SFist Reviews: Tiny Kushner at Berkeley Rep

Valeri Mudek and Kate Eifrig in "Flip Flop Fly"

The production currently playing on the thrust stage at Berkeley Rep -- while American Idiot finishes out its raucous pre-Broadway run in the Roda Theater -- is Tiny Kushner, a collection of one-act plays written by Angels in America scribe and Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner. The plays were all written in the 90's and 00's and originally produced in this grouping by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Though they all bear some familiar Kushner-esque markings -- psychotherapy, fictionalized portrayals of real people, fantastical premises involving the afterlife, politicized critiques of the government -- they are relatively unconnected pieces and deserve to be discussed separately. So here goes, in brief:

Flip Flop Fly
The first play opens on the moon, where two obscure but notable women of yesteryear have arrived to share a quiet afterlife. Valeri Mudek plays the goofy and unflappable Lucia Pamela, famous mostly for a single piece of mid-century kitsch, a 1969 album called "Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela" which she claimed was recorded on the moon. Kate Eifrig plays Geraldine, Queen of Albania, who despite having an American mother is staunchly proud of her Eastern European roots and the many difficulties of her life. Both actresses do a fine job of clashing and playing off one another given their bizarro world circumstances. We won't say the play is a trifle, but it is definitely Kushner at his most whimsical -- a funny experiment that goes very right when Geraldine turns to Lucia, bitterly denouncing all her playful American fictions and says, "But my life was real. It happened. On earth. In real tick-tock time."

Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence
Can you tell Tony was a little ambivalent about titling this one? We open in a therapist's office where a female therapist (Kate Eifrig) is treating a hyper and neurotic gay male patient (J.C. Cutler, pictured) whose treatment she had tried to terminate because he frightens her. Each character has behind them a lover who speaks in the scene without physically being in the room. It's an odd play that deals heavily in psychoanalytic rhetoric, but its notable for the extremely intimate and in-depth conversation the male patient has with his lover about anal sex and how it disgusts him. In other words, don't go see this show with your mom.

East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues
Actor Jim Lichtscheidl (pictured, right) shines in this one-man piece (commissioned by Alec Baldwin) playing at least two dozen characters and telling the story of a tax evasion scheme that spread like wildfire for a couple years among city employees in New York. Though the play, of necessity, deals a lot in tax code language and therefore gets tedious, Lichtscheidl truly wows with his casual mastery of accents, speech patterns, and body language which are downright Streep-ian in their accuracy, and never stray into Robin Williams ham territory.

Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise
Another play about psychotherapy, this time in the afterlife: Richard Nixon's psychiatrist is having an advisory session with heaven's queen therapist, The Recording Angel. The premise allows us to hear from the man who counseled one of our most troubled presidents through one of the most troubling periods in U.S. history. And in between having to listen to Nixon for an hour every day in the afterlife, Hutschnecker's been enjoying The Sopranos on DVD and can't stop talking about how brilliant Melfi is. It's a cute play, and J.C. Cutler does a great job embodying Hutschnecker's frustrations and intellectualism, but there isn't a whole lot there besides some insight into Nixon, and this is the weakest play of the bunch.

Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy
Laura Bush is invited by an angel to read to several dead Iraqi schoolchildren on the other side, none of whom speak but who emit songbird music from their mouths, specifically Messiaen's classical interpretations of songbirds. Kate Eifrig is terrific as Laura, and Valeri Mudek delivers her lines, and gruesome stories of how each child died, with pitch-perfect, Kushnerian brightness. Laura decides to read to the children from The Brothers Karamazov, specifically the "Grand Inquisitor" chapter, because she figures that having passed over to the other side these kids can handle it. Though it might seem to start off as an elaborate joke, the play becomes an insightful and wrenching exploration of morality, responsibility, and human fallibility. Laura is at once obstinately pragmatic about casualties and the war on terror, and complicatedly honest about how the choices she has made in her life have led her to have to defend something so vile and indefensible, and to stand with Dostoyevsky questioning the goodness of God. (Our only minor criticism of the production was that we really wanted to hear, at least once, the Messaien songbird music emitting from the invisible childrens' mouths, but it was never played.) Eifrig, playing Laura, was visibly choked up by the play's end, and was still wiping away tears during the curtain call.