Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

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

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  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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Next: Telephone by Ariana Reines, The Foundry Theatre