Tucker, Eric (Theater Director)

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    ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

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    Bedlam’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s time-traveling mind-bender of a play is a meditation on uncertainty.If even commonplace matters of everyday life — weather, traffic, disease — can defy scientific expectations, what hope could there be in predicting human behavior? With “Arcadia,” his 1993 play, Tom Stoppard set out to explore the science of this uncertainty and how it can disrupt our understanding of history. A new staging presented by Bedlam makes a valiant effort to adapt Stoppard’s cerebral probes into chaos theory, Newtonian law, thermodynamics and metaphysics for a 2023 audience, but the result is a muddled one. And that may just demonstrate Stoppard’s frustrating but brilliant point.Act 1 introduces us to the play’s complicated narrative mechanics, as we jump back and forth between the Regency Period of the early 1800s and the early 1990s. The staging of the 1990s years feels even closer to our own when two primary characters — the independent-minded author Hannah (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and one of her love interests, the logic-driven mathematician Valentine (Mike Labbadia) — pull out smartphones and sleek laptops.Stoppard sets the play in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England, but Eric Tucker, the director, has his actors drop the British accents. So when Hannah and Valentine enter an academic arms race with a smarmy Byron scholar named Bernard (Ian Zafir) who values poetry above all other subjects, they spew hard consonants and short vowels. The North American Englishness of it all makes it slightly easier to hold on to Stoppard’s words.Even in a space as physically intimate as the West End Theater (located on the second floor of a century-old church, which provides an aptly haunting atmosphere), the production feels cold, caught up in its own profundity at the expense of our comprehension. The Bedlam company’s acting is void of real thrill so the bits of Stoppard’s playful wordplay and humor we do catch fall flat in both centuries.There are two exceptions: the luminous Caroline Grogan as Thomasina, a preternaturally wise student, and the stormy Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Septimus, her tenacious tutor. Together, they find themselves on the brink of a major discovery that Valentine will investigate in the 1990s. The pair find a seductive chemistry that blossoms as Septimus opens Thomasina’s mind to entropic (and erotic) possibilities.In Act 2, the eras blur. Timelines that were previously distinct are now stacked on top of one another. After intermission, we’re ushered back into the theater only to discover that Tucker has brazenly swapped the actors’ playing area for our seating area. By doing so, Tucker fulfills Bedlam’s mission statement to “reinvigorate traditional forms” and “collapse aesthetic distance.” But he’s also honoring one of Stoppard’s main provocations — that the unknowability of the past meets the unknowability of the here and now.ArcadiaThrough Dec. 23 at the West End Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Fall River Fishing’ Review: So She Dated an Axe Murderer

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      A casually absurd play about the infamous Lizzie Borden, presented by Bedlam, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event.There will be blood. And meat sauce. And dancing corpses. And Sharon Tate. Clarity? Not so much.Though, to be fair, if you aren’t ready for madness, perhaps a play about Lizzie Borden, presented by a theater company named Bedlam, isn’t your best bet.“Fall River Fishing,” written by Zuzanna Szadkowski and Deborah Knox, who also star, is a Rube Goldberg machine of a play: an entertaining spectacle of seemingly disparate parts that are actually interconnected. Yet this ornate display winds up feeling like a lot of show for an unimpressive payoff.But let’s begin with Lizzie Borden (Szadkowski), the woman from the gruesome children’s rhyme, who in 1892 took an ax and served 40 whacks in a double parricide that claimed the lives of her father and stepmother. Well, not an ax exactly, but a hatchet, as Bridget (Knox), the Borden family’s maid — and Lizzie’s kind-of lover — describes it. The weapon doesn’t actually appear until late in the first act, which comprises a series of domestic scenes in the Borden home, including interactions between Lizzie, Bridget, Lizzie’s father (Tony Torn), her young stepmother (Susannah Millonzi) and Uncle Nathan (Jamie Smithson), on the day of the murders.From left, Susannah Millonzi as Lizzie’s young stepmother, Jamie Smithson as Uncle Nathan and Tony Torn as the Borden patriarch in “Fall River Fishing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead of opting for an “American Psycho”-style gorefest, “Fall River Fishing,” directed by Eric Tucker, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event, making the infamous real-life murders the anticlimax and continuing on from there. So from the start, we see onstage the bloodstained couch, the puddle of blood on the floor and red stains on the bed, though the characters sit and walk around the space as though everything is perfectly normal. Perhaps there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in this casually absurd play, which is packed from beginning to end with dark ironies. The most obvious being that the Bordens, despite wearing 19th-century fashion and sitting on 19th-century furniture, don’t just speak in contemporary English, but also make rather contemporary cultural references: to Cabbage Patch Kids, to the appeal of Greek yogurt, to the O.J. Simpson verdict.The dialogue is a constant stream of random quips, anachronisms, expletives, awkward gaffes and surprising non sequiturs. All of which is very funny — if that kind of quirkiness and drollery is your cup of tea. If not, you’ll struggle with the play’s humor, which may wear thin even for those enjoying it. After all, the play prioritizes its high-concept, heightened comedy over character building, plot or any of the usual forces behind a work’s momentum — so its engine runs out of steam almost immediately.It’s because of the no-holds-barred work of the cast and the director, however, that “Fall River” manages to stretch its charms for as long as it does (a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time could have been cut by a full 60 to 90 minutes). Szadkowski proves to be an expert of deadpan humor from the first (unprintable) word she utters as Lizzie, who is both an insecure outcast and a selfish flirt with an endless need for attention. And, to make things worse, Lizzie is an aspiring actress who declares her performance as Nora in “A Doll’s House” — watch out, Jessica Chastain — her greatest feat.Knox’s Bridget makes a perfect pair with Szadkowski’s Lizzie, who strings the earnest maid along; Bridget follows Lizzie’s whims and bizarre scene studies, donning a wig and a pregnancy belly to play Sharon Tate (who makes an additional appearance). The Borden patriarch played by Torn is an unbearable misogynist, who wistfully recalls his first polyamorous marriage and the appeal of “foreign genitals, novel genitals,” courtesy of Tinder, with entertaining crudeness. Millonzi, as Lizzie’s alternately meek and vicious stepmother, performs her role with such otherworldly abandon that the character seems to have stepped out of her own universe, even within this already curious realm of weirdos and fools. Her physical performance is most impressive: She’s constantly draping herself over furniture, folding over suddenly and slouching around like a wet noodle. And Smithson is an utter delight as Uncle Nathan, a living, breathing cringe in the form of an adult man.After all of the jokes and the bloodshed and a brief waltz between the deceased, the play turns into a less interesting thought experiment in its second act, with Szadkowski and Smithson now playing a modern-day Nora and Torvald as they entertain some very bizarre guests. Soon everyone is digging into a bowl of spaghetti, hands-first, and rubbing it over their faces. By then “Fall River” has not only lost its steam, but also its appeal, and its last bit of sense.“This is nonsense!” Torvald/Nathan declares near the end of the production. True, but a little nonsense offers laughs and flights of imagination. Too much, and you leave the theater feeling mad.Fall River FishingThrough March 9 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’: 2 Takes That Shout Subtext

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      Irreverence can be illuminating. But Bedlam’s energetic productions of classics by Ibsen and Shakespeare lose insight in the process.Forgoing subtlety onstage has its advantages. Exaggeration leaves little room for doubt, obvious feelings burn hot, and in-your-face humor doesn’t‌ risk flying over your head. At least, that’s the idea. But in the Bedlam theater company’s productions of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” now playing in repertory at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, subtlety isn’t just dead, it’s the devil in need of exorcis‌ing.Take the newlywed Hedda Tessman, sunk low in a chair, coolly lighted at center stage as the 1891 play that bears her maiden name begins. Portrayed with viscous, palpable disaffection by Susannah Millonzi, she is a woman so unsuited to domesticity that her chair is leopard print. And when Hedda greets her doting, unrefined aunt (“Visiting us so early — that’s so very… kind of you”) her expression of good manners, which Ibsen soaked with subtext, becomes overtly sarcastic, subverting the play’s careful attention to the ways people use language to hide or reveal themselves.Bedlam, now in its 10th anniversary season, has built a reputation for reinterpreting classic texts, like “Sense & Sensibility” and “The Crucible,” with stripped-down, energetic stagings and a modern touch. Under the direction of the artistic director Eric Tucker, many of these revivals have sought to expose the essential bones of familiar works. Here, Tucker, who directs and acts in both productions, seems to be reacting against received ideas about the texts, resisting what’s expected of these classics with an exceptionally playful hand. But it’s a tricky gesture that, in each case, tends to obscure more than it illuminates.Using a colloquial adaptation of “Hedda Gabler” by Jon Robin Baitz, the production recasts the drama of betrayal in captivity as a daffy but dour comedy that happens to end in death. If Ibsen is known for his design of psychological interiors and subconscious intentions, here every room is turned inside-out, with feelings and attitudes sprung in the open. Rag-tag vintage furniture is pressed against the periphery of the stage (set design is by John McDermott), suggesting the drawing-room realism that Ibsen fathered has been deliberately cast aside.With a Hedda this sour and cunning from the start, her union with Tucker’s chipper, oblivious Tessman can only come off as a farce, its absurdity radiating outward. Line readings defy logic; one moment Tessman is shouting to Hedda as if she’s on the roof, the next he’s surprised to find her right beside him. Innuendo turns literal, as when Judge Brack (Ryan Quinn) all but humps the legs of Hedda’s chair. Dialogue and action are mismatched, as when Hedda claws meat off a roast chicken in the fridge, though she purports to be reading a letter. (She’s a woman of appetite, remember?) ‌‌The consequence of so much funny business is that there’s not much to ponder about the characters’ inner lives, which makes Ibsen far less interesting to watch. And the lighting (by Carolina Ortiz) and sound (by Jane Shaw) are heavy handed, indicating when the mood turns serious and sincere. With Hedda’s misery so loud and clear upfront, modulation also becomes a problem. By the time her foul deeds come to a head, she is throwing up, slapping the walls and hollering in a way that seems unsuited to a woman averse to public scandal.Lisa Birnbaum as Hermione and Eric Tucker as Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale,” the most unwieldy of Shakespeare’s plays, with a bear attack and a statue that comes to life.Ashley GarrettThe transgression of social bonds — between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, leaders and citizens — links the repertory pairing and seems to make Bedlam’s case for its resonance in the present.Suspicion of infidelity kicks off “The Winter’s Tale,” in which Tucker’s volatile, and obtuse, patriarch Leontes rules over a frat party-style royal court. With its swing from apparent tragedy to roving rom-com, and its grab bag of devices (a bear attack, a 16-year time jump, a statue that comes to life), Shakespeare’s play is an unwieldy beast to wrangle onstage, and one of the most amenable to bold and wacky interpretations. ‌‌Leontes and the neighboring king Polixenes (Elan Zafir) start out demonstrating their brotherly affection by slapping each other across the face with flour tortillas between shots of cheap liquor. But when Leontes suspects the queen Hermione (Lisa Birnbaum) is pregnant by Polixenes instead of him, the jig is up in a flurry of banishments and deaths that leaves him without his wife, child and friend.A cast of seven (some of whom appear in both productions) double and triple up roles in “The Winter’s Tale,” with only slight changes in the ’80s thrift-store costumes by Daniele Tyler Mathews to help viewers distinguish between them. The most impressive juggling act comes from Zafir, who plays both father and son in a confrontation at the altar of young love. Karen Alvarado, as faithful servant Camillo (and the ardent, naïve Thea in “Hedda Gabler”) is a standout in both, a rare anchor of earnestness and ease. But not everyone is as comfortable, especially with Shakespeare’s verse; under Tucker’s direction, some of the actors fall into the trap of gesturing at rather than conveying the meaning of words.There is something to be said for a company clearly having a blast — several, including Tucker, broke character cracking up at Mike Labbadia’s Clown (modeled after his pop culture moniker Chad, or loathsome alpha male), a laugh that might have been more fun were everyone in on the joke.Improvised bits of modern dialogue and a variety of acting styles give the productions a sense of a particularly collaborative rehearsal process. Challenging the form and style of revered material is what keeps them alive. But neither revival makes easy work of identifying cohesive or incisive arguments about the texts while also allowing the audience to follow along.If less can be more, as previous Bedlam productions have shown, “Hedda Gabler” and “The Winter’s Tale” suggest that more can also be too much. So much exuberance can demonstrate a breach of trust in the material, and the audience’s ability to understand it. As Ibsen and Shakespeare both point out, underestimating people comes at a cost.Hedda GablerThrough Nov. 19 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.The Winter’s TaleThrough Nov. 20 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More