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There are only a few more opportunities to catch this provocative play; at $10, it's one of the best theatrical values in town -- and might I add, one of the best shows. If we want to see more quality representations of disability in the popular culture we need to support efforts like these.
We vote with our ticket purchases, folks. If you want to see more make certain you support quality work being done now.
John Belluso's THE POOR ITCH
Presented by and at the Public Theater as part of Public Lab,
425 Lafayette St., NYC.
March 19-23. Tue.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.
(212) 967-7555 or www.publictheater.org.
New York Times
THEATER REVIEW | 'THE POOR ITCH'
Playwright’s Last Work on the
The ragged structure of “The Poor Itch,” an unfinished play by John Belluso now on view as part of the Public Theater’s Lab series, gives the audience a moving insight into the complexities (and the frustrations) of the playwriting process. The loose ends take on larger meaning too, as this story of a disabled
Mr. Belluso had not completed work on the play at his death in 2006, at the terribly young age of 36. “The Poor Itch” was in development at the Public Theater at the time. The script has been assembled from several drafts by the director Lisa Peterson, the dramaturge Mandy Hackett and the actors, most of whom had been involved in prior stages of the play’s development.
Putting together “The Poor Itch” for a public performance has clearly been a hard labor of love for the artists involved, and they have succeeded in infusing a cobbled-together text with authentic theatricality. Drafts of the same scenes are played in succession, with an actor announcing the switch to a different version. A bell is rung to signal a rough transition to the next scene or a fragment of another draft. Several passages, particularly in the last act, were still being sketched out. In these cases an actor reads a description of the action or a note from Mr. Belluso describing his intentions, ending with the words “Scene unwritten.”
But despite the admirable and intelligent work put into it, both before and after the playwright’s death, “The Poor Itch” remains an unachieved play. Mr. Belluso had not resolved central questions of structure, plot and style when he died, and definitive choices have not been made for him.
His compassionate understanding of the central character, a 22-year-old paraplegic
Christopher Thornton, who stars as Ian, appeared in two of Mr. Belluso’s previous works. His friendly, wonderfully unfussy performance does much to bring the character to persuasive life. A spine injury has left Ian in the care of his mother, Coral (Deirdre O’Connell, earthy and terrific), a nurse whose ease with her son’s disability is touchingly natural.
Picking up his relationships with his best friend, Curt (Michael Chernus), and Curt’s girlfriend, Erica (Susan Pourfar), is more complicated. Ian and Erica had been having an affair before Ian left for
This doesn’t stop either of them from engaging in casual drug use. Curt immediately hits on the idea of selling some of Ian’s pain pills for profit, a plan Ian shruggingly agrees to. Meanwhile Ian turns for affection to Katie (Alicia Goranson), the bleached-blond-and-tattooed visiting nurse hired to give him physical therapy.
The plot takes these relationships in several different directions, but we don’t get very far down any particular road, emotionally speaking, perhaps because the everyday story is just one of several layers to the play. Ian is also visited by dreams of his experiences in
One recurring image finds him drifting down the
Mr. Belluso was clearly embarking on an ambitious attempt to dramatize how traumatic injuries — and post-traumatic stress disorder — wreak havoc on the lives of
But “The Poor Itch” remains sketchy and unfulfilled, despite the fine work of Mr. Thornton and the rest of the cast. At one point Mr. Chernus reads a note Mr. Belluso left on one of the drafts: “Ian sees his wound and subsequent disability as a punishment, a kind of curse. Ian’s unconscious searches for the answer to the question: Why did I torture that man? What kind of human am I?”
Those agonizing questions certainly cannot easily be resolved, onstage or in life, but Mr. Belluso did not get close enough to articulating them in the play itself for “The Poor Itch” to be effective in the form he left it.
THE POOR ITCH
By John Belluso; directed by Lisa Peterson; sets by Rachel Hauck; costumes by Gabriel Berry; lighting by Ben Stanton; original music and sound by Robert Kaplowitz; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Jenny Gersten; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented as part of the Public Lab series by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director, Mara Manus, executive director. At the Public Theater,
WITH: Michael Chernus (Curt), Alicia Goranson (Katie), Marc Damon Johnson (McGowan), Piter Marek (the Singing Translator/Ensemble), Deirdre O’Connell (Coral), John Ottavino (Delay/Roberts/Ensemble), Susan Pourfar (Erica), Renaldy Smith (Vince/Ensemble) and Christopher Thornton (Ian).
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Variety: The Poor Itch
(Public Theater/Shiva; 99 seats; $10 top) A Public Lab presentation of a play in two acts by John Belluso. Directed by Lisa Peterson.
Ian - Christopher Thornton
Coral - Deidre O'Connell
Erica - Susan Pourfar
Curt - Michael Chernus
McGowan - Marc Damon Johnson
Singing Translator - Piter Marek
Katie - Alicia Goranson
Vince - Renaldy Smith
Delay, Roberts - John Ottavino
Death flaps by at least a few times in every play about war, but it sits perched on the shoulder of "The Poor Itch," the Public Lab's posthumous production of John Belluso's sprawling, truncated drama. An engrossing metafiction of branching plot paths, the play treats its unfinished status as an advantage rather than a handicap, much the way Belluso was said to have treated his own confinement to a wheelchair. "Nothing's going like I thought it was gonna go," muses the main character, but maybe that's the point.
Director Lisa Peterson has built this play out of five scripts, drafts A through E, each of which follows disabled veteran Ian (Christopher Thornton) through the aftermath of his honorable discharge. Belluso couldn't be less interested in the minutiae of life in a wheelchair. Instead, "The Poor Itch" is more involved with what Ian did in
"The Poor Itch" is not about discovering your identity so much as recovering it: What kind of a person is Ian, now that he's back from his tour? He's changed physically (here the play is heartbreakingly perfunctory; everyday things are now hard, and that's that), but he's also changed mentally and emotionally.
For one thing, he's having nightmares about a door his dead buddy McGowan (Marc Damon Johnson) keeps warning him not to enter. Other parts of his dreams are less certain -- sometimes he's in the middle of combat with McGowan, sometimes they're at Walter Reade, and frequently the two men are floating down a river on a raft. Where are they going? What will happen when Ian looks behind the door? Ian's rich dreamlife points at his worst secrets, things that hurt him but also help to explain him.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Ian starts off with a year's supply of oxycodone and a renewed friendship with his shady buddy Curt (Michael Chernus). Pretty soon, he doesn't have either. But he does have a burgeoning, warped relationship with Curt's wife Erica (given wonderfully trashy life by Susan Pourfar) and is godfather to their impending child. But wait, there's more -- possibly more than one play can hold. Ian is also trying to get close to his pretty, married in-home nurse, Katie (Alicia Goranson) and deal with his mother (Deidre O'Connell), who lets him live with her since her apartment is on the ground floor.
There are questions raised here that Belluso might have found time to answer, had he drafted the play again: Is Ian actually the child's father? When does he break off his relationship with Erica? These are things we'll never know, and that may be for the best. The human elements in this play are deeply messy and inclined to stay that way, and Peterson's refusal to arrange them into an artful pattern gives "The Poor Itch" much of its strength.
It also gives the play its most interesting structural device: When one of the drafts diverges from the others in a significant way, someone rings a bell and the scene starts over from the narrative fork. The choose-your-own-adventure trick starts slow in the first act and then picks up speed in the second, eventually metamorphosing into brief sketches from Belluso's notes, read aloud by the actors with the explanation "scene unwritten" tacked on.
Things don't resolve neatly in this play, Peterson seems to be telling us, because things don't resolve neatly in general, as evidenced by Belluso's death in 2006 at age 36.
In a smart performance, Chernus takes Curt from adorably ursine pal to nasty addict and back again. Curt does something so stupid it necessitates his hasty exit, but life goes on. Ian gets himself evicted by his own mother, but life goes on. Only the dreams stay the same, and those offer Ian his only real hope of redemption.
Belluso put it best, by accident, in a note to himself he wrote near the end of the play, describing a scene in which Ian reconciles in the waking world with the singing Iraqi translator (Piter Marek) he's been dreaming of. "He decides to talk to Ian, and he shares with Ian words of profound wisdom; a poetic expression of reconciliation tied together by the threads of progress and shaped by the hard-edged tools of history," Marek reads. "Scene unwritten."
Set, Rachel Hauck; costumes, Gabriel Berry; lighting, Ben Stanton; original music and sound, Robert Kaplowitz; fight direction, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Katrina Lynn Olson. Opened
New York Post: UNFINISHED 'ITCH' IS UP TO SCRATCH By FRANK SCHECK
Rating: 
The work was left unfinished when the playwright, who suffered from a rare bone disease, died two years ago at 36. Now being presented in a raw but still deeply vibrant form, it reveals a real loss to the theater world.
Like many of Belluso's other plays, it concerns a disabled veteran named Ian (Christopher Thornton, who's confined to a wheelchair in real life, following a climbing accident), back home from the Iraqi war, where his complicity in torture has left him with post-traumatic stress disorder.
These days he lives with his mother (Deirdre O'Connell), making ends meet by selling off the painkillers readily available to him.
Between appointments with the physical therapist (Alicia Goranson) on whom he has a crush and conversations with his best friend, Curt (Michael Chernus), who develops an addiction to the pills, and Curt's pregnant wife, Erica (Susan Pourfar), with whom he once had an affair, Ian has flashbacks to wartime experiences both real and imagined.
Although at times unfocused in theme and structure, "The Poor Itch" displays enormous empathy for its troubled characters. Bursting with raw emotion and unsettling humor, it's an impressive work, even though it's clearly unfinished.
Director Lisa Patterson's assured staging makes no effort to hide its lack of completion. The actors frequently recite the stage directions, describe scenes that were left unwritten and deliver notes about the work left by the playwright. Some scenes are performed in alternate versions taken from different drafts.
Despite or perhaps because of the roughness of the unfinished script, the players deliver superb performances. Their commitment to the play is both obvious and moving.
THE POOR ITCH
Public Theater,
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