Goats
Review from The Indianapolis Star
Phoenix Theatre festival offers a hit and a miss
Goats
**** Author: Alan Berks. Location: Phoenix Theatre, 749 N. Park Ave.
When: 4 p.m. March 3D and April 6, 6 p.m. April 4 and 8 p.m. April 20. Tickets: $20, $10 ages 10 and younger. Call 1-317-635-7529.
True to Scale
* Author: Wendy Belden. Location: Phoenix Theatre, 749 N. Park Ave.
When: 6 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. March 28, 8 p.m. March 29, 8 p.m. April 6, 2 p.m. April 7,
8 p.m. April 12. 4 p.m. April 13. Tickets: $20, $10 ages 10 and younger. Call 1-317-635-7529.
By Marion Garmel
marion.garmel@indystar.com
The 2002 Basile Festival of Emerging American Theatre is off to a rocky start wIth one misfire and a bull’s-eye in the opening weekend.
Wendy Belden’s True to Scale Is an ambitious full-length play that tries to get into the heads of the parents of a teen-age girl who commits an atrocious crime.
But it just comes away leaving the audience confused.
Alan Berks’ Goats is a one-man show written and delivered by Berks, about a Jewish American’s quest for faith during a summer he spent herding goats on a farm outside Jerusalem.
Berks, with his informal, friendly delivery. gives us a real person searching his heart, while Belden, with poetic language and philosophical speculation, gives us mechanical characters performing to specification.
True to Scale was inspired by a true event. In 1996, an affluent New Jersey teen-ager gave birth to a baby in a motel room, and her boyfriend stuffed it in the trash.
Belden transplants the crime to the girl's home, then speculates on how the crime affected her parents.
The mother Is a Buddhist, the father is an architect, and the play is built around the metaphor of architecture. The bathroom where the birth occurred becomes a place the mother won’t enter. The father spends the rest of his life designing houses that have no private spaces where things like infanticide can take place.
But these are not real people, and nothing makes much sense. They seem to have no histories. The Jewish-American affluence that was a big part of the New Jersey trial is touched on only once when Josh, the boyfriend, reports on why Jewish law was brought in to keep his girlfriend’s parents from testifying.
The mother is incredibly selfish, “I don’t care about your children, I only care about mine,” she says at one point. And explaining why she spoke as she did in an interview with Barbara Walters on 20/20: “So that my response might reflect the national conversation.” People don’t talk like that.
Diane Kondrat. who plays the mother, gives a bravura performance, but it’s the same she gives in other plays. LeBron Benton, normally a marvelous actor, makes no more sense of the father than the audiences does. You want to scream at both of them: “Just go to a therapist and get it over with.”
As the girl, Karen Irwin at least seems to be playing a real person. Marc Jablon also is affecting as Josh, the boyfriend. The final character, Scotty, played by Dan Van Paris, is the girl’s son by a later marriage. He loves Pokemon and talks like a computer game.
To be sure, Belden can write a dramatic scene, and there are laughs in the pop culture references. But the totality is so confusing that, at the end of the play on opening night. everyone sat quiet, lost in thought.
Berks, on the other hand, had the small audience (which should grow nightly) at his opening eating out of his hand. He talks like an ordinary guy telling a group of his friends what happened to him during that fateful summer when a Jewish assassin killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who seemed on the verge of making peace in the Middle East, and why working on a farm tending goats gave him the insight to come to terms with his own life and the contradictions of the world around him.
With a great deal of artistry, the 24-year-old Berks pulls the audience into his tale, jumping from rock to rock on the top of a mountain, while goats fail to follow his orders.
The farmer who owns these goats is a guru-type individual living on a mountaintop making cheese from goat milk and entertaining rock stars and prime ministers. He answers Berks’ questions with vague generalities.
But just when you think the narrative is going off on a tangent, Berks suddenly brings you back home with a thud.
This is virtuoso storytelling.
Both are world premieres. Goats is being performed on the Underground Stage, while True to Scale is on the Mainstage.
This weekend, two more plays open: Tony McDonald’s savant with a half-price preview at 7:30 p.m. today and performances at 8 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Saturday on the Mainstage, and Kevin Burke’s Born to Goof, another one-man show by a psychic comedian, opening at 6 p.m. Sunday on the Underground stage.
All four shows will play in repertory through April 21. You have three chances to see all four in one weekend, Thursday through Mar. 31; April 4-7 and April 11-14. Call the theater at 1-317-635-7529 for more information.
Contact Marion Garmel at 1-317-444-6078.
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