Right now at the sweet little Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan, you can see two very different shows about the lessons learned in childhood. One is candid, funny, musical and furious — a tutor’s-eye revue — while the other is a nauseating account of the things we absorb as kids. I saw them both on a single evening when the hourlong one-acts played back-to-back. The compound experience was disorienting, like staring through a microscope and a telescope at the same time.
I hope Milo Cramer, the performer-composer of the excellent “School Pictures,” approves of that use of simile. “A simile is a comparison using ‘as’ or ‘like,’” he sings in one of the show’s deceptively simple passages. “A metaphor is the sky.” His song-cycle, directed by Morgan Green, consists of: a) 10 portraits of middle and high schoolers Cramer worked with as a private tutor; b) one bravura lecture on “Othello”; and c) one expository lecture about the New York City school system.
I loved: d) all of the above.
With Brechtian lightness, Cramer delivers his numbers in a kind of sprechgesang: His eyes are mischievous, and he can often sing randomly loud, rather like a 5-year-old showboating the national anthem. Strumming a ukulele or whacking out a melody on a toy piano, Cramer sings about lightly fictionalized students like Leigh, who’s scared her mother will yell at her for getting a C- in science. When the stakes are low, the songs are hilarious. But with children, the stakes are never low.
Cramer works with a boy, Jason, for example, who says extreme and hateful things. “He’s a 16-year-old libertarian — I’m kind of afraid of him!” Cramer shout-sings. “He jokes that we should, quote, ‘mercy kill the uggos.’” Can Cramer divert the nihilism of this frightening child? Can he “be the one who helps him”? Of course not.
Cramer knows that he’s preparing his tutees for school entrance exams that will advance them in “the largest, most complicated and most inequitable school system in the country”; he recoils at becoming a cog in that grinding machine. He’s also sharply aware of an ugly class dynamic. He worries that one set of parents might recognize him from his work as a barista, but then he realizes that they would never look that closely at a person in service.
Cramer premiered “School Pictures” at the Wilma in Philadelphia (in 2022) and performed it at Playwrights Horizons in 2023; at the Cherry Lane, it still seems as fresh as the day it was made. Cramer performs with a nicely galvanizing rage, reserving most of his ire for the testing that pushes rich children into further privilege. He delivers largely the same speech here that he did three years ago about fixing the system. No wonder he sounds mad: Three years is forever for a kid! Imagine how much damage has been done in that time.
Since the production of “School Pictures” requires just a few musical instruments and a corkboard, it seems like an easy show to travel. Perhaps Cramer could perform it outside the mayor’s Gracie Mansion home or at a City Council meeting?
Though it’s similarly portable, I don’t recommend that tack for the other Cherry Lane production, Eliya Smith’s jauntily unpleasant “Two Girls,” directed by Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky of the Goat Exchange. For one thing, it would freak the heck out of City Hall’s press corps.
The performers Claudel and Juliana Sass seat themselves on two chairs, at which point they take turns becoming a version of Smith herself as she interviews various men. The actors recite from the recordings of these chats, listening to in-ear microphones and echoing the original speakers’ ums and ahs.
Smith (via the actors) says that she’s curious about a 2007 video, a deranged bit of scatological fetish pornography often called “2 Girls 1 Cup,” which made the rounds when she was in middle school. Smith has never seen it, and she doesn’t want to — “Sorry, I’m actually really squeamish about body stuff,” Claudel-as-Smith says. The men she’s questioning (who were young boys passing the video around the lunchroom) claim to have only fuzzy memories of it, though their descriptions are viscerally evocative. Some will haunt me forever. I will simply say, “soft-serve ice cream,” and now one can haunt you, too!
That sort of mental contagion is actually the subject of this strangely chilly show, which eventually becomes a discussion about when a girl’s self-loathing first sets in. The boys who giggled at the video were also learning a worldview of female abjection linked to physical repulsion; the girls — even those who didn’t see it — then absorbed those ideas from the air. Late in the hour, Smith begins to discuss issues she’s having with her own body, now, as an adult. How does a woman come to be “squeamish about body stuff”? The conversation suddenly shifts: There are suddenly too many answers for just two girls to give.
School Pictures and Two Girls Through Nov. 29 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time for each show: 1 hour.
The post In ‘School Pictures’ and ‘Two Girls,’ the Tweens Are Not All Right appeared first on New York Times.
