Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
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
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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
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