Emily Otto – nytheatre.com

“[Kansas City Or Along The Way] a finely wrought piece of theatre that will remain with [audiences] long after the lights come up. …
Attenweiler's golden ear for dialogue and poetic imagination conspire to produce lines that are at once metaphorically rich and completely speakable. …
Both Benhayon and Groves turn in nuanced performances here. Groves, in particular, is captivating to watch. …
I feel lucky to have had the chance to see it. … gorgeous.”

Julia Furay –Curtain Up

“[W]hat really makes this show sing are the compelling performances by Groves and Rebecca Benhayon, and playwright Robert Attenweiler's colorful dialect and lively characterizations. … 
Attenweiler's script is infused with innocent charm and expressive language…
2008 American English feels watered down by comparison.  Even better are the wholesome and committed performances by Groves and Benhayon, …
[T]here's plenty to like about this new play.

Theatre Is Easy called Kansas City “romantic” and “well-executed”:
“[T]he performances are refined and passionate. …
The music is really incredible... Every time Groves walked toward the guitar I was hoping he'd pick it up and play some more. …
I really enjoyed this play and I'm impressed with the caliber of talent involved with it.”

And Aaron Riccio from New Theater Corps, calls it 'an excellent character piece ...filled with beautiful moments.  ...
Attenweiler's a talented writer.'

 "In Kansas City Or Along The Way Robert Attenweiler's talents as a playwright and poet converge beautifully to create an intelligent and fascinating work of art."
Rajiv Joseph, playwright (HUCK AND HOLDEN, Cherry Lane Theatre - ALL THIS INTIMACY, Second Stage Theatre)

...and we all wore leather pants

nytheatre.com review - Martin Denton · September 6, 2007

Robert Attenweiler's new play, ...and we all wore leather pants, is funny, poetic, and often dazzlingly surreal, absurd, and magical. He describes it as Gabriel Garcia Marquez crossed with Twisted Sister; for me, some apt reference points beyond the obvious world of '80s rock in which it is set might include Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Jean Genet, and The Addams Family. Weird stuff keeps happening to the Sturgess clan in Attenweiler's play, but they accept it with an alacrity that most of us would fail to locate, I think: Blanton, the patriarch, is nowhere near old enough to be the father of Jagger and Krank (but apparently he is); Jagger doesn't wear pants and is constantly being reassured by his wife Mary that he's a car mechanic (though he's not); Mary keeps losing her children—misplacing them, literally; and Krank, estranged from the family, lives in a car set up on cinder blocks in the driveway.

And I haven't even given away the best surprises.

But I want you to hear Attenweiler's remarkable language, which is the fuel of this antic if not wholly successful play. Here's Blanton explaining to a government bureaucrat why he's trustworthy:

I am recently turned a serious religious man. Not in the way where I'm good to people or nothin', but I heard talk on the radio the other day 'splained Jesus in a way I finally get it....Way I see it, I ain't the wicked and I ain't the virtuous—an' if I can keep a low profile when he comes 'round—nose clean and everything—I'm hopin' to fly total under his radar....

Here's Krank on a date, in his car (he's just served the young woman coffee):

JOANNE: This is good. How do you keep it warm?
KRANK: Mix of carpet fibers and dried leaves keeps a good flame.
JOANNE: This thing is on fire right now?
KRANK: A very low fire.
JOANNE: I gotta go. I don't care what's on these notes, but burning or suffocating ain't a good hand.
KRANK: No, it's fine. People tell ya shouldn't have fires inside a' cars, but they mean when you don't think n' crack a window.

I love listening to these people as they try to solve their unsolvable problems: Blanton's trying to keep Social Services at bay, Jagger's trying to remember whether he really was a rock star or not, Krank wants to hit the road with his one-man rock band ("Me"), Mary wants to find her lost kids and hold on to her husband, Joanne wants to have a baby. A mysterious stranger appears suddenly in their midst and everybody is sure he's the key to the individual redemptions they're seeking. Of course he's not; Attenweiler's plotting falters a bit with this character, though, and ultimately his purpose in the play feels a bit murky. The ending is perfect, though, and the journey to it, with these off-kilter folks in pursuit of the same American Dream as the rest of us is artful and compelling. All anybody wants is security and attention, after all, even in the weird alternate universe where this play happens, where a guitar can literally make dollar bills instead of music (in the play's most arresting and unforgettable image).

Director John Patrick Hayden seems simpatico with Attenweiler's startling sensibility, and his production realizes the play beautifully. The cast is exceptional: frequent Attenweiler collaborators Becky Benhayon (Mary) and Joe Stipek (Krank) are joined by Danny Bruckert (Jagger), Ariana Shore (Joanne), Darren Ryan (Blanton), and Ryan West (Mysterious Stranger) to bring these eccentric characters to vivid, believable life. Their conviction and commitment are infectious.

Gratifyingly, Attenweiler provides Jagger with a gorgeous speech in the center of the piece that explains the title; his command of the craft of playwriting grows with each successive work that I've seen. He's a talent to watch, and ...and we all wore leather pants is a dizzying roller-coaster ride of a play.

Down Home Magic

If only life were more like a music video, where success is amplified to the max. For the Sturgess family, things couldn't be more different. One son lives in a car propped up on blocks, the other has mental breakdowns that are cured only by liquor, and Dad has Social Services breathing down his neck. Their sole escape: a steady supply of heavy metal and punk music.

In fact, in ...and we all wore leather pants the only thing more magical than rock 'n' roll is magic itself. The plot is peppered with mystical events, ranging from a mysterious visitor plucked from the sky to an immaculate conception.

Robert Attenweiler's imaginative script is set in a rather unimaginative place: Ashtabula, Ohio (read: Anytown, USA). The contrast makes for poignant and comical moments, which the talented cast aptly captures. The first three scenes contain some fabulous repartee that is aided by quick dialogue and a snappy pace set by director John Patrick Hayden.

Most at home among the witticisms is Joe Stipek. As Krank, the loner, car-dwelling son, he has a perfect deadpan tone that makes even the wildest notions sound inappropriately (and hilariously) matter-of-fact. When his date expresses concerns over his makeshift hot plate in the backseat, he explains, "No, it's fine. People tell ya shouldn't have fires inside a' cars, but they mean when you don't think n' crack a window." His complete sincerity makes dangerous ignorance seem adorable.

As his brother, Danny Bruckert's Jagger is Krank's boisterous and self-assured foil. He struts around the stage, mostly without pants, and revels in the play's more absurd moments. For poor Jagger, things are pretty absurd: he may or may not be a mechanic, and he may or may not be the former star of a heavy metal group. While he keeps having strange and increasingly aggressive flashbacks–a guitar solo here, a wild motorcycle ride there–his wife, Mary (Becky Benhayon), remains determined to stamp them out with alcohol. As a result, Jagger has no idea who he is, and Bruckert captures his confusion and mounting frustration well.

Thanks in part to an inexplicable combination of a meteor shower and an earthquake, the characters' problems and innermost needs and fears are hurtled to the surface. However, the play stumbles a little when everyone collides in the family den. While the shorter, two-actor scenes earlier in the play offer some real zingers, the lines don't have the same bite when the entire ensemble shares the stage.

The appearance of a mysterious visitor, who speaks like a prophet and dresses like a jogger, also trips up the story slightly. Here, the simple lyricism of magic layered over the mundane is replaced with lengthy speeches that tip almost too far in favor of the former.

But when the play maintains this balance, it's a delight. Take, for instance, the show's depiction of the so-called meteor shower. Jagger and Mary have just brought out some glow-sticks (they couldn't find a flashlight) to look for their missing child when a loud rumble and flickering lights overtake the stage. As the characters stumble through the chaos, Mary goes to the door at the back and struggles to hold herself up with the frame. Her shaking hands wave the stick up and down until its glow flashes like green lightning.

Despite its modest technology, the clever production team creates a dazzling special effect. Now here's a group that knows more than a few things about crafting magical scenes from ordinary ingredients.

Cum On Feel The Noize

by Barton Bishop

Robert Attenweiler’s …and we all wore leather pants.

Tire-deprived cars splayed out on concrete blocks littering lawns in need of mowing. AC/DC and Ratt t-shirts, the sleeves of which must be ripped before the shirts can be worn with dignity. Angry mutters carrying talk of auto plants and every kind of mill slamming closed their doors, blame that bastard Reagan if you please.

East Village theatrical auteur Robert Attenweiler wants to thrust you into a time and place when working men and women were taunted by visions of escape via gigantic hair, double-necked guitars, painted fingernails, and pretty men screeching in three-part harmony. His latest play, …and we all wore leather pants, revolves around a working-class family toiling away in middle America circa 1985. The narrative employs a vivid combination of harsh realism and magical levity to explore the relationship between myth, identity, and class.

“Historically, the lore and literature of those on the down side of any economic divide have often had connections to magical realism,” says Attenweiler. “Being chased by a lynch mob, the freed slave—with the help of ancestral spirits—turns into a bird and flies away. In Latin-American literature, when an impoverished woman cries over her missing fisherman husband, huge waves rise up and wash his boat to her doorstep.”

Writing about the rock-n-roll days of his Ohio youth, Attenweiler developed a strong belief that working-class America has either been denied a direct connection to magic and fantasy or has chosen to deny itself this connection. “Magical realism gives its underserved characters a feeling of being in tune with something greater, of not always being without power in their lives,” he says. “Working-class America has sports, rock ‘n roll, drugs, religion, but that’s all stuff that seems to come back to bite us in the ass rather than taking us someplace higher.”

The narrative of leather pants centers around the Sturgess family – self-destructive patriarch Blanton and brothers Jagger (who “might be a famous hair-metal musician, might be a local mechanic”) and Krank, who has formed his own one-man hardcore band called Me. Going with the glam-rock vs. hardcore clash as social metaphor was an easy choice for Attenweiler. “For about four or five years in the ‘80s, hair-metal was the pop music, that is to say the popular music; hardcore was its antithesis,” he says. “Fans of both camps would argue that the two movements couldn’t be more different, but they seem similar to me. Sure, hardcore often had more of a political platform, and rejected all of the so-called emptiness of the fortune and fame sought by hair bands. But looking back, hardcore seems wrapped in a sheet of pretensions just as thick as the one worn by Motley Crue. Both genres proscribed a lifestyle and both said a lot about that time in our country. This was something I realized I could have fun with while exploring notions of identity and myth.”

When he talks about his new play, Attenweiler often pushes the glam-rock angle to the story, but don’t be fooled—as an artist, Attenweiler is punk rock all the way. As founder, producer, and resident playwright of Disgraced Productions (which in the last two years, has given life to five new plays), Attenweiler embraces the D.I.Y. work aesthetic of the hardcore scene. He funds all of his shows out-of-pocket. He has little interest in refinement. “I want to give an audience new work that’s ripe with originality and mistakes, not filtered through a dozen eyes brought upon by a development process.” He’s quick to concede that many projects benefit from longer periods of development, but insists upon the excitement found when an artist follows impulse and courts spontaneity. Pressed to talk about whether his theatrical approach grew out of choice or necessity, Attenweiler dodges, focuses on the positive—“It’s exciting when you find that you trust yourself to make something on your own terms that’s worth watching. And I’m stupid lucky to have actors and directors around who know that the huge grants aren’t coming but will still get in the sandbox and play with me.”

As with all of his plays, a wry sense of dichotomy and humor permeates leather pants. Attenweiler loves to assert the D.I.Y. theatrical aesthetic he’s adopted (“I’m proud to say that after two years, Disgraced Productions has raised a staggering one-hundred and eighty dollars in donations”), but a close look at the lead character, Krank, finds the author simultaneously celebrating and poking fun at his own sense of identity: “I never want to make any money doin’ it. I’m not doin’ it so someone’ll say I’m talented. Completely devoid of financial support, patronage, or public interest. My most original creative thoughts will be forgotten as soon as I forget them. That will be my legacy.”

Reviewed by Martin Denton, nytheatre.com

The most striking thing about this pairing of two one-act plays from Disgraced Productions is how seamless and thematically pure it is: though one of the evening's two pieces is a 35-year-old rock-n-roll fantasia by Sam Shepard while the other is a brand new piano bar drama by young playwright/director Robert Attenweiler, the pairing feels organic and inevitable: two wistful looks at the elusive American Dream, melancholy and redemptive at the same time.

Attenweiler's play is poignant and moving; it feels like the kind of understated slice-of-life that William Inge might write if he were living in the Lower East Side nowadays (though there are traces of O'Neill and Williams here as well). If the story and structure of Thick Like Piano Legs doesn't surprise, the poetic dialogue almost always does: there's real beauty here, suggestive of a nascent talent that absolutely bears watching.

Hayden's staging [in Cowboy Mouth] is sublime: claustrophobic, uplifting, and always startling. Becky Benhayon as Cavale and Adam Groves as Slim both do excellent work.

…I know I'll be watching for the next works from Disgraced Productions eagerly.

Mind the generation gap

Review by Michael D. Jackson, Off-Off Broadway Review

A new theatre group in their second production, Disgraced Productions, should feel far from disgraced at their mounting of an original play, [Thick Like Piano Legs], written and directed by Robert Attenweiler and paired with an old play, Cowboy Mouth, by Sam Shepard.

…And so we have it, that fantastical play about not seeing one’s potential fully blossom in combination with the real triumph of the evening, Attenweiler’s very good original play with a similar theme. The new play and the old blended beautifully together and one might believe that [Thick Like Piano Legs] was written by Shepard as well -- though it is actually more concise …

…Attenweiler’s play is rather clear. A problem is established at the top of the play that propels the rest of the story, the characters are clearly defined, and we get the satisfaction of understanding the question of a missing piano, so integral to the play. This is a fine character play that was given a credible production, and future work by Attenweiler will be much anticipated.

…[T]his evening of theatre showed daring and was an enticing introduction to a new theatre group. It will be interesting to see what this group comes up with next.

Rock n’ Roll Saviors

Reviewed by William Cordiero, OffOffOnline

Attenweiler's one-act evokes the ambience of Tom Waits's ballads through its drunk and dreamy characters' slangy, exuberant dialect that's prone to down-home idioms and exaggerated storytelling…

[T]his fast-paced and exciting production is like a reckless joy ride with a stolen car. Becky Benhayon brings spunk, humor, and her own eccentricities to her interpretation of the peculiarly morbid yet bouncy character of Cavale, while Adam Groves delights with his boyish charm as the jumpy, energetic Slim.

[T]hese two one-acts successfully capture the explosive energy of down-and-out drifters in sexy, smoke-filled dives. Like rock 'n' roll itself, with its all-or-nothing attitude in the face of youth's big hopes and slim chances, these plays help life's disappointments seem a little less lonesome.