XL ARTS REVIEWS
'Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge' 'Degrees of Separation'
Monday, November 27, 2006
Comedy
TWIST ON DICKENS CLASSIC BINGES ON MUSICAL COMEDY
Christopher Durang is the playwriting world's answer to Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter ("Adaptation") whose intricately structured stories abound with meta-cognition. What a Kaufman script does for film, a Durang play does for live theater: It normalizes the absurd by embracing the form's perceived limitations, often to hilarious effect. "Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge," a cynical and up-tempo reconfiguration of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" that premiered in 2002, might not rank among Durang's most inventive or outrageous works. But, as Different Stages' joyous production at the Play Theater proves, it is a clever amalgamation of cultural icons.
"Binge" refocuses the familiar "Carol" tale on poor Bob Cratchit's wife, a marginal player in Dickens' novel. Durang envisions Mrs. Cratchit as a cantankerous housewife who makes Anna Nicole Smith-Stern look like mother of the year. Despite being billed as a play with music, "Binge" belongs to another theatrical subgenre — the self-parodying musical comedy. As in similarly intentioned shows (which are wildly popular on Broadway), the characters in "Binge" regularly interrupt the proceedings to deliver — and occasionally sing — some reflexive witticism or topical commentary to the audience. Durang uses these breaks mostly to justify his play's frequent departures from Dickens.
Director Karen Jambon enabled the cast of Different Stages' "Binge" to embody the playwright's tricky balance of empathy and detachment. Although a few actors seemed uneasy with the material, most of the cast gamely conveyed Durang's bristly tone and humor. Nikki Zook (as an uproariously pathetic Tiny Tim) notably maintained her character's integrity while pandering to an enthusiastic audience. Other crowd favorites — especially Julianna Wright (the three Christmas ghosts), Nicole Marosis (Mrs. Cratchit) and Eric Porter (Scrooge) — spit one-liners ferociously, but their quest for laughs sometimes betrayed a moment's dramatic honesty. Nevertheless, the cast's sterling ensemble work overshadowed minor inconsistencies in particular characterizations.
("Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge" continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 9. Play Theater, 1204 Cedar Ave. $15-$30. 474-TIXS.)
— Tommy O'Malley
Installation art
JOHNSON'S EXHIBIT IS A STITCH
Heather Johnson has been beguiling us for a few years now. She spearheaded the delightful "Cracks in the Pavement: Gifts in the Urban Landscape" series that twice had artists leaving small creations in forgotten urban and suburban spots — highway underpasses, median strips, drainage ditches — to be found for the taking, once you hunted them out, that is.
As an individual artist she's used the same quotidian locations as metaphors for our transient, fast-moving modern lives, rendering detailed maps as embroidered pieces of white linen, every line, symbol and notation carefully stitched in black thread.
In "Degrees of Separation," the current solo show at Women & Their Work, Johnson blends her masterly stitched diagrams and charts with delicate graphite drawings of equally mundane urban sites or mechanical objects. Only this time around, Johnson has included fragments of overheard conversations she's been collecting for the past year, stitching or drawing the odd phrases — such "five years old then" or "two steps forward one step back" — into her detailed schematics. The language fragments continue like a visual echo across the gallery walls.
Maybe it's the labor-intensive yet home-spun nature of the embroidery. Maybe it's the painstakingly accurate (and often miniature) details Johnson includes in her maps and plans. Maybe it's the fact that all the maps, charts and diagrams are disenfranchised from their original context and thus, in the end, don't reveal anything to you. Actually it's a combination of it all — and the fact Johnson simply makes beautiful objects — that evoke a feeling of melancholy and isolation: Lots of information, delicately assembled, ultimately leads us nowhere but back to ourselves.
("Degrees of Separation" continues 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Dec. 23 at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St. Free. 477-1064.)
— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
