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show listings: productions
This Is Your Brain On…
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON...
by Martin Denton · January 25, 2004
This Is Your
Brain On...,
Vital Theatre Company's splendid new evening of short plays celebrating the
cerebellum, begins with actor/playwright Jane Shepard delivering a learned talk
on science idiocy. Shepard, mock-serious (for a while, at least) in a lab coat
and spiky hair, would seem to be doing a faux lecture, putting us on. But she's
not: her piece—an account of how her right-brained approach to thinking
(aka "a learning disability") got her into trouble at school and
ultimately exactly where she is today (i.e., on the stage of an
off-off-Broadway theatre, talking to us)—is a right-brainer's idea of a
"lecture." Which means that it's filled with digressions and tangents
and weird, sharp turns (at least to the left-brainers in the crowd); that
Shepard uses character voices, props, pictures, and even a boxing nun puppet at
one point to illustrate the way that her mind works. It's a funny and touching
monologue, and a pointed one, too, reminding us that ways of looking at the
world that are different from our own are meant to be celebrated, not stifled.
It's a provocative
way to begin a delightful evening. The folks at Vital, with Shepard's one-woman
tour de force in hand, asked eight playwrights to come up with complimentary
short plays. The playwrights were asked, "If a brain could speak, what
would it say?" None of them seems to have left-brainedly pointed out that
brains can speak (and do, every time someone talks); instead, happily,
these authors relied, like Shepard, on their spectacularly diverse right brains
to come up with a selection of one-acts that run the gamut from social
commentary and self-examination to depictions of an election between a brain
and a spleen and a 40-year-old man's internal Vice President of Rational
Thought turning in his resignation.
Andrea Lepcio and
Robin Rothstein offer the most concrete examples of brains speaking their minds
in Crossing Town and Two P.M., respectively. Lepcio's
illuminating piece, skillfully acted by Jacqueline Mazarella, reveals the
stream-of-consciousness thoughts of a woman caught in the rat race, on the
morning she decides to duck out of it forever. Rothstein's comedy lets us
inside the head of another woman (Vanessa Shealy live and via voiceover) who is
having trouble getting motivated to do anything on a sleepy Sunday afternoon.
Lorna Littleway's
potent Bang! Bang! Bang! is narrated by the brain of a black youth who
has just been shot by a cop; Christopher Burris plays this unfortunate young
man, body and mind, with great conviction. Rob Sheridan does similar double
duty as the protagonist of Mark Loewenstern's pensive and incisive One is
the Road, playing a fairly ordinary man driving home from vacation with his
wife, and speaking the thoughts running through his head. One is the Road
turns on the notion that the human brain can simultaneously manage seven
"thoughts" at once: Loewenstern's piece literalizes this concept with
resonant results.
After-Brain, by Catherine Gillet,
offers a woman and her brain side by side, figuring out how to recover from the
devastatingly terrible premiere of a play they have spent the past two years
working on. Shealy and Mazarella are hilariously in-synch as nerve center and
bundle of nerves in this humorous piece.
Taking the heftiest
leaps during the evening are J. Holtham, Suzanne Bradbeer, and Mike Teele, each
of whom imagines—quite successfully—what's actually going on inside that
squishy cortex in our skulls. Holtham's Halves features an argument
between the right and left sides (inventively indicated by a single actor, Tom
Johnson, doing a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing behind an enormous pair of spectacles).
Johnson also performs Bradbeer's Election Day, as a brain who is
awaiting results of an election that will determine whether or not it will
retain control over the body it inhabits; in both plays, he's very engaging and
very funny. Teele's play, the evening closer, is Take This Job and Shove It!,
in which Rob Sheridan plays John, Senior VP of Rational Thought, who is
resigning from his job after the sentient organism that he calls "The
System" decides to abandon his detailed five-year plan in favor of the
more spontaneous lifestyle advocated by Charlie (of the Pleasure Center).
(Interestingly, all
three of these plays are more or less about the exact same thing. But they
couldn't be more different; as Dr. Seuss once said, oh the thinks we can
think!)
This Is Your
Brain On...
defies the odds and conventional wisdom by being a program of one-act plays
with no weak links; even more remarkable is the fact that the whole shebang was
put together in less than a month by the playwrights, actors, and a dedicated
and talented behind-the-scenes staff that includes eight directors (Frank
Pisco, Linda Ames Key, Daniel Jáquez, Julie Hamberg, Aimée Hayes, Karen
Sommers, Margot Massie, and Sue Lawless) and a design team whose efforts, from
a simple backdrop depicting a blue sky against a dark void to the selection of
appropriate transitional music such as "Going Out of My Head" and
Aretha Franklin's "Think," provide unity and constancy to an evening
of pyrotechnic mental gymnastics.