Stone Cold Dead Serious 6/1 & Nocturne 6/5 @ CPT

It’s not often that you get to see two plays by a hot, new contemporary playwright in the same year -- much less in the same week. So it’s news that Cleveland Public Theatre has put together an Adam Rapp double-header. In a co-production with TitleWAVE Theater, the black comedy Stone Cold Dead Serious previews today in the experimental James Levin Theatre. Then on Sunday, Dan Kilbane will perform Rapp’s 75-minute monologue play Nocturne. I talked to Kilbane and to directors Greg Vovos and Jyana Gregory to find out why CPT has gone Rapp-crazy this June.

“I’m a total Rapp-head,” admits Vovos with a laugh. “I’ve traveled to both New York and Pittsburgh to see three of his plays.” Though his work has yet to be seen in Cleveland, Rapp has emerged nationally as a critical favorite for his edgy, off-beat work. “These two plays ,which are my favorites, really show his range as a writer,” says Vovos. “I find them beautiful, poetic, hypnotic.”

Kilbane agrees. “I read Nocturne a couple of years ago,” he says, “and fell totally in love with it. I heard about it when I was in NYC in the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and somebody came in raving about this incredible one-man show, one of the best plays they’d ever seen.” Kilbane had originally hoped to direct it, but after a turn in playwright Sarah Morton’s solo performance class, he was encouraged by the artists at CPT to perform in a solo show. He chose Nocturne.

Stone Cold Dead Serious is a dark comedy/drama about a blue collar family down on its luck. Dad is out of work, Mom’s struggling as a waitress, daughter is a druggie runaway. Their teenage boy tries to pull them out of the hole by playing a real-life version of a snuff video game. The prize is a million bucks if he wins but the battle is to the death.

“Oh, man, the language is so out there, and it’s so funny, you’re laughing, and you’re laughing, and then -- well, it really reels you in,” says Vovos. “The people become so real. It has a brutal honesty about tough lives -- the kind of people who might live right around the block from us here in Cleveland. It has a great heart.”

The production won this year’s Danny Morris Award from the Cleveland Theater Collective, a subsidy which allows CPT to hire two Equity actors, Meg Kelly Schroeder and Bob Ellis. “It’s great to have these experienced actors to anchor our cast,” says Vovos. “Our two younger actors, Magdalyn Donnelly and Stephen Dale, are learning a lot from them.”

In contrast to the gothic cartoon of Stone Cold Dead Serious, Nocturne is a quiet shocker. It’s told by a guy in his early 30s who has lived through a freak car accident 15 years earlier, when as a teen he ran over and decapitated his sister. Kilbane will be performing it in an intimate site-specific space -- one of the under-construction CPT offices not used since their marathon Pandemonium benefit.

“Nocturne is raw, open, poetic”, says Jyana Gregory, who is directing the piece as her last official project as CPT’s Associate Artistic Director. (The Theatre Communications Group support grant that brought Gregory from NY runs out this year.) “The story is about living with unimaginable grief, and how one slowly emerges from it,” says Gregory. “Ultimately it’s about human connection and healing.”

CPT, 6415 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, 216-631-2727. Stone Cold Dead Serious runs June 1-18. Nocturne plays on Sun, Mon., Tue, June 5-15, $10. http://www.cptonline.org.
from Cool Cleveland theater correspondent Linda Eisenstein Linda@coolcleveland.com (:divend:)