Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

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

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

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.