Word: playgoers
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Even with a mountaineer's ax stuck in his head, Leon Trotsky (Philip Hoffman) can find nine ways to muse on life and death. And even in a 10-minute sketch, playwright David Ives can find a dozen ways to aerobicize the playgoer's brain. Six pieces in one dazzling off-Broadway evening display Ives' verbal gifts and humanist brooding. These are breathless sprints that the heart makes over the high hurdles of language...
...every penny-pinching little theater company leaves the scenery and props to the audience's imagination. But here the ideas seem like masterstrokes. They strip away the academic barnacles that too often make an evening of Shakespeare feel like a final exam in Esperanto, and they allow the playgoer to focus on the emotional gaiety and bewilderment at the heart of the text. What could have been minimalist camp -- oh, Lord, men in pearls and blond wigs! -- becomes a sweet meditation on mistaken sexual appetites and identity...
...hero is no less shocked and outraged by this catechism of concupiscence than a middle-class Manhattan playgoer might be. But because the plague years have forced Jeffrey to retreat from sex, or even from expressions of love, he is desperate for wisdom from any source. And -- surprise! -- Father Dan has some for him. "Of course life sucks," the cleric says. "It always will. So how dare you not make the most of it? . . . There's only one real blasphemy: the refusal of joy! Of a corsage and a kiss...
Like Sondheim, Finn is prone to write tinkly, brittle art songs that break off in midphrase and to fill them with lyrics so clever they reward, and maybe require, repeated hearing. Like Sondheim, he is witty, wistful and wickedly funny. But Finn is readier to satisfy the playgoer's yearning for a hummable phrase. In Falsettos he gives every character a big ballad, ranging from the tender What More Can I Say to the abandoned wife's showstopper I'm Breaking Down to the AIDS patient's edgy, sardonic You Gotta Die Sometime. In all, the three dozen musical numbers...
...climax of 17th century Spain's greatest tragedy, as oppressed villagers hack to shreds their tyrannical overlord, trashing his palace and slaughtering his bullyboy guards, the playgoer's mind leaps to Nicolae Ceausescu's Bucharest, to Samuel Doe's Monrovia and to far too many other gruesome places arraigned in current headlines. Although Lope de Vega's play was written around 1612 and was based on an actual occurrence in 1476, the abuses of power it depicts remain painfully close to our times...