From MX
BG--
Theater Review: Romance
by Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt on 12/06/2007
This holiday season, Zealot Productions decided not to launch the typical Christmas play — indeed they decided to do just the opposite. Romance, a comedy by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, is set in a courtroom and follows a trial that’s literally gone crazy. With a pollen-sensitive judge popping antihistamines, an anti-Semitic lawyer defending a Jewish chiropractor and a homosexual prosecutor caught in a relationship crisis with his flamboyant boyfriend, this play isn’t for the faint hearted.
If you’re not familiar with the most recent developments in derogatory name-calling, this unabashedly non-P.C. play will bring you up to date, and in doing so it will leave you bent over your seat in a fit of laughter. The small amount of order that the trial begins with quickly collapses, resulting is a disorderly and intensely funny debate between these broadly painted characters as they poses many worthy questions: What will resolve conflict in the Middle East? Was Shakespeare a Jew… was he gay? What do homosexuals really… do? What will happen if a man takes too many of his allergy pills?
Zealot’s cast of seven is strong, and the play’s director, Ryan Madden, seems to know that his cast shines on stage. In a theater made to hold 50 people, the BeBe enhances the feeling of being a part of the play’s dysfunctional trial. If you want to laugh this holiday season, don’t miss Zealot’s production of Romance. However, be sure to leave the kids at home.
Romance will at the BeBe Theatre till Dec. 8th and begins at 7:30 p.m.
— Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt, listings assistant
07 December 2007
Romance
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I recently came across a blog called wnctheatre.livejournal.com and was delighted to find some reviews of local shows. I have no idea who the blogger is or how to get in touch, so for now I'm posting these without permission. If anyone knows the blogger, please check and see if they mind!
Bernhard Grier--
Zealot Productions’ second (?) full-length production was David Mamet’s Romance, a contemporary farce centering around truly absurd court proceedings and a collection of dysfunctional characters spewing forth a veritable symphony of racist and homophobic epithets. I’m not sure if Mamet intended this play as a satire, some sort of bizarre personal catharsis, or just a bunch of nutjobs acting like nutjobs. It came across primarily as the latter for me. Fairly solid performances by all, John Crutchfield being a slight stand-out. A fun show, lots of laughs, a few cringes (at the brashness of the material, not at the presentation), wish the script had a little more apparent substance to it.
also from wnctheatre's blog...
--BG
I agree with you about the Mamet script, and about John Crutchfield being the standout, but I also found the play to be for the most part woefully miscast. These were supposed to be New York lawyers and judges? When most of them noted having graduated college in the last couple of years? C'mon... The other thing that I found really annoying about this show was the costumes: the lawyers wore cheap ill-fitting suits, shoes that were not even dress shoes, and did not even have good knots in their ties. I'm unsure why they decided to produce the script in the first place, because it didn't seem like they were able to cast or stage it right--not that it was exactly capable of greatness anyway (why not just do Glengarry, Buffalo, or whatever else if you want to do Mamet?).
Post a Comment