In this week's TONY: my disappointed take on My Name Is Rachel Corrie (miscast and misdirected); and Heartbreak House (would someone please deconstruct the fucker!?!); and an inspired write-up of Hell House.
While I didn't have space to mention it in the Hell House review, here are added thoughts. Okay, it's smart, ingenious, lots of fun and incredibly ambitious for the already delightfully overreaching Les Freres Corbusier. But, as with most Les Freres enterprises, the execution rarely lives up to the premise. Heddatron was great on paper, okay in production. There's a studied, intentional amateurishness to the performances and production elements in Hell House that actually detracts from its potential visceral effect. Make no mistake: there is some excellent acting going on there, especially from Jeff Biehl as Lucifer and Julie Klausner as Chrissy, the Botched Abortion Cheerleader. But director Alex Timbers seems to have decided not to actually scare the audience members, perhaps afraid to detract from the obvious humor of the piece. Also to allow us the space to see the fundamentalist-Christian pathology in full putrid flower. I'd appreciate more insanity, energy, shocks and frights, less of the cheap implicit irony. I mean, get us really freaking scared we're going to hell or that these loopy Jesus freaks might plunge a knife in our unbelieving hearts.
Part of me wishes that Les Freres had taken the money that Hell House cost to produce and simply transported an actual Hell House to St. Ann's. Who knows if some goddamn lousy church would agree to it, but Pastor Keenan Roberts, the pious hack who sells Hell House starter kits for $300, cooperated with this show. In fact, Les Freres' boasting that they carefully consulted Roberts to avoid the appearance of satire disturbs me a bit. I guess in my old-fashioned way, I'd rather see a nice play blaspheming Jesus, Mohammed and Moses than an ironically unironic re-creation.
If Lincoln Center Festival were actually curated by anyone with taste or imagination, they wouldn't be commissioning multicultural monstrosities like Geisha or My Life As a Fairy Tale, last year's Hans Christian Andersen turkey, but they'd invite a Hell House from Texas or Colorado to set up shop in Damrosch Park, just as the Iranian Ta'zieh plays did four years ago. (That, and bringing Le Dernier Caravanserail to NYC in 2005 were, admittedly, great moves by LCF.) There could be panels and symposia set up about the role of religion in theater, the perception of NYC by fundamentalist Christians, and so on. Now, anyone who's read this blog should know that I'm a militant atheist, but perhaps the only way to destroy the ancient idiocy of religion is to infect it with reason and humor. Light chasing away shadows and all that.
I thought your review of Hell House was a hoot - you were certainly inspired, and it's nice to see some creativity with the form. But in the absence of a formal review, I will admit to checking the star-rating to try to get a bead on what you actually thought of the piece qualitatively. And a five-of-six star review doesn't seem to reflect the reservations you express here. Pourquoi?
Posted by: rjt | October 25, 2006 at 04:41 PM
Good question! You see, the TONY star-rating system is very intricate, very scientific. Um... The truth is, I covered Hell House in three modes: the TONY review, this blog post, and the NY1 review. Different media, different shades. I guess, given the reservations I had, I could have given Hell House 4, not 5, stars. But the truth is, it's a pretty unique and fun time (althugh $25 is a little steep for a concept) and that went into weighing how many stars. I personally would have liked a more intense theatrical experience, but given the basic ingenuity of the whole enterprise, I thought it merited a little more than 4. Will it end up on my Best Ten Shows list? Probably not. But you're right to ask. Frankly, this blog exists partly so I can dwell on something logn enough to stop liking it. Or liking it so unreservedly.
Posted by: David Cote | October 25, 2006 at 04:49 PM
Nice. It definitely shows up the weakness inherent in a categorical system like the stars, for all that they provide an exceedingly handy mental handhold. When I was reading scripts at EST, we were supposed to give them a rating of 1-10, and even THAT felt limiting. I swear to god, I'd agonize over whether to give something a 7 or an 8, and ended up giving some 7+'s.
It's interesting that the hardest breaking point falls right there, between "It's really quite good" and "It's really REALLY good" - for me, between 7 and 8, for you, between 4-star and 5. In each case, the former can feel like too-faint praise for something where the elements that work do so exceptionally well (which I believe can be said for HH).
In any event, thanks for the thoughtful response. I've heard lots of theoretical discussion of the nature of Criticism, and the possibility of dialogue built around public criticism, but to actually be able to have such a dialogue is extraordinarily bracing.
Posted by: rjt | October 25, 2006 at 11:27 PM