Laurel Holland and Michael Micalizzi feature in the five connected playlets that make up Itamar Moses' 'Love/Stories.'
A Flea Theater presentation of five short plays by Itamar Moses performed in one act. Directed by Michelle Tattenbaum.
With: John Russo, Maren Langdon, Felipa Bonilla, Laurel Holland, Michael Micalizzi.
With his new showcase at the Flea Theater, Itamar Moses risks serious abuse on the subject of gender politics. But the final word on the writer's five-play mini-marathon is that it's a hell of a lot of fun. "Love/Stories" follows similar well-meaning, if slightly schlubby guys through funny-sad encounters with similar manipulative, unfaithful, histrionic women. With each piece, the writer trots out another ingenious formal device to pick at the knot in his protagonist's heart, but he doesn't seem to be getting any closer to undoing it until at last, he tells us so in the evening's marvelous final monologue.
At least two of these plays have been seen in New York before, in Naked Angels one-act fests. One is that monologue play ("Untitled Short Play"); the other is "Szinhaz," the title of which is Magyar for "theater." For those keeping score, the latter features an experimental director named Istvan (Felipe Bonilla, at his best), presumably after Hungarian national theater founder Istvan Szechenyi. That, roughly, is about the level of overthinking you can expect from Moses, and that showoffy tendency will either get on your last nerve or amaze and delight you.
For those prone to delight, "Love/Stories" is a revelation. Each short piece rotates around a central metaphor -- finite relationships vs. temp employment, professional disillusionment vs. romantic disillusionment and so on. A good one-act rarely needs more than an interesting formal device to sustain it, so this is the perfect forum for Moses' theatrical instincts, especially as realized by Michelle Tattenbaum (who directed both those earlier short pieces and "The Four of Us," Moses' best full-length play to date).
After two or three of these plays, some patterns start to emerge: The male character may be a playwright holding an audition (Bonilla again, in "Chemistry Read") or a tentative temp worker (Michael Micalizzi, in "Temping"), but he's usually put-upon, nice and sincere. Each of the women is bitchy and mildly evil, with the exception of Istvan's translator in "Szinhaz" (Maren Langdon, hilarious both here and as the self-centered office drone in "Temping"), who has her own problems.
The fourth piece, "Authorial Intent," emphasizes Moses' blind spot by deconstructing itself twice without discovering how one-dimensional its main character (Laurel Holland) is.
The ever self-aware Moses goes a long way toward solving this problem with "Untitled Short Play," in which John Russo sets the scene for a final encounter, this time between Bonilla and Holland. He sets the scene for so long, in fact, that the final play never happens, because there's no way it could be good enough. It's just "work filled with so-called characters who are actually just tissue-thin cartoons built mostly from lazy guesswork," he admits. He has no idea what the female character is thinking.
In this last play, Moses uses his skill to demand more of himself than he has in recent memory. He also effectively hands tomatoes to his detractors, but it's hard to imagine many of them flying. This is not a play that uses formal trickery to disguise a lack of depth -- the basis for the most frequent criticism leveled against Moses. Instead, he gives us four very funny plays that, taken together, call into question his ability to truthfully write a convincing female character and caps them with a fifth play stating that question out loud and wondering further what it says about him as a person.
"I sat down here to re-create the closeness, and the very first keystroke begins to re-create the distance," sighs the narrator. We knew we were getting cleverness when we walked in, but this sounds suspiciously like wisdom.
Set, Jerad Schomer; costumes, Jessica Pabst; lighting, Joe Chapman; sound, Brandon Wolcott; production stage manager, Amanda Pooran. Opened Feb. 16, 2009. Reviewed Feb. 15. Running time: 1 HOUR, 45 MIN.
Contact Sam Thielman at
sam.thielman@variety.com
Date in print: Tue., Feb. 17, 2009