FringeNYC 2015: Schooled; Serial: The Parody!; Wilde Tales
(© Andrea Reese)
By Zachary Stewart
It's a bit surreal seeing Lisa Lewis' Schooled in the Robert Moss Theater at 440 Studios. That outpost of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts is an ideal venue for this play about overprivileged film students and the miserable professors who cater to them. While Lewis offers a very authentic portrayal of that world, she fails to convince us that we should really care about it.
Andrew (Quentin Maré) is a screenwriter, but mostly he just teaches screenwriting to wealthy students at his alma mater. Atlantic City native Claire (Lilli Stein) is the rare working-class girl who slipped through the cracks (and who's probably hauling a mountain of debt on her back). She's a huge fan of Andrew's work. Her rich-kid boyfriend Jake (Stephen Friedrich), the school's golden boy, is less impressed. To Jake's chagrin, Claire begins to spend more and more time with the professor, hoping that some of his brilliance will rub off. "You know who makes art," he says to her during one of their many barroom writing sessions. "Retarded people." One wonders where wisdom ends and cynicism begins.
Lewis hits on some really important themes relating to art and privilege. "Only kids with money get to make art these days," Claire caustically remarks to Jake. Unfortunately, the implications of that frightening observation are never fully explored.
As portrayed by Lilli Stein, Claire is immensely likable, attempting to navigate a world of fragile male egos in order to live out her dream of making movies. A starry-eyed young dramatist, Claire wants so much for this play to be a rags-to-riches bildungsroman, even as a rather tiresome love triangle keeps forcing its way onstage.
Both of the men in Schooled are fairly insufferable man-babies. Friedrich's Jake is a pompous know-it-all with a limited grasp on reality. Through Maré's relentlessly morose portrayal, Andrew lives out the tragedy of the aging Gen-Xer. He styles himself after a vintage Clint Eastwood (rough boots and jeans designed by Christopher Metzger), but increasingly just looks like Don Imus. He listens to Led Zeppelin in his minivan. There is nothing remarkable, edgy, or cool about his midlife crisis, even if he is a moody screenwriter.
That's the biggest problem here. Even with fine performances and thoughtful direction by James Kautz (the Amoralists), the stakes are too low for us to really care. A disappointing anticlimax hammers this home. As with most plays about writers and artistic types, their lives are not nearly as fascinating as they might think they are.
(© serialparody.com)
By David Gordon
In 1999, a young woman named Hae Min Lee was murdered, her corpse found in the Leakin Park section of Baltimore. For more than a decade, the case, which ended with her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, generated only local interest. But in the fall of 2014, that all changed when journalist Sarah Koenig made it the subject of her new podcast, Serial, a This American Life spinoff that quickly gained international recognition and diehard fandom.
Two of those fans were writer/performers Olga Elliot and Brandi Bravo, who have now turned their obsession into the stage show Serial: The Parody! Bravo plays Koenig herself, a woman so wildly in love with her subject that she'll go to great lengths to see him exonerated, even if that means visiting a trash-eating medium to contact Hae on the other side (both played by Elliot). As for Adnan (Aldo Uribe) himself, he's frequently shirtless and living it up in prison as his muscles glisten.
Under the direction of Jessica Kane, the performances are all better than average for a play of this nature. Bravo not only looks like the real Koenig, but also nails her speech patterns. Elliot impressively makes distinct impressions as six different characters, while Uribe's indifference to his situation also earns hearty laughs. The standout is Jonathan Braylock as Jay, the case's key witness, who brings "unhinged" to new levels of maniacal hilarity.
Overall, Serial: The Parody! relies too heavily on easy humor and over-the-top wackiness. And yet, amid the generally shrug-worthy insanity, there are actually a few glimmers of both genuine wit and surprising intelligence. The writers brilliantly skewer the vagueness of radio in a riotous lampoon of the famous attempt by Sarah and her assistant Dana (Elliot, again) to re-create the state's timeline of Hae's murder. However, there isn't enough of that type of humor to fully sustain the piece's 40-minute duration.
(© Eric Tronolone)
By Hayley Levitt
After publishing his 1888 collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Oscar Wilde admitted that his fanciful stories were "not for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty." What was a confusing concept for the original audiences (who relegated the short stories to their current state of cultural limbo) finds a perfect clarity in Dry With a Twist Theatrics' Wilde Tales — a bare-bones stage presentation of three of Wilde's forgotten parables, adapted and directed by Kevin P. Joyce.
Sandra Bates, Justin Hart, Geoffrey Hymers, Deanna Marie, Sabrina Michelle Wardlaw, and Drew Paramore make up the company of actors interpreting The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose, and The Fisherman and His Soul through a combination of dialogue, music (composed by Joyce), and puppetry (designed by Dorothy James Loechel). The narrative themes of helpless love and self-sacrifice are not the stuff of bedtime stories but charm with their nostalgic balance of childish whimsy and mature poignancy.
The Happy Prince opens the trio with a Giving Tree-like tale in which a statue of a prince (a stately Hymers) gives himself piece by piece to a swallow (played endearingly by Marie, who also composed a delightful song for the segment) to disperse among his city's poorest citizens. In The Fisherman and His Soul, we find a lovelorn man of the sea (an adorably smitten Hart) who abandons his soul (an infinitely expressive Paramore) to be with a beautiful mermaid (a lovely performance by Bates).
The Nightingale and the Rose is the strongest of the three vignettes, led by Paramore as a lovestruck student with Coke-bottle glasses in search of the red rose he needs to win the heart of his beloved. Wardlaw sweetly sings the role of the Nightingale — a hopeless romantic who surrenders her life to provide him this perfect rose. Like its two companion pieces, The Nightingale and the Rose is a gruesome narrative with a tragic conclusion that sharply diverges from the pithy Wilde we are most accustomed to seeing. Even so, the company manages to honor his mischievous ways, capitalizing on a comforting folksiness that warms your heart while simultaneously breaking it.
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