Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Plays from Argentina and Romania
They do keep coming, those press releases from the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. And here's one more free event: next Tuesday, 6 November, at 6:30 p.m., MESTC will host a celebration (read: book party) and discussion of two new Segal Center publications, BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation and roMANIA After 2000 -- Five New Plays. The translator of the Argentine plays, Jean Graham-Jones, will be joined by the editors of the Romanian volume Dan Gerould, Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff. Both books will be on sale, I'm sure; there's more information on the event at the Segal Center Web site (scroll down for the details).
The BAiT festival at PS122 last November was one of the highlights of the 2006-2007 theatre season. I wrote about all four plays then at the ur-Superfluities Web site.
Posted at 7.08 pm in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
In coming to the end of the first month of Superfluities' fourth year, I took the opportunity to trace back some of the high points of the blog, as well as some of the low points. What I've written here has engendered some controversy, not to mention mystification and even anger and insult: the Organum (which has grown nearly to the size of a book itself) and the "95 Sentences" -- a kind of Kantian prolegomena to the Organum -- have been responsible for some of it, but interestingly, the threads of my current concerns have something of a logical progression, even if many of the ideas in them don't. Easily, they had their origin in my 2005 review of Saint Oedipus, though many of the ideas in that review were first elaborated upon in 2006 elsewhere. But 2006 did see the launch of the Organum, which itself isn't fully explicable without my continuing writing on Richard Foreman and Howard Barker. More recent Organum entries are here.
Something of a low point was reached earlier this year, when after having spent 2006 writing reviews (about 75 of them altogether) for this blog, the New York Times and nytheatre.com, a crisis of faith manifested itself following a review of Jan Fabre's Je Suis Sang, but I pulled out of it (though I still have days on which I feel the same ambivalence). As I had to, bearing in mind Beckett's imprecation to "fail better" and Howard Barker's courageous insistence:
I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistentAnd I ask
Does anybody want them?The answer comes back
Nobody at allSo I go on
I continue on from the point very much from which I started: with Oedipus and erotic tragedy; a few hundred reviews, six or seven plays of my own, a few other essays later, and this evening I hope to review the Greenwich Village 2007 Halloween parade. Not bad at all, really, and I've even started to get the files in order. So I go on. And a Happy Halloween to you, as well.
Posted at 11.11 pm in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
I'm looking forward to the New York premiere (it opens tonight) of Howard Barker's A Hard Heart at the Epic Theatre Ensemble, and in about a month the New York Theatre Workshop will present four Beckett plays: the two Acts Without Words, Rough for Theatre I and an adaptation of the television play Eh Joe. Not a bad finish to the year. But what intrigues me about all of these plays is that they all fall quite early on in the careers of these writers. All of the Beckett plays date from the first ten years of his career in the drama, and the Howard Barker play was first published in 1992, fifteen years ago.
Barker is still going strong, though Beckett obviously is not. The intrigue, though, lies in that a great deal of the innovation that these dramatists introduced into the form took place rather later in their development. With his 1962 Play, Beckett introduced the concision and idiosyncratic mise-en-scene that constitute his most lasting aesthetic achievement in the theatre; Barker's conception of the exordium, as well as his more incisive and disturbing stage poetry, have developed considerably in the past decade and a half. Why, then, the decision to produce these fairly early works?
The Beckett decision is not hard to figure. If you've got Mikhail Baryshnikov on your program of Beckett shorts, the last thing you do is stick him in an urn and tell him to sit still for twenty minutes. (This would also explain the presence of both the mime pieces.) The Barker situation is harder to suss. Of the four Barker productions we'll have had here in New York by the end of 2007, all of them will have been of older plays: the Potomac Theatre Project's No End of Blame dates from 1981; the American Theatre of Actors staged the 1988 The Possibilities; QED Productions presented the 1985 Scenes from an Execution. There are reasons to produce all of these, of course, and they're all worthy plays. But why these, say, and not the 2004 Dead Hands or the 2002 Gertrude -- The Cry? Why those Beckett plays and not Ohio Impromptu and What Where?
Most dramatists mature over time; if we were to not produce any O'Neill plays beyond the middle of his career, we'd be stuck with Marco Millions and Dynamo. These early plays of O'Neill's may have some merit, but compared to his later, more mature plays, they're more in the nature of curiosities. (Speaking of curiosities, I'm particularly interested in Ian W. Hill's hint that he'll be staging one of Richard Foreman's first plays, Harry in Love, next August.) And for some dramatists, the preference is clear. Who wouldn't want Death of a Salesman over The Creation of the World ..., or A Streetcar Named Desire over Vieux Carre, regardless of the quality of these later plays?
In discussing some of these later plays of Barker's and Beckett's with other theatre professionals and critics, I gain a sense that they believe that these later works are somehow "ahead of their time" -- that audiences aren't ready for them, or at least, they'd be better prepared if they were exposed to the early work first. This is nonsense; artists are not singularly possessed of time machines that shoot them twenty years into the future, where they write plays that they then bring back to the present to sit in their drawers for another two decades. Every play, every work of art, is a product of its time. If the dramatist is ready for that expression, so is the audience.
Theatre continues to be infested with this backward thinking; the influence of Artaud and Grotowski continues to be primary in most contemporary performance, yet The Theatre and Its Double is 75 years old and Towards a Poor Theatre was published in 1968. As necessary and important as this work was at the time, it fails to foresee future developments of the art: the attempts at reasserting a lyrical language, a controlling individual aesthetic consciousness centered in words, in the midst of the Theatre of Cruelty, for example, and the completion of the attempt to present the fragmented narrative and character that began with Artaud and Grotowski, but didn't end there. Most other Western theatre practitioners have merely been rediscovering Stanislavsky for a media-saturated world, reintroducing a performative anachronism among video and television screens, themselves a surrender to the anti-theatrical.
If it weren't for the fact that the Epic Theatre Ensemble, the New York Theatre Workshop and the Potomac Theatre Project are all non-profit organisations, dedicated in their mission statements to new theatre and the avant-garde, I might understand that the more aesthetically ambitious work of these dramatists might be momentarily sidelined for their earlier, arguably more accessible work. But that's not so. There is also, for consideration, the argument that Milton Babbitt made in 1958 for the continuing development of new music in private performances or in the academy. But Babbitt's argument (the title of the essay, by the way, was foisted on Babbitt by the editor without consultation with him) holds water only if the operation of university research has not been affected by the same neo-capitalism that has affected every other public sector. (Interestingly, many of Beckett's later plays, and many of Barker's recent plays, have indeed had their world premieres within university departments rather than on the stages of commercial or subsidised theatres.)
I don't wish to unduly criticise or question the motives of these producing organisations. I'm very happy that these shows are being done at all, and it's heartening that these major organisations have thrown their weight behind these dramatists. A healthy skepticism, though, requires some dismay that both the Beckett evening and A Hard Heart are so front-loaded with celebrities, Baryshnikov, Akalaitis and Philip Glass in the case of the Beckett, Kathleen Chalfant in the case of A Hard Heart, especially given Barker's stated refusal to engage in marquee-name casting for his own productions. The proof is always in the pudding, but would these plays see these New York stages without the presence of these particular name artists?
Who knows what all this means? But it does seem to indicate that more aesthetically innovative work remains on the sidelines of the larger conversations about theatre and aesthetics. Perhaps we should begin to think of staging these works on other than commercial considerations -- for only one or two performances, say, instead of renting a theatre for four weeks to attempt a recoupment of expenses; most new music premieres take place for one night only, not for sixteen performances over four weeks. But for theatre, with its additional expenses, this is in most cases economically unfeasible. The other option is for these theatre companies to more assiduously cultivate the production of more ambitious work: to produce, not the most familiar or the most accessible, but the rarer and more challenging work to which they've offered dedication in their mission statements. If the plays are not ahead of their own time, they're not ahead of their audiences' either.
Posted at 8.55 am in /Openings
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 29 October 2007
Free this Thursday, 1 November, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, UBU -- European Stages editor Chantal Boiron and Act French editor Philippa Wehle will trade observations on the theatre capitals of Paris and New York and the health of the drama in both of those cities. Joining them will be Edward Baron Turk of MIT and Robert Lyons, artistic director of the Soho Think Tank. A good opportunity to catch up on developments on both sides of the Atlantic; the discussion will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, at 6:30 p.m. More information at the MESTC Web site here.
Posted at 4.12 pm in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 29 October 2007
Playwright Jeffrey Jones posted on his blog on 22 October an essay he wrote for the October 2005 issue of American Theatre, "Thinking about Writing about Thinking about New Plays" (thanks to David Cote for the link). Jones writes about the audience reception of new, "difficult" work, even when the critical atmosphere for it is better than it could be.
Jones makes several points worth considering, especially the role that both criticism and the presenting venues play in providing a context for work that might be considered avant-garde, experimental or otherwise "difficult." Both theatres and critics seem more interested in producing pullquotes for advertising than anything else. But in contemporary theatre, even the "top-drawer, high-powered, literate criticism -- which doesn't mean they can't be fun and snarky and even perhaps a little heavy-going from time to time" that Jones praises is considered irrelevant; the aesthetic experience, goes the common wisdom, should stand entirely on its own. And there is something to this. But Jones is right in that somehow providing context for this new work, be it in newspaper columns, expanded programs or the blogosphere, is a means of advocating for the acceptance of this new work that extends beyond the superficial, facile responses that seem to be the common coin of theatre criticism in mass-market publications.
European stages are much better at this; I remember, particularly, a program for a Heiner Müller production, perfect-bound, that contained the text of the play, several essays and other material related to the production that the dramaturg had collected -- it ran to about 300 pages. But this was a state-subsidised theatre. And most of the museum catalogs that Jones mentions are published in association with major art publishing houses (primarily Abrams). At the current production of Philoktetes at the Soho Rep, the text of the play itself is available in the lobby for a cost of $5.00, which is a step in the right direction. (I also remember when playtexts used to be commonly available in the lobby of the Public Theater in the 1970s; after seeing A Prayer for My Daughter and Curse of the Starving Class, I purchased both on my way out of the theatre.)
Jones' suggestions could of course double back to bite him right in the contextualisation -- there is a profound anti-intellectualism infesting attitudes towards art and theatre, as well as the nation generally -- and Jones himself confesses that the perceived need for this contextual information might lead to charges of elitism:
Theatre is so afraid of seeming "elitist" that it often pretends to be dumber than it really is, then tries to mend the damage by claiming that somehow, within its precincts, the "challenging" will be made "accessible." Which is nothing but a fiddle, which an audience will recognize as a fiddle, thereby leaving all parties to the transaction feeling sheepish.
Is there really any reason not to appeal to intelligence -- or at least, to the level of intelligence which is assumed, say, by the New Yorker or the New York Times Book Review? Is anyone likely to be offput by a presumption of intelligence? Is it possible that major American cities do not host even a few thousand people who would want to see new, strange, unusual plays -- people who might find the very invitation bracing -- as long as it came with the assurance that they would also be provided with the terms and concepts that would allow them to follow such current explorations at the forefront of theatre?
Well, I don't know; intelligence presumes disciplined thinking about art and aesthetics, and there seems to be little taste for that these days. And though there is need for it, it's no real replacement for the individual's experience of the aesthetic epiphany that would lead to studying, and seeing, more difficult work, as Howard Barker describes in his first prologue to The Bite of the Night:
They brought a woman from the street
And made her sit in the stalls
By threats
By bribes
By flattery
Obliging her to share a little of her life with actorsBut I don't understand art
Sit still, they said
But I don't want to see sad things
Sit still, they said
And she listened to everything
Understanding some things
But not others
Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again, saidIf that's art I think it is hard work
It was beyond me
So much beyond my actual lifeBut something troubled her
Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friendsSit still, she said
And again, she listened to everything
This time understanding
different things
This time untroubled that some things
Could not be understood
Laughing rarely but now without shame
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again saidThis is art, it is hard work
And one friend said, too hard for me
And the other said, if you will
I will come again
Because I found it hard I felt honoured
The solution may lie somewhere between Jones and Barker, and Barker's ultimate faith in the individual audience member provides something of a conflict with that idea of "smart fun" that Jones mentions, especially when it comes to a genre as difficult and challenging as tragedy, which eschews the common idea of amusement or "fun." But that means the dramatist, too, needs to do the hard thinking about art and aesthetics before she puts her pen to paper. And there's precious little of that, these days.
Posted at 9.35 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Friday, 26 October 2007
"The metaphor of childbirth which never seems to die." A poem, a play, is the chronicle of a perception: not the perception itself (which may be trite or complex, commonplace or rare, selfserving or altruistic), but a chronology of its emergence. This is how it exists in time, from beginning to end, and like birth, it is experience, not product. The poem describes it, its contours, as means of communicating its content.
The poem is procedure. The greatest task of the poet is discipline and care, not to write (or, at least, not merely write, and in this golden age of literacy everyone can), but to time, precision and specificity: to try to get it right the first time. Like an obstetrics manual, the poem must describe accurately, carefully, without baroque augmentation or unnecessary linguistic spectacle, the means to the expression of that unique perception. (In the realm of poetry and drama, spelling counts; one can't abuse or disregard the tools of expression without exposing our ignorance of their power, our lack of respect for written communication itself and those whom we're addressing, and the possibilities of experience words invite.) An obstetrics manual which indulges in platitude or moralism is quite as useless as a poem which does the same (at least, the poem's uselessness, if we take it as a given, is squared). At worst, inaccuracy and slop in the description can lead to death, of the child and its mother, or of the perception.
At any rate, and in any case, description can only follow experience; no amount of imagination, of frill, will be worthwhile if it is not grounded in direct perception. A poet might describe his own birth, but only if he has courageously sought it, and then that perception remains his own perception. He can only tell how he got there. The pain and the wound, too, remain his own. He cannot share, he cannot express, the self. "Self-expression" is not only meaningless, but, in the realm of art, impossible. Self is expressed in life, not in art. He can only instruct in the means of finding and exploring one's own.
Posted at 1.33 pm in /Organum
Permanent link to this story
Friday, 26 October 2007
The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being to a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.
It is a life dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement. In the actual work, a discipline, a service. Or, to utilize the metaphor of childbirth which never seems to die: the writer is the one who attends, who facilitates: the doctor, the midwife, not the mother.
Louise Gluck
"Education of the Poet"
Proofs and Theories
Ecco Press, 1994
Posted at 9.42 am in /Quotes
Permanent link to this story
Thursday, 25 October 2007
Two-Headed Calf: Drum of the Waves of Horikawa
An unlikely band of avengers
in Drum of the Waves of Horikawa
UPDATE: To correct the closing date for the show (17 November, not 17 October).
I have too much affection for the members and work of the Theater of a
Two-Headed Calf to be able to offer any Olympian objectivity about
their new show, Drum of the Waves of Horikawa. The low-comic,
high-camp epic, which brings together kabuki, Preston Sturges and punk
rock, is based on a samurai revenge drama by Chikamatsu, and the company
is in full everything-
Performances at HERE run through 17 November; there will be post-show discussions on selected evenings through the run, and on Sunday, 4 November, at 6:00 p.m., a guest panel will discuss the role of music in both Kabuki performance and Western theatre. Tickets and schedule information here.
Posted at 8.31 am in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Adam Rapp: Bingo with the Indians
Bingo with the Indians, a new play by Adam Rapp, begins performances at The Flea Theatre on Thursday, 25 October; it runs through 22 December. Rapp, whose 2006 play Red Light Winter was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, offers a story in which, according to the press release, "a disgruntled East Village theater company descends upon a small New England town with a plan to pay for their next production -- heist the local bingo game."
More information on Rapp and the play here; tickets and schedule information here.
Posted at 9.26 am in /Openings
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 22 October 2007
New York Theater Review Fundraiser
Just a reminder that, if you've got $25.00 or more burning a hole in your pocket and nothing to do tonight, you might drop by PS122 for the annual fundraiser for the New York Theater Review; I wrote the introduction for the 2007 edition. The fundraiser for the 2008 edition should be terrific; among performers at the fundraiser will be The Rising Fallen, the New York Neo-Futurists and members of the Flux Theatre Ensemble. More information is available at the NYTR Web site.
Posted at 8.55 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 22 October 2007
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Hitler: A Film from Germany
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, with
Heiner
Müller, was one of Brecht's most talented pupils, and nowhere is this
more evident in his 1977 film Hitler: A Film from Germany, which
will receive its first U.S. DVD release tomorrow. The seven-hour film (in
four parts, originally made for television) is a unique document, an essay
about the simultaneous rise of the modern totalitarian state and the
emergence of technological mass-media; in some ways it out-Adornos Adorno.
Susan Sontag called it "The most extraordinary film I have ever seen," and
most viewers will share that conclusion.
It is not an easy film to watch; broadly presentational rather than representational, it's neither documentary nor fiction, but a long meditation on the means by which mass media has served the evolution of the democratic nation-state into a totalitarian playground, manipulated by the compelling, moving film-and-video image and those who control it. Syberberg examines the ambivalent nature of German Romanticism, especially as it emerged in the operas of Wagner (Syberberg's film of Parsifal muses further on this nature), to simultaneously affect both the fascist and the democratic mind. The film is in 22 scenes or "tableaux" set on a soundstage, rear-projections serving as landscapes before which the detritus of twentieth-century history is lovingly handled and considered by the fine performers, especially Peter Kern. Hitler emerges as a man, but also as a face stuck on a girl's doll and a ventriloquist's dummy (who speaks through Hitler?).
At its price (the film is available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore), it may be a while until I can get to it again, but many of its images haunt me nearly 30 years after I'd first seen it. I'll look forward to seeing it again. I wrote about it in 2003 for the original Superfluities blog; my short notes on the film are below.
Ladies and gentlemen, now that we're rid of the Kaiser and God -- off we go.
The Song of Songs, the greatest story ever told. Let's give him his chance, let's give ourselves our chance. Taboos, this show's about taboos. The greatest show of the century, big business, the show of shows ... No human story, but a history of humankind, no disaster film, but disaster as a film. The end of the world. Deluge, the cosmos biting the dust.
So announces a circus barker at the very beginning of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany. After five years of preparation, shot on a single soundstage in four weeks on a $500,000 budget, the seven-hour-plus film infuriated audiences around the world and finally infuriated American audiences when Francis Ford Coppola financed a roadshow tour in 1978/1979, needlessly nailing home the point in retitling the film Our Hitler, which was its title when I saw it at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre for the first time.
Filmmakers had dealt with Hitler and the Holocaust before, of course. The television series Holocaust dates from the same period; a few years before, Alec Guinness(!) had starred as Hitler in a docudrama about the dictator's last few days in a Berlin bunker. But except for Susan Sontag's essay on the film, reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn, the work slipped out of sight following its late-1970s run.
That may have been its destiny. Hitler: A Film from Germany is an attempt to divorce Hitler and the Third Reich from a simple narrative and historical summation through a marriage of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and the Brechtian alienation effect, an unlikely alliance but a profitable one: Film as the art form of the 20th century, the epic theater providing its principal dramaturgical devices. "I made the aesthetically scandalous attempt," Syberberg explained, "of combining Brecht's doctrine of the epic theater with Richard Wagner's musical aesthetics, of linking the epic system as anti-Aristotelian cinema with the laws of the new myth."
Hence a circus metaphor; hence depth through duration; hence the episodic quality of the film. Hitler: A Film from Germany is a long series of monologues, film clips, puppet shows and tableaux, motifs emerging and re-emerging from episode to episode. Syberberg's most fascinating technique is to strip even these devices of their ability to enchant by laying them bare as cheap circus tricks. The "puppets" (no more than dolls, really, of Hitler, Goebbels and other historical and symbolic figures) are clumsily manipulated and their lines spoken on-screen by live actors. Even the device of quotation is exposed. In "Part I: The Grail," Austrian actor Peter Kern, costumed and made-up as Hitler (though Kern's considerable girth undermines the illusion of impersonation), delivers the final monologue of the child sex murderer in Fritz Lang's 1933 film M. Kern's delivery is overdramatic, like Peter Lorre's; Syberberg's parallel explicit; but in this shameless theatricality he makes the ease of narrative suspension-of-disbelief ambivalent. We must ask ourselves: What are we watching here? Any film student sees the cultural significance of M to inter-war Germany; what does it mean to make this significance over-explicit in post-war Germany? Does it make our interpretation of M (and, for that matter, Hitler the film and Hitler the figure) easier, or are we made to face our mythologizing tendency to distance our most unpleasant natures from ourselves as observers?
The film is now available on the Internet at Syberberg's Web site. It is a chamber opera, in many ways, demanding intimacy, and so works better on the small screen of television (and the computer monitor), perhaps, than it does on the large screen of the Walnut Street Theater. Until an enterprising American distributor sees his way clear to releasing the film on DVD, it's the best we can get now, but it's far more than we've had since the film dropped from sight in the early 1980s.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Film
Permanent link to this story
Sunday, 21 October 2007
Molière/Ivo van Hove: The Misanthrope
The Misanthrope. Text by Molière, translated by Tony Harrison. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Production design by Jan Versweyveld. Costume design by Emilio Sosa. Sound design by Raul Vincent Enriquez. Video design by Tal Yarden. Dramaturgy by Bart van den Eynde. Stage manager: Larry K. Ash. With Bill Camp (Alceste), Jeanine Serralles (Célimène), Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jason C. Brown, Amelia Campbell, Joan Macintosh, Alfredo Narciso and Thomas Jay Ryan. Running time: 110 minutes, no intermission. A production of the New York Theatre Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director. At the NYTW, 79 East 4th Street, now through 11 November. Tickets and schedule information here.
As in the greatest comedies (like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale), the reunions and redemptions of The Misanthrope's final curtain are hard-won. After the rise of the bourgeois class in the mid-seventeenth century (and Molière's career fell squarely within that time), the scene of comedy shifted from forests and the court to middle-class living rooms, and witty, comic observations of consumption and middle-class morality replaced more flighty metaphysical considerations of identity and love. The reunions and redemptions are particularly hard-won in director Ivo van Hove's new 21st-century perspective on the play in the New York Theatre Workshop production running through 11 November. The upper-middle-classes are still in for it, but, like Shakespeare, Molière is uncompromising in running through the foolishness of his lovers before giving them their final due of love. So is van Hove. And sentiment has no place.
The first thing one notices about Jan Versweyveld's design is that it's all gray and black, all right angles: the stage is framed and lit coolly, not an element out of place. (Until the final curtain, the unflattering white light from fluorescent fixtures is, well, unkind to the human face: every detail and pore, in Tal Yarden's video close-ups of the performers, is visible via a large video screen on the upstage wall.) And that's as it should be; Molière's Alceste, the unyielding Bill Camp, is all about honesty, people shorn of physical and moral cosmetics.
In the interests of space and time, we'll take the plot of the play, among the greatest and most frequently revived of French comedies, as read. Van Hove opts for Tony Harrison's translation, a straightforward, actable rhyming verse translation possessed of an easy but not facile wit, much freer and more speakable than the commonly available Richard Wilbur version, and for the most part van Hove stages it straight up. For all of the attention that's been given to van Hove's experimental, avant-garde reputation, there's nothing here that seems unnecessarily tacked-on, nothing that doesn't emerge organically from the play.
Even the use of video is particularly apt. Comedy is quite often about the ironic distance between private behavior and public morality, and it only makes sense that, in the age of the picture-snapping cell-phone and the palm-sized digital video recorder, the barriers between bedroom and livingroom, between the street, the foyer, the theatre and the backstage dressing room become more porous, and video is the tool for this. It's especially appropriate here, as Alceste seeks to tear simple facile behaviors from friendship and love; he does so to reach the true core of friendship and love beneath. Honesty is not truth; nor is the destruction of privacy via technology a means to honesty and emotional or political security; often it's merely an occasion for shame. It's Alceste's comic failing, of course, that honesty sets nobody free, least of all him, despite his insistence that the brutally honest life is the only authentic means of existence.
Bill Camp and Jeanine Serralles in
Ivo van Hove's production of The Misanthrope
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
Van Hove locates the growing exteriorisation of contemporary life in its two most conspicuous expressions: its urge to consume and its urge to waste. Alceste, always the self-consciously honest man, makes his physical comment on the age of consumerism by literally rolling in the food and its wrappers at a particularly wasteful buffet party early in the play; later on, he hauls the detritus, the garbage of the wasteful society onto the clean floor of the stage. They serve as signifiers of the emotional consumption and garbage of contemporary lovemaking: shame, jealousy, all the destructive and degrading emotions that love and passion can evoke are scattered across the stage, physically as well as linguistically. So when Camp's Alceste, broken by jealousy and rage, makes his final approach to Jeanine Serralles' wild but tender Célimène, offering his love, he rises from the trash-heap that he's created around himself and approaches her, a complete physical and stinking mess, offering all: and his reward, as it should be in comedy, is her acceptance of him as he accepts her. It is a brutally touching and entirely honest moment.
And it's a beautiful moment because of the performances of Bill Camp and Jeanine Serralles. Camp, especially, brings a stoic dignity and sublime presence to his role, finding the profound pain and wounded abyss in a man who strips himself of all his illusions (one would like to see him take on Lear sometime, and sooner rather than later, so that he could invest that most tragic of stage characters with the physicality it so desperately requires); Serralles, as a woman unable to give up her vivacious physicality in society and live like a hermit with Alceste despite her love, demonstrates as profound an ambivalence, unable to commit to a permanent love; her emotional gestures to him are tentative, despite her determined physical gestures of desire. Of course, this is Molière, and I should also point out that both performers are hilarious in the midst of the knockabout physical farce that threads through the production.
In his notes on the play, van Hove describes his conception of The Misanthrope as hopeful: citing the work of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, van Hove notes the influence on this production of the concept of the "liquid life," in which family, work, social relations have all become more fluid. For van Hove, "It is important that we are not judgmental about this liquid life," which renders his revisioning of The Misanthrope more than a satire of contemporary love and society. Funny (often very funny), yes, even true to Molière's own conception of his own times. Hardly avant-garde or experimental, van Hove brings a kind of hyperrealism to the play. It's a brilliant production, a production of a nearly 400-year-old play that speaks to the life that goes on on the street, outside the theatre, in 2007.
Posted at 9.13 am in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
Thursday, 18 October 2007
What she knew. To "write what you know," for a dramatist or for that matter for any other creative artist, is an easy trope to disseminate in the classroom or textbooks about writing. Creation is a form of knowing, of coming-to-know something that was previously unknown. If for the sake of argument we can even say that the word "knowledge" is appropriate, it is knowledge that comes through the process of creative discovery, of an imaginative entering into a landscape of the mind. Beauty is not an issue here; landscapes are not beautiful in and of themselves, they are cold hard things. Only the perspective of the observer can wrench a recognisable beauty from them. Knowledge is an examination of, a familiarity with, landmarks in that landscape. (And certainly discoverable, too, in music, as discoverable as these landmarks are as they're described with the spoken word.)
In that destructive trope is supposedly a recipe for creation: the easy definition, in that what is known is history, memory, science, experience. But that is not knowledge of a landscape; that is trivia, grist for the imagination. Bodies in that landscape, too, can be entered, discovered; the explorer finds recognisable features of the lay of his own land in the landscapes of others.
But it is possible to know. The subtitle of my new play about Jokasta is "What she knew," and it is only possible to explore that by entering her experience as the Sophoclean landscape presents it to me. Whether or not Jokasta is a fictitious character is immaterial; I can enter her body, her features, see a landscape through her eyes. And make notes, for the store of knowledge that I can then call upon when writing the words I would have her speak. But this is not study; it is experiencing imaginatively her body and landscape. Because desire is recognisable, a common human trait, I already have this path into her. (I've found Helmut Newton's portfolio Sex and Landscapes and Paul Cava's very different Children of Adam useful suggestions for my cartographic essay.)
But it is an imaginative path, education a dynamic process between perceiver and perceived. And it is amoral: Brecht's Galileo says "I must know," and it is the passion for knowing that leads him to defy the culture and the church. To find and express a new knowledge. Bearing Galileo in mind, it must be said that knowledge is not something one learns, one picks up in books, one sees through a telescope, or even within everyday experience or memory. It requires discipline and sacrifice. Knowledge is not to study, to remember, to learn. To know, the poet must dare.
Posted at 9.03 am in /Organum
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
AND ONE MORE (17 October): Tickets are on sale now for the Epic Theatre Ensemble's production of Howard Barker's A Hard Heart at Theatre Row's Clurman Theatre, performances beginning on 30 October and running through 2 December. Kathleen Chalfant plays Genius Riddler; the show is directed by Will Pomerantz. Tickets and schedule information here.
Once in a long while I'm asked for suggestions of which new shows may be worth seeing (though why they'd ask me is anybody's guess). Well, notices of upcoming productions from old favorites and new, all opening within the next few months, have been dropping into my inbox. Consider them suggestions.
First up, starting next week: Both Brooke O'Harra and Brendan Connelly have been twisting my arm to show up at next Wednesday's opening at HERE of the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf's New York premiere of Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, their exploration of the 18th century play by Chikamatsu. I've written about them several times: once to review their masterful Major Barbara for nytheatre.com, then again more generally about the company in The New York Times in June 2006. I'll be there, I'll be there, especially since both Brooke and Brendan have been leaving welts.
The last time I wrote about the Red Bull Theater, it was about their fine production of the Jacobean revenge drama The Revenger's Tragedy. It's been a while, but finally artistic director Jesse Berger has come around with a new show, this time Christopher Marlowe's Edward the Second, adapted by Garland Wright, scheduled to open on 11 December. Tickets are on sale now at Ticket Central. In the meantime you can amuse yourselves with the Red Bull's Revelation Readings series, featuring performers like Lynn Redgrave, Ellen McLaughlin and Michael Cerveris in new adaptations of classic plays.
My good friend Susan Bernfield at New Georges (home of last year's Dead City by Sheila Callaghan) reminds me that their current production of Maggie Smith's play Good Heif, directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde, runs through October 27. More on the play here.
Finally, the New York Theatre Workshop will follow up their production of The Misanthrope with Beckett Shorts, which opens on 5 December. JoAnne Akalaitis will direct Mikhail Baryshnikov and others in some of Samuel Beckett's more intensely physical short plays, including the Acts Without Words, Eh Joe and Rough for Theatre I. The original score is by Philip Glass. Tickets (when they go on sale on 2 November through TeleCharge) will go fast, no doubt. Put it on your calendar.
What I suggest? Well, now you know.
Posted at 6.43 pm in /Openings
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Philoktetes. Written, directed and designed by John Jesurun. Light design by Jeff Nash. Costume design by Ruth Pongstaphone. Stage manager: Andrea Jess Berkey. With Will Badgett (Odysseus), Louis Cancelmi (Philoktetes) and Jason Lew (Neoptolemus). Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission. A production of Soho Rep, Sarah Benson, artistic director. At Walkerspace, 46 Walker Street, New York, now through 28 October. Tickets and schedule information.
John Jesurun originally wrote his
Philoktetes in 1993-1994 for
Ron Vawter, who died of complications due to AIDS in 1994 at the age of
45. The play was first staged at the National Theatre of Mexico in 2000,
and Jesurun has directed productions of the play as far afield as Berlin,
Belgium and Japan, but it's taken until now for the play to premiere in
New York, as the opening production of Sarah Benson's first full season as
artistic director of Soho Rep. In choosing Philoktetes, Sarah has
opted for a play which centers around the condition of the pariah, a
difficult and demanding text that offers little respite from the suffering
of its central character. Visually it's a beautiful production, and
textually it finds a liquid, fluid American English lyrical quality to the
myth. It bodes well for Soho Rep, and for the condition of tragedy on our
stages generally.
Although Philoktetes may be best known to the West through the Sophocles tragedy, this is entirely Jesurun's; in stripping the play down to its three central characters, he has done away with Heracles' deus ex machina entrance and left Philoktetes, still in pain and suffering, in solitude at the end of the play. Otherwise the broad outlines of the myth inhere. It's interesting to note here that Philoktetes was one of two tragic heroes who achieve transfiguration in the Sophoclean versions, the other Oedipus in the groves of Colonus. Jesurun denies this easy transfiguration however, taking the hard way out of the pain and suffering to which the wounded Philoktetes has become eternal victim. In terms of the circumstances of the play's conception in 1993 for Vawter, it's a daring choice. Though AIDS is never mentioned in the play, the seemingly arbitrary and vicious visitation on Philoktetes finds its echo there, and the play's homoerotic undertones serve to broaden the human canvas of the myth.
Louis Cancelmi's Philoktetes has the requisite pride and anger for the role, though it on occasion seems untested, unseasoned; nonetheless he's still a match for Will Badgett's businessman Odysseus, with whom he engages in a series of intellectual and emotional debates through most of the text. Both Philoktetes and Odysseus share the knowledge of Philoktetes' shame and the Greek community's condemnation of his pain and stink; his screaming and the putrescence of his wound are what lead to his exile on the uninhabited island of Lemnos. The young Neoptolemus, Achilles' son, played by a subtly maturing Jason Lew, is new to this, and the so-called reversal and recognition in this play is entirely his. Philoktetes has provided an example for him of how suffering can touch love, and vice versa.
Jesurun has staged and designed his production of his own play with elegance. The effective video projections on the floor and a screen overhead are elemental, abstractions of sky and water, a cool ironic counterpoint to Philoktetes' hot, searing suffering, and the three mismatched chairs of the playing space, moving about the stage as Odysseus and Philoktetes duel as near-equals, are nonetheless precise in their variousness: the hotel-like comfortable discomfort of Philoktetes' chair is countered by the plain chair of Odysseus. Jesurun has wisely chosen to have his actors underplay the passions here, for the most part, and the production is largely without unnecessary affectation or anachronism. However, one of the funniest and most effective passages in the production is the final confrontation between Philoktetes and Odysseus, when Odysseus takes off his sportscoat, rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, for all the world like a preening, cheap Law & Order television detective. As clever as Odysseus is, however, the impassive Philoktetes, who has learned to embrace his suffering as a part of his bodily existence, is more than a match for him.
Philoktetes is left, at the end of Jesurun's version of the myth, in suffering but no longer in terror, accepting both his wound and his status as pariah, proud in his own way of his own humanity, knowledgable of it even as the community denies it to him. This acceptance, it's true, is a form of pride, but pride only became a sin with Christianity and especially Medieval Christianity. It was a later reading and interpretation of Aristotle's hubris that read the quality as a sin, and in Walter Kauffman's discussion of the term in his fine Tragedy and Philosophy he questions the status of hubris as a tragic flaw: a tragic quality perhaps, but a flaw? In the case of Sophocles' Philoktetes and Oedipus, it does not negate the possibility of redemption. Jesurun's Philoktetes is redeemed as well, but redeemed by his self-acceptance, the acceptance of his arbitrary wound.
Though the 2007-2008 New York theatre season is still young, to date the city has already seen the National Theatre of Greece's production of The Persians, as well as Theatre Gardzienice's Iphigenia at Aulis and now Jesurun's Philoktetes. It may be indicative of the status of the tragic form in the United States that it's taken Jesurun's play nearly 15 years to find its way to a New York stage, but despite its elitist foundation and the dismissal of the form by most American critics as either irrelevant or unnecessary, tragedy continues to speak to audiences who seek it out. More power, then, to Jesurun and Sarah Benson's Soho Rep, unafraid to meet that need for the tragic experience in their theatres.
Posted at 9.27 am in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 15 October 2007
The Wooster Group: Ghosts in the Text
In recognition of The Wooster Group's production of Hamlet currently running at The Public Theater, I offer here "Ghosts in the Text," an essay about the Group that brings together several posts regarding the collective that ran on earlier iterations of this blog:
My first experience with The Wooster Group (and these days, and given the technological wizardry for which the group has become known, it might be more accurate to call it an "interface") occurred on a cold winter night in late 1983 or 1984. The play was L.S.D. (Just the High Points), the group's reinterpretation of Arthur Miller's high-school stand-by The Crucible. Before entering the group's small 99-seat performance space, The Performing Garage, on Soho's Wooster Street, I thought I'd known The Crucible, but at the end of the 90 minute performance, I re-emerged into the cold night air realizing that, until that performance, I hadn't really known it at all.
I don't think my experience was unique. I had, unfortunately, seen a radically shortened version of the original three-part L.S.D., but enough of the original was left to allow some of that original production to shine through. Director Elizabeth LeCompte and the cast (which included original Wooster Group members Ron Vawter and Spalding Gray, along with Kate Valk, who joined the group as a seamstress a few years earlier) put Miller's text through a variety of twists and turns, staging it at a long conference table reminiscent of the 1950s-era HUAC hearings that had served as one inspiration for the play; and Valk's black-faced Tituba impressively drove home just that metaphysical hysteria that gripped the original Salem witch trials, its other obvious inspiration. It may, for all its inversions of Miller's own realist dramaturgy, have been the most loyal interpretation of the original text that had been produced until that time.
I also discuss several later productions of The Group, including House/Lights and The Emperor Jones. You can read the entire essay here.
Posted at 11.54 am in /Essays
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 15 October 2007
Chris Boyd of The Morning After and other publications spoke last month to South African playwright Athol Fugard; Peter Brook's 35th anniversary production of Fugard's Sizwe Banzi is Dead is running as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Says Fugard on language:
[No] two people ... speak in exactly the same way. We've all got a grammar of our own. A grammar and a dictionary of our own. ... Give me two people talking to each other. Or one person talking to an audience. And you capture character. Our character is in the way we speak more indelibly than it is in our faces, in our gestures, in anything else we do ... in how we dress. ... Language is how we affirm our existence. And there it is.
More from Boyd and Fugard at The Morning After here.
Posted at 8.54 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Friday, 12 October 2007
Jan Kott: The Memory of the Body
The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death. Jan Kott. Translated from the Polish by Jadwiga Kosicka, Lillian Vallee and others. 153 pages. Northwestern University Press, 1992. Now available from the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore.
Since my return to New York from Montauk it's been a slow few weeks, theatrically speaking; the invitations to openings are few (though the invitations I've received have been gracious and flattering). So most evenings are spent reading. And, to a large part, reading about theatre: plays and essays, mostly, including quite a lot of Greek plays, mostly in preparation for seeing them -- Iphigenia in Aulis last week, this week Philoktetes. As I sit in my apartment or on the subway reading through these scripts, I feel that I'm still participating in the theatre; I take the theatre with me on my commute or in my evenings. This integrates drama into my days and nights, when I'm away from auditoria. I'm also writing a lot about the theatre.
The experience of theatre and its
threads through everyday life were a part of Polish critic Jan Kott's
project as well. Especially in his later essays, for instance those in his
1992 collection The Memory of the Body, there is little or no
differentiation between body, quotidia and theatre, drama. The same
characteristics affect his earlier criticism (the insights contained in
Shakespeare Our Contemporary, The Eating of the Gods and
The Gender of Rosalind could not have emerged without Kott's
experiences in first Nazified then Stalinist Poland), but as he aged and
his body began to fail him, his essays became more intimate. The theatre
is a bodied art, and we all have bodies. Kott examined his more intensely
than most theatre writers, the way it moved through the streets of Poland,
Vienna and Korea.
Kott may be best remembered now for his influence on Peter Brook, Peter Hall and other directors, but it seems to be Kott that will last. For all that Brook is a fine director, there's also something of the charlatan about him, and there's something very cold about his books The Empty Space and The Open Door; his facile division of the art into Deadly Theatre, Holy Theatre, etc. seems simplistic when one recognises the broad multidimensionality, the personal risk and vision, of Kott's writing; a lot of Peter Brook's theory reads like a self-help book, as elegant and high-falutin as it most undoubtedly is. Hall is firmly of the institutional theatre now -- no more empty spaces for him without an elegant foyer and stars on the stage. Not that there isn't a place for this too, and not that Hall isn't a brilliantly talented director himself. But his diaries and his writing about Shakespeare are no match for Kott's incisive, idiosyncratic and (yes) lyrical dramatic consciousness.
"There are experiences one undergoes but does not talk about," Kott writes at the beginning of his essay on his own struggles with heart disease, "The Memory of the Body." "The experiencing of extreme situations should be remembered." Kott is primarily a critic, an abstractionist, though, and his training is in talking about things one does not -- or, perhaps, can not -- talk about. "An orgasm given by a body is inarticulate speech, a cry, quickened pulse, trembling, sweat. Right now I am trying to change this into discourse, but I know that there is an entire dimension that is inexpressible," he continues in the same essay. The struggle for both critic and dramatist is to not describe but to suggest the inexpressible, that bodied rhythm that is available to the theatrical experience in a way that is not suggestible in any other art form.
These late essays of Kott's are largely about sex and death, but about other everyday matters as well. In the first third of the book, Kott is on more familiar territory. There's a lovely, comic essay about the uselessness of dramaturgs (Kott was one himself for many years, so he knows whereof he speaks), and fine essays about Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz (introducing the idea of "lyrical friendships," which I find quite delightful and, more to the point, accurate), Kantor, Mrozek and Grotowski; his description of Tadeusz Kantor's I Shall Never Return at La MaMa E.T.C. in June 1988 would be a textbook example of how to write about avant-garde theatre were it not for Kott's inimitable personal insight, not to mention a length that would test the patience of editors at the New York Times and nytheatre.com both.
But this is a death-haunted book (Kott himself died in December 2001). The final essay is a lengthy disquisition on the Gilgamesh myth and its evocation of mortality, much on Kott's mind then, given his medical history. But his deepest insights are saved for his descriptions of pain and the heart, the nexus between sex and death. This is never far from eros, and Kott draws this final parallel:
We use two words in reference to the erotic: sex and love. Throughout the entire Greek and Roman tradition, the word eros or amor is used and each of these contains both concepts. What is essential is that need, desire, is given free from the outside, it is inborn, a consequence. It is, simultaneously, the need to join bodies and to join souls. I once introduced the concept of soul-bodies or body-souls which desperately seek one another. Which is to say that what is encoded in the body -- need and longing -- is also the soul. Soul-bodies in Eros are inseparable.
In the experience of death, in the actual experience of dying, you know that you die as a soul-body. I have no doubt about this. When the heart hurts and it hurts very intensely, then the soul-body or body-soul hurts. Maybe that is why the heart is a sign of love. And death -- you die alone in the world. You are in love with someone, and lose the very boundaries of your flesh. But you die in something that is not only you, because you die with everything all around. The soul and body are inextricably bound to one another.
"The soul flew from the body," goes a Polish folk song. In my dying the body falls away from the soul. Only the heart, in a great spasm of pain, clings to the soul to the very end.
If one were a gossip one might ask for more: descriptions of the experience from which these insights were painfully extracted. But these are precisely the experiences one "does not talk about"; the insights should be enough for us, and if they're not, that just says more about our own small-minded tendency to gossip and moral judgement than about Kott's expressions. And over the past several years in the New York theatrical critical sphere, the insights are lacking, theatre writers and critics seem to have become bored with theatre itself. In the print press, critics approach new plays as they would approach new cars, quick five-star ratings and descriptions of new features; in the blogosphere, fragmentation and lack of attention has led to a plethora of plugs, of quick hits here and there, of dull academic theorising, of political jeremiads. The uplift of shambling, careerist mediocrity is everywhere, in both arenas. (I'm almost tempted to say that there is too much room devoted to theatre in the daily press, if that's all there's going to be.) There is theatre, and there is life, but their essential codependence -- a codependence as intimate and catastrophic as the codependence of sex and death -- is ignored.
There are a lot of walks in Kott's more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott's thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre, not unlike composers like John Cage. It is in my broadest public statements, in my most intimate personal experience. In "The Memory of the Body," Kott demonstrates that this insight can continue to life's end -- which, for dramatist and audience both, is theatre's end as well.
Posted at 8.56 am in /Books
Permanent link to this story
Thursday, 11 October 2007
The function of language in eroticism undergoes a change ... . Language goes back to its roots, to the moment of its birth. Either it is nonarticulated, a cry and an onomatopoeic sound, as if it were only just learning the names of things and actions. Or it is articulated and then its function is magical, or akin to magic. The difference between a concept and an object, between a token and a thing, is blurred or disappears. Language becomes action, like in magic: it causes a thing or an action to exist just by naming it and gives it qualities that have been expressed in words. This erotic, or rather suberotic, language constantly breaks taboos. For taboos last longest in the sphere of language; they are almost invariably relics of an era in which the connections between a thing and its name were magical. ...
But the paradox and sadness of eroticism consists in the fact that its absolute fulfillment is not possible. Testing is possible only during the act itself. To possess means just that. But the moment the act is over, the partner and his/her body become separate again. The body is a stranger again, it exists for itself and not for me. The partner, real and created, the partner of the consummated act and the partner of imagination, becomes ambiguous again. He/she has to be tested again. And testing is possible only through a new act, through another appeal to the body. For the body is an essence and there is no other essence apart from the body. But the reduction to essence is possible only for a fleeting moment. The partner escapes again and cannot be permanently reduced to the body alone.
Jan Kott (Translated by Boleslaw Taborski)
"A Short Treatise on Eroticism"
The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Posted at 1.34 pm in /Quotes
Permanent link to this story
Thursday, 11 October 2007
Cy Twombly. Fifty Days at Iliam: Heroes of the Acheans, 1978. Oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas. 75 1/2 x 59 inches (191.8 x 149.9 cm). In the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The names are simultaneously familiar and distant, scrawls (not childlike or childish, but savage) upon a field. Here a bloodied battlefield, writ in blood, strange and bloodied letters. (The goddess Athena doesn't rank; her name is a gray pencilled scrawl, in its place overseeing the Acheans, but it is Achilles' name which seems etched in the flesh of the canvas.) What heroes, either shadows and vague associations or insistent figures and tearing of the skin?
Posted at 9.00 am in /Organum
Permanent link to this story
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Pornography, Sensation and Taboo
Andrew Field of The Arcades Project writes today of the thin line between sensationalism and transgression in the theatre:
There is an argument that in the sealed off space of theatre nothing is taboo. Separated as it is from the real world by the edge of the stage and a hearty round of applause, in the bubble of theatre, anything can happen without undermining the values we live by. Hence while transvestism out in the real world is a fabulous and (for many) uncomfortable challenge to our narrow conceptions of male and female, on stage it is the oldest joke in theatre. And it is interesting to note that in Bieto's Platform, the moment the first few claps signalled the end of the performance, the actress who had remained naked throughout the previous two hours was quickly covered by a robe. ...
... [What] else might we see on stage that would reach out into the stalls and prick us from our cosy, cosseted safety? What will remind us that actually we’re not so far from the real world after all, and have us squirming with discomfort?
Anything that toys with illegality seems to have the desired effect – jerking the audience into an acknowledgement that the stage is still part of the wider world and (most) of its laws. Someone carefully rolling a joint and that ... familiar smell wafting over the stalls would likely have people scanning their row nervously to judge the appropriate response.
Possibly, another alternative, one that similarly undermines that neat division between theatre and the real, might be to see someone genuinely suffering on stage. I was told recently of a solo show in which a performer delivered a monologue while drinking four bottles of whisky, lined up as an almost endless series of shots, glistening across the breadth of the stage. As the show got into its stride there were contented gurgles of laughter as the audience watched the performer slurring and swaying across the space. By three quarters of the way in the guy was unable to stand, collapsing on the floor with a loud, resonant slap. Now the audience were uncomfortable, gazing on helplessly, even desperately at an image of reckless, drunken suffering sprawled on the stage in front of them.
Although Andrew speaks of physical suffering here, I note that on-stage depictions of suffering generally – not the melodramatic suffering that one finds in most realistic or naturalistic plays, but a more spiritual, noumenal suffering that can only be revealed through a form and practice that extends beyond realism and naturalism – are additionally taboo. (The performance that Andrew describes in that last paragraph, though, seems like little more than an uncomfortable stunt, and the discomfort it provokes doesn't seem to have much significance, except in the sense that looking at films of police chases and crimes caught by security cameras have.) The depiction of suffering and tragedy detracts from the pornographic pleasure and shame that inheres in the sensationalistic stage tropes and moments that Andrew describes. Contemporary theatre has rendered eroticism (not pornography) and terror (not maudlin sympathy) taboo as well. The new puritanism rewards cheek and titillation, tickling the genitals. But it does not begin to approach the dark bodies and souls to which they're attached.
Read Andrew's entire post here.
Posted at 8.54 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Tuesday, 09 October 2007
G.W. Pabst: The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera. Directed by G.W. Pabst. Screenplay by Bela Balazs, Leo Lania and Ladislaus Vajda, from the play by Bertolt Brecht. Songs composed by Kurt Weill. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. Edited by Hans Oser. Art direction by Andrej Andrejew. With Rudolf Forster (Mackie Messer), Carola Neher (Polly Peachum), Reinhold Schunzel (Tiger Brown), Fritz Rasp (Peachum), Lotte Lenya (Jenny) and Ernst Busch (The Street Singer). Germany, 1931. Running time: 105 minutes. DVD released through The Criterion Collection and available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore, as is the Manheim/Willett translation. The Kurt Weill Foundation maintains this Web site with an extensive background and history of the play.
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? – Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
The streets and buildings are carved
from stone and eerily lit in G.W. Pabst's 1931 film of The Threepenny
Opera, available now from The Criterion Collection in a new
restoration. Designed with more than a glance to Expressionism, the film
retains the identification of Victorian London with Weimar Berlin; the
camera sinuously snakes, like Mackie Messer himself, through the
alleyways, basements and offices of the urban landscape. This is, easily,
a true black-and-white underworld. Mackie himself, while dapper and
well-dressed, is a rapist, arsonist and murderer; the whores are given the
most lush accommodations among the characters of this world. As Brecht
wished (despite a lawsuit he instigated to stop the film), it's no longer
the fun romp through a Guys and Dolls ambiance that it had become,
but an incisive critique of the bourgeois world, and it also retains the
sweet aura of desiccated sexuality that permeated the German theatre and
culture of the time. (Neher's Polly, through the first half of the film
wearing a tight, bright white wedding dress that seems to glow, is a
fetishistic object of false innocence and becomes, at times, even a more
central character than Macheath; this provides an echo of the tormented
sexuality present in Brecht's early plays like Baal, Drums
in the Night and Edward II.)
There are other ways, too, in which it's not the Threepenny Opera with which we're most familiar. Only half of the music is retained (most sadly, the "Tango-Ballad" in which Macheath and Jenny describe, in song, the circumstances surrounding the abortion of their child was dropped, for fear of censorship problems, early in the production process); the plot elements are rearranged and shifted, and, rather than a near-hanging, the film now ends with the four principal characters founding a bank. Mackie himself is a middle-aged, graying Rudolf Forster, not Sting nor Raul Julia nor Alan Cumming, three recent Macheaths. The film however does the singular service of preserving three of the most mesmerising performances from the original Berlin production – Neher, Lenya and Busch – and the musical direction is by Theo Mackeben, who also presided over the music at the 1928 Schiffbauerdamm premiere.
Pabst's Threepenny Opera is mostly his own; those who seek a truer rendition of the Brecht/Weill original will have to look elsewhere. (Unfortunately, the sparkling Columbia recording of the Richard Foreman/Stanley Silverman Threepenny Opera from the mid-1970s, which restored Weill's original score and orchestrations, remains out-of-print, as does the 1956 recording of the full score in the original German language, supervised by Lenya and something of a benchmark, for all its faults.) But Pabst does cut to the criminal core of the original, which continues to remain relevant. The DVD also contains an informative 49-minute documentary, featuring Eric Bentley, Weill expert Kim Kowalke, Pabst scholar Jan-Christopher Horak and Pabst's son Michael, about the origin and history of both the play and the film.
Posted at 9.11 am in /Film
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 08 October 2007
Mark your calendars: The fundraiser for the New York Theater Review, the annual roundup of activity in downtown theatre, is coming up on Monday, 22 October. This year, the hosts will be the good people at PS122. If you make your reservation and donate now, you'll save $5.00 on the $25.00 admission price. Editor Brook Stowe has a grand evening planned, with folks from the Flux Theatre Company and the New York Neo-Futurists scheduled to perform. And there's music, too: Are those the dulcet tones of The Rising Fallen I hear echoing in my ear?
On the Pinter watch, there's a rather pedestrian profile of the dramatist by Sarah Lyall that appeared in this past Sunday's New York Times, a promotional puff piece for the opening of Kenneth Branagh's remake of Sleuth, with a screenplay by Pinter, which opens on 23 November. For more, much less pedestrian thoughts on Pinter, though, there's Alison Croggon's incisive review of a new Adelaide, Australia, production of The Homecoming. The play is making the rounds; tickets are now available (for American Express cardholders; the rest of us will have to wait until 20 October) for Daniel Sullivan's new Broadway production. I wrote about The Homecoming recently here.
Finally, John Jesurun's version of Sophocles' tragedy Philoktetes, originally written for Ron Vawter (who died in 1994), opens at the Soho Rep this Saturday, 13 October. The show runs only through 28 October. Tickets are now available.
Posted at 8.57 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Sunday, 07 October 2007
Euripides/Theatre Gardzienice: Iphigenia at Aulis
Iphigenia at Aulis. Based on the play by Euripides. Text adapted and directed by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. Original music by Zygmunt Konieczny; adaptation of ancient Greek music by Maciej Rychly. Light design by Grzegorz Podbieglowski. Choreography by Julia Bui Ngoc. Costumes by Monika Onoszko. Sound by Maciej Znamierowski. With Mariusz Golaj (Agamemnon), Joanna Holcgreber, Marcin Mrowca, Karolina Cicha, Agnieszka Mendel, Anna Dabrowska, Charlie Cattrall (Benedict Hitchins) and Justyna Jary. In Polish, English and Greek (synopsis provided in program). Running time: 50 minutes. At The Annex at La MaMa E.T.C., 66 East 4th Street, New York, now through 21 October. Tickets and schedule information. The W.S. Merwin/George E. Dimmock, Jr. translation is available through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore.
Agamemnon,
Menelaos and the Greek armies are stranded in Aulis at the
beginning of the Trojan War; the gods will not send a wind to set them
asail until the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia is made. That
done, Calchas prophesies, the fleet will be swept along to Ilium and a
certain victory. Agamemnon, against his will, sends for Iphigenia with
word that, in Aulis, she will be married to Achilles. Iphigenia arrives,
accompanied by her mother Clytemnestra. Agamemnon continues to balk, but
the Greek armies, driven by bloodlust and visions of victory, demand that
the sacrifice be made. And so it is; and the Greeks sail on to Ilium, and
to a violent, devastating victory. The curse of the House of Atreus
follows them all.
It isn't Helen's beauty that drives Menelaos and the Greeks to sacrifice and violence. Beauty is a quality inherent in an object, a person; it is essentially static, inactive, it does nothing on its own except to attract the attention and admiration of the subject. Desire for the possession of the object of that beauty, however, is dynamic, and it is desire, not beauty, that provides the basis for the Trojan Wars (as well as, for that matter, most Greek tragedy). Tragedy itself is a weaving of the threads of desire and sacrifice. In Euripides' late Iphigenia at Aulis, first produced in the waning years of Greek tragedy, this weaving finds a dangerous center in Iphigenia. First, she is drawn to Aulis in expectation of the sacrifice of her virginity to Achilles; finally, she offers herself up as a bloody sacrifice of her life to the glory of Greece. Self-sacrifice is a form of desire fulfilled. This parallel makes the reading of Iphigenia at Aulis as an anti-war play extremely ambivalent. This ambivalence is a fatal fault of the otherwise spectacular and Dionysian Iphigenia at Aulis that the Gardzienice Theatre has brought to La MaMa E.T.C. for the next few weeks.
Directed and adapted by Wiodzimierz Staniewski and with an original score by Zygmunt Konieczny (and an interpretation of ancient Greek music by Maciej Rychly), the Gardzienice's Iphigenia at Aulis is a ritual, a sacred rite, precise in its choreography and bodied language. Each gesture here is a carefully sculpted example of the research that Staniewski and his company have conducted into folk and ancient ritual and music. Dressed in loose, delicate robes by Monika Onoszko, the performers dance an oratorio of the play, evoking what the program notes call a "[restoration of] tragedy from the spirit of music." Mariusz Golaj as Agamemnon, Joanna Holcgreber as Clytemnestra and especially Karolina Cicha as Iphigenia embody Staniewski's style of ageless, rehearsed bodied actions, simultaneously precise and violent. Golaj, angrily torn between his status as Army commander and his role as loving father, is all rage and indecision, his long white hair whipping over his shoulders in the violence of his conflict. Cicha first appears as Iphigenia as a weak, pale maiden in a wheelchair, barely able to stand. She comes alive when she sees her falsely-intended fiance Achilles, innocent desire wakened; once wakened, it is tranferred to her recognition of her own status as sacrificial object, just as willing to give her body to death as to Achilles. There is clear playfulness in her Dionysian madness, and the play ends in her sacrifice, a red scarf drawn around her neck as her father sharpens the sacrificial blade. (The coda, in which semi-nude women in a pale yellow half-light frenetically and rhythmically flail their upper bodies in paroxysms of terror and ecstasy, their bodies becoming moving light-sculptures in the near-dark, is breathtaking.)
The language of the performance is distributed among the English, Polish and Ancient Greek tongues. And woe for that English, for in it lies the main fault of the production. The anachronisms introduced into the play by the director and performer (for they don't appear in the translation prepared for the production by Charles Walker) – a "fucking" here and there, and an entirely unnecessary "God bless America!" yelled by Golaj after describing the glory of the Greek people – serve not to bring the play into the 21st century and the days of the War in Iraq, but are jarring inconsistencies in the presentation of this myth of desire and sacrifice. What makes Clytemnestra's cry of "Does no-one speak against this?" particularly heartrending is that Agamemnon and Achilles both have already done just that; they fear the wrath of the community, bloodthirsty and now obsessed by dreams of ultimate victory, should they fail to make the sacrifice.
That said, the Gardzienice's Iphigenia in Aulis, presented here in its world premiere (the company, founded during the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1977, has been at La MaMa several times before), is a unique look at the reclamation of the tragedy from ancient Greek history, seeking with care and love and research to restore the tragic spirit to the contemporary world. There are those who don't think tragedy is possible (or even desirable) in the 21st century, especially the deep, irregular rhythm of tragedy that was first explored by the ancient Greeks – the rhythm, though, is that of the human heartbeat. It is through the ignorance of this tragedy at the heart of human experience that wars, for Helen or for oil, continue to be waged. Iphigenia at Aulis is not anti-war, then, but an exploration and speaking, singing embodiment of whatever part of the human spirit – a spirit composed of desire, of dominance and submission, of masochism, of sacrifice, of both love and death – is expressed through it.
Posted at 2.34 pm in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
Saturday, 06 October 2007
Act French: Contemporary Plays from France. Edited by Philippa Wehle. 196 pages, with an introduction, "The Power of Words," by Wehle, and short biographies of the playwrights. PAJ Publications, 2007. Paperback, $18.95. Available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore.
Just published by PAJ Publications,
this anthology of seven recent plays is a fine picture of contemporary
French drama, often neglected here in the United States. Among the best
plays in the volume are José Pliya's Pinteresque examination of
power, colonialism and sexuality We Were Sitting on the Shores of
the World ... and Michel Vinaver's oratorio on the World Trade
Center disaster, 11 September 2001; perhaps my favorite is
Emmanuelle Marie's self-styled "partita" on female sexuality,
Cut, which easily leaves The Vagina Monologues in the
dust. (Sad to note that Marie died on 10 May 2007, just before this
book went to press.)
These plays reflect a renewed interest in content and language inflected with a strong sense of both global concerns and deeply intimate personal experience, quite often simultaneously. It's nice, especially, to have these works in a single volume; many of them constitute the first United States publications of these dramatists. The volume is prefaced with a knowledgable, informative introduction by Philippa Wehle, which sets the plays in their historical and political contexts. This book, along with a collection of plays by Maria Irene Fornes, Letters from Cuba, is among the first results of a revitalised book publication effort from PAJ: attractive, well-designed volumes devoted to contemporary drama and theatre from around the world, with more to come.
Posted at 10.20 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Friday, 05 October 2007
Wedekind/Franzen: Spring Awakening
Spring Awakening: A Children's Tragedy. Frank Wedekind; translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen. 88 pages, with an introduction, "Authentic but Horrible," by Franzen, and notes. Faber & Faber, 2007. Paperback, $13.00. Available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore.
When
Frank Wedekind died in 1918, the funeral in Munich was one step
short of a riot, in keeping with Wedekind's own barely controlled works.
Wedekind's widow was followed in the cortege by family, artists, and a
contingent of prostitutes, all of whom jostled each other for position
around a very crowded grave. At the grave, Heinrich Lautensack, one of
Wedekind's young admirers, made certain that a camera crew was in place
before he hysterically leapt upon Wedekind's coffin deep in the ground,
"proclaiming his despair," as Wedekind's English-language biographer Alan
Best put it. Other mourners helped him out again. Bizarre, but seen
from the year 2007, oddly contemporary; today, Lautensack would post
the video on YouTube to the delight of his peers, no doubt.
It's hard to guess whether Wedekind, who had settled into a rather bourgeois existence with wife and children himself when he breathed his last at the age of 54, would have approved of this behavior or been mortified, so to speak. He probably would have understood it either way. By that time, though, he had left his mark on German drama. Firmly within the dramaturgical tradition of Lenz and Buchner, a strong influence on the young Brecht and the Expressionists (though Wedekind disliked Expressionism himself), the much-maligned and often-censored dramatist had created a body of work that anatomised the tragedy of sex and love in dozens of plays and stories. His two most enduring works were a trilogy of plays about a vamp named Lulu (which gave rise to a masterful opera by Alban Berg and a fine film, Pandora's Box, by G.W. Pabst) and a somewhat shorter play, Spring Awakening, which followed the sexual misadventures of a group of adolescents in Germany in 1892.
Spring Awakening, especially, has endured. After Wedekind's death the play was staged by Max Reinhardt, and even now there are several English translations that remain in print: Eric Bentley, Ted Hughes and Edward Bond have all had a crack at adapting the play. And now we have novelist Jonathan Franzen, perhaps best known for his 2001 novel The Corrections.
And then there is the musical. Garrett Eisler's September 4, 2007, column over at the Huffington Post has all the gossipy detail about the contretemps Franzen's comments about this musical in the introduction to the book have engendered between Franzen and the musical's creators Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater and Michael Mayer. I assume Garrett gets this mostly right (except that the translation is not new but was written more than twenty years ago for the Swarthmore College theatre department; the translation came before the musical, not the other way around). I'm inclined to disregard this here not only because I haven't seen the musical but also because it all seems irrelevant to the translation itself, which is quite good and stageable. The musical is the musical, regardless of its merits or demerits. Here, we have the real thing, for those who want it.
Any translation is fraught with difficulties, and a dramatic translation requires, unlike translations of verse or prose, that the language can be spoken and acted. A poet like Wedekind is even tougher: Wedekind wrote very precisely of his own time and place, in his own peculiar German tone and with his conception of German literary and dramatic history that held Goethe in particularly high esteem.
 |
| Peter Lorre as Moritz and Lotte Lenya as Ilse in the October 1929 production of Fruhlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) at the Theater am Bulowplatz, Berlin. |
But the true tragedy of the work is not in the stories of Moritz or Wendla or even Melchior; it is in the concept of eternal recurrence. Both the adolescent and adult worlds are fully open to ridicule in Spring Awakening; while the parents and teachers parodied in the play are foolish, repressed, prudish and even destructive, the same can be said of the adolescents under their tutelage. The dead Moritz, appearing to Melchior in a graveyard in the last scene of the play, underscores the repetition of the generations of ignorance and repression: "We observe people in love and see them blush at each other, suspecting that they're deceived deceivers. We see parents bringing children into the world in order to be able to say to them: how lucky you are to have parents like us! – and see the children going out and doing the same thing." Spring Awakening doesn't celebrate adolescent sexuality but subjects it to the same scrutiny as the scrutiny to which it subjects bourgeois adulthood. Both come up lacking.
But Melchior is alone. And what saves the play from an easy categorisation into the bins of either "tragedy" or "comedy" is in the fact that, at the end of the play, Melchior chooses life; what's more, he chooses life at the urging of a character named here "The Masked Man." The Masked Man approaches Melchior to offer something other than the romanticised death and decay of his friend. "I'll open up the world for you," says the suave, cosmopolitan Masked Man to Melchior, who is on the verge of committing suicide at Moritz's urging. "This temporary distress of yours is due to your miserable situation. It will seem ridiculous as soon as you've got a warm dinner under your belt. ... I'll introduce you to people. I'll give you the opportunity to broaden your horizons in the most fabulous way. You won't miss a single interesting thing the world has to offer." The Man characterises Moritz as a "charlatan. ... The sublime humorist is the most woeful, pitiable creature in creation!" And so The Masked Man takes Melchior's arm to leave the cemetery – and the dead – to ...
Well, who can say? Wedekind leaves the question of the Masked Man's identity open, though Eric Bentley has suggested that Wedekind meant Goethe. Bentley has a point. Goethe predated Nietzsche in straddling the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals of the ordered polis and instinctual sexuality; The Masked Man is neither the gawky teenage misfit nor the stuffy school headmaster, but the free and open acceptance of an adult sexuality, aware and maturing with experience. Though not optimistic (nor pessimistic) about the possibility of happiness, The Masked Man points the way to a full adulthood; it is this adult who will fulfill the potential of his sexuality, not the children who toy with it, crippled as they are (often willingly enough) by the demands and strictures of a moralistic culture.
It's no wonder that the play has appealed to poets and dramatists (Bond and Hughes again) with a profound interest in tragedy; Franzen here has navigated his way between the viciously comic satire and puling lachrymose melodrama (this latter quite deliberate on Wedekind's part, reflecting the puling lachrymose self-regard of arrogant adolesence) quite well, even brilliantly at times, and his grasp of the play's comedy, particularly in Act III Scene 1, is exquisite. My argument with his introduction (and I think it's a mere quibble) is his attempt to grapple with the definition of the play as comedy or tragedy. To be fair, Wedekind apparently had the same problem, subtitling Spring Awakening "A Children's Tragedy" while referring to it as a comedy in several other places. Spring Awakening is, more accurately, a grotesquerie, that peculiar German genre of sex drama that includes The Tutor, Wozzeck, Baal and others: it partakes of the bizarre juxtapositions that comedy and tragedy produce in the same work and pursues those juxtapositions to epiphanic ends. It's not comic in the way that, say, Joe Orton is comic; Orton stayed on the surfaces of things; but then, he knew and admitted that he was writing farce, which is a different sort of comedy altogether. Farce validates the ordering of chaos at the final curtain; grotesquerie finds, offers and validates the chaos to be found just beneath the veneer of order. This produces the vertiginous sensuality of Wedekind's particular kind of drama, and why it has exerted the fascination that it has since it was written in 1891. It is this vertiginous amoral sensuality that drew the censors' wrath, as well as the attention of Bond and Hughes. And now Franzen, in this able and entertaining translation, as well.
Posted at 3.04 pm in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Wednesday, 03 October 2007
Quotes: Desmond Manderson on Messiaen and Schönberg
"[T]he piano [in the Quartet for the End of Time] in particular often has 'tangles' of notes thick with dissonance. Not one, but crowds of notes compete for attention under the hand of the pianist. Yet Messiaen makes of this cluster of discord something lustrous: 'Tangles of rainbows.' There is something spiritual in these dissonances which makes me wonder whether the most beautiful sound might not be the most various, the most discordant. Dissonance here is not experienced as rivalry or irresolution but as an infinite and all-inclusive unity. The 'harmony of heaven' might not be silence but on the contrary the capacity – and the willingness – to hear every note, to the fullness of its truth, at once. Again, there is a strong sense in which reading Schönberg only as the creator of an authoritarian order, a musical fascist, does an injustice to his role in developing this new aesthetic. For Schönberg, long before Messiaen, claimed to be involved in the 'emancipation of dissonance' and the destruction of the old order of human certainty. In its place he founded a vast new palette of expressive possibilities on which composers such as Messiaen have been able to build with imagination and freedom. As Schönberg wrote, 'Here, liberated dissonance became anew harmony, psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order.' Releasing the potential of dissonance from the shackles of Romantic harmony is emblematic of what amounts to an ultimate pluralism."
Desmond Manderson
Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice
University of California Press, 2000
Thanks to Matthew Guerrieri for this quote.
Posted at 2.54 pm in /Quotes
Permanent link to this story
Wednesday, 03 October 2007
I love ... Within tragedy this is the darkest, bloodiest truth, insofar as there is any truth value at all in tragedy. The phrase underlies all individual and family experience, guides the body and the words, impels the performer to make her offering and joins audience and dramatist in the descent into the dark abyss. Such words may be too powerful to be spoken in the Greek tragedies: in King Lear, its most searing metaphor is Cordelia's silence. Its most powerful expression then is metaphor detached from metaphor, a metaphor with all signifiers open to transformation and transgression: the possibility of tragedy is in the simultaneous egoism and surrender, the profound compulsive desire for union with the Other, the One, inherent in the phrase. Transgressive metaphor fleshed and costumed. Tragedy succeeds when the profound human rhythm – the heartbeat, playing arhythmically and threaded through its regular beat with the shocks of experience and ecstasy – that this represents is felt in blood, in communal jointure. The phrase repels entertainment, simple pleasures and pains, in favor of the complex ecstasy and grueling terror it implies. Both the laugh and the cry, in midst of disorientation, discipline and fear, are recognition of the rhythm.
In finding the language for its expression, the dramatist embodies himself in his characters, female and male alike, in willed nightmare. This is his investigation and research, and why the dramatist must be primary: he stages in the theatrical space the contours of his own fear, terror, pleasure, as precisely as he can, even as he accepts its cultural meaninglessness. The creative act of the performer is in this fleshing of "I love"; it is rendered procreative, as a gift, to her audience.
Posted at 9.13 am in /Organum
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 01 October 2007
I've trudged back from Montauk with a (nearly complete) new play in my satchel and, refreshed, to pick up Superfluities with a slightly new title (see the top of this page) and a slightly new direction: the blogroll at right will slowly grow in the next few days, the posts here will become somewhat longer and broader in scope, and I've determined that I will no longer maintain comments for individual posts; the comments too often devolve into arguments about one thing or another which tend to befog rather than clarify issues. I can always be reached via email at geh-at-panix-dot-com.
My desk is piled high with invitations and new books: there's an Iphigenia at Aulis from the Polish Gardzienice Theatre that I won't miss, and I'll make it to one of the final few performances of Ivo van Hove's Misanthrope at the New York Theatre Workshop. Information is now available too for upcoming productions of plays by Howard Barker, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Samuel Beckett, and my bedside table is now creaking with the addition of tomes by blogger Alex Ross, translator Jonathan Franzen, and of course our very own Miss Alison. And I'm not forgetting the Criterion Collection DVD of G.W. Pabst's 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera, newly released, which my DVD player is eagerly anticipating. (Apart from that, those readers with access to Project MUSE can read my review of Mac Wellman's Q's Q: an Arboreal Narrative and Howard Barker's Death, The One and the Art of Theatre, just published in the September 2007 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. It should also be available in better bookstores now.)
You will hear more about most of these – and the Organum will return – as the weeks go by. The new season is off to a strong start: the skies are brightening. Stay tuned.
Posted at 9.17 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
