Review: Dance Nation

Dance Nation
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
17 March 2019
Red Stitch
to 14 April
redstitch.net

"Dance Nation". Red Stitch. Photo by Teresa Noble

You'll probably never hear a 10-, 11-, 12-, 13-year-old call themselves "prepubescent". It's a word so distant from the experience of being that age that it rarely escapes from text books. It's a time when you feel like a child and look like an adult or feel like an adult and look like a child. And get treated in ways that are embarrassing, inappropriate or ick either way. Dance Nation is about girls in this in-between age, as seen through the memories of women in their 20s to 60s.

USA playwright and actor Clare Barron had her first play produced in 2013 and has since won some significant awards. Dance Nation is her seventh work and this Red Stitch production is its Australian premiere.

It's set in a local USA dance school that's desperate to get to nationals (finals). Their dance teacher (Brett Cousins) knows that their sailor routine isn't up to scratch, so he's developing a work for his six-girl- one-boy troupe about Gandhi. Oh, yes, it's as ridiculous a dance as it sounds, and is made even more wonderful with Holly Durant's choreography, which solves the problem of the tiny stage, and Adrienne Chisholm's glitz-on-a-pocket-money budget gold design and ballet-mom costumes.

All the pre-teens are played by adults (Caroline Lee, Zoe Boesen, Casey Filips, Hannah Fredericksen, Natalie Samsu, Tario Manvondo, Georgina Naidu and Shayne Francis, who also plays all the moms) and all bring the experience of knowing that the adult life you imagine at 12 isn't the life you live. None of which makes the confusion of personal competition contradicting personal friendship less confusing. Or makes the realisation that your body's changing in ways that will keep you on stages or get you off stages, and that your choice may be irrelevant. Or that you will be sexualised or not sexualised no matter what. And that doesn't stop once you're a teenager, adult, older adult or older-still adult.

Maude Davey's direction has the style of a daggy suburban dance competition with a core of sophistication and experience that's inspired by the emerging power girls find at that age. This is power that girls are often told to suppress, but we'd all rather learn the routine that lets all women hold onto that power and ignore anyone who says it's wrong.

Review: Detroit

Detroit
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
28 August 2015
Red Stitch
to 26 September
redstitch.net

Sarah Sutherland. Detroit. Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Detroit never says it's about Detroit. It's about suburbs where communities are falling apart and the hope of the hard-work way to an easy happy-ever-after is disintegrating in a world where the only real trickle down is insecurity and crisis. Directed by Tanya Dickson, the Red Stitch production keeps its feet in America but feels like it's made for the suburbs that many of us abandoned in our 20s and find ourselves heading back to in our 30s and 40s.

Writer Lisa D'Amour is from New Orleans, studied playwriting in Texas, and is also known for co-creating site-specific interdisciplinary works. Her play Detroit was first presented by Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2010 and on Off-Broadway in 2012. It was a Pulitzer finalist and won the Obie Award for Best New American play in 2013.

Ben (Brett Cousins) and Mary (Sarah Sutherland) had nice safe jobs, then Ben was laid off and is on his computer starting his own financial planning business. The house next door is a mirror image of theirs, except it's falling apart. It was also empty until Kenny (Paul Ashcroft) and Sharon (Ngaire Dawn Fair) move in and come over for a barbecue and talk about how they met in rehab and are trying to buy the house by working in a warehouse and a call centre. In a place where neighbours no longer talk to each other, everyone welcomes a convenient friendship that doesn't ask too many questions or notice just how broken their new friends are.

The tiny stage at Red Stitch isn't made for sprawling backyards and at first Matt Adey's set of two white dollhouse-esque houses and mini yards feels like it's being squished into the space. The the first scene ends and the white becomes a screen for images moving down the unchanging-but-constantly-changing suburban streets. This makes the mini houses defy the space and brings us into the hugeness and unexpected beauty of the suburbs, which some of us drove from to enjoy to the inner-city theatre.

The writing's bitterly funny and sprinkled with symbolism like a planters wart eating into the soul/sole of the community and touches of magical realism as the characters describe their dreams. The pitch-perfect performances revel in its comedy but are grounded in its gritty truth, and the direction finds an uncomfortable truth that's as much part of Melbourne as it is Detroit.

I wonder if I'd have laughed so much if I didn't live in Highett.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Glengarry Glen Ross

Glengarry Glen Ross
Melbourne Theatre Company
19 July 2014
The Sumner
to 9 August
mtc.com.au

Photo by Jeff Busby

David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross is many things. It won Mamet the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama because it captured a time, place and attitude so remarkably. He re-wrote it as an acclaimed film (1992) and the play's an aspirational piece for actors. Who doesn't want to do a Mamet? But this MTC production fails to capture what makes Mamet so popular.

It's hard to make the anger and social-grasp of Mamet dull, but director Alkinos Tsilimidos manages to make it feel like a soporific mid-afternoon tv movie. It passed the time pleasantly enough, but lacked any spark to make a blaze.

The cast are all terrific actors, but seem to be performing to be watched for their performance rather than working together to tell a story (which has nothing to do with John McTernan coming in at the last minute and still having his script).  They're enjoying the experience of being in the play, but they're not bringing the audience into the world on the stage.

There's no way in for the audience an emotional connection or to find a reason to care. The most empathy comes from Brett Cousins, as the conned Lingk, but the play's not about him; he's there to show what a dick Roma (Alex Dimitriades) is and what a dick Levene (McTernan) can be.

The detail of the design's 1980s office is a welcome distraction, but there's no comment, fun or satire to support the script or help make it about now and us. And it's not like there are no parallels to easily draw about dodgy real estate being sold to people who can't afford it.

If a production isn't a reflection of us and now, why bother?

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Out of the Water

Out of the Water
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
7 February 2014
Red Stitch Theatre
to 8 March
redstitch.net

Red Stitch have opened the year with some of the best performances I've seen there.

Out of the Water is by US writer Brook Berman. With parallels to The Odessy, with its journey home disrupted by sirens, it captures the unease of early middle age that's fuelled by the palpable pain of what's missing or what might have been.

Polly (Kate Cole) is in her later 30s and leaves New York for a funeral, one of her dead mum's husbands, where she meets Graham (Brett Cousins), her nearly-forgotten step brother, who never left the same conservative Illinois town. They're not related and there are drunken sparks, but Polly doesn't expect Graham to turn up in NY or that his 17-year-old daughter with a Jesus crush, Cat (Emily Milledge), would follow.

With a story ostensibly about family and fidelity, there's fear of movie-of-week melodrama, but it's quickly dismissed as director Nadia Tass embraces the overt theatricality of the work and ensures a tone that lets the humour be dark and the subtext speak loudly, as the lovers say everything except what they want to.

The lighting design (Jason Bovaird) creates texture and more spaces than the design, but this cast could perform in a concrete bunker and still make us care.

Too often at Red Stitch, actors put their performances before their characters; not in this case. Cole and Cousins make the attraction between these broken and not-especially-likeable people felt as much as it's seen, and their toeing of the not-incest-but-not-Facebook-status line makes for a tension that's only momentarily broken with frantic – and hot and honest – sex.

Their contrast is Cat, who wants to bring her dad home but gets caught up in the excitement of being in NY, finding a perfect first kiss and wondering if falling in love is as wonderful as ice cream. Milledge (who last year came to attention in The Rabble's Story of O and Room of Regret) finds endless hope in this teenager who knows she should be hurting and understands what her dad is going through far more than Graham does himself.

With the year starting with such complex and complete performances from a cast who work with an awareness that makes them feel like they really are family, I'm excited to see what Red Stitch  – with new Artistic Director, Ella Caldwell – bring us next.

This was on aussietheatre.com.

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Review: Stockholm

Stockholm
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
29 April 2012
Red Stitch
to 26 May

Stockholm continues Red Stitch's not-to-be-missed 2012 season. Why I know that it's is bloody great theatre: After the show, I sat with my friend and we talked about how it related to our lives.

We didn't talk about the quality of the post-show wine or about the performances or the design (all great). We talked personally and exposed issues in our own relationships that we'd normally hide. The ability to  reflect on your own life may be the line between entertainment and art; it's certainly the line between being glad I went to the theatre rather than staying home to watch The Voice.

Todd and Kali are young and gorgeous and have enviable sex . They gutted their house to create a love nest that they never have to leave and ignore phone calls from Todd's mother. Loving Ingmar Bergman films, they are planning a trip to Stockholm and are practicing their Ikea-Sweedish, as Todd prepares a perfect dinner and Kali checks his phone for messages.

Blending third person description with naturalism, UK writer Bryony Lavery's beautiful script creates the distance and denial that exists in a destructive co-dependent relationship. The desire to be in the relationship and to be happy overwhelms that voice that knows it has to end but wonders if perhaps the awful bits are the price for the wonderful parts and is silenced by the "attraction of true remorse".

Director Tanya Gerstle understands the eponymous syndrome and creates an uneasy mood as intense as their sex life.  With levels and spaces created by Peter Mumford (design) and Richard Vabre (lighting), the tiny stage feels both isolated and cavernous, and allows Todd and Kali to move and hide what they need to from the other.

Gerstle also lets Brett Cousins and Lusia Hastings-Edge find their own truth in their characters. It's this kind of honest acting that lets an audience find their own truths on the stage. The relationship they create stage is erotic and natural and fearful, which comes from a remarkable trust between the performers. They let us understand why they behave like they do, don't let us take sides and almost draw us into the destruction by wanting them to be work it out.

I'm so over leaving theatres and not caring about what I just saw, but I keep going back because once in a while, you get a show like this.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Review: The Aliens

The Aliens
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
27 August 2011
Red Stitch
to 24 September

On realising that The Aliens was another work about young disillusioned American youth on July the fourth, I was as disillusioned as a disillusioned American youth who has realised that the American Dream is a crock. But it didn't last, as this is a fascinating and beautiful study of young men drifting from love and home.

American writer Annie Baker is only just 30 and has already won significant awards for her plays Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation (which is on at the MTC this month). The Aliens is her third major work and was nominated for an Obie (the Off-Broardway Theatre awards given by The Village Voice – the Off-Broadway Tonys).

All three are set in a fictional Vermont town called Shirley. Shirley's fiction enables her to easily transform into any city. Even with northern hemisphere accents and references, it was no stretch to see the same world a short walk from Red Stitch's theatre, in any direction.

Heartbroken novelist Jasper (Brett Cousins) and shroom-loving college drop out KJ (Brett Ludeman) spend their days in a filthy alley behind a new-age cafe. Their comfortable silence is strangely comfortable to watch and the intrusion of high school student Evan (David Harrison), who works part time in the cafe before going to Jewish band camp, lets them talk about their band with many names, Bukowski's poems, their respective genius minds and their attempts at reaching to women for comfort.

Baker's gentle writing lets us observe and accept without judgement.  Her exposition is such a part of their conversation that is goes unnoticed and her story is so subtle that the impact of its climax is unexpected, especially as director Nadia Tass is unafraid of the silence and lets her actors use the time to create men we know and recognise.

This is writing needs time to settle into the hearts of its audience, but its sparseness creates a world that is far more familiar than alien.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by David Parker

Review: The Creditors

The Creditors
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
19 November 2010
Red Stitch
to 18 December

Is love always a competition? Would we really rather that our exes thought we were happy than to actually be happy? August Strindberg had three wives and if his art is any reflection of his life, then there's no wonder that a long quiet monogamous life wasn't for him.

This new version of Strinberg's The Creditors by UK playwright David Grieg was commissioned by the Donmar Warehouse in 2008. The adaption maintains the formality a of Strindberg's language, but ensures that we can't dismiss the behaviour and emotional impact as a reflection of its time. Couples still hide behind decorum to rip shreds off each other and no one fights as dirty as someone trying to ruin love, apart from someone trying to make their lover love them better.

Whilst waiting for his beloved wife Telka (Kat Stewart) to return, crippled artist Adolph (Brett Cousins) takes counsel from the older and wiser Gustav (Dion Mills). Gustav insists that Adolph has been emasculated by his wife's independence and her writing career and can only regain his masculinity through sexual abstinence. It all makes complete sense to the sensitive artist, especially as the gorgeous Telka still flirts with no regard to his manhood. On her return Telka isn't keen on the idea and wonders why her husband wants to know too much about her ex.

In Strindberg's world, relationships are about personal gain and his characters show the side of love that is governed by ego, jealousy and control; where winning is far more important than how they play the game.  We all like to think that we're better than that – but I dare anyone to not recognise a moment or a motivation with regret.

The Creditors is an actors play. Each role is a gift for the cast who relish every syllable. This results in three different performances and as each character is so unaware of the feelings of other people this strengthens their isolation and leaves little room for authentic connection. If we felt too sorry for any of them or believed they could be happy, The Creditors might be too painful to laugh at . 

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.