Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Contracorriente / Undertow, a Peruvian film by Javier Fuentes-Leon, starring Cristian Mercado, Tatiana Astengo and Manolo Cardona, in Spanish with English subtitles

Reviewed by guest author John Buscarello 

... against the current ...

Undertow, a wonderful simple film, focuses on a modest town where a modern perspective starts to crack open a closed village society.  I came across this film, knowing nothing about it, on HBO’s On Demand, and found myself swept up in its direct beauty.

Charmingly photographed in a tiny Northern Peruvian coastal town, Cabo Blanco, Undertow draws one in, as surely as the ocean’s tide.  As the movie begins we watch a seaside burial.  It’s a fishing village and traditions run deep.  According to custom, the spirit of the newly deceased must be buried properly at sea.  Miguel (Cristian Mercado) has the magical touch that will allow the deceased’s spirit to be free from the bondage of our world, and thus we follow Miguel out to sea where the body is cast off into the ocean.

Back in town life goes on -- simple lives, fishermen, their wives or girl friends, tavern owners, a local market... a close-knit town for sure, obviously there for decades.  Yet, oddly the town has been invaded by a photographer, Santiago (Manolo Cardona);  he drifts about, always an onlooker, documenting the town with his camera, clearly an outsider and different in his ways.  The movie intercuts between the town’s people and Santiago and, as we discover in time, Santiago and Miguel are lovers.  The director gives us hints that ghosts may inhabit the town and all may not be as rosy as we think, through the abandoned buildings where the lovers meet.

Miguel’s problem is he’s married and his wife is about 7 months pregnant.  Santiago adores Miguel who, to him, is as beautiful and tranquil as the town.  Santiago is an artist -- a painter as well as photographer -- and he’s truly come to town because of Miguel.  Ah but Miguel, in spite of his enjoyment of his erotic time with Santiago, believes that he’s truly a man in the conventional sense the village would understand, and he loves his wife too.

Alas after one of their erotic encounters, Santiago has an accident.  He slips on his boat and is drowned.  Not being buried properly as tradition dictates -- his body is at the bottom of the ocean -- his spirit is trapped at the seaside town.  Magical happening abound between Miguel and Santiago to both men’s delight and fears.  Thus, reality and the supernatural intermix in this beguiling story, as the town is dragged into the fray.  Miguel is confronted with his true self and must come to terms with it, as difficult as it will be for himself and his family.  Will these simple seaside villagers be able to accept gay men in their midst?

I was surprised by the film’s unpretentious charms, yet deep devotion to explore majestic themes.  The photography made one long for a mythical seaside existence where life seemed simpler.

As the riveting story takes a number of twists and turns, each complicating matters (I will not reveal its secrets.), we see that the human spirit can soar and adjust to life’s most difficult challenges.  The film builds ever more surely to a beautiful, teary-eyed ending.  I loved the film.

John Buscarello

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George Orwell’s Burmese Days, adapted and directed by Ryan Kiggell, Aya Theatre Company at 59E59 Theater B

The idea of an adaptation for theater of George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days of 1934, is appealing but this production does not rise alive from Orwell’s pages as a true dramatization.  On a simple stepped stage, and with static staging, the actors speak Orwell’s words sometimes facing the audience, sometimes engaging with one another but either way the feeling is that of attending a spliced and incomplete reading of the novel.   The assignment of the actors to their multiple parts seems abrupt and arbitrary and undercuts identification and sympathy with the characters. 

Burmese Days, which grew out of Orwell's personal experiences as a member of the British military police in Burma, takes us into the world of British officers in a colonial outpost of the British Empire and the natives with whom they interacted.  No surprise that this was not to the benefit of the natives, in spite of stabs at education and medical assistance, but the British also could be ground down by the exotic isolation of the postings and the grueling human conflicts embedded in exploitative relationships. 

In the play, one British officer is at odds with his colleagues because he doesn't share their racist attitudes and gross condesension towards the native Burmese.  He in fact enjoys a friendship based on respect with a Burmese medical doctor, and keeps a Burmese woman as his mistress.  But under pressure from the others in the officers club, and with a minimum of soul searching, he betrays the doctor and, falling in love with a single British woman who arrives at the outpost, he readily abandons the native mistress.  A man of decent instincts but moral weakness, he seizes an inevitable and, by then one feels, deserved fate.

The sound effects are the best thing in the play and the most fun:  sounds such as birds in flight, and the encroaching jungle wildlife, are evoked with simple objects in full view of the audience as in some eastern theater traditions –- a pink umbrella swishes closed when a rare bird with stunning plumage is shot for sport, a powerful and telling moment.  

George Orwell’s Burmese Days plays at 59E59 Theater B, in mid-town Manhattan through December 4.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Burning by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Scott Elliott, The New Group at the Acorn Theatre

... The Marquis de Bradshaw ...  

 

One gets the impression that Thomas Bradshaw began by making a list of everything he could think of that might shock you  re sexuality and worked his story to get in as much of it as possible, and then went on to make sure to get it acted out as graphically as possible.  By the way, it’s not remotely erotic.  More just plain distasteful.  And disappointing, given the talent Bradshaw has shown earlier.

Behind all the clutter, and the several characters with mix and match relationships there's a central story which could have been truly interesting if better told.  It’s the mid-80’s:  a successful Black painter whose name “doesn’t sound Black,” who’s married to a white woman, and who hides his race when he can to avoid having his paintings evaluated with an affirmative action attitude, learns on a trip to Germany that “I really am a Black man” (hard to miss given the total nudity here and everywhere in this play);  at the same time he becomes aware of his deep, erotic attachment to his now dead sister, Lucy:  [erratum: Lucy is the mother of Peter's second cousin:  for a fuller explanation and how this provides a different view of the artist see the comment on this post by Paul] he calls the Black prostitute with whom he has fallen in love by [his sister's] name, and notes, smelling his fingers, that she smells as he always knew Lucy would.  (This is just a sample.)

This is not the only over-close [brother and sister] relationship:  it’s really amazing how the playwright has time to inject various taboos and variety of penetrations so many times in one standard length play -- but he works at it.

Other characters include a mature gay male pair, actor and producer, and a fourteen-year old boy they take in to their home out of compassion and for fun.  Also there's a playwright who's absurdly willingly to alter all the meaning out of his play at the drop of a producer’s request, and a man whose profession I missed [he's the fourteen-year old boy grown up, and trying to become an actor: see Paul's comment] but whose role is to enable a young Black man (Lucy’s son) to discover he’s gay, and there are a Nazi skinhead brother and his like minded, paralyzed, sister. 

The characters are lightly drawn to the point of caricatures.  The playwright seduces the fourteen-year old by their shared intellectual excitement over a simplistic line or two from the Marquis de Sade (the Marquis' book is pushed on people often in this play).  The successful theatrical producer demands excessive cuts -- from five characters to one -- and total revisions from the playwright to which the playwright accedes without a struggle:  there’s no exploration of the truths behind these clichés and it’s all done with the careless exaggeration of a joke.  

More importantly, although the Black artist’s paintings are described as showing violence against Blacks, this is never put face to face with his leading his life as a white man, and never used to explore what by the end of the play we're given to understand are struggles within his divided personality.  Everything about these characters is on the surface.

An exception: the skinhead and his sister, paralyzed in her legs by an automobile accident that killed their parents, share their inherited fascist ideology, belief in a "pure" Germany and hatred of various groups including most particularly for this play Blacks.  In contrast to the cartoon-like strokes Bradshaw uses for the other characters, these are subtly delineated and the tense, covert/overt erotic relationship between them well developed, strengthened also by the fine portrayals of Drew Hildebrand and Reyna de Courcy.  Here the inevitable, but remarkable, love scene illuminates character and serves a true dramatic purpose.  In the relationship of the brother and sister, we see the reallly talented playwright at work.  

I made a point of seeing Burning because I'd been impressed by two of Bradshaw's earlier full-length plays, Dawn and, even cleverer, The Bereaved.  I expected him to get better and better and I still do.   I hope he gets the Marquis de Sade out of his system with Burning and that he’ll go on to something that fulfills his talent. 

The much handed around book of the Marquis de Sade reminded me of an amusing and recognizable description of a college English class in Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot, set like the play in the 1980's.  "The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren’t about sex but politics.  They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against.”  (p. 24)  I don’t know if Bradshaw intended the sex in Burning to have some broader or revolutionary purpose but it doesn’t.  It's there for its own sake and to show how at times, calisthenically speaking, it can make people look really silly.

Burning plays at the Acorn Theatre, The New Group, on Theatre Row, West 42nd Street in Manhattan, through December 17.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Clowns Full-Tilt: A Musing on Aesthetics, created and directed by Kendall Cornell in collaboration with the ensemble, Clowns Ex Machina, at La MaMa

… art, life and wit! …

If you enjoy the pleasures of really deep satisfying laughs coming fast one upon the next, see Clowns Full-Tilt.  It’s marvelously performed, and constantly surprising.

On a stunning, helter-skelter post-mod stage with classical columns at the tilt, derelict platforms covered in brown paper, and an old-fashioned bathtub, the cast of nine multi-talented women, all wearing red clown noses, bring to three-dimensional life some famous paintings -- and with some “great moments” in literature thrown in.  They dance, they sing and they act with a non-stop, cleverly devised flow of one scene to the next.  Everything is done with vigor, balletic grace, and infectious ebullience and everything is underlined by great wit -- to say nothing of knowledge of art, literature and the classics.

Serious ideas lie behind the laughter – and you’re laughing all the time.  Among the paintings, Degas’ disaffected couple in his key painting, Absinthe, come to life and talk existential (what else in a French cafe?).   Diego Rivera’s Frida Kahlo is there with her iconic stare and dashing Mexican ruffles.  If you've always wanted to see the face of the girl in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, now’s your chance … and hold on to your hat because you’re in for a surprise.   Dreiser’s American Tragedy finds its way in as a source for great comedy – why not!  Nothing is sacred, even a Raphael Madonna and Child, and it’s all life affirming.

Meet Frida Kahlo.  L Diane Lovrin and R Carla Bosnjak.  Photo:  Marina Levitskaya

Some particularly strong episodes with a feminist bent go beyond the art-to-life theme.  Smart girls in school anxiously come up with the right answers to difficult questions while being equally anxious about staying, as the word goes, “dainty.” There’s a classic confessional in which venial, and not so venial sins are admitted that strike knowing cords of recognition.  Like all fine clowns, these are fine actors, and you see in their faces their struggles to confess -- or not to.

And Clowns Full-Tilt is liberating with its unabashed range of female body types in motion.  The cast appears at times looking nearly nude in pink unitards with bright nipples (sometimes a bit askew), and dance, sing, act and range into the audience in their full female variety.  Short, tall, thin, chunky, younger and older (though all not apparent in the photo below), their joie de vivre casts its spell.  They all dance well but they all wouldn’t make it into the American Ballet Theater.  Talk about acceptance – yes! 

       Clowns Full-Tilt ensemble.  Edge of that bathtub visible on left with canvas open to   possibilities on  right.  Photo:  Marina Levitskaya

Clowns Ex Machina -- like the deus ex machina, the "god from the machine" who appeared miraculously at the end of ancient tragedies thanks to a scenic contraption -- and made everything OK.  Perfect title for this clown troupe -- great comedy makes everything OK, too, at least for a little while.  But then, the Greek gods couldn't do any better.   

I’m glad to think of all the great paintings, all the literature, all the ideas in the world just waiting for a thorough go-over by Clowns Ex Machina.    Great there's room for lots more to come!

Clowns Full-Tilt  plays at La MaMa's First Floor Theatre in Manhattan's East Village through November 20.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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LA STRADA, written by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, adaptated by Gerard Vazquez, directed by Rene Buch and Jorge Merced, starring Nanda Abella, Luis Carlos de La Lombana and Israel Ruiz, compania artistica La Strada

... prismatic perfection ... 

LA STRADA shines like a gem.  The writing, acting, music, movement, mis en scene are perfect.  Based on Fellini’s great film of 1954, and now set in Spain, it tells the story of Gelsomina, one of the world’s extra persons, a slightly feeble-minded, dreamy young woman “with a cauliflower head”  who, in a poor family of too many women, is sold by her mother to Zampano, an itinerant “strong man” entertainer and together they set off on a bleak, Goyaesque road.

He bursts chains with his muscle and lung power;  she in her sad but appealing striped, droopy costume, passes the hat.  A few coins trickle in.  They work comic bits in which she’s the butt of the joke.  The strong man is brutal in this way and others, and when things take that turn, he’s unfaithful to her.  She’s deeply attached to him in ways we don’t thoroughly understand. 

Luis Carlos de la Lombana as the strong man.  Photo:  Martin Fernandez Lombana

Joining up with a circus, they meet an absolutely wondrous clown, light footed and charming in his movements, profound in his understanding.  Attracted to Gelsomina, he’s gentle, respectful, and filled with insight -- everything Zampano is not.  The clown -- with tender patience -- teaches Gelsomina a beautiful song.  Two dwellers on the edges of society finding an end to loneliness, a purpose in each other -- there’s the possibility of an idyllic ending, of heaven on earth. 

But -- oh, eternal triangle -- what about Zampano?

The clown and the somewhat dimwitted girl, two poor and easily overlooked human beings, make as great a sacrifice on the altar of honor and love as exists in literature or life.  He gives her a remarkable and most self-sacrificing gift: he tells her that she alone, and nobody else, would stay with Zampano (Who is really the strong man?).  His gift is to let her understand she is needed.  The waif for whom life seemed meaningless, now has a purpose.  Existence is unified and so everything matters, even a tiny pebble.  Even Gelsomina.  Even Zampano. She and the clown reach -- poetically and not fully verbalized -- a noble and tragic understanding that she will stay with Zampano.  In time, as the tragedy works unsparingly through these three lives, the melody the clown taught Gelsomina hangs on the wind of someone else's memory.

It's a play with a narrow focus and a vast, truly universal, meaning.  It looks at three figures who are unimportant by societal reckoning, on the margins, and finds in their "small lives" the full range of human experience from from selfishness to self-sacrifice and from brutality to love.   

This powerful and moving play is performed in Spanish with English super titles so available on the monitor you hardly notice you’re reading them.  Nanda Abella is touching and passionate as the soft, uncertain girl who discovers a tough center within herself.  Luis Carlos de La Lombana conveys the circus strong man’s all-out brutality with only a hint of vulnerability.  Israel Ruiz brings an unforgettable sense of depth to the role of the clown -- one feels the clown knows all there is to know, conveyed with a dancer’s flexibility and irony of a great actor.  

The set with swooping rhythms in the brownish tones of a landscape by Goya, makes the small stage seem big as the world and the road continuing, in harmony with the largeness of these "small" characters.

The music, songs by Luis Carlos de La Lombana and Caridad Martos, arranged by Jorge Merced, is poignant, enveloping, and beautifully played by Stephanie David on the violin and Jennifer Harder on the trumpet.     

This spare, fast tragic tale -- like Cavelleria Rusticana -- fires the imagination.  

La Strada plays at TBG Theater on West 32nd Street in Manhattan through December 4th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Teatrostagefest & La Strada Company Special Event November 5th at 3 PM." Adapting Fellini to the Stage".  TalkBack immediately following the 3 pm performance Saturday, November 5th.  Q & A with La Strada Company performers, directors, and special guest Marlo Fratti, playwright of the musical "Nine," an adaptation of Fellini's film 8 1/2, followed by reception/refreshments  with participants to which the audience is invited.

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