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Assassins, past and future
"Freedom Club' at the Fringe (2nd review)
Jonathan M. Stein
Whit MacLaughlin's New Paradise Laboratories productions typically drill into our societal psyche to reveal the comic and the manic that propel us often uncritically through life. Last year's Live Arts Festival success, Fatebook, compelled its rapt audience to collide with lives in cyberspace, in real space, and in mirrored video images twirling around them. The political extremists who populate our daily news and newscasts, and their historical antecedents offer fertile material for similar theatrical invention. But Freedom Club misses the mark.
Freedom Club is the collaborative effort of playwright Adriano Shaplin— artistic director of the Riot Group, a New York-based experimental theater group— and MacLaughlin as director, as well as an exemplary cast from both companies. The play attempts to link thematically a first act— focused on Abraham Lincoln (Elliot Drew Friedman), struggling in 1865 with plans for post-Civil War reconstruction, and John Wilkes Booth (Jeb Kreager), gathering steam for his assassination of Lincoln— with a second act set in the near-future in a radical commune in rural Virginia, divided in its radical mission and, yes, sending Jeb Kreager playing another character again out gunning for the president, who this time is a female "centrist."
The Lincoln first act enjoys some dramatic heft through Kreager's portrayal of Booth as a Shakespearean actor who attributes his regicidal urges to the Bard's more malevolent characters. Kreager, a founding member of the New Paradise crew, might consider some tempering of his stentorian declamations in order to realize other dimensions of his role.
But this Lincoln whom Shaplin has targeted is rendered as such a depressive and inept leader that it seems inconceivable that he could win an election, much less a civil war. Lincoln's efforts with his Secretary of State William Seward (Paul Schnabel) to bring a civil war to an equitable and reasonable conclusion do contrast well with the racist venom and paranoia of the Booth character. One can even accept the ahistorical (for 1865) injection of Mary Todd Lincoln's pressing for universal suffrage into this mix.
But the second half is an almost sophomoric cartoon of some lefty Weatherman group from the '70s, here sprinkled with incoherent feminist and gender themes.
Other actors in the work— Stephanie Viola, McKenna Kerrigan, and Mary McCool— contributed vivid characterizations in their roles.♦
To read another review of Freedom Club by Jim Rutter, click here.
Freedom Club is the collaborative effort of playwright Adriano Shaplin— artistic director of the Riot Group, a New York-based experimental theater group— and MacLaughlin as director, as well as an exemplary cast from both companies. The play attempts to link thematically a first act— focused on Abraham Lincoln (Elliot Drew Friedman), struggling in 1865 with plans for post-Civil War reconstruction, and John Wilkes Booth (Jeb Kreager), gathering steam for his assassination of Lincoln— with a second act set in the near-future in a radical commune in rural Virginia, divided in its radical mission and, yes, sending Jeb Kreager playing another character again out gunning for the president, who this time is a female "centrist."
The Lincoln first act enjoys some dramatic heft through Kreager's portrayal of Booth as a Shakespearean actor who attributes his regicidal urges to the Bard's more malevolent characters. Kreager, a founding member of the New Paradise crew, might consider some tempering of his stentorian declamations in order to realize other dimensions of his role.
But this Lincoln whom Shaplin has targeted is rendered as such a depressive and inept leader that it seems inconceivable that he could win an election, much less a civil war. Lincoln's efforts with his Secretary of State William Seward (Paul Schnabel) to bring a civil war to an equitable and reasonable conclusion do contrast well with the racist venom and paranoia of the Booth character. One can even accept the ahistorical (for 1865) injection of Mary Todd Lincoln's pressing for universal suffrage into this mix.
But the second half is an almost sophomoric cartoon of some lefty Weatherman group from the '70s, here sprinkled with incoherent feminist and gender themes.
Other actors in the work— Stephanie Viola, McKenna Kerrigan, and Mary McCool— contributed vivid characterizations in their roles.♦
To read another review of Freedom Club by Jim Rutter, click here.
What, When, Where
Freedom Club. By Adriano Shaplin; directed by Whit MacLaughlin. New Paradise Laboratories and The Riot Group production through September 11, 2010 at Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St. (at South St.) as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. www.livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=12742.
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