Reviews

MITF Roundup #3

Andrea Kolb inSometimes Over the Summer...
Andrea Kolb in
Sometimes Over the Summer…

From a funny, Upper-West-Side Jewess facing a mid-life crisis to a distressed pulp heroine with a one-way ticket to Tinseltown, this year’s Midtown International Theatre Festival is brimming with desperate dames of the Diaspora doing solo performances. Andrea Kolb riffs on secular Jewish culture in Sometimes Over the Summer; another performer puts her epic experiences as an globe-hopping singer-dancer-poet into an exposé called On the Couch with Nora Armani; Marta Rainer, a second-generation Polish-American girl, goes to absurd lengths to explore her Slavic roots in Unaccustomed to My Name; and a pink haired ‘toon embarks on a dizzying voyage of self-discovery in Inside Cherry Pitz. They are all women on a mission to find the soul of an identity in constant flux.


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Sometimes Over the Summer…


Andrea Kolb is a highly physical comedian who will spread-eagle herself (with remarkable flexibility) to get a good laugh. She’ll also use her elastic facial expressions to milk a joke to the fullest without crossing the line to hamming. Much of Sometimes Over the Summer… is composed of segments of her various stand-up comedy acts, and she’s a talented comedian. As theater, though, the show winds up a little thin because the actress often sacrifices depth of character for punch lines.


SOS is about a modern woman — presumably Kolb herself — faced with managing a career, a marriage, a family, and a lover. Apparently, it’s an exhausting combination, and the audience watches her try to juggle them all. She spends her limited free time at her local Barnes & Noble, reading the latest trendy self-help tome and fending off the men who constantly hit on her. One of these gents wins her over and they start an affair, but the play reveals too little about either the woman’s husband or the “other man” to make this conflict dramatic.


Sketches about the woman’s family are also underdeveloped, composed mostly from obvious stereotypes like the overbearing Jewish mother and the brassy grandmother who gives frank sex talks. There’s a joke about her father causing awkwardness at the dinner table with his talk of politics but we never learn what causes he feels passionate about. The characters rarely scratch through the familiar if sometimes funny surfaces.


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On the Couch with Nora Armani


A certified singer, dancer, poet, performer, and expatriate extraordinaire, Nora Armani puts all the bells and whistles into her solo show. There are almost too many bells at the beginning and the play seems like it’s going to be a heavy-handed meditation on the differences between performance and reality, but Armani soon settles into her act and lets her sincerity carry the evening. Her persona is as inviting as the couch of her title, radiating warmth and understanding.


Armani is nostalgic for all of the countries that she has visited; for example, her France is the country of cafés and Edith Piaf. She even expresses sympathy for imperial Britain and, at one point, romanticizes the power of the colonizer while singing an English anthem! By the end of the evening, she will make you understand her point of view.


Still, her ingrained optimism doesn’t prevent her from vividly describing the Armenian genocide that most (not all) of her family managed to escape or the repressive nationalism of Nasser’s post-revolution Egypt that ultimately drove her to the States. Once she arrives in America, she faces that casting problem of many minority actors: being considered “too ethnic” or “not ethnic enough.” This kind of sharp commentary is the spine of her show and prevents it from becoming a novelty act.


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Cyndi Freeman as Cherry Pitz
Cyndi Freeman as Cherry Pitz

Inside Cherry Pitz


Cherry Pitz had a traumatic experience as a young performer: During a drag show, she was booed off the stage for actually being a woman. That memory caused her to take a perilous road, as a young starlet, to a “city of lost angels and vagabonds on crack.” Still, she was a hopeful gal. When she unwittingly took residence at a local whorehouse, she found herself enamored with the red lights of the brothel that twinkled “just like it was Christmas.”


Spoofing pulp fiction seems like a redundant exercise since the genre is already steeped in irony, but bravura performer Cindi Freeman sends up the form in a way that manages constantly to surprise and provoke. Beneath the pop veneer, Inside Cherry Pitz is a snappy exploration of postmodern identity. Freeman’s early experiences as an impersonator launch the play’s gender commentary, which the actress complicates with plot twists involving Elvis karaoke (don’t ask) and a revelation about her absentee “mother.”


Although Freeman gets some easy laughs with jokes about Monica Lewinsky and the furry former sitcom star Alf, her mostly strong writing vacillates between the poetic and the absurd — and is sometimes both at once. Her instincts, charm, and inventiveness as a performer are first rate, and she does chameleonic impressions of an East-Ender Brit, a Broadway diva, and the French. Her curtain line is a winner: “You’re in America, where every mother’s son can be the President — or Bette Davis!”


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Unaccustomed to My Name


Perhaps the only comedy composed largely of quotations from 19th-century Russian literature, Marta Reiner’s Unaccustomed to My Name impresses the audience not only with the performer’s obvious erudition but also with her humor, versatility, and heart. The play concerns that most familiar of characters: the overeducated post-graduate who has to face a big, scary world.


The image of Reiner soaking in a tub while wearing a bathrobe and quoting the classics symbolizes that sorry state of affairs. A second-generation Polish-American girl still living in her hometown in New York State, she wants to spend a year traveling in Eastern Europe but she ultimately heeds her mother’s warning about the Russian Underground: “They won’t care that you can quote Dostoyevsky off the top of your head when they’re stuffing you into a burlap bag.” Reiner has a talent for one-liners, such as this musing on liberal guilt: “If only I could legitimately have ‘the blues!'”


She also has a knack for mimicry, and her spot-on impressions of her friends and family become fodder for an interesting plot twist. Reiner eventually takes that Eastern European trip in her imagination, traveling north to Buffalo under a Russian alias and pretending to be a Siberian émigré. It’s not surprising that the writer-performer roped in good reviews when she presented the show in last year’s Edinburgh Festival; one expects that Unaccustomed to My Name has a long and fruitful journey ahead.

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