Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Monday, 14 July 2008
Scenes 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
Peter Schmitz and Jan Maxwell
in Scenes from
an Execution
(Photo: Stan Barouh)
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:
To have lost such a canvas would have been an offence against the artistic primacy of Venice. To have said this work could not be absorbed by the spirit of the Republic would be to belittle the Republic, and our barbarian neighbors would have jeered at us. So we absorb all, and in absorbing it we show our greater majesty. It offends today, but we look harder and we know, it will not offend tomorrow. We force the canvas and the stretcher down the gagging throat, and coughing a little, and spluttering a little, we find, on digestion, it nourishes us! There will be no art outside. Only art inside.
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-
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Thursday, 10 July 2008
Crave 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.
Adam Ludwig, Stephanie Janssen, Rishabh Kashyap
and Stephanie Strohm in Crave
(Photo: Stan Barouh)
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:
When a friend commits suicide, you're always going to feel angry with them. Any personal anger that I felt towards Sarah has long since gone, but I still feel a flash of anger that she could leave a fine body of work that can be appropriated as suicide art. Her work is far better than that. ... Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don't know her. We never knew her. Let's look at her work.
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.
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Thursday, 12 June 2008
Blind 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.
Oxygen as a sexualised fetish for life: Ashleigh
Leite in Blind Spot
(Photo: José
Aragón)
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.
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Sunday, 27 April 2008
Maintaining the Simulation: Untitled Mars (This Title May Change)
Untitled Mars (This Title May Change). Conceived and directed
by Jay Scheib. Scenic design by Peter Ksander. Lighting design by Miranda
Hardy. Costume design by Oana Botez-Ban. Sound design by Catherine
McCurry. Video design by Balász Vajna and Miklós Buk.
Dramaturg/producer for Hungary: Anna Lengyel. Text assembly by Jay Scheib.
A co-
Jay Scheib's sci-
Innocent little green man (Karl Allen) meets greedy
big white man (Caleb Hammond) in Untitled Mars
(Photo:
Justin Bernhaut)
Two things about the name of Jay Scheib's new show, which closes today at PS122.
First, despite its high-
He tried to do so in This Place Is a Desert earlier this season
at Mark Russell's Under the Radar festival at the Public, but here he
skirts the risk of self-indulgence that he couldn't entirely avoid in the
earlier show. Perhaps it's the unique presence of the director himself in
Untitled Mars that's the saving comic grace; he plays "Jay Scheib,"
a mordantly skeptical theatre director doing research for the show we're
currently watching about a future manned mission to Mars. This research
takes the form of a teleconferenced conversation between Scheib and a
genial woman with the Mars Desert Research Lab. (The choppy, elliptical
nature of this Internet conversation using Skype also begs the question:
If this is the fragmented, jerky communication we have between Utah and
New York, what can we expect of the conversation between Mars and Earth,
let alone between two human beings alone in the same room?) One of the
options for this mission is, chillingly, a one-
Assuming the worst possible outcome, Untitled Mars becomes a
wild, grueling sex farce (and Scheib's sexual imagination runs free, given
the admitted lack of research as to sexual relationships and even the
possibility of childbirth in such a colony). Researcher Mannie (Natalie
Thomas in a flowing red dress, one of the multidimensionally sexy and
sexless costumes designed by the ever-impressive Oana Botez-Ban) has
already gone round the bend, induced into acute situational schizophrenia
by the
emotionless scientific perspective that the research has necessitated;
it's up to Jackie (Tanya Selvaratnam), another researcher with her own
doubts and questions about her sexuality, to find a cure for her and save
the mission itself. It doesn't help that the other two women on the
mission are the hard-edged but seductive Anne (April Sweeney), who has her
eyes set on Jackie's cynical husband Sylvere (László
Keszég); bi-
It doesn't take long to see that this landscape isn't Mars of the late
21st-
This all looks to dissolve in disastrous chaos, but Scheib can't resist offering two endings. In the first, the simulation looks to spin wildly out of control and end in dismal, painful failure. Through the self-evidently silly device of time travel (and the only real representative trope of the genre of science fiction that informs the production), Scheib offers a second, more optimistic close to the fable. In this, the rapacious businessman gets his comeuppance through the agency of a decidedly non-futuristic bow-and-arrow, and the show closes on a touching, moving and hopeful attempt at marital reconciliation.
Scheib is an amazingly prolific director – this is his third New York show in the past few years, and at the same time he's been assiduously working in Europe as well – but as his career goes on he is demonstrating the tightening focus of his vision. He is emotionally drawn to large, empty spaces (in his stagings of both Women Dreamt Horses and This Place is a Desert) which the human body desires to fill with expressions of its own violent reaches for pleasure and possession; the very American schizophrenia that lurches between utopia, possession, freedom and environmental destruction; the tenuousness of the mediated technological vision in a physically crumbling world; and, finally, the urge to the repression of human irrationality, an irrationality that can erupt in the experience of ecstasy. He is also drawn to the big mess that these tormented human beings can create both in Utah and elsewhere (not to mention the stages on which he works). Though still possessed of a bleak and tragic perspective, Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) locates a comic aspect of his vision that may provide a new territory for his own explorations.
Untitled Mars is the first installment of Simulated
Cities/
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Thursday, 03 April 2008
Almost an Evening by Ethan Coen. Directed by Neil Pepe. Set design: Riccardo Hernandez. Sound design: Eric Shim. Light design: Donald Holder. Costume design: Ilona Somogyi. With F. Murray Abraham, Johanna Day, Tim Hopper, J.R. Horne, Jordan Lage, Mark Linn-Baker, Mary McCann, Del Pentecost and Joey Slotnick. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. At the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street. Reviewed at the 29 March evening performance. Runs 20 March-1 June 2008. Information at the production's Web site; tickets via Telecharge.
Three entertaining sketches comprise Ethan Coen's off-Broadway debut
Joey Slotnick displays his last shred of
unabandoned
hope to a skeptical Mark Linn-Baker in
Almost an Evening
(Photo: Doug Hamilton)
Some of Ethan Coen's film work has consisted of thoughtful, darker contemplations of American life (Fargo, Miller's Crossing), but most of the rest has been playful juggling within the constraints of genre: the film noir in Blood Simple, the screwball comedy in Raising Arizona, and the Frank Capra salute to American optimism in The Hudsucker Proxy. It's this latter Coen that's on display in the three slick and highly entertaining sketches that comprise Almost an Evening, his first foray onto the stage. Here, the genre is sketch comedy, not of the Saturday Night Live style but more akin to the extended comedies of Your Show of Shows and The Carol Burnett Show. And it's nice to have it back at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street through June: a springtime/early summer treat.
Not all of the sketches hit home; of the three, the middle sketch about a self-doubting secret agent is perhaps the weakest, starting almost nowhere and getting nowhere fast. But the first and last remind you of the glory days of Tim Conway and Sid Caesar -- in this production, Joey Slotnick and F. Murray Abraham in particular respectively cringe and storm their way through silly situations that approach sublime insanity. If they don't ultimately reach that glorious height, they approach near enough to sparkle.
In the first sketch of the evening, "Waiting," Joey Slotnick is a mild-mannered doofus who finds himself in a waiting room with no door -- No Exit literally, not for a very long time. His cheerful hangdog face (yes, Slotnick proves, it's possible to have one of these) becomes more and more crestfallen as he is shunted from office to office to correct his personal record; the twist ending can be seen coming from a mile off, but thanks to Slotnick and a prissy, bureaucratic, skeptical Mark Linn-Baker, the audience's waiting for the payoff is well-compensated by beautifully timed performances. (And I loved the dial telephone ... ah, the memories it brings back ...)
It's F. Murray Abraham, though, who steals the show in the final sketch of the evening, "Debate." Mark Linn-Baker as the modest bow-tied God Who Loves sits back as Abraham, the God Who Judges, launches into an extended, angry, uproarious George Carlin-esque rant condemning contemporary humanity. Abraham's long flowing gray wig whips left and right as he delivers judgment upon the theatre audience here in an obscenity-laced tirade against, among other things, body piercing. Abraham is a delight; at the performance I saw, a particularly well-timed ad lib of "bless you" to a sneezing member of the audience nearly brought the house down. "Debate," however, overstays its welcome by nearly half as the play fizzles out into some backstage and restaurant-bound shenanigans involving a couple of audience members, Abraham, his erstwhile girlfriend and a hassled cafe staff.
To be fair, all the sketches are a little too long, but Neil Pepe's precise and slick direction eases the plays past the longeurs with considerable grace. The title Almost an Evening invites too many easy puns, and I'll control myself here. For a Friday or Saturday night's post-dinner entertainment, though, it's a fun lark through a style of comedy that we don't see enough of these days, on television or the stage, and of the generally excellent ensemble cast, Abraham, Slotnick and Linn-Baker shine. Almost an Evening runs through 1 June. It's a cheerful way to spend an evening of any variety.
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