On & Off Broadway

‘Building The Wall’ and ‘Ernest Shackleton Loves Me’

Reviews by Elyse Trevers

Posted

Sometimes it only takes two performers to send a powerful message.

Set some time in the future, Building The Wall presents a dire warning about the future of the U.S. After two bombs were detonated in Times Square, the President declared martial law and placed all illegal aliens in detention centers to be repatriated.

Some time has now passed. The play is set in a prison where the two characters are literally and figuratively on opposite sides. Tamara Tunie plays Gloria, an historian who has come to speak with Rick to get his version of the crime for which he’s imprisoned. Rick (James Badge Dale) clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, ran one of the private detention centers. When the prison became overcrowded, lack of proper medical care led to cholera and deaths of many of the detainees. Explaining that he did all he could but got no help, he had to burn the dead bodies. When his boss tacitly tells him to find a solution for what will otherwise become a publicity nightmare, Rick begins mass extermination. Thousands of people are murdered.


Robert Schenkkan’s play is a bit heavy handed, beginning with Rick registering surprise that Gloria is a Black woman and then insisting that he has no problems with Blacks or Muslims. Rick explains his connection to Trump who has made it okay to be White and Christian. References to the Holocaust are inevitable, especially when Gloria compares “wooden soap” to Rick’s placement of an old plane nearby, giving the immigrants the false hope they will be flying home. Rick also vigorously refutes peoples’ claims that they had no idea what was happening the way many Europeans did after WWII.

Dale works really hard protesting that he was just doing his job and explaining that no one helped him. He fights a losing battle because it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him. He’s the bad guy despite his protestations, and it’s difficult to connect to him. Tunie (“Law and Order: SVU”) hammers away at him and represents the audience.

The best line in the play comes at the end in explaining the title. It’s not about building a wall to keep people out but it’s about the figurative wall that we’ve built. Rick wonders why would anyone want to come in. The premise is frightening and sadly not that farfetched but Building The Wall could have been improved with a bit of subtly. My friend noted that she wouldn’t refer the play to anyone who voted for Trump - but maybe they are exactly the ones who should see it.

Ernest Shackleton Loves Me
Another two-person show is the stuff of bumper stickers and T-shirt mottos. The quirky offbeat Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, winner of Best New Musical 2017 from the Off Broadway Alliance, tells of Kat (Val Vigoda), a single mother. Her baby’s daddy has gone on tour with a Journey cover band (providing opportunity for Journey jokes) leaving her with their baby son in a freezing apartment. She’s a musician/composer, working as the composer for Star Blazers, a computer game. When she’s fired and replaced by a high school girl, she becomes more despondent. Lonely, broke and unhappy, she creates a video for a dating site.

Miraculously, Kat gets a response to her video from the dead explorer, Ernest Shackleton. After several video messages, the Antarctic explorer comes to her through her refrigerator, calling her his muse. (Okay, we were expecting that, given the title.) “Together” they tackle the cold and ice, deprivation and starvation, but finally are able to rescue his 22 men.

The musical stars GrooveLily's electro-violinist Valerie Vigoda and the funny, attractive Wade McCollum (Priscilla Queen of the Desert.) Along with the improbable silliness, there’s a lot of humor, mostly provided by McCollum, who plays all the male characters. He is especially adorable as the somewhat egotistical pompous Shackleton. Vigoda is extremely talented and it’s fascinating to watch her create music.

With book by Joe DiPietro, the unusual little musical runs only 90 minutes but does go on too long, as Shackleton goes from one catastrophe to another. Like the ice floes, it becomes tedious. Yet the two performers are immensely likable, their voices are terrific and their personalities charismatic. When Shackleton sings about how Kat saved his life, someone in the theater yelled out that the performers had saved the audiences’ lives. Okay – I wouldn’t go that far. Shackleton is an optimist and repeatedly gives Kat the positive advice. Being a brave musician is like being a brave explorer. Put that on your bumper sticker.