Roslyn Sulcas, NY Times - June 24, 2009

Colin Gee, a slight, slim man, appears at the start of his new work, "Across the Road," dressed in neat khaki pants and a white shirt. His long face, with its large, mobile features, is discreetly whitened; his dark hair, side-parted and slicked across his head in an old-fashioned style. His resemblance to a Marcel Marceau-type figure, doubtless intentional, is reinforced by the small, subtle gestures and movements that accompany his spoken performance.

He appears framed by a band of gauzy fabric overhead and to each side, with additional sheer curtains layered behind. The set, exquisitely lighted to create soft sepia tones, evokes a child's puppet theater, and Mr. Gee (who was once a principal Cirque du Soleil clown) appears like the traditional French puppet character Guignol, slightly too large for his setting.

This duality - the sense of looking at figments of the cultural past through a strongly contemporary lens - is one of the strongest features of "Across the Road," which was performed last week at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens. But it's a duality that is hard to sustain, and in his hourlong one-man show, Mr. Gee doesn't quite manage to transcend the rather plodding narrative that underpins the show.

That narrative is told through text projected overhead and snippets of film; it concerns a couple, Mark and Aoife, at odds over whether to sell a family farm. This strangely prosaic subject is exploded to some degree by Mr. Gee's presence, as he slips between the filmy curtains to offer poetic, associative riffs on the ideas and emotions raised by the film and the text.

At first it's tempting to try to follow Mr. Gee's slightly mumbled, monotone words, spoken over an eerie electronic soundtrack punctuated by wordless song (by Erin Gee, Mr. Gee's sister). But their aspirations to Gertrude Steinian sound patterns ("actions attract me, refraction, a fraction of her satisfaction, don't retract") soon become a somewhat numbing backdrop to Mr. Gee's simultaneous, beautifully nuanced gestures.

With the curve of an arm, the twitch of a finger, the slight shift of a foot Mr. Gee can suggest infinite possibilities of physical language, intimate the subtleties of human feeling. But his deliberately contained range of movement, and the compelling visual quality of the work, aren't quite enough to maintain interest through the ultimately predictable even-paced alternation of film and speech, narrative and nonsense.

Still, it's clear that Mr. Gee is an original artist, a kind of one-off. "Across the Road" displays at least that.

Charles Isherwood, NY Times - June 2, 2009

"Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening."

That is Gertrude Stein, in case the distinctive syntax had not clued you in, musing as only this bemusing modernist could muse, in an essay about the theater titled "Plays." "So your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play," she continues.

That's an astute observation - at once obvious and insightful - and it seems natural to apply it to "A Family of Perhaps Three," a rare staging of a Stein play by the Target Margin Theater at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens. The production is part of "The Theater of Tomorrow," the companyÕs admirable festival of experimental American drama from the first half of the 20th century.

It would be interesting to analyze the audience's emotions concerning the play before, during and after this theatrical oddity. Fascination and curiosity might chase around the mind in the opening minutes. Following briskly behind would be deflation and disappointment. Next, a sober commitment to endurance. And then comes a long chaser of boredom. That, at least, was my general reaction.

Most of the dozens of works Stein classified as plays do not resemble standard theatrical texts at all, even when they are divided - willy-nilly it seems - into acts and scenes. Stein compared plays to landscapes, and many of hers are just assemblages of words, dense or spare expanses of verbal terrain that are as daunting to navigate on the page as they surely are to put onstage. (They rarely are put onstage, with the notable exceptions being the texts used in the operas "The Mother of Us All" and "Four Saints in Three Acts.")

"A Family of Perhaps Three" consists simply of thick paragraphs of Stein's circling, repetitive, recalcitrant prose. The director, David Herskovits, divides the text among three actresses, Chinasa Ogbuagu, Allison Schubert and Indika Senanayake. Each has a distinctive presence, and all deserve accolades simply for keeping the puzzling piles of words from getting jumbled up in their heads. (Not that you'd notice if they did.)

On a set featuring a few pieces of furniture and three screens, the performers recite Stein's eddies and rivulets and waves of words, sometimes as if meditating on them, sometimes with no emotion whatsoever, sometimes in a tone of comic melodrama.

There is a tentative whisper of a story, of an older sister and a younger one, and possibly a mother. The text, all in the third person, circles obsessively around a few ideas: the question of earning a living, of marrying and not marrying, of protecting and being protected. The prose thickens and clots, and then thins out again.

A clipped, clear sentence - "The younger one was protected" - will be followed by a dizzying one: "She was protected from knowing that they were ones having been living when they were young ones, she was protected from knowing that they were not ever completely earning a living, she was protected from knowing that they were not going to be succeeding in earning a living."

The performers exchange intense glances, eye one another warily, sometimes testily. They sit and then they stand. They hustle on or offstage during the frequent blackouts. Cinched around their waists are those bulky blankets used to wrap furniture during a move. I couldn't tell you why. Eventually these are discarded. I would not attempt to offer a rationale for that either.

Stein was fascinated by words and their colors and weights, and throughout her work mixed up the circuits running between language and sense. But much of her thornier writing is obscure even when it is playful. She uses words as objects in themselves, making strange music of disordered or convoluted syntax. Most of us prefer that they signify things, communicate sense, possess emotional significance.

Admirers of her experimental writing should check out this show, if only as an opportunity to hear how her language breathes in a theatrical space. Mr. Herskovits has done an honorable job of staging the text without trying to impose any reductive meaning on it. Most others, I expect, will find themselves feeling itchy, irritated, smothered - simultaneously surfeited with words and starved for meaning.

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