The Politics of Gender at Theater for the New City

Theater for the New City

I feel as though I am discovering an entirely new realm of New York actors. As with almost anything beyond the Pale of Broadway, it was worth going to see "The Politics of Gender" because of the cast whose professional capabilities could not be hidden in a small theatre where the audience sits three feet from the stage. Two long-standing professionals on the O-O-O-O-B theatre world shone in this production: Taylor Graves, whose technique was as strong as her presence; she is a literally luminous beauty who acts with her eyes as much as anything else and brings her character fully into being in the most literal sense, and Linus Gelber a brilliant Danny De Vito lookalike, who has been in everything, for years, who was cast as Lady Bracknell before it became common to put a man in the role and is a star of the continuing theatre soap opera "It's getting Tired Mildred". The play, a dated Italian thriller, was as amusing as it was predictable. The killer was who I thought it was and not the main suspect who turned out not to exist. Even so, it was fun to see a production which opened with a corpse being removed from the scene of the crime (though the lucky cast member with that roll-off role was not actually credited on the playbill) and the "film noir" script was only enhanced by the sounds of street life going on outside on 10th Street: cops yelling, radios blaring, sirens wailing, all of which was so pertinent that at first I thought it was a sound track until the inevitable irruption of a cellphone inside the theatre made me realise that all that noise was but the intrusion of the real world.