| . | 06/14/2009
The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side
By: Eugene Paul
Playwright Derek Ahonen directs his own plays, which is, unusually, mostly a good thing. He revels in titles for his works that may not have a scintilla of relationship to his message or messages, verbal, physical, emotional, philosophical. Viz and to wit. Regardless, Ahonen lures his casts to understand everything he wants to convey, title or no. That they often also convey his own commentaries on his characters whether they know it or not is also part of his command, his skill. He does his own casting, drawing from within his company, The Amoralists, primarily. In this play, he requires four characters to be a sexual family, two male, two female, freely coupling in any combinations they mutually find pleasurable at the moment. Three of them are in their thirties; one is less than half their age, a waif they rescued from the streets. What canny director Ahonen has done is to make sure his cast is visually pleasing to the eye, since nudity is a prominent component of the play. Had he not, had he cast lumpish, prosaic, everyday bodies, his tale would have been starkly different. And he knows it.
The Pied Pipers is a three act play, uncommon these days. In the first act, we become steeped in the rituals, emotional explosions, idylls of this quartet living and loving together. They have a common responsibility for each other and for their little tribe as a group. All of them are also responsible for the Vegan restaurant they run downstairs from this squat of an apartment in the ratty building they’ve been allowed, even encouraged to inhabit by their patron saint, Donovan (Malcolm Madera). But Donovan is a Rosewater, which followers of Ahonen works know is a charming, scurrilous, unscrupulous family of scalawags, truly amoral, not like our quartet, Wayne (Mathew Pilieci), Billy (James Kautz), Dear (Sarah Lemp) and Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore) who, in their own way are beatifically moral, common sexual mores aside. The Rosewater history is my contribution; you’ll find more about each of our tribe in the program notes where it’s the characters’ bios you read, not bios of the actors who portray them. Another Ahonen perk. In act one, we also witness the arrival of Billy’s kid brother, Evan (Nick Lawson) on a visit of interrogation and inspection. He’s bratty, arrogant, horny, foul mouthed, a teen aged, know-it-all jerk. Earth mother, Dear, waif, Dawn, and emotional infant Wayne decamp to the bathroom to give alcoholic Billy time with the kid. It does not go well. Wayne decides the kid needs some shocking. He leads the parade of them as they come out of the bathroom naked, wet, playful, and in Wayne’s case, priapic. Using nudity on Broadway or off is nothing new. Think Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen in The Blue Room, think the trick in Six Degrees of Separation. And countless yards of skin Off, Off-Off currently as well as in the scroll of years. Practical, tactical theatrical titillation hooks. Ahonen goes some inches further: Wayne sports an erection. Its propriety is that it is in context. However, its reality causes other staged actions inevitably to seem less real.
In the second act, Donovan drops the bomb: he has sold the building; he wants them out in three days. The first act with all its mishugas has been vamping; the play has started. In the third act, they depart, their attempts at resolution sad; they are breaking up their happy home. And drunken Billy has seen God. (Not uncommon in Ahonen plays.) We are left to ponder the meaning of morality when all is said and done. Rest assured, discovering God does not mean that sex is bad, it means that selling out is bad. Billy will march to the drums he has often talked about but not done anything about. Sober. At the same time, we are aware that director Ahonen has cast Billy with an actor whose depiction of this profound mystery (sex to follow, of course) is seriously flawed, thus subjecting such revelation to doubt. Nor is Billy convincing either as a receptacle for Divine communion or drunken wisdom. Otherwise, James Kautz’s performance at the core of this tribe rings true when it comes to their physical relationships and when he comforts Wayne’s terrors of death. Mathew Pilieci, Wayne, is all raw emotion in the moment and splendid. I admired Sarah Lemp as Dear most especially for her clear, convincing explanatory, legalistic manner turning everything upside down. Dawn, Mandy Nicole Moore, is a frighteningly convincing innocent waif whose vast sexual experience hasn’t fouled her. Nick Lawson, almost totally marvelous as hormone ridden kid brother Evan, could be totally marvelous if his almost totally in character unintelligibility were as clearly comprehensible as his co-workers’.
Malcolm Madera makes a very convincing slime ball as Donovan, even as you realize he cares about these victims of his good old American Know-how, so that unresolved as things are left, so, too, have they ended just as playwright Ahonen intended. Dig a couple of layers out of that. Morality? Immorality? Amorality? It’s not as if others haven’t been trying. The play is enjoying its third run.
The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side. At PS 122, 150 First Avenue at Ninth Street. Tickets: $25. 212-352-3101 or www.PS122.org . Thu, Fri, Sat, Mon 7:30 pm, Sun 5 pm.
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