Wendy R. Williams

Greeting theater lovers, April was a sparse month for theater attendance. The month started with the end of the New Directors New Films Festival at MOMA and Lincoln Center and ended with the Tribeca Film Festival in full swing. So in the words of the Muppets in the movie commercial, it was a month of, “Movies! Movies! Movies! Movies!” But I did see two plays: Paula Vogel’s Hot ‘N’ Throbbing and Tanya Klein’s Outdoing the Jones.

Lisa Emery and Elias Koteas

First, the Signature Theatre Company’s Hot ‘N’ Throbbing certainly did live up to its title. This exquisitely timed piece managed to be both excruciatingly funny and horrifyingly scary. Ms. Vogel certainly does not believe in letting her audience off the hook. She took us along for the entire ride, even after the car metaphorically “sped off the cliff and plunged into the lake.” Every one of the actors on stage nailed their part. They were totally believable inhabitants of Ms. Vogel’s scary world and they certainly “hooked in” this audience member. This run is over and that is a shame, because this was a great show.

Hot ‘N’ Throbbing starred: Suli Holum as Leslie Ann; Lisa Emery as Charlene; Rebecca Wisocky as Voice-over; Tom Nelis as Voice; Matthew Stadelmann as Calvin; Elias Koteas as Clyde. The play was directed by Les Waters.

Hot ‘N’ Throbbing was staged Off-Broadway at Manhattan’s acclaimed Signature Theatre Company and the show certainly benefited from being backed by the Signature with their talented set and lighting designers. On the other end of the cost spectrum was the Off-Off-Broadway production of Tanya Klein’s Outdoing the Jones which had a bare-bones staging at the Creative Artist Laboratory at 303 West 42 nd Street on the third floor.

Outdoing the Jones

The theater for Outdoing the Jones was no more than a classroom-with-lights with only a minimal set (some chairs and a fake fireplace) on the third floor of a building that houses a strip joint (Show World). In fact, as we were going to the play, we kept passing the night’s downstairs performers in the elevator and the hall – a real flash back to one of the characters in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing.

Ms. Klein’s Outdoing the Jones is a heart felt piece about the perils of living in suburbia with all the pressure to both keep up with and outdo the Jones. It is the story of a married couple and the relationship they have with each other and with the wife’s brother and sister. The first act was spent telling us who these characters are and what they wanted. The story really took off in the second act when the characters began to engage each other because as they say on TNT, “Drama is conflict.”

The play was blessed with four talented actors: Ali Baynes as Sandra; Michael Jalbert as John, Cassandra Cooke as Jessie; Brian W. Seibert as Philip. The play was also directed by Ms. Klein who deserves a lot of credit for creating and staging her show in the “wetlands” of the Manhattan theatrical ecosystem.

Rock on!

Wendy