Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

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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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 like 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 the 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!                                         

Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Museum, The Walt Whitman Project

                                                        ... still a young nation ...

It was nothing less than a privilege to meet up with America's greatest poet in his home town, Brooklyn!

What a city!  So much happening, how to keep track?  If I hadn't happened to know an organizer, I might not have known about the Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn, held in the Library of The Brooklyn Museum on May 2*.   

Most startling was mezzo-soprano Nicole Mitchell who, simply arising from her place, filled the room with her deep, gospel singer's voice, without accompaniment and with startling power, singing Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susannah" (most popular song of the 19th Century, Whitman had written about it). 

Cascading readings from Whitman ... "Old Brooklyn Days" ... "Paumanok" from Leaves of Grass, "Old Time Amusement" ... "A Fourth of July Patriotism" ... piled up a renewed sense of the promise of America -- small scale but it felt like Obama's Inauguration.  Toward the end Mitchell sang a Whitman poem to martyrs of the American Revolution set to the music of the Star Spangled Banner -- it was almost overwhelming.

Whitman's father had seen with his own eyes some of our founding fathers, whom he idolized.  Whitman was Abraham Lincoln's contemporary, "O Captain! My Captain!", his most famous poem, written to express grief at Lincoln's death, and the poet's words continue to speak from the 19th Century to us directly in the 21st Century.  Many of his Brooklyn haunts evoked in his writings are still there.  It's good reason to feel glad we've been a nation for a short enough time to hold to a complete vision.

Glad, and grateful to those who, sometimes catching us by surprise, bring us into intimate touch with the best of human aspiration and achievement.  Thanks to Principal Museum Librarian Deirdre Lawrence and readers Greg Trupiano, Lon Black and Hakim Williams for creating Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn, held Saturday, May 2 and there's more*:  The Walt Whitman Project is holding its Sixth Annual Whitman Birthday Bash in Manhattan May 27  -- it's even FREE. 

                                                                                 Yvonne Korshak  

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Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco, starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon

                                                    ... everything theater ...

Exit the King is a hilarious parable, transported to the other worldly by marvelous music, dazzlingly written, with profundity hidden behind the comic mask.  It's everything theater should be -- including outstanding performers and a brilliantly intelligent production.  You could not have a better time than at Exit the King.

Aristophanes lives on in Ionesco's wild tale where anything can and does happen because that's how life is.

The set is dominated by vast, "kingly" but drooping drapery -- with Goyaesque drawings, like a Metropolitan Opera set making way for a new production.  Everything about this play is about endings.  King Berenger, played by Geoffrey Rush in one of the greatest performances I've seen, is dying.  (Rush is so good you just don't want it to ever end.)  We're told that the King will be dead by the end of the performance -- the characters check their watches now and again to see how much time he has left.

Queen Marguerite seems wryly, even coldly, willing to let things take their course -- she's a puzzle we don't understand fully until the end -- in contrast to Queen Marie, his second and younger wife, a frail vessel of those pesky human emotions of love, grief, and resistance to the inevitable.  The King, a classic clown with German Expressionist smears of face paint, does not want to die, and his rationales, explanations and feints are those we all share -- talk about "universal."  Only he's so funny.

From the start we know it's not only the King who's dying.  The clock's ticking also on his once enormous kingdom, greatly reduced in size and power because of his neglect, to the point where now the pond is lapping at the fence posts.  One thinks of polar bears puzzling it out on a melting block of ice.  The play is prescient, written in 1962.

An individual dies and an entire world vanishes -- we often think that narcissistic union (or confusion) of microcosm and macrocosm is peculiar to humans and for much of the play that seems to be the topic.  But toward the end meanings crescendo and masks fall away.  Susan Sarandon -- regally -- removes her Queen's cloak to reveal fully her vibrant green gown.  Nature herself, there she is!  The inevitable, the truth!  Muse-like -- there's so much that's Classical about this zany, "absurdist" play -- she leads the King to where he must go.  Her role swells and the shrinking Kingdom shows its true face.  It's not only Berenger's:  it's the human kingdom, our world -- the big one -- that we've neglected, muddied, handed over to entropy without a fight ... and now beyond recall.

Early on, railing frantically against inevitability, the King comes up with an argument from nature:  "Death's not natural.  That's why nobody wants to do it."  Only death, it turns out, is natural.  If we've had any doubts, by the end we've heard it from Nature herself.

Exit the King plays at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway, NYC, through June 30th.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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

On Broadway -- Schiller's Mary Stuart, a new version by Peter Oswald, starring Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter

                                                          ...  whose history ? ...     

The situation of Mary Stuart is that Elizabeth I, the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII (see here below), is Queen of England and Mary, formerly Queen of the Scots, a devout Catholic, is in prison in London for murdering her husband and plotting against the English throne.  Egged on by various plotters and courtly connivers, the two engage in contest of wills:  Mary seeks to be freed, while Elizabeth hesitates to execute her for ethical reasons and to avoid turning her into a martyr for the Catholic cause.  Mary is finally executed, Elizabeth claiming it was done without her specific bidding.

How then does Friedrich Schiller turn this into a play in which the beheaded Mary is seen as victorious and Elizabeth, who in fact goes on to reign as a great Queen, as vanquished?  Good writing, professional production and excellent acting mask the fundamental nonsense. 

Mary has quite a resume.  She has murdered her husband, married his murderer, been thrown out by the Scots as their Queen and engaged in several murderous plots.  Yet Schiller, and Oswald, envision her as spiritually superior to ElizabethI, a beloved Queen who strengthened the arts, crafts and commerce of her nation, prepared it militarily to ward off threats from powerful enemies, and fostered the great flowering of Elizabethan England. 

This play has been called "revisionist" but it's just biased.

The two go hair to hair.  At the end Mary, who is purged of all her sins in a lengthy confession while bathed in a heavenly light, goes toward the execution block calmly, gorgeously dressed and magnificently coiffed with a gold hair net.  Elizabeth, on the contrary, comes onstage irascible, then isolated and forlorn, and without her elaborately braided costume wig -- her short underneath hair looks as if it had been chopped with a hedge shears.  How interesting, a purposeful twisting of fact by the playwrights to shaft Elizabeth, since Mary's lost wig was the one that really figured in this execution.  According to the accounts, when the executioner held up Mary's severed head, her glamorous auburn wig fell off, revealing her gray hair.  That's not my idea of how to come out a-head.  :-)

Mary Stuart was first produced in Germany in 1800.  Schiller, in this revolutionary period, fired by romantic aspirations, was inspired to write an anti-monarchical account of Elizabeth ... but Mary Queen of Scots is no standard bearer for liberation. 

Mary Stuart plays at the Broadhurst Theatre in NYC through August 16th.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Film Note: Duplicity with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen

                                             ... James Bond on a leash ...

James Bond tamed -- that's Duplicity.  Bond-style music, master spies, international glossy views and fantasy luxury gorgeously photographed, and Clive Owen's looks almost fall in line with the Sean Connery successors though there's a touch of the spaniel about him.  But the intrigue, which anyhow lacks the scope and wild imagination of a Bond film, plays second fiddle to the saccharine and unbelievable love story whose sex scenes and dialogue are platitudes:  Roberts to Owen:  "I know what you are and I love you anyway."  Owen to Roberts:  "I've been faithful."  James Bond domesticated.  

                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Waste of Time after Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, adapted by Robert David Macdonald, at Classic Stage

                                                 ... what a Waste of Time ...

Over the epic course of generational time that marks Remembrance of Things Past, Proust charts subtle and ever evolving change in societal attitudes -- the acceptance of modernity, and of democratic values.  Waste of Time gives only the slightest nod to this grand topic and immerses itself in gossip.

Did he sleep with her?  Did she sleep with her?  Did she sleep with him?  Did he sleep with him?  And what did they do when they did?  How do Lesbians manage?  etc.

Sure there are a few laughs, like any gossip.

It didn't help that the actors seemed less practiced than in the two earlier, and far more effective, Proust adaptations -- the actor playing Marcel, Proust's stand-in, gave the impression he'd never seen the script before.  (For reviews of the first two adaptations, Swann in Love, and Albertine Regained, check here below).   

You couldn't glean that a monumental novel stands behind the dramatization.

Swann in Love will be presented again at Classic Stage in NYC's East Village on April 13 -- and that's time well spent!

                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome -- just scroll down and click!

Lets Talk Off-Broadway, The Good Negro by Tracey Scott Wilson, directed by Liesl Tommy, at The Public Theater

                                                     ... desegregating Birmingham ...

The Good Negro is a fictionalized dramatization of a key moment in the civil rights struggle -- Martin Luther King's campaign to desegregate downtown Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

This play has a very strong aspect, impressive and exciting.  It focuses on the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Council struggling to keep their eye on the great ideal of freedom in the face of human failings -- rivalries, sexual indiscretions, antagonisms, fear, betrayal -- that could have derailed the campaign for a desegregated downtown Birmingham.  How rare for suspense to be not just about who's going to get killed or who's going to be found out, although those threats are imminent, but can this group of dedicated freedom fighters overcome human weakness in service of a high ideal?  I can't think of another play or narrative that has that theme -- if you can, please let me know!

And, in transcending the frailties that would divide them, they learn something important.  In order to evade distractions from their main point by the opposition, they'd been looking for "good Negroes" to carry their banners, those who had suffered dramatically from Jim Crow but who were personally beyond criticism.  By the end, these leaders have grown beyond that last acquiescence -- the "last temptation."  People are people;  Jim Crow targets all Negroes.

The play's weakness is its failure to characterize the movement leaders, particularly Martin Luther King, with a strength to coincide with events.  After seeing The Good Negro, I read King's famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written while he was jailed during the confrontation the play dramatizes -- it was a different voice from anything heard in the play or from his stand-in, Reverend Lawrence.  It wasn't possible to relate the strength, the clarity, the intelligence, the weighing of factors, the understanding -- the sheer monumentality of the portrait of King that emerges from his own words in the "Letter" and elsewhere with the character in the play.

Still and all, The Good Negro brings to vivid life a time when water fountains could be segregated, when the FBI and JFK played equivocal roles and the KKK was unequivocally virulent, and when a defining struggle for freedom was underway.

The Good Negro plays at the Public Theater in NYC's Greenwich Village through April 19.

                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome -- please scroll down and click. 

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Albertine Regained after Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Adapted by Pamela Hansford Johnson, Directed by Michael Sexton, at Classic Stage

                                                                ... Proust II ...

Albertine Regained, the second in Classic Stage's Proust Project, isn't as compelling as Swann in Love (reviewed directly above) because, though well acted, it's not as good a story.  Motivations are unclear:  why on earth is Albertine, a young girl on a holiday with her friends at the beach, so drawn to the lethargic, "thin armed" Marcel?  especially since she has an eager, suitable and equally wealthy suitor right at hand, Bloch.  He may not be sufficiently sensitive for her taste but Marcel isn't characterized as having any competitive advantage on his side.  And Marcel's way of "loving" Albertine, confining her in a stuffy house, and not making love to her, is so equivocal that it's hard to see it as "love" in the romantic and passionate sense the characters use the word.

Just as Swann marries Odette when he has ceased to love her, so Marcel marries Albertine when, he says, he no longer loves her.  Ah love's perversities -- Proust follows them with the subtlety of a fine line drawing, loving them more than love itself.  You can tell Proust knew this story needed something extra -- he introduces a female Iago character (that's how he describes her) to keep things interesting but that character doesn't quite do the trick, just lets you know the author saw the problem.

Albertine Regained does, however, have its own competitive advantage.  In several stunning passages Proust, painting with a full brush and color palette, uses images from the outer world to convey inner states of mind.  In that new territory opened up for exploration in the early Twentieth Century -- the inner landscape -- he was a great pioneer.

Albertine Regained was presented at Classic Stage March 30.  Still to come in the Proust Project series based on Remembrance of Things Past is Waste of Time on April 6, and Encore: Swann in Love on April 13.

                                                                                    Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome -- please scroll down and click.

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Swann in Love by Pamela Hansford Johnson, after Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Directed by Tony Speciale, at Classic Stage

                                                    ... The Proust Project ...

Why have an off night? It's not enough for Classic Stage to be putting on currently three major plays by three different Greek playwrights, they're using their one night off to do their Proust Project, a series of four Monday nights of dramatized readings after Proust's great early 20th century novel, Remembrance of Things Past.  I'm so glad they are!

The first Proust evening of Swann in Love was breathtaking, with the actors on an unadorned stage in front of the backdrop of the current major production, An Oresteia (see here below), and with three chamber music players framed by a cut in the plywood set behind it, and playing beautiful music that calls up the time -- the way, for Proust, the madeleine pastry evokes the past.

Proust, in Swann in Love, recounts in subtle detail, taking his time, leaving nothing out the very process of this love, the story of a highly sophisticated man of high society, an amateur of the arts, who falls profoundly in love with a clever lower class cocotte, Odette.  Swann in Love has its beginning as a long section of Remembrance of Things Past but it stands well on its own and has been published as a novella and dramatized several times -- Jeremy Irons played Swann in the movie.

Most of this Swann in Love is dramatic dialogue with the character of Marcel Proust providing as the writer some narrative links, a refreshing shift in texture.  It was hard to take my eyes off Michael Stuhlbarg's face as he reflected with outward restraint, but missing nothing, the inward passions and torments of Swann.  But I had to watch also Tina Benko's knowing gestures and expressions, and sheer charm with which she, as Odette, spins Swan in.  The expressiveness of all of these actors standing in place, the timing, the lighting and the music were so evocative it's hard to remember it was a "reading."  Didn't I see their whole world?  I'm sure I did -- it's still in front of my eyes.

Swann in Love will be presented again Monday April 13th.  Go!

The Proust Project will be playing at Classic Stage in the East Village, NYC, March 30 (Albertine Regained), April 6 (Waste of Time), and April 13 (Encore:  Swann in Love).

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- An Oresteia, plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides translated by Anne Carson, Classic Stage Company

                                                    ... cycles of vengeance ...

"Oresteia" refers to Aeschylus' trilogy about the chain of vengeance murders in the House of Atreus -- House as in "noble family who live in the palace".  Classic Stage begins their Oresteia with Aeschylus' Agamemnon, moving to Sophocles' Elektra for part two, and Euripides' Orestes for part three.  How often does one have the chance to see together three great Greek tragedies fully produced!  This is an ambitious project, and worthwhile for bringing these exciting and profound works to new audiences.  This production has excellent qualities, including Anne Carson's naturalistic but intense translations and some peaks of acting, though some aspects are less satisfying.

                                                             ... Agamemnon ...  

In Aeschylus' play, the Greek leader in the Trojan War, Agamemnon, returns home to Argos where he, and his captive concubine, Cassandra, are soon murdered by his wife, Klytaimnestra.  This is a vengeance killing:  the Greeks sailing to Troy had found themselves becalmed and Agamemnon, in search of a favorable wind had sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenaia, to the gods. 

After seeing this production, it's hard to imagine anyone but Stephanie Roth Haberle in the role of Klytaimnestra:  she has a strong and richly inflected voice, and with her tall and exceedingly narrow form and in her blood red dress she seems the very embodiment of a sharp-edged weapon.  As Agamemnon, though, Steve Mellor opts for a casual hands in his pocket effect and doesn't project his voice;  perhaps this is intended to deconstruct a cliche of the proud and triumphant ruler, but Agamemnon a wimp?  Cassandra screams and gyrates but does not reach the character's emotional depth.  In general, throughout this production the actors seem to be straining for effect, notable exceptions being in the magnificent performances of Haberle as Klytaimnestra and Annika Boras as Elektra.

The versatile, red stained plywood backdrop for all three plays evokes the bloody constant in this House.  During Agamemnon, though, the set was pulled forward blocking sight of the stage to those sitting on the sides, the explanation being that this was "alternative seating";  it struck me and others as less than respectful to those stuck in the alternate seats.

                                                                   ... Elektra ...

In Sophocles' Electra, Orestes, the son of Klytaimnestra and Agamemnon, returns from exile and kills his mother in vengeance for her murder of his father.  The straightforward English of Anne Carson's translation makes the great arguments of this play excitingly immediate.  This is also particularly successful among the three plays because the large role of the bitter and uncompromising Elektra is played by an outstanding actor, Annika Boras.  If you don't know Sophocles well, here's a chance to see the brilliant way he writes hot and building verbal conflicts between two characters whose points of view are totally irreconcilable.  The most famous Sophoclean argument is in Antigone (see Pearl Theatre's Theban Cycle, here below in October) but Elektra's arguments are equally dazzling.  Boras' sardonic Elektra argues with Haberle's haughty, frightened Klytaimnestra -- great on great.  Michi Barall as Elektra's conventionally minded sister doesn't have as strong a voice to counter Boras but does well enough to let the playwrights words come through so you can "get" it.

It's amusing to see the Chorus of "Women of Mycenae" turned into two sunbathing women and a man around the pool, with sunglasses -- that's OK -- but on the other hand it's illogical that these friends and confidants of Elektra are allowed to live the life of Reilly in Klytaimnestra's palace while she and her paramour, Aigisthos, are hatefully demeaning Elektra herself. 

                                                                  ... Orestes ...

Even if you know what's coming, Euripides' Orestes shocks by its apparent cynicism.  The questions of Euripides' attitudes toward his fellow human beings and the gods is continually -- perhaps eternally -- debated and the play puts the ambiguities on display.  None of the characters, including the god Apollo, is high-minded and there's no indication of redemption such as one finds in Aeschylus.  Mickey Solis plays Orestes as anxiety ridden and deeply depressed -- getting out of bed is a challenge.  It's reasonable to interpret Orestes' pursuit by the Furies in terms of modern psychology (and Euripides is often called "the most modern of the playwrights") but one needs to keep in mind:  only six days have passed since he killed his mother.  Give the boy some time!  Still, Euripides leaves us feeling that there's not much peace of mind ahead for this matricide in any event.

A fine and daring aspect of this Orestes was to turn Euripides' Chorus of Women of Argos, along with Hermione, daughter of Helen of Troy, into singers and musicians.  Daring because so little is known about Greek singing, but the choral odes were certainly sung and danced:  contemporary melodies, dance and instrumentation, as here, are creative ways to acknowledge what's unknown while maintaining the pleasures of music.  With some of the performers the singing was beautiful and insinuating -- new but, yes, pure Euripides -- though with others, the singing masked Euripides' poetry.

Three playwrights -- of any epoch -- carrying through on a single narrative line is rare and of great interest.  There are some rough edges here but the cumulative effect of this Oresteia brings one in touch with the powers of the classical Greek playwrights to move and to provoke thought.

Agamemnon and Elektra are directed by Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas, and Orestes is directed by Paul Lazar, and associate directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson.

An Oresteia plays at Classic Stage in NYC East Village through April 19, 2009.  Choices between seeing the three plays on one Sunday (I did) or two on one night and one another.

                                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Wooster Group La Didone, Music by Francisco Cavalli, Libretto by Giovan Francesco Busenello, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte

                         ... 17th century opera meets Planet of the Vampires ...

First of all I have to say that La Didone is a tremendous lot of fun.  It's exciting and spectacular -- many things are happening all the time though not too much to keep track of.  What a lot of smiles!  How refreshing!

Two stories are played on stage concurrently.  La Didone, a 17th century opera based on Virgil's Aeneid is beautifully sung and performed.  It's the real thing, in a sense, and if you love opera, here's a good one, but if you're one of those people who find opera long and hard to take don't stay away on that account, the Wooster Group makes it immediate and -- you could never use the word "stuffy" about anything they do.  The other is Terrore nello spazio after the 1965 film Planet of the Vampires, populated with Star Trek look-alike talk-alike cosmonauts in metallic jumpsuits, and complete with a spaceship that you'd swear lands and lifts off with plenty of G's in the course of the play.  Live actors interact with video monitors showing the same, or different, or partly the same actions.  The sensory upload feels terrific.

Why put the opera and film stories together?  Both are about quests to discover new worlds that are interrupted by involuntary landings on unknown territories.  By the end, Aeneas and his crew and some of the cosmonauts escape but not without great loss:  they leave behind their souls.  The cosmonauts literally leave their souls behind since aliens take over their bodies, dislodging their souls.  For Aeneas, loss of soul is a metaphorical expression of his parting forever from his beloved Dido whom he abandons ... or is that more literal?  The parallel story lines raise lots of interesting questions.   The two stories bump into one another now and then but for the main they're separate.

What does all this staccato excitement add up to?  The language of La Didone is poetic and given the long line by operatic singing.  Gestures are slow and grand.  Not so in Terrore nello spazio where Cosmonaut Deadpan is spoken:  "Check the meteor rejector!"  "What the -- ?"  Gestures are clipped and muscular -- you know it because you've seen it.  Titles projected above keep things straight and highlight the wild contrasts of style, a wonderful counterpoint.  In La Didone people are willing to throw away kingdoms for love and die for it, fully sung.  It's the emotion of fear that drives the cosmonauts crazy -- in few words.  The stories are from different epochs and told in entirely different modes but -- here comes a favorite Wooster Group message -- one's as conventional as the other.  They're just different conventions.    

The Wooster Group follows a totally original path.  Often they've dismantled expressive conventions, this time they play off one against another.  To my mind, this is the best work they've ever done -- a culmination!

The Wooster Group La Didone plays at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO, Brooklyn, through April 26.  A video opens the site.

                                                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- RUINED by Lynn Nottage, directed by Kate Whoriskey, Manhattan Theatre Club

                                               ... This house is a home ...

Ruined brings us to a cafe-bar-whorehouse in the Congo, an oasis in the midst of war between "government" and "rebels".  As in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, on which this play is loosely based, it doesn't matter who's fighting -- the effect on the little people struggling to survive is the same no matter which violent-prone combatants they encounter and will be the same no matter who wins.

Mama Nadi runs her place and her prostitutes with a firm hand.  She's an unsentimental, bottom-line realist, using as whores the girls who are victims of sexual exploitation -- mass and ongoing rapes -- by soldiers, and then expelled by their kin as dishonored.  She offers them a place and a living.  Most of the time they keep in mind that they have no choice and are grateful -- but thoughts of sweeter and more decent possibilities sometimes overwhelm them.  It's a brutal story, and a real one in the sense of being based on  the playwright's interviews with victimized Congo women.

The play thus tells an important story, and has well written and acted confrontations between determined characters.

BUT ... A problem is that Mama Nadi's seems too nice a place.  In between the terrible things that happen in front of your eyes, you begin to feel that -- like the girls -- you could do worse than be here.  In Mother Courage everybody's so hungry, the last time I saw it I came out hungry -- oh for some warm soup!  Mama provides food and shelter, in critically short supply in Brecht's play.  She her girls, and the repeat visitors form a family, like the denizens of O'Neill's bar in The Iceman Cometh.  Mama's strength, conveyed with an all embracing vitality by Saidah Arrika Ekulona, is reassuring.  The set is lit by a golden gleam, reflecting off the piano-polished stage floor.  Everything's in good repair -- the ramshackle bar is painted over in pretty pastels.  The play takes up violence in terms of war, gender, and conventions of honor, but until violence directly intrudes, Mama's place seems benign.  AIDS and other STD's, in this play about prostitutes and soldiers in Africa, are never mentioned.  None of the girls is on drugs and none is alcoholic.  If war didn't intrude here, what would happen to these girls anyway in ten years?  Ruined doesn't ask that.  

Thus, in spite of horrific events, the overall mood is so upbeat the play is ultimately sentimental.  In this it differs mightily from Journeys, recently produced in NYC and reviewed here below, which like Ruined tells violence-plagued stories of women from around the world based on interviews, without the rosy glow.  Ruined lets the audience leave with one of Brecht's "happy endings, nice and easy" -- without the irony.  Brecht doesn't paint in pastel colors.

Ruined, however, draws dramatic strength from its fully drawn and realized characters and fine cast.  The play shines a light on the worst aspects of humanity, on much in between, and also on the best, particularly in the character of Christian, a purveyor of goods who loves Mama Nadi, and whose poetic and persistent character is beautifully played by Russell G. Jones.  The three girls we follow (we never see hide nor hair of the seven or eight others who are said to be there which is a real flaw in this play) have distinct personalities and their stories are moving and emblematic:  Condola Rashad as the sensitive, maimed Sophie, Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Salina who must forget the past, and Cherise Booth who ... don't miss her dancing!

Ruined is easier to take than it should be  -- perversely it turns out to be a pleasant evening of theater. 

Ruined plays at NY City Center Stage 1 in midtown Manhattan, through April 19th.

                                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

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Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII, at The Grolier Club

                                                         ... Love and History ...

Henry VIII made one of the most momentous breaks in Western history:  he severed England from the Catholic Church, and established the Church of England independent from Rome.  Why?  Henry wanted to marry Anne Boleyn and the Pope wouldn't let him divorce his current wife.  So it's often summed up -- a kind of mnemonic.  How often people look to great historical turning points and find a love affair at the crux!  The very birth of democracy in Greece, for instance, with a love story as its origin myth -- the Tyrannicides.  The exhibition Vivat Rex! reminds us:  to rescue history from fantasy, look to primary documents.  And they are here -- astonishing texts and objects of the period that enable the viewer to engage with the true story.  That's even more exciting than a love affair -- well, maybe as exciting ...

You'll find here remarkable "true" things of the time, things from the hand of Henry and those associated with him:  Henry VIII's schoolboy copy of Cicero from which he learned Latin;  his mother's prayer book;  his father's, Henry VII's, list of characteristics -- mainly physical -- that he looked for in a new wife;  the great Francois I of France's handwritten account of expenses incurred in meeting with Henry, Martin Luther's Open Letter to Pope Leo X Concerning Indulgences; and Henry's Attack on Martin Luther;  and Luther's Response to Henry;  and the inordinately valuable 10th century gospel book the Pope gave Henry to thank him for his support (prematurely as it turns out);  Henry writing with first hints at a break with Rome;  Erasmus coming in on the divorce issue;  the Act of Parliament in which England declared its complete independence from Rome (passed in a hurry because Anne Boleyn was two months pregnant and that divorce was really needed);  the Act dissolving the Monasteries -- all showing the complexities of the process we call the Reformation, and how mired it was in conflicting motivations, pragmatism and high ideals.  Treaties, portraits of contemporaries who made history all are here, including a youthful portrait of his daughter Elizabeth who became queen (he never did have a son survive to adulthood in spite of divorcing two wives, beheading two others after first divorcing them, having one who died otherwise and one who lived, in his quest for a male heir).   

Arthur L. Schwarz of the Grolier Club is the prime mover of the exhibition and richly illustrated catalog that has essays by leading scholars, well written annotations, and full scholarly back-up -- it's a major resource for anyone interested in the period, from political, military and social history to customs and manners.  The exhibition is drawn from works in the Houghton, Law and Theater Libraries at Harvard, the Morgan Library,the Folger Library, and Schwarz' own collection.  See the exhibition -- take advantage of this remarkable cooperation!

Vivat Rex! is at the Grolier Club, in midtown Manhattan, through May 2.  For more information on attending, click on link.

                                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

Comments Very Welcome! Please just scroll down ...

of related interest, see posts here on A Man for All Seasons, and New Thoughts on A Man for All Seasons

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Kaspar Hauser A Foundling's Opera by Elizabeth Swados and Erin Courtney, World Premiere, The Flea Theater

Kaspar Hauser is an opera about a "feral child" who turned up on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany in 1833;  its music, focus on a world-battered individual, melodrama, cynical stream, and terrific sensory overload take us right back to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill:  think Threepenny Opera.

At his first appearance among the people of Nuremberg, Kaspar is wobbly legged because, according to his account which is represented in the opera's stunningly choreographed beginning, he grew up in a dungeon.  Awkward and with little speech--he's grown to teen age without proper human contact--he seems to them like an idiot.  We see him sitting autistic-like, repetitively rolling his little horse back and forth.  Quickly, though, he achieves great fame as an oddity and object of pity.  Much as in Truffaut's film, The Wild Child, about a true feral child, a professor takes him in to study and teach, aided by a loving woman, the professor's mother.  Throughout, the opera conceives this wide-eyed beautiful boy abruptly thrown into the real world as an innocent, somewhat Christ-like, while enemies are out to get him for their nefarious reasons.  The gullible crowd sways back and forth at the slightest suggest between adoring him and persecuting him, but he's actually done in by upper class forces that want him out of the way (because he might really be a child of noble birth who was sent away to die in infancy, etc.)

The production, placed in something of a long narrow pit below the level of the audience, is magnificent.  Chiaroscuro lighting creates a furtive Brechtian world of fickle fate.  The actors, many of the Bats, the Flea's wonderful young resident company, are beautifully costumed and choreographed, often caught strobe-like in moments of grotesque expressions, see photo below, like something out of Bosch's Christ Mocked (follow link for photo).  Behind it, in front, all around--and loud--is the percussive, mass sung, growing Weill beat.  Only a few of the singers have operatic voices, but all sing well enough for the small theater, further baffled by placing the five members of the orchestra behind a curtain that spans the entire stage.  One would have liked the chance to applaud the orchestra but they didn't come from behind the curtain to take a bow.

Kaspar Hauser is about a victim, in personality as well as in fact, and the passivity of this central character is a fundamental dramatic weakness.  Everything happens to him.  The other characters are all also oddly lacking in volition.  The professor who takes him in gets "tired".  The professor's mother tries to protect Kaspar but not hard enough to achieve anything.  His real mother sings sadly but with absolutely no thought of finding him.  The competitive "bad" mother behind Kaspar's childhood abduction uses somebody else to try to get the teen-age Kaspar out of the way.  Her agent fails, and then seems unsure of what he wants to achieve about the boy.  Here we really part from Brecht, and his passionately motivated, determined character creations.

Still and all, for its outstanding production values, and strong musical and theatrical heritage, this is quite a show.   Kaspar Hauser  plays at The Flea Theater in Tribeca, NYC, through March 28 

                                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome!  Please just scroll down--thanks!

  The Ensemble

 

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- New Thoughts on A Man For All Seasons ... on Broadway and in film ...

note:  We are happy and grateful -- and fascinated -- to have received a guest blog with new information on A Man For All Seasons.  For the review of the production this blog is responding to, see LetsTalkOff-Broadway -- here below.  It helps me understand why the production seemed somewhat flat to me ... how about you? YK

                          ... once the script leaves the playwright's hands ...

The original play had a character in it called "The Common Man" who showed up in various different disguises, such as a river boatman, etc., and constantly commented on More's impeccable and self-sacrificing conduct with words that basically expressed the thought, "Yeah, right, but still I  gotta go home and feed the missus and walk the dog, so I gotta do what I can do to earn a living!" and such.  This character was cut from the movie script, and for some reason the people who presented the new production at Roundabout decided to keep that cut in place.  In my opinion they made a great mistake, and I would not have allowed it, were it up to me -- which it was not.  I guess they all thought he was irrelevant -- leave the audience to think that -- but he wasn't.  This character kept saying everything you and I -- and the audience was thinking:  things like "Like man, give them what they want and go home to that great woman who is waiting for you!"  In my opinion they cut out, in effect, the catalytic character who made the play work!

                                                                                                          Art Asher

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Of related interest, see reviews here of A Man for All Seasons, and Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating 500 Year Anniveresary of the Accession of Henry VIII, here above.

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- David Greenspan performs Gertrude Stein's Lecture PLAYS, The Foundry Theatre's Greenspan/Stein, at The Cherry Lane Theatre

                                                     ... intelligence at work ...

There is a theatrical genius among us:  David Greenspan.  One two Mondays in February this charismatic actor and writer performed Gertrude Stein's lecture about plays as a monologue, Greenspan/Stein.  He characterizes her without imitating her.  How?  By finding the thought processes that lie behind the words and conveying them through his expressions, rhythms, changes of pace and gestures.  The audience concentrates intensely.  The effect:  Stein's muddy though purposeful lecture takes on the suspense of an action thriller.

Stein peppers her sentences (to the extent they are sentences) with the creative holy grail of the early 20th century -- the search for essence.  She's in harmony with her friends, Picasso and Matisse, and their search for essence but there's a big difference:  they succeeded, expressing the essential through new modes of abstraction.  Stein didn't have the creative capacity herself to do for words what the painters did for the visual arts, though she set a challenge for others.

In the new modern painting, telling a story and expressing essence were totally opposed.  In this Lecture, and elsewhere, Gertrude Stein, seeking a comparable purity for her writing, subverts her own narrative.  She also gives herself over to a stream of consciousness style that reflects contemporary interest in ongoing process, and in new psychoanalytic ideas.  These features make her writing hard to follow, to the ridiculous at times -- this is an amusing theater piece -- but they're driven by hot, revolutionary convictions with continued import that Greenspan makes accessible by conveying her thoughts-in-motion.

In contrast to Plato who wrote dialogs, Aristotle wrote his philosophy straight yet recently Greenspan performed a monologue of Aristotle's writings about theater, from the Poetics, that was as intensely dramatic -- and deeply moving -- as any play I've seen.  It was something of a shock.  But, yes, intelligence at work to create ideas is drama -- that's what Greenspan reveals.

Watch what this remarkable theater personality does next!

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Bay Area Theater, Betrayed by George Packer, Aurora Theater Company, directed by Robert Stanton, Berkeley, Ca.

                                   ...  How could we have let this happen ... ?

Entering the theater, you find a full floor-sized map of Iraq with all the now familiar city names written in and, at one end, a 20 foot high arched structure like an ancient Babylonian gate.  All is bathed in a desert sand color and there's immediate archeological appeal.  The audience toes the map on three sides of this stunning theatrical set.

The play takes place mainly in Baghdad, and the gate is the Assassins' Gate, an entry point into the Green Zone through which Iraqi translators, office personnel and others who went to work for the Americans passed daily.  This play is their story.  The trajectory is tragic, from their initial optimism at Saddam's fall and elation over their prized jobs with the Americans through the fast-growing danger of attacks by insurgents who saw them as traitors and spies.  From their early illusions of unity with the Americans to awareness of betrayal: the Americans left them out to dry.

How could we have done it?  This is an important story and affecting drama by George Packer, who adapted his New Yorker magazine article about these Iraqis into a book, and then, still not having fully expunged what he'd learned, wrote Betrayed as his first play. 

Betrayed occasionally slips from drama to exposition, back story the author feels we need to know, perhaps a journalistic residue.  I also found his treatment of the female interpreter, Intisar, who refused to wear the head scarf and dreamed of riding through Baghdad on a bicycle, disconcerting.  Of two male and one female interpreters on whom the story centers, she's the one to die, and quite early in the game, leaving the dramatic field all to men, Americans and Iraqis, for the rest of the play:  an ironic fate for this symbol of the liberated Iraqi woman.

The characterizations are uneven:  Prescott, the interpreter's boss is more the naive American than he needs to be (you have to agree with the Ambassador that he may not be cut out for the Foreign Service), while other characters, including the three Iraqi interpreters, are more three-dimensional.   The acting also is uneven: Intisar's expression of her powerful response to reading Emily Bronte is particularly moving.  But all in all, the production fulfills the brutal political, historical and human truths that fire this play.  We all should know this story.

The Aurora Theatre Company's Betrayed plays at the Alafi Auditorium in Berkeley, California, extended run through March 8.

                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used To It) by Itamar Moses, directed by Michelle Tattenbaum, Downstairs at The Flea Theater

Love/Stories is a delightful romp through how we speak with one another when we are getting into and out of love.  There are five short plays that move into one another with a pleasant fluidity, as the actors, members of the Bats, the Flea's young resident company mix and match into couples.  The author has a fine ear for contemporary language and amusingly recognizable contemporary types who nonetheless come across as true individuals.

My favorite was part monologue in which a young actress, doing a favor for a playwright, spins out a problematic history for a successfully auditioning actor to spoil his chances, inventing negatives with more and more enthusiasm and detail as she warms into it.  Others specially loved the talk-back with an audience in which an interpreter with a marvelous Slavic accent conveys the pain (But You Will Get Used To It) of a Russian avant-garde theater director.

The last of the five should have been left out:  it's a self-indulgent variation on the topic of "what should I write about" as the subject for a narrative.  But, you can look back past it to an evening filled with smiles and several good laughs.

Love/Stories plays Downstairs at the Flea Theater in Tribeca -- extended run through April 25 (that's the second extension for this play that's really found its own popularity!) 

Upstairs on the main stage is Kaspar Hauser: a foundling's opera, a world premier by Liz Swados and Erin Courtney, through March 30, reviewed here above.

                                                                                                 Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd by D. H. Lawrence, directed by Stuart Howard, at the Mint Theater

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd is a three-act play by D. H. Lawrence about family and class tensions, and to my knowledge there's not a more compelling production currently running in New York City.

The Mint Theater, under the direction of the knowing and dedicated Artistic Director Jonathan Bank, produces little known plays by well-known authors -- thank heavens!  I'll never forget their Uncle Tom's Cabin by George Aiken after Stowe's novel -- and learning that it was the most often produced play of the 19th Century.  Or Echoes of the War by J. M. Barrie -- who actually wrote something besides Peter Pan.  But for me the discovery of plays by authors who are known as novelists has been particularly revelatory.  Mint produced D. H. Lawrence's The Daughter-in-Law in 2002-03.  Lawrence wrote plays?  Fine plays?  Eight of them?  The raw psychology, sexuality and class issues Lawrence wrote about made it hard enough to publish a book -- it was even harder to pull together what it takes to produce a play that breasts the current.

For the duration of The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, our eyes never leave the interior of the Holroyd's home, a cottage in a Midlands mining town like that where Lawrence grew up.  The central conflict involves a love triangle.  Mr. Holroyd is a tall, strong, handsome coal miner, given to brutality when drunk and angered.  Mrs. Holroyd is above him in station and lets him know it;  she's a fine boned and naturally elegant woman in this rat-infested though otherwise cozy-seeming home.  In contrast to Holroyd, young Blackmore, who's in love with Mrs. Holroyd, is intelligent and sensitive and a skilled professional -- an electrician -- thus also above Holroyd in earning power, status and independence. 

How will this turn out and how will it affect the Holroyd's two children -- and how will they affect the resolution?  In outline, the outcome of this classic situation may seem predictable but it's not because, as in his novels, Lawrence is engaged in his passionate quest for truths below the surface.  Complex forces seethe and interact:  convictions, conventions, class, economics, age, fears, appetite, desire, and idiosyncrasy, and you won't know what happens, or how it happens, until it's over.  Nor are the ethical issues easily resolved. 

The acting is superb to the point where it's impossible to separate in one's mind the actors from their characters -- even when the play's over they continue to live.  Eric Martin Brown is the burly, handsome Holroyd, Julia Coffey the refined but tough Mrs. Holroyd, Nick Cordileone the active minded, able Blackmore -- I've never seen an actor convey erotic desire more persuasively.  Dalton Harrod played the Holroyd's forthright and courageous son the night I saw the play, and Amanda Roberts was the charming and conflicted Holroyd daughter.  The perfect casting of these and others in the cast in terms of physical mien and acting skill brings to mind the limitations of repertory groups (see Twelfth Night, reviewed below).  

The play has, I think, a flaw.  In order to bring about the resolution, the third act has to cram in a lot of information about the coal miners'  lives and work that hasn't been prepared in Acts I and II, and also introduces several important characters not mentioned above.  The assimilation of new material siphons off some of the emotional intensity of the ending but that's OK --  there's plenty to spare.

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd plays at the Mint Theater on West 43rd Street in NYC through March 29.

                                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Telephone by Ariana Reines, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, The Foundry Theatre, at the Cherry Lane Theatre

                                                             (seen in preview)

                                                       ... is anybody there? ...

There's a really terrific gadget from ancient Egypt illustrated in the current issue of Archaeology magazine (Mar/Apr 09, p 38) -- a flat, rectangular stone somewhat rounded at the top, and decorated with ears.  The idea was you could talk into it though the ears and the gods would hear you, "like an ancient cell phone." *  Did the gods give ear?  The scientifically minded and result oriented Alexander Graham Bell, as he's characterized in Part 1 of Telephone, would have been skeptical but Thomas Watson, his collaborator in the great invention, more given to imaginative flights, would have said "I knew it!"  Thus playwright Ariana Reines conveys the complementary aspects of successful invention. 

Part 1 of The Foundry's Telephone  is a dialog that dramatizes history, seeming to catch Bell and Watson at the very moment they succeeded in transmitting speech through space.   Part 2 is a breath taking tour de force monologue, and if you love wonderful acting a reason in itself to see the play:  Miss St., an insane -- but utterly charming -- woman speaks non-stop, her stream of consciousness and oddly sense-making language locked in the isolation of madness.  Part 3 is an highly imaginative, almost musical, voice montage in which the three superb actors we've already seen, Matthew Dellapina (Watson), Gibson Frazier (Bell) and Birgit Huppuch (Miss St..) shed their identities and appear on a dark stage, shifting personae of voices and silhouettes speaking in cyberspace in variations of the theme of love.

What an invention the telephone -- to transmit voice over distances for the first time in world history!  And what does this theater piece add up to?  If we had only Parts 1 and 3, the Telephone would be an artful expression of the evolution from phone to computer of the immediate broadcast of thoughts, feelings and ideas that characterizes our world.  But what about Part 2?  Well, Miss St. (for Saint, one of her illusions, she also believes she rules the world) does fit more words into a minute -- and a sentence -- than anyone else while in a room alone ... an ultimate statement of language untransmitted?  Well, maybe that's a stretch.  It feels like an insert.

A unifying theme of this theater piece is also the outstanding production given it by The Foundry Theatre.  Nothing is left unattended, and the inherent character of each segment has received the fulfilling benefit of intense intellectual scrutiny and theatrical know-how.  Particularly stunning visually is, as my friend said, the Magritte-like surrealism of the smoky darkness of Part 3, both isolating and linking the voices.

Telephone plays at the historic Cherry Lane Theatre, in New York City's West Village, through February 28.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

 ( * not for sale, unfortunately -- we could use one.)

nearby restaurant favorite:  Panca, Peruvian, 92 7th Ave S | Between Grove & Barrow Sts

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Twelfth Night (or What You Will) by William Shakespeare at The Pearl Theatre, directed by J. R. Sullivan

                                                .... Let's Hear it for Malvolio ...

If you are collecting "life Shakespeare plays" the way birdwatchers collect "life birds," here's a chance to add Twelfth Night.  The stage is large in comparison with the audience space -- not a bad seat in the house -- and the actors all have good diction so you'll catch every word, though perhaps not the fullness of the poetry.

Twelfth Night is a problematic play, in spite of its reputation as a favorite among Shakespeare's comedies.  For one thing, it's a mean play:  much of the comedy is based on a cruel hoax perpetrated on a servant, Malvolio, who, though admittedly dour and pompous, doesn't deserve what he gets.  The injustice is righted only at the very end after the characters and the audience have had plenty of laughs at his expense.  Shakespeare must have known Malvolio had to be intensely interesting -- he's one of the unforgettable characters -- and that Malvolio's subplot had to gross a lot of laughs because the main plot isn't enough to keep a full play going.

In this comedy of mistaken identities circling around a brother and sister separated by a shipwreck, the sister, Viola, being in the employ of Orsino, cross-dresses to woo Olivia on behalf of her master whom she secretly loves.  Repulsing Orsino, and believing that Viola is a boy, Olivia falls in love with her instead.  Eventually the brother thought to be lost shows up and -- after an extended period in which the brother and sister share the stage without noticing one another -- they realize with joy that all are safe:  Viola easily transfers her passion to Olivia's newly-arrived look-alike brother, Viola and Orsino are united, and -- thank heavens! -- some restitution is made to Malvolio, though not enough to make up for what he's gone through to keep everyone laughing.

Malvolio's degradation is caused by a letter sent "for fun" to delude him into thinking that Olivia, his mistress (in love with male-appearing Viola) cherishes a passion for him, and that to please his mistress he should don clothing and act in a way that, taking him beyond his temperament and station in life, will render him absurd.  Following the instructions -- how not since he believes they come from his mistress' own hand? -- he appears, famously, cross-gartered, in yellow stockings, etc., and altogether ridiculous:  it's assumed he's gone mad and he's thrown into prison.  It's worth considering that in addition to the fact that the letter really did appear to come from his mistress, we know that she did fall in love with Viola whom she thought to be a servant (as well as male) so the mistress-loves-servant motif is not preposterous, so therefore not preposterous for him to have believed.

When I've seen Twelfth Night  in the past, Malvolio's stylized pomposity in his early scenes seems just itching for a come-down, and his imprisonment is, if anything, slightly underplayed, upstage, making the cruelty of the hoax, while always bothersome, less prominent.  In this production, Malvolio is much more to the fore, partly because Dominic Cuskern is, quite simply, the most profound actor in the cast:  he has perfect comic timing and also the ability to convey intense, complex emotion.  The scene in which Malvolio is in prison, downstage, dirty, disheveled, anguished, bedeviled by the sense of injustice and mocked by the Fool to boot, is grim:  there's nothing funny about it.  It's fascinating the way a shift in an actor's interpretation allows us to hear new meanings in Shakespeare's words. 

Canonically, comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death, and histories in a shift in power.  Twelfth Night  ends in two marriages -- a comedy!  But when Malvolio's wretched story is played forcefully and realistically, it drives home the awareness that Shakespeare's plays defy neat categorical outlines.

Twelfth Night plays at the Pearl Theatre in New York City's East Village through February 22, 2009 

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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