Tiny Kushner: An Evening of Short Plays by Tony Kushner
Direction & Scenic Design, David J. Miller; Stage Manager, Margaret Umbsen; Costume Design, Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design, Chris Fournier; Sound Design, Walter Eduardo
CAST: Maureen Adduci, Craig Houk, Kara Manson, Victor Shopov
Performances through October 22 by Zeitgeist Stage Company in the Plaza Black Box Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, MA; Box Office 617-933-8600 or www.BostonTheatreScene.com.
One fact is irrefutable: Tony Kushner is an intelligent and gifted writer. If he had retired after penning his 1993 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning epic play in two parts Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, this singular achievement would have cemented his legacy in the pantheon of the finest American Playwrights of his and several other generations. It is our great fortune that Kushner is prolific and has continued to write for both stage and screen, garnering an Emmy Award, three Obie Awards, and an Oscar nomination, among many others. Now, Boston theatergoers have an opportunity to sample a tasting menu, as it were, as Zeitgeist Stage Company opens their 2011-2012 season with the East Coast premiere of Tiny Kushner, a collection of five short plays which were packaged together in 2009 by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for a mini-Kushner Festival.
Artistic Director David J. Miller directs the play and hand selected four cast members who have all previously worked with him at Zeitgeist. Although none of the four has acted together before, their chemistry in the mix and match nature of Tiny Kushner is organic. Kara Manson and Maureen Adduci set a light tone in the opening segment Flip Flop Fly!; the duo concludes the play on a decidedly more serious note in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. Adduci and Craig Houk pair up in Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker In Paradise, Manson plays a bit part with Victor Shopov in East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: A little teleplay in tiny monologues, and all four appear in Terminating OR Sonnet LXXV OR "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" OR Ambivalence. (Note that Kushner's penchant for lengthy, detailed titles for his plays persists!)
Kushner's scripts often cast a laser beam on both political and religious topics, and he skewers real people, dead or alive, in the process of telling his stories. The roster of characters in Tiny Kushner includes 20th century musician and eccentric Lucia Pamela, Queen Geraldine of Albania, Richard Nixon's psychotherapist Dr. Hutschnecker, and former First Lady Laura Bush. The author mines his own life and Shakespeare's 75th sonnet as the basis for Terminating which explores a symbiotic relationship between a therapist and her client who can't seem to disengage from each other. The 36th president's shrink finds himself on the analyst's couch in the afterlife with Metatron, the highest of the Jewish angels who also serves as the celestial scribe. In searching for common themes amongst the five plays, there aren't many, but three of them are set in the afterlife and Hitler's name is dropped on more than one occasion. However, Miller concedes that there are none that pervade the entire collection.
What does pervade Tiny Kushner is the playwright's incisive wit (three of the selections are comedic) and the Zeitgeist ensemble makes solid contact with the funny bits, as well as the more deeply dramatic. Shopov is practically manic, yet masterful in his portrayal of twenty-two characters (seven of whom are women) in East Coast Ode. In the tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, he differentiates each person simply by facial expression, voice modulation, or a shift in posture. His only props are a nail file and a typed sheet of paper. Houk is believable, first as the clingy client prone to rages, and later as the psychosomatic medicine specialist undergoing his own analysis.
