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Theater , Video , Playwrights Horizons , Jeanine Serralles , Jordan Harrison , Maple And
Vine , Off-Broadway , Entertainment News
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Inspiring Funny Hot Scary Outrageous Amazing Weird CrazyTheater: "Maple And Vine" Finds
The Future Is...Back In The Year1955
MAPLE AND VINE **
PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZON
Jordan Harrison's new play is very high concept, a sort
of Pleasantville for real. You've heard of Civil War
reenactments and maybe been to one of those touristsites where actors pretend to be Pilgrims and answerquestions about their daily routine.
In this comic drama, Harrison imagines a group of
people who take this one step further: they create agated community where everyone is committed to livingback in 1955. Wives mostly stay at home and preparemeals, husbands go to work and have a few drinks after,the TV shows I Love Lucy on one of its three channels,
racism and other prejudices are subtly back in style andso on. Why?
Why indeed. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that only very damaged people would want toescape to a "better" time in the past. Mind you, there is something to be said for repression and limits -primetime comedies are sometimes more sophisticated than cable versions because they can't simplyshow sex or curse freely and therefore must be more creative. The idea bubbling under Maple and Vine is
that the repressions of the 1950s might serve a similar freeing purpose for our heros.
We begin in the present -- wait, the whole show takes place in the present. We begin in the City where
Katha (Marin Ireland) is sunk into a depression over a miscarriage and her husband Ryu (Peter Kim)finds his career as a plastic surgeon unsatisfying. The play spends ten or so tiresome minutes trying toconvince us that these two would be open to uprooting their lives and joining a cult -- as Ryu puts it --where they'd lose all contact with the outside world and be living in 1955.
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Maple And Vine would have been much better off beginning right away with the sales pitch by Dean
(Trent Dawson) and Ellen (Jeanine Serralles). They have a lot of fun embodying 50s cliches with passion,
from the right clothes to the right lingo (but not too much; don't overdo it, they caution). Besides, wenever really buy the central conceit that our heroes would actually do this, especially since they're a
mixed race couple and that raises all sorts of complicating issues.
The show develops a little interest when Katha -- now Kathy, no funky offbeat names in 1955, thank you
very much -- blossoms as a housewife, Ryu finds the lowered expectations at his job a relief, and they
encourage some subtle prejudice in order to spice up their experience. Further complications arise when
we discover Dean is a homosexual. The Commies are presumably just around the corner though at Maple
and Vine they're mostly present as a scare tactic rather than a real internal threat (just like in 1950s
America)!
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I want to praise Alexander Dodge's smart-looking set but I won't. I think perhaps the gorgeous new
facilities and resources of Playwrights Horizons gave him too many toys to play with. The switches fromone lovingly presented 50s household to another to the City to streets and so on are laboriously createdby wheeling giant sets on and off the stage by a tireless crew (they even took a deserved bow). Worse is
the factory floor where Ryu folds boxes. Nothing could be lower tech than that, but to get to the factory
floor, Dodge raises up out of the floor a very elaborate metal-table/space with a hole for dumping boxes.
They could have easily created the same setting far more easily with a simple wooden table at the front ofthe stage or some other low-tech idea.
Even more distracting are the giant visual banners hung above the City apartment and on the wall at the
beginning of the show. They look like windshields during a rainstorm and it's hard to know if they serveany purpose other than to be distracting and hide the roof of the 1955 household that Katha and Ryu willoccupy. In general, the set design involves an awful lot of heavy lifting for very little effect. The same istrue of the show itself. Director Anne Kaufman keeps the material at hand delivered smoothly, thoughthe elaborate set changes might have made her feel more like a traffic cop than director. Ilona Somogyiwisely avoids jokey outfits and keeps the 50s look spot-on in the costumes. David Weiner subtly uses thecontrast between over-lit sets (for that sitcom feel) and more subtle lighting when deeper emotions ariseand sound designer Bray Poor's work is invisble as it should be.
The actors struggle to get across the central conceit, especially our heros. Ireland improves a bit as her
character wakes up, though Kim never makes much impression. As mentioned, Dawson has more fun asthe closeted Dean and Pedro Pascal is good in dual roles as his lover and an office worker in the City.
The show is almost worth seeing simply for the wonderfully amusing and rich performance of Serralles,
who plays Ellen and an office worker in the City. She has somehow created a backstory for Ellen that isconvincing and true to her and makes that character's commitment to 1955 both sad and very, veryfunny. She gets a laugh from shrugging her shoulder or just saying hello and then even manages to wringsome emotion out of Ellen's predicament. Harrison's play may be flawed but the crazy concept gaveSerralles enough material to craft a subtle, hilarious portrait of desperation. We already knew the visionof a rosy past was an illusion. But the future for Serralles just got brighter.
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Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that
reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion
makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.
Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also
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Note : Michael Giltz was provided with free tickets to these shows with the understanding that he
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