ScheckOnTheater

Just in case you somehow fail to realize that the blue-collar family at the center of Blood from a Stone is falling apart, the set designed by Derek McLane periodically alerts you. Several times during the course of this new work by first time playwright Tommy Nohilly, rainwater crashes through the rotting panels of the kitchen’s ceiling. It’s one of the all too many obvious devices in this overlong, kitchen sink drama being presented by the New Group.

Ethan Hawke, in full grunge mode, plays the central character of Travis, a pill-popping ex-Marine who has dropped by his Connecticut family home en route to a new life out west. He doesn’t exactly encounter domestic bliss: his mother Margaret (Ann Dowd) and abusive father Bill (Gordon Clapp) are at each other’s throats, and brother Matt (Thomas Guiry) is clearly in serious financial and possibly criminal trouble.

Watching these troubled characters ferociously battle with each other for two-and-a-half hours might have been interesting if any of them had something interesting to say. But despite the endless profusion of profanities and insults hurled about, this dysfunctional family drama clearly influenced by Sam Shepard fails to provide the sort of rich characterizations or situations that would make us care.

Inexplicably wasted are the terrific Natasha Lyonne and Daphne Rubin-Vega, who show up for brief, inconsequential scenes as Travis’ relatively sane sister and his married but sex-starved ex-girlfriend respectively.

Under the vivid, detailed direction of Scott Elliott, the performers do manage to provide fully lived-in characterizations. Clapp, in a role far removed from his mousy detective on TV’s NYPD Blue, is formidable as the fiery paterfamilias; Dowd projects vulnerability and fierceness in equal amounts; Guiry well conveys the insidious charm of the huckster brother and Hawke centers the proceedings by essentially playing straight man as he passively reacts to the surrounding chaos.

Acorn Theater, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. www.telecharge.com.  

The concept of illness as metaphor has long been a fertile area for playwrights, the latest example being Obie Award-winner Adam Bock’s (The Receptionist, The Thugs) A Small Fire at Playwrights Horizons. Tracking the physical disintegration of a vibrant woman who loses her senses one by one, the drama fails to capitalize on its provocative premise.

Emily (Michelle Pawk) is a successful contractor whose professional competence is indicated by her easygoing rapport with her burly foreman Billy (Victor Williams). But she seems less than satisfied in her marriage to the mild-mannered John (Reed Birney), and her relationship with her grown daughter Jenny (Celia Keenan-Bolger) is fraught with tension.

The trouble begins when Emily nearly starts a fire because she’s unable to smell a burning towel. It soon becomes apparent that she’s lost her sense of smell. This is quickly followed by the succeeding losses of taste, sight and hearing. Before long she’s reduced to sitting forlornly on her couch, still able to speak while others can communicate to her only via squeezing her hand.

The problem with the play is that Bock provides neither the texture for it to succeed as naturalism nor the poeticism to infuse his central character’s plight with sufficient resonance. Although there are moments that are quietly moving—such as when Emily informs her devoted husband, “I didn’t love you…but I love you now”—for most of the brief, 80 minute running time it feels like a mundane domestic drama that has been artificially inflated with its high-concept mysterious illness.

Under the direction of Trip Cullman, the excellent ensemble delivers sensitive portrayals that help flesh out their thinly written characters. Pawk is so charismatic in her early scenes that her character’s progressive deterioration becomes deeply tragic. Birney is very touching as the pained husband who discovers his inner strength; Keenan-Bolger well suggests the complexity in the prickly daughter who tries to provide her mother with loving support; and Williams is wonderfully natural as the good-natured Billy.

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.

The back story behind Being Harold Pinter is nearly as compelling as this powerful, politically themed show itself. Being presented by the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, this production by the Belarus Free Theatre almost didn’t make it to these shores, thanks to the relentless persecution by that country’s repressive regime. The company members literally had to be smuggled out the country, arriving here only days before performances were scheduled to begin.

New York theatergoers are certainly the beneficiaries, as this harrowing 75-minute piece displays both well-realized thematic ambition and intellectual rigor.

Adapted and directed by Vladimir Scherban, the provocative work uses the late playwright’s texts to explore the nature of power and repression. Using excerpts from the plays Mountain Language, One for the Road, The Homecoming, Old Times, Ashes to Ashes and The New World Order as well as excerpts from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech and letters from Belarussian political prisoners, it provides a compelling argument that even Pinter’s early, seemingly non-political works have great relevance when it comes to exploring the dynamics of totalitarian regimes.

Performed in Russian--the English supertitles are unfortunately hard to read--by a seven-person ensemble, the piece includes many striking visual touches, such as the application of red paint on an actor’s forehead to suggest an injury once suffered by Pinter when he fell. At another point, the actors writhe helplessly under a plastic sheet in a not-so-subtle metaphor for artistic repression.

Although those not intimately familiar with Pinter’s works may find themselves adrift at times due to the sometimes confusing manner in which they have been excerpted, the vividness of the writing still comes through powerfully. And the physical commitment by the performers, not to mention the personal bravery exhibited by the travails they went through both to create the piece and bring it to America, is to be greatly admired. 

La MaMa, 74A E. 4^th St. 212-475-7710. www.lamama.org.

Put a wooden stake in it, it’s done.

The undead production of Dracula currently playing at the Little Shubert Theater is bad enough to put an end to the seemingly inexhaustible craze for all things vampire, that is, if anyone bothers to see it. Clearly hoping to cash in on the current frenzy engendered by True Blood, the Twilight series and the endless other examples of its ilk--not to mention older theatergoers’ fond memories of the superb 1977 production starring the sexily charismatic Frank Langella—this revival of Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel falls short on all counts.

Resembling summer stock in its cheesy production values and mostly amateurish performances, this staging by director Paul Alexander runs a mere two hours, but feels as long as its titular character’s centuries-old existence. Granted, the play itself is quite old-fashioned, filled with talky exposition about the minutiae of vampire characteristics that we’ve all come to know by heart.

But there’s no doubt that the material could still work if done with any degree of flair, a quality that is sadly lacking here. Where to begin? The cheap looking sets, which seem made out of cardboard and contains gaps large enough to provide glimpses of stagehands scurrying in back (Willa Kim’s stylish costumes provide some compensation); the absurd use of classical music that makes one think that the proceedings are about to morph into ballet; the comical special effects, including “bats” flying about like errant kites.      

But the real problem is the performances. Emily Bridges’ Lucy is even more wan than the literally bloodless character should be, but the actress at least has an excuse: she was a last-minute replacement for original star Thora Birch. John Buffalo Mailer, as the unhinged, fly-eating sanitarium patient Renfield, seems to be amusing himself far more than anyone else, although he does have a nice bit when—aided by Flying by Foy—he crawls headfirst down a wall.

Timothy Jerome is reasonably professional as Dr. Seward, but the veteran George Hearn, as the vampire killer Van Helsing, mainly looks confused, as if wondering why in the world his agent got him into this mess.

And then there’s Michel Altieri as the bloodsucking count. A theater star in Italy, where he was apparently discovered by Luciano Pavarotti, the performer, sporting silly shoulder-length hair, is about as sexy and threatening as Christopher Walken’s “The Continental” character on Saturday Night Live. Barely intelligible with his heavy accent and fumbling all of the best-known lines (“I never drink…wine”), the young actor plays Dracula as if he was Eurotrash lounging around in a seedy disco.

Ah, well. This Dracula will undoubtedly soon be gone. But as we all know, the immortal character will undoubtedly rise again, hopefully under more felicitous theatrical circumstances.

Little Shubert Theater, 422 W. 42^nd St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com. Through Mar. 13.

A romantic triangle of sorts is explored in Edna O’Brien’s elusive and allusive new play, now making its U.S. premiere in a production imported from Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Featuring sterling performances by Niall Buggy, Beth Cooke and two-time Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn (Secrets and Lies, Little Voice), Haunted  sacrifices clarity in favor of poeticism to detrimental effect.

A memory play whose events are apparently taking place in the mind of elderly widower Mr. Berry (Buggy), it depicts the relationship that develops between him and an innocent younger woman, Hazel (Cooke), who he hires for elocution lessons. In return for her services, he provides her with items of vintage clothing and jewelry that had belonged to his late wife.

Except that Mrs. Berry (Blethyn), who works as a supervisor in a doll factory—a profession all too obviously designed to make poignant the couple’s childlessness—is not quite dead. So she’s quite perplexed as her possessions gradually disappear, eventually confronting her hopelessly dithering, wandering husband.

The couple’s previously happy but now stagnant relationship is well delineated in such lines as when Mr. Berry describes his wife, at least in her younger days, as being “sturdy with remarkable thorns.”

The overly talky, mostly lifeless proceedings, filled with endless literary references ranging from Long Day’s Journey Into Night  to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  to Shakespeare, are made palatable only by the performances. Cooke is charming and beguiling as the younger woman; Buggy perfectly personifies a middle-aged house-husband whose long dormant intellectual and romantic passions have been rekindled only to once again be snuffed out; and Blethyn brings her trademark earthiness and honesty to her role as the long-suffering wife.

Although she’s written several plays, including Virginia, based on the life of Virginia Woolf, the Irish-born O’Brien is better known as a novelist. It’s hard not to think that this dense piece would have worked far better as prose.

59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. www.59e59.org.