Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater


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Tuesday, 18 May 2010

Upcoming: That Face

UPDATE: The Observer's Hermione Hoby interviews Polly Stenham on the New York opening of her first play here.


The Manhattan Theatre Club production of Polly Stenham's That Face, directed by Sarah Benson, is currently in previews, and should be an interesting test-case scenario in the recent London/New York debates that surrounded Enron's failure on Broadway. Stenham's first play, written when she was 19 years old, was nominated for one of Britain's highest honors, the Olivier Award, and according to Alison Croggon's recent review of the Melbourne, Australia, premiere, the play has a particularly British perspective:

There's an unspoken history [lying beneath the play] that is still playing out in Britain. In his unfond memoir of his prep school St Cyprians, George Orwell described the brutalities of his middle class boarding school as a training ground for the front troops of Empire, fostering the lack of empathy and Darwinian competitiveness necessary for ordering around, and possibly shooting, the brown people who lived in the pink bits of the map. Another association, more telling perhaps in its poignancy, is from Michael Apted's 7-Up series: the unhappy middle class teenager Suzy, devastated by her parents' divorce, introvertedly twirling her hair as her pet dog chases and kills a rabbit in the background.

This resonance simply doesn't translate to Australia: yes, we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here. We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.

Will it be perceived as "an enclosed family psychodrama" here, whatever the accents that Benson decides upon? Maybe. And though Alison points out that the play's power rests in "its precise observations of a family locked in the crisis of mental illness," you won't find that in the publicity materials for the MTC production, which describe the play's plot as "a powerful and darkly comic look at an affluent family in freefall. Mia has been suspended from boarding school. Her brother, Henry, has dropped out altogether. And Martha, their mum, manipulates them all. Money can no longer fix their problems — now it's up to them" — not a mention of mental illness to be found (or, for that matter, class upheaval, though there's the glamour of money to be sure) and more, indeed, an "enclosed family psychodrama" among the affluent. Never mind the director; the press material has it simplified from the start. Is the play's Martha a "a fragile, damaged creature teetering wildly on the edge of a catastrophe curve," as Alison describes her, or a "Real Housewife of Contemporary Great Britain"? Is there a significant difference? The production will tell.

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Sunday, 09 May 2010

Howard Barker at the Segal Center

I hope you'll be able to join the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and theatre minima for Howard Barker at the Segal Center tomorrow, Monday 10 May, beginning at 1.00pm. The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature a variety of screenings, readings and performances to celebrate the four-decade-long-and-counting career of dramatist, director, poet and polemicist Howard Barker.

The Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue between 34th and 35th Streets in New York, and a full schedule for the day is at the theatre minima Web site here. I look forward to joining you in welcoming Barker on a rare visit to our shores.

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Wednesday, 05 May 2010

Tony nominations for Jan Maxwell


Jan Maxwell. (Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Congratulations to Jan Maxwell, who yesterday was nominated for not one but two Tony Awards for the 2009-2010 season: one for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play (for The Royal Family) and a second for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play (for Lend Me a Tenor, which is now on Broadway). It's quite a trick, and in the 63-year history of the Tonys she is only the fourth actress to garner double nominations in a single season.

But Broadway and Tony aficianados will probably be surprised to learn that Ms. Maxwell is also one of the foremost performers of the work of Howard Barker in the United States. She is a founding member (with Richard Romagnoli and Robert Emmet Lunney) of The Barker Project, won a Drama Desk nomination for her performance as Galactia in the 2008 Potomac Theatre Project's production of Scenes from an Execution, and was a revelation in the title role of Barker's Judith in a reading for the 21-for-21 festival of the playwright's work last year.

Which makes us doubly glad that she'll taking some valuable and no doubt hectic time out to join us for the Howard Barker at the Segal Center event next Monday, where she'll be discussing Barker's work on a panel that will also include Romagnoli and Lunney, and reading a scene from Barker's Gertrude — The Cry, directed by the Red Bull Theater's artistic director Jesse Berger.

I'm grateful that Ms. Maxwell will provide a welcome dose of Broadway lustre and glamour to our proceedings, and again offer my sincere congratulations to her.

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