbean color and style, an equally bold statement.

Brave as Olympe may have been in real life in her attempts to champion women’s rights and to reconcile the radicals with the royals, Gunderson infuses her inspiration with her own trepidations over putting your life on the line with your plume. So it’s an ambivalent and bumpy ride for Lisa Schacher as Olympe, one that alternately accentuates the comedy and drama, both of which would suffer if Gunderson’s concoction were more sure of herself.

Jennifer Adams is mostly at the comedy end of the spectrum as the deposed, soon-to-be decapitated Marie: too vain to skulk through the streets in disguise, she materializes in Olympe’s parlor, announcing her own entrance and assuming everybody is talking about her. Yet Gunderson allows her dopiness to vanish at times, giving way to clairvoyance at her brilliant moments and allowing Adams to display maternal feelings – to Marianne, of all people.

Her most charming moments perhaps come when Adams puts aside Marie’s regality and snobbery to become rather childish in her candid enthusiasm, the glue in the quartet’s sisterhood. Sororité!

My chief difficulties with this production came from the eternally serious women, Jane Elvire as Marianne and Marissa Dibilio as Charlotte – though each of them lands a barb or two at the lighter women’s expense. Likely because of her authentic Haitian roots, it took me a few minutes to attune myself to Elvire’s lilting accent, with a couple of relapses later as Marianne’s actions and words become more urgent.

With her bounty of natural dignity and presence, Elvire is exactly what Gunderson had in mind when she described her as “the sanest of them all.” Whether through instinct or through diligent research into Marianne’s historical parallels, Gunderson burdens the free Caribbean black woman with the most adversity to deal with. Ultimately, her sufferings help the playwright pierce Marie’s silly, frilly façade in some of the quietest, most human moments of the evening.

From a dramaturgical standpoint, Dibilio’s dashing outfit may be Welsh-Noel’s most audacious decision. Dressed like that, you multiply your chances of not being admitted to Marat’s bath by his servants and bodyguards. But it helps Dibilio look the part, though paintings of the famed assassin, in action or brooding at the Bastille, opt for more conservative clothes.

At times, Dibilio falls into the trap of sounding too natural in her gripping performance, lowering her voice when she gets really close to other players. When we can hear her, she’s quite compelling.

From the opening, when we hear a falling guillotine and Olympe’s first words are “Well, that’s not a way to start a comedy,” we’re clued in to Gunderson’s aim to mess with us. Talk about audacity, she’s serving us notice that she’s presenting a comedy that writes and rewrites itself before our eyes.

That’s not really possible, is it? But what The Revolutionists accomplishes is nearly as impossible: reminding us that, in horrendously troubled times, the noble words and actions of our finest writers and activists will certainly outlast tyrants, bigots, and bullies. While making us laugh between bloody plunges of the guillotine.

“Wink” Dares Us to Jump out of Our Skins

Review: Wink at Booth Playhouse and Warehouse PAC

By Perry Tannenbaum

If you love cats, you already know the open secret of their appeal: they are all wild thangs. Yes, we can declaw them or inflict various mutilations on their genitalia to superficially tame them. But they will still swat at things floating in the air, still hiss when cornered, still religiously stalk, crouch, bide their time, creep stealthily closer to their prey, and pounce.

And they purr.

In Jen Silverman’s Wink, there is no purring. Now in transit from its opening weekend at Booth Playhouse to the comparably compact Warehouse PAC in Cornelius, Wink may be tough to catch in the wake of its positive word-of-mouth. Reactions at the Booth to the sight gags rank with the loudest, most vociferous, and gob-smacked I’ve heard in the QC.

Spearheading this flawless Charlotte Conservatory Theatre production – at an admirably brisk pace – director Marla Brown has cast real-life husband and wife Steven Levine and Shawnna Pledger as Sofie and Gregor, the caretakers of the title feline. The couple has radically opposing views on Wink. Sofie adores her AWOL pet, while Gregor strives to veil his murderous antagonism.

The unscientific ploy that Sofie uses to partially pierce Gregor’s defenses in this staid opening scene is unmistakably feminine and devastatingly clever. Such fancifulness, heterodoxy, and cleverness suffuse this 75-minute gem.

It’s not glaringly obvious in the sedate, passive-aggressive early moments, but Gregor and Sofie could likely benefit from some top-notch marriage counseling. It’s already too late. Separately, with complete confidentiality, they are seeing the same psychologist, the profoundly lonely and disciplined Dr. Frans, beautifully calibrated by Dan Grogan.

He’s a perfect fit for both Sofie and George. Perhaps too perfect, since the remedy he insists upon for both their ills is the same: tamp down and conquer your outré impulses. Oh, and go on vacation with your spouse as a healthier release of your tensions. It’s a prescription for George and Sofie to go on doing what they’ve done for their entire adult lives.

Played with an edgy insouciance by Nathaniel Gillespie, Wink also goes to see Doc Frans, but not as a patient. Every word from Wink, and every move, indicates that he is – or was – purr-fectly comfortable in his own skin. Out of his skin, Wink remains a hunter, but now, like a snake, he’s a coil of vengeance, poised to lash out.

But what is Wink at this point? Answers at this point will vary among audience members, who may see him as a projection of Gregor’s guilt, a Doc Frans nightmare, a monstrous cat succubus, or a surreal Saturday morning cartoon. Maybe a Saturday night cartoon, since Silverman is delivering a dark comedy and Gillespie can never be mistaken for a comedian.

If I haven’t pussyfooted sufficiently around Silverman’s plot, my apologies for the spoilers. At about this point, I looked at reviews of previous productions and discovered they disclose less, zeroing in on each of the humans’ problems, and not always troubling to include Wink as a character or how he’s portrayed. That’s pretty much how Charlotte Conservatory’s press release handled it, so I was expecting a breezy little comedy, maybe a Sylvia Redux with breeds and genders switched on the title pets.

It would be interesting to hear Silverman’s advice on how much to divulge. In her playscript, she lets the cat out of the bag in her character descriptions, before the action even begins. There’s plenty more electricity to come.

The script is not bossy, very spare in its stage directions, so the shtick we encounter in the opening scene is Brown’s. One thing you’d only detect in the script is its layout, occasionally abandoning its prosaic paragraphs and laying out like poetry – but only after Wink makes his first sinewy and sensational entrance.

How much of the Booth Playhouse audience expected to see Wink? If you caught Gillespie’s photo on Facebook, on a lobby poster, or downloaded the playbill from the posted QR code soon enough, you would know. For those savvy few, the costume design by Allison Collins (and “Group Effort”) provides the needed extra jolt when the spotlight hits him.

The hits keep coming as Sofia and Gregor transform in sudden lurches, arriving at a kind of Peanuts absurdity. With wine. Set design by Chris Tyer, with the unblissful couple’s house at stage left and the doc’s office at stage right, should compress neatly enough at the renovated Warehouse PAC, but somebody will need to confirm for me whether the gratuitous use of the Booth flyloft will be replicated up in Lake Norman. Modifications could also dawn on David M Fillmore, Jr.’s shrewd lighting design.

At its essence, Wink explores what can happen when we rashly, spontaneously, and completely yield to our impulses. It wouldn’t be so frightening – or so much hilarious fun – if we didn’t have a conscience about it all, if we didn’t recoil from our own audacity. On balance, Gregor’s and Sofie’s cover-ups are funnier than their crimes, and both Levine and Pledger play it that way. Silverman layers on additional new obsessions for Gregor and new deceits for Sofia that ironically show us how similar they are as they drift apart.

Are they losing their minds or becoming more self-aware? Silverman has provided a double edge here.

The evolution between Wink and Doc Frans is vastly quieter and quirkier, though there are playful moments. Gillespie and Grogan can play at teaching and learning from each other. Since there’s always a couch to our right, Brown yields briefly, unbidden by the script, to the temptation of redefining their doctor-patient relationship – with Frans reclining on the sofa.

With all the hairpin twists, sudden surprises, and belly laughs, you can reach the end of this whirlwind evening asking yourself, “What did I just see?”: a rare and thrilling experience at the theater. There’s so much wrong with Doc Frans’ preachings of discipline and such excesses in Sofia’s and Gregor’s escalating impulses that we can easily imagine that Silverman wants us to be dizzily ambivalent.

She probably does. It’s the kind of “You just gotta see this” reaction a playwright lives for.

Take a few extra moments, then, to consider Wink as a role model. His hunting routine, repeated more than once, is a blend of discipline and savagery, keen calculation and patience before taking your shot.

Expect that of a dog? Their lack of self-control and stealth is why they hunt in packs. You can train a dog to stop on a dime when it gets a first sniff of its prey, but then it just dopily points its nose in the air towards your quarry. Still imprecisely.

There may be nothing happier than a contented dog; that’s true. Give the enlightened Wink a bottle of wine, and he’s still cool. Cheers!

Photo by Perry Tannenbaum