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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > January > 26
Monday, January 26, 2009
Review: ‘The Bird’ and ‘The Bee’
“The Bird and The Bee” is essentially two very good plays within one great production.
“The Bird,” by Al Smith, and “The Bee,” by Matt Hartley, were originally staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as two separate offerings, giving audiences the chance to view them a la carte or take in the double billing. In Capital T Theatre’s new take, it’s hard to imagine them apart.
Each play tells the story of a different teenager and how they came to meet, fall in love, and die. In “The Bee,” Chloe, played by Tayler Gill, weathers the death of her brother in a traffic accident and is confronted by the insincerity of her friends and neighbors’ mourning. While Gill stands silent, lost in her own feelings, her fame-seeking friend Hannah, played to comically loathsome hyperbole by Melissa Recalde, sets up a virtual memorial, trite pop songs and all.
In “The Bird,” we meet Jakob, who appears only as a silent figure on the other end of Chloe’s instant messages in “The Bee.” While his looming presence there makes him seem a predator taking advantage of Chloe’s suburban discontent, we soon find out that the poor teen’s life is in a whole new category of misery. The crippled son of an immigrant Russian prostitute, Jakob’s only father figure is a teacher who quickly chooses to become a John instead of an inspiration. And yet Jakob remains, for the most part, hopeful and romantic.
I won’t give away the rather dramatic plot revelation that ties the two pieces irrevocably together, but it certainly makes viewing them individually hard to understand. The playwrights add in other little motifs and themes that run across both works, but the more impressive connections are brought out by director Kelli Bland.
“The Bee” is a quiet, bitterly comic play. Chloe is precocious and naïve and prone to ruminating on the nature of public and private spaces, online and off. It’s a work of sweet, subtle connections, with conversations between a drawn-in Gill and her brother, friends, and silent Jakob filling the time.
“The Bird,” however, is largely a monologue by Jakob, played here by Chase Wooldridge giving the best performance that I’ve seen from him. As Jakob relates his life story, he begins with a child’s magical perspective on the world: the clothes left behind by his mother’s visitors are relics of ghosts, the bees in an ever-expanding hive reminiscent of their spirits. The narrative builds like a sad fairy tale until, in a burst of rage, Wooldrige explodes on the ghosts, trying to stop their visits and save his mother. It’s portentous, but disquieting in its own sudden transition.
That switch is the key to the two plays that Bland and her talented ensemble have found to unlock their strengths. On its own, each play is poignant and well executed. As a dual offering, they take on a new tenor of both beauty and horror. “The Bee” strings out the audience’s tension as Gill goes through an arc of ennui to happiness even while the play itself grows tragic. While the cast wrings out all the comedy they can from the horrible townspeople, it can still be a slow build, focusing more on thoughts than actions. That it’s punctuated by the gut punch of “The Bird,” though, makes it a perfect prelude and the pair a wonderful, if emotionally exhausting, combination.
(“The Bird and The Bee” continues at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 28 and at 7 p.m. Jan. 30 at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. $10. 479-PLAY, fronterafest.org)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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Review: ‘Kill Will’
“Kill Will” is an entertaining, though derivative, new play. For better or worse, though, it’s at its funniest when it feels most like a pastiche of other works.
The play opens with, as a sign of things to come, a man lying on the floor, a gunshot, and an ominous threat that there’s more on the way. By the end of the play, it’d be tough to find space for one more body. Mickey, the man on the floor, is a sometime East Ender coke dealer who has uncovered an earl’s storage unit full of priceless artifacts and begun moving them for greater profit. Of course, he still has some loose ends from the drug world threatening to do him in, so along with his slow-witted, aspiring actor partner, he’s out for one more big sell to make good. Unfortunately, everyone from Russian assassins to a museum curator named Ophelia is after him before he can sell the diary of William Shakespeare, which would prove the Bard’s existence and authorship.
If you can already see the touches of Quentin Tarantino, the close parallels to Guy Ritchie, and the influence of playwright Martin McDonagh, you’re well ahead of the game. Tarantino and McDonagh both earn mentions in Austin Alexander’s script, but the similarities to Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” may have been a bit too close to home for a mention. Or, as Mickey is told by his limerick-obsessed bartender, the caper would make one hell of a movie. No matter that there’s already plenty out there like it: They all make good money, so throw in a bit of Shakespeare, and you’ve got an interesting twist.
Oddly, though, there’s not much Shakespeare. Ophelia argues over and over again for the importance of his existence and significance as an English author, but everyone else is more interested in the money than the history. That’s probably for the best since her repetitive lectures come off less like Ron Rosenbaum’s engaging book on the question of authorship, “The Shakespeare Wars,” and more like an angry Wikipedia commenter.
Alexander seems obsessed with saying something, though, and peppers “Kill Will” with rambling meditations on pop culture and self-aware in jokes. There’s talk of the boredom of watching theater and movies, musings on the pointless existence of one-line characters, and, after a hazy first act that killed any nostalgia I had for pre-smoking-ban dive bars, a joke about fiddling with cigarettes to look cool on stage and fill up dead space. The meta-jokes do more to rub in the play’s problems than evoke laughs.
And that’s really too bad. When Alexander surrenders to the riffy style of Tarantino and Ritchie, “Kill Will” can be quite funny. As arch crime lord William Slate, Justin Scalise finds comedy in cruelty and a sardonically low value for human life. It feels at times more like an impersonation of Brick Top, Alan Ford’s role in “Snatch,” than an original character, but it doesn’t matter when you’re laughing. Likewise, Sesar Sandoval and Devyn Ray are laugh-out-loud awkward as the fairly stock Russian assassins, and co-director Nathan Osburn finds little gems scattered throughout a variety of bit characters.
Martin McDonagh has long been heralded—or jeered, depending on your tastes—as the Tarantino of theater. He didn’t earn his fame by name-checking his influences or borrowing their broad plots, but by taking the best of their styles and adapting it to his own stories. When Alexander does that, he’s genuinely funny and very much so. Of course, there’s always a place for homage, and it’s worth pointing out that Shakespeare himself is the most famous and talented copycats of them all. Still with the glimmers of originality and a clever sense of humor running throughout “Kill Will,” maybe this is one time where it’s best not to look to Shakespeare for inspiration.
(“Kill Will” continues at 8:45 p.m. Jan. 29 and noon Feb. 1 at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. $10. 479-PLAY, fronterafest.org)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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