Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, directed by David Staller, The Irish Repertory Theatre and Gingold Theatrical Group

Man and Superman is a totally delightful evening of theater that lifts you from yourself with enjoyment and -- thinking about it after -- reminds you of what theater is all about.  It couldn’t be better.  It’s a romantic comedy as well as a play of ideas that spins off from the story of Don Juan, particularly the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera, though with a bit of Faust, and Milton's Satan thrown in.  Shaw subtitled it "A Comedy and a Philosophy."

With the death of her father, Ann Whitefield, an entrancing and feisty young woman, is placed in the hands of two male guardians (even though, in early 20th-century England, she has a mother) Jack, a young, wealthy, and wittily ironic iconoclast and author of theThe Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion, and the older, stuffy, conventionally minded and reactionary Roebuck Ramsden.

The free thinker Jack and the old guard Ramsden agree on only one thing: that Ann should marry Octavius who adores her.  But she only toys with his infatuation, giving him the affectionate but romantically dismissive nickname, Ricky Ticky Tavy.  We -- and the characters -- catch on to a love triangle:  Octavius loves Ann who loves Jack AND we can tell that Jack loves Ann, too, but he is so leary of being ensnared in marriage that he doesn’t recognize that he loves her … or at least, he’s the last to admit it. 

There’s another pair of lovers, Violet, Octavius’ sister, secretly married to Hector, son of an American millionaire.  And there’s Straker, Jack’s car mechanic and chauffeur, representative of the proletariat -- who has many of the really great lines, but don't worry, there are plenty left over for everybody else.  This play is a feast of language.  No wonder Shaw compared himself to Shakespeare.

The whole crew goes driving in two cars, when cars are still a novelty, from England to Spain, all the way South to Granada. There, dislocated from their home base in England, the imagination opens to new vistas. 

On the road, Jack and Tanner are held up for their car by the exotic, mysterious brigand, Mendoza: that night, falling asleep in the wilds of Mendoza’s desert, Jack dreams the great and famous scene of “Don Juan in Hell”.  Before our eyes, asleep on the desert floor, Jack rises, dressed in embroidered vest and bandeleras, knee ties and, finally, the plumed hat with the swooping brim of his own distant ancestor, Don Juan.  He's now in hell, and a Faustian Mendoza, dark and dapper, has become in Jack's dream the Devil in sleek dinner dress.  The two argue, words flowing bountifully, the great issues of human existence, relationships between men and women, capitalism and the exploitation of labor, human nature and life on earth, and the question of whether it's better to spend eternity in heaven or in hell.  Like everything in this play drenched with ironic opposites, that's a surprisingly tricky question.  

When Ann, much to her own surprise, arrives in hell, her costume -- Gypsy bodice and fluffy white bloomers -- is as witty, expressive and eye-filling as Don Juan's.  Ramsden -- now the Statue, Ann’s father Il Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, drops by on a visit from heaven:  “I have my share of vanity," he says, "for as a young man I was admired by women, and as a statue I’m praised by art critics.”

Which then is, actually, the better place to be?  Heaven seems boring, and Hell has turned out to be a pleasure palace.  No fire and brimstone here, the Devil’s a gentleman for whom “beauty is good to look at ... music is good to hear ... love is good to feel ... and they are all good to think about and talk about.”   But, Don Juan retorts, “Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh!”

Don Juan is a reformer, a prophet burdened by the evils and injustices of the world and seized by a purpose beyond himself -- to improve the world.  As a Philosophic man, he seeks heaven where he can contemplate the Life Force and affect things for the better.   How is not clear but one thing’s for sure: “The philosopher is Nature’s pilot,” he says … “ to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.” 

To which the Devil plays a really top card in the deck -- the freedom card:  “I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force.”

Women seek improvement in their biologically driven way, through propagation that may lead to a superman:  thus they are central to the Life Force and Ann, as things turn out, is no exception.  Watch out, Jack.

It’s hard to remember a play so perfectly cast as this one. The acting is universally superb.  Max Gordon Moore plays Jack with manly strength combined with scampish vigor of a stand-up comic that fully expresses his iconoclastic take on absolutely everything.  Janie Brookshire is tough and charming as the Life Force at work.

Jonathan Hammond is irresistible as the seductive Mendoza, a cynical realist except that romantic love drives this worldly sophisticate to write dreadful poetry. 

As Octavius, Will Bradley stops at exactly the right place short of camp in expressing his idealizing romantic love, not man enough for Anne but man enough to carry an eternally broken heart. 

Brian Murray fascinates as the rigid but not heartless Ramsden, dense but not a fool;  one believes everything this wonderful actor does and at one and the same time marvels at how he does it.

Laurie Kennedy as Mrs. Whitefield, Paul O’Brien as Malone, Margaret Loesser Robinson as Violet, Brian Sgambati as Straker, and Zachary Spicer as Hector are all amusing, touching, and true to their parts.   That these highly individualized characters work together so well as an ensemble is surely due to the vision of the Director, David Staller. 

So who wins the heaven vs. hell argument between Don Juan and the Devil?  As the Devil says, “… men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell … ”  But you won’t get tired of this play!  Man and Superman takes ones breath away with its succinct and knowing brilliance, and with the magic of that other world that Jack discovers when he dreams his dream. 

Man and Superman  plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan's Chelsea district through June 17, 2012.  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 totally private -- no emails ever appear with comments.

 

Don’t Dress For Dinner by Marc Camoletti, adapted by Robin Hawdon, with Ben Daniels, Dam James, Patricia Kalember and Jennifer Tilly, directed by John Tillinger

Don’t Dress for Dinner  -- and don’t see this show either.  I went because I read somewhere it was really funny.   It is, for about ten minutes.

But the rest is an uninspired cliche -- though well performed in madcap farce style -- a play about a weekend somewhere outside of Paris where the English husband thinking his English wife will be elsewhere invites his French mistress (though Jennifer Tilly makes no attempt to seem French in the role) and hires a French cook for a really sweet time but things get complicated when a family friend the wife is having an affair with shows up and the wife decides to stick around so everyone has to pretend that the cook is really the family friend's girlfriend -- or his niece, depending who's being lied to -- and that the mistress is the cook who doesn’t know how to cook and yellow gooky food ends up all over the lap of the family friend so then ...  oh well, you get the idea. 

It’s all thoroughly predictable including the fact that who ends up with who is a mere matter of who's available -- in a word it’s crude.

The funny part?  Early on, in Act I, when the mistaken identities first get going, the plain-girl cook, wittily played by Spender Hayden, enthusiastically takes on the part of an ultra-sophisticated high class French woman who tosses down her drinks and dances the tango with gusto.   And for a brief while, Jennifer Tilly is amusing as the mistress thrust into role of the cook who doesn’t know her baked alaska from her quiche -- basically she plays herself and that’s kind of fun.

There’s a bit of the women taking off their tops almost in sight of the audience, and Tilly eventually emerges in a soft porn corset and garter belt outfit which she makes the most of -- she really is an uninhibited performer!  And I did enjoy her throaty, little girl voice. 

But you can be sure this sitcom a) goes on too long and b) ends -- no surprise here -- with a routine "whoever's left over" partnering up for sex that leaves a bad taste that all but wipes away the interlude of good fun in Act I. 

 Don’t bother.

Don't Dress For Dinner , produced by Roundabout Theatre Company, plays at the American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.  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.

Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by David Cromer, Barrow Street Theatre

Tribes is a cleverly written, witty and engaging play about a “problem.”  The surface problem involves deafness.  A young man who is deaf and a young woman who is going that way fall in love.  But more importantly it’s about in-groups, others, "us and them,” and the virtues and limitations of the human tendency to collect into -- tribes.  It's a play that's funny, engrossing, and doesn't make intellectual compromises.

Billy is the deaf, beloved, youngest child of Christopher, a smart, arrogant, rigid and closed-minded academic and Beth, an amused mother who in spite of her easy-going nature and sensitivity doesn’t always get it.  Daniel is a vaguely beat, mildly schizophrenic older son and Ruth is the frustrated singer daughter.  Part of the charm of the play is the intensity with which one feels this as a genuine family -- with all of everybody’s issues, it still seems nice to belong, and sitting in the audience in-the-round above the beautifully lit family dinner table, one feels a part of it.  This play comes to us from the UK, and this is a British family.

And they do have plenty of issues.  Billy learned to speak vocally and is a skillful lip reader, but he has to keep reminding his family to do their speaking -- and screaming at one another, often with very amusing repartee -- in his direction so he can know what’s going on.  The strain’s enough to make him give up at times, and ultimately he's drawn to Sylvia, a woman who can truly understand his communication frustrations because she’s the child of deaf parents and is herself now, in young adulthood, going deaf.  It would appear to be a match made in heaven.  She teaches him sign language, giving him a new entry into the deaf world.

The play is filled with clever and meaningful criss-cross relationships.  Billy was born deaf to hearing parents, Sylvia was born hearing to deaf parents. Billy has never heard. Sylvia is moving from fully hearing to fully deaf.  She fights deafness as a terrifying handicap that’s pulling her into its grasp.  Billy, a new enthusiast, buys into the idea that deaf is not a handicap, only different.

And while Billy, and soon Sylvia, can’t hear anything of what's around them, Daniel, Billy’s schizophrenic older brother, is bedeviled by imaginary voices.

The course of love never runs smooth takes an orignal turn.  Billy embraces deafness and Sylvia; Sylvia resists deafness and Billy, or at least his enthusiasm for the deaf world.  Because having now learned sign language, after a life-time of being forced to use verbal language by his father, Billy comes to feel alienated from his talky-talky family and ultimately abandons them in favor of full identification with the deaf.   He loves the deaf social occasions.  He blooms.  And he gets a job, belying the dependency his family assumed.  Sylvia, fighting deafness all the way, hears with disgust, while she still can, the atonal monotony that’s coming into her speaking voice from diminished hearing feed-back.  She comes to detest the deaf social gatherings, “always the same people.”  Tribes -- all tribes, the playwright makes clear -- offer a sense of belonging; tribes are parochial and limiting..

Tribes is a stimulating play, superbly acted, with an alluring set and lighting, and perfectly paced.  No wonder its NYC run has just been extended to September!  While the story focuses on Billy’s conflicts and journey of self-discovery, all the characters are fully written and pleasurably idiosyncratic, which means, it may not be a pleasure to live with all these types but it sure is fun to watch them in theater.

Tribes plays at Barrow Streete Theatre in NYC's West Village through September 2, 2012.  For further 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.

 

A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O’Neil, directed by J. R. Sullivan, The Pearl Theatre

A Moon for the Misbegotten is a tense, character driven play that demands  great acting and this excellent production provides it:  Kim Martin-Cotton is as fine an actress as I’ve seen anywhere and she makes the role of the tough-on-the-outside farm girl, Josie Hogan, come alive.

The play, written in 1943, takes us back to a 1923 farmhouse.  Like O’Neill’s earlier play, Beyond the Horizon, currently Irish Repertory Theater, this, too, is about trying to hold on to the farm.  Josie and her father Phil Hogan, are tenant farmers, and their landlord, James Tyrone, Jr., is a local boy who made it in the big city as an actor, and whose self-weary, drunken lack of self-respect leads him to mock his own success.  Josie's in love with Tyrone, but hides it behind a cynical, sluttish affect.  He claims, in an affected, stentorian way, to love her, but she doesn't believe a word, comparing her big farm girl self to the dainty women she figures he knows in the city.          

Word has it that a rich neighbor has put in a bid to buy the farm from Tyrone, putting the Hogans' hearth, home and livelihood at risk.  Will Tyrone sell, betraying “his best friend” Phil, and Josie whom, with drunken bathos, he says he loves?  Phil, with his own tough exterior and a wily streak, comes up with a plan.  Thinking he knows what’s best for his daughter better than she does, he concocts for Tyrone and Josie to be together and alone on the farm for a long, moonlit night, throwing them into each other’s arms, for Josie’s happiness and to keep the farm.

Fueled by enough whiskey to make most men pass out, Tyrone pours out the sources in his youth for his haunted nature, and his sense that, actor that he is, he's a man for effect, capable of faking tears at his mother’s funeral and empty within, having room only for the self-hatred.   And after spilling all,Tyrone does end up in Josie’s arms, not in the way Phil intended but asleep across her lap, his head resting on her breasts (which he has much admired), in a late night Pieta.  Awaking at dawn, he feels, for the moment, refreshed and free, having forgotten, it seems, that he has spent the night confessing to Josie the secrets of his guilty soul, the reason he now feels liberated.

So now will Josie and Tyrone live together happily ever after?  Bottom line, he won’t sell the farm out from under the Hogans.

The Moon for the Misbegotten has a driving narrative, and the scenes between the strongly conceived characters are exciting.   I don’t think this play has the unforgettable, mythic stature of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which the Director’s program notes link it to.  Tyrone’s bathetic confessional (which lasts a little long) has the character and content of a pat psychoanalytic catharsis, somewhat dating the play.  Still, throughout we are held by the playwright’s vibrant skill in creating compelling psychological interactions, and by the fine acting that puts them across. 

Phil Hogan, played by Dan Daily, seems at first a stock character, a domineering, crude Irishman pushing his children around, but gradually, through this outstanding actor's timing and subtlety, we come to glimpse the active mind, wit and depth of feeling lurking behind the “drunken Irishman” mask.   The complexity of this character -- and the way it sneaks up on you -- is one of the great strengths of the play -- he does what you don’t expect.

Though not quite fitting the part, Andrew May is able in the demanding and intensely emotional role of James Tyrone, Jr.   Kern McFadden as the business-minded  farmer next door is a stolid foil for Phil Hogan’s rambunctious ridicule in a richly humorous scene that’s a highlight of the play.  Often the lead actor at the Pearl Theatre, Sean McNall is good in a brief turn as the last of the Hogan boys to run away from their over-controlling father. 

And Kim Martin-Cotton's performance as Josie is transcendent, of the kind that it’s hard to see anyone else in the part.  She has a rich speaking voice and very expressive use of her body.  As my companion said, “She’s as good as Meryl Streep.”  (There but for the grace of God … ! ) 

Moon for the Misbegotten plays at the Pearl Theatre in New York City's Lincoln Center through  April 15, 2012.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comment very welcome ... scroll down., click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private and never appear with comments.

War Horse, based on Michael Morpurge's novel, adapted by Nick Stafford in association with Handspring Puppet Company, Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, from National Theatre of Great Britain

Seeing War Horse in its current production is a powerful experience -- the kind one has to be glad one had and feel concerned for everyone who hasn't had the chance.   “You must see it” I have said in the three days since I did, to all my friends.  

It’s well known that it’s a story about a boy and a horse and that the horses in the play are represented by wonderful puppets -- “puppets” sounds small -- think horse size.

Without seeing it, what’s harder to know are the elements of sight and sound that convey the passage of time, travel across the earth, and what it looks like and feels like to be everywhere from the English countryside to trench warfare and bombardments in France during World War I, and how these affect the humans and horses we come to love --  especially the horses.  All told, War Horse, as my friend puts it directly, is one of the great anti-war masterpieces.  Some have found the story sentimental:  but a great anti-war masterpiece isn’t sentimental.

Billy Narracott, son of an English farm family, raises from a colt the horse he’s named Joey until, at the start of World War I, the horse is sequestered by the cavalry.  Broken-hearted at the loss, and fearful for Joey’s safety, Billy runs away to become a soldier so he can search for Joey across the wartime landscape of France.   We follow Billy’s  and Joey’s independent experiences with the brutal war -- Billy never wavering in his determination to save Joey, and Joey’s minute-by-minute will to survive. 

Billy carries in his pocket a sketch of Joey -- torn from a friend’s drawing pad -- the way Billy's army buddies carry photos of their girlfriends.  Against the dark backdrop of the play is a long, narrow “window,” the torn and ragged edged sketch paper magnified -- and through this window we see the realities of place, time, and action that surround Billy, and Joey, and every other creature, sometimes as filmed bombardments, sometimes as charcoal sketches of  French rooftops.  The torn papers, small and large, express torn-up lives, as well as the fragmented view of war any one individual has.   War itself becomes a character in War Horse.

Frantic from the violence and din, Joey attempts to jump a barbed-wire barrier, but the coiled wire traps his legs like the tentacles of an octopus.  While the opposing sides, English and Germans, each debate among themselves in their separate trenches how to get hold of the horse without being killed by the other side, Joey fights the wire, becoming more and more entrapped, brought to a tangled standstill, exhausted, head bowed, on a raised platform that is ground level, the men being below in trenches. 

Elevated, isolated, in a glaring spotlight, Joey recalls -- he sums up -- all martyrs, including Christ on the Cross, the barbed wire Joey’s crown of thorns, an association heightened by the crown of roses a little French girl had worn in one bright moment shortly before.  The human actors represent individual lives:  Joey universalizes experience.

Born of a draft horse and a “hunter” -- a thoroughbred -- Joey combines the capacity for hard, repetitive work and the spirit of daring and outstanding achievement.   Billy raised Joey as a hunter but -- because of a bad bet made by his father -- was forced to teach him to pull the plough.  How this figures in Joey’s story once he’s gone to war is a breath-taking turn of the plot (so good its makes you say inside, “Thank you, Author!”) -- and it's also part of Joey’s transformation into a universal symbol.  Joey survives:  Topthorn, a pure thoroughbred -- and so less universal -- doesn’t.

Joey, Topthorn and the other horses that seem so real are not “realistic” in the purely visual sense:  we see through their cage-like structures and moving joints while visible humans on-stage adjust their limbs and bring their backs to quiver as they snort over the oats, or carry a cavalryman.  But the designers have so understood the fundamental truths of horses that they are as much characters -- or more so -- than the human actors.  

It’s not possible to separate the impact of the play from this particular production but so what if you’re deciding whether to see this War Horse, that we’re privileged to have at the moment in NYC.   

War Horse plays at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC's Lincoln Center.  For more information about the play, its history, and the astoundingly talented team that created the production, and for tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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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

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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 

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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.

These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar, The Flea Theater, featuring The Bats

Allison Buck as Tekmessa and Grant Harrison as Ajax, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

If you’re lucky enough to see These Seven Sicknesses, you’re in for a rich adventure.  It’s like setting sail.  First of all, you’ll walk in to a party -- there’s a buzz, the actors, in costume, are there to talk with you, offering to bring you water or wine.  This is transformative, opening you to whatever's going to happen soon on the stage, that is, the wood floor between the facing banks of the audience.   

The play is an ambitious and exciting weaving together of the seven extant plays of Sophocles.  It follows their basic story lines and generally their emotional arcs while changing some aspects.  To catch any of Sophocles’ words you have to think fast because the language is our current lingo and delivered with today’s expressions and body language, marvelously by a superb group of young actors -- the Flea’s Bats.  The stories are tragic, and Graney’s treatment of them is witty and hilarious.  Since it’s a long evening¸dinner is served (by the actors to the audience) after Act I and -- if you can believe it –- dessert comes after Act II, which leaves room for delightful conversation among the actors and audience.  Feeling so well taken care of is in itself transformative.  

For those who may know Sophocles’ plays and are interested in the order in which they’re taken up, Act I presents, with these titles, Oedipus [The King], In Trachis, In Colonus.  Act II:  Philoktetes, Ajax.  Act III:  Elektra, Antigone.

The opening act is over-compressed which led me to think These Seven Sicknesses might be superficial but -- hold on, it isn’t!  Still, much of Act I is performed with rambunctious speed.   Oedipus acknowledges his guilt fairly early on so Sophocles’ portrait of him as a searcher for truth is lost.  The Oedipus episode slows down, though, for its exciting, theatrical crescendo.  In a scene poignantly played by Satomi Blair, Oedipus’ wife Jocasta, drenched in guilt at the discovery of her polluted marriage with her son, steps into her bath and cuts her wrists, her blood reddening the water (in Sophocles she hangs herself).  In terms of the themes of blood and pollution in the play, as Ms. Blair commented to me in the intermission, this manner of suicide is rich in symbolism.  To see a woman step into a bath on the  plank floor between the facing banks of seats has character of a sacrifice: it"s "not in Sophocles" but it's filled with suggestive resonance of other sacrifices of women in these plays and at the heart of much Greek drama.

above:  Satomi Blair as Jocasta, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

below: Seth Moore as Philoktetes and Alex Herrald as Neoptolemus, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater 

Philoktetes, next,  follows most closely Sophocles’ actual and emotional story line, it’s given the time it needs, and is magnificently acted by Seth Moore:  the upshot -- a great Philoktetes!  Years ago, as the story goes, the Greeks were headed to fight at Troy but the warrior Philoktetes had a gangrenous, disgusting leg wound, so they abandoned him on a desolate island -- “They left cans of food for me but no can opener,” Philoktetes says.  Now, after ten years of fruitless war, the prophetic word is out that the Greeks can’t capture Troy without Philoktetes’ magic bow.  The play begins as Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, arrive on the island to get it.  They and we meet a Philoktetes in agony, half-crazed with bitterness at the way he has been treated¸ his isolation, and the unrelenting pain of his rotting leg.  With Odysseus and Neoptolemus plotting by fair means and foul to get that bow, the pain of suspicion is added to his anguish.  Philoktetes covers the long stage with his one good leg and a make-shift crutch, his suppurating leg fallen upon, and stomped upon by Odysseus who’ll stop at nothing.  In this episode several nurses, on hand throughout These Seven Sicknesses as a singing Greek chorus … Well, what they do here is an operation, more I will not say, except that it gives Seth Moore the opportunity to add some blood curdling cries of pain to his stunning performance.

Ajax, the story of unother unappreciated warrior, omits Sophocles' rich, long speeches but gives plenty of time to the main dramatic action, choreographed on a grand scale and performed with thrilling power, deft speed and spinning turns by Grant Harrison as Ajax.  The hero whose name is proverbial for great strength is brooding over an unbearable blow to his honor:  since Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, died, his armor was to be awarded to the the next greatest fighter and in a vote the Greeks awarded it -- not to Ajax but -- to Odysseus.  Ajax is agonizing over the intolerable insult when a squadron of armed men and women enter in a choreographed advance, uttering the low, oddly frightening bah's of sheep.  Driven by a passion to avenge his honor, and crazed by the disrespect, Ajax enters battle against what he thinks are his enemies and slaughters them all, only to find out that he has, in his insanity, slaughtered nothing but a herd of sheep.

 After that, what’s left for a hero to do?

Philoktetes and Ajax emphatically bring to mind current issues:  fruitless wars that last ten years, and the grievous plight of fighters, suffering wounds that won't heal, lacking their due respect, who may be driven to violence and suicide.  Seeing these issues laid bare in ancient stories expands them to the universal.      

Other highlights include Kate Michaud’s passionate and complex performance as Herakles’ wife Dejanira, stung by Herakles’ rejection of her in favor of a younger woman but loving him still -- with good reason, that’s one mighty, compelling Herakles played by Victor Joel Ortiz.

With the shaved head and dark garb of a Buddhist monk, Holly Chou, a brilliant character actor playing the Blind Seer, speaks prophetic ambiguities with precise articulation -- what an irony! 

Betsy Lippit bounds into Elektra an explosive tomboy.  What a fury she is, grappling in full rage with her mother Clytaemnestra, who brings out her side of the story, played by Akyiaa Wilson.  These are only among my favorite episodes and performances -- there are great moments throughout.  There are, after all, 7 plays and a cast of 37! 

These Seven Sicknesses is a rich feast of theater! 

These Seven Sicknessess plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through March 4.***  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

***Due to popular demand, The Flea Theater will bring back THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES this summer. This critically lauded theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays (Oedipus, In Trachis, Philoktetes, In Colonus, Ajax, Elektra and Antigone) will return for a limited engagement June 6 through July 1

Yvonne Korshak

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The Philanderer by Bernard Shaw, directed by Gus Kaikkonen, The Pearl Theatre Company

... pre-vintage Shaw ...  

Shaw’s early play, The Philanderer of 1893, is a romantic comedy that’s as focused on the ideas of Henrik Ibsen as it is on love, and with good reason:  for Shaw ideas and love were equally suffused with eros.

Shaw saw Ibsen’s A Doll’s House five times around 1893 and this iconic drama was revelatory, bringing him to the possibility of a theater of ideas.  And, with his comic bent, and awareness of the pitfalls of stern moralizing, Shaw sought a humorous way to explore Ibsen’s theme of the independent woman.  This led him inThe Philanderer to comic exaggerations which today to me seem dated, though when the play was first produced, they may have seemed fresh and provocative.  As a gauge of that, the Pearl's program tells us that  "...due to strict censorship ... it was not performed on the stage until 1902."

In a romantic triangle (like one Shaw experienced), Grace Tranfield, a down-to-earth widow and Julia Craven, volatile and erotically assertive, both love Leonard Charteris, an attractive curmudgeon, who’s just broken off from the over-possessive Julia and is now courting Grace.  During some romancing at Grace’s house, Julia bursts in, claiming Leonard really belongs to her.  Shaw, alluding to Ibsen’s “advanced” ideas about independent women, has fun with the jealous Julia – how can a woman who calls herself independent speak of one person “belonging” to another?

Julia keeps up her boisterous scene even when Grace’s proper father, Colonel Craven, arrives, along with his long lost friend who happens to be Julia’s father.  How fascinating that Shaw describes a similar romantic rivalry and late night scene in his diary in early 1893! An exhausted Leonard (just like a “horribly tired and shocked and upset” Shaw) finally gets Julia out of there with a romantic lie, sober Grace having long ago retreated upstairs. 

The play continues at to the “Ibsen Club”, where a stern portrait of Ibsen dominates the Library, and where Ibsen’s ideas about independent women are carried to the point of caricature.  Women are allowed in this London club, an innovation, but to be members they must be “unwomanly women.”  Julia’s younger sister, Sylvia, fills the bill in a pants role.  But how Julia can manage to stay in the Club, in spite of her “womanly” amorousness and sexy clothes, is the set-up for some humor.

The conflict between Julia and Grace over Leonard (because it’s wearing thin it seems to me) is joined by stuffy Dr. Percy Paramore’s unrequited love for Julia, who despairs even more when the news comes in that his gruesome scientific experiments are proven to be useless (anticipating Shaw’s later The Doctor’s Dilemma).  As in Moliere’s The Misanthrope , which the sexual dynamics in The Philanderer much resemble, the undercurrent of true sexual attraction between the flirt and the curmudgeon, here Leonard and Julia, retains its ambiguity and the romance is left unresolved. 

I’m glad to have had the chance to see The Philanderer and I appreciate the The Pearl for putting in on.  The production is straightforward and so adequate for introducing one to the play, but it’s uninspired.  Of the central threesome, Bradford Cover is strong and charming as the rumpled Leonard.  Karron Graves plays the amorously determined Julia with the vivacity the part calls for though, at the heights of emotion, her voice gives way to a kind of shrieking in her all out performance .  Rachel Botchan could have used some of Graves’ energy -- a fine performer in other roles I’ve seen, she played Grace with a dull placidity that makes one wonder what Leonard could possibly see in her.

The Pearl used to be in a proscenium theater but now plays in a theater with seating on three sides, yet continues to stage plays fully to the front as in the old theater:  more flexibility and variety of movement would be interesting, and give better site lines to those seated on the side.     

The Philanderer  holds fewer streaks of the Shavian wit than one hopes for.  But the fact is, when he does construct one of those marvelous, sly build-ups that land you with pleasurable jolt at a great line, and you find yourself laughing heartily, then the play, Shaw, and everything else, for the moment, seem intensely worthwhile.

The Philanderer  plays at NYC's City Center Theater in mid-town Manhattan through February 19, 2012.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Stopped Bridge of Dreams, written, directed and designed by John Jesurun, Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa

... artistic directors ...

Ellen Stewart, the astoundingly brave and brilliant founder of La MaMa theater in NYC’s East Village, died just about a year ago, Jan 13, 2011.  Since, from the time she founded her experimental theater group in 1961 to the time of her death, La MaMa created approximately 3,000 productions.  (!)  I doubt anyone could have seen all of them -- except Ellen Stewart.  But some of the greatest theater I’ve ever seen, simply unforgettable productions, were at La MaMa.

What will happen to La MaMa now that Ellen Stewart is gone?  Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.  Things are busy at La MaMa which is a good sign.  They’ve been serving as a venue for some other exciting theater groups and performers which keeps their performance spaces -- the tiny and the large -- active.  They've also mounted their own productions since the loss of Stewart and these, in my view, have been less successful. 

Stopped Bridge of Dreams, La MaMa’s own production, is a case in point.  It has a lot of trendy elements, from Oriental influence and allusions to the use of video and “multi-media” -- not much multi, mainly, video -- but these seem mainly there to distract one from thinking about that there’s no real play here. 

While there’s not really a plot, there’s a situation, though it takes awhile catch on to it.  We’re up in the air in a transcontinental airliner that functions as a brothel and the characters are the prostitutes plus the Madam.  We hear about the clients but never see any.  The denizens of the plane have some ghostly characteristics but they’re alive -- somewhere in the numinous between life and death and past and present, though that doesn’t quite work out either.

The characters have various relationships among themselves.  A central relationship is between the Madam and a young man who is or is not one of her thousands of unborn aborted children; you may guess that this is a tense relationship.  There's a flirtation or two.  Although the prostitutes populating the plane seem suited to the environment, and generally not looking to leave, there’s seems to be an underlying ennui.  Or maybe that was my ennui waiting for this to be over.

This all takes place under monitors that just below ceiling level run the full length of the long theater, with screen-saver like videos suggesting the heavens, clouds, etc., and also some panoramic shots of cities approached as for landing from above (my favorite shots).  Cameras provide varied angles and greatly magnified close-ups of the performers interacting or narrating, live or filmed ahead of time.

There's reference to an early "floating world" Japanese novel with narration from it of the tragic story of a young girl who grows up to be a prostitute and supplants the current Madam as the new Madam of the plane.  The old one will drift off to become a cloud -- at least that’s what she says.

Speaking of video ... The Wooster Group, an outstanding off-Broadway group, pioneered the use of videos and other tech, slick and mod-appearing devices in their plays in ways that are challenging, witty, and make one see things in new ways.  The video-driven multiple points of view in Stopped Bridge of Dreams rely on some aura of innovation, but are unsearching.  This play doesn’t lead one to see things in new ways, through tech or otherwise, it's more watered down Sci Fi.

The author, director, designer, John Jesurun, has an imposing lists of honors and activities for his theatrical work, including back in 1996 a MacArthur “genius award” Fellowship.  So much for all that.  The -- to now -- falling off from quality of the La MaMa productions since the death Ellen Stewart drives home that among the real geniuses of the off- and off-off Broadway scene are the Artistic Directors.  Creators such as Ellen Stewart, and -- to name just a few current -- Brian Kulick of Classic Stage, Jim Simpson of the Flea Theater, Jonathan Bank of Mint Theater, Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group, and others, make it happen.

Although their theater groups each differ profoundly one from another, these artistic directors share imagination, intense individuality, leadership, love of theater, and perseverance against great odds.  They unite individual vision with habits of personality that, to me, are quite astsonishing, they are like iron in their toughness.  If you want to look for genius, in my view, here’s where. 

About that question, how will La MaMa fare?  Give it time.  Great artistic directors need apply.

Stopped Bridge of Dreams  plays at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre in NYC's East Village through February 5, 2012.  For further information and tickets, click on live link of play's title. 

Yvonne Korshak

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Blood and Gifts by J. T. Rogers, directed by Bartlett Sher, at Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi Newhouse

... here's the cold war ...

Blood and Guts tells the story of the American thrust for influence in Afghanistan during the cold war through a close look at the lives and adventures of three intelligence officers -- one American, one British, and one Russian.  James Warnock, a CIA operative based in the country of our 1980’s ostensible ally, Pakistan, is in charge of organizing covert aid and weapons delivery to Afghan chiefs fighting the Russians.  On hand is his British counterpart, Simon Craig, less idealistic about aiding freedom fighters, and more realistic about power politics.  Both of them are suffering strained relationships with their wives that come with being intelligence officers in distant and dangerous posts on long assignments, as is the guy on the “other side,” the Russian intelligence officer, Dmitri Gromov.

Although “allies” in the 1980’s, the U.S. and Pakistan are in fundamental conflict over control of Afghanistan.  The U.S. aims to fill the anticipated power void that would be left with the Afghan defeat of the Russians while Pakistan is determined itself to take full control over -- essentially annex -- their neighboring country.  Thus the essential question in the play: which Afghan factions will get the weapons the U.S. is providing to Afghanistan, moderates or extremists?  Will this conflict come down on the U.S. side, in the person of Warnock’s Afghan “asset”, Abdullah Khan, a strong, canny (and as played by Bernard White immensely likable) nationalist and religious moderate?  Or will it be cultural and religious extremist Afghan leaders favorable to Pakistan.  Colonel Afridi, head of Pakistani intelligence, ruthlessly undercuts the American and British relations with Khan in favor of more extreme Afghan elements.

Much of this story of power politics is told through words rather than dramatic action: it's a talky play, though interesting and sometimes exciting to follow.

The personal lives of Warnock, Craig, and Gromov weave through the story of their intelligence goals and hazardous posts.  Back home, children are born, lost, or go astray.  Wives become impatient.  While he’s a cold war enemy of Warnock and Craig, Gromov faces the same challenges of alienation from his far-off family as the American and the Englishman, a demonstration of their common humanity that includes a grudging understanding of one another -- a counterpoint to the large scale issues of power and control.  This was a good direction but it doesn’t quite work: the domestic problems of the intelligence officers are thinly presented and seem obviously inserted to maintain the “human element.”  Craig, charmingly played by Jefferson Mays, and Gromov, in a vivid performance, as well as Khan -- whose personal story also plays a roll -- are well characterized but the personal dimension is somewhat damped by Warnock, the main character, acted routinely by Jeremy Davidson, a cliché of an American can-do idealist who ultimately can’t do.

Blood and Gifts  tells a very important story and is well worth seeing for the history, though dramatically it’s a little flat.  Never mind -- because otherwise you’re not likely to be clued in on American foreign policy and actions with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980’ and early ‘90’s which cast great light on current, and very pressing events.  Ah, now I understand something of key importance that was never clear to me -- that's an excellent reason for seeing this play.

Blood and Guts plays at the Mitzi Newhouse theater in NYC's Lincoln Center.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Please scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Emails are private;  emails never appear with comments.

Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain, suggested by “The Question of God” by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., directed by Tyler Marchant, starring Mark H. Dold as C. S. Lewis and Martin Rayner as Sigmund Freud

... science vs. religion ...

In an imagined encounter between Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis, two intelligent men discuss significant human issues.  No sex, no violence.  What a relief.

It’s September 3, 1939, Freud, 83 years old, in London having fled the Nazis in Vienna, is suffering dreadfully from the oral cancer which has dogged him since 1922, and has invited the young Lewis, a recent convert to Christian belief, to his book-lined study, not, as Lewis first assumes, to lambaste him for satirizing Freud in a recent book, but for a more touching reason.  The aged psychoanalyst, in his profound devotion to science, and near death, is still seeking knowledge:  specifically, he wants to understand how an intelligent man can be a Christian believer.  Thus the debate between science and religion takes hold between these two, smart men.

They're well matched in flexible and inventive language, quick repartee, amusing wit and in dug-in commitment to their opposite world views (though Freud gets more good jokes).  Surprisingly, the play doesn't rest on the strength of their opposing arguments -- they voice "the usuals" about science and religion and acknowledge their brief encounter isn’t going to settle these essential queries.  That, a weakness in the play, is compensated for by the careful charting of the emotional closeness they develop in their short time together, all the while remaining -- start to finish -- intellectually apart.  They become, for the time, like father and son:  Lewis, on the spot, helps the ailing Freud in an extremely intimate way that previously only Freud's daughter, Anna, had been allowed to do.  They're ready to save each other's life, though their views of life totally differ.  That's powerful.     

As a counterpoint to the discussion of two brainy men in the library setting, there's a momentous, frightening background:  September 3, 1939 is the day Prime Minister Chamberlain announced that Hitler had refused to withdraw his troops from Poland, forcing England to declare war on Germany.  In the course of the play, Freud periodically dials on the 1930’s style radio, turning it off in the musical interludes, so as not to miss Chamberlain’s anticipated announcement, which we hear, too.  We also hear the first words of King George VI's inspiring speech to the nation which was the thrilling climax of the film, The King’s Speech. 

A sudden air raid alarm scares them both -- Lewis with his life ahead of him and Freud who, while craving death as release from the torturous pain in his mouth, doesn't want to die.  Lewis makes no more of that than is warranted, to the credit of the playwright.  In fact, to escape his unbearable pain, Freud committed suicide with morphine later that September.

Freud avoids music, as on the radio, because -- evidence-seeking scientist that he is -- if he can't understand how something gives pleasure, he doesn't enjoy it.  Lewis sees in music's capacity to affect us without our understanding how as metaphor of religious faith.  Freud will have none of it, but after Lewis leaves and Freud's again alone in his study, he turns on the radio and allows himself to listen to the music, appearing to find comfort.  This death-bed conversion doesn't ring true.  Having kept the weights even, the  playwright tips the scales  at the end but the play has been fun to watch so one almost forgives this intellectual slippage.

No sex, no violence ... well not exactly.  Through the play, Freud’s prioritization of the sexual drive is a theme and source of humor, and a butal war has begun -- that's nice irony.  But, in Freud's book lined and art filled study, it's still possible to talk about essential human issues.  No wonder this is the longest running play off-Broadway in NYC.  It has lots to say. 

Yvonne Korshak

Freud's Last Session  plays at New World Stages on Manhattan's west side.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.  

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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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ODYSSEY - The Epic Musical, Matt Britten Director, book and lyrics; Dimitri Landrain Composer, vocal arrangements; Daniel Sefik Music Diretor, additional lyrics; Marianne Ward Set Designer, scenic paint charge; The Araca Project

... a big musical on its way ...

ODYSSEY calls itself an epic musical and it is.  It has the look of a musical headed to Broadway and -- with some strengthening -- it will get there. Meanwhile, it’s tremendous fun! 

First of all, the set is gorgeous.  The show is playing in a fairly small theater but the stage is vast and the set uses all of it in a seemingly serendipitous, free flowing way to suggest the sea, the islands in it, the voyages across it, and the high realm of the gods and the earthy realm of humans.  It's a set that conveys the complexity and exhilaration of existence – it’s wonderful, and keeps you on the journey even when occasionally the play gets a little waterlogged.  Nets, sails and figureheads -- it has lots of blue and turquoise and one wants to be there.  (You can even get the flavor in the design of their web page.)

The show begins with a little boy reading the first lines of The Oydyssey where Homer invokes the Muse to sing to him Odysseus’ tale:  “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course … " and the singing begins.  It’s very moving … and it ends with the boy and the book, too.  A beautiful frame.

The story takes Odysseus from the time he is a boy, and then a king of Ithaca, married to Penelope, through to the war at Troy, and like the Odyssey, the weight of the story is on Odysseus’ long voyage home, when he’s “driven time and again off course” into a serious of famous and wonderfully inventive adventures.  We visit the Cyclops' cave, resist the Sirens (though the rest of Odysseus’ crew meets its end there), visit Circe’s magical island, and sojourn with the seductive nymph Calypso. 

We also voyage with Odysseus through some adventures not part of Odysseus’ story, in particular a lengthy episode in which, because Athena has fallen in love with Odysseus, Zeus and the other gods offer him the gift of eternal life in a kind of rapturous Age of Aquarius scene. 

The music is generic musical comedy, not very original, the only exception I noticed being the appropriately beautiful music of “Siren Song,” but the lyrics are often witty, intriguing and hilarious.  The musical number “Nobody,” a riff from Homer’s joke about how Odysseus tricked the Cyclops, is a show stopper [Odysseus told the Cyclops his name was “Nobody” so after Odysseus had stuck a poker in the monster’s one eye, the Cyclops cried out in useless vengeance “Nobody injured me!”]

For a stronger musical ODYSSEY, the character of Odysseus and the narrative as a whole need to be more consistent, and the hero less dithering.  Uncertainty may be a strength, but Odysseus looks inept rather than heroic in scenes such as that where his Ithacans look to him as their King to ease their current miseries, and the “clever Odysseus” has no resources to help them and not a clue what to do.  One senses in this instance the reason for including a crisis that isn’t in the Odyssey was to justify a very good song with a contemporary ring to it, “Everything to Fear.”  Even within this show’s narrative, it’s inconsistent because we see that Odysseus was in fact very rich – it takes decades for Penelope’s free loading suitors to make a dent in his grand estate, and still there's plenty left.  This inconsistency among others weakens the believability and impact.

Other narrative decisions, such as the interloping “real life is better for mortals than eternal life” episode and related themes that run through the show seem governed by the desire to put across a world view.  The philosophy is trendy-murky and doesn't derive from the characters.

There’s no reason why a creative team in 2011 working with the story of Odysseus that goes back to many centuries BC, have to include the most famous incidents in the Odyssey (although those who chose to come might be disappointed not to see what they expected -- OK, fact is, I missed his sojourn with Nausicaa a lot!) 

And I suppose (though, look, Homer did create a really great fundamental story, mess with it at your peril) that they're free to include incidents that the Muse never got around to telling the Bard.  But such interpolations, like everything else in the story, need to flow within a consistent world view led by a consistently and plausibly developed character. 

The plot of the musical hinges on Athena's crush on Odysseus, but perhaps we could be given a little more clue as to why she is the goddess of wisdom. 

It's a big cast -- 28 performers and several have multiple roles, and they're very professional and charismatic.  Josh A. Davis as Odysseus leads the way through with strong acting and singing and goes a long way toward creating the sense of the whole.  Emma Zaks is a vigorous, adorable Athena.  Janine Divita brings a strong dramatic voice to Penelope.  Eddie Korbich is so funny as Poseidon you want to hug him!

Why mike these and other good singers, especially in a small theater?  They'd sound better without the electronic barrier. 

Odyssey the Musical has begun its voyage: avoiding the self-indulgent seductions of the Sirens, chances look good for its making it to Broadway but as it launches from its off-off Broadway port, it’s already great fun.  It's a short run -- this time -- but try to see it!!  

ODYSSEY plays at American Theater of Actors on West 54th Street in Manhattan through October 30.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.   Also there's up-to-the moment information on their Facebook page.

Yvonne Korshak

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King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by James Macdonald, The Public Theater

... not in our stars ...

The cast is so star studded* that it’s surprising that this production comes out no more than a serviceable Lear.   But that's still alot:  since it’s such a great play, and all the words (except for the Fool) come across with full clarity it’s a rewarding evening.  You understand all the actions, motivations, and entanglements of the plot and come out feeling you have an enhanced understanding of the play.  That’s worthwhile.  The language seems immediate, not distant.  Good.  But the poetic power is damped, and the production seems disjointed. 

I went to see this Lear because I have been fascinated by Sam Waterston's brilliance as an actor on Law and Order and so wanted to see him on stage.  It turns out that as Lear, he’s best in the quieter scenes, the ones that lend themselves to just the sorts of tv close-ups we’re used to seeing him in.  We watch his face registering evolving situations with great subtlety, calculating, negotiating, gauging his own responses -- you see his mind at work.  But in the passionately emotional scenes, such as Lear on the heath, or the death of Cordelia, he strains.  Not that he holds back -- he reaches courageously for big, but it eludes his grasp.  Darn it.  He looks silly -- not tragic or even pitiful -- shuffling around in his longjohns with one shoe on and one shoe off.  A lot of poor decisions were made in the staging of this play.

The most compelling performance -- by one of the greatest actors in the world today -- is John Douglas Thompson as Lear’s loyal follower, the Earl of Kent.  Thompson’s Kent is vigorous, wily, and self-sacrificing, ready for any task, physical or mental, to protect the King and the Kingship.  Thompson brings his rare physical power and athleticism to the role:  to convey an urgent  moment, he takes the breadth of the stage in three strides.  He’s miscast though, as Kent who, at times, verges on the obsequious, not Thompson's natural mode by a long shot.  I would like to see him as Lear. 

Bill Irwin, a great clown, is miscast here as the Fool.  A Fool isn't a clown -- different meanings, different purposes -- but Irwin plays the role as a clown, including clown face make-up (white face, short red vertical lines above the eyes), baggy costume and oversize, floppy shoes.  I sure missed the motley!  Most important, the odd, fascinating closeness between Lear and his Fool is lost.  These two hardly seem to know one another.  Also Irwin is the only member of the cast who can't always be understood.

The other roles are generally well played by experienced and well known actors  who speak Shakespeare’s language with clear naturalism.  Still, the characters often seem emotionally separate, their words and actions foregone conclusions governed by the lines of the play rather than by their responses to one another, as if they'd rehearsed their parts too much by themselves, and not enough together.

The straightforward content, if not the full emotional and dimensions and poetry, comes across.  Seeing this play is a reasonable way to get to know better Shakespeare's masterful Lear.   One would expect more, though, with all that star power. 

King Lear plays at the Public Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village through November 20th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

*The cast icludes (alphabetically) CHE AYENDE, CRAIG BOCKHORN, KRISTEN CONNOLLY, MICHAEL CRANE, HERB FOSTER, SETH GILLIAM, ENID GRAHAM, BILL IRWIN, MICHAEL IZQUIERDO, MICHAEL MCKEAN, ARIAN MOAYED, KELLI O'HARA,  JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON, RICHARD TOPOL, SAM WATERSTON, FRANK WOOD

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Raft of the Medusa by Joe Pintauro, Premier of Revised Edition, directed by Francisco Solorzano, Barefoot Theatre Company at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre

... cut adrift ...

Raft of the Medusa is powerful, intensely human, and totally real -- you are there.

Like Gericault’s epic shipwreck painting, The Raft of the Medusa of 1819 (see it below left), this play is based on a dire situation with many deaths and few survivors -- only instead of shipwreck victims, these are victims of a mortal disease, brought together in 1988 not on a survival raft but -- same thing -- in a group therapy session for those infected with the AIDS virus.  Seeing the play you know this is what it was like:  beyond belief grim, and yet -- in the way its draws out the best in people, there’s a gleam of light, a breath of hope, as in the painting.   It’s a rich, brilliant and beautifully written play, acted to perfection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Group therapy:  (right) Gil Ron as Dr. Jerry Rizzo (Center) and cast members of Raft of the Medusa, Barefoot Theatre Company at Cherry Lane Theatre. Photo:  Michael Mallard

Adrift at sea: (below) Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, oil on canvas, Paris: Louvre Museum, H. 4.91 m., W. 7.16 m

 

At the start of the play, the youthful Donald dies agonizingly in the arms of his lover, Michael, in a stunning, male pieta (compare the old man and young boy in the left foreground of the painting).  The scene moves to a realistic group therapy session -- sparse office, metal chairs -- with its big city racial and ethnic admixture, from affluent and successful to homeless and out-of-work, drawn together by a common denominator, AIDS. 

A beautiful White gay model, Tommy, can’t get a job since he’s gotten so thin.  There’s Alan, an enraged Hispanic with Karposi’s Sarcoma dotting his face like marks of Cain.  Men and women, young and old, they got it all the ways you can.  Doug, a Black drug dealer who seems straight, got it shooting up in jail.  Some of them tell their stories -- prompted or not by the psychiatrist, Jerry.  Cora, a slick looking professional woman, distances herself from the gay men but eventually blurts it all out.  Donald who has died his painful death mysteriously moves in and out -- a Christ figure, which is why the point that he is Jewish is emphasized (he wanted to be a Rabbi, a teacher):  he hovers, in every way a Holy Ghost.

The group session lurches through quieter periods of “sharing” through to volatile bursts, fueled by the unbearable tension of near and certain death.       

The action is heightened by the arrival of newcomers, a high school girl who got it from her boyfriend (his family has moved to California to avoid her suing them) and a well known tv and movie actor.  Their arrivals clarify underlying situations and catalyze the revelation of explosive truths about themselves and others.  In the original event that the painting describes, there was cannibalism among those set adrift on the raft with almost no food and water -- and, we discover, there's cannibalistic exploitation in the group therapy room. 

The group dynamics are absolutely on target.  This is an author who understands human beings on the deepest level:  what a pleasure to be in his company.  The acting is uniformly excellent.  John Gazzale plays Donald’s death with no-holds barred passion.  Samantha Fontana shows sustained power as the smart, bitter Cora.  Andrew MacLarty, with an alluring blend of innocence and seductiveness, makes you love Tommy.  In an unforgettable performance, Gillian Rougier fairly dances through her role as Nairobi, a hearing and mentally impaired Black woman who has lost just about all and will now lose the rest.

There’s a lot of blame thrown around among these desperate human beings: Michael blames Donald for infecting him, Cora blames the guy who gave it to her.  The government comes in for blame for not doing more to find a solution to AIDS, as the government was blamed in the 19^th Century for gross safety lapses at the time of the shipwreck of the Medusa.  The psychiatrist blames himself for encouraging sexual liberation, “freedom”, in the ‘70’s before implications were known; that’s why he’s a weak figure, asking, uncertainly, after a pause, helplessly when he hears a tale of desperation, “how does that make you feel?”  (Hey, man, how do you think that makes me feel!) 

With all that blame, is there forgiveness?  That’s a biting question in this play, and to the credit of its great realism and tough mindedness, never answered.   But there is love, because what else is there?

Pintauro's Raft of the Medusa is an outstanding theater experience.

Raft of the Medusa plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre in NYC's Greenwich Village through October 22.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

*For an account of the history behind the painting, click on links in the 2nd and 6th paragraphs.

Yvonne Korshak

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Felix & The Diligence by Colby Day, story by Colby Day and Daniel Johnsen, directed by Daniel Johnsen, the Pipeline Theatre Company

               ... it beats me ... ?

I really don't know why anybody thought this play was worth producing.  It's a shipboard farce, a sendup of ship narrative cliches presented with something like frolicksome good humor in a way intended to bring out the ridiculous.    

Felix, wearing a dark shirt and khakis, looking for adventure, pushes himself on board as a member of the crew of a cod fishing  boat, The Diligence, where he does things wrong and annoys the captain and everybody else.  Then somebody else named Felix, wearing the same outfit, joins up, as does another Felix who turns out to be Felicia, i.e., a girl, but not until there’s been time for mistaken identities about boys and girls and which Felix did what, etc.

The motley crew sets off.  The first Felix, the main character and very well performed by Menj Mirman, is a comic type of gung ho optimist who misses the point a lot and is given to moments of hyper-imagination.  He meets up with some sea creatures who swim along the boat including a mermaid (play on actor's name?) with whom he instantly falls in love, and these are not of his imagination though he has a hard time persuading others about them.  Everyone on board is an exaggeration of some type or other, including the martinet Captain who gives a Scottish tar 20 lashes for some peccadillo. 

Benj Mirman as Felix and Allison Smith as the mermaid.  Photo:  Ahron R. Foster

As a Master of Ceremonies, a blind old fisherman is played by a very heavy set, sighted young woman with a very loud, grating voice and who, clown-like, makes her own body a source of laughter, an offensive tack.  Long ago the Captain, a research chemist at the time, loved Amelia Earhart, as it turns out when she turns up in tattered 1930's air woman's attire, jodphurs and boots, etc. (the ship veers near a desert isle).  The action reaches its crescendo when a Nazi ship approaches, the play being set during World War II, and two of The Diligence crew turn out to be Nazis: the mishap-ridden Felix fences with the one named Fritz, well played by Willy Appelman, and in spite of Fritz' rapier, Felix vanquishes him with a broomstick.

The set by Andy Yanni, with the wood prow of the ship jutting into the audience's space, is appealing.

Does this play have a purpose?  I tried but couldn't figure any out.   

The Pipeline Theatre produced one of the best off- and off-off Broadway productions of last season, Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, reviewed here, which led me to search hard to understand something worthwhile in this production.  Was I missing something? I asked myself.  The ridiculous can have great value, as in Dada performances, but there’s no hint of the ethical and political intensity which illumines Dada.  Maybe this is some sort of brilliant deconstruction.  Well, why on earth do ship narratives need deconstruction?  Perhaps it’s a critique of  Gilbert and Sullivan?  They really need one in 2011.  Even to call Felix &The Diligence “absurd” gives the play too much philosophical weight.  So I’m left to think that Felix and the Diligence is a performance that, like a school skit, is more fun for those in on its making than those watching it.

If I’ve missed a point, I hope someone will write in and let me know.  Meanwhile, I’ll be waiting for Pipeline Theatre to return to the excellence it displayed in its last major production.  

Felix & The Diligence plays at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan's East Village through October 8.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                          Yvonne Korshak 

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Benito Cereno by Robert Lowell, based on Herman Melville’s novella, directed by Woodie King Jr., Horizon Theatre Rep at the Flea Theatre

... don't miss this play ...

Benita Cereno is electric -- a powerful, hard hitting play, historically and philosophically resonant.  Set around 1800, and based on an actual incident, modified by Melville, and again by Lowell, it tells the story of a slave rebellion on a Spanish merchant ship in which all the Spanish officers have been killed except for the Captain, Benito Cereno.  Anchored off the coast of Trinidad, Amasa Delano, Captain of an American ship, notices through his spy glass that the Spanish ship seems to be in trouble, and out of the compassionate rules of the sea and his own generous nature, approaches and boards, accompanied by his Bosun, Perkins.  Everything is indeed unexpected, out of order, and deteriorated aboard the Spanish ship.  But why?

Hunger and thirst are everywhere and the Black slaves, sharpening knives, unknotting ropes, seem to have the run of the place, while Captain Cereno, though attentively cared for by his Black servant, Babu, is clearly ill, uncommunicative and -- most irksome to Delano -- unappreciative of the sustenance he provides.  This doesn’t stop Delano, though.  His optimistic personality and positive view of life lead him to find a positive rationalization to explain everything he sees that’s amiss.

Who's in charge here?  L-R Raphael De Mussa as Spanish Captain Benito Cereno and James Jorsling as Babu.  Photo: Stephanie Berge

Since he takes at face value Babu’s loyalty and hovering concern for the ailing Cereno, as the signs grow darker, Delano even entertains the thought that Cereno may be planning to murder him, but again his tendency to think the best of everyone leads him to dismiss that idea -- partially.   In fact, everything is opposite from what it seems to him.  There’s been a slave mutiny, the Spanish officers have been killed, and Cereno is under the knife -- and in a chilling scene the razor -- of Babu who has complete control.  Death lurks in every step.

We in the audience catch on right away, Perkins almost as fast, and so we watch Delano cheerfully explaining away his growing unease, and persisting in his plans to improve things on board and repair the ship.  It’s a scary dramatic tension worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, Melville's contemporary.  And it’s fulfilled in an equally brilliant dramatic explosion.

Melville’s great descriptive language is used, rearranged, and augmented by the poet Lowell.  Every line resonates, the density of meanings a feast for the mind as the dramatic excitement is a feast for the spirit.

The characters are fully drawn, and at the same time represent ideas larger than themselves.  Delano (though he at one point brushes off the idea) comes to represent the American Republic.  His optimism seems that of the new nation and its belief in itself.  He’s compassionate, but loaded with firepower.  The complexity of his attitudes toward the “Negro” is a study of equivocation: the Negroes are human beings, he declares, pleased in his own broad minded views, while celebrating their natural abilities as servants.  His denigration of women is only offset by the John Adams-like appreciation Perkins has for his own wife. 

Cereno is an elegant representative of the ancien regime with small pale hands, unused to work.  Babu is the clever Black whose Uncle Tom masquerade covers up his plot to take over the future.   Each of these men engages in one-on-one, significant conflicts with the others, representing historical and philosophical themes:  Old World versus New World, Africa versus Europe and America, Blacks versus Whites, Pagan versus Christian, monarchy versus democracy, freedom versus slavery, servant versus master, New England versus the Southern states, James Madison versus Thomas Jefferson. 

In this shower of dualities, technology is a bottom line:  knives versus guns.  I’d like to say more about this but don’t want to reveal the end of the play, which is stunning. 

But given the importance of knives versus guns, there's a small cavil:  why, in the play, aren’t there any guns on the Spanish ship?  The American merchant vessel, after all, is well armed.  This is a bothersome question.  Was there an answer in the novella?  I had to know so I read it and was happy to find that, yes, Melville describes the Spanish guns and quite specifically how they were disarmed.  The Spanish ship would have carried guns and Lowell shouldn't have left them out, even if his dramatic purpose was the heighten  the theme of guns versus knives:  it's implausible and manipulative, dissipating the sense of tragic inevitability.  The play brings to mind O’Neil’s The Emperor Jones  but, partly for this, doesn’t quite reach that iconic level.   As said, this is a small cavil -- don’t miss this thrilling play.

The actors -- and dancers and music makers since this play verges on the operatic in its variety of expressions -- are very strong.   As Babu, James Jorsling’s movements, intonations, timing, intensity, and his shifts from loyal servant to canny master are beyond fascinating:  you don’t watch how good he is, you see the very character he creates.  One of the great strengths of this play, and a source of its rich ironies, is the portrait of a man of many contradictions who’s aware of none: Captain Delano.  Arthur Bartow conveys Delano’s complexities  while maintaining his naval captain’s centered sureness and unity of personality, a mainstay of the play.  While tragic, there’s a good deal of humor in Benito Cereno, particularly in the self-satisfied certainty with which Bartow expresses Delano’s obtuse prejudices and misapprehensions. 

Benito Cereno was first produced in NYC in 1965, when it won an Obie as part of Robert Lowell's trilogy "The Old Glory," and Roscoe Lee Browne, Frank Langella and others won Obie awards for their work in it.  It was last seen in NYC in 1976.  Thanks to Horizon Theatre Rep for this rare opportunity to see a beautifully written, exciting, and never-to-be forgotten play about themes that are both timely and universal.    

Benito Cereno plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan's Tribeca through October 16.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title.

                                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

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Crane Story by Jen Silverman, directed by Katherine Kovner, The Playwright’s Realm at The Cherry Lane Theatre

… liminality …

Crane Story takes up an interesting topic: mixed states of being.  Characters are Japanese and American, can seem both male and female, and move between the world of the living and the dead.  As Theo, the American guitarist exasperatedly exclaims to his beloved, I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, or a man or a woman.

To explore the world of liminality, Crane Story uses two separate ghost stories.  In the first, invented by the author and told with some characteristics of western realism, a young woman, Cassis, born in Japan and brought up in the U.S., returns to Japan to search out the ghost of her also Japanese-American brother, Junpei, who committed suicide at 17 years.  She engages his friend, Ishida, in her quest which takes her to the land of the dead where a huge bureaucrat -- a character with a large face mask and played by varying numbers of actors hidden under voluminous white cloaking fabric construction -- oversees the rules and record-keeping.  Cassis is enabled to bring Jonathan back to our world, though he remains dead, as a 13 year old and then as the 17 year old who, on a trip to Tokyo, engages in a love relationship with an American acoustic guitarist and singer, Theo although eventually he returns to the land of the dead (I think).

In the other story, based on a Japanese folkloric myth of the Crane Wife and presented with something approaching Japanese stylization, a poor man takes in a wounded crane, nurses her back to health and releases her.  She returns in the guise of a woman, they fall in love and are married but she makes him promise never to look at her while she weaves a beautiful cloth that they can sell but, eventually, the man takes a peek -- shades of Orpheus -- and she flies away forever.  In this play, though not in the myth, we see the Crane Wife having returned to search for her husband -- played by a gaunt, bluish puppet manipulated by visible puppeteers in the Bunraku Japanese puppet tradition -- who drowned himself. 

In addition to "Orpheus," there are resonances of the theme of someone alive substituting in the underworld for one who by rights should be dead as in Euripides' Alcestis and, seen just last year, the compelling Nightsong for the Boatman by Jovanka Bach.

What is impressive about this production is the extraordinary visual theatricality, with set design by Michael Locher and lighting by Ji-Youn Chang, and evocative and just plain beautiful sound design and music by Nathan A. Roberts, melded into an effective and well-paced unit by director Katherine Kovner. 

As an example of the visual satisfactions this production offers, the subtle, delicious back lighting of the shelves holding the warehoused scrolls throws them into silhouette so they seem to be leaning against one another, animating them so that the casual array seems like the very souls of the dead.

Some scenes, particularly the one in which Theo realizes his lover appears to be a boy instead of a girl, have emotional intensity.  Barret O’Brien, who plays Theo, is not only a touching actor who builds a real character but a singer it feels good to hear and his rendering of "The Saddest Song” is a high point of the play.  Kale Manabat as Junpei shows a range of age as well as feelings.  Angela Lin expresses through body language as well as verbal ways Cassis' mixed identity.  Louis Ozawa Changchien gives us a glimpse of Ishida's unfolding emotions.  But ultimately the unclear motivations of the characters make one not care a lot what happens to them, and the two ghost stories run parallel without strengthening one another so that at any point one or the other seems irrelevant.  Still, Crane Story is often a feast for the eye and ear and the marvelous production values make it fun to watch.

Crane Story  plays at The Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan's West Village through October 1.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Yvonne Korshak  

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The Select (The Sun Also Rises), based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, directed by John Collins, created by Elevator Repair Service, at New York Theatre Workshop

… so what’ll we do now? …

With The Select, The Elevator Repair Service, an outstanding experimental theater company, has for some reason, created a complete misfire.  The adaptation, the acting, the direction, the set -- it misses in just about every way possible.  How could this have happened given their recent illuminating adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which did everything right?

I didn’t see their Gatz, based on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby but by most accounts that, too, was highly effective.

The Select is about American and British expatriates living in post World War I Paris, a group of sophisticated, feckless bar hoppers (The Select is the bar and these are somehow select people), most of whom manage to get by without having to work -- what Gertrude Stein dubbed “the lost generation.”  A central tension is the love between the American Jake Barnes, whose war injury makes sexual fulfillment impossible, and the British Brett Ashley – a smart talking “modern woman” who makes love readily with just about every man in sight maybe because she can’t have the one man she wants: Jake.  Because or not because? that is the question.  Jake works as a journalist, but when ennui threatens to overcome the small group that keep running into one another in Paris, he’s as free as everyone else to go off to Pamplona, Spain to take in the running of the bulls for some excitement. 

On the way to the Pamplona fiesta, Brett detours for a brief affair with Robert Cohn (for Hemingway and the "select" crowd he created, her willingness to sleep with a Jew appears to be a gauge of her decadence).  Jake and a buddy detour for some Hemingway-masculine-bonding and fishing in the mountains.  Eventually the whole tense and bored crew makes it to Pamplona where there continues to be much drinking and Brett enters into an affair with Pedro Romero, the current star matador -- she even gets an ear out of it.  That affair won’t last but then nothing does -- except the earth which abideth forever, as evidently some still thought back in the 1920's.

The actors, many of whom were so effective in The Sound and the Fury, are miscast here.  Jake, the central character upon whom much depends, lacks the defining charisma of a hard boiled, thoughtful newsman.  Brett lacks fascinating magnetism that would draw all these men to her.  Toward the end, it’s kind of interesting to see a petite actress with a tight pony tail as Matador Romero, dressed as a torero and slashing her red cape at the upended table moved around by another actor, a scene that's to give us the idea of what a bull fight’s like:  but it’s not possible to believe her masculinity would overwhelm Brett.  It seems these actors were just more suited for Faulkner than for Hemingway.

The unchanging set is wrong from the start, when it’s supposed to represent a Paris bar/nightclub, in that instead of individual, likely marble, tables it’s is fitted out with long commercial tables with metal legs that would furnish a seminar room in a modest college.  The designers may have found it convenient have these inauthentic but multi-purpose tables on hand for non-bar contexts, but when a character supposedly goes to his room to stretch out, he looks like he’s lying down on a very uncomfortable table, and when one of these long tables is upended to represent a fighting bull well … let’s just say it doesn’t convey “bull.” 

The play as a whole lacks drive; it’s one thing to represent bored characters, another to bore the audience and, judging by those who did not return after the intermission, I was not alone in checking my watch. 

Evidently for The Elevator Repair Company this turned out to be a detour, and I’ll look forward to their getting back on track for their next production, and to their real fiesta. 

The Select (The Sun Also Rises) plays through October 23rd at New York Theatre Workshop on 4th Street in NYC's East Village.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Completeness by Itamar Moses, directed by Pam MacKinnon, at Playwrights Horizons

Itamar Moses catches today’s lingo like butterflies.  Completeness is about young people, in the Computer Science and Biology Departments of a university, talking about love, molecular biology and computer science, while going through a variety of partners.  It's good to have a play about people who are intelligent and care about their work. 

Elliot is a Computer Science Assistant Professor (or thereabouts) who -- beyond his sleepy-eyed cool -- is dedicated to solving THE problem in Computer Science, “The Salesman’s Problem” -- and if you see the play, he will tell you all about its complexities.  He’s so articulate you feel he knows everything, except how to resolve the conflict between his anxiety about commitment (described in a hilariously hyperbolic monolog that’s a high point of the play) and a yearning to settle in with “the one” or “love” or whatever. 

At the start, he’s in the process of ushering Lauren out of his bedroom and, in little time, ushering Molly in:  she’s a grad student in molecular biology, and this seems promising because she’s as passionate about identifying a difficult-to-isolate protein as he is about “The Salesman’s Problem.”   She’s a bit of a clickety-clackety run-on speaker -- but that’s her enthusiasm, and anyhow he finds her adorable.  Work is one level of existence, love’s another – and they both have had an eye on each other which adds up to it doesn’t take long to get naked and into bed.

Elliot sets about developing an algorithm to aid Molly’s scientific project.  I found that really great:  not only are they each intellectually engaged with their own work, they can work together!  The playwright tries taking it to a more generalized level:  that since he’s a Computer Scientist and she’s a Molecular Biologist, they complement each other not only as individuals but also in some broad sense of a union of life and mathematical abstraction. But that last comes across more like a sound bite;  it makes the play easy to talk about, but isn’t fully realized.      

Molly ditches her older Advisor/Professor in favor of Elliot (you can be sure the professor isn’t alone for long), and then, when Elliot and Molly are driven apart by their individual commitment angst, various partnerings arise -- fast.  Inner anguish and jealousy are expressed but never trouble the play’s bright, witty, surface.  Whatever the characters are going through, we’re having a good time.

The characters themselves question why their generation is so fast about getting to sex, and so distant from commitment.  There's a resonant truth in the line about partnering, “We don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” an issue for this generation I've read about in the news.  Promiscuity in this play doesn’t seem to be making anybody happy but it makes for a lot of amusing lines and situations which keep the audience happy. 

In spite of all the lengths they go to explain themselves, though, and the fine acting, the characters seem types, though amusingly recognizable types.  Why does this pair bond or not bond?  We don't sense it deeply, it could go either way.  And it doesn't seem to matter all that much.

The successs of Completeness owes a lot to the excellent cast and brisk direction.  Karl Miller plays the oh so sharp Elliot with intelligence and perfect timing, and makes the part his own.  Whether about love or molecules, Aubrey Dollar spins Molly’s recitatives almost as fast as Figaro in the Barbara of Seville.  Meredith Forlenza shows range as three avatars of contemporary young women including Lauren, the one with residual romantic expectations.  Brian Avers plays with great appeal both the older professor who’s stuck on bench science and resists computer modeling, and the graduate student who sees through him.  They are all fun to watch.

Completeness is comic fluff – not a “must” but it’s enjoyable. 

Completeness plays at Playwrights Horizons on Wests 42nd Street in Manhattan through September 25th.  For information and tickets, click on live link of the title.

Yvonne Korshak

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Fringe Festival NYC 2011 -- Overall Excellence Awards -- Here Are the Winners!

FringeNYC 2011 Overall Excellence Award Winners


Overall Production/Play:
PigPen Presents The Mountain Song
The More Loving One

Overall Production/Musical:
Yeast Nation
Pearl's Gone Blue
 
Performance:
Jennifer Barnhart (The Legend of Julie Taymor,or The Musical That Killed Everybody!)

Ryan Barry (In the Summer Pavilion)

Miles Cooper (Elysian Fields)

Patrick Byas (Sammy Gets Mugged)
Casey McClellan (My Name Is Billy)

Brian Charles Rooney (Winner Takes All)
Lauren Hennessy (Ampersand: A R&J Love Story)
 
Playwriting:
Nicholas Billon (Greenland)
A.D. Penedo  (The Three Times She Knocked)
Bella and the Pool Boy (Dennis Flanagan)

Music Composition:
Chris Rael (Araby)
Dusty Brown (The Ballad of  Rusty and Roy)
 
Ensemble:
Jersey Shoresical

The Bardy Bunch: The War of the Families Partridge and Brady
Stimulated!
Crawling with Monsters


Costume Design:

Stephanie Alexander (Le Gourmand, or Gluttony!)
Mark Richard Caswell (Parker and Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End of the Rainbow)

Tara DeVincenzo (Technodulia Dot Com)

Directing:

Greg Foro (Hamlet)

Joshua Kahan Brody (Fourteen Flights)

Alaska Reece Vance (The Disorientation of Butterflies)


Solo Performance:
Donna/Madonna

The Day the Sky Turned Black

Be Careful! The Sharks Will Eat You!

Paper Cut
Heroes and Other Strangers

Dance:
Wallstories
When the Sky Breaks 3D


Video Design:
Cinty Ionescu (Nils' Fucked Up Day)

TheaterMania Audience Favorite Award:
COBU - Dance like Drumming, Drum like Dancing.


Applications for the 2012 festival will be available online in November 2011 and completed applications will be due February 14, 2012. For more information, www.FringeNYC.org

In 1997, New York City became the seventh US city to host a fringe festival, joining Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston, Orlando and San Francisco.  In its first 15 years FringeNYC has presented over 2500 performing groups from the U.K., Canada, Poland, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Germany, the Czech Republic and across the U.S., prompting Switzerland’s national daily, The New Zurich Zeitung, to declare, “FringeNYC has become the premiere meeting ground for alternative artists.” The festival has also been the launching pad for numerous Off-Broadway and Broadway transfers, long-running downtown hits, and regional theater productions including Urinetown, Matt & Ben, Never Swim Alone, Debbie Does Dallas, Dog Sees God, 21 Dog Years, Krapp 39, Dixie’s Tupperware Party, Silence! The Musical,  The Irish Curse, 666, Tales from the Tunnel and Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party and as well as movies (WTC View) and even a TV show (‘da Kink in My Hair). FringeNYC is a production of The Present Company, under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

Press Contact: Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 x. 11, ron@spincyclenyc.com

OFF-BROADWAY IN EDINBURGH -- My Picks of the Edinburgh Fringe: Request Programme by Franz Xaver Kroetz, directed by Hedvig Claesson, SIRIS Original Theatre, and Kafka And Son, directed by Mark Cassidy, Richard Jordan Productions Ltd/Threshold/Assembly

 Guest review by Mark Haggard, Cambridge, UK

Viewing the Edinburgh Fringe --

Two vignette reviews cannot do justice to the productive maelstrom that is Edinburgh Fringe Festival, run every August in parallel with the other Edinburgh Festivals (International, Book etc).  Of the 2,500 productions, most will make a considerable financial loss as in the past; nowadays, ribald so-called comedy has so outgrown experimental theatre that this is the association that many people now have for the Fringe.  It was always possible to go as couple and as an audience be outnumbered by the cast, and there is still much amateur acting, but also a very large number of good productions for which the audience and reviewers are not numerous enough.  Darwinian profusion and competition: much good writing and acting talent is first seen at this important showcase.  Aided by track record of author and company, and nowadays by internet-accessible reviews of the production before it came to Edinburgh (from almost any quarter of the globe), it is possible at relatively affordable prices to feast breakfast-to-suppertime on shows including music, dance, cabaret and children’s fare, whilst mostly avoiding those productions you need for the occasional laughable story, but would want to tell friends to avoid.  I am thus confirming rather than showing any original insight original in awarding  *****  to the following two.

Request Progamme by Franz Xaver Kroetz …

The frightening thing about Miss Rasch, the sole character in Request Programme, is not that she is deeply abnormal, but that she is marginally normal with obsessive tendencies, and living alone, very very alone, in her mini-apartment.  The author Franz Xaver Kroetz is a much-honoured left-leaning German political playwright.  Rasch is a not uncommon name in German but it also means “quick” or “over-hasty”.  Controversial in the Germany of its birth in the 1970s, this play was staged in New York in the 1980s.  The script running to 7 pages is more like a screen-play and gives no words for the actress to speak, only broad prescriptions for her return from the office, domestic round of evening meal, cleansing of crockery and some acts of personal hygiene, and preparation for sleep. The challenge of this very free hand accorded to Swedish director Hedvig Claesson and actress Cecilia Nilsson is therefore to sustain sufficient interest in detailed observation of movements and objects through the long introduction, in which the mild obsessionality is only marginally humorous.  The excruciation is managed brilliantly by Nilsson with a facial expression blank and fixed, as is common in combined anxiety and depression. 

Just when we can take no more silence, sound arrives through the radio request programme.  This is a middle-brow medley but the musical content does not call for too subtle decipherment; it seems largely irrelevant with the exception of a piece of Tina Turner rock which briefly elicits some very human crazed gyration during the dish-drying -- the only expression of any positive emotion, which is rapidly self-censored.  Significantly, all the dedications from the requesters to the show concern dysfunctional relationships, but these amount to at most a few hundred words.  Later, on checking the lock but failing to get to sleep immediately, Fraulein Rasch proceeds in steps of only minor hesitation to commit suicide, swilling down the pills with a pre-opened (therefore undoubtedly flat) mini-bottle of champagne from the mini-fridge.

Many Edinburgh Fringe productions are staged in church halls but this was in the loft office of a language school.  The central set is ingeniously designed for theatre-in-the round with an audience space of only 20 seats.  The mini-versions of sink, fridge, table and bed-sofa with bedding compartment, underline the hemmed-in quality of a life felt by its owner to be worthless.  These and more minor properties become very important with the lack of words, and give coherent hints of the emotional poverty of the character’s life, or perhaps some lost richness. A kitsch china dog of the type whose unglazed back permits home-grown cress shoots to grow for ultra-fresh but ultra-small vegetable portions; an equally kitsch candlewick rug which the character is completing, with a design featuring a dog and a baby.   Request Programme continues almost 40 years after it was written to push the boundaries of our idea of theatre.

Kafka and Son, developed by Alon and Mark Cassidy from a letter Kafka wrote to his father ...

Franz Kafka was a tortured soul, as is evident from his writing, in which there is renewed interest because of the currently contested ownership of the archived papers.  In 1919 Franz wrote his father Hermann a long letter full of psychological insight and not too self-centred, which Hermann probably never received.  The purpose was to explain why Franz was afraid of his father and to resolve an intolerable set of problems arising from that fear.  It is from this that the script has been meticulously constructed.

The father, a successful businessman was apparently not just a bully but a systematic tyrant, sarcastically deprecating and deriding all of Franz’s activities and thoughts: childhood milestones, writing, marriage intentions, and exhaustively undermining the boy’s confidence.  Even the Judaism to which Kafka senior paid lip-service, and might have offered some solace as an alternative authority structure, was vilified with little subtlety.  The letter is fashioned somewhat as a legal case.  Hermann is given some limited right of reply, via a repudiation of the complaints in the letter; but we are set up to find this unconvincing because it is in caricature form by the mainly Franz character (it would be marginally incorrect to call this a monologue).  In effect, Franz illustrates the bullying via ripostes presumed from the father, of which the argumentative content is poor, as we would now expect.  The father’s imputed replies grant no concessions, whereas in the writing Franz articulately and dispassionately gives some concessions, seeking chiefly to clarify rather than blame, and his position is consistent.  Arbitrariness and inconsistency, the hallmarks of tyrants, pervade these replies.

Whilst this plot is readily summarised, the dialectic and its illustrations are sufficient to support an hour’s one-man show.  At the most cataclysmic moments, scene-changes are in effect created by alterations of lighting along  with mood, and by altered use of the minimalist stage properties, a mattress free wire-sprung bed and some metal animal caging.  Periodically throughout, one of these serves also as the writer’s desk, but also once as a cage of refuge, underlining the refuge in writing.  These alterations are expertly managed in a virtuoso performance by Alon Nashman, abetted by skilled direction from Mark Cassidy, in a production that has played in major Canadian cities.

The writing desk cage is covered with black feathers, which serve variously as quills and other things -- food for the gourmandising father or -- when the feathers scatter -- as general trappings of chaos.  Although Kafka wrote in German, the family name means “jackdaw” in Czech, a black bird to which European tradition ascribes kleptomania for bright objects.  There is also one large white feather.  In some contexts white feathers have been a badge of cowardice.  Indeed, fear and failure previously to confront his father are an issue that Franz himself recognised, but the symbolism imparted is more that of the escape into writing.  Does this piece of theatre render the letter more accessible and the writer and his works more explicable ?  Definitely.

Request Programme  plays at Inlingual School, 40 Shadwick PL » Pleasance, through 27 August.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Kafka and Son plays at Assembly George Square Edinburgh, through 28 August.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

Mark Haggard

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Email addresses never appear with comments. 

OFF-BROADWAY IN SAG HARBOR – Enter Laughing, The Musical, book by Joseph Stein, Music & Lyrics by Stan Daniels, Music Direction by Phil Reno, Music Arrangements & Orchestrations by Matt Castle, Direction & Musical Staging by Stuart Ross

 
Josh Grisetti and the cast of Enter Laughing, The Musical.  Photo by Jerry Lamonica

I never saw anything funnier than Enter Laughing. The situations are hilarious, the songs are witty, and the cast is out of sight perfect.  If you enjoy laughing, really, you have to see this.   It has  only one "message":  the life-affirming power of pure fun. 

Set in the 1930’s and based on Carl Reiner's semi-autobiographical novel, Enter Laughing tells the story of David Kolowitz, a boy from the Bronx who aspires to be an actor against the wishes of his over-protective parents who are plotting his career as a pharmacist, “almost a doctor”.  Kolowitz, who’s given to fantasizing success and seeing his name in lights, is played by Josh Grisetti , a major talent and -- it’s easy to see from this show -- a star in the making:  he sings, he dances, he acts, and he is so funny.  David in the play, however, not only lacks talent but generally hasn’t a clue, yet somehow bumbles through to an onstage debut, bounding from stage fright to worldly pronouncements in the voice of Ronald Coleman.

He gets to kiss the girl, too, the show-girl gorgeous Kate Schindle playing Angela Marlowe, who delivers the tongue-in-cheek torch song, “The Man I Can Love,” with the absolute seriousness of true comedy from atop a piano, her feet entangled with the keys -- one of many show stoppers. She has a liberated, to say nothing of open minded, view of the man she can love.

Richard Kind, surely one of the funniest men alive today (the others being Josh Grisetti and Geoffrey Rush) plays the theater impresario Harrison Marlowe, Angela’s father, with a combination of takes, timing, dead pan, and rational/nutty thought processes that’s delicious.  He’s fascinating -- I could watch him forever.  I’d urge you to see this show if only to hear how he answers the phone as David’s butler when Greta Garbo calls (“The Butler’s Song").

The singing and dancing of the two old guys in the play, David’s boss in the machine shop and his father, in their dual number, “Hot Cha Cha”, is  another -- touching -- show stopper.

And so it goes … hilarity after hilarity … witty song after song … and just when you’re feeling a little sorry it’s over too soon, Grisetti comes up with one more gift -- his bow -- so you can Leave Laughing.

Enter Laughing plays at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through September 4.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of title. 

 
Enter Laughing, The Musical :  Richard Kind (standing) as Harrison Marlowe;  L-R, Erick Devine as Mr. Pike, Josh Grisetti as David Kolowitz, Kate Schindle as Angela Marlowe.  Photo by Jerry Lamonica

Yvonne Korshak

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FRINGE NYC -- 15th Annual New York International Fringe Festival: August 12 - 28

PRESS RELEASE

 
Yeast Nation, photo Jay Sullivan

                           First Sold Out Performances Announced
                       NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL
                       ** 15th Annual Festival runs August 12 - 28 **

note:  to help you decide,  Ken Davenport, a producer of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, sorts out his 10 to see in in his blog, date August 11, click on live link. For the official site of FringeNY with information and tickets, click on live link.   Theatermania's outline guide is also useful, click on live link. 

The New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), the largest
multi-arts festival in North America, will present the 15th Annual Festival from August 12 - 28, 2011. This year, the festival will present programming by 192 of the world's best emerging theatre troupes and dance companies in 20 venues in Lower Manhattan. Attendance at last year’s festival topped 75,000 people, making it New York’s fifth largest cultural event (just behind New York International Auto Show, Tribeca Film Festival, New York City Marathon, and New York Comic Con). The festival presents works covering a wide range of disciplines including drama, comedy, dance, performance art, children's theater (FringeJr), outdoor theater (FringeAlFrecso), spoken word, puppetry, improv, and multimedia.

Dreamplay, photo Veseth R Sieu

Thus far, advance sales are on par with last year. “At only $15 per
ticket, FringeNYC is one of Manhattan’s few remaining bargains,” notes
festival Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

Yesterday afternoon, Yeast Nation (a new musical by the Tony Award-winning team behind the FringeNYC-to-Broadway hit Urinetown) became the first show to sell out a performance. This is the earliest  a show has sold out in the 15-year history of the festival. In 2005, Silence! The Musical (which was co-produced by much of the same team behind Yeast Nation) became the first show in FringeNYC history to sell out before the opening day of the festival.

Today, Bella and the Pool Boy sold out its opening performance and several other productions are on track to sell out individual performances including: The Legend of Julie Taymor, Facebook Me, Pearl’s Gone Blue, Smoking Section, Jersey Shoresical, and The Bardy Bunch: The War of the Families Partridge and Brady. Other top sellers thus far are: Parker & Dizzy’s Fabulous Journey to the End of the Rainbow, Whale Song, Sammy Gets Mugged, You’ve Ruined A Perfectly Good Mystery, Destinations, Pawn, and Hush The Musical.

In 1997, New York City became the seventh US city to host a fringe festival, joining Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston, Orlando and San Francisco. In its first 13 years FringeNYC has presented over 2100 performing groups from the U.K., Canada, Poland, Japan, China, Germany, the Czech Republic and across the U.S., prompting Switzerland's national daily, The New Zurich Zeitung, to declare FringeNYC as “the premiere meeting ground for alternative artists.” The festival has also been the launching pad for numerous Off-Broadway and Broadway transfers, long-running downtown hits, and regional theater productions including Urinetown, Never Swim Alone, Debbie Does Dallas, Dog Sees God, 21 Dog Years, Krapp 39, Dixie’s Tupperware Party, Silence! The Musical, Matt & Ben, The Irish Curse, 666 and the current Off-Broadway productions of Tales From The Tunnel and Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party and as well as movies (WTC View) and even a TV show (‘da Kink in My Hair). FringeNYC is a production of The Present Company, under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Elena K. Holy.

FringeNYC shows run 2pm - midnight weekdays and noon - midnight on
weekends. Tickets are: $15 in advance at www.FringeNYC.org or
866-468-7619; $18 at the door, subject to availability. Discount
passes for multiple shows ($70 for a Fiver Pass, $120 for a Flex Pass
good for 10 shows, and $500 for an all-you-can-see Lunatic Pass) are
also available. 

                                                                                Welcome Eternity, photo Dixie Sheridan

Press release contact:  Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 x. 11, ron@spincyclenyc.com

Comments very welcome ... scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.  Email addresses never appear with comments.

OFF-BROADWAY IN LONDON -- Emperor and Galilean by Henrik Ibsen in a new version by Ben Power, directed by Jonathan Kent, at the National Theatre, Olivier Theatre, London

Guest review by Mark Haggard, Cambridge, UK

The National Theatre has a great reputation for brilliant staging of old and new drama based on historical fact, to which witness the great success of The White Guard, Coram Boy, and Pitmen Painters, on the last of which I have written previously.  This reputation remains intact with the present production, despite lesser success in my own view and the average of very varied reviews received (2 to 4 out of 5 stars).

In theatre or historical fiction (and occasionally, in painting) there is an issue of how, starting from consistency with the known sources and fixed points of established history, the work of art can add to the understanding of what was probably going on.  The sublime example on ancient Rome is Margaret Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.  Is this what Ibsen (for Emperor and Galilean is indeed by him, despite being left off many lists of his works) was trying to do?  It seems only secondarily so.  Ibsen's preceding plays, Brand and Peer Gynt, have romantic and mystical elements in common, and address philosophical problems of free will and belief (Brand is a questing priest and Peer Gynt is set in a mythical fairytale past).  These now seem dated historical curiosities.

Emperor and Galilean is a theatrical curio of a different kind, first published 1873 but not produced for 23 years thereafter.  I suspect that Ibsen was so overwhelmed by his visit to Rome (1864) that he felt he had to write something of cosmic sweep for an international audience and took some years getting this idea, as well as the mid-century idealistic philosophy out of his system. This, Ibsen's third and grandest play, was gestated alongside those first two in the 1860s.  Ibsen also thought it his greatest;  however its relative failure in terms of productions (Ibsen is the next most produced dramatist after Shakespeare) perhaps signposted Ibsen elsewhere -- to great success with the psychological and social conflicts of the Scandinavian bourgeoisie. The later plays seem much less dated, even glaringly modernist (eg, A Doll's House, 1879).

Under the short rule (360-363) of Julian "the Apostate" (331?-363) the Roman empire is thought nearly to have reverted to paganism from Christianity, which had then only been the established religion for 4 decades.  This is indeed an issue of cosmic sweep, set in a complex period with a complex flow of historical processes, on which the sources are patchy.  Success in capturing the relation between the events of the period and Julian's enigmatic and ascetic personality also eluded Adrian Murdoch (The Last Pagan, Inner Traditions, 2008), with his much better contemporary access to primary and secondary materials than Ibsen had.  The sources are good enough for some leads but not for a very detailed set of what-if? historical analyses (which fiction has already done on Julian).  It is uncertain just how near or far from success Julian's dis-establishment project might have been at the time of his death in action in Mesopotamia.  This occurred in yet another Persian war, one that he had felt obliged to pursue to consolidate loyalties in the East.  In Ben Power's adaptation of the play, this nemesis results (based on probably inaccurate historical sources) not from hubris but from gullibility.  This would be a most unbecoming demise for Julian, a cynic who forswore a religion partly because of its excessive demands for suspension of disbelief.

We are therefore left asking, if historical accuracy is not overriding for Ibsen, what in the dramatic character of the stage Julian has he given us to make us identify with him enough to feel affected when things go wrong as his rule unfolds?  I have to say not a lot:  perhaps an over-wariness in the adaptation about too much intellectual argument in theatre, especially theological and philosophical argument nearly two millennia old, has deprived us of an opportunity to appreciate his reasoning.  

In Ben Power's competent shoe-horning adaptation of Ibsen's 8 hours into an action-packed 4,  the career narrative is so dominant that we get a rather sampled reportage of the way in which the Christians were perhaps unnecessarily provoked, but little sense of the dynamics and interplay of historical events.

More revealing is the way in which Christian Rome, though from just before Julian's birth we should more properly be calling it Byzantium', is shown as retaining all the shortcomings of its predecessor: to stay alive as a member of the elite, you had either go into exile or seize power yourself.  The pace of the career narrative is Shakespearian, somewhat recalling Macbeth; the source of seduction is only slightly the attractions of power (and despite a bizarre scene with the wife, who is also sister of the menacing preceding emperor, Julian's uncle Constantius, it is not particularly a power-hungry spouse).  But sorcery and obscure prophesy are seductions as for Macbeth.

Julian is portrayed as trapped by his situation; he starts out professing to want freedom of worship to include Christianity, but the political monopoly in an established monotheistic religion makes conflict inevitable.  Julian rightly despised Christian superstition and seemed initially in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius to favour the classical learning and philosophy that was to be lost to the West for a millennium as Christianity grew to hegemony.  This point was not lost on the anti-Christian Edward Gibbon in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88).  Yet Julian appears also to have indulged in and favoured similarly superstitious pagan practices, and not to have drawn much of value from his flirtation with philosophy in the backwater that was 4th-century Athens.  As with Christianity in his earlier maturity, he became disillusioned.  It is perhaps surprising that a century after Gibbon, Ibsen felt he had to give Christianity a much better press (eg, in his sympathetic portrayal of Gregory of Nazianzus as saint and martyr) than he gives Julian -- perhaps a touch of Ibsen's growing sympathy for the underdog which at this point Gregory becomes. 

Ibsen worked up the play in the post-Darwin 1860s, when religious values were waning, so it is not surprising that he thought the apostacy would be relevant to the audience's concerns, despite its remote historical and geographical setting.  Ibsen was later quite frank about the opiate value of religious belief, and Rebecca in Rosmersholm (1879), has lost hers.  Society was facing the possibility that God may not exist.  But Julian did not "disbelieve in God" in the sense Rebecca or we would understand of espousing materialism;  the general cultural assumption on deities in the ancient world was "anything goes", and Julian felt that the Judaeo-Christian God's monopoly was not justified socially and politically.  There is no very good evidence that on his deathbed Julian said "You have won then, Galilean."  It is an anachronism, implying that he could have been obsessed with our own hindsight what-if question, rather than the pressing matters of his power base and the Persian war. 

The unifying force which Constantine had seen in Christianity had led to a political role for the clerical hierarchy, the decay of both pagan religion and classical learning, and a question about the relation between church and state, one which was important at the time of writing the US Constitution and which is to some extent still with us.  The newly established religion was a threat to the intellectual fabric of ancient civilisation and to the divine cult of the emperors.  The meeting point of the drama with historically plausible conjecture, is that Julian started with the former laudable fear but that it shaded into the latter less laudable one, because power always corrupts. This message is there in the play but extracting it requires much concentration due to the many distracting sub-plots and prior knowledge of the history certainly helps when there is not time to read the excellent but lengthy programme notes.

This is a play mostly for those with an interest in ancient history and/or theatrical realisation.  Despite the length there is no boredom and much engagement created by the usual excellent NT acting and the flexible use of the set on the rotating multi-depth stage.  The imperial religious procession of Constantius is a breathtaking delight, worthy of a place in the annals of staging and costume.  I was not quite so sure about Julian's fellow sun-worshippers appearing as trance-held hippies, but even in an action-packed drama there is room for humorous moments.

Emperor and Galilean plays at the National Theatre, Olivier Theatre, London, through August 10^th.  For information and tickets, click on live link.

                                                                                      Mark Haggard

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Off-Broadway in Shelter Island, L.I. – Shakespeare’s As You Like It at Sylvester Manor’s Windmill, performances July 16 and 17, directed by Sarah Hankins, The Green Theatre Collective

… the Forest of Arden …

What could be better than circling the fruitful fields of Sylvester Manor’s Community Supported Agriculture farm to arrive at the windmill, sitting on the verdant grass, and in this idyllic, mid-summer setting watching a beautiful production of Shakespeare’s great pastoral comedy performed by talented and idealistic actors of the Green Theatre Collective? 

Nothing could be better.

We wait for the play to begin, some people nibbling the organic crudités and sipping wine.  A thin cord rests on the top of the bouncy grass, marking the “edge of the stage.”  Are those the actors seated -- like ourselves -- on picnic blankets on either side of the windmill?

A nature spirit appears -- Amiens, played alluringly by Melanie Closs, moves in and around singing the gentle, insinuating “Come Hither.”  You bet!

Melanie Closs as Amiens. Background L: audience;  R: actors Photo: Robert J. Ruben

Orlando, persecuted and cheated out of his inheritance by his older brother Oliver, flees with his faithful servant Adam, first having fallen in love with Rosalind, daughter of the banished Duke Senior.  Duke Frederick, who usurped his older brother, the good Duke Senior, but had allowed Rosalind to stay in his court since she was his daughter’s, Celia’s, friend, but still hating her as her father’s daughter, now throws out Rosalind, who has fallen in love with Orlando;  her dear friend Celia, and the Jester Touchstone accompany her into banishment.  Rosalind goes disguised as a young man, “Ganymede,” and Celia, disguised as a poor lady, takes on the name Aliena to suit, as she says, her current situation.

All these loving, free spirits find their way to the Forest of Arden where, it happens, the exiled Duke has also found his way, living with some retainers.  Tragedy ends in death, and comedy in marriage:  this is a comedy and it ends in several marriages, but not before the course of true love has many chances to be confounded.

If you had any doubts about whether there’s such a thing as love at first sight, you'll know for sure when Hal Flickett as Orlando is literally struck dumb, head over heels in love with Rosalind, his hands straining to convey to her the words of his ardor, locked in by his overwhelming passion.  

Jessica Glannone as Rosalind matches his at first sight passion with her own, and holds it through the hilarious scenes where, she entrains him in her Ganymede disguise to woo her in the forest  “as if I were Rosalind”;  she also plays Audrey, a country girl with a country style. 

Seven actors play many parts (as all of us do, as Shakespeare reminds us in this play).  Since Close and Flickett play one and Glannone two, the other four actors are kept really busy -- shifting with skill and speed among characters, mood and -- from palace to forest -- locale.  It was fascinating to see David Gautschy switch -- by slipping off his vest -- from the nasty older brother Oliver to the poetic, free associating Fool Touchstone;  can this really be the same man!?  Gautschy expressed all the poetic nuance and suggestive liberation of one of Shakespeare’s great Fools who convey a sense of depth that just won’t let you go.  

Brendan Boland brought an outstanding quality of intelligence and weight to Jacques, whose melancholy provides a leaven to the idyllic fantasy of As You Like It.   Boland brought to the famous “Seven Ages of Man” passage a passion equal, in its way, to that of the lovers -- and by “sans everything” he had moved me to tears. 

Gina Rivera was dynamic as the humorous, tough-minded Delia, a foil to the romantic Rosalind.  It was touching that she played Adam the old servant as lame and weak-kneed while having a dancer’s freedom of movement:  free and in the forest, she came up with some heart-lifting light dance steps and a terrific cartwheel expressive of the buoyancy and joie de vivre of the play.   

David Shaw was especially busy in terms of sheer number – five distinct characters and speaking parts.  I especially enjoyed him as Charles the Wrestler in the scene where, as a strong man, he’s bested by the underdog Orlando. 

In today’s NY Times (07/18/ll) Charles Isherwood, commented about the Royal Shakespeare Company productions in NYC,  “… these are among the most consistently clear Shakespeare stagings I’ve seen, at least in term of simple intelligibility.”  The same can certainly be said of the Green Theatre Collective’s “As You Like It” – and they were acting with the acoustics of the great outdoors and the wind in the trees!  I never missed a word -- or a joke, or an idea.  The gorgeous language was completely accessible – for the time, the language of Shakespeare, of the actors, and of the audience was all one.

It was a privilege and a joy to see Shakespeare so well and so appropriately performed.  Thanks to Sylvester Manor Farm for extending itself in the direction of the arts, and bringing this play our way.  I’m greatly looking forward the Green Theatre Collective’s future performances.

So far this summer this traveling troupe has played “As You Like It” in Maudsley State in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the Musical Pagoda in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, and at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, Long Island, NY. 

Green Theatre Collective will perform the play at Franklin Stage Company, Franklin, NY, on July 23 and 24.  For more information about the performances, and about the theatre company, and for ticket information, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

Taking a curtain call -- with not a curtain in sight ...  L-R Melanie Closs, Hal Fickett, David Shaw, Jessica Glannone, Gina Rivera, David Gautschy, Brendan Boland.  Photo:  Robert J. Ruben

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OFF-BROADWAY in SAG HARBOR -- Betty's Summer Vacation by Christopher Durang, directed by Trip Cullman, Bay Street Theatre

 It’s a sit-com in reverse -- everything that looks normal and every-day turns out ghastly.   This dark comedy takes potshots at the over-influence of the media and various clichés of popular psychology and Betty has the vacation from Hell, all of which could be interesting, but the characters and situations are so exaggerated, obvious and over-worked that it’s silly and irrelevant

Betty enters the breezy, appealing summer house for her summer share with Trudy who, however, talks a blue streak -- oh oh, is this vacation going to be fun?  The possibility remains but when Mrs. Siezmagraff, Trudy’s hated mother enters and blithely announces that -- Dad (whom we fast find out has sexually abused Trudy) just having died -- she’s staying here, too, we know bad stuff’s ahead. 

Then comes the gay guy with a suspicious looking hat box (read head box) and blood on his hands, and the super stud who’s colossally randy and with the size to go with it as we’re reminded again and again and again.  Also on hand is an unappetizing derelict flasher whom Mrs. Siezmagraff has invited in for sex.  Voices from somewhere above laugh with shrill cackles, comment, and egg on the characters to greater and great excesses -- well, you never know what you get with a short-term rental.

Everything in this beautifully designed set of a summer house by the beach is at it should be with star fish motifs and blue sky vistas except for the tacked up sign over a far door that hangs askew -- it looks like it could be read but -- go close and it’s nonsense.  This cleverly announces the theme of the play, the wacky absurdity within conventional norms -- but then the set is much better than the play.  Act I shows Betty, played with strength and a fine range of emotion by Heidi Schreck, holding onto stability amidst all these nut cases acting accordingly nuts which means that -- accepting a prompt from the voices -- she takes a long walk on the beach, leaving room for plenty of in-house sexual and murderous violence.  The set piece is a game of charades -- what else in a beach house share? -- and as Betty says, never has the word “penis” been spoken with greater frequency.

In Act II the three  “Voices” descend from above amidst breaks in the ceiling and plaster powder, looking something like space travelers, and are revealed as personifications of the media of sorts, voyeuristic, looking for distraction, and eagerly pushing everybody on to still worse to come.  In a mock trial since, after all, violence has been done, Veanne Cox as Mrs. Siezmagraff plays Judge, Prosecutor and Witness with such wonderful comic timing that for awhile Betty’s Summer Vacation actually becomes funny.  The play goes out with a bang and a whimper, both.    

There is a reason to see the play:  the excellent acting, and in particular the standout performance of Veanne Cox playing crazy-normal:  that is, her responses to the goings on, including her own zaniness, would look totally normal if what was happening and what she was saying and doing weren’t wild and violent.  I feel I didn't need to see this play, but I wouldn't have wanted to miss her performance.

Bay Street, an outstanding regional theater, has gone a little off course in its first offerings this season but the next, Enter Laughing, should be great.

Betty’s Summer Vacation plays at Bay Street Theatre on the wharf in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through July 31.  For information and tickets, click on live link of title.

Yvonne Korshak

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OFF-BROADWAY IN SAG HARBOR - TRU by Jay Presson Allen, with Darrel Hammond as Truman Capote, directed by Matt McGrath, Bay Street Theatre

TRU -- for Truman -- is a one-person play that takes up Capote’s life after he published in Esquire magazine chapters of his novel Answered Prayers  in which he exposed the seamy side of the lives of many of his wealthy, socialite friends.  Fiction -- but everyone of his crowd recognized themselves and their friends in the thinly disguised characters.

It’s the mid 1970’s and Capote is at the height of his fame as a writer -- hence the rich friends -- mired in alcohol and drugs and causing what were, for the time, sexual indiscretions of a gay life.

We find him in his handsome successful writer’s apartment in New York City near the United Nations building, appealingly evoked by the set.  ACT I focuses on Capote's relationships with others.  It’s Christmas and he's feeling abandoned by his lover who’s abroad.  Calling everybody who’s anybody “Honey,” he mends bridges with his fancy friends, especially the wives.  He’s big among the little people, too.  A telegraph operator gushes, some nobody sends him a poinsettia which he tosses out.   He ranges from imperious to babyish.      

ACT II brings a more inward view.  He’s off the bottle, planning on a physical fitness regime, and morose -- the word “suicide” is used often.  He speaks of his early life, his abandonment by his mother “but the family took pretty good care of me,” his childhood drive to write, publication of his first story when he was eight in which -- like Answered Prayers -- he made fun of people he knew and aroused their ire, and, moving forward, a well-known wild party he threw in the ‘60’s, and, later, the evidently inexplicable, shocking suicide of his mother.  We finally pick up a dramatic conflict:  his successful resistance to suicide in the face of his mother having succumbed to it.

Capote’s affected style wears thin quickly in ACT I.  We know he was a writer of depth and power, but put it this way:  if we didn’t know the man we were watching was a fine writer, we’d think he was a superficial, self-focused bore.  ACT II disappoints in a different way:  we hear him recount personal events, but not in a way that provides insight.  His resistance to suicide, in contrast to his mother, is interesting and as a dramatic conflict could have enlivened the play, but it comes too late, and her death is too little explored.  

Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wonderful impersonation of Capote in the film, Capote, one can't help thinking that if Hoffman played the role, the play would be more fun to watch.  Darrell Hammond is a fine actor but he seems too large and rough hewn in his style and manner to catch the seductive childishness of Capote, his southern accented babyish voice, and his odd allure.    

Two whole acts in which Capote speaks -- but we don’t really know from TRU much about who this man was. 

TRU played at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, through June 26.  For Bay Street’s rich program and plays and other programs forthcoming, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Please scroll down, click on "comments", write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.

 

Unnatural Acts, written by members of the Plastic Theatre, conceived and directed by Tony Speciale, Classic Stage Company

Unnatural Acts is a strong and thought provoking play based on a true and tragic event:  the purge of a group of gay men at Harvard University in 1920.  The catalyst was the suicide of Cyril Wilson, assumed to be gay, which led Harvard to get rid of the group of homosexuals associated with him, evidently to avoid scandal.  

One by one, ten students and one instructor suspected of being part of Wilson’s cadre of homosexual friends were interrogated by a “Secret Court” of high level administrators which determined their “guilt” as homosexuals, or their “innocence.”  Most were found “guilty” and were expelled.  We learn, by the end of the play, of the blight the investigation and expulsion cast on almost all of their lives.

It's a fascinating and very clever theatrical choice that the only characters we see in the play are the eleven directly affected men.  The Harvard disciplinary board is a dark presence, its activities illuminated only by the monologs of the accused young men called in to testify and responding to questions.  All focus is on the men themselves, their lives, personalities, purposes, sexual drives (though oddly, nobody seems in love), interactions, and the effect on these of the punitive purge.    

At the start of the play, the eleven react variously to Wilson's suicide.  Some close friends feel grief and attend his funeral, acting as pallbearers, while others who knew him casually are more distant.  As the play advances, though, the noose tightens equally around all of them.  That’s a powerful structure.  

Early on there’s a wild party in the suite of Earnest Roberts that I think everyone who sees the play is bound to remember for a long time.  It's very well staged.  There’s drinking, music, lovemaking, and banter while Roberts, “the ringleader,” makes witty proclamations from tabletops, wearing a gorgeous sequined flapper dress.  The process that will crush most of them is well underway but they don’t understand that yet, partly because these men, mainly sons of privilege, have a sense of invulnerability.  

         The party's warming up ...  fromUnnatural Acts.  Photo:  Classic Stage

But soon enough they’re all roped in.   Being a congressman's son won't get you out of this one.

Under interrogation, some are damned for telling the truth and others damned for lying.  One egregious liar who’s gay is exonerated and one truth-teller who’s straight receives a relatively mild one-year suspension (and may be the only one who goes on to live a long time and have the kind of fulfilled career that Harvard men look forward to). 

The disciplinary board appears to have tried sincerely to separate those who were “guilty” from those who were "innocent" -- as those words applied to gays in 1920.  But "sincerity" is irrelevant -- the play drives home that secret deliberative bodies are inherently cruel and unjust, and that intolerance set in motion against a class of people judged to be different from oneself is cruel and unjust.  

Why did Harvard do it?  Since the disciplinary board is a kind of composite character in the play, I missed knowing what motivated them.  Was it blind prejudice?  Avoidance of scandal?  Or?  The investigation begins right after Wilson's death and Harvard already had a reputation as the most "faggoty" school: this suggests the administration had been looking the other way with regard to gay activities until Wilson's suicide raised the fear of scandal, but that's a guess.  Those eleven men would have been guessing about that, too, and talking it over.                 

Tony Speciale conceived the play and shepherded it through a process of collaborative creation with the cast, and it’s presented as an ensemble piece.  The actors are for the most part very good, though some characters could use greater differentiation -- that's an awful lot of young men in suits to keep track of (though it's easy to remember the nude track star and Roberts in a dress!).  That nobody's in love, however, is unlikely.  A focus on a deep love among these individuals would heighten the play's impact.  The direction, with dramatic switches from a bright to a dark stage, is tense and clear. 

This is really an example of many cooks who didn’t spoil the broth, but arrived at a sturdy, unified drama that tells an important story.    

Unnatural Acts plays at Classic Stage in New York City's East Village -- through July 10 run extended through July 31.  For information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

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A Little Journey by Rachel Crothers, directed by Jackson Gay, Mint Theater Company

… All aboard …

A Little Journey is about what happens to a group of strangers back when travel across our broad United States meant a four-day train trip.  Who’d be sharing your Pullman “sleeper car”?  You never knew but by the end of the trip you were liable to know everyone really well. 

Time:  Spring 1914.   Place:  The inside of a Pullman sleeping car bound for the Pacific Coast, the set a marvelous evocation of a sleeping car which turns round in order to convey the train’s forward movement.  The “All Aboard” sounds.  Last minute visitors are shuffled off, the train pulls out of the station, and a classy seeming young woman, Julie, is near to weeping.

Not only has Julie been abandoned by her lover, she's lost her ticket and will have to get off the train -- until a free-spirited Western type of guy, Jim, prevails on her to let him lend her the money for a new ticket.  And we’ve got several more days ahead for Jim to fall in love and romance her, and for the disparities between her high class Eastern upbringing and conventional views to be overcome by Jim with his own tough story and new age (for that age), rough and ready brand of personal salvation -- if they can be overcome.

Beyond differences of gender, occupation and class, people become interested in one another -- and in the burgeoning romance.  The deaf old lady and her granddaughter returning home out West gossip with the fancy New York matron.  Two Princeton boys take an interest in the pretty granddaughter.  Encouraged by Jim, Julie’s upper-crust edge softens;  she gets involved with a waif of woman who seems more destitute than she herself, giving the woman temporary relief by holding her baby, and finding a new attachment in the baby.

But Julie’s  problems won't go away (actually, the solution's obvious but the playwright isn't ready to let it happen so artificially strings things out):  rejected by her New York lover because she doesn't have her own money, devoid of occupation because as a well-educated woman of the early 20^th Century she has no marketable skills, she faces the prospect of life with relatives out West who don’t want her.  And then, just when her private sorrows seem overwhelming, disaster strikes, affecting everybody.  

In one of the most convincing, though awkwardly staged, episodes, the common disaster faced by the passengers transforms this disparate cross-section of American society into a unified, deeply bonded group.  Even the Black sleeping car porter, who in spite of his great dignity has so far been treated as a fetch-and-carry (and how uncomfortable is that to watch, even when you know "it's a play"), gets to join the team.  Faced with a poignant and important dilemma, they rise to the occasion, all pitching in and making contributions, and working it out together.      

It's fascinating to learn that Rachel Crothers was one of the most successful playwrights in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.  Still, as a play, A Little Journey seems somewhat dated and over-given to easy romantic solutions to stony problems.   Every potential romance blooms, the Whites and the Black man link hands -- things happen because they’re “nice,” without character development to support them.

Some of the sense of sentimentality might have been overcome with better casting.  The acting is, at least for the most part, competent but only Samantha Soule gives a genuinely strong performance as Julie. 

Again and again the Mint Theater's productions of little known plays by well known authors, and other outstanding finds from the past have brought its audiences -- certainly myself -- thrilling illumination.  A Little Journey doesn't have the strength of many of the Mint’s superb discoveries. 

But with its depictions of social categories, and glowingly optimistic view of America set in the context of that great symbol of American optimism -- the journey West -- A Little Journey is a rich and important document of social history -- and if The Mint hadn't produced it, who would know?  That, and a seductive nostalgia, are excellent reasons to see and enjoy it.  Disparities of wealth, class, education and race dissipate.  This was one of those moments in our history when one could believe that there was a place for everybody on board. 

A Little Journey plays at the Mint Theater on Manhattan's West side through July 10.  For further information and tickets, click on live link. 

Yvonne Korshak

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The Illusion by Tony Kushner, adapted from Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion Comique, directed by Michael Mayer, Signature Theatre Company

… “an extravagant trifle” …

The Illusion is well produced, stunningly acted, and trivial.  It's interesting, though, for the attention it brings to formal aspects in theater history.  When Corneille wrote L’Illusion Comique in 1635, it was highly experimental for the time -- daring variations on the theme of how to write a play by a young but experienced playwright (7 plays written by the age of 29).  As one would surely learn if one took the course in college, in L’Illusion Comique Corneille breaks with the three classic unities of action, time and place, mixes various traditions – tragic-comedy, pastoral, Commedia del’arte, etc. -- and incorporates not one (as in Hamlet) but multiple plays within a play, the characters’ names changing in concert.  This play about the evanescence of all things is as confusing as it’s meant to be.  It's very much a precoscious -- by close to 400 years -- exercise in deconstruction.

This is not, however, simply Kushner’s translation of Corneille’s play but an adaptation:  Kushner simplified the structure somewhat, and in many places substituted his own poetry for Corneille’s, with a focus on the pains of love that seems separate from the characters and has something of a modern whine to it.          

How does it play (especially if, like me, you didn’t take that 17th-century French drama course?)  After seeing it, I did some research on Corneille’s original play and its context, and what I learned about its experimental aspects was extremely interesting.  I found watching The Illusion, however, mainly boring, with some perking up at surprising moments toward the end (I was almost ready to leave after the first act but I hung in there), a few good laughs and, scattered here and there, some fine poetry.

It starts in a dark, spooky magician’s cave, where a father enters looking for news of his son.  The father had thrown the boy out of the house years ago because he was a troublemaker and hard to handle, but now, nearing the end of life, feeling guilt and ambivalent love, he yearns to know what happened to his son.  The cave has two creepy denizens, the magician, Alcandre, and her gnome-like, scary servant, piano player and “Amaneunsis”,  whose tongue she’s cut out and ears deafened, or so she says.  Together they conjure up episodes from the son’s life for the father to watch … and things are not looking good.  We see the young man -- serially named Calisto, Clindor and Theogenes -- as a philanderer,  a gold-digger, a heart-breaker, precariously near death, and dead, causing his father great grief (in other words:  the son fulfilled his promise).  But things are not as they seem, in case you thought they were.

The situations Calisto etc. gets into of courtly love and infidelity come across as silly:  early on, there’s no sign of depth or meaning so the episodes are irritating rather than interesting.  In Act II the increasing convolutions become so preposterous that they take on the independent life of the excessive, and they are helped by outstanding character acting.  In particular, Henry Stram (also great as the servant) is powerfully weird and intense as the heroine’s wretchedly mean father, and Peter Bartlett is fascinating and touching as the bewigged, pompous Matamore whose dreamy sadness we come to know.  The subtle and humorous expressions that cross Merritt Weaver’s face as the servant who figures out how to strike it rich are a pleasure to watch when things otherwise get foolish.  Throughout, Lois Smith has great stage presence as the magician.

So there are some saving graces in The Illusion, including especially the prompt to learn more about Corneille, and all in all I’m not sorry I saw it, but not seeing it would have been fine, too.  Corneille called his play at various times “a strange monster,” a “caprice,” and “an extravagant trifle, ”  descriptions that survive Kushner’s adaptation.  Corneille knew what he was talking about.  

The Illusion plays at the Signature Theatre on West 42nd Street in NYC through July 11.  For information and tickets, click on live link of the title. 

Yvonne Korshak 

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I Married Wyatt Earp, a musical, book by Thomas Edward West and Sheilah Rae, Lyrics by Sheila Rae, Music by Michelle Brourman, Prospect Theater Company and New York Theatre Barn, at 59 E 59

Throwing convention to the winds, a girl from a well-to-do San Francisco Jewish family joins a traveling theater troupe to get herself to the wild west, where she meets and marries, well, common law, Wyatt Earp -- what a promising idea for a musical! 

And in many ways the promise is fulfilled.  There are great production numbers, beautifully performed -- see I Married Wyatt Earp and you’ll have a good time.  And the idea's original, too -- a Western with no men!  Instead, the story, loosely based in real characters and events, is told through a cast of 11 women, the idea being to place the women’s lives center stage, although that doesn’t work quite as well as it might. 

The wives (common-law and otherwise)  of the three Earp brothers are living together as a tight knit family in the silver boom-town of Tombstone, Arizona when Josie Marcus, the San Francisco outlier, arrives.  She creates quite a stir as a singer-dancer, and in giving up another man for Wyatt Earp, "the love of her live."  

Earp's common-law wife of the time, Mattie, a laudanum addict, tortured now by jealousy, is driven to violence first directed at Josie and then turned inward.  In an ironic turnaround of a traditional Western, Mattie, the weakest of the women, is the one who brandishes the long barreled silver revolver.  But she dies of a suicidal overdose, leaving Josie with Wyatt and a sense of guilt -- though not enough to shake her sparkle. 

I Married Wyatt Earp is framed as a play within a play:  at the start, we see Josie, now 81 years old, and Allie, widow of Wyatt’s brother Wilbur, age 90, in Josie’s apartment for an evening of settling old scores and -- booze at hand -- finding some amicable resolution to their conflicts.  Allie blames Josie for Mattie’s death, and for creating the myth of Wyatt Earp as the toughest law-man, fastest gun and greatest entrepreneur of the West when the crown should have gone to her husband. 

As they reminisce, scenes of their young lives -- the loves, the drama, humor, workaday pleasures and pains -- rise up vibrantly before our eyes.  One of the most powerful aspects is the way the old Josie and Allie move among their young selves, bending over them, observing, and sometimes -- it's absolutely beautiful to see -- singing along.  Of course they can’t change anything – even if they wanted to.  This is marvelously done. 

Other great strengths are the musical numbers, and there are lots of them, this is a real musical and a feast of singing -- solos, duets, quartets and ensembles.  Some of the titles give the flavor:  “High Class Attraction,” “They Got Snakes Out Here,” “Pins and Needles,” “Didya Hear?” (gossip!).  Some of the rhymes are too obvious, still, often I felt I was watching the next great musical.

There's a problem with the musical’s book, though.  The intent is to focus on the women’s lives but the depiction of their lives is incomplete and confused.  It's implied constantly that they work hard, but at what and why is not clear.  At running the bar?  We first meet the wives at the Earp-owned bar where Josie has just arrived and performs with the theatrical troupe (in a rousing number!).  We do see young Allie carry in a crate of bottles but that's it:  there are no customers, nobody serves a drink, wipes a table or mops a floor … and after that scene the bar pretty much disappears. 

Later we find the wives singing about the hard work they do to pay the rent by sewing tents for miners (“Pins and Needles”).   Pay the rent?  Maybe everyone had to pitch in, but we know their husbands are well employed in law enforcement and own a silver mine:  surely they'd be paying the rent, not their wives.  Here and elsewhere, touches of pathos are arbitrarily planted trading on the assumption that we all know that women were exploited and had to work hard so we'll be sympathetic automatically and it doesn't much matter what they're shown working hard at doing. 

Conveying the lives of women whose lives are inextricably tied to those of men, without men, accounts for some of the problems.  So much so that for the episode of the famous Shootout at OK Corral where the Earp brothers wipe out their rivals, the play resorts to the actual presence of males, but as shadowy, silhouetted, forms, all in black, faces hidden by western hats.  Still, I think that with the loose ends more carefully tied, and the women's activities and relationships with the men (even unseen) clarified,  the all-female cast could be maintained.  Take the idea of focusing on the lives of the women to its conclusion -- and really do it! 

Also, we need to have a deeper sense of Josie -- a cliche like "he's the love of my life" is not enough to bring us close to this feisty woman and the unusual choices she makes. 

All the roles are sung, danced and played beautifully – this is a well cast show.  Mishaela Faucher has the singing, dancing and acting strength to hold the play together as its main character.  I was particularly fascinated by the wry wisdom of Carolyn Mignini as the older Josie.  Tina Stafford is irresistible -- tough and extraordinarily graceful in the “pants role” of leader of the theatrical troupe.  Karla Mosley is a great showgirl, with charismatic vitality and beauty.

With some strengthening of the book, this could  be the next great musical but here and now it’s an engaging, fun-filled delight. 

I Married Wyatt Earp  plays at 59 E 59 theater in NYC through June 12.  For more information and tickets, click on live link of the play's title.

Yvonne Korshak

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2010 - 2011 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards -- Independent Theater Bloggers Association

The Independent Theater Bloggers Association (the “ITBA”) is proud to announce the 2011 recipients of the Third Annual Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Awards.   Patrick Lee was one of the ITBA's founding members. Patrick passed away suddenly last June, and was an erudite, passionate, and tireless advocate for theater in all its forms. Patrick was also the ITBA's first awards director, and was a regular contributor to Theatermania and TDF Stages.

 

The 2010-2011 Patrick Lee Theater Blogger Award Winners:

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY

Jerusalem

 

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL

Anything Goes

 

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL

The Normal Heart

 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

The Kid

 

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL (PLAY OR MUSICAL)

Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches

 

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW/PERFORMANCE (ALL VENUE CATEGORIES)

Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

 

CITATIONS FOR OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF BROADWAY SHOW

Feeder: A Love Story

Invasion!

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Belarus Free Theater's Discover Love

Black Watch

ReWrite

 

UNIQUE OFF-OFF BROADWAY EXPERIENCE

Sleep No More

 

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE

The Scottsboro Boys

 

CITATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE BY INDIVIDUAL PERFORMERS

Nina Arianda, Born Yesterday

Laura Benanti, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Reed Birney, A Small Fire

Christian Borle, Peter and the Starcatcher

Norbert Leo Butz, Catch Me If You Can

Bobby Cannavale, The Motherfucker with the Hat

Colman Domingo, The Scottsboro Boys

Sutton Foster, Anything Goes

Josh Gad, The Book of Mormon

Hamish Linklater, School for Lies

Joe Mantello, The Normal Heart

Arian Moayed, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Lily Rabe, The Merchant of Venice

Mark Rylance, Jerusalem

Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

Benjamin Walker, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

 

CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN OFF-OFF BROADWAY THEATRE

La Mama

 

The list of the 2011 recipients of The Patrick is read by Susan Blackwell, Heidi Blickenstaff, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, the cast and creators of the acclaimed [title of show] and who are currently collaborating on Now. Here. This.", a Developmental Lab Production at the Vineyard Theatre: http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/show-now-here-this.html.   A video of their reading is on Youtube at  http://youtu.be/-aC4viVcP2Y  which was filmed by ITBA member Jesse North. 

 

The ITBA, is comprised of bloggers who regularly see live performances in all its forms in New York City and beyond.   Members are in New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and London.  For further information and a list of our members, our website is www.theaterbloggers.com.  If you are interested in learning more about the ITBA, email info@theaterbloggers.com.  To invite the members of the ITBA to your show or event, please send an email to  invite@theaterbloggers.com.

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Sleep No More, Punchdrunk Theater Company

... What is it? ...

I went to Sleep No More thinking, from what I'd heard, that it would be an exciting, deconstructed version of Macbeth.  That is, I expected to see a play since it's listed as "Off-Broadway" and Punchdrunk is a British theater company.  Oh was I wrong.  I'm writing about it to let you know, if interested, that it's not a play and not much about Shakespeare's Macbeth.  Still, it's well done for what it is, and admirably polished, though not my cup of tea. 

It's a kind of spooky fun-house entertainment installed in a re-worked old hotel in NYC's Chelsea district.  Almost everyone in line (you wait in line outside as for a club until your scheduled time comes up) was in their early 20's, lots of couples who'd made a fiscal investment for a night of fun.  Teenagers would love it but it's expensive and the large bar is the central launching point for the experience so in feeling it's more for "over 21" -- but not much over.

Finally allowed in, you pass through a long, dark, high-ceilinged passage, check your belongings (for a hefty fee) since it's best to be unencumbered and the staff keeps repeating "It's hot up there," turn your reservation into a playing card ticket farther on, and then set off on narrow, winding (Sleep No More is not for the claustrophobic) twists and turns to emerge into a large bar and lounge:  its smoky illusion unifies staff in evening dress, vistors in jeans and whatever, and the blood red decor for an oceanic experience:  cocktails are available for purchase to heighten the intoxication.

From there -- when your number comes up, heh heh -- you embark on the path of Sleep No More.  Wearing a mask to further remove you from yourself, you follow maze-like dark corridors at seeming random with illuminated vignettes with elaborate and well done sets, and music and dance, that are scary, seductive or both:  unlike, say, Disney's "Pirates of the Carribean," these scenes have live performers.  Some make reference to Macbeth, e.g., there's an attack by witches, and others are just violent -- a man kills a woman -- or sexy -- two guys in bed, and other mixes and matches.  

The staff is well trained (you can tell them by their black masks, yours is white) and are on hand to rescue the faint-hearted or those who just want to find their way back to the bar -- or the exit.  Still, the sense that you're in a fire-trap ... well, let's just say it adds a realistic note of fear.  DISCLOSURE:  I didn't see all of it but after getting the idea, found a black mask to guide me to the exit.

So that's what that's about.   ...  chacun a son gout ... caveat emptor ... etc ...

Sleep No More  plays on West 27th Street in NYC through June 27th.  For information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

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Future Anxiety by Laurel Haines, directed by Jim Simpson, The Flea Theater

                ... normalcy meets end of world ...

Future Anxiety is a vast, crisp ensemble play that brings you to the future by following through on everything that's undermining our earth as we know and love it.  "Vast" even though it all takes place in The Flea's rather small Off-Off-Broadway theater but when this talented group gets through with it -- it seems positively epic! 

Things we take for granted are in short supply -- toilet paper's doled out one square at a time.  Violent storms rack the sky interrupted by fires broad as the horizon -- shades of today's news of tornadoes and fires.  Radioactivity everywhere is a given.  When an awakened cryogen who hasn't yet fully accommodated to her new body wants to go outside for some fresh air, the thought sends the nurse into paroxysms of laughter.  Oh yes, and China having collected on its debt, Americans are serving as slaves to the Chinese. 

Karl, a man with a Jesus complex, played by Ugo Chukwu, is offering  salvation via a space voyage to another planet but it's clear that in spite of his manic optimism, the trip isn't going to make it.  But is staying behind any better?  As a parable, Future Anxiety reminds me of Thornton Wilder's optimistic The Skin of Our Teeth, but in reverse.

Ugo Chukwu as Karl recruiting for a space trip.  Photo:  Richard Termine

One reason the play manages to seem so big is that the set is a series of platforms on different levels, performance spaces for fast moving individual vignettes of impending disaster.  The actors are from the Flea's young theater group, the BATS, which is a good thing because the staging and directing require outstanding agility and energy.  Reynaldo Piniella (as Jake) leaps at full twisting speed from level to another -- but he makes it!

A compelling aspect is that this future is not too distant and things are not all that different from today, only worse.  The population that's crowding the planet isn't 40 billion or 200 billion -- it's 12 billion (today, approximately 6.9 billion).  Sonia (Katherine Folk-Sullivan), the sweet girl with the mean job of people collector (like house re-possessor) munches a bag of chips she's found somewhere with an expiration date of 2012. 

Among the excellent performances, Holly Chou's as Comrade Li, in charge of U.S. debtor-slaves, is a genuine show stopper.  The expressions that cross the face of this martinet party-liner who finds liberation in poetry are in  themselves a reason to go to The Flea and see the show.  I've never  seen anyone carry a bucket on stage that looked so genuinely heavy as when Raul Sigmund Julia as the slave-poet Malcolm labors under her eagle eye.  Same when he digs his shovel into a pile of rocks.  

 

Raul Sigmund Julia as Malcolm sets down his heavy bucket for a moment as Holly Chou as Comrade Li profers a creation. Photo: Richarde Termine

While not the first future dystopia by a long shot, Future Anxiety rings a new and important bell:  a growing sense of guilt among human beings about the state of the planet and, joined to it, a negative assessment of our own kind.   In expressing this point, the role of the poet, Malcolm, is key.  Malcoln is given a chance to be free of his slave labor, but he's so burdened by a sense of guilt for what human beings have wrought on this planet that he prefers to remain a slave, rather than add his hand to the destructive work of those who play responsible roles in this world. 

There's some brief but wonderful use of constructed masks/dummies, like the one Karl makes to replace his beloved but estranged Christine (Joy Notoma), leaning his head against it and draping its limp puppet arm across his own chest in a poignant-though-you-know-it's-a-dummy moment.  

For some of its jokes the play relies too closely on Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone (I know it well because I acted in it).  Future Anxiety doesn't need anybody else's jokes, though.  It's fired by the underlying seriousness that makes for the best humor!    

Future Anxiety plays at The Flea Theaterin NYC's Tribeca through May 26th.  For more information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak 

Comments very welcome.  Scoll down and click on "comments" -- write in comment box and click on "post".  Thank you.

 

School For Lies by David Ives, directed by Walter Bobbie, Classic Stage

... triple play ...

What a romp!  What sheer fun!  Moliere would have loved The School For Lies .

And what a record, three for three, for Classic Stage and David Ives:

    2009:  Classic Stage produces Ives' brilliant play about    Spinoza,  NewJerusalem:  The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza

    2010:  Classic Stage produces Ives' Venus in Fur which was a big success and launched Nina Arianda into stardom (though I found it tiresome)

    2011:  Classic Stage produces Ives' The School for Lies, from Moliere's The Misanthrope, and they're right back on brilliant

The School for Lies  roughly follows Moliere's The Misanthrope with Ives translating it into the words, rhythms, and catch-all phrases of today's youth-slanted English -- and these are very young characters.  He's discovered complete freedom of vocabulary -- no word for word translation but every attempt, and success, at catching the sense of each line, its feeling, the characters' pleasure in saying it and the impact on the hearer.

The effect in its way is pure Moliere.  Ives bridges the 17th to 21st Centuries!  

And, though perhaps less inventive, Ives is as witty as Moliere!  Like The Misanthrope, The School for Lies is in rhyme -- rhyming couplets, strings of internal rhymes, can-you-top-this? rhymes, punning rhymes, delayed rhymes that you wait for and that never disappoint on arrival -- bringing a grin, a chortle, a guffaw, and a sigh of satisfaction.

We're in Paris among aristocrats in the 17th Century.  Well, we're sort of there:  the furnishings are of the time, and the characters wear gorgeous period costumes  but they talk like us.  Celimene is a spirited, witty recent widow and a flirt who loves society.  Frank is an impulsive, sarcastic brooder, disdainful of humanity and its superficial social conventions -- hugs in particular.  He's sort of a hippie, she's a party girl, and yet they love, sparring like Annie and Frank in Annie Get Your Gun.   The play abounds with rich characters, Philante, Frank's friend with the "be reasonable, Frank" message who turns into a Queen ex machina;  Clitander (fun and names) super rich and content with his stupidity;  Oronte, whose dreadful poetry bears the brunt of Frank being frank, and others to entangle themselves in each others' lies and loves. 

This is a cast with great comic timing and marvelous expressions -- subtle and broad as needed -- Jenn Gambatese is particularly amusing as Elainte who loves ... well, everybody here loves a few different people.  The tall, tousled Hamish Linklater gives a vigorous and always humorous performance and he's handsome so that we can believe Celimene falls in love with him against her better judgment.  Mamie Gummer is persuasive as Celimene though the role could use more sparkle.  Everybody's good but I'd particularly mention Steven Boyer whose long-suffering deadpan in the role of two servants holds the play together -- you'd think that particularl joke that goes along with him might be overdone, but it works every time.

I've seen The Misanthrope at the Pearl Theatre recently which prompts comparison:  the stories and characters are similar but the differences are interesting -- though I was so captivated by The School for Lies  that these took awhile to sink in.   In The School for Lies, the hero, Frank, speaks of his hatred of hypocrisy.  In The Misanthrope,  the parallel hero, Alceste, hates hypocrisy and injustice.  And therein lies a tale.  The School for Lies is focused on individuals, on the foibles of this group and the hilarity they engender.  Injustice looms larger in The Misanthrope where, for all the laughter, one is always aware of the great power imbalances of the social structure and the insecurities they cause.  All in all, The School for Lies is a less political play than The Misanthrope.  In a way this is surprising, since Moliere, living and writing under the tight reign of Louis XIV, had two of his plays banned by the government, while Ives has nothing to lose.  

(And those court cases often referred to are totally unclear to me in both plays.)  

And Moliere's play, for all of its exaggerated characterizations, is more realistic in terms of personalities and relationships, particularly in the more complex, anguished and genuinely philosophical character of Alceste, now Frank in The School for Lies.  And speaking of realism, Frank impossibly turns out to be someone else -- but it's so wonderfully funny you wouldn't want it any other way.  These aspects give Moliere's play the universality that inspires interpretations, adaptations, performances and other kinds of conversations with it in new generations -- like The School for Lies.  But The School for Lies  has its own great wit and language.     

The School for Lies plays at Classic Stage in NYC's East Village through May 22;  that's too short a run for such an enjoyable play!  For information and tickets, click on live link.  Check the website (live link) for tickets and note of extended run.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome.  Scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.

 

 

A Minister's Wife, a musical-theater version of George Bernard Shaw's Candida, book by Austin Pendleton, music by Joshua Schmidt, lyrics by Jan Levy Tranen, conceived and directed by Michael Halberstam, Lincoln Center

A big problem for A Minister's Wife is that, unlike most of Shaw's plays, Candida is in my view -- though others disagree -- dated.  It has to do with a woman determining her own fate but the ideas circulating about relationships between men and women, marriage and love, are archaic -- and there's barely a spoonful of Shavian wit.  These problems were evident in the recent production of Candida  by the Irish Repertory Theater , and setting some speeches to music, as in A Minister's Wife, doesn't make them go away.

The situation is a love triangle among Candida, her husband the Reverend James Morell, and Marchbanks, a teen-aged poet and household hanger-on.  Candida, who has a good figure and a great head of hair, arrives home from somewhere for a day's stay.  Morell has been so intensely involved in composing one of his passionate socialist sermons that -- much as he adores her -- he misses picking her up at the train.  That's one of Morell's weaknesses as a husband -- he's too involved in his work.  Oh Oh. 

Marchbanks, the boyish, dreamy, idealistic poet who's in love with Candida seizes the opportunity to woo her with a combination of his own poetic soul and his understanding of her inner woman's nature, a flirtation Candida enters into in her home and under the eyes of her husband who, understandably, grows angry and, ultimately frightened.

A Minister's Wife starts auspiciously.  The set, the Morell's living room/office, is an appealing blend of refinement, education and lived-in wear:  it conveys the Minister's seriousness of purpose.  Early on, Morell sings, more a recitative than a song but very effective in making real for the audience his powerful sermons -- and the Shavian language is up to the idea.  Marc Kudisch's rich baritone and good looks convey believably and pleasurably his often referred to charisma.

That's the best use of music in The Minister's Wife.   After that, the music is one note per word, plain up and down the scale repetitive to the point of being irritating, and the "songs" never take flight from the mode of recitative.

And who can take the allure Candida finds in Marchbanks seriously?  For one thing, Marchbanks, played by Bobby Steggert, is fifteen years younger than Candida.  And Morell is a mature, powerfully attractive man to whom his Secretary, everyone who hears his sermons, and Candida herself is attracted.  And although the dialog indicates that Marchbanks has a poetic soul, we never hear him say anything of particular poignancy nor hear any powerful poetry from him -- mainly he flirts, speaks disrespectfully to Morell (who has rescued him in from a park bench) and, in between times, languishes.

Candida's flirtation with Marchbanks, and her density and/or callousness (Shaw can't seem to decide which) about her husband's feelings, make her seem silly and small, draining her significance.  Kate Fry as Candida has a pleasant voice but doesn't bring a dramatic presence to the role that might help us overlook its weaknesses.

When Liz Bates has center stage, she brings the play temporarily to life with her vitality and wit as Morell's Secretary, "Prossy," tough-minded but filled with yearning, aided in her moment of liberation by Morell's Curate, played by Drew Gehling.

The Morell's children are briefly mentioned but -- on the one day their mother comes home -- they never appear.  What an error!  They may have been in his narrative way -- as children often are -- but Shaw should have figured out something better than leaving them out, all the more in a play about who protects whom in a marriage.

Ibsen's A Doll's House of 1879 never seems dated but Candida of 1898, Shaw's answer to A Doll's House, does.  Candida is spirited, but not independent-minded, unlike Nora as her personality emerges in A Doll's House.   In A Minister's Wife, as in Candida, it all comes down to a very simplified view of who protects whom in a marriage.  I find particularly irksome that the resolution of the story -- in the play and musical version -- infantalizes the mature Morell;  to me, this comes across as one of Shaw's peevish complaints about women, masked as a "modern" story of women and independence.

A Minister's Wife  plays at the Mitzi E Newhouse theater at NYC's Lincoln Center Theater.  For information and tickets, click on live link.  

Yvonne Korshak  

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Go Back To Where You Are by David Greenspan, directed by Leigh Silverman, Playwrights Horizons

... transformations ...

The setting, the deck of Claire’s beach house around Montauk, on the East End of Long Island, is delightful and the play is pleasant in a summery way well into it, with sun shining on the deck, the ocean near by, and a touch of the magic of time travel. Lunch is being prepared, conversations swirl, tensions emerge among the characters to keep things interesting. Claire's a successful actress while her friend and fellow actress, Charlotte, has to scramble for parts. Tom’s a successful producer, on hand because he’s working with Claire on her next play, but he and his partner Malcolm are at odds because of Tom's compulsive promiscuity.  

Then, in a scene shift, we meet Passalus, who once lived as an actor in Ancient Greece: now God (why not Zeus?) sends him emphatically, and as way to earn his release from purgatory, to our contemporary world to straighten out the relationships of this particular Hamptons gathering.  
 
To be able to fulfill his assignment, Passalus arrives on Claire’s deck disguised in the form of a chatty 72 year old woman with an English accent -– nobody’s sure where she came from or why but the point isn’t pushed –- English accents are so protective. David Greenspan, a brilliant performer, and inevitably hilarious at playing women, plays Passalus in this, his play. 
 
But instead of simply doing what God commanded, Passalus falls in love: with Claire’s son, Wally, a pleasant young man but, brooding over a lost love, a determined loner. But for Passalus to be able to take long walks on the beach with Wally, and to woo him, the guise of an old lady just won’t cut the mustard. Passalus changes himself into the male actor he really is -- or was back then in Ancient Greece -- and, as needed, transforms himself back into the old lady.  Greenspan changes from male to female and back again at the drop of a hat –- in mid sentence, no costume change needed for him to be convincing. So there’s lots of fun here with confused identities.
 
Abruptly, the play becomes emotionally intense as Passalus, smarting from Wally’s rejection, grieves mightily, about Wally and, more generally, about the transformations of time -- becoming an aging, wrinkled actor whose lost his looks, lost his appeal and, as he sees it, is fated to be unloved and alone.  We’re not prepared for the shift in tone, and the emotions seem too raw.
 
Then, though nothing happens to explain it, Wally changes his mind and we’re given to think that Wally and Passalus will live happily ever after -- or at least for a reasonably long time.  And almost everybody else’s relationship problems are resolved, too; Tom, formerly driven to promiscuity, will henceforth be faithful.  Really?  How?  We don't see it.     And almost out of the blue (there was an early, unexplained phone call but that seems like a mechanical plant) we learn that Claire will be dead of cancer in a year.  Huh? That resolution is unsatisfying because it’s so arbitrary – i.e., why did the playwright do that when he could have done this or the other?
 
In alternating between Passalus the actor from ancient Greece acting as a contemporary man, and the 72 year old English Lady, Greenspan pulls off a fine tour de force;  he’s such a fascinating performer that you watch him even when he’s in the background and not part of the action.  Among the other fine performances, Lisa Banes is wonderful as Claire – timing, wit, drama, stage presence, she has everything and it’s a privilege to see her.
 
Miscellaneous:  Speaking of transformations ... I wondered why Greenspan names his character Passalus?  Looking up the word, I found it's the name of one of a pair of thievish scamps in Classical mythology, the Kerkopes brothers, who for punishment, are transformed into wrinkled, old, monkey-men, as in Ovid's long poem of transformations, Metamorphoses -- and as Passalus feels he's become in his moment of agonized despair in the play.   If that not enough of an explanation, it's also the name of a certain horned beetle.   P. S. The playwright Agathon wrote in the 5th Century B.C.   
 
In one of the breaks from sheer play to sly communications with the audience, Passalus/Greenspan suggests that Go Back To Where You Are may be a sketch, not a play, and I can see why he entertains the thought.
 
Go Back To Where You Are plays that Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater on West 42nd Street through May 1. For more information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

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INDIE/OFF-OFF-BROADWAY THEATER PANEL: The Land of Plenty -- New works in the NYC theater scene, "Sustaining New Theater"

... "Great Work Can Happen Anywhere" *...

March 22 I attended a panel** on "The Land of Plenty" -- New works in the NYC theater scene," with a focus on sustaining Indie/Off-Off-Broadway theater. The setting was a tiny theater on East 4th Street -- a street dense with theaters, tiny to ample.  The stage set behind the panelists, with hospital beds and overhead lights, is for the OYL Theater Company's current play, The Killing Room.  Thumps from above led Ianthe Demos, OYL's Artistic Director, to explain that the theater is dark on Tuesdays because of the karate class -- that's why we were here on a Tuesday.

And that says a lot:  small, determined and seizing upon obstacles as opportunities, to say nothing of committed, varied and talented:  these are powerful signatures of the Indie theater scene in NYC today.

What really matters:  I was struck, in the discussion, that though some problems were brought up, at any given moment the panelists were much more likely to be talking about the pleasures, thrills, gratifications of working in Indie--Off-Off-Broadway theater!  They were well aware of the issues and problems, and looking to find ways to solve them, but what they really cared about was what they were doing creatively.  What matters is "the work," as Daniel Talbot said.

Obstacles:  Actors Equity loomed as a nuisance factor in the course of the evening, in particular rules on numbers of performances permitted -- Indie would like longer runs -- and strictures against taping performances.  Equity's rules are in their way -- antiquated and certainly not designed for the issues of current Indie theater.  Fiscal problems came up.  "I would like to be able to pay my playwrights $10,000," said Demos.  But the speakers invariably spun off from these "negatives" to their satisfactions and excitement about "the work."

Theater as nurturing "home":  Several panelists stressed that Indie theater plays an essential role in developing new plays and nurturing new playwrights -- "Playwrights learn by being produced," said playwright Crystal Skillman.  Several emphasized Indie theaters can provide an important "home" for theater artists -- August Schulenburg spoke with pride of the generative "home" environment his theater, Flux, provides for new plays and playwrights -- Skillman agreed with enthusiasm! 

Strengthening Off-Off-Broadway: Schulenburg suggested a unifying organization with perhaps some theater-sharing.  How about an intra-theater flex-pass that would encourage theater-goers to get to know a variety of Indie theaters?  Strengthening and encouraging connections between Off-Off and Off-Broadway;  this already happens informally since some people involved in Off-Off-Broadway, including some panelists and audience members, have "day jobs" and other connections with Off-Broadway.  "Don't miss a chance to talk about your work," said Skillman, "talk about it anywhere and everywhere, in and out of NY!"

Broad View:  One might expect people so dedicated and involved in their tough work might wear blinders to quality beyond their immediate world but not these creative artists.  The panelists were not at all parochial.  They enjoyed talking about fine works they'd seen at well established Off-Broadway theaters such as Public Theater and Manhattan Theater Club -- although they didn't spend much time on that, and it wasn't the point of the evening.  I hope those working in the established Off-Broadway theaters, and Broadway theaters, have the same broad view.

*"Great work can happen anywhere," Talbott said in discussing connections between Indie and Off-Broadway.  Yes!  That happens to be one of my most deeply held beliefs, and by the way, I'll go anywhere, Off-Off-, Off- or plain vanilla, where I think there'll be something good.  Off-Off-Broadway today is a land of astonishing plenty and we on hand in NYC are fortunate to enjoy the bounty.  I wish even more people realized that. 

**The panel:  Zack Calhoun, actor and playwright;  Ianthe Demos, director, Artistic Director One Year Lease Company (OYL);  Alan Lockwood, theater critic, writer and cultural commentator;  Sarah McLellan, arts administrator;  August Schulenburg, playwright, actor, director, and Artistic Director of Flea Theatre Ensemble;  Crystal Skillman, playwright;  Daniel Talbott, actor, playwright, teacher, Literary Manager Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Artistic Director Rising Phoenix Rep.

Yvonne Korshak

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Double Falsehood by William Shakespeare* and John Fletcher*, Adapted by Lewis Theobald, Directed by Brian Kulick, Classic Stage Company

A rumored connection to Shakespeare's the thing here -- not the play.

Is Double Falsehood  based on a play Shakespeare wrote* in collaboration with John Fletcher,* that has come down to us through an 18th-century adaptation by Lewis Theobald?  Classic Stage would like us to entertain that possibility.  It's worthy to examine Shakespearean controversies but -- theater is theater and this is not a good play.  And there's nothing of Shakespeare to experience in it.

In Valencia, Spain, Roderick, the older son of the Duke is dutiful and responsible while the younger brother, Henriquez, is a rake.  Henriquez, out of town, sends Julio to collect money from the Duke and, having gotten his good friend out of the way, proceeds to woo Julio's beloved, the well-born Leonora.  Attracted at the same time ("double falsehood") to virtuous, lower class Violante, he rapes her onstage (Shakespeare?).  Leonora's father tries to force her to marry Henriquez, and Julio, returning in time to interfere with the wedding, is bested in a fight by Henriquez (?) and sent on his way, while Leonora faints and her father discovers her suicide note in response to the hateful wedding prospect.

Julio becomes crazy, ranting in the wilds and stealing food from shepherds, while Violante, disguised as a boy, is servant to a shepherd who, realizing she's female, threatens her sexually, though she's spared by the arrival of Roderick.  He's there though, actually, to help Henriquez steal Leonora from her refuge nunnery (and Roderick's the good brother ?).  He speaks about honorable action but (with inconsistency, not complexity of character) we see him collaborating with Henriquez to violently abduct Leonora.  Somehow, though (somehow?) they all arrive back at the ducal palace where Julio is reunited with Leonora, and so is Henriquez with Violante who, we understand, is about to marry her rapist (?).  I felt sorry for the actress, Mackenzie Meehan as Violante, who had to stand there and make that look like something having to do with Shakespeare.  There's no girl for Roderick, even though he's the first born and his father's heir (?).

The characters are thin conventions;  the only one with any interest is Henriquez because he's nasty, and played with vigor by Slate Holmgren, though Henriquez lacks the depth of characterization of Edmund in Lear :  he's melodramatic rather than driven.  As questioned (?) above, and commented on by others,* several plot turns seem not only un-Shakespearean but anachronistic.  But what makes the play particularly dull to sit through is the language, flat, cliched and without metaphoric inventiveness.

The best thing about the production of Double Falsehood are the quotations from an interview with Jorge Luise Borges that Brian Kulick, the passionately committed and talented Artistic Director of Classic Stage, includes in his introductory essay to the play -- nothing like close contact with a fine writer like Borges.  But there's no contact with Shakespeare in Double Falsehood -- close or distant.  That one can point to crossed loves and girls dressing as boys and the fast changes of fortune -- well, that's pretty general.

* For a discussion of texts Theobald may or may not have had in hand that may or may not have related to Shakespeare in writing what Theobald claimed was his adaptation of a play he said was written collaboratively by Shakespeare and Fletcher, based on the story of Cardenio in Don Quixote, places to start are:  Classic Stage's introductory brochure, and the entries with bibliographies on Double Falsehood in Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia -- the Wikipedia article in its skepticism of the link to Shakespeare is very amusing.

Double Falsehood  plays at Classic Stage Company in NYC's East Village through April 3.  For more information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

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The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Eric Bentley, directed by Anya Saffir, music by Cormac Bluestone, Pipeline Theatre Company

Pipeline Theatre Company's Caucasian Chalk Circle is one of the best productions I've seen all season, if not the best.  It's a complicated and fascinating play within a play, fired by Brecht's moral passion, in which a visiting bard, The Singer, spins his tale to two work groups in Communist Russia contesting over control of a fertile valley.  A solution to the conflict -- a moral -- emerges from The Singer's dramatized story.

During a civil war, the Governor and his wife, threatened and rushing to escape, forget to take their infant, Michael, with them (the Governor's killed but the mother gets away).  A servant girl, Grusha, rescues the baby and, to save him from the Prince, flees to the mountains pursued by the Prince's soldiers, the Ironshirts.  Grusha's ingenuity, stamina in crossing vast distances through the cold Caucasus mountains with the child in a sack slung from her shoulders, and courage in the face of obstacles can only be compared to the flight of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Thrust out of a brief refuge in her brother's rural house, Grusha finally agrees to marry a villager who's on his deathbed so that she and the baby can have a roof over their heads.  But after the wedding, the Civil War ends and her husband, no longer threatened by the draft, wakes up hale and hearty!  She's stuck with a live husband -- just when her true love, the soldier Simon, released from war duty arrives to find her married to someone else (though her marriage is, luckily, unconsummated).

Also now that war's done with, Baby Michael's mother has decided she wants her child back -- after all Grusha's huge sacrifices for him and the love she bears him.  Back in town, we meet one of the most fascinating characters Brecht created, Azdak -- for his story check out the play.  But Azdak through a convoluted series of events becomes a Judge who in an erratic and corrupt way tends to favor the poor and the oppressed.  When the case comes before him of which is the "real mother," Grusha who took care of the baby, or the birth mother, Azdak devises a solution reminiscent of the Judgment of Solomon: you can bet the one who loves him most wins and you can bet that's Grusha.  Things work out well also for Grusha and Simon.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle has a vast number of characters and the many actors, except for The Singer, play multiple roles.  The acting is without exception, and without even a moment's lack of focus or concentration (not anywhere, and I was in the first row and in arm's reach of the actors) exceptional:  professional, well-trained, moving.  Three parts are particularly key.  Grusha experiences the gamut of human emotions and experiences, and Maura Hooper, in this huge role, expresses these whether subtle or large scale.  The part of Grusha is so central that the success of the play truly depends on it and Ms. Hooper carries it off with great stage presence and charisma.  The roll of Azdak is similarly key in the later part of the play where Gil Zabarsky in the part is powerful, rakish and hilarious.  And throughout Michael R. Piazza as the Singer bridges the episodes with a voice brimming with thoughtful tenderness;  his face constantly reflects the experience of taking in the events he's describing.  But in truth the same could be said of everyone -- these are such good actors!

Talk about production values!  Using, well, not a lot -- beams, rope, a ladder, a large and wondrously ragged piece of cloth, the designers of this off-off Broadway production conjure up vast distances in a varied landscape, from city to rural mountain villages, treacherous bridges crossing precipitous valleys -- I could only think, Spider-Man eat your hat.  

The puppet that represents Michael as a toddler has a refreshingly original look and conveys the fluctuating vitality and unease of the young child.  The puppets of the men hanged up there are bedraggled and poignant.  The music, both in the background and accompanying Brecht's songs suggests Russian folk songs and Kurt Weill -- just right.

But what about that solution to the conflict -- the moral of the story? 

Brecht drew upon an old Chinese play for Caucasian Chalk Circle but made an important change:  in the physical tug-of-war between the child's birth mother and the woman who cared for him, the birth mother in the old Chinese story spares her child by releasing her hold on him, while the woman who cared for him would tear him apart.  It's reversed here:  Grusha, who has cared for him, puts her own desire to possess him second and acts upon what's best for the child -- she let's him go -- while the birth mother in her selfish urge to possess him would tear him limb from limb.

From here, Brecht segues into lyrical poetry about possession, expressing the view that those who nurture and take care of things are the ones who should own them.  Here, Brecht is expressing his Marxist point of view;  he's writing about property, and his view that ownership should be in the hands of those who do the work, like Grusha.  This idea came across with particular force in a staged reading of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Classic Stage Company a couple of years ago:  if I hadn't heard it there, I would have missed it here.  There's so much stage action toward the end of this production that the lyrical and visionary Brechtian poetry, the play's poetic peak, is interrupted, and Brecht's idea of ownership does not come across clearly.  Too much weight is given to the importance of people being "good" -- which Brecht didn't much trust anyway -- and too little to his political purpose and view.

Nevertheless this is a richly realized production ofThe Caucasian Chalk Circle.  It's so good I can hardly wait for what Pipeline Theatre Company does next!

The Caucasian Chalk Circle  plays at the John and Seward Johnson Theater at Theater for a New City in NYC's East Village through March 19.  Click on live link for more information and tickets.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... scroll down pasts photo, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.

 
Left, Maura Hooper as Grusha, Center (above), Gil Zabarsky as Azdak, (below), Glen Hergenhahn as Shauwa, Right, Jacquelyn Landgraf as the Governor's Wife (the birth mother), far right Sam Dash as Soldier.  Photo: Ahron Foster

Cactus Flower by Abe Burrows, based on a play by Barillet and Gredy, directed by Michael Bush, Daryl Roth Productions and Stonemill Productions

.. if you want to have a good time ...

Cactus Flower is an engaging, delightful light comedy, beautifully presented currently at the Westside Theatre.  I'm sure the whole audience left smiling and happy -- as I did.

The show is placed in the 1960's against an appealing set of the period that morphs easily as dentist's office, to studio apartment, to a Hernando's Hideway type of cocktail lounge -- all against a stylized and invigorating New York skyline featuring the Empire State Building.  Here's the situation:  Dr. Julian Winston, an attractive, successful -- and unmarried -- dentist keeps his mistress, Toni, on a string by claiming he has a wife and two children.  Toni, though expresses -- dramatically -- that she's become fed-up with being the "other woman" so Winston, to avoid losing her, promises to divorce his wife to marry her.  Only has has no wife.  This might not seem a problem but Toni, with her own style of virtue, and not wanting to be a wicked home-breaker, insists on meeting the wife to make sure the wife's as eager for a divorce as Winston says.  Clearly Winston has to come up with a "wife," which he does by persuading his prickly, prissy Nurse/Receptionist, Stephanie, to play the part.

The pay-off is one funny scene after another based on mistaken identities and mispalced expectations.  The lines are witty and the actors are terrific.  Jenni Barber is adorable as the cute, young blond mistress -- she first appears in baby-doll pajamas and wears a fetching series of '60's miniskirts and boots in various scenes.  Maxwell Caulfield as the handsome dentist Winston, trying to maintain his customary control over events as they threaten to blow up in his face, delivers his lines with great timing and authority.

The key player here, though, who absolutely holds the show together, is Lois Robbins as Nurse Stephanie, and her wry humor, her comic timing, and her extremely funny but humanly believable transformation from uptight, tough-talking nurse in uniform -- one character says she looks like a band-aid -- to a mature, alluring, glamorous woman is perfect.  She deserves her mink!

The smaller parts are also well played -- timing is everything here, and when Robin Skye as Dr. Winston's seductive older patient shimmies up and delivers a line, it's impossible to resist laughing.

If this be escapism, make the most of it!  This show is classic fun!

Cactus Flower  plays at the Westside Theatre on West 43rd Street in NYC.  For further information and tickets, click on live link.

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down past photo, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you.

 L-R Maxwell Caulfield, Jennie Barber, Lois Robbins, Anthony Reimer in Cactus Flower.  Photo:  Carol Rosegg