Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

FILM NOTE – The Intouchables starring Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy, directed by Olivier Nakache and Erik Toledano (in French with English titles)

                                                    … opposites attract …

This movie is a delight.  The Intouchables is about a hugely rich French man who became paraplegic in an accident and hires against the odds a big Black man originally from Senegal to be his caregiving man -- his arms and legs essentially and to take care of him in every way -- and the liberation they each bring to each other in their different ways.  It's a comedy, with lots of joyous laughs and continually interesting characters.  The photography is stunning, with the contrast between the totally gorgeous rich house, and the child-crammed chaotic apartment in the housing projects of the Paris suburbs where the Black man's family lives powerfully well described.

The contrasts between the two men are fully drawn:  Philippe, in late middle age, is a lover of classical music and literature and an art collector.  He’s The Establishment, living in his luxurious, serene mansion filled with a sense of hereditary and current imnportance -- but he’s physically helpless.  Far from The Establishment, Diss is a petty thief, Black and poor, with a brutal rupture in his past:  as a boy, he was sent by his parents from his home in Senegal to Paris to live with an Aunt and, as the movie begins, Diss’s Aunt, having given up on him, throws the big, muscular, unruly guy out of her apartment. 

He only interviews for the position of Philippe's caregiver because he needs a signature to verify he’s looked for work in order to qualify for his government “benefit”.  But in the face of the more apparently qualified candidates who line up for the job, Philippe hires him.  Improbable, yet all the more wonderful because we know that this film is based on a true story.  Philippe recognizes Diss's  outstanding vitality:  not only his exceptional physical strength -- the very opposite of his own limp limbs and useless back -- but also his originality and emotional daring, a dynamism that was once his own but is now largely sapped by his incapacity.

They have a lot to offer each other.  Rambunctious Diss pulls Philippe out of himself, caring for him in the bodily sense, but also driving him to new adventures which Philippe can enjoy with the wonderfully strong surrogate arms and legs of Diss always there to protect him -- except for occasional distractions.  Philippe has a few adventures to show Diss, too.  And Diss, though stricken by an evening of 4 hours ahead of German opera, absorbs a great deal not only about art and literature but about a mode of being in which one can work toward what one wants, and control a measure of ones existence.

And eventually Diss engineers a romantic interest for Philippe -- and for the housekeepr Yvonne.  In fact, great, big, unangelic Diss is a sort of Cupid in this movie. 

Francois Cluzet as Philippe is elegant, sophisticated, and -- seeking a way beyond his incapacity -- is ready to seize the day: his subtely allows us to understand the suffering his paralysis causes him, and there’s also great appeal in his readiness to enjoy -- and all that money has a charisma of its own, which helps him get the girl.  Omar Sy is so big, his physical power, his know-how, his fast learning curve, and fundamental ethical quality inspire so much confidence, that you have to love him just as Philippe does.   This down and out ex-con is a man who, it turns out, is truly one who takes good care … of Philippe and others.  It’s a funny, unexpected and inspiring character beautifully acted by Sy.

The Intouchables is very much like the movie The King’s Speech.  In both, a funcctional incapacity in someone at the top, Philippe’s paralysis, the King of England’s stutter, catalyzes a meeting with an aide far down the social and economic scale -- Diss;  George VI’s  speech therapist.  The unlikely connection, loaded with incongruities ripe for laughter and touching moments, develops into a deep friendship.  And all the better in this type of film, neither of these is fiction:  both of these profound relationship are based on real life, and, in fact, lasted beyond the time frame of the movie, for the rest of all the characters’ lives.  In this way, both films project a gratifying sense of some fundamental unity of our society, and the resolution of class conflicts -- of racial conflict as well in The Intouchables.  Both films leave us feeling that we’re all in it together and that our common humanity transcends class, economic disparities, and contrasts in opportunity.  It’s a spurious sense of unity -- and one of the reasons we go to the movies.  You’re filled with a happy glow while applauding the film with every one else in the audience, while leaving the theater, and beyond.  No wonder these are both, as The Intouchables describes itself, “crowd pleasers.”  And. yes, I still feel the glow.

Yvonne Korshak 

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Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, directed by David Staller, The Irish Repertory Theatre and Gingold Theatrical Group

Man and Superman is a totally delightful evening of theater that lifts you from yourself with enjoyment and -- thinking about it after -- reminds you of what theater is all about.  It couldn’t be better.  It’s a romantic comedy as well as a play of ideas that spins off from the story of Don Juan, particularly the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera, though with a bit of Faust, and Milton's Satan thrown in.  Shaw subtitled it "A Comedy and a Philosophy."

With the death of her father, Ann Whitefield, an entrancing and feisty young woman, is placed in the hands of two male guardians (even though, in early 20th-century England, she has a mother) Jack, a young, wealthy, and wittily ironic iconoclast and author of theThe Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion, and the older, stuffy, conventionally minded and reactionary Roebuck Ramsden.

The free thinker Jack and the old guard Ramsden agree on only one thing: that Ann should marry Octavius who adores her.  But she only toys with his infatuation, giving him the affectionate but romantically dismissive nickname, Ricky Ticky Tavy.  We -- and the characters -- catch on to a love triangle:  Octavius loves Ann who loves Jack AND we can tell that Jack loves Ann, too, but he is so leary of being ensnared in marriage that he doesn’t recognize that he loves her … or at least, he’s the last to admit it. 

There’s another pair of lovers, Violet, Octavius’ sister, secretly married to Hector, son of an American millionaire.  And there’s Straker, Jack’s car mechanic and chauffeur, representative of the proletariat -- who has many of the really great lines, but don't worry, there are plenty left over for everybody else.  This play is a feast of language.  No wonder Shaw compared himself to Shakespeare.

The whole crew goes driving in two cars, when cars are still a novelty, from England to Spain, all the way South to Granada. There, dislocated from their home base in England, the imagination opens to new vistas. 

On the road, Jack and Tanner are held up for their car by the exotic, mysterious brigand, Mendoza: that night, falling asleep in the wilds of Mendoza’s desert, Jack dreams the great and famous scene of “Don Juan in Hell”.  Before our eyes, asleep on the desert floor, Jack rises, dressed in embroidered vest and bandeleras, knee ties and, finally, the plumed hat with the swooping brim of his own distant ancestor, Don Juan.  He's now in hell, and a Faustian Mendoza, dark and dapper, has become in Jack's dream the Devil in sleek dinner dress.  The two argue, words flowing bountifully, the great issues of human existence, relationships between men and women, capitalism and the exploitation of labor, human nature and life on earth, and the question of whether it's better to spend eternity in heaven or in hell.  Like everything in this play drenched with ironic opposites, that's a surprisingly tricky question.  

When Ann, much to her own surprise, arrives in hell, her costume -- Gypsy bodice and fluffy white bloomers -- is as witty, expressive and eye-filling as Don Juan's.  Ramsden -- now the Statue, Ann’s father Il Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, drops by on a visit from heaven:  “I have my share of vanity," he says, "for as a young man I was admired by women, and as a statue I’m praised by art critics.”

Which then is, actually, the better place to be?  Heaven seems boring, and Hell has turned out to be a pleasure palace.  No fire and brimstone here, the Devil’s a gentleman for whom “beauty is good to look at ... music is good to hear ... love is good to feel ... and they are all good to think about and talk about.”   But, Don Juan retorts, “Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh!”

Don Juan is a reformer, a prophet burdened by the evils and injustices of the world and seized by a purpose beyond himself -- to improve the world.  As a Philosophic man, he seeks heaven where he can contemplate the Life Force and affect things for the better.   How is not clear but one thing’s for sure: “The philosopher is Nature’s pilot,” he says … “ to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.” 

To which the Devil plays a really top card in the deck -- the freedom card:  “I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force.”

Women seek improvement in their biologically driven way, through propagation that may lead to a superman:  thus they are central to the Life Force and Ann, as things turn out, is no exception.  Watch out, Jack.

It’s hard to remember a play so perfectly cast as this one. The acting is universally superb.  Max Gordon Moore plays Jack with manly strength combined with scampish vigor of a stand-up comic that fully expresses his iconoclastic take on absolutely everything.  Janie Brookshire is tough and charming as the Life Force at work.

Jonathan Hammond is irresistible as the seductive Mendoza, a cynical realist except that romantic love drives this worldly sophisticate to write dreadful poetry. 

As Octavius, Will Bradley stops at exactly the right place short of camp in expressing his idealizing romantic love, not man enough for Anne but man enough to carry an eternally broken heart. 

Brian Murray fascinates as the rigid but not heartless Ramsden, dense but not a fool;  one believes everything this wonderful actor does and at one and the same time marvels at how he does it.

Laurie Kennedy as Mrs. Whitefield, Paul O’Brien as Malone, Margaret Loesser Robinson as Violet, Brian Sgambati as Straker, and Zachary Spicer as Hector are all amusing, touching, and true to their parts.   That these highly individualized characters work together so well as an ensemble is surely due to the vision of the Director, David Staller. 

So who wins the heaven vs. hell argument between Don Juan and the Devil?  As the Devil says, “… men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell … ”  But you won’t get tired of this play!  Man and Superman takes ones breath away with its succinct and knowing brilliance, and with the magic of that other world that Jack discovers when he dreams his dream. 

Man and Superman  plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan's Chelsea district through June 17, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are totally private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

 

Don’t Dress For Dinner by Marc Camoletti, adapted by Robin Hawdon, with Ben Daniels, Dam James, Patricia Kalember and Jennifer Tilly, directed by John Tillinger

Don’t Dress for Dinner  -- and don’t see this show either.  I went because I read somewhere it was really funny.   It is, for about ten minutes.

But the rest is an uninspired cliche -- though well performed in madcap farce style -- a play about a weekend somewhere outside of Paris where the English husband thinking his English wife will be elsewhere invites his French mistress (though Jennifer Tilly makes no attempt to seem French in the role) and hires a French cook for a really sweet time but things get complicated when a family friend the wife is having an affair with shows up and the wife decides to stick around so everyone has to pretend that the cook is really the family friend's girlfriend -- or his niece, depending who's being lied to -- and that the mistress is the cook who doesn’t know how to cook and yellow gooky food ends up all over the lap of the family friend so then ...  oh well, you get the idea. 

It’s all thoroughly predictable including the fact that who ends up with who is a mere matter of who's available -- in a word it’s crude.

The funny part?  Early on, in Act I, when the mistaken identities first get going, the plain-girl cook, wittily played by Spender Hayden, enthusiastically takes on the part of an ultra-sophisticated high class French woman who tosses down her drinks and dances the tango with gusto.   And for a brief while, Jennifer Tilly is amusing as the mistress thrust into role of the cook who doesn’t know her baked alaska from her quiche -- basically she plays herself and that’s kind of fun.

There’s a bit of the women taking off their tops almost in sight of the audience, and Tilly eventually emerges in a soft porn corset and garter belt outfit which she makes the most of -- she really is an uninhibited performer!  And I did enjoy her throaty, little girl voice. 

But you can be sure this sitcom a) goes on too long and b) ends -- no surprise here -- with a routine "whoever's left over" partnering up for sex that leaves a bad taste that all but wipes away the interlude of good fun in Act I. 

 Don’t bother.

Don't Dress For Dinner , produced by Roundabout Theatre Company, plays at the American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter, with Tracie Bennet, Michael Cumpsty, Tom Pelphrey, Jay Russell, directed by Terry Johnson

End of the Rainbow tells the story of the last weeks of Judy Garland’s Life.  Addicted to drugs and alcohol, and debt ridden, she’s spiraling downward -- but her personality, on and off-stage, is as charismatic as ever.  In London for a concert series, she’s staying in a lavish suite in a high end hotel (great set) with two men in tow: the young lover, Mickey, she's taken on as her manager because he's good looking -- not the best reason to hire a business manager -- and who's in it for what he can get out the fading star, and Anthony, her long-time piano accompanist, who's gay, loyal, and truly loves her. 

Judy uses her star-power charm and desperate excess in dizzying rotation to get whatever she wants.  When the hotel manager demands payment, she stands on the window sill threatening to jump, confident that, she tells Mickey and Anthony, the hotel won’t want Dorothy splattered all over their pavement.  And they don’t.   But mostly what she wants is booze and pills, which she sneaks or wheedles from the two men who are trying to keep her sober enough to make her performances.  

Judy’s performance are fully staged with Anthony at the piano and a full on-stage backup band.  Tracie Bennet, as Judy, belts out the great songs associated with Garland.  Sometimes being juiced intensifies Judy’s performance.  At other times it’s a hazard -- she forgets her lines, forgets which song she’s singing -- yet, she can get away with it.  Her audience, broad but with a strong gay component, forgives her, loves her for her forceful delivery of the songs, loves her for her goofs, just loves her. 

Anyhow, if she isn’t high, she won’t go on.   Realizing this, Mickey changes tactics:  he feeds her habits, revealing he’s only in it for himself (Judy tried to think otherwise but we've known he’s a sleaze bag all along).   Anthony offers to take her away from all this to a quiet protected life but she turns him down.  And, we learn, that not much after this Judy dies from an overdose, said to be accidental but suicide’s been in the air from that first foray on the window sill.     

The situation is a framework for Judy to sing some wonderful songs of the 50’s and ‘60’s associated with her, including of course “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.  The play is just a vehicle:  in that, it's like cabaret but while Bennet is an excellent vocal stylist in a torch singer’s mode -- not quite Garland’s -- it’s not a voice you'd go to cabaret to hear.  She’s fun to watch, and costumes are gorgeous and her way of moving within them exciting, but hard as she works, she doesn’t have an irresistible voice:  Judy Garland did.   

It’s as an actress, though, that Bennet is superb, petite, and with a dancer’s flexibility and stamina, and gives a fine portrait of an alcoholic, drug ridden, physically jerky, desperate and proud star.  But the play is all on the surface, making no attempt to give insight into the source of Judy’s personal anguish¸ and the repetitive plot is mainly a lot of her going for the bottle, or the pills, and reeling around with their effect.  The suspense is mainly about will she or won’t she be able to get through her radio interview?  Her performances?  

As Anthony, the brilliant actor Michael Cumpsty comes across well with a Scottish accent and tender caring for Judy.  Handsome Tom Pelphrey's wooden performance as the stud, Mickey, indicates that the casting director's reasons for hiring him were as thin as Judy's.  

I didn’t see Judy Garland come to life in End of the Rainbow, nor hear her voice nor her style.  The show’s gotten some “rave” reviews and -- full disclosure -- the audience all around me seemed to love it, and gave Traci Bennet a standing ovation.  But I found, in spite of Miss Bennet’s fine performance, the play was so thin, and the great songs and Garland delivery so attenuated, End of the Rainbow was disapointing. 

End of the Rainbow plays at the beautiful Belasco Theatre in Manhattan's mid-town, just east of Broadway.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private:  no emails ever appear with comments.

 

OFF-BROADWAY IN PROVENCE – La Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence, France and Joan Miro's world

Joan Miro, large blue stained glass at Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, France, detail

The wild flowers are yellow and purple and the hills are terraced with olives, and amidst it is what I will always think of as Miro-Land -- the Fondation Maeght, founded by Marguerite and Aime Maeght in 1964 for modern art, which remains a uniquely private museum.  Unique also:  it's open every day of the year "sans exception" -- I love the spirit of that!  And the total dedication.

Great modern artists have outstanding works here, but the Spanish artist Joan Miro in particular is everywhere and it’s his inventive genius, his sense of surprise -- his sheer joie de vivre that brings it all to life.   Not surprising, perhaps in that he was integral in the planning of the fondation, working with Marguerite and Aime Maeght, art dealers, art lovers, friends of art and artists and philanthropists, in the planning and development of the fondation which was inaugurated in 1964.

There’s some paradox in Miro’s art:  it's often whimsical and his paintings characteristically include miniaturist units suggestive of the smallest things -- microscopic views of one-celled life forms.  And yet none of the moderns is more fundamentally monumental.  A vast Miro tapestry, 20 x 35 feet, hung in the lobby of Number 2 World Trade Center:  its destruction was the greatest artistic loss that occurred in connection with the destruction of the towers.  (That's my personal view, but I was interested recentlly to learn that it was also the most expensive loss.)

And the tapestry makes the point that though many think of him mainly as a painter Miro worked in many media, small and large, sculpture in bronze, wood, and many kinds of stone, ceramics and stained glass, as well as tapestry. The first gallery I spent time in at the Fondation Maeght is the one dedicated to, taken over by and suffused 

 

                                                   Miro, La Fourche, 1963, bronze, Fondation Maeght

with the colors of Miro’s large blue stained glass double window (illustration at very top).  Matisse’s Chapel in nearby Vence the day before disappointed (more on this to come): Miro’s double window in intense blues and jewel colors reaffirmed the joie de l'art.

Outside is Miro’s Labyrinth, a garden where – beyond looking – one explores on foot and so becomes joined with Miro’s world of surreal transformations.  Free form wandering takes one through the polymorphic Gaudi-esque L'arc (left), made in concrete, and among enigmatic sculptures that seem to pulsate with life with a primal form and intensity, a fanciful ceramic wall spout filling a lusciously refreshing blue mosaic pool that sparkles with visitors' tossed coins.  And -- beyond any whimsy -- Miro’s La Fourche (above right) is a tall punctuation and another kind of thought: homage to the Spanish peasants, Miro’s countrymen, who raised their pitchforks as weapons against Franco during the Spanish Civil War.   In terms of immediate impact, it holds its own with Picasso's Guernica, and indeed, Miro holds his own among the greatest modern artists ( and surpasses Matisse -- at least in Provence!).  I came away feeling more than ever the strength and magnitude of his work.  How did I ever miss the Fondation Miro dedicated to his art in Barcelona?  I guess my head was too turned by Gaudi there.  Have to go back!

There’s much more to see here than Miro.  A stabile by Alexander Calder greets you.  A mosaic, Les Amoureux, by Marc Chagall and La Vie, the largest easel painting Chagall ever made, although he made even larger murals, such as the two that define the façade of Lincoln Center for the Arts in New York City.  There’s a powerful Leger as large as the Chagall and outdoors Leger’s wall mosaic.  An entire court is given over to a battalion of figures by Giacometti.  A pool (right) with fish is by Georges Braque (there's a surprise).  The building (which I liked best for its interior spaces and the courts and gardens) is designed by the Spanish architect Lluis Sert, a Catalan like Miro. The Fondation Maeght has to be on the this I must see list for any lover of modern art.

Joan Miro, L'Oiseau lunaire, marble, 1968, Fondation Maeght

For further information, click on live link of title in first paragraph.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails every appear with comments.

Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by David Cromer, Barrow Street Theatre

Tribes is a cleverly written, witty and engaging play about a “problem.”  The surface problem involves deafness.  A young man who is deaf and a young woman who is going that way fall in love.  But more importantly it’s about in-groups, others, "us and them,” and the virtues and limitations of the human tendency to collect into -- tribes.  It's a play that's funny, engrossing, and doesn't make intellectual compromises.

Billy is the deaf, beloved, youngest child of Christopher, a smart, arrogant, rigid and closed-minded academic and Beth, an amused mother who in spite of her easy-going nature and sensitivity doesn’t always get it.  Daniel is a vaguely beat, mildly schizophrenic older son and Ruth is the frustrated singer daughter.  Part of the charm of the play is the intensity with which one feels this as a genuine family -- with all of everybody’s issues, it still seems nice to belong, and sitting in the audience in-the-round above the beautifully lit family dinner table, one feels a part of it.  This play comes to us from the UK, and this is a British family.

And they do have plenty of issues.  Billy learned to speak vocally and is a skillful lip reader, but he has to keep reminding his family to do their speaking -- and screaming at one another, often with very amusing repartee -- in his direction so he can know what’s going on.  The strain’s enough to make him give up at times, and ultimately he's drawn to Sylvia, a woman who can truly understand his communication frustrations because she’s the child of deaf parents and is herself now, in young adulthood, going deaf.  It would appear to be a match made in heaven.  She teaches him sign language, giving him a new entry into the deaf world.

The play is filled with clever and meaningful criss-cross relationships.  Billy was born deaf to hearing parents, Sylvia was born hearing to deaf parents. Billy has never heard. Sylvia is moving from fully hearing to fully deaf.  She fights deafness as a terrifying handicap that’s pulling her into its grasp.  Billy, a new enthusiast, buys into the idea that deaf is not a handicap, only different.

And while Billy, and soon Sylvia, can’t hear anything of what's around them, Daniel, Billy’s schizophrenic older brother, is bedeviled by imaginary voices.

The course of love never runs smooth takes an orignal turn.  Billy embraces deafness and Sylvia; Sylvia resists deafness and Billy, or at least his enthusiasm for the deaf world.  Because having now learned sign language, after a life-time of being forced to use verbal language by his father, Billy comes to feel alienated from his talky-talky family and ultimately abandons them in favor of full identification with the deaf.   He loves the deaf social occasions.  He blooms.  And he gets a job, belying the dependency his family assumed.  Sylvia, fighting deafness all the way, hears with disgust, while she still can, the atonal monotony that’s coming into her speaking voice from diminished hearing feed-back.  She comes to detest the deaf social gatherings, “always the same people.”  Tribes -- all tribes, the playwright makes clear -- offer a sense of belonging; tribes are parochial and limiting..

Tribes is a stimulating play, superbly acted, with an alluring set and lighting, and perfectly paced.  No wonder its NYC run has just been extended to September!  While the story focuses on Billy’s conflicts and journey of self-discovery, all the characters are fully written and pleasurably idiosyncratic, which means, it may not be a pleasure to live with all these types but it sure is fun to watch them in theater.

Tribes plays at Barrow Streete Theatre in NYC's West Village through September 2, 2012.  For further information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

 

A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O’Neil, directed by J. R. Sullivan, The Pearl Theatre

A Moon for the Misbegotten is a tense, character driven play that demands  great acting and this excellent production provides it:  Kim Martin-Cotton is as fine an actress as I’ve seen anywhere and she makes the role of the tough-on-the-outside farm girl, Josie Hogan, come alive.

The play, written in 1943, takes us back to a 1923 farmhouse.  Like O’Neill’s earlier play, Beyond the Horizon, currently Irish Repertory Theater, this, too, is about trying to hold on to the farm.  Josie and her father Phil Hogan, are tenant farmers, and their landlord, James Tyrone, Jr., is a local boy who made it in the big city as an actor, and whose self-weary, drunken lack of self-respect leads him to mock his own success.  Josie's in love with Tyrone, but hides it behind a cynical, sluttish affect.  He claims, in an affected, stentorian way, to love her, but she doesn't believe a word, comparing her big farm girl self to the dainty women she figures he knows in the city.          

Word has it that a rich neighbor has put in a bid to buy the farm from Tyrone, putting the Hogans' hearth, home and livelihood at risk.  Will Tyrone sell, betraying “his best friend” Phil, and Josie whom, with drunken bathos, he says he loves?  Phil, with his own tough exterior and a wily streak, comes up with a plan.  Thinking he knows what’s best for his daughter better than she does, he concocts for Tyrone and Josie to be together and alone on the farm for a long, moonlit night, throwing them into each other’s arms, for Josie’s happiness and to keep the farm.

Fueled by enough whiskey to make most men pass out, Tyrone pours out the sources in his youth for his haunted nature, and his sense that, actor that he is, he's a man for effect, capable of faking tears at his mother’s funeral and empty within, having room only for the self-hatred.   And after spilling all,Tyrone does end up in Josie’s arms, not in the way Phil intended but asleep across her lap, his head resting on her breasts (which he has much admired), in a late night Pieta.  Awaking at dawn, he feels, for the moment, refreshed and free, having forgotten, it seems, that he has spent the night confessing to Josie the secrets of his guilty soul, the reason he now feels liberated.

So now will Josie and Tyrone live together happily ever after?  Bottom line, he won’t sell the farm out from under the Hogans.

The Moon for the Misbegotten has a driving narrative, and the scenes between the strongly conceived characters are exciting.   I don’t think this play has the unforgettable, mythic stature of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which the Director’s program notes link it to.  Tyrone’s bathetic confessional (which lasts a little long) has the character and content of a pat psychoanalytic catharsis, somewhat dating the play.  Still, throughout we are held by the playwright’s vibrant skill in creating compelling psychological interactions, and by the fine acting that puts them across. 

Phil Hogan, played by Dan Daily, seems at first a stock character, a domineering, crude Irishman pushing his children around, but gradually, through this outstanding actor's timing and subtlety, we come to glimpse the active mind, wit and depth of feeling lurking behind the “drunken Irishman” mask.   The complexity of this character -- and the way it sneaks up on you -- is one of the great strengths of the play -- he does what you don’t expect.

Though not quite fitting the part, Andrew May is able in the demanding and intensely emotional role of James Tyrone, Jr.   Kern McFadden as the business-minded  farmer next door is a stolid foil for Phil Hogan’s rambunctious ridicule in a richly humorous scene that’s a highlight of the play.  Often the lead actor at the Pearl Theatre, Sean McNall is good in a brief turn as the last of the Hogan boys to run away from their over-controlling father. 

And Kim Martin-Cotton's performance as Josie is transcendent, of the kind that it’s hard to see anyone else in the part.  She has a rich speaking voice and very expressive use of her body.  As my companion said, “She’s as good as Meryl Streep.”  (There but for the grace of God … ! ) 

Moon for the Misbegotten plays at the Pearl Theatre in New York City's Lincoln Center through  April 15, 2012.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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War Horse, based on Michael Morpurge's novel, adapted by Nick Stafford in association with Handspring Puppet Company, Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, from National Theatre of Great Britain

Seeing War Horse in its current production is a powerful experience -- the kind one has to be glad one had and feel concerned for everyone who hasn't had the chance.   “You must see it” I have said in the three days since I did, to all my friends.  

It’s well known that it’s a story about a boy and a horse and that the horses in the play are represented by wonderful puppets -- “puppets” sounds small -- think horse size.

Without seeing it, what’s harder to know are the elements of sight and sound that convey the passage of time, travel across the earth, and what it looks like and feels like to be everywhere from the English countryside to trench warfare and bombardments in France during World War I, and how these affect the humans and horses we come to love --  especially the horses.  All told, War Horse, as my friend puts it directly, is one of the great anti-war masterpieces.  Some have found the story sentimental:  but a great anti-war masterpiece isn’t sentimental.

Billy Narracott, son of an English farm family, raises from a colt the horse he’s named Joey until, at the start of World War I, the horse is sequestered by the cavalry.  Broken-hearted at the loss, and fearful for Joey’s safety, Billy runs away to become a soldier so he can search for Joey across the wartime landscape of France.   We follow Billy’s  and Joey’s independent experiences with the brutal war -- Billy never wavering in his determination to save Joey, and Joey’s minute-by-minute will to survive. 

Billy carries in his pocket a sketch of Joey -- torn from a friend’s drawing pad -- the way Billy's army buddies carry photos of their girlfriends.  Against the dark backdrop of the play is a long, narrow “window,” the torn and ragged edged sketch paper magnified -- and through this window we see the realities of place, time, and action that surround Billy, and Joey, and every other creature, sometimes as filmed bombardments, sometimes as charcoal sketches of  French rooftops.  The torn papers, small and large, express torn-up lives, as well as the fragmented view of war any one individual has.   War itself becomes a character in War Horse.

Frantic from the violence and din, Joey attempts to jump a barbed-wire barrier, but the coiled wire traps his legs like the tentacles of an octopus.  While the opposing sides, English and Germans, each debate among themselves in their separate trenches how to get hold of the horse without being killed by the other side, Joey fights the wire, becoming more and more entrapped, brought to a tangled standstill, exhausted, head bowed, on a raised platform that is ground level, the men being below in trenches. 

Elevated, isolated, in a glaring spotlight, Joey recalls -- he sums up -- all martyrs, including Christ on the Cross, the barbed wire Joey’s crown of thorns, an association heightened by the crown of roses a little French girl had worn in one bright moment shortly before.  The human actors represent individual lives:  Joey universalizes experience.

Born of a draft horse and a “hunter” -- a thoroughbred -- Joey combines the capacity for hard, repetitive work and the spirit of daring and outstanding achievement.   Billy raised Joey as a hunter but -- because of a bad bet made by his father -- was forced to teach him to pull the plough.  How this figures in Joey’s story once he’s gone to war is a breath-taking turn of the plot (so good its makes you say inside, “Thank you, Author!”) -- and it's also part of Joey’s transformation into a universal symbol.  Joey survives:  Topthorn, a pure thoroughbred -- and so less universal -- doesn’t.

Joey, Topthorn and the other horses that seem so real are not “realistic” in the purely visual sense:  we see through their cage-like structures and moving joints while visible humans on-stage adjust their limbs and bring their backs to quiver as they snort over the oats, or carry a cavalryman.  But the designers have so understood the fundamental truths of horses that they are as much characters -- or more so -- than the human actors.  

It’s not possible to separate the impact of the play from this particular production but so what if you’re deciding whether to see this War Horse, that we’re privileged to have at the moment in NYC.   

War Horse plays at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC's Lincoln Center.  For more information about the play, its history, and the astoundingly talented team that created the production, and for tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak

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Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, The Irish Repertory Theatre

While watching Beyond the Horizon, I was often gripped by the strong conflicts in individual scenes.  Yet, the play came across as less than the sum of the parts. 

O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for this, his first full-length play (what a personal thrill that must have been!).  The focus on a low class family -- farmers brought to struggle to hold on to the farm -- the use of American vernacular, and the laying bare of brutal competition within what seems on the surface a wholesome American farm family must have been electrifying at the time.   Without these issues of innovation, today the play has less going for it.          

Two brothers love the same girl.  Like his father, the older, Andrew, is a farmer through and through -- and an excellent manager.  Rob is his opposite, a poetic dreamer, always with book in hand, who longs to travel the world and has no interest or aptitude for farming.  Both love Ruth, the girl next door.  Rob’s love is unspoken -- until the eve of his departure as a sailor on a ship that will take him to all the exotic places he’s been dreaming about.    

At that fraught last moment, Ruth seductively draws out of Rob his confession of love and, pouncing on his admission, admits she loves him too, and doesn’t love Andrew who’s been expecting to marry her all along.  The upheaval in the family is huge and the upshot is that nobody does what he's supposed to do:  Andrew the farmer, filled with bitter, jealous rage, goes to sea while Rob the dreamer of far away places, stays home to marry Ruth and work the farm with his aging father.   

Only Rob isn’t very good as a farmer.  He has no aptitude for managing, he’s on the frail side, and anyhow, he’d rather be reading his book, so when the father dies, Rob is left alone to preside fitfully over the slippage into failure of a once prosperous farm.

Rob's increasingly embittered wife, now a frazzled mother, imagines that Andrew will return to set the farm aright and, assuming Andrew still loves her, will take her over as well.  Andrew does return as a successful man with money in his pocket and big plans for grain deals in Argentina -- and no plans for her.  He’s off with the next ship to Argentina. 

At the play’s heart are the ways these two very different brothers respond to their true, inner selves.  Rob gives in to his inner nature, unwilling or incapable of transcending it, and so failing in his responsibilities and precipitating tragedy.  Andrew, in contrast, violates his inner nature:  he goes to sea when he should farm;  he becomes a commodities speculator, not growing the food he was born to grow, but growing money, working with “paper” instead of “grain”.   Rob is lost.  There is the possibility that in the tragic aftermath of the play, the immensely able Andrew will regain his true self, and find his way home.

It strikes me as characteristically American that while there are dangers both in giving in too fully to inner nature, and in violating it, competence can pull you through -- even spiritually.  

It’s interesting to think of O’Neill juggling the parallels and oppositions between Rob and Andrew, but in the play, these contrasts in “inner nature” come across as simplistic.  Of the two, Andrew’s story is the most interesting, but we hear what happens to him indirectly, while we live through life with Rob.  Also, Act II has so many reversals, leave takings, homecomings, and a very lengthy death that it becomes tiresome.  For these reasons, the play as a whole has less staying power in my mind than some of the individual scenes with fiery conflicts of wills.

Part of the reason also is that the play is not well cast.  The actors are not exciting nor convincing, though they work intensely at their characterizations.  There are exceptions among the smaller parts:  David Sitler brings great power to his role as the stern, rigid father in the scene in which he learns that Andrew will be the sea farer and Rob will stay home --  for me the most memorable in the play.  (Too bad he dies and we don’t see more of him.)  Aimee Laurence is touchingly natural as Rob and Ruth's little girl, caught between an embittered mother and the incompetent father she adores.  Patricia Conolly is amusing as Ruth's wheel-chair bound mother, the stubbornly healthy invalid, although her patrician speech is out of place.  Although O'Neill intended a naturalistic vernacular, the varied accents among the actors are disunifying, making the characters hard to accept as part of a small, isolated early 20th-century Massachusetts community.  Rob and Andrew are so disparate in all ways, quite aside from the contrasting personalities, that it's hard to believe they are brothers.

Beyond the Horizon plays at Irish Repertory Theater on Manhattan's West Side through April 15.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Early Plays based on Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn Plays, Adapted and directed by Richard Maxwell¸ a Wooster Group and New York City Players Production

The three early one-act plays by O’Neill are moving and naturalistic, not melodramatic as I’ve seen them called elsewhere.  In order to find this out, though, one has to look through this production's useless, arbitrary stylization which has the characters speaking with emotional emphasis but deadpan rhythms.  Still, if one sticks it out, one gets a good sense of the atmosphere and feeling of being part of a crew for a merchant ship in the early 20th Century.

In the first play, Moon of the Caribees, we’re on shipboard (The Glencairn) anchored off an island in the West Indies. The men are lonely, filling their time with jokes and complaints, but two native girls come aboard with rum hidden in their big sacks and for a brief time sensuality, joy as well as disappointment and anger erupt in a drunken party.  In spite of the stilted delivery of the lines, I saw it all -- the ship, rendered with a few telling scenic strokes, the repetitiveness of life aboard, the explosive excitement, and, always, the looming, oppressive authority of shipboard rank.

It’s a long night in Bound East for Cardiff, as a crewman whose vitality we came to know in Moon of the Carribees lies dying from an accidental shipboard injury. His mates are giving him what physical and emotional comfort they can as fog circles the ship, the heavy fog a poetic visualization of the state of dying. We not only saw the all-encompassing fog but in a most satisfying way felt and heard the creaking of the boards of the ship.

We’re in a dockside bar in The Long Voyage Home as a young sailor, an innocent among thieves, heading home with his pack of pay from one long voyage is robbed and, the worst of it, shanghaied onto another.

Creative disjunctions have been, in the past, the very essence of The Wooster Group's vision.  The Group holds to a play’s narrative -- as in last year's production, Vieux Carre -- while simultaneously undercutting it:  there are abrupt breaks and shifts, wacky, anachronistic furniture that skuttles around, tv monitors that may, or may not, be in synch with what’s currently on stage -- a myriad of tech devices that violate sentimentality, illusion, and that old gold standard of narrative effectiveness, “suspended disbelief.”

And these stylizations have a point.  The tension between our cozy expectations of narrative and the Wooster Group’s willful violations of it keeps us on edge. This Group joins ranks with artists for whom “illusion” of truth or anything else is still illusion -- i.e., false.  And falsity is not worth an artist's time.  To see, here, in a Wooster Group production a meaningless speech stylization standing in for their usually inventive range of disconnects is disappointing.  The collaboration with Richard Maxwell's New York City Players hasn’t done them any good.

Yet, although one doesn’t necessarily look to O’Neil for a realistic view of a time and place, that’s what we got in these three fine short dramas.  And the plays give us glimpses of the O’Neil to come, in the mood poetry, the woman-threat, and intense dramatic scenes, values that -- in spite of the idiosyncratic flat stylizations -- come through.

Early Plays is at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, through March 11.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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An Iliad by Denis O’Hare & Lisa Peterson, based on Homer’s The Iliad translated by Robert Fagles, directed by Lisa Peterson, with Denis O’Hare and Stephen Spinella, New York Theatre Workshop

Denis O’Hare gives  a magnificent performance as “The Poet”, a bard transported through time from ancient Greece to today, picking up our style and our way of speaking to tell us the story ofThe Iliad.   A smallish man on a near-bare stage with pipes and a sink near the back wall, he's travel worn, time worn, his only baggage a knocked-about canvas suitcase -- that and his memory. 

At first O'Hare speaks in a searching, self-effacing, almost ordinary way – oh oh, what’s he going to do with Homer? -- until he catches fire, and holds the audience rapt.  Superb lighting design punctuates emotion as O’Hare takes on the characters -- now he’s Achilles enraged at Agamemnon’s insult, now Hector chucking his baby’s chin before going off to die, now Andromache grieving for Hector and herself.  What a tour de force of swift shifting characters and volatile emotions!

And sometimes he’s just himself, that ordinary seeming man, but a true professional: driven to take on his gift of telling, struggling to understand the significance of the gore and mayhem he’s describing and -- since he’s made that trip through time and has a bard's outstanding memory -- of all wars. 

His shadow may loom large, to suggest, for example, the power of Achilles.  But he's rather slight.  And crowded as the stage seems to become with the vivid characters of all sizes, shapes and ages he brings to life, he remains alone, an everyman, burdened with responsibility, compelled to grapple with meaning.  Epic and personal, history and one man making it through come together in a great performance.

The language moves from colloquial to epic (in Fagles’ translation).  So sometimes he’s not speaking Homer’s words at all but that doesn’t make it any less an Iliad.  The story of the Greeks at Troy was first sung by generations of bards in their own ways until, when writing came to Greece, The Iliad was written down and codified.  That’s why this is called An Iliad -– there were others.  And this Iliad, while moving from personal musing to epic description, captures the essential truths of the characters’ personalities and conflicts in the epic attributed to that elusive poet, Homer.  This is a telling that Homer would applaud, if he knew about us (unless, as a fellow-bard, his competitive sense got the better of him).

The ancient bards and rhapsodes sang with lyres or cytharas.  Here the bass provides the musical and emotional resonance:  the original music by Mark Bennett, played by Bassist Brian Ellingsen, is so beautiful it warrants its own soundtrack.

Program notes describe the long and careful development that brought An Iliad into being.  Like the outstanding These Seven Sicknesses  currently playing at The Flea Theater, the creators have found in the ancient Trojan War a way to engage with our long war in Iraq.  The creative team includes Scenic design by Rachel Hauck, Costume design by Marina Draghici, Lighting design by Scott Zielinsky and Donald Friend is Production Stage Manager.

Denis O’Hare and Stephen Spinella are taking on the role of The Poet in different performances.  This is so good, I want to see it again, and see Spinella.     

An Iliad plays at New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan's East Village through March 25, 2012  Extended through April 1.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan, directed by Laura Braza, Attic Theater Company

The Time of Your Life is a classic American play.  It’s terrific, wonderful, rich in comedy, music, dance, vivid characters, feeling, humanity -- all that and it has a great sense of place and time, a gritty San Francisco waterfront bar on the eve of World War II. 

Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, Bar, and Entertainment Palace:  think colorful characters, from the guy sweeping, to Nick himself who comes in to open, to the old guys and young, cripples and musicians, tarts and society dames.  And everybody has a good heart except for Blick, the Cop the puritanical vice hunting cop.  That's Saroyan -- he's filled with love but he knows the score.

The story centers around Kitty Duval, a street walker with a burlesque past, Joe, the only of Nick’s regulars with money, and Tom, Joe's not-too-bright errand boy who loves Kitty.  Joe’s a cynic on the outside but tender on the inside, and sees the special human virtues in all the denizens of Nick’s bar, including the inner innocence of Kittty the tart.

Being at Nick’s is like being part of a family -- you belong.  Nick gives a chance -- and a job -- to the Black kid who can’t believe he’s lucky enough to get paid for playing boogie-woogie on the piano.  And Nick finds a place for the dancer/comedian who can’t raise a laugh.  But there's a snake in the garden of this sweet if seamy Paradise -- Blick, the vice cop.  Nick throws him out of the place when he comes hunting “vagrants” and “whores”.  “I’m not breaking any laws,” Nick says.  But Blick “is” the law, and we know he's going to be back.

Set in a bar which is home to its regulars, and where dreams flourish, the play reminds me a lot of O’Neil’s Iceman Cometh, but The Time of Your Life looks outward rather than inward and is more seated in the American social context and history than in philosophy and psychology.  By the end of Time of Your Life, you feel you've seen a full American panorama, played out through lives of individual characters you care about.  The play has an unexpected -- and beautifully planted -- ending that brings together truth and fantasy¸ realism and hope, in a way I’ll never forget. 

The Attic Theater production is appreciative of the play and the play comes through.  Henry Packer is strong and humorous as Kit Carson who has impossible romantic yarns to tell about the early West  -- and has that wonderful last word on things -- and I loved listening to Rocky Bostick as Wesley on the piano --  but in general the actors are a little youthful and unseasoned for their parts.   You do not get the sense of lives lived in tough circumstances.   But you do getThe Time of Your Life, and that’s a lot.    

The Time of Your Life plays at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan's East Village through February 25th, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Charles Laughton, directed by Brian Kulick, choreographed by Tony Speciale, with F. Murray Abraham, Robert Dorfman and Amanda Quaid

The conflict in Galileo is iconic:  freedom of ideas vs. censorship.  Brecht peppers his play and his character of Galileo (1564-1642 ) with some Marxist views which are anachronistic but the play triggers thought and thrills one at the power of human intellect.  

Everybody’s having a good time looking through the telescope Galileo has recently perfected, and figuring out its benefits and fiscal profits.  Galileo, short of money, wouldn't mind reaping some profit, too, but fundamentally he's peering into his telescope in his quest for truth, recording his observations, and thinking about them.  His observations and calculations reveal to him that the earth rotates around the sun, not the other way around.

Galileo understands, of course, that his heliocentric view runs directly counter to Catholic dogma in which Man and his earth are at the center of God’s creation, but, driven by the passion to know, excited and even arrogant in the power of his discoveries, he seems unworried that the Church, through its powerful enforcement arm, the Inquisition, will censor his ideas or threaten his personal safety.  

In one of the great scenes in theater, Cardinal Barberini, Galileo's old friend, is transformed from an ordinary man into The Pope as he stands, center stage, and is dressed, with the aid of an advisor, into full papal regalia, buttoned from neck to hem into to his long gown, taking up the mitre, until, crowned by the tiara, his identity becomes merged fully with the Church.  And, having resisted to this point, he now accedes to his advisor’s insistence that Galileo’s heresy must be stopped, and he releases Galileo to the Inquisition.

It’s enough just to see the Inquisition's horrific instruments of torture -- Galileo recants.   Recant – it’s worth pausing to think about what it means.   Driven by fear, Galileo is forced to state publicly that what he knows to be the truth is not the truth. 

His "unheroic" recantation disillusions some of his followers.  But they weren’t shown the instruments of torture.  Among the disappointed, Galileo’s servant says “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.”  “No, Andrea, unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” Galileo answers.  Brecht’s Galileo is as much a man of the flesh as of the intellect, one of the keen strengths of the play. 

His geocentric view now branded a heresy, Galileo spends the rest of his life under house arrest, but he continues his scientific studies -- examining sunspots by peering through his telescope to the point where he blinds himself.  His followers smuggle the results of his investigations beyond the borders of Italy and to the larger world.  Brecht believed that revolutionary ideas are ultimately unstoppable:  in this instance he was right.

F.. Murray Abraham portrays Galileo with a gruffness that suggests a weary experience with the world, but misses the inner excitement and inspiration of his life as a scientist.  Robert Dorfman conveys exquisitely the gentle humor of Brecht’s Pope, thoughtful, ironic, amused even at himself, until he takes on the rigidity of high position.  Amanda Quaid as Galileo’s daughter effectively moves from joyous young love to its disappointment, to a nunnish devotion to her aging father, representing the fallout of the effects of Galileo’s scientific drive on those he loves.    

The set is so evocative one seems to hear the music of the spheres.  Suspended globes of different sizes in bluish tones conjure up the solar system, their appealingly rough surfaces referring to Gallileo’s key -- and religiously controversial -- observation that the moon isn’t perfectly smooth but has mountains.  At times a round projection suggests a view through a telescope -- here I think this production missed a bet:  instead of generic views of starry skies, etc., they would have done well to show what Galileo with the magnification available actually saw when he put his eye to the lens, including the way, over time, things moved. 

This is a play that I think is inportant to know, and here's your chance to see it well produced and performed.  Earlier, Classic Stage presented a staged reading of Galileo, and a click on that live link will take you to an account of it, including the play's two possible endings, one "hopeful," one "hopeless."  The reading included both endings:  here we have one.      

Galileo plays at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan’s East Village through March 18, 2012.  For more information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak 

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Blood Knot written and directed by Athol Fugard, starring Colman Domingo as Zachariah and Scott Shepherd as Morris, SignatureTheatre

... Who wears the suit ?....

Set in South Africa in 1961, during apartheid, Blood Knot tells the story of two brothers, one who looks White and the other Black. They're sons of one black mother each with a different father and, as is said of the one who looks completely White, “It happens.”

They were treated differently from the moment of birth.  How do we know? The older got the Biblical "Black" name of Zachariah, while the younger. born looking White, was given a "White" name: Morris.

Other contrasts are that Morris is literate and speaks with a White South African accent, and Zachariah is illiterate and speaks with a Black South African accent.  (We know the two were brought up together and were very close as boys, so while -- sure -- one can figure out reasons for these contrasts, they remain unconvincing.)      

They’ve been living together in Zachariah’s ramshackle shack in Korsten, a Black neighborhood on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth.  Morris, who’s been a drifter while passing as White, returned to Korsten and to Zachariah about a year ago with a plan:  putting money aside regularly from Zachariah’s wages, he’s saving up for them to buy a farm together -- one thinks of Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Zachariah, who works at a hard job with a mean boss, and that gives him painful feet, longs to go out for a good time like he used to before Morris installed his dour regime of saving for the future and praying.  Most of all Zachariah longs for “woman.”  To keep him on the straight and narrow while letting him gratify his “woman” fantasies, Morris sets illiterate Zachariah up with a “pen-pal”, a girl in a distant city Zachariah can fantasize about all he wants -- until it looks as though the girl is going to come to Port Elizabeth and look for him.  It's fascinating to watch Zachariah’s strength of personality blast through his dependency on Morris for the writing and reading of exchanged the letters.

Since the pen-pal girl turns out to be White and Zachariah is Black (though she doesn’t know it), the pains and ironies of race relations under apartheid emerge within this oh-so-human correspondance. The pen-pal relationship, with all its room for deception, is filled with humor, pathos and keen suspense as we worry that Zachariah’s romantic desire may lead to a tragic end.  Blood Knot has a terrific Act I.

Act II;  good-bye Lennie and George, hello Cain and Abel.  The basically we’re-in-it-together relationship in Act I is replaced in Act II by raw jealous conflicts between the brothers and by extension between Blacks and Whites.  Once the girl is out of the picture, the men are left with the fancy clothes -- featuring an electric blue suit -- that Morris had bought for Zachariah when they thought she might actually appear.  Morris dons the suit and -- clothes maketh the man -- turns gradually into a kind of mean White overbearing, plutocrat overseer, brutalizing his Black brother (supposedly all in a game.).

But with these events, telling as they may be, the action no longer emerges from the characters, but appears arbitrarily invented to make the author's point.  Zachariah becomes more sophisticated and better spoken, and at the same time more servile than the character we’ve come to know, all in service to the author’s message, that is:  brutal conflict between brothers is in our blood, and we are all brothers under the skin. 

From a rich human drama, the play turns into a schematic parable.  I haven’t seen this kind of programmatic slippage in other Fugard plays; perhaps it’s here because Blood Knot was one of first plays (1961), though revised and re-titled slightly in 1987.  Colman Domingo is powerful and moving as Zachariah in Act I where he has a genuine role to play.  Scott Shepherd is a good foil to him but never as convincing because the role as written is more wobbly.

Among the reasons to see Blood Knot are to learn more about South Africa under apartheid and glimpse the effects on individual lives, and to see the young Fugard finding his way as an important playwright.

Blood Knot  plays at SignatureTheatre, The Pershing Square Signature Center, on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are totally private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar, The Flea Theater, featuring The Bats

Allison Buck as Tekmessa and Grant Harrison as Ajax, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

If you’re lucky enough to see These Seven Sicknesses, you’re in for a rich adventure.  It’s like setting sail.  First of all, you’ll walk in to a party -- there’s a buzz, the actors, in costume, are there to talk with you, offering to bring you water or wine.  This is transformative, opening you to whatever's going to happen soon on the stage, that is, the wood floor between the facing banks of the audience.   

The play is an ambitious and exciting weaving together of the seven extant plays of Sophocles.  It follows their basic story lines and generally their emotional arcs while changing some aspects.  To catch any of Sophocles’ words you have to think fast because the language is our current lingo and delivered with today’s expressions and body language, marvelously by a superb group of young actors -- the Flea’s Bats.  The stories are tragic, and Graney’s treatment of them is witty and hilarious.  Since it’s a long evening¸dinner is served (by the actors to the audience) after Act I and -- if you can believe it –- dessert comes after Act II, which leaves room for delightful conversation among the actors and audience.  Feeling so well taken care of is in itself transformative.  

For those who may know Sophocles’ plays and are interested in the order in which they’re taken up, Act I presents, with these titles, Oedipus [The King], In Trachis, In Colonus.  Act II:  Philoktetes, Ajax.  Act III:  Elektra, Antigone.

The opening act is over-compressed which led me to think These Seven Sicknesses might be superficial but -- hold on, it isn’t!  Still, much of Act I is performed with rambunctious speed.   Oedipus acknowledges his guilt fairly early on so Sophocles’ portrait of him as a searcher for truth is lost.  The Oedipus episode slows down, though, for its exciting, theatrical crescendo.  In a scene poignantly played by Satomi Blair, Oedipus’ wife Jocasta, drenched in guilt at the discovery of her polluted marriage with her son, steps into her bath and cuts her wrists, her blood reddening the water (in Sophocles she hangs herself).  In terms of the themes of blood and pollution in the play, as Ms. Blair commented to me in the intermission, this manner of suicide is rich in symbolism.  To see a woman step into a bath on the  plank floor between the facing banks of seats has character of a sacrifice: it"s "not in Sophocles" but it's filled with suggestive resonance of other sacrifices of women in these plays and at the heart of much Greek drama.

above:  Satomi Blair as Jocasta, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

below: Seth Moore as Philoktetes and Alex Herrald as Neoptolemus, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater 

Philoktetes, next,  follows most closely Sophocles’ actual and emotional story line, it’s given the time it needs, and is magnificently acted by Seth Moore:  the upshot -- a great Philoktetes!  Years ago, as the story goes, the Greeks were headed to fight at Troy but the warrior Philoktetes had a gangrenous, disgusting leg wound, so they abandoned him on a desolate island -- “They left cans of food for me but no can opener,” Philoktetes says.  Now, after ten years of fruitless war, the prophetic word is out that the Greeks can’t capture Troy without Philoktetes’ magic bow.  The play begins as Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, arrive on the island to get it.  They and we meet a Philoktetes in agony, half-crazed with bitterness at the way he has been treated¸ his isolation, and the unrelenting pain of his rotting leg.  With Odysseus and Neoptolemus plotting by fair means and foul to get that bow, the pain of suspicion is added to his anguish.  Philoktetes covers the long stage with his one good leg and a make-shift crutch, his suppurating leg fallen upon, and stomped upon by Odysseus who’ll stop at nothing.  In this episode several nurses, on hand throughout These Seven Sicknesses as a singing Greek chorus … Well, what they do here is an operation, more I will not say, except that it gives Seth Moore the opportunity to add some blood curdling cries of pain to his stunning performance.

Ajax, the story of unother unappreciated warrior, omits Sophocles' rich, long speeches but gives plenty of time to the main dramatic action, choreographed on a grand scale and performed with thrilling power, deft speed and spinning turns by Grant Harrison as Ajax.  The hero whose name is proverbial for great strength is brooding over an unbearable blow to his honor:  since Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, died, his armor was to be awarded to the the next greatest fighter and in a vote the Greeks awarded it -- not to Ajax but -- to Odysseus.  Ajax is agonizing over the intolerable insult when a squadron of armed men and women enter in a choreographed advance, uttering the low, oddly frightening bah's of sheep.  Driven by a passion to avenge his honor, and crazed by the disrespect, Ajax enters battle against what he thinks are his enemies and slaughters them all, only to find out that he has, in his insanity, slaughtered nothing but a herd of sheep.

 After that, what’s left for a hero to do?

Philoktetes and Ajax emphatically bring to mind current issues:  fruitless wars that last ten years, and the grievous plight of fighters, suffering wounds that won't heal, lacking their due respect, who may be driven to violence and suicide.  Seeing these issues laid bare in ancient stories expands them to the universal.      

Other highlights include Kate Michaud’s passionate and complex performance as Herakles’ wife Dejanira, stung by Herakles’ rejection of her in favor of a younger woman but loving him still -- with good reason, that’s one mighty, compelling Herakles played by Victor Joel Ortiz.

With the shaved head and dark garb of a Buddhist monk, Holly Chou, a brilliant character actor playing the Blind Seer, speaks prophetic ambiguities with precise articulation -- what an irony! 

Betsy Lippit bounds into Elektra an explosive tomboy.  What a fury she is, grappling in full rage with her mother Clytaemnestra, who brings out her side of the story, played by Akyiaa Wilson.  These are only among my favorite episodes and performances -- there are great moments throughout.  There are, after all, 7 plays and a cast of 37! 

These Seven Sicknesses is a rich feast of theater! 

These Seven Sicknessess plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through March 4.***  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

***Due to popular demand, The Flea Theater will bring back THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES this summer. This critically lauded theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays (Oedipus, In Trachis, Philoktetes, In Colonus, Ajax, Elektra and Antigone) will return for a limited engagement June 6 through July 1

Yvonne Korshak

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The Philanderer by Bernard Shaw, directed by Gus Kaikkonen, The Pearl Theatre Company

... pre-vintage Shaw ...  

Shaw’s early play, The Philanderer of 1893, is a romantic comedy that’s as focused on the ideas of Henrik Ibsen as it is on love, and with good reason:  for Shaw ideas and love were equally suffused with eros.

Shaw saw Ibsen’s A Doll’s House five times around 1893 and this iconic drama was revelatory, bringing him to the possibility of a theater of ideas.  And, with his comic bent, and awareness of the pitfalls of stern moralizing, Shaw sought a humorous way to explore Ibsen’s theme of the independent woman.  This led him inThe Philanderer to comic exaggerations which today to me seem dated, though when the play was first produced, they may have seemed fresh and provocative.  As a gauge of that, the Pearl's program tells us that  "...due to strict censorship ... it was not performed on the stage until 1902."

In a romantic triangle (like one Shaw experienced), Grace Tranfield, a down-to-earth widow and Julia Craven, volatile and erotically assertive, both love Leonard Charteris, an attractive curmudgeon, who’s just broken off from the over-possessive Julia and is now courting Grace.  During some romancing at Grace’s house, Julia bursts in, claiming Leonard really belongs to her.  Shaw, alluding to Ibsen’s “advanced” ideas about independent women, has fun with the jealous Julia – how can a woman who calls herself independent speak of one person “belonging” to another?

Julia keeps up her boisterous scene even when Grace’s proper father, Colonel Craven, arrives, along with his long lost friend who happens to be Julia’s father.  How fascinating that Shaw describes a similar romantic rivalry and late night scene in his diary in early 1893! An exhausted Leonard (just like a “horribly tired and shocked and upset” Shaw) finally gets Julia out of there with a romantic lie, sober Grace having long ago retreated upstairs. 

The play continues at to the “Ibsen Club”, where a stern portrait of Ibsen dominates the Library, and where Ibsen’s ideas about independent women are carried to the point of caricature.  Women are allowed in this London club, an innovation, but to be members they must be “unwomanly women.”  Julia’s younger sister, Sylvia, fills the bill in a pants role.  But how Julia can manage to stay in the Club, in spite of her “womanly” amorousness and sexy clothes, is the set-up for some humor.

The conflict between Julia and Grace over Leonard (because it’s wearing thin it seems to me) is joined by stuffy Dr. Percy Paramore’s unrequited love for Julia, who despairs even more when the news comes in that his gruesome scientific experiments are proven to be useless (anticipating Shaw’s later The Doctor’s Dilemma).  As in Moliere’s The Misanthrope , which the sexual dynamics in The Philanderer much resemble, the undercurrent of true sexual attraction between the flirt and the curmudgeon, here Leonard and Julia, retains its ambiguity and the romance is left unresolved. 

I’m glad to have had the chance to see The Philanderer and I appreciate the The Pearl for putting in on.  The production is straightforward and so adequate for introducing one to the play, but it’s uninspired.  Of the central threesome, Bradford Cover is strong and charming as the rumpled Leonard.  Karron Graves plays the amorously determined Julia with the vivacity the part calls for though, at the heights of emotion, her voice gives way to a kind of shrieking in her all out performance .  Rachel Botchan could have used some of Graves’ energy -- a fine performer in other roles I’ve seen, she played Grace with a dull placidity that makes one wonder what Leonard could possibly see in her.

The Pearl used to be in a proscenium theater but now plays in a theater with seating on three sides, yet continues to stage plays fully to the front as in the old theater:  more flexibility and variety of movement would be interesting, and give better site lines to those seated on the side.     

The Philanderer  holds fewer streaks of the Shavian wit than one hopes for.  But the fact is, when he does construct one of those marvelous, sly build-ups that land you with pleasurable jolt at a great line, and you find yourself laughing heartily, then the play, Shaw, and everything else, for the moment, seem intensely worthwhile.

The Philanderer  plays at NYC's City Center Theater in mid-town Manhattan through February 19, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Stopped Bridge of Dreams, written, directed and designed by John Jesurun, Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa

... artistic directors ...

Ellen Stewart, the astoundingly brave and brilliant founder of La MaMa theater in NYC’s East Village, died just about a year ago, Jan 13, 2011.  Since, from the time she founded her experimental theater group in 1961 to the time of her death, La MaMa created approximately 3,000 productions.  (!)  I doubt anyone could have seen all of them -- except Ellen Stewart.  But some of the greatest theater I’ve ever seen, simply unforgettable productions, were at La MaMa.

What will happen to La MaMa now that Ellen Stewart is gone?  Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.  Things are busy at La MaMa which is a good sign.  They’ve been serving as a venue for some other exciting theater groups and performers which keeps their performance spaces -- the tiny and the large -- active.  They've also mounted their own productions since the loss of Stewart and these, in my view, have been less successful. 

Stopped Bridge of Dreams, La MaMa’s own production, is a case in point.  It has a lot of trendy elements, from Oriental influence and allusions to the use of video and “multi-media” -- not much multi, mainly, video -- but these seem mainly there to distract one from thinking about that there’s no real play here. 

While there’s not really a plot, there’s a situation, though it takes awhile catch on to it.  We’re up in the air in a transcontinental airliner that functions as a brothel and the characters are the prostitutes plus the Madam.  We hear about the clients but never see any.  The denizens of the plane have some ghostly characteristics but they’re alive -- somewhere in the numinous between life and death and past and present, though that doesn’t quite work out either.

The characters have various relationships among themselves.  A central relationship is between the Madam and a young man who is or is not one of her thousands of unborn aborted children; you may guess that this is a tense relationship.  There's a flirtation or two.  Although the prostitutes populating the plane seem suited to the environment, and generally not looking to leave, there’s seems to be an underlying ennui.  Or maybe that was my ennui waiting for this to be over.

This all takes place under monitors that just below ceiling level run the full length of the long theater, with screen-saver like videos suggesting the heavens, clouds, etc., and also some panoramic shots of cities approached as for landing from above (my favorite shots).  Cameras provide varied angles and greatly magnified close-ups of the performers interacting or narrating, live or filmed ahead of time.

There's reference to an early "floating world" Japanese novel with narration from it of the tragic story of a young girl who grows up to be a prostitute and supplants the current Madam as the new Madam of the plane.  The old one will drift off to become a cloud -- at least that’s what she says.

Speaking of video ... The Wooster Group, an outstanding off-Broadway group, pioneered the use of videos and other tech, slick and mod-appearing devices in their plays in ways that are challenging, witty, and make one see things in new ways.  The video-driven multiple points of view in Stopped Bridge of Dreams rely on some aura of innovation, but are unsearching.  This play doesn’t lead one to see things in new ways, through tech or otherwise, it's more watered down Sci Fi.

The author, director, designer, John Jesurun, has an imposing lists of honors and activities for his theatrical work, including back in 1996 a MacArthur “genius award” Fellowship.  So much for all that.  The -- to now -- falling off from quality of the La MaMa productions since the death Ellen Stewart drives home that among the real geniuses of the off- and off-off Broadway scene are the Artistic Directors.  Creators such as Ellen Stewart, and -- to name just a few current -- Brian Kulick of Classic Stage, Jim Simpson of the Flea Theater, Jonathan Bank of Mint Theater, Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group, and others, make it happen.

Although their theater groups each differ profoundly one from another, these artistic directors share imagination, intense individuality, leadership, love of theater, and perseverance against great odds.  They unite individual vision with habits of personality that, to me, are quite astsonishing, they are like iron in their toughness.  If you want to look for genius, in my view, here’s where. 

About that question, how will La MaMa fare?  Give it time.  Great artistic directors need apply.

Stopped Bridge of Dreams  plays at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre in NYC's East Village through February 5, 2012.  For further information and tickets, click on live link of play's title. 

Yvonne Korshak

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New American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with thoughts on Washington Crossing the Delaware

Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak, 1863, oil on canvas, 73 1/2 x 120 3/4 in. 186.7 x 306.7 cm (for other paintings, see full captions with dimensions at end)

The MMA’s New American Wing is a feast of paintings.  There are so many, and they are so fine and varied, and worth seeing for different reasons.  The overall effect is to give a sense of the strength of the American painting tradition, placing it on a par with the European traditions.  That’s clearly what the designers of the new wing intended, and they succeeded.  And why, evidently, the galleries are “a contemporary interpretation of 19^th-century Beaux-Arts galleries,” according to a Museum description.  The general sense is familiar great.  It engenders a sense of pride in the accomplishments of American painting in the circumscribed period the Wing covers, from the 18th Century to 1920.

In light of all the innovation current in museums throughout the world, the fundamentally conventional character of the New American Wing is surprising and even disappointing.  The designers went against the stream in this.  At the same time, though, while wondering, “wasn’t there another way to do it?”, I was delighted at their accomplishment in solving a difficult problem -- weaving together chronological organization with thematically focused galleries.  The decision in exhibitions to go with “chronology” or “thematic” often seems either-or (and can be bitterly fought over).  Here the designers effectively integrate the two, and it works.

It's wonderful to see favorite people of the past -- and for me that's George Washington -- seeming as if alive as in this painting by Charles Willson Peale (L) (apologies -- the painting is much brighter than the photo). Naturally portraits are almost always designed to magnify whomever's portrayed.  Charles Willson Peale's low point of view in this very large

portrait (all dimensions given in captions below) makes this tall man seem exceedingly tall, exceedingly solid, and his individuality of great importance.  How grand, and how expressive of the democratic spirit of the new republic, that the fabric seller,  Elijah Boardman, painted near in time by Ralph Earl on a canvas of approximately equal size conveys a comparable magnitude and substance.  Boardman is advertising his fabrics -- some, in this moment of warm feeling between France and the United States, look quite French.

The great icon of American patriotism, the huge painting by Emanuel Leutz of Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1851, has come out of the shadows of a long, dim wall and is now the centerpiece of a double-sized and well lit gallery, and a spectacular gilded frame has been constructed for it based on vintage photographs. 

The painting commemorates a key event in the American Revolution:  December 26, 1776, in harsh weather, Washington and his men crossed the Delaware River, surprising and capturing approximately 1,000 Hessians based at Trenton, N. J. who’d let down their guard following Christmas revels.  This victory, following upon darker days, raised Revolutionary morale and stirred a new belief in the possibility of the American cause, encouraging the new recruits Washington needed for the army.

Leutz sacrificed historical accuracy in the service of the inspiring image.  The Stars and Stripes flag, for example, hadn’t been designed at the time of the crossing but by 1864 had become a stirring national symbol, while the original Grand Union Flag of 1776 by then would have been largely unfamiliar.     

While the crossing took place in the dead of night, with rain, sleet and snow, Leutz gives James Monroe, right behind Washington, almost equal billing.  He carries the flag -- literally and figuratively.  Like Washington, Monroe was a future President, and his Monroe Doctrine of 1823 asserted the national policy of no further intervention by European powers in the Americas, extending the principles of the American Revolution.

The boats are painted smaller and the river wider than they were, heightening the drama, and horses were not brought over in small boats.  Yet, the fight against great odds, the hazard of the event, the intelligence of the complex plan, the courage to carry it out, and the momentous meaning of the victory are the truths that Leutz conveyed.  It’s hard to want it any other way -- or at least this image is so embedded in our national awareness, it’s hard to imagine it differently.

In the painting’s former, dimmer setting, I’d never noticed Washington’s watch fob, seen below his stomach, at the bend of his leg.  Watches were very valuable and symbols of status, and a watch fob is a favored male attribute, as in the portrait above of Isaiah Berlin, and is visible in several portraits of Washington (though not in the Peale above).  In place of the usual metallic chain, here Washington’s watch fob is represented by two round balls, where his leg bends out from his torso, below the belly (shadowed -- check it out in the museum). This is so unusual, I wondered if these two rosy balls are intended to suggest “balls” in the anatomic sense, and characterizing -- along with the stance, facial expression and weaponry -- Washington’s masculine vigor.  And it may carry an even more specific symbolic purpose -- as my companion suggested -- to connote specifically Washington as Father of his Country.   I think so.

Washington Crossing the Delaware is flanked by two important works, of our great Hudson River School, equally monumental, and artistically surpassing Leutze’s painting, Frederick Church’s Heart of the Andes  and Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains (illus at top):  the historic sense of the gallery is heightened by the fact that these three paintings were displayed together, much as they are here, in the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair of 1864. 

Entitling one of twenty-seven galleries "The West 1860-1920" marginalizes a good part of our country and highlights the Americans-doing-it-like-the-Europeans bias of the New American Wing.  On the other hand, it's interesting, though not unusual, to see Frederic Remington's Bronze sculpture Broncho Buster (L) adjacent to Remington paintings like On the Southern Plains.  While focused on paintings, sculptures are interspersed, pertinently, among the galleries of the New American Wing, though sculptures are mainly on exhibit elsewhere in the museum. 

In the fundamentally conventional organization of the New American Wing, Barbara Weinberg, Curator of this section created a stimulating shake-up.  Thomas Eakins' brooding portrait of his brother-in-law, The Thinker:  Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, is hung, unexpectedly, in the gallery of "Portraiture in the Grand Manner" among proud, patrician portraits such as Sargent's Madame X (below R; to compare Eakins and Sargent, click on live link).  Eakins' single standing figure, darkly dressed on the tall canvas coordinates with the "grand manner" portraits in form, but in spirit it's entirely different.  It fits in, and it doesn't.  The unexpected inclusion of Eakins' portrait with the "grand manner" portraits stimulates new thought.  

Eakins' large portrait in its newly-thought out position is climactic, given that the next gallery, if one is following the chronological arrangement, brings us to the latest works, the Ashcan School (1900-1920), not a strength of this museum -- there are some good paintings, e.g., but no George Bellows.  The American Impressionists nearby, of the same period, fare better. 

Sculptures are exhibited elsewhere … art of Native Americans is elsewhere … Modern art is elsewhere -- don't expect to find Jackson Pollock in the New American Wing!   There are no seventeenth-century paintings, although these galleries include an extensive collection American silver from 1660 to 1800 (including of course Paul Revere), Late Colonial furniture, and a fully re-created and furnished entrance hall from a the pre-Revolutionary Van Rensselaer Manor House.  Few women artists are represented, and little "outsider art," partly because, by definition, the mediium is mainly painting.  There’s no consistency in the decisions underlying these arrangements -- it’s a matter of taste, past practices, the “feel of things,” and the history of the museum’s acquisitions, and in that sense, “The New American Wing” is something of a misnomer -- buyer beware.  

Moving through the galleries, the stars remain the stars in a fixed firmament.   John Singleton Copley, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, simply stun among the rest. 

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845, o/c 29 x 36 1/2 in  73.7 x 92.7 cm 

Additional captions in order of appearance:  Charles Wilson Peale, George Washington, ca. 1779-81, o/c, 95 x 61 3/4 in  241.3 x 156.8 cm;   Ralp;h Earl, Elijah Boardman, 1789, o/c, 85 x 51 in 210.8 x 129.5 cm;  Emanuel Gottlieb Leutz, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, o/c, 149 x 255 in  378.5 x 647.7 cm;  Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895; revised 1909;  this cast, by November 1910, bronze, 32 1/4 x 27 1/4 x 15 in  81.9 x 69.2 x 38.1 cm;  John Singer Sargent, Madame X(Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883-84, o/c, 82 1/8 x 43 1/4 in  208.6 x 109.9 cm.  Photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak 

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For information on visiting the Museum, click on live link. 

 

FILM REVIEW – The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher, Alexandra Roach as the young Margaret and Harry Lloyd as the young Denis

There's one reason to see this film: Meryl Streep. The Iron Lady follows Britain’s Margaret Thatcher from aspiring politician to political powerhouse, from loving wife to grieving widow.  Streep brings to this range of life experience her power to move one with the slightest tilt of her head, to convey inner experience with the minuscule shift of the direction of her eyes.  By the end of the film, one feels one has been enlarged and touched by the depth with which one has shared the full life of another human being from the inside.  We feel we know what it felt like. That makes the movie a great pleasure to experience.

The story's told through Thatcher’s mental world in old age as it flows between past and present, and between what’s actually happening in her life and what’s illusory -- particularly the hallucinatory and “alive” presence and companionship of her beloved husband, Denis Thatcher, who often settles in with her for a chat across the dining room table, on the sofa, and in bed, but who -- as she at the same time knows well -- had died a few years earlier.  It's a compelling, and genuinely interesting coda to a moving love story.      

Thatcher's against-all-odds climb to the pinnacle of power as Prime Minister of England is Horatio Alger-like (though her father did own two grocery stores).  The film sees a relationship between her arch conservatism, especially her focus on individuals as responsible agents, and disdain for government solutions for people’s problems, to her own relatively humble beginnings and tough uphill battle.  She remembers herself as a girl working in her father’s grocery store, through her early grasps at political office and her marriage with the wealthy businessman, Denis, to her rise as a national political figure.  Along the way she has to overcome, and often overlook, sexism and snobbery (the grocer’s daughter in Parliament -- you can imagine!). 

In its treatment of her long tenure as Prime Minister, the film gives glimpses of positive and negative aspects of the tough-minded and at times brutally enforced conservative policy of the "Iron Lady", and takes us through to her eventual defeat as head of the Conservative Party. 

But for all of Thatcher’s central, and continuing, political significance, these are background to what the film focuses on and does well: the inner life of this strong and independent-minded woman, now diminished in strength, and with her independence challenged in even the smallest everyday matters -- like going out on her own to buy a carton of milk.  This is an imagined telling of her toughest battles:  lost love and old age.

It’s not possible to know how much the subjectively presented film reflects that “real” Margaret Thatcher.  Are these really her thoughts?  Streep sounds like and looks very like Thatcher but, in the scenes of Thatcher's mid-years, a little softer and prettier, with Streep’s characteristic girlish underlay (she managed to avoid this, however, in her astonishingly convincing portrayal of Julia Child in Julia and Julia).  But never mind physical vanity:   in the showdown -- old age -- Streep gives all to expressiveness.  During one scene in which she’s still really good looking, it takes a long time to sew on a bodice button, with Streep’s impressive décolleté spotlighted all the while.  I thought, she likes to allure, but she likes even more to be a great actor.  There’s nothing’s left of handsome -- or glamorous or graceful -- in the old, red eyed, bulky, wispy haired, and often frightened Mrs. Thatcher.

But personality persists.  This Margaret Thatcher maintains her full self in the face of the frailties of age, grief and hallucinatory confusion.  We know about these, since the movie let’s us see her at her weakest, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to know!  Interacting with others -- with a doctor, or at a dinner party -- she drifts off.  But she realizes it.  And will not tolerate condescension.  How shall she retrieve her dignity?  Characteristically, of course, by a rousing political statement, on the spot, articulate and vigorous.  She rouses herself with a jolt, I'm still Margaret Thatcher.  These are some of my favorites scenes in the movie. 

Alexandra Roach is charming, feisty, looks the part, and in all ways creates an affect consistent with the mature Margaret portrayed by Streep, and Harry Loyd brings an erotic chemistry to their romance that effectively warms the movie.  Olivia Colman as their daughter Carol portrays the conflicted but loving relationship with her extraordinary mother. 

But how did the grocer’s daughter become Prime Minister of England anyhow?  We get glimpses of what she did but no insight into how.  Surely Thatcher didn’t climb the slippery slope just by being a peppery young woman.  She couldn’t have maintained power and forced through her policies without manipulations, accommodations, negotiations and alliances within alliances, but these are barely hinted at, and the film leaves one wondering about the mechanisms of her success.  There’s another movie to be made about Margaret Thatcher.  But this one is compelling in human terms, a most public woman in her private life, a most powerful woman struggling with the weaknesses of old age, illumined by a remarkable actress.

Yvonne Korshak

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Blood and Gifts by J. T. Rogers, directed by Bartlett Sher, at Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi Newhouse

... here's the cold war ...

Blood and Guts tells the story of the American thrust for influence in Afghanistan during the cold war through a close look at the lives and adventures of three intelligence officers -- one American, one British, and one Russian.  James Warnock, a CIA operative based in the country of our 1980’s ostensible ally, Pakistan, is in charge of organizing covert aid and weapons delivery to Afghan chiefs fighting the Russians.  On hand is his British counterpart, Simon Craig, less idealistic about aiding freedom fighters, and more realistic about power politics.  Both of them are suffering strained relationships with their wives that come with being intelligence officers in distant and dangerous posts on long assignments, as is the guy on the “other side,” the Russian intelligence officer, Dmitri Gromov.

Although “allies” in the 1980’s, the U.S. and Pakistan are in fundamental conflict over control of Afghanistan.  The U.S. aims to fill the anticipated power void that would be left with the Afghan defeat of the Russians while Pakistan is determined itself to take full control over -- essentially annex -- their neighboring country.  Thus the essential question in the play: which Afghan factions will get the weapons the U.S. is providing to Afghanistan, moderates or extremists?  Will this conflict come down on the U.S. side, in the person of Warnock’s Afghan “asset”, Abdullah Khan, a strong, canny (and as played by Bernard White immensely likable) nationalist and religious moderate?  Or will it be cultural and religious extremist Afghan leaders favorable to Pakistan.  Colonel Afridi, head of Pakistani intelligence, ruthlessly undercuts the American and British relations with Khan in favor of more extreme Afghan elements.

Much of this story of power politics is told through words rather than dramatic action: it's a talky play, though interesting and sometimes exciting to follow.

The personal lives of Warnock, Craig, and Gromov weave through the story of their intelligence goals and hazardous posts.  Back home, children are born, lost, or go astray.  Wives become impatient.  While he’s a cold war enemy of Warnock and Craig, Gromov faces the same challenges of alienation from his far-off family as the American and the Englishman, a demonstration of their common humanity that includes a grudging understanding of one another -- a counterpoint to the large scale issues of power and control.  This was a good direction but it doesn’t quite work: the domestic problems of the intelligence officers are thinly presented and seem obviously inserted to maintain the “human element.”  Craig, charmingly played by Jefferson Mays, and Gromov, in a vivid performance, as well as Khan -- whose personal story also plays a roll -- are well characterized but the personal dimension is somewhat damped by Warnock, the main character, acted routinely by Jeremy Davidson, a cliché of an American can-do idealist who ultimately can’t do.

Blood and Gifts  tells a very important story and is well worth seeing for the history, though dramatically it’s a little flat.  Never mind -- because otherwise you’re not likely to be clued in on American foreign policy and actions with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980’ and early ‘90’s which cast great light on current, and very pressing events.  Ah, now I understand something of key importance that was never clear to me -- that's an excellent reason for seeing this play.

Blood and Guts plays at the Mitzi Newhouse theater in NYC's Lincoln Center.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- The Artist, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, and that wonderful dog ...

This is as good a movie as I’ve ever seen or ever hope to see.  And it’s such a surprise.

It’s filmed in black and white and as a silent film, about a silent film star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), whose name suggests Valentino and who looks enough like Douglas Fairbanks to pass as Zorro -- the first Zorro -- in a film clip.  It’s not totally silent, though, and the occasional break-throughs to sound are so clever and witty you could squeeze them tight with happy gratitude.   And then there's the brilliant use here and there of silent film captions like the one where ... well, you'll have to see it to believe it.

In 1927, Valentin, at the cusp of his fame in silent films but at the brink of the talkies meets a young actress/dancer Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a nobody who -- even as they fall in love, though in keeping with the theme it's never said aloud -- parlays their fortuitous meeting into stardom -- in the new talkies.  Valentin, rich, confident, used to the power of his stardom, refuses to make the bridge to the talkies.

Thus Peppy’s arc rises and his falls.  She soars to the top while he, uncompromising in his artistic pride, refuses to talk for the movies.   With the kind of marvelous play on words this “silent” movie abounds in, when his wife, on the brink of leaving him, comes up with the familiar “We have to talk,” he refuses, blows her off.  So she blows him off ...  and keeps the mansion, the jewelry, the objets d'art ... 

He descends, he pawns his tuxedo, he drinks, he let’s his loyal, unpaid butler go, giving him the car which is all he has left, and he hits bottom.   Well, he has one other thing left, his totally marvelous dog (if there were no other reason to see the movie, the dog would be enough). 

The titles of the movies these two stars make echo where they are in their personal story.  Leaving the studio, he loses huge sums of money in his self-funded silent film fiasco in which we see him drowning in quicksand at “The End.”  The rest of his money goes in the 1929 crash.  While Peppy, in her new stardom, makes Guardian Angel, and she is his guardian angel, or tries to be, but he resists all help because of pride.  Valentin has another guardian angel, though, the dog -- like him a genius at wordless communication.

How to find a way around Valentin’s pride -- without making him talk in the movies?  There is a way, and … you will leave this movie smiling broadly, deeply, warmly.   

Dujardin is marvelous as the silent film star with his dark good looks and that smoothed back hair. The scene in which he -- for several film retakes -- winds his face up into the inhibited smile/sneer of a German officer is funny and fascinating for the sheer artistry .  In the quietest moments of introspection his face reflects the parade of thoughts, memories and emotions that cross the mind in his fall from greatness.  And he’s an outstanding, charismatic dancer.

Bejo, with her large dark eyes and mobile face, is entrancing as the dynamic talent, out for herself but -- here’s the strength of her  character -- not only for herself.   In a world of glitter and make believe, she truly loves him and she proves it;  the more obvious ways she tries are touching for the film goer but leave him unmoved, so she strains to find a way, in harmony with his artistic pride, not to restore him -- her first thought -- but to enable him to restore himself.

Everything about this movie is in fact intelligent, witty and great -- including the musical score, which, along with the screen play and the film as a whole is Academy Award worthy.   It couldn’t be more vibrant, compelling, funny, touching or memorable.

Yvonne Korshak 

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Who's going to Broadway shows? Broadway Audience Demographic Study -- thanks to Ken Davenport

Ken Davenport, producer of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, posted on his blog,  http://www.TheProducersPerspective.com , a summary of the Annual Broadway League's report about the demographics of the Broadway Audience 2010-2011.  Thank you, Ken.  Here it is:

The demographics of the Broadway Audience 2010-11 Executive Summary:  In the 2010-2011 season, approximately 62% of all Broadway tickets were purchased by tourists. 65% of the the audiences were female. The average age of the Broadway theatergoer was 44 years. 83% of all tickets were purchased by Caucasian theatergoers. Broadway theatergoers were also quite affluent compared to the general United States population, reporting an average annual household income of $244,100. Broadway theatergoers were a very well-educated group.  Of theatergoers over 25 years old, 78% had complete college and 39% had earned a graduate degree. The average Broadway theatergoer reported attending 5 shows in the previous 12 months.  The group of devoted fans who attended 15 or more performances comprised only 6% of the audience but accounted for 33% of all tickets (4.1 mission admissions). Playgoers tended to be more frequent theatergoers than musical attendees.  The typical straight play attendee saw eight shows in the past year; the musical attendee, five. The use of the Internet to purchase tickets has been steadily increasing.  In this season, 44% of respondents said they bought their tickets online. 35% of respondents reported having purchased their tickets more than one month prior to the show. The most popular sources for theatre information were Broadway.com, The New York Times and word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth was by far the most influential factor in show selection. In general, advertisements were not reported to have been influential in making the purchasing decision. 74% of the Broadway audience said that some kind of incentive (discounts, freebies, add-ons) would encourage them to attend shows more often.

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"Looking at Christmas" by Steven Banks, directed by Jim Simpson, The Flea Theater, a World Premiere

NEWS FLASH 12/15/2011:  The Flea's Romantic Holiday Comedy
LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS Comes to TV
December 21 - 25 on Thirteen WNET
Thirteen WNET will air The Flea Theater's acclaimed 2010 production of LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS by Steven Banks (head writer of SpongeBob SquarePants) beginning December 21. Filmed live at The Flea last year, this romantic comedy set in front of New York’s famed holiday window displays is directed by Jim Simpson and features The Bats, The Flea’s resident company of actors. Broadcasts on Thirteen WNET are slated for Dec. 21 at 10pm; Dec. 23rd at 3am, and Dec. 25 at 11pm. Check your local listing for airdates in other markets.  Here's the review (Dec. 2010 ) . . . . . .

 ... Boy Meets Girl in front of Bloomingdale's ...

Looking at Christmas is a delightful romp through some of the world's great Christmas stories with just enough bite to make it exciting -- and hilarious.

John, a young writer who's just been fired meets Charmian, a young actress with no audition call-backs, who charms him into accompanying her on their private Christmas Eve tour of NYC's famous decorated Christmas store windows -- Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf's, Lord & Taylor's and then some -- with a climactic finale at Macy's.  After they move on to the next, the window they've been viewing comes alive: we get to see what John and Charmian saw and more -- what the characters in the windows think and do about their lives in the stories they find themselves in.  All along the way Banks gives us amusingly irreverent views of iconic narratives -- he's a tv writer and the play shows that in its fast-paced episodic appeal, but you won't quite see this on tv. 

Mrs. Santa Claus -- in the skimpy outfit we heard about from John and Charmian -- allures an Elf.  The Little Match Girl rebels against Fate.  Tiny Tim in a metallic space suit lets Scrooge have it.  The spoof of the fabulous ice wonderland of Bergdorf's windows, with an icy Princess and a Snowman missing some crucial parts, was one of my favorites.  We get the "true story" behind eight vignettes, with the last being ... well, I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag -- although you can find it on the Flea's web page.  A couple of the episodes seem somewhat forced, but all are at the least entertaining.

We may not have known how much we wanted the characters in those detailed and tinseled store windows to come to life but Banks, a lead writer for SpongeBob SquarePants, did (not surprising when you think about it), and in Looking at Christmas  he fulfills our yearning.  As a friend said, John and Charmian's exchange of gifts at the end echoes that of the couple in O'Henry's Gifts of the Magi, one of the windows.  With that knowing stroke, the real world and the world of characters in our communal imaginations come together -- on the real side of things.

Jim Simpson directs Banks' witty script with verve and style.  Raul Sigmund Julia as Snowman, Christian Adam Jacobs as Elf, Holly Chou as the Little Match Girl struck me as nothing less than powerful in their humor, but all the actors, mainly from the Flea's young resident company, The Bats, are about perfect in their roles, and their timing throughout carries the day.  The costumes are just right, the lighting and scenic relationship between the real world and the Christmas dioramas are effective -- this play is a real Christmas present!  

Looking at Christmas plays at the Flea Theater in NYC's Tribeca through December 30.  For more information, and tickets, click on live link. 

Yvonne Korshak 

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Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain, suggested by “The Question of God” by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., directed by Tyler Marchant, starring Mark H. Dold as C. S. Lewis and Martin Rayner as Sigmund Freud

... science vs. religion ...

In an imagined encounter between Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis, two intelligent men discuss significant human issues.  No sex, no violence.  What a relief.

It’s September 3, 1939, Freud, 83 years old, in London having fled the Nazis in Vienna, is suffering dreadfully from the oral cancer which has dogged him since 1922, and has invited the young Lewis, a recent convert to Christian belief, to his book-lined study, not, as Lewis first assumes, to lambaste him for satirizing Freud in a recent book, but for a more touching reason.  The aged psychoanalyst, in his profound devotion to science, and near death, is still seeking knowledge:  specifically, he wants to understand how an intelligent man can be a Christian believer.  Thus the debate between science and religion takes hold between these two, smart men.

They're well matched in flexible and inventive language, quick repartee, amusing wit and in dug-in commitment to their opposite world views (though Freud gets more good jokes).  Surprisingly, the play doesn't rest on the strength of their opposing arguments -- they voice "the usuals" about science and religion and acknowledge their brief encounter isn’t going to settle these essential queries.  That, a weakness in the play, is compensated for by the careful charting of the emotional closeness they develop in their short time together, all the while remaining -- start to finish -- intellectually apart.  They become, for the time, like father and son:  Lewis, on the spot, helps the ailing Freud in an extremely intimate way that previously only Freud's daughter, Anna, had been allowed to do.  They're ready to save each other's life, though their views of life totally differ.  That's powerful.     

As a counterpoint to the discussion of two brainy men in the library setting, there's a momentous, frightening background:  September 3, 1939 is the day Prime Minister Chamberlain announced that Hitler had refused to withdraw his troops from Poland, forcing England to declare war on Germany.  In the course of the play, Freud periodically dials on the 1930’s style radio, turning it off in the musical interludes, so as not to miss Chamberlain’s anticipated announcement, which we hear, too.  We also hear the first words of King George VI's inspiring speech to the nation which was the thrilling climax of the film, The King’s Speech. 

A sudden air raid alarm scares them both -- Lewis with his life ahead of him and Freud who, while craving death as release from the torturous pain in his mouth, doesn't want to die.  Lewis makes no more of that than is warranted, to the credit of the playwright.  In fact, to escape his unbearable pain, Freud committed suicide with morphine later that September.

Freud avoids music, as on the radio, because -- evidence-seeking scientist that he is -- if he can't understand how something gives pleasure, he doesn't enjoy it.  Lewis sees in music's capacity to affect us without our understanding how as metaphor of religious faith.  Freud will have none of it, but after Lewis leaves and Freud's again alone in his study, he turns on the radio and allows himself to listen to the music, appearing to find comfort.  This death-bed conversion doesn't ring true.  Having kept the weights even, the  playwright tips the scales  at the end but the play has been fun to watch so one almost forgives this intellectual slippage.

No sex, no violence ... well not exactly.  Through the play, Freud’s prioritization of the sexual drive is a theme and source of humor, and a butal war has begun -- that's nice irony.  But, in Freud's book lined and art filled study, it's still possible to talk about essential human issues.  No wonder this is the longest running play off-Broadway in NYC.  It has lots to say. 

Yvonne Korshak

Freud's Last Session  plays at New World Stages on Manhattan's west side.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.  

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Contracorriente / Undertow, a Peruvian film by Javier Fuentes-Leon, starring Cristian Mercado, Tatiana Astengo and Manolo Cardona, in Spanish with English subtitles

Reviewed by guest author John Buscarello 

... against the current ...

Undertow, a wonderful simple film, focuses on a modest town where a modern perspective starts to crack open a closed village society.  I came across this film, knowing nothing about it, on HBO’s On Demand, and found myself swept up in its direct beauty.

Charmingly photographed in a tiny Northern Peruvian coastal town, Cabo Blanco, Undertow draws one in, as surely as the ocean’s tide.  As the movie begins we watch a seaside burial.  It’s a fishing village and traditions run deep.  According to custom, the spirit of the newly deceased must be buried properly at sea.  Miguel (Cristian Mercado) has the magical touch that will allow the deceased’s spirit to be free from the bondage of our world, and thus we follow Miguel out to sea where the body is cast off into the ocean.

Back in town life goes on -- simple lives, fishermen, their wives or girl friends, tavern owners, a local market... a close-knit town for sure, obviously there for decades.  Yet, oddly the town has been invaded by a photographer, Santiago (Manolo Cardona);  he drifts about, always an onlooker, documenting the town with his camera, clearly an outsider and different in his ways.  The movie intercuts between the town’s people and Santiago and, as we discover in time, Santiago and Miguel are lovers.  The director gives us hints that ghosts may inhabit the town and all may not be as rosy as we think, through the abandoned buildings where the lovers meet.

Miguel’s problem is he’s married and his wife is about 7 months pregnant.  Santiago adores Miguel who, to him, is as beautiful and tranquil as the town.  Santiago is an artist -- a painter as well as photographer -- and he’s truly come to town because of Miguel.  Ah but Miguel, in spite of his enjoyment of his erotic time with Santiago, believes that he’s truly a man in the conventional sense the village would understand, and he loves his wife too.

Alas after one of their erotic encounters, Santiago has an accident.  He slips on his boat and is drowned.  Not being buried properly as tradition dictates -- his body is at the bottom of the ocean -- his spirit is trapped at the seaside town.  Magical happening abound between Miguel and Santiago to both men’s delight and fears.  Thus, reality and the supernatural intermix in this beguiling story, as the town is dragged into the fray.  Miguel is confronted with his true self and must come to terms with it, as difficult as it will be for himself and his family.  Will these simple seaside villagers be able to accept gay men in their midst?

I was surprised by the film’s unpretentious charms, yet deep devotion to explore majestic themes.  The photography made one long for a mythical seaside existence where life seemed simpler.

As the riveting story takes a number of twists and turns, each complicating matters (I will not reveal its secrets.), we see that the human spirit can soar and adjust to life’s most difficult challenges.  The film builds ever more surely to a beautiful, teary-eyed ending.  I loved the film.

John Buscarello

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George Orwell’s Burmese Days, adapted and directed by Ryan Kiggell, Aya Theatre Company at 59E59 Theater B

The idea of an adaptation for theater of George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days of 1934, is appealing but this production does not rise alive from Orwell’s pages as a true dramatization.  On a simple stepped stage, and with static staging, the actors speak Orwell’s words sometimes facing the audience, sometimes engaging with one another but either way the feeling is that of attending a spliced and incomplete reading of the novel.   The assignment of the actors to their multiple parts seems abrupt and arbitrary and undercuts identification and sympathy with the characters. 

Burmese Days, which grew out of Orwell's personal experiences as a member of the British military police in Burma, takes us into the world of British officers in a colonial outpost of the British Empire and the natives with whom they interacted.  No surprise that this was not to the benefit of the natives, in spite of stabs at education and medical assistance, but the British also could be ground down by the exotic isolation of the postings and the grueling human conflicts embedded in exploitative relationships. 

In the play, one British officer is at odds with his colleagues because he doesn't share their racist attitudes and gross condesension towards the native Burmese.  He in fact enjoys a friendship based on respect with a Burmese medical doctor, and keeps a Burmese woman as his mistress.  But under pressure from the others in the officers club, and with a minimum of soul searching, he betrays the doctor and, falling in love with a single British woman who arrives at the outpost, he readily abandons the native mistress.  A man of decent instincts but moral weakness, he seizes an inevitable and, by then one feels, deserved fate.

The sound effects are the best thing in the play and the most fun:  sounds such as birds in flight, and the encroaching jungle wildlife, are evoked with simple objects in full view of the audience as in some eastern theater traditions –- a pink umbrella swishes closed when a rare bird with stunning plumage is shot for sport, a powerful and telling moment.  

George Orwell’s Burmese Days plays at 59E59 Theater B, in mid-town Manhattan through December 4.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Burning by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Scott Elliott, The New Group at the Acorn Theatre

... The Marquis de Bradshaw ...  

 

One gets the impression that Thomas Bradshaw began by making a list of everything he could think of that might shock you  re sexuality and worked his story to get in as much of it as possible, and then went on to make sure to get it acted out as graphically as possible.  By the way, it’s not remotely erotic.  More just plain distasteful.  And disappointing, given the talent Bradshaw has shown earlier.

Behind all the clutter, and the several characters with mix and match relationships there's a central story which could have been truly interesting if better told.  It’s the mid-80’s:  a successful Black painter whose name “doesn’t sound Black,” who’s married to a white woman, and who hides his race when he can to avoid having his paintings evaluated with an affirmative action attitude, learns on a trip to Germany that “I really am a Black man” (hard to miss given the total nudity here and everywhere in this play);  at the same time he becomes aware of his deep, erotic attachment to his now dead sister, Lucy:  [erratum: Lucy is the mother of Peter's second cousin:  for a fuller explanation and how this provides a different view of the artist see the comment on this post by Paul] he calls the Black prostitute with whom he has fallen in love by [his sister's] name, and notes, smelling his fingers, that she smells as he always knew Lucy would.  (This is just a sample.)

This is not the only over-close [brother and sister] relationship:  it’s really amazing how the playwright has time to inject various taboos and variety of penetrations so many times in one standard length play -- but he works at it.

Other characters include a mature gay male pair, actor and producer, and a fourteen-year old boy they take in to their home out of compassion and for fun.  Also there's a playwright who's absurdly willingly to alter all the meaning out of his play at the drop of a producer’s request, and a man whose profession I missed [he's the fourteen-year old boy grown up, and trying to become an actor: see Paul's comment] but whose role is to enable a young Black man (Lucy’s son) to discover he’s gay, and there are a Nazi skinhead brother and his like minded, paralyzed, sister. 

The characters are lightly drawn to the point of caricatures.  The playwright seduces the fourteen-year old by their shared intellectual excitement over a simplistic line or two from the Marquis de Sade (the Marquis' book is pushed on people often in this play).  The successful theatrical producer demands excessive cuts -- from five characters to one -- and total revisions from the playwright to which the playwright accedes without a struggle:  there’s no exploration of the truths behind these clichés and it’s all done with the careless exaggeration of a joke.  

More importantly, although the Black artist’s paintings are described as showing violence against Blacks, this is never put face to face with his leading his life as a white man, and never used to explore what by the end of the play we're given to understand are struggles within his divided personality.  Everything about these characters is on the surface.

An exception: the skinhead and his sister, paralyzed in her legs by an automobile accident that killed their parents, share their inherited fascist ideology, belief in a "pure" Germany and hatred of various groups including most particularly for this play Blacks.  In contrast to the cartoon-like strokes Bradshaw uses for the other characters, these are subtly delineated and the tense, covert/overt erotic relationship between them well developed, strengthened also by the fine portrayals of Drew Hildebrand and Reyna de Courcy.  Here the inevitable, but remarkable, love scene illuminates character and serves a true dramatic purpose.  In the relationship of the brother and sister, we see the reallly talented playwright at work.  

I made a point of seeing Burning because I'd been impressed by two of Bradshaw's earlier full-length plays, Dawn and, even cleverer, The Bereaved.  I expected him to get better and better and I still do.   I hope he gets the Marquis de Sade out of his system with Burning and that he’ll go on to something that fulfills his talent. 

The much handed around book of the Marquis de Sade reminded me of an amusing and recognizable description of a college English class in Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot, set like the play in the 1980's.  "The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren’t about sex but politics.  They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against.”  (p. 24)  I don’t know if Bradshaw intended the sex in Burning to have some broader or revolutionary purpose but it doesn’t.  It's there for its own sake and to show how at times, calisthenically speaking, it can make people look really silly.

Burning plays at the Acorn Theatre, The New Group, on Theatre Row, West 42nd Street in Manhattan, through December 17.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Clowns Full-Tilt: A Musing on Aesthetics, created and directed by Kendall Cornell in collaboration with the ensemble, Clowns Ex Machina, at La MaMa

… art, life and wit! …

If you enjoy the pleasures of really deep satisfying laughs coming fast one upon the next, see Clowns Full-Tilt.  It’s marvelously performed, and constantly surprising.

On a stunning, helter-skelter post-mod stage with classical columns at the tilt, derelict platforms covered in brown paper, and an old-fashioned bathtub, the cast of nine multi-talented women, all wearing red clown noses, bring to three-dimensional life some famous paintings -- and with some “great moments” in literature thrown in.  They dance, they sing and they act with a non-stop, cleverly devised flow of one scene to the next.  Everything is done with vigor, balletic grace, and infectious ebullience and everything is underlined by great wit -- to say nothing of knowledge of art, literature and the classics.

Serious ideas lie behind the laughter – and you’re laughing all the time.  Among the paintings, Degas’ disaffected couple in his key painting, Absinthe, come to life and talk existential (what else in a French cafe?).   Diego Rivera’s Frida Kahlo is there with her iconic stare and dashing Mexican ruffles.  If you've always wanted to see the face of the girl in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, now’s your chance … and hold on to your hat because you’re in for a surprise.   Dreiser’s American Tragedy finds its way in as a source for great comedy – why not!  Nothing is sacred, even a Raphael Madonna and Child, and it’s all life affirming.

Meet Frida Kahlo.  L Diane Lovrin and R Carla Bosnjak.  Photo:  Marina Levitskaya

Some particularly strong episodes with a feminist bent go beyond the art-to-life theme.  Smart girls in school anxiously come up with the right answers to difficult questions while being equally anxious about staying, as the word goes, “dainty.” There’s a classic confessional in which venial, and not so venial sins are admitted that strike knowing cords of recognition.  Like all fine clowns, these are fine actors, and you see in their faces their struggles to confess -- or not to.

And Clowns Full-Tilt is liberating with its unabashed range of female body types in motion.  The cast appears at times looking nearly nude in pink unitards with bright nipples (sometimes a bit askew), and dance, sing, act and range into the audience in their full female variety.  Short, tall, thin, chunky, younger and older (though all not apparent in the photo below), their joie de vivre casts its spell.  They all dance well but they all wouldn’t make it into the American Ballet Theater.  Talk about acceptance – yes! 

       Clowns Full-Tilt ensemble.  Edge of that bathtub visible on left with canvas open to   possibilities on  right.  Photo:  Marina Levitskaya

Clowns Ex Machina -- like the deus ex machina, the "god from the machine" who appeared miraculously at the end of ancient tragedies thanks to a scenic contraption -- and made everything OK.  Perfect title for this clown troupe -- great comedy makes everything OK, too, at least for a little while.  But then, the Greek gods couldn't do any better.   

I’m glad to think of all the great paintings, all the literature, all the ideas in the world just waiting for a thorough go-over by Clowns Ex Machina.    Great there's room for lots more to come!

Clowns Full-Tilt  plays at La MaMa's First Floor Theatre in Manhattan's East Village through November 20.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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LA STRADA, written by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, adaptated by Gerard Vazquez, directed by Rene Buch and Jorge Merced, starring Nanda Abella, Luis Carlos de La Lombana and Israel Ruiz, compania artistica La Strada

... prismatic perfection ... 

LA STRADA shines like a gem.  The writing, acting, music, movement, mis en scene are perfect.  Based on Fellini’s great film of 1954, and now set in Spain, it tells the story of Gelsomina, one of the world’s extra persons, a slightly feeble-minded, dreamy young woman “with a cauliflower head”  who, in a poor family of too many women, is sold by her mother to Zampano, an itinerant “strong man” entertainer and together they set off on a bleak, Goyaesque road.

He bursts chains with his muscle and lung power;  she in her sad but appealing striped, droopy costume, passes the hat.  A few coins trickle in.  They work comic bits in which she’s the butt of the joke.  The strong man is brutal in this way and others, and when things take that turn, he’s unfaithful to her.  She’s deeply attached to him in ways we don’t thoroughly understand. 

Luis Carlos de la Lombana as the strong man.  Photo:  Martin Fernandez Lombana

Joining up with a circus, they meet an absolutely wondrous clown, light footed and charming in his movements, profound in his understanding.  Attracted to Gelsomina, he’s gentle, respectful, and filled with insight -- everything Zampano is not.  The clown -- with tender patience -- teaches Gelsomina a beautiful song.  Two dwellers on the edges of society finding an end to loneliness, a purpose in each other -- there’s the possibility of an idyllic ending, of heaven on earth. 

But -- oh, eternal triangle -- what about Zampano?

The clown and the somewhat dimwitted girl, two poor and easily overlooked human beings, make as great a sacrifice on the altar of honor and love as exists in literature or life.  He gives her a remarkable and most self-sacrificing gift: he tells her that she alone, and nobody else, would stay with Zampano (Who is really the strong man?).  His gift is to let her understand she is needed.  The waif for whom life seemed meaningless, now has a purpose.  Existence is unified and so everything matters, even a tiny pebble.  Even Gelsomina.  Even Zampano. She and the clown reach -- poetically and not fully verbalized -- a noble and tragic understanding that she will stay with Zampano.  In time, as the tragedy works unsparingly through these three lives, the melody the clown taught Gelsomina hangs on the wind of someone else's memory.

It's a play with a narrow focus and a vast, truly universal, meaning.  It looks at three figures who are unimportant by societal reckoning, on the margins, and finds in their "small lives" the full range of human experience from from selfishness to self-sacrifice and from brutality to love.   

This powerful and moving play is performed in Spanish with English super titles so available on the monitor you hardly notice you’re reading them.  Nanda Abella is touching and passionate as the soft, uncertain girl who discovers a tough center within herself.  Luis Carlos de La Lombana conveys the circus strong man’s all-out brutality with only a hint of vulnerability.  Israel Ruiz brings an unforgettable sense of depth to the role of the clown -- one feels the clown knows all there is to know, conveyed with a dancer’s flexibility and irony of a great actor.  

The set with swooping rhythms in the brownish tones of a landscape by Goya, makes the small stage seem big as the world and the road continuing, in harmony with the largeness of these "small" characters.

The music, songs by Luis Carlos de La Lombana and Caridad Martos, arranged by Jorge Merced, is poignant, enveloping, and beautifully played by Stephanie David on the violin and Jennifer Harder on the trumpet.     

This spare, fast tragic tale -- like Cavelleria Rusticana -- fires the imagination.  

La Strada plays at TBG Theater on West 32nd Street in Manhattan through December 4th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Teatrostagefest & La Strada Company Special Event November 5th at 3 PM." Adapting Fellini to the Stage".  TalkBack immediately following the 3 pm performance Saturday, November 5th.  Q & A with La Strada Company performers, directors, and special guest Marlo Fratti, playwright of the musical "Nine," an adaptation of Fellini's film 8 1/2, followed by reception/refreshments  with participants to which the audience is invited.

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ODYSSEY - The Epic Musical, Matt Britten Director, book and lyrics; Dimitri Landrain Composer, vocal arrangements; Daniel Sefik Music Diretor, additional lyrics; Marianne Ward Set Designer, scenic paint charge; The Araca Project

... a big musical on its way ...

ODYSSEY calls itself an epic musical and it is.  It has the look of a musical headed to Broadway and -- with some strengthening -- it will get there. Meanwhile, it’s tremendous fun! 

First of all, the set is gorgeous.  The show is playing in a fairly small theater but the stage is vast and the set uses all of it in a seemingly serendipitous, free flowing way to suggest the sea, the islands in it, the voyages across it, and the high realm of the gods and the earthy realm of humans.  It's a set that conveys the complexity and exhilaration of existence – it’s wonderful, and keeps you on the journey even when occasionally the play gets a little waterlogged.  Nets, sails and figureheads -- it has lots of blue and turquoise and one wants to be there.  (You can even get the flavor in the design of their web page.)

The show begins with a little boy reading the first lines of The Oydyssey where Homer invokes the Muse to sing to him Odysseus’ tale:  “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course … " and the singing begins.  It’s very moving … and it ends with the boy and the book, too.  A beautiful frame.

The story takes Odysseus from the time he is a boy, and then a king of Ithaca, married to Penelope, through to the war at Troy, and like the Odyssey, the weight of the story is on Odysseus’ long voyage home, when he’s “driven time and again off course” into a serious of famous and wonderfully inventive adventures.  We visit the Cyclops' cave, resist the Sirens (though the rest of Odysseus’ crew meets its end there), visit Circe’s magical island, and sojourn with the seductive nymph Calypso. 

We also voyage with Odysseus through some adventures not part of Odysseus’ story, in particular a lengthy episode in which, because Athena has fallen in love with Odysseus, Zeus and the other gods offer him the gift of eternal life in a kind of rapturous Age of Aquarius scene. 

The music is generic musical comedy, not very original, the only exception I noticed being the appropriately beautiful music of “Siren Song,” but the lyrics are often witty, intriguing and hilarious.  The musical number “Nobody,” a riff from Homer’s joke about how Odysseus tricked the Cyclops, is a show stopper [Odysseus told the Cyclops his name was “Nobody” so after Odysseus had stuck a poker in the monster’s one eye, the Cyclops cried out in useless vengeance “Nobody injured me!”]

For a stronger musical ODYSSEY, the character of Odysseus and the narrative as a whole need to be more consistent, and the hero less dithering.  Uncertainty may be a strength, but Odysseus looks inept rather than heroic in scenes such as that where his Ithacans look to him as their King to ease their current miseries, and the “clever Odysseus” has no resources to help them and not a clue what to do.  One senses in this instance the reason for including a crisis that isn’t in the Odyssey was to justify a very good song with a contemporary ring to it, “Everything to Fear.”  Even within this show’s narrative, it’s inconsistent because we see that Odysseus was in fact very rich – it takes decades for Penelope’s free loading suitors to make a dent in his grand estate, and still there's plenty left.  This inconsistency among others weakens the believability and impact.

Other narrative decisions, such as the interloping “real life is better for mortals than eternal life” episode and related themes that run through the show seem governed by the desire to put across a world view.  The philosophy is trendy-murky and doesn't derive from the characters.

There’s no reason why a creative team in 2011 working with the story of Odysseus that goes back to many centuries BC, have to include the most famous incidents in the Odyssey (although those who chose to come might be disappointed not to see what they expected -- OK, fact is, I missed his sojourn with Nausicaa a lot!) 

And I suppose (though, look, Homer did create a really great fundamental story, mess with it at your peril) that they're free to include incidents that the Muse never got around to telling the Bard.  But such interpolations, like everything else in the story, need to flow within a consistent world view led by a consistently and plausibly developed character. 

The plot of the musical hinges on Athena's crush on Odysseus, but perhaps we could be given a little more clue as to why she is the goddess of wisdom. 

It's a big cast -- 28 performers and several have multiple roles, and they're very professional and charismatic.  Josh A. Davis as Odysseus leads the way through with strong acting and singing and goes a long way toward creating the sense of the whole.  Emma Zaks is a vigorous, adorable Athena.  Janine Divita brings a strong dramatic voice to Penelope.  Eddie Korbich is so funny as Poseidon you want to hug him!

Why mike these and other good singers, especially in a small theater?  They'd sound better without the electronic barrier. 

Odyssey the Musical has begun its voyage: avoiding the self-indulgent seductions of the Sirens, chances look good for its making it to Broadway but as it launches from its off-off Broadway port, it’s already great fun.  It's a short run -- this time -- but try to see it!!  

ODYSSEY plays at American Theater of Actors on West 54th Street in Manhattan through October 30.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.   Also there's up-to-the moment information on their Facebook page.

Yvonne Korshak

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King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by James Macdonald, The Public Theater

... not in our stars ...

The cast is so star studded* that it’s surprising that this production comes out no more than a serviceable Lear.   But that's still alot:  since it’s such a great play, and all the words (except for the Fool) come across with full clarity it’s a rewarding evening.  You understand all the actions, motivations, and entanglements of the plot and come out feeling you have an enhanced understanding of the play.  That’s worthwhile.  The language seems immediate, not distant.  Good.  But the poetic power is damped, and the production seems disjointed. 

I went to see this Lear because I have been fascinated by Sam Waterston's brilliance as an actor on Law and Order and so wanted to see him on stage.  It turns out that as Lear, he’s best in the quieter scenes, the ones that lend themselves to just the sorts of tv close-ups we’re used to seeing him in.  We watch his face registering evolving situations with great subtlety, calculating, negotiating, gauging his own responses -- you see his mind at work.  But in the passionately emotional scenes, such as Lear on the heath, or the death of Cordelia, he strains.  Not that he holds back -- he reaches courageously for big, but it eludes his grasp.  Darn it.  He looks silly -- not tragic or even pitiful -- shuffling around in his longjohns with one shoe on and one shoe off.  A lot of poor decisions were made in the staging of this play.

The most compelling performance -- by one of the greatest actors in the world today -- is John Douglas Thompson as Lear’s loyal follower, the Earl of Kent.  Thompson’s Kent is vigorous, wily, and self-sacrificing, ready for any task, physical or mental, to protect the King and the Kingship.  Thompson brings his rare physical power and athleticism to the role:  to convey an urgent  moment, he takes the breadth of the stage in three strides.  He’s miscast though, as Kent who, at times, verges on the obsequious, not Thompson's natural mode by a long shot.  I would like to see him as Lear. 

Bill Irwin, a great clown, is miscast here as the Fool.  A Fool isn't a clown -- different meanings, different purposes -- but Irwin plays the role as a clown, including clown face make-up (white face, short red vertical lines above the eyes), baggy costume and oversize, floppy shoes.  I sure missed the motley!  Most important, the odd, fascinating closeness between Lear and his Fool is lost.  These two hardly seem to know one another.  Also Irwin is the only member of the cast who can't always be understood.

The other roles are generally well played by experienced and well known actors  who speak Shakespeare’s language with clear naturalism.  Still, the characters often seem emotionally separate, their words and actions foregone conclusions governed by the lines of the play rather than by their responses to one another, as if they'd rehearsed their parts too much by themselves, and not enough together.

The straightforward content, if not the full emotional and dimensions and poetry, comes across.  Seeing this play is a reasonable way to get to know better Shakespeare's masterful Lear.   One would expect more, though, with all that star power. 

King Lear plays at the Public Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village through November 20th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

*The cast icludes (alphabetically) CHE AYENDE, CRAIG BOCKHORN, KRISTEN CONNOLLY, MICHAEL CRANE, HERB FOSTER, SETH GILLIAM, ENID GRAHAM, BILL IRWIN, MICHAEL IZQUIERDO, MICHAEL MCKEAN, ARIAN MOAYED, KELLI O'HARA,  JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON, RICHARD TOPOL, SAM WATERSTON, FRANK WOOD

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Silver Screen Silver Prints, Hollywood Glamour Portraits from the Robert Dance Collection, curated by Ann H. Hoy, The Grolier Club, NYC

... star struck ...

 

This exhibition brings together 90 publicity photographs, made by the big studios, of major Hollywood stars:  the earliest is of Theda Bara as Cleopatra of 1917, and the latest of Elizabeth Taylor -- not as Cleopatra (that would have been fun) -- but as Barbara in Ash Wednesday (a woman driven to plastic surgery to keep hold of her husband), dated 1974.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra, by Albert Witzel, 1917, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8".  Photo: Grolier Club

 

These are ultra large format gelatin silver prints and required great effort and expense to produce but evidently the studios thought they were worth it -- I learned at an introductory Discussion that at one point MGM employed 500 people just to turn out the prints, and hundred of thousands of prints were made at "astounding" cost. These went to magazines, newspapers and elsewhere and, reduced in size and autographed before printing were sent to fans who wrote in requesting them. 

But why are most of the photos of female stars?  That excellent question was asked by someone in the audience during that Discussion presented by Ann H. Hoy, Robert Dance and film director Paul Morrissey, and the response was that "day-long photo sessions" lie behind these photos and the male stars didn't have the patience or interest in posing to do them.  Yet the star power and popularity of the male stars -- without such a stream of publicity photos -- equaled that of the female stars, which leaves open some questions well worth pursuing:  just what was the --evidently great -- impact of the studio publicity photos?  and on whom?  And why were they so valuable to the studios?   Any ideas?     

Ramon Novarro and May McAvoy, for Ben Hur attributed to Warren Lynch, 1925, geltin silver print, 13 x 10".  Photo: Grolier Club     

A valuable aspect of the exhibition is that while highlighting movie stars, it also brings out the specific talents of the photographers whose names, perhaps with the exception of Edward Steichen, even film buffs aren't likely to know.  The photographers didn't sign the photos but, through their work played a part in creating that sense of linked personality and image -- that persona that helped to emblazon the stars in the popular imagination.  Thus there are photographs Ruth Harriet Louise made of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford with Robert Montgomery, and others grouped so as to give a sense of the photographer's presence and individuality.  Photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull photographed Lillian Gish in 1917, Greta Garbo in 1931 and Hedy Lamarr around 1942.  You can read in the informative catalog essay how photographer George Hurrell enabled Norma Shearer to become a star.

Norma Shearer by George Hurrell, 1930, gelatin silver print, 13 x 10".  Photo: Grolier Club

The photographs are beautifully printed, often with the fine resolution and subtle chiaroscuro large format makes possible.  A few show the effects of time and the instability of the gelatin silver process, while remaining effective. 

I find, though, that for all the skill, there's a thinness in the glamour posturing and patent manufacture of personality.  It's a playing with surface -- lots of chiaroscuro but not much depth.  And how much more vital and communicative it is to see these actors in dramatic contexts, hard at work in their films, creating for us not mere image but characterizations! 

But publicity photos are significant and omnipresent in our culture and, thanks to Robert Dance making them available, Silver Screen Silver Prints lets you see original prints of some rare images that strike chords of resonant cultural memories. 

The illustrated Catalog is by the Curator Ann H. Hoy, Art Historian and author of The Book of Photography, published by National Geographic in 2005.  Silver Screen Silver Prints, free and open to the public, will be on view at the Grolier Club through November 11.  For further information, click on live link of exhibition title.

Yvonne Korshak 

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Raft of the Medusa by Joe Pintauro, Premier of Revised Edition, directed by Francisco Solorzano, Barefoot Theatre Company at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre

... cut adrift ...

Raft of the Medusa is powerful, intensely human, and totally real -- you are there.

Like Gericault’s epic shipwreck painting, The Raft of the Medusa of 1819 (see it below left), this play is based on a dire situation with many deaths and few survivors -- only instead of shipwreck victims, these are victims of a mortal disease, brought together in 1988 not on a survival raft but -- same thing -- in a group therapy session for those infected with the AIDS virus.  Seeing the play you know this is what it was like:  beyond belief grim, and yet -- in the way its draws out the best in people, there’s a gleam of light, a breath of hope, as in the painting.   It’s a rich, brilliant and beautifully written play, acted to perfection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Group therapy:  (right) Gil Ron as Dr. Jerry Rizzo (Center) and cast members of Raft of the Medusa, Barefoot Theatre Company at Cherry Lane Theatre. Photo:  Michael Mallard

Adrift at sea: (below) Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, oil on canvas, Paris: Louvre Museum, H. 4.91 m., W. 7.16 m

 

At the start of the play, the youthful Donald dies agonizingly in the arms of his lover, Michael, in a stunning, male pieta (compare the old man and young boy in the left foreground of the painting).  The scene moves to a realistic group therapy session -- sparse office, metal chairs -- with its big city racial and ethnic admixture, from affluent and successful to homeless and out-of-work, drawn together by a common denominator, AIDS. 

A beautiful White gay model, Tommy, can’t get a job since he’s gotten so thin.  There’s Alan, an enraged Hispanic with Karposi’s Sarcoma dotting his face like marks of Cain.  Men and women, young and old, they got it all the ways you can.  Doug, a Black drug dealer who seems straight, got it shooting up in jail.  Some of them tell their stories -- prompted or not by the psychiatrist, Jerry.  Cora, a slick looking professional woman, distances herself from the gay men but eventually blurts it all out.  Donald who has died his painful death mysteriously moves in and out -- a Christ figure, which is why the point that he is Jewish is emphasized (he wanted to be a Rabbi, a teacher):  he hovers, in every way a Holy Ghost.

The group session lurches through quieter periods of “sharing” through to volatile bursts, fueled by the unbearable tension of near and certain death.       

The action is heightened by the arrival of newcomers, a high school girl who got it from her boyfriend (his family has moved to California to avoid her suing them) and a well known tv and movie actor.  Their arrivals clarify underlying situations and catalyze the revelation of explosive truths about themselves and others.  In the original event that the painting describes, there was cannibalism among those set adrift on the raft with almost no food and water -- and, we discover, there's cannibalistic exploitation in the group therapy room. 

The group dynamics are absolutely on target.  This is an author who understands human beings on the deepest level:  what a pleasure to be in his company.  The acting is uniformly excellent.  John Gazzale plays Donald’s death with no-holds barred passion.  Samantha Fontana shows sustained power as the smart, bitter Cora.  Andrew MacLarty, with an alluring blend of innocence and seductiveness, makes you love Tommy.  In an unforgettable performance, Gillian Rougier fairly dances through her role as Nairobi, a hearing and mentally impaired Black woman who has lost just about all and will now lose the rest.

There’s a lot of blame thrown around among these desperate human beings: Michael blames Donald for infecting him, Cora blames the guy who gave it to her.  The government comes in for blame for not doing more to find a solution to AIDS, as the government was blamed in the 19^th Century for gross safety lapses at the time of the shipwreck of the Medusa.  The psychiatrist blames himself for encouraging sexual liberation, “freedom”, in the ‘70’s before implications were known; that’s why he’s a weak figure, asking, uncertainly, after a pause, helplessly when he hears a tale of desperation, “how does that make you feel?”  (Hey, man, how do you think that makes me feel!) 

With all that blame, is there forgiveness?  That’s a biting question in this play, and to the credit of its great realism and tough mindedness, never answered.   But there is love, because what else is there?

Pintauro's Raft of the Medusa is an outstanding theater experience.

Raft of the Medusa plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre in NYC's Greenwich Village through October 22.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

*For an account of the history behind the painting, click on links in the 2nd and 6th paragraphs.

Yvonne Korshak

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Felix & The Diligence by Colby Day, story by Colby Day and Daniel Johnsen, directed by Daniel Johnsen, the Pipeline Theatre Company

               ... it beats me ... ?

I really don't know why anybody thought this play was worth producing.  It's a shipboard farce, a sendup of ship narrative cliches presented with something like frolicksome good humor in a way intended to bring out the ridiculous.    

Felix, wearing a dark shirt and khakis, looking for adventure, pushes himself on board as a member of the crew of a cod fishing  boat, The Diligence, where he does things wrong and annoys the captain and everybody else.  Then somebody else named Felix, wearing the same outfit, joins up, as does another Felix who turns out to be Felicia, i.e., a girl, but not until there’s been time for mistaken identities about boys and girls and which Felix did what, etc.

The motley crew sets off.  The first Felix, the main character and very well performed by Menj Mirman, is a comic type of gung ho optimist who misses the point a lot and is given to moments of hyper-imagination.  He meets up with some sea creatures who swim along the boat including a mermaid (play on actor's name?) with whom he instantly falls in love, and these are not of his imagination though he has a hard time persuading others about them.  Everyone on board is an exaggeration of some type or other, including the martinet Captain who gives a Scottish tar 20 lashes for some peccadillo. 

Benj Mirman as Felix and Allison Smith as the mermaid.  Photo:  Ahron R. Foster

As a Master of Ceremonies, a blind old fisherman is played by a very heavy set, sighted young woman with a very loud, grating voice and who, clown-like, makes her own body a source of laughter, an offensive tack.  Long ago the Captain, a research chemist at the time, loved Amelia Earhart, as it turns out when she turns up in tattered 1930's air woman's attire, jodphurs and boots, etc. (the ship veers near a desert isle).  The action reaches its crescendo when a Nazi ship approaches, the play being set during World War II, and two of The Diligence crew turn out to be Nazis: the mishap-ridden Felix fences with the one named Fritz, well played by Willy Appelman, and in spite of Fritz' rapier, Felix vanquishes him with a broomstick.

The set by Andy Yanni, with the wood prow of the ship jutting into the audience's space, is appealing.

Does this play have a purpose?  I tried but couldn't figure any out.   

The Pipeline Theatre produced one of the best off- and off-off Broadway productions of last season, Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, reviewed here, which led me to search hard to understand something worthwhile in this production.  Was I missing something? I asked myself.  The ridiculous can have great value, as in Dada performances, but there’s no hint of the ethical and political intensity which illumines Dada.  Maybe this is some sort of brilliant deconstruction.  Well, why on earth do ship narratives need deconstruction?  Perhaps it’s a critique of  Gilbert and Sullivan?  They really need one in 2011.  Even to call Felix &The Diligence “absurd” gives the play too much philosophical weight.  So I’m left to think that Felix and the Diligence is a performance that, like a school skit, is more fun for those in on its making than those watching it.

If I’ve missed a point, I hope someone will write in and let me know.  Meanwhile, I’ll be waiting for Pipeline Theatre to return to the excellence it displayed in its last major production.  

Felix & The Diligence plays at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan's East Village through October 8.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                          Yvonne Korshak 

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Benito Cereno by Robert Lowell, based on Herman Melville’s novella, directed by Woodie King Jr., Horizon Theatre Rep at the Flea Theatre

... don't miss this play ...

Benita Cereno is electric -- a powerful, hard hitting play, historically and philosophically resonant.  Set around 1800, and based on an actual incident, modified by Melville, and again by Lowell, it tells the story of a slave rebellion on a Spanish merchant ship in which all the Spanish officers have been killed except for the Captain, Benito Cereno.  Anchored off the coast of Trinidad, Amasa Delano, Captain of an American ship, notices through his spy glass that the Spanish ship seems to be in trouble, and out of the compassionate rules of the sea and his own generous nature, approaches and boards, accompanied by his Bosun, Perkins.  Everything is indeed unexpected, out of order, and deteriorated aboard the Spanish ship.  But why?

Hunger and thirst are everywhere and the Black slaves, sharpening knives, unknotting ropes, seem to have the run of the place, while Captain Cereno, though attentively cared for by his Black servant, Babu, is clearly ill, uncommunicative and -- most irksome to Delano -- unappreciative of the sustenance he provides.  This doesn’t stop Delano, though.  His optimistic personality and positive view of life lead him to find a positive rationalization to explain everything he sees that’s amiss.

Who's in charge here?  L-R Raphael De Mussa as Spanish Captain Benito Cereno and James Jorsling as Babu.  Photo: Stephanie Berge

Since he takes at face value Babu’s loyalty and hovering concern for the ailing Cereno, as the signs grow darker, Delano even entertains the thought that Cereno may be planning to murder him, but again his tendency to think the best of everyone leads him to dismiss that idea -- partially.   In fact, everything is opposite from what it seems to him.  There’s been a slave mutiny, the Spanish officers have been killed, and Cereno is under the knife -- and in a chilling scene the razor -- of Babu who has complete control.  Death lurks in every step.

We in the audience catch on right away, Perkins almost as fast, and so we watch Delano cheerfully explaining away his growing unease, and persisting in his plans to improve things on board and repair the ship.  It’s a scary dramatic tension worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, Melville's contemporary.  And it’s fulfilled in an equally brilliant dramatic explosion.

Melville’s great descriptive language is used, rearranged, and augmented by the poet Lowell.  Every line resonates, the density of meanings a feast for the mind as the dramatic excitement is a feast for the spirit.

The characters are fully drawn, and at the same time represent ideas larger than themselves.  Delano (though he at one point brushes off the idea) comes to represent the American Republic.  His optimism seems that of the new nation and its belief in itself.  He’s compassionate, but loaded with firepower.  The complexity of his attitudes toward the “Negro” is a study of equivocation: the Negroes are human beings, he declares, pleased in his own broad minded views, while celebrating their natural abilities as servants.  His denigration of women is only offset by the John Adams-like appreciation Perkins has for his own wife. 

Cereno is an elegant representative of the ancien regime with small pale hands, unused to work.  Babu is the clever Black whose Uncle Tom masquerade covers up his plot to take over the future.   Each of these men engages in one-on-one, significant conflicts with the others, representing historical and philosophical themes:  Old World versus New World, Africa versus Europe and America, Blacks versus Whites, Pagan versus Christian, monarchy versus democracy, freedom versus slavery, servant versus master, New England versus the Southern states, James Madison versus Thomas Jefferson. 

In this shower of dualities, technology is a bottom line:  knives versus guns.  I’d like to say more about this but don’t want to reveal the end of the play, which is stunning. 

But given the importance of knives versus guns, there's a small cavil:  why, in the play, aren’t there any guns on the Spanish ship?  The American merchant vessel, after all, is well armed.  This is a bothersome question.  Was there an answer in the novella?  I had to know so I read it and was happy to find that, yes, Melville describes the Spanish guns and quite specifically how they were disarmed.  The Spanish ship would have carried guns and Lowell shouldn't have left them out, even if his dramatic purpose was the heighten  the theme of guns versus knives:  it's implausible and manipulative, dissipating the sense of tragic inevitability.  The play brings to mind O’Neil’s The Emperor Jones  but, partly for this, doesn’t quite reach that iconic level.   As said, this is a small cavil -- don’t miss this thrilling play.

The actors -- and dancers and music makers since this play verges on the operatic in its variety of expressions -- are very strong.   As Babu, James Jorsling’s movements, intonations, timing, intensity, and his shifts from loyal servant to canny master are beyond fascinating:  you don’t watch how good he is, you see the very character he creates.  One of the great strengths of this play, and a source of its rich ironies, is the portrait of a man of many contradictions who’s aware of none: Captain Delano.  Arthur Bartow conveys Delano’s complexities  while maintaining his naval captain’s centered sureness and unity of personality, a mainstay of the play.  While tragic, there’s a good deal of humor in Benito Cereno, particularly in the self-satisfied certainty with which Bartow expresses Delano’s obtuse prejudices and misapprehensions. 

Benito Cereno was first produced in NYC in 1965, when it won an Obie as part of Robert Lowell's trilogy "The Old Glory," and Roscoe Lee Browne, Frank Langella and others won Obie awards for their work in it.  It was last seen in NYC in 1976.  Thanks to Horizon Theatre Rep for this rare opportunity to see a beautifully written, exciting, and never-to-be forgotten play about themes that are both timely and universal.    

Benito Cereno plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through October 16.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

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Crane Story by Jen Silverman, directed by Katherine Kovner, The Playwright’s Realm at The Cherry Lane Theatre

… liminality …

Crane Story takes up an interesting topic: mixed states of being.  Characters are Japanese and American, can seem both male and female, and move between the world of the living and the dead.  As Theo, the American guitarist exasperatedly exclaims to his beloved, I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, or a man or a woman.

To explore the world of liminality, Crane Story uses two separate ghost stories.  In the first, invented by the author and told with some characteristics of western realism, a young woman, Cassis, born in Japan and brought up in the U.S., returns to Japan to search out the ghost of her also Japanese-American brother, Junpei, who committed suicide at 17 years.  She engages his friend, Ishida, in her quest which takes her to the land of the dead where a huge bureaucrat -- a character with a large face mask and played by varying numbers of actors hidden under voluminous white cloaking fabric construction -- oversees the rules and record-keeping.  Cassis is enabled to bring Jonathan back to our world, though he remains dead, as a 13 year old and then as the 17 year old who, on a trip to Tokyo, engages in a love relationship with an American acoustic guitarist and singer, Theo although eventually he returns to the land of the dead (I think).

In the other story, based on a Japanese folkloric myth of the Crane Wife and presented with something approaching Japanese stylization, a poor man takes in a wounded crane, nurses her back to health and releases her.  She returns in the guise of a woman, they fall in love and are married but she makes him promise never to look at her while she weaves a beautiful cloth that they can sell but, eventually, the man takes a peek -- shades of Orpheus -- and she flies away forever.  In this play, though not in the myth, we see the Crane Wife having returned to search for her husband -- played by a gaunt, bluish puppet manipulated by visible puppeteers in the Bunraku Japanese puppet tradition -- who drowned himself. 

In addition to "Orpheus," there are resonances of the theme of someone alive substituting in the underworld for one who by rights should be dead as in Euripides' Alcestis and, seen just last year, the compelling Nightsong for the Boatman by Jovanka Bach.

What is impressive about this production is the extraordinary visual theatricality, with set design by Michael Locher and lighting by Ji-Youn Chang, and evocative and just plain beautiful sound design and music by Nathan A. Roberts, melded into an effective and well-paced unit by director Katherine Kovner. 

As an example of the visual satisfactions this production offers, the subtle, delicious back lighting of the shelves holding the warehoused scrolls throws them into silhouette so they seem to be leaning against one another, animating them so that the casual array seems like the very souls of the dead.

Some scenes, particularly the one in which Theo realizes his lover appears to be a boy instead of a girl, have emotional intensity.  Barret O’Brien, who plays Theo, is not only a touching actor who builds a real character but a singer it feels good to hear and his rendering of "The Saddest Song” is a high point of the play.  Kale Manabat as Junpei shows a range of age as well as feelings.  Angela Lin expresses through body language as well as verbal ways Cassis' mixed identity.  Louis Ozawa Changchien gives us a glimpse of Ishida's unfolding emotions.  But ultimately the unclear motivations of the characters make one not care a lot what happens to them, and the two ghost stories run parallel without strengthening one another so that at any point one or the other seems irrelevant.  Still, Crane Story is often a feast for the eye and ear and the marvelous production values make it fun to watch.

Crane Story  plays at The Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan's West Village through October 1.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak  

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The Select (The Sun Also Rises), based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, directed by John Collins, created by Elevator Repair Service, at New York Theatre Workshop

… so what’ll we do now? …

With The Select, The Elevator Repair Service, an outstanding experimental theater company, has for some reason, created a complete misfire.  The adaptation, the acting, the direction, the set -- it misses in just about every way possible.  How could this have happened given their recent illuminating adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which did everything right?

I didn’t see their Gatz, based on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby but by most accounts that, too, was highly effective.

The Select is about American and British expatriates living in post World War I Paris, a group of sophisticated, feckless bar hoppers (The Select is the bar and these are somehow select people), most of whom manage to get by without having to work -- what Gertrude Stein dubbed “the lost generation.”  A central tension is the love between the American Jake Barnes, whose war injury makes sexual fulfillment impossible, and the British Brett Ashley – a smart talking “modern woman” who makes love readily with just about every man in sight maybe because she can’t have the one man she wants: Jake.  Because or not because? that is the question.  Jake works as a journalist, but when ennui threatens to overcome the small group that keep running into one another in Paris, he’s as free as everyone else to go off to Pamplona, Spain to take in the running of the bulls for some excitement. 

On the way to the Pamplona fiesta, Brett detours for a brief affair with Robert Cohn (for Hemingway and the "select" crowd he created, her willingness to sleep with a Jew appears to be a gauge of her decadence).  Jake and a buddy detour for some Hemingway-masculine-bonding and fishing in the mountains.  Eventually the whole tense and bored crew makes it to Pamplona where there continues to be much drinking and Brett enters into an affair with Pedro Romero, the current star matador -- she even gets an ear out of it.  That affair won’t last but then nothing does -- except the earth which abideth forever, as evidently some still thought back in the 1920's.

The actors, many of whom were so effective in The Sound and the Fury, are miscast here.  Jake, the central character upon whom much depends, lacks the defining charisma of a hard boiled, thoughtful newsman.  Brett lacks fascinating magnetism that would draw all these men to her.  Toward the end, it’s kind of interesting to see a petite actress with a tight pony tail as Matador Romero, dressed as a torero and slashing her red cape at the upended table moved around by another actor, a scene that's to give us the idea of what a bull fight’s like:  but it’s not possible to believe her masculinity would overwhelm Brett.  It seems these actors were just more suited for Faulkner than for Hemingway.

The unchanging set is wrong from the start, when it’s supposed to represent a Paris bar/nightclub, in that instead of individual, likely marble, tables it’s is fitted out with long commercial tables with metal legs that would furnish a seminar room in a modest college.  The designers may have found it convenient have these inauthentic but multi-purpose tables on hand for non-bar contexts, but when a character supposedly goes to his room to stretch out, he looks like he’s lying down on a very uncomfortable table, and when one of these long tables is upended to represent a fighting bull well … let’s just say it doesn’t convey “bull.” 

The play as a whole lacks drive; it’s one thing to represent bored characters, another to bore the audience and, judging by those who did not return after the intermission, I was not alone in checking my watch. 

Evidently for The Elevator Repair Company this turned out to be a detour, and I’ll look forward to their getting back on track for their next production, and to their real fiesta. 

The Select (The Sun Also Rises) plays through October 23rd at New York Theatre Workshop on 4th Street in NYC's East Village.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Completeness by Itamar Moses, directed by Pam MacKinnon, at Playwrights Horizons

Itamar Moses catches today’s lingo like butterflies.  Completeness is about young people, in the Computer Science and Biology Departments of a university, talking about love, molecular biology and computer science, while going through a variety of partners.  It's good to have a play about people who are intelligent and care about their work. 

Elliot is a Computer Science Assistant Professor (or thereabouts) who -- beyond his sleepy-eyed cool -- is dedicated to solving THE problem in Computer Science, “The Salesman’s Problem” -- and if you see the play, he will tell you all about its complexities.  He’s so articulate you feel he knows everything, except how to resolve the conflict between his anxiety about commitment (described in a hilariously hyperbolic monolog that’s a high point of the play) and a yearning to settle in with “the one” or “love” or whatever. 

At the start, he’s in the process of ushering Lauren out of his bedroom and, in little time, ushering Molly in:  she’s a grad student in molecular biology, and this seems promising because she’s as passionate about identifying a difficult-to-isolate protein as he is about “The Salesman’s Problem.”   She’s a bit of a clickety-clackety run-on speaker -- but that’s her enthusiasm, and anyhow he finds her adorable.  Work is one level of existence, love’s another – and they both have had an eye on each other which adds up to it doesn’t take long to get naked and into bed.

Elliot sets about developing an algorithm to aid Molly’s scientific project.  I found that really great:  not only are they each intellectually engaged with their own work, they can work together!  The playwright tries taking it to a more generalized level:  that since he’s a Computer Scientist and she’s a Molecular Biologist, they complement each other not only as individuals but also in some broad sense of a union of life and mathematical abstraction. But that last comes across more like a sound bite;  it makes the play easy to talk about, but isn’t fully realized.      

Molly ditches her older Advisor/Professor in favor of Elliot (you can be sure the professor isn’t alone for long), and then, when Elliot and Molly are driven apart by their individual commitment angst, various partnerings arise -- fast.  Inner anguish and jealousy are expressed but never trouble the play’s bright, witty, surface.  Whatever the characters are going through, we’re having a good time.

The characters themselves question why their generation is so fast about getting to sex, and so distant from commitment.  There's a resonant truth in the line about partnering, “We don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” an issue for this generation I've read about in the news.  Promiscuity in this play doesn’t seem to be making anybody happy but it makes for a lot of amusing lines and situations which keep the audience happy. 

In spite of all the lengths they go to explain themselves, though, and the fine acting, the characters seem types, though amusingly recognizable types.  Why does this pair bond or not bond?  We don't sense it deeply, it could go either way.  And it doesn't seem to matter all that much.

The successs of Completeness owes a lot to the excellent cast and brisk direction.  Karl Miller plays the oh so sharp Elliot with intelligence and perfect timing, and makes the part his own.  Whether about love or molecules, Aubrey Dollar spins Molly’s recitatives almost as fast as Figaro in the Barbara of Seville.  Meredith Forlenza shows range as three avatars of contemporary young women including Lauren, the one with residual romantic expectations.  Brian Avers plays with great appeal both the older professor who’s stuck on bench science and resists computer modeling, and the graduate student who sees through him.  They are all fun to watch.

Completeness is comic fluff – not a “must” but it’s enjoyable. 

Completeness plays at Playwrights Horizons on Wests 42nd Street in Manhattan through September 25th.  For information and tickets, click on live link of the title.

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE – Brighton Rock, with Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, Helen Mirren, and Andy Serkis, directed by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel by Graham Greene

... the hesitation ...

I went to Brighton Rock (not usually going to gangster films) because   Graham Greene writes great stories and I hoped this one would survive the movie.  It does:  the story is terrific and the film is well done, and well worth seeing.

And at heart an absolute classic on how to build a character and a story on ... hesitation.

Set in Brighton, England in the 1960’s, the film tells the story of Pinkie (Sam Riley), a small-time, ruthless gangster trying to be a bigger one.  Killings lead to killings and as Pinkie’s group tries to take over from a rival, powerful gang, Pinkie commits a revenge killing.  On the sunny Brighton boardwalk filled with strollers and “every day” people, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), a waitress in a café, innocently taking the air and reading, accidentally comes into possession of evidence linking Pinkie to the crime, and thus is drawn into his murderous life -- it helps that he’s handsome, though awfully grim.

To purloin the evidence, and then to keep her quiet, Pinkie takes her out for an evening on the town.  She falls for him -- ignoring all danger signals including the fresh knife cut across his cheek (doesn't she recognize that mark of Cain?  maybe, but she never hesitates), and the attempts to protect her by the café owner, Ida (Helen Mirren).  And he, somewhere in his rotten soul, is touched by her trust and falls in love with her -- or maybe he falls in love with her.  Or what is love anyway?  And can it coincide with hate?  We never know:  the emotional ambiguity of this movie is brilliant. 

Whatever he feels for her, it’s powerful and sets up a conflict in him, because clearly the easiest thing to do about her, now that she knows too much, is to murder her:  but he hesitates.  He can’t quite bring himself to do it, he makes excuses to his friends, and, not a man for honor among thieves, he knocks off his closest associates as they get in his way about her and about challenging the gang run by powerful, rich Colleoni (Andy Serkis);  Pinkie does everything conceivable to keep her quiet except kill her.  Even at the end, well, I can’t tell you the end but it is absolutely superb.  

The violence in this film is necessary -- nothing gratuitous about it (a refreshing change) -- because it’s part and parcel of the hot conflict within Pinkie:  seeing how totally brutal he is, his hesitation becomes all the more powerful, and thought-provoking.  Inner conflict in this brute?  Yes.  Which is exactly Graham Greene’s point.  We all have a soul, and somewhere in all of us is the possibility of love.  Maybe.  It’s a human message as well as, in this film and in Greene’s work, a Catholic vision.  Maybe.   

You have to see the story through to the end to understand its powerful embedded ambiguities about a really bad man.  Pinkie tells Rose early on, “I’m bad, you’re good.  We’re alike.”   What was that supposed to mean?  By the end, I knew.

The film is set against the background of violent conflicts between motorcyclists (“Rockers”) and scooter drivers (“Mods”) that disrupted the pleasant resort of Brighton, near the White Cliffs of Dover, during the 1960’s.  The Rockers-Mods' hectic speed, noisy collisions and dangerous hatreds spill over onto the mild pleasure seekers on the boardwalk, providing cover for the dark chases and murders beneath it.  While the novel (1938) and the first film made of it (1947), are set in the 1930’s, I think that bringing it up to the time of the Rockers v. Mods is a creative act:  this way the film shows violence as not something below the surface, sequestered among men who make their livings as gangsters and so, if you're lucky, potentially avoidable:  violence is surround-sound.   

Yvonne Korshak

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Fringe Festival NYC 2011 -- Overall Excellence Awards -- Here Are the Winners!

FringeNYC 2011 Overall Excellence Award Winners


Overall Production/Play:
PigPen Presents The Mountain Song
The More Loving One

Overall Production/Musical:
Yeast Nation
Pearl's Gone Blue
 
Performance:
Jennifer Barnhart (The Legend of Julie Taymor,or The Musical That Killed Everybody!)

Ryan Barry (In the Summer Pavilion)

Miles Cooper (Elysian Fields)

Patrick Byas (Sammy Gets Mugged)
Casey McClellan (My Name Is Billy)

Brian Charles Rooney (Winner Takes All)
Lauren Hennessy (Ampersand: A R&J Love Story)
 
Playwriting:
Nicholas Billon (Greenland)
A.D. Penedo  (The Three Times She Knocked)
Bella and the Pool Boy (Dennis Flanagan)

Music Composition:
Chris Rael (Araby)
Dusty Brown (The Ballad of  Rusty and Roy)
 
Ensemble:
Jersey Shoresical

The Bardy Bunch: The War of the Families Partridge and Brady
Stimulated!
Crawling with Monsters


Costume Design:

Stephanie Alexander (Le Gourmand, or Gluttony!)
Mark Richard Caswell (Parker and Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End of the Rainbow)

Tara DeVincenzo (Technodulia Dot Com)

Directing:

Greg Foro (Hamlet)

Joshua Kahan Brody (Fourteen Flights)

Alaska Reece Vance (The Disorientation of Butterflies)


Solo Performance:
Donna/Madonna

The Day the Sky Turned Black

Be Careful! The Sharks Will Eat You!

Paper Cut
Heroes and Other Strangers

Dance:
Wallstories
When the Sky Breaks 3D


Video Design:
Cinty Ionescu (Nils' Fucked Up Day)

TheaterMania Audience Favorite Award:
COBU - Dance like Drumming, Drum like Dancing.


Applications for the 2012 festival will be available online in November 2011 and completed applications will be due February 14, 2012. For more information, www.FringeNYC.org

In 1997, New York City became the seventh US city to host a fringe festival, joining Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston, Orlando and San Francisco.  In its first 15 years FringeNYC has presented over 2500 performing groups from the U.K., Canada, Poland, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Germany, the Czech Republic and across the U.S., prompting Switzerland’s national daily, The New Zurich Zeitung, to declare, “FringeNYC has become the premiere meeting ground for alternative artists.” The festival has also been the launching pad for numerous Off-Broadway and Broadway transfers, long-running downtown hits, and regional theater productions including Urinetown, Matt & Ben, Never Swim Alone, Debbie Does Dallas, Dog Sees God, 21 Dog Years, Krapp 39, Dixie’s Tupperware Party, Silence! The Musical,  The Irish Curse, 666, Tales from the Tunnel and Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party and as well as movies (WTC View) and even a TV show (‘da Kink in My Hair). FringeNYC is a production of The Present Company, under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

Press Contact: Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 x. 11, ron@spincyclenyc.com

OFF-BROADWAY IN EDINBURGH -- My Picks of the Edinburgh Fringe: Request Programme by Franz Xaver Kroetz, directed by Hedvig Claesson, SIRIS Original Theatre, and Kafka And Son, directed by Mark Cassidy, Richard Jordan Productions Ltd/Threshold/Assembly

 Guest review by Mark Haggard, Cambridge, UK

Viewing the Edinburgh Fringe --

Two vignette reviews cannot do justice to the productive maelstrom that is Edinburgh Fringe Festival, run every August in parallel with the other Edinburgh Festivals (International, Book etc).  Of the 2,500 productions, most will make a considerable financial loss as in the past; nowadays, ribald so-called comedy has so outgrown experimental theatre that this is the association that many people now have for the Fringe.  It was always possible to go as couple and as an audience be outnumbered by the cast, and there is still much amateur acting, but also a very large number of good productions for which the audience and reviewers are not numerous enough.  Darwinian profusion and competition: much good writing and acting talent is first seen at this important showcase.  Aided by track record of author and company, and nowadays by internet-accessible reviews of the production before it came to Edinburgh (from almost any quarter of the globe), it is possible at relatively affordable prices to feast breakfast-to-suppertime on shows including music, dance, cabaret and children’s fare, whilst mostly avoiding those productions you need for the occasional laughable story, but would want to tell friends to avoid.  I am thus confirming rather than showing any original insight original in awarding  *****  to the following two.

Request Progamme by Franz Xaver Kroetz …

The frightening thing about Miss Rasch, the sole character in Request Programme, is not that she is deeply abnormal, but that she is marginally normal with obsessive tendencies, and living alone, very very alone, in her mini-apartment.  The author Franz Xaver Kroetz is a much-honoured left-leaning German political playwright.  Rasch is a not uncommon name in German but it also means “quick” or “over-hasty”.  Controversial in the Germany of its birth in the 1970s, this play was staged in New York in the 1980s.  The script running to 7 pages is more like a screen-play and gives no words for the actress to speak, only broad prescriptions for her return from the office, domestic round of evening meal, cleansing of crockery and some acts of personal hygiene, and preparation for sleep. The challenge of this very free hand accorded to Swedish director Hedvig Claesson and actress Cecilia Nilsson is therefore to sustain sufficient interest in detailed observation of movements and objects through the long introduction, in which the mild obsessionality is only marginally humorous.  The excruciation is managed brilliantly by Nilsson with a facial expression blank and fixed, as is common in combined anxiety and depression. 

Just when we can take no more silence, sound arrives through the radio request programme.  This is a middle-brow medley but the musical content does not call for too subtle decipherment; it seems largely irrelevant with the exception of a piece of Tina Turner rock which briefly elicits some very human crazed gyration during the dish-drying -- the only expression of any positive emotion, which is rapidly self-censored.  Significantly, all the dedications from the requesters to the show concern dysfunctional relationships, but these amount to at most a few hundred words.  Later, on checking the lock but failing to get to sleep immediately, Fraulein Rasch proceeds in steps of only minor hesitation to commit suicide, swilling down the pills with a pre-opened (therefore undoubtedly flat) mini-bottle of champagne from the mini-fridge.

Many Edinburgh Fringe productions are staged in church halls but this was in the loft office of a language school.  The central set is ingeniously designed for theatre-in-the round with an audience space of only 20 seats.  The mini-versions of sink, fridge, table and bed-sofa with bedding compartment, underline the hemmed-in quality of a life felt by its owner to be worthless.  These and more minor properties become very important with the lack of words, and give coherent hints of the emotional poverty of the character’s life, or perhaps some lost richness. A kitsch china dog of the type whose unglazed back permits home-grown cress shoots to grow for ultra-fresh but ultra-small vegetable portions; an equally kitsch candlewick rug which the character is completing, with a design featuring a dog and a baby.   Request Programme continues almost 40 years after it was written to push the boundaries of our idea of theatre.

Kafka and Son, developed by Alon and Mark Cassidy from a letter Kafka wrote to his father ...

Franz Kafka was a tortured soul, as is evident from his writing, in which there is renewed interest because of the currently contested ownership of the archived papers.  In 1919 Franz wrote his father Hermann a long letter full of psychological insight and not too self-centred, which Hermann probably never received.  The purpose was to explain why Franz was afraid of his father and to resolve an intolerable set of problems arising from that fear.  It is from this that the script has been meticulously constructed.

The father, a successful businessman was apparently not just a bully but a systematic tyrant, sarcastically deprecating and deriding all of Franz’s activities and thoughts: childhood milestones, writing, marriage intentions, and exhaustively undermining the boy’s confidence.  Even the Judaism to which Kafka senior paid lip-service, and might have offered some solace as an alternative authority structure, was vilified with little subtlety.  The letter is fashioned somewhat as a legal case.  Hermann is given some limited right of reply, via a repudiation of the complaints in the letter; but we are set up to find this unconvincing because it is in caricature form by the mainly Franz character (it would be marginally incorrect to call this a monologue).  In effect, Franz illustrates the bullying via ripostes presumed from the father, of which the argumentative content is poor, as we would now expect.  The father’s imputed replies grant no concessions, whereas in the writing Franz articulately and dispassionately gives some concessions, seeking chiefly to clarify rather than blame, and his position is consistent.  Arbitrariness and inconsistency, the hallmarks of tyrants, pervade these replies.

Whilst this plot is readily summarised, the dialectic and its illustrations are sufficient to support an hour’s one-man show.  At the most cataclysmic moments, scene-changes are in effect created by alterations of lighting along  with mood, and by altered use of the minimalist stage properties, a mattress free wire-sprung bed and some metal animal caging.  Periodically throughout, one of these serves also as the writer’s desk, but also once as a cage of refuge, underlining the refuge in writing.  These alterations are expertly managed in a virtuoso performance by Alon Nashman, abetted by skilled direction from Mark Cassidy, in a production that has played in major Canadian cities.

The writing desk cage is covered with black feathers, which serve variously as quills and other things -- food for the gourmandising father or -- when the feathers scatter -- as general trappings of chaos.  Although Kafka wrote in German, the family name means “jackdaw” in Czech, a black bird to which European tradition ascribes kleptomania for bright objects.  There is also one large white feather.  In some contexts white feathers have been a badge of cowardice.  Indeed, fear and failure previously to confront his father are an issue that Franz himself recognised, but the symbolism imparted is more that of the escape into writing.  Does this piece of theatre render the letter more accessible and the writer and his works more explicable ?  Definitely.

Request Programme  plays at Inlingual School, 40 Shadwick PL » Pleasance, through 27 August.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Kafka and Son plays at Assembly George Square Edinburgh, through 28 August.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Mark Haggard

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OFF-BROADWAY IN SAG HARBOR – Enter Laughing, The Musical, book by Joseph Stein, Music & Lyrics by Stan Daniels, Music Direction by Phil Reno, Music Arrangements & Orchestrations by Matt Castle, Direction & Musical Staging by Stuart Ross

 
Josh Grisetti and the cast of Enter Laughing, The Musical.  Photo by Jerry Lamonica

I never saw anything funnier than Enter Laughing. The situations are hilarious, the songs are witty, and the cast is out of sight perfect.  If you enjoy laughing, really, you have to see this.   It has  only one "message":  the life-affirming power of pure fun. 

Set in the 1930’s and based on Carl Reiner's semi-autobiographical novel, Enter Laughing tells the story of David Kolowitz, a boy from the Bronx who aspires to be an actor against the wishes of his over-protective parents who are plotting his career as a pharmacist, “almost a doctor”.  Kolowitz, who’s given to fantasizing success and seeing his name in lights, is played by Josh Grisetti , a major talent and -- it’s easy to see from this show -- a star in the making:  he sings, he dances, he acts, and he is so funny.  David in the play, however, not only lacks talent but generally hasn’t a clue, yet somehow bumbles through to an onstage debut, bounding from stage fright to worldly pronouncements in the voice of Ronald Coleman.

He gets to kiss the girl, too, the show-girl gorgeous Kate Schindle playing Angela Marlowe, who delivers the tongue-in-cheek torch song, “The Man I Can Love,” with the absolute seriousness of true comedy from atop a piano, her feet entangled with the keys -- one of many show stoppers. She has a liberated, to say nothing of open minded, view of the man she can love.

Richard Kind, surely one of the funniest men alive today (the others being Josh Grisetti and Geoffrey Rush) plays the theater impresario Harrison Marlowe, Angela’s father, with a combination of takes, timing, dead pan, and rational/nutty thought processes that’s delicious.  He’s fascinating -- I could watch him forever.  I’d urge you to see this show if only to hear how he answers the phone as David’s butler when Greta Garbo calls (“The Butler’s Song").

The singing and dancing of the two old guys in the play, David’s boss in the machine shop and his father, in their dual number, “Hot Cha Cha”, is  another -- touching -- show stopper.

And so it goes … hilarity after hilarity … witty song after song … and just when you’re feeling a little sorry it’s over too soon, Grisetti comes up with one more gift -- his bow -- so you can Leave Laughing.

Enter Laughing plays at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through September 4.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

 
Enter Laughing, The Musical :  Richard Kind (standing) as Harrison Marlowe;  L-R, Erick Devine as Mr. Pike, Josh Grisetti as David Kolowitz, Kate Schindle as Angela Marlowe.  Photo by Jerry Lamonica

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- Sarah's Key, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frederic Pierrot

                                    ... history ...

Sarah's Key contains some of the most powerful, heart-wrenching scenes ever filmed -- and this is not sensationalism, but truth.  This film is important for making everyone aware of a particularly horrific episode in France during World War II and -- if you didn’t know -- what human beings are capable of, for ill as well as for good.

Based on the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Elle s’appelait Sarah, “her name was Sarah,” this is an unsparing account of the Vel’ d’Hiv' Roundup in which tens of thousands of Jews were literally pulled from their homes to be sent to their deaths in concentration camps.  The Starzynski family is being dragged away but Sarah, 10 years old (Melusine Mayance), manages to hide her younger brother in a wardrobe, taking the key with her as she, her mother and father are brutally transported to the Velodrome d’Hiver stadium -- hence the name Vel' d'Hiv'.  With the unflinching realism of a great documentary, we see the thousands of people of all ages held there for days without access to food, water or toilets.  Here is  Hell on Earth.

Surely it can’t get any worse but it does as the men are violently separated from their wives and children and then -- can it get worse than that? -- the children under 12, Sarah, feverishly ill, among them -- are literally torn from the arms of their mothers.  These police are not Nazis but French functionaries of the wartime Vichy government that cooperated with the Nazis, which makes no difference in their level of brutality.

Through it all, separated from her brother, her father, and her mother, Sarah, ill, alone in a children's concentration camp, is totally focused on getting back to her brotherl and unlock the closet.  With astonishingly daring, she escapes with another girl from the barbed wire compound, helped by a kindly guard who lifts the entangling wire.  Once they're out, the guard is left with the bloody imprint of the jagged wire on his palm, like the stigmata of Christ.  It's his second kindness to the little Jewish girl.  One worries about what will happen to him, too.

Some of the French say they weren’t aware of the Roundup (though living across the street from the stinking stadium), some admit to a vague awareness but “What could you do?”  But some are courageous in their opposition to inhumanity.  Sarah and her co-escapee find their way to the rural home of a couple with grandchildren Sarah's age, the Dufaures, who at first try to “avoid trouble” but then take them in and bravely brazen it out with the police in order to call in a physician to attend the other little girl who is, however, beyond saving.  And -- since Sarah is unstoppable in her attempt to get back to her little brother -- the Dufaures accompany her to Paris, risking their own arrest, in a great train scene in which the police share their compartment and the conductor comes looking for everybody’s transit papers.  And what happens when Sarah gets back to the old apartment and the locked wardrobe … ?

The film blands down as it turns to the aftermath of Sarah's return to Paris.  Two stories run parallel, Sarah’s and, to bring it to the present, that of Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist who, in our own time, is writing an investigative story about the Vel’ d’Hiv' Roundup.  In the course of her research, she uncovers Sarah's story and learns that she, unlike her mother and father, did not die in the concentration camps.  Julia sets about finding out what happened to her, and learning more and more about the brave and agonized little girl, takes Sarah deep into her heart.  Meanwhile Julia and her French husband are about to move in to an apartment that had been in her husband’s family for 50 years -- until Julia, through her research, comes upon the nauseating fact that her in-laws apartment, that she's about to move in to, had become vacant 50 years ago because the  Starzynskis had been ripped out of it.

Confronted by Julia, her husband’s father recounts what happened when he was a boy during the war and Sarah returned to the apartment with the key to free her brother.  His memories provide a breakthrough in Julia’s search for Sarah: as she uncovers the full complexity and tragedy of Sarah’s existence, Julia frees herself from a careless, overbearing husband who wants her to abort her unexpected late-life pregnancy but -- having learned of the deaths of so many children, she cannot go through with the abortion.  Eventually, Julia shares her knowledge of Sarah's background and fate with Sarah’s now adult son who gains a deeper understanding of his mother and himself.

The story about the present -- Julia, her pregnancy, her distracted, ambitious, cell-phone addicted husband, and that of Sarah’s son -- is superficial compared with the story of the past.  We see Julia in the U.S. with her little girl -- but what about her twelve-year old daughter left in France?  And the French father who, even if he opposed the birth, might now welcome his new little daughter?  Julia says she's planning to go back to Paris so she, the younger child, her older daughter and the father can be "near".  Near.  What would the Dufaures, who so lovingly took in Sarah, have thought ofthat?  Julia in fact abandons her older daughter, her husband, too, in favor of the new child which dissipates the impact of what she has come to feel as the gem-like value of each child.  At the end Julia and Sarah's son embrace powerfully.  With understanding?  Maybe.  But it has the movie look of "they all lived happily ever after".  I don't think so. .   

This “present” story dominates the later part of the film so, on leaving, one has to think back to connect again with the true power of Sarah’s Key.  Without that thinning out, it could have been one of the great films but it remains compelling, gripping, important.  

It's interesting to think about Sarah's Key in comparison with another recent film with a similar theme, Inglourious Basterds (reviewed here below):.  In that film, too, one little Jewish girl escapes the massacre, by the Nazis, of her entire family and, growing the maturity in Paris, must deal with her survival in the face of total family loss.  Inglourious Basterds is a more thrilling, artful film, brilliant, with a driving dramatic arc and a climactic finale one can wish were true -- but, plain and simple, is counter to history.   In contrast, Sarah’s Key, though with a "present" story that saps some of its strength, remains more faithful to the truths of history, which  gives it an equivalent weight and lasting impact. 

I'm glad for both of them.

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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FRINGE NYC -- 15th Annual New York International Fringe Festival: August 12 - 28

PRESS RELEASE

 
Yeast Nation, photo Jay Sullivan

                           First Sold Out Performances Announced
                       NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL
                       ** 15th Annual Festival runs August 12 - 28 **

note:  to help you decide,  Ken Davenport, a producer of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, sorts out his 10 to see in in his blog, date August 11, click on live link. For the official site of FringeNY with information and tickets, click on live link.   Theatermania's outline guide is also useful, click on live link. 

The New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), the largest
multi-arts festival in North America, will present the 15th Annual Festival from August 12 - 28, 2011. This year, the festival will present programming by 192 of the world's best emerging theatre troupes and dance companies in 20 venues in Lower Manhattan. Attendance at last year’s festival topped 75,000 people, making it New York’s fifth largest cultural event (just behind New York International Auto Show, Tribeca Film Festival, New York City Marathon, and New York Comic Con). The festival presents works covering a wide range of disciplines including drama, comedy, dance, performance art, children's theater (FringeJr), outdoor theater (FringeAlFrecso), spoken word, puppetry, improv, and multimedia.

Dreamplay, photo Veseth R Sieu

Thus far, advance sales are on par with last year. “At only $15 per
ticket, FringeNYC is one of Manhattan’s few remaining bargains,” notes
festival Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

Yesterday afternoon, Yeast Nation (a new musical by the Tony Award-winning team behind the FringeNYC-to-Broadway hit Urinetown) became the first show to sell out a performance. This is the earliest  a show has sold out in the 15-year history of the festival. In 2005, Silence! The Musical (which was co-produced by much of the same team behind Yeast Nation) became the first show in FringeNYC history to sell out before the opening day of the festival.

Today, Bella and the Pool Boy sold out its opening performance and several other productions are on track to sell out individual performances including: The Legend of Julie Taymor, Facebook Me, Pearl’s Gone Blue, Smoking Section, Jersey Shoresical, and The Bardy Bunch: The War of the Families Partridge and Brady. Other top sellers thus far are: Parker & Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End of the Rainbow, Whale Song, Sammy Gets Mugged, You’ve Ruined A Perfectly Good Mystery, Destinations, Pawn, and Hush The Musical.

In 1997, New York City became the seventh US city to host a fringe festival, joining Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston, Orlando and San Francisco. In its first 13 years FringeNYC has presented over 2100 performing groups from the U.K., Canada, Poland, Japan, China, Germany, the Czech Republic and across the U.S., prompting Switzerland's national daily, The New Zurich Zeitung, to declare FringeNYC as “the premiere meeting ground for alternative artists.” The festival has also been the launching pad for numerous Off-Broadway and Broadway transfers, long-running downtown hits, and regional theater productions including Urinetown, Never Swim Alone, Debbie Does Dallas, Dog Sees God, 21 Dog Years, Krapp 39, Dixie’s Tupperware Party, Silence! The Musical, Matt & Ben, The Irish Curse, 666 and the current Off-Broadway productions of Tales From The Tunnel and Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party and as well as movies (WTC View) and even a TV show (‘da Kink in My Hair). FringeNYC is a production of The Present Company, under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

FringeNYC shows run 2pm - midnight weekdays and noon - midnight on
weekends. Tickets are: $15 in advance at www.FringeNYC.org or
866-468-7619; $18 at the door, subject to availability. Discount
passes for multiple shows ($70 for a Fiver Pass, $120 for a Flex Pass
good for 10 shows, and $500 for an all-you-can-see Lunatic Pass) are
also available. 

                                                                                Welcome Eternity, photo Dixie Sheridan

Press release contact:  Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 x. 11, ron@spincyclenyc.com

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OFF-BROADWAY IN LONDON -- Emperor and Galilean by Henrik Ibsen in a new version by Ben Power, directed by Jonathan Kent, at the National Theatre, Olivier Theatre, London

Guest review by Mark Haggard, Cambridge, UK

The National Theatre has a great reputation for brilliant staging of old and new drama based on historical fact, to which witness the great success of The White Guard, Coram Boy, and Pitmen Painters, on the last of which I have written previously.  This reputation remains intact with the present production, despite lesser success in my own view and the average of very varied reviews received (2 to 4 out of 5 stars).

In theatre or historical fiction (and occasionally, in painting) there is an issue of how, starting from consistency with the known sources and fixed points of established history, the work of art can add to the understanding of what was probably going on.  The sublime example on ancient Rome is Margaret Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.  Is this what Ibsen (for Emperor and Galilean is indeed by him, despite being left off many lists of his works) was trying to do?  It seems only secondarily so.  Ibsen's preceding plays, Brand and Peer Gynt, have romantic and mystical elements in common, and address philosophical problems of free will and belief (Brand is a questing priest and Peer Gynt is set in a mythical fairytale past).  These now seem dated historical curiosities.

Emperor and Galilean is a theatrical curio of a different kind, first published 1873 but not produced for 23 years thereafter.  I suspect that Ibsen was so overwhelmed by his visit to Rome (1864) that he felt he had to write something of cosmic sweep for an international audience and took some years getting this idea, as well as the mid-century idealistic philosophy out of his system. This, Ibsen's third and grandest play, was gestated alongside those first two in the 1860s.  Ibsen also thought it his greatest;  however its relative failure in terms of productions (Ibsen is the next most produced dramatist after Shakespeare) perhaps signposted Ibsen elsewhere -- to great success with the psychological and social conflicts of the Scandinavian bourgeoisie. The later plays seem much less dated, even glaringly modernist (eg, A Doll's House, 1879).

Under the short rule (360-363) of Julian "the Apostate" (331?-363) the Roman empire is thought nearly to have reverted to paganism from Christianity, which had then only been the established religion for 4 decades.  This is indeed an issue of cosmic sweep, set in a complex period with a complex flow of historical processes, on which the sources are patchy.  Success in capturing the relation between the events of the period and Julian's enigmatic and ascetic personality also eluded Adrian Murdoch (The Last Pagan, Inner Traditions, 2008), with his much better contemporary access to primary and secondary materials than Ibsen had.  The sources are good enough for some leads but not for a very detailed set of what-if? historical analyses (which fiction has already done on Julian).  It is uncertain just how near or far from success Julian's dis-establishment project might have been at the time of his death in action in Mesopotamia.  This occurred in yet another Persian war, one that he had felt obliged to pursue to consolidate loyalties in the East.  In Ben Power's adaptation of the play, this nemesis results (based on probably inaccurate historical sources) not from hubris but from gullibility.  This would be a most unbecoming demise for Julian, a cynic who forswore a religion partly because of its excessive demands for suspension of disbelief.

We are therefore left asking, if historical accuracy is not overriding for Ibsen, what in the dramatic character of the stage Julian has he given us to make us identify with him enough to feel affected when things go wrong as his rule unfolds?  I have to say not a lot:  perhaps an over-wariness in the adaptation about too much intellectual argument in theatre, especially theological and philosophical argument nearly two millennia old, has deprived us of an opportunity to appreciate his reasoning.  

In Ben Power's competent shoe-horning adaptation of Ibsen's 8 hours into an action-packed 4,  the career narrative is so dominant that we get a rather sampled reportage of the way in which the Christians were perhaps unnecessarily provoked, but little sense of the dynamics and interplay of historical events.

More revealing is the way in which Christian Rome, though from just before Julian's birth we should more properly be calling it Byzantium', is shown as retaining all the shortcomings of its predecessor: to stay alive as a member of the elite, you had either go into exile or seize power yourself.  The pace of the career narrative is Shakespearian, somewhat recalling Macbeth; the source of seduction is only slightly the attractions of power (and despite a bizarre scene with the wife, who is also sister of the menacing preceding emperor, Julian's uncle Constantius, it is not particularly a power-hungry spouse).  But sorcery and obscure prophesy are seductions as for Macbeth.

Julian is portrayed as trapped by his situation; he starts out professing to want freedom of worship to include Christianity, but the political monopoly in an established monotheistic religion makes conflict inevitable.  Julian rightly despised Christian superstition and seemed initially in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius to favour the classical learning and philosophy that was to be lost to the West for a millennium as Christianity grew to hegemony.  This point was not lost on the anti-Christian Edward Gibbon in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88).  Yet Julian appears also to have indulged in and favoured similarly superstitious pagan practices, and not to have drawn much of value from his flirtation with philosophy in the backwater that was 4th-century Athens.  As with Christianity in his earlier maturity, he became disillusioned.  It is perhaps surprising that a century after Gibbon, Ibsen felt he had to give Christianity a much better press (eg, in his sympathetic portrayal of Gregory of Nazianzus as saint and martyr) than he gives Julian -- perhaps a touch of Ibsen's growing sympathy for the underdog which at this point Gregory becomes. 

Ibsen worked up the play in the post-Darwin 1860s, when religious values were waning, so it is not surprising that he thought the apostacy would be relevant to the audience's concerns, despite its remote historical and geographical setting.  Ibsen was later quite frank about the opiate value of religious belief, and Rebecca in Rosmersholm (1879), has lost hers.  Society was facing the possibility that God may not exist.  But Julian did not "disbelieve in God" in the sense Rebecca or we would understand of espousing materialism;  the general cultural assumption on deities in the ancient world was "anything goes", and Julian felt that the Judaeo-Christian God's monopoly was not justified socially and politically.  There is no very good evidence that on his deathbed Julian said "You have won then, Galilean."  It is an anachronism, implying that he could have been obsessed with our own hindsight what-if question, rather than the pressing matters of his power base and the Persian war. 

The unifying force which Constantine had seen in Christianity had led to a political role for the clerical hierarchy, the decay of both pagan religion and classical learning, and a question about the relation between church and state, one which was important at the time of writing the US Constitution and which is to some extent still with us.  The newly established religion was a threat to the intellectual fabric of ancient civilisation and to the divine cult of the emperors.  The meeting point of the drama with historically plausible conjecture, is that Julian started with the former laudable fear but that it shaded into the latter less laudable one, because power always corrupts. This message is there in the play but extracting it requires much concentration due to the many distracting sub-plots and prior knowledge of the history certainly helps when there is not time to read the excellent but lengthy programme notes.

This is a play mostly for those with an interest in ancient history and/or theatrical realisation.  Despite the length there is no boredom and much engagement created by the usual excellent NT acting and the flexible use of the set on the rotating multi-depth stage.  The imperial religious procession of Constantius is a breathtaking delight, worthy of a place in the annals of staging and costume.  I was not quite so sure about Julian's fellow sun-worshippers appearing as trance-held hippies, but even in an action-packed drama there is room for humorous moments.

Emperor and Galilean plays at the National Theatre, Olivier Theatre, London, through August 10^th.  For information and tickets, click on live link.

                                                                                      Mark Haggard

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Off-Broadway in Shelter Island, L.I. – Shakespeare’s As You Like It at Sylvester Manor’s Windmill, performances July 16 and 17, directed by Sarah Hankins, The Green Theatre Collective

… the Forest of Arden …

What could be better than circling the fruitful fields of Sylvester Manor’s Community Supported Agriculture farm to arrive at the windmill, sitting on the verdant grass, and in this idyllic, mid-summer setting watching a beautiful production of Shakespeare’s great pastoral comedy performed by talented and idealistic actors of the Green Theatre Collective? 

Nothing could be better.

We wait for the play to begin, some people nibbling the organic crudités and sipping wine.  A thin cord rests on the top of the bouncy grass, marking the “edge of the stage.”  Are those the actors seated -- like ourselves -- on picnic blankets on either side of the windmill?

A nature spirit appears -- Amiens, played alluringly by Melanie Closs, moves in and around singing the gentle, insinuating “Come Hither.”  You bet!

Melanie Closs as Amiens. Background L: audience;  R: actors Photo: Robert J. Ruben

Orlando, persecuted and cheated out of his inheritance by his older brother Oliver, flees with his faithful servant Adam, first having fallen in love with Rosalind, daughter of the banished Duke Senior.  Duke Frederick, who usurped his older brother, the good Duke Senior, but had allowed Rosalind to stay in his court since she was his daughter’s, Celia’s, friend, but still hating her as her father’s daughter, now throws out Rosalind, who has fallen in love with Orlando;  her dear friend Celia, and the Jester Touchstone accompany her into banishment.  Rosalind goes disguised as a young man, “Ganymede,” and Celia, disguised as a poor lady, takes on the name Aliena to suit, as she says, her current situation.

All these loving, free spirits find their way to the Forest of Arden where, it happens, the exiled Duke has also found his way, living with some retainers.  Tragedy ends in death, and comedy in marriage:  this is a comedy and it ends in several marriages, but not before the course of true love has many chances to be confounded.

If you had any doubts about whether there’s such a thing as love at first sight, you'll know for sure when Hal Flickett as Orlando is literally struck dumb, head over heels in love with Rosalind, his hands straining to convey to her the words of his ardor, locked in by his overwhelming passion.  

Jessica Glannone as Rosalind matches his at first sight passion with her own, and holds it through the hilarious scenes where, she entrains him in her Ganymede disguise to woo her in the forest  “as if I were Rosalind”;  she also plays Audrey, a country girl with a country style. 

Seven actors play many parts (as all of us do, as Shakespeare reminds us in this play).  Since Close and Flickett play one and Glannone two, the other four actors are kept really busy -- shifting with skill and speed among characters, mood and -- from palace to forest -- locale.  It was fascinating to see David Gautschy switch -- by slipping off his vest -- from the nasty older brother Oliver to the poetic, free associating Fool Touchstone;  can this really be the same man!?  Gautschy expressed all the poetic nuance and suggestive liberation of one of Shakespeare’s great Fools who convey a sense of depth that just won’t let you go.  

Brendan Boland brought an outstanding quality of intelligence and weight to Jacques, whose melancholy provides a leaven to the idyllic fantasy of As You Like It.   Boland brought to the famous “Seven Ages of Man” passage a passion equal, in its way, to that of the lovers -- and by “sans everything” he had moved me to tears. 

Gina Rivera was dynamic as the humorous, tough-minded Delia, a foil to the romantic Rosalind.  It was touching that she played Adam the old servant as lame and weak-kneed while having a dancer’s freedom of movement:  free and in the forest, she came up with some heart-lifting light dance steps and a terrific cartwheel expressive of the buoyancy and joie de vivre of the play.   

David Shaw was especially busy in terms of sheer number – five distinct characters and speaking parts.  I especially enjoyed him as Charles the Wrestler in the scene where, as a strong man, he’s bested by the underdog Orlando. 

In today’s NY Times (07/18/ll) Charles Isherwood, commented about the Royal Shakespeare Company productions in NYC,  “… these are among the most consistently clear Shakespeare stagings I’ve seen, at least in term of simple intelligibility.”  The same can certainly be said of the Green Theatre Collective’s “As You Like It” – and they were acting with the acoustics of the great outdoors and the wind in the trees!  I never missed a word -- or a joke, or an idea.  The gorgeous language was completely accessible – for the time, the language of Shakespeare, of the actors, and of the audience was all one.

It was a privilege and a joy to see Shakespeare so well and so appropriately performed.  Thanks to Sylvester Manor Farm for extending itself in the direction of the arts, and bringing this play our way.  I’m greatly looking forward the Green Theatre Collective’s future performances.

So far this summer this traveling troupe has played “As You Like It” in Maudsley State in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the Musical Pagoda in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, and at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, Long Island, NY. 

Green Theatre Collective will perform the play at Franklin Stage Company, Franklin, NY, on July 23 and 24.  For more information about the performances, and about the theatre company, and for ticket information, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

Taking a curtain call -- with not a curtain in sight ...  L-R Melanie Closs, Hal Fickett, David Shaw, Jessica Glannone, Gina Rivera, David Gautschy, Brendan Boland.  Photo:  Robert J. Ruben

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OFF-BROADWAY in SAG HARBOR -- Betty's Summer Vacation by Christopher Durang, directed by Trip Cullman, Bay Street Theatre

 It’s a sit-com in reverse -- everything that looks normal and every-day turns out ghastly.   This dark comedy takes potshots at the over-influence of the media and various clichés of popular psychology and Betty has the vacation from Hell, all of which could be interesting, but the characters and situations are so exaggerated, obvious and over-worked that it’s silly and irrelevant

Betty enters the breezy, appealing summer house for her summer share with Trudy who, however, talks a blue streak -- oh oh, is this vacation going to be fun?  The possibility remains but when Mrs. Siezmagraff, Trudy’s hated mother enters and blithely announces that -- Dad (whom we fast find out has sexually abused Trudy) just having died -- she’s staying here, too, we know bad stuff’s ahead. 

Then comes the gay guy with a suspicious looking hat box (read head box) and blood on his hands, and the super stud who’s colossally randy and with the size to go with it as we’re reminded again and again and again.  Also on hand is an unappetizing derelict flasher whom Mrs. Siezmagraff has invited in for sex.  Voices from somewhere above laugh with shrill cackles, comment, and egg on the characters to greater and great excesses -- well, you never know what you get with a short-term rental.

Everything in this beautifully designed set of a summer house by the beach is at it should be with star fish motifs and blue sky vistas except for the tacked up sign over a far door that hangs askew -- it looks like it could be read but -- go close and it’s nonsense.  This cleverly announces the theme of the play, the wacky absurdity within conventional norms -- but then the set is much better than the play.  Act I shows Betty, played with strength and a fine range of emotion by Heidi Schreck, holding onto stability amidst all these nut cases acting accordingly nuts which means that -- accepting a prompt from the voices -- she takes a long walk on the beach, leaving room for plenty of in-house sexual and murderous violence.  The set piece is a game of charades -- what else in a beach house share? -- and as Betty says, never has the word “penis” been spoken with greater frequency.

In Act II the three  “Voices” descend from above amidst breaks in the ceiling and plaster powder, looking something like space travelers, and are revealed as personifications of the media of sorts, voyeuristic, looking for distraction, and eagerly pushing everybody on to still worse to come.  In a mock trial since, after all, violence has been done, Veanne Cox as Mrs. Siezmagraff plays Judge, Prosecutor and Witness with such wonderful comic timing that for awhile Betty’s Summer Vacation actually becomes funny.  The play goes out with a bang and a whimper, both.    

There is a reason to see the play:  the excellent acting, and in particular the standout performance of Veanne Cox playing crazy-normal:  that is, her responses to the goings on, including her own zaniness, would look totally normal if what was happening and what she was saying and doing weren’t wild and violent.  I feel I didn't need to see this play, but I wouldn't have wanted to miss her performance.

Bay Street, an outstanding regional theater, has gone a little off course in its first offerings this season but the next, Enter Laughing, should be great.

Betty’s Summer Vacation plays at Bay Street Theatre on the wharf in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through July 31.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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OFF-BROADWAY IN SAG HARBOR - TRU by Jay Presson Allen, with Darrel Hammond as Truman Capote, directed by Matt McGrath, Bay Street Theatre

TRU -- for Truman -- is a one-person play that takes up Capote’s life after he published in Esquire magazine chapters of his novel Answered Prayers  in which he exposed the seamy side of the lives of many of his wealthy, socialite friends.  Fiction -- but everyone of his crowd recognized themselves and their friends in the thinly disguised characters.

It’s the mid 1970’s and Capote is at the height of his fame as a writer -- hence the rich friends -- mired in alcohol and drugs and causing what were, for the time, sexual indiscretions of a gay life.

We find him in his handsome successful writer’s apartment in New York City near the United Nations building, appealingly evoked by the set.  ACT I focuses on Capote's relationships with others.  It’s Christmas and he's feeling abandoned by his lover who’s abroad.  Calling everybody who’s anybody “Honey,” he mends bridges with his fancy friends, especially the wives.  He’s big among the little people, too.  A telegraph operator gushes, some nobody sends him a poinsettia which he tosses out.   He ranges from imperious to babyish.      

ACT II brings a more inward view.  He’s off the bottle, planning on a physical fitness regime, and morose -- the word “suicide” is used often.  He speaks of his early life, his abandonment by his mother “but the family took pretty good care of me,” his childhood drive to write, publication of his first story when he was eight in which -- like Answered Prayers -- he made fun of people he knew and aroused their ire, and, moving forward, a well-known wild party he threw in the ‘60’s, and, later, the evidently inexplicable, shocking suicide of his mother.  We finally pick up a dramatic conflict:  his successful resistance to suicide in the face of his mother having succumbed to it.

Capote’s affected style wears thin quickly in ACT I.  We know he was a writer of depth and power, but put it this way:  if we didn’t know the man we were watching was a fine writer, we’d think he was a superficial, self-focused bore.  ACT II disappoints in a different way:  we hear him recount personal events, but not in a way that provides insight.  His resistance to suicide, in contrast to his mother, is interesting and as a dramatic conflict could have enlivened the play, but it comes too late, and her death is too little explored.  

Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wonderful impersonation of Capote in the film, Capote, one can't help thinking that if Hoffman played the role, the play would be more fun to watch.  Darrell Hammond is a fine actor but he seems too large and rough hewn in his style and manner to catch the seductive childishness of Capote, his southern accented babyish voice, and his odd allure.    

Two whole acts in which Capote speaks -- but we don’t really know from TRU much about who this man was. 

TRU played at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through June 26.  For Bay Street’s rich program and plays and other programs forthcoming, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

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Unnatural Acts, written by members of the Plastic Theatre, conceived and directed by Tony Speciale, Classic Stage Company

Unnatural Acts is a strong and thought provoking play based on a true and tragic event:  the purge of a group of gay men at Harvard University in 1920.  The catalyst was the suicide of Cyril Wilson, assumed to be gay, which led Harvard to get rid of the group of homosexuals associated with him, evidently to avoid scandal.  

One by one, ten students and one instructor suspected of being part of Wilson’s cadre of homosexual friends were interrogated by a “Secret Court” of high level administrators which determined their “guilt” as homosexuals, or their “innocence.”  Most were found “guilty” and were expelled.  We learn, by the end of the play, of the blight the investigation and expulsion cast on almost all of their lives.

It's a fascinating and very clever theatrical choice that the only characters we see in the play are the eleven directly affected men.  The Harvard disciplinary board is a dark presence, its activities illuminated only by the monologs of the accused young men called in to testify and responding to questions.  All focus is on the men themselves, their lives, personalities, purposes, sexual drives (though oddly, nobody seems in love), interactions, and the effect on these of the punitive purge.    

At the start of the play, the eleven react variously to Wilson's suicide.  Some close friends feel grief and attend his funeral, acting as pallbearers, while others who knew him casually are more distant.  As the play advances, though, the noose tightens equally around all of them.  That’s a powerful structure.  

Early on there’s a wild party in the suite of Earnest Roberts that I think everyone who sees the play is bound to remember for a long time.  It's very well staged.  There’s drinking, music, lovemaking, and banter while Roberts, “the ringleader,” makes witty proclamations from tabletops, wearing a gorgeous sequined flapper dress.  The process that will crush most of them is well underway but they don’t understand that yet, partly because these men, mainly sons of privilege, have a sense of invulnerability.  

         The party's warming up ...  fromUnnatural Acts.  Photo:  Classic Stage

But soon enough they’re all roped in.   Being a congressman's son won't get you out of this one.

Under interrogation, some are damned for telling the truth and others damned for lying.  One egregious liar who’s gay is exonerated and one truth-teller who’s straight receives a relatively mild one-year suspension (and may be the only one who goes on to live a long time and have the kind of fulfilled career that Harvard men look forward to). 

The disciplinary board appears to have tried sincerely to separate those who were “guilty” from those who were "innocent" -- as those words applied to gays in 1920.  But "sincerity" is irrelevant -- the play drives home that secret deliberative bodies are inherently cruel and unjust, and that intolerance set in motion against a class of people judged to be different from oneself is cruel and unjust.  

Why did Harvard do it?  Since the disciplinary board is a kind of composite character in the play, I missed knowing what motivated them.  Was it blind prejudice?  Avoidance of scandal?  Or?  The investigation begins right after Wilson's death and Harvard already had a reputation as the most "faggoty" school: this suggests the administration had been looking the other way with regard to gay activities until Wilson's suicide raised the fear of scandal, but that's a guess.  Those eleven men would have been guessing about that, too, and talking it over.                 

Tony Speciale conceived the play and shepherded it through a process of collaborative creation with the cast, and it’s presented as an ensemble piece.  The actors are for the most part very good, though some characters could use greater differentiation -- that's an awful lot of young men in suits to keep track of (though it's easy to remember the nude track star and Roberts in a dress!).  That nobody's in love, however, is unlikely.  A focus on a deep love among these individuals would heighten the play's impact.  The direction, with dramatic switches from a bright to a dark stage, is tense and clear. 

This is really an example of many cooks who didn’t spoil the broth, but arrived at a sturdy, unified drama that tells an important story.    

Unnatural Acts plays at Classic Stage in New York City's East Village -- through July 10 run extended through July 31.  For information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

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A Little Journey by Rachel Crothers, directed by Jackson Gay, Mint Theater Company

… All aboard …

A Little Journey is about what happens to a group of strangers back when travel across our broad United States meant a four-day train trip.  Who’d be sharing your Pullman “sleeper car”?  You never knew but by the end of the trip you were liable to know everyone really well. 

Time:  Spring 1914.   Place:  The inside of a Pullman sleeping car bound for the Pacific Coast, the set a marvelous evocation of a sleeping car which turns round in order to convey the train’s forward movement.  The “All Aboard” sounds.  Last minute visitors are shuffled off, the train pulls out of the station, and a classy seeming young woman, Julie, is near to weeping.

Not only has Julie been abandoned by her lover, she's lost her ticket and will have to get off the train -- until a free-spirited Western type of guy, Jim, prevails on her to let him lend her the money for a new ticket.  And we’ve got several more days ahead for Jim to fall in love and romance her, and for the disparities between her high class Eastern upbringing and conventional views to be overcome by Jim with his own tough story and new age (for that age), rough and ready brand of personal salvation -- if they can be overcome.

Beyond differences of gender, occupation and class, people become interested in one another -- and in the burgeoning romance.  The deaf old lady and her granddaughter returning home out West gossip with the fancy New York matron.  Two Princeton boys take an interest in the pretty granddaughter.  Encouraged by Jim, Julie’s upper-crust edge softens;  she gets involved with a waif of woman who seems more destitute than she herself, giving the woman temporary relief by holding her baby, and finding a new attachment in the baby.

But Julie’s  problems won't go away (actually, the solution's obvious but the playwright isn't ready to let it happen so artificially strings things out):  rejected by her New York lover because she doesn't have her own money, devoid of occupation because as a well-educated woman of the early 20^th Century she has no marketable skills, she faces the prospect of life with relatives out West who don’t want her.  And then, just when her private sorrows seem overwhelming, disaster strikes, affecting everybody.  

In one of the most convincing, though awkwardly staged, episodes, the common disaster faced by the passengers transforms this disparate cross-section of American society into a unified, deeply bonded group.  Even the Black sleeping car porter, who in spite of his great dignity has so far been treated as a fetch-and-carry (and how uncomfortable is that to watch, even when you know "it's a play"), gets to join the team.  Faced with a poignant and important dilemma, they rise to the occasion, all pitching in and making contributions, and working it out together.      

It's fascinating to learn that Rachel Crothers was one of the most successful playwrights in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.  Still, as a play, A Little Journey seems somewhat dated and over-given to easy romantic solutions to stony problems.   Every potential romance blooms, the Whites and the Black man link hands -- things happen because they’re “nice,” without character development to support them.

Some of the sense of sentimentality might have been overcome with better casting.  The acting is, at least for the most part, competent but only Samantha Soule gives a genuinely strong performance as Julie. 

Again and again the Mint Theater's productions of little known plays by well known authors, and other outstanding finds from the past have brought its audiences -- certainly myself -- thrilling illumination.  A Little Journey doesn't have the strength of many of the Mint’s superb discoveries. 

But with its depictions of social categories, and glowingly optimistic view of America set in the context of that great symbol of American optimism -- the journey West -- A Little Journey is a rich and important document of social history -- and if The Mint hadn't produced it, who would know?  That, and a seductive nostalgia, are excellent reasons to see and enjoy it.  Disparities of wealth, class, education and race dissipate.  This was one of those moments in our history when one could believe that there was a place for everybody on board. 

A Little Journey plays at the Mint Theater on Manhattan's West side through July 10.  For further information and tickets, click on live link. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Please scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."