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, 29 April 2008
The venerable arts Web site Artsjournal.com has now gotten around to launching two
blogs specifically about theatre. On lies like
truth, San Francisco-
Posted at 10.28 am in /Miscellaneous
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Monday, 28 April 2008
[Rodolphe] could not see – this man of such broad experience – the difference of feeling, beneath the similarity of expression. Because wanton or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no one can ever tell the precise measure of his own needs, of his own ideas, of his own pain, and human language is like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary (1856)
Translated by Margaret Mauldon
Posted at 8.19 am in /Quotes
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Sunday, 27 April 2008
Maintaining the Simulation: Untitled Mars (This Title May Change)
Untitled Mars (This Title May Change). Conceived and directed
by Jay Scheib. Scenic design by Peter Ksander. Lighting design by Miranda
Hardy. Costume design by Oana Botez-Ban. Sound design by Catherine
McCurry. Video design by Balász Vajna and Miklós Buk.
Dramaturg/producer for Hungary: Anna Lengyel. Text assembly by Jay Scheib.
A co-
Jay Scheib's sci-
Innocent little green man (Karl Allen) meets greedy
big white man (Caleb Hammond) in Untitled Mars
(Photo:
Justin Bernhaut)
Two things about the name of Jay Scheib's new show, which closes today at PS122.
First, despite its high-
He tried to do so in This Place Is a Desert earlier this season
at Mark Russell's Under the Radar festival at the Public, but here he
skirts the risk of self-indulgence that he couldn't entirely avoid in the
earlier show. Perhaps it's the unique presence of the director himself in
Untitled Mars that's the saving comic grace; he plays "Jay Scheib,"
a mordantly skeptical theatre director doing research for the show we're
currently watching about a future manned mission to Mars. This research
takes the form of a teleconferenced conversation between Scheib and a
genial woman with the Mars Desert Research Lab. (The choppy, elliptical
nature of this Internet conversation using Skype also begs the question:
If this is the fragmented, jerky communication we have between Utah and
New York, what can we expect of the conversation between Mars and Earth,
let alone between two human beings alone in the same room?) One of the
options for this mission is, chillingly, a one-
Assuming the worst possible outcome, Untitled Mars becomes a
wild, grueling sex farce (and Scheib's sexual imagination runs free, given
the admitted lack of research as to sexual relationships and even the
possibility of childbirth in such a colony). Researcher Mannie (Natalie
Thomas in a flowing red dress, one of the multidimensionally sexy and
sexless costumes designed by the ever-impressive Oana Botez-Ban) has
already gone round the bend, induced into acute situational schizophrenia
by the
emotionless scientific perspective that the research has necessitated;
it's up to Jackie (Tanya Selvaratnam), another researcher with her own
doubts and questions about her sexuality, to find a cure for her and save
the mission itself. It doesn't help that the other two women on the
mission are the hard-edged but seductive Anne (April Sweeney), who has her
eyes set on Jackie's cynical husband Sylvere (László
Keszég); bi-
It doesn't take long to see that this landscape isn't Mars of the late
21st-
This all looks to dissolve in disastrous chaos, but Scheib can't resist offering two endings. In the first, the simulation looks to spin wildly out of control and end in dismal, painful failure. Through the self-evidently silly device of time travel (and the only real representative trope of the genre of science fiction that informs the production), Scheib offers a second, more optimistic close to the fable. In this, the rapacious businessman gets his comeuppance through the agency of a decidedly non-futuristic bow-and-arrow, and the show closes on a touching, moving and hopeful attempt at marital reconciliation.
Scheib is an amazingly prolific director – this is his third New York show in the past few years, and at the same time he's been assiduously working in Europe as well – but as his career goes on he is demonstrating the tightening focus of his vision. He is emotionally drawn to large, empty spaces (in his stagings of both Women Dreamt Horses and This Place is a Desert) which the human body desires to fill with expressions of its own violent reaches for pleasure and possession; the very American schizophrenia that lurches between utopia, possession, freedom and environmental destruction; the tenuousness of the mediated technological vision in a physically crumbling world; and, finally, the urge to the repression of human irrationality, an irrationality that can erupt in the experience of ecstasy. He is also drawn to the big mess that these tormented human beings can create both in Utah and elsewhere (not to mention the stages on which he works). Though still possessed of a bleak and tragic perspective, Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) locates a comic aspect of his vision that may provide a new territory for his own explorations.
Untitled Mars is the first installment of Simulated
Cities/
Posted at 11.33 am in /Notices
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Friday, 25 April 2008
Embracing Kink
(See entry for 27 April)
In this week's Night Planner, there's a little bit, I hope, to make you think. I know I did; and to think again, and then once more. Though this thinking centered more on issues surrounding theatre and drama instead of theatre and drama itself, these ancillary issues also approach the supposed responsibility, utility and interpretation of art, and so always worth a moment or two of consideration. And given that there are panel discussions galore coming up, perhaps you'll stop in and offer your own perspective.
In a ruminative mood, then, a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 26 April: Post-
Armed with pre-
show discussions and supplementary dramaturgical materials, The Program roams from theater to theater, providing context to audiences at selected experimental productions. In the fine arts, museum- goers feel welcome at even the most abstract, difficult shows: docents, catalogues and wall text reach out to new viewers. But in the theater, we get tossed in front of the avant garde with little preparation.
Speaking as one who finds wall text at abstract, difficult museum shows an often irrelevant and sometimes condescending experience and who profoundly doubts that this kind of contextualising is anything but the imposition of a curatorial and critical ideology upon the work of art, not to mention its audience, I'm skeptical too. (And, for what it's worth, I've seen two of Jay Scheib's shows without any instruction – I'm sorry, "preparation" – as to his aesthetic or his process and I think I made it through both just fine.) But preparation you'll get tonight, as Time Out New York's theatre editor sits down with Shaw and Jones to talk with Untitled Mars director Scheib. And there's "maybe a glass of wine" involved, Cote says. The Program begins at 7.00pm; the Play begins at 8.00pm. Information about Untitled Mars here; as far as The Program goes, it's free. More information through PS122's general info number, 212.477.5288.
Sunday, 27 April: Today at 4.00pm (and running through 4 May as
part of PS122's Best of the Boroughs festival), Japanese playwright
Yukiko Motoya's Vengeance Can Wait watches a couple as they
"come to understand the 'kinks' in their relationship – and embrace
them." Motoya's play is influenced by anime and manga; the translation
by Kyoko Yoshida and Andy Bragen is directed here by Jose Zayas. Tickets
and schedule information here; it's a co-
Monday, 28 April: The April 2008 issue of the online journal Hyperion contains Mark Daniel Cohen's new translations of poems from Rilke's Neue Gedichte and Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil, a conversation with Richard Foreman by Fulya Peker (as well as the text of her play Requiem Aeternam Deo: A Play for Everyone and Nobody), and an interview with theatre director Wlodzimierz Staniewski. A good night's reading here.
Tuesday, 29 April: At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Andrei
Belgrader's production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame runs through 18 May, with an
all-
Wednesday, 30 April: Beginning today and running through
Saturday, 3 May, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center plays host to the PEN World
Voices Festival. The seven associated events and panel discussions
about theatre are all free and open to the public. The
afore-
The interesting note here, of course, is that the titles of these
panels assume that there is such a thing as an artist's or a writer's
responsibility to anything except his or her own vision and work –
that somehow this vision isn't enough, and that without some kind of
explicit instrumental political or cultural intent the work is somehow
lacking. It's the artist's responsibility to extend the reaches of his or
her own imagination, to spring beyond them – to be culturally and
politically irresponsible in denying any kind of ameliorative
political or ideological certainties. This work can fail or succeed just
as easily as work that claims to be beholden to one kind of cultural
functionalism or another. And the risk of solipsism – whether a work
is hermetic, arrogant in its self-
An art of theatre disclaims any responsibility for culture or politics even as it examines most intently cultural and political concerns – its interests are elsewhere, its vision darker, perhaps – but a panel discussion examining that kind of theatre doesn't appear to be on the horizon this week.
Posted at 8.33 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 24 April 2008
De causis plantarum
Originally posted 5 February 2007.
Paul Cava, Listrum Vulgare
Used by permission of the artist
Pressed between the pages of a yellowed book, its thick red leather cover oxidising with age, or a palimpsest under glass: our vision overlaid upon a translucent writing, etched upon flesh, flesh upon flesh between wooden bedposts (antiqued, whether present or past), and all laid atop the seeds contained in berries hanging from the pulsing vine. An openness, her body a blossom, rooted upon his. A finger reached to touch, to disturb, and the page crumbles: sere and flaked, ink, flesh and leaf easy fuel for a wooden match. The intent of the disturbance to participate, but the couple is beyond us, too fragile for our participation. Their pleasure operates from within the veined green, behind the unreadable text, the foolscap of their history and inscription of their coupling. Legs intertwined to weave and thread through the crumbling textures of history, drawing them all to their root, his deep penetration into her, both arched in criminal desire. (See her limbs, fetished in a caressing silk.) She settles on him, full body surrendered, his body a bed for her that surrounds, into which she sinks, as the layers settle upon a tender page, inside a tender book. Under a glass that protects them, from us.
This could remain in light, as torn as a Schwitters collage, but Schwitters you could drive a truck into, you could laugh at the tickets and the numbers, the only travel here is towards the center, the self, not detritus of railroads, instead things themselves. These handwritten words, besides, not torn but fading: ink disappearing in light; dancing letters and figures in retreat from present torture.
In anger and envy you shatter the glass that protects them, holds them safe in the confines of the curling leaf, the arms that embrace her. If you were to set a match to the sere linen page, this architecture of the dry surface, it would burn quickly, explode, set them free, in eternal memory of each other.
Posted at 8.44 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Wednesday, 23 April 2008
I do not know the theatre, and the theatre does not know me. ...
One has heard talk of many theatres existing, and of many forms, as if theatres tolerated one another. The fact is that theatres annihilate one another as all religions annihilate one another. Is this because theatre is a religion? Let us confess, the art of theatre has many of the characteristics of religion. For example, it finds so much theatre anathema. It excommunicates. Its methods are akin to prayer. What distinguishes it from all religion is this, however: that it recoils from truth. It repudiates truth as vulgarity.
Howard Barker
Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (2005)
§§ 1, 8
Posted at 8.47 am in /Quotes
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Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Caspar David Friedrich, Kriedefelsen auf
Rügen
1818/1819
Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten Winterthur
The viewer and the artist do not have the daring of the subjects: two men, a woman, approaching the chalk cliffs through a clearing in the forest, edging to a fall. Safely distant, perhaps to anticipate the elegantly dressed (the red velvet of the woman's dress) subjects' fall. Set deep inside the mind, perspective framed within the sphenoid of the chalkwhite skull. But the fall invites as one edges closer to the extreme of the cliff's perimeter. They may have the daring to enter the landscape.
Posted at 8.43 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Monday, 21 April 2008
The play as erotic aphorism. There is an intense need in the
decision to work aphoristically: that there is so much to say, so little
time to say it in, with too few resources. The most economically and
environmentally sound of method, aphorism squeezes each last theatrical,
aural and literary drop from each and every movement, sound and word. (So
it is the most lyrical, too, of forms.) The fragility of time is such that
with each second we can slip from it; millions in the past century have
learned that time can be torn asunder with a knock at the door or a flash
in the sky (millions more in the last, most technological,
democratic, humanistic and enlightened century than in any century before,
a fact which interests no-
As with Webern and Celan, each sound, each word expands in all
dimensions of space and time simultaneously. Even the interstitial
silences and stillnesses bear weight. Calling attention to themselves (not
out of the self-
Environmentally, too: ambitious design sprawls like a soft, manicured
and unnecessary suburb around a hard city of experience. And ambitious
longer forms rob the audience of time better spent with their lives than
with our art. That we take their money in the name of entertainment is
indicative of our absorption in the culture industry. "Of course,
it's very funny, too": these words the self-
In building a theatre that is necessary (necessary because like all
necessary things it is imaginable and does not yet exist), I don't need a
space of more than 50 seats, nor more than a few performers, nor the run
of more than a half-
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 3.27 pm in /Organum
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Friday, 18 April 2008
Preparing a theatre season, even for a one-
Until then, a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few current and upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 19 April: Matthew Freeman's new play When is a Clock?
opens this week in a production by the Blue Coyote Theater Group at the
Access Theater, 380 Broadway at White Street. The story is about a man's
search for his missing wife in the Pennsylvania heartland; fine
performances here from Tom Staggs as the husband, Tracey Gilbert as his
protean wife and a particularly memorable comic turn by David DelGrosso as
an apocalyptically-
Sunday, 20 April: crooked, a new comedy by Catherine
Trieschmann, opens tonight at the venerable Women's
Project's Julia Miles Theater, 424 West 55th Street. "A
14-
Tuesday, 22 April: "Climate of Concern: Short Plays on Global Warming" is the name of a discussion and series of play readings scheduled for 4.00pm (the discussion) and 6.30pm (the readings) today at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. New short plays about environmental issues by Don DeLillo, Brian Tucker and John Jesurun, featuring performances by Kathleen Chalfant and Lisa Harrow, will be presented as part of the Earth Day 2008 celebration. At the afternoon event, digital media artist Andrea Polli will present new work based on her journey to Antarctica; joining her will be several experts on environmental art. Both programs are free; more information at the Segal Center's Web site.
Wednesday, 23 April: The off-Broadway production of Jenny
Schwartz's God's Ear, which I reviewed in its
off-
Posted at 8.44 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 17 April 2008
Howard Barker on actors:
"[Actors] responded to his text because they needed to speak, and to speak to the speech's limits. Because of this profound need in the soul of the actor, Barker loved them, but those he loved best never permitted this pure instinct to become contaminated either by vanity or the corrosive effects of the cult of entertainment. He had a vision of acting as a form of religious practice, which in its most spiritual manifestation became an ecstasy, an ecstasy in which the actor would not know himself. In this condition of ecstasy the audience would be delivered from the requirement to criticise, it would in effect be seduced into a condition of receptivity which abolished values, politics, morality from the stage and enabled it to enter the realm of authentic tragedy. Speech would not be rendered in the terms of conventional realism. Its metaphorical and rhythmic character effectively eliminated any of the associative qualities so esteemed in naturalistic theatre. Barker did not want his audience to identify with the stage character, he required them to be overtaken by surprise and to admit surprise. His world was not the world as the realists struggled to understand it. Yet by its profound and desperate searching it surpassed the realists by its realism ... not all actors possessed the capacity or the will for this practice, for its disciplines were severe and the public rewards – given the status of Barker's theatre – limited ..."
Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth
A Style and Its Origins (2007)
(ellipses in original)
I would only urge that one consider adding the word
"dramatists" to the word "actors" in the above excerpt. While expression
with the pen and
expression with the speaking and moving body call upon different
disciplines and trainings, there is a sense in which the dramatist is the
ur-
The dramatist must too know acute ecstasy and suffering before he can translate it to the words that he passes along to the performer. The sympathetic marriage of dramatic and performative impulse, the marriage of performer, dramatist and word, is clear and necessary. The director paints and designs in the staging of these impulses. But he cannot know, in his external role, the terror that gives rise to the ecstatic wonder of the dramatist and performer in the paroxysms of creation. It passes through him, but he keeps none of it. The written and spoken text of the body takes center stage again.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 2.05 pm in /Organum
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Saturday, 12 April 2008
The top story in New York this week is the Broadway premiere of Caryl
Churchill's Top Girls; the top story Aussie-
Tuesday, 15 April: If you haven't yet seen Richard Foreman's
Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, which runs through the end of
April, this might not be a bad evening to stop in; following the
performance tonight, Foreman sits down with another notable Richard,
Richard
Schechner, founder of The Performance Group and current editor of
The Drama Review, for a free post-
Wednesday, 16 April: Performances begin this week for Elevator Repair
Service's latest production, The Sound and the Fury: April Seventh,
1928, based on the novel by William Faulkner. John Collins directs a
twelve-
Thursday, 17 April: New York alternative theatre enthusiasts can
curl up tonight with New
York Theater Review 2008, the latest edition of the annual
collection of essays and plays, edited by Brook Stowe. This year's edition
includes plays by Taylor Mac, Tommy Smith, and Ping Chong & Sara
Michelle
Zatz, as well as specially-
Friday, 18 April: Caryl Churchill comes to Broadway this week
when a revival of her early play Top Girls, about a dinner party
for five historical female characters thrown by the new managing director
of an employment agency, opens at the Biltmore Theatre in a production
offered by the Manhattan Theatre Club. James Macdonald directs an
all- Saturday, 19 April: Our Sydney readers (and we have a few)
probably already know about this, but our antipodean stragglers need to
get their tickets to Daniel Keene's new double-
Posted at 2.37 pm in /Openings
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Friday, 11 April 2008
UPDATE (perhaps): If anyone continues to believe in the
purity-
Did you hear the one about the contemporary American theatre?
Critic walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "Unlike earlier plays about groups ... new [American] plays' character assemblages suggest the sitcom producer's instructions in The Heidi Chronicles: 'Just tell us who these women are and why they're funny.' That's not enough for Heidi ... and it's not enough for the theater, either. Yet it is enough, apparently, for a wide and affluent stratum of people, served by theaters nationwide – or maybe just for the managerial types who choose those theaters' plays. [Or for the people who write them. – GH] For them, it seems, the quest to make the figures onstage vaguely recognizable, like people you might see at the mall or on reality TV, has replaced the shock of recognition that comes with great drama. We may be living in a world so dramatic that those who provide entertainment for a living instinctively want to soften their work, providing a harmless, faintly insipid virtual reality that never encroaches too much on the actual one looming outside."
There's a lot of this going about, as the lady said to the vicar.
Another critic down the other end of the bar says, "[Sarah] Ruhl's easy-
To be fair, a collection of those earlier plays that Michael Feingold
mentions above, 1972's monumental The Off-Off-Broadway Book, contains enough
"harmless, faintly insipid virtual realities" and "easy-
The current scene may be the fault of "managerial types" who run institutional non-profits. It's possible that the serious drama that aims for more ambitious heights is still being written but not produced, cowardice being the reason. Critic David Cote suggested as much in a Swiftian modest proposal last week.
I don't think so. Unlike fifty years ago, today most playwrights and experimental theatre artists emerge from MFA programs in theatre. The writers that these critics mention are all products of these MFA programs. Their plays indeed "rank high in terms of quality workmanship," as Feingold notes. They not only sharpened their dramaturgical pencils under teachers and a charismatic guru or two; upon graduation they entered into a network of funders and producers who supported the work of both the mentors and their protégés. You don't need to look far to see the reasons why this work sometimes sounds and looks the same. Great drama might yet still be produced by these MFA graduates. But insofar as these programs cater to an aesthetic paradigm of "a harmless, vaguely insipid virtual reality" with the reward of production by an American theatre sympathetic to that paradigm, the likelihood is less.
As Cote points out, theatres like the Public Theater and the New York Theatre Workshop are opening their doors to these theatre artists – so, really, the system is working; slowly, but that's the way systems work. Maybe that's the joke. What is still lacking is that "unexpected shock of recognition" that Feingold tells us is the mark of great drama. That's where the system fails.
For some people, that "great drama" that Feingold mentions is going to
stick in the craw, for it assumes that there's such a thing as
"not-
There is a touch of revolutionary messianism in every great artist; it's a part of their madness. The great dramatists of the modern period, from Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw and Brecht on to Müller and Barker, believed that they were responsible, as part of their mission, for changing the theatre at its roots: the whole theatre: form, content, education, criticism, technique, economics, audience, cultural position and approach. (Beckett may have seemed less ambitious, but even so, he was creating a theatre that he wanted to see in opposition to the theatre that he saw around him.)
MFA programs, by their nature, are designed to crush out the revolutionary and messianic strain. They are evolutionary: they take a raw talent, set it a series of hoops to jump through and requirements to complete, and at the end that talent receives a document guaranteeing that the talent has met the bureaucratic requirements of the institution and satisfied its representatives in the classroom and bursar's office. The talent also receives entrée into a working guild, a means to a livelihood, not unlike the apprenticeship process of the feudal era. The MFA process adapts the talent to the environment, as evolution adapts the biological specimen to its environment. But true revolution comes from without. True revolution seeks to change the environment to provide the full exercise of the self's – and the talent's – possibilities. A process which encourages adaptation to an existing paradigm of aesthetics (including the unexamined underlying ideologies of contemporary theatre and academia, which are businesses as well, as we're always reminded – but there's a limit to what numbers can tell us about art, or the human spirit) cripples the individual talent, even as it claims to refine the raw material of that talent. The most valuable education is self-education; let's not mistake academia for anything other than a symbol of learning, and not learning itself.
How many critics, playwrights or artistic directors does it take to change a light bulb – I mean, the American theatre? Well, perhaps only one – but, like the psychiatrist's light bulb, the American theatre has to want to change.
Posted at 8.54 am in /Drama
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Monday, 07 April 2008
The below essay appeared in a shorter (by half) form in the Guardian last week. This version fills out a few of the ideas left necessarily thin in the first.
On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists
than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal,
nineteenth-
Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert's songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.
Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was
determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an
anthology
of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett,
found it necessary to direct his own music-
For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music's abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.
There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the
theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see
the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands
of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner's
production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic
theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-
In the post-war era, Bayreuth's directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett's first plays were being performed in Paris – plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett's 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett's later work, until 1972's Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.
Dorn's production for the Met marries Beckett's stage practice to
Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett's conception of colorless
existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three
pure-
In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in
much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The
Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is
performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into
one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly
impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed
in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night
which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear – the
words and the music – that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic
event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk
for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely
beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a
century of Tristan performances and half-
Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. "[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form," Wagner wrote in "The Music of the Future." "... I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner's final operas, Beckett's dramas from 1962's Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.
Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.
Posted at 2.19 pm in /Music
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Monday, 07 April 2008
Back in the day (more precisely 1976), I was led to think of the theatre as a career when I saw John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson on Broadway in Peter Hall's production of No Man's Land by Harold Pinter. That was 32 years ago now. Perhaps sentimentally I continue to think of it as one of Pinter's most meditative, elegaic plays. And you certainly can't beat that cast.
Theatre is ephemeral and over the years the memory has faded somewhat, though the power of the work continued to claw. Fortunately memory can get a poke in the side too. Below is a video of the 90-minute BBC television version of the play, recorded in 1976 with the original cast. The image and sound are a little hazy, but no more so than my memory:
Over the weekend I updated my own Web site, with new material on the biography and news pages.
Posted at 8.28 am in /Videos
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Friday, 04 April 2008
Seeing Ourselves
(See entry for 9 April)
You could hem-and-haw about donations, subsidy and artistic directors'
salaries, or you could be blessed with a modern Medici. A mysterious,
enigmatic American supporter has just provided Howard Barker's The Wrestling
School with funding to subsidise two productions a year by the company
through 2010. This patronage will also assist in the creation of the
Howard Barker Research Fund at the University of Exeter's Department of Drama – an
exceedingly rare demonstration of support and belief in an individual
dramatist's work. In addition, Barker will focus in the near future on a
three-
Nothing quite so dramatic emerges on this side of the Atlantic this week, but despite that, a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 5 April: Six plays in 35 years? Now I don't feel quite
so bad about my own creeping-
[Shawn's] early plays especially deal very frankly with the life of the body. You don't necessarily see the actors fucking, shitting or vomiting, but they speak about these things the way they naturally occur in life, though rarely if ever in the theatre. On top of that, Shawn's plays are literary works that stir up provocative moral and existential questions while aggressively declining to provide answers. Indeed, their beguiling yet unreliable narrators often make a persuasive case for attitudes which, if received passively, are downright toxic. That can leave audiences feeling baffled, uneasy, even enraged.
For his admirers, though, Shawn's plays are everything you dream of theatre being – really smart, stimulating, unsettling, hilarious and truthful. ... Yet the more-
talked- about- than- seen aspect of his plays make him a kindred spirit to the likes of the Wooster Group's Elizabeth LeCompte and the Ontological- Hysteric Theater's Richard Foreman, avant- garde theatremakers considered masters inside the field but virtually unknown to mainstream audiences.
"Really smart," "hilarious" ... well, gosh. Anyway, the print edition of this month's American Theatre also has an essay by Shawn himself on writing about sex; it's the foreword to a new collection of plays from TCG due soon.
I've enjoyed Shawn's work since reading A Thought in Three Parts
in PAJ's late and lamented Wordplays series in the early 1980s, and
I reviewed his play The Music Teacher for
nytheatre.com in March 2006. At a party, Shawn told me that he thought
that mine was the only positive review the show received. What that means
I have no idea. But read the full interview here. (For a sample of Shawn's dramatic work, Shewey
also points the way to this radio
version of Shawn's "bleak, dread-
Monday, 7 April: Soho Rep's 2007/2008 Writer/Director Lab Reading Series kicks off tonight with a reading of Mike Daisey's play The Moon Is a Dead World, beginning at 7.00pm at 46 Walker Street. Admission is free; details at the Soho Rep Web site. Speaking of Daisey, he returns with his monologue How Theatre Failed America to Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, on 14 April. The monologue runs Monday nights at 7.00pm through 11 May; information here.
Tuesday, 8 April: Untitled Mars (this title may change) is the latest from director Jay Scheib; it opens tonight at 8.00pm at PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street. Scheib's new show "pits hard Science against Philip K. Dick as interplanetary speculation runs amok, the indigenous population gets screwed, and a strange 'anomalous' kid seems to hold all the answers." Scheib developed the show with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, where he teaches; it features sets by Peter Ksander and costumes by Oana Botez-Ban. Untitled Mars runs through 27 April; more information here.
Wednesday, 9 April: For our London readers: Howard Barker's latest play, I Saw Myself, begins performances tonight at the Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre, Malet Street, in London. The new piece concerns a character named Sleev, "a rich and promiscuous woman [who] wants to confess her scandalous sexual history to a world that has never dared acknowledge it," according to the Web page for the play, which also contains schedule and ticket information. I Saw Myself runs through 19 April. In addition, on Saturday 12 April, the same theatre will host a free rehearsed reading of another new Barker play, Actress with an Unloved Child.
Thursday, 10 April: Athol Fugard's 1972 play Sizwe Banzi Is
Dead, a parable about identity and freedom co-created with John Kani
and Winston Ntshona, was a slap in the face to the South African apartheid
leadership when it was first presented in Cape Town 36 years ago. Kani and
Ntshona recreate their roles as the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents the
Baxter Theatre
Centre revival, which opens in Brooklyn this week and runs through 19
April. Given that the U.S. now routinely photographs and digitally
fingerprints every non-U.S. man, woman and child entering the country,
even as freedom-
Posted at 8.14 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 03 April 2008
Almost an Evening by Ethan Coen. Directed by Neil Pepe. Set design: Riccardo Hernandez. Sound design: Eric Shim. Light design: Donald Holder. Costume design: Ilona Somogyi. With F. Murray Abraham, Johanna Day, Tim Hopper, J.R. Horne, Jordan Lage, Mark Linn-Baker, Mary McCann, Del Pentecost and Joey Slotnick. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. At the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street. Reviewed at the 29 March evening performance. Runs 20 March-1 June 2008. Information at the production's Web site; tickets via Telecharge.
Three entertaining sketches comprise Ethan Coen's off-Broadway debut
Joey Slotnick displays his last shred of
unabandoned
hope to a skeptical Mark Linn-Baker in
Almost an Evening
(Photo: Doug Hamilton)
Some of Ethan Coen's film work has consisted of thoughtful, darker contemplations of American life (Fargo, Miller's Crossing), but most of the rest has been playful juggling within the constraints of genre: the film noir in Blood Simple, the screwball comedy in Raising Arizona, and the Frank Capra salute to American optimism in The Hudsucker Proxy. It's this latter Coen that's on display in the three slick and highly entertaining sketches that comprise Almost an Evening, his first foray onto the stage. Here, the genre is sketch comedy, not of the Saturday Night Live style but more akin to the extended comedies of Your Show of Shows and The Carol Burnett Show. And it's nice to have it back at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street through June: a springtime/early summer treat.
Not all of the sketches hit home; of the three, the middle sketch about a self-doubting secret agent is perhaps the weakest, starting almost nowhere and getting nowhere fast. But the first and last remind you of the glory days of Tim Conway and Sid Caesar -- in this production, Joey Slotnick and F. Murray Abraham in particular respectively cringe and storm their way through silly situations that approach sublime insanity. If they don't ultimately reach that glorious height, they approach near enough to sparkle.
In the first sketch of the evening, "Waiting," Joey Slotnick is a mild-mannered doofus who finds himself in a waiting room with no door -- No Exit literally, not for a very long time. His cheerful hangdog face (yes, Slotnick proves, it's possible to have one of these) becomes more and more crestfallen as he is shunted from office to office to correct his personal record; the twist ending can be seen coming from a mile off, but thanks to Slotnick and a prissy, bureaucratic, skeptical Mark Linn-Baker, the audience's waiting for the payoff is well-compensated by beautifully timed performances. (And I loved the dial telephone ... ah, the memories it brings back ...)
It's F. Murray Abraham, though, who steals the show in the final sketch of the evening, "Debate." Mark Linn-Baker as the modest bow-tied God Who Loves sits back as Abraham, the God Who Judges, launches into an extended, angry, uproarious George Carlin-esque rant condemning contemporary humanity. Abraham's long flowing gray wig whips left and right as he delivers judgment upon the theatre audience here in an obscenity-laced tirade against, among other things, body piercing. Abraham is a delight; at the performance I saw, a particularly well-timed ad lib of "bless you" to a sneezing member of the audience nearly brought the house down. "Debate," however, overstays its welcome by nearly half as the play fizzles out into some backstage and restaurant-bound shenanigans involving a couple of audience members, Abraham, his erstwhile girlfriend and a hassled cafe staff.
To be fair, all the sketches are a little too long, but Neil Pepe's precise and slick direction eases the plays past the longeurs with considerable grace. The title Almost an Evening invites too many easy puns, and I'll control myself here. For a Friday or Saturday night's post-dinner entertainment, though, it's a fun lark through a style of comedy that we don't see enough of these days, on television or the stage, and of the generally excellent ensemble cast, Abraham, Slotnick and Linn-Baker shine. Almost an Evening runs through 1 June. It's a cheerful way to spend an evening of any variety.
Posted at 8.41 am in /Notices
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Wednesday, 02 April 2008
The American Dream and The Sandbox
The American Dream and The Sandbox by Edward Albee. Directed by the author. Original music by William Flanagan. Set design: Neil Patel. Sound design: Arielle Edwards. Light design: Nicole Pearce. Costume design: Carrie Robbins. With Judith Ivey (Mommy), George Bartenieff (Daddy), Lois Markle (Grandma), Kathleen Butler (Mrs. Barker), Harmon Walsh (Young Man, The American Dream), Daniel Shevlin (The Musician) and Jesse Williams (Young Man, The Sandbox). Running time: 90 minutes, with one intermission. At the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street. Reviewed at the 29 March matinee performance. Runs 21 March-19 April 2008. Ticket information at TeleCharge.
Edward Albee's savage satire and tender comic elegy come triumphantly home to the Cherry Lane Theatre one more time
Ionesco on the Upper West Side:
Judith Ivey, Harmon Walsh and George Bartenieff
in The American Dream
(Photo: Gabe Evans)
Edward Albee's 1961 play The American Dream put him on Martin Esslin's map of the Absurdists. And it does recall the nonsensical doings of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano easily: the seemingly inane dialogue and stylised behavior of a husband and wife waiting for visitors are loopy comedy of the highest order. But there's a slashing viciousness here too, an economic/political awareness, not to mention the seeds of much of Albee's later work. Albee's own production of the play, along with its sort-of companion piece The Sandbox (though written before The American Dream, it's here presented on the second half of the bill) at the Cherry Lane Theatre, is a reminder that American surrealism wasn't always so whimsical, as the current saying goes: here it cuts deep, reminding one of Swift's injunction that one should use the point of one's quill, and not the feather.
Both plays had productions at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the 1960s, so it's kind of a homecoming for Albee. Childless Mommy and Daddy, in a large apartment and saddled with a tetchy Grandma, are waiting for a Mrs. Barker for some undetermined reason as the play begins; the reason remains undetermined even when Mrs. Barker finally arrives. It's Grandma who finally reveals Mommy and Daddy's dark secret to Mrs. Barker: that Mrs. Barker was responsible for arranging a catastrophic adoption, and that Mommy and Daddy are selfishly seeking "satisfaction." They get it in the form of a Young Man who wanders rather aimlessly into the apartment; he is the American Dream, Grandma decides, and she engineers both a cruel joke on Mommy and Daddy and her own escape from their clutches.
That's the plot, but Albee doesn't lecture; he explores, and among the issues he uproariously upends are parenthood, the treatment of the elderly, materialism, professional do-gooding. Clearly too, the themes that will haunt his later plays are all here: sexual and reproductive barrenness and the irrationality of sexual desire (not to mention the Puritanical disgust with sex itself – Mommy refers to sex with Daddy as a process of "bumping [his] uglies"), the illusions that keep marriages together, the emptiness at the heart of contemporary American life and even the metaphysics of twins. They're picked up and juggled, twisted in the light and let fall again, and none of the questions he raises about American life are answered. Well, that's not quite true; answers to mysterious questions are what drive narrative along, after all; but, as with the Absurdists, the answers to all these questions are provisional. The Young Man, an actor from Hollywood, warns, "Be careful; be very careful. What I have told you may not be true. In my profession ..." In these provisional answers Albee gives leave to the audience for imaginative freedom; once led into a dark corner through comedy, it's up to the audience to find its way out again.
The Sandbox, written shortly after the death of Albee's grandmother, is a 13-minute comic elegy featuring many of the same characters of The American Dream, but unlike The American Dream it replaces the illusion of life with the reality of death. There's a Young Man here too; however, he's no longer the "American Dream," but, as he says, "the Angel of Death" (and in this production played by a different actor than the Young Man in the first play). The piece enacts the final moments in Grandma's life as Mommy and Daddy follow social conventions that accompany family death, and they leave as lightly as they arrive, but only Grandma has finally found peace at the curtain.
Albee's own production is simple and vaudevillian. The brightly-lit set and costume colors of The American Dream are swathed almost exclusively in hues of red, white and blue; he takes the play at a breakneck pace, and draws burlesque performances from his actors, with Judith Ivey as a sharp-edged but craven Mommy and George Bartenieff as a feminised, infantilised Daddy, who spends most of the plays bouncing his useless fists up and down on his knees like a toddler in a high-chair. Lois Markle is incisive, mordantly cynical and bitter as Grandma as she demonstrates a more realistic perspective on the absurdities around her than any of the other characters, who also include Kathleen Butler as the blithely inane Mrs. Barker, Harmon Walsh and Jesse Williams as the beautiful but empty young men, and Daniel Shevlin in a small but amusing role as the musician in The Sandbox, performing William Flanagan's original, tender score for the play.
The plays do date somewhat, showing their era. There are iceboxes instead of refrigerators in the dialogue; and it's been some time since Women's Clubs have been common, let alone women have regularly worn hats (it's Carrie and her gang drinking Cosmopolitans at dance clubs now). But Albee's plays here demonstrate the same careening, contemporary energy that animates his most recent work. They also demonstrate that the themes that haunt an artist from the beginning to the end of his career rarely change; the drill deepens, but in taking on the darker questions of American life, you'll never hit rock bottom.
(Full disclosure: I was the grateful recipient of Mr. Albee's largesse when I won an Albee Foundation fellowship last year. Even so, I don't think one positive review from me will win him any new acclaim.)
Posted at 6.44 am in /Notices
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Tuesday, 01 April 2008
In the Guardian (UK) today, I write about the parallels between Dieter Dorn's production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met and one of the most influential dramatists of the 20th century:
On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett. Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner. But Dieter Dorn's production of Tristan und Isolde, recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera, suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye.
The entire entry is available here.
Posted at 8.17 am in /Guardian
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