“Grand Theft Ovid,” through July 24
“Theater of the Arcade,” through July 25

The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

Everyone’s famous to five favorites, our drone armies increasingly travel on the eye-hand coordination of remote users and the line between blockbuster film and living-room videogame is fuzzing by the minute in both subject and quality, so a breaching of live theater’s realer time was right in the queue. The Brick Theater’s second annual Game Play festival loads the content openly and both sides are elevated and upgraded.

Eddie Kim’s “Grand Theft Ovid” reprocesses the great cautionary tales of Greek myth to tag the source code of our historically looping mistakes. Done in live machinima with a mission-control of onstage gamers and some fruitful interference from linked-in hecklers, “Ovid” overwrote an insightful translation by Carrie Thomas onto recurrent daydream images of popular videogames. The programmed lamentation of Daedalus for his fallen son (portrayed as a helicopter crash from Grand Theft Auto 4) was both a rote removal of emotion and an inescapable tide of misery; the theme of kids sent to die by oldguys, in remote lands too far away for many to care about, was encoded powerfully under the surface. Loss of loved ones and moral bearings was high in a murky, poignant Orpheus and Eurydice played to Call of Duty and Legend of Zelda. The fall of Niobe’s sons and daughters due to hubris punished by the gods, run through a Halo sniper sequence, showed that one death is tragedy and 14 is slapstick, a grim yet infectious punchline for our century of spectatorship. Talent borrows and genius steals, but in “Grand Theft Ovid” these founding fables are returned with interest.

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The promo preamble for Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Theater of the Arcade” asks “are these the plots of classic video games, or searing narratives of modernist drama”; the bonus plotpoint is that they are *specific* narratives from modernist drama, in a kind of Capcom vs. Marvel in which the playwright assumes the avatars of five of his famous peers to play the academy against the arcade.

The binary choices of forward, back and sideways in the first-person-commuter survival struggle of Frogger is crosswired with the terse existential riddles of Becket; the animus of Donkey Kong is imported to a Tennessee Williams tenement gothic in a grindingly hilarious portrait of obsessive misbehavior (and authorial fixation); the business-as-usual of Asteroids hacks a Mamet watercooler tragedy of working stiffs in space. Since Pac-Man was always a kind of musical, keyed more than most games to its pre-ringtone themes, it’s only just that it be cut-and-pasted here into a Brechtian morality-revue (echoing Blitzstein as a distant Player 2), with the insatiable protagonist as a devouring capitalist with a tight reign on the means of consumption in what had everyone on my side of the stage’s jaw not snapping but dropped at this diabolically brilliant evening’s highest-scoring segment.

As Frogger and others, Robert Pinnock takes many steps forward in his progress as the wise and weary Buster Keaton of the vital fringe, and Hope Cartelli’s histrionic spectrum expands its bandwidth in the desperate cheer of the Pac-Man CEO’s discarded trophy-mistress and the cutthroat cool of the Asteroid-cracking firm’s corporate axewoman. What Cartelli has done for hysteria these last few years Fred Backus has done for hostility, and in a tight multiplayer competition he takes the championship for eyepopping repertory workout, in back-to-back turns as the debauched Weimar demon and the shit-job-in-space’s tarnished, trash-talking golden boy. Lewonczyk may have found his ideal directorial foil in Gyda Arber (or at least I’ve found her if they’ve done this before); his manic wit is given a serene and inspired precision of mood and lithe, inevitable-feeling choreography of motion that finds the extra beat all console Olympians need.

“Theater of the Arcade” cycles the entire canon of Great Plays you were fed in highschool through the medium of what you were actually concentrating on at the time (and I took that directly from something Jeff said after the show; genius cobbles, journalism steals). In a concluding round with the Mario Bros. palette-swapped into two Sam Shepardesque road-wallowers, the protagonists end the play smashing through the metaphorical barrier of bricks that symbolizes the fourth wall of narrative awareness and the bastions between genres and levels of literary legitimacy. We know there’s just a fifth wall and a sixth beyond that one, and the boxes the brothers are trying to think outside of have just gotten smaller since the days of public cathode-ray screens. But “Theater of the Arcade” proves that greater and greater things can still come in these packages.

(Being an occasional digression from comics to songs I can’t get out of my head)

Melody Gardot, My One and Only Thrill (Verve)

Delicate brazilliant balladry, tragedies of orchestral jazz grandeur, haunted blues and weird nightspot exotica, all with superlatively inventive vocal instincts and unprecedented instrumental ingenuity. Twenty years of Stepford-lounge from yer Squirrel Nut Zippers, Peyrouxs and Norah Joneses was worth it if it carved a niche in the universe for this — the woman who’s reclined across time to find an unopened vein in the classic American songbook while evolving tweets into a haiku artform. This elegant, elevating set of string-sectioned and guitar-strummed singer-songwriterly sophistication and skewed insight is not “ironic,” or “arch,” or worse yet “elegiac”; throw out your post-retro phrasebook and just enjoy a supernatural talent that has tapped a timeless and un-oldable pulse of optimistic, individual harmony-of-the-spheres we used to think was linear nostalgia instead of cross-dimensional cool. The wellspring is there for each generation to make its way to if they think hard and take it easy enough, and Melody Gardot is this time’s diviner.

[www.melodygardot.com]
[www.vervemusicgroup.com]

(Being an occasional digression from comics to songs I can’t get out of my head)

Meshell Ndegeocello, Devil’s Halo (Mercer Street)

On her eighth album, which as always feels as fresh as a first and as skilled as a hundredth, Meshell takes a little over half an hour to knock both the frontiers and foundations of contemporary music into a new direction for decades. In her farthest detour from state-of-the-art hip-hop since Bitter ten years ago (which intercepted the orbit of modern-classical), Meshell mines the timeless ear-candy catalogue for the closest thing to a pop album she can or would want to do. But it’s done her way, with irresistible yet unprecedented signatures suspended in abstractly scattered but flawlessly structured patchwork compositions — the Platonic Hook, floating in nebulae of sonic textures.

No one but Prince can squeeze as many majestic-spacey, religious-experience sounds out of synths and studio treatments; she’s a one-woman national park on wax. Meshell weaves between dimensions, from vintage bubblegum to next year’s R&B, from distant Caribbean inflections to metallic crunch and rural plunk, and from gauzy atmospherics to stark demo-ish hyperrealism. That last trait, with naked vocals proved as true as the processed ones, is one signal of the intense personalness of this collection, which is also the most specifically lesbian in its references since Peace Beyond Passion and the best showcase for the bassist she started out as since maybe ever.

The subject is true love, false love, passionate self-sabotage and unrequited narcissism — and like the cursed paradise of the title, you’ll want to run as fast as you can in its direction.

www.mercerstreetrecords.com
www.meshell.com

My pick for this week is definitely Wanted, as in the comic, not the movie! I LOVE this book and highly recommend it. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Wanted is about a group of supervillains called The Fraternity. The Fraternity’s main objective is ridding the world of superheroes. The main characters~ Wesley Gibson (aka The Killer) and The Fox are hardcore assassins. I loved The Fox, she is one of the coolest, baddest female characters ever written. I really liked Mark Millar’s writing, and I’m totally a fan of J.G. Jones’ art. Wanted is really innovative, Mark Millar bases a lot of the characters on DC/Marvel characters. I have to admit, it’s kinda a dude’s book, but that doesn’t mean girls can’t like it! So, check it out!!!

Is there a franchise book in worse shape than Superman? From the late �90s �til recently I�d gotten used to the idea of the flagships existing to stay static and be riffed on, as in James Sturm and Guy Davis� indie-licious �real-life Fantastic Four� tragedy, Unstable Molecules. But with the main FF, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman and Batman books all undergoing both commercial and artistic renaissances at the moment, I keep trying Superman, and, as Harvey Pekar might say, it�s a reliable disappointment.

From the drowsy phone-ins of Kurt Busiek (who as everyone knows can make superheroes literature, from books like Marvels and much of Astro City) to the clich�-ridden debut of a major comic-store manager in his post-Busiek one-shot (full disclosure: it�s a major comic store which majorly supports my own comic, though maybe not after this), to the debut of James Robinson in what is billed as an era-defining relaunch (though this book seems to have a new era several times a year), Superman defines bland in a way that commemorates the strip�s stereotype as a brand leader rather than honoring its historic status as the prototype of an artform.

I lasted about eight pages with Robinson�s pitiful hipness and post-Bendis sitcom/cell-phone dialogue, the state-of-the-art of nothing but a cutesy, sub-TV-show shorthand of characterization and superficial preference of patter over content. Okay, I read ahead a bit too, to see if anything interesting was being done with Jack Kirby�s obscure barbarian hero Atlas, rebooted here as some kind of mythic foe/disapproving elder for Supes. No such luck; just the usual psuedo-Arthurian trash talk and car-tossing. I�d hoped to see Atlas show up in the jaw-dropping current Wonder Woman arc, where Gail Simone is doing brilliant things with a catalogue of DC�s B-list �70s sword & sorcery heroes, from Beowulf to Stalker to Claw, but it seems the gods of copyright renewal are fickle in their bestowals.

Anyway, there�s been no shortage of compelling Superman stories lately, from Morrison & Quitely�s modern folklore in All-Star to Cooke and Sale�s cosmic Frank Capra arc in Confidential to Simone & Byrne�s definitive yet criminally short-lived Action run to Dwayne McDuffie�s heartwarming fill-in on the same title. DC should start looking to these satellite books as its farm team. It�s easy to think of the little Comics Code symbol still hanging on in a cover corner as a kind of hex sign against creativity, but actually that hasn�t hurt most of the DC books I mentioned above; either way, it�s time for Superman to break the seal.

Meanwhile I�ve realized what�s wrong with the rebooted Hulk, which broke off from its own franchise at the conclusion of Greg Pak�s World War Hulk event so Pak and Fred Van Lente could carry on in Incredible Hulk’s numbering with the now much-more-happenin� Incredible Hercules. Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness deliver endearing monster-movie suspense and spectacle, with many a Kirbyesque double-splash� and a narrative that advances by a few minutes every month, and there�s the problem: Kirby�s staging was panoramic, but his storytelling was never decompressed; Loeb and McGuinness get how he could open up but not what he could pack in. Many fanboys might describe somethin� like Optic Nerve as �slow-moving,� but Hulk is one of many comics that�s slow-progressing, and I admit I don�t get why that�s better, or even how it�s what the Almighty Demographic wants; it ain�t videogames� instant gratification that�s driving the demand for this (or, come to think of it, maybe it is, through the magic of overstimulation fatigue), but in any case my own attention span is drifting.

One book I�m parting more amicably with than expected is Marvel�s Squadron Supreme restart. I�d assumed this would be a revival in more ways than one, and of more things than should be brought back — the �70s were full of artistic books that would get cancelled suddenly or relieved of their signature creators to be �repaired� by house-style hacks, and with Squadron it looked like we�d be getting the worst of both: a Watchmen-caliber run by prestige writer J. Michael Straczynsky disappeared without notice a few years back and now returned without fanfare in different hands. But it�s a full departure in an intriguing direction; instead of being Marvel�s perennial take on DC�s archetypes, this reads like a modern DC comic reinterpreting Marvel�s icons (which is true to the strip�s history, having originated as a prank between Roy Thomas and Denny O�Neil to do a then-forbidden Avengers/JLA crossover with stand-in characters in each other�s books, though only Roy went through with it). Howard Chaykin handles this idea with imagination and conveys the book�s tone of gloomy tension well; I�m just still not sure why JMS� epic had to give way to this exercise.

A more recent tradition has me not giving up a book but, in a way, a book giving up me, with the rotation of writing team Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction off Immortal Iron Fist to go write Uncanny X-Men. With Iron Fist, Broob and Fraction took a second-tier, perennially-cancelled concept and landed it in every egghead AND fanboy commentator�s best-of-year column. Mythic and kickass. This earned the team a promotion to Uncanny, which I hope rewards them but I know does fans few favors; it�s pretty common these days to see offbeat creators do something unique with a property that needs it and then get bumped up to follow the rules of some franchise whose sales wouldn�t flag if they just let a cat walk across the keyboard. A pet peeve this team may prove the exception to, but I wanted to vent before it actually comes out like Chaykin�s Squadron and contradicts me with annoying facts.

And when the heck will non-ComicCritique writers be able to comment on this blog site? I know *I* could only take so much of my blather�

In honor of the kind of movie I usually see this time of year I subtitled Sex and the City “Fantastic Fortysomething,” since no superhero movie goes to such lengths to get its characters into costume. And in much the same way that modern comics can feel like the result not of narrative necessity but of role-play with the toys they largely exist to generate (What if we team up the Viking and the magician? Today let’s have the zombies fight the Martians!), this flick’s script feels not like it was composed at a laptop or workshopped with actors but blocked out with Barbie dolls — all premise and no plot or characterization (Today we’re in a wedding! Here we are at a Mexican resort!). Surely none of these characters have lives beyond what quirks of mannerism and scraps of career and homelife are necessary to set up a joke or drag the narrative forward (fussy Miranda’s on a short fuse ‘cuz she “has a job,” which we are often reminded of but never see her actually having to go to; a funny if, like most everything in this movie, unconscious inversion of the unknowable occupations of ’50s sitcom dads, which is perhaps the closest nod to feminism in this weirdly gown-and-fertility-fetishizing flick).

This franchise was never shy about getting laughs at its heroines’ expense, but one of the lines that reveals more than it means to comes when Miranda’s apartment-hunting in a mostly-Chinese neighborhood and exclaims that she needs to follow a “white guy with a kid” that she’s spotted. They never show him, but I’m pretty sure the white guy is Woody Allen on his way to meet Blair Brown. This movie takes place in the same urban-Pleasantville monoculture as Manhattan or Molly Dodd, and after genuinely-fabulous Jennifer Hudson comes and goes as Carrie’s assistant, it seems one of the movie’s main messages is that it’s more important to take back a cheating husband than to keep a black friend (don’t worry, I didn’t spoil which husband cheats). Indeed, another way this is really a comic-book movie is that so far no superhero flick has directly translated the comic medium’s tradition of caricature like this one, from the vaudevillian ticks of the, like, two gay guys in a whole movie about the fashion world to the token “mazeltov”s that remind you of Charlotte’s valor in marrying a Jew.

On long glassy-eyed stretches I’d find myself doing puzzles with the movie’s raw material — like guessing who paid more for product placement, Vivienne Westwood or Louis Vuitton, and figuring out the age-ranking of the leads by who was insecure enough to agree to how much of a nude scene. But of course, the actual sex is unsensationalized and incidental; the most pornographic scenes are all about puttin’ as much stuff as possible on, as in Sarah Jessica Parker’s two endless dress-up set pieces (one for when she’s cleaning out her closet, one for a Vogue photo-spread which presents itself with all the plausibility of the Green Goblin turning out to be Peter’s best friend’s dad, mystic coincidences being this movie’s other tie to the logic of a comic book).

From early on I was convinced I was watching one of the most fascinating surrealist movies ever made, but then I realized what it’s really like — the lurches from clueless dead-seriousness to knowing self-parody, the fevered riffs of every possible pun on a given dialogue motif, one of which is hilariously witty and the other 18 of which are all used too, resemble not a script but a notebook, as if the screenwriter died before shooting and his/her unshaped (and, at two-and-a-half hours, believe me, unedited) sheaf of lists and improvised drafts were translated directly to the screen; funny for a movie about a writer, but, come to think of it, very true to the tough-go-shopping work ethic of this one.

If the Sex and the City characters knew they were ridiculous, they’d be the B-52s, who I was reflecting on for more reasons than the comic-book coincidence of getting their latest disk for my birthday while I took the GF to this movie for hers (she, by the way, simply couldn’t stand it, while I was having the time of my life reveling in the most baffling hunk of anti-film since Ang Lee’s Hulk). Easily 10 years older than the SatC cast and exponentially hornier, the B’s are like an intrepid band of Sexual Revolution re-enacters, showing up after a 15-year coffee-break to deliver the album Madonna keeps thinking she’s making. Funplex could be the unofficial soundtrack to Sarah Jessica’s movie (”Faster, pussycat/Thrill! Thrill!/I’m at the mall on a diet pill”) and shows that, when franchises reboot, some silver ages are shinier than others. Tonight I’m off to see Hancock, which seems to have been judged the one chick-safe movie of its type by its presence among a bunch of trailers that made us think Sex and the City had already started. So come one, come all — how different could it be?