Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Cato by Joseph Addison (1712) at THE FLEA Theater -- only a few more days!

Which one is true?:

George Washington  a) could not free his slaves in his will.

                                   b) insisted on having his portrait on the first U.S. coins.

                                   c) presented a play to his men at Valley Forge.

And the answer is:  ........  C

George Washington presented the play Cato at Valley Forge.  It was one of the most popular plays of the 18th Century and a favorite of Washington.  He saw it several times.  In a letter, he saw himself playing the role of Juba, the young African lover of Cato's daughter.

No wonder -- the play rings with passionate expressions of freedom and patriotism!

When Patrick Henry said "Give me liberty or give me death!" he was drawing on lines from Cato.  So was Nathan Hale when he said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." 

Cato the Younger defended what he saw as ancient Roman virtues of simplicity, stoicism, patriotism and republican liberties against the onslaught of Caesar and empire.  Caesar won, and Cato, true to the Roman tradition of honor, comitted suicide, though not without some difficulty.

The play has been directed in a bare but warmly lit space and the actors wear simple, current clothes that convey more than any costumes could the theme of stoic simplicity that is the essence of the play.

Andre de Shields is a tough,passionate Cato with an underlying humor that keeps him human for us.  Reg E. Cathey as the traitor Syphax demonstrates a breathtaking emotional range and fascinating stage presence -- and what a speaking voice!  The role moves him from treacherous warmth and charm to vicious fury:  I'd love to see him as Iago, or Othello.

Anthony Cochrane is effective as Sempronius, a villain one loves to hate.  Carly Zien as Marcia conveys the vulnerable severity of Cato's daughter with the wit and authority of a fine professional. Holly Chou as the lover of Cato's son demonstrates a character concentration that could fortell a great actress in the making.   

Next at The Flea, in Tribeca, is Dawn by Thomas Bradshaw, November 9 through December 6.  I'm aiming for opening night!

(other answers:  a) Washington navigated the complicated laws regarding emancipation to free his slaves in his will.    b)  Washington's popularity led to strong sentiment to see his portrait on coins but the great man rejected the idea, and for the most wonderful of reasons -- he said it was the custom of despots --  and proposed instead that Liberty herself grace the first coins of the new United States.  He would not like finding himself on today's quarters.)

                                                                                                        Yvonne Korshak

NEXT -- Peter Brook's The Grand Inquisitor at New York Theatre Workshop

 

 

    

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Oedipus Cycle at the Pearl Theatre, directed by Shepard Sobel, translated by Peter Constantine

                  

      --- The story's the thing ....  

The three plays of the Oeipus Cyle at the Pearl Theatre tell a continuous story although Sophocles wrote them "out of order" over vast intervals of his life (~ 496-406 BCE):  Antigone  which ends the cycle when he was in his fifties, Oedipus the King which starts it in his sixties, and Oedipus at Colonus just before he died.  Although they aren't a true trilogy, the material was with him all his life and the Pearl Theatre gives us the opportunity to see them in narrative sequence, a stimulating experiment.  The problem is that in this production the story's the thing -- instead of the play.  25% of the text has been eliminated, and with it much of the poetry and meaning.  Evidently this was done to make the three plays fit into a single theatrical evening.  Also the somewhat lofty language of the translation collides with the fast trendy rhythms of the actors' speech.

                                                                     - - -

        ---- The First Cold Case .....  

In Oedipus the King -- the world's first cold case mystery -- Oedipus, ruling in Thebes, discovers that, in actions long past, he's unknowingly committed two crimes:  killed his father and married his birth mother, Jocasta.  The revelation drives Jocasta to hang herself and Oedipus to thrust the broaches that held her gown in place into his eyes, blinding himself.  The actors speak very fast and that, along with the abbreviated text, alters our apprehension of the mystery.  Instead of the creeping invasion of terrible truths, we get a story that moves as fast as Law and Order and relies on shock value, climaxing when Oedipus emerges with blood streaking from his eyes onto his face and clothes, though not his chin as is described in the eyewitness account of his blinding (the Greeks kept the worst off-stage, relying on vivid, poetic descriptions). 

      

       ---- Birth and Death .....

Oedipus at Colonus is the most ambiguous of the plays.  Blind Oedipus, aided by his daughter Antigone, ends his long wanderings in exile at Colonus, near Athens.  Colonus, where Sophocles himself was born is the site of Oedipus' mysterious, magical death in a play written at the very end of the playwright's life.  The meaning of this bringing together of birth and death is suggestive but elusive, and Sophocles' choral ode to the beauty of Colonus in the play, "...the noblest home on earth," here given breathing space, can only be compared with the nostalgic aria of the beauties of Provence sung by Giorgio Germont in Verdi's La Traviata.  And these choruses, too, were sung in Sophocles' day, to music now lost.  The actors slow down for Oedipus at Colonus and sprigs of profound and beautiful poetry push through.  Sophocles asks a question here that's barely come up before -- and it's a question with momentous implications for the future:  is a man guilty for crimes he commits unknowingly?  How exciting to see the aged playwright grappling tenaciously with moral issues of great resonance!

    

---- Even a winning general could be executed if he failed to retrieve the battle dead for burial ...

In Antigone, as in Oedipus the King, almost everything is minimized that doesn't push the narrative, including the choruses.  Creon, Jocasta's brother, now ruling Thebes decrees that the body of Polyneices, Oedipus' son and Antigone's brother shall not be buried now that he's been killed attacking Thebes.  In obedience to the unwritten laws she holds sacred, Antigone defies Creon's decree and ritually buries her brother.  It helps to know that for the Greeks proper burial was essential -- victorious generals were executed for failing to retrieve for burial bodies of their men who died in battle.  Antigone's pious act leads to her passionate debate with Creon in which she defends "the immortal, unrecorded laws of God" against Creon's defense of the laws of men and the state.  Not surprisingly it takes them awhile to say everything they have in their hearts about these most fundamental conflicting values.  The confrontation between Antigone and Creon is the locus classicus for this conflict.  During World War II Jean Anouilh adapted it to dramatize the fight between freedom and fascism.  But in the current presentation, the debate was over before I knew it.         

A better solution would be to produce these plays in full -- perhaps with time out for dinner as is sometimes done with long presentations.

                                                                                        Yvonne Korshak 

COMING:  The Grand Inquisitor at New York Theatre Workshop, dramatization from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,  with consideration of "An Evening of Dostoevsky:  The Grand Inquisitor" presented at 92StY November 10, 2008.                                   

              

 

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Indignation: Philip Roth's conceit

NOTE: A new book, Philip Roth's Indignation.   This is a tired book.  It casts only a dim and distorted light on the 50's, corny view, really, and isn't worth reading for that.  This isn't "history" as some are saying -- it's Roth setting history up as a straw man, easy to knock over.  Old age and death have been his recent preoccupations and it's as if he said to himself his readers might tire of decaying old men so he wrote about a young one, but that's just a mask and -- speaking of decay -- the college boy protagonist is dead, too.  Literally.   A weak conceit. 

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Coming December 15 -- Dickens' A Christmas Carol reading with F. Murray Abraham, Lynn Redgrave

NOTE : One night only in NYC -- a reading of A Christmas Carol adapted from Charles Dickens with F. Murray Abraham, Lynn Redgrave...The Acting Company, Salon Series...info

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Brecht's Life of Galileo translated by Charles Laughton--Fourth in the Classic Stage series of Brecht dramatic readings

                     (see post below -- The Good Person of Sezuan by Bertolt Brecht) 

             --defending truth

The life and science of Galileo are so inherently dramatic that, I think, they led Brecht somewhat astray as a dramatist--he thought a total play wasn't needed.  Wasn't all the drama a playwright could want already there in the searing conflict between Galileo's heliocentrism and the Church's no-holds-barred defense of its geocentric doctrine?  What confrontation could be more elemental than that between Science and Dogma--Galileo vs the Inquisition--with its notorious outcome in which Galileo is forced to recant publicly the truths of sciences?  Brecht is a playwright of ideas but in his best plays he includes other paraphernalia of great theater:  living characters engaged in meaningful conflicts with high stakes (at least to them).  In The Life of Galileo, translated by Charles Laughton, the conflict could not be more significant--truth itself is at stake.  Yet characters live mainly as mouthpieces of ideas.

Maybe, also, that's why the play is jam packed with marvelous lines and memorable aphorisms:  "Truth is the daughter of time, not the author."  "I have no patience with a man who doesn't use his brains to fill his belly."  They help keep us going--luckily!

Because in working out the implications of Galileo's recantation, Brecht's ingenious humanism comes into play, raising the importance of this flawed drama.  True, the recantation of the famous scientist is taken throughout Europe as a set-back for science.  But bear in mind, as Brecht make sure we do, that Galileo was shown the very instruments of torture in a purposeful, programmed climax to his interrogation by the Inquisition.  Hence Brecht's implicit challenges in this play:  Why would you expect Galileo to act otherwise?  Why do you rely on heroes?  and the essential Brecht:  Rely on yourselves.  For this playwright, Galileo is not a failed hero:  he is a man with extraordinary brains and insight who is quite normally human in his fear of pain and love of pleasure.  "Unhappy is the land that has no hero," a disillusioned assistant moans, visiting Galileo during his life-time sentence of house arrest.  "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero," is Galileo's fast retort.

Brian Kulick, Artistic Director of Classic Stage who directed the reading of The Life of Galileo  for the First Look series, treated us to the two extant endings of the play:  one hopeless, one hopeful.  Immediate:  while I was still in the theater, winding down from the reading, I took the hopeless ending to be the "true" one, but in thinking about all I have learned from these readings of four Brecht plays, in reflecting on Brecht's humanism, and on Classic Stage's genereosity and high achievement,  I'm leaning toward "hopeful."

                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

              comments very welcome --

Nearby restaurant favorite -- Cafe Deville, 103 3rd Avenue

          Next Week:  The Oedipus Cycle at Pearl Theatre

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- At Classic Stage, The Good Person of Sezuan by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Tony Kushner

       ----a peak Off-Broadway experience and they weren't even in costume....

The Brecht is an exciting add-on at Classic Stage, what they call their "First Look Festival."  They're doing a series of four readings on Monday nights--with totally professional actors.  (What an amazing opportunity to delve deeply into a playwright through these readings!  What a cultural contribution!)  First was The Caucasian Chalk Circle--I found it fascinating and by the end was deeply moved though I know others who were less affected.  The second was In the Jungle of Cities--very early Brecht, very dull, but worth doing "archivally".  The Good Person of Sezuan (traditionally The Good Woman of Sezuan) on October 13th was brilliant--and there's more to come, Monday October 20th is Life of Galileo.

The Good Person of Sezuan circles around a question:  how good can a good person be in our imperfect world?  The character whose actions will hold the answer is Shen Te, a prostitute with a golden heart.  Thus the playwright thrusts immediately into a paradox from which we keep hoping and even expecting--with breathless dramatic tension--we can escape.  We can't, and though that may not be news, the dramatic realization at the end left the audience near to transfigured.

Tony Kushner's translation, current and true, helped bring Brecht to vibrant life as did the outstanding cast, headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal who persuasively transformed herself from the pure minded Shen Te to her invented realistic other self, Shui Ta--and back again--with wit and charm.  All the actors seemed to have a marvelous time in the stand-up-when-you-have-lines-sit-down-when-you-don't reading.  Even the podiums that held their scripts came in to play, raised delicately for an imminent seduction, banged down when a character left the scene in frustration.

The Brecht readings are in addition to Classic Stage's current main performance of The Tempest with Mandy Patinkin (which was read in their First Look Festival a couple of years ago).  The generosity of Off-Broadway theaters is prodigious:  How can they do so much at once?  where does the stamina come from?  the constant creative refreshment?  In the face of struggle to exist?  The three divinities of Sezuan, who really seemed to hover on substantial Buddhist clouds, should conduct their search for good people among the artistic directors of Off-Broadway theaters--why not start with Brian Kulick of Classic Stage?

The Life of Galileo, at Classic Stage Monday October 20th

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

comments welcome -- thanks!

                            Next week:  Brecht's Galileo

                                                                                                                      

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- NOTE: visual story-telling in Ballast

Don't miss, at the beginning of Ballast, the shiny, nailed on numbers that mark the address of the modest-to-ramshackle Mississippi house: 69.  It takes awhile to realize that its a visualization of twins in the womb--what an idea!  And it's key to the story, a beginning beyond a beginning.  Inventive storytelling leads us through this movie with a sure hand.  Watch for shiny things.  Directed by Lance Hammer.

Ballast is at Cinema Village and The Brooklyn Heights Cinema

 

Let's Talk Off-Broadway - Journeys at LaMaMa

The stage for Journeys is simple to make the women's voices seem louder-- seven women who recount their struggles for human rights in seven different countries. 

The original activists' stories are told by playwrights and presented by actresses -- at first that's a disappointment, one's looking for authenticity, but would we want the "real" women -- engaged in their ongoing struggles -- to drop by East 4th Street in NYC for our benefit?  Let them do their work!  The plays are uneven and the best are those told as if in the voice of the women actually involved in the struggle.  What was it like to try to eliminate domestic violence in Russia, and how on earth does one ever come to take on such a task?  Here's what and here's how!   

The most beautifully written is Susan Yankowitz' play about Mukhtaran Mai, an illiterate Pakistani ("I didn't know we had a constitution") who after a gang rape ordered by local officials in retribution for no crime she'd committed stood up for herself in court.  Moving through a judicial system illiterate (signing blank documents with a thumb print), she nevertheless obtained a settlement of $8,000 with which she set about building schools in the face of continued opposition--Musharaff said women are getting raped now just to become millionaires, according to the play.  The moment when toward the end the marvelous actress, Reena Shah*, tells us she's going to one of the schools she herself built --"I'm in fifth grade now," is worth all .

Journeys is at La Mama, in the East Village in NYC, 74A East 4th Street

      Next week:    Brecht's Galileo at Classic Stage.

                                                                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak