Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, The Irish Repertory Theatre

While watching Beyond the Horizon, I was often gripped by the strong conflicts in individual scenes.  Yet, the play came across as less than the sum of the parts. 

O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for this, his first full-length play (what a personal thrill that must have been!).  The focus on a low class family -- farmers brought to struggle to hold on to the farm -- the use of American vernacular, and the laying bare of brutal competition within what seems on the surface a wholesome American farm family must have been electrifying at the time.   Without these issues of innovation, today the play has less going for it.          

Two brothers love the same girl.  Like his father, the older, Andrew, is a farmer through and through -- and an excellent manager.  Rob is his opposite, a poetic dreamer, always with book in hand, who longs to travel the world and has no interest or aptitude for farming.  Both love Ruth, the girl next door.  Rob’s love is unspoken -- until the eve of his departure as a sailor on a ship that will take him to all the exotic places he’s been dreaming about.    

At that fraught last moment, Ruth seductively draws out of Rob his confession of love and, pouncing on his admission, admits she loves him too, and doesn’t love Andrew who’s been expecting to marry her all along.  The upheaval in the family is huge and the upshot is that nobody does what he's supposed to do:  Andrew the farmer, filled with bitter, jealous rage, goes to sea while Rob the dreamer of far away places, stays home to marry Ruth and work the farm with his aging father.   

Only Rob isn’t very good as a farmer.  He has no aptitude for managing, he’s on the frail side, and anyhow, he’d rather be reading his book, so when the father dies, Rob is left alone to preside fitfully over the slippage into failure of a once prosperous farm.

Rob's increasingly embittered wife, now a frazzled mother, imagines that Andrew will return to set the farm aright and, assuming Andrew still loves her, will take her over as well.  Andrew does return as a successful man with money in his pocket and big plans for grain deals in Argentina -- and no plans for her.  He’s off with the next ship to Argentina. 

At the play’s heart are the ways these two very different brothers respond to their true, inner selves.  Rob gives in to his inner nature, unwilling or incapable of transcending it, and so failing in his responsibilities and precipitating tragedy.  Andrew, in contrast, violates his inner nature:  he goes to sea when he should farm;  he becomes a commodities speculator, not growing the food he was born to grow, but growing money, working with “paper” instead of “grain”.   Rob is lost.  There is the possibility that in the tragic aftermath of the play, the immensely able Andrew will regain his true self, and find his way home.

It strikes me as characteristically American that while there are dangers both in giving in too fully to inner nature, and in violating it, competence can pull you through -- even spiritually.  

It’s interesting to think of O’Neill juggling the parallels and oppositions between Rob and Andrew, but in the play, these contrasts in “inner nature” come across as simplistic.  Of the two, Andrew’s story is the most interesting, but we hear what happens to him indirectly, while we live through life with Rob.  Also, Act II has so many reversals, leave takings, homecomings, and a very lengthy death that it becomes tiresome.  For these reasons, the play as a whole has less staying power in my mind than some of the individual scenes with fiery conflicts of wills.

Part of the reason also is that the play is not well cast.  The actors are not exciting nor convincing, though they work intensely at their characterizations.  There are exceptions among the smaller parts:  David Sitler brings great power to his role as the stern, rigid father in the scene in which he learns that Andrew will be the sea farer and Rob will stay home --  for me the most memorable in the play.  (Too bad he dies and we don’t see more of him.)  Aimee Laurence is touchingly natural as Rob and Ruth's little girl, caught between an embittered mother and the incompetent father she adores.  Patricia Conolly is amusing as Ruth's wheel-chair bound mother, the stubbornly healthy invalid, although her patrician speech is out of place.  Although O'Neill intended a naturalistic vernacular, the varied accents among the actors are disunifying, making the characters hard to accept as part of a small, isolated early 20th-century Massachusetts community.  Rob and Andrew are so disparate in all ways, quite aside from the contrasting personalities, that it's hard to believe they are brothers.

Beyond the Horizon plays at Irish Repertory Theater on Manhattan's West Side through April 15.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Early Plays based on Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn Plays, Adapted and directed by Richard Maxwell¸ a Wooster Group and New York City Players Production

The three early one-act plays by O’Neill are moving and naturalistic, not melodramatic as I’ve seen them called elsewhere.  In order to find this out, though, one has to look through this production's useless, arbitrary stylization which has the characters speaking with emotional emphasis but deadpan rhythms.  Still, if one sticks it out, one gets a good sense of the atmosphere and feeling of being part of a crew for a merchant ship in the early 20th Century.

In the first play, Moon of the Caribees, we’re on shipboard (The Glencairn) anchored off an island in the West Indies. The men are lonely, filling their time with jokes and complaints, but two native girls come aboard with rum hidden in their big sacks and for a brief time sensuality, joy as well as disappointment and anger erupt in a drunken party.  In spite of the stilted delivery of the lines, I saw it all -- the ship, rendered with a few telling scenic strokes, the repetitiveness of life aboard, the explosive excitement, and, always, the looming, oppressive authority of shipboard rank.

It’s a long night in Bound East for Cardiff, as a crewman whose vitality we came to know in Moon of the Carribees lies dying from an accidental shipboard injury. His mates are giving him what physical and emotional comfort they can as fog circles the ship, the heavy fog a poetic visualization of the state of dying. We not only saw the all-encompassing fog but in a most satisfying way felt and heard the creaking of the boards of the ship.

We’re in a dockside bar in The Long Voyage Home as a young sailor, an innocent among thieves, heading home with his pack of pay from one long voyage is robbed and, the worst of it, shanghaied onto another.

Creative disjunctions have been, in the past, the very essence of The Wooster Group's vision.  The Group holds to a play’s narrative -- as in last year's production, Vieux Carre -- while simultaneously undercutting it:  there are abrupt breaks and shifts, wacky, anachronistic furniture that skuttles around, tv monitors that may, or may not, be in synch with what’s currently on stage -- a myriad of tech devices that violate sentimentality, illusion, and that old gold standard of narrative effectiveness, “suspended disbelief.”

And these stylizations have a point.  The tension between our cozy expectations of narrative and the Wooster Group’s willful violations of it keeps us on edge. This Group joins ranks with artists for whom “illusion” of truth or anything else is still illusion -- i.e., false.  And falsity is not worth an artist's time.  To see, here, in a Wooster Group production a meaningless speech stylization standing in for their usually inventive range of disconnects is disappointing.  The collaboration with Richard Maxwell's New York City Players hasn’t done them any good.

Yet, although one doesn’t necessarily look to O’Neil for a realistic view of a time and place, that’s what we got in these three fine short dramas.  And the plays give us glimpses of the O’Neil to come, in the mood poetry, the woman-threat, and intense dramatic scenes, values that -- in spite of the idiosyncratic flat stylizations -- come through.

Early Plays is at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, through March 11.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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An Iliad by Denis O’Hare & Lisa Peterson, based on Homer’s The Iliad translated by Robert Fagles, directed by Lisa Peterson, with Denis O’Hare and Stephen Spinella, New York Theatre Workshop

Denis O’Hare gives  a magnificent performance as “The Poet”, a bard transported through time from ancient Greece to today, picking up our style and our way of speaking to tell us the story ofThe Iliad.   A smallish man on a near-bare stage with pipes and a sink near the back wall, he's travel worn, time worn, his only baggage a knocked-about canvas suitcase -- that and his memory. 

At first O'Hare speaks in a searching, self-effacing, almost ordinary way – oh oh, what’s he going to do with Homer? -- until he catches fire, and holds the audience rapt.  Superb lighting design punctuates emotion as O’Hare takes on the characters -- now he’s Achilles enraged at Agamemnon’s insult, now Hector chucking his baby’s chin before going off to die, now Andromache grieving for Hector and herself.  What a tour de force of swift shifting characters and volatile emotions!

And sometimes he’s just himself, that ordinary seeming man, but a true professional: driven to take on his gift of telling, struggling to understand the significance of the gore and mayhem he’s describing and -- since he’s made that trip through time and has a bard's outstanding memory -- of all wars. 

His shadow may loom large, to suggest, for example, the power of Achilles.  But he's rather slight.  And crowded as the stage seems to become with the vivid characters of all sizes, shapes and ages he brings to life, he remains alone, an everyman, burdened with responsibility, compelled to grapple with meaning.  Epic and personal, history and one man making it through come together in a great performance.

The language moves from colloquial to epic (in Fagles’ translation).  So sometimes he’s not speaking Homer’s words at all but that doesn’t make it any less an Iliad.  The story of the Greeks at Troy was first sung by generations of bards in their own ways until, when writing came to Greece, The Iliad was written down and codified.  That’s why this is called An Iliad -– there were others.  And this Iliad, while moving from personal musing to epic description, captures the essential truths of the characters’ personalities and conflicts in the epic attributed to that elusive poet, Homer.  This is a telling that Homer would applaud, if he knew about us (unless, as a fellow-bard, his competitive sense got the better of him).

The ancient bards and rhapsodes sang with lyres or cytharas.  Here the bass provides the musical and emotional resonance:  the original music by Mark Bennett, played by Bassist Brian Ellingsen, is so beautiful it warrants its own soundtrack.

Program notes describe the long and careful development that brought An Iliad into being.  Like the outstanding These Seven Sicknesses  currently playing at The Flea Theater, the creators have found in the ancient Trojan War a way to engage with our long war in Iraq.  The creative team includes Scenic design by Rachel Hauck, Costume design by Marina Draghici, Lighting design by Scott Zielinsky and Donald Friend is Production Stage Manager.

Denis O’Hare and Stephen Spinella are taking on the role of The Poet in different performances.  This is so good, I want to see it again, and see Spinella.     

An Iliad plays at New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan's East Village through March 25, 2012  Extended through April 1.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan, directed by Laura Braza, Attic Theater Company

The Time of Your Life is a classic American play.  It’s terrific, wonderful, rich in comedy, music, dance, vivid characters, feeling, humanity -- all that and it has a great sense of place and time, a gritty San Francisco waterfront bar on the eve of World War II. 

Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, Bar, and Entertainment Palace:  think colorful characters, from the guy sweeping, to Nick himself who comes in to open, to the old guys and young, cripples and musicians, tarts and society dames.  And everybody has a good heart except for Blick, the Cop the puritanical vice hunting cop.  That's Saroyan -- he's filled with love but he knows the score.

The story centers around Kitty Duval, a street walker with a burlesque past, Joe, the only of Nick’s regulars with money, and Tom, Joe's not-too-bright errand boy who loves Kitty.  Joe’s a cynic on the outside but tender on the inside, and sees the special human virtues in all the denizens of Nick’s bar, including the inner innocence of Kittty the tart.

Being at Nick’s is like being part of a family -- you belong.  Nick gives a chance -- and a job -- to the Black kid who can’t believe he’s lucky enough to get paid for playing boogie-woogie on the piano.  And Nick finds a place for the dancer/comedian who can’t raise a laugh.  But there's a snake in the garden of this sweet if seamy Paradise -- Blick, the vice cop.  Nick throws him out of the place when he comes hunting “vagrants” and “whores”.  “I’m not breaking any laws,” Nick says.  But Blick “is” the law, and we know he's going to be back.

Set in a bar which is home to its regulars, and where dreams flourish, the play reminds me a lot of O’Neil’s Iceman Cometh, but The Time of Your Life looks outward rather than inward and is more seated in the American social context and history than in philosophy and psychology.  By the end of Time of Your Life, you feel you've seen a full American panorama, played out through lives of individual characters you care about.  The play has an unexpected -- and beautifully planted -- ending that brings together truth and fantasy¸ realism and hope, in a way I’ll never forget. 

The Attic Theater production is appreciative of the play and the play comes through.  Henry Packer is strong and humorous as Kit Carson who has impossible romantic yarns to tell about the early West  -- and has that wonderful last word on things -- and I loved listening to Rocky Bostick as Wesley on the piano --  but in general the actors are a little youthful and unseasoned for their parts.   You do not get the sense of lives lived in tough circumstances.   But you do getThe Time of Your Life, and that’s a lot.    

The Time of Your Life plays at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan's East Village through February 25th, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment boxd and click on "post."  Emails are private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Charles Laughton, directed by Brian Kulick, choreographed by Tony Speciale, with F. Murray Abraham, Robert Dorfman and Amanda Quaid

The conflict in Galileo is iconic:  freedom of ideas vs. censorship.  Brecht peppers his play and his character of Galileo (1564-1642 ) with some Marxist views which are anachronistic but the play triggers thought and thrills one at the power of human intellect.  

Everybody’s having a good time looking through the telescope Galileo has recently perfected, and figuring out its benefits and fiscal profits.  Galileo, short of money, wouldn't mind reaping some profit, too, but fundamentally he's peering into his telescope in his quest for truth, recording his observations, and thinking about them.  His observations and calculations reveal to him that the earth rotates around the sun, not the other way around.

Galileo understands, of course, that his heliocentric view runs directly counter to Catholic dogma in which Man and his earth are at the center of God’s creation, but, driven by the passion to know, excited and even arrogant in the power of his discoveries, he seems unworried that the Church, through its powerful enforcement arm, the Inquisition, will censor his ideas or threaten his personal safety.  

In one of the great scenes in theater, Cardinal Barberini, Galileo's old friend, is transformed from an ordinary man into The Pope as he stands, center stage, and is dressed, with the aid of an advisor, into full papal regalia, buttoned from neck to hem into to his long gown, taking up the mitre, until, crowned by the tiara, his identity becomes merged fully with the Church.  And, having resisted to this point, he now accedes to his advisor’s insistence that Galileo’s heresy must be stopped, and he releases Galileo to the Inquisition.

It’s enough just to see the Inquisition's horrific instruments of torture -- Galileo recants.   Recant – it’s worth pausing to think about what it means.   Driven by fear, Galileo is forced to state publicly that what he knows to be the truth is not the truth. 

His "unheroic" recantation disillusions some of his followers.  But they weren’t shown the instruments of torture.  Among the disappointed, Galileo’s servant says “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.”  “No, Andrea, unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” Galileo answers.  Brecht’s Galileo is as much a man of the flesh as of the intellect, one of the keen strengths of the play. 

His geocentric view now branded a heresy, Galileo spends the rest of his life under house arrest, but he continues his scientific studies -- examining sunspots by peering through his telescope to the point where he blinds himself.  His followers smuggle the results of his investigations beyond the borders of Italy and to the larger world.  Brecht believed that revolutionary ideas are ultimately unstoppable:  in this instance he was right.

F.. Murray Abraham portrays Galileo with a gruffness that suggests a weary experience with the world, but misses the inner excitement and inspiration of his life as a scientist.  Robert Dorfman conveys exquisitely the gentle humor of Brecht’s Pope, thoughtful, ironic, amused even at himself, until he takes on the rigidity of high position.  Amanda Quaid as Galileo’s daughter effectively moves from joyous young love to its disappointment, to a nunnish devotion to her aging father, representing the fallout of the effects of Galileo’s scientific drive on those he loves.    

The set is so evocative one seems to hear the music of the spheres.  Suspended globes of different sizes in bluish tones conjure up the solar system, their appealingly rough surfaces referring to Gallileo’s key -- and religiously controversial -- observation that the moon isn’t perfectly smooth but has mountains.  At times a round projection suggests a view through a telescope -- here I think this production missed a bet:  instead of generic views of starry skies, etc., they would have done well to show what Galileo with the magnification available actually saw when he put his eye to the lens, including the way, over time, things moved. 

This is a play that I think is inportant to know, and here's your chance to see it well produced and performed.  Earlier, Classic Stage presented a staged reading of Galileo, and a click on that live link will take you to an account of it, including the play's two possible endings, one "hopeful," one "hopeless."  The reading included both endings:  here we have one.      

Galileo plays at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan’s East Village through March 18, 2012.  For more information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak 

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are totally private -- no emails every appear with comments.

Blood Knot written and directed by Athol Fugard, starring Colman Domingo as Zachariah and Scott Shepherd as Morris, SignatureTheatre

... Who wears the suit ?....

Set in South Africa in 1961, during apartheid, Blood Knot tells the story of two brothers, one who looks White and the other Black. They're sons of one black mother each with a different father and, as is said of the one who looks completely White, “It happens.”

They were treated differently from the moment of birth.  How do we know? The older got the Biblical "Black" name of Zachariah, while the younger. born looking White, was given a "White" name: Morris.

Other contrasts are that Morris is literate and speaks with a White South African accent, and Zachariah is illiterate and speaks with a Black South African accent.  (We know the two were brought up together and were very close as boys, so while -- sure -- one can figure out reasons for these contrasts, they remain unconvincing.)      

They’ve been living together in Zachariah’s ramshackle shack in Korsten, a Black neighborhood on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth.  Morris, who’s been a drifter while passing as White, returned to Korsten and to Zachariah about a year ago with a plan:  putting money aside regularly from Zachariah’s wages, he’s saving up for them to buy a farm together -- one thinks of Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Zachariah, who works at a hard job with a mean boss, and that gives him painful feet, longs to go out for a good time like he used to before Morris installed his dour regime of saving for the future and praying.  Most of all Zachariah longs for “woman.”  To keep him on the straight and narrow while letting him gratify his “woman” fantasies, Morris sets illiterate Zachariah up with a “pen-pal”, a girl in a distant city Zachariah can fantasize about all he wants -- until it looks as though the girl is going to come to Port Elizabeth and look for him.  It's fascinating to watch Zachariah’s strength of personality blast through his dependency on Morris for the writing and reading of exchanged the letters.

Since the pen-pal girl turns out to be White and Zachariah is Black (though she doesn’t know it), the pains and ironies of race relations under apartheid emerge within this oh-so-human correspondance. The pen-pal relationship, with all its room for deception, is filled with humor, pathos and keen suspense as we worry that Zachariah’s romantic desire may lead to a tragic end.  Blood Knot has a terrific Act I.

Act II;  good-bye Lennie and George, hello Cain and Abel.  The basically we’re-in-it-together relationship in Act I is replaced in Act II by raw jealous conflicts between the brothers and by extension between Blacks and Whites.  Once the girl is out of the picture, the men are left with the fancy clothes -- featuring an electric blue suit -- that Morris had bought for Zachariah when they thought she might actually appear.  Morris dons the suit and -- clothes maketh the man -- turns gradually into a kind of mean White overbearing, plutocrat overseer, brutalizing his Black brother (supposedly all in a game.).

But with these events, telling as they may be, the action no longer emerges from the characters, but appears arbitrarily invented to make the author's point.  Zachariah becomes more sophisticated and better spoken, and at the same time more servile than the character we’ve come to know, all in service to the author’s message, that is:  brutal conflict between brothers is in our blood, and we are all brothers under the skin. 

From a rich human drama, the play turns into a schematic parable.  I haven’t seen this kind of programmatic slippage in other Fugard plays; perhaps it’s here because Blood Knot was one of first plays (1961), though revised and re-titled slightly in 1987.  Colman Domingo is powerful and moving as Zachariah in Act I where he has a genuine role to play.  Scott Shepherd is a good foil to him but never as convincing because the role as written is more wobbly.

Among the reasons to see Blood Knot are to learn more about South Africa under apartheid and glimpse the effects on individual lives, and to see the young Fugard finding his way as an important playwright.

Blood Knot  plays at SignatureTheatre, The Pershing Square Signature Center, on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are totally private -- no emails ever appear with comments.