Potion, A Play in Three Cocktails, conceived by Kiran Rikhye and Jon Stancato, directed by Jon Stancato, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

featuring Natalie Hegg, Noah Schultz, and Raife Baker; music by Sean Cronin produced by Stolen Chair, People Lounge, New York City, April 2014

Potions. Transformative, magical, sometimes lethal—they always take the drinker from one state or form to another. The potion is a fix-all. Need to live forever—drink this. Need to be beautiful—quaff this. Need invisibility—no problem. But what if you really could go to a tiny, out-of-the-way bar on the Lower East Side and for an hour or so be what you wish, have what you don’t. Would you?

On the train to precisely that sort of bar, I was re-reading the press release for Potion. When I read the play’s description as a “spoken opera,” Tom Waits’s “9th and Hennepin” played in my head. There’s something about the way his words taste, and that’s what I was thinking as I entered the People Lounge, a tiny bar with a Three-penny Opera vibe. The musician, one-man orchestra Sean Cronin, with the giant bass and other instruments to the side had me thinking:

And no one brings anything small into a bar around here

They all started out with bad directions ...

And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet

‘til you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen...

While Potion did reflect on characters spilling out their desires to the bartender and did so with gymnastic feats of language, Charley’s Potion Lounge and Speakeasy was more akin to a place where Miracle Max tends the bar and the characters unfold like a Waits song interpreted by Brecht. Stolen Chair’s immersive, off-the-cuff performance kept up their reputation for the “aesthetically promiscuous and wickedly irreverent” material. With their adroit artistry and sense of play, Stolen Chair’s Potion is a heady combination of language and music bracketed by cocktails tasting of metaphors and intellectual absinthe.

The actors were already out, running the bar—taking coats, seating people—their costuming combining modern and vintage as did the space. The bartender, Jim (Noah Schultz), served water and sarcasm in equal measure, definitely channeling a turn of the century Miracle Max with his handlebar mustache, suspenders, and French sailor’s cap. One of the owners and creator of the bar’s potions, Charley (Natalie Hegg) and her business partner Tom (Raife Baker) made the rounds of the audience assuring our comfort.

Then we began. The action started with cocktail service. Yes, real booze. This was the first of three, all of which were designed by mixologist Marlo Gamora (she’s a genius). In front of each of us, the actors placed a glass and an oddly shaped bottle corked and bearing an ornate paper tag which read “Curiosity.” It was time to enter act one with curiosity for what might unfold and the drink contained lemon, honey, rye whiskey, and cynar (an Italian bitter liquor with herbs, predominantly artichoke). We toasted one another, creating an instant and intimate sense of community between actors and audience and individuals within the audience.

So we sipped our curiosity and watched act one unfurl.

Tom is in the back checking inventory while Jim and Charley tend the bar. Andi (Liz Eckert), an edgy, misanthropic goth enters. She’s one of their regulars and knows exactly what she wants—“Benevolent Spirit.” The potion she downs gives her a few hours of relief, and, instead of seeing people’s flaws, she sees the good. None of the potions served here are permanent, and their effects vary in quality and duration. As Andi sits at the bar to sip her cup of kindness, Tom returns to harangue Charley about overordering: “You don’t discuss before you act./ You never think of cost.” Charley does act without giving thought to the consequences, but Tom rarely allows himself to take any action at all.

Charley sits near Andi and begins to describe how a “customer” wanted a love potion for someone she shouldn’t love, a colleague. It’s the one potion she can’t make work though she’s tried. At this point Andi blatantly says everyone at the bar already knows: she’s in love with Tom. The poetry of the script builds to a brilliant spoken quartet about action and inaction and concludes with an apology from Tom for his earlier outburst. The audience broke into spontaneous applause.

During the quartet, an older man (Jon Froehlich) enters the bar and seats himself quietly in its farthest corner. He merely sits, sipping a beer and watching others with mild interest. Emma (Molly O’Neill) and Philip (David Skeist), a mild-mannered couple, enter. Philip leaves to use the bathroom, and the mysterious man immediately hits on Emma. He excuses himself for his audacity but feels the need to tell her that her eyes twinkle, “If you could see you, you would/ Know. But you can’t see yourself.” She doesn’t believe him, tells him “No,” and he melts away as Philip returns.

Emma turns to Charley and Jim and asks how to order—they’re new—and Charley replies, “How you feel, how you think, how you are. The/ Options are endless, per/ Each imbiber’s request.” Emma immediately embarks on a wild ride of self-discovery as she tries to find who she really is. She settles on trying to be meaner. Claiming not to feel any effects, Emma becomes angrier. The man at the bar approaches her and asks about whether one could really trust the drinks. She goes slightly ballistic and leaves the bar, raging that nothing has happened, pulling Philip after her. Knowing they’ll return, Charley and Jim prepare several potions they think she might enjoy. Meanwhile, the mysterious man approaches Charley and reveals himself as Mr. Forth, the health inspector. He intends to shut the bar down for selling illegal drugs. Only one loophole exists: if a potion affected someone else instead of the drinker. Charley feels confident as there are hundreds of potions in the book she brings out from behind the bar, but Forth wants the one thing she hasn’t been able to create: a love potion. Specifically, Forth, having overheard the earlier conversation, wants her to prove the effectiveness of the potion by making Tom fall in love with her. If she can’t, the bar will be shut down.

Our curiosity sated, it was time to begin act two. Once again, the actors served us a corked bottle with a glass. This time the label read “Pins and Needles” (a rather potent, sharp mixture of mescal, ginger beer, green chartreuse, and lime juice—it kind of grows on you).

Emma continues to experiment with various potions in an attempt to find herself. Jim and Andi decide to take Philip on as their project. Andi insists on buying him a potion, which Jim mixes behind the bar. “Wistful” is weak and short-lived in the drinker, so Philip is game to try. Jim brings out a huge vessel of liquid—really it looked like well over a gallon—and Philip drinks the entire thing in a single go (once again we, the audience, had to applaud such an astounding feat). Philip under the potion’s influence comes to understand the world, “Yes, it’s sweet; silly, too. / Yes, it’s sweet; painful, too.”

Charley’s efforts on a love potion continue to fail, but Philip decides to try one—it makes a person sexy. Shy, quiet, uptight Philip slowly turns into a complete and highly entertaining lothario trying, out some truly clichéd lines on audience members. The other characters look on in dumbstruck awe until finally Andi can’t control herself. She jumps Philip and the two head to a back corner in the audience where they suck face with gusto.

We were given the final potion of the night—Love Potion No. 10 (a heady concoction of lambrusco, gin, absinthe, simple syrup, and lemon juice). If you don’t get the reference, there’s no hope for you.

Charley tries her own potion, asking Tom if he feels anything. Nothing happens. Charley thinks that perhaps she could cheat and asks Tom to pretend that he loves her, but the attempt Tom and Charley make is ridiculous. Tom leaves, and Forth vehemently denounces Charley as a charlatan and vows to bring her down. Emma approaches Forth, having taken “Philosopher’s Stone” which has made her extremely logical, and points out that while the potions do only effect the drinker, there’s no way to prove that they do not have an effect on someone else. Everyone pauses and looks at Andi and Philip going at it in the corner.

Tom reenters and argues with Charley about her “betting” the bar without consulting him. The argument gets more furious, and the two move closer, until they kiss. While they marvel at the change in their relationship, Forth sneaks the bottle of love potion off the bar, and the other patrons come down from the effects of their drinks. One by one they leave as they came but retain a little of what each potion accomplished for them. Tom and Charley exit to the storeroom, leaving Jim to tend the bar and roll his eyes at what he knows is going on off-stage.

Now, for once I’m going to discuss the audience. In any performance it isn’t enough that an audience is there. Ideally, the point is to meld the audience together with one another as well as the actors, creating what anthropologist Victor Turner termed communitas, a feeling of intense togetherness and solidarity that comes from a group experiencing liminality together. Now, a lot of people throw the term liminality around, but in anthropology, it is that sense of ambiguity in the middle of a ritual where one is neither here nor there; they are in the moment of change, of transformation (usually social). In the liminal stage of the ritual, the people participating stand at a threshold between their previous selves or community and the new form resulting from the ritual. Theater has often been thought of as a liminal space between the real world and that of the play where, if the performance does its job, the audience is transformed in some small way through this communal experience. And Potion does this beautifully.

The experience of community among audience members and between audience and actors was in no small part due to—of all things—the props. Specifically, Aviva Meyer’s choice of those mysterious, corked bottles with their quaint tags and Wonderland feel were a shared signal within the play. They made the audience a community; we all partook of the same thing as a group. Not only that, while we know that these were only cocktails, within the world of the play they were meant as illicit potions, a forbidden yet secretly desired something. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t real potions; for the duration of the performance, we decided to act as if they were. In a way, this was true: we were curious; we were on pins and needles; we did watch love work. But alcohol also carries that potential for change, does change you, reducing inhibitions and letting out what individuals might want to repress for good or ill. These wonderful bottles filled with mysterious liquids—and they were mysterious. I had NO idea what was in the drink until I was given the list after the play. We were given the opportunity to decide whether to take the risk and drink them.

The bottles, symbols of the fantastic in a perfectly average bar, melded the audience together, making the actors’ jobs that much easier. They knew they had us and so could relax into the roles. I could point to particular actors, but in reality, the artistry was in the ensemble. Schultz’s Jim really was Miracle Max with a handlebar mustache and seen-it-all attitude. Hegg’s earnest, impulsive Charley; O’Neill’s ability to take Emma from potion effect to potion effect with a subtle ease; and Skeist’s hilarious and yet deeply insightful Philip—each actor made room for, enhanced, gave, took, and showed me just how good Jon Stancato is as a director because the performance felt like it wasn’t constructed but simply happened.

The program notes describe the genesis of this odd marriage of spoken word, music, and opera. The play was plotted based on a “pastiche of operatic tropes and archetypes.” Each scene was matched with

an aria, duet, trio, or ensemble piece from Italian operas by Donizetti, Mozart, Verdi, and others. [Rikhye] then mapped out the meter, the rhymes, the repetitions, and the simultaneous, overlapping, and interwoven text....

This sometimes resulted in hearing simultaneous expressions of inner desire from multiple characters. This could have been a sonic mess, but instead it mimicked the thought processes we have as we try not to express our own desires in conversations with others. It evoked that often chaotic roil of feelings, of our desires pulling us in multiple directions all at once. This is a haunting extension of Tom Waits’s poetry.

Potions in the fantastic are all about threshold and risk. Does the character stay in their old life or risk drinking the potion, a liquid threshold, and come out changed, as with the love potion in the story of Tristan and Iseult Lucy’s all-healing elixir in The Chronicles of Narnia? The act of drinking the potion is an acceptance of risk, one that can change you into someone or something else. Potion has a slightly different take hinted at in the first act with the notion of “if you could see yourself, but you can’t.” Philip best expressed and understood the real magic behind the potions:

Weird, it’s just me, more or less.

It’s not bad in here, I guess.

Yeah, you could say it’s the drink,

Not myself, but it’s just me more or less.

Which isn’t want ... it isn’t what

I’d thought. There’s some stuff in here.

Yeah, I liked it. And I see

how you could say it’s the drink,

but it’s me, just more. And less....

I wonder what else I’ve got in here, you know?

So if anyone wants to take their inner, untapped self out for a spin, I’m buying.

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Jen Gunnels lives in uncorked liminality.

David Skeist, Natalie Hegg, Molly O’Neill, Noah Schultz, Liz Eckert & Jon Froehlich. Photo by Carrie Leonard.

Tom (Raife Baker) & Charley (Natalie Hegg). Photo by Carrie Leonard.

Cheers! The ensemble. Photo by Carrie Leonard.