A Danse Macabre to Spring

by Marty and Martha Roth

Three desperate, corrupt French nuns hide in an abandoned factory during a revolution in Haiti in 1805. The Mother Superior urges them to extend their protection to a rich white woman who fears for the safety of her jewels. This is the setting for Eduardo Manet’s savage comedy “The Nuns,” now in a brilliant production at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The nuns are played matter-of-factly by men: Robert Rosen as a dictatorial Mother Superior, Vincent Gracieux as the thuggish Sister Angela, and Steven Epp as a mute Sister Inez; and the exquisite clash of their habits with their bodies reminded us of what Jean Genet wrote about men performing in his play, “The Maids”: the shock of seeing a man’s hairy forearm protruding from a dainty maid’s uniform can disorient an audience’s perceptions to the point where they will accept extraordinary acts onstage.

Extraordinary acts abound in “The Nuns,” which is cruel, violent, and very funny. Although freed Blacks began the Haitian struggle, the action of this play concerns only Whites, the three nuns, the rich woman (played superbly by Barbara Berlovitz), and a Corpse, played by new company member Jon Morris (who does one of the most amazing comic turns we’ve seen in a long time). We won’t say more except to urge you to see it. Jeune Lune is a company of the first rank, and “The Nuns” is exactly the sort of play that they do best. Incidentally, the program tells us that it’s “collaboratively produced and directed,” an almost impossible feat. These theater artists are at the peak of their powers, and we are grateful that they still dwell among us.

Shawn McConneloug and Her Orchestra gave a reprise of “Palace of Dreams,” last season’s hit production, at the new Suburban World Cabaret. Subtitled “21st Century Vaudeville,” the piece attacked various forms of the movie musical and happily demolished them, from South Sea spectacles to biblical epics to patriotic war stories. We can hardly wait for their next show, “Stand on Your Man,” when they’ll take on country music. The Suburban World, by the way, serves very nice food and drink, the sound and lighting systems are super, and the clouds still roll by overhead.

Next season, the Suburban World will be home to Minneapolis Musical Theatre, the terrific troupe that has put on pocket-sized musicals at Bryant-Lake Bowl for the past several years. Their most recent show, “Lucky Stiff,” a hilarious romp involving gangsters from New Jersey, a British clerk, a corpse, and the gambling casino at Monte Carlo, marked the end of their BLB residence. The musical by Steven Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens is tight fun in every respect and represents those artists at their best (before they took leave of their talents in the creation of Ragtime).

We look forward to seeing these marvelous singers and dancers on a slightly larger stage. Part of the fun of seeing them, along with the fact that they rescue from obscurity many shows that we’d never see otherwise, is their skill at squeezing their huge talents onto a little bitty stage. But we certainly wish the men behind MMT, Kevin Hansen and Steven J. Meerdink, the best of luck in their new venue, and we’ll be there to cheer them on.

“Alice in Wonderland,” at the Children’s Theater Company, although it had charming touches, disappointed us. Directed by Dominique Serrand of the Jeune Lune company, it seemed to be aimed at cynical twelve-year-olds rather than the younger children for who have always been an important audience for CTC. Stage business was both chaotic and fussy, and the urban-grunge sets didn’t work well. Characters like Alice and the White Rabbit, who should give children some focus of stability in a crazy Wonderland, seemed so un-anchored themselves that they simply added to the chaos.

At the bottom of the month’s heap we found “The Blue Room,” Jungle Theater’s staging of the David Hare adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Round Dance,” a turn-of-the-last-century piece of bittersweet Viennese pastry that became a French film, “La Ronde,” directed by Max Ophuls. The play is a sexual daisy chain: the man from the first scene meets a new woman in the second, she meets a new man in the third, and so forth until the new man from the next to last scene meets up with the original girl. A round dance, right?

Part of Hare’s difference from Schnitzler is that only two actors, a man and a woman, play all the characters. Another part is that he literalizes the sexual encounters—this is the play in whose original London production Nicole Kidman got naked. Director Bain Boehlke approached the script with his usual disciplined gusto, but we found the play so tired that even Jungle’s usual spruce production couldn’t save the evening. Kirsten Frantzich did some nice, varied work as the five women, but poor Kris L. Nelson was simply not up to the demands of his five parts. A closed-screen TV transmission let us see the actors hustling into their backstage costume changes, but we couldn’t see why it was there unless it was to give us something to look at between scenes.

Probably the best film we saw last month was “Changing Lanes,” the extended road-rage drama in which Ben Affleck turns in his best performance to date and Samuel Jackson gets to be a recovering alcoholic trying to change his luck but trapped in his small-time loser’s behavior. Some of the plot turns and action are barely credible, involving shady legal practice and shrinking the topography of New York City like a ZIP drive, but director Roger Michell keeps the action brisk and the supporting performances are superb, particularly Kim Staunton as Jackson’s wife, Amanda Peet as Affleck’s, and Sidney Pollack and Richard Jenkins as legal weasels. Unlike most urban dramas, we had the sense that these were real people suffering real gender madness, and we felt caught up in their plight. As an allegory of masculinity it seems more serious and worthy of attention than most recent films.

The slick Argentinian mystery “Nine Queens” also caught us up, but differently. Its characters are lovable grifters and conmen, and the cracking pace and twisty narrative kept us enthralled. Ricardo Darin makes an adorable swindler, and Gaston Pauls a plausible apprentice. This is the first film by director Fabian Bielinsky, who also gets screenwriting credit, and we can’t remember a more promising debut. The plot takes a bare twenty-four hours to unfold and we beg to be excused from summarizing it but we do recommend the film.

Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” was also a disappointment, but who will take the words of two sexagenarians for that. It rests on two legs, the “spidey” effects and the charm of Tobey Maguire in repose. It has no interesting story to tell. It has no gratifying villainy—Willem Dafoe, who is always close to a certain order of freakiness and can be said to have come out in his recent Nosferatu fiasco, acts as over-the-top-mad as any Roger Corman mad scientist. Its visual spread is shamelessly taken from the first Christopher Reeve “Superman” film. The effects are indeed grand but eroded by the fact that the technology involved approaches animation so closely that we felt constantly manipulated. Maquire has a lot of charm, but it’s the same charm he had in the charming “Wonder Boys,” and it left us wondering if this was to be his permanent acting horizon.

Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Cat’s Meow” has received more pre-release publicity than any film we can think of besides, well, “Spider-Man,” but it doesn’t show well, either. Opulent, brilliantly cast, and beautifully shot, “Meow” suffers from an obscure script that introduces too many minor characters and unfortunately muddy sound recording, so that dialogue that might have clarified the characters’ place in the story can’t be heard.

The story concerns the disappearance of film pioneer Thomas Ince from a cruise on the yacht of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, film star Marion Davies. Edward Herrmann makes a wonderful Hearst, especially when blasting seagulls from the deck of his yacht. Kirsten Dunst does a nice job conveying Davies’ flair for comedy, which Hearst never liked to acknowledge; he wanted her to be known as a serious dramatic actress. Eddie Izzard, the British comedian, makes a bored, puffy Charlie Chaplin without Chaplin’s physical delicacy. Joanna Lumley as novelist Elinor Glyn and Jennifer Tilly as gossip columnist Louella Parsons are delicious, but neither of them can save the film.

Last, and least, is the Belgian film “Pauline and Paulette,” a soft-hearted, soft-headed domestic comedy about a quartet of aging sisters, one of whom is retarded. Dora van der Groen gives a brilliant performance as Pauline, the “little girl of 66,” but it’s not nearly enough. There’s hardly any story, and the other characters are so unattractive that the film serves as a kind of anti-travelogue: if that’s what Belgians are like, we wouldn’t go there on a bet.

NOTE: Ten Thousand Things, the theater company without walls, will be presenting their June show, “Anna Bella Eema,” by Lisa D’Amour, for a few public performances including three at Open Book, June 7-9 at 8:00 p.m.