Synopsis A collection of five one-act plays written by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner. Flip Flop Fly! - A bizarre lunar encounter between two dead women, Lucia Pamela - the fabulous American concert pianist, singer, songwriter, recording star, bandleader and radio personality, who claimed to have made a record album on the moon in1969 - and Geraldine, the deposed queen of Albania. With one nattering on about her life in entertainment and the other about her life in exile, the two compare the courses of their lives. Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence - Sitting in an office are Esther, an analyst, and her former patient, Hendryk, along with their lovers, Dymphna and Billygoat , respectively, as Hendryk, pleads with Esther to take him back as a patient. East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues - An outrageous 1990s scheme actually used to avoid paying taxes. As a housing detective discovers its success, news of the fraud spreads rapidly, prompting the government to investigate. Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise - Metatron, a Recording Angel with a million eyes, is holding a supervisory session with Dr. Hutschneker in an upscale office in heaven. The two discuss how Hutschneker’s pains and his denial of mortality could quite possibly be related to his sessions with his own patient, Richard Milhous Nixon, with whom he frequently meets in the afterlife. Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy - Now-former First Lady Laura Bush reads from The Brothers Karamazov to the pyjama-clad ghosts of dead Iraqi children, all of whom are watched over by an angel.
Last week (3 September 2010, previews from 1 September), the Tricycle Theatre presented the British premiere of the Guthrie Theater/Berkeley Rep production of Tiny Kushner, a collection of five one-act plays by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner.
Running until 25 September 2010, Tiny Kushner is directed by Berkeley Repertory’s artistic director Tony Taccone, and transfers replete with its all-American cast of JC Cutler, Kate Eifrig, Jim Lichtscheidl and Valeri Mudek.
Kushner is one of America’s most prolific playwrights and the winner of awards including the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Emmy Award, an Olivier Award, two Evening Standard Awards and a Golden Globe. His plays include Angels in America, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, Hydriotaphia and Slavs!. He also wrote the book and lyrics for Caroline, or Change (which transferred to the National Theatre in 2006), and the screenplays for Angels in America and Munich.
So were the British critics as enamoured as their US counterparts?
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (three stars) - "Five short plays by Tony Kushner prove a mixed bag in this feisty import direct from the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis ... It’s always a pleasure to welcome actors as good as these from the other side of the pond: Tony Taccone, one of Kushner’s longtime associates, directs a versatile quartet in some acidic, fantastic collisions between Richard Nixon’s therapist and the Recording Angel; a bizarre St Louis beauty queen turned entertainer and the scary real-life Queen of Albania; and Laura Bush and three invisible dead Iraqi children ... This latter sketch is easily the best, profoundly squirm-inducing as Kate Eifrig’s Laura offers false comfort and apology while reading from her favourite author, Dostoevksy. The worst item is a baffling series of mini-scenes delivered (very well) as a monologue by Jim Lichtscheidl as a rabble-rousing anti-tax activist."
Libby Purves in The Times (three stars) - "If you’ve a taste for left politics, trippy fantasy, intellectual exhibitionism and kvetching New York-Jewish comedy, this is your night. Parts of it were definitely mine ... The performers are beautifully balanced: Valeri Mudek in innocent blonde parts, Kate Eifrig edgy and alarming, Jim Lichtscheidl doing narratives and uncanny imitations of teenage girls, and JC Cutler in wilder character parts ... The final play is the most shocking: a poignant angry session in which Laura Bush - wonderful Eifrig again, mixing ladylike guilt with repressed anger - arrives in Paradise primary school to read Dostoevsky to Iraqi children dead of sanctions and bombings ... You could hear a pin drop."
Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard (four stars) - "This quintet of one-act plays shows Tony Kushner at his most fanciful and eclectic ... In truth, all five of the pieces here are slightly too long but they neatly display Kushner’s flair for creating a sort of mad conceptual ballet, in which the ordinary collides with the extravagant and indeed the ethereal ... Tony Taccone’s production sustains a nice rhythm across the five constituent parts, yet it’s Kushner’s linguistic dexterity that impresses most ... While not all of Tiny Kushner takes wing, there’s plenty to admire in this two-hour exhibition of the playwright’s distinctive, showy intelligence."
Michael Billington in the Guardian (four stars) - "Tony Kushner is still best known for his epic fantasia Angels in America. But, even in these five short plays imported from the Guthrie Theatre and Berkeley Rep, he reveals his gift for blending the hallucinatory and the political ... Tony Taccone's production saves the best till last: a playlet, which caused a scandal in America, in which Laura Bush treats a group of dead Iraqi children to a summation of the Grand Inquisitor's speech from The Brothers Karamazov ... At times, fantasy descends into whimsy. An opening sketch about a lunar encounter between an American chanteuse and an Albanian royal left me cold ... A playful, political evening that, although wildly uneven, testifies to Kushner's continuing belief in ambivalence."
Paul Taylor in the Independent (four stars) - “Radical politics and erudite, high-camp fancifulness inform these five short but imaginatively outsize works. As in Angels, invented characters, supernatural beings and real-life figures are brought into bizarre confrontations … In a loony, posthumous encounter on the moon, Kate Eifrig's hilariously sour Queen of Albania, an embittered fascist exile, squares up to her ideological opposite, the semi-delusional, relentlessly optimistic American entertainer Lucia Pamela ... Ms Eifrig is magnificent in the haunting, climactic play … The resulting conflict between her official mission (to reassure the children that their deaths were necessary for the cause of freedom) and her deepening intuitions (that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Dick Cheney have much in common, say) creates a painfully moving, speculative portrait of a decent, divided soul.”
Five short plays by Tony Kushner prove a mixed bag in this feisty import direct from the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, where they were first seen as part of a Kushner Celebration in May 2009.
It’s always a pleasure to welcome actors as good as these from the other side of the pond: Tony Taccone, one of Kushner’s longtime associates, directs a versatile quartet in some acidic, fantastic collisions between Richard Nixon’s therapist and the Recording Angel; a bizarre St Louis beauty queen turned entertainer and the scary real-life Queen of Albania; and Laura Bush and three invisible dead Iraqi children.
This latter sketch is easily the best, profoundly squirm-inducing as Kate Eifrig’s Laura offers false comfort and apology while reading from her favourite author, Dostoevksy. The worst item is a baffling series of mini-scenes delivered (very well) as a monologue by Jim Lichtscheidl as a rabble-rousing anti-tax activist.
Delightful, bright-eyed Valeri Mudek and jowly, jaundiced J C Clayton pick up the pace and help disguise the awkward genesis of the sketches (one or two were written as magazine articles), but not Kushner’s unique ability to channel his view of the world through imaginative reconstruction of some of its leading players.
It’s a long way from the epic Angels in America to this – and I’m afraid it’s all downhill. I thought Tony Kushner was a major new playwright, but everything since Angels (with the exception of the musical Caroline, or Change) suggests he’s more of a one-hit-wonder. Only one of these five short plays really works – the rest is like Beckett on acid. The first play has Albania’s Queen Zog with a fictional(?) American musician on the moon. It’s preposterous, pointless and dreadfully over-acted. The second is a conversation between a lesbian therapist and her gay ex-client; I haven’t got a clue what it was about. The third takes an interesting true story of tax evasion but by presenting it as a breathless monologue I became so irritated that I stopped paying attention to the story. If you return after the interval (we did!) the fourth is another obtuse sketch about Nixon's psychotherapist in paradise. The play that does work is the last one – a chilling tale where Laura Bush reads Dostoyevsky to dead Iraqi children. Sadly, this is too little to late. I found a lot of the acting coarse, but given the material this may be excusable. Of course, it may be that I’m just thick, but it seems to me Kushner is following the well-worn path of others like Beckett, Pinter and Churchill; playwrights whose become minimalist with work so ambiguous, so obtuse and so obscure that they appear to be disappearing up their own backsides (or in this case, butt – he’s American). It’s also a long way from Minneapolis, but I have to be honest and say that from where I was sitting it was a wasted journey. - Gareth James
14 Sep 10
4 stars for the acting and a begrudging 3 for the writing. Out of the five plays 2 stand out and each of these has a solo performer. East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, performed by Jim Lichtscheidl, is a virtuoso turn of accents and characters and was the best, but Kate Eifrig runs him a close second with her beautifully mannered portrayal of Laura Welch Bush (yes the president's wife) reading to a group of dead Iraqi children. The first play, Flip Flap Fly, was, I think, too bizarre for a British audience - I could imagine the howls of laughter the actors would have received from a Minneapolis audience so the deathly silence of a County Kilburn audience must have been very unnerving for them, but Kate Eifrig and Valeri Mudek valiantly battled on - god bless 'em. The two other plays would go down well in NYC but London? Two out of three for me then but for you it may be 5 out of 5. Even so it's good to see these transatlantic exchanges and I hope we get the chance to experience many more. - rds
Film information line 020 7328 1900. Society of London Theatre member. The theatre has a cafe - La Brunelloise Traiteur - serving pre theatre snacks and meals from £2-£6.
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