Midwesterner, Northwesterner, now New Yorker (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ny_odyssey) wrote,@ 2007-11-04 12:01:00 |
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| Entry tags: | 24 hour plays on broadway, broadway, live shows |
24 Hour Plays On Broadway
Hm, as I was going through the stack of things in my 'to do' pile, I came across the Playbill for 24 Hour Plays on Broadway 2007 (which was on Oct 22, 2007). Oh yeah. I never did get around to writing up my experience at 24 Hour Plays. So, here it is, in (not so) brief.
| This was the same day as filming SVU in my neighborhood. Quite literally as soon as that was over I dashed to my apartment to grab the tickets. There was a last minute cancellation from the person going with me so I called Colleen and said, "What are you doing and do you want to go to 24 Hour Plays?" Heh. I swung by her apartment and we headed to the subway. We got to Times Square and walked up to the theater about 20 minutes before show time; I'm still a little jacked up from the day and from the last minute dash to the theater. I go up to willcall to get the tickets and give them my name. The guy goes and looks and then asks for my name again and my method of payment. The guy goes and looks again and then comes back and asks for my confirmation. I'm getting worried now as I hand over my SmartTix confirmation printout. He looks at it and I'm nervous—I would be so PISSED if something got screwed up and we didn't have tickets. He points to the show name and asks if we're seeing 24 Hour Plays. I say, "Yes, right, 24 Hour Plays." He goes, "That's not in this theater. It's in the theater next door." Dur. LOL So we go to the theater next door and get tickets and head inside. And who should we run into? Randomly we run into a friend of Colleen's sister that I've met before. She's there with her brother. And her seats are one row from ours. How totally bizarre. I swear, this city is really, actually, a very small town. OK, interlude to remind everyone what 24 Hour Plays is. The night before the show, they essentially lock the writers in a room to go write six short plays over night. The next morning the directors read them and cast them. During the day, the cast rehearses the plays and then starting at 8 they're preformed. Inception to Closing in 24 hours. You never quite know what you're going to get. |
 From the PlayBill for 24 Hour Plays to benefit Working Playground |
Anyway, back to the show we busy ourselves reading the PlayBill and particularly the actor one line bios many of which were, really, quite entertaining: |
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Then the show gets started. The main sponsor is Mont Blanc and they're going to be doing some things to honor Marlene Dietrich throughout the night. Ooookay. On to the show. There were six plays, only one of which was really not worth the time, lol. The other five were quite entertaining and one of them particularly so. And, it's truly amazing when it's remembered that it's all done in the course of a single day. The descriptions of the plays are below if you want to read about them, but if not, I'll just say that it was, like last year, a very fun time. And it supports a very good cause. If I'm still in New York this time next year, I'll definitely be there again for next year's 24 Hour Plays on Broadway. And now, my rankings for shows I've seen: 1. 24 Hour Plays on Broadway 2006 2. Kristen Chenoweth at the Met 3. Mama Mia 4. Altar Boyz 5. Fame Becomes Me 6. Inherit The Wind 7. 24 Hour Plays on Broadway 2007 8. Apple Tree 9. Encores Stairway to Paradise 10. A Chorus Line 11. Talk Radio 12. The Little Dog Laughed 13. Angry Young Women in Low Rise Jeans with High Class Issues 15. Grey Gardens The first play was Dave Chappelle is Not Crazy. It was written by Eisa Davis. Who is apparently a Pulitzer Prize winner. Well, perhaps her play was deeply metaphorical and laced with themes that were simply over my head, because I did not get it. At all. It was some sort of rehab meeting something where they beat each other up and some famous lady ran it and it didn't work and really I had no idea. Maybe it was supposed to be funny…I didn't find it so. Redeeming value: it had Mamie Gummer in it (who is Meryl Streep's daughter and my goodness is the spitting image of her mother). This was redeeming only because it made Colleen excited that maybe Meryl Streep was in the audience. Lol The second play was Open House by Theresa Rebeck. By far THE BEST of the night. We were ROLLING; the entire audience was ROLLING through the entire thing. It was a play about this lesbian couple (played by Kristen Johnston and Gaby Hoffman) looking at a house in Brooklyn that was for sale. Kristen Johnston's character loved it because it was "pretty" and Gaby Hoffman thought of it, "For Park Slope, it doesn't completely make me want to wretch". As these two are talking about the merits of buying this place in Park Slope, various other people who are also attending the open house come in and interrupt their argument. One of them is Jeremy Sisto who went on this long rant about how you get to this point of your life looking at a house in Brooklyn ("which, I mean, it's BROOKLY! It might as well be in Ohio!") that has a painting of fat winged children and a woman in a meadow in the bathroom. It was hysterical and whether he memorized that long rant in just an afternoon or was just improvising, it doesn't matter, it was AMAZING and funny as hell. Next in was Diane Neal who played a pregnant woman who was all bouncy and excited and thrilled, husband, baby on the way, buying a house. Then she wanted to open all the drawers to see what was inside them. Gaby's character was opposed, thinking that was a violation of the homeowner's privacy. Diane's character really wanted to. Gaby asked her girlfriend, Kristen's character who was off sulking in the corner because she and Gaby had been fighting before Diane came in. Gaby goes, "What do you think?" And Kristen looks at her for a second and goes, "I don't know what to say! I can't remember my fucking line!" LOLOL The audience lost it. Kristen stayed PERFECTLY in character for it, Gaby started laughing and clapping her hands, Diane stood there with her hands on her hips nodding and looking at Kristen with this, "You go, girlfriend, tell it like it is" expression. Good lord, it was funny. Finally everyone recovered enough to finish the play—the realtor came in and said they couldn't open the drawers and asked if they wanted to put an offer in on the place. And that was it. You would not have thought a play about an open house could be so funny, but something about it just was. All the characters were just perfect and there was a ton of New York humor and with the missed line…it was just plain fun. The next play was Wakey Wakey by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was ostensibly about a girlfriend (played by Tracie Thoms) and a boyfriend (played by Peter Hermann). The boyfriend kept having affairs (it turned out that he was having them with people in their building that had disabilities, lol) so the girlfriend got back at him by drugging him to sleep and having someone from Craigslist come take pictures of him while he was sleeping. The play was about the photo shoot. And, eventually, the pharmacist who supplied the drugs showed up as well as a woman the boyfriend had an affair with who was narcoleptic. There was something wrong with the drugs and they didn't stay fully asleep for the shoot so the boyfriend, the pharmacist, and the narcoleptic kept falling asleep randomly throughout the play. It was pretty funny though it went on a little longer than needed. The funniest part was probably when Peter Hermann would fall asleep he'd slump over onto the wooden table in front of him and there was an audible THUD from his head landing EVERY TIME (like three times). The audience laughed every time because it sounded soooo painful (and apparently we're all sadists because, yes, we laughed at that). In any case, Peter Hermann either had a massive headache when it was over or he was doing an amazing job creating a THUD sound effect with something other than his head, lol. Then there was an intermission. And let me take this moment to say that in between each play, there was a "musical interlude" by this woman named Nellie McKay. The best description I've heard is that the audience reacted with "perplexed appreciation" to her. It was hard to know whether you were supposed to laugh at her or not. She was dressed in a tux with tails, sometimes a top hat, carrying a teeny tiny little guitar and singing with a strange accent. You didn't want to laugh if she was serious, but you didn't want to not laugh if she wasn't. And it was soooo hard to tell. She did some songs straight. And then there were some songs (like, "Feminists Have No Sense Of Humor") that were clearly humorous. It was bizarre. And perplexed was definitely the audience reaction to her. I still haven't a clue exactly what she was all about. Back to the play. The fourth play was called A Bus Stop Play by Julia Jordan It was this pregnant woman (played by Lili Taylor) talking at a man (played by Hugh Dancy) at the stop about baby names. She just kept going on an on about the merits of different baby names and this poor guy just looked so overwhelmed by it. His expressions were hysterical, but he never got a word in. Soon, another woman (played by Hope Davis) shows up at the bus stop. She's….odd. She's wearing this long purple hat and speaks kind of haltingly and is just…odd. But endearingly so. We find out that Lili Taylor doesn't know the man she's been talking to about baby names, lol. And I just can't really explain this one except that it was very good and very cute and Hope Davis played her character amazingly. It was one of those times when I thought, I could meet that person on the street and that's what they'd be like; that was *her*. It didn't feel like she was acting at ALL and even though she was only on stage for maybe 5 minutes, you came to really like her and feel like you knew her. It was incredible in that regard. Play 5: I.P. by Warren Leight This was about a gay couple (played by Ben Schenkman and Chris Rock" trying to get a surrogate donor so they could have a baby. But Chris Rock was a famous action movie star and no one knew he was gay and he wanted it to stay that way. It was an OK play, not super funny but it had it's moments. The funniest was when Chris Rock was trying to explain that no one knew he was gay and the surrogate counselor (played by Marlo Thomas) said, "You're on the down low! I saw that episode of SVU. I love that Ice-T!" LOL And there was a woman behind us in the audience who said, "I saw that episode, too!" Colleen and I were rolling. Last play, called Tenure by Michael Lew was also funny. It was about this woman who just got tenure at a university and she was trying to convince two male colleagues that they needed to get serious about their careers so they could get tenure, too. But they were still behaving as if they were still frat boys *in* college partying and pulling pranks all the time. I liked it because it had Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show in it. Colleen liked it because it had David Cross in it. And the running joke in this one was how the professor got a Monte Blanc pen when she got tenure (the sponsor, remember, was Monte Blanc) and she was holding this pen up like it was the amazing shining light to strive for and the boys were, of course, making fun of it. In any case, the boys were both very funny with their antics and it was an enjoyable little play. |
