Film to stage
Woody Allen's Manhattan comes to Austin in improvised "Stories" at the HideoutTheatre
Jul 21, 2012 | 12:05 pm
Painters at the MoMA, perverts on the subway, a gaggle of therapists, and a good hot reuben.
These are just some of the ingredients of Manhattan Stories, an improvised performance inspired by Woody Allen and directed by veteran local improvisers Jon Bolden (of Squirrel Buddies) and Valerie Ward (of Parallelogramophonograph). Manhattan Stories is playing at the Hideout Theatre on Saturday nights throughout July and August.
Bolden hosts the show with a skillful Woody Allen impersonation that gets lots of laughs. But the show’s true strength lies in evoking, rather than mimicking, Manhattan’s beloved (and reviled) bard of neurosis.
In another type of show, this love triangle would be fairly easy to resolve. But this was, after all, Woody Allen — almost! — and instead it became a crooked spider web of indecision and doubt, enhanced by brilliant bits of absurdist humor among the supporting cast.
The rock-solid ensemble cast, comprised of Nicole Beckley, Kaci Beeler, Andy Buck, Alex Dobrenko, Emma Holder, Lisa Jackson, Marc Majcher, Troy Miller, Caitlin Sweetlamb, and co-director Ward, demonstrates a firm grasp of Allen’s deceptively loose narrative style, in which seemingly inconsequential conversations are woven together in themes alternately absurd and grandiose.
It was Bolden’s Woody Allen impression that initially led friends — including Ward — to suggest a Woody Allen improv show. Bolden resisted the idea at first.
“But the more of his movies I watched, the more I realized that a lot of it is pretty Chekhovian," Bolden says. "It’s an ensemble cast, with several story-lines all centering around some kind of theme, and various perspectives around that theme. And I realized that was the improv I wanted to see anyway.”
A fellow improviser once identified the tall, doe-eyed Ward as “the Diane Keaton of the group,” and in the performance we attended she played the protagonist with a combination of quick wit and supreme patience that did indeed conjure up a gentler version of Keaton. (The lead, as in most improv, changes with every performance.)
Ward played the long-suffering girlfriend of an artist (Dobrenko) who, having been christened “the next Modigliani” by The New Yorker, decided that the only way to find out whether his name would outlive him was to commit suicide on television. Faced with this idiocy, Ward’s character longed for a doltish ex-boyfriend (Buck) who, somewhere across the city, longed for her, too.
In another type of show, this love triangle would be fairly easy to resolve. But this was, after all, Woody Allen — almost! — and instead it became a crooked spider web of indecision and doubt, enhanced by brilliant bits of absurdist humor among the supporting cast.
Dobrenko’s narcissistic artist (who would certainly be played by Woody Allen if this were the real thing) yielded some of the funniest moments in the show, from the repetition of the phrase “the next Modigliani” to the appearance, in dreams and visions, of Modigliani himself (Buck), along with buddies Frida Kahlo (Beeler) and Auguste Rodin (Miller).
However, Dobrenko’s real achievement was his ridiculous but poignant articulation of the show’s central themes: the urgent desire to make one’s life meaningful on a large scale, even when that desire conflicts directly with the human relationships that can make it meaningful on a small scale. This is Woody Allen par excellence.
It’s rare to speak of “central themes” in an improvised show, where the show changes every night and performers are tasked with creating plot on the fly. Ward describes the challenge of improvising Allen’s style: “Once you start really analyzing his movies, there’s so much to him... There are all these small, subtle details — how do you remember them all without obsessing about them in your head, and still be able to do good improv? You have to watch the movies and internalize what is Woody Allen.”
And what is Woody Allen, exactly?
“It’s grappling with cosmological themes and philosophy and the meaning of life — and then some really dumb one-liners. They talk to God while they do their laundry. It’s that mix of the sublime and the mundane.”
Thanks to Woody Allen, New York will always seem like the perfect place to stage such contradictions. People often say that the city is another “character” in Allen’s films. But, as evoked the beautifully understated set on the small Hideout stage, New York isn’t a character so much as a microcosm.
It's a little world where people are held in a kind of suspended animation, ordering the same hot reuben every day in the same deli, retreading the same faded romances, and trying to produce art that will freeze them forever in the same time and place, even after they die.
---
Manhattan Stories plays at the Hideout Theatre Saturdays through August.
