The Salt Girl
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“If someone told me that a play that included a man doing a techno dance in a full body panda suit would be my favorite show of 2009, I would never have believed them, and yet sitting here looking over the program for Boston Playwrights' Theatre's The Salt Girl, I cannot help but relive the flood of emotions I felt when I saw this show on Saturday night. Was it the handfuls of Fruity Pebbles being thrown into the audience? Perhaps the hunks of celery that Actor and Playwright John Kuntz hacked apart with a meat cleaver and threw at audience members crunching all around me in the otherwise silent theatre? It could have been the breathtaking set, a wall of televisions glowing ominously and flickering with film clips and pictures, as if we were seeing directly into the mind of the character, or it could have been delightful sound-scape which seamlessly led the audience through time periods and state of mind (Adam Stone should be commended). I'm not sure I could pinpoint one detail of this thrilling play that could define its perfection, but as my companion and I agreed, we would be forever changed for having seen it.”
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“John Kuntz gives an exceptionally brave performance in The Salt Girl, and not just because he performs one scene in the nude and another in a panda suit. That may make The Salt Girl sound gimmicky. It's much more than that. True, this one-man play, written by the actor, has gimmicks aplenty, including a Hollywood Squares-style, floor-to-ceiling backdrop containing nearly two dozen TV sets, on which flicker images that range from humdrum to hallucinatory.
... At bottom, The Salt Girl is a meditation on the power of that big, wounding, and inescapable question: What if? Kuntz explores that question with arresting originality ... Under the inventive direction of David R. Gammons, Kuntz takes a lot of chances, and he asks a lot of the audience within the small Boston Playwrights' Theatre, too. If Quint cannot escape the claustrophobic confines of his mind, neither can we.”
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“There are elements in Kuntz's strange, piquant tale — in which a soupçon of autobiography is ballooned by imagination and then wrapped in a mix of 1970s television, '80s rock, and the occasional Bach cello suite — of the Jon Benét Ramsey murder case, and the formative experiences of a gay man haunted by memories at once sensual and bruising. At one point, Quint spots the heavy-breathing memory man who keeps calling his cell phone afloat in the sky and appeases the specter by donning a panda suit and serving up a committed, mechanically gyrating dance that takes him into the audience and back. But mostly this wounded soul tells his story from the bleak, blinking confines of his father's hospital room, where he tries to connect with a man beyond connection.
For all its ramblings down a memory lane strewn with also-ran candy, sugary cereals, and encomia to celery and The Love Boat, The Salt Girl is the creepiest and most potent thing Kuntz has written since the chilling two-hander Sing Me to Sleep. And in a raw, brave performance in which he sheds most of his zany mannerisms (not to mention his clothes), the actor makes us weep for his peculiar train wreck of a character, serving up painful history and recipes for Waldorf salad, even as we laugh at him.”
Blackbird
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If you’ve got a free evening and a thick skin, you must go see SpeakEasy’s production of “Blackbird.”
And if you haven’t got a free evening, make one. And if you haven’t got a thick skin, grow one. Just make sure you see it.
Director David R. Gammons has established himself as Boston’s go-to guy for gritty theater, and here he proves himself the reigning champ. It helps that he’s working with Bassham and Wilder, two top-notch actors who give career-making performances. Both seem to have subsumed Harrower’s characters into their psyches. Gammons leads them in a sort of dance in “Blackbird,” their attract/repel body language telling the story that their words conceal. Bassham, particularly, all but lays her innards bare. It’s shocking - and humbling - to witness.
...To sit through Gammons’ “Blackbird” is to take a trip into theater’s own heart of darkness. It isn’t easy. It certainly isn’t cozy. But it is unforgettable.
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...if you agree with Edward Albee that playwrights should be slugging audiences in the face, the aptly named Harrower’ play (at SpeakEasy through March 21) is for you. It was for director David R. Gammons, who felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach after reading it. But don’t worry, you’ll feel no physical pain, except for at least one moment of almost unbearable tension.
...Gammons and his two actors, Marianna Bassham and Bates Wilder, make this play their own, with help from a crack design team.
...Gammons and Wilder and Bassham do a sterling job with the spare, half-sentence dialogue that has its roots in Pinter and Mamet, even if the rawness of the emotions and the surprise twists and turns are closer to what goes on in Neil LaBute’ dramatic universe. Gammons is Boston’ master of ultra-violence. He won an Elliot Norton Award for“Titus Andronicus” before moving on to such pleasant ditties as John Webster ’ “The Duchess of Malfi” and Martin McDonagh’ “The Lieutenant of Inishmore."
I won’t say whether there’ any violence in “Blackbird,” but the way Bassham slams a door or bats Wilder’ tie away attests to Gammons’ ability to transfer that punch in the stomach. And in this case, you needn’t be a masochist to appreciate such a well-delivered blow.
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What can be written about "Blackbird" – a play so disturbing, yet so telling in its exploration of humanity’s contradictions on the dark side – that can convey the conflicting emotions of a viewer?
...Under David R. Gammons’ clinical direction, this production is the best example in a long time of drama needing little more than "two boards and a passion.'' The action of the play, set on designer Eric Levenson’s sterile re-creation of a garbage-strewn, corporate lunchroom under white fluorescent lights, is about a confrontation between Una and Ray, 15 years after their illicit affair.
...The image of the title, "Blackbird," is as disconcerting as the relationship between Una and Ray, making one think of birds of prey pecking at the vital organs of road-kill. But, as difficult as it is to watch the situation unravel, it is even harder to look away. I can guarantee that the issues between these people, coupled with the stories we’ve read in the press about sexual predators and the damage they inflict, yet enhanced by two virtuoso performances, will keep "Blackbird" with you long after the stage lights come down.
The Duchess of Malfi
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But the best reason to see this Duchess of Malfi is that David R. Gammons is directing it. Both in ASP’s Titus Andronicus a couple of years ago and in The Lieutenant of Inishmore at New Repertory Theatre earlier this season, Gammons has shown that he knows exactly how to stage a gorefest, with or without buckets of blood. So it’s not surprising that his Duchess of Malfi has plenty of violence, but not a drop more than it needs. ... Gammons has slashed the text with abandon, leaving all the juiciest bits and also highlighting the stark central tale ... Gammons sets all this on a long, narrow runway down the middle of the handsomely rugged basement space at Midway Studios, with heavy paneled doors looming at either end and the audience arrayed, like spectators at a grisly tennis match, on both long sides of the stage. We can't help watching the other spectators as well as the action, and their expressions of shock, wincing pain, or incredulity become part of the play itself. As for the action onstage, it is bold and visually dramatic, with a heightened stylization that feels exactly right for the extreme passions boiling throughout. From the first image - the Duchess, swathed in black veils, gazing impassively at us from center stage - through the crisp deployments of servants, the feverish swirling of a madmen’s dance, the curiously beautiful execution with thick scarlet ropes, and on to the final deadly tableau, each moment is at once an arresting image and an action charged with energy.
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The production exceeds the company’s always-high creative standards, and David Gammons’ direction makes the work accessible to a modern audience. ... The set (by Gammons), light (by Jeff Adelberg), and sound (by Cameron Willard) all mesh flawlessly, creating a tone and an atmosphere that is part haunted house (dig the human bones beneath the floorboards: they don’t come into play in the story, but they do tell us a thing or two about life at court) and part family driven political thriller. ... Gammons reigns it all in, imposing a rigorous, often geometrical discipline on the play’s blocking and overseeing split-second timing on lighting and sound cues. Such careful preparation pays off: events move along with the momentum of a Greek tragedy, charging along unstoppably. ... Under Gammons’ direction, and in the unique Midway Studios location, "The Duchess of Malfi" is pure theatrical spectacle.
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T.S. Eliot famously opined that John Webster saw "the skull beneath the skin." In David R. Gammons’s staging of the Jacobean dramatist’s "The Duchess of Malfi" for Actors' Shakespeare Project, we see the skull beneath the stage. In the director’s scenic design, the 1614 revenge tragedy is played out on a long runway overhung by crystal chandeliers and bookended by gilt-edged doors. But beneath the narrow strip of a playing space are strewn caches of bleached bones: skeletons in the basement — perhaps because, in a milieu so murderous and corrupt, the closets are full. ... As with his plasma-free Titus Andronicus for ASP, Gammons’s staging is stylized. At the center of the runway sits a plexiglass chair occupied at the beginning by Jennie Israel’s duchess ... At ASP, her palace a prison where the comings and goings are propelled by jangling music and the repeated clanging of slamming doors, she dies a stoic, almost triumphant death — far nobler than those of the less savory characters who follow her like dominoes in a work that could as easily have been inspired by an Elizabethan tavern dare to one-up the death count of Hamlet as by a jaundiced world view.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
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I love this play. I loved it when I saw it on Broadway in 2006, and I love it in its current incarnation from the New Repertory Theatre. Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a work by a playwright at the top of his game. It’s funny, gross, innovative, poignant and exceedingly well-crafted. ... Having staged the Bard’s gory Titus Andronicus for the Actors’ Shakespeare Project last year, director David R. Gammons is no stranger to a bit of the old ultra-violence. He ranges wide, using the Arsenal Center’s whole stage and backstage, for Inishmore‘s killing grounds.
And it’s true that the wretched excess onstage can be disarmingly, almost sickeningly funny; there’s a kind of brilliance to the fury with which McDonagh blows his characters and his story apart. Certainly Wednesday’s opening-night audience had its share of huge, disbelieving laughs, and a couple of them were mine. For that, credit goes not only to McDonagh’s razor-sharp writing, but to Gammons’s skill in keeping the razor’s edge poised right at our throats for the full two hours. His pacing and focus are superb, and the whole production supports and rounds out his vision of the play, from set designer Janie E. Howland’s shabby cottage on a blasted heath to Gail Astrid Buckley’s tatty costumes, Karen Perlow’s incisive lighting plan, and Rick Lombardo’s careful choices of ear-blasting punk and hard rock. Kudos, too, of course, to special-effects designer Stephen Tolin for all the blood and guts.
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Except that it’s a black farce, not a tragedy, you could call The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh’s Titus Andronicus. The 2002 Olivier Award winner and 2006 Tony nominee, which is getting its area premiere from New Repertory Theatre (at Arsenal Center for the Arts through November 16), is so rife with mutilation and dismemberment that you might as well direct it with a Cuisinart. Faced with similarly poetical mayhem in the Bard’s Titus, David R. Gammons, who won an Elliot Norton Award for his staging, spilled not one jot of stage blood. Now we know why; he was saving it up! Gammons’s production of Inishmore sets the largest Aran Island afloat in a bucket of plasma: it gushes like Old Faithful and splatters like Jackson Pollock….By the time act two rolls around, with executions nested in executions like Russian dolls and the stage strewn with less-than-realistic-looking body parts, you don’t know whether to cry mercy from Quentin Tarantino or John Millington Synge. But between Gammons’s adroit mayhem management and Rick Lombardo’s sound design, a layering of traditional Irish rebel songs and propulsive rock that adds to the play’s momentum, McDonagh’s one-trick pony canters. And both the acting and the accents are ace.
My Name Is Rachel Corrie
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Rachel Corrie is a superlative work, here in a superlative production by director David R. Gammons and actor Stacy Fischer. Comprised of text from Corrie’s journals and e-mails, it was adapted for the stage by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner. The work presents Corrie not as a martyr or an extremist - as she has often been portrayed in the media - but as a precocious, idealistic woman coming into adulthood and reacting to what she sees. The play opens on Rachel in her Olympia, Wash., bedroom and follows her to the Gaza Strip. Her voice is funny, honest and poignant, and through the alchemy of Corrie’s words and Fischer’s dynamic performance, we’re drawn in from the word go.
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The play’s Rachel Corrie, here portrayed with endearing vitality and quintessentially youthful self-contradiction by Stacy Fischer, first appears huddled under a comforter in her messy room decorated with postcards and stuffed animals, and we realize: Oh, she’s a kid. A college kid, with idealistic dreams of becoming an artist and saving the world, but a privileged, white, American middle-class kid who’s never actually had to face genuine hardship or conflict.
And then she ends up in Gaza. She’s there, the play tells us, to protest the bulldozing of Palestinian homes by the Israel Defense Forces. Most people in the audience already know how that story ends, with her death in 2003 when one of those bulldozers knocked her down. Some of the controversy about the play concerns whether it accurately depicts these circumstances: Was she protecting homes or smugglers' tunnels? Did the bulldozer driver see her? Was her death an accident or a murder?
But the experience of actually watching the play leaves us less interested in those questions, and more interested in the development of a specific, flawed, but fascinating human being. The almost giddy young girl we met at the outset has, by the end, grown into a far sadder, more complicated, and yet still resiliently optimistic woman.
Of course this play tells Corrie’s story from a personal perspective, not a universal or objective one. That’s what makes it a play, not a news story. And that’s what makes it worth watching, worth thinking about, and worth discussing rather than shouting it down. Thanks to New Rep for giving us all the chance to do just that.
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Downstage @ New Rep, under David R. Gammons’s direction, Stacy Fischer rather emphasizes Corrie’s high-flying, socks-and-boxers-clad cuteness. Living her scattershot if well-intentioned local activist’s life in Olympia, she never stops moving, whether to “Ruby Tuesday” or the self-consciously audacious sound of her own mouth ... Once the character gets to Gaza and her idealism meets its Waterloo, Fischer, growing stiller, captures her horror and her heartbreak. But don’t look for two sides here — or even for an acknowledgment that there are two sides. "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" is a memorial to a sensitive, slyly humorous young woman who wanted to do some good in the world and thought she could by making lists and banners and a commitment, all of which she did with a whole heart.
Titus Andronicus
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“…Gammons directs for actors and audiences, too, with an assured control of movement, imagery, and theatrical space that sends us hurtling into the starkly nightmarish Rome of “Titus” with terrifying clarity and speed…
Through it all, Gammons evokes gruesome violence without stage blood or rubber heads. And, by refusing to distract us with a sensational bloodbath, Gammons focuses our attention on the play’s deeper themes of cruelty, tortured loyalty, and revenge…” -
“…ASP actually makes a valid case for it in an elemental, ritualistic, and very masculine staging surrounded on four sides by audience and what look like cave paintings. Although the gore is understated, the violent imagery is not…Gammons has streamlined the arguably Artaudian script, calling forth the military toughness of its characters…but also their unexpected tenderness… Moreover, despite this contrast of martial brutality and sad sweetness, the production, with its dim but harsh lighting by Jeff Adelberg and effectively mechanistic sound design by Cam Willard, is very much a whole…”
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“ …A circle of stones; the spilling of ashes; some coils of rope; tears; and, of course, blood. These are the elements of the more than impressive production of Shakespeare’s seldom-mounted tragedy ‘‘Titus Andronicus,.. The catalogue of murders, vicious rape, and evil deeds, placed by Shakespeare in ancient Rome but transformed here into modern dress, is nearly beyond human comprehension… Under the skilled and chilling direction of David R. Gammons – who also designed the eerie setting of walls blank except for a blotch of blood and a few animal totems – an all-male cast stalks through the ritualistic presentation that elevates the gore to nearly ceremonial status…”
David R. Gammons — Theatre Direction and Design
166 Main Street
Concord, Massachusetts 01742
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