Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
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A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Sunday, 12 October 2008 The Return of the Night PlannerThe "Night Planner" returns for the 2008/ I want to note here, by the way, that though the conceit of this item
is that of a daily planner, many of these events and productions are on
continuing schedules; full time- So, the first highly selective, prejudiced look of the season at a few current and immediately upcoming events and productions, along with other items of interest: Friday, 22 August (today): Jake Hooker's What We Should Judge When We Judge ..., a
"lecture" on lyric Greek poetry and Latin art punctuated with unusual
digressions on loneliness, loss, regret and other entries in the
angst hit parade, is the offering of the Ontological-Hysteric
Theatre's Incubator series this week. Hooker's collaborators are Tlaloc
Lopez- Saturday, 23 August (tomorrow): This weekend Anthology Film Archives is running two masterpieces by Canadian artist and filmmaker Michael Snow. Today at 4.30pm, his 1967 Wavelength will be screened at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at East 2nd Street. The "story" (if you can call it that) of a murder mystery, the film itself is a formal investigation of stillness and silence within a catastrophic criminal event, an investigation that Snow would take further in <–> (Back and Forth), which is running tomorrow at the Archives. It has been called a "triumph of contemplative cinema," and calls to mind similar work by John Cage and Morton Feldman. Rare screenings of seminal American films. After the film you might want to head over to Brooklyn's Brick Theater,
where the tireless Ian W. Hill and his Gemini CollisionWorks company are
closing their three- Sunday, 24 August: The Flying
Carpet Theatre Company is at PS122, 150 First Avenue at East Ninth
Street, this weekend for A Day in Dig Nation, which offers its final
performances tonight and tomorrow. Dig Nation, according to the Web
site, "features Rex, a man so consumed by technology that he forgets how
to communicate with actual people." Rex is Michael McQuilken, who
co- Tuesday, 26 August: 106 prints by the Northern Renaissance
master Albrecht Dürer (1471- Wednesday, 27 August: Next up at the
Ontological- Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerThe truncation of the Night Planner this week is the result of time (so many hours in the day) and day work (too much to the dayenglish of the dayjob, too little to the nightenglish of the theatre). I'm making efforts to rectify this imbalance – I've purchased my tickets for Soho Rep's NY premiere of Sarah Kane's Blasted in October (and it's selling out quickly, so get tickets today and make Sarah Benson a happy artistic director) and getting through books by and about David Rudkin and Martin Crimp. I snatch what I can on the subway and in the corners of the hours, few of them vacant any more. Still and all, below is a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few current and immediately upcoming events and productions, along with other items of interest: Friday, 19 September (tonight): The Godfather Films. Francis Ford Coppola's two
Godfather films of the early 1970s were perhaps the last great
accomplishments of the Hollywood studio system. His adaptation of Mario
Puzo's novel transformed it from a genre mob tale to a grand,
seven- Sunday, 21 September: What of the Night? The latest collection of
plays by Maria
Irene Fornes from PAJ Publications includes the well- Wednesday, 24 September: Prelude '08. Mark your calendars and set aside
the next four days for the Segal Center's annual festival of new and
experimental theatre work; you normally need to go downtown to see this,
but all roads lead instead this week to the CUNY Graduate Center at 365
Fifth Avenue. Banana Bag & Bodice, Sheila Callaghan, Richard Foreman, the
NTUSA, the New York City Players, Okwui Okpokwasili and Tal Yarden will
all be represented on panels, during performances, or by installations,
and I'll be moderating the final panel discussion of the festival, "The
New Theatre," on Saturday, 27 September. If you scroll down to the bottom
of this page, you'll find a description of the session. I
and my fellow panelists will, no doubt, offer conclusive and
incontrovertible answers to every question you have. It's free, and I look
forward to seeing you there. And, by the way, happy birthday wishes today to my dear friend Alison. Says she: "The fact is that my youth was not
so much fun and I don't have any nostalgia for it. I like the age I am. It
feels fine. The zeitgeist might be feeling the chilly winds of history,
world financial markets might be reaping their sub- Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 RIP: Simon GrayCompared to his contemporaries Harold Pinter, Edward Bond and Caryl
Churchill, Simon Gray, who died this week at the age of 71, was not a
first- Gray has been best known recently for his series of darkly comic
memoirs, including The Smoking Diaries, in which he described his
successful battle against alcoholism and his failed battle against
cigarettes. His other plays included The Common Pursuit,
Otherwise Engaged (a miraculously spare, savage and hilarious
inversion of E.M. Forster's adage, "Only connect"; Tom Courtenay played
the lead on Broadway in another Pinter- His work was a demonstration to me of the more sublime regions and
ambitions of the English comic spirit when I first saw Butley in
the mid- Simon Gray, an unapologetically commercial playwright, was among the
last of a vanishing breed, writing plays not for children nor for adults
stuck and deliberately wallowing in a permanent adolescence and crippled
by a culture- Posted in /RIP Sunday, 12 October 2008 Letter of SupportThose who wish to add their names to the open letter of support for Bill Henson can now do so here. Those who doubt that sex may be on the minds of Australian politicians far more than Australian photographers may find this a source of enlightenment, as well as worthy of a laugh or two. Maybe Chris had a point about the Freudian approach. Posted in /Politics Sunday, 12 October 2008 Innocence LostAustralian photographer Bill Henson is currently facing charges of creating and displaying child pornography (more specifically, "publishing an indecent article") relating to an exhibition of his work in Sydney. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described Henson's images as "revolting," and Australian police have announced their intention of prosecuting the artist. The 13-year-old subjects of Henson's photographs do not appear to be enrapt in states of sexual excitement or posed in positions that explicitly depict intercourse (though they may not be particularly chaste either); instead, it's the very display of these fragile bodies, uniquely young and therefore innocently vulnerable (though "innocence" itself is a condition that Henson may be exploring), that offends. That adolescent sexuality is all-pervasive in this commercial culture as a means to sell products -- whether they're promoted through commercials during Gossip Girl or offered as iPod downloads after a performance by one of any number of scantily-clad adolescent pop-stars -- is apparently not at issue. Henson's photographs, instead, bring this vulnerability to light, as images and vulnerability that sell nothing. Responding to concerns that his work might provoke disturbing feelings (feelings that can't be catharted through the purchase of a product, anyway), Henson says, "You can't control the way in which individuals respond to the work," adding that his intention is to explore notions of intimacy: "Something which is absolutely inviolate and unknowable." Far from violating his subjects, Henson seeks to express their ambiguous inviolability, without attempting moral judgment or conclusion -- which is not the same thing as violation in the least. What Rudd and the show's opponents hope is to further marginalize these bodies and images -- to push them further into the dark corners of society, where, in the shadows, they ironically would be even more vulnerable to corruption, violence and harm than in the light that Henson seeks to bring to them. The sickness of the puritan mind is that, through the relentless justification of moral condemnation, it itself imagines these bodies as objects of violence and exploitation, and therefore guarantees the continued curse of the taboo upon expressions and sexualities both mature and otherwise. The puritans themselves imagine the violation and the violence, rendering the bodies objects of shameful desire and disgust (for what can "revolting" mean, other than "disgusting"?). It should be the duty of every artist to condemn these actions by the Australian government, for there are Rudds and puritans everywhere, in every country. As Solzhenitsyn and Kafka have memorably demonstrated, it is one of the conditions of the 20th century that the greatest fear should be that of the knock of the police at the door (whether it's your apartment or the gallery or the theatre in which you show your work), and the disappearance of the individual, at the business end of a policeman's gun, in the night. Alison Croggon and Chris Boyd have more on the story; Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has also released a statement. Grossly and crudely censored and mutilated samples of the work in question are here. And so much for the political capital that the Labor Party's Rudd government tried to pile up with the Australia 2020 summit, at least in some quarters; it'll be interesting to see where the dividing line falls on this one. Posted in /Politics Sunday, 12 October 2008 Fifty Years On
In 1960, then in her early twenties, Caryl Churchill reviewed the first five years of the Royal Court Theatre, which soon enough would be one of her primary artistic homes. As Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin report in their anecdotal history of the institution, Churchill wasn't yet finished. "Referring to plays such as The Entertainer, Roots, Waiting for Godot and The Caretaker, Churchill noted, 'It is as if the playwright has a special prefabricated view of the world which he doesn't like so he goes round picking out loose stones with his penknife and writing rude words on the wall, instead of pulling the wall down, designing a better building – not designing a new society but finding a better, broader way of looking.' She called for a shift away from 'this everlasting flat depression' towards, at the very least, 'lashing satires and despairing tragedies.' Churchill advocated the 'power of concentration' of image and idea in drama, and looked towards a 'fuller use of form' allowing for greater depth and scope in a play's purpose, beyond the habit of naturalistic moping with which contemporary plays seem infected." The Royal Court itself influenced over the following half- And yet it happened anyway. In 1960, Churchill was also seeing a US
election cycle that pitted Richard Nixon against John Kennedy; a crisis in
British politics over Suez, marking the final bitter end of British
imperialism; an unpopular, ideologically- I don't mean by this to mock Churchill in the least (much of what she
said remains relevant to the contemporary US theatre) but only to
indicate that theatre has proven profoundly inefficacious in providing
practical alternate structures of political and economic reformation. It
has become very very good at limning just those cultural and political
dynamics that produce that naturalistic (or, for that matter, abstract and
absurd) moping which she saw as one of the burdens of Royal Court realism.
But has all this politically- I don't mean to suggest that some explicitly political theatre isn't effective, sometimes powerfully so. Without Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, it seems safe to say, the AIDS crisis would not have begun to receive the national attention that it eventually did, and more recently The Laramie Project and The Exonerated have led to political changes and a higher awareness of the injustices inscribed into the culture. But these examples are few and far between, and perhaps are only the exceptions that prove the rule. It remains true that AIDS has been controlled, but not eradicated (indeed it has spread in many areas of the world), and the rights of homosexuals and prisoners remain profoundly circumscribed. The US remains one of the sole Western countries to retain the death penalty. Direct political action has proven more effective than productions of these plays in any case. Often, the changes that theatre brings about are oblique and hard to quantify. Though the Royal Court's productions of Edward Bond's Saved and Early Morning were the events that brought the censorship of theatre in England to a belated end, neither of these plays explicitly dealt with censorship. To take this to a somewhat more profound level, the perceptual changes in consciousness that the work of Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Barker, Foreman and Churchill herself exemplify do not lead to direct cultural change either. But they do broaden the possibilities of imagining the world and the
existence of the tender, fractured, bodied speaking individual within it.
It is, perhaps, these new imaginings that remain permanent, that obliquely
lead to long- Posted in /Politics Sunday, 12 October 2008 On Newsstands NowThe September 2008 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, online and on newsstands now, features my introduction to this gallery of working papers and photographs from a few of Richard Foreman's recent productions. But the issue itself is introduced by Robert Brustein's somewhat petulant and cranky essay "More Masterpieces," in which Brustein takes to task what he calls a "radical theatre" trend to trivialise classic dramatic literature: "I am now ready to concede," says the author of The Theatre of Revolt, "that the postmodern movement may have gone too far, and that instead of helping to illuminate classical plays, the auteur director is often obfuscating and obscuring them." Brustein then discusses two recent productions, The Wooster Group's Hamlet and Ivo van Hove's The Misanthrope, and concludes that the directorial imperatives brought to these productions "do not allow us to enter the play[s]," using a first person plural in which I certainly wouldn't include myself, who happily entered into van Hove's Misanthrope in a way that I hadn't been able to enter (funny use of the word, that) a Moliere play before. But the world is a big place; to each his own. Brustein's discussion is limited to directorial approaches to classical texts, and I do wonder what his response would have been to contemporary dramaturgical responses to classical texts, such as John Jesurun's Philoctetes or Howard Barker's (Uncle) Vanya; on these, Brustein is unfortunately silent, for his comment would be most interesting, given his dismay at what directors, let alone dramatists, have done to similarly canonical works. He is not silent, however, about his fear that these directorial approaches are "more evidence of our growing indifference to the written word," citing (once again) that Richard Nelson speech to ART/NY last year about the lack of production opportunities available to new American playwrights. Mind you, I live in a city in which there has just concluded a massive
Fringe festival:
over 200 productions – not readings or workshops, but productions,
however simple they were – of plays and performances of one sort or
another, over ninety percent of them quite new, within a 16- And beware, Mr. Brustein – at the end of my article, Foreman warns that one of his next productions will be a staging of a play by Federico Garcia Lorca. He doesn't plan to deconstruct then reconstruct the text as he would for one of his own plays, but "it will be my own version of Lorca," he told me. Will the horror never end? Posted in /Publications Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerThe Night Planner wanders uptown for a night or two this week following its determination to stay south of 14th Street last week. Below, a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few current and immediately upcoming events and productions, along with other items of interest: Friday, 12 September (tonight): Experimental Music.
Travis Just's series of new music at the Ontological- Saturday, 13 September (tomorrow): The Two Sisters; or Douglas Mery, Next to
Nothing. At the OHT's Incubator series this week through 27
September, the Brainium Bros. & Sons Theatrical Outfit offer this "new
millenial comedy" directed by Anthony Cerrato. It's a fantasia about the
end times, the characters partaking of clairvoyance and baked chicken in
two sisters' search for their long- Sunday, 14 September: New theatre blogs are still cropping up here and there. A dull rainy Sunday is a good day to catch up. From New York, Untitled Theatre Company #61's artistic director Edward Einhorn has launched Theater of Ideas; Einhorn in the past has curated some remarkably ambitious festivals, including those that staged the complete works of Vaclav Havel and Eugene Ionesco. No small feat, that. And last month, Australia's James Waites, former theatre critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and other publications, opened the eponymous James Waites for business. Welcome to both. Meanwhile, also in Australia, Alison's been slapping away at some noisome gnats lately, exploring once again the inescapable gray area between the personal and professional lives of artists and critics (and even the gray area between practitioner and critic). I sympathise. Monday, 15 September: Restoration Comedy. The Red Bull Theater's production of Edward the Second was one of the highlights of last season, and they kick off the 2008/2009 season with a benefit reading of Amy Freed's Restoration Comedy, an adaptation of two plays by John Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber, directed by the Red Bull's artistic director Jesse Berger. Restoration Comedy is a part of the company's ambitious "Revelation Readings" series, featuring the participation of both regular Red Bull repertory company members and special guests from film and television; Michael Urie, who appears in Ugly Betty and appeared in the Red Bull's Revenger's Tragedy a season or two back, joins them for this one. Benefit prices start at $100 for admission to the reading and a party afterwards; I can think of few other companies who deserve the support. The reading will take place at the Theater at St. Clement's, 423 West 46th Street. Tickets here. Tuesday, 16 September: Kirchner and the Berlin Street. The Museum of Modern Art is featuring an exhibition of German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Street Scenes" series through 10 November. The seven paintings in the series are accompanied by sixty related prints and drawings. Says MoMA's Web site: "The street life in Berlin, in particular the familiar presence of prostitutes, identified by their elaborate plumed hats, captured Kirchner's eye and inspired this spectacular series. Shown together for the first time in New York, these works exude the vitality, decadence, and underlying mood of imminent danger that characterized Berlin on the eve of World War I." Well, I'm there. For those who are still loathe to cough up MoMA's $20 admission fee (or who find themselves at some distance away from New York), there's an online exhibition as well. Wednesday, 17 September: Exhausted, you enjoy Project Runway, which, with the season half
over, is getting down to the nitty- Thursday, 18 September: The Image. Samuel Beckett's text The
Image gets a theatrical treatment from the French director Arthur Nauzyciel at New York's French
Institute/ Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerThis weekend, I believe, will see the publication of the "New Season"
issue of the Sunday New York Times' Arts & Leisure section; so we
begin the 2008/ Uptown, that is. Leaning toward downtown events in location and
aesthetic, this first "Night Planner" of the season, on the other hand,
gives us nothing but new shows – six in New York, one in London (that
of a new play by an American playwright) – and, unlike the
Times, online or in print, you can click through to more
information
about these shows to your heart's content, so no apologies for the
link- Below, then, a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few current and immediately upcoming events and productions, along with other items of interest: Friday, 5 September (tonight): The Accursed Items. Andrew Dinwiddie's latest
project, a dance piece that "presents a moving portrait of humans and the
myriad ways our lives can go astray," is at the Ontological- Saturday, 6 September (tomorrow): Southern Promises. With his earlier shows Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist and Cleansed, Thomas Bradshaw has developed a reputation as a theatre artist who provocatively addresses issues of race in America. Southern Promises, set in the Civil War era and inspired by the true story of Henry "Box" Brown, a slave who escaped to the north by mailing himself in a box, should prove no exception. At PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street, through 27 September; tickets here. Alexis Soloski has an interview with Bradshaw in this week's Village Voice. Sunday, 7 September: Beast. At the New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, Michael Weller's new play (some of his previous plays were Moonchildren, Loose Ends and What the Night Is For) about a road trip by two Iraq War veterans to the heart of Texas runs through 12 October. Beast was inspired by Purple Hearts, a photo series of wounded Iraq War veterans by Nina Berman, and contemporary horror films. Jo Bonney directs. Tickets online here. Monday, 8 September: Now or Later. A new play by American dramatist Christopher Shinn opens (as usual) in London; this time, Shinn has his eye on electoral politics and the moral compromises necessary to a successful political campaign. "I don't think we should give up our values to find common ground," says one of his characters. "Then it's not common ground, it's their ground and we're just standing on it." Now or Later opened last week at the Royal Court Theatre and runs through 18 October – we won't see it in New York until after Election Day (nothing about a US production has yet been announced). The Web page features photographs from and interviews about the production, including a link to this recent interview with Shinn, in which he comments: "Compromise is still a very American value. The way we divided our government is intended to encourage compromise. The president can do little without Congress. But other societies look at the principle of compromise with suspicion – they regard it as utter defeat." And here's the trailer for the Royal Court production: Tuesday, 9 September: The Gazillionaire's Late Nite Lounge. Last
year's edition of the annual visit of Absinthe (which I reviewed here) was "hosted" (if that's the word) by the
masterly Gazillionaire and his faithful assistant Penny; this year, his
reward is his own late- Wednesday, 10 September: Oh
What War. For the past three years, Jason Craig and Jessica
Jelliffe of Banana Bag & Bodice have been working with Mallory
Catlett on Oh What War, "a fantasy of flagrant disobedience" that
takes the form of "an underground entertainment performed by a band of
deserters stuck in No Man's Land." The results of their collaboration open
tonight at HERE, 145
Sixth Avenue between Spring and Broome Streets, and run through 4 October.
Joining the trio are production designer Peter Ksander, music
director/ Thursday, 11 September: The Passion Project. Reid Farrington
has assembled a performance/ Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Performance Space 122 Fall SeasonThere is a distinctly European cast (specifically northern and central
European) to the new fall season at Performance Space 122 this year, the details of which
were announced by PS122's artistic director Vallejo Gantner last night at
a lavish and dynamic party at the lovely new Norwood Club, a private
organisation for artists and their friends located in a historic
five- The season opens on 6 September in PS122's downstairs theatre with Southern Promises, a world premiere work by "playwright provocateur" Thomas Bradshaw of Prophet and Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist, a Civil War story: "When the master of the plantation dies," the press release says, "he wills his slaves to be freed, but his wife doesn't believe that good property should be squandered." As I said, "playwright provocateur." Reid Farrington's The Passion Project, another world premiere, will play at the same time in PS122's upstairs theatre. The Passion Project is a reconstruction for theatre of Carl Theodor Dreyer's sublime 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, which integrates outtakes and descriptions of lost footage; the production was also supported by the Danish Film Institute and the University of Copenhagen. Shelley Kay stands in for Reneé Falconetti, who played Joan in the original Dreyer film. In the following months, Norway's Verdensteatret
will bring their new production Louder, inspired by a journey
through Vietnam and down the Mekong River; French director Pascal Rambert
and choreographer Rachid Ouramdane will present a unique Diptyque
of dance pieces in October; WaxFactory will open BLIND.NESS, another world
premiere, also in October; Goat Island will present their last production, the
elegaic The Lastmaker, in November; and, through the fall, Yanira Castro + Company will be performing Dark
Horse/ There's more to come, of course, including new work from The Debate Society, Amy Caron and Sara Juli; I've only scratched the surface. A full program of PS122's fall season is available as a .pdf here, and you should bookmark the PS122 Web site for continuing updates. Next year, PS122 celebrates its 30th anniversary season, but they show no signs of slowing down. So whip out those datebooks and start making your reservations now. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 The New TheatreThe schedule for this year's Prelude '08 festival, the Segal Theatre Centre's
annual celebration and preview of the work of New York's "most influential
emerging and established theatre artists," has just been announced, and
the event, held this year on 24-27 September at the CUNY Graduate Center,
365 Fifth Avenue, looks to be the best so far. Mingling, talking and
performing at the free four- A few critics will be kicking around too, including Bonnie Marranca and David Cote. I myself will be putting on my moderator hat for "The New Theatre," the final panel discussion of the festival on Saturday night 27 September, at which I'll be talking with folks from Banana Bag & Bodice, Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players Company, and the National Theater of the United States of America about their upcoming projects, all of which will be previewed that afternoon and evening, and probably much more. Curators Andy Horwitz, Geoffrey Scott and Frank Hentschker and festival dramaturg Morgan von Prelle Pecelli have done a bang-up job this year, and as usual, all four days of the festival – performances and discussions, as well as installations and interactive art – are absolutely free. Updated schedule information and a full list of performances and events will be available soon at the Prelude '08 Web site. If you can only make it to one festival this year ... well, you know the rest. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Potomac Theatre ProjectA unique opportunity to see two of the most noteworthy British plays of the past quarter-century begins next week when the Potomac Theatre Project visits New York's Atlantic Stage 2 for its annual repertory season. Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution (1985/1990) is the story of Galactia, a 15th-century Venetian painter commissioned by the government to portray a bloody military confrontation. Her painting provokes controversial responses from her patrons and leads her to a difficult decision about her work and her collaboration with society's conformist forces. Richard Romagnoli directs. Sarah Kane's Crave (1998) is a quartet for four voices as they weave among the detritus of memory, abuse and love; Cheryl Faraone is the director here. The 45-minute Crave is paired with the New York premiere of Somewhere in the Pacific, a play by Neal Bell and directed by Jim Petosa, about the men of a World War II troopship on its journey to Okinawa. The plays run 1-26 July 2008; full schedule information can be found here. Atlantic Stage 2 is located at 330 West 16th Street; tickets available through Ticket Central for Scenes and Crave/Somewhere. $24.00 gets you in the door. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerA highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest: Sunday, 18 May: The MCC Playlab Series continues tonight with a staged reading of Sangeet by Ranbir Sidhu. Sidhu's play, "a comedy without manners," is a poetic exploration of multiculturalism in Margaret Thatcher's London, focusing on an ex-strongman from India, a male nurse who leans toward euthanasia for some of his more borderline patients, and their children. Sidhu's plays (I've read this one and True East) are physically and linguistically explosive meditations on race, sex, shame and guilt, uneasy and complex approaches to uneasy and complex questions – a staged reading may not pass along the physical dynamics, but certainly will demonstrate the linguistic. It's free and open to the public; a wine and cheese reception will follow. At Baruch College's Engelman Recital Hall, 25th Street between Lexington and Third. The reading begins at 5.00pm. Monday, 19 May: Wherefore theatre criticism in New York? John Heilpern of the New York Observer, Jonathan Kalb of HotReview.org and Alexis Soloski of the Village Voice each respond to the question during the panel discussion "New York Theatre Criticism" at the Segal Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, tonight at 6.30pm. It's free and open to the public; more information at the Segal Center Web page here. And it's unlikely to run very long; Soloski, at least, will be heading downtown later tonight – as one of the judges of this year's Obie Awards, which will be handed out this evening at Webster Hall, she won't want to miss the ceremony to be hosted by Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp. You can watch the ceremony yourself during the first live Webcast of the event; more information at the Obies Web page. And keep an eye out for me; I'll be there too. Though I must promise to keep shtum on the evening itself; what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as the commercial says. Tuesday, 20 May: Also this week from the MCC Theater is the world premiere of a new play from the controversial (and my erstwhile correspondent) Neil LaBute, Reasons to be Pretty. LaBute's new play is the third in a trilogy (the first two parts were The Shape of Things and Fat Pig) about America's obsession with physical beauty and the warping effects this obsession has upon American men and women alike. Reasons to be Pretty runs through 5 July; more information here. Wednesday, 21 May: Something about the Greeks has gotten into
the water (or, more likely, the wine) over at PS122. Following La Femme est Morte, the Shalimar's current
production about Phaedra, Oedipus is in their sights now. The Pan Pan Theatre
of Dublin is offering up Oedipus Loves You, beginning tonight at
8.00pm and running through 1 June. "Pan Pan's punk rock sensibility
strikes a fierce chord in this savvy update of Sophocles' classic drama of
the ultimate dysfunctional family. ... Oedipus is still counselled by the
wise Tiresias, but the sightless sage is now a Freudian analyst and
ex- Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerA highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest: Saturday, 10 May: The unofficial 2007-2008 Edward Albee theatre season in New York concludes this week with the opening of Occupant, Albee's recent play about sculptor Louise Nevelson. The Signature Theatre Company production stars Mercedes Ruehl and Larry Bryggman under the direction of Pam MacKinnon; Occupant runs through 6 July. More information at the Signature Theatre Company's Web page for the show. Monday, 12 May: Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna of Poland's TR
Warszawa theatre company will talk to Susan Feldman, artistic director
of St. Ann's Playhouse, about his upcoming Brooklyn production of
Macbeth tonight at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth
Avenue. TR Warszawa is one of Poland's leading contemporary theatre
companies, revisioning theatrical traditions for the contemporary stage;
Jarzyna's production of Medea at Vienna's Burgtheater won the 2007
Nestroy-Preis. The evening is co-presented by the Polish Cultural
Institute, which is almost single- Wednesday, 14 May: Performance group The Shalimar returns their show, the
whimsically- Thursday, 15 May: The Ontological- Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerIn 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-
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 in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerYou 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-
"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 in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerUPDATE: Tomorrow (Friday) night, 28 March, the Metropolitan Opera will Webcast the final live performance of Tristan und Isolde this season. Says the email:
The performance begins at 7.00pm Eastern time; click here to access the Webcast. Between posts on this blog, I've been scurrying around, reading a few others. For a cross-Atlantic look at the "value of theatre" discussion, take a look at Chris Wilkinson's precis in today's Guardian; and Mark Armstrong spotlights what appears to be an off-hand but ill-advised comment about American playwrights and their significance, whatever that means, from the new director of artistic development at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Jerry Patch. Of interest, in a dour sort of way. There's about two months left in the official 2007-2008 theatre season; then comes the theatre festival season, which isn't the same thing but tends to get just as hectic. But there's life in the old girl yet, as a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest, will attest: Saturday, 29 March: Fans of the Coen brothers may wish to consider Almost an Evening, three short plays by Ethan Coen, currently running through 1 June at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker. Like some of his films, the descriptions of the plays at the Web site are coy ("Someone waits somewhere for quite some time," goes the entire synopsis for Waiting; in Debate, we're told, "Cosmic questions are taken up. Not much is learned"), but with a cast that includes F. Murray Abraham, Mark Linn-Baker, Mary McCann and Joey Slotnick, one can hope for at least a bright diversion. Sunday, 30 March: Alison Croggon takes some time off from theatre blogging and presiding over the land of Pellinor with the online publication of her latest chapbook of poems, Torque. "And, as all poetry ought to be, it's free," she notes. You can download Torque, in .pdf format, here, at the Ahadada Books Web site. Monday, 31 March: The Segal Center welcomes Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman of The Civilians, who will discuss their new historical cabaret Paris Commune, opening at The Public Theatre for a three-week run beginning on 4 April. The show was developed from primary source materials about the 1871 working class uprising. Daniel Gerould moderates tonight's discussion, which begins at 6.30pm; excerpts from the show are also promised. Admission is free; the Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. Tuesday, 1 April: Order up your tickets for God's Ear, Jenny Schwartz's 2007 play about a family coming apart at the edges following the death of a child, which moves to the Vineyard Theatre with director Anne Kauffman and many of the cast of last year's New Georges production intact. God's Ear opens on 9 April and runs through 18 May. My review of the New George's premiere – positive, with just a few reservations – is here. And the text of the play is also available, published by Faber & Faber. Thursday, 3 April: A party follows tonight's 8.30pm opening of Annie Dorsen's Democracy in America at PS122, 150 First Avenue. Okwui Okpokwasili, Philippa Kaye and Anthony Torn perform a show devised from purchases made by the public via a Web site earlier this year. Can money buy happiness – or, at least, an engrossing evening at the theatre? We'll find out. Friday, 4 April: Downtown theatre types know him better as an impassioned publicist for Richard Foreman, the Blue Man Group and others, but give Manny Igrejas his due as a playwright himself tonight. His Kitty & Lina at manhattantheatresource, 177 Macdougal Street, looks at the relationship of two New York women, one a wide-eyed actress and the other an immigrant from Portugal. It runs through 26 April. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night Planner (and a Few Night Thoughts)Your correspondent will be winging his way to France for a few days later this week, which means posting will be light here (for a different reason, however, than the recent light posting). But in the meantime, here is a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest: At the Public
Theater: Previews have begun for Drunk Enough to Say I Love
You?, the latest from Caryl Churchill. It's a two-hander directed by
James Macdonald, who helmed the Royal Court premiere last year, though there's a new
cast for the New York staging (Scott Cohen and Samuel West); the play is
an allegory about the foreign policy relationships between Great Britain
and the United States (the characters are named "Jack" and "Sam"). The
show runs through 6 April; tickets and schedule information here. (I note, by the way, that the general admission
price for Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? is $50.00 for this
two-person play; it runs 45 minutes, which makes it, on a play- At RADA: Speaking of British playwrights, my London readers will want to make their way to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art this week, where Wrestling School associate Melanie Jessop is directing Howard Barker's Ursula, beginning Tuesday, 11 March, and running through 22 March. Consider it a prelude to the opening of Barker's new play, I Saw Myself, a drama about the role and responsibility of the artist in society, at RADA's Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre in April. At La MaMa ETC: Theodora Skipitares directs a puppet-production of Euripides' Medea, which opens on 13 March. Skipitares has in the past created an adaptation of Iphigenia; per the Web page for the show, Medea "features puppets, created by Cecilia Schiller and Skipitares, in various styles: colored shadow puppets, small rod puppets, as well as realistic life-size figures operated by actors; along with the use of video and live music, and a chorus represented by gigantic heads worn on the bodies of female performers." Medea runs through 30 March; tickets and schedule information at OvationTix. At the Cherry Lane Theatre: In previews this week is a new production of Edward Albee's The American Dream and The Sandbox, directed by the playwright and featuring a stellar cast that includes Judith Ivey, Myra Carter and George Bartenieff. This marks a return to ground zero, in a way; the plays were originally produced at the Cherry Lane in 1961/1962, just prior to the phenomenal Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It's part of a continuing "Albee season" of sorts, which started with the McCarter Theatre production of the playwright's newest comedy, Me Myself and I, and will continue later this season with the premiere of Occupant, Albee's play about sculptor Louise Nevelson, at the Signature Theatre. Tickets for The American Dream/The Sandbox are available from Telecharge. Elsewhere on the Web: Christopher Shinn speaks to Jarrett Dapier in a new interview for In These Times, "A Playwright's Traumatic Vision". Chris discusses growing up gay in Bill Clinton's America, gives a brief glimpse of his latest work, and discusses the role of the artist in the theatre:
Read the whole interview here; thanks to Mark Armstrong for calling it to our attention. On the necessity of throwing bricks: Finally, there's been a little whizbang about theatre criticism both here and in Australia lately. Having waded through this mucky swamp before I'm not going to do it again, but I did want to note the following thoughts about the health of theatre criticism in the United States from Eric Bentley. It's from the foreword to a 1955 reissue of his 1946 book The Playwright as Thinker and does not appear in the current edition, but it seems to me his viewpoint is still timely, even fifty years later:
Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerThere's been much blogosphere discussion of a variety of issues lately (especially this from Mike Daisey, with its resultant controversy), and if I've stayed out of it, it's because I have little to add; greater minds than my own, with more experience of the tensions and anxieties involved, are on these contemporary problems, and more power to them. (I also don't really understand the question involved, that theatre is supposed to serve or fail that bizarre idea of "America" in some way, whatever "America" is, not to mention China, or Australia, or Mozambique, and whether theatre is failing them, too; it scrapes against the intimation that art, by its nature, doesn't possess explicit cultural utility, but touches the individual instead; the idea itself smacks of that curious contemporary Western pragmatism that castrates theatre's possibilities; but I've been obtuse before and will be again.) I do feel that what's on the stages of these theatres that we're talking about is at least as important as how those plays get there, and really that's all I've been trying to write about. We'd all like to see "more theatre" around America, I'm sure, but there's a McDonald's in every small American town and billions of their hamburgers are sold every year; I don't think you can say that America's physical health has been well-served as a result. That theatre can be once again an intersection of philosophy and poetry, the unique nature of theatre and drama a means of intense entry to that bodied experience of philosophy and poetry, not unlike the status of the ancient theatre, is really all the idea I've been toying with; that bodied nexus is still, often enough, missing in the theatre. There are a few theatre practitioners out there, I know, who believe as I do that compromise in the pursuit of exploring that intersection is fatal, that the stakes are too high to worry about anything but the construction of that philosophical vision and the exploration of the means to join both body and mind in the recognition of its darkest moments. (Of course, this has political and cultural implications as well.) Which means, really, that so long as we've got playwrights and critics making these facile distinctions between feeling and intellect, subjectivity and objectivity, body and word, the work remains urgent. One of these days I'll get out some more; spring springs for all of us, me included. So apologies for the light posting lately. But here, as every Friday, is a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest: Saturday, 1 March: At the center of the Neue Galerie's Gustav Klimt show is their recent acquisition Adele Bloch-Bauer I, one of Klimt's masterpieces: the ability of the fetish as exemplar of desire to transcend the subject/object dichotomy inherent in desire (note those eyes within the golden textile of the subject's skirt), was perhaps never more explicit than in this portrait. The show itself is a major U.S. retrospective of the artist, featuring eight additional paintings, 120 drawings (many tenderly explicit) and a replica of the receiving parlor of Klimt's second studio. You can also see a full-sized photographic replica of Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the extraordinary original of which I recently saw for myself at Vienna's Secession building. The exhibition runs through 30 June at 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street. Sunday, 2 March: Hello Failure, a new play by Kristen Kosmas that previewed at the last Prelude festival, gets a full production which begins tonight at PS122 at 6.30pm (note the early curtain time). It is, according to the Web page, "a sprawling associative neo-realistic comedy of beauty involving seven submariners' wives, one counterfeit civil war ghost, one lusty renegade hairdresser and a poignant potted plant all making it through the day ... barely." Ken Rus Schmoll, late of Amazons and their Men, directs a cast that includes the playwright herself, Aimee Phelan-Deconinck and Maria Striar; through 22 March. PS122 is at 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street; more information and tickets here. Monday, 3 March: Just arrived on my desk is Lovefuries, a new collection of plays by David Ian Rabey, a Welsh playwright/director and the artistic director of the Lurking Truth theatre company. These most recent plays (two solos -- one for a woman, another for a man -- and a two-hander) explore transgressive desires in the midst of loss and the urge to a self-realization denied by social conventions; The Contracting Sea is a response to Synge's Riders to the Sea that attempts to reify the elemental power of feminine desire to transcend mourning. Rabey is also one of the leading exponents of the work of Howard Barker, though his own work is quite different and just as powerful; I hope to write about it more soon. The book is available for pre-order now from Amazon. Wednesday, 5 March: The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is offering "Sonic Meditations," a program of solo pieces for percussion performed by David Schotzko, tonight at The Tank, 279 Church Street between Franklin and White at 7.00pm. Schotzko will perform five pieces, including Alvin Lucier's "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra for Solo Amplified Triangle" and Iannis Xenakis' "Psappha for Solo Percussion." Tonight's program is the first in a new series, ICETank, which will feature members of ICE in intimate and unusual programs on the first Wednesday of every month. Thursday, 6 March: Up at the Segal Center, members of the Target Margin Theater company will discuss their recent two-year series "On the Greeks." The company's artistic director David Herskovits and others will also preview their upcoming production of Aristophanes' Frogs. (As you might imagine, this two-hear project has particular interest for me.) The program is free and begins at 6.30pm at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue; more information here. Friday, 7 March: Performances begin this week for Ken Urban's The Happy Sad and Tommy Smith's The Break-up, both written for the Flea Theater's Bats company; there's a preview tonight at 9.00pm. For this commission, Ken's written his first musical, a comic one-acter about New Yorkers who "make unfortunate choices about love and sex"; Smith's play is about a man who falls in love with his drug dealer, "with disastrous results," the press release says. Both plays are directed by Sherri Kronfeld in the Flea's small downstairs space at 41 White Street, between Broadway and Church; the show officially opens on 22 March and runs through 7 April. Tickets at OvationTix, and to learn more about the show, drop by the Flea's Web site. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerI've added Jonathan Kalb's Hot Review to the list of "Other Theatre Web Sites" at right, and glancing over recent entries there have found a few interesting dissents from the critical acclaim accorded some recent Broadway shows: see, for example, Alexis Greene's response to August: Osage County and Shawn-Marie Garrett's short essay on Spring Awakening. Otherwise, a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest: Saturday, 16 February: Mark Schultz's play Deathbed is about "the boundaries of human compassion in the midst of personal suffering," in the context of seven people seeking to come to terms with death. Mark's work has appeared in the past at the Public Theater and the New York Theatre Workshop. Deathbed runs through 1 March at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre, 2162 Broadway at West 76th Street; tickets through Theatermania. Monday, 18 February: Take advantage of your day off and get to your local bookstore for a copy, fresh off the press, of Bonnie Marranca's new collection of essays Performance Histories. Marranca's a broad-ranging critic of extraordinarily catholic tastes, and her new book includes essays on Wallace Shawn, Maria Fornes, the Wooster Group and food, as well as interviews with Romeo Castellucci and Susan Sontag, among others. (Full disclosure: I copyedited the book, quite happily.) You can pre-order the book, which should ship soon, from Amazon.com. Tuesday, 19 February: Richard Nelson, until recently the head of the playwriting program at Yale, opens his new play, Conversations in Tusculum, at the Public Theatre, 425 Lafayette Street, at 7.00pm. Set during Julius Caesar's reign in ancient Rome, Nelson's story of "the country you love and the values it represents ... being destroyed by a misguided leader" (oh, that old chestnut) includes a tempting cast, among them Brian Dennehy and David Strathairn; Nelson also directs. More information at the Public's Web page for the show; it runs through 23 March. Wednesday, 20 February: Tonight at 8.30pm, Justin Bond & Friends brings its new show, Lustre: A Midwinter Trans-fest, to PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street. A celebration of queer cabaret, the show also features Our Lady J, Glenn Marla and other "surprise guests"; you may know Bond better as one-half of the performance duo Kiki & Herb (he's Kiki). The show runs through 9 March; tickets and schedule information here. And on Thursday, 6 March, the 2008 Ethel Eichelberger Award Ceremony will take place just after the performance (Bond won the 2007 Eichelberger award). Thursday, 21 February: Also at PS122 this week is Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road), the latest from Temporary Distortion. The troupe, which "has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of theatre by staging plays in claustrophobic boxlike structures, with little physical movement and a unique restrained style of acting," has staged this piece as a hybrid of theatre and cinema -- an onstage road movie. Earlier iterations of the piece appeared at the Ontological-Hysteric's Incubator series and at the Chocolate Factory; from here it tours to France. Through 23 February only; schedule and ticket information here. If you find yourself in the West Village instead, troop on over to NYU's Loewe Theatre, where Marilyn Nonken will be performing a program of "New Music for Piano and Electronics" at 8.00pm. Marilyn will be offering world premieres by Chris Bailey and Tom Beyer, along with pieces by Alvin Lucier, Beth Wiemann and Jonathan Harvey; she'll be joined by guest artist Kathleen Supové on the Beyer. While you're there, pick up Marilyn's latest, beautiful recording of Chris Dench's "Passing Bells: Night," just out on Beyond Status Geometry, a compilation album of Dench's music from Tzadik. Friday, 22 February: It is one of the great problems of having a full-time, non-theatre-related job that I can't get to events like this year's NoPassport conference at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, being held today from 10.00am through 9.00pm. The theme of this year's conference is "Dreaming the Americas/The Body Politic in Performance," and participants in the scheduled panels include Caridad Svich (who founded NoPassport), Erik Ehn, Betty Shamieh, Jay Scheib, Jason Grote, Ken Urban and literally dozens of others. More information on the history of NoPassport is here; the Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue. The program is free, but a $5.00 donation is suggested. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerAfter the cold winds and festival madness of January, the colder winds of February. One would have hoped for a bit of a breather, but alas, theatre struggles on. So do I, despite a lingering bout of discouragement at the thought of revising a new play for some elusive and vague possibility of future production -- what insane woman would want to perform the damn thing? leaving aside the question of who the hell would want to read, produce or see it -- and the continuing wisdom of trailing this blog farther than it's worth, along with the usual dour grumbling. Dare one call it "a disaffected postmodernist ennui"? Well, tough. And screw you, too. I know, I hear you -- I should get out more. There's more than enough to keep me out of the house, tightly wrapped. So, a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest: Saturday, 2 February/Sunday, 3 February: Although you've missed the first few nights of the hotINK International Festival of Play Readings at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, no reason to miss the last few nights. Scheduled for 2-3 February are new plays from US dramatist Mac Wellman (1965 UU), Australian playwright Tee O'Neill (Best Possible World) and France's Bernard Da Costa (Boomerang), this last featuring Kathleen Chalfant. Schedule varies; full listing and details here. Monday, 4 February: Just see Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland and can't get enough R. Foreman? Hie yourself down to The Housing Works at 126 Crosby Street at 7.00pm tonight and join Foreman as he discusses "art, behavior and his latest collection of work [from TCG Books], Bad Boy Nietzsche! And Other Plays" with Eric Bogosian. He'll sign your book for you too, apparently; a reception follows. Details (only a few, but details nonetheless) at The Housing Works' Web site. When you get home, put the book down next to your computer; you may want it nearby as you read Nicholas Birns' excellent essay on Foreman's recent work, "Mediated Understandings," in Hyperion -- an Internet magazine quickly becoming a required visit for anyone interested in the condition of contemporary American and world theatre. Tuesday, 5 February: Artaud's sole complete stageplay, his adaptation of Shelley's The Cenci, opens in a brand new translation by Richard Sieburth and produced by John Jahnke's Hotel Savant theatre company at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street. Whether this example of the Theatre of Cruelty will be able to compare with today's New York/Super Tuesday Presidential primary is anybody's guess. But it's no ordinary revival, this: "It is the Hotel Savant's intent to impugn The Cenci, an infamous but neglected work, with an aptly modern theatrical language. Jahnke and his company will portray the fall of the house of Cenci -- powerful and doomed, victimized and victimizing -- inspired by what it most resembles today: a tabloid comic tragedy. Specters of the past, the Cencis also prefigure our modern day obsession with private lives lived publicly and sensationally, knowingly pursued yet simultaneously trapped by the media attention they invite." Hmm ... considering Bill and Hillary's history, maybe there's more to the comparison than I thought. Jahnke's last New York show was the 2006 world premiere of Susan Sontag's play A Parsifal, and this production features work by downtown stalwarts Peter Ksander (designer) and Tony Torn, Lauren Blumenfeld and Todd d'Amour (performers). Act now; it runs only through 23 February. Tickets and information through Theatermania. Wednesday, 6 February: At 6.00pm tonight, join Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi and Claudia Castellucci, the principals of the Italian theatre group Societas Raffaello Sanzio, for an open discussion about their company's work at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY's Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. The group is perhaps best known for its epic work Tragedia Endogonidia (a YouTube clip of the haunting production is available here). The name of the company is a reference to Raffaello, "the Renaissance painter (Raphael) who combines the perfection of the shape with the inquietude of a world which is quickly losing its reference points; therefore he is the witness to a dramatic tension and a dynamics of technique that are trends always present in the company's works." It's free; details from the MESTC Web site here. And if that's not enough for you ... Thursday, 7 February: ... the group's latest work, Hey girl!, opens tonight at Montclair State University's Peak Performances series at 7.30pm. "In this new piece, Romeo Castellucci examines the language of gesture. The genesis for this play came to him while stopped at an intersection; he saw a group of girls waiting for their buses," the promotional material says. "In Castellucci’s masterful hands, nuance is everything: a nod, a finger pointed, a raised eyebrow, or a moment of recognition. Hey girl! examines the relationship of what is going on in the mind of our everyday girl. What is her destiny? Who summons her to appear?" Intriguing questions. Hey girl!'s limited run closes on 10 February. To get more information, visit the page for the show at the Peak Performances Web site. Friday, 8 February: Israeli choreographer Deganit Shemy arrives at PS122 for Iodine [YOD], her new dance piece for five women who "move between control and abandon, between being victims and victimizers, as well as between vision and blindness, dependency and individuation. They long to be a part of something larger but also fear losing their identity in the throng." Don't we all? The show runs 5-9 February at 8.00pm, Sunday 10 February at 6.00pm. More information at PS122's Web page for the show. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerA highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest: Saturday, 19 January: One of our favorite companies, the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, is letting its hair down this winter and spring with Room for Cream, a continuing lesbian-themed soap opera, at La MaMa ETC, 74A East 4th Street. Episode 2, "The Flashback," is performed today at 5.30pm. Future episodes will appear on the first and third Saturdays of each month through June, same time, same place. "Join us," they write, "as we follow the espresso-laced exploits of dykes in distress, lesbians in love, queers in ... well, you get the point." I guess you do. More info at the La MaMa ETC Web site. Tickets are only $8.00. Sunday, 20 January: Through 13 April, the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers blog.mode: addressing fashion, the first in a series of exhibitions examining the way we present our bodies to the world: through our clothes. The title of the show? A reference to one of our own new modes of communication, the blog. Monday, 21 January: Down at his Flea Theatre, artistic director Jim Simpson directs the Flea's resident company, the Bats, in a revival of Peter Handke's 1966 Offending the Audience, one of the Austrian playwright's earliest metatheatrical works. Previews begin tonight in advance of a 31 January opening; a rare New York production of a Handke play. More information at the Flea's Web site. Tuesday, 22 January: Karole Armitage's Armitage Gone! Dance Company premieres part three of their "Dream Trilogy," Connoisseurs of Chaos. Armitage and designer David Salle base this most recent piece on Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field. Tonight through 27 January, more information here. Armitage also choreographs the upcoming Broadway production of Passing Strange, the musical by Stew, Heidi Rodewald and Annie Dorsen, which opens in February at the Belasco. Wednesday, 23 January: There's still time to catch Edward the Second, the Red Bull Theater's production of the Christopher Marlowe tragedy; it's been extended through 27 January. I wrote about the show on 17 December of last year; tickets at Ticket Central. Thursday, 24 January: Brooke Berman's new comedy Hunting and Gathering, about that most terrifying of New York life experiences, the apartment hunt, begins previews tonight at Primary Stages, 59 East 59th Street, at 8.00pm. (I'd suggest it was more appropriate for an Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty approach, but opinions can differ.) Their production last summer of Opus, Michael Hollinger's play concerning the dissolution of a string quartet, was a highly pleasurable evening. More information on the show and ticket information at the Primary Stages Web site; the show runs through 1 March. And Ms. Berman also has a blog of her own. Friday, 25 January: One of our most respected contemporary portraitists is the subject of a new exhibition called Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings at the Museum of Modern Art through 10 March. Along with 75 of Freud's etchings, the show will also include a selection of his paintings and drawings. There's an online exhibition as well. (If you're chafing at MoMA's $20.00 ticket price, not to worry; admission is free every Friday evening from 4.00 to 8.00pm.) Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerMay I make a modest request? Put the kibosh on the festivals already. Currently underway are four festivals of downtown theatre, each of them packed with enough inviting performances and productions to make my head spin. That's more than 40 productions all told, and that doesn't cover all of the other openings of the next seven days. It's more than a middle-aged man with a full-time, 35-hour-a-week job (completely unrelated to theatre, by the way) can take. Where's Martin Denton when you need him? The big one is the Under the Radar Festival, curated by Mark Russell at the Public Theater (17 individual productions), which continues to go strong with work by Jay Scheib, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, the brilliant British troupe rotozaza -- and that's just a few days. A few blocks east of the Public, Vallejo Gantner's PS122 is hosting Coil: A Winter Festival of Theatre, Dance and Performance (10 productions), which will include, along with a great deal of new work, encore visits from John Moran and Saori and Banana Bag & Bodice. But don't stop there; catch the crosstown bus to the West Village for HERE's 2008 Culturemart (12 productions), with new work from The South Wing and Ex.Pgirl. And Steven McElroy in today's New York Times also highlights the Barrow Street Theater's Fortnight festival (9 productions). Winter doldrums indeed. I only hope the NyQuil holds out. That said, here's a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest: Saturday, 12 January: PS122's Coil festival brings the new British theater company 1927 to these shores with their show Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, tonight at 10.00pm. A hit at the Edinburgh Festival, Between the Devil ... "takes you to the wild woods and the shipwrecked seas, from the weird underbelly of the suburbs to the tweedy world of the old rich. Hapless cats, marauding gingerbread men and cross dressing devils all make an appearance, not to mention the sinister twins and their misfortunate guests," using the techniques of silent film. Through 27 January; tickets via OvationTix. (Now these festivals are ganging up, too: This is a coproduction with the Under the Radar.) Sunday, 13 January: I hope you have your tickets, because monologuist Mike Daisey's new show at the Under the Radar festival, the intriguingly-titled How Theater Failed America, is already sold out. With luck, it'll be back. But if you don't have tickets, you can enjoy reading one of Mike's regrets for 2007:
Thanks to Boston's Art Hennessey for pointing me to this. Monday, 14 January: Paris Syndrome is the new dance theatre piece about culture shock from the Ex.Pgirl group, tonight at HERE's Culturemart festival at 8.30pm. "Through their trademark use of humorous video interviews, playful multi-lingual text, and hilarious physicality, Ex.Pgirl engages the ideas of madness, love, beauty, and cultural misunderstanding that surround this psychological condition," the Web page says. Tickets via OvationTix. Tuesday, 15 January: Mike Leigh's critically-acclaimed latest play Two Thousand Years, about an assimilated Jewish family in London whose son turns to orthodoxy, sold out quickly when it opened at London's National Theatre in 2005. Now (and north of 14th Street, for a change), it gets its New York premiere via The New Group, who did a terrific job with Leigh's Abigail's Party a season or two back. Scott Elliott directs; the cast includes Laura Esterman and the always-welcome Richard Masur. Performances begin tonight at 8.00pm. Wednesday, 16 January: Maybe after all that downtown theatre you might like to try to make some yourself. Courtesy The Foundry Theatre and rotozaza, you'll be able to do so in Etiquette at the Veselka Restaurant, 144 Second Avenue. "You sit across from each other at a table in a restaurant wearing headphones that tell you what to say to each other, or to use one of the objects positioned to the side," the press material says. "Etiquette exposes human communication at its most delicate and explores the difficulty of turning our thoughts into words we can trust. For it to work you just need to listen and respond accordingly." Not unlike rotozaza's excellent Five in the Morning at PS122 last season, except that you're at the center of it now. Audience participation never had it so good. From the Under the Radar festival; information here. And the Village Voice's Alexis Soloski has more. Thursday, 17 January: You've no doubt seen the posters (they do crop up every January). Performances begin for Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (England, Japan & New York): A Richard Foreman Theatre Machine at the Ontological Theater at Saint Mark's Church, Second Avenue and Tenth Street. It's the 40th anniversary show for Richard's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre: "Plunging deeper than ever into ravishing abstract theater, Richard Foreman evokes the atmosphere of a séance, combining the tableaus filmed in Japan and England with five live New York actors who navigate a sinking grand piano." As if words could describe it. Here's a production blog, with entries from current Foreman performer Fulya Peker and former Foreman performer Juliana Francis Kelly. Tickets via OvationTix. Friday, 18 January: Do the laundry. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 OpeningsUPDATE: In re the Democracy in America project noted in the last paragraph below, you can participate yourself in bringing the play to fruition by visiting the project's Web site, where you can purchase a little piece of live theatre. Bring a credit card and your imagination. Christmas will arrive early for Bertolt Brecht enthusiasts this year; perhaps with the Disneyfied post-capitalist labor relations problems uptown, his time has come again. The Elephant Brigade is presenting a new production of Brecht's 1926 Man Is Man at HERE Arts Center, 145 6th Avenue, starting on Thursday, 6 December. Paul Binnerts directs, with a cast almost entirely drawn from Tisch/NYU, where the production originally opened this past spring. According to the HERE Web site, "Man Is Man is played as 'real-time' theater, with the actors always present on the stage as themselves, staging themselves in the roles and scenes they play. They tell the story of the play by employing theatrical devices they handle themselves: small objects, miniature set pieces, exposed on tables, which they manipulate and film with a video camera." The production runs through 22 December; more information at the Elephant Brigade's Web site. About a week later, on 13 December, David Gordon will present Uncivil Wars, a further adaptation of Brecht's Measure for Measure adaptation The Roundheads and the Pointheads (1932/34), 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." An inviting idea and revisioning of Brecht, indeed. The production (which will not be open for review) runs through 22 December. Tickets now available through TicketWeb. If you find it a little cold this December, though, you needn't step out into the winter night to get your Brecht fix; the PBS series Great Performances will broadcast the Los Angeles Opera production of the Brecht/Kurt Weill opera of 1927/29, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, on 10 December (but, as always with PBS shows, check your local listings). Patti LuPone stars; John Doyle, who recently staged the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, directs. A rare treat. Looking for something to do tomorrow (that is, Monday) night, 26 November? You might head up to Paragraph at 6.30pm, where Chris Shinn will be speaking at the PEN American Center's Writers' Roundtable (admission is free; the event is open to the public). After that, head down to Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, where Annie Dorsen and friends host the launch party for the Foundry Theatre's Democracy in America spring production at PS122. The doors there open at 9.30. Andy Horwitz has the full run-down at Culturebot. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Openings: Beethoven LiveAs anybody who's been reading this the past few days will tell you, I try to advocate for work that recognises that there are languages other than English and countries other than America in which theatre is done. So I'll advocate for this, too – especially since there's precious little time left to see it. Through Sunday 3 November at PS122, the Czech-based Lhotáková & Soukup Company (LaS Company), which specialises in dance theatre from a documentary aesthetic, will be presenting Beethoven Live, a segment of their longer international project called The Name of the Game, scheduled to premiere in its entirety in Prague in late 2007. Choreographer Kristina Lhotáková and director/sound designer Ladislav Soukup took four young people from New York City to the Czech capital to work with the Prague company on a project that explores what the press material calls "the irrevocability of nature" (they'll get no argument from me there). The piece draws its inspiration from the movement of non-dancers. The company's prize-winning work has been seen around the world, from Perth to Rio de Janeiro. Lucky readers of Superfluities Redux can get discount tickets to this show during the remainder of its brief New York run, too. Just plug in or mention the code TEN when you order tickets online, by phone (at 212.351.3101) or at the theatre and you'll save a cool ten bucks on the admission price. A tough deal to beat. Remaining performances are tonight through Saturday at 8:00pm. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Opening: Potatoland Production BlogRichard Foreman dreams "of the voice so deep that its rumble sounds all possible words, all possible ideas, all at the same time, such multiple universes of sound and sense" as he launches the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's new production blog for the January 2008 opening of Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (England, Japan & New York). A central feature of this production, I'm told: a sinking grand piano. Fulya Peker, Joel Israel, Caitlin Mcdonough-Thayer, Sarah Dahlen and Caitlin Rucker are in the cast. The first post also features a link to Foreman's production notebook for the show. A sample:
It seems that anxiety and fear of falling await us once again. Miscellaneous notes from over the years on Foreman here. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 Scenes from an ExecutionScenes from an Execution by Howard Barker. Directed by
Richard Romagnoli. Original music by Peter Nilsson. Sound design by Ben
Schiffer. Lighting design by Laura J. Eckelman. Scenic design by Mark
Evancho. Costume design by Julie Emerson. With Jan Maxwell (Galactia),
David Barlow (Carpeta), Alex Draper (Urgentino), Patricia Buckley (Gina
Rivera), Timothy Deenihan (Ostensible), Peter Schmitz
(Prodo/ Making art in Renaissance Venice and the 21st century Western world in Howard Barker's contemporary classic, in a brilliant production with Jan Maxwell by the Potomac Theatre Project Anna Galactia (not unlike the historical Artemisia Gentileschi) is a middle- Scenes from an Execution, originally written in 1985 as a radio
play and adapted for the stage a few years later, is Howard Barker's most
popular and most frequently- As Galactia's personal faults become more and more evident, she is more and more at the mercy of the Doge (Alex Draper), an immeasurably better politician who nonetheless is a genuine connoisseur of the painter and her work. At the end of the play, explaining the decision to exhibit the work, he says:
It is this idea of absorption into the community that renders the art powerless to offend, as well as powerless to change the community or the world. (And Galactia's status as a woman in Venice helps this along. "If it had been painted by a man it would have been an indictment of the war, but as it is, painted by the most promiscuous female within a hundred miles of the Lagoon, I think we are entitled to a different speculation," another painter says.) Though it might be easy to leave the Doge with the last word of the play, it belongs as it should to Galactia, whose "Yes" leads her to an honored seat at the table of the powers that first sought to suppress the painting and punish the artist. Barker denies closure to the issues he raises: these are questions, this is the situation of the artist who accepts patronage and the democratic community which seeks to recognise her in promoting its own self-validation and self-congratulation, and there we have it. Romagnoli's spare production sharpens the focus of the conflict; we never see Galactia's work (indeed, we don't even get to see her sketch; Maxwell's hand as it travels over her sketchpad holds no pencil). We see only the artist and her condition. Maxwell is a powerful, energetic and sensuous Galactia, who leads her
younger lover, Carpeta (a comically effective David Barlow, who may as
well physically wrap himself around Maxwell's little finger), like a puppy
on a leash; a good lover, not even he can contain her arrogance and
stubbornness. With loose hair flying in all directions, loose clothing
draping over her body's curves and little make- The day- Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 John Moran and Others: What if Saori Had a Party?What if Saori Had a Party? (a.k.a. Saori's Birthday). Composed and directed by John Moran. Choreography by John Moran and Saori Tsukada. Production assistant: Celine Aguillon. Lighting by Yi Zaho. With Saori Tsukada (Saori), Joseph Keckler (Singing Telegram Man) and Katie Brook (The Baby). Running time: 45 minutes. At PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street, 21 October-4 November, 2007. Tickets and schedule information. A Philip Glass protegé, composer John Moran has been working with dancer Saori Tsukada since 2003; this is their latest, a commission whipped up for PS122 within the space of six weeks. This parody of anime children's shows is a fleeting amusement -- precise, affecting, but fleeting nonetheless, memorable most for Moran's eclectic score, which distills various musics and sounds into something resembling an operetta, and Saori Tsukada's knowing takeoff on the all-surface, no-texture gleaming cheer and exaggerated pouting of children's television shows. Hostess Saori lives in a computerised bubble; she greets every day, the warm sun that comes through the window, with a bubbly cheer, and this she can do because, her computerised companion tells her, she has no birthday. But she desperately wants one today, she wants a present, and before long a Singing Telegram Man (Joseph Keckler, possessed of a fine bass-baritone) arrives at her doorstep, bringing her a unique birthday present indeed: a baby (Katie Brook). But with the introduction of birth and reproduction, death is never far in the distance, and when Saori's clean well-lighted bubble bursts after she tries to bring the baby into the bubble with her, all is utterly lost, and Saori winds up writhing on the black floor (trimly but elegantly lit, circus-style, by Yi Zaho), dying and in anguish. Saori Tsukada's task here is to bring a three-dimensionality to a two-dimensional figure, and to do so largely through movement (her own dialogue is almost entirely in Japanese, the contemporary Japanese that freely integrates English words like "computer"). The precision she brings to the stylised movements of anime (not unlike the exaggerated movements of children's show hosts here in the U.S., too) goes far to putting over the somewhat old-news revelation of the consciousness of death and the persistence of the memory of pain; she and Keckler, a telegram man who wouldn't be out of place in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood either, make a unique team, and Katie Brook's Baby, in a demure babydoll dress, becomes more watchable the more she explores the strangeness of the world into which she's been invited. The running time isn't much longer than those old Pee-Wee's Playhouse episodes, and John Moran's playhouse appears to be in the same neighborhood: colorful, manic, and closed off from real experience, in an eternal childhood. The irony is that childhood itself brings the worm of mortality. What if Saori Had a Party? is very much in line with his other works that have drawn on popular culture for their formal structures (such as his 1989 Jack Benny! and the 1997 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), but, as Moran said as he introduced the piece last night, this is a piece composed for the "party" that appears to be the overarching concept for this season's programming at PS122. And if you're not hungover the morning after, the memory of a party, like those of most good parties, lingers pleasurably, but begins to dissipate not long after the music stops. But if you like parties, you'll like What if Saori Had a Party? too; I did. And what better nights for parties than Friday and Saturday night? Final performances tonight and tomorrow at 8:30pm and this Sunday at 6:30pm. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Deep Trance Behavior in PotatolandDeep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (England, Japan & New York): A Richard Foreman Theater Machine. Written, directed, designed and scored by Richard Foreman. Managing director: Shannon Sindelar. Technical director: Peter Ksander. Stage manager: Brendan Regimbal. Sound engineer: Travis Just. With Joel Israel (Man in Striped Suit), Caitlin McDonough Thayer (Girl in Sailor Hat), Fulya Peker (Girl with Black Hair), Caitlin Rucker (Girl with the Golden Dress), Sarah Dahlen (Girl with the Tiara), and Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim and André Malraux (Voices on Tape). A production of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street. Running time: 62 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 17 January performance. 17 January-13 April 2008. Ticket and schedule information at OvationTix. Two grand pianos and a graceless hummingbird provide new challenges to Richard Foreman's characters UPDATE: I was remiss, I realise, in not congratulating Foreman's fine performers in Deep Trance Behavior in the original post this morning -- they're central to much of the comedy and emotional tenderness of the evening. Deep Trance Behavior frees the Foreman performer more than I've seen in recent years. So here's to the generously comic bravado and clumsily masculinist fustian of Joel Israel, Caitlin McDonough Thayer's whispered sweetness, the dark and sexy vampishness of Fulya Peker, Caitlin Rucker's glamorous awareness, and Sarah Dahlen's fetching and flirtatious skepticism. As Foreman moves ahead, his casts grow younger and more energetic. But their worlds are one. The piano, like the two diminutive grand pianos that dominate the stage in Richard Foreman's latest play, is among musical instruments one of the most complicated and mysterious -- mysterious because most mechanical. Anyone familiar with the actions the machine must make through the disciplined, trained hand of the performer to produce a sound knows that the piano's "action" (the proper name for that mechanism) is made up, like the human hand with its bone, muscles, nerves, flesh and blood, of dozens of parts, wood, felt and steel; what's more, unlike those of the flute or the violin, the mechanism is usually invisible to both performer and audience. The mechanism, like the mechanism of consciousness, can be explained in its physical and physiological existence. But what of the sounds it makes, the dying away of the note once attacked, or the dying away of the perception once recognised? What's left after it dies? We're not in the realm of science now, but of art and philosophy. We're also in Richard Foreman's realm. For the 40th anniversary production of his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Foreman continues to be fascinated by digital media (a new kind of machine, all ones and zeroes to be processed by elaborate technical equipment), and so are his characters. The very first sequence of the play is a Girl in a Golden Dress (Caitlin Rucker) walking to center stage, facing the audience and elaborately swallowing a pill -- the trancelike state follows (though, according to the controlling consciousness of the play, sounding as usual through a tape, this is an odd pill: "Imagine a pill named O-X taken every day for a period of a year. And just once each day in the twenty-four hours of its effectiveness, it links the perceived data of a specific ordinary moment to universal truth"). The live performers seem to be urged to join the two-dimensional, flat characters on the screen behind them. Production intern Anna Friedlaender wrote on the production blog for the show:
In Foreman's current aesthetic, the tension between the two-dimensional surface of the projected image and the three-dimensional experience of the body is stretched to the breaking point, not irrelevant to his obsession with what he called "pancake people" in earlier plays. And in the subtitle to this new play, he introduces the consciousness of travel, of the cameras and cellphones we take with us as we fly from country to country, around the world, in those airplanes that so mystified Proust (who was also memorably mystified by telephones and revolving doors). "You understand me immediately," says a Japanese woman in the video, but we can't really understand her; she's not there, available for questioning. (And she, in her body now, doesn't see us; we're watching a digital shadow, an illusory nothingness.) Like the five performers, we may take her at her word, tranquillized by our own pills -- or, we can recognise that her image and sounds, as inviting as they are, aren't even the light captured by the photographic mechanism or the sound captured by an analog recording device, but only ones and zeroes. The digital video mechanism doesn't capture people; it doesn't capture light or sound either, but only numbers (and, therefore, the mysticism attached to numerology). The mistake is in thinking that this simulacrum is reality itself, but without the mechanism to decode these numbers (like the mechanism we use to perceive the world in its three dimensions), they remain meaningless data. Deep Trance Behavior suggests that, as these videos and sounds are memoirs of experience, they're a far more fragile media of memory -- they're an illusory world, and our immersion in it invites us to lose our own three-dimensional existence in those ones and zeroes. The lie behind these memoirs, of course, is that they're not permanent. As a record of the past, they grant the illusion of immortality for those who believe they're captured within the two-dimensional screen; and they dull us to what is possible for us, experientially, as three-dimensional, knowing beings in this comic world. We can see characters on the screen, hear them -- but we cannot touch them, and they can't feel our touch. The irrational desire for an impossible immortality, the Spanish philosopher Unamuno believed, defined the human being as a tragic figure. The illusory immortality of the screen blinds us to the very real mortality of our own bodies. In Deep Trance Behavior there is, for the first time in my memory of Foreman's work, a representation of death on-stage, and even a melodramatically wailing mourner. More to the point is the tableau that ends the play: as a curtain opens in the video, finally allowing metaphorical entrance to that two-dimensional realm, it's too late for the characters on stage, who are in various states of ... rest? Or something else? Foreman would have it as a state of relaxation -- "The actors are simply resting" is the last legend of the play, which we read over the fallen, motionless bodies of the performers onstage. This may be true, but it also calls into consciousness the possibility that they might also be dead, and that we may be prone ourselves to make that mistake were we not reminded of the metaphorical form of the theatre itself. In watching a Richard Foreman play, we are invited to become aware of our own machinery of consciousness -- to recognise the two-dimensionality of the screened world, whether it's Japanese or English, as an invitation to escape our own three-dimensional, fleshed, very mortal bodies; and to recognise the tricks that these numbers play on our senses. And in this is a form of hope (Foreman is a comic, not a tragic, dramatist -- and there's enormous comedy in Deep Trance Behavior, not to mention the showmanlike flourishes for which he's known; Foreman's always had a lot of Belasco in him). The irony of mortality can be a comic irony as well as a tragic one. It's for us to decide, and recognise, as the play's own musing consciousness says:
Maybe it'll be you. More on Richard Foreman here. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 John Jesurun: PhiloktetesPhiloktetes. 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 in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Molière/Ivo van Hove: The MisanthropeThe Misanthrope. Text by Molière, translated by Tony Harrison. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Production design by Jan Versweyveld. Costume design by Emilio Sosa. Sound design by Raul Vincent Enriquez. Video design by Tal Yarden. Dramaturgy by Bart van den Eynde. Stage manager: Larry K. Ash. With Bill Camp (Alceste), Jeanine Serralles (Célimène), Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jason C. Brown, Amelia Campbell, Joan Macintosh, Alfredo Narciso and Thomas Jay Ryan. Running time: 110 minutes, no intermission. A production of the New York Theatre Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director. At the NYTW, 79 East 4th Street, now through 11 November. Tickets and schedule information here. As in the greatest comedies (like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale), the reunions and redemptions of The Misanthrope's final curtain are hard-won. After the rise of the bourgeois class in the mid-seventeenth century (and Molière's career fell squarely within that time), the scene of comedy shifted from forests and the court to middle-class living rooms, and witty, comic observations of consumption and middle-class morality replaced more flighty metaphysical considerations of identity and love. The reunions and redemptions are particularly hard-won in director Ivo van Hove's new 21st-century perspective on the play in the New York Theatre Workshop production running through 11 November. The upper-middle-classes are still in for it, but, like Shakespeare, Molière is uncompromising in running through the foolishness of his lovers before giving them their final due of love. So is van Hove. And sentiment has no place. The first thing one notices about Jan Versweyveld's design is that it's all gray and black, all right angles: the stage is framed and lit coolly, not an element out of place. (Until the final curtain, the unflattering white light from fluorescent fixtures is, well, unkind to the human face: every detail and pore, in Tal Yarden's video close-ups of the performers, is visible via a large video screen on the upstage wall.) And that's as it should be; Molière's Alceste, the unyielding Bill Camp, is all about honesty, people shorn of physical and moral cosmetics. In the interests of space and time, we'll take the plot of the play, among the greatest and most frequently revived of French comedies, as read. Van Hove opts for Tony Harrison's translation, a straightforward, actable rhyming verse translation possessed of an easy but not facile wit, much freer and more speakable than the commonly available Richard Wilbur version, and for the most part van Hove stages it straight up. For all of the attention that's been given to van Hove's experimental, avant-garde reputation, there's nothing here that seems unnecessarily tacked-on, nothing that doesn't emerge organically from the play. Even the use of video is particularly apt. Comedy is quite often about the ironic distance between private behavior and public morality, and it only makes sense that, in the age of the picture-snapping cell-phone and the palm-sized digital video recorder, the barriers between bedroom and livingroom, between the street, the foyer, the theatre and the backstage dressing room become more porous, and video is the tool for this. It's especially appropriate here, as Alceste seeks to tear simple facile behaviors from friendship and love; he does so to reach the true core of friendship and love beneath. Honesty is not truth; nor is the destruction of privacy via technology a means to honesty and emotional or political security; often it's merely an occasion for shame. It's Alceste's comic failing, of course, that honesty sets nobody free, least of all him, despite his insistence that the brutally honest life is the only authentic means of existence. Van Hove locates the growing exteriorisation of contemporary life in its two most conspicuous expressions: its urge to consume and its urge to waste. Alceste, always the self-consciously honest man, makes his physical comment on the age of consumerism by literally rolling in the food and its wrappers at a particularly wasteful buffet party early in the play; later on, he hauls the detritus, the garbage of the wasteful society onto the clean floor of the stage. They serve as signifiers of the emotional consumption and garbage of contemporary lovemaking: shame, jealousy, all the destructive and degrading emotions that love and passion can evoke are scattered across the stage, physically as well as linguistically. So when Camp's Alceste, broken by jealousy and rage, makes his final approach to Jeanine Serralles' wild but tender Célimène, offering his love, he rises from the trash-heap that he's created around himself and approaches her, a complete physical and stinking mess, offering all: and his reward, as it should be in comedy, is her acceptance of him as he accepts her. It is a brutally touching and entirely honest moment. And it's a beautiful moment because of the performances of Bill Camp and Jeanine Serralles. Camp, especially, brings a stoic dignity and sublime presence to his role, finding the profound pain and wounded abyss in a man who strips himself of all his illusions (one would like to see him take on Lear sometime, and sooner rather than later, so that he could invest that most tragic of stage characters with the physicality it so desperately requires); Serralles, as a woman unable to give up her vivacious physicality in society and live like a hermit with Alceste despite her love, demonstrates as profound an ambivalence, unable to commit to a permanent love; her emotional gestures to him are tentative, despite her determined physical gestures of desire. Of course, this is Molière, and I should also point out that both performers are hilarious in the midst of the knockabout physical farce that threads through the production. In his notes on the play, van Hove describes his conception of The Misanthrope as hopeful: citing the work of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, van Hove notes the influence on this production of the concept of the "liquid life," in which family, work, social relations have all become more fluid. For van Hove, "It is important that we are not judgmental about this liquid life," which renders his revisioning of The Misanthrope more than a satire of contemporary love and society. Funny (often very funny), yes, even true to Molière's own conception of his own times. Hardly avant-garde or experimental, van Hove brings a kind of hyperrealism to the play. It's a brilliant production, a production of a nearly 400-year-old play that speaks to the life that goes on on the street, outside the theatre, in 2007. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 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- 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 in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Man is ManMan 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 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. 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. More on Bertolt Brecht. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Journey to the End of the NightJourney to the End of the Night. Adapted from the novel of the same name and the life of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Created by The Flying Machine. Text by Jason Lindner. Directed by Joshua Carlebach. Sound design by Zach Williamson. Lighting design by Anjeanette Stokes. Set design by Anna Kiraly. Costume design by Brad Wilson. Performed by Richard Crawford. A presentation of The Flying Machine. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 10 January 2008 performance. At The Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond Street, New York, 8-26 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania. Richard Crawford's bravura performance as the notorious French novelist grounds a haunting examination of the anti-semitic author's life and work Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 Journey to the End of the Night is among the dozen or so monuments of the modernist novel. Unceasingly, mordantly comic and epic in its sweep, the book is a cry of outrage at man's inhumanity to man, from the global and the personal perspectives, macrocosmic and microcosmic. Its narrator, Bardamu, winds his picaresque path from the First World War through imperialism in Africa and life as a doctor in a small village, seeing crime, cruelty and destruction everywhere (Bardamu himself far from blameless). Céline's prose style is a broken, shattered hash of prosaic shards (which, in his later books, became little more than sentence fragments strung together with ellipses); his work has drawn praise from writers as diverse as Albert Camus, Andre Gide and Charles Bukowski. The writer himself became just as controversial as his work in the years following its publication. Beginning in 1937, Céline began to produce a series of vicious, grossly anti-semitic pamphlets, leading to his denunciation by the French government in 1944, his arrest and imprisonment in Denmark and finally his conviction in absentia of treason. Granted amnesty a few years later, Céline returned to France where he produced a further trilogy of stark novels and several lunatic texts for ballets, working as a doctor for the poor until his death in 1961. (Céline's life was also the inspiration for Howard Barker's play The Early Hours of a Reviled Man.) The wonder is not that his work and the story of his life have been adapted to the stage at all, though its epic range beggars spaces like the 74-seat black-box Gene Frankel Theatre. The real wonder is that it's been done so well, in The Flying Machine's new one-person adaptation of Céline's life and work. Director Joshua Carlebach and writer Jason Lindner have devised a highly stagable text that alternates between scenes from Journey and a monologue by the author himself, a genial, gregarious hermit prone to launch into foul-mouthed gross denunciations of his critics, his neighbors, the world and especially the Jews. Added to this is the recital of a text from one of Céline's late ballets ("without orchestra, without music, without anything" as the author describes it) -- a bizarre, fevered and ludicrous mishmosh set in Olympus. The conceit of the show is that the audience has been invited to the writer's apartment towards the end of his life for a conversation-cum-casual seminar about his work: an "evening with the author." Behind a desk, the center of Anna Kiraly's hopelessly cluttered, dusty and highly realistic set (a set which spills into the audience and lit just as realistically by Anjeanette Stokes), sits the author himself, in the person of Richard Crawford, who over the 75-minute running time impersonates not only the author but also a half-dozen characters from his most important book in a dizzying, detailed, disciplined and brilliant performance, only once rising from his chair. His face details a range of expressions, from those of his fellow soldiers to that of his moronic friend Robinson to that of Robinson's coprophiliac wife Madelon (as she's in the midst of a violent ass-fucking, no less). Employing a wide range of British and American accents, Crawford's impersonations are precise and dynamic in their variety. In all the talk that's been going on about acting and performance styles in the blogosphere lately, here's a keen example of the evolution of style and technique. Crawford received his training at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, teaches the technique at SUNY Purchase and has directed clown work for the Cirque du Soleil and appeared as the lead clown in Slava's Snowshow. Though the text itself is based in character-delineation and realism, Carlebach and Crawford have apparently based their own approach not primarily as an exercise in Stanislavskian characterisation but in the intensely physical clown work of Lecoq. The production is an incisive and instructive example of the value of these new techniques towards the evocation of the theatricality inherent in seemingly realistic texts. Crawford's face, body movements and hand gestures, even anchored and rooted in one spot over the play's duration, give rise to as varied and engaging a performance as any interior quasi-psychological approach: a performance from the physical gesture inward, instead of the mental impulse outward. A lesson in recent literary history, then, and a lesson in great acting. Journey to the End of the Night fulfills its ambitions on both counts. The show runs through 26 January. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Euripides/Theatre Gardzienice: Iphigenia at AulisIphigenia at Aulis. Based on the play by Euripides. Text adapted and directed by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. Original music by Zygmunt Konieczny; adaptation of ancient Greek music by Maciej Rychly. Light design by Grzegorz Podbieglowski. Choreography by Julia Bui Ngoc. Costumes by Monika Onoszko. Sound by Maciej Znamierowski. With Mariusz Golaj (Agamemnon), Joanna Holcgreber, Marcin Mrowca, Karolina Cicha, Agnieszka Mendel, Anna Dabrowska, Charlie Cattrall (Benedict Hitchins) and Justyna Jary. In Polish, English and Greek (synopsis provided in program). Running time: 50 minutes. At The Annex at La MaMa E.T.C., 66 East 4th Street, New York, now through 21 October. Tickets and schedule information. Agamemnon, Menelaos and the Greek armies are stranded in Aulis at the beginning of the Trojan War; the gods will not send a wind to set them asail until the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia is made. That done, Calchas prophesies, the fleet will be swept along to Ilium and a certain victory. Agamemnon, against his will, sends for Iphigenia with word that, in Aulis, she will be married to Achilles. Iphigenia arrives, accompanied by her mother Clytemnestra. Agamemnon continues to balk, but the Greek armies, driven by bloodlust and visions of victory, demand that the sacrifice be made. And so it is; and the Greeks sail on to Ilium, and to a violent, devastating victory. The curse of the House of Atreus follows them all. It isn't Helen's beauty that drives Menelaos and the Greeks to sacrifice and violence. Beauty is a quality inherent in an object, a person; it is essentially static, inactive, it does nothing on its own except to attract the attention and admiration of the subject. Desire for the possession of the object of that beauty, however, is dynamic, and it is desire, not beauty, that provides the basis for the Trojan Wars (as well as, for that matter, most Greek tragedy). Tragedy itself is a weaving of the threads of desire and sacrifice. In Euripides' late Iphigenia at Aulis, first produced in the waning years of Greek tragedy, this weaving finds a dangerous center in Iphigenia. First, she is drawn to Aulis in expectation of the sacrifice of her virginity to Achilles; finally, she offers herself up as a bloody sacrifice of her life to the glory of Greece. Self-sacrifice is a form of desire fulfilled. This parallel makes the reading of Iphigenia at Aulis as an anti-war play extremely ambivalent. This ambivalence is a fatal fault of the otherwise spectacular and Dionysian Iphigenia at Aulis that the Gardzienice Theatre has brought to La MaMa E.T.C. for the next few weeks. Directed and adapted by Wiodzimierz Staniewski and with an original score by Zygmunt Konieczny (and an interpretation of ancient Greek music by Maciej Rychly), the Gardzienice's Iphigenia at Aulis is a ritual, a sacred rite, precise in its choreography and bodied language. Each gesture here is a carefully sculpted example of the research that Staniewski and his company have conducted into folk and ancient ritual and music. Dressed in loose, delicate robes by Monika Onoszko, the performers dance an oratorio of the play, evoking what the program notes call a "[restoration of] tragedy from the spirit of music." Mariusz Golaj as Agamemnon, Joanna Holcgreber as Clytemnestra and especially Karolina Cicha as Iphigenia embody Staniewski's style of ageless, rehearsed bodied actions, simultaneously precise and violent. Golaj, angrily torn between his status as Army commander and his role as loving father, is all rage and indecision, his long white hair whipping over his shoulders in the violence of his conflict. Cicha first appears as Iphigenia as a weak, pale maiden in a wheelchair, barely able to stand. She comes alive when she sees her falsely-intended fiance Achilles, innocent desire wakened; once wakened, it is tranferred to her recognition of her own status as sacrificial object, just as willing to give her body to death as to Achilles. There is clear playfulness in her Dionysian madness, and the play ends in her sacrifice, a red scarf drawn around her neck as her father sharpens the sacrificial blade. (The coda, in which semi-nude women in a pale yellow half-light frenetically and rhythmically flail their upper bodies in paroxysms of terror and ecstasy, their bodies becoming moving light-sculptures in the near-dark, is breathtaking.) The language of the performance is distributed among the English, Polish and Ancient Greek tongues. And woe for that English, for in it lies the main fault of the production. The anachronisms introduced into the play by the director and performer (for they don't appear in the translation prepared for the production by Charles Walker) – a "fucking" here and there, and an entirely unnecessary "God bless America!" yelled by Golaj after describing the glory of the Greek people – serve not to bring the play into the 21st century and the days of the War in Iraq, but are jarring inconsistencies in the presentation of this myth of desire and sacrifice. What makes Clytemnestra's cry of "Does no-one speak against this?" particularly heartrending is that Agamemnon and Achilles both have already done just that; they fear the wrath of the community, bloodthirsty and now obsessed by dreams of ultimate victory, should they fail to make the sacrifice. That said, the Gardzienice's Iphigenia in Aulis, presented here in its world premiere (the company, founded during the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1977, has been at La MaMa several times before), is a unique look at the reclamation of the tragedy from ancient Greek history, seeking with care and love and research to restore the tragic spirit to the contemporary world. There are those who don't think tragedy is possible (or even desirable) in the 21st century, especially the deep, irregular rhythm of tragedy that was first explored by the ancient Greeks – the rhythm, though, is that of the human heartbeat. It is through the ignorance of this tragedy at the heart of human experience that wars, for Helen or for oil, continue to be waged. Iphigenia at Aulis is not anti-war, then, but an exploration and speaking, singing embodiment of whatever part of the human spirit – a spirit composed of desire, of dominance and submission, of masochism, of sacrifice, of both love and death – is expressed through it. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Two-Headed Calf: Drum of the Waves of HorikawaUPDATE: To correct the closing date for the show (17 November, not 17 October). I have too much affection for the members and work of the Theater of a
Two-Headed Calf to be able to offer any Olympian objectivity about
their new show, Drum of the Waves of Horikawa. The low-comic,
high-camp epic, which brings together kabuki, Preston Sturges and punk
rock, is based on a samurai revenge drama by Chikamatsu, and the company
is in full everything- Performances at HERE run through 17 November; there will be post-show discussions on selected evenings through the run, and on Sunday, 4 November, at 6:00 p.m., a guest panel will discuss the role of music in both Kabuki performance and Western theatre. Tickets and schedule information here. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 The HomecomingThe 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. Daniel Sullivan finds the "real" in Pinter's surreal family comedy-drama 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. 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. More on The Homecoming. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Hello FailureHello Failure by Kristen Kosmas. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. Set design: Sue Rees. Sound design: Leah Gelpe. Light design: Garin Marschall. Co-producers: Shady Lane Productions. With Matthew Maher (Horace Hunley), Maria Striar (Netta), Joan Jubett (Kate), Kristen Kosmas (Rebecca), Michael Chick (Shlomy), Tricia Rodley (Gina), Janna Gjesdal (Valeska), Benjamin Forster (Voice of Japanese Teacher/Tim), Aimée Phelan-Deconinck (Karen) and Megan Hart (The New Girl). Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. At Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street. Reviewed at the 6 March performance. Runs 6-22 March 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania. Kristen Kosmas' story of seven submariners' wives marries Chekhovian realism to a language reminiscent of Gertrude Stein for one of the best new plays of the season After an eleven-hour day at work yesterday I was tempted to just head home for an evening with Gordon Ramsay, but instead I felt drawn to get to a theatre – any theatre – to remind myself why I was working so long and hard at my day job in the first place. So I took a chance, made it up to Performance Space 122 and handed over my $18.00 to the box office staff just in time for the 8.00pm curtain of Kristen Kosmas' new play Hello Failure, mainly curious to see a very rare straight, text-based play at a venue that spends most of its season presenting less mainstream forms of theatre. Based on Hello Failure, I hope they do it again and again and again. Kosmas' play is one of the brightest lights of the season. Though my regular readers know that I resist writing anything that could be constituted as a pull-quote, I'll offer a few here before considering the play itself: Kosmas is one of the most exciting and accomplished new voices in the American theatre. Though small in scale, Hello Failure is rich in imagination and lyricism, and the ten performers deliver Kosmas' musical text with flair and panache. And it deserves a nice long run. Realism is far from a dead thing in the theatre, and American playwrights are particularly drawn to it, especially that domestic naturalism exemplified by Chekhov: the discovery of universal forces beneath the everyday events and discourses of seemingly undistinguished individuals. Following an overture of sorts performed by the entire cast, the play wanders through the course of a day spent by six women gathered together in a conference room: a support group for the wives of submariners, who (in an all-volunteer Navy, you understand) have chosen to submerge themselves beneath the oceans for months at a time, leaving their wives and partners in a peculiar state of in medias res until their return. As in Chekhov, there is a thin plot: one of their regular number, Rebecca (performed here by playwright Kosmas), who seems to be having a breakdown in her bathroom, has not arrived; a "new girl" (Megan Hart) is joining the group for the first time. And I give nothing away when I say it all ends without resolution, but with, if not hope, then a determination to go on. Hello Failure's obvious Chekhovian forebear is Three Sisters, but the linguistic mother of it all is Gertrude Stein. Comparisons are always odious, and Kosmas has a unique, idiosyncratic voice all her own that avoids both baroque affectation and naturalistic reportage such as common slang, but the influence is there. Asked to describe his life in three words and an object, one character responds, "Water. Water. Water. A glass of water," a fully Steinian construct. And because her language is elemental, Kosmas is able, without stretching too far, to locate common language within common physical elements. Water and air are the two controlling images of the play: Michael Chick as Shlomy, with whom one of the characters may or may not be having an affair, delivers a wonderful aria on his dead brother, who had been fascinated by both water and air. I use the word "aria" advisedly. Director Ken Rus Schmoll seems to have cast his performers in part for the timbre of their voices: as the six women in the conference room spend the day together, their stories are told as solos, duets, trios and quartets (there are a number of especially effective duets between Joan Jubett as Kate at stage right and Kosmas, trapped in her bathroom at stage left). Language itself then becomes key, this particular issue focusing in Aimée Phelan-Deconinck's Karen. Feeling desexualised, she decides to learn Japanese in an attempt to reconnect with the world and her body through a new, unfamiliar discourse -- an attempt which fails with a particularly comic coup de theatre that I won't disclose here. Hello Failure is an uncommonly rich play, which avoids the self-consciously wry and kooky, gratuitously coy and winsome Surrealism Lite that seems to infect many new American playwrights. Among the remarkable crop of young playwrights currently at the margins of the mainstream theatre (hence this play's production at the decidedly non-mainstream PS122), Kosmas' play resembles the work of Jenny Schwartz, whose God's Ear opens for an off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre later this spring. But Kosmas trusts her language and performers more, avoiding the sometimes melodramatic reaches of Schwartz's narrative. The spare design of Sue Rees (sets), Garin Marschall (lights) and Leah Gelpe (sound) focuses all the audience's attention on those wonderful words of Kosmas', as it should. A fine ensemble cast also features Matthew Maher as the ghost of submarine inventor Horace Hunley (maybe), Clubbed Thumb's co-founder Maria Striar as the uptight professional Netta, and Tricia Rodley a delightfully spiky Gina. But really, singling out individual performances here detracts from the extraordinary ensemble work. A fine downtown cast in a terrific new American play -- one more pull-quote, then, for the road. You can see it at PS122 through 22 March. Culturebot's Andy Horwitz has more on the show here. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 The Break-Up and The Happy SadThe Break-Up by Tommy Smith and The Happy Sad by Ken Urban. Directed by Sherri Kronfeld. Set design: John McDermott. Sound design: Brandon Wolcott. Light design: Ben Kato. Costume design: Erin Elizabeth Murphy. With The Bats: Felipe Bonilla, Havilah Brewster, Jane Elliott, Pete Forester, Tom Lipinski, Stephen O'Reilly, John Anthony Russo, Annie Scott and Ronald Washington. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission. At The Flea Theater, 41 White Street. Reviewed at the 24 March performance. Runs 6 March-7 April 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania. Seven young New Yorkers cope with loss and love in Ken Urban's short entertaining comedy In Ken Urban's short new comedy, a "musical" of sorts written for The Bats, the young resident company at the Flea Theater, seven young men and women from across a range of careers and sexualities pair off, break up and get together again as slowly they come to terms with adult life as a series of losses and momentary pleasures. Beneath their La Ronde-like pairings and departures, they also discover that they so far lack a language for the melancholy that affects them: not the poetry of everyday speech but the poetry of The Hallmark Company just touches their sadness. But it is a comedy, and there's light here in most of the relationships, even those that fail, and so some hope. I don't want to claim too much for the play – it's a relationship comedy, tentative love among the ruins of popular culture, an American comic genre that may have begun with David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and continues on with Chris Shinn's Other People (everybody in New York seems to have one of these plays in them; I've even done one myself), and Ken's entry here is winning and entertaining, not least because of the attractive and earnest cast. Among the standouts are Annie Scott's bi- and cheerfully- curious Annie, Stephen O'Reilly's wounded and tentative Stan and, especially, Havilah Brewster's Mandy. As the only one of the characters sexually inactive through the play (and coping with the death of a parent), Mandy is on the edge of realising an adult life of solitude and frustration; Brewster catches her fear and terror quite memorably. Ken's simple songs, performed here a capella, have an affecting schoolyard innocence, especially a trio rendered by the three women in a health-club sauna. The simple production in the small downstairs theatre at the Flea by Sherri Kronfeld is effective, if a little prop-happy: once again, the audience is prompted to admire the touches of naturalistic authenticity in what is, essentially, a bare-stage show (look! real salt-and-pepper shakers!), a disheartening trend that detracts from the stars of the production, which should be the language and the performers. That said, a word for Erin Elizabeth Murphy's costume design, too, which brings a little more style and panache than usual for a contemporary play. The evening is preceded by a ten-minute curtain-raiser, Tommy Smith's The Break-Up. Like Aaron, I have nothing to say about it. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Edward the SecondEdward 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 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. 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. 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. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 This Place Is a DesertThis Place Is a Desert. Conceived and directed by Jay Scheib. Produced by Shoshana Polanco. Scenic and lighting design by Peter Ksander. Sound and video design by Leah Gelpe. Costume design by Oana Botez-Ban. Camera by Karl Allen. With performances by Sarita Choudhury (Jeanette), Caleb Hammond (Bill Faulkner/Mr. Rowe), Thomas Keating (Jim Floyd), Aimée Phelan-Deconinck (Victorovna), Jorge Albert Rubio (Marcello), Eric Dean Scott (Richard Harris), Tanya Selvaratnam (Nurse/Mrs. Rowe), April Sweeney (Monica) and Karl Allen (Glenn "Haskell Wexler" Chick). A production of the Under the Radar festival. Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 13 January 2008 performance. At The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, 9-20 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at The Public Theater Web site. Something's missing from Jay Scheib's elegant but unconvincing meditation on modern alienation The three couples and their associated lovers in This Place Is a Desert express their bitterness, loneliness and desire exclusively through their bodies. The sound that echoes most through the Public Theater's cavernous LuEsther Hall during Jay Scheib's meditation on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, the locale transferred to the post-capitalist multi-ethnic United States, is the inimitable smack of flesh pounding into flesh, and its most memorable visual trope is the presence of male and female bodies in various states of elegant, posed deshabille. As they change partners, express affection and even engage in a most unpleasant-looking orgy through the nearly two-hour running time, though, their entrapment in their surroundings (and in the frame of the camera) begins to seem beyond the insights of the characters, and, unfortunately, beyond the conception of the work. For even a theatre primarily of movement and images requires some kind of exploratory if implicit objective correlative, a way into what lies beneath the dynamics of the movement and images. Even so, there is narrative of a sort here. The marriage of writer Marcello (the artist figure) and Jeanette is fraying at the edges, not least because of his illicit liaison with the disaffected Victorovna; nuclear-power consultant Jim Floyd copes with his disturbingly unpredictable wife Monica; high-powered moneyman Mr. Rowe treats his relationship with his wife and those around him with all the crudity of cold hard cash. The physical confines of the boxy interiors in which these characters have been condemned to live their lives is paralleled by the entrapment of their facial features in the camera's frame. Love may or may not be possible. But then ... what? The uncredited text and dialogue may underscore the entrapment of these characters linguistically as well: they speak, when they do, in a series of clichés. The prosaic quality of these dialogues rarely calls attention to itself, but one wishes that it would, especially from writer Marcello (and there's little indication here as to whether he's a good writer or not; he's a good friend with a dying character named "Bill Faulkner," but acquaintance doesn't necessarily breed talent, and the little pieces we get of his prose are about as unenergetic and colorless as the clichés that Jeanette and Victorovna trade when they finally meet at the end of the play -- indeed, one wishes that they'd drop the predictable, melodramatic dialogue and start smacking each other around instead; everybody else has been smacked around, after all). That said, the cast and the design team (Peter Ksander, Leah Gelpe, Oana Botez-Ban) contribute brilliantly to the production, ever-watchable and dynamic, and Scheib remains one of the most sensuous, haunted young directors of the time. But the production fails to become more than the sum of its parts. And perhaps it's those elements of Antonioni's films that Scheib omits from his piece that lead to my dissatisfaction. Antonioni framed his characters not only in rooms, but also in natural landscapes, and while that can't be done given the confines of the theatrical form in which he works, Scheib doesn't really find a counter-valence for his interiors that exteriors represented for Antonioni. (The intimacy and invasiveness of the video camera mimics Antonioni's intimacy and invasiveness, but here too, little is added that video-in-theatre hasn't already explored, sometimes ad nauseam.) And, though one hates to say it (and risks, admittedly, the charge of playing the age card), perhaps the fault here is the rawness of youth: there's not that reluctant, torturous resignation regarding the ennui in the modern world that comes with long experience. This Place Is a Desert has got the elegance right, and the sensuality, and the luxury, and the transitoriness of modern interior furniture, but not the ambivalence of that world's dark heart. At the end of This Place Is a Desert, Marcello and Jeanette step downstage, out of the boxy set, and only begin to communicate then. But in Antonioni's world (and indeed in the modern world), there's no downstage, conveniently situated outside of the boxes and traps of the set. Here, it seems a bit of a cheat. Resignation to surroundings and the objects within them is not only inevitable, but necessary: hence its tragedy, as the closing montage of L'Eclisse suggests. I was reminded here particularly not of an Antonioni film but of Roberto Rossellini's 1953 film Voyage in Italy, a profound influence on Antonioni's work and a masterpiece of sorts that remains unavailable on DVD in the United States as yet. That film too detailed the dissolution of a marriage within a modern world that, first, holds no beauty and, second, numbs our capacity for the recognising the beauty of other individuals, experiences and worlds. George Sanders, the victim of this existence, is the very model of a desiccated elegance bored and smothered by ennui -- he is dead inside. But even he gets his moment of love, however fleeting, from Ingrid Bergman. It's that possibility that remains in the modern world; perhaps its recognition comes only with time, and years. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 CraveCrave by Sarah Kane. Directed by Cheryl Faraone. Sound design
by Ben Schiffer. Lighting design by Laura J. Eckelman. Scenic design by
Mark Evancho. Costume design by Franny Bohar. With Adam Ludwig (A),
Stephanie Janssen (M), Rishabh Kashyap (B) and Stephanie Strohm (C).
Running time: 45 minutes. Performed on a double- A quartet of voices explores the craving for love unto death in Sarah Kane's play. Crave (1998) marked a substantial formal departure from Sarah Kane's first three physically frenetic and explicit plays. She writes here for four seated performers who do not move from their chairs for the duration of the work; in this, she draws entire attention to the language of two couples, an older woman (M) and a younger man (B) in an illicit relationship, and an older man (A) and young girl (C) engaged in an abusive tryst that threatens to destroy both of them. But the ease of identity is not that simple as the play progresses; not only the roles of abuser/abused and exploiter/exploited (and each has their own definitions of abuse and exploitation), but family roles as well (are the older man and older woman also related in some way?) are under constant redefinition; the pedophile is granted the most eloquent paean to love in the entire play. Morality and judgment, then, slip out from under the lyrical dialogue in Kane's effort to present, on the stage, the impossible cravings and desires that emerge from love. Ninian Smart, in her article about Buddhism for Macmillan's Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, sums up four doctrines of Buddhist philosophy. "They affirm that (1) life is permeated by suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha); (2) the origin of suffering lies in craving or grasping (tanha); (3) the cessation of suffering is possible, through the cessation of craving ..." These Buddhist ideas seem central to Crave, which refers throughout to a variety of other texts (among them Eliot's The Waste Land and Beckett's Waiting for Godot) as well as both local and apparently (though not necessarily, this being unknowable) autobiographical references; the language and references permeate and render timeless and complex the everyday gestures of both love and abhorrence that the characters verbalise. For her characters, however, the fourth tenet of Buddhism – that "the way to [the cessation of craving] is the Noble Eightfold Path," as Smart has it – remains a dogma beyond their reach. In the end, the craving for love is revealed as a craving for death and oneness, a spectacular realisation that transcends emotion and simple good/bad, optimism/pessimism dichotomies without a vision of an afterlife; instead, in an ecstatic final vision, their individual lives beyond the world become pure undifferentiated light and energy; until then, they are trapped in their individuated, special, personal darkness. The act of craving speaks through each character individually, an act which is mirrored in Cheryl Faraone's insightful and solid production (a difficult thing in an ambivalent play of shifting surfaces such as this) by the simple set design by Mark Evancho. Though there are four chairs, each is quite different from the other, individuated instances which refer back to some Ideal "chair," as the characters' unique cravings each refer back to a primal undifferentiated craving. The four performers bring an appropriate sensual passion to the language, though I sensed something vaguely lacking. Because Crave is a language piece for four voices, these voices are ideally differentiated as the different timbres of the instruments common to a string quartet. Not to question the age-specificity of the performers here, who all seem to be around the same age and become deeply enrapt in the play's obsessions as the play progresses, but the range of the play's linguistic and musical tonality suffered from the lack of a deeper, more weathered voice – the viola or cello, if you will, of the quartet. Adam Ludwig, as the older man and the abuser of a schoolgirl (perhaps his daughter), is affecting in his role and delivers the central monologue of the evening with a tightly controlled passion and anxiety. But as written (and as played in other productions of Crave), the role is for an older, more weathered voice, a timbre which would have contrasted with the higher registers of the voices of the women and the younger man, rendering to the play a wider tonal spectrum. Another minor problem with the production is in its costume design; in dressing the younger woman in a schoolgirl's jumper, the production stacks the deck against a properly ambivalent reading of the play; instead, we're drawn into a vaguely conventional consideration of abuser/abused and guilt/innocence which the play works hard to mitigate against. It's not pity that Kane is after, at least not exclusively; it's the recognition that the nature of craving is, beyond individuation, the same for all four. My reservation about vocal tonality aside, the four performers here
– Ludwig, Rishabh Kashyap as the younger man, Stephanie Strohm as the
schoolgirl, and especially Stephanie Janssen, who brings a brittle
hardness to her role as the older woman – are fully vested in Kane's
language and absorbing in their presence; in effectively restricting their
movements in a tight space through this passionate 45- The Potomac Theatre Project offers here a fine production of one of Kane's most mature, elusive and complex plays. I only wish that the program wasn't burdened by the anonymous dramaturg's note for Crave – the note doesn't detract from the power of this production or the play itself, nor do I mean any slight against the dramaturg who wrote it, but because I feel strongly opposed to the sentiments it expresses I must argue with it. The note begins with the phrase "Art is autobiography" (is it really? And if it is, in what sense? Is that the whole or even the most significant dimension of it?) and unfortunately ends with the observation that "Kane hung herself with a shoelace some months after writing the play, a necessary part to the completion of it," an irresponsible statement that flies straight in the face of Mark Ravenhill's 2005 essay in the Guardian, commenting on his friendship with Kane:
A play is not an obituary. Crave is not about the sufferings of Sarah Kane through her experience of craving; as this production ironically suggests, it is about the sufferings of each individual audience member as they experience the cravings of passion and love as well. To characterise it as an extended aestheticised suicide note is not only inaccurate, but in bad taste, denigrating the status of Kane's plays as a poetry that has the potential to speak personally to every individual; the biographical context is utterly irrelevant. It also makes the assumption that any person's final catastrophic act is ultimately knowable and explicable. It isn't. She and her plays deserve more. More about Sarah Kane in these earlier posts. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 The CenciThe Cenci by Antonin Artaud. Directed, conceived and adapted by John Jahnke, from a new translation by Richard Sieburth. Set design: Peter Ksander. Sound design: Kristin Worrall. Light design: Miranda K. Hardy. Costume design: Ramona Ponce. Choreography: Benjamin Asriel. With Anthony Torn (Cenci), Lauren Blumenfeld (Beatrice), Anna Fitzwater (Lucretia), Kobi Libii (Giacomo), Alexander Paul Nifong (Bernardo), Mauricio Tafur Salgado (Orsino), Todd D'Amour (Camillo), Joshua Seidner (Andrea), Tanisha Thompson (Assassin #1 [Olimpia]) and Alexander Lane (Assassin #2 [Marzio]). Running time: 75 minutes. A production of The Hotel Savant at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street. Reviewed at the 8 February performance. 6-23 February 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Theatermania. Uneven casting weakens a curiously uninvolving production of Artaud's only complete stageplay I confess that I've always been skeptical of the Artaudian project; though without Antonin Artaud we'd have had neither Jerzy Grotowski nor the Living Theatre, the essays and manifestoes that make up his classic 1938 The Theatre and Its Double, read in the cold light of day rather than the fevered darkness of the shadows, strike one as poetic, even inspirational, but hardly a firm basis for a new theatre practice. His calls (clichéd by now; they're more than seventy years old, much older than Stanislavsky's and Brecht's practices were when Artaud was writing) of "No More Masterpieces" and to the need for the performer to "signal through the flames" seem more suited to protest placards than as a basis for rehearsal room exercises. Artaud's own dramatic and performance work as it has come down to us remains available for reading (there once was a sound recording of this on the Internet, but I can't seem to track it down). And through the text of his sole complete stageplay, of course, The Cenci from 1935, which John Jahnke's Hotel Savant is staging in a new translation through 23 February. As Mark Blankenship notes in his feature article on the production for the New York Times, the play is worth a revival for its curiosity value alone. While Susan Sontag said that Artaud's Cenci was "not a very good play," Jahnke in the same article begs to differ: "Is it a flawed piece? Absolutely. But does that detract from the fact that it's exciting onstage? No, not at all." Despite all the efforts of Jahnke, his inspired design team and his cast, however, the evidence here is that it's not very exciting onstage at all. Based on Shelley's 1819 drama, the story concerns the grotesque maneuverings of the Cenci family in 1599 Rome; it's easy to see Artaud's attraction to the story, the tale of a perverse patriarch and his dealings with both his family and the Papacy. It's a grand guignol in many ways, filled with rapes and bloody deaths, and it calls for the heightened language and wild action of the Jacobean tragedy, which it most closely resembles in form. It calls, too, for that calculated, disciplined excess in both language and production to fully engage the performers and audience in the events of the play. Finally, it's that excess that's lacking here, and lacking that excess the play and production are uninvolving. Peter Ksander contributes a maze-like, often anachronistic set (Cenci dictates into a tape recorder, and telephones play a significant part of the communications matrix of the production), imaginatively lit by both flourescent and incandescent instruments by Miranda Hardy, which, spread across the wide Ohio Theatre space, provides a broad chiaroscuro environment reminisicent of Italian historical painting. Perhaps it's that distance that swallows the possibility of engagement; the mazes trap the performers as well as the characters. On occasion, the production reaches heights which demonstrate its potential, especially in an elegantly choreographed (by Benjamin Asriel) banquet/orgy scene: no maze needed here for the presentation of perverse manners. Though Anthony Torn as Cenci and Todd D'Amour as Camillo throw their energies full-throttle into the violent events of the play and so are the greatest successes in the ten-person cast, the remainder seem oddly uninvolved. Lauren Blumenfeld has excellent moments as Beatrice, but at times she seems to oscillate between fear and terror (appropriate to Artaud) and mere petulance (which is not). That said, I can't blame Ms. Blumenfeld or the rest of the cast; much of the fault must lie, as I've mentioned, with the script. Artaud's weak text lacks the pounding rush of violent lyricism that sustains the work of Marlowe or even Shakespeare in plays like Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida, and this has the effect of undermining the Theatre of Cruelty tropes that Jahnke bases his production upon. Ironically, a performance practice like this seems to need a masterpiece, a text equal to the passions that the bodied performers hope to demonstrate. You get the idea that these performers and characters lack a language equal to their actions, and rather than releasing bodied passions, this lack constitutes a repression, a missing element: the body needs language to elicit and limn the suffering that lies within, to make it theatrically communicable. Artaud hoped to threaten quotidian, dead composure in his theatre; through the evocation of ecstatic suffering, he hoped to reawaken a part of the human spirit that rationalism had rendered dormant. Both Grotowski and the Becks then and Jan Fabre and Howard Barker now continue that project; perhaps it's time to say that we've moved beyond Artaud, to wonder if there remains any "there" there, that the creation of new texts appropriate for his example is our current need. But The Cenci doesn't threaten that composure, and the evocation remains wan. There is a program note, "There will be smoking on stage in one short scene," that seems to encapsulate the deepest flaw of the project; if second-hand smoke is all there is to be worried about, if that's the main threat to our composure, then the work remains to be done. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Embodied Doubles: Blind SpotBlind Spot. Choreography, direction, set design and sound
design by Pavel Zuštiak. Lighting design by Joe Levasseur. Costumes
by Nick Vaughan. Music by Tiersen, Pompouguac, Taizé. Photography by
José Aragón. "The Voice": Jeffrey Fracè. Performed and
created with Gina Bashour, Yo- Pavel Zuštiak's meditation on love, desire and the recalcitrant body returns for an encore performance. In dance theatre, bodies are what we have to work with: when Yo-el Cassell emerges to begin Palissimo's Blind Spot, originally premiered at Chashama in 2003 and returning for an all-too-few six performances at PS122 through this Sunday, he tries to communicate with individual members of the audience via American Sign Language. Movement bears the weight of the conventional linguistic signifier: the body entire speaks instead of the mouth, which in dance nearly reaches the status of fetish itself. Touching desire, the body starts to yammer hopelessly, its expression confined to the private sphere between two people, and ever-imperfect: the speaking body becomes tongue-tied. Untying that tongue is the project of Pavel Zuštiak's beautiful, elegant, sexy and winning full-length dance piece. There are points at which it nearly touches the sublime, and I'm not at all sure that it doesn't in fact succeed at that. But that would leave Zuštiak and his company nowhere to go, and it's exciting to think that in future work they will indeed go further. In Blind Spot, there are three couples among the four dancers. A man (Cassell) and a woman (Gina Bashour) in everyday dress attempt the expression of desire, but among these "real" bodies there are two strangers, dressed more brightly. Anthony Whitehurst, in white t-shirt and pants, is Cassell's body double; Bashour's is Ashleigh Leite, who emerges wearing a blonde wig and wearing a pale fringed leotard (and later a silver dress: the fine costumes here are the work of Nick Vaughan). When Cassell and Bashour meet, the sudden and unexpected emergence of desire calls upon their bodies to express that desire in a manner in which they had not expressed it before: they suddenly realize Whitehurst and Leite as untrained potentials for expression in their own bodies. Much of the 70 minute program consists of the clumsy attempts of the real couple to negotiate and incorporate the Ideal couple within themselves (and the consequent real coupling to Ideal coupling). The couple has their work cut out for them. Cassell, violently trying to manipulate Whitehurst's hopelessly liquid arms, finds them completely useless, unable to grasp or hold (an amusing metaphor for impotence). Bashour's challenge is different – Leite, once unleashed, is everywhere on the stage, bouncing against its boundaries, violently birthing new possibilities of movement and expression, finding bizarre pleasure as well as profound irritation at being contained within the spatial limits of the performance area. In a series of duets, trios and quartets, each performer attempts to come to terms with the dynamics of desire: at times the Real and the Ideal, potential and realisation, can be glimpsed in the triangulations of desire so well expressed by Anne Carson's meditations on Eros and Sappho's poetry. Bashour, looking beyond Cassell, sees an Ideal of desire and love in Whitehurst: she recognises the potential and indeed can dance with him, be swept up in the possibility. It is left to Cassell to embody that potential in the real. Eventually, in the hopeful dénouement, the couples – all three of them – are engaged together: both the paired women and the paired men are able to incorporate elements of each other's potential, thereby staking a claim to the expression of desire between Bashour and Cassell. The visible fetishistic attributes of desire – here, four pairs of shoes, two men's and two women's – are comically manipulated only to be violently disposed of once the potential for expression is entirely embodied in corporeal movement rather than objects. Finally, desire having matured, Leite can tear away the translucent plastic curtain to unveil the linguistic expression of desire: the body has found voice for the precision of love. Desire is dangerous: the final duet between Cassell and Whitehurst indicates, without conclusion, that the body in desire is always poised between a life-enhancing swim in its possibilities and a risk of drowning. But as the text presented at the end of Blind Spot indicates, where nothing is risked, nothing is gained. Every real body is capable of a prayer to desire's potential; but then one needs consciously to pray for it. Rereading the above, I can sense a certain linguistic thickness in this description of Blind Spot. This is, however, dance: where words fail. This description shouldn't serve as analysis, but as tentative approximation. What words and photography can't catch are the beautiful bodies and movements of the four performers in this violently energetic essay. It is a work, perhaps, of modest means, though this modesty manages to render it far more egalitarian, far freer, than other recent attempts at limning the same themes (the self-important, overproduced, smug wankery of Romeo Castellucci's Hey Girl! seems for example unutterably twee next to it). Violent stylised movement in the name of desire's expression is Zuštiak's palette here, as violent stylised spoken language is that of the drama. One could say that, here, dance is perhaps fifty years ahead of the drama – this, however, is overstating the case. Quite regularly at PS122, one finds the future of theatre in an astonishing array of works of the present, in both dance and drama. So long as Vallejo Gantner and his crew there continue to curate as brilliantly as they do, there will be newly-hewn bricks to work, and to build, with. A brick, of course, is an entirely inappropriate metaphor for the delicacy and elegance of Blind Spot. Nonetheless, it inspires as well as amazes. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Beckett ShortsBeckett 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 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. 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. 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. More on Samuel Beckett here. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 The American Dream and The SandboxThe 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 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 in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Amazons and Their MenAmazons and Their Men by Jordan Harrison. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. Music by Matt Carlson. Set design and projections by Sue Rees. Costume design by Kirche Leigh Zeile. Lighting design by Garin Marschall. Sound design by Leah Gelpe. With Rebecca Wisocky (The Frau), Brian Sgambati (The Man), Heidi Schreck (The Extra) and Gio Perez (The Boy). A presentation of Clubbed Thumb, Maria Striar and Meg MacCary, producers. Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 5 January 2008 performance. At the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street, New York, 3-26 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at OvationTix. Compromise with a corrupt system in the hopes of freedom is an illusion in Jordan Harrison's play based on the career of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl
What Martin Heidegger was to philosophy, Leni Riefenstahl was to film history. The unquestionably talented director put her services to the work of the Nazi government in the 1930s, producing and directing films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia; later, Riefenstahl and Heidegger both sought to distance themselves from their contributions to the culture of Hitler's Germany. And, like Heidegger, Riefenstahl continues to influence her discipline to this day, especially in the final scenes of Star Wars, the composition of which George Lucas admitted was influenced by Riefenstahl's Triumph. When, later, Riefenstahl continued to make films, the reception of her work was tainted by her associations with the fascist government, regardless of the content of that work. (Whether the content of that later work itself was corrupted by her brush with Hitler and his minions is a question too complex to be gone into here.) Jordan Harrison's new play at Clubbed Thumb, Amazons and Their Men, is a meditation on that story. His Riefenstahl stand-in, The Frau, is trying to make a film entirely for herself, a version of Penthesilea's story, in which she has cast herself as the Amazon warrior. Surrounding her are the actors and supernumeraries of her film -- those performers who are necessary but not sufficient to the completion of her new work. Also necessary to its completion is the money and cooperation of the Nazi government, which is funding the film. But it's 1939, and Hitler's government is far more interested in the eastern front than in film production. Despite The Frau's efforts to provide work and protection for the several homosexuals in her cast, the historical situation and her own arrogance lead to disaster for all but her. Harrison navigates the churning waters of the issue with considerable deftness, aided by Ken Rus Schmoll's bare but kinetic staging; the only two setpieces are a comfortable leather chair in The Frau's apartment and a large modular structure on wheels. It swerves and circles during the sequences in which we see scenes from the film, in a dynamic and convincing imitation of The Frau's own camera movements. The four-person cast, too, is a convincing ensemble. Brian Sgambati and Gio Perez, playing two gay actors who portray Achilles and Patroclos in The Frau's film, offer considerable tenderness and tension as they find their own desires fired by their collaboration, and Heidi Schreck finds a woundedness as The Extra, doomed ever to die -- and live -- at the margins of The Frau's mise en scène. But it's Rebecca Wisocky as The Frau who dominates the stage in one of the first memorable performances of 2008. Wisocky cleverly channels both Riefenstahl and Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in portraying the arrogant director. There is an appropriate campiness to her performance (camp an element of both Nazi and gay aesthetics in some of their manifestations), but she keeps it admirably channeled towards a violent emotional intensity in the quieter scenes of the play. Amazons and Their Men, despite its subject matter, is a brisk and often very funny 70 minutes (thanks in no small part to Heidi Schreck's gift for physical comedy), but admirably it doesn't lose sight of its issues, which are just as significant today as they were in Germany in 1939. Despite all the seemingly apolitical work she did after WWII, Riefenstahl's career continues to be tainted by her association with Hitler's government and institutions, as does Heidegger's philosophy. And today, during a politically charged year, it's good to be reminded that we all work within a system, within institutions (of which the military is only one; there are social, corporate and artistic institutions as well) which have their own ideological presuppositions. Some may choose, like Riefenstahl, to work within them, assuming that eventually they will have the liberty to express themselves fully. But compromise does not buy artistic freedom -- or any other kind. It buys us instead. Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 Almost an EveningAlmost 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 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 in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 On the VergeSpring is vaguely approaching New York – there are still few buds on the trees, and the temperatures are only slowly creeping upward – but there's still business to attend to, and in the thick of it. Light posting is the order of the day, especially after rolling in at 1.00am on a school night yesterday. More to come. But: yes, by all means drop on down to the Flea Theatre to check out Ken Urban's The Happy Sad, running through 7 April. Compared to Ken's work with his own Committee Theatre Company, it's something of a trifle, but the Bats, the Flea's resident company of young performers, are game and winning. Deborah Voigt, it turns out, was indisposed and absent from last night's performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Met, but it was her loss. Janice Baird made a fine Isolde, and held her own against the brilliant Ben Heppner as Tristan and Matti Salminen's deeply affecting King Marke. Best of all was James Levine and the performance of the Met orchestra; the Met arguably boasts the finest orchestral ensemble in New York (which makes it one of the best in the world), and their rendering of one of the greatest achievements of Western music and drama was stunning and, as it should be, exhausting. More to come on Dieter Dorn's production, a marriage of Beckett and Appia, this weekend. Many years after his notorious break with Wagner (well-examined in Bryan Magee's indispensable The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy), Friedrich Nietzsche said of the opera, "Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan – I have sought in vain, in every art." Only a fool would argue with Nietzsche. Radio and HD-cinema performances of this production of Tristan seem to have run their time in the U.S. this season, but my European and Australian readers may still be in luck, with performances running in April. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 Across the SeasFree this Thursday, 1 November, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, UBU – European Stages editor Chantal Boiron and Act French editor Philippa Wehle will trade observations on the theatre capitals of Paris and New York and the health of the drama in both of those cities. Joining them will be Edward Baron Turk of MIT and Robert Lyons, artistic director of the Soho Think Tank. A good opportunity to catch up on developments on both sides of the Atlantic; the discussion will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, at 6:30 p.m. More information at the MESTC Web site here. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 Suggested ReadingUPDATE: Ironically, on the very same day as LaBute's article appears in the Guardian, a press release relating to The Fire Department's At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq winds up in my inbox. The show will present excerpts of new political plays by writers such as Jessica Blank & Eric Jenson and José Rivera, with a cast including Bebe Neuwirth and David Strathairn. Perhaps Neil's just on the wrong mailing lists. As part of the Guardian's new Tetchy-Playwright-of-the-Week series (apparently launched with 3 January's interview of Edward Bond), American playwright Neil LaBute takes time out on the eve of the London premiere of his latest plays to excoriate writers on the other side of the pond:
While I yield to no one in my admiration for the British playwrights that he lists in his first paragraph -- and for Messrs. Shinn and Shawn, if not Mr. Mamet -- I sense more smoke than fire here, since the list of American playwrights he admires grows just as long as those of British extraction by the end of his essay. (And, to be fair to LaBute, he includes himself in the ranks of the American writers he excoriates as well.) After saying that he "can still count on a playwright like David Hare or Caryl Churchill to give a shit" (really? The Year of Magical Thinking director David Hare?), he promises, each time he sits down at his desk, "to write about a subject of some importance, and to do so with honesty and courage. The time for fear and complacency is past. Bravery needs to make a comeback on both sides of the footlights, and fast." More from the Gen. George Patton of the American theatre here. Consider your shit given, Mr. LaBute. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 The InternationalistMy first post at the Guardian (UK) was published online today; it concerns English-language dramatists who find their plays first produced in countries other than their own:
My further casual thoughts on the subject here, along with Chris Shinn's notes on his own experience. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 Deep Trance Behavior at St. Mark's ChurchIf you're in the East Village tomorrow night and haven't yet had the chance to see Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, which I wrote about here, please drop by and say hello. Immediately after the Tuesday 4 March performance I'll be sitting down with Mr. Foreman himself to host a post-performance discussion of the play; I'll try to get a few questions of my own in there, but mostly it's a chance for the audience to pitch their own two cents at Richard. I'll collect the pennies from the floor afterwards. The discussion is free (included in the $25.00 admission to the show) and open to the public. You're more than welcome to join us. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 Noises Off: A Director's ProcessThough members of the Writers' Guild won't want to hear it, the only two television shows I watch regularly are Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (full episodes available at the Web site if you've missed it) and Project Runway, which began its fourth season this week. They're glimpses into the difficulties of running a restaurant, becoming a clothes designer -- things we normally take for granted. Apart from the personalities involved, the appeal of the shows is two-fold. First, you develop a new appreciation, a new thoughtfulness, about the clothes you wear and the food you eat: you realise, really, that these make a difference, to other people and yourself. Second, you learn things about couture and cuisine that you didn't know before. At least, you think you do (which is television all over for you), and that's enough for some people. Me, after watching these shows (and their predecessors like Iron Chef and the BBC What Not to Wear), I started studying more about couture and cuisine myself. All this is a roundabout way of saying that, as part of my unusual practice these days of writing for Web sites other than my own, a report of my visit to a rehearsal for Richard Foreman's next show is now up at the Ontological-Hysteric production blog -- behind the scenes, into the kitchen or the atelier, whatever. Perhaps you will learn something about Foreman, or about the directorial process itself. At any rate, it's a chance to hear about some unique theatre artists at work. I don't think we'll be seeing a show like Richard's Theatre Nightmares on the Fox network anytime soon -- there's much less yelling and bawling, and only rarely do Foreman's performers and technicians respond with a deferential "Yes, chef!" to his notes. But for those who'd like to see it, free103point9.org offers a real-time Webcast of Foreman's rehearsals every Friday from 10:00am to 5:00pm. Foreman's not exactly a foul-mouthed ex-soccer-playing three-star Michelin chef, and Brendan Regimbal doesn't play Tim Gunn to Richard's Heidi Klum -- at least, not very often. But it's a short peek into the Ontological atelier. Photo of Richard Foreman © Paula Court Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 Gone FishingI'm on my way out of town for the next week or so. While I'm gone, you're encouraged to see Kristen Kosmas' fine Hello Failure at PS122 and The Break-Up/The Happy Sad at the Flea; also at PS122 is Kevin Augustine's Bride, which begins performances this Sunday, 16 March. I've received an email or two recently about some of the more theoretical writings on Superfluities Redux, especially the "95 Sentences" and the Organum. Most of the comments have regarded the difficulty and density of some of these texts, for which I offer no excuse; the struggle I have with these ideas is a part of my writing about them. But I thought, as background, I might offer a short list of books on my bedside table, which inform my own writing. It might (or might not) be useful to someone else; I regard them all as having unique implications for drama, tragedy and theatre: Julia Kristeva's Black Sun. A frequent criticism thrown at contemporary tragedians is that they are pessimistic or dour; Kristeva's study of depression and melancholia nonetheless argues that there is a unique, necessary beauty in the confrontation of loss and catastrophe. Read alongside her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, which implies an extension of the work of Georges Bataille into the contemporary psychoanalysis (and subsequent philosophy) of Lacan, it is hard not to be led directly to the theatre practice of Howard Barker and Sarah Kane -- often painted as pessimists or miserabilists themselves. But they are not. Kristeva demonstrates why. Howard Barker's Arguments for a Theatre seems to have a permanent place on that bedside table, as indispensible inspiration. Today this attracts me, from the essay "Honouring the Audience": "A new theatre will be over-ambitious. It will not settle for anything less than a full company of actors. The stage should swarm with life. No new writer should be taught economy, no matter what the economy demands. The new writer should be shown that the stage is a relentless space and never a room. If the new writer is taught economy the theatre will itself shrink to the size of an attic. It is probably time to shut the studio theatres in the interests of the theatre." But, at the same time, the tension between this idea and the work of Harold Pinter, which is all about a few people in small rooms and which I'm also re-reading, is fascinating rather than contradictory to me. The poems of Baudelaire are the starting-point of modernism, but hardly its end-point. In fact, Kristeva's work also extends Baudelaire's project into the novels of Céline, Burroughs and beyond -- from modernism into what is often labelled post-modernism. Apart from demonstrating the uselessness of these distinctions, Baudelaire remains an urban contemporary. And, along with Barker's essays, on that table semi-permanently there are these and these, not to mention this. And, although it's been missing from this blog for a while, this is ever in easy reach. Posting will resume on Saturday, 22 March. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 Theatre for SaleIf you're still looking for a Valentine's Day gift for your drama-minded special someone, here's an idea: a piece of a show – and I don't mean a percentage of the gross. Today and tomorrow are the final days of the purchasing period of Democracy in America, the new production from Annie Dorsen and The Foundry Theatre. At their Web site, and for as little as $10.00, you can purchase text, lighting cues, songs and various other ephemera that will be incorporated into the show to be presented at PS122 beginning 1 April. You can't argue with the quality of the performers who are willing to say your words or even get naked for a few sawbucks: Philippa Kaye, Okwui Okpokwasili and Tony Torn have put their talent on sale to the lucky (and, hopefully, wealthy) few. So buy your honey a piece of Democracy in America. Who knows? It could be the beginning of a beautiful – and bargain-minded – friendship. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 ArchaeologyIn coming to the end of the first month of Superfluities' fourth year, I took the opportunity to trace back some of the high points of the blog, as well as some of the low points. What I've written here has engendered some controversy, not to mention mystification and even anger and insult: the Organum (which has grown nearly to the size of a book itself) and the "95 Sentences" – a kind of Kantian prolegomena to the Organum – have been responsible for some of it, but interestingly, the threads of my current concerns have something of a logical progression, even if many of the ideas in them don't. Easily, they had their origin in my 2005 review of Saint Oedipus, though many of the ideas in that review were first elaborated upon in 2006 elsewhere. But 2006 did see the launch of the Organum, which itself isn't fully explicable without my continuing writing on Richard Foreman and Howard Barker. More recent Organum entries are here. Something of a low point was reached earlier this year, when after having spent 2006 writing reviews (about 75 of them altogether) for this blog, the New York Times and nytheatre.com, a crisis of faith manifested itself following a review of Jan Fabre's Je Suis Sang, but I pulled out of it (though I still have days on which I feel the same ambivalence). As I had to, bearing in mind Beckett's imprecation to "fail better" and Howard Barker's courageous insistence:
I continue on from the point very much from which I started: with Oedipus and erotic tragedy; a few hundred reviews, six or seven plays of my own, a few other essays later, and this evening I hope to review the Greenwich Village 2007 Halloween parade. Not bad at all, really, and I've even started to get the files in order. So I go on. And a Happy Halloween to you, as well. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 World AIDS DayToday, 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. Posted in /Miscellaneous Sunday, 12 October 2008 G.W. Pabst: The Threepenny OperaThe Threepenny Opera. Directed by G.W. Pabst. Screenplay by Bela Balazs, Leo Lania and Ladislaus Vajda, from the play by Bertolt Brecht. Songs composed by Kurt Weill. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. Edited by Hans Oser. Art direction by Andrej Andrejew. With Rudolf Forster (Mackie Messer), Carola Neher (Polly Peachum), Reinhold Schunzel (Tiger Brown), Fritz Rasp (Peachum), Lotte Lenya (Jenny) and Ernst Busch (The Street Singer). Germany, 1931. Running time: 105 minutes. DVD released through The Criterion Collection. The Kurt Weill Foundation maintains this Web site with an extensive background and history of the play.
The streets and buildings are carved from stone and eerily lit in G.W. Pabst's 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera, available now from The Criterion Collection in a new restoration. Designed with more than a glance to Expressionism, the film retains the identification of Victorian London with Weimar Berlin; the camera sinuously snakes, like Mackie Messer himself, through the alleyways, basements and offices of the urban landscape. This is, easily, a true black-and-white underworld. Mackie himself, while dapper and well-dressed, is a rapist, arsonist and murderer; the whores are given the most lush accommodations among the characters of this world. As Brecht wished (despite a lawsuit he instigated to stop the film), it's no longer the fun romp through a Guys and Dolls ambiance that it had become, but an incisive critique of the bourgeois world, and it also retains the sweet aura of desiccated sexuality that permeated the German theatre and culture of the time. (Neher's Polly, through the first half of the film wearing a tight, bright white wedding dress that seems to glow, is a fetishistic object of false innocence and becomes, at times, even a more central character than Macheath; this provides an echo of the tormented sexuality present in Brecht's early plays like Baal, Drums in the Night and Edward II.) There are other ways, too, in which it's not the Threepenny Opera with which we're most familiar. Only half of the music is retained (most sadly, the "Tango-Ballad" in which Macheath and Jenny describe, in song, the circumstances surrounding the abortion of their child was dropped, for fear of censorship problems, early in the production process); the plot elements are rearranged and shifted, and, rather than a near-hanging, the film now ends with the four principal characters founding a bank. Mackie himself is a middle-aged, graying Rudolf Forster, not Sting nor Raul Julia nor Alan Cumming, three recent Macheaths. The film however does the singular service of preserving three of the most mesmerising performances from the original Berlin production – Neher, Lenya and Busch – and the musical direction is by Theo Mackeben, who also presided over the music at the 1928 Schiffbauerdamm premiere. Pabst's Threepenny Opera is mostly his own; those who seek a truer rendition of the Brecht/Weill original will have to look elsewhere. (Unfortunately, the sparkling Columbia recording of the Richard Foreman/Stanley Silverman Threepenny Opera from the mid-1970s, which restored Weill's original score and orchestrations, remains out-of-print, as does the 1956 recording of the full score in the original German language, supervised by Lenya and something of a benchmark, for all its faults.) But Pabst does cut to the criminal core of the original, which continues to remain relevant. The DVD also contains an informative 49-minute documentary, featuring Eric Bentley, Weill expert Kim Kowalke, Pabst scholar Jan-Christopher Horak and Pabst's son Michael, about the origin and history of both the play and the film. Posted in /Film Sunday, 12 October 2008 Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Hitler: A Film from GermanyHans-Jürgen Syberberg, with Heiner Müller, was one of Brecht's most talented pupils, and nowhere is this more evident in his 1977 film Hitler: A Film from Germany, which will receive its first U.S. DVD release tomorrow. The seven-hour film (in four parts, originally made for television) is a unique document, an essay about the simultaneous rise of the modern totalitarian state and the emergence of technological mass-media; in some ways it out-Adornos Adorno. Susan Sontag called it "The most extraordinary film I have ever seen," and most viewers will share that conclusion. It is not an easy film to watch; broadly presentational rather than representational, it's neither documentary nor fiction, but a long meditation on the means by which mass media has served the evolution of the democratic nation-state into a totalitarian playground, manipulated by the compelling, moving film-and-video image and those who control it. Syberberg examines the ambivalent nature of German Romanticism, especially as it emerged in the operas of Wagner (Syberberg's film of Parsifal muses further on this nature), to simultaneously affect both the fascist and the democratic mind. The film is in 22 scenes or "tableaux" set on a soundstage, rear-projections serving as landscapes before which the detritus of twentieth-century history is lovingly handled and considered by the fine performers, especially Peter Kern. Hitler emerges as a man, but also as a face stuck on a girl's doll and a ventriloquist's dummy (who speaks through Hitler?). At its price (the film is available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore), it may be a while until I can get to it again, but many of its images haunt me nearly 30 years after I'd first seen it. I'll look forward to seeing it again. I wrote about it in 2003 for the original Superfluities blog; my short notes on the film are below.
So announces a circus barker at the very beginning of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany. After five years of preparation, shot on a single soundstage in four weeks on a $500,000 budget, the seven-hour-plus film infuriated audiences around the world and finally infuriated American audiences when Francis Ford Coppola financed a roadshow tour in 1978/1979, needlessly nailing home the point in retitling the film Our Hitler, which was its title when I saw it at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre for the first time. Filmmakers had dealt with Hitler and the Holocaust before, of course. The television series Holocaust dates from the same period; a few years before, Alec Guinness(!) had starred as Hitler in a docudrama about the dictator's last few days in a Berlin bunker. But except for Susan Sontag's essay on the film, reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn, the work slipped out of sight following its late-1970s run. That may have been its destiny. Hitler: A Film from Germany is an attempt to divorce Hitler and the Third Reich from a simple narrative and historical summation through a marriage of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and the Brechtian alienation effect, an unlikely alliance but a profitable one: Film as the art form of the 20th century, the epic theater providing its principal dramaturgical devices. "I made the aesthetically scandalous attempt," Syberberg explained, "of combining Brecht's doctrine of the epic theater with Richard Wagner's musical aesthetics, of linking the epic system as anti-Aristotelian cinema with the laws of the new myth." Hence a circus metaphor; hence depth through duration; hence the episodic quality of the film. Hitler: A Film from Germany is a long series of monologues, film clips, puppet shows and tableaux, motifs emerging and re-emerging from episode to episode. Syberberg's most fascinating technique is to strip even these devices of their ability to enchant by laying them bare as cheap circus tricks. The "puppets" (no more than dolls, really, of Hitler, Goebbels and other historical and symbolic figures) are clumsily manipulated and their lines spoken on-screen by live actors. Even the device of quotation is exposed. In "Part I: The Grail," Austrian actor Peter Kern, costumed and made-up as Hitler (though Kern's considerable girth undermines the illusion of impersonation), delivers the final monologue of the child sex murderer in Fritz Lang's 1933 film M. Kern's delivery is overdramatic, like Peter Lorre's; Syberberg's parallel explicit; but in this shameless theatricality he makes the ease of narrative suspension-of-disbelief ambivalent. We must ask ourselves: What are we watching here? Any film student sees the cultural significance of M to inter-war Germany; what does it mean to make this significance over-explicit in post-war Germany? Does it make our interpretation of M (and, for that matter, Hitler the film and Hitler the figure) easier, or are we made to face our mythologizing tendency to distance our most unpleasant natures from ourselves as observers? The film is now available on the Internet at Syberberg's Web site. It is a chamber opera, in many ways, demanding intimacy, and so works better on the small screen of television (and the computer monitor), perhaps, than it does on the large screen of the Walnut Street Theater. Until an enterprising American distributor sees his way clear to releasing the film on DVD, it's the best we can get now, but it's far more than we've had since the film dropped from sight in the early 1980s. Posted in /Film Sunday, 12 October 2008 Tom Stoppard Reaches for His DhotiIn an interview published in Sunday's Observer (UK),
Tom Stoppard discusses foreign policy and human rights, for which he has
been a life-
Stoppard also discusses his relationship with Vaclav Havel, the condition of the writer under cultural repression, and whether or not Western definitions of human rights go beyond cultural differences such as clitoridectomies. The entire interview is here. Posted in /Dramatists/Tom_Stoppard Sunday, 12 October 2008 High ArtIn his best plays (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and the darker Edmond, Oleanna and film adaptation of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy), David Mamet is a superb ironist, manipulating the literary device to both comic and tragic effect. Perhaps this explains his short essay, "Drama That Brings Home the Bacon," in yesterday's New York Times, which concludes:
It's just possible that he is bringing this irony to the pages of the New York Times now as he did to the pages of the Village Voice earlier this year; and I hope the New York Times also recognises the irony of insisting that their editorial and advertising walls in the arts section are as thick as those elsewhere in the paper. I doubt it, though; his citation of Adam Smith seems straightforward enough. Not to mention that the thesis of the article – that the specific business of the content of American drama is business – is a pretty rickety stand to hang a trenchcoat on, especially after Shaw, Brecht and Wesker, who also had a thing or two to say about the public economic life of private individuals. (Oedipus' and Lear's day jobs also came into some conflict with their private consciences, I believe, with intriguing moral consequences.) As the characters of Speed-the-Plow suggest, in any event, it's not true that individuals and corporations "can grow rich only through fulfilling a need"; they also, as parts of the Culture Industry, create fictitious needs, manufacturing wants as (in Noam Chomsky's memorable phrase) they manufacture consent: they manipulate wants, playing upon the lowest common denominators of ignorance and blindness. They close eyes, rather than open them. Because, honestly, we don't "need" The Sopranos, or Seinfeld, or Nascar or Sarah Jessica Parker. Nor do we need biographies of Shostakovich. The danger to history is in manipulating us into believing that we do; that the sand into which we've stuck our heads is delightfully warm; and who needs the chilly air anyway? (Though without it, it's true, we eventually suffocate.) A provocative thought experiment is to wonder what Mamet's admitted mentor Harold Pinter may think about his apparent rightward turn; Pinter has moved to the far left of the political spectrum in his own public pronouncements; and Beckett's champions may wonder about Mamet's diktat that High Art is not "the lookout of drama." On the other hand, Mamet's sole public comment on the occasion of Beckett's 100th birthday was "He was a great kisser" – a comment which was also reported in the Times – though some more generous commentators have chalked this up to a sense of inferiority and anxiety faced with Beckett's achievement, instead of idiocy. But leave it be, leave it be. At least Mamet practices what he preaches; he is, according to the Times bio line, the creator and executive producer of the CBS television series The Unit. Superb ironist, Mamet must be aware that "unit" is a common euphemism for the primary masculine sexual characteristic; and more power to Mamet for finally reaching the point in his career where he can grow rich through the aggressive marketing of and constant attention to his own Unit. Maybe that's where he was heading all along. Posted in /Dramatists/David_Mamet Sunday, 12 October 2008 Churchill at 70I first saw Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine in about 1982, at a
small cabaret theatre in Philadelphia. The play was staged as more of a
sex farce than a political essay (of course, on some level it's both; its
producer there had also produced an Oh Calcutta! ripoff called
Let My People Come in the same space, so you get the general drift
of the marketing and advertising associated with the show), but even then,
Churchill's subversive cross- I'm not sure how sensitive I as a young man of 20 was to the
ideological nuances of the play, but we do get older and, with luck, more
sensitive. Churchill is older too, celebrating her 70th birthday this
week. Like many other British dramatists of the past few years, her vision
has grown more intense and more spare after a career of broad- Posted in /Dramatists/Caryl_Churchill Sunday, 12 October 2008 More BrechtThe Bertolt Brecht revival, which I wrote about last December for the Guardian (UK), continues apace. London is now seeing the premiere of Brecht's final play, Turandot, at the Hampstead Theatre through 4 October. The play's translator, Edward Kemp, writes in today's Guardian:
The plot of In the Jungle of Cities, too, turned on Shlink's attempt to purchase the opinion of librarian George Garga, ending in bloody and devastating disaster. Brecht would return to the issue again and again, in Galileo depicting the purchase – with threats of torture – of Galileo's silence. In the body of his essay, Kemp discusses the ideological background of
the play and Brecht's increasingly ambivalent attitude towards Soviet
Communism in the post- Speaking of Galileo, there's a new series of Brecht plays from
Penguin Classics returning to print the fine Willett/ Posted in /Dramatists/Bertolt_Brecht Sunday, 12 October 2008 Wedekind/Franzen: Spring AwakeningSpring Awakening: A Children's Tragedy. Frank Wedekind; translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen. 88 pages, with an introduction, "Authentic but Horrible," by Franzen, and notes. Faber & Faber, 2007. Paperback, $13.00. When Frank Wedekind died in 1918, the funeral in Munich was one step short of a riot, in keeping with Wedekind's own barely controlled works. Wedekind's widow was followed in the cortege by family, artists, and a contingent of prostitutes, all of whom jostled each other for position around a very crowded grave. At the grave, Heinrich Lautensack, one of Wedekind's young admirers, made certain that a camera crew was in place before he hysterically leapt upon Wedekind's coffin deep in the ground, "proclaiming his despair," as Wedekind's English-language biographer Alan Best put it. Other mourners helped him out again. Bizarre, but seen from the year 2007, oddly contemporary; today, Lautensack would post the video on YouTube to the delight of his peers, no doubt. It's hard to guess whether Wedekind, who had settled into a rather bourgeois existence with wife and children himself when he breathed his last at the age of 54, would have approved of this behavior or been mortified, so to speak. He probably would have understood it either way. By that time, though, he had left his mark on German drama. Firmly within the dramaturgical tradition of Lenz and Buchner, a strong influence on the young Brecht and the Expressionists (though Wedekind disliked Expressionism himself), the much-maligned and often-censored dramatist had created a body of work that anatomised the tragedy of sex and love in dozens of plays and stories. His two most enduring works were a trilogy of plays about a vamp named Lulu (which gave rise to a masterful opera by Alban Berg and a fine film, Pandora's Box, by G.W. Pabst) and a somewhat shorter play, Spring Awakening, which followed the sexual misadventures of a group of adolescents in Germany in 1892. Spring Awakening, especially, has endured. After Wedekind's death the play was staged by Max Reinhardt, and even now there are several English translations that remain in print: Eric Bentley, Ted Hughes and Edward Bond have all had a crack at adapting the play. And now we have novelist Jonathan Franzen, perhaps best known for his 2001 novel The Corrections. And then there is the musical. Garrett Eisler's September 4, 2007, column over at the Huffington Post has all the gossipy detail about the contretemps Franzen's comments about this musical in the introduction to the book have engendered between Franzen and the musical's creators Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater and Michael Mayer. I assume Garrett gets this mostly right (except that the translation is not new but was written more than twenty years ago for the Swarthmore College theatre department; the translation came before the musical, not the other way around). I'm inclined to disregard this here not only because I haven't seen the musical but also because it all seems irrelevant to the translation itself, which is quite good and stageable. The musical is the musical, regardless of its merits or demerits. Here, we have the real thing, for those who want it. Any translation is fraught with difficulties, and a dramatic translation requires, unlike translations of verse or prose, that the language can be spoken and acted. A poet like Wedekind is even tougher: Wedekind wrote very precisely of his own time and place, in his own peculiar German tone and with his conception of German literary and dramatic history that held Goethe in particularly high esteem.
But the true tragedy of the work is not in the stories of Moritz or Wendla or even Melchior; it is in the concept of eternal recurrence. Both the adolescent and adult worlds are fully open to ridicule in Spring Awakening; while the parents and teachers parodied in the play are foolish, repressed, prudish and even destructive, the same can be said of the adolescents under their tutelage. The dead Moritz, appearing to Melchior in a graveyard in the last scene of the play, underscores the repetition of the generations of ignorance and repression: "We observe people in love and see them blush at each other, suspecting that they're deceived deceivers. We see parents bringing children into the world in order to be able to say to them: how lucky you are to have parents like us! – and see the children going out and doing the same thing." Spring Awakening doesn't celebrate adolescent sexuality but subjects it to the same scrutiny as the scrutiny to which it subjects bourgeois adulthood. Both come up lacking. But Melchior is alone. And what saves the play from an easy categorisation into the bins of either "tragedy" or "comedy" is in the fact that, at the end of the play, Melchior chooses life; what's more, he chooses life at the urging of a character named here "The Masked Man." The Masked Man approaches Melchior to offer something other than the romanticised death and decay of his friend. "I'll open up the world for you," says the suave, cosmopolitan Masked Man to Melchior, who is on the verge of committing suicide at Moritz's urging. "This temporary distress of yours is due to your miserable situation. It will seem ridiculous as soon as you've got a warm dinner under your belt. ... I'll introduce you to people. I'll give you the opportunity to broaden your horizons in the most fabulous way. You won't miss a single interesting thing the world has to offer." The Man characterises Moritz as a "charlatan. ... The sublime humorist is the most woeful, pitiable creature in creation!" And so The Masked Man takes Melchior's arm to leave the cemetery – and the dead – to ... Well, who can say? Wedekind leaves the question of the Masked Man's identity open, though Eric Bentley has suggested that Wedekind meant Goethe. Bentley has a point. Goethe predated Nietzsche in straddling the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals of the ordered polis and instinctual sexuality; The Masked Man is neither the gawky teenage misfit nor the stuffy school headmaster, but the free and open acceptance of an adult sexuality, aware and maturing with experience. Though not optimistic (nor pessimistic) about the possibility of happiness, The Masked Man points the way to a full adulthood; it is this adult who will fulfill the potential of his sexuality, not the children who toy with it, crippled as they are (often willingly enough) by the demands and strictures of a moralistic culture. It's no wonder that the play has appealed to poets and dramatists (Bond and Hughes again) with a profound interest in tragedy; Franzen here has navigated his way between the viciously comic satire and puling lachrymose melodrama (this latter quite deliberate on Wedekind's part, reflecting the puling lachrymose self-regard of arrogant adolesence) quite well, even brilliantly at times, and his grasp of the play's comedy, particularly in Act III Scene 1, is exquisite. My argument with his introduction (and I think it's a mere quibble) is his attempt to grapple with the definition of the play as comedy or tragedy. To be fair, Wedekind apparently had the same problem, subtitling Spring Awakening "A Children's Tragedy" while referring to it as a comedy in several other places. Spring Awakening is, more accurately, a grotesquerie, that peculiar German genre of sex drama that includes The Tutor, Wozzeck, Baal and others: it partakes of the bizarre juxtapositions that comedy and tragedy produce in the same work and pursues those juxtapositions to epiphanic ends. It's not comic in the way that, say, Joe Orton is comic; Orton stayed on the surfaces of things; but then, he knew and admitted that he was writing farce, which is a different sort of comedy altogether. Farce validates the ordering of chaos at the final curtain; grotesquerie finds, offers and validates the chaos to be found just beneath the veneer of order. This produces the vertiginous sensuality of Wedekind's particular kind of drama, and why it has exerted the fascination that it has since it was written in 1891. It is this vertiginous amoral sensuality that drew the censors' wrath, as well as the attention of Bond and Hughes. And now Franzen, in this able and entertaining translation, as well. Posted in /Drama Sunday, 12 October 2008 Suggested Reading: Samuel BeckettThe Deborah Warner/Fiona Shaw production of Happy Days, running at BAM through 2 February, has given rise to many positive reviews – but is it Beckett? Rainer Hanshe, in his essay "Stoic Nihilism and the Beauty of Oblivion" for the online journal Hyperion, uses the occasion to offer extended thoughts on Beckett's contemporary reputation in American culture. After considering this production and the American canonisation of Beckett as some kind of aesthetic saint (and highbrow Dr. Phil) since Beckett's death in 1989, Hanshe turns to the urge of performers and directors to "reinterpret," counter to Beckett's wishes, his theatrical work:
But this is only part of a much longer meditation on Beckett, Nietzsche's vision of art and the role that literature itself plays in the character of Happy Days' Winnie. As an antidote to a current common conception of Beckett as some kind of hope-dealer, it's worthwhile to examine once more one of the most oft-quoted passages of Beckett's work, from the last page of his 1950 novel The Unnamable:
Hanshe's essay reminds us that those final seven words can be read in a variety of ways, only one of them an assertion of courage. They are also, in the musical decrescendo cadence of this passage, a dying of the light, a tortured expression of inevitable painful existence towards an inevitable death. And, too, a third perspective: that the narrator does, indeed, "go on," but as a being-in-words, as a linguistic memoir of suffering and pain -- as the "stain upon the silence" that Beckett wished to leave as his legacy. It is in this last sense that the imposition of directorial arrogance upon Beckett's work most desecrates the work itself. As the writer's nephew points out, Beckett's dramatic texts (and texts like it) are unique in that each word, even the words of the stage directions, counts. Unlike most plays, you can't just go through the texts with a black marker, eradicating the stage directions (to provide room for directorial and interpretive "creativity"); in many cases you'd have little play left. If one respects Beckett (at least, if one asserts that one respects Beckett), one must also respect that being-in-words that his dramatic texts represent as well. If this is too much of a constraint for those "middling directors and actors" whom Hanshe castigates, well, there's nothing stopping them from writing and devising their own new texts and productions -- writing and staging their own poetic visions. And more power to them. But they don't need Beckett for that; paper and pens are available at most local corner stores. And Beckett doesn't need them. Hanshe's rich and thoughtful essay is available in full here. Posted in /Drama Sunday, 12 October 2008 Act FrenchAct French: Contemporary Plays from France. Edited by Philippa Wehle. 196 pages, with an introduction, "The Power of Words," by Wehle, and short biographies of the playwrights. PAJ Publications, 2007. Paperback, $18.95. Just published by PAJ Publications, this anthology of seven recent plays is a fine picture of contemporary French drama, often neglected here in the United States. Among the best plays in the volume are José Pliya's Pinteresque examination of power, colonialism and sexuality We Were Sitting on the Shores of the World ... and Michel Vinaver's oratorio on the World Trade Center disaster, 11 September 2001; perhaps my favorite is Emmanuelle Marie's self-styled "partita" on female sexuality, Cut, which easily leaves The Vagina Monologues in the dust. (Sad to note that Marie died on 10 May 2007, just before this book went to press.) These plays reflect a renewed interest in content and language inflected with a strong sense of both global concerns and deeply intimate personal experience, quite often simultaneously. It's nice, especially, to have these works in a single volume; many of them constitute the first United States publications of these dramatists. The volume is prefaced with a knowledgable, informative introduction by Philippa Wehle, which sets the plays in their historical and political contexts. This book, along with a collection of plays by Maria Irene Fornes, Letters from Cuba, is among the first results of a revitalised book publication effort from PAJ: attractive, well-designed volumes devoted to contemporary drama and theatre from around the world, with more to come. Posted in /Drama Sunday, 12 October 2008 From the ArchivesOriginally posted on 19 August 2005. Slightly revised. Jonathan Jones in the Guardian yesterday reviewed the new Degenerate Art display at the Tate Modern, which (for our London friends) runs through 30 October. The exhibition is an attempt at recreating, on a much smaller scale, the 1937 exhibition of modern art that the Nazis considered harmful, insulting or demeaning to the German people. This show included Kandinsky and Chagall, but it also included most of the artists associated with the Expressionist, Brücke and New Objectivity movements. Though he might go overboard at the conclusion of his essay, Jones has
got a few points to think deeply on, especially for those who deny the
value of an explicitly "confrontational" art and believe that the proper
locus of art is a facile celebration of ourselves and our culture, and a
peculiar, superficial, culturally-
Posted in /Archives Sunday, 12 October 2008 Night PlannerBelow, a highly selective, prejudiced look at a few current and immediately upcoming events and productions, along with other items of interest: Friday, 26 September (tonight): Heart of the Matter: New and Selected Works.
Photographer Paul Cava's work is familiar to readers of this blog (it was
one of his images that I used for the In Public
publicity material a few years ago, and Alison's new book of poetry features one of Paul's prints on
its cover). This new exhibition of his recent work exemplifies Paul's
"sensual, intricately- Saturday, 27 September (tomorrow): Prelude 08. The Prelude festival at CUNY's Graduate Center ("at the forefront of contemporary NYC theatre & performance," the Web site says) concludes today with a terrific program that features performances and discussions with the likes of Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, Jay Scheib, Vallejo Gantner, Richard Foreman, Sheila Callaghan, Jenny Schwartz ... the list goes on and on. Also among today's events is "Spotlight Poland," which takes the attention off New York for a few hours and focuses instead on work from that fine Central European nation. I'll be moderating the final panel of the conference, "The New Theatre," and hope you'll join Jason Craig, Richard Maxwell, myself and others to discuss where, if anywhere, we go from here. It's all free; the CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue in New York. Wednesday, 1 October: Outside Inn. Austrian playwright Andreas
Jungwirth's play about a civic engineer on the lam in Mexico opens tonight
at the 59E59 Theatres in a production by the International Culture Lab.
Director Melanie Dreyer has seized on the play to experiment with
"differences in theatrical performance style between the United States,
Germany and Austria," examining the ways in which the sounds of spoken
languages themselves shape character development and the
actor/ Thursday, 2 October: Blasted. It's been a long time coming, but at last it's here – the New York premiere of Sarah Kane's debut play begins performances tonight at Soho Rep, 46 Walker Street (two blocks below Canal). A dysfunctional relationship burning out its dying embers in a Leeds hotel room is shattered suddenly by the incursion of a war. Soho Rep's artistic director Sarah Benson directs a cast that features Reed Birney, Louis Cancelmi and Marin Ireland; I've written about Kane in the past here. Tickets via OvationTix, but act now; the show's nearly sold out through the run. Posted in /Openings Sunday, 12 October 2008 The First Five YearsThe problem and the joy of the Internet, some wag once said, is that
trying to remove anything from it, once there, is like trying to get pee
out of a swimming pool. So, though I have no control over it, I can still
see, via The Internet Archive at www.archive.org, the home page of Superfluities as it appeared on 1 October 2003,
the unofficial debut of the blog you're reading now. Though apparently
I had been writing Superfluities off- Though at the time theatre and drama had a relatively small role to
play in the writing there, that would change very rapidly, and six months
later nearly all of the postings had something to do with theatre and
drama, as they do now. Looking back over that half- And some things haven't changed. In 2008, as in 2003, I write without a
journalistic, academic or professional portfolio, and advertising
continues to have no place on these pages. This latter has been constant,
but the former hasn't always been so. In 2006 I wrote a few
dozen reviews on a freelance basis for the New York Times, an
association that ended when fellow blogger and Times freelancer Rob
Kendt turned in a positive review of my play In Public, which was
ex post facto spiked by the editors as representing a
"conflict- Oh well. And as I've continued to maintain the blog my time has been
less and less entirely my own, with a current full- Superfluities and its successor Superfluities Redux were never places to share my political opinions (why anybody should care about those – though I do have them, like everybody else – is beyond me), nor my personal life (about which they should care even less, it being, after all, none of their business). Everything I have to say publicly about either can be found in my plays and in the Organums One and Two. I'm glad to say that I've regretted nothing I've said here over the past five years. Outside of that, I have been glad to do my small bit to encourage other theatre bloggers and take note of some productions and dramatists that have been of particular significance for me, especially if they might have gotten a little lost in the hysteria and hype that contribute to the background noise of the New York theatre world. And I've tried to be constant about this; the only substantive break I've taken was last September, when I took a month off to indulge in my Albee Foundation fellowship and write the first draft of What She Knew. That said, Superfluities has changed my life in countless ways. No need to go into these here, but it has changed not least in that it has brought to me a few new friends who have broadened my world and my imaginative life, and whose acquaintance I cherish. They know who they are. Some of them I haven't met in person. I hope to do so one day, though this in no way lessens the tremendous affection and regard I hold for them already; those days on which I find their emails in my inbox are a little brighter than all the rest. And I find as my conceptions and reconceptions of theatre and drama becoming more and more radical, these friends have become closer and closer (even if they agree or disagree with what I write here, find it more or less valid), rendering the dividing lines between the art of theatre, the fashioning of self and the conduct of life more and more invisible. This is perhaps inevitable, if the urge to dramatic creation is felt as deeply as it should be. They have seen me through many difficult times, wittingly and unwittingly. To them this work is dedicated, and because of them I look forward to what might be accomplished here, and on whatever stages I may haunt, in the next five years. Posted in /Archives Sunday, 12 October 2008 BlastedBlasted by Sarah Kane. Directed by Sarah Benson. Set design by Louisa Thompson. Lighting design by Tyler Micoleau. Sound design by Matt Tierney. Costume design by Theresa Squire. Technical director: Billy Burns. With Reed Birney (Ian), Marin Ireland (Cate) and Louis Cancelmi (Soldier). Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes; no intermission. A production of Soho Rep. Reviewed at the 3 October 2008 performance. At Soho Rep, 46 Walker Street, New York, 2-26 October 2008. Ticket and schedule information at OvationTix. A near- Sarah Kane's 1995 Blasted, making its New York premiere in Sarah
Benson's rigorous, imaginative production at Soho Rep through 28 October,
changed the face of English theatre for a generation – by and large,
by recapturing the violent, moralistic stage world and practice of the
17th- No play that followed Blasted's 1995 premiere reached the same
status as an exemplar of "in- And Blasted gets that realisation here. Benson's set blasts open
too with the violent explosion that blows apart the hotel room at the end
of Scene Two, revealing the interior structure of the theatre at 46 Walker
Street; the self-
If I haven't yet mentioned the performances, it's because they are all
on the same brilliant level of achievement as the set: Reed Birney is a
tired, cruel, cancer- A production this extraordinary, however, unearths weaknesses as well
as strengths in Kane's text, weaknesses that may not be evident on a mere
reading of the play. The idea that the conscious agency of cruelty gives
rise to more cruelty in an unending spiral of suffering has been with us
since the Oresteia and, in the more modern era, Shakespeare's own
Titus Andronicus and other revenge tragedies. While Kane's
so- The conclusion of the play presents certain perhaps inevitable
ambiguities, but these ambiguities seem to confuse rather than provide a
deeper insight into the condition of the play's world. Of all the
directorial challenges that Kane's plays present (especially the notorious
"The rats carry Carl's feet away" stage direction of Cleansed),
perhaps none is more difficult to render than the four- As readers, we know beyond any possible doubt that Ian has died. Is this so, however, in the theatre, without the text before us? The challenge for the director is to render Ian's death as certain in the watching as it is in the reading. I begin to fear, however, that it is an insuperable challenge; the problem is that, in the theatrical experience of the play, it may be far from certain, and there is the risk that, if this death is not explicit, the play itself as a theatrical event becomes structurally deficient. Benson chooses to dress Cate in a white shift for her re- The question remains at the center of Kane's work through Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, but it was only with the growing need to expand the language of her plays at the expense of stage violence that she was able to achieve the expression of the pain and ecstasy at the root of her dramatic impulse. The language of Blasted is not that much of an extension from that of Edward Bond's Saved, notorious for its scene of a baby being stoned to death in a London park, a play which Kane cited as a profound influence on her own decision to become a dramatist. But that language could not entirely contain, at this point in her work, the ambivalence of the vision, which grew sharper as the last plays became more poetic. The prosaic vernacular could only reach so far. That said, you have to begin somewhere. Kane began with Blasted,
one of the most powerful and influential first plays in generations
(perhaps only Beckett's Waiting for Godot and John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger can be compared to its significance for the
English- Posted in /Notices Sunday, 12 October 2008 RIP: Karlheinz StockhausenUPDATE: 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:
Posted in /Music Sunday, 12 October 2008 Claude VivierClaude Vivier's 1979/1980 opera for seven vocalists and seven musicians, Kopernikus, subtitled a Rituel de Mort, takes place at that Kantian point where the phenomenal and noumenal spheres impinge upon each other. A woman, Agni, finds herself in a metaphysical Wonderland, she herself her own Alice; she is located on a precipice that hovers between life and death. She tries to make sense of her new surroundings through dream images – Merlin, Mozart, Tristan and Isolde, and others. Ultimately she is unsuccessful at entering into the symbolic play of her own imagination and is left, at the close of the opera, quite alone. Vivier's mature vocal work utilizes "everyday" language as a possibility (never realised) of entering that noumenal sphere. Perhaps it plays for him the same role that birdsong plays for Messiaen, whose music his own work resembles. Set against this everyday language there is a tapestry of music and nonsense language. Unsurprisingly, though the nonsense language beggars meaning, it also permits a vocal expression that transcends ordinary human conversation; the tension in the opera is between these two spheres. In one of those happy coincidences which are too rare, I also saw Sarah
Kane's Crave last night, which takes place in that same grayish
light, that same no- Vivier's work, because of his recognition of the role of heightened and quotidian language in their abilities to touch on this noumenal dimension, is perhaps more accessible than that of much contemporary music (though in another sense I doubt this very much – that the quotidian language is a red herring that does no more than lead into the deeper aesthetic experience we sense beneath that everyday conversation). Sex and violence, too, play a role in the conception of Vivier's metaphysic; a dangerous but necessary exploration. Like Kane's Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Vivier's final
work, the powerful and stunning Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der
Seele, contains a remarkable premonition of his own violent death in
Paris in 1983; unlike Kane's work, at the artist's death Vivier's work was
largely unrecognised as the remarkable aesthetic and spiritual achievement
that it was (Kane had been in newspaper headlines since the premiere of
her first work, Blasted, in 1995). His work continues unrecognised,
though there are signs that this is changing. There is a fine two- In connection with the Lancaster concerts, the Guardian published this appreciation by Alfred Hickling. And below, from YouTube, is a version (with Spanish subtitles) of the last eight minutes of Glaubst du ..., which ends suddenly, eerily, at the point at which the manuscript stops – following the description of a sex murder. This appears to be from the 2004 Amsterdam production of Rêves d'un Marco Polo. Posted in /Music Sunday, 12 October 2008 Interview with Marilyn Nonken
Because much of this remains fascinating from performance, music and theatre perspectives (and for other reasons besides), I repost my 2006 interview with pianist Marilyn Nonken today. In the interview, she discusses the role of gender in performance, her experience working with Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories, aesthetic and everyday perception, as well as a wealth of other issues. To update Marilyn's biography briefly, she is currently the Director of Piano Studies at NYU/Steinhardt; other relevant updates are in the introduction to the interview. Posted in /Music Sunday, 12 October 2008 Brecht's BackYou 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:
The full post is here. Posted in /Guardian Sunday, 12 October 2008 "Playwrights Writing"Below is the text of my book review, "Playwrights Writing: Procedure and Polemic," which first appeared in the September 2007 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.
Academics write about theatre for other academics. When playwrights write about theatre, their audience is simultaneously themselves and the general public: a view from the inside, as moles underneath their aesthetic ground, examining the soil from which the art of drama springs. In his Short Organum and The Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht told theatre practitioners how to make theatre and audiences how to receive it, as did Shaw in his early theatre reviews and prefaces. The form of this polemic was straightforward: the essay, expository prose that had the air of practical utility. Among recent English-language playwrights, Suzan-Lori Parks' and Tony Kushner's writings on theatre share this same strategy. But there are other more playful, suppler forms. It's not surprising that these forms, rather than the essay, have especially appealed to those playwrights who take language in and of itself as the subject of their dramatic work. Two recently issued book-length polemics on theatre, one from Mac Wellman in the United States and the other from Howard Barker in Europe, break free from the essay form to present evolving ideas about drama and theatre, and in doing so they demonstrate a variety of contrasts: between America and Europe, the comic and the tragic, the narrative and the aphorism. These books share, however, a goal of seeing theatre as a part of culture, both reflective and transformative of society itself. Wellman's avenue is towards cheerful satire, Barker's towards tragic apocalypse. Having written many essays about theatre and drama in the past, Wellman turns in Q's Q to the novel to present his anatomy of contemporary American drama: a satiric allegory of the current state of the art. The story is set in the bucolic Sweet Thumb River Valley among individuals in a non-profit community theatre company: Chris Name, a New American Playwright (or NAP, as Wellman's characters abbreviate it: there are so many of these NAPs that this mere abbreviation can stand in for all of them), is assigned by the Great Wind Repertory Theatre's artistic director, Van Rensselaer Board, to adapt a massive, hopelessly convoluted myth from the Central European country of Perfidia for the stage. Dramaturgs and assistant dramaturgs all have their say, actors and directors push and pull Name's text into something resembling a piece of theatre -- a staged reading that provokes a riot, leading ultimately to the death of the artistic director at the hands of Great Wind's board of directors when he has the effrontery to suggest that the play be added to the theatre's next mainstage season. Wellman's target here is the identity politics which infests contemporary American theatre, and for a writer as obsessed by the slipperiness of language as Wellman, identity is manifested in words -- words, however, which in their protean power have magical qualities. As well as the name of the novel, Q's Q is the name of the Perfidian national epic poem Name is asked to adapt, translatable to the eerie Weird's Weird. In working with the poem (from a text rearranged by Constantine, an irritable Perfidian invited by the artistic director to intern at the company; Constantine's main responsibility, however, seems to be to empty out the trash cans and run minor errands), Name manages to unleash and even to embody the strange violent lusts the myth evokes -- lusts which, at the staged reading, provoke the novel's comically violent denouement. The American drama that the Perfidian epic disrupts is a paltry thing, though; Wellman suggests that it's the novelty of these unleashed forces that ultimately testifies to the power of the art, an art that in the United States has become desiccated over time. One of the most delightful aspects of the book is Wellman's parodic twisting of American dramatic tropes. Tennessee Williams and his brand of lyricism, especially as practiced by lesser writers, is exemplified by A Burnt Angel Called Tempt Me: "Everyone in the play swerved and swore and sweated a lot; drank iced tea, wine in wine coolers and rye whiskey in jars. They tore open their greasy tee-shirts to reveal the remarkable wounds they had gotten in the War and show how much they loved the girl who was called 'Tall Yaller,' had been a nightclub singer before she lost all her teeth in a fight and her leg to a disease too terrible to name. ... [They] worked the old emotional marimba like a son of a gun. It was very impressive, like watching a gorilla knot a necktie ..." Theatre academics themselves are parodied in the character of Pooh, the feminist dramaturg assigned to Name's play, who pledges allegiance to a bizarre mélange of academic PC-speak: "[the theory] allows for a ubiquity of grievance within the universal color-blind panopticon for unobstructed viewing of abuse, harassment, molestation, brutalization, rites of exclusion, silencing and erasure as a strategic mask-play in the oppositional grid that is the postmodernist's response to Phallocentric Patriarchy." This is a good set of words with which to construct a self-serving academic identity; not so good when it comes to putting a play on a stage. And despite the PC identity politics that Wellman satirizes as a weakness of the contemporary American stage, ultimately this PC language serves not so much the community and collaboration, but the self. In using this language to protect their own self-image and self-importance, the characters -- playwright, adapter, dramaturg, performer, director -- send the collaborative process necessary to theatre-making to spinning: as a result of the centrifugal force of all this spinning, the art itself flies apart. The last word in the novel belongs to Luna, the moon: the light which oversees Sweet Thumb River Valley, the light which shows the way to the front door of the theatre for the 8.00 pm curtain. Despite the awful state of American theatre, the moon hopes for the best: "To behold me is to become aware of the truly sublime; that is to say, there is a kind of drama that is wholly alien to that of the torn tee-shirt, that of the stunning revelation that has been so ham-fistedly foreshadowed ... that the revelation usually feels more like an instance of the stunningly obvious ...; than what is more rare and marvelous, the species of drama that is like stillness and quiet, but is not stillness and quiet; ... the variety of drama that is always approaching, approaching the inexpressible but never quite arriving at that place, just as the human heart approaches but never quite reaches the place called love, called hate, called home ..." Wellman seems to share the hope of his anthropomorphized satellite (Luna "ends it all on a note of lightness and hilarity"), his vision of the condition of the American theatre still a comic vision, ripe for his satire and parody, and possessed of the capacity for rebirth that the spirit of comedy represents. This is an optimism for culture itself; Wellman's subject is not merely theatre, but the self and the world, as is Howard Barker's. While the ostensible subject of Death, The One and the Art of Theatre is drama and theatre, theatre for Barker is also all-encompassing: "All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not the subject" is a mantra that runs through the book, a Nietzschean collection of aphorisms that depends for its power upon its cumulative effect. And like Wellman, Barker is an extraordinarily productive dramatist (more than 40 plays over the past 37 years). But there the resemblances stop. Howard Barker's work has been slow in coming to American stages, and even in his own country it is very rarely produced by institutional theatres like the National Theatre or the Royal Court. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in his plays; Oberon Books is now publishing a uniform edition of his plays, and several volumes of criticism have been published, with a volume of interviews with Barker scheduled for publication in the near future. His career, from the premiere of his 1970 play Cheek at the Royal Court to his more astringent recent productions with his own theatre company, The Wrestling School, is an attempt to revive the spirit of tragedy for a 21st century post-ideological philosophy based upon desire and seduction. Where Wellman's book is of the present of the theatre, Barker's book is of its future. And this future must be wrenched from the roots of the art form, a radical reclamation. Barker differentiates between existing "theatre" and his vision of an "art of theatre," a divorce of the commercial and the artistic. "The theatre purports to give pleasure to the many. The art of theatre lends anxiety to the few. Which is the greater gift?" he asks early in the book. In emphasizing the present theatrical body as a dying body, Barker sees in contemporary theatre a violent attempt to deny the unique truths about the human spirit, its dynamic of pain and pleasure staged in full knowledge and awareness of mortality: a knowledge and exploration that the performer seeks to share with the audience. Barker's metaphysics is not a playful metaphysics, as is Wellman's metaphysics of language; instead, playfulness constitutes a refusal of theatre's essence, which, in Barker's vision, is an awareness of the pain and violence inflicted by individual human beings upon each other. This is far from an identity politics or PC ideology. Indeed, it refuses both explicit politics and ideology through the sensual enactment of language, an enactment beyond the critical eye. "To stage death," Barker writes, "we must -- let us admit it, and affirm it -- abolish the critical regard -- a regard so fissured and cataracted as to have become in any case a condition of the blind ..." For the aphoristic polemicist like Barker, this doesn't lead to the abolition of criticism but an abolition of its traditional interpretive function, its use. It defines theatre and criticism as experiential rather than interpretive, a suppler brand of Sontag's erotic attitude towards the work of art. This renders criticism and polemics of theatre themselves more nuanced and imaginative in the manner of Cixous. A new art of theatre requires a new art of theatre criticism, of theatre writing. The forms of Barker's past critical and theoretical work, particularly in his landmark Arguments for a Theatre (originally published in 1989 but now in its third edition), owed more to Brecht than to, say, Cioran: straightforward essays and speeches were interspersed with occasional dialogues and poetry. In Death, The One ..., the volume of aphorisms supplants the anthology of related but loosely arranged expository prose as an attempt at expressing a theatrical aesthetic. The fragmented nature of these aphorisms leads to a more imaginative approach to the criticism on the part of the reader. Like Barker's theatre, his theory is now provocative of a reader's response and encourages an immersion in the arrangement of the aphorisms on the page, similar to an immersion in the fragments and images of Barker's theatre practice itself. Death, The One ... is a logical extension of Barker's recent poetics. He only began publishing his verse in 1985, 15 years after the premiere of his first play and at about the time of The Castle, his first major tragedy. More recently Barker seems to have honed his aesthetic to a more ascetic practice, as evidenced in this book (published to coincide with the premiere of his 2004 play Dead Hands, which marks a movement away from his former epic practice and more towards a chamber theatre, from The Castle's ensemble of more than 15 characters and 11 scenes to Dead Hands' three characters and one unbroken act). The evolution of Barker's theoretical style runs parallel to the evolution of his theatrical style, as Wellman's language-based identity politics in Q's Q runs alongside his examination of language's contribution to identity in his plays. As their theatres suggest a radical reconstruction of theatrical possibility, Wellman's and Barker's polemics suggest a radical reconstruction of the critical perspective through which these theatres can be experienced. Posted in /Books Sunday, 12 October 2008 Jan Kott: The Memory of the BodyThe Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death. Jan Kott. Translated from the Polish by Jadwiga Kosicka, Lillian Vallee and others. 153 pages. Northwestern University Press, 1992. Now available from the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore. Since my return to New York from Montauk it's been a slow few weeks, theatrically speaking; the invitations to openings are few (though the invitations I've received have been gracious and flattering). So most evenings are spent reading. And, to a large part, reading about theatre: plays and essays, mostly, including quite a lot of Greek plays, mostly in preparation for seeing them -- Iphigenia in Aulis last week, this week Philoktetes. As I sit in my apartment or on the subway reading through these scripts, I feel that I'm still participating in the theatre; I take the theatre with me on my commute or in my evenings. This integrates drama into my days and nights, when I'm away from auditoria. I'm also writing a lot about the theatre. The experience of theatre and its threads through everyday life were a part of Polish critic Jan Kott's project as well. Especially in his later essays, for instance those in his 1992 collection The Memory of the Body, there is little or no differentiation between body, quotidia and theatre, drama. The same characteristics affect his earlier criticism (the insights contained in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, The Eating of the Gods and The Gender of Rosalind could not have emerged without Kott's experiences in first Nazified then Stalinist Poland), but as he aged and his body began to fail him, his essays became more intimate. The theatre is a bodied art, and we all have bodies. Kott examined his more intensely than most theatre writers, the way it moved through the streets of Poland, Vienna and Korea. Kott may be best remembered now for his influence on Peter Brook, Peter Hall and other directors, but it seems to be Kott that will last. For all that Brook is a fine director, there's also something of the charlatan about him, and there's something very cold about his books The Empty Space and The Open Door; his facile division of the art into Deadly Theatre, Holy Theatre, etc. seems simplistic when one recognises the broad multidimensionality, the personal risk and vision, of Kott's writing; a lot of Peter Brook's theory reads like a self-help book, as elegant and high-falutin as it most undoubtedly is. Hall is firmly of the institutional theatre now -- no more empty spaces for him without an elegant foyer and stars on the stage. Not that there isn't a place for this too, and not that Hall isn't a brilliantly talented director himself. But his diaries and his writing about Shakespeare are no match for Kott's incisive, idiosyncratic and (yes) lyrical dramatic consciousness. "There are experiences one undergoes but does not talk about," Kott writes at the beginning of his essay on his own struggles with heart disease, "The Memory of the Body." "The experiencing of extreme situations should be remembered." Kott is primarily a critic, an abstractionist, though, and his training is in talking about things one does not -- or, perhaps, can not -- talk about. "An orgasm given by a body is inarticulate speech, a cry, quickened pulse, trembling, sweat. Right now I am trying to change this into discourse, but I know that there is an entire dimension that is inexpressible," he continues in the same essay. The struggle for both critic and dramatist is to not describe but to suggest the inexpressible, that bodied rhythm that is available to the theatrical experience in a way that is not suggestible in any other art form. These late essays of Kott's are largely about sex and death, but about other everyday matters as well. In the first third of the book, Kott is on more familiar territory. There's a lovely, comic essay about the uselessness of dramaturgs (Kott was one himself for many years, so he knows whereof he speaks), and fine essays about Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz (introducing the idea of "lyrical friendships," which I find quite delightful and, more to the point, accurate), Kantor, Mrozek and Grotowski; his description of Tadeusz Kantor's I Shall Never Return at La MaMa E.T.C. in June 1988 would be a textbook example of how to write about avant-garde theatre were it not for Kott's inimitable personal insight, not to mention a length that would test the patience of editors at the New York Times and nytheatre.com both. But this is a death-haunted book (Kott himself died in December 2001). The final essay is a lengthy disquisition on the Gilgamesh myth and its evocation of mortality, much on Kott's mind then, given his medical history. But his deepest insights are saved for his descriptions of pain and the heart, the nexus between sex and death. This is never far from eros, and Kott draws this final parallel:
If one were a gossip one might ask for more: descriptions of the experience from which these insights were painfully extracted. But these are precisely the experiences one "does not talk about"; the insights should be enough for us, and if they're not, that just says more about our own small-minded tendency to gossip and moral judgement than about Kott's expressions. And over the past several years in the New York theatrical critical sphere, the insights are lacking, theatre writers and critics seem to have become bored with theatre itself. In the print press, critics approach new plays as they would approach new cars, quick five-star ratings and descriptions of new features; in the blogosphere, fragmentation and lack of attention has led to a plethora of plugs, of quick hits here and there, of dull academic theorising, of political jeremiads. The uplift of shambling, careerist mediocrity is everywhere, in both arenas. (I'm almost tempted to say that there is too much room devoted to theatre in the daily press, if that's all there's going to be.) There is theatre, and there is life, but their essential codependence -- a codependence as intimate and catastrophic as the codependence of sex and death -- is ignored. There are a lot of walks in Kott's more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott's thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre, not unlike composers like John Cage. It is in my broadest public statements, in my most intimate personal experience. In "The Memory of the Body," Kott demonstrates that this insight can continue to life's end -- which, for dramatist and audience both, is theatre's end as well. Posted in /Books |
