Theatre in Review: Amusements/School Pictures/Sad Boys in Harpy Land

	Ikechukwu Ufomadu. Photo: Chelcie Parry

For its fall attraction at the upstairs Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Playwrights Horizons has cracked open a three-pack of solo shows. It's putting it mildly to note that they are a mixed lot, but this often seems to be the dominant format of our self-obsessed time and the contrast between the artists' approach and concerns certainly gives one plenty to think about.

The aptly titled Amusements is the product of writer-performer Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who has a knack for turning traditional entertainment formats upside-down, shaking them to see what drops out. (An earlier piece, Ike at Night, seen at the Under the Radar Festival in 2015, was nothing less than a traditional TV talk show, held onstage, with local political figures.) Here, dressed suavely in a tux, he works the room with a comic monologue that, in its creeping absurdity, hair-splitting way with words, and perfect timing, is a model of hilarity.

After an opening announcement warning that if we intend to be in one of a dozen other buildings named after Peter Jay Sharp (whose name is in fact memorialized in at least three other New York theatres), he greets us with a "hello," noting that it is "just the first of many words I'll be sharing with you this evening. including, but not limited to: 'including,' 'but,' 'not,' 'limited,' and 'to'." By way of clarification, he says that, regarding the use of "to," "don't be surprised if, over the course of my set this evening, I find some way of sneaking the other two versions of the word 'to,' too. As I just have." He adds, generously, "I will hold for your applause."

Coaxing a lusty "woo" from the audience, he slips into a John F. Kennedy imitation, meditating on the word in the most august possible terms, asserting that we have given him "a 'woo' that served as a stern rebuke to those who say humankind has splintered beyond repair A 'woo' that reminds us that though passion may have strained, it has not yet broken our bonds of affection for one another." The contrast between the everyday use of onomatopoeia and high-flown rhetoric is riotously fitting. (It was, he adds, "a 'woo' that showed the people of the Earth what humankind can achieve when united together in common purpose and towards a common cause.")

It's Robert Benchley (in his "Treasurer's Report" mode) crossed with Eugène Ionesco, a grandiose oration so obsessed with the precise meaning of words that it ends up signifying nothing at all. This could be a recipe for tedium but, dipping into Moby-Dick, reminiscing about a childhood spent "on the sauce" (apple, it turns out), and genially handling a series of frequently asked questions (the first of which is "'Sup?'), Ufomadu's serene mastery of his pedantic material keeps the laughs coming. (Offering himself to any audience member as a volunteer, at the performance I attended he dealt suavely with someone who expressed the need for a sugar daddy, gifting the person with...a nickel.) "You know," he says in one of many displays of fake concern, "in today's entertainment marketplace, you, the consumer, have more choices than ever before for comedy." That's certainly true, but I like Ike. Nemuna Ceesay directed.

I like Milo Cramer, too, at least up to a point. In School Pictures, he details his time as a tutor to children of privilege, a subject that reveals many distressing things about the way we live now. There's Charlotte, who, in the seventh grade "has radical dramaturgical ideas that she doesn't know are radical dramaturgical ideas," including the notion that plays should consist only of climaxes. There's Terrance, who "was expelled from what's described to me as 'an elite home school'," and who, at twelve, has his own BAM subscription. Javier, the most jaded middle-schooler ever, thinks we're all doomed and the only thing to do is to party. Divya, ordered to write an essay on the question of Othello and racism, obtains from Cramer an exquisitely nuanced response that she blows off with a typically adolescent response. ("Don't hate me, but I kind of liked reading Othello. The story is really crazy, and the language is really pretty.")

Alas, these funny/sad, happy/tragic episodes, distinguished by pinpoint social observations, are delivered musically, with Cramer singing, mostly off-key, while playing a ukelele or toy piano; his delivery ranges from a murmur to a caterwaul. More than once, I wanted to beg him to stop, for all that's holy, and just get on with it. At about the two-thirds point, he drops the lyric interludes to offer a searing deconstruction of New York City's inequity-riddled educational system. These include a "gifted and talented program" that "traditionally and functionally has served to isolate and advance white and wealthy children;" the Specialized High School Admissions Test for elite public high schools, which has generated a costly coaching industry; and the bizarrely gerrymandered District 2, which takes in the bulk of the city's well-off families. He is also unsparing about his own role as a cog in the system, earning ninety dollars an hour while worrying that his employers might notice that, only a few weeks earlier, he was working as a barista at their local coffee shop. (An amusing sidebar about the years he spent serving up Bill DiBlasio's daily espresso only serves to buttress his argument about the whole crazy system.)

Cramer is a personable performer with an unruly shock of hair and a wicked glint in his eye, both of which contradict his supremely mild manner. He's a talented performer and a writer of wit but the excessively cutesy quality of the early passages is supremely counterproductive. If he put down the uke and simply spoke to us, School Pictures -- a piece that ultimately becomes captivating -- might be a knockout. His director, Morgan Green, might have a word with him about that.

Alexandra Tatarsky is a knockout, all right, but not in a good way. After ten minutes of Sad Boys in Harpy Land I felt so punch-drunk from her assaultive presentation that I had to restrain myself from discreetly creeping toward the exit. The piece begins with Tatarsky entering and vomiting into a bucket. (Not to be obvious, but this is never a good sign.) Next, she sings a ballad, about being poisoned by tinned fish, employing a voice so screechy that she makes Milo Cramer sound like Bryn Terfel. Then, in a voice so loud they probably hear it down the street at Signature Theatre, she screams, "My mind is a hellscape!"

All in all, not the most promising opening. One's hope dims further when she announces, "I don't have any material," then, to underscore the point, she wiggles a breast at us. Actually, she is loaded with material; the piece is so clotted with literary references that it collapses into incoherence. Tatarsky is, apparently, filled with despair about the current state of the world, a feeling with which, I'm sure, we're all in agreement. However, she passes her angst through a series of filters, beginning with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. "The idea was I would track Wilhelm's DEVELOPMENT alongside my own... checking in every few years to see how we were PROGRESSING and yeah the parallels between our lives have been...deeply unsettling." (The capital letters are hers.) But, obsessed with the concept of the bildungsroman, she moves on to Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, featuring a central character who refuses to grow, his anguished banging on the instrument of the title signaling the disaster befalling Germany. This leads to Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, whose world-roaming character she compares, not inaccurately, to the legend of the Wandering Jew. And we arrive, in a sideways fashion, at Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, in which a white woman torments a Black man on a New York subway. Also, the setting for this display of agony is inspired by Dante's Inferno, "specifically the circle of hell called Harpy Land or the Woods of the Suicides, where all the people who killed themselves are turned into trees." It's often impossible to tell which frame of reference is being employed and for which reasons.

If all this sounds more like a syllabus than a script, you're right, but it doesn't matter because most of Sad Boys in Harpy Land is marked by the performer's overemoting; Tatarsky's delivery, which suggests a barely contained panic, is exceedingly hard to take, especially when she appears to become hysterical and starts hitting herself. The world is indeed in rough shape these days, but her distress is surely one of the least interesting things about it. By the time she had asked us to join her onstage, singing and waving our arms on the way, I began to feel I had been consigned to Harpy Land myself. Many in the audience were clearly taken with the performer; I have no explanation for this. Iris McCloughan served as director; in this case, I think she functioned as an enabler. Anyway, never say Playwright Horizons doesn't give you plenty of choices. --David Barbour