The Troy Foundry Theatre, an incubator project of the Theatre Institute at Russell Sage College, launched this weekend with an adaptation of the late Harold Pinter's 1991 play, New World Order, wrapped around five other Pinter pieces in a tidy hour-plus package. The fact that admission was free, although tickets could be ordered online in advance, virtually ensured that the Maeder Theatre at Sage would be full for each of the three nights it hosted the production. The scene shifts across town to the Hangar on the Hudson for performances next Thursday & Friday.
Creative director David Girard opened the proceedings with a short speech welcoming everyone to the theatre. And, then, the fun began. And I use the term "fun" very loosely.
Two of the six plays, Mountain Language & One For The Road, are presented in four parts apiece, and are interlinked together. A couple (Ethan Botwick & Emily Curro) are captured and tortured by a dystopian, authoritarian government which seems to place its faith in God as interpreted in the Old Testament. Hmm, that has a familiar, disturbing ring to it to anyone from the South or Midwest.
New World Order itself has a blindfolded man (Botwick, wearing a full hood) subjected to the cruel trash talking of a pair of doctors (Alex Tarantelli and Shayne David Cameris). This same pair also figures into Precisely, which is linked to Order.
Tarantelli, wearing a big wig, then plays an evangelist in God's District, which skewers the Bible Belt mercilessly. Tarantelli is so over the top, it's a wonder local churches aren't raising a fuss.
The glue holding the entire production together, really, is local stage veteran John Romeo, who is both charming and sinister at the same time in Mountain and One For The Road. The coda to the production is the Press Conference, in which the cultural minister (Romeo) takes questions from reporters, and is unashamed to admit to the practices of the secret police.
It seems that the selection of New World Order to launch the Foundry Theatre is a coincidence, considering that one of the criticisms of the Trump administration is that the President, if you believe the media, may be modeling his administration after Russia's Vladimir Putin and/or North Korea's Kim Jong Un, given how Trump is using Twitter as a bully pulpit. Pinter's works, meanwhile, have some of their roots in George Orwell's legendary 1984, which might just be in the Presidential library right now.
Dark, disturbing, but surprisingly swift in pace. If this was a movie, it'd be rated R for coarse language and adult situations.
Rating: A-.
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