Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Aristocrats by Brian Friel, Directed by Charlotte Moore, at the Irish Repertory Theatre

                                                     ...  family reunions ...

Aristocrats, about a far flung family of O'Donnells converging on the crumbling family mansion in Northern Ireland for a wedding, is wordy and pedestrian -- with the exception of one outstanding characterization.

Claire, once a promising pianist, is finally getting married to a much older local commoner with children to raise.  Not surprisingly, she's depressed, and her alcoholic sister Alice who's come up from London is not likely to cheer her up.  Their brother Casimir has flow in from Germany, leaving behind a fictitious wife and children -- invented cover-ups for his homosexuality and low-level job.

Judith, the third sister, is trapped in the drudgery of tending to the decaying mansion and those who've stayed home, Claire, and a sick father whom we know through his domineering and delusional voice booming on the intercom from upstairs, helping us understand why the mother, an actress, committed suicide to escape.  An elderly uncle who wanders around with a passive/aggressive silence adds nothing to the dramatic action, although he's intended to be part of an unconvincing renewal at the end.

As in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, with its similar theme, the aristocrats are has-beens and all vitality is with the commoners, Eamon who married Alice (though he loved Judith, but he's making a reasonable best of it), and the erstwhile chauffeur, now a successful business man, Willie Driver, who would marry Judith but is reluctant to take on her illegitimate child sent by the father to the orphanage.

Also on hand is an American taking notes on the O'Donnells as a case study in Irish Catholic aristocracy;  maybe he was intended as a scientific-minded foil to a more poetic Irish spirit but this is never developed:  with the uncle, that makes two extraneous characters.

The set, combining a built set, tangible chairs and tables, etc., and photography conveys the former grandeur and current struggles of the aristocrats at home.  The directing is slow-paced.  The acting is on a professional high level ... BUT ...

If you're looking for a reason to see this play, John Keating's evasions as Casimir, the failed law student, are witty, touching, and brilliantly timed.  He has the gift of being hilarious as a character while always, totally, remaining in character.  In an Iceman Cometh moment when his pipe dream is shattered, one sees fully the desperate loss and almost as fast the recovery of the fantasy that allows him to live.  This is a wonderful tour de force of characterization.

It seems natural that in an era of centrifugal spread of families, the theme of distant family members honing in on the ancestral home for a rite of passage has become popular.  It's a promising motif for expansive studies of character and for revealing the way truths from the past remain active in the present.  Sometimes it works that way, as in Tracy Lett's August: Osage County, or the current film Rachel Getting Married, but it can also verge on soap opera as in Horton Foote's Dividing the Inheritance (reviewed below).  In Aristocrats, the revelations are immediately understood or are too familiar. 

Aristocrats plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre in East Chelsea, NYC, through March 8.

                                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

Please comment ... just scroll down.  Thank you!        

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Ten Blocks On The Camino Real by Tennessee Williams, Directed by David Herskovitz, Target Margin Theater

The original Camino Real, first produced on Broadway under Elia Kazan's direction in 1953, took up the stories of several individuals grouped around Camino Real, pronounced real as in really real in Target Margin's brilliant production.  Following an early version of the play, David Herskovitz chooses to focus on one:  Kilroy, a former light-weight boxing champion, now an itinerant American who lands in the plaza of a patently violent Mexican town at fiesta time.  His pesos are stolen fast, nor do we have much hope that he'll hang on to the mementos of the past before he was a has-been, a champion's belt around his waist and the golden gloves looped over his shoulders.

But will he hold on to his life?

He has a life-threatening enlarged heart which has ruled out boxing and sex, forcing him to abandon a promising career and, out of compassion (poetically, large heart), to leave a wife he loves so as not to disappoint or burden her.  For Kilroy, sexual abstinence is not only physically wise but spiritually essential -- it's the link of loyalty to the woman he loves.  But his arrival coincides with the festal night when the Gypsy's daughter becomes a virgin once again, and picks her man.  This time it's Kilroy.  He resists, and ultimately succumbs to her seduction, while her mother relieves him of the last ten bucks from sale of his mementos.  The ending, where the realms of reality and yearning share the stage, worlds apart but back to back, is sublime.

The production has a satisfying pop-comic-nostalgic visual unity, something like Red Grooms would cast over a Mexican plaza.  The steady golden light casts an appealing glow over the set, suggestive rather than constructed, and the wonderful actors, Satya Bhabha as Kilroy, Purva Bedi as Esmeralda and others, Curt Hostetter as Gutman and others, McKenna Kerrigan as Marguerite Gautier and others, Raphael Nash Thompson as Jacques Casanova and others, with Dara Seitzman as the Guitar player weaving her way Siren-like among the characters and through the scenes.  I found myself looking for an indication of the heroic sculpture that would be in the midle of a Mexican plaza.  The costumes and props are witty and touching:  the helmet made of vegetable steamer baskets wrought into the instantly recognizable shape of Don Quixote's deserves a place in the costume hall of fame.

I never saw the full Camino Real but I doubt it could be more powerful than this one that David Herskovitz has honed down to a single focus, all the more likely since the original production seemed at the time confusing and disparate.  Target Margin comes off two years of immersion in classical works; that experience, and Herskovitz' deep knowledge of the classics, must lie behind the remarkable unifying thrust brought to this production of a modern playwright.  Aristotle's unities of action, time and place are at work here on Camino Real -- the plaza rather than the full ten blocks.  Herskovitz has shaped the play in a way that if anything intensifies the lyrical poetry of Tennessee Williams' vision of human frailty.  This production is a rare theatrical opportunity. 

Target Margin's Ten Blocks on the Camino Real plays at the Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street in SoHo, January 14 through January 31. 

                                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

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

Nearby restaurant favorite:  Via dei Mille, 357 West Broadway

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Coppelia, The New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center, Spring 2009

The great classical ballets are founded on great stories.  Coppelia is true to form, and enriched with comedy, and some of the most heart lifting music ever written for ballet by Leo Delibes -- the "oh here's where that comes from" kind of music! 

The setting is an idyllic central European village during festival time, rendered with a watercolor rich background, sketchy enough to give breath to imagination.  Frantz loves two "women, " Swanilda (swanny word play on Wagner and Swan Lake) who returns his love, and Coppelia, a full-sized animated doll who sits on a high porch in the home of Dr. Coppelius, her inventor-maker, reading a book (upside down as we find out). 

In Act II, Frantz, Swanilda and her friends find their way into Dr. Coppelius' workshop where Swanilda disguises herself as the automaton, the ruse revealing to Frantz (once he wakes up from Coppelius' potion) that Coppelia does not exist -- not as a real woman -- and the lovers are reconciled.  Dr. Coppelius, danced by  Adam Hendrickson, is left holding the limp form of a rag doll. 

Thus, with the lovers united, the story thins after Act II but Act III is so filled with gorgeous dancing, including the ecstatic pas de deux between Frantz and Swanilda, that one hardly notices.

The idyllic setting and implausible persuasiveness of the wind up doll might make Coppelia in outline seem a childish story but it isn't.  All major, and mature, emotions come into play, arrowing upward for Frantz and Swanilda, with Dr. Coppelius a tragic counterpoint.  Flirtation, desire, love, betrayal, jealousy, plans that succeed, plans that go awry, joy and despair:  the issues are fundamental, conveyed with the full depth and breadth of emotion through dance. 

Tiler Peck danced the tour de force role of Swanilda that calls on the ballerina to perform full classical ballet and, in Act II, to dance with the mechanical motions of the pretend wind up doll, and even semi-wind up as the ruse begins to deteriorate.  The victory of the real woman over the "doll" in her lover's affections is a satisfying moment (though we're never really worried about her) -- and a notably feminist theme and outcome for a ballet completed in 1884.  For perspective, Henrik Ibsens' A Doll's House was first performed in 1879.

Andrew Veyette was electrifying as Frantz:  he has the strength and big leaps of the great male dancers with an individualizing loose limbed flexibility.  The program notes call Frantz a "country bumpkin" but it's hard to connect the word "bumpkin" with that kind of dancing -- although it's true, he was taken in by that "doll" -- at first.

A classical ballet like Coppelia compells one to compare the physical characteristics of men and women that fuel the soaring culminations of desire.  Voyeurism, yes!  One contrasts constantly the shape of the female torso with the male, the legs, the arms, the neck, the faces as the dancers perform the full range of movements.  These ballets let us have our cake and eat it, too.  The piper is paid by the discipline of the forms and the years of hard work the dancers have invested in their skill.  These cast a permissive veil over sheer elemental eroticism. 

                                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

next:  Ten Blocks on the Camino Real by Tennessee Williams, Target Margin Theatre

Comments welcome ... please scroll down.  Thanks!

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- Faust With No Choice

A man is born and grows young:  this brilliant reversal, from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, shines a new light on all the commonplaces of life.  They say that when people have cataracts removed they see everything with a new brightness and intensity of color, even if they didn't realize they were missing anything before.  In Benjamin Button, everything -- birth, growth, death, love, separation, joy, pain -- is recognizable but seen afresh, and with poignant intensity.

All that, and the Faustian allure of growing young again and finding a beautiful love.

The film begins with routines carried out inside a New Orleans hospital while the first winds and water of hurricane Katrina slash at the windows, a framing metaphor for the treachery of existence and the combination of ignorance and nobility that keeps human beings moving in the face of it.  Benjamin Button's story -- and her own -- emerge from the memento filled suitacase of a dying old woman.  A clock is built to run backwards, and the movie pulls out all the stops in turning an old man into a young one.

Queenie, a Black maid in an old people's home, determines to keep the grotesque-looking White baby abandoned on her doorstep, rejecting the cautions of a reasonable, kind doctor that some are not born for existence.  The full, worthy life Benjamin goes on the live, albeit backwards, validates her decision.  The movie was made to prove Queenie right about individual worth.

In the "brief encounter" love story, the transience of the affair is bound not by train schedules or prior loyalties but by the lovers' trajectories criss-crossed in time:  growing old meets growing young.  Still they find a way to make their love permanent as life itself -- life, that is, with Katrina at the windows.

From his wizened babyhood, Benjamin adapts to his odd position by being careful not to cause trouble, and by watching others for clues about how to act.  A problem with the film is that he maintains his defensive passivity as he grows young.  Even as a hale and hearty man in mid-life, he continues to react rather than initiate, which thins the character and narrows what's asked of Brad Pitt in terms of emotional range.  Still, Pitt's right for the part:  for those lacking Queenie's saintly character, it takes the exceptional charm and tousled-haired good looks of a Brad Pitt to offset unease about a freak of nature, and to make him seem enough of a regular guy that we -- and his lover -- can warm up to him.

While Benjamin grows young, Cate Blanchett as the volatile Daisy grows older in a subtly developed personal evolution.  Taraji P. Henson as Queenie touches the heart with her lightest smile.  In this movie of richly developed -- richly loved -- characters, there are in a sense no small parts.  Jared Harris as the tugboat Captain who gives Benjamin a vocation, cluing him in at the local brothel about why a man needs money in his pocket, is particularly vivid.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, is ambitious in taking on existence as its subject, and it's as engaging, humorous, tragic, sensuous, suspenseful, serious and moving as life itself. 

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome -- please scroll down.

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Garden of Earthly Delights by Martha Clarke, Music by Richard Peaslee

If you want to know how many positions at all speeds the young, nude (nearly) human body can take on, including when airborne -- think upside-down -- see Garden of Earthly Delights.  All this and a story, too.  The ballet recounts humanity's path from innocence, to guilt and repression including a vivid auto da fe, to a conclusion in hell, with a glimpse of springtime renewal at the end. 

In its tripartite interpretation of existence, the ballet reflects Hieronymus Bosch's great triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted early in the 16th Century, that hangs on the wall of the Prado Museum in Spain as a pilgrimage destination for art lovers.  Several positions of the dancers and their intertwinings, such as the famous sex play with the flowering branch, are drawn specifically from Bosch's painting.  As if with a paint brush, Clarke represents through her dancers the look of wiry nudity that for many makes a Bosch look like a Bosch (though the type was widespread in  northern art), in contrast to more voluptuous models of the contemporary Italian Renaissance that western culture has tended to adopt as its ideal.

Mostly, though, Clarke draws more generally from Bosch's towering level of imagination:  taking inspiration from his unparalleled inventiveness of images, surrealistic disjunctions, challenging sexual unions and no-holds barred polymorphic sexuality.  The music, performed by musicians in monk's dress on early instruments and on other instruments that appear in Bosch's painting, introduces unfamiliar and haunting sounds that interplay with the surreal vision.

Release from gravity is a governing fantasy in this ballet.  The performers seem almost nude in their sheer body tights but the lyrcra neatly slickens the areas of the body that would show gravity's pull.  When their turns come, these young dancers are ready to take off.  Water scenes, too, continue the idea of floating.  In this focus on buoyancy, Clarke is in strong contrast to Bosch, more Rococo than Northern Renaissance, true to the tradition of ballet.

With all the inventiveness of motifs in Clarke's Garden, and expertise of production, why does this ballet drag?  With each new visual motif, starting with the initial entrance of the dancers in a four-limbed walk that shows off the beauty of their lean backs, as Bosch reveals it, one starts off fascinated, and is soon waiting for what's next.  The Garden only lasts about an hour, but it's a long hour.  Bosch's painting of The Garden of Earthly Delights has fascinated endlessly, in its individual motifs and as a whole, for the past 500 years.  That's a lot to ask of a contemporary ballet but since Clarke herself emphasizes the connection, one does wonder why her Garden of Earthly Delights, with its serious purpose, skill and inventiveness, is not more compelling.

My tentative answer is that Bosch's figures, in all their numbers and variety, convey a massive sense of ebullient and unquenchable free will.  The opposite is true of Clarke's ballet.  Each individual dance motif, as "shocking" and original as it may seem, runs its path through in an automatic way, so that when one sees the beginning one sees it all, and has to wait until it concludes for a new thought.  Artistic design and choreography dominate feeling.

But there's another aspect to the ballet beyond that hour--its continuation in the imagination.  The next day it's left a gift, a memory of the soaring physical freedom of the very human dancers with which one can identify.

Garden of Earthly Delights is playing at the Minetta Lane Theatre in NYC's Village, through May 31st. 

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

Nearby restaurant favorite -- BellaVitae, 24 Minetta Lane (right next door!)

Comments welcome ... please scroll down.