Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

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

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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

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