Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – PTP/NYC’s summer season (its 32nd!) is in full swing with an eclectic collection of works

• By drediman
• July 27, 2018
• No Comments

This year, Potomac Theatre Project is celebrating its 32nd impressive year performing in New York City. The company fills an interesting niche in the city’s Off-Broadway landscape. PTP/NYC’s focus on presenting difficult European plays and playwrights, often times neglected because of their perceived uncommercial qualities, is a mandate that other companies tend to shy away from. Indeed, one of the great stage actresses of our time, the late great Jan Maxwell championed PTP/NYC’s mission, often times appearing in their productions (her searing final stage appearance was in the company’s remounting of Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution three years ago, an experience I won’t soon forget). This summer’s rotating pair of evenings at Atlantic Stage 2 is an especially eclectic set, comprised of a double bill – Mr. Barker’s The Possibilities and Caryl Churchill’s The After-Dinner Joke – as well as a theatrical collage entitled Brecht on Brecht.

Christopher Marshall and Jonathan Tindle in Howard Barker’s “The Possibilities”. Photo by Stan Barouh.

Howard Barker is indisputably the theater company’s most-staged playwright. It would be an odd occurrence if a PTP/NYC season didn’t include one of his plays. The Possibilities is essentially a quartet of very short plays – each running approximately just 10 minutes – that contemplate “what if” in various scenarios. Although each of these are extremely short so-called parables, they still manage to be vintage Barker – nihilistic, savage, yet poetic and oddly beautiful, and they’re enacted by some of the company’s reliably committed veteran performers. The Possibilities is paired with a rarely-performed work by another British playwright, the acclaimed Caryl Churchill’s The After-Dinner Joke. Although I applaud the adventurous choice, the play is a difficult one to land effectively. It’s a intellectually-minded parody regarding charitable giving vis-à-vis politics, and it ruminates on the inextricable relationship and dance that occurs between the two. Although gleefully and gamely performed by a younger cast than that of The Possibilities, The After-Dinner Play is a play that needs to have its audiences in on the joke(s), and at the performance I attended, this occurred only intermittently.

Harrison Bryan and company in “Brecht on Brecht”. Photo by Stan Barouh.

The cast of Brecht on Brecht is even younger yet (perhaps this is a company in transition?). Although these performers seemed to be culled straight from drama school, the heavily-curated evening of Brecht writings, which is running in rotating repertoire with the aforementioned Barker/Churchill double bill, mostly hung well on them. Sometimes we forget the revolutionary bent and anger underlying Brecht’s works. He wasn’t just a coolly sophisticated artist, the man was also a revolutionary (both in his politics and his theater-making) with a fascinating personal story spanning continents and genres of art, a characteristic which these young performers smartly capitalized on. Even if some of the more world-weary, pungent sketches and songs – most of them iconic collaborations with the great Kurt Weill – were as of now just beyond their grasp, they admirably gave it the old college try.

RECOMMENDED

THE POSSIBILITIES / THE AFTER-DINNER JOKE / BRECHT ON BRECHT
Off-Broadway, Play
PTP/NYC at Atlantic Stage 2
Various run times
In repertoire through August 5