Superfluities Redux

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Set design by Eugene Lee. Costume design by Jess Goldstein. Lighting design by Kenneth Posner. Sound design by John Gromada. With Ian McShane (Max), Raúl Esparza (Lenny), Eve Best (Ruth), Michael McKean (Sam), James Frain (Teddy) and Gareth Saxe (Joey). Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, one intermission. Reviewed at the 18 December 2007 performance. At the Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York. Ticket and schedule information at Telecharge.

A small family gathering: Ian McShane, Raúl Esparza,
Eve Best and Gareth Saxe in The Homecoming, directed by Daniel Sullivan
(Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times)

As Rob Kendt pointed out the other day, Harold Pinter's The Homecoming is based on a true story -- specifically, the story of one of Pinter's friends, Morris (Moishe) Wernick, who, having married then quickly moved to Canada, kept the knowledge of his marriage from his family for ten years. He then returned to London and suddenly introduced her to them in what Wernick called "one of the memorable moments in my life" -- no doubt an understatement. Pinter allowed Wernick to read the first draft of the play, Michael Billington reports in his biography of the playwright: Pinter "freely [acknowledged] that he had expanded on the idea."

Indeed. And I note this only to acknowledge Daniel Sullivan's decision to stage the realism in Pinter's surreal family fantasy of power and seduction, a realism that re-energises The Homecoming. In sacrificing some of the heaviness of the expected Pinterian pauses and silences (Sullivan's production moves at the speed of an express train), Sullivan leads his cast through a production that, while emphasising the comedy of the play, also grounds it fully in the bodies of the cast -- no metaphors here, nor should there be. (See our friends at Obscene Jester for a slightly different, dissenting view.)

It's hard to create a metaphor for an ever-changing family dynamic anyway, and it's in playing the destabilised dynamic instead of the given situation that Pinter's vision is ever new, even in this forty-year-old play. It's still the seedy side of residential London of 1965 in costume, hairstyle and set design here, but the cast Sullivan has gathered plays Pinter with a slightly jumped-up speed more fully of our own time.

Raúl Esparza's Lenny is more vividly instinctual here, more physical, than Ian Holm's colder performance in the 1973 film -- an adder that lunges and snaps instead of a coiled boa. Though Eve Best as Ruth doesn't come into her own until the second act, she does so brilliantly there in a performance that returns a feminine sexuality into this male bastion with a firm confidence fully in keeping with the menacing and fearful dynamic.

Ian McShane as Max in The Homecoming
(Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times)

But perhaps the most surprising return in Sullivan's investment in the naturalistic approach is his persuasive insight that there's still family sentiment beneath the perversions that traditional male/female roles have imposed upon the nuclear structure. There's far more of a brotherhood between Ian McShane's butcher Max and Michael McKean's chauffeur Sam than I've seen in other productions; they locate a playfulness in the violent bantering of the first scene that nears the edge of affection. And the diminutive forms of the sons' names (Lenny, Joey, Teddy) emerge with considerable power here as emblems of the essentially childish, immature sexualities in which these men have their sexual play.

The Homecoming is an incisive, comic, terrifying critique of the crippling effects of the perverse sexuality of a perverse culture; each character is simultaneously tormentor and tormented, victimiser and victim. Sullivan's realistic production of the work only underscores the extent to which Pinter's vision is grounded not in the symbolic realm but in common experience -- rendered lyrically by Pinter's poetic imagination, but ever more real for that. This is as excellent and insightful a staging of The Homecoming as New York is likely to see before the play is a half-century old. Make it a Christmas present to yourself.

There's one final notice to come, of the Broadway The Homecoming, that I hope to post today or tomorrow. But I reach the end of the week (and the beginning of the holidays) thoroughly sated and in need of a holiday myself. It's been not only Pinter, but Marlowe, Brecht and Beckett too in the last two weeks, and that's enough for anyone.

That said, the next week will ease up, but for those who remain in the city, Edward the Second and Beckett Shorts run through the holiday week and beyond, while Man is Man concludes its performance run tonight and tomorrow. At PS122, 500 Clown Christmas, a combination concert, clown show and holiday party, runs 21-30 December. Just a little further downtown C'est Duckie, from the British-based performance troupe Duckie, brings a little vaudeville and burlesque swank to the CSV Cultural Center at 107 Suffolk Street; if you can't catch them before the New Year, they'll be around until 19 January.

And then, of course, we rest. And we'd better. January and February bring us new productions of plays by Antonin Artaud (via John Jahnke) and Peter Handke (via The Flea), a new piece from The Flying Machine based on Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, and Clubbed Thumb's contemplation on the life of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Amazons and Their Men, by Jordan Harrison. More on these in the New Year, but just to warn you -- it'll start with a series of very unique bangs.

So, after the notice of The Homecoming, Superfluities Redux will take a well-deserved chance to recharge its batteries and reopen for business on 3 January 2008. Best wishes for a happy New Year.

Beckett Shorts by Samuel Beckett. Directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Original music by Philip Glass. Set design by Alexander Brodsky. Costume design by Kaye Voyce. Lighting design by Jennifer Tipton. Sound design by Darron L West. Video design by Mirit Tal. With Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Neumann, Bill Camp and Karen Kandel. A presentation of New York Theatre Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director. Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 14 December 2007 performance. At the New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, New York, 5 December 2007-20 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Telecharge.com.

Four early Beckett plays are successfully refurbished for the 21st century

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Bill Camp in
Rough for Theatre I, from Beckett Shorts
(Photo: Joan Marcus)

The news about which you'll all be wondering is good: Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the most renowned dancers of the 20th century, eases into his new role as Beckett interpreter with grace and style in the program Beckett Shorts at the NYTW through 20 January.

And for this production, I have few "buts" to offer. JoAnne Akalaitis stages the four plays in the program with a visual imagination that retains Beckett's vision of optimistic futility while acknowledging, in the final play (a stage adaptation of the television play Eh Joe), the technological origins of Beckett's work for broadcast media. In this she is assisted by sculptor Alexander Brodsky's debut as a stage designer and the rest of the ensemble gathered for this short evening.

Mikhail Baryshnikov as a Beckettian metrosexual in Act Without Words I (Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times)

The concision of Akalaitis' staging, along with her disciplined eye, is evident from the first work on the program, Beckett's solo mime piece Act Without Words I (1956). The man unceremoniously flung onto the stage at the beginning of the piece is not the Beckett tramp of yore, but a 21st-century New York City metrosexual: Baryshnikov's designer eyewear and trim suit (from costume designer Kaye Voyce) broaden the frame of Beckett's reference to a contemporary landscape, though that landscape of white sand is as bleak as ever. The various offers of comfort and shade in this landscape are withdrawn as quickly as they are offered, and the offers from a sadistically playful universe which eventually robs the man even of the tools for suicide are made without hesitation. (So kudos too to stage managers Anthony Cerrato and Odessa "Niki" Spruill and their crew for the decisiveness of the stage mechanics, which are as much a character of the piece as Baryshnikov's gestures.) A small video replay of the piece, time stretched to infinity and compressed to stillness, projected in the upper-right-hand corner of the stage adds a new palimpsest of time to the simple mime production.

In Act Without Words II (1959), Baryshnikov is joined by choreographer/actor David Neumann. This most comic piece of the evening features Baryshnikov in sullen, sloppy mode, scarcely able to sustain interest in the carrot that he eats; in the meantime, Neumann's prompt, neat pragmatist is no further served by his precision than Baryshnikov's slob is by his apathy (though, too, Baryshnikov proves that irritable slovenliness can have a precision all its own). They each drag the other, never meeting, from repetition to repetition, stage left to stage right, each of them a comic Sisyphus, their rocks each other.

The fine Bill Camp is a crippled tramp to Baryshnikov's street musician in Rough for Theatre I (c. 1956), which is barely more than a Beckettian doodle, a sketch of the dynamics of envy, affection, hostility and human companionship. Camp especially makes the most of Beckett's histrionic cripple.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Karen Kandel in Eh Joe
(Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times)

The final play of the evening, Eh Joe (1965), is the weakest in execution, though the most ambitious technically. Originally conceived as a television play, the play examines a man alone in a bare room; the camera movements are a series of closeups of Joe's face as the dynamics of guilt, memory and conscience play upon his features. These dynamics originate with an unseen woman's words. In Beckett's conception, the source of the words is tentative and ambiguous: they could be the memory of the woman's voice, conscience and guilt themselves as female, or an imagined former lover.

To locate the voice in an onstage body, as Akalaitis does here in the person of Karen Kandel, is to undermine some of these ambiguous dynamics. No argument with Kandel's performance (though she does risk a certain imperiousness which detracts from the experience of the ambivalent voice), and Mirit Tal's video design cleverly maintains the experience of the videographed closeup of Joe's (and here Baryshnikov's) face. But, as a whole, the shifting audience perspective from Joe to the speaker, from down right where Joe sits to up left where the woman alternately sits and stands, dissipates Beckett's more laserlike conception of the work. Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn wrote about the play in A Beckett Canon:

The four plays presented in Beckett Shorts never really add up to more than the sum of their parts -- perhaps that's inescapable, given the varying genres of mime, sketch and video play presented here. But the Akalaitis/Baryshnikov Beckett is, regardless, a fine evening. Philip Glass's new score for the program is unobtrusive -- it will be effective for those who enjoy the composer's work, but won't detract from the plays for those who find it less entrancing.

Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe, adapted by Garland Wright. Directed by Jesse Berger. Set design by John Arnone. Costume design by Clint Ramos. Lighting design by Peter West. Composer: Scott Killian; sound designed by Scott Killian and Chris Peifer. With Raum-Aron, Arthur Bartow, Kenajuan Bentley, Rob Breckenridge, Wesley Broulik, Joseph Costa, William DeMeritt, Davis Hall, Lucas Hall, Randy Harrison, Claire Lautier, Garth Wells McCardle, Matthew Rauch, Derrick LeMont Sanders, Raphael Nash Thompson, Patrick Vaill and Marc Veitor. A presentation of Red Bull Theater, Jesse Berger, artistic director. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, one intermission. Reviewed at the 16 December 2007 performance. At the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, 11 December 2007-13 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Ticket Central.

A feverishly erotic revival of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy of desire and politics

Claire Lautier and Marc Vietor in
Edward the Second (Photo: Brian Dilg)

Erotic desire and the lust for power have been strange and sweaty bedpartners from Salome and Herod to the smarmier pairing of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. The theatre, especially the Elizabethan and Jacobean tragic theatre, has always been a unique situs for the partnership; apart from whatever transpired up on the stage, the auditorium and theatre building itself, recent research tells us, was also the site of various illicit pairings between the upper classes and prostitutes (as well as those men and women who exchanged bodily fluids without an associated economic exchange). The erotic dynamic between stage and auditorium, too, found its way into the drama of the time, from Christopher Marlowe all the way to the Jacobean revenge tragedies that were the art's stock-in-trade until 1642, when the Puritan Parliament closed the theatres.

This was the age of Shakespeare, whose more classical and humanistic worldview tended to eclipse the wilder heights of language and imagination to which the erotic tragedians of the period aspired (though Shakespeare too, in his later more complex work about sexuality and power in Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra and Measure for Measure, climbed to those same heights). Case in point: Marlowe's Edward the Second (1592/93), Garland Wright's adaptation of which is now enjoying a new production by the Red Bull Theater under the direction of Jesse Berger.

Kenajuan Bentley and Marc Vietor in
Edward the Second (Photo: Brian Dilg)

Edward the Second continues to hold particular fascination for 20th century audiences. Brecht's adaptation and production of the play in 1923 found an Elizabethan equivalent for his own erotic poetics of the period, and as recently as 1991 Derek Jarman's film brought the play into the politics of the gay rights movement and the Stonewall riots. Berger and his fine cast, without irony or parody, leap fearlessly into the swirling passions of Marlowe's play, as they did in their 2005 production of The Revenger's Tragedy, drawing from it the erotics and lusts that, though no longer present in the auditorium itself, have their rightful place on the stages of a world in crisis.

Edward II, upon ascending the throne of England, recalls his beloved "favorite" Gaveston from Paris as one of his first acts; when Gaveston returns, Edward showers favors and power upon him, much to the disgust of Edward's wife Isabella and the peers of England. The disgust doesn't reside only in Edward and Gaveston's shameless and honest homosexuality, but also in considerable envy and simple dismay (indeed, one of the earls' greatest disapprovals is that, given Gaveston's low birth, the pairing is morganatic). A second desire driving the play is that of Mortimer for the neglected Isabella. Edward is forced to banish Gaveston once again; when that doesn't improve matters, Gaveston returns, only to be killed. Here, homosexuality is not a love that dare not speak its name -- instead it's shouted from the rooftops, though this is just as tragic in its implications as its repression.

Marc Vietor as Edward grows in stature as the play progresses; seemingly a licentious libertine in the first scenes, by the end of the play, chained in a sewer, filth up to his knees and near an ignominious death, he reaches the authority of a true tragic hero, alone with the consciousness of the whirring wheel of fortune (a wheel that Mortimer, too, at the end of the play, acknowledges).

Berger's pace in guiding his 17-member cast across the small Peter Jay Sharp Theatre space is unflagging, and, as in his production of Revenger's Tragedy, he has encouraged his performers to leap head first into the dark abyss that constitutes Marlowe's worldview. Matthew Rauch's Mortimer is quickly seized by the ambition to which his disgust has led, and Lautier's Isabella is consumed by sexual frustration -- she is sexually a stranger to her husband, as she, French-born, is a stranger to the land of which she is the queen. Vietor, Rauch and Lautier are sharp-edged figures of desire and power, denied, satisfied and undeniably fleshed -- they present themselves not particularly as characters or even as symbols, but as the forces of passion themselves, elicited and shaped by Marlowe's fervid linguistic imagination.

And they are daring. I go back and forth on the question of nudity on the New York stage, which has become such a cliche as to be utterly expected in everything from the Living Theatre to Broadway; and when you have costumes the quality of Clint Ramos', you wonder if the director shouldn't have more trust in his designers. But here, after some thought, I have to come down on the side of explicitness. The tableaux of male nude flesh here, the loving and caresses of Edward and Gaveston (Kenajuan Bentley, in a performance of considerable emotional complexity; one wonders if Edward's mad passion is returned by Gaveston, and perhaps Gaveston isn't sure himself), are ultimately necessary as a presentation of the tenderness of any and all desire for the flesh of another once it has met its satiation: it presents the approach of love to a possible redemption of the self. And, as Bataille recognised, it must be a naked flesh.

In presenting the play without a wink to the audience, Berger retains the fluidity and passion of the work. He presents the play on set designer John Arnone's sharply divided stage, playing spaces running on a parallel to the proscenium (emphasising the presentationality of the work; there's not the escape that a diagonally-oriented set would provide) upon platforms set on a variety of heights, preserving the fluidity of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramaturgy. Ramos's costumes, which run the range of texture and sensuality from the tight trousers of the leather trade to Claire Lautier's couture-inspired black outfits (not without sado-masochistic touches themselves) and the long black coats with upturned collars of 1930s fascism in Italy and Germany for Mortimer and the peers, are themselves delightful; Lautier's costume changes reflect Isabella's own desperation to attract, her husband or Mortimer; either will do.

Claire Lautier, Raum-Aron, Matthew Rauch
and Lucas Hall in Edward the Second
(Photo: Brian Dilg)

Among the other members of the cast, Davis Hall and Joseph Costa as Lancaster and Warwick make an entertaining Two Stooges of bureaucratic power; Rob Breckenridge as Lightborn is a dark executioner, Wesley Broulik a comic jailer and the 11-year-old Raum-Aron seethes with a most unchildlike ambition and bloodthirstiness in the final scene. Scott Killian's percussive score provides the production's severe heartbeat.

NOTE: Red Bull will present a reading of Brecht's version of Edward II as part of their Revelation Readings series on 7 January, featuring members of the cast of the mainstage production.

Why don't we have a national theatre in the US? First, we don't need one; second, we shouldn't have one. The reasons why are in my latest Guardian (UK) post, "Why America has no national theatre."

A highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:

Saturday, 15 December: Playwright James Comtois, director Pete Boisvert and a host of very funny ladies and gentlemen present the season's final performance of A Very Nosedive Christmas Carol tonight at 11.00pm at The Red Room, 85 East 4th Street. If you think you're sick and tired of hearing about Scrooge year after year, imagine how Scrooge feels about it. Tickets and other information at Theatermania.

Sunday, 16 December: The Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections exhibition continues at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street. The exhibition features eight paintings and more than 120 drawings by Klimt, and includes a reconstruction of a portion of Klimt's studio with its original furnishings.

Monday, 17 December: Music night: in the flesh, join Object Collection at 224 Centre Street at 9.00pm for an "Experimental Intermedia" performance featuring music by Travis Just and text by Kara Feely; the work was written for an ensemble of actors as well as a variety of electronic media, including signal processing programs and samples. Don't forget, though, to Tivo Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the LA Opera production of the Brecht/Weill opera, on PBS (Channel 13 here in New York); 9.00pm is the curtain time for this as well.

Tuesday, 18 December: The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is presenting a day-long look at The Art of Yiddish Drama: Modernity Confronts Tradition at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. This free event starts in the afternoon with screenings of film adaptations of Yiddish plays; at 6.30pm, Rachel Dickstein, Daniel Gerould, Stefan Kanfer, Alisa Solomon and others gather to introduce and discuss a series of readings from neglected Yiddish plays in English translation.

Wednesday, 19 December: The new Red Bull Theater production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward the Second, adapted by Garland Wright and directed by Jesse Berger, continues its run at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street. I had many nice things to say about the Red Bull's The Revenger's Tragedy in 2005. It's a fine company, in much better digs now. Tickets at Ticket Central.

Thursday, 20 December: The holiday season still with you, even with all that shopping and the dread family gathering next week still to come? The Brick's Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee: Second Coming runs through this Saturday, 22 December, to provide much-needed relief. Bawdy and raucous one-act Christmas-themed plays from the likes of Banana Bag & Bodice's Jason Craig, Matthew Freeman, Jason Grote, Jakob Holder and Aaron Mack Schloff are offered in two separate programs, "Marys" and "Josephs." The Brick is at 575 Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn; tickets and schedule information at Theatermania.

Friday, 21 December: David Mamet's new comedy November featuring Nathan Lane as a beleagured US Presidential candidate continues previews at the Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street, prior to a January opening. Laurie Metcalf also stars.

Three short videos today, comparative rarities. First, there's this 1949 interview from American radio with the composer Arnold Schönberg, who discusses his paintings, his music and his influences:

Also on music, and as a final in memoriam for Karlheinz Stockhausen, below is an English-language profile of the composer, with a few seconds of Stockhausen in rehearsal and an interview with the almost comically uncomfortable artist (watch as he bolts from the set at the end of the piece):

Finally, German dramatist and poet Heiner Müller reads his poem "The Odor of Soap" in the following clip from the 1993 film I Was Hamlet, directed and photographed by Dominik Barbier:

Man is Man by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Gerhard Nellhaus. Directed by Paul Binnerts. Set design by Amy Rubin. Costume design by Caleb Hammons. Lighting design by Bradley King, Kevin Guzewich and Travis Sawyer. Sound design by Richard Kamerman. Projection design by Marilys Ernst. With Lauren Blumenfeld (Jeriah Jip/Galy Gay's Wife/Soldiers), Tristin Daley (Polly Baker), Eric Eastman (Uriah Shelley), Brandon "B" Goodman (Jesse Mahoney), Natalie Kuhn (Galy Gay), Justin Lauro (Sgt. Charles "Bloody Five" Fairchild/Mr. Wang) and Sarah Wood (Leokadia Begbick). A presentation of the The Elephant Brigade, produced by Rebecca Keren Eisenstadt. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, one intermission. Reviewed at the 6 December 2007 performance. At HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue, New York, 5 December-22 December 2007. Ticket and schedule information.

An honest, insightful, bare-bones production of a rare Brecht play, with moments of sublime beauty and unexpected power

Brandon Goodman, Natalie Kuhn and Tristin Daley
in Man is Man. Photo: Jackie Munro.

This is a play about "a man who can't say no." Bertolt Brecht's 1926 A Man's a Man, to give it the title under which it's best known, is an unusual, transitional work in the Brecht canon, falling between the first glimmers of his epic theatre theory demonstrated in 1924's Edward II and the more trenchant social and economic analysis of 1928's The Threepenny Opera. And in many ways it remains among the more riotous Expressionist parodies and celebrations of individualism like Baal and Drums in the Night: but now, identity is mutable. A simple non-violent porter can be turned into a killing machine within only a day or two, so long as the porter permits it to happen; this mutability is ambivalent. Transformations are rife in the play: a mere soldier becomes an Oriental god, and a sadistic army sergeant is turned into a blubbering subject of sexually-aroused desire when in his civvies.

The theme of transformation drives the play's plot. Galy Gay is a simple porter in colonial India who one day goes out to buy a fish; along the way, he meets three men of a four-man machine gun brigade. The fourth man has been abandoned following a robbery gone wrong, and the brigade needs a new fourth man so that their sadistic sargeant's suspicion can be deflected. In exchange for a few boxes of cigars and a few bottles of beer, Galy Gay cheerfully goes along with the plan, but when the brigade is suddenly forced to pull up stakes and head for the front, the soldiers decide that Gay will have to take their comrade's place permanently -- and so the transformation of a simple porter into a bloodthirsty soldier is begun.

Man is Man is a play rarely revived. Because the play is set among British soldiers in turn-of-the-century India (Brecht was still deeply inspired by the poetry of Kipling and retained a bit of the same colonialist romanticism), most often it's taken as a satire of militarism, an anti-war play. A satire of militarism it is; more broadly, it's a satire of all of society's organisations that reward conformity, and the military certainly ranks among those. It's harder to defend its status, though, as an anti-war play. When Brecht wrote it in the 1920s, the First World War was over and 1933 was almost a decade away; the play premiered in one of the most economically and culturally stable years of the Weimar Republic, during the "Golden Era" of Gustav Stresemann's government. If it was an anti-war play, there was no specific war to be against, and Brecht occasionally takes great glee in the irresponsible behavior of his four soldiers. The bourgeois-socialist orientation of Weimar during those years did, however, reward a certain conformist perspective. One went along to get along, much as Brecht's Galy Gay does in Man is Man.

But the play does prophesy war, and in this The Elephant Brigade's new production of the play at HERE through 22 December, with an eye to its contemporary relevance, is an honest, insightful production. Paul Binnerts' "real-time" production is explicit in its debt to Brecht's own techniques of epic theatre. (The program itself specifies the time and place as "2007, New York City.") As the audience enters, it is greeted by the members of the cast, who approach friends and generally loll about in the minutes before the houselights come down and the play begins; Binnerts' procedure is to keep the performers from fully entering into their roles in the Stanislavskian sense. Instead, they "demonstrate" their characters, distancing themselves from their roles through the use of video and a presentational performance directed towards the audience rather than towards each other.

Justin Lauro, Lauren Blumenfeld and Sarah Wood
in Man is Man. Photo: Jackie Munro.

The question of identity, then, including the identity of the performers with their roles, is central. It's an open question in Man is Man, and because it's open, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The male Galy Gay is played by a woman (Natalie Kuhn), and it's testimony to the success of the staging that after a moment or so this becomes immaterial. Still, the passions about identity that the play evokes sometimes overcome the actors, who enter into emotional moments perhaps more fully than they should, particularly in the second act. When Galy Gay is led through his own fake trial, execution and funeral, the production drops its pretense to objectivity and out come good old Stanislavskian histrionics.

But when Binnerts' production works, it works brilliantly, and its strongest moments come in the same second act that contains its weakest. Justin Lauro's character Sgt. Charles Fairchild castrates himself to protect his military nature (and his nickname "Bloody Five") from the depredations of his own more sensual inclinations; in the Brecht play, the castration takes place off-stage, but here it's onstage, even televised, as Lauro manipulates a small doll that represents his character, tearing off its penis in an exquisitely affecting moment that unites video, performer and prop. Even better is a moment that isn't in Brecht's text at all. Towards the end of the play, Galy Gay has denied his identity to his wife, played by Lauren Blumenfeld; she then takes a microphone, comes downstage center, and coldly recites the lyrics to the 1933 Al Dubin/Harry Warren song "Remember My Forgotten Man" as the music for the song plays over the speaker system. During this simple presentational moment, you could hear a pin drop: a testimony to the effectiveness of Ms. Blumenfeld's fully-realised performance of the song, Binnerts' production and the pain that the realisation of the mutability of human identity can elicit. (She also plays Jeriah Jip, the soldier whom Gay is meant to replace in the platoon, adding another dimension to the complex portrayal of identity inherent in the play -- an inspired bit of doubling.)

Binnerts' utilisation of video provides a new window onto the cinematic quality of Brecht's dramaturgy -- at the beginning of the play, a video camera glides over a miniature landscape; projected onto one of the bedsheets that serve as video screens, the resulting image is reminscent in its crude way of Apocalypse Now's aerial photography. A televised image of a miniature coffin, pulled by a thread past a row of toy soldiers, rifles held silently before them, approaches the poetic. But the production is not entirely successful, and for unfortunate reasons (unfortunate for being merely opportunistic); a brief parody of the behavior of US soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison detracts from the experience, rather than rendering it contemporary.

That said, The Elephant Brigade's Man Is Man is an imaginative production of a rare play that remains relevant for more than its explicitly political messages, something of an undiscovered gem among Brecht's early work. The makeshift design of the production is often resourceful, the comic moments cheerful, the darker moments affecting and approaching the sublime; contemporary composer Louis Andriessen contributes a few minutes of haunting, original music. Among the rest of the performers (drawn from Binnerts' students at NYU/Tisch, where a version of this performance was presented earlier this year), Sarah Wood stands out as the sceptical canteen-keeper, Leokadia Begbick; a character who would reappear a few years later in the Brecht/Weill opera Mahagonny, she watches it all with bemusement, playing her role in the broadly comic mock-trial that leads to Galy Gay's faked death, and Wood also contributes a sadness just right for the production. Sad, but inescapable; Begbick also has the last word on the play's theme, reminding us that Brecht knew his Heraclitus:

As Brecht might point out, this is true not only for the army, but for all of a culture's other conformist institutions, including its theatre. Sometimes, you don't have to join the army to become a killing machine; just doing your job uncritically, day after day, without saying "no," turns you into a machine as well.

Last week I noted that theatre minima was recently accepted as a sponsored organisation of Fractured Atlas; what I neglected to mention was why I applied in the first place. I explain it in my latest Guardian (UK) theatre blog entry here. (Title and subtitle courtesy the editor, not yours truly.)

UPDATE: The New York Times published Paul Griffiths' obituary of Stockhausen in Saturday's edition.

One of the great composers of our times, Karlheinz Stockhausen, passed away on 5 December.

Although he worked in a variety of forms, including theatre and opera (and many of his works were profoundly theatrical even in their concert settings), Stockhausen's Klavierstücke always had the greatest resonance for me. The insistence of the individual note, repeated seemingly with an endless violence through the relentless discipline of the solo performer, imbued this work with light in the midst of darkness, life in the midst of death.

Stockhausen also influenced, in this insistence, my own work. He sought, in the chaos of sound, a significance (not a meaning, which would be asking too much, but an avenue to recognition). In the theatre, one might say that the words offered by the talking body itself may provide a similar significance: a new light, a new life, in the most elemental components of the desire to express, previously unrecognisable until it is grasped knowingly (a performative, metaphysical, bodied and sexual desire). Two brief quotes from the composer:

Ellen Corver's recording of the first Klavierstück is available here. The obituary from the Stockhausen foundation can be found here. Ivan Hewitt's appreciation is also available. From Hewitt's essay:

A highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:

Saturday, 8 December: There's always something of interest going on at PS122; on Friday and Saturday night there's C.L.U.E. (it stands for Color Location Ultimate Experience), a new dance performance with accompanying movement-based video from the robbinschilds group. They're calling it an "exploration of the intersection between movement and architecture, both natural and manmade." It's selling out fast; performances on Friday and Saturday nights at 8.30 and 10.30pm. Ticket information here.

Sunday, 9 December: It's opening weekend for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma production of No Dice, the season's second offering from Soho Rep, this time at 66 White Street in Tribeca. The new show is described as a "four-hour epic of the everyday," based on hundreds of hours of recorded "real-life" conversations -- and, before curtain time, there's sandwiches and soda. Tickets available here.

Monday, 10 December: Theatres are dark and you'll get some holiday shopping done, no doubt. While you're trawling the virtual aisles of amazon.com, get yourself a present and order a copy of A Style and Its Origins by Howard Barker and Eduardo Houth, which is after a delay finally listed as "in stock" in the US. I wrote about the book earlier this year here. So long as you're at it, take some of your Christmas bonus (assuming you get such a thing) and purchase Richard Foreman's latest book of plays, Bad Boy Nietzsche! And Other Plays, just out this month from TCG.

Tuesday, 11 December: Previews continue tonight prior to a 16 December opening for the Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. Daniel Sullivan directs Ian McShane, Eve Best, Raúl Esparza and Michael McKean.

Wednesday, 12 December: I told you there was always something to see at PS122. Tonight it's the opening of 500 Clown Frankenstein, the holiday show, this year based not on A Christmas Carol but on that other masterpiece of 19th-century English literature by Mary Shelley. It's one night that's unlikely to be silent. More information on the 500 Clown company here; tickets here.

Thursday, 13 December: David Gordon's Uncivil Wars, an adaptation of Brecht's The Roundheads and the Pointheads (1932/34), opens at The Kitchen. The production features the Michael Feingold translation and the original songs by Hanns Eisler; the cast includes the inimitable Estelle Parsons. Says the Kitchen Web site: "Uncivil Wars is a new dance-theater work developed with material borrowed from Brecht's treatises on playwriting and from his play The Roundheads and the Pointheads, as well as Eisler's thoughts on composing for the theater. Gordon explores implications of readdressing historical works in the context of our present moment and considers racial, religious, linguistic and geographical divisions resulting in war." The production (which will not be open for review) runs through 22 December. Tickets now available through TicketWeb.

Friday, 14 December: The Debate Society (Oliver Butler, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen) presents a workshop showing of its latest pieces, "a short play about abandoned buildings and a longer play about crushed cars," at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery (between Houston and Prince Streets). I very much enjoyed their production in the Ontological Incubator series, The Eaten Heart, last summer; this should be worth a peek as well. Tickets and information here.

And on a cheerier note, word came yesterday that theatre minima has been approved by the Fractured Atlas board of directors as a fiscally-sponsored project of the organisation, which means that plans can proceed for production and fundraising under the 501(c)(3) provision of the non-profit tax code.

There's much to do before fundraising can begin, but I'm proud to be a part of the organisation, and soon theatre minima can begin to solicit for tax-deductible donations. And the work is what is most important.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Perhaps it's the cold and the wind -- 30 mile an hour gusts whipped down Broadway past my office yesterday, and we'll be lucky if the temperatures get above freezing today -- but your loyal correspondent is in the midst of a maelstrom and coping with Seasonal Affective Disorder (his convenient characterisation for his usual quiet dour pensiveness) and hopes to get back to you soon. Not enough hours in the day, etc. But once I'm charged up again, there'll be more.

In the meantime I note that tickets are on sale now for Deborah Warner's production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, the National Theatre of Great Britain production starring Warner's frequent collaborator in her Beckett pieces, Fiona Shaw, at BAM's Next Wave Festival. Happy Days will open on 8 January 2008 and run through 2 February. More information about the show here.

This also gives me a chance to port over from the old site my own notes on Beckett and his work, dating all the way back to the beginning of this blog in 2003.

In 1968, George Coe, Sidney Davis and Anthony Lover collaborated on De Düva, a wonderful 14-minute parody of Ingmar Bergman, especially his early films Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. Keep an eye out for a young Madeleine Kahn:

It's beautifully made, precise, knowing, loving -- and very very funny. A small masterpiece.

Kristen Sieh as Joan Dark, surrounded by the forces of industry, in Lear de Bessonet's
2007 production of St. Joan of the Stockyards. Photo: Rachel Roberts

You can't keep Herr Brecht down; my latest piece for the Guardian (UK) is a consideration of the revival of several mid-period Brecht plays and their role in the resurgence of new explorations of form and content in political theatre:

Today, sadly, is World AIDS Day. Although enormous strides have been made in managing the syndrome, AIDS remains without a cure, and 40 million people around the world continue to live with the disease. It has claimed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of theatre artists (among them actor Ron Vawter and writer/director Reza Abdoh), though of course it continues to have profound global ramifications, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the home of 64% of people -- about 25 million of them -- living with HIV. AIDS doesn't know from age, color, ethnicity, income, class, gender, sexual preference or geography, from prejudice and ignorance; the numbers, all of them, continue to increase.

If you visit the World AIDS Day Web site, you will find a variety of ways you can help: by making a donation, volunteering or supporting the effort to provide universal access to AIDS treatments. AIDS continues to affect everyone. Take a moment today to pass the word on, and to remember the work that remains to be done towards the eradication of the disease.