House of Gold @ Woolly Mammoth

Sam and I ushered this one together. It is a retelling of the Jon Benet Ramsay story with some added characters (I think) and a surreal setting. Many of the major characters are all given ghoulish motives and the play feels like the shadowed projections of those motives onto a big screen. Sometimes these stories overlap and conflict and do not make a lot of sense from a plot standpoint, but the overall affect is interesting in its successful portrait of the entire situation as being basically a clusterfuck. And if nothing else, it portrays a murky line between how messed up a world a writer can create compared to how messed up the world is we inhabit.

The real standout for me was the young bullied kid, Jon Benet befriends (not sure if he is a character in the real life drama). This show benefits a bit from some reflection as my impression while watching it was not especially favorable. But then I think it may be trying to communicate an ugly tale. I feel like I just ate a tray of eggplant. I suppose its good for me but only in an academic sort of way.

Ameriville @ Round House

This was a very innovative production, a fusion of cadence, poetry, drama and percussion. Four performers mostly alternating monologues breath life into stories of New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina hit, and now years later. The telling is an indictment of our nonchalance towards the victims there, and the story uses Katrina as a mechanism to point a spotlight at many of the ills of American society, and especially those related to it's class divide.

I think this piece was successful when it talked about Katrina directly. At times though, the shear volume of social ills it attempted to spotlight becomes overwhelming and numbing. Perhaps more focus on a smaller set of issues would have been more poignant.

From an artistic standpoint, this was very well done. The performers were all excellent, and this innovative drama provides a nice break from the formulas I am more accustomed to seeing.