Stage
Rebellion Cabaret
Fri., Jan 21
Downtown wonderwoman Penny Arcade and sitar/rock virtuoso Chris Rael pair up to present this new "rant-n-roll" show. The piece, through Arcade's incisive, hilarious monologues and Rael's music, creates a dreamscape in which Paris Hilton and The Vagina Monologues are standards of progressive feminism. They also comment on "America's new patriotism and the Gospel According to Dubya."
Fez under Time Café, 380 Lafayette St. (Great Jones St.), 212-533-7000; 8, $20.
-Hector Meza
As You Like It
Through Jan. 30
Legendary British director Sir Peter Hall brings to America his Theatre Royal Bath production of Shakespeare's classic about hidden identities and secret love. The play stars Hall's own daughter, Rebecca, as the wily and resourceful heroine, Rosalind. The work features some of Shakespeare's most memorable scenes, including the moment Rosalind, disguised as a young shepherd named Ganymede, teaches young Orlando-clueless as to his teacher's identity-how to woo the woman he loves-i.e., Rosalind herself. The piece is also home to one of the bard's most famous speeches, spoken by the melancholy Jacques, "All the world's a stage."
BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St. (betw. Rockwell & Ashland Pls.), Ft. Greene, 718-636-4100; Weds.-Fri. & Tues. at 7:30, Sat. at 2 & 7:30, Sun. at 3, $25-$75.
-Hector Meza
Gem of the Ocean | open run
Playwright August Wilson nears completion of his 10-play cycle about African- American life in the 20th century with Gem of the Ocean. This installment is itself an epic about the most difficult of American subjects-the lingering psychological effects of slavery. Wilson's specialty is writing characters whose dramatic interactions allow them to discourse on their immediate troubles, but they also reflect on what political, historical circumstances brought them to their current personal crisis.
The play's opening line, "This is a peaceful house," introduces the audiences to Aunt Ester, her maid Black Mary, her handyman Eli, an anxious visitor Citizen Barlow and an intrusive constable Caesar. Ironically, Gem of the Ocean is about people who live in quiet tension. It's 1904, slavery is a real memory (referred to as "bondage"), labor strikes and lynching are a current reality. Busying themselves with different forms of work and survival (Aunt Ester is a clairvoyant known for "cleaning souls"), each character's struggled-for peace is violated by painful remembrance of something lost and the realization of the outside, uncontrollable world.
"It's all adventure," Aunt Ester says, putting a lullabye slant on things. She tries to help Citizen Barlow, a young man who resembles her dead son, escape his demons and find his purpose. Their souls meet in the play's climactic exorcism scene where the ex-slaves' tortured psyches engage with political necessities. They deal with real (and imagined) difficulties. Wilson uses the ocean voyage as a symbol of the Middle Passage and the ongoing roiling adventure of American existence.
Gem of the Ocean is not an ordinary drama. It expands theatrical form into unwieldy shapes-slipping from chamber play to poetic speech and brief, stunning musical sequences that demonstrate how black folk create art as part of their daily subsistence. Some scenes are as swift as a movie montage, others have a prosaic stasis. Wilson is wrestling with forms of expression, challenging playgoers to figure out which style of art suits a character's emotional needs-and their own.
Wilson's vision is as expansive as Tony Kushner's but uses less comedy and more philosophical reflection. He combines the tough lyricism of the blues and the sophisticated rumination of Harlem Renaissance poetry. Black life is his topic, but his real subject is the power of metaphor-faith versus law. (Money = dog shit = something called "pure.") He gets at how Americans believe in themselves, God, a social system or family. Phylicia Rashad puts it together, making Aunt Esther a mythical figure filtered through Wilson's representation of gospel, slavery and capitalism. Her adventure sets up the many tales in Wilson's huge but unbounded cycle. Wilson's art defies easy categorization. As Anthony Chisholm's Solly Two Kings says when flouting the law: "I'm under God's sky, motherfucker."
Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St. (betw. B'way & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; Weds. & Sat., 2 & 8; Thurs. & Fri., 8; Sun., 3; Tues., 7; $25-$85. -Armond White
THE SHAPE OF A GIRL | Jan. 22, 23, 29, 30
There are no crueler beings in the universe than teenage girls-just ask anyone who dared to violate the adolescent female pecking order in middle school. But no one was punished more harshly than Reena Virk, the pudgy British Columbia 14-year-old beaten and drowned in 1997 by a gang of girls and one boy she tried to befriend.
Canadian playwright Joan MacLeod draws on the sensational murder case in The Shape of a Girl, a one-woman show opening this Saturday. Braidie (Jennifer Paterson) is 15, tormented by the shrill Voice of Mom and her own guilt at the escalating violence meted out by her friends on a classmate, a girl they call "It." She becomes obsessed with a tv news report reminiscent of Virk's murder, horrified that the alleged attackers look just like kids at her school.
It's been more than seven years since Virk's battered body was found face down in a tidal pool, but MacLeod's taut script still resonates. Braidie's funny, twisted, vulnerable character saves the play from the sermonizing that plagues so much "youth-oriented" theater. Though it's hard to imagine fidgety teenagers being able to sit through a 55-minute monologue, attendance should be mandatory for all those still mired in the hideousness of high school.
The Shape of a Girl kicks off a 36-state tour with its New York debut, which includes six shows over two weekends. The New Vic will also host a panel discussion Jan. 30 featuring city Council Member Alan Jay Gerson, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and Omari Jeremiah, the 14-year-old author of Paperboy, an illustrated book series about a superhero who defends kids from bullies.
New Vic at the Duke, 229 W. 42nd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 212-239-6200, 2 & 7, $20.
-Anna-Kaisa Walker