Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Candida by George Bernard Shaw, directed and designed by Tony Walton, The Irish Repertory Theatre

I love Shaw and the Irish Repertory Theatre does plays wonderfully so I was keenly looking forward to Candida.

It turned out to be very dull.  Why?  The play or the production?

The Play  The time is 1894.  Candida is a married woman at the apex of a love triangle.  Marchbanks, a near-to-vagabond young poet, has romantic visions of the world and of their love.  Her husband, Morrell, also a man of words, is a diligent, charismatic minister constantly lecturing to do-good organizations, including Shaw's Fabian Society.  She loves her husband but is drawn to Marchbanks.  Each man claims that Candida is truly his.  Whose is she?

Marchbanks' claim to Candida is that he "understands" her in a poetic sense that's never really clear.  Morrell's supposedly more pedestrian claim is that he loves her, she agreed to marry him, he is in fact her husband and, furthermore, he protects and provides for her.  But who does Candida believe she belongs to?  The climax of the play is when she places herself on auction, giving each man a chance to make his claim, ultimately demonstrating that she is not his or his -- she's her own person. 

We can more or less accept Marchbanks as a young swain in love with an older woman, and Morrell as an upstanding man in the world in love with his own wife, but there are too many inconsistencies and questions around Candida to allow her to come across as a particularly interesting or fully realized character.  She's just come in from a vacation but claims that the household is short of money, and something's said about her taking care of children but there are no children in the play.  She does or does not resent having the help the maid peel onions:  which is it?  We're told that she has nice hair and a good figure but other than that, there's nothing special about her so we're left with each of these men being in love with her just because people fall in love. 

What does she do all day anyhow beside fluff the pillows, when she's not mothering Marchbanks, whose poetry doesn't interest her?  It's said that Shaw wrote this play in response to Ibsen's A Doll's House in which, at the end, Nora leaves her husband.  Candida stays with her husband, in some newly defined relationship we are to understand, but we don't see it in the play.  Some things have been said, e.g., she has in the past been the one to put off the creditors when the family's short of money while he gets credit for munificence when they pay up.  She runs interference for him.  Are we supposed to think that from now on he'll face off the creditors?  And that's a good thing?  She'll have even less to do in the outside world.

Or does she get to pay the bills?  That's not much fun.

And what happened to Shavian wit in Candida?  There are a couple of cracks about people liking to hear what ministers tell them to do and then not doing it, and that's about it.

The Production  The set was predictable, a cluttered, slightly disorderly late 19th Century British middle class household that makes you sneeze just to look at it.  In spite of a distinguished cast, the acting didn't serve the play.  Perhaps an actress with great style and power -- Katharine Cornell played Candida -- could have overridden the weaknesses in the characterization, but Melissa Errico 's Candida is all on the surface -- instead of playing the part, she plays herself playing a type of part she's done a number of times before.  Ciaran O'Reilly, another highly accomplished actor with an impressive resume, looks and acts scruffy and vague instead of a dynamic minister everyone including Candida falls in love with.  Sam Underwood's irritating, clickety-clack reading of his lines as Marchbanks makes it impossible to understand Candida's attraction to him.  Only the smaller parts came alive, and Xanthe Elbrick is particularly humorous and believable as the minister's typist.

Candida is sometimes said to be more human and psychological than Shaw's more "talky" plays of ideas.  If so, I say bring back the talky ones!  Like the hilarious and totally enjoyable Misalliance, reviewed here in December, at the Pearl Theatre.

Candida plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC's Chelsea through April 18.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome -- please scroll down, click on the word "comment", write in the box that opens up, and click on "post".  Emails don't appear with comments.

Charles Dickens' Hard Times, adapted by Stephen Jeffreys, directed by J. R. Sullivan, The Pearl Theatre Company

Dickens wrote a play?  How interesting, I want to see this?  I thought, learning about the Pearl Theatre's presentation of Hard Times,  and too intrigued to bother to read further.  But Dickens didn't write this play* -- it's an adaptation by Stephen Jeffreys from Dickens' novel Hard Times as I learned when I focused in.  The acting in the Pearl's production is marvelous, and there are flashes of interest extracted from Dickens but the play is diffuse and comes across as overlong, hinting at its origin in a book that was written to be read gradually -- serialized over many weeks.  

This adptation of Hard Times is constructed more like a novel than a play, with a hoard of characters and transitions between scenes bridged by straight narrative.  The story largely concerns the conflict between "masters and servants", as the most touching character, the industrial weaver Stephen Blackpool puts it, between haves and have-nots.  The characters are vivid and often amusing, but each of them also represents, rather simplistically, a social archetype and/or an idea circulating in the middle of the 19th Century including early feminism, early environmentalism, the early labor movement and issues of social justice (Dickens wrote Hard Times in 1854).   

Josiah Bounderby is the chief "have" of a fictional, environmentally degraded Coketown, a banker and a manufacturer.  His wife, Louisa, pressed into marriage with the rich man, has sentiments that cross the great divide, though with little effect.  Her father, Gradgrind, represents the dangers of rationalized Utilitarianism:  he's a schoolteacher who, with the best rationalizing intentions, represses creativity and joy in his students as well as in his daughter and his feckless son .  Grandgrind's spiritual antagonist is Leary, who runs a circus and serves the play as on apostle of joy.  Grandgrind, though, is one of the most interesting characters in the play in that by the end he changes.  Most of the others just run down.

There are glimpses throughout of a great novelist's language, humor, and brilliant and compassionate mind at work, and the six actors who share the more than twenty roles among them bring each of his characters to life with wit, energy and understanding -- in terms of the performances, the production is a remarkable achievement.  But in spite of their talented efforts, this adaptation doesn't locate the core of a play in Dickens' novel or illuminate or enlarge it.

*I've since learned that Dickens collaborated on two plays with Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep and No Thoroughfare. 

Hard Times  plays at New York's City Center Stage 11 February 5th through 28th.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down below the photo to click on "comment," write your comment in the box that appears, and click "post".  No emails appear with comments.

The wonderful cast of the Pearl Theatre's Hard Times:  from L to R:  Sean McNall, Jolly Abraham, T. J. Edwards, Rachel Botchan, Robin Leslie Brown, and Bradford Cover.   Photo by Gregory Costanzo. 

 

 

A Play On War, inspired by Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children, conceived and directed by Ruben Polendo, written by Jenny Connell, National Asian American Theatre Company in collaboration with Theater Mitu

... Mother C ...

Written in 1939 in response to Hitler's invasion of Poland, Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children is set in the 17th Century during the Thirty Years War.  It goes beyond theater, standing in the minds of those who know it as an archetypal image of war as seemingly endless, futile and cruel.  A Play On War is presented as being inspired by Brecht's Mother Courage but this production by the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) is essentially Brecht's play.

Mother Courage (here called variously "The One on the Cart", "The One Who Watches Television", or "Mama C") makes a living for herself and her children by selling items to soldiers from the wagon she wheels through a war torn countryside.  She profits from the war and, one by one, loses her three children to it:  her older son, her younger son, and her mute daughter, until at the end she has nothing but the wagon.  There it is in its powerful nutshell.

The machine of war grinds each of its characters, innocent or perpetrators, smart or stupid, or the usual mixed bag, to dust.  The characters aren't revealed to the audience through their words and actions;  they're emblematic and used to express Brecht's ideas and visions.  We know who they are from the start and they don't change;  their situations change, all beyond their control.  And which side you're on doesn't matter:  you loose on both sides. 

Visually this production is original and intriguing.  The white, simplified costumes support the symbolic nature of the characters;  as a friend pointed out, white is a color of mourning in the Japanese tradition and, particularly interesting for Brecht's title, is also associated with courage.  The movement is choreographic rather than naturalistic.  Aspects of Arabic clowning and the Beijing opera are included, as we're told.  The "bad guys" (of the moment), soldiers who come to grab civilian recruits, ride threateningly fast on child-size bicycles, a particularly effective way of conveying Brecht's thoughtless, fascist toughs.  The music, both as background and as accompaniment, is evocative and warms the experience of watching the play.

A variation on Brecht's script is that instead of a continuous time line, the narrative shifts back several years every time it takes up another child's life, returning to the point where that child's story veers off to bad.  This was not a good decision:  although fate holds a different end for each child, they interact as members of one family so this device comes across as repetitive and makes the play seem overlong. 

Mother Courage is challenging, exciting and iconic but it's not seductive.  The characters are not "well rounded" and "sympathetic":  Brecht truly brings us into the play of ideas on all counts.  Restarting the story several times as here turns a powerful but challenging play into a marathon.  It doesn't help that Brecht's twelve years of war in twelve scenes is turned into over twenty!  Nevertheless there are some intriguing visual and musical ideas.  They don't remove A Play on War an arm's length from the original, but they provide some stimulating ways of experiencing Brecht's play which is, itself, highly stylized and open to experimentation.

A Play on War is at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan's East Village February 12 through March 6. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome... please scroll down past the photos, write comment in comment box and click on "post."  Emails don't appear with comments.  Thank you. 

Jon Norman Schneider as Suez Cheese and Nikki Calonge as Birdie in NAATCO's A Play on Words.
Photographer William P. Steele 

Mia Katigbak as Mama C, Marcus Ho as Rev and Orville Mendez as Cookie in NAATCO's A Play on War.  Photographer William P. Steele

 

Decade at a Glance, created, directed and choreographed by Joan Evans, Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre, Stella Adler Studio

... the unpromised land ...

Decade at a Glance is an exhuberant, humorous and joyous ensemble piece that tells the story of the Great Depression of the 1930's through music and dance.  While it's inspired by sources directly from the period, it successfully goes beyond them to create its own new artistic whole, because, I think, it's fired by personal, creative compassion for the struggles for better lives of those it depicts, viewed through a hopeful and affirmative lens.

Decade draws on photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange (compare the production photo below with Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"), songs of Woody Guthrie and others, and for its text, passages from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as well as published interviews of the period -- an immediately fascinating idea that works beautifully.  It follows the story of the Oakies, who lost their farms in the center of our country to the dustbowls and banks (with a spirited rendition of "Jolly Banker" by Woody Guthrie) and set out in dilapidated trucks to create new lives in California.  As migrant laborers picking California's bounty of produce, they encountered brutality and prejudice (Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" with an ironic twist). 

The choreographed ensemble creation of a jam-full open truck with a Conestoga wagon-like covering, its stressed engine puffing and spitting to make it over the mountains, is wonderful.

In focusing on the rural story of the Oakies, the narrative essentially parallels that of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, a point that should have been mentioned in the program, even if no specific text was taken from it.  Decade also casts a glance at the urban story -- early on the ensemble constructs a choreographed sky scraper with a tumbling suicide, and a cast member sings "Brother can you spare a Dime" by Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney -- a song so powerful that if anything of art can alter how one thinks and acts, this can.

The attempt to take on both the rural and urban story is ambitious.  I missed somewhat a central focus on an individual or family, but Decade is comprehensive and kaleidoscopic, and the music, choreography, and talent of the performers, students at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting -- all acting, singing, dancing, and with some playing musical instruments -- surround one and altogether carry it through.  The Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre seeks "to create vital and visceral performance work that responds to our world and has meaning for our lives."  Decade at a Glance  is a moving and exciting all-over expression of a significant time in the American experience.

Decade at a Glance, presented by Stella Adler Studio of Acting and The Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre, in association with Interaction Arts Foundation, plays at the Stella Adler Studio on West 27th Street in NYC February 11-13, 17-19, March 6-7.   In March it will move on to play in New Orleans.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome ... scroll down below the photo and after writing your comment in the comment box click on "post".  No emails appear with comments.

Mother and infant in Decade at a Glance, photo courtesy of Stella Adler Studio of Acting and The Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre

 

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Georgina Berkeley, from the Berkeley Album, 1867-71, Watercolor and albumen silver prints, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.  Photo:  Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

 

"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage” opens up a wonderful world of visual fantasy.  It’s a surprise and delight -- don't miss it!  It's so refreshing.
 
Photography was invented in 1839, and in no time small photographic portraits – cartes de visites– became popular as calling cards and souvenirs. In the 1860’s and ‘70’s aristocratic British women who, this exhibition indicates, led very busy lives, managed to find time to create photocollages using pieces they cut from the cartes de visites, usually the heads, and pasting them on their own watercolors and drawings to create witty, sarcastic, commemorative, and often wildly surrealistic images. They gathered their work into albums.   Not all who did this work were aristocratic British women but it was particularly their domain. The exhibit is a bounty of their images and albums.
 
Cut and paste allows for the union of things that can never be together, of sights that can never been seen. The collages differ with the personalities of the artists, their skills, and purposes but they almost always bring out a smile – and one senses the artist’s smile, too. In place of the royal family on picture cards, Georgina Berkeley pastes the heads of her own family – why not? Others (top of page) get rides on an ostrich and a turtle.

The Bouverie album, below, shows Alice in Wonderland children riding a toad and perched on toadstools. 

Elizabeth Pleydell-Bouverie and Jane Pleydell-Bouverie or Ellen Pleydell-Bouverie and Janet Pleydell-Bouverie, from the Bouverie Album, 1872-77, collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints.  Photo courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film 
 

Lady Filmer creates a drawing room scene, below, that includes her own portrait at the table near the back, with knife and paste and the album she's working on, that of her royal admirer leaning on the table, and her husband, small scale and near the dog. 

 Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer, from the Filmer Album, mid-1860's, collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints.  Photo E. Walter

 
My favorite artist is Kate Edith Gough who did this startling image of her proud -- and  

Kate Edith Gough, from the Gough Album, late 1870's, collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints.  Photo:  V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

hatted -- friends floating around as ducks.  Her most astounding collage: a “family tree" filled with a great variety of animated monkeys -- all with human faces: Darwin at work.  No photo available for that one -- guess you'll have to just go and see the exhibit!
 
As soon as that ostensibly “objective” medium – photography -- was invented (1839), artists, including inventors themselves, raced beyond “realism” to create imaginative, subjective images.  Here, too, we see the human imagination using objectivity not as an end … just a starting point.
 
These Victorian photocollages are highly innovative.  Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912 is regularly cited as the major turning point in modern art because his use of collage ushered in Synthetic Cubism. Take a look at it; Picasso has dismantled various visual realities – oil painting, oil cloth reproducing the pattern of chair caning, pieces of paper, newspaper type transformed into paint -- and reconstituted them anew, tying the whole together with a rope. There’s a lot of playing with pictures there too, as well as a great achievement in opening up new ways of seeing. BUT, though it’s often said, he didn’t invent collage.
 
By the way, way before Picasso artists of harbor scenes were framing their pictures in rope. And, amateur artists were cutting up photos and combining them with drawings and painting to create assemblages to express their social, psychological and aesthetic messages, their own visions.

"Playing with Pictures" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, through May 9.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome, scroll down to comment box, and after commenting click on "Post".  Comments can be anonymous or not, as you like it.

True West by Sam Shepard starring Brionne Davis and Ryan Spahn, directed by Jen Forcino, the Athena Theatre Company

... showcasing ...

True West, written in 1980, is about sibling rivalry between two estranged brothers of opposite temperaments and life styles brought together in the home of their mother, in Southern California, while she's traveling in Alaska.  Austin, the younger ivy-league educated, conventionally living screen-writer -- short and rumpled -- is house-sitting for his mother while finishing up a screen play near-to-contract with a Hollywood producer when Lee -- the rangy, handsome one (though you wouldn't know it from the photo) -- a volatile, desert roaming, manipulative thief shows up, distracting, threatening, and simply refusing to disappear. 

The brothers are crushed together by Lee's insistence on remaining, interfering with Austin in every way, but also, Shepard hints, by tangled emotions, ambivalent love and appreciation, as well as jealous rage at the traits in the other opposite their own. 

Until Lee horns in on Austin's professional territory.  With a heavy dose of charm, browbeating and manipulation, Lee invents a storyline and wangles a movie contract out of Saul, Austin's producer friend.  Saul is willing to produce both of their storylines, Austin to write the actual script for Lee's as well as for his own, and both brothers will make a lot of money.  But Austin, infuriated by Lee's take-over, and overwhelmed by jealousy at Saul's attention to his semi-literate brute of a brother, refuses.  He sacrifices his own contract to his fury, himself responsible for his own dizzying downward spin -- though with plenty of help from the cleverly manipulative Lee and, anyhow, you can sure understand the psychological pressures that drive him.

There are improbable moments where I doubt he'd say that pokes a hole in suspended disbelief, and there are unconvincing plot turns, e.g., would Saul really fall for Lee's script, given what we know about it?  Why does Austin's wife and family, briefly mentioned, mean so little to him?  The second act has more of these than the first. 

Still, Shepard brings to life a tense drama and a vivid world.  Lee is a great character and his consistency creates a powerful ending.  The strength of this production hinges on the fine acting of Brionne Davis as Lee, whose gestures, timing, and driving moment-to-moment shifts are fueled by motivation and personality -- with no breath for let-ups.   

Ryan Spahn plays the writer superficially, a sitcom wimp, and isn't credible in his out-of-control scenes.  Here's something that interested me:  the lines Shepard wrote for the mother seemed silly... how could a talented playwright make such a mistake?  But thinking about it, I realized that if the same lines were spoken by a narcissistic, hippie, free spirit character, of the place and time, instead of the "Bingo mom" conceived in this production --leather fringe instead of voluminous hopsack -- they'd not only make sense, they'd deepen understanding of the characters.

This showcase production of True West plays at the Lion Theatre, Theatre Row on West 42nd Street, January 28-February 14.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome... please scroll down past the photo and after writing in the comment box click on "post" -- comments can be anonymous or not ... as you like it.

Brionne Davis as Lee and Ryan Spahn as Austin in True West, Bitten By A Zebra Photography
 

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Venus in Fur by David Ives, directed by Walter Bobbie, with Nina Arianda and Wes Bentley, Classic Stage Company

... SM ...

 

The Marquis de Sade died in 1814, which left over half a century for sadism to languish alone until masochism "arrived" in the 1870 erotic novelVenus in Furs -- the author's name, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, providing the word.  

 

Ives' play Venus in Fur  roughly follows the extreme SM relationship between the man and woman in the novel, which allows for plenty of sadism, masochism, and a beautiful woman in Victoria's Secret type of lingerie tempting and teasing a man.  Voyeurism, sexual revelation, sanctified by touches of social history and the "serious" overtones of a "classic novel" -- you can see why someone thought this would be a good play to produce.  The play's repetitive quality and predictability, and -- a casting problem -- a total lack of chemistry between the actors playing the man and woman, make it boring.    

 

A young writer has spent the day auditioning women for his first play.  That he instead of the director is holding the auditions introduces a sense of authorial fantasy.  He's closing up shop when a pushy blond woman thrust herself into his grungy office and insists on reading for the part.  Thomas is impatient, wants to get home to his girlfriend but Vanda won't take no for an answer.  She's not on the list for readings -- her agent's error, she insists (though it enhances the "is it real?" sense), and keeps talking.  Eventually she badgers him into letting her read for the part while making him read the male character's lines.

 

From her first lines, she's transformed from a street-wise, ordinary girl with a New York accent to the upper class 19th century countess she's portraying.  She insists that he not merely mouth his lines but really play the part, thus enmeshing him in the archetypal slave and master relationship, with him the slave, that he's written into the play and, through that, the "real" one with her.  They switch back and forth between play acting and being real, between their ordinary personae and the high class SM characters he's written into his play;  with each switch, their power dynamic takes a further step toward reversal.   At the start, he's in charge, auditioning, choosing:  by the end, victim and victor have changed places, and sexes.

 

In its criss-crossing of power arcs, Venus in Fur recalls Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones) Dutchman of 1964, seen in a recent revival at the Cherry Lane Theatre, but whereas in Dutchman, in a similarly locked space, Blacks rise from victims to victors, here it's the politics of feminism. 

 

In contrast to the Obie award winning Dutchman, however, Venus in Fur doesn't crackle and move with devastating speed toward a brilliant and unexpected denouement.  It repeats itself as it lurches toward a predictable ending.  Oh not again, one says to oneself (at least that's what I said to myself, can't speak for the rest of the audience) as the tall, shapely, and dramatically strong Nina Arianda once again takes off her street clothes to reveal her sexy black lingerie, or Victorian ruffles, or puts them on again, or off again, or on ...   I thought she had a lot of stamina for changing clothes.  So much of this play is what the woman is wearing.  A move to boots could be called the play's preliminary climax.  Wow!  Black boots.  Sensuality and sexual dynamics are in the line of sight but not in the air.

 

Venus in Fur plays at Classic Stage, on East 13th Street in NYC, through February 21.   

 

Yvonne Korshak

 

Comments welcome ... please scroll down below photo, write in comment box, and click on "post".  "As you like it" -- comments can be anonymous.

 

Wes Bentley and Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur take a close look at Sacher-Masoch's well-thumbed novel.  Photo courtesy of Classic Stage Company   

 

 

The Foundry Theatre in the news ...

There's exciting news for The Foundry Theatre and Melanie Joseph, the Producing Director:  The current Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure Section, January 17, 2010, has an interview article about Melanie Joseph, with photos of this intensely creative woman, and also of David Greenspan: The Foundry's current production is David Greenspan's The Myopia, reviewed right here. 

Last Sunday, Charles Isherwood in The New York Times January 12, wrote an excellent review of Greenspan's The Myopia;  there are links to several other excellent reviews of the play, including mine, on The Foundry Theatre's web site.

It is wonderful -- and frankly a great relief (not to confuse medium size things with the most vast, but sort of like when Obama was elected!) -- when an off-Broadway theatre that has struggled against huge obstacles to produce the plays it believes in, and to maintain its artistic vision, receives significant public recognition.

If you'd like to know more:

The link to the New York Times print article is http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/theater/17foundry.html 

Toward the end of the print interview, there's a link also to an online "slide show" of works by The Foundry Theatre:  http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/17/theater/20100117_FOUNDRY_SLIDESHOW_index.html

Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome ... please scroll down, right your comment in the box, and click on "Post".  Thank you!

The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion, written and performed by David Greenspan, directed by Brian Mertes, The Foundry Theatre

 

David Greenspan, photo Jon Wasserman

 …  rhythms of awareness …

 

David Greenspan has all the characteristics of a fine performer -- he’s charming, is an excellent actor, has an expressive voice and body, and is an exceptional impersonator, but what makes what he does essential to see is that he’s so smart.  He “gets” everything, just like you do.  It’s so satisfying -- and validating!  You feel in your heart yes, I understand, yes, I know just what you mean.  At last!
 
Whether he’s delivering on the words of Aristotle, or Gertrude Stein or his own Myopia, his
subject is that thinking matters and his delivery follows the rhythms of awareness: it’s irresistibly fascinating to watch him do it and share it with you.
 
In The Myopia, there’s a stage, a chair, a bottle of water, and David Greenspan.  That’s all that’s needed for worlds to open up for you -- and the ones he chooses are often preposterous and totally liberating.  It’s a varied, exciting cosmos with unexpected events and rich characters evoked through description, “Light illuminates Warren G. Harding, immobile, seated in an easy chair in his room in the La Salle Hotel, Chicago, June 12, 1920,” and through impersonation -- you'll find Carol Channing engaged in vital conversation in The Myopia.  You believe he’s who he’s impersonating even though he makes no attempt to look like that person: in a riff, I could have sworn I heard Al Jolsen’s rising tenor.
 
To the extent that there’s an easily stated subject, The Myopia is a quest to understand the truth and power of drama and some episodes involve a playwright hiding out in the bathroom (what can one say? -- it is hard for writers to get the isolation they need).  The play, or maybe it’s a musical, is about how Warren Harding became President on a wave of corrupt politics (How’s that for a musical?).  In spite of Herculean efforts on all fronts by the guy with the typewriter in the bathroom, the authorship is in doubt since an electronic orb resembling my roomba (robot vacuum cleaner) named Barclay also claims in his R2d2 voice to be writing it (or is the author Barclay’s father?).  I found the orb ridiculous (I even got a little bored with it) but never with the overall stream of brilliant consciousness that is David Greenspan.  He overcomes the loneliness that separates humans -- a definition and achievement of great art.  When it’s over, you’re already looking forward for the next chance you’ll have to share Greenspan’s vision, bridging the impossible -- to see another’s inner view outward, through his eyes, his myopia.  Congratulations to the Foundry Theatre and Melanie Joseph, Artistic Producer, for bringing us this outstanding writer and performer in an essential event.   

It’s not surprising that Greenspan is taken by Aristotle on the art of theater, and Gertrude Stein’s stream of consciousness: in his dramatic readings of their works, you see the writer figuring it out.  Weekends during the run of The Myopia, you can see it as a "double feature" in
combination with his Plays, a lecture by Gertrude Stein (his earlier production reviewed here February 2009).  See both. 

The Myopia plays at the Atlantic Stage 2 in Manhattan's Chelsea, through February 7th.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome ... please scroll down past the photos, write in comment box and click on "post".  Thank you!

   Photos: Jon Wasserman
 

 

Little Gem by Elaine Murphy, presented by the Guna Nua/Civic Theatre, Ireland and the Flea Theatre

  ... the three ages of woman ...

In Little Gem, three women -- brilliant actors all -- face the audience to recount their characters' personal stories.  In this the play reminds me of Journeys, produced in New York a little over a year ago (reviewed here below Oct. 5, 2008), though in Journeys the seven stories are united only by the theme of the women's struggles for human rights in seven countries.  In Little Gem the uniting factor is that they are of one, modest Dublin family, though you don't know that right away.  As they take turns speaking, the spotlight shifting from one to another, we learn that they are daughter, mother, grandmother, their individual dramatic monologs blending like streams into a river into one narrative. 

We meet Lorraine as a mousy, cautious, compulsive woman called up to the office of the retail establishment where she works to explain her recent agitation (caused by concern over her ailing father) which led to an altercation with a customer.  Rather than take "time off," she's gently shoved toward meetings with a therapist who prescribes, "do one nice thing for yourself this week"  --  and does she ever!  Amber, Lorraine's teenage daughter, the opposite of her mother, is adorably pretty, lives for the moment, and loves partying and her boyfriend, who deserts her just as she becomes pregnant.  The mother of the family, Kaye, warm and humorous, eternally in love with her husband, "Gem" (from James), is positively itchy from sexual frustration because of a lack of action since his heart attack over a year ago which left him hazardously frail.  That all three are lusty women gives a particular strength and interest to what could be a rather sentimental play.  We never actually meet Gem or any of the men so central in the lives of these women but we sure hear about them.

How unusual for a contemporary play that these are not "career women," though they can hold a job.  These women aren't engaged in the world at large, and don't miss it;  the value of their lives is determined by their loving relationships.  And things tie up nicely.  For Lorraine, that "one nice thing for herself" a week becomes another ... and another .. if only therapy was always so successful!  The experience of having the baby boy, named "Little Gem" after her grandfather, brings Amber to a joyous sense of responsibility -- there's even a hint that the boyfriend may return.  Kay loses her husband to natural causes but her grief is somewhat buffered by the life-affirming love she shared with him, and the ongoing love of her daughter and granddaughter.  

What makes this play a "little gem" worth getting to the Flea Theatre to see during its short run is the marvelous acting:  Anita Reeves as Kay, Hilda Fay as Lorraine, and Sarah Greene as Amber.  They are all in terms of their own characters hilarious and touching.

Little Gem plays at the Flea Theatre in NYC's Tribeca through January 16.

Yvonne Korshak

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Anita Reeves as Kay, photo Futoshi Sakauch

    Hilda Fay as Lorraine, photo Futoshi Sakauch Sarah Green as Amber, photo Futoshi Sakauch
   
 
 

 

FILM NOTE: The Road starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, directed by John Hillcoat

The current issue of Scientific American (Jan 2010) has an article called "Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering".  The authors, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, calculate that the effects of a nuclear war between, for example, India and Pakistan could be enough to blot out the sun, the ultimate source of all our food:  we'd shiver and starve as we and most of the rest of life on earth wound down.  A major nuclear war between the U. S. and Russia isn't needed -- a smallish one could do the job.

This, or a comparable impact like a large asteroid hit, is the situation in The Road.  Starting some time after the apocalyptic disaster, when it's gotten good and cold, the movie focuses on one family, clinging to their home while reduced to eating insects.  But the mother can't take it anymore.  As a last loving act, she devises a way to commit suicide so as not to waste on herself the two last bullets in their gun:  her husband will need them.  Father and son head south, hoping the blessed sun may have a greater hold there, and that it will be brighter and warmer.  (don't count on it.)

The depiction of the barren, de-energized earth is relentless and the film offers no sentimental comforts.  The landscape now resembles the lunar vision of the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy but this isn't surreal -- it's real.  The same sense of "that's just how it would play out" carries through to the all-out brutality in the frightful encounters between the scarce human survivors along the road.  Food is the issue, cannibalism is the solution, along with opportunistic theft and sexual predation.  Survivalism an sadism join hands.  And given what humans do to one another on the earth when the sun shines and crops grow, how would it be otherwise in a struggle to survive at the edge of nothing?  

This movie should have been better than it is.  Viggo Mortensen was outstanding as the protective father in History of Violence, in my view among the finest movies (and that didn't get its fair due).  Good reason for him to be cast here as the father determined to enable his son's survival.  But the screenplay, after Cormac McCarthy's novel, in spite of the gruesome material, is uninventive.  The threats father and son face, grotesque as they are, manage to seem repetitive.  Again we may be eaten -- better get a move on.  Sometimes challenges are unfulfilled:  when the father starts to swim out to the boat for supplies, does he reach the boat?  The dialogue is flat, except for one poignant line when they reach a southern beach that I'll leave you to discover. Possibilities for an intriguing plot are missed.  The grim salvation at the end could have been a thread drawn from the fabric of earlier incidents:  the characters who make this possible are there, but instead the ending is tacked on with no lead-up.

But the movie stays in the mind because of the truth with which it plays out a devastating, and not-impossible, scenario.   

Yvonne Korshak

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Rasta Thomas' ROCK THE BALLET, starrring The Bad Boys of Dance, at the Joyce Theater

... or even badder? ...

Rock the Ballet  brings together rock music and ballet in a completely natural and satisfying combination -- as in, "so glad you did this!"  The ballet technique is superb, and incorporates movements from hip hop and other contemporary dance, and the music is the best of rock.

Interpreting both, and holding it all together are the outstanding lit backdrops by William Cusick, amalgams of computer design, video and photography that are stunningly beautiful works of art in themselves.  Since these evolve continuously, it's hard to pin them down in memory but the episode with large patches of oranges and yellow with thinning edges, like frayed linen -- sort of Mark Rothko sideways -- lingers. 

Rasta Thomas is a masterful ballet dancer and the most charismatic performer but all the dancers have wonderful -- even irresistible -- moments.  This is a great event to take young people to since the youngest in the audience know the music and love the athleticism of the dance -- along with the older ones!

In Act I:  BEAUTIFUL DAY, the accent is on joy.  It features dances composed to the music of the Black Eyed Peas, U2, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Mathews Band, Coldplay, Journey, as well as Bizet's Carmen sung by Maria Callas and "Ne Me Quitte Pas by Jacques Brel.  The partnering of Rasta Thomas and Adrienne Canterna-Thomas was particularly effective in "Ne Me Quitte Pas" -- the only music of the entire program the young people in my neighborhood didn't know but that didn't spoil their enjoyment of the dance.

ACT II:  ROCK YOU, lets out the stops on vibrant rhythms and big exciting noise -- with big exciting dance -- and the music of Clint Mansell, queen, Prince, and Michael Jackson.

Two small thoughts:  the choreography by Adrienne Canterna-Thomas is able but she could loosen up on her imagination.  More surprising, for a group that calls themselvesThe Bad Boys of Dance, they are on the well-behaved side.  Personally, I'd like to seem them even badder.  The fact is, though, Rock The Ballet left everyone with huge smiles, warm faces and heartbeats raised a pleasant notch.

Rock the Ballet  plays at the Joyce Theater in NYC's Chelsea through Jan 3.

   Yvonne Korshak

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Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Jeff Steiter, the Pearl Theatre Company

... an update on Hypatia ...

What a lark!  What delicious wit!  What a pleasure to see the Pearl's production of Shaw's Misalliance!  It would be hard to have a better time.

All the events of Misalliancetake place one summer day in the conservatory of the Tarletons' English country mansion.  John Tarleton has made a fortune in underwear, "rags-to-riches" you might say, yet in this play written in 1909 one of his guests is a British Lord, along with the Lord's son who wants to marry Tarleton's daughter, Hypatia.  Thus one of the themes of the play is about the new melding among the classes in England, as the upper class gets poorer and the upper middle class gets richer and buys them out.

The name, Hypatia, is a clue to another theme, women's struggle for independence and the opportunity to engage in meaningful activities in the world at large -- to have a career.  Hypatia is a feminist exemplar from the ancient world, a philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, inventory, administrator and lecturer in Alexandria, Egypt, tragically murdered as a heretic and for not knowing her place as a woman.  We find out quickly Hypatia Tarleton is longing for some unformulated adventure to fall from the sky and free her from her penned-in existence.  Unlike the earlier Hypatia, though, she doesn't dress mannishly like a scholar:  she's delicate, pretty, and aware of her feminine allure so romance -- as well as ideas -- are in the air.  She selects her husband -- not the other way around -- so in that, at least, she's one of Shaw's "new women."

And who has named her "Hypatia," her father, of course, who can't help making money but is also a great reader, drenched in the world of ideas, and ready to suggest at the drop of a hat which author you'd best read to solve whatever your current dilemma might be ... until in a critical moment in his own life it occurs to him what he should read, in one of the most amusing lines in all theater.  To think of how Shaw leads up to that moment is thrilling!  John Tarleton, big, blustering, rich, sensuous, realistic and idealistic is a great character, and holds the play together -- one doesn't want to lose him, and Dan Daily plays the part to a T.  The moment the play was over I wanted to see it again -- to spend more time with John Tarleton, and see what author to fit what life issue he would come up with next.

The physically weak but brainy aristocrat's son, Bentley Summerhays, is played off against the no nonsense, fist ready Johnny Tarleton ... but Johnny has his sensitivities, too.  No character is two-dimensional.  Of the women, Mrs. Tarleton comes closest to seeming like an old-fashioned, nurturing, well-domesticized wife but she goes along with that radical new idea -- an open marriage!  The advent of three newcomers -- two of whom actually do fall from the sky in what is surely the first plan crash in theater sets the plot in motion.  Joey Percival and Lina Szczepanowska (what fun Shaw -- and the characters -- have with pronouncing that name) bring various and inventive new love interest, Lina an archetypal tough career women in boots with a sexy Eastern European accent.   The Man who enters this garden of earthly delights near the end of Act I, the product of one of John Tarleton's flings with the women in his factory, does his part as the representative of the embittered lower classes, but he's tenderly co-opted by Mrs. Tarleton, for all his anarchist fury.  In Misalliance, the manufacturing Middle Class is winner-take-all.

The play has a few loose ends but why complain in the face of Shaw's wonderful stream of characters and wit ... or was I co-opted by wit?  I don't care -- it's a total delight!

Misalliance plays at City Center's Theater 2, in midtown Manhattan, through January 24th.

Yvonne Korshak 

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L-R:  Dan Daily (John Tarleton), Lee Stark (Hypatia Tarleton), and Sean McNall (The Man)

Photo by Sam Hough

BRIEF FILM NOTE: Invictus, Clint Eastwood's film starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

Excellent ... pulls you through the whole gamut of emotions AND gives great sense of history.  One of the greatest movies of all time?  No, because the characters are a little too simple and also there's a self-conscious quality to the great "bits" involving two races getting together, but still ... tremendous! 

Mandela's references to the poem, Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, written in 1875, are intensely moving.  In the context of being held in prison unjustly over a period of many years, those are two mighty last lines.  (Sometimes the poem is printed with the words in the first stanza "...my conquerable soul."  I can't imagine why.)  Henley wrote the poem in response to the amputation of his foot as a result of tuberculosis.  I'm including it below just to make it easy to get to and read. 

YK

INVICTUS

William Ernest Henly

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winched nor cried aloud 
Under the bludgeoning of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond the place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the horror of the shade 
And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

It matters not how straight the gate, 
How charged with punishment the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul. 

The Great Recession at the Flea Theater, plays by Thomas Bradshaw, Sheila Callaghan, Erin Courtney, Will Eno, Itamar Moses Moses and Adam Rapp

The Flea is presenting six plays by six authors, each with some reference to the recession.  The actors are drawn from The Flea's "Bats," the young, capable and energetic actors of their resident company -- you find yourself hoping for a good show at least as much for them as for yourself, but it doesn't happen.  For most of the plays, the link to the recession is so synthetic it doesn't matter.  The plays don't matter much either, which is too bad for what must have seemed like a good idea.

Classic Kitchen Timer by Adam Rapp is based around a kill or be killed bargain.  A character out of work is offered $25,000 to murder a baby or herself be murdered.  If someone "in the audience" prevents her from killing the baby in a set time, she'll killed by whoever interferes, which occurs, leading to the bargain being reset for him -- kill the baby and make a lot of money or be killed, and so on ...   The situation is so bizarre that it doesn't illuminate the lives of those out of work because of the recession (or for any other reason).

Fucked shows Itamar Moses' keen ear for the dialog of contemporary relationships as in his enjoyable Love Stories at The Flea, reviewed here February 2009.  There are similar amusing moments in this one, but nothing really happens:  the girl leaves but that's a foregone conclusion, and it's also obvious from the start that the guy doesn't care.  A phone conversation reveals that the guy's dad has lost money in commodities but that doesn't figure in the play and so seems squeezed in to fit the recession theme. 

In New York Living, Thomas Bradshaw returns to his loveless couples breaking up and recoupling -- what difference does it make who as long as there's a live body and some sex?  In his recently produced The Bereaved, reviewed in September, this theme had a political purpose -- it was the engine that drove a revolutionary parable.  Here, the "issues" between the couples are childishly prurient with much ado about erections, and the mechanical breakups and recouplings have no purpose at all, like the plot of Cosi Fan Tutte without the music.  Needing a place to live figures but -- boom or bust -- that's always true for young actors in New York City. 

Severed by Erin Courtney is a conversation between two people on a bench in which the young man, in a fine suit, is out of work but optimistic, and the young woman, who seems briefly attracted to him, leaves for her job with preschoolers wearing as she does for work a huge over-the-head bulbous eunuch's mask.

In Recess by Sheila Callaghan, insane people mill around an open area as in a classic Bedlam.  One lies dead and another's dead by the end from compulsive exercise and anorexia, while a couple plays footsies, men fight, and the group eats a meager meal while imagining better fare.  So many people appear nude in Recess that by the end it's totally clear that there's a difference between male and female anatomies but then that's not news.  Recess, the program says, takes place in an "apocalyptic near future when the bottom has indeed fallen out" but you wouldn't know if you hadn't read it.

Unum by Will Eno, about the mighty and not-so-mighty dollar, develops slowly and stiffly and with empty pauses between episodes, until finally it reaches a truly affecting passage when a mother with Alzheimer's is moved to a care facility because of the squeeze on living space.

Two performances stand out among many good ones.  In Classic Kitchen Timer, Nick Maccarone is wry and balletic as a Host, really a Master of Ceremonies in the style of Joel Grey in Cabaret  (though the role seems pointless in connection with the play).  Jessica Pohly in Fucked has a terrific comic delivery while conveying genuine feeling, like Carol Burnett.  

The Great Recession plays at The Flea Theater in NYC's Tribeca through December 30.

Yvonne Korshak

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Dorien Makhloghi and Jessica Pohly in Fucked by Itamar Moses
Photo: Courtesy of The Flea Theater

 

 

Orpheus X written and composed by Rinde Eckert, directed by Robert Woodruff, with Rinde Eckert, Suzan Hanson and John Kelly, video by Denise Marika

... so that's what it's like down in Hades ...

 

I thought Rinde Eckert's two-person play, And God Created the Great Whales, was one of the greatest pieces of theater I'd ever seen so I was keen to see Orpheus X, a multi-media performance piece with drama, singing, instrumental music, and video, that recounts the ancient myth in contemporary terms.  It has touches of genius, and is also somewhat tiresome, darn it!

 

Passing through the understructure in the small theater, you see through steel beams on the other side a pale, lovely looking naked woman with red hair, concentrating fiercely as she scribbles with chalk on glass set in the floor.  It's surprising, intriguing and seems of compelling importance.  Inside, a video plays of the woman scribbling, seen from below the glass so everything's reversed including a few intelligible Greek characters.  The sound of scratching is its own music.  I focused on every scribble, every shift of style and pace, feeling surely I'd learn something essential if only I concentrated hard enough.  Rinde Eckert's a genius! I thought.  This fascinating segment, however, occurs before the play begins.

 

All the parts are sung as well as spoken, and Eckert's Orpheus is a contemporary rock star whose lover, Eurydice, has been killed by a taxi in which Orpheus was riding in a no-fault sad accident.  The play takes place largely where he lives but also in his studio, since the four-piece band is always on stage playing Eckert's meditative music.  Eckert grieves for Eurydice so that, like Achilles in his tent, he curls up in a corner and refuses to make music and bring joy to his fans, in spite of blandishments from his manager, the charismatic performer John Kelly.  Eventually, as in the ancient myth, Orpheus makes it to Hades to bring his Eurydice back.  Ultimately, like the ancient Orpheus but for a different, perverse reason, Orpheus loses Eurydice forever because while leading her out of Hades but before they've reached the land of the living, he sets eyes on her.

 

It's always fun -- as in Aristophanes'  Frogs -- to get a look at Hades!  Here the underworld is represented largely by John Kelly now playing an androgynous Persephone -- Pluto, Cerberus, the river Lethe are referred to but not seen.  Persephone's song as Queen of Hades as sung by Kelly is an outstanding moment.  We come to understand Eurydice's chalk:  on earth she'd been a poet, but Hades is where nothing lasts, including memory, so instead of her pens, here for writing she has only ephemeral chalk.

 

With all this good material of the myth -- that's been a narrative success through the centuries -- and with Eckert's multi-faceted talent, and three fine performers, why isn't this play more compelling?  Why, in fact, short as it is, near the end, in a quiet moment came a loud yawn (I actually found myself checking my watch) though also at the end I heard behind me "he's a genius"?

 

The most important reason is that Orpheus and Eurydice's love doesn't come across as real.  They have no chemistry, and I never believed he missed her.  This Orpheus mopes, but doesn't yearn.  Eckert seems more interested in acting, poetry, song, instrumental music, lighting and video than in Eurydice.  Suzan Hanson, the pale skinned red-haired Eurydice has a nice operatic voice and an alluring figure but after a time one got tired of seeing her, again and again, naked and more naked, on the repetitive video.

 

It doesn't help that while some of the poetry is interesting, the dialog is flat.  "Do you love me?"  "She'll be back later."  "I love having breakfast with you."  Context doesn't bring life to lines like that.  It also doesn't help that the singers are miked which tended to make their voices abrasive, particularly Eckert's.  Why, and in a small theater of all places, would professional performers use microphones? 

 

Above all, though, it's about characters and what happens to them.  In Orpheus X, the powerful and evidently eternal theme of love and loss is a scaffold for multi-media.

 

Orpheus X plays at The Duke on 42nd Street, Theater for a New Audience, West of Broadway in Manhattan, through December 20

Yvonne Korshak

 

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Rinde Eckert, John Kellly and Suzan Hanson in Orpheus X, Photo Courtesy of Production

 

   

 

The Age of Iron from William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Thomas Heywood's Iron Age, adapted and directed by Brian Kulick, at Classic Stage

Just about the entire legend of the Trojan War is told -- or at least "covered" -- in The Age of Iron, from Paris' abduction of Helen to the sack of Troy by the Greeks using their ruse of the "Trojan Horse," all the way to the suicide of Ajax.  Brian Kulick achieved this mainly by appending to Shakespeare's play, which is focused on a short period toward the end of the war, the "beginning" and the "end" from another Elizabethan play, Heywood's Iron Age.   The Age of Iron is beautifully produced and you both hear the poetry of Shakespeare's language and understand every word.   

Even those Shakespearian idioms and figures of speech that are not current in today's English make sense and have a strong impact as if suddenly one understood "Elizabethan," a magic I can't explain and that I found particularly rewarding about this production.

Was it effective to fit the whole story into one drama?  There are pluses and minuses.

Homer begins the Iliad at a time late in the war and concludes it before the war's end, as does Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida.  Paris doesn't slay Achilles with an arrow to his heel in the Iliad, there's no Trojan Horse, no sack of Troy, no vote among the Greeks over awarding Achilles' armor, and no suicide of Ajax.  In giving themselves a sharp focus, Homer and Shakespeare knew what they were doing -- no surprise there -- but there is great adventurousness and effect in Kulick's telling of the story.

There's a real satisfaction to getting the complete narrative, or most of it, under one's belt in a single evening.  And not unimportant, it's genuine fun to see dramatized the source of those famous figures of speech we use all the time -- "Achilles' heel," "Trojan horse" (though I'd liked to have seen the horse).  On the other hand, in giving us the whole story, The Age of Iron loses some dramatic impact.  The play is presented in two parts, and part 2, where many people start getting killed off, and eventually we leave Shakespeare and move into Heywood, becomes overlong and somewhat wordy. 

Still, the heart of the excellently staged (on a field of sand), acted, and directed production is Shakespeare's fascinating, perverse play, with his language at full sail.  In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare turns on the tables on expectations.  The great heroes turn out to be venial:  Achilles doesn't meet Hector in fair fight but pulls in his gang of Myrmidons to attack and kill him -- and then takes full credit!  Ulysses' sophistry beats Ajax' heroism.  Troilus and Cressida's pure love is sullied.  Some call that "problematic," but to watch the conflicts and interactions of these fully written and oh so human characters is intensely interesting.  What a leap of imagination -- the banquet where the leaders of the Greeks and Trojans agree to a truce so that for once they can drink and dine together, and can't manage to keep the peace for the duration of a single evening! 

Troilus and Cressida would have been enough to produce.  A more ambitious and overarching choice was made.  What would off-Broadway be if it wasn't ready to fulfill new creative visions?  One leaves this banquet fully satisfied.

The Age of Iron plays at the Classic Stage in NYC's East Village through December 6th.  Yvonne Korshak

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Finn Wittrock as Troilus and Dylan Moore as Cressida  Photo:  T. Charles Erickson

Idiot Savant starring Willem Dafoe, written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman at The Public Theater, in association with Ontologic-Hysteric Theater

Idiot Savant is a chaotic, post modern play that eludes meaning but is a great vehicle for Willem Dafoe's particular performance talents:  his powerful ability to express every state of mind from the hilarious to the desperate through his extraordinarily mobile face and articulated body, and his energy, intelligence, and willingness to go all the way.

The set is like a character and one sees it first so let's start with it.  It's a room crowded with stuff like hanging chandeliers, mirrors, cabinets, looming closed doors, portraits of one man's face repeated from one end of the room to the other, geometric patterns, rows of alternating dark and light squares, all spelling claustrophobic and obsessive.  It is hung with letters of the alphabet, some in proper order and repeated in reverse, some random, suggesting a play about meaning or the lack of it.  Numbers are painted on the floor.  It is a compelling projection of a locked-in intelligence, of the idiot savant who dwells there.

When Dafoe throws himself onto this stage dressed in a zany maid's uniform and a man's necktie, his hair partly tied in a top-of-the-head pony tail, it's an electric moment.  Everything Dafoe does in this is electric, but as far as the play goes, nothing much happens.  Two women move around this room with the idiot, Marie, in a medieval looking long velvet dress with a cross around her neck, read "purity," and Olga, in riding pants, a Hedda Gabbler with a delicious Eastern European accent.  A man between two women representing two poles of femininity.  Again.  The Idiot Savant is sexually drawn now to Marie, now to Olga but can never break through the shell that keeps him to himself.  There are lots of amusing bits, gymnastics, mysterious boxes, characters appearing from cubby holes, disappearing through doors, there are servants who appear stiffly with dark and light square patterned bows lifted as if to catch a deer on a medieval tapestry, lots of distractions but no real action.  I was a little disappointed the Idiot Savant didn't do or say anything all that savant, unless his musings and utterances were more savvy than I could catch.

Until finally an over twice-human size figure comes walking in with a prominent yellow duck's bill and duck's face, and we're given to believe that he is a god, or god-like.  He speaks platitudes in an electronically altered sonorous voice that we've been hearing intermittently since the beginning.  Things actually dull down in his presence, and really, he seems such a stupid idea.  If you were thinking maybe there was something to this play, here's where you decide for sure there isn't.  Shortly the Big Duck takes off "forever."  Dafoe does all he can to save the play with a final stunning and astounding freeze moment.

I wondered (before Big Duck) whether the idea of this play might be that human beings, the most intelligent creatures on earth, are idiot savants, locked away from one another in impotent isolation.  Maybe, but though you can make the words work, that's not really what comes across.  Idiot Savant is exciting visuals and a thrilling actor in search of a better play.

Idiot Savant plays at The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan through December 13.

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Willen Dafoe in Idiot Savant.  Photo:  Joan Marcus

The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney at The Public Theater

Three plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney that have several characters in common, take place mainly among Blacks in Louisiana bayou country and move forward in time are billed as a Trilogy.  The Brothers Size, in the center, is built around a significant conflict and is a fine one-act play.  The other two are choreographed, and dramatically and aesthetically lit -- there are some great effects but one senses the hyper treatment is making up for their weakness as plays.  The Brothers Size, presented in a straightforward fashion, carries its own weight.  McCraney writes with a fine poeteic realism throughout, and the acting in all three plays is excellent but Marc Damon Johnson as Ogun Size in The Brothers Size is monumental.   The names of the characters are drawn from Yoruba gods. 

In the Red and Brown Water

The first, In the Red and Brown Water, directed by Tina Landau, focuses on Oya, a young Black woman who's a talented runner, as we learn in beautifully choreographed and visually patterned scenes.  She's offered an athletic scholarship to the state university but doesn't want to leave her ailing mother (and it's annoying and unmotivated that her mother, supposedly very loving and good, doesn't encourage her daughter to seize the day and live her own life).  By the time her mother dies, the University's second choice in the running slot has "taken seven minutes off her time" and Oya's opportunity is lost.  The rest of the play takes up Oya's relationship with men -- not good, no surprise there.  She's drawn to the dashing Shango who's not committed to her, and courted by the solid, stolid Ogun Size.  This is a place about a young woman who makes poor choices in terms of her own fulfillment in life but we don't understand anything about her that helps us understand why.  In terms of personality, she seems normal enough, well balanced, intelligent.  We aren't given reasons to see her problems as involving racism, or conflicts between the individual and society either, because the world at large doesn't cause her problems that we witness;  what we see is that she's offered a scholarship by a reasonable recruiter.  When she makes the choices she does, it's annoying rather than tragic.  One feels like saying, "get real."

The Brothers Size   photo below

The conflict in this three-character play, directed by Robert O'Hara, is fascinating.  Oshoosi Size is the brother who has just returned from prison.  Ogun, the older brother, deeply committed to taking care of Oshoosi and looking after his welfare, is trying to keep him on the straight and narrow -- getting him up in the early a.m. to work in Ogun's auto repair shop, for instance.  Oshoosi is willing but unsettled -- he's hungry for girls, you're never sure he'll stick around, finish the job, stay out of trouble.  In the audience, you worry about this almost as much as Ogun does.  Oshoosi wants freedom, both from jail and some other freedom having to do with the spirit, that Ogun doesn't understand but feels as danger.  Elegba comes by the shop, a smaller, smiling, ingratiating man, and he procures, shadily, what Oshoosi's been wanting, a car.  He gives it to Oshoosi.  This is out of the ordinary, and given the freedom that the car offers, worrisome.  The relationships turn out to be more complicated than they seemed at first.  Oshoosi and Elegba were friends before prison, and were together in prison, where Elegba was a great comfort to Oshoosi.  And now here he is again, tempting Oshoosi to trouble, which occurs and is the crisis of the play.  Ultimately, Ogun grows to the situation, and gives Oshoosi what he's always wanted:  freedom, both kinds.  Ogun is a great character and Marc Damon Johnson's portrayal of Ogun's certainty of purpose, tenderness, fundamental goodness, his breakthrough to a new level of understanding -- a new capacity to provide what is needed -- is powerful.

The relationship between Oshoosi and Elegba seemed equivocal.  Elegba takes Oshoosi by surprise in initiating a sexual seduction, yet they've known each other all their lives, including in prison;  considering all they've been through together, it doesn't ring true that this dimension of their relationship only arises now.

.Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet

The final play, directed by O'Hara, a coming-of-age story of a homosexual boy, is the weakest of the three because there are no strong conflicts.  That's surprising because there sure are plenty of potential conflicts but these are vitiated.  As it emerges that Marcus is "sweet," people are generally bemused but accepting;  his girlfriend puts up a little static but they work it out;  and he himself, while puzzled by a dream about an older man who appears always in rain, is basically accepting of himself also.  In lieu of conflict the play is peppered with colorful "characters" who keep things going but, while fun to watch, they don't substitute for drama.

Why is this a trilogy?  Ogun Size appears in all three plays, but he's only a powerful character in the second.  He could be almost anybody in the first and third.  Other characters' names are recognizable in two or three of the plays but, though there's a genealogy, it doesn't drive the action.  We learn, for example, that Oshooshi has died in the third play but we know nothing of why or how, so while it makes the (watered down) Ogun sad, there's no dramatic continuity from Oshooshi's major role in the second play.  The Brother/Sister Plays don't have the driving force of a trilogy.  

But there's a driving force to see The Brothers Size.   

The Brother/Sister Plays are at Public Theater in downtown Manhattan through December 13. 

 Yvonne Korshak

Comments are extremely welcome!  Please scroll down past the photo and click on "comment".  Thank you!

 Marc Damon Johnson as Ogun and Brian Tyree Henry Oshoosi in The Brothers Size  Photo: Joan Marcus

  

 

Down Range by Jeffrey Skinner, directed by Trish Minskoff, with Bob Celli, Steve Sherman, Rachel Parker, Thaddeus Daniels, Tracy Weller

... it matters ...

Down Range brings us into the world of career soldiers and their families, the tensions that shape their lives, and the effects of deployment in Iraq.  Frank and Doc and their wives Beth and Eva are a close foursome.  Once they were young and playful, picnicking near a lake but more recently life has come to weigh heavier.  The play moves back and forth through time and we see it all as the men pursue their careers, early romance gives way to infidelity, and the women live as adjuncts, hangers on, one finding sufficient satisfaction in her family life, the other childless and bitter.  That's how it's been until now.  But the convoy the two buddies were traveling in while serving together in Iraq is hit by an IED and Doc, it seems, is killed.  We witness the military protocol with which Doc's body is escorted home, while Frank returns alive.

A particular strength of Down Range is its exploration of various kinds of love at different stages of life, between lovers and between friends, between rivals, and between the living and the dead.  It imbues this often stark view of military living with great humanity, and makes all the more vivid the world it reveals to those not in the military, and the range of sacrifices our soldiers and their families are called upon to make.  Here at last, in a rather slow-starting off-Broadway season, is a well written, beautifully acted play about something that matters to us all.   

Down Range  plays at Theater 3 on West 43rd Street in New York City through November 14.  It's produced by Delano Celli Productions, sponsored by Beth Davis In Good Company.

 Yvonne Korshak

Comments are very welcome, please scroll down past the photo and comments that have been made to click on the word "comments" ... email addresses never appear with comments.

     

Thaddeus Daniels and Bob Celli in Down Range
 

 

   

The Young Archer sculpture "attributed to Michelangelo" on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

... sexual coming into being ... 

 

The Young Archer now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a sculpture of sexual discovery.  The nude, sensuous, sinuous, lightly built, somewhat effeminate youth, an object of desire, draws an arrow from his quiver with a dreamy look.  And what a quiver -- made from the paw of a leonine animal:  long, thick, strong, feral, in every way a contrast to the slim, delicate boy.  In this play of contrasts, the boy's act of drawing out his arrow from the quiver becomes a nascent sexual act.  (see the three photos of the Young Archer below) 

 

Did Michelangelo carve the Young Archer?  There's little or no evidence he did.

 

In the mid-16th Century a visitor to the palazzo of Jacopo Galli in Rome, Ulisse Aldovrandi, noting Michelangelo's sculpture of Bacchus, next comments about an "Apollo" that he says is a work by the "same" artist.  The curator, James David Draper, has a light touch, and has wisely not made too much of Aldovrandi's comment -- there's no reason to believe that this philosopher and naturalist, visiting from Bologna, was correct about Michelangelo's authorship -- all the more since he calls the work "Apollo" while the Young Archer is most likely Cupid.  Apollo is represented as older and most often with his lyre, not drawing an arrow from his quiver.  Michelangelo was the most famous and adored artist of the 16th Century and many works were said to be by him that were not.  Eventually, the Archer, now owned by France was on display at the French Embassy Cultural Service at 972 Fifth Avenue in NYC, and is currently on a ten-year loan just across the street at the Metropolitan Museum.

 

In sum, the sculpture's history doesn't support attributing it to Michelangelo.

 

What about stylistic traits and comparisons with Michelangelo's other works?  One should look particularly to his early works because, if by Michelangelo, The Archer would have been made in 1490 or '91 when he was around fifteen or sixteen, living in the palazzo of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, learning his skills and absorbing classical ideas and knowledge of classical art.

 

There are no significant stylistic comparisons.  Comparisons that have been claimed, such as "perfect correspondences" between passages in the carving of the hair of the Young Archer and Michelangelo's Kneeling Angel of 1494 in Bologna but upon observation, these are simply not there. 

 

A key issue involves classical contrapposto.  As in classical works, the Young Archer stands (as one can reconstruct from the current condition) with his weight distributed unevenly on his legs, a shift of weight that reflects the famous classical Greek negotiation with gravity -- the "deal" the human body makes to remain upright against gravity's incessant pull.  But the counter position isn't carried through to the Young Archer's head.  If it were, there would be a movement in his head in the direction opposite that of the more open, expanded side of his chest -- but no, the Archer's head follows the open chest.  From Michelangelo's earliest works, contrapposto is a central theme of his art.  In his first known carving, Battle of the Centaurs, among all the gyrations of figures, the play of opposites is always there. 

 

And throughout the figures he painted as well as scupted, seated as well as standing -- one can think of the Slaves, Moses, or the Prophets of the Sistine Chapel -- Michelangelo uses the tension of contrapposto, often as a kind of grinding conflict within the body, to convey inner, spiritual struggle in physical terms, to make the invisible visible.  It is a signature motif.

 

I think, though, there is one tantalizing reason for linking the work to Michelanglo:  its cleverness.  It's worth considering in connection with the Archer, that Michelangelo's early David, with its magnificent contrapposto, represents a spiritual coming of age.  The Archer represents a sexual coming of age.  Themes of coming of into being, process, movement, emerging, are characteristic of Michelangelo's art.  And the powerful idea of the sexually loaded contrast between the boy and the quiver may also point in Michelangelo's direction.  It's quirky enough for him!  But these issues are a "soft" kind of evidence for attributing a work -- and Michelangelo wasn't the only talented young sculptor around Florence to "come of age."

 

Since the Young Archer would be an early work, an advocate for Michelangelo can discount anything that doesn't "fit" in with what's known about him by saying he was still very young.  There are awkward anatomical passages -- "He was still learning."  The contrapposto is incomplete -- "He hasn't gotten there yet."  But discounting anything and everything doesn't get you anywhere.  The question of who made the work remains wide open.

 

Maybe he just made that quiver!

 

Yvonne Korshak

 

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FILM NOTE: A Serious Man with Michael Stuhlbarg, written, produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

... Job in the Midwest ...

Billed as a dark comedy, A Serious Man is a modern version of the story of Job.  Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a likeable, responsible Jewish man, a Physics professor in a Midwestern university who's terrific covering the blackboard with Heinsenberg's uncertainty principle equations, his intensity indicating true passion for his subject.  Piece by piece, though, everything goes wrong.  His wife leaves him for another man who sends Larry off to stay at the local motel with his brother with the disgusting, suppurating sebaceous cyst.  His daughter's a narcissist, his son's just this side of delinquent, his neighbor impinges on his property, etc... etc...  The rabbis of his congregation can't provide meaningful guidance and the lawyers don't do any better, while running up big bills.  Even when things pick up -- againsts the odds, it seems, his son makes it through his Bar Mitzvah -- they quickly sour.

That may sound interesting in outline -- it works well in the Bible -- but it's not a good movie.  For one thing, the characters just do whatever the film makers want them to in order to make life hard for Larry -- nobody's bothered to make them consistent.  Why does his wife leave him?  And then why does she warm up to him at the Bar Mitzvah?  The writers give us no clue -- maybe we're supposed to fall back on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but that's not good enough for the plot.  Two days before the committee is to meet to consider Larry's application for tenure at the University, the Chair drops by to mention it would be useful for Larry to let the tenure committee know of anything he's published in his field.  "I've done nothing," Larry says, like it's a new idea.  Nonsense, he would know the score.  And anyhow that's not how the process works -- why didn't the Coen brothers bother to get things straight?

Although Larry is the main character, visually and otherwise the movie feels as if it's told from a child's point of view.  There are many close-ups of older people's hairy ears, droopy noses and overlarge, wet mouths, uniformly yucky.  In one scene, Larry's son actually does face a rabbi who seems terrifying but turns out a humbug, like the Wizard of Oz.  Most important for the character of the movie, though, Larry's helplessness is like that of a child in an adult world, his struggle lacks Job's metaphysical strength. 

This seems like a grudge movie -- an ugly tone of old resentments.  Let's get back at the fathers, mothers, teachers, rabbis -- all those hypocrites, weaklings and moral cop-outs who call themselves adults.   Didn't the Coen brothers take well to the guidance, religious and otherwise, they received as boys?  Who knows?  The worst thing the rabbis do in the film is fail to explicate the meaning of life, nor do they solve the problem of evil.  It's hard to hold those failures against anybody, even Heisenberg.

Yvonne Korshak

The Oldsmobiles by Roger Rosenblatt with Richard Masur and Alice Playten, directed by Jim Simpson, at the Flea Theater

... rule of thumb ...

The Oldsmobiles is a conversation between a couple in their 60's perched on the Manhattan Bridge and getting ready to commit suicide by jumping into the East River.  

The title, well, Oldsmobiles were upper middle end cars now obsolete and the inference is so are these Oldsmobiles. 

Only -- just one of the play's many inconsistencies -- they really aren't.  They're still very fit as we're told several times, lead varied, interesting lives and have enough money to carry on quite well.  

He's more gung ho to commit suicide than she is but she'll go along.  Why is simply never clear.  The whole situation is unthought, the characterizations inconsistent, the set-up no more than a platform for some banal jokes:  if they draw a laugh at all it's because of some recognizable reference to "contemporary life".  The couple's children don't have much interest in their parents -- they show up when the media have caught on to the news story about a couple evading rescue about to jump into the river but they don't stick around.  This is funny?  Periodically one Oldsmobile says to the other, "You're stupid," or asks "Is this profound," to which the other answers "no."

Oh shoot!  The Flea has done such wonderful shows, why'd they have to come up with this one?  

One of the dullest plays I've ever seen was by the brilliant cartoonist Jules Feiffer at Circle Repertory Theater:  before the lights came up, my friend and I asked each other, "Why would Feiffer produce his play in this small off-Broadway theater when with his name you'd think he could take it anywhere?"  We found out.

Roger Rosenblatt has written some plays, I learned from the program, but he's known for other writing and as a public television personality. 

Rule of thumb:  if a person with a "name" for something other than plays produces one in a small off-Broadway theater, approach with caution.   

The Oldsmobiles  

  plays at Flea Theater in NYC's Tribeca through November 14   

 Yvonne Korshak

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Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge, directed by J. R. Sullivan, The Pearl Theatre Company

       ... not all 'classics' are classic ...

J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World is an overrated classic.  It's a well constructed play hinging on a preposterous idea:  that an entire isolated Irish village, particularly the women, would become totally infatuated with a young man who appears suddenly among them because, according to him, he killed his father in an act of rage.  It doesn't hold water. 

No wonder the Irish were enraged when it first played at the Abbey Theatre in 1907: this characterization of the Irish villagers, by the well born and highly educated Irish playwright, is early modern primitivizing -- Gauguin in the South Seas -- with the remote villagers the "natives," whom Synge depicts as gullible and violent as if that adds up to some kind of naive purity.  It was the literary avant garde, not the Irish populace whose spirit Synge claimed to celebrate, that nudged Playboy into the modern canon.  No wonder it doesn't hold up well today, even when given an earnest and competent production by Pearl Theatre.

The down and out young man who arrives in town, Christy Mahon, embellishes his tale of patricide as he sees the enchantment it casts on his listeners, particularly Pegeen Mike, the pub owner's daughter whom he plans to marry, with all the promise of security and prosperity that good match holds for him.  Things fall into place so well for him that Christy only wishes he'd "killed his father sooner."  Augmenting his larger-than-life image in the village, he also begins to win horse races, though these take place off-stage and are puzzling rather than convincing for the audience.  But the villagers go gaga.

Ultimately Christy has his great comedown.  It turns out he's no dashing superman but a wimp, dominated by a very large and brutal father who appears in town quite alive, much to everyone's amazement, with only a bloody head wound from Christy's blow.  To salvage his reputation Christy tries to kill him a few more times but the father just won't go down, heightening Christy's humiliation.  Unable to kill him, Christy finally leaves town with him, having reached a degree of father-son understanding.  Since this is a "well made play," Pegeen Mike changes, too:  after having turned on him in a particularly horrible way, she loses him totally, emerging with a deeper though now hopeless love.

Sean McNall as Christy, who recently gave a memorable performance as the sensitive, indecisive narrator in Tennessee William's Vieux Carre, isn't convincing as Playboy's swashbuckling liar.  Lee Stark is the charming and feisty pub owner's daughter who falls in love with Christy;  and the open flirtatiousness of all the girls is an interesting counterpoint to the mature sexuality of Widow Quin, played by Rachel Botcham.  All the actors do a good job of capturing Synge's Irish language but in the rough and tumble of the play, a lot of words are missed.  In general, the play is at its best when the ordinary moments of living are taking place, not in the moments of excess.

The Pearl Theatre has just moved from a proscenium theater to this one with seats on three sides but Playboy was staged to the center as if still in the old theater.  I imagine as they warm up to it they'll do more with the exciting possibilities of the audience surrounding the playing area.

The Playboy of the Western World plays at New York City Center, Theater II, through November 22.

Yvonne Korshak

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L-R Lee Stark (Pegeen Mike) and Sean McNall) Christy Mahon

Photo by Gregory Costanzo

 

 

Oleanna by David Mamet, directed by Doug Hughes, with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles

     ... he said, she said ...

Oleanna is a parable of social revolution along the lines of Bonfire of the Vanities or Animal Farm.  It doesn't have the internal consistency that's made those a kind of starting point for thinking, but still, it resonates. 

What first hits one is the glamorous set, a vast and luxurious professor's office beyond anything in the Ivy League, let alone an office for an untenured college prof at Oleanna.  It's used to underline the power and class disparities between the Professor and the student but spells, "this isn't real." 

Carol, a college student in danger of failing a course visits her Professor, John, in that office to understand why she's not doing better and get him to give her another chance.

Each is under pressure, Carol not to fail, and John because he's currently under consideration for tenure.  Mamet ups the stakes for John:  betting on a post-promotion raise, he's settling on a bigger and better house ahead of time (what's the rush?  I doubted he'd be that foolish.)  Carol doesn't "get" what John tries to explain about her academic weaknesses and John becomes frustrated and over-excited about that and everything else.  Mamet sure knows how to set up a conflict and write peppery dialogue to go with it, complete with naturalistic interrupted sentences, and these fine actors have perfect timing.

The script begins its slide into unbelievability, though, about those academic weaknesses.  The sentence John reads aloud from her paper is illogical, but no liberal arts student who attends all classes, listens attentively, takes copious notes, checks in with the teacher in his office for more clarification, who is from a lower class background, and who really tries like Carol, fails courses because of her writing -- certainly not in recent history.  (If they did, who'd be left in class?)

John's hyper state leads him to do several things not quite right for a Professor dealing with a student.  He reveals too much emotional intensity about personal and professional topics, from problems closing on the house and the too constant phone calls to the ideas in his book (of course required reading).  He tries too hard to get Carol to understand not only her academic difficulties but his professional opinions and mind set.  Once or twice he sits on the same sofa:  watching, one can see not great judgment but nothing truly out of hand.  Carol, meanwhile, seems quite unintelligent, her responses so off the point we wonder how she could have pulled together even a badly written paper.

After a time, Carol returns to the office, having filed complaints with the tenure committee about John on several points, raising John's level of tension.  She visits again, and then again, each time having raised the ante from complaints about his teaching to more sensational charges, from the tenure committee to the courts.  Their power arcs intersect as intensifying threats send John downward toward fear and despair and Carol upward on an impact surge.  With the speed of light, Carol changes from being verbally weak to throwing off sophisticated, politicized arguments about gender and class with astonishing fluency.  

We know he didn't do much of what she claims to get him into big trouble, but that she's turned emotionally driven phrases and gestures into hard-edged errors and crimes in order to destroy him.  Since it's just her word against his, however, he's helpless, or so we're to think.

Oleanna is most effective in its open-ended exploration of its secondary theme, class conflicts in the academic context.  Carol, who "has worked really hard to get here," is enraged that her college professor has written about education, the very system that pays him and lets him live better than anything she ever knew, in a sarcastic and dismissive way.  She has a point.

To punch home his main political argument, however, Mamet forswears the consistent character development of his Speed-the-Plow, off-Broadway last year, and American Buffalo, reviewed here below.  Oleanna is written with dramatic power, but it would be a more compelling exploration of victimization through untestable sexual harassment charges, and generally of determining guilt without witnesses, if the thought "that's not real," didn't keep intruding. 

Oleanna plays at the Golden Theatre, 45th Street West of Broadway, NYC.

Yvonne Korshak

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Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Jude Law, directed by Michael Grandage

 

... a two man show ...

Sometimes theater goers will say of classic plays, "I sawThe Seagull -- or A Doll's House -- or Hamlet -- recently, I'm just not ready to see another one".  Fair enough, but Jude Law puts such a distinctive mark on Hamlet that, believe me, you haven't seen this, ever.

His Hamlet is a younger man than most seem to be (regardless of the actor's age).  His performance is athletic, unquestionably charismatic (the audience applauds after every great scene like after an aria in an opera), and openly vulnerable.  He listens to others intensely, and his words, thoughts and actions come as genuine responses flowing from within -- the script falls away and Shakespeare's character emerges as a real, conflicted, engaged man.  He's all over the stage.  He gives himself completely, with a great actor's generosity, to the performance.

Law does full justice to the astonishing poetry without any archaic distance to separate us from the language -- we hear the way he talks.  In this he's helped by the production's unobtrusive modern dress that underscores the play's timelessness.  You hardly notice whether the actors are wearing Elizabethan costumes or not.

The youthfulness of this Hamlet lays an interesting slant on his tangled involvement with his mother, his father, and the saturated sexuality of his mother's new marriage to his murdered father's brother.  "Why doesn't he kill Claudius?"  "What's his problem?"  To the many answers to that central puzzle, Law brings what seems to me a new take -- though a man physically, he's still somehow a boy living at home caught up in youthful conflicts.  The care with which he listens to others and himself suggests he's still formative.  He's not yet ready for the burden that's placed on him. 

If only the rest of the actors were as good as Law!  They are uniformly routine stereotypes in the way they play their characters (Claudius, Gertrude), some seem to be thinking about something else (Horatio), some are strained (Ophelia) and some are downright dull (Laertes).  They mostly spring from London's Donmar Warehouse theater that has a big reputation, simply not lived up to in this production.

All the weight of the play is on two men's shoulders -- Jude Law and Shakespeare.  Luckily they're both in brilliant form! 

Hamlet plays at the Broadhurst Theater, 44th Street West of Broadway, through December 6. 

p.s.  How interesting that two film actors created two outstanding Shakespearean characters this year -- Jude Law as Hamlet and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago in Othello, reviewed here below.

  Yvonne Korshak

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The Foundry Theatre's Provenance of Beauty, A South Bronx Travelogue by Claudia Rankine, Created by Melanie Joseph and Claudia Rankine

     ... all aboard ...

Setting things off from the rest often makes them beautiful or exceptionally interesting, sometimes unexpectedly.  In getting you onto a tour bus, excursion-like, for a ride through NYC's South Bronx, The Foundry Theatre is trying to bring that heightened awareness to the South Bronx.

Here's how it works:  you meet the tour at a historic church on 121st Street and Lexington Avenue, pick up your ear phones and take a seat on the bus waiting at the curb.  It's a real tour bus, with mounted video monitors and the addition of bunches of basil (herb of memory) tucked between the luggage racks.  A tour leader, in just that tone of voice alternates facts about sites that come up -- "On the left we have ... " -- with poetic evocations of the area, past and present.  Meanwhile the video monitors move between motion and stills, from almost what's outside the window to abstract.  Eyes shift between windows and monitor, while recorded male and female voices break in on the live tour leader with meditation and reminiscence about the South Bronx.

The voices meld to an anonymous "I" who comes from there and shares memories, information and point of view.  The compounding of input is fascinating.  We learn new things as on a "regular" tour like the colorful and unexpected histories of impressive looking buildings.  We drive past the world's largest wholesale food center, the Hunts Point Market, and the vast sewage treatment plant nearby.

For the first moments on board, the originality and anticipated discovery are thrilling.  The creative theatrical vision is undercut, unfortunately, by a flat script.  The reminiscences are generic, and peppered with toney references only vaguely linked to the material, though delivered in an elegiac voice -- in a word, pretentious.

And the script is also over-pushy in telling us what to think.  Yes, the South Bronx has too often been made a dumping ground for what people don't like "in their back yards" -- a sewage plant, a correctional facility.  Still, did the commentary on every park we passed -- and there were a lot of them -- have to focus on the people displaced to build it as if the ones enjoying them right now in front of our eyes didn't matter.  The upgrading of a particularly funky park that had served the neighborhood well was bemoaned -- it sounds like it had been pretty grubby, though -- and it was nice to see children playing in the new one.

By taking its passengers to the South Bronx, The Provenance of Beauty heightens awareness of an important and overlooked part of New York City, though it doesn't carry on board the deepened understanding and illumination that art can bring.  One knows, though, from the thrill of the first totally novel moments that with a better script, Provenance could have better fulfilled the theatrical vision.

Congratulations to The Foundry Theatre for this audacious experiment that points in new directions.  The Provenance of Beauty is a unique opportunity for those who love New York City and its inhabitants, and those who are curious and impassioned by all the places that theater can take you -- literally and figuratively!

The Provenance of Beauty plays on weekends September through November -- click on the site link for information and specific dates.

Yvonne Korshak

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Shakespeare's Othello with Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz and Jessica Chastain, directed by Peter Sellars, The Public Theater and Labyrinth Theater Company

   

... honest Iago ...

This is a wonderfully open Othello, easy to enter, listen to, live with awhile with no sacrifice of Shakespeare's language and meaning.  It's done in generalized modern dress, with TV monitors used for atmospheric slide projections placed center stage like gleaming mosaics.  The actors, sometimes using cell phones, link naturalistic, current English and Shakespeare's language so that one hears Shakespeare's language as ones own.

The cell phones raise a laugh at first but they're no joke, so when, for instance, the Duke of Venice needs to communicate with his military commander, Othello, the interactions are conveyed in a way that's true to Shakespeare's conception of the distances his play covers.  It's part of the openness and breadth that characterizes this production.

Center stage beneath the bright abstractions of the slides is the slanted platform of Othello and Desdemona's bed.  They are intense, physical presences -- we're kept very aware of their bodies throughout, her slim, pale femininity, his dark, muscular masculinity -- and even when they have no part in a scene they're shown entwined, enamored, while other action takes place around them, a visual embodiment of an essential truth of the play about loving -- "too well". Sometimes, in the free form movement of the actors, Iago looks in on them:  yet another reason for jealous Iago to be jealous.

All the characters are often onstage when not specifically part of a scene, which heightens the sense of the flow of nature, and the thrust of cause and effect that drives this story of love, ambition and human frailty towards its tragic conclusion.  Walls, in this remarkable vision of Director Peter Sellars, would seem like artifice.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago is no lean, devilish, sharp dresser in leather slyly dripping venom into the ears of his victims, as Iago is usually pictured.  He's full-faced, beer-bellied and very scruffy -- a beer drinking buddy as we see him with Cassio, and even Othello.  Most remarkable -- thrilling, really, is the way he insinuates and tempts openly and in full voice, a soft-sell with no hint of the secretive about it.  There's no apparent reason for Othello, or Cassio, or Desdemona, or his poor shill Rodrigo, to doubt him -- anyhow, who could doubt anyone with such big blue eyes (is this the first blue-eyed Iago?  certainly with a sweatshirt and baggy pants!).  Still, as time and events move forward, the characters, each in his or her own way, do begin to suspect, and the fascination grows as we seem them not suspecting enough -- thanks to the synergy of their natures and Iago's versatile play with them.

What an interpretation Hoffman has come up with -- to make Iago actually look and act like the "honest Iago" Othello takes him for.  But the audience, with the benefit of foreknowledge, sees in the subtle range of expression in Hoffman's face what's being missed by the characters on stage:  his calculation, smart changes of tack, recognition of opportunity, glee at getting under someone's skin -- above all, his total focus on his goal: bring down Othello.  Playing Iago with such seeming lack of guile, while keeping the audience in contact with the truth about him, underlines the irony.  And it's sure fun to watch!

As the seed of doubt takes hold, John Ortiz as Othello maintains his commander's outer control yet lets you sense in a reddening of his face, a narrowing of his eyes his entry onto the tortuous path Iago has set out for him.  Ortiz makes his background as a naturalistic actor with a detectable New York accent appropriate, and even charming, for the tough outsider Moor, though toward the end he seemed strained to reach the vastness of Othello's anguish.  As Desdemona, Jessica Chastain lets us see beyond the conventional blond ingenue to the talented and even feisty woman Shakespeare has scripted.

There are places where the body language becomes a little too loose-contemporary for the script -- e.g., Desdemona lying down listless in the presence of those she doesn't know well.  But all in all this production's modern dress and techno touches make a welcome bridge between then and now but don't distract from the fact that the play is timeless.

Othello plays at NYU's Skirball Center in NYC's Greenwich Village through October 4.

    Yvonne Korshak

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The Bereaved by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by May Adrales, Partial Comfort Productions

                                                ... race ya to the bottom ...

At first it seems The Bereaved is going to be a superficial play, a sitcom, at best a comedy of manners and it does keep the audience laughing, but one comes to realize it's a dead serious, carefully constructed and politically radical play, written by a Black playwright, about race -- specifically about which race or races will come out on top and which at the bottom.

Waiting for the play to begin one can study the domestic set, the kitchen with an ordinary commercial but matching table and chairs, and a bedroom with a teen boy's posters and paraphernalia.  Michael, a stay-at-home husband and low-paid adjunct college Professor is working at his computer on his book about Mao and sipping booze when Carol, his high salaried lawyer wife enters and berates him for not taking out the garbage -- after all, he's home all day.  They reconcile and chatter brightly about where it is or isn't OK to masturbate.  I saw a fairly good play by this author recently, Dawn at the Flea Theater last November, so I held off at this point on deciding that this was going to be totally idiotic.  Teddy, the 15-year old son comes in and the family decides to go to Bouley for dinner, a restaurant for which one needs to make reservations a month in advance:  on the phone, Carol gets one immediately, i.e., this woman is at the top of the pecking order.

But (no dinner tonight) Carol suddenly keels over with a heart attack, is hospitalized and suffers acute medical complications.  Near death, she exacts a promise from Michael and her friend Katy, an "Oriental" Psychologist (Carol and Michael are White) that when she dies they marry each other, to ensure her son won't suffer from some wicked stepmother.  Though they both love Carol, Katy and Michael waste no time making out robustly in the apartment while Carol's still alive.  Their humorously viewed, racially tinged and graphically acted sex (there's a lot of nakedness and acting out of sexual fantasies in this play), along with their casual coke sniffing, the trope of the kid, Teddy, glued to his blackberry screen in the direst moments, and Teddy's sex with the totally wise-to-it-all 15-year old girlfriend Melissa make it seem it's a play that laughs at contemporary superficial emotions or something along those lines.

Enter Jamal, the Black coke dealer.  Or rather, he doesn't enter -- the White kids Teddy and Melissa go to Harlem to find him.  But he soon becomes part of all their lives -- except Carol's who's dead by now -- and his presence makes a hash of her careful plans.  The play unfolds through the playwright's disciplined logic.  More I cannot say except -- there's a new pecking order at the end and -- it's not the Whites who are on top. 

And who's responsible for that?  Bradshaw makes the case that in different ways, the Whites bring it on themselves.  They ask for it, as Carol asks Michael to marry Katy, the move that brings the house tumbling down.  But things are already askew at the start because of Carol and Michael's male/female role reversal, which the playwright carefully swings back to conventional (how quaint) by the end when they're both out of the picture and the new guys are on top.  Beyond the personal, the economic values of the White dominated society are askew:  the Professor makes $6,000 a year, the Psychologist $60,000 which, it's made clear, is not enough, the Lawyer makes a huge amount but is burdened with student loans, and who takes in the most? The drug dealer.

Played before a mostly White audience, The Bereaved brings to mind the aristocrats watching Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro in the years leading up the the French Revolution.  The play made the aristocrats look ridiculous, and directly challenged their position at the top of the pecking order (the King and the censors tried to ban it).  Those well educated, sophisticated aristocrats understood perfectly well that it was revolutionary but -- radical chique -- they went anyhow, and enjoyed the comedy immensely.

The Bereaved runs at The Wild Project in NYC's East Village, through September 26. 

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

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LET'S TALK OFF-BROADWAY IN LONDON The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall, directed by Max Roberts

      Guest review by Mark Haggard, Cambridge, UK (mph38@cam.ac.uk)

     ... a rich tapestry of art, drama and recent history ...  with personal recollections of Richard Lyon ...

What makes a particular play run and run?  No single property surely, but some of them are well illustrated by The Pitmen Paintersnow back at London's National Theatre for the third time, and for a 4-month season.  I would hazard that two such properties are interrelated:  breadth of appeal and the efficient weaving of an optimum, slight, degree of ambiguity (ie several messages, none too heavily stated), achieved by having several strands in the dramatic development interwoven with enough coherence to not fall apart.  Rank ambiguity is tolerable in the visual arts because we can choose to walk to the next picture, but not in a play;  we can't reasonably disrupt the performance by leaving before the end of the first act.  Waiting for Godot was a success but a rare one, in what is historically a very minority taste.

Lee Hall, who counts Billy Elliott among his past successes, knows the formerly industrial North East of England well.  The Pitmen Paintersis is based on William Feaver's book of the same name that tells the story of the Ashington group of painters, active from the mid 1930's till the early 70s, but who fell into obscurity during the 50s.  This award winning joint production of the National (Cottesloe Studio Theatre) and the Live Theatre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne was brought back earlier this year to the larger auditorium at the National Theatre (with an accompanying exhibition of some of the paintings) to great critical acclaim and a sellout, and here it is back for a third Fall-Winter season.  English speaking theatre enthusiasts everywhere should find it rewarding and largely accessible.  There's quite a strong Geordie (Newcastle) dialect, which hasn't been moderated because it underpins much of the cultural tensions and humour.  The rather long build up in the first half of the play may make it difficult to see where the drama is going but does afford an opportunity for the ear to attune.

Hall succeeds with the many-stranded Pitmen Painters in several ways, so that playgoers can come away with very differing though favorable reactions to it, and even differing views of what it's mostly about.   The core plot is quite simple, which permits the layering.  A group of miners in the mid-1930s in Ashington, a mining town near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, wish to better themselves through the Workers' Educational Association.  As the result of a coincidence, they settle on wanting to learn about art.  Lecturer Robert Lyon from Newcastle starts off with theory and history, but for these practical men, the greater interest lies in the practice of painting.  Lyon responds with composure and patience, urging them to find their own styles, which turn out to vary -- by no means all "primitives".  As adult education, the art class is a success and more.  The group journeys to another world, that of exhibitions and aristocratic patronage, first as viewers, then as exhibited artists themselves.  Success tempts them to develop further in new ways.  In the chief turning point of the play, one of them comes close to accepting aristocratic patronage to leave mining, but does not.  This turns out beneficial for his painting because, come the war, mining is crucial for wartime production.  They all continue (but for one who's unemployed so called up for military service) to work a full (long) shift down the pit.

In a sense there isn't a denouement that this lengthy description might give away.  The early post-war socialist developments such as nationalization of the coal mines mark the waning of the artistic movement.  Some of the broader social ideas of which WEA was a part at the time seemed on the way to achievement, but patterns of patronage, spending power and consumption changed within a few years as society rebuilt.  The group's subject matter had remained parochial while everything except war production contracted, but it continued so through the large upheaval and forward-looking expansion that followed.  Their artistic moment had passed, a predicament no means unique given 6 years of all-out war.  It's useful to remember that although Russia lost far more population, Britain depleted a far higher percentage of its national resources than any other country to ensure victory;  WWII still dominates national consciousness.  

Skilfully interwoven with the main plot are sub-themes that provide the layers and make it hard for anyone not to find an area of interest:  the noise and danger of mining; class; education and the North/South divide; private/public ownership of the means of production; the communicative values of abstract art and whether simple geometric shapes are a confidence trick;  the difficulty of making any objective artistic judgment outside one's own cultural tradition; and the essentially local -- and not transportable -- nature of ties and cultural capital of the British working class, underlying as it did the lower labour mobility seen till the post-industrial age from the 1990's.   

For me, a quietly handled moral frisson was the crux of the play.  Lyon writes a thesis on the group of painters that he has nurtured without consulting or even telling them, and in 1940 is appointed (it's implied at least partly as a consequence) as Principal of Edinburgh College of Art.  By today's standards of mobility, he would have had to be moving on soon anyway, but we're shown clearly that he doesn't keep in contact as much as he'd promised.  Is his excuse of long working hours in wartime when few teachers remained valid?  We're left wondering how things might have turned out if the shepherd had stayed with his flock.

But more importantly, what uncomfortable mixture of mild exploitation, patronization and experimentation without participant consent can we now see embodied in Lyon's thesis?  For some, the dilemma of exploitation that lies in discovery and presentation of provincial talent may come to mind more readily by recalling Gee's Bend quilters who were widely exhibited in important galleries in the last decade.   In a masterly piece of writing, Hall brings the audience into some complicity with Lyon.  Amid the dialogue in and around the art classes, the painters have to learn to talk about art so as to comment on one another's efforts.  Their first utterances with art-theory, Freudian and Marxist ideas, are of course clumsy;  realistically portrayed, and kept this side of caricature these mingle seamlessly with the general situation comedy.  But in laughing at these, and in particular at the apparent incongruity of psycho-babble in broad Geordie dialect, are we too reaching back across 70 years to patronize and objectify the painters? 

The play is brilliantly directed by Max Roberts.  Some of the scenes near the beginning and end are longer than necessary to support plots and characterization, perhaps a price paid for supporting multiple sub-themes.  But just when dramatic development around the art class seems to be stagnating, it's moved on by the introduction of the aristocratic patron.  Short inter-act scenes at the mine, on a bleak night-time station platform, make up for their simple sets with powerful use of lighting and sound effects.  The above-centre projection screen serves triply:  for Lyon's initial lantern-slide show to the class, for time and place scene indications, and to show the many paintings that characters are viewing or doing within the play.  This succeeds totally and seems well in place in the contemporary world of widespread electronic projection.

There were more painters than the drama could include.  Selection and simplification create the small number of specific dramatic tensions there's time for the dialogue to support:  the Marxist, the opportunist, the legalistic bureaucrat, and the one with the true artist's soul.  Lyon is the catalyst and the action revolves around him so he is fixed, in the sense that any of his personal development is outside the scope of the play and hence has to be minor.  As the prime mover and link to the art world, there's only one of him whilst there are many miner-artists.  

Robert Lyon died in 1959, and I last saw him perhaps a year before.  The inevitably limited understanding of adult character in a very young person, such as I was as the time, limits the comments that can be usefully made.  I remember him as less staid than the stage character, more spontaneous and communicative, occasionally even impish, but from other things that I know, I think the charge of opportunism does stick.  Lyon was an important impresario in British, particularly Scottish, art in his time.  He was a competent but not great artist himself, with a style on which it's difficult to pin a label.  In a late scene in The Pitmen Painters, set in 1944, Lyon is executing a portrait of Oliver Kilbourn, conversing with his subject on the past and on the various artists' destinies.  The screen shows us the finished portrait, which was criticized at the time for not bringing out well the force of Kilbourn's character, and one can see why.  

On the other hand Lyon's 1945 portrait of my elder brother as a 6-year-old is charming and does capture much spirit.  There are two traceable portraits of my stepfather Richard Elmhirst (who within the last few months of his US citizenship, in August 1945 refuelled the Enola Gay  on a Pacific island airstrip for its fateful mission, but that's another story).  One is by Lyon from the mid 50s, and the other by the well-known American abstract expressionist Mark Tobey, from the late 30s.  Tobey achieved what Lyon did not in bringing out character on canvas.  

But perhaps as an educator Lyon made possible the Ashington painters and hence this play by bringing out character in other ways.

The Pitmen Painters plays at the National Theatre, London, through January 18, 2010.    

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FILM NOTE Inglourious Basterds, with Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, directed by Quentin Tarantino

... "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France ... "

-- INGLOuRIOUS BASTARDS

  Three driven personalities and three suspenseful story lines, all in collision course toward a hellish and thrilling climax. 

Out in the countryside during WWII, early in the German occupation of France, a Jewish girl, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) is the survivor of a targeted Nazi massacre that wipes out her entire family.  Near the end of the war, she seizes the opportunity to carry out a vengeful plot.

Lieutenant Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt), under military orders, heads up a crew of Jewish soldiers organized to terrify Nazi's with brutal vengeance murders.  Raines is the right man for the job:  we don't know the source of his particularly passionate determination to kill Nazis but there are a couple of hints:  an ear to ear scar on his neck -- somebody taught him some brutal lessons with a knife -- and his reference to being part American Indian.

The Nazi Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz in a performance of Academy Award caliber) matches Raines in his own compelling passion -- to round up and murder Jews.  We think we know him well from his first scene in which he directs the massacre of Shosanna's family.  Still, while the others run true to form, he surprises us.  The anomalies, the things he does off-path are intriguing.  Why, for instance, does he let Shosanna go free -- twice?  The subtle emergence of Landa's personality, specifically of his perverse sexuality and sadism, is one of the features that brings the film to near greatness.

All three of these major characters perpetrate grizzly acts of violence but only one is evil -- Colonel Landa.  The exploration of the problem of pure evil, and of complicity in evil, is another of the film's strengths.

Actions in this movie are not only dramatic and compelling but resonate symbolically.  Shosanna up on a ladder, doing her job, dusts off one by one the letters on the marquee of her film theater -- a purge is in sight.

A close-up focuses on a French pastry as Landa stabs and then, with a deliberate, circular motion, snuffs out his lit cigarette in the whipped cream.  How x-rated!  How perverse.

Or, in a new take on that age-old sexual symbols (think Cinderella), Landa slips a lost shoe onto the foot of a German actress who's spying for the British and terrified of being found out;  the shoe's perfect, click into place fit incriminates her, whereupon Landa proceeds to -- well, I have to leave out the next part but if you see the movie, you'll see the relationship to the French pastry.  Tarantino uses visual images and symbolic repetitions -- and his camera -- to great effect.

What, then, keeps Inglourious Basterds from reaching the realm of the great all-time movies?  I think it's too mythic for a film about such recent and well known history.  People may be vague about some details of World War II but everybody knows Hitler died in a bunker -- not as here.  Nor would anybody believe that, with the Americans having invaded France and moving toward Paris, and the end of the war at hand, the entire German High Command would have handed themselves over to the trap this movie sets for them.  It didn't happen like that and it never could have and the movie, even for its own fictional space of time, just can't overcome that knowledge.

Never mind -- it's the best movie I've seen in a long time.  The way the war ends in Inglourious Basterds departs from history but grimly, perversely, humorously, it satisfies ones sense of justice restored, barely and at great cost.  That's real.

 Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE: Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep

                                                           ... Mickey Mouse ...

This movie weaves between two stories, one from the past and one current.  The good part lets us in on Julia Child's early years in Paris, her ecstatic discoveries of French food, the pleasures of the good life she shared with her husband, and how she became a chef and author.  Julia, her husband, played with touching warmth by Anthony Tucci, Paris, the food all look wonderful.  Meryl Streep captures Julia's flighty, deep, tony voice, her bulky occupation of space that goes hand in hand with her alarming and amusing clumsiness, and her perseverance.  Julia Child lives before our eyes in that fascinating fluctuation of yes it's her but after all it can't be like watching Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote or David Strathaim as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck. 

What an annoyance that the contemporary story of feckless Julie keeps rudely interrupting the genuine Julia!  Julie, played by Amy Adams, living with her husband in "Astoria" (spoken as if the word "Astoria", in Queens, NY is some kind of exile, which it isn't) lacks a sense of purpose, so she sets about cooking through all the recipes in Julia Child's book written with two other chefs, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year and, at her husband's suggestion, records it all in a blog.  Her blog becomes a success and she wins a book contract.

In the movie, outside of being able to follow the directions in a cookbook, Julie has nothing special to offer.  Her too-cuteness and bemusement over boning a duck don't compensate for her boring self-involvement.  Under a strain to be interesting, the Julie scenes unwind into slapstick.  Julia Child took no interest in Julie's project.  How right she was.  It all but spoils her movie.  And Meryl Streep all but saves it, so in the upshot, it's worth seeing if you're drawn to Julia Child.

The relationship between Julia and Julie reminds me of what Stephen Jay Gould showed happened to Mickey Mouse -- at first he was a feisty, self-assured mouse with a good long, sharp mouse's nose but over time softened up, turning into today's baby faced spinoff of the original Mickey, with a so cute little nose.   

                                                                                        Yvonne Korshak

On a culinary note:  Since I've made Julia Child's boef bourguinon which features prominently in the movie, I feel I should say it doesn't come out looking with that web of sticky-looking carrots on top.

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Miss Margarida's Way by Roberto Athayde, starring Julie Halston, directed by Daniel Goldstein, produced by Bay Street Theatre at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton

This is a play in which an insane teacher lectures to her eighth grade students -- the audience seated in rows with desks -- for two acts.  Miss Margarida does everything a teacher should never do.  She's volatile, violent, seductive, intimidating, sexually exhibitionist, domineering, vulgar, rigid, irrational and inconsistent and you can't follow a thing she says.  Her "lecture" meanders in a kind of free-for-all of psychic drives with, when the stage lights dim, psychic memories that don't add insight;  there's nothing there "to learn" and a threatening sexual current runs through it.  It's not a "tragic comedy for an impetuous woman" as Bay Street describes in their flier and which drew me to see it -- impetuous my foot, she's loony.

(While describing it as a "developmental production," the flier leaves out the name of the playwright.) 

Can an audience (or reader) identify in a meaningful way with a character totally out of touch?  In Peter Weiss' Marat Sade, Sade is, well, decidedly odd, but not this nuts.

The closest answer "yes" to the question I can think of is The Foundry Theatre's recent Telephone, reviewed here in February, in which Birgit Huppuch kept the audience spellbound through her fast-flowing, elegant, one-act monolog of Miss St, Jung's schizophrenic madwoman who "suffers the slander of invisible telephones and tells you all about it."  But playwright Ariana Reines gave Miss St more richly nuanced emotional shifts and surprising changes of course than this author comes up with. And Miss St is only at it for one act.  Miss Margarida is the whole play.  The cast does include also a designated student among the audience, an actor who runs up to the stage a few times during the performance (we worry for his eighth-grade chastity) but he has no lines and, as far as I can see, doesn't add to character development or the audience's insight.

Written in 1973 by Brazilian playwright Robert Athayde as a satire of dictatorship, Miss Margarida's Way was initially banned in Brazil.  As Mel Gussow, however, noted in 1990, it's too thin and undercharacterized to work as effective satire.   

Julie Halston's performance is a great tour de force, and if you love fine acting, and are in the vicinity, she's a reason to see the show.  She's as comedic as Carol Burnett with, in addition, remarkable switches to tenderness, confusion, and other unfunny states of mind.  It's fascinating to watch the way she persuasively captures the affect of an earnest, middle-aged "Biology" teacher with stiffly blown hair while plowing ahead unstoppably as a teacher from Hell, the normal and the bizarre crossing tracks.  She's as brilliant in the role as Birgit Huppuch was in Telephone, but with a script that's more repetitive and flatter in terms of language.  What I learned from this "teacher" was -- don't miss Julie Halston's next show.

Miss Margarida's Way plays at The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, LI, NY Aug 19 - 22 and Aug 26 - 29.

                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Dames at Sea, book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller, Music by Jim Wise. Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, LI, NY

                                                          ... after taste ...

Because of the title and the aura of its publicity, I expected Dames at Sea to be a 1930's escapist musical and that's what I thought I was seeing, a story set in the early 30's about actors fighting to make a success on Broadway.  Glittering Hollywood-type production numbers, tuneful songs, virtuoso tap dancing, and a rags to riches story with love conquering everything left over, it was all there.  It was moving to think that this show filled with optimism and patriotism emerged in the face of the Great Depression.  And downright amazing, in fact, in the way it anticipated musicals still to come like Pal Joey, The Pajama Game and South Pacific -- note those "Dames" in the title.

I applauded hard when Ruby -- just a little girl from Utah -- arrives in NYC to make it big on Broadway with nothing but a pair of tap shoes and gets an audition for a big show her first day in town.  I cheered when the theatrical troupe, thrown out of their theater on Opening Night, got to present their play on a ship!

It occurred to me that the cast of seven was too small for a big musical but, enjoying the show, I explained to myself Bay Street must have transposed it from a large cast musical -- all the more remarkable that these seven talented performers were coming across with such great effect.  It also crossed my mind that obstacles were overcome a little too easily -- even for a 30's musical -- but it was such a relief to feel, thanks to a dose of good old suspended disbelief, that life could be like that I overlooked its foolishness.  By the end when the Big Star who had interfered with our ingenue heroine's day-long rise to the top and even tried to vamp her true love came over to Ruby's side a good part of the audience - the adults more than the younger people there -- was filled with high elation!  A little like the night Obama won the election -- for a moment everyone seemed on the same team!

Only, as I learned afterward, that's not what this show is.  

Produced off-Broadway in 1968 at the height of the protests and national self-doubt associated with the Vietnam war, Dames at Sea doesn't anticipate South Pacific and the other great post WWII musicals as I'd given it credit for, it takes bits and pieces of them and embeds them in the structure of a Depression era extravaganza in order to throw an ironic light on just the earlier 20th-century optimism and patriotism it had seemed, during this performance, to celebrate.   Presented four years after Susan Sontag's "epoch defining" article "Notes on Camp," Dames at Sea is just that -- pure camp.

A date in the program would have helped.  After thoroughly enjoying the show believing it to be one thing -- along with most of the audience, I think -- and finding out was totally other, I didn't like it as much -- I sort of felt I'd been had. The theater, it seemed, had underplayed the play's context so as to offer light summer fare, but it wasn't true to the nature of the show. 

I'm a fan of Bay Street theatre which does excellent work on a regular basis, but Dames at Sea is not a "rollicking valentine to the Hollywood musical of the 30's" as they call it in their ad lead line, much quoted in the local papers:  it's parody, and not just of earlier musicals but of significant societal values.  It was an off-Broadway hit at a time when societal disaffection ruled the day.  In contrast to how it would have come across in 1968, here, shorn of its irony, in retrospect it seems superfluous. 

Dames at Sea plays at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, L.I., NY August 11 - September 6.

                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

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The Day on Which a Man Dies by Tennessee Williams, directed by David Kaplan, at Ross School, East Hampton, NY

The Day on Which a Man Dies is visually spectacular.  The scene is set in Japan.  A large, well built though fleshy man, a painter intended to suggest Jackson Pollock, virtually naked except for body paint, crashes around half a stage worth of space -- his studio -- drinking, smashing bottles, stepping on the glass, bleeding, painting with the blood, falling into the walls, rolling on the abstract expressionist painting in progress on the floor, his body picking up more paint mixed with his own blood and miscellaneous trash as he goes.  He's been highly successful as an artist but now his dealers are rejecting his new work because it's totally non-objective (definitely nothing to do with Jackson Pollock on these last two counts).  Where have the figures gone? he asks, downcast on the floor like a child who's lost ... well, let's say his marbles.

In Ed Harris' great film, Pollock, it's the violence of breakthrough originality, here of breaking down.

In contrast to The Man's furious, slobbering and drunken-maudlin abandon, the denizen of the bedroom on the other side of the stage is his pert mistress who wears a Jackie Kennedy suit and an Elizabeth Taylor wig, well put together -- read in control.  The play is their mutually enraging psychological and sex play.  They rail:  The Woman (her character name in the play), I'm only your whore, I have no legal standing.  The Man:  You're an emasculating, parasitic blood sucker.  The straw that breaks the camel's back, he reads notes from her casual lovers, and kills himself by downing Lysol at the very moment that she, sitting in a cafe on The Ginza, realizes she loves him and, flooded with a yearning to fill her womb and leap from barrenness to joy by bearing his child, rushes home to make love ... too late.

A serene Japanese counterpoint is provided by the Oriental man and woman Stagehand.  Dressed in black, they tactfully move props and bring drinks, the male going beyond Oriental theater tradition by commenting on the action like the Stage Manager in Our Town.  Mainly he (for Yukio Mishima see below) contrasts the Japanese way of suicide with the Western one we're clearly about to witness -- the Japanese way seems better for a reason that eluded me.

A great delineator of character, Tennessee Williams has written a play in which the characters are stereotypes, and gives us no reasons to help understand their personalities or relationships.  Why, for instance, did The Man ever fall for The Woman who sarcastically mocks art?  She went for him for the money, that makes sense, but why, as she discovers after twelve years, does she love this slob while berating him for using spray paint?  Why does she order -- significantly emphasized -- very strong tea as if craving a fast fix and then ignore it when it comes?  The play depends for effect on excesses instead of insights.  Still, the excesses in themselves are somehow refreshing.

The producers of The Day on Which a Man Dies note, "In 1960 Williams wrote a fierce fantasia on the great painter's [Jackson Pollock's] death -- and kept the text for himself.  Williams' 'secret script' is dedicated to the Japanese visionary writer Yukio Mishima."  Perhaps he kept the script secret because he knew it wasn't among his good plays.

A talented, dedicated crew has created as fine a production of The Day on Which a Man Dies as the author could have wished (if he wished for a production!).  The visual conception is stunning and heightens the emotional content -- canvases splashed in red and waiting in white, sheets torn, fabric ripped.  Jeff Christian goes all-out as the frantic painter and Jennie Moreau is amusing and ironic as the The Woman -- it's amazing how putting on an Elizabeth Taylor wig makes her look like Elizabeth Taylor and taking it off makes her look like ... Jennie Moreau.

There's much to learn from productions of lesser plays by major playwrights -- among which, not everything a fine author writes is great.  It rounds out our view.  We can observe Williams' interest in Japanese literature and experimentation with oriental theater devices.  It helps us follow his themes of male-female antagonisms, fertility and barrenness, mental deterioration, his hatred of the puritanical, all of which run through this play.  A full production may bring to light overlooked excellences -- though I didn't find them here. Of course one can read an unproduced play, and theatrical producer Ken Davenport in his blog of August 5 reminds us of the new perspectives that can come through reading scripts.  But then the production with full theatrical arsenal helps the theater going public come closer to a play's reality, and calls attention to the little known.  Thanks to all who had a hand in this!  I wish I could attend the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival this September to see the good -- and maybe the not-so-good.

The Day on Which a Man Dies, first produced by Chicago's National Pastime Theater, plays at the Ross School in East Hampton, NY August 7 - 9 and during the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival September 24 - 27, 2009.  The paintings are by Megan Tracy.

Other recent reviews of plays by Tennessee Williams:  Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, Vieux Carre, and the Glass Menagerie.  

                                                                                Yvonne Korshak  

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DINNER by Moira Buffini, at Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, with Mercedes Ruehl, directed by David Esbjornson

                                                                ... Truth(s)  ...

Bay Street bills this world premier of DINNER as a satyric comedy, but for the most part it draws its laughs from the bizarre rather than the witty.  Paige, in a formal white dress, making final touches to the table for a dinner party to celebrate her husband's new book, kisses the hired waiter -- well, perhaps that's not so bizarre.  But the Menu, that includes Primordial Soup, Apocalypse of Lobster and, for dessert, Frozen Waste, is.

Some people, I'm told, took it for "just a simple play."  With that menu? 

A constant delight of DINNER is Mercedes Ruehl's wonderful way with tossed off ironies.  At tense moments, she circles her hand vaguely toward the Waiter, "We need drinks."  Does that sound funny?  It is, when she says it, as are her more wildly imaginative riffs on the course of events, and her guests.

The guests gather, Wynne, an artist, Paige's husband Hal, a Scientist, Sian, a newscaster, Hal's wife.  Wynne's husband couldn't make it, having left his wife just before the party -- oh oh, Hostess Paige, a perfectionist, now  has an empty place at the table.  Whoever will take that place???  Whoever indeed.  We are given a premonitory hint:  "In my family, we always said an empty place at the table was for Christ."   It's Mike, though, who comes in, a young lower class man needing to use the phone -- and the bathroom -- because his van broke down.

Thrown in among the fancy folks Mike passes himself off, for fun, sort of, as a thief who has just robbed the house next door.  Thrills and chills, contact with those lower classes, he's soon invited to fill the empty seat at the table.  But is it true he's a thief?  Or false?  Paige, who's bitterly at odds with everyone, most of all with her husband, develops a rapport with Mike:  she protects him when her husbands wants to throw him out, and lets him "steal" an oversized gilded antique Cupid from her bathroom -- Christ, after all, is Love. 

From Primordial Soup to Frozen Waste, this is a play about truth and falsehood, life and death, and the invitees are emblematic societal interpreters:  scientist, artist, newscaster, and Mike -- who turns out to be quite a pragmatist.  But what about Paige who sees everything through the prism of irony?  She defines herself as the one who "does nothing."  A social parasite.  But when you're dealing with ultimates, is anything truer than irony?

oh, and the Waiter ... he waits -- there's an ultimate truth there, too.

The play would be more compelling if, in addition to being teased by "what's this all about," the audience could grasp a conflict.  Still, DINNER holds up well as an intricate parable:  I can't prove that here, though, without revealing the recipes for the dessert -- and main course -- and that wouldn't be fair, they're too full of bizarre surprises.

Bay Street Theatre comes through, as always, with a production that brings out fully the values of its plays.  DINNER is at Bay Street, in Sag Harbor, through August 2.

                                                                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

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Film Note -- The Hurt Locker, with Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

                                             ... strong material, weak film ...

In a way everyone should see The Hurt Locker:  it's not a good film but it makes clear what it's like for our soldiers in Iraq to carry out their duties while relentlessly under the eyes of armed enemy insurgents out to kill them.

The movie does have suspense -- these are, after all, our boys moving into treacherous, hostile situations time and time again, acting heroically and escaping by the skin of their teeth.  One thing's for sure:  when traveling on a desolate road in this country, don't get a flat tire.

No soldiers place themselves more in danger than the three-person Bravo squad whose task is to locate and disarm -- locate the detonater and cut the live wires -- of car bombs, roadside bombs, and bombs which, if not padlocked to their chests, are surgically implanted into the guts of suicide bombers.  Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is the best bomb disarmer and biggest risk taker of them all, and even his tough squad members, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Jackie) and the young Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are angered because he thrusts them into danger unnecessarily, risking not just his life but theirs, bypassing military protocol in his passion for disarming bombs -- he's done over 800 of them.

"Do you know why I do this?" James asks Sanborn (who looks like Ralph Lauren's famous Black male model, and has a similar range of emotional expression).  Sanborn doesn't, and unfortunately the audience hasn't a clue either.  We watch him take his irresponsible risks but he's so thinly characterized we don't feel his genuine drive, though we do feel some admiration for his ability.  That in itself might have been developed as a reason:  Sanborn describes hm as "a trailer park red-neck" so finding something he can do well could have helped explain James' passion and determination to keep doing it (he smiles with happy anticipation when, leaving behind a beautiful wife and adorable child who looks just like him, he lands in Iraq for another tour of disarming bombs) but there's no follow-through on that idea.

Often things are said and done that one just doesn't believe.  An army psychiatrist portrayed as an ectomorphic ivy league nerd-weakling joins on a bomb-search mission because he's bored around his office -- I don't think so.  Why doesn't James speak when he calls his wife and son from Iraq on his cell phone?  Why did Sanborn leave his Intelligence unit to volunteer for the bomb squad?  Why doesn't Sanborn want a child?  Why doesn't the army commander recognize a renegade when he sees one? 

"War is a drug" is the movie's answer to James compulsion but we never feel that wild high, though we're told of it, so James just seems, well, odd.  Stephen Crane got the intoxication of battle right in his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage -- this film team doesn't.  Leaving the theater, some people thought the problem was poor acting.  I thought it was more a problem with the scripting -- too many "weighty" thoughts tossed in but never picked up by the plot -- like unused props on a stage -- and none of the characters have any back story that helps us understand them.

                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

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The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, directed by Harris Yulin, at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY

                                                               Master of Seduction

No one writes seduction as well as Tennessee Williams.  In his Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, earlier this season, sex is morally and physically deadly for Kilroy -- i.e., he has every reason to resist.  And it does take the Gypsy's daughter awhile -- a delicious, suspenseful while -- but he succumbs.  In Vieux Carre, another game played out on a small bed, an unattractive man, elderly and sickly, uses skill, experience and patience in a breathtaking seduction of a beautiful young man.  You might think you wouldn't want to see that -- but you do. 

Act I of The Glass Menagerie sets up an intriguing psychological situation but it's not until the great seduction scene of Act II that, in this production, the play comes alive.

Tom, who's both a character and narrator in this play, wants to be a writer and yearns for adventure but is stuck in a shoe factory supporting his tyrannical mother, Amanda, and lame and reclusive sister, Laura, who finds emotional refuge in her collection of small, glass animals that break easily, like her.  Amanda, an erstwhile Southern belle, chatty and flirtatious, tries to make her intensely shy daughter into a creature like herself, while holding too tight a rein on her son through emotional blackmail and incestuous flirtatiousness -- at one point, as my friend noted, in response to one of her intimate onslaughts, Tom covers his groin with his cap.  The traps that lock this family are economic and psychological but Williams is most interested in the psychological.  As Sartre concluded in his play No Exit, of the very same year, 1944, "Hell is other people."

Frantic to find Laura a suitor, Amanda pushes Tom to invite for diner a man from the factory, Jim who, it turns out, Laura had been attracted to in high school, only intensifying Laura's pathological shyness.  Jim takes it on himself to draw Laura out of her shell ... instead of a bed, Williams here gets them sitting together on the floor, in candlelight, while the others are in the kitchen.  Outstandingly handsome in this production (though not in the script) and sure of himself in a full-of-himself sort of way, Jim succeeds in opening her to romance and a kiss in a tender and cruel seduction.  It turns out he's engaged.  For him, it was a combination kindness and ego-trip.  For Laura, it's the ultimate loss.

The Glass Menagerie, Williams' first great theatrical success, has strong reference to his own life (see also Vieux Carre).  Like the narrator-son in The Glass Menagerie, Williams' true name was Tom, and it's no stretch to see in the psychologically fragile and abandoned Laura a reflection of his mentally ill sister Rose whom Williams felt he had abandoned (Jim's nickname for Laura is "Blue Roses" from his play on words of the pleurosis she suffered.) 

The play's psychological themes speak strongly to the powerful stream of Freudian thought in much twentieth-century literature, particular in the earlier years when everyone was writing about psychological arrest, a la Kafka, and when it was widely believed, for instance, that homosexuality was caused by absent fathers and over-protective and seductive -- Amanda-like -- mothers.  But the play remains fresh because Williams' characters are vivid and fully developed, their passions deep, and their interactions intense, believable and inevitable.

The Glass Menagerie, with Amy Irving as Amanda, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Tom, Louisa Krause as Laura and John Behlmann as Jim, plays at Guild Hall in East Hampton through July 26.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, directed by Michael Mann

                                                          Loving the bad guys ...

John Dillinger was very smart and courageous in his exploits, totally loyal to his friends, took on the giants, and won again and again, against great odds!  Oh, yes, and he was "gentlemanly," throwing a coat over the shoulders of his female hostages.  To all that Johnny Depp adds his star power charm and a boyish cowlick.  What's not to love?  Outside of the fact that he's a gangster.

He preferred not to kill -- a point made in a couple of philosophical pauses in the movie by this otherwise unintrospective character -- but if your time is spent robbing banks and evading the law with blasts of machine guns and other fast violence, it's bound to happen often.  He was called "The American Robin Hood" but he didn't rob the rich to give to the poor -- he robbed for money.  Yet, law abiding citizen that I am, I found myself rooting for him as was most of the audience, just as many rooted for him back in the early '30's.  Sepia tones bring us back to that earlier period, and the photography is often angled close-ups of large machinery that hook us into the large and grinding emotions.

We also root for Dillinger because his ultimate opponent, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, is so easy to hate, a mean spirited martinet driven by selfish ambition.  But Melvin Purvis, Dillinger's one-on-one opponent whom Hoover puts in direct charge of the case is admirable -- he has a high minded view of law enforcement which lends a larger meaning to his manhunt, he doesn't like to kill either, and Christian Bale who plays Purvis is handsome and charming in his own tight, disciplined way with 1930's slicked back hair (read:  opposite of anarchic cowlick).  Still, you root for Dillinger -- after all, you don't know anything about how much Purvis loves his girlfriend -- and the movie builds wonderful suspense as it moves from Dillinger springing his friends from prison at great danger to himself, to daring robberies, to unbelievable escapes to robberies to escapes until ...

... Dillinger's girlfriend, Billy Ferchette, played by Marion Cotillard is brutally beaten by law enforcement authorities to induce her to rat on him -- she doesn't -- and for all the invincibility Dillinger's shown, we're pretty sure by this point that he won't be able to spring her, and so what if he did?  look what he's already let her in for.  There's no way he could possibly pay for that.  So by the time the inevitable betrayal happens that leaves him dead on a Chicago sidewalk, we're ready to give him up too.  Public Enemies considerately resolves the ethical issue of the anti-hero and lets the audience off the hook -- this is a true Hollywood movie in the old sense, part of its nostalgic appeal. 

It would be a better, even more engaging movie if we understood the backstories of the characters.  The little said about Dillinger is too thin to help us see him as fully three-dimensional, as is true for the others.  It reminds me of the old Dick Tracy detective comic strips -- characters outlined, fast movement from frame to frame, and you do stay with it.

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

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Dance -- Keigwin + Company at the Joyce Theater

For their opening night at the Joyce Theater, Keigwin + Company presented four dances.  Natural Selection was the ins and outs of three pairs of dancers in muted colors suggestive of simplicity and nature that didn't add anything to similar modern pas de deux variations, and the dancers sometimes searched for their footing when set down from a lift.  One learned fast to keep ones eyes on Liz Riga, a tall, long legged, extremely flexible and vibrant dancer.

Love Songs, to music by Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, was more varied in terms of partnering and with more traces of street dancing, but tended to repeat its good "bits."  The program notes that Liz Riga "was named one of the top 20 dancers of 2008 by Dance Magazine for her 'over the top raunchy/funny femme fatal' performance of Larry Keigwin's Love Songs."  She's great, but that's an overstatement of the role.

Triptych was a world premier but brought nothing new.  The last, Bolero NYC, had an interesting possibility:  large numbers of people of all sizes, shapes and ages promenading dance-like in an open urban area -- like Washington Square Park, many of the dancers come from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts near there.  Once dancer -- yes, Liz Riga -- leads a dog.  There's a steady-ahead bicyclist.  Everybody wears black and red miscellaneous costumes from "Our Closets."  There are crowd pleasers:  an extremely tall ectomorphic male parading slowly in a tiny red bikini;  an overweight woman in a bright red satin dress wiggling to "Bolero," and in fact, the ballet panders to laughs and sentimentality. A tiny tot of a girl is left too long alone on the stage with an inflated balloon;  and, as if Ravel's "Bolero" wasn't enough, at the end there's a segue to "Celebration." 

The dancing ranged from competent to, in one case, tops -- the women were generally finer dancers than the men -- but all in all the choreography lacked imaginative vigor.

Keigwin + Company dances at the Joyce Theater -- usually a GREAT venue for dance -- in NYC's Chelsea district June 23-27.

                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

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Film -- Whatever Works, written and directed by Woody Allen ...

                                                   (  ... but he doesn't act in it ...)

Whatever Works is about a brilliant man with a totally morbid view of people and existence -- a real Woody Allen stand-in.  Most of us manage to block out this fundamentally realistic view of existence most of the time, but Boris Yelnikov sees it and feels it every moment -- no wonder he's given to panic attacks.

Once a Physicist at Columbia University "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize" -- echoes of Brando, "I could have been a contender" -- Boris is now a professorial dropout who pays rent on his dingy, wonderfully textured Greenwich Village apartment by teaching chess to children, and berating them for their stupidity.  For Boris, everyone is stupid except himself, and he believes this with good reason:  he had hold of a unique understanding of the full tragedy of existence.

The scruffy, balding Boris, gimpy from a failed suicide attempt, meets up with Meloody, an under-21 beauty pageant winner from the deep South who is, he thinks, stupider even than the other "worms" and "cretins" around him -- this is as hilarious looking a September-May romance as has ever been filmed.  Melody, played by Evan Rachel Wood, has the youthful comfortable in her underwear charm that's characterized Allen's leading ladies since Annie Hall.  Allen has a wonderful time -- so does the lucky audience -- with their collision of sophistication and naivete, of his burdened, wary pessimism and her dreamy optimism and joie de vivre.

Melody's small town Alabama conservative church-going Mother appears -- herself a runaway from the disasters that, yes, even the most mainstream middle class Americans risk, and in no time she's fully into the New York swing, showing her photographic collages of rearranged body parts of naked men and women at a tony art gallery.  Uptight Dad -- sort of a Governor Mark Sanford type -- comes soon and it doesn't take long for him to get liberated either, as it all spins off into an impressive series of mix-and-match loves (like Mom's polymorphic body collages).  And these loves are ... well, "Whatever Works."

New York City is lovingly filmed -- the movie starts reassuringly, though somewhat slowly, in a Greenwich Village cafe, and gathers steam with the arrival of the finest actor in the cast, Patricia Clarkson as the Southern Mom.  It's a very funny movie but ... if only Woody Allen were delivering the irony and pessimism himself.  Larry David as Boris comes recognizably close, and at times even manages to look like Woody -- or Woody's camera manages to make that happen -- which makes you realize whom you really want to see playing Boris.

Woody Allen cuts deeper and deeper to the bone of existence, which has always been his subject.  As the movie moves along, he hands over his ultimate pessimism to love.  That's part of his genius:  he never forgets who he is as an artist -- a comedian -- and by the end he lets you off the hook so you can leave with a happy smile -- thank you, Woody.

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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Off-Broadway in the Hamptons -- Bell, Book And Candle by John van Druten, directed by Jack Hofsiss, at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor

In Bell, Book and Candle, Gillian Holroyd, a modern day witch, bewitches an attractive regular guy to fall in love with her and in the course of it is bewitched herself.  It's a delightful comedy, witty, romantic, with a shiver of the occult, and contemporary -- if by contemporary we can include around 1950.

It all takes place in Gillian's mid-20th century New York City apartment -- complete with sunken living room, portable cocktail bar, and clunky land lines.  She's attracted to the handsome publisher in the apartment upstairs, Shepherd Henderson, and while she'd prefer to attract him to her in the regular way, there's no time -- he's about to announce his engagement that very night and, worse, to a girl she hated in college -- so she has to use her witchcraft in a hurry, helped by her cat Pyewacket -- the name's enough to turn the cat into a character.  (Most witches, like Gillian's brother Nick and her Aunt, Miss Holroyd, can't do much more than turn the lights on and off with a snap of the fingers or pass through a door but Gillian is really tops!)

Sidney Reditch, an eccentric author and expert on witches, happens by (so he thinks, but he's really been compelled by a spell) and holds forth on how witches are hidden everywhere looking like regular people, and holding conspiratorial meetings in high places.  "They're all around us," he claims, "anyone might be a witch."  And seizing on Shep, the one non-witch in the bunch, he says, "But I can tell one when I see one."  Recognizing -- particularly at the word "Un-American" the playwright's spoof on Senator Joe McCarthy and his anti-Communist "witch hunt", the audience had a good laugh.  What a laugh that must have been during the height of McCarthyism and the run of the play!

"Witches don't cry."  The playwright has a psychological point to make.  Witches, as he sets them up, are self-centered, always looking to get what they want via short cuts, and are incapable of love, and as the play unfolds the effects of this personality type on itself and the havoc it can reek on others is dramatized.  Will Gillian make the leap from narcissism to love?  It's not fair to say, but I can tell you that the play ends with one of the best last lines ever!

Bay Street Theatre has given this beautifully crafted play a fine production -- stylish, great set, well paced, and acted with vigor and charm.  Marvelous actors have played the romantic roles:  Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer in the original Broadway production, which John van Druten directed, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novack in the movie, the origin of the TV series "Bewitched";  here, Arija Bareikis as Gillian and Sam Robards as Shep make an appealing pair, and like all the cast  are great fun to watch.

Bell, Book And Candle plays at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY through June 28th.

                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak  

Now here's a story that's followed this play:  During the original Broadway production, the married actor couple Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer were continually trying to break one another up on-stage "for fun."  Rex Harrison arranged with the Stage Manager to make the phone ring at a wrong time.  Lilli Palmer walked over the the phone, put it to her ear, and handed it over to Rex Harrison, saying sweetly, "It's for you, Darling."

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Things of Dry Hours by Naomi Wallace, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, New York Theatre Workshop

It's the deep South, 1932, during the Great Depression and we're in the home of Tice Hogan, a Black man who's lost his job at the local factory, and his daughter Cali, a young woman with a sour marriage behind her.  They're making do -- Tice picks up some odd jobs and Cali does laundry for White folks -- when a White guy, Corbin Teel, tumbles into their house, he's probably killed a foreman in a fight at the factory, needs a hideout, and forces the Hogan's to let him stay by using as a lever his knowledge, from some guys at the factory, that Tice is a member of the Communist Party.

How unusual for current theater -- a sympathetic communist character.  Things of Dry Hours  has an important point to make:  capitalism, not racism, is the fundamental enemy of men and women at the bottom of the barrel, a view Marx would endorse.  Racism is a capitalist device and diversion.

Naturally, and metaphorically, bonding takes place among the three.  Corbin has probably been sent by the higher-ups as a snitch.  Nevertheless Tice's humanity and belief that people can change lead him to try teaching the illiterate Corbin the truth about capitalism as he sees it, as well as how to read, using the Communist Manifesto as the text for both.  Corbin falls for the bitter and eccentric Cali.  She's the toughest nut to crack of the bunch but love, of a kind, does filter through her hard veneer.

This is promising dramatic material.  Unfortunately, the play is not well written and makes several missteps.  To mention just a few.  In Scene 1 Tice Hogan has just arrived at a dark entry to heaven after an uncomfortable journey a number of years after the incidents of the play;  this scene has nothing to do with the play as it unfolds.  The grotesque sexual humiliations Cali forces on Corbin, and Corbin's acquiescence, don't ring true:  explanations are provided that she's turning the tables in response to humiliations she's suffered, and he's hot, but nevertheless these sadistic scenes seem dragged in and motivated by something outside the play itself.  The nude male forced strip scene, not of Cali's doing, did not emerge from the play but also seemed dragged in.  And all these characters are much too well spoken and knowledgeable about the world at large than is plausible.  If we weren't told we were in a small town in Alabama in 1932 we'd never guess it.   

What makes Things of Dry Hours  at least interesting to watch is Delroy Lindo as the Biblically magisterial yet vulnerable Tice, Roslyn Ruff as the ornery but tender Cali, and Garret Dillahunt as the frantic, doomed Corbin.  In spite of the fine cast, though, in its present state, it seems like a play with potential seen in an early workshop production.

Things of Dry Hours plays at New York Theatre Workshop in NYC's East Village through June 28.

Yvonne Korshak

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You, Nero by Amy Freed, directed by Sharon Ott, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre -- Off-Broadway in California

You, Nero is an at times hilarious comedy, so wacky and so focused on the decadent emperor that it's easy to miss it's aimed at serious matters.  The setting is Rome, 64 AD.  Scribonius, a "serious playwright" (much humor derived from contemporary hip lingo applied to the past) is conscripted by Nero to write a play to shine up the wicked emperor's image.  Ah, but Scribonius is an idealist, imbued with the view -- harking back to the Greeks -- that theater should educate and uplift.  

The viperous web of Nero's circle wastes no time in seducing him.  Poppaea, Nero's wife, gets to him with sexual pleasures he'd only imagined (what do they do?).  Worse, yielding to the Emperor's flattery -- and power over life, death and torture -- Scribonius sets about writing a Nero-pleasing play, his conscience yielding to rationalizations conveniently provided by the philosopher Seneca.  Through his art, Scribonius will make Nero a better man.

First try:  he'll write a play that shows Nero as virtuous, and so lead the emperor to virtue.  But that doesn't please feckless, narcissistic Nero, for reasons not clear to me but with lots of laughs derived from the impulsive and cruel antics and responses of the childish, sexually ambidextrous and all-powerful emperor, wonderfully played by Danny Scheie.  Scribonius tries another tack, digging deep to bring out the Emperor's essential human innocence in an extremely interesting sequence because it almost makes you believe in it -- a stretch, though, since in the course of the play, Nero castrates his sex toy, Fabiolo, to keep him boyish and murders his own mother and he will, in due course, play the violin -- his art -- as Rome burns.

Act I relies too much on "we're on our way to Caesar's Palace" type jokes and, when those waver, slapstick -- not everyone stayed for Act II.  Too bad, because in Act II when the comedy gets serious, genuine wit emerges and by the end, so much has been deeply funny, ironic, and worth thinking about, it's hard to remember dull Act I.

Scribonius is castrated as an artist as Fabiolo is physically -- at least he never comes up with a play that pleases the Emperor, and we're left thinking he won't be writing any more plays.  But though he's responded in oh so human ways to seduction and intimidation -- his conflicts humorously and wisely conveyed by Jeff McCarthy -- he's not corrupt.  He's failed to improve Nero's character through his art, and Rome does catch fire during a zany bread-and-circuses rock concert, but the now wiser Scribonius hopes and imagines that sometime in the future -- with the advent of Amy Freed? -- the moral, educative purposes of theater will re-emerge.  In maintaining his vision, Scribonius persuades us of the existence of the essential human innocence that he couldn't find in the Emperor.

But can art really improve anyone?  We are left to wonder.

You, Nero plays at the Berkeley Rep Theatre, Berkeley, California, through June 28.

                                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

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American Ballet Theatre -- The Balanchine-Tchaikovsky Spectacular

                            ... George Balanchine and Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky ...

This was a magnificent evening of joyous music and consummate ballet, seen Friday, May 22.  The four ballets moved like four symphonic movements.

The uncluttered, glowing color behind the dancers is all the setting one wants or needs to enjoy the dazzling use of the human body -- and the ABT's glamorous, sensuous costumes that bring out its beauty.  Think jewels splashed against exotic tie-dyed silk. 

   Here they are:

  Allegro Brillante is like a classical pas de deux but with Balanchine's purity -- beyond narrative -- although eroticism is its own story.  From his first moment on stage, Ethan Stiefel was thrilling and charming, he just has it in him since Gillian Murphy, perfect in technique, seemed emotionally disengaged.  The choreography is interesting in the way it follows the music.  For example, if the music flutters, alternate lines of dancers alternately go up and down, fluttering with it.

  Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux:  Well -- there are those who dwell on a more rarefied plane but -- this above all is what most people come to the ballet for!  A classical pas de deux in the style of Petipa, it's loaded with the narrative of desire, and astonishingly danced by the big, strong Marcelo Gomes -- those leaps! -- and the delicate and poignant Paloma Herrera.  The music was originally written for Act III of Swan Lake, according to the program note, but wasn't used for reasons of history, was lost, and later discovered -- a good reason for Balanchine's choice of classical choreography.

  Mozartina is the andante -- the costumes are black, lacey and 18th Century.  Suspended chandeliers speak ancien regime and the sequence of dance styles, a prayer, a gig, a minuet, a pas de deux, and a finale are like a courtly entertainment.  Ballet students, little girls not yet on pointes, dance in the ensemble.  Principal Dancer Veronika Part was strong and precise but, as in Allegro Brillante, the male Principal Maxim Beloserkovsky had more fire, and his footwork in the air is breathtaking.

  Theme and Variations is a big piece with lots of dancers, just right for a finale.  It was beautifully danced and costumed but the choreography is distracting.  David Hallberg was superb in his solos but overworked in partnering Michele Wiles.  As in Allegro Brillante the choreography  often followed the music only here, the musical "ups" required Hallberg to lift Wiles again and again, to the point where the repetition seemed unimaginative and lacked balletic ease -- at her final leap into his arms he looked shocked, I had a close view from the second row and hoped he could hold on.  He did.  Whew!

An evening of ballets by a single composer and choreographer is a wonderful idea -- a free flowing unity in diversity.  This is a great season for The American Ballet Theatre.  Shortly they will be dancing their All-Prokofiev Celebration, including a world premier, On the Dnieper.  The American Ballet Theatre is performing at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC.

                                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

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Is "The Torment of St. Anthony" by Michelangelo? Here's another reason to think so.

                                                    ... look to the landscape ...

Did Michelangelo make the painting of "The Torment of St. Anthony" which has recently been in the news?  Writers contemporary with Michelangelo indicate he made a painting of the subject when he was around 12 or 13, and an apprentice in Ghirlandaio's workshop, but it's never been agreed that this painting is the one Michelangelo made.

A good place to see color photos, including excellent details, is the website of The New York Times.

Recently purchased in London for 2 million, the painting was cleaned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sold again, for $6 million or more, to the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas.  The arguments about its authorship are circling around connoisseurship issues.  Keith Christiansen, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum is particularly impressed by some strong cross-hatching.  Evidently Christiansen didn't persuade others -- if the Metropolitan Museum thought this was Michelangelo's first painting, they they never would have let it go!    (recession or not)

Judging from the photos:  This painting doesn't  "say" Michelangelo.

On the other hand, there's one aspect I detect so far that may point to Michelangelo -- the relatively simplified, even barren landscape.   Michelangelo is interested in the human body, never mind leafy trees!  His landscapes are less lush, less sensuous, more hard-edge than those of his Italian and Florentine contemporaries -- think Sistine Chapel Temptation and Expulsion.  In his earliest known painting, he pretty well lets his monumental figures squeeze out the landscape behind the Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist at a time when contemporary painters were glorifying the landscapes behind holy figures.

There's barely a nod to the famous, Renaissance "atmospheric perspective" in "The Torment."   Instead, the contours of the shore and distant hills are slick -- they look air-brushed.  The waves seem pasted on.  Condivi, who knew the artist, said Michelangelo told him he'd gone to the fish market to learn how to depict fish scales (they do indeed appear in this "Torment" and not the Schongauer engraving upon which this painting is based) -- no sign that the painter attended to what's out there in the landscape with that kind of focus.

Christiansen also sees in the vibrant, almost iridescent colors in "The Torment" a possible "prelude" to the colors in the Sistine Chapel vault.  Could well be.

Is this by Michelangelo?  The treatment of the landscape, the colors, and other aspects make it a genuine possibility.  I look forward to seeing the painting directly when it goes on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in June, before moving on to Texas. 

                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

Vieux Carre by Tennessee Williams, directed by Austin Pendleton, at the Pearl Theatre

                                                 ... streetcar named memory ...

The setting is a run-down boarding house in New Orleans' French Quarter in the 1930's and you know you're in good hands from the first moment.  The house is empty now, The Writer comments at the start, remembering when he lived there, but clearly it isn't -- Mrs. Wire, the landlady is on stage even before the play begins.  With that brilliant contradiction, Williams conveys the paradox of memory.

The Writer, turning his memories into a play, brings us with him to the time this house was crowded with the intensely individualized characters and their desires, jam packed with the ongoing torments of their situations and the occasional raptures open to them through their partnership in the human spirit. 

It's interesting that The Writer is both the central character in the play and also the most passive.  Though young and beautiful, he doesn't seduce but is seduced, by an elderly and not appealing painter -- the man has serious lung disease -- who in a sparkling moment of truth defines himself as "rapacious."  Appetite never dies -- the painter reminded me of Goya's black painting of "Old Man and Old Woman Eating Soup," skeletons scraping their bowls to the end.  All the other tenants in Mrs. Wire's rooming house are ravenous, in one way or another.  The handsome Tye is sexually passionate, stimulating Jane's unquenchable desire.  Two once higher class old ladies are famished to the point of scrounging in garbage cans, while Mrs. Wire cooks gumbo.

Even toward the end when The Writer has the chance to move to a new freedom, a cross-country car trip to the West, he's invited along but it's the other guy's plan.  The Writer's action is mainly to observe and understand things better.  This gives the play a soft center.

Vieux Carre was written in 1978 near the end of Williams' career but written about writing and about coming to terms with sexuality, it has the feel of a coming of age play.  He often draws upon memories of his life and family in his plays but this is the most directly autobiographical -- Mrs. Wire's has the same address as his French Quarter boarding house -- 722 Toulouse.  It even has a structural laxity one might expect of a youthful playwright with more to learn.  Perhaps, after having produced a great body of work, Williams felt he'd earned the right to just give himself over to autobiography -- at last.  Never mind:  the production is flawless, the acting superb, the language goes directly to the heart and the characters are real, vivid, and remain in the imagination.  

Vieux Carre is at the Pearl Theater in the East Village, St Mark's Place, through June 14th.

                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome -- please scroll down and click.  Thank you!     

P.S. Two of the best plays I've seen this year are Vieux Carre, and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, reviewed here (click on link).  And more to come -- I'm looking forward to Glass Menagerie at Guild House in East Hampton, L.I., this summer (reviewed -- click here). Also reviewed here, Williams' The Day on Which a Man Dies (click on link) in East Hampton, August 2009.

Coraline, music and lyrics by Stephin Merritt, book by David Greenspan, based on Neil Gaiman's novel, directed by Leigh Silverman

The novel is an international best seller, the movie has grossed over $80 million, there's a movie tie-in edition, a movie collector's edition, a graphic novel, a visual companion, and a video game, and now a brilliant group of New York theater people have produced a musical play.

This makes sense.  This production, however, in its intense and imaginative focus on the weird visual effects and surrealistic juxtapositions, loses somewhat the thread of the human story.

Coraline -- like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the Darling children in Peter Pan, Clara in The Nutcracker -- escapes the world of busy grown-ups and their rules for fantasyland.  For Coraline, adventure lies in an apartment on the other side of a magic door -- like Dorothy's mirror -- from her own.

Past that door everything -- furniture, Mother, Father, stray occupants -- are the same but not quite the same as what she's left behind.  At first, the differences spell "freedom."  The Other Mother will give her everything she wants!  Wow!  But the dark side emerges, the Other Mother is a soul-stealer, ghostly children with button eyes appear, her previous conquests.  She kidnaps Coraline's true parents.  The Good Witch of the North is really the Wicked Witch of the East.

How will Coraline escape and free her parents?  Through a clever game, with the help of a black cat and a special stone.  I think.  At least that's what I heard mentioned.  But I never really saw how it happened.

How Coraline succeeds in tricking the wicked Other Mother is lost amidst the extravagant visuals, and some arbitrary magic.  Solutions are handed over too easily to special effects.  Coraline, the story, already deemed a classic, is about working out problems for oneself, and coming to appreciate sometimes humdrum loving parents, and love as we have it in our bothersome real world.  It's a story of growing up, and we need to see that.  But the production skimps on the psychological development and that, even amidst the clever moments, limits ones engagement.  Coraline is smart at the start and smart at the end, and that's about it. 

Still, there are extraordinary images and witty word play, as well as sophisticated disjunctions that provoke big laughs.  Jayne Houdyshell as a mature actress and a convincing pre-teen Coraline at one and the same time is an ongoing fascination, and for this surreal production, a brilliant choice.  David Greenspan plays unforgettably the defeated Other Mother falling down a deep well for a very very long time -- I wouldn't mind seeing the play over just to see him do that again.  Julian Fleischer as the mature, thoughtful, upright talking cat makes the slinky ones in "Cats" seem really tacky.  The songs are wonderfully rhymed;  they're hilarious, a highlight.

Coraline, a production of MCC Theater, plays at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in NYC's West Village through July 5th.  

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down and click.  Thanks!

Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, the 1947 film with Rex Harrison, Kay Hammond ...

                                                                ... always ...

Since Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is currently on Broadway, it seems like a good time to look at the 1947 film, directed by David Lean.

With an evanescent greenish cast and semi-transparent, a beautiful ghost returns to stir things up with her novelist husband in the midst of his new life with a new wife.

People talking to the ghost in one direction when she's really on the other side of the room ... flowers carried from the table to the mantelpiece with no one carrying them ... a seductive ghost ... a suave and youthful Rex Harrison .. a terrific "great performance" medium played as an English eccentric by Margaret Rutherford ... a common sense Constance Cummings as the second wife puzzling through inexplicably opening and closing doors ... that's a lot.

A broad percentage of the film's appeal comes from the sheer allure of Kay Hammond as the ghostly first wife, with her throaty voice, ironic gaze, and the cast given by greenish overtones to her red lips.  Lounging gracefully over the back of the sofa, she's completely at home -- so amusing. 

The title comes from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark" ... "HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!  Bird thou never wert -- "  The film has a musical theme, "I'll be loving you, always, with a love that's true, always ... "  Right, "always."  The plot is thin -- but the fantasy is powerful!

                                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Heightening contrasts -- Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, at the Brooklyn Museum

                                        ... the front of a boy, the back of a man ...

Not always following the Impressionist "rules," Caillebotte fulfills the French Impressionist purpose -- to capture the moment, deliciously.  This exhibition covers his main subjects, scenes of the city and urban labor, and with a special focus on his paintings in which water plays a major role.  Here are two of my favorites ...

In Oarsman in a Top Hat, we (unseen), are in a rowboat, knee to knee with a rower who's taken time off from the office for a refreshing row on the river.  Beside him on the rower's bench is his folded jacket -- what a detail to conjure up th just before and the just after, framing the great Impressionist subject:  the now.  His cheeks are rosy, his face flushed with physical activity -- he's just pulled forward on th oars -- but he looks aside, caught in thought.  Physical activity and thought, the Impressionist broken brushstrokes of the water and the clear, curved contours of his hat, the color-filled shadows of his face and the black of his vest, the dappled patterns of the watter and the stripes of his shirt sleeves, he's near as he could be, others are distant -- this painting is a study of contrasts, a visual drama of available human joys.

The Floor Scrapers is a study of browns and sepias.  What -- no juxtaposition of complementary colors?  no broken brush strokes?  hard work as a subject? -- for reasons like these Caillebotte has often been overlooked, because the "true" Impressionists -- Monet and Renoir, bathed in such prestige.  What a narrow attitude that assumes that hard work isn't fun!  that arbitrarily decides that the color brown, poor brown, lacks light.  For this artist, neither is true.

As in Oarsman in a Top Hat, Caillebotte paints mind and body.  Concentration on the job, one of our greatest pleasures -- well, isn't it?  -- is as much the subject of The Floor Scrapers as scraping floors.  The older worker, on his knees, uses experience, training and focus to do a fine job -- it's all in his posture.  The young worker concentrates on sharpening his blade, head bent to the task.   

Natural light pouring through the window falls across the poignantly naked chest of the young man and the shirted back of the older one -- the front of a boy, the back of a man, coming and going, flesh and no flesh, youth and age ... and yet, both face the same direction.  This is one canny painter.  The unpausing light illuminates the parallel rows they've been cutting through the old floor varnish, the curly shavings a heightening contrast, and reflects with a refreshing dazzle from the wetted floor.

These are life-affirming paintings.

Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, is at the Brooklyn Museum through July 5, 2009.

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak         

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down and click.  Thank you!