"Getting There" at New Conservatory Theatre Center

 

NCTC production photo by Lois Tema

I don't often get to shows at NCTC, despite the fact that I used to work in the neighborhood. They seem to fly under my radar a lot, though I have quite enjoyed several shows we have seen there. One that didn't get mentioned on this blog (since I was on hiatus at the time) was their production of Head Over Heels in 2019. It was fun and very approachable. This play was also under my radar, but we got invited, so we went.

The Play

Getting There is a world premiere of a commissioned work by Dipika Guha. I have to admit it feels a bit rough at times, despite the fact that we were seeing the closing performance of the run. So I suspect those are actual holes in the script, not so much issues with the production.

Part of the issue is structural: the play eschews a linear timeline, opting to bounce among flashbacks and the present time. It's only covering a few days total, so it's unclear that there is really all that much to be gained by yanking the audience around, in ways that are indicated mostly by projections that aren't all that obvious to the viewer. I'm still not sure I caught all of the guideposts. Mostly these devices seem to be an effort to hide the (very quickly revealed, anyway) relationships among the characters. There are no big surprises there--I suspect the overall structure of the play would be enhanced by just writing the timeline straight.

There are only five characters in the play, although because of the structure of the play, it's unclear that's what we're dealing with, at least at first. The play initially seems more like a series of vignettes, though eventually we realize the actors are playing consistent characters throughout. Julie and Kai are American tourists in Paris. Julie meets a distraught Ira while Kai is off doing...something. Kai gets picked up by Radha, while Anissa is waiting for her at the train station. Radha and Anissa turn out to be married. Ira is Anissa's daughter. Julie has inexplicable feelings for Kai, who is supposed to be marrying someone else when she's not being picked up by older French women.

It's more coherent than my description makes it sound, but at the same time, the convolutions seem rather contrived and for limited reasons. Ultimately, most of the characters make a fair amount of sense, but Kai never does (to me, anyway).

The Production

It's a pretty sparse production, in NCTC's smaller theater space. Pretty much just a black box with a couple of benches and some curtains, with a few items on the walls. I kind of wished the cast had been allowed to just leave things in place, rather than rearranging the few pieces between scenes, but that seems to be director Nailah Harper-Malveaux's preference. Similarly, we have characters leave the stage by ducking behind a diaphanous curtain, so they're still quite visible to us, but apparently not to the other characters.

Most of the acting is quite good. The French characters in particular (Laura Domingo as Ira, Simone Bloch as Anissa, and Desiree M. Rogers as Radha) all feel well-rounded and coherent. Lauren Andrei Garcia as Julie is fine, if constantly exasperated (not sure that's entirely justified by the script--I'd like to have seen a little more range). Leigh M. Marshall as Kai is a kind of a nebulous cypher. She seems to wander aimlessly through life, evincing privilege and seeming utter lack of curiosity or engagement with others. There is absolutely no indication of why Julie is attracted to her at all--nothing we see in the play has Kai showing anything other than neglect or disregard for her. The script doesn't help here, but I would have hoped someone would have at least tried to add some relating to the relationship.

Anyway, the cast does pretty well with the thin script they're given. The relationship between Anissa and Radha has the core of something interesting to it, and their relationship to Ira has promise.

Bottom Line

This doesn't feel like a completed play: more like a draft that got put on stage before it was ready. That said, NCTC has done a pretty good job of staging it, but the difficulties with the script make it hard to take away much from the play overall.

I probably wouldn't recommend it very highly, but since it was the last show of the run, my recommendation wouldn't mean much anyway. There is the core of something in the play, and the production was good. I just wish they had fleshed out the story a bit more before putting it on stage.

"Sons of the Prophet" at New Conservatory Theatre Center

NCTC photo by Lois Tema

Stephen Karam is one of the hot names in American theater these days. He's been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama...twice, won the Tony Award for Best Play, and has a host of other awards an honors. I discovered his work quite by accident back in 2007, when I serendipitously stumbled across his play, "Speech and Debate" playing in New York City when my family was there. Given that my wife and my mother-in-law and I had all both competed in and coached high school speech and debate, it was clear we had to go see that.

What I like about his work is that it manages to be fun and playful with language while poking unsparingly at difficult subjects. His plays are far less about defining who is a good or bad character, and much more about portraying difficult and interesting situations that real people can find themselves in.

That brings me to...

The Play

I knew virtually nothing about this play before I saw it, other than it was one of Karam's, and it had won some awards. That's more than enough to make me want to see it. The main characters of the play are two brothers in Nazareth, PA, who lose their father as a result of a high school football hazing prank gone awry. Joseph, the elder brother, works for a rather bizarre book publisher to earn health benefits. His younger brother Charles helps to care for their aging uncle. We get views into the tough economics of eastern Pennsylvania--the very definition of the Rust Belt. Plus we get glimpses of family life, inter-generational struggles within immigrant families, celebrity privilege on a local level, and practical balancing of privacy and the need for funds.

There is a lot going on, but it never seems particularly forced: more like, "of course this would also have to go wrong right now." And there are some noticeably quirky characters, but none seems like a caricature. It's just a slice of life.

Oh, and the title refers to the fact that the Douaihy family is probably distantly related to Kahlil Gibran (known for writing "The Prophet"), and there are numerous plays on Gibran and his writing, as well as projected titles for the scenes, drawn from "The Prophet."

Overall, I like the play a lot. I think it's well-written, with pretty tight language that makes the characters believable. Good stuff.

The Theater

Just a quick side note here that this was my first play at the New Conservatory Theatre Company (NCTC), which is a little surprising, since their theater at 55 Van Ness Avenue is essentially around the corner from the office where I have worked for about a decade. Of course, they are in the basement of a rather large building, and I don't actually go by the building that often, so although I became aware of their existence a  while back, I had never ventured in or seen a production.

The facility is pretty nice. I gather they have recently renovated the lobby area, which has a small box office and a bar tucked away in a corner. There appear to be two different theater spaces down there, but we were in the smaller one. It's quite small, but it worked well for this production. I'll be interested to see what the larger space is like sometime.

My overall impression of the company was that they are small and friendly, and perhaps have a somewhat insular community. I'm not aware of them doing much advertising or outreach, but I am now curious to see what else they get up to.

The Production

I was impressed with the acting. The set itself is quite basic, but that works here. There isn't room for anything elaborate, and the simplicity makes it easy to transition scenes just by moving a chair or a table, maybe adding a phone or a microphone. The costumes as such are pretty much contemporary clothes, with a couple of nice, quirky exceptions.

I thought all the actors were solid, at least. Cheryl Smith as Gloria comes across from the start as something of a head case, but in the fullness of time we come to understand why. But she does make life challenging for her employee, Joseph (played really well by Eric Kerr). Joseph is the core character around which everything else pretty much flows, and Kerr handled that with aplomb, even in a hospital gown. The other real stand-out for me was Loralee Windsor as a series of secondary characters, each of which had a distinctive, fun personality, and in the closing scene, her Mrs. McAndrew was very touching.

On the whole, the cast manages to take a pretty tight, closely-timed script and execute it well, maintaining the humanity and vulnerability of all the characters.

Unfortunately, the run was virtually sold out by the time I went to get tickets. I was only able to buy in their "extension," which was a couple of added matinees on the last two weekends. So the show has already closed, but it obviously found an audience and filled the small house.

I was impressed by the company, and will definitely be watching to see what else they get up to, especially now that I know they are just around the corner!