Reviews: 1998-99 Season
BY BRUCE-MICHAEL GELBERT
Radiant Russian Mezzo
Olga Borodina, mezzo-soprano, Dmitri Yefimov, pianist
Alice Tully Hall, March 14, 1999
Lincoln Center Great Performers Art of the Song series.
Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina, responsible at the Metropolitan Opera this season for French and Italian roles, in addition to a Russian part, returned to music of her homeland for her recital, assisted by pianist Dmitri Yefimov, at Alice Tully Hall on March 14. The afternoon program was presented as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers “Art of the Song” series.
Borodina lavished radiant sound on tragic songs by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, singing achingly, despairingly of love that has ended in “Ni slova, o moy drug”(“Not a word, beloved”), “Otchevo?” (“Why?”), and “Nyet, tol’ko tot kto znal” (“None but the lonely heart”), before turning gently to a timeless lullaby (“Kolybelnaya”), in which a mother summons great cosmic forces—wind, sun, the eagle—and tames the mighty wind to help rock her child to sleep. The mood turned brighter, briefly, as the singer infused with eagerness no less intense, but more optimistic views of love in “Ty byla ranneyu vesnoy” (“It was in the early spring”) and “Zakatilas solntse” (“The sun has set”), returning to desolation in “Snova, kak prezhde, adeen” (“Again, as before, I am alone”).
Moving to more effusive, expansive music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Borodina lent lush, vibrant tone to “V molchani nochi tainoi” (“In the silence of the mysterious night”), “Zdiez khorosho” (“How fair it is here”), and “Sirien” (“Lilacs”), her delivery ecstatic or euphoric by turns. She brought plangency to “O, nie grusti!” (“Do not grieve”) and “Ja zhdu tiebia” (“I’m waiting for you”), the last containing hints of hope.
The mezzo’s gripping “Songs and Dances of Death,” by Modest Mussorgsky, began with a different sort of lullaby from the Tchaikovsky one. In an “Erlkönig”-like dialogue, Borodina aptly contrasted voices of an agitated mother, frightened for her child, and calm, inexorable Death. With imposing, dark timbre, she depicted a dashing Death, enticing a feverish maiden with a serenade beneath her window. Borodina’s Death slyly, seductively danced an old, drunken man into his grave and, finally, on the battlefield, Death’s rousing martial call gave way to a solemn dirge, sung in dusky tone.
Her encores, all opera arias, began with a classically sculpted, richly vocalized “Ombra mai fu,” from George Frideric Handel’s Serse. Her “Mon coeur,” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, with which she and Plácido Domingo began the Met season, was ravishing, silky and sultry, and capped with a bright high B-flat. A surprise was a glorious “Summertime,” from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, marked by a serious attempt at idiomatic phrasing.
The next Lincoln Center Great Performers “Art of the Song” recital will be given by tenor Ian Bostridge, with pianist Julius Drake, on April 11 at 2 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall. Music of Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf is to be the fare. Tickets, priced at $32, are available at the Tully Hall box office at Lincoln Center, by calling Centercharge at 212-721-6500.
Dazzling Choral Porter
Swellegant Elegance, Music of Cole Porter
New York City Gay Men’s Chorus at Carnegie Hall
March 15, 1999.
On March 15, the refined 175-voice New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, under the baton of new Music Director Barry Oliver, celebrated the life and music of an earlier gay spirit, composer Cole Porter, in a scintillating concert at Carnegie Hall entitled “Swellegant Elegance.” There was music familiar and rare, accompanied by pianist Leslie Downs, and welcome appearances by a pair of guest artists from Broadway.
Playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles), hosting the salute, introduced “Swellegant Elegance” by reciting the first lines of the refrain of “Anything Goes” in that unmistakable throaty tone of his. Chorus members, asserting their presence and identity, pointedly began the verse “Times have changed” locked in each other’s embrace and discreetly changed a later line to “Those guys today that men prize today.” A corps of tap dancers augmented this stirring opening number.
Fierstein offered bits of Porter’s biography throughout the performance, covering his career composing for theatre and film, his entry into the highest echelon of society and ensuing caustic musical commentary, his taste in men, his marriage of convenience, and the riding accident that damaged his legs irreparably.
The polished choral singing started in a hush and swelled in a medley of Cole classics “Night and Day,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “In the Still of the Night.” The singers gave a wry, vehement reading to “I Hate Men,” the heroine’s credo from Kiss Me, Kate. They exchanged gossipy tidbits in a brittle “Well, Did You Evah!” In the evening’s sharpest change of mood, the Chorus brought a tear to the eye with sentimental waltz “True Love,” then segued into “Be a Clown,” enlivened by the slapstick antics of the New York Goofs, a guest troupe.
With knowing naiveté, guest Kristin Chenoweth (You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) delivered a rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” that was at once brassy and sweet, belted and legit. Her solo, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “Wunderbar,” with the Chorus, further proved that bel canto and Broadway can co-exist. Chenoweth and Fierstein collaborated on a tongue-in-cheek “Love for Sale” that ended with some competitive trading of cadenzas. (She won).
Talented individuals and groups within the Gay Men’s Chorus were also given their due. In glitzy red dress and long blonde wig, in his travesti persona as Jacqueline Jonée, Chorus baritone John D. Nieman proffered pertinent siren song “Is it the Girl? (Or Is it the Gown?)” Tenors Marc Bailey and James Pfister sang a reflective “Wouldn’t It Be Fun,” a paean to the ordinary life, from Porter’s final musical, Aladdin, written for television. A propos of Porter’s attraction to “rough trade,” a trio in police uniform flirted lyrically with danger in “I Want to Be Raided by You.” An ingratiating quartet gave a swinging Latin flavor to “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” following it with heartfelt accounts of “Do I Love You?” and “Easy to Love.” The Chorus’ Chamber Choir treated “Miss Otis Regrets,” the piquant tale of love and revenge, as a dulcet a cappella madrigal.
Midway through the evening, the Chorus presented a check from its AIDS Outreach Fund to service organization Momentum AIDS Project.
This extraordinary ensemble concluded its concert on an upbeat note with “You’re the Top,” complete with a rare bawdy verse, entrusted here to Fierstein, and Chenoweth and the Chorus men’s sizzling “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” with some stratospheric-sounding top tones interpolated by Chenoweth.
The Gay Men’s Chorus returns to Carnegie Hall on June 17 at 8 p.m. for “Common Ground: a Celebration of Gay Pride,” which features an appearance by Sound Circle, a women’s musical group from Boulder, Colorado, and the world premiere of a commissioned work memorializing gay-bashing victim Matthew Shepard. Tickets priced from $10 to $75 can be obtained by calling Carnegie Charge at 212-247-7800.
Refreshing Ravel
L’Heure espagnole and L’Enfant et les sortilèges by Maurice Ravel.
New York City Opera at New York State Theatre
March 19, 1999. Also March 25th at 7:30 p.m., 27th & April 3rd at 1:30 p.m., 7th at 7:30 p.m., & 10th at 8 p.m.
Tickets $20-90 at New York State Theatre box office, Lincoln Center
phone 212-870-5570.
On March 19, the New York City Opera revived its delightful double bill of “L’Heure espagnole” (“The Spanish Hour”) and “L’Enfant et les sortilèges” (“The Child and the Enchantments”), charming one-act operas by Maurice Ravel, in productions directed by Frank Corsaro and designed by children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, after an absence of nine years. Guiding the orchestra and casts of exceptional lyric singers was conductor and company Music Director George Manahan.
The first opera concerns a bored Spanish doña, Concepcion, married to a much older man, the clockmaker Torquemada. To while away the time during her husband’s absence, she receives adoring gentlemen callers and, on the verge of getting caught, hides them, most resourcefully, inside the huge grandfather clocks in her spouse’s shop. The no-less-practical Torquemada makes the best of things by selling the clocks to her guilty suitors. Whimsical clocks, in the forms of a dog, a rooster, a skeleton with an hour glass, and a lady with a mandolin adorned the airy set. A trio of mimes, in keeping with the theme, portrayed wind-up automatons.
Soprano Amy Burton, as Concepcion, sang a fiery plaint about the sorry nature of the buffoons who would woo her. Experienced character tenor John Lankston was a knowing Torquemada, master of his trade and of the situation he finds at home. Baritone Kurt Ollmann, making a distinguished company debut as the strong, dumb and pliant muleteer, Ramiro, answer to the lady’s dreams, delivered a buoyant apostrophe the charms of Concepcion between treks up and down stairs, toting the weighty clocks. Another impressive debutant was tenor Thomas Trotter, as the wide- and wild-eyed poet, Gonzalve, given to high-flown fancies and engaging in an extravagant, stylized love scene with the doña to Ravel’s angular rhapsodic strains. Anchoring the cast was bass Kevin Glavin as the well-padded bureaucrat Don Inigo Gomez, whose words of love brought forth cynical orchestral commentary. A joyous habañera for the full quintet rounded out this half of the evening.
In “L’Enfant,” a spoiled child runs amok. Furniture and crockery that he has damaged, coming to life and singing and dancing; figures from the pages he tore out of books; and animals he has tormented prepare to exact revenge. When they see him bind the hurt paw of a squirrel, wounded in the melée, and they forgive him and join him in calling for “Maman” to assist him. Filmed sequences, executed by Ronald Chase, using the wonderful Sendak designs, helped expand the scope of the child’s garden and imaginatively illustrated such elements, called for in the opera, as the dancing fire, escaped from the fireplace. Too often, however, this staging exiles singers to the wings, so that they have to be amplified excessively in order to be heard.
Soprano Marguerite Krull made a persuasive debut as the child, who, in this context, brought to mind Max from Sendak’s own Where the Wild Things Are. Also making a favorable impression in the large cast were high sopranos Anita Johnson (debut) as an Eastern Princess from the child’s storybook, Jami Rogers as the coloratura fire and the nightingale, and Robin Blitch Wiper as a Shepherdess, ripped from the wallpaper of the child’s room; mezzo-soprano Carla Wood (who doubled as the child’s mother) and baritone Michael Chioldi (debut) as a slinky pair of cats; and tenor Benjamin Brechet as the scolding Arithmetic, spouting dizzying fragments of math problems. [BMG]
"La Juive" Reexamined
"La Juive" by Jacques-François Halévy
Opera Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall
Reviewed April 13, 1999.
On April 13, for the second of its season's three operas-in-concert at
Carnegie Hall, Eve Queler's Opera Orchestra of New York presented
Jacques-François Halévy rarity "La Juive." It was preceded by Giuseppe
Verdi's "I Masnadieri," in March, and will be followed by Vincenzo Bellini's
"La Sonnambula," in May. A sprawling, early 19th-century French grand opera
that takes its time making its points and moving from highlight to glowing
highlight, "La Juive" was once a mainstay of the repertory, but fell from
fashion earlier this century. It served, 80 years ago, as a vehicle for Rosa
Ponselle and Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera and was later championed
by Richard Tucker. Music director Queler assembled a fairly high-level
ensemble for the hearing at hand, which lacked, however, one essential
ingredient-a strong soprano for the title role-but fielded a promising tenor
for the other principal part. With the third act ballet music mercifully
omitted, repetitions of a number of passages cut as well, and two short
intermissions taken in the course of the five acts, the performance still
clocked in at just under four hours.
"La Juive" pits Christians and Jews against each other in 15th Century Switzerland and neither faith comes off well. The opera finds Christian leaders ordering persecution of the Jews and asking Jews to renounce their faith and their loved ones. One character, Léopold, pretends to be a Jew in order to woo an apparent Jew, Rachel, who does not know that she was born a Christian. The Jewish jeweler Éléazar, his line crabbed and hectoring, in one trio, against the lyrical flights of two Christian characters, spews forth bitter hatred for his Christian oppressors even as he rubs his hands in greedy contemplation of the gold coins they will spend on his wares. He lets Rachel, whom he has raised as a daughter, go to her death in a cauldron of boiling oil in order to exact revenge on the Cardinal Brogni, whose offspring she really is.
As Rachel, the eponymous "Jewess," Hasmik Papian made a favorable first impression, disclosing the sort of voice the role was written for - a full-bodied soprano with a warm mezzo-soprano core (called the falcon, for Marie-Cornélie Falcon, the part's creator) - in her statement of surprise, beginning the first act finale, that a threatened pogrom has subsided and agitated, haunting showpiece, "Il va venir," anticipating an assignation with the man she loves. Marring Papian's efforts, even from the start, though, was some uncertainty of intonation, which in short order progressed to increasingly wild and disquieting stabs at pitches.
Francisco Casanova, as Éléazar, by turns dulcetly chanted or forcefully declaimed high-lying prayers for Passover, celebrated in secrecy, of necessity, in this hostile society. After a confrontation scene with Paul Plishka, as Brogni, that crackled with dramatic tension, Casanova capped his contribution with a tour de force in the fiery recitative "Va prononcer ma mort" and wrenching aria "Rachel, quand du Seigneur," limning mournful phrases in smooth lirico-spinto tenor sound that wanted only a bit more upper-range freedom.
Joining Papian in a pair of spirited duets for contrasting soprano voices, Olga Makarina, as Princess Eudoxie, brightened the proceedings with her coloratura facility and clear high tone, as she has in performances at the New York City Opera. As her errant Prince, Léopold, high tenor Jean-Luc Viala made an ingratiating showing with his serenade in the first act and stirring love duet with Rachel in the second. Opera Orchestra and Met veteran bass Plishka was, as ever, imposing and dependable as he led off stately grand ensemble "Si la rigeur" and pronounced a vehement imprecation upon Éléazar, Rachel, and Léopold in Act Three finale "Vous qui du Dieu vivant." Grant Youngblood, Valerian Ruminski, Edward Albert, the Dallas Symphony Chorus, and the players of the Opera Orchestra ably rounded out the performing forces.
The company's season continues with "La Sonnambula," with Ruth Ann Swenson, on May 12. Tickets priced from $20 to $85 are available at the Carnegie Hall box office at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue or by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800.
Life and Strife at the Strauss House
"Intermezzo" by Richard Strauss
New York City Opera at New York State Theatre
April 13, 16, 18, 21 and 24, 1999. Tickets $20-90.
This spring, the New York City Opera added Richard Strauss' "Intermezzo" -
the composer's cozy valentine to his tempestuous wife Pauline - to its
repertory in a capital production starring Lauren Flanigan. I attended the
second hearing, on April 16.
In "Intermezzo" - called by its creator "a domestic comedy with symphonic interludes" - Strauss depicts the calms and storms of life with the mate that, difficult as she is, he truly loves. The conversational libretto, sung here in Andrew Porter's singable English translation, is Strauss' own and treats the couple's bickering, misadventures and making up, set to, ultimately, rhapsodic, arching strains.
The composer and conductor, styled Robert Storch in the text, is leaving for two months to prepare for a new musical season. His wife, given the name Christine, begins a mild flirtation with a charming but penniless young baron, who amuses her, but is really after her money. A love letter, meant for Stroh, a lesser colleague of Storch's, and written by a young lady of dubious reputation, arrives and rocks the happy home until the misunderstanding is cleared up and peace and tranquility reign anew.
An offhand remark of Christine's regarding her husband's frequent travels - rendered no doubt accurately by Porter as "I suspect there's more than a drop of Jewish blood there," apparently a reference to the "wandering Jew" of medieval legend - reminds the listener that this tender, feel-good Strauss is the same Strauss who, approaching 80, would be honored by the Nazi regime until he fell from its favor.
Commanding the stage as Christine, soprano Flanigan wedded an exemplary musical performance to a bravura, seriocomic histrionic one, showing keen comprehension of the highly emotional figure, once a celebrated prima donna, whose stage is now the domestic one and whose drama now consists of haughty displays of temperament, jealous outbursts, laments about the sorry lot of a composer's wife and, if pressed, declarations of devotion to her spouse - usually out of his earshot. Her sound was clear and silvery and her movement convincingly that of a mature and stout, but still imperious woman. That said, her graceful dance with her youthful swain, both on roller blades, representing ice skates, must be mentioned as well.
Effectively supporting Flanigan were lyric baritone John Hancock as a patient Storch and tenor Matthew Chellis, a young dandy of a Baron Lummer; Leah Creek, Bettina Papoulas Bierly and Kristen Garver as the long-suffering servants of the Storch household; Dennis Petersen, James Bobick, William Ledbetter and Stefan Szkafarowsky as Storch's colleagues and card-playing cronies; Evan Charney Maltby as the Storchs' young son; and Marc Embree and Caroline Whisnant as Storch's lawyer and his wife.
George Manahan, presiding in the pit, and Leon Major, who staged the work with wit and warmth, kept "Intermezzo" moving along smoothly. Clever set designs, allowing for many, seamless scene changes, were by Andrew Jackness, who, with a few set pieces, could suggest a tasteful Art Deco living room. Costumes, evocative of the 1920s, were by Martha Mann.
Baritone Gregory Keil and mezzo-soprano Maria Zifchak, as John and Elizabeth
Proctor, made effective highlights of their second act scene, filled with
hurt and recrimination, and loving final encounter in jail. Keil also
contributed a warm, solid rendition of his solo welcoming spring to his farm
and attempting reconciliation with his wife, a dramatic dénouement to Act
Two, protesting Elizabeth's innocence of the charge of witchcraft, and
defiantly heroic climactic confrontation with Judge Danforth, who has
condemned him to hang.
Lori Brown Mirabal proffered a vivid portrayal of the slave Tituba, reveling
in the attention of the Salem leaders, who seek her confession of trafficking
with the Devil, and following it up with a sultry Barbados song in the prison
scene. Suzanne Lustgarten, as Mary Warren, delivered a chilling description,
imbued with zealotry, of her work with the court and forceful confession,
before Danforth, of the devastating hoax perpetrated by her and her friends,
accusing innocent citizens of witchcraft.
Other leading roles were taken by Brigitte Bellini as Abigail Williams,
Walter MacNeil as Judge Danforth, David Dillard as Reverend Hale, Barbara
Norcia as Rebecca Nurse, Larry Raiken as Reverend Parris, Martin Broms as
Giles Corey, and Gary Giardina and Mazzelle Sykes as Thomas and Ann Putnam.
Dicapo Opera Theatre's next season will consist of Pietro Mascagni's
"Cavalleria Rusticana," paired with Gaetano Donizetti's "Il Campanello," on
September 29 and October 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10, Jules Massenet's "Le Jongleur
de Notre Dame" on December 10, 11, 12, 17, 18 and 19, Samuel Barber's
"Vanessa" on February 11, 12, 13, 18, 19 and 20, 2000, and Donizetti's "Lucia
di Lammermoor" on April 7, 8, 9, 14, 15 and 16. Call DiCapo at 212-288-9438
regarding subscriptions, which sell for $99, or $85 for seniors.
[BMG]
If you are hungry to see a great artist perform, go immediately
to the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse and catch the inimitable
mime Marcel Marceau, who will be there until March 28th. His
return to New York, I am happy to report, is a remarkable event
in that Marceau, at the age of 76, is still in fabulous form.
Blessed with a body that retains its original dimensions--not an
ounce of fat, not a thickening waistline--he is wondrously
graceful and sprightly just as he was when he premiered here more
than 40 years ago. In fact, one is amazed at how perfect his
movements are, and indeed how beautiful.
The first part of the program is devoted to long pieces, the most
successful is "The Trial" a scene at court. In a display of
phenomenal virtuosity, Marceau acts out all the roles--the
prosecutor, the judge, the defense lawyer, the client. He slips
into one character after another and, of course without uttering
a sound, I swear I understood the dialogue. As the prosecuting
attorney, he is hard and forceful (expressed through his hands,
his stance, and his flexible face) determined to get a
conviction. In contrast, as the defense attorney, catering to the
emotional side of the jury, he is self piteous, sentimental, and
soft spoken. The judge sits there, old and half asleep and in
fact, disinterested. A hilarious piece of brilliant acting.
In sharp contrast is Marceau's great piece, his famous "Youth,
Maturity, Old Age and Death," no longer than five minutes. Devoid
of humor, quiet in tone, Marceau is crouched in the infant's
position at first; gradually he grows up, his face becomes
exuberant, his body longer and muscular and, slowly he changes
from a powerful, happy youth to a somber, mature being. Then
moving slowly and gradually, he grows old and painfully realizes
that his end is near. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this
work is Marceau's timing, and the gradual transitions that are
so clearly and perfectly captured.
An important part of the program centers on Bip, Marceau's famous
alter ego. Close to a Charlie Chaplin type, Bip with his hat and
flower, is the epitome of everyman. Nothing he does works out,
although he tries. He travels by sea and gets seasick, he sells
china in a shop but is unsuccessful, he looks for a job but is
turned away; he hopes to meet a woman though a matrimonial agency
but comes up against undesirable types. Marceau's depiction of
the human condition, the absurdity of life, the expectations and
the lamentations, the joy often blasted by disappointment are the
source of his ironic humor and overall sympathy for the underdog.
And this underlying content of his work coupled with his
extraordinary technique is what makes seeing Marceau a remarkable
experience.
"The Maskmaker" is another tour de force. A Maskmaker tries on a
number of different masks. Changing his expressions with
astonishing speed, Marceau's faces are varied: some are hostile,
some nasty, some sweet, some angry. Finally the maskmaker tries
on a laughing mask, struts around with it and, then, as he tries
to remove it, he realizes that it has become stuck to his face.
Writhing in agony on the floor, pulling and tugging at the mask,
he cannot get it off. Finally he succeeds. And a real face
appears--a sad, tragic look of man's inner condition. Underneath
his smiling face is the real human being diametrically opposed to
what the mask projects.
Marceau, in his white face, exaggerated eyebrows and mouth and
gorgeous hands exquisitely used, is a deeply humanistic artist.
He is an astute observer of people's foibles, and has a sharp
understanding of human emotions. With a remarkable technique--
control of the body, the use of his hands, his spatial
arrangements, and careful attention to minute details--he creates
his world with all its foolishness and sweetness. A shrewd
observer of life, keenly aware of the ironic and hilarious
situations that accompany good intentions, and clearly
sympathetic to the endeavors of the everyman-- Bip--trying to
overcome life's vicissitudes.
Finally it is Marceau's genius that captures the entire range of
the human condition in one evening. We recognize his amazing
facility to create mankind's universe without uttering a single
word. And that universe, despite its hardships and bitterness,
its downfalls and disappointments, Marceau, the great artist,
alone on the stage, imbues the audience with a marvelous sense of
poetry and everlasting beauty.
[Croyden]
It is an occasion whenever Marcel Marceau comes to town. The last time was
1995. Although this is a review, one cannot “review” genius. And Marceau
is, indeed, a genius of the art and craft of mime, the silent drama of
gesture and action. He is now 76 years old. One could have been forgiven
for expecting to see the noble ruins of a great artist. I admit to having
looked for the signs of an edifice with peeling paint and cracked walls.
Yes, his face under the white makeup has aged. How could it not have? But
Marceau seems to have weathered without losing any of his incredible ability
to encapsulate a multitude of characters and transform his face, fingers,
figure, and actions from one to another in the blink of an eye.
He presented two programs, each one in two parts separated
by an intermission. The first part consisted of several vignettes in which
he performed the roles of from one to a dozen characters; the latter half
consisted of Bip adventures. Program A, part I, contained: “The Painter,”
“The Little Café,” “The Trial,” “The Pickpocket’s Nightmare,” “The Soliloquy
of Three Poor Souls,” and “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death.” Program B,
part I, contained: “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Hands.” The former
consisted of seven scenes: Laziness (A very busy day), Lust (The painter and
his model), Envy (The great sculptor and his pupil), Greed (A charity
dinner), Pride (The General plays chess with his orderly), and Anger (A
quiet Sunday drive). The Bip adventures were: Bip travels by sea, ….sells
China, ….looks for a job, ….and the matrimonial agency (Program A); ….as a
babysitter, ….as a street musician, ….commits suicide [Don’t panic; he fails
every attempt.], and ….remembers (Program B); the first group ended with the
non-Bip “The Maskmaker,” one of his most famous tours de force.
Everyone will have his/her own favorite(s), probably depending on individual
life experiences and the nature of his/her imagination. My favorites are:
“The Little Café,” “Envy: The great sculptor and his pupil,” “Greed: A
charity dinner,” and “Bip commits suicide.”
In the claustrophobic “Little Café,” the central character is the Waiter who
must nudge his way through the clientele and the little tables and busy
himself with whatever the seated patrons are engaged in; he shifts from one
role to another. Just when we think that the skit has finished when he bids
goodbye to each departing customer and closes the door and sliding gate, we
are treated to a surprising epilog. The waiter, now a dandy, primps himself
up and goes out on the town for a drink.
In “Envy: The great sculptor and his pupil,” the word “great” proves to be
highly ironic. The Master, chiseling away at a large stone masterpiece, is
indifferent to the defential student, building up his own clay work from a
small nodule, intermittently seeking the Master’s approval. The “great
sculptor” ignores the student, when not being condescending---until the
student builds an enormous masterpiece that the master, now inceasingly
disturbed, reacts to with envy and, finally, impassioned aggression.
Great mime is not imitation. It involves creating a character-symbol that
inhabits the imagination of the audience—even the collective imagination
(e.g., “the tramp” and “Bip”). Although the mime’s gestures and body shapes
are an extension and elaboration of natural daily-life movements and not a
codified system of movements and gestures (e.g., ballet, the mudras of
Indian dance and the shadow-puppet-like movements of some Javanese
dance-drama), they are not mere imitations. The Eyes, the gaze, the mouth,
the muscles of the face, the hands, the fingers, the whole body is employed
in a non-formalized expressive manner. That is the actor’s technique, not
his empathy or emotion or “living in” the character. Marceau’s sense of
timing, for example, is formidable.
Marceau is the inheritor of a tradition whose prehistory can be traced back
through the Commedia dell’arte of the 16th century, to the Middle Ages to
Roman and Greek times. His immediate predecessor and teacher was the famous
French mime Etienne Decroux who revived the art of mime in the 1930s
(although it never quite died as pantomime spectacles in England and in
Denmark (the Tivoli Gardens) during the 19th century and to this day
testify). Marceau is not a stock character, such as Pierrot or Harlequin or
“Joey” or “The Tramp” or even his trademark “Bip.” He is a master of
multiple personas conceived with telling wit and played with nuance and
subtlety.
[PAB]
When, on the same evening, you’ve prayed for a performance to end sooner
than its allotted time, and you’ve craned to see and hear another
performance, wishing it might continue longer but thankfully satisfied, in
any case, when it ended, you know you’ve been to Off-Off-Broadway. Only the
genius and fame of Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig could have, more-or-less,
justified dramatizing their banal correspondence in “Topsy on the
Boardwalk.” By the end of the presentation, I was exasperated by both
geniuses. By contrast, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie presented his
own vulnerabilities and triumphs in a dozen wry and witty dramatic one-man
sketches that had the ring of reality and endeared the playwright-actor. He
was ably abetted by Steve Sweeting at the piano.
War, Sex, and Dreams: an evening with Jean-Claude van Itallie
“Topsy” (on the Boardwalk) was adapted into a theatrical form by Edward
Kinchley Evans (who also directed) from the love letters of Isadora Duncan
(the creator of modern dance at the beginning of the century) and Gordon
Craig (the innovative stage designer that was in good part responsible for
revolutionizing the romantic and realistic staging then prevalent into
abstract and expressionist mood settings and lighting) who had a passionate
affair for five years, a child out-of-wedlock (Deirde) and corresponded
until Isadora’s death in Nice in 1927.
Both actors, Glen Z. Gress as Gordon Craig and Adrienne Wehr as Isadora
Duncan, gave “awesome” performances. I am always awed by actors’ feats of
memorization. However, call me an “agist,” but it was like watching Beauty
and the Beast. I could not reach the point of suspended disbelief. I
dreaded the moment when he was about to touch her, hoping it would be a
grandfatherly gesture. He also tended to sputter. I am not competent to
tell whether he was attempting to imitate Gordon Craig’s enunciation (not
having read accounts of his life and character traits) or merely being
histrionic. I would like to think the former.
Call me a “curmudgeon,” but, despite her beauty and talent, I could not
believe for a second that Wehr was Isadora, despite Evans’ (the director)
intrusion of a few “Isadora poses” which was supposed to pass for dance.
Most of the performance Wehr spent in languorous repose in a chair—and she
could have stayed there for all her inability to project any of Isadora’s
charisma and instinctively vivid movement (from all first-hand accounts).
Back-lighting and a shapely body (but not enough meat) do not create an
Isadora nanosecond.
As for the content….Here we have two of the great artistic personalities of
the age, and their mushy thoughts are completely banal, when not floridly
stilted (Craig). I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have written to each
other any way they wished, only that it doesn’t bear reading by anyone but
themselves and certainly not dramatization. What drama? If this
correspondence hadn’t been between Duncan and Craig, no one with any
literary sensibility would have gone beyond page one.
What a contrast with van Itallie’s presentation and performance in his
autobiographical “War, Sex and Dreams.” Maybe Joel Gluck’s directing made
the performance move, maybe not; there were some awkward moments and a bit
too obvious vaudevillian hop-skip-and-dancing to “liven” things up in this
75-minute, no intermission, twelve-sketch revue, accompanied by the piano
playing of Steve Sweeting. First, of course, there was a real person
impersonating himself. Then there was substance: wit, irony,
sentimentality, some tears, and much laughter that justified the evening.
Even when you knew that your emotions were being manipulated by a
playwright, you wanted to go along with him to enjoy the vignettes. Sure,
it wasn’t high literature, and it only touched lightly on anything really
serious. Even so, one felt closer to van Itallie--and wanted to know him
better--than the off-putting melodrama of the Duncan-Craig nearly 20-year
correspondence that never brought us to an appreciation of the personalities
of the dynamic, creative ogre that was Isadora and the egotistical, driven
genius of staging that was Craig.
[PAB]
"I saw her come on to an empty platform to dance," he would one day
declare. "It was Berlin, the year 1904, the month December . . ."
She came through some small curtains . . . and walked down to
where a musician, his back to us, was seated at a grand piano;
he had just finished playing a short prelude by Chopin when
in she came, and in some five or six steps was standing by the
piano, quite still and, as it were, listening to the hum of
the last notes.
Quite still. You might have counted five, or even eight, and
then there sounded the voice of Chopin again . . . it was
played through, gently, and came to an end, and she had not
moved at all. Then one step back or sideways, and the music
began again and she went moving on before or after it. Only
just moving, not pirouetting or doing any of those things we
expect to see . . .
She was speaking in her own language . . . not echoing any
ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen
anyone move before. The dance ended, and again she stood quite
still. No bowing, no smiling, nothing at all . . . yet no one
present had a moment's doubt . . . and I, I sat still and
speechless.
"You send me poems that are caresses and words that are like kisses
or a flock of little soft birds that fly down and nestle in and
all about me and take away my senses," she would cry.
"Our bed," he would remember of their first night on the floor of
his studio, "was two carpets on which [was thrown] a fur cloak
(hers) with my overcoat as pillow and two blankets and a sheet as
covering. We do not sleep much all night. It is lovely to have her
here."
This love story of two tempestuous artists, and its inevitable end
-- inevitable for a million reasons, not least that old devil,
money -- is retold in their own words in a show called "Topsy on the Boardwall" at La MaMa E.T.C.
"You know," says Glen Z. Gress, "the behavior of artists of this
caliber on a personal level can be difficult."
Gress is the Gordon Craig of the performance, Adrienne Wehr is the
Topsy -- the name by which Isadora often signed her letters to
Craig. The script of "Topsy on the Boardwalk" has been devised by
Edward Kinchley Evans -- who also directs the piece -- from those
Craig-Duncan love letters and other sources.
Love letters?
Pretty soon in one of them Craig is bitching for an answer to his
request (demand?) for 6000 marks. "Or is the ship to go down once
more? . . . You don't seem to realize how serious this whole thing
is."
Shortly thereafter, in a huff, he to her: "Write no more to me.
Think about me no more. I no longer exist for you, since that for
which I live is less than nothing to you . . . "
Craig, says the man who plays him, was "pretty arrogant, and pretty
much a male chauvinist of his time. Quite a cad. He had nine
children we know about, by various ladies, and God knows how many
others we don't know about."
And Isadora?
"Despite the creative artist, pretty much a dependent woman. Her
family lived off her, as did Gordon Craig. He and she would play
games with one another. She, the helpless female, begging him to
come hold her. He: 'Where's the money? -- if you send the money,
I'll come and see you.' "
Gress does think "theirs was one of the truly passionate great love
affairs -- two people who were artistic and sexual soulmates, but
could never stay in the same room together very long."
It was also of course also a love affair stamped by tragedy. In
1913, in an accident spookily prefiguring Isadora's own death 14
years later, an auto slid into the Seine, drowning two of her allªtoo©much©neglected children
and their governess. The children were
3-year-old Patrick, Isadora's son by Singer Sewing Machine heir
Paris Singer, and 7-year-old Deidre, her daughter by Gordon Craig.
Edward Gordon Craig was himself the illegitimate son of actress
Ellen Terry and architect and producer Edward Godwin. What's
interesting is that Ellen Terry was to have her own now famous
romantic correspondence with George Bernard Shaw -- "what would be
phone sex today, I guess," says Glen Gress dryly.
What's further interesting is the following appraisal of Craig by a contemporary:
If ever was a spoilt child in artistic Europe, that child was
Teddy [i.e., Gordon] Craig. The doors of the theater were
wider open to him than anyone else. He had only to come in as
others did, and do his job, and know his place, and accept the
theater with all its desperate vicissitudes and inadequacies
and impossibilities, as the rest of us did, and the way would
have been clear for all the talent he possessed.
Glen Z. (for Zaccashen, a made-up name) Gress has a past in theater
that goes back to the old Circle in the Square and the Barr/Albee
Playwrights' Unit on Vandam Street, a present in films that
includes roles in "Lorenzo's Oil," "Ragtime," and three Woody Allen
movies.
Born in Saltillo, Pa. -- "Fourteen houses, six churches, a couple of
thousand cows, cats, and dogs" -- he came out of Juniata College
to New York City in 1950, and drifted into costume design when all
he wanted was to be hired as an actor. At one time he had three
design schools running in this town -- "and a wonderful reputation
for bringing in a show [costume-wise] under budget and on time."
In 1969 he moved back to paint and read and think in Pennsylvania,
where he lives to this day, with playwright/director Evans, in a
big house on a hill, "the old Crawford mansion," that, as Gress
only learned after moving in, had been where Sunny Crawford von
Bulow grew up -- some few years before topsy got turvy. [Tallmer]
(TOPSY ON THE BOARDWALK played March 25 to April 11 At La MaMa E.T.C., 74 A East 4th St.)
Neodanza made its third appearance (1991, 1996, 1999) at LaMaMa Annex Theater from February 25 to 28. I had seen the troupe in 1996 and was impressed by its all-out vigor, expressionist intensity and grotesque imagery (somewhat like Pina Bausch but with its own character) and was prepared to write a glowing review. Alas, no such review is forthcoming. First, however, let me warn you of my bias. I love dance. I hate postmodernism---the word, even more than the product. I love plain speaking. I hate the rhetorical nonsense with which the choreographer explained the meaning of the piece (in the program). Thus, I am probably not the best reviewer of the performance of "Carne en doce escenabolo" by the Cuban-born choreographer Alexey Taran, who was also one of the three performers---the other two being Arais Batlle and Ines Rojas (Daniela Pinto, mentioned in the press release, apparently did not appear). I was somewhat intrigued by the first scene in which three people (mentally challenged?) don slaughterhouse aprons and, sitting in chairs, at first lethargic, become increasingly more spastic and violent, calm down and then flare up uncontrollably again (which went on too long---unless that was the first, second and third scenes), but then I gradually became aware that the rest would be more of the same---or worse, much worse. The "12 Scenes" of the title, although having "no internal relationship," according to Taran, seemed (loosely) to be a kind of "Ages of Man." In a series of scenes the performers, wearing full-body padded costumes, went through youthful tantrums smashing dolls (or real life babies?) while squealing, grunting and tumbling over each other; pissed and defecated (symbolic, or otherwise)---the male (Taran) from an elevated height seemed to be pissing on one of the naked women in a tub; struggled with their individual curtains of entangling strings (a message about daily life?); slammed each other like slabs of meat on a metal table (that could have been a butcher's table, an operating table or a morgue slab); did a "dance" of the disabled with arm-clasped canes, and, finally, lapsing into a nearly comatose state on upstage chairs with holes in them (commodes?), stirring only to relieve themselves (using bottled water to produce the puddle) while a TV monitor replayed the whole performance (life?) in superfast time (including the missing fourth person). The "music" by Bz12=Miguel Noya+Wyzton Borrero+Julio Alonso consisted of electronic, percussive and whistle sounds and alternated with periods of silence through which the performers performed. Sunday, February 28th, was Neodanza's final performance at LaMaMa, so this review is a post mortem. A final word: the company is dedicated, intense, intelligent, and, if this is the direction it is taking, has little to do with dance. I should add that, according to Taran, this piece "creates a piece of clear contemporary Latin American personality" and apparently won the company the prix d'auteur general de la seine-saint denis, France.
Teatro Flamenco, presented by Maria Benitez (its founder, artistic director and lead dancer), is stamping the boards at The Joyce Theatre (175 Eight Ave) from February 23rd to March 7th.
Is it possible to be hot, virtuosic, vivid, and still be drained of life's juices? Teatro Flamenco proved that the apparent oxymoron is, indeed, possible. Using the vocabulary of flamenco, Maria Benitez and Cecilio Benitez (her husband and co-artistic director) staged and choreographed away the essence of flamenco under a pall of conformity. The emphasis for the company as a whole was battery dancing (like the Irish "Lord of the Dance," which I detested). The straightjacket effect of dancing in unison under spots in a darkened stage was neither diminished nor alleviated by the virtuosic displays of Antonio Granjero, Immaculada Ortega and Maria Benitez who each choreographed their own solos in Solea, Alegrias and Seguiriyas, respectively.
The single program consisted of: Estampa Flamenca, a NY premiere choreographed by Antonio Granjero for the whole company (Idalia Molina Bascos, Sasha Morena Caponi, Martin Gaxiola, Antonio Granjero, Jose Junco, Adriana Maresma-Fois, Julian Martin, Rosa Mercedes, and Immaculada Ortega), Alegrias, a NY premiere choreographed and danced by Immaculada Ortega, Folies d'Espagne, a NY premiere choreographed by Maria Benitez for herself and company, Aires de Cadiz, a NY premiere choreographed by Antonio Granjero for the company, Solo Guitarra by Jose Valle Fajardo "Chuscales," Formas e Imagenes choreographed by Maria Benitez for herself and company and Antonio Granjero (his too lengthy solo), and the Finale. The accompanying musicians were "Chuscales" and Roberto Castellon on guitar and Francisco Javier Orozco Fernandez "El Yiji" singer with Rosamund Morley playing the viola da gamba in the piece by Marin Marais.
The heart of flamenco (and the joy for the audience who participate vicariously) is epitomized in the communal, good-humored, gypsy cuadro when all the fiery individualistic display is brought together in a final contest of dancing egos, admiringly abetted and judged by those only temporarily sidelined, and the singers, as well, play a prominent role. Everything up to that communal gathering, when the whole meal is laid out, is appetizer. Creative artists, such as Maria Benitez, with companies of their own and a desire to expand the domain and boundaries of flamenco dancing, eliminate the cuadro at their peril.
Nevertheless, it is possible to realize new forms through which flamenco vocabulary, style and dynamics flow. It is possible to use flamenco interpretively as Benitez, herself, successfully demonstrated in her dramatic piece Folies d'Espagne to the baroque music of Marin Marais, and as others have done before her.
My chagrin with Teatro Flamenco's presentation is the dominant role given to in sync stamping and the lighting design (by Clifton Taylor) that isolated the performers (as a group and individually) not only on the stage but from the audience, that is, me. Unlike the reviewer for the NYTimes, I went with an open heart but felt cheated---like cutting into an orange and discovering that it is dried up inside. [Perry Bialor]
Saluting Richard Rodgers
Her tone dark and plangent, Ann Hampton Callaway tugged heartstrings with a
wrenching "My Funny Valentine," from Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in
Arms, played as a jazz reverie, and waxed ecstatic in the concert’s title
song, taken from their Spring is Here. With Richard Rodney Bennett at the
piano, Mary Cleere Haran took us on a sentimental tour of the city in the
team’s "(We’ll Have) Manhattan," from The Garrick Gaieties, and
urged keeping one’s eyes firmly on one’s goal in the waltz "Over and Over
Again," from Jumbo. Soprano Harolyn Blackwell captivated listeners with
a sweeping "Falling in Love with Love," from The Boys from Syracuse,
capped with a ringing top note. She and Howard McGillin gently lamented a
loveless state in a medley made up of "Nobody’s Heart," from By
Jupiter, and "The Sweetest Sounds," from Rodgers’ solo outing No
Strings. Composer Adam Guettel, Rodgers’ grandson, honored his grandfather
with a wry, lyrically sung "Glad to Be Unhappy," from On Your Toes.
After a hushed, intimate initial verse of "Isn’t it Romantic?" from
Love Me Tonight, Michael Feinstein changed gears for a rarely heard, sarcastic
second verse. He sang a honeyed "My Romance," from Jumbo, as well,
and traded barbed repartee with Wesla Whitfield in "Everything I’ve Got
Belongs to You," from By Jupiter. In a voice redolent of experience,
Whitfield, assisted by pianist spouse Mike Greensill, proffered a poignant
"This Funny World," from Betsy, and torchy "He was too Good to
Me," written for, but cut from Simple Simon. She went on to laud a clean
melodic line in "I Like to Recognize the Tune," from Too Many Girls.
If an odd note was struck here, it came with Mark Murphy’s swung "This
Can’t Be Love," from The Boys from Syracuse, accompanied by pianist Mike
Renzi, which left that melodic line choking somewhere in the dust. Murphy’s
"Surrey with the Fringe on Top," from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Oklahoma, was similarly jarring.
Faith Prince paired a brassy "I Cain’t Say No," from Oklahoma, with
"I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outa My Hair," from South Pacific,
her deadpan "hick" accent in the former delightfully at odds with
her red diva gown. McGillin sang a dulcet "Oh, What a Beautiful
Morning," from Oklahoma, and, unfazed by its wide range, "If I Loved
You," from Carousel. Drawing on this last pair of musicals as well,
Blackwell delivered a caressing, crystalline "Out of My Dreams" and,
with Stern at the keyboard, a no less limpid "What’s the Use of
Wondrin’?" Whitfield took a pessimistic view of love in up-tempo rarity
"The Gentleman is a Dope," from Allegro.
Callaway, Haran, and Prince brought down the house near the end of the evening
with their honest look at deliciously discombobulating love in
"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," from Rodgers and Hart’s Pal
Joey. Orchestral excerpts from South Pacific and The King and I, written with
Hammerstein, framed the vocal selections.
[Gelbert]
Mass Appeal
Following Salonen and the Philharmonic’s brisk and breezy account of Haydn’s
evocation of evening in his Symphony Number 8 in G major ("Le
Soir"), came a haunting Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, written by
Britten for his life partner, tenor Peter Pears, and French horn player Dennis
Brain. Drawing on texts representing four centuries of English poetry, the
Serenade takes us through diverse aspects of night, from gentle to splendid,
through somber and nightmarish, to mischievous and playful, and back again.
To these six songs, Paul Groves lent bright, ingratiating lyric tenor tone,
which was as fluid as one could want it for the melismas of the setting of Ben
Jonson’s "Hymn." The varied horn part—now rustic sounding, then all
but calling down Judgment Day’s wrath—was expertly executed by Jerry Folsom,
the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s principal horn player.
Guiding the quartet of soloists; the sonorous New York Choral Artists,
directed by Joseph Flummerfelt; and the orchestral forces, Salonen firmly but
sensitively molded a formidable and mellifluous Mass in C minor by Mozart.
Substituting for an indisposed Barbara Bonney, soprano Janice Chandler made a
finely floated florid contribution to the opening "Kyrie" and,
singing lightly, with agility, proved herself just about equal to the
challenge of the long, filigree lines of the graceful, dulcet "Et
incarnatus est." Mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer proffered a vibrant
rendition, replete with cleanly articulated coloratura, of the demanding
bravura "Laudamus te." Chandler and Mentzer blended well in
"Domine Deus," their duet, and delivered, with Groves, a no less
harmonious "Quoniam." Joined by bass-baritone Nathan Berg for the
"Benedictus," these singers helped bring the work to a stirring
conclusion.
[Gelbert]
Gory Story
The grisly tale of Lizzie Borden, the repressed, driven young woman from Fall
River, Massachusetts, accused but officially acquitted of murdering her father
and stepmother late last century, has long fascinated the American public and
found its way onto the stage as opera, ballet and drama. In March, near the
start of its Spring season at the New York State Theater, the New York City
Opera staged a gripping revival of Lizzie Borden, turbulent American opera by
composer Jack Beeson and librettist Kenward Elmslie, with scenario by the late
Richard Plant. This new production stars Phyllis Pancella and Lauren Flanigan
and is conducted by George Manahan, directed by Rhoda Levine, and designed by
John Conklin (sets), Constance Hoffman (costumes), and Robert Wierzel
(lighting). The production originated at Glimmerglass Opera. City Opera had
given the work its world premiere at City Center in 1965 and last aired it in
1976 as part of its American Bicentennial celebration.
With Manahan and Levine presiding, the company’s forces fully succeeded in
realizing the now spiky, now lyrical music drama and making palpable the
tension and acrimony abounding within the dysfunctional Borden family in its
grim, gray surroundings. Vibrant mezzo-soprano Pancella contributed a vivid,
knowing portrayal of the tightly wound, loveless Lizzie, frustrated and
increasingly unhinged. Of note were her second act "mad scene,"
chafing under her father’s prohibitions and flinging chairs and papers about;
singsong solo about death, as she sat, tightly clenched, in her rocking chair,
in her dead mother’s wedding gown; Straussian rhapsody when she finally gave
vent to her desire for her sister’s fiancé; suggestion of incest in a
chilling scene with her father in which, already stained with Abigail’s blood,
she saw herself taking her mother’s place; and ultimate embrace of isolation,
rejecting even her friend Reverend Harrington (tenor Dennis Petersen in a
worthy debut), while the voices of children chanted mockingly of the bloody
deed in the words quoted above. A highlight as well was her confrontation
with her stepmother — the frilly and spoiled, but unyielding Abigail, ever
expressive soprano Flanigan — who taunted Lizzie for her hopeless lust in a
bustling line set against her stepdaughter’s firm and proud statement of
relief at having helped her sister, Margaret, elope with a sea captain. Claws
were bared at the climax, when the women declared open hostility toward each
other, with Lizzie accusing Abigail — once hired help and Andrew Borden’s
secret lover — of anxiously awaiting her mother’s death, which freed Lizzzie’s
father to remarry. In contrast, were Pancella’s loving, dulcet duets with
pure-voiced soprano Robin Blitch Wiper, as Margaret, marking the passage of
time, lamenting their untenable situation, and plotting the younger sibling’s
escape.
To bass-baritone Stephen West — as stern, stingy paterfamilias Andrew Borden —
were entrusted gruff, miserly and bigoted credos. To the more baritonal Dean
Ely, the dashing Captain Jason MacFarlane, fell responsibility of beginning a
striking set-piece, a quintet in which he and Blitch Wiper exchanged warm
words of love, and Flanigan and Petersen nattered on about gardens and weeds,
while Pancella ruminated over her needlepoint. Flanigan’s fluent account of
Abigail’s sentimental parlor song, with coloratura flourishes, and the
orchestra’s stormy interlude after the ax murders — not the only time Strauss’
Elektra came to mind--must also be mentioned.
[Gelbert]
Chez Melinda
Ms. Kourisky chose to direct "The Bald Soprano," which was first produced
in Paris in 1950, for both its hilarious comic effects and for the contemporary
relevance in its tragic undertones. "It's a possible danger that in New York
or in Paris, for example, or anywhere, that people will forget how to speak,
how to feel, and that they will all become interchangeable with the same name,
Bobby Watson," as the play portends, Ms. Kourilsky explained.
The "Bobby Watson" to whom Ms. Kourilsky is referring occurs in an
early sequence of Ionesco's play (subtitled an anti-play). Ionesco, who had
always hated theatre except for Punch and Judy puppet shows, sets up a petit-
bourgeois couple, the Smiths, who are violently funny puppet-like caricatures
themselves. Ionesco was studying English from a book when all of a sudden the
phrases in the lesson took on a life of their own and he was impelled to write
a play. Most critics call it a play about impossibility of communication and
the empty language of clichés. The non-sense logic which dominates our
quotidian lives becomes a dead-pan, hysterically funny colloquy between the
Smiths based on the rapid, increasingly absurd and repetitious use of the
name "Bobby Watson." Bobby Watson's, children, parents, and innumerable
relations are uniformly named Bobby Watson regardless of gender, age, or any
trait whatsoever.
Ms. Kourilsky based both the French and English characterizations on the
Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton and in the vocal and physical mannerisms of the
actors, adding to the wild inter-cultural mix. The two English couples are
French-Canadian and the Fireman is French. Watching the two productions in
tandem was like looking at an Andy Warhol Diptich, for example the photographs of
Marilyn Monroe, in which one is tinted in rose, the second in violet. Watching the play in
French then in English mimics the repetitious, dislocated language of the play
in the nuances between the two languages. During the French production, the
wild absurd humor and frantic pace are mesmerizing; in the English
version, the tragic impulses underneath the language rise to the surface. Ms.
Kourilsky has changed the ending of the original production in which the words
at the end of the play repeat the words in the beginning. In line with
Ionesco's fantasy of standing up at the end of the play and shooting at the
audience, Ms. Kourilsky invented a brilliant violent ending with all the
characters as cannibals, coming to blows with each other, with dismembered parts of
legs and arms appearing and disappearing while the language disintegrates
into the empty cries of vowels and consonants.
Ms. Kourilsky has produced bi-lingual productions in the past,
including Sartre's "Huis Clos " (No Exit) and Camus' "Le Malentendu" (the
Misunderstanding). This back to back bi-lingual production of "The Bald Soprano" is a further part of
an experiment worth watching develop. Who knows what innovations Ms.
Kourilsky might try next? Perhaps, she'll mix styles in the next piece
between naturalism and expressionism, or apply the approach to plays which focus on themes
immigration and assimilation, in which divergent tongues could be a useful tool. Ubu's audiences look forward with great
anticipation to her future experiments with all the languages of the stage.
[MGG]
Zoe Wanamaker played Electra as an aging, hysterical waif with dishevelled, patchy hair---a combination of Julietta Massima, Charlie Chaplin and a volcano. One critic aptly characterized her as a "child-woman," stunted by the trauma of her father's murder (with Freudian implications). She pounced around the stage ranting, moaning and emoting her anguish non-stop about her miserable captivity, that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (her mother and step-father, her father's assassins) were not yet dead, and that her brother Orestes had not yet appeared to execute her vengeance. When Orestes finally does appear and make himself known (following disinformation that he had died), Electra leaps on him, placing a "lingering kiss" on his lips that is less "ambiguous" than arbitrary in suggesting that her blood lust is accompanied by incestuous lust (a directorial decision?). This was clearly Electra's play, that is, Zoe Wanamaker's. No wonder it is considered such a wonderful part, for the play itself is no great shakes. Some scholars even consider it Sophocles' worst (of the handful of plays that survived).
Michael Cumpsty played a wooden Orestes to all his 6 foot something stature, even when emoting at top decibals still stiff as a board, except when grasping Electra---thank god that Sophocles didn't draw out the recognition scene as did Euripedes in his Electra. Apparently, the drab gray outfits that everyone wore (except Claire Bloom in red and Aegisthus in white) did not bring greater "realism" to the role. He could have been playing the house at Epidaurus. Moreover, the gore up to his elbows (it wasn't enough to have it on his hands) after killing his mother could probably be seen from the last row of that amphitheater. A bit of Grand Guinol seemed out of place when the murder itself-in ancient Greek style-took place offstage. How he managed to get so much blood on himself when he never wore a sword or other sharp implement during the play is puzzling.
As Clytemnestra, all Claire Bloom had to do was walk on stage to be quietly regal. It was a small but important role, played simply, with sincerity and the pathos of conflicted emotions on hearing the report of the death of Orestes (false, as she was soon to learn to her detriment). Her second "appearance" was as a voice screaming inside the palace as she was being slaughtered by her son Orestes.
The old man, Orestes' servant was played by Stephen Spinella. He was miscast. He didn't know when to declame and when to simply describe a scene (perhaps one should blame the Director, David Leveaux, for not providing the proper rhetorical balance). His extended description of the chariot race in which Orestes was presumably killed in an accident (perhaps because it was his moment in the spotlight) was orated more dramatically than almost anything else in the drama. It must have thrilled an Athenian audience. The outrageous length of this bit of flummery, however, must be blamed on Sophocles (who also put Orestes as a competitor at the Delphic Games, which did not exist at the time of the plot), not Spinella.
Daniel Oreskes appears as Aegisthus near the end of the play only too submissive and ready to be killed by an unarmed Orestes. He would have been more convincing as a petty mafia boss than as the king; fifteen or so years in office apparently did nothing to increase his dignity or credibility as a king. Pat Carroll, as the Chorus of Mycenae, was as solid as the Rock of Gibralter-forceful when giving Electra advice; part of the landscape when not. Chrysothemis, Electra's compromising sister, was played by Marin Hinkle. It is a thankless role, mainly a common sensical foil to Electra's obsessive desire for vengeance. Sophocles couldn't have liked her much. We aren't given a chance to like her much too. Ivan Stamenov played the forelorn Pylades (a mute part); Mirjana Jokovic and Lyra Lucretia Taylor were Chorus, which, in this play, took up more room than words.
[Bialor]
The admirable solo quintet was made up of soprano Rachel Elliott, countertenor
Stephen Wallace, tenors Rodrigo del Pozo and Joseph Cornwell, and bass Clive
Bayley.
The brightest spots in the birthday ode were the spirited celebratory
introduction, entrusted to Cornwell and acquitted nobly; the stirring
responsive duet "Sound the trumpet," proffered with flair by Wallace
and del Pozo; and "Strike the viol," the Chilean-born del Pozo’s
dulcet solo.
Highlights of the ode to music’s patron saint were the florid "Hark!
Hark! Each Tree its silence breaks" with the contrasting agile
instruments, in striking synchronization, of Wallace and Bayley; the peaceful
"’Tis Nature’s Voice" and more vigorous "And lofty Viol,"
illuminated by del Pozo’s bright, limpid high tenor, with its skillful voix
mixte; the airy "Thou tun’dst this World below," estimably
dispatched by Elliott; the quietly exultant "In vain the Am’rous
Flute," mellifluously limned by del Pozo and Cornwell; and the coloratura
martial aria "The Fife and all the Harmony of War," ringingly
delivered by Cornwell. The full choral complement’s moment of greatest glory
was "Hail! Bright Cecilia, Hail to thee!" the jubilant climax.
Played as encores were the Grand Passacaglia, "How happy the lover,"
and joyous drinking song, "I call, I call, you all to Arthur’s
hall," from King Arthur, the latter boasting del Pozo’s florid solo, and
"To the hills and the vales," the final chorus of Act One of Dido
and Aeneas.
The company returns to the United States in November with Purcell’s music for
King Arthur and that of Jean-Baptiste Lully for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,
appearing in Richmond, Virginia’s University Concert Hall on the 5th, in
Fairfax, at George Mason University on the 6th, at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall on
the 8th, at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium on the 10th, at New York’s Alice Tully
Hall on November 12th and 13th, at the Orange County, California Performing
Arts Center on the 16th, and at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium on the 19th
and 20th.
BAM Opera continues with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, at the BAM Opera House,
under René Jacobs and director and choreographer Trisha Brown, on June
10th, 11th and 12th at 7:30 pm and 13th at 3 pm. Tickets, priced at $25, $55
and $75, are available from directly from BAM, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
NY 11217-1486, phone 718-636-4100, or through Ticketmaster at 212-307-4100.
[Gelbert]
Hagegård and Futral began breezily enough. In Johannes Brahms’
"Vor der Tür" ("Unlock the door"), the baritone sang
from offstage as if genuinely denied admission by the mischievous soprano. An
excerpt by Mozart from the collaborative opera "Der Stein der
Weisen" ("The Philosopher’s Stone") found a bewitched Futral
sporting long cat’s whiskers and giving voice solely to a series of
"Miau"s and Boström wandering briefly into Gioachino Rossini’s
better-known "Cat Duet." Benjamin Britten’s "Underneath the
Abject Willow, (Lover, sulk no more)," to W.H. Auden’s words, continued
this airy vein.
With alienation next on the agenda, Futral gracefully pondered her predicament
as "The More Loving One" of the mates in Ricky Ian Gordon’s setting
of another Auden text. The singers shared their sorrow in an almost operatic
"Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," Franz Schubert’s version of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s lament of Mignon, and kept agony in check in Claudio
Monteverdi madrigal "Ardo e scoprir."
The lovers looked deeply within themselves, probing feelings and motivations
in his "Troget och milt" ("Faithful forever") by Ingvar
Lidholm and her showpiece, the "Brentano Lieder," Richard Strauss
songs to poems of Clemens Brentano, beginning with a haunting "An der
Nacht" ("Ode to Night"), boasting echoes of Tristan und Isolde.
If Futral seemed determined to emphasize the tears over the notes in a
plaintive "Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden" ("I meant to
make you a posy"), it became clear that reconciliation was in store from
her rhapsodic "Säus’le, liebe Myrthe" ("Whisper, dear
myrtle") and ecstatic, high coloratura "Amor," diction and tone
crystal clear throughout the stratospheric ascents. Still singing, she strode
down an aisle of the auditorium, whereupon Hagegård stole back onstage,
to Boström’s strains of the joyous postlude from Der Rosenkavalier, in
time to observe Futral’s exit.
Suffering, ruminating, and confronting his mortality, Hagegård plumbed
the depths of torment in his own tour de force, soliloquies from the play
Jederman (Everyman), penned by frequent Strauss collaborator Hugo von
Hofmannsthal and set to music by Frank Martin which conveyed urgency without
indulging in Straussian expansiveness. Boström provided an interlude of
tranquility with Mozart’s "Fantasie in C minor" and the singers made
peace in a flowing "Herbstlied" ("Autumn Song") by Felix
Mendelssohn.
Futral and Hagegård reveled in their pre-recorded voices, seeming to
issue from an ancient gramophone horn, in a conciliatory "Bei
Männern," from Zauberflöte, complete with 78 rpm
"hiss," and toasted their domestic paradise regained with sugar-
coated duets from—what else?—romantic musical comedy and operetta. These were
Vincent Youmans’ "Tea for Two," from No, No, Nanette (in which an
opportunity was missed to strike a blow for sexual equality when Futral
changed "you" to "I" on repeating Hagegård’s lines
ordering "you’ll awake/ and start to bake a sugar cake"); Franz
Léhar’s "Merry Widow" waltz; and Emmerich
Kálmán’s "Weisst du es noch?" from Die
Czárdásfürstin. The singers sent the audience off with
Brahms’ Lullaby, which made one wonder if a visit from the stork was supposed
to be imminent.
[Bruce-Michael Gelbert]
Hvorostovsky played the part of Francesco Moor, would-be patricide and
fratricide who, in addition, covets his cousin, Amalia, beloved of his older
brother Carlo. His rich cocoa-colored instrument fully at his command from
the start, Hvorostovsky displayed the dramatic but flexible sound that his
music demands, and, not the least inhibited by the concert format, cut a
magnificent figure as the snarling image of evil incarnate in his scena
"La sua lampada vitale…Tremate, o miseri" ("His vital lamp
burns low…Tremble, you wretches"). The baritone made the most of his
opportunity later to depict the villain undone by his misdeed, like Macbeth
and Attila, as he recounted his nightmare and expressed his fears in his
haunted sounding "Pareami che sorto da lauto convito" ("I
dreamt I had eaten a sumptuous feast").
A character akin to Ernani, Carlo is a dreamer and intellectual, forced by
circumstance to become leader of a band of bandits, who stabs his love in lieu
of letting her wed an outlaw. Antonio Nagore sang Carlo’s music in a
basically solid and ingratiating spinto tenor, which, however, sometimes
spread at the top.
Tailored to the voice of the popular "Swedish nightingale" Jenny
Lind, a lyric bel canto singer rather than a dramatic one, florid writing for
Amalia has a sound more graceful and Bellini-esque than does most rough-and-
ready early Verdi. In music once embraced by Joan Sutherland and Montserrat
Caballé, Sally Wolf made a favorable first impression, drawing on dark
and bright timbres, her soprano warm, limpid and fluid in Amalia’s restrained
declaration of love for the absent Carlo. She offered fairly smooth soft
singing in her prayerful cavatina "Tu del mio Carlo al seno"
("You’ve flown to the bosom of my Carlo"), acquitted herself nobly
in its exposed, bravura cabaletta "Carlo vive" ("Carlo
lives"), and capped later climaxes with strong stratospheric top notes.
Under pressure, though, as in her confrontation with the menacing Francesco,
Wolf’s voice could turn pallid or shrill.
Metropolitan Opera stalwart Paul Plishka made a solid dramatic contribution as
Count Massimiliano Moor, the brothers’ father, brutalized by his ruthless
younger son. The opera had a second imposing bass in Julian Konstantinov as
Moser, the priest who refuses to absolve Francesco of his crimes. Tenors
Christopher Pucci and Brian Nedvin, and the New York Opera Ensemble gave
admirable support as well.
Opera Orchestra continues its season under Maestra Queler with French grand
opera La Juive, by Jacques-François Halévy, with Hasmik Papian,
Jean-Luc Viala, Olga Makarina, Francisco Casanova, and Carlo Colombara, on
April 13, and bel canto opera La Sonnambula, by Vincenzo Bellini, with Ruth
Ann Swenson, Octavio Arévalo, Lynette Tapia, John Relyea, and Carla
Wood, on May 12. Performances are at 8 p.m. and tickets, priced from $20-$85,
are available at the Carnegie Hall box office, at 57th Street and 7th Avenue,
or by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800.
The company concentrates on bel canto next season, with Bellini’s I Capuleti e
I Montecchi, with Vesselina Kasarova, on October 25, and Donizetti’s Adelia,
with Mariella Devia, on November 11, and Lucrezia Borgia, with Renée
Fleming, on February 14, 2000.
[Gelbert]
NANTES, FRANCE -- Jet Lag, a collaboration between New York-based The Builders Association and
the internationally prominent architectural team of Diller+Scofidio, is a
fascinating cross- media project combining the presence of live performers
with new technologies; video on the one hand, and computer graphics on the
other. Seen in Nantes, France, during the "New York-Turn of the Century
Festival" [December 28, 1998 - January 2, 1999] where for four days, New
York's "finest" in experimental theater/performance played to sold out houses,
Jet Lag is the latest creation of Marianne Weems and her excellent team of
artists and players.
Directed by Marianne Weems, designed by Diller +Scofidio, and scripted by
Jessica Chalmers, with video by Christopher Kondeck and lighting by Jennifer
Tipton, and computer animation by dbox-James Gibbs, Jet Lag weaves together
two true stories about modern travel.
In Part One, yachtsman Roger Dearborn sets off on a solo race around the globe
as part of the 1969 Round The World competition even though he is not
adequately prepared. He is little more than a weekend sailor. When he
encounters severe setbacks, he refuses to admit defeat to the outside world.
Instead he stays off the coast of South America, circling round and round,
sending home faked reports documenting his progress and producing a
counterfeit log. The media make him into a popular hero while in reality his
mind slowly deteriorates at sea and he takes his own life by drowning.
Part Two tells the story of an American grandmother who kidnaps her grandson
and flies with him across the Atlantic 167 times within a period of six months
in order to the keep the child's father from taking him to a psychiatrist for
treatment. Stopping only briefly in airports where the she does her best to
make a home for her grandson, the grandmother finally dies of jet lag.
In order to recreate Dearborn's experience at sea, its 30 foot waves and
roaring winds, the yachtsman, played by Jeff Webster, either sits on a stool
or moves about in front of a large screen. His publicist and members of the
media broadcast news of his latest position from behind their desks placed in
front of him. Video images of the ocean, the swaying deck of his boat, his
cabin, projected onto the screen behind him combine with sounds of roaring
water and seagull shreiks to create the illusion that the sailor is indeed out
in deep waters. His initial attempts at videotaping himself with the video
camera he uses to keep a log of his journey, produce shaky images and a snowy
screen. In fact, everything moves - the screen moves from side to side as
Dearborn moves back and forth on his stool and the waves rise and fall on the
screen. Dearborn's projected image on the screen and footage from his
videotaped log add to the impression that we are reliving the sailor's
terrible adventure.
In Part Two, computer generated scenography creates the airport and airplane
in which Doris Schwartz and her grandson live in deferred time. On a gigantic
screen, a tiny point of light opens up to become the moving walkway at an
airport. The grandmother and her grandson [played by Dale Soules and Dominique
Dibbel] are seen moving along the walkway, carrying their hand luggage. Soon
the walkway becomes the interior of an airplane with a row of seats facing the
audience. Real plane seats are then moved onto the stage and placed in front
of the rows on the screen, creating the illusion that we are inside of the
plane. This is where the boy and his grandmother sit during their many
transatlantic flights. When they are not in flight, we see them moving among
the computer generated images of the airport; up and down escalators or
settling in on a bench to rest and wait for the next plane. Spreading jackets
on the benches, changing into more comfortable traveling clothes, or choosing
an isolated corner of the waiting room for their brief moments of respite,
Mrs. Schwartz does her best to create a domestic atmosphere for her grandson.
Jet Lag is "a meditation on travel in contemporary culture," in the words of
Marianne Weems. For these voyagers, time as we know it is obliterated and
space is compressed. The grandmother feels the full impact of this. "She is a
contemporary heroine," according to Paul Virilio in The Third Widow, "because
she really lived in deferred time." This may well be but it is her choice to
remain in constant motion and she pays the terrible price of her perpetual jet
lag; death. The yachtsman is an equally tragic figure. Having taken advantage
of the lag in communication with the outside world in order to create the
illusion that he is traveling, he becomes as much the victim of media hype as
of his own folly.
[Wehle]
What is most perplexing is that British playwright David Hare,
whose work has always dealt with important social and political
themes, would stoop so low as to associate himself with this so
called satire on sex. "The Blue Room" is no satire at all, it is
not even sophisticated comedy, but an adolescent depiction of the
many ways one can indulge in sex. And, as everyone knows, these
ways are exceedingly limited. It is this limitation that reduces
the play to a high class peep show, a soft porn exercise designed
elegantly and cleverly to exploit Ms. Kidman body, which is
thrust at us at every possible moment. Ms. Kidman and her
leading man, Iain Glen, are versatile performers but very much
misused and exploited, especially Ms. Kidman whose main
contribution here, though she tries hard to act, is to display
her physique, not her acting talents.
But it does not help that the most untheatrical aspect of this
production is its repetiousness. The plot, what there is of it,
is a series of vignettes depicting the sexual encounters of
eleven people--types really--a married woman, a model, an
actress, a cab driver, a politician, a playwright, to name a few,
all played by Ms. Kidman and Mr. Glen. After having sex with
his/her partner, each character moves on to the next sexual
rendezvous creating the daisy chain pattern, expressed in "La
Ronde." In each eleven scenes the characters get dressed and
undressed repeatedly, either on, or off stage. After the fifth
time, seeing the characters in their underwear one gets the
point, and hopes for a speedy finish to this predictable play.
Unfortunately Ms. Kidman taking off her clothes, appearing in
different colored briefs, or in short short dresses that reveal
plenty of skin, is not actually exciting; the scenes are forced
and redundant and, despite her physical attributes, Ms. Kidman is
strangely unerotic. For all the hoopla about her nudity, her
backside is on display for exactly five seconds. If you wink,
you'll miss it.
Although Ms. Kidman and her co-star try hard to whip up some heat
they succeed only in conjuring up a lot of hot air and cold
draughts. Mr. Glen, also constantly undressing, strutting around
in his underwear and, in one scene, is completely naked doing a
hand stand, or performing various sexual acts including
cunnilinguism, cannot lift this play out of the doldrums. Scene
after scene the action is the same: kiss, kiss, grab, grab,
feel, feel, undress undress, fornicate fornicate. End scene. On
to the next. Repeat action.
One wonders what was in David Hare's mind? Is he trying to say
that all sex is just a silly overrated game, and that people feel
very little as they participate, or is he saying the obvious--
that in the absence of love, sex, superficial or not, is the
convenient substitute. Perhaps the mystery of human sexuality
would be better understood (and more interesting) by reading
Freud rather than watching a play where the men are all seducers
the women, all enablers and the overall atmosphere is retro. Why
write about group of characters who turn out to be sluts,
deceivers, drug users, prostitutes, call girls, mistresses, and
hypocrites. It is hard to see what is interesting about these
people.
Nicole Kidman, in her many roles, works hard and is adequate.
But virtually all her characters seem similar, with the exception
of the actress. Kidman relies on quick changes of hair style,
different accents and speech patterns, not to speak of the
various outfits. These tricks are clever; nonetheless, her
characters resemble each other. The same is true for Iain Glen
for his predatory men. With the exception of his intellectual
playwright (a take off on Tom Stoppard?) and the repressed, stiff
upper lip aristocrat, Mr. Glen's men are indistinguishable,
despite accents, hair styles and body stances.
Sam Mendes, who so cleverly directed "Cabaret" is not so clever
here. The evening drags; the performance lasts only one hour and
40 minutes, it seems like three. And throughout, his direction
seems contrived and ostentatious.
Once again Broadway has outdone itself in dumbing down the
theater, in hyping a play and a performance that is cleverly
merchandized but has little to do with a serious work, be it
satire, or comedy. One is left to think that David Hare never
expected us to take him seriously, though he has a reputation for
being a serious writer. He is right if that is the case. One
cannot take the play seriously, in fact, one cannot take this
play at all.
[Croyden]
"Ma, I told you, don't call me here. No. No. I'm not supposed to get calls. I know it's a
public phone, but it's their public phone . . . Ma, did you take your pill
today? Jesus Christ. Ma, you gotta take your pill, you know what happens when
you . . .
"Sorry, Mr. Diaz. It's just my Ma, she's not doin' so good, you know, upstairs [points to his
own head]. I know, I only gave her the number in case of emergency, but . . . "
It was when actor/writer Richard Hoehler was walking along 14th Street a couple of years ago
that he first began thinking about those men on those ladders outside those stores.
"One day," Hoehler says, "I saw one guy who was particularly poignant. Preoccupied. Not very
happy about what he was doing. I thought: If I could only go inside his head to see what's
happening in there."
What came out of Hoehler's own head he put into the words he speaks as above and enacts
[ENACTED for X recent weeks] from the stage of the Kaufman Theater, far west on 42nd Street.
The sketch, "Last Call," is one of five short pieces by Hoehler that under the heading of
"Human Resources" go to make up a straight-from-the-shoulder evening of tough, compassionate
portraits of the insulted and injured.
The program can have its abrasive moments, as in the opening number, "Bum's Rush," when
Hoehler eyeballs the audience, takes a swig from a bottle, and snarls:
"What're you staring at? This ain't Oprah. Nobody flew me in here. I walked . . . Look at
you. Poor sons of bitches drag your tired asses downtown for some 'cultchah.' and this is
what you get. But hey, at least it's better than that Disney [stuff] where the furniture
sings and dances."
Richard Hoehler, passing an hour in a coffee shop in the Village, is not at all abrasive. He
is a quiet, youthfully bearded, idealistic fellow in his early 40s, and the cultchah he came
from is working-class Carteret, N.J. "A lot of oil tanks," he remarks.
Does anybody in the audience at "Human Resources" ever talk back?
"Oh yeah, a lot of people talk back. 'Hey, bum!' I have no problem with that," Hoehler says.
He sometimes, in fact, turning the tables on himself, invites men from a homeless shelter to
see the show "to tell me if I'm on target."
Another of the segments is called "Handout." The protagonist, distributing (to invisible
passers-by) flyers for a clothing firm, rambles on about his girlfriend Betty -- "Betty in
Returns, at Handel's Housewares."
There are two pegs to (Hoehner's) personal reality here.
"For eight years," he specifies, "1981 to '89, I did returns at a tool company in what's
called the South Village, Sixth Avenue and Spring Street. One day when I was working at that
store somebody on the sidewalk stuck a flyer in my hand. It was for Gilcrest Clothes. I still
have the thing. I use reproductions of it on stage."
Hoehler, son of the late Richard Hoehler, Sr., and Patricia Kenely Hoehler -- who got cheated
out of a couple of letters in her Irish maiden name -- was born Oct. 16, 1953, not in
Carteret, where he grew up and went to school, but in Elizabeth, N.J.
"The only place in Cartaret you could find theater was the Carteret Jewish Community Center,
which," Hoehler says, "is where I got all involved in theater and learned a lot of Yiddish.
"At Hope College -- went there because of the name -- they turned out to have a great theater
department. I was lucky." Hope College is in Holland, Michigan. "Couldn't have been any more
different from Carteret, N.J. Tulips along the street -- from oil tanks to windmills."
With his '76 BA from Hope in hand, he came to New York to be -- as he Hoped (excuse it) -- an
actor and a director. His first onstage assignment was as a young cab driver in an
Off-Off-Broadway production of Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty."
Hoehler remembers his truckdriver father coming to see the show. "A strong union man, my dad.
He said: 'That shit's not the way it is at all.' "
But to the truckdriver's son, who would a decade later direct a "Waiting for Lefty" of his
own, Clifford Odets was and still is today the playwright of all American
playwrights.
"I hope to live long enough to play Jacob someday" -- the burnt-out, Caruso-loving old
grandfather in "Awake and Sing."
From 1982 to 1990, Hoehler ran a group called the American Line Theater, a gypsy company
that played wherever it could find shelter, the East Village, Midtown, Upper West Side,
Chelsea.
It was Patricia Kenely Hoehler who, some years earlier -- "when I was living in New Jersey,
out of work, with no prospects" -- had got her son to try his hand at writing.
"She's a writer herself, my Mom. She writes letters to newspapers about things she sees as
injustices. The letters are so passionate, the papers usually print them. She steered me into
entering this statewide New Jersey writing contest." Much to his own shock, he won first
prize. "That was my 'experience' -- what I took to the Village Bridge Writers."
The Village Bridge Writers, then on Washington Square, was a workshop run by novelist
Florence Bonine. Another novelist, Mary Bringle, ran another writers' workshop, called Aux,
on Perry Street.
Hoehler spent 12 years between the two groups, and they're where he developed his material
both for "Working Class," the 1996 one-man, seven-character work that won an OOBR Award as
Off-Off-Broadway's best of the season, and the current "Human Resources." It was also through
one of the workshops that he met Joyce and Seward Johnson, backers of both those shows.
"Even now, if I get stuck, I go back to Aux to read my stuff. I just did it recently with the
first two pieces of this new bill. I'm always a little nervous when I go there -- so that's a
good sign."
He hasn't changed a word, however, in the last -- and to this auditor's mind, best -- of the
five takes in "Human Resources." Called "Gas Man," it's about an old balloon-seller who, when
he'd retired as a meter reader, had sent a goodbye note to all his "customers." The piece is
based on a letter Hoehler found one day in the lobby of his building when the mailman
retired. "So beautiful."
There's a novel by Hoehler that's being shopped around. "It's a first novel, so," the author
says with a laugh, "it's set in a small industrial town in New Jersey, okay?"
Okay.
[Tallmer]
A PEARL OF A "COUNTRY WIFE"
Or so he would have every male in London -- especially every husband -- believe. The ladies,
as it happens, know better -- or soon, to their relish, learn better, when dropping in at
Horner's lodgings, one after another, with the full approbation of their deluded, blustering,
cuckolded mates.
In a single day -- just under three hours in the theater -- Horner disproves his incapacity
to no fewer than four such gladly cooperative females, not least Mrs. Margery Pinchwife, the
naive young cloistered-away wife of a bullying, jealous, violence-prone, paranoid 50-year-old
member of the landed gentry.
In 1675, when William Wycherley's "The Country Wife" had its first performance at the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane, everything you ever wanted to know about sex was right there in that frank
and fearless Restoration comedy, 300 years before Masters & Johnson, Dr. Ruth, Howard Stern,
or Kenneth Starr.
It's just that it didn't use four-letter words as such, at least not the same four-letter
words as today. One very useful five-letter word for Wycherley, for instance, was "china" --
the porcelain stuff that teapots and so forth are made of. Except that in "The Country Wife,"
the word "china" becomes a synonym for masculine equipment, sexual intercourse, and other
tomfoolery.
[Enter LADY FIDGET with a piece of china in her hand, and
HORNER following]
LADY FIDGET [to MRS. SQUEAMISH]: And I have been toiling and moiling for the
prettiest piece of china, my dear . . .
SQUEAMISH: O Lord, I'll have some china too. Good Master Horner, don't think
to give other people china, and me none. Come in with me too.
HORNER: Upon my bonour I have none left now.
SQUEAMISH: Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan't
put me off so. Come.
HORNER: This lady had the last there.
LADY FIDGET: Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.
SQUEAMISH: Oh, but it may be he may have some you could not find.
LADY FIDGET: What, d'ye think if he had had any left. I would not have had it
too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough.
Sobel, the co-founding (with his wife, actress Joanne Camp) artistic director of the Pearl
Theatre Company, mounted the production of "The Country Wife" that had a well-received
January run at the Pearl, 80 St. Mark's Place.
In the above scene as played at the Pearl, Lady Fidget (Robin Leslie Brown), emerging from a
closet, hands the piece of china to her just-cuckolded husband, Sir Jaspar Fidget (Edward
Seamon), who hands it in turn to Old Lady Squeamish (Anna Minot), grandmother of Mrs.
Squeamish.
There are no stage directions for any such action. "What you can't find on the page you find
in rehearsal," says Sobel. "That's Wycherley's stage sense -- he really knew what would play.
And that's what you need audiences for.
"In the first few days of previews there were giggles during this scene, but we weren't
really playing it broad enough. You don't want to go so far as playing the whole thing with a
wink to the audience -- that's too far. We went just far enough for some nice laughs."
A good part of those laughs he ascribes to the face of Anna Minot at the top of the scene.
"When she's handed this piece of china she brings 40 or 50 years on stage to knowing just how
to handle it."
The Horner of the Pearl production was Ray Virta, the Mrs. Margery Pinchwife of the title
(once played by, among others, Ruth Gordon) is Patricia Dalen.
Completing the ensemble: Lisa Bansavage (Mrs. Dainty Fidget), Hope Chernov (Mrs. Alithea),
Dan Daily (Mr. Jack Pinchwife), Matthew Gray (Bartholomew), Robert Hock (Quack), Christopher
Moore (Sparkish), Paul Niebank (Harcourt), John Prave (Dorilant), and Missy Thomas (Lucy).
"A tough show, because it's so huge," says its director. "Just under three hours, and 15
people. We've been wanting to do it for years.
"We put it off for two reasons. One, when I first read it in graduate school, I couldn't make
head or tail of it. Two, the language. In talking with Robert Neff Williams, our Speech and
Text Coach, it became clear that you really can't do a play like this unless you have the
language.
"There are very few actors [in America] who have ] such skills. So we prepared
ourselves by doing some classic comedies where the language was very difficult but not quite
this difficult: 'The Rivals,' 'School for Scandal,' 'The Beaux Stratagem.' "
Sobel says that though he cut the play by about 15 percent, "not a word [otherwise] has been
changed." That means leaving in place anachronisms like "salute" for "kiss."
"It's a temptation just to change the word to 'kiss,' but if you do, you lose the charm, and
the whole feel of an era. So I'd rather do it the hard way.
"It's our job -- the job of the actors -- to make the meanings clear. That's also the great
delight: It's like watching a language Olympics. We learned a lot from the preview audiences
-- learned where the laughs don't ] come. We also learned that this show is
very, very popular. And I have no explanation for that."
But you're not broken-hearted --
"No, I'm not."
What Sobel finds "most remarkable" about "The Country Wife" is "that it's still shocking.
This is not a promiscuous or salacious play. It's shocking in that its attitude toward sex is
so honest."
Or as Wycherley, through Horner, puts it: "Well, Sir Jaspar, plain dealing is a jewel."
Does Shep Sobel see Horner as a nice guy like Bill Clinton or, depending on where you come
from, a rotten guy like Bill Clinton?
"Well," says the director, "he's both, really. The fact that the playwright uses Horner to
unmask all brands of hypocrisy doesn't mean that the actor has to play him like the Lone
Ranger. You just have to play him as a man asking: 'Who -- what woman -- is interested, and
how fast can I get her into my bed?'
"That doesn't make Horner a good guy or a bad guy. It just makes him a guy.
"The joke, in the end, is on him as well as everyone else, because he gets more than he can
handle. They're coming in the windows."
Everybody should have it so bad.
WOYZECK, RE-MADE
On Reade Street, far downtown in a city called New York, his Franz Woyzeck, an inarticulate,
humiliated, cuckolded private soldier at a remote militia post in provincial 1830s Germany,
has turned into Private Jackson, an unlettered black enlisted man similarly humiliated by his
officers, but at an Army base in the Deep South in the United States of 1961.
Not only that, but not every drama these days has a black man saying things like:
"Look at the kid sleepin'. I'll just move his arm so he don't get a cramp. Look at that, Mary
-- those drops on his head. We niggers is a sorry lot, always workin', always sweatin', even
in our sleep."
Or a white man (the Colonel, chief among the officers bedeviling Jackson) saying things like:
"Slow down. Jesus Christ, I said slow down, Jackson! . . . What are you in such a rush for?
You are making me feel light-headed, boy, with all this running around . . . Think about it,
Private. You've got at least 30 years ahead of you . . .
"Of course if you'd finished high school, you'd understand the magnitude of what I'm talking
about, boy . . . So don't go rushin' around. When I say go slow, you go slow. When I say:
'Whoa-Jack,' you slow down. You understand me, Private?"
The play -- an adaptation of Buchner's "Woyzeck" -- is in fact called "Whoa-Jack!" and it
follows the savage Buchner tragedy scene for scene, transposed in time, locale, ethnicity,
and sociological pivot: racism instead of feudalism.
Written in 1981-82 by a Jeff Cohen then, at 24 or 25, a smidge older than the Buchner who,
dead at 24, had left the scattered, unnumbered pages of "Woyzeck" behind him, "Whoa-Jack!" is
only now receiving its world premiere. The show, directed by Cohen, has been extended through
Feb. 15 at the Tribeca Playhouse, 111 Reade Street.
A Jazz Singer -- Queen Esther -- backed by a jazz quartet, provides a strong undertide of
blues and soul from the opening with Duke Ellington's "Solitude" to Billie Holiday's "God
Save the Child" at close, after Jackson, on the heels of his own explosion of violent
vengeance, is lynched.
"When I wrote this thing I really didn't know any better," says the Cohen who a decade later
would come up with such shockingly good, sharply pertinent updates of the classics as
"Orestes: I Murdered My Mother" and "The Seagull: The Hamptons: 1990s." But the pattern had
been set back with this youthful first stab at the process.
"I always try to make connections," says Cohen. "Connections for me. ] I guess
I first read 'Woyzeck' at NYU in the '70s, and I actually acted in a college production of
it, I think in the role of Woyzeck's friend Andres.
"Buchner was really such a revolutionary of the drama, coming up with a proletarian anti-hero
and the use of idiomatic speech for the lower-class characters. But the German sensibility
has always been difficult for me to connect with.
"So why the black-and-white of my version? I honestly don't remember, but at this remove it's
easy to see that the dirty secret which has always been swept under the rug in Europe is that
feudalism was a slave structure. So, yeah, Woyzeck [a peasant pulled into the army] was
descended from slaves."
It must be said -- an interviewer said -- that sometimes some of the speeches and characters
in your play border on caricature.
"Yes," said Cohen, "I think that's why it's taken me a long time as a director to create a
complete picture. If the Jackson character -- or the Woyzeck character -- does not have a
dignity or an intelligence, the play loses any value.
"Here you've got a guy, in 1960, '61, who lacks education; doesn't have the ability, or the
background, to be articulate. He's also caught in a social structure that's built around just
getting along.
"Even now," says Cohen, "all these years after the civil-rights movement, when I visit my
brother in Atlanta [Rob Cohen, a photographer for the music industry], I find that the way
many blacks interact with whites is scarily deferential. In a restaurant, on a bus . . . you
could call it a polity of politeness.
"So in 1961 someone like Jackson almost had ] to take on the mantra of 'Yessuh,
no suh' to get along -- especially in the Army."
The Jackson at Tribeca Playhouse is Michael D. Brown. Jackson's wife Mary is portrayed by
Genie Sloan; the salacious Major who takes one glance at Mary and exclaims: "Holy shit, look
at that piece of black ass, will you?" is Peter Shaw; the bullying, sneering Colonel is Roy
Barnitt; the looney military doctor who's investigating (as in "Woyzeck") what a diet of
(exclusively) green peas will do to Pvt. Jackson's urine is Darius Stone. Phyllis Johnson
plays Mary's friend Margaret, and Marcuis Harris plays Jackson's friend Andy.
Cohen feels that a real feather in the production's cap is the appearance of the singer who
calls herself Queen Esther. "She's unbelievable," he says. "Almost an incarnation of the
young Billie Holiday. She walked in at an audition, sang one line of 'God Bless the Child,' I
gave her a script and said: 'Please read this.' "
Why do "Whoa-Jack!" at this particular time?
"Because it's the first thing I ever wrote, and having been afraid to touch it all these
years, I felt that for my own growth as a director, it was the right time to bring it to
life. Also because at the present moment there's a real, invidious lack of attention to
matters of race."
In the theater?
"In the country, where it's become part of the dialogue to say: 'Well, now there's an even
playing field . . . Let's get rid of the quotas . . . "
One wonders if playwright/director Jeff Cohen is braced for a possible black backlash along
the lines of the recent ill-informed teapot tempest over Carolivia Herron's "Nappy Hair" or
the even iller-informed perennial idiocies over Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn."
"I've thought about it," he says. "This middle-class Jewish boy [from Baltimore] writing a
play that ends in a lynching. As is shown by 'Parade' " -- the musical at the Vivian Beaumont
about the 1913 lynching in Georgia of Leo Frank, a Jew from Brooklyn -- "the application of
violence and discrimination is not limited to any particular racial minority."
Or to any place. Not even Woyzeck's Germany.
WHOA-JACK! An adaptation by Jeff Cohen of Georg Buchner's "Woyzeck." A Worth Street Theater
production, directed by Cohen, through Feb. 15 at the Tribeca Playhouse, 111 Reade St., (212)
604-4195. (Interview courtesy Downtown Express.)
Determined to deconstruct, demythologize and otherwise devastate virtually every corner of the opera and song repertories, and alternating the tried and true chestnut with the new addition, the diva set the tone for the evening with "Son vergin vezzosa," from Vincenzo Bellini's "I Puritani," studded by sudden sustained pianissimi, alarming and cavernous chest tones, endless ornate cadenzas, and startling, piercing forte top notes.
In "Suicidio," from Amilcare Ponchielli's "La Gioconda," the prima donna considered a cornucopia of ways of doing herself in (asp, dagger and pistol among them) that would have made Dorothy Parker blanche, while giving vent to the most unbuttoned vocalism, punctuated by a few forays into the highly tasteful. Luxuriating in a lush low register, Mme Galupe-Borszkh probed that favorite vehicle of sopranos of a certain vintage, Francesco Cilea's "Adriana Lecouvreur," with a "Poveri fiori" in which the violets in question were so liberally "laced with mystery rival poison" that they issued forth with great powdery clouds whenever they were moved.
Dear Vera milked a Hugo Wolf lied, "Die Zigeunerin," for the last ounce of nuance in its every "la la," and "ha ha" and recalled favorite Uncle Sergei (sir gay), Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's fey "protégé," whose sled dogs were poodles, with an emotional rendition of the composer's "Utchevwaw?" ("Why?" or, in the diva's accent, "Vhy?").
There were laughs aplenty, to be sure, but, as the reader may 6have gathered, the singer offered, as well, models of seamless, quiet legato singing in "When I am laid in earth," from Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas"; bittersweet waltz "Les chemins de l'amour," by Francis Poulenc; and--its absurd poetry, wedded to exquisite music, mercilessly twitted--"Del cabello mas sutil," by Fernando J. Obradors.
The intrepid soprano ventured into the realm of crossover, scatting and getting hot in George and Ira Gershwin's "'S Wonderful," but, in a rare fusion (confusion?) of styles, could not resist tossing in some refined pianissimi and coloratura out of the "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "Puritani" mad scenes.
The full complement of La Gran Scena will lay siege to Town Hall on May 14 and 15 at 8 pm. Tickets are available from Ticketmaster, at 212-307-4100, and after April 15, at the box office at 123 West 43rd Street, 212-840-2824.
[Gelbert]
An emotional evening, the concert was dedicated to the memory of Rorem’s long-
time life
partner, composer and organist James Holmes, who died in January at age 59.
The evening began with Spring Music, trio for violin, cello, and piano, now
peaceful and airy, then wildly exuberant and even tragic sounding, but
ultimately uplifting,
played by the Peabody Trio, consisting of violinist Violaine Melançon,
cellist
Thomas Kraines, and pianist Seth Knopp.
There were two vocal works.
Assisted by violinist Akiko Suwanai, cellist Zuill Bailey, and pianist Simone
Dinnerstein, lyric tenor Jerry Hadley summoned a hefty tone for The Auden
Poems, a song cycle of unsettling turbulence set to texts, written during or
in the wake
of World War Two, by W.H. Auden. "The Shield of Achilles" probes,
in a
jagged musical idiom, the horrors of war, fascism, poverty, and random
violence.
"Lady, weeping at the crossroads" paints a restless portrait of
decay and deceit.
"Epitaph on a Tyrant" sketches the rise of a dictator, in miniature,
to an
off-kilter waltz. Fidelity as a virtue is frankly flayed in the crushing
"Lay your
sleeping head, my love" and faith and certainty further pulverized in wry
villanelle
"But I Can’t." "Yes, we are going to suffer" looks at
genocide,
which takes us by surprise, and the haunting final "Nocturne" mourns
all our
losses.
Rorem was at the piano for Anna la Bonne, "a seven-minute
opera," cloaked in plush, rubicund soprano sound by Angelina
Réaux. To
bittersweet strains, Anna, a maid, considers the mistress she has murdered
and,
matter-of-factly, addresses her corpse. She then gives vent, by turns, to
phrases frantic,
ironic, and, just momentarily, a touch remorseful.
Concluding the concert was String Quartet Number 3, spare and angular even
in its tear-laden "Dirge" and "Epitaph" movements and
continuous, agitated dénouement, intriguingly entitled
"Dervish."
Playing the piece was the Mendelssohn Quartet, made up of violinists Nick
Eanet and
Nicholas Mann, violist Ulrich Eichenauer, and cellist Marcy Rosen.
The upcoming Previn program, on Sunday afternoon, April 25 at 3, features his
Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano, songs to poetry by Toni Morrison, the Cello
Sonata, Two Remembrances, and the Bassoon Sonata, a world
premiere. Soprano Harolyn Blackwell, cellist David Finkel, bassoonists Nancy
Goeres
and Judith LeClair, pianists Wu Han and Previn himself, and oboist Sherry
Sylar will
perform. All tickets are $35 and are available at the Y box office at 92nd
Street and Lexington Avenue or by telephoning Y-Charge at 212-996-1100.
[Gelbert]
Lattimore first came to my attention, no, not when she played Kate Pinkerton,
when the
Met’s current Madama Butterfly production first opened—one can gauge little,
after all, from a singer’s Kate Pinkerton—but at a Richard Tucker Music
Foundation
master class given by Leontyne Price at the Juilliard School. The young mezzo-
soprano
sang a rondo finale from Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola so polished in its
pyrotechnics that there was little that Price, surprised and pleased, could
suggest.
No less refreshing was Lattimore’s Weill Hall recital debut in February, with
Brian Zeger
at the piano. Her instrument bright and fluid, Lattimore began with music by
Henry
Purcell. Going against the grain of the text in a playfully assertive, but
nonetheless valid,
"What Can We Poor Females Do?" she certainly sounded quite capable
of
taking care of herself. After a gently caressing "Music for a While"
and
flirtatious "When First Amintas Sued for a Kiss," she came
mellifluously
unraveled—agitated in her raving and plaintive in her mourning—in "Bess
of
Bedlam," as arranged by Benjamin Britten.
Lattimore’s account of a gondola race was delivered with persuasive
vivaciousness in
Rossini’s La regata veneziana, which Zeger, never letting the momentum flag,
kept moving at a lively clip. Nor did a selection of Richard Strauss lieder
tax
Lattimore’s vocal resources. Her tone never sounded forced as she commenced
with
"Schlagende Herzen" ("Beating Hearts"), infectious in its
enthusiasm, and "Die Nacht" ("The Night"), the essence
of peacefulness. Her "Hat gesagt—bleib’s nicht dabei" ("Said it
doesn’t stop there"), mischievous, then passionate, and ever youthful,
ended this part
of the evening.
Lattimore and Zeger offered a range of Johannes Brahms’ songs—a cheerful
"Ständchen" ("Serenade"), hauntingly understated
"O kuhler Wald" ("Cool Wood"), and somber renditions
of the more weighty "Der Tod, das ist die kuhle Nacht" ("Death
that is the cool night") and "Immer leiser wird mein
Schlummer" ("Ever lighter grows my slumber"). A highlight of a
Joaquin Rodrigo group was a bravura "De los alamos vengo,
madre," suffused with the intoxication of young love.
From William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein’s theater piece Casino Paradise
came Lattimore’s rueful "My Father the Gangster," replete with
sardonic
humor and Weill-esque in it’s fusion of classical and popular sound. The
singer lamented
a lost love, surely that of another woman, in Bolcom’s setting of Hilda
Doolittle’s
"Never More Will the Wind." Lattimore and Zeger ended the formal
program
with a zesty "Amor," Bolcom and Weinstein’s Latin-flavored song of a
charmer irresistible to all.
Encores were Brahms’ "Vergebliches Ständchen," in which the
singer breezily, but firmly told off a persistent suitor; "Non piu
mesta,"
the florid Cenerentola conclusion, proffered rousingly, with agility; and
"Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," straightforward in its lyrical
simplicity.
[Gelbert]
Much of the play’s dark humor falls flat, as in the case of a newcomer who rents an apartment cheap because of a “roach problem”—and when did that ever happen?—which turns out to be an enormous cockroach that permanently occupies one of the rooms. Some of the writing is just strange: One character mentions that he comes from a small town in Delaware, “just 20 miles west of the Water Gap.” A cop presents his brother with a handgun for self-defense, pointing out that the gun is safe to own and use because “the serial number has been filed off.” Say what?
The upper classes are represented here by a Trump/Helmsley-like creature named Duncan Thyme (Dan Lundy) who is so concerned about polishing his image that the hires spin doctor Ben Graves (Frank Spinelli, whose name is also, somewhat mysteriously, the name of another character in the play, portrayed by actor Christopher Winfield). Thyme creates the Empire Awards, to be presented at a huge fete on Ellis Island. (Graves’ best shot, by the way, is a TV commercial with Mick Jagger singing—at any price—“Thyme’s on Your Side.”) The lower orders appear in the persons of Hap (Brendan Lieb), a sick man who becomes homeless because he can’t pay his rent in a Thyme building, then descends into insanity, and The Boy, a very young Hispanic lad who runs away from home to explore the city (played unconvincingly by Sara Kathryn Bakker, a thankless task for a tall blonde).
Nearly everyone else in Dominic Orlando’s play is a cater waiter (and most of these are desperate, wannabe actors as well), working for a company owned by Maurice Lumiere, an overweight faux-nobleman (Mark Poppleton) and his lover Boyd Harp (James Anderson), a failed dancer. Among the waiters is Robin Goodman (Daren Firestone), a struggling playwright/producer.
Unfortunately Orlando’s ambitious, sprawling play—with its many quick cuts from place to place and 26 characters played by 10 actors—severely challenges the resources of his company. With all the quick changes, it’s not always clear, especially early on, which characters are supposed to be on stage in any given scene. This is particularly true of actors who possess a distinctive physical stage persona, such as Lieb, who turns up first as Lumiere’s houseboy, then as the miserable Hap, and finally as a young man who’s recently inherited a lot of money; only plot developments convince us that these are three very different people. Similarly, David Dial mostly plays the waiter Darko; when he turns up as the minor character Arlene, you wonder whether Darko does drag in his spare time. The capable Mahasin Ali is fine as a new employee in the catering company, but when she appears as Thyme’s secretary or as a lah-de-dah museum executive, she comes across as someone doing stand-up imitations. But it’s a problem for others as well. The excellent Bakker plays both the girlfriend of Goodman and the wife of Graves, two similar characters, suggesting that Orlando intends the women to be generic. [John Hammond]
Prater Violet
And now, the horrible but unavoidable moment has come when we have to talk about
this crime we are about to commit; this public outrage, this enormous nuisance, this
blasphemy . . .
You have read the original script? . . . Marvelous! Excellent! You see, I am such a
horrible old sinner that nothing is ever as bad as I expect. But you are surprised. You
are shocked. That is because you are innocent. It is this innocence that I need
absolutely to help me, the innocence of Alyosha Karamazov. I shall proceed to
corrupt you. I shall teach you everything from the very beginning . . .
The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion, it revolves
with an enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot retract anything. It cannot wait
for you to understand. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion
we have to prepare, like anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice . . .
-- Friedrich Bergmann to Christopher, in Christopher Isherwood's
"Prater Violet"
The best book ever written about the movies -- that is to say, the book that of all others
gets closest to the heart, bone, blood, muscles, truth, hopes, lies, and essence
of the movies -- is a 127-page 1945 novella by Christopher Isherwood called
Prater Violet.
It would not have seemed possible for that shrewd, subtle, knowing, crystal-clear short work
to be turned into anything for the screen or stage itself, but adapter/director Will
Pomerantz, an American in his mid-30s, has now done it, in an Off-Off-Broadway production
that's been called back by popular demand to a second run, through Sunday [FEB 14], at a big,
raw performance space called The Salon, next to a noodle factory and one flight up at 432 E.
91st St.
Schlepping up to East 91st from his SoHo apartment down near Vandam Street five times a week
to take the stage and speak, with irony, dignity, Jewish weariness, and power, the words at
the top of this column and a great many others, is a short, round, bearded actor named Dylan
Green.
He -- accent and all -- is the Friedrich Bergmann of this scrupulously faithful adaptation of
Isherwood's autobiographical memory piece, a near-genius old pirate of a film director (read
Lubitsch, or Korda, or Pabst, or who you will) holed up in 1933 London to try somehow to
breathe life into an ultra-banal Hapsburg-era fairy-tale musical at the very moment Hitler is
about to devour Bergmann's Vienna and the Blue Danube, in Bergmann's brooding vision, will
run red with blood.
No, Dylan Green is not Jewish. No, he is not Viennese.
"I'm an Irish kid from Kansas!" the 63-year-old Green bursts out with boyish glee. "When Will
sent for me and handed me the novella and told me about Bergmann, his first question was:
'Will you do it?,' his second question was: 'What about the accent?' "
Well, what about the accentt?
"I don't know. I just don't know," Green replies with a shrug. "To tell you the truth, I'm at
a point" -- in life, and in a long, honorable career -- "where I don't do a hell of a lot of
thinking about what I do. I just do it."
And does it very well indeed, matched step by step by young Kameron Steele's unbruised
cleancut sensibility as Bergmann's screenwriting co-conspirator in "this crime we are about
to commit" -- the "Kreestoffer Ischervood," then 29, whose first salutation from the older
man is: "You know, already I feel absolutely no shame before you. We are like two married men
who meet in a whorehouse."
Yet at the end of the drama it is Cristopher who will say: "The dialogue was crude -- a
Mama's Boy and a Comic Foreigner With a Funny Accent. But it didn't matter, for beneath our
disguises we knew . . . He was my father. I was his son. And I loved him very much."
"Isn't the kid who plays Isherwood wonderful?" says Dylan Green, who has three grown children
of his own. "And his relationship with me is the same as the relationship in the play."
Then:
"The amazing thing to me is that I've played a lot of parts, a hundred or so, and took 20
years off to raise my kids, and yet I've never had a response
like this. Never!
"My own daughter -- my own daughter! -- came up to me, in tears, after she saw this show. Her
name is Erin. She said: 'Dad, at this point I didn't think there was anything you could do
that could surprise me. And that happened tonight.' "
"I don't know," Green says again. "There's something about this role where I really felt
vulnerable, because I'm out on a limb. Why am I doing all this yelling and screaming?
Soometimes I scare directors because I 'start big.' With this one I had to go back to Will's
script, and to Isherwood.
"Thia ia ao embarrassing to admit, but a lot of what I do with Bergmann is, in a strange way,
variations on Falstaff. The man is a silly man, absurd, he's wrong! All this yelling and
screaming. And yet, there's something -- something about his heart -- that's my
my dad, I mean my real-life dad, and my dad is suffering right now, and I love him."
Dylan Green was born Jerry Glen Green in Kansas City, Kansas, June 5, 1935. His dad is Gerald
Albert Green, who "worked for the telephone company all his life, and loved it." His mother
is Marguerite Pixle Green. "She and my dad are from a small southeast-Kansas town. You've got
to print this: Neodesha, Kansas."
It was Actors Equity that, because somebody else already had the name, required Jerry Glen
Green to change his own.
"At the time I was ushering at the Circle-in-the-Square on Bleecker Street. The show was
'Under Milkwood,' by Dylan Thomas, directed by Bill Ball. Remember that great cast? Carol
Teitel, Jack Dodson, Joyce Ebert, Bette Miller . . . So anyway, I thought: Dylan Thomas,
Dylan Green, why not."
From public schools in Kansas City and Central Missouri State College, he'd come to New York
in the fall of 1957 to go to acting school.
"I'm from Kansas, I get off the bus, I walk into the American Theater Wing, and here I am
studying mime with Barbara Bulgakov, who had a back like a ramrod, who smoked like a furnace,
was just fabulous, and whose husband, Leo Bulgakov, had been in the Group Theater. Gorki's
'Lower Depths' is dedicated to Leo Bulgakov -- dig that!
"Will Lee was my teacher for a year. I adored him. And Dorothy Sands, who taught us shtick."
Green found work, and plenty of it, as an actor from 1955 to 1972. (Barbara Garson's
near-seditious "MacBird!" at the Village Gate was one of the shows he was in.) In '72 he quit
acting in order to raise those three kids -- Miles, Erin, and Geoffrey -- in the big SoHo
apartment he's lived in since 1966, and still lives in today.
"Their mother had left. We were so poor. She was a beautiful, wonderful, talented, loving
woman, and the children adored her, but she couldn't handle poverty and raising children
too."
Nineteen years later he decided to go back to acting. "On my 55th birthday I was dispatching
trucks in Brooklyn, and loved it, was working with about 20 great guys. But I realized, this
is my birthday, my kids are grown, so I walked in and quit. My kids were thrilled. It took 10
months to get a part, to get back on stage again . . . "
Three years ago Green first worked for Pomerantz in a Catskills production of "The Diary of
Anne Frank," as Mr. Van Damm, then again as in a Lincoln Center production of Strindberg's
"Playing With Fire," as the Father.
"So I guess I'm in his book as the guy who does the older parts. A year ago my son Miles, a
composer/musician -- his brother Geoffrey's also a musician -- told me he'd heard that Will
Pomerantz was working on a project that would have something in it for me."
The project was "Prater Violet." If you look in the program you will see one credit for Dylan
Green (as Friedrich Bergmann) and two credits for Miles Green: Sound Design (with Will
Pomerantz) and Original "Prater Violet" Music.
Was somebody saying something about fathers and sons? [Tallmer]
-----
PRATER VIOLET. An adaptation by Will Pomerantz, and directed by him, from the novella by
Christopher Isherwood. Through Feb. 14 at The Salon, 432 E. 91st St., (212) 388-8188.
This time, when Josh Kornbluth was flying in to New York from San Francisco, he had to pay "a
huge extra $50 charge" at the airport for a crateful of books.
"So many, I can't even count them," he says, but they're all books about or by Benjamin
Franklin, our old friend on the $100 bill, and every last one of these works, notably
Franklin's autobiography, were on stage with Ben, or Josh, throughout the two hours of "Ben
Franklin: Unplugged," Kornbluth's latest hit West Coast show that's now at P.S. 122 through
Sunday [JAN 24].
You may remember Kornbluth for his "Red Diaper Baby" at the Actors' Playhouse and elsewhere
Off-Broadway six years ago. I do. It was a warm, personal, funny-frantic memoir about what it
was like growing up in and around New York as the son of two dedicated hard-core American
Communists, and about that boy's sexual baptism with a neighbor lady.
"Ben Franklin: Unplugged" is about, well, Ben Franklin. But also, of course, about Josh
Kornbluth, who since "Red Diaper Baby" has put to the stage various other "chapters of my
life" including "The Mathematics of Change" (on "when I went as a freshman to Princeton sure
I was the greatest mathematical genius in the history of the world"); "Haiku Tunnel" (on
"being a really bad legal secretary at a corporate law firm in San Francisco"); and "Pumping
Copy," a work still in progress about an art form he'd pursued at the Boston Phoenix and at a
Socialist newspaper in Chicago called In These Times.
Okay, why Ben Franklin?
"Well," says Kornbluth, "I was shaving one day and I saw myself in the mirror." He does a
double-take, acting it out. "I'd never realized it before, but I look like Ben Franklin." He
does, somewhat, particularly around the cheeks, broad dome, and hairline.
"At the time," he says, "I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I didn't want
to do another chapter of my life. I'd run out of life. And my wife had just got pregnant. I
didn't want to talk about that in public; didn't want my son someday to talk
about me on stage when he got older."
The son is Guthrie (after Woody and/or Tyrone) Kornbluth, now going on 16 months. Proud papa
pulls out a wallet and a photo. "His first bagel." The wife is Sara Sato, "mostly from Lake
Placid, N.Y. -- a fan who wrote me fan mail and almost ran me over in a parking lot in San
Francisco. She asked if I accepted groupies. I said yes."
Kornbluth's mirror-induced belief that he looked like Ben Franklin created "some opening for
me to get into history, into actual American stuff. In 'Red Diaper Baby' I spoke of this
preoccupation: How when I was a baby my father told me that some day I'd grow up to lead a
Communist revolution in America. So far, as you note, it hasn't happened.
"Yet, to be serious, I felt an obligation to ask: Why am I not politically engaged? Oh, I'd
talked about politics, but I really wasn't political. I didn't do anything.
So -- "
At that point what did you know about Benjamin Franklin?
"Nothing. All I knew was the kite."
All the answers were to be found in an academic preserve called The Ben Franklin Papers, up
at Yale University -- "a collection of everything Franklin ever wrote or received, available
only to scholars." And, as it seems, to persuasive performers. The scene as Kornbluth
describes it was rather like the one in "Citizen Kane" where the reporter in search of Kane's
past sits in a hushed marble mausoleum, turning the ledger pages of the diary of the late
Walter Parks Thatcher, under the stony eye of a guard.
But it was there in New Haven that Kornbluth was also fortunate to meet "someone who was my
guide through this whole process," Franklin expert Claude-Anne Lopez, "a Jewish Belgian
immigrant married to an Italian Sephardic Jew. When I called her, she not only invited me to
their house but made me a risotto. To paraphrase another famous movie, it was the beginning
of a beautiful friendship."
Kornbluth's other guide in transforming himself into Franklin has been director/collaborator
David Dower.
Josh Kornbluth, son of Paul and Bernice ("Bunny") Selden Kornbluth -- pop from the Bronx, mom
from Bensonhurst -- was born in Roslyn, L.I., May 21, 1959.
"My father was a Communist on and off ever since the YCL [Young Communists' League] as a kid.
'Along with almost everyone else in the Bronx,' is the way he put it. I think at one point in
the '60s he was written up in The Villager." And more of the story of Kornbluth's
schoolteacher father and all the rest of it has been filled out by Josh in the book "Red
Diaper Baby" (Mercury House, San Francisco).
"My parents divorced when I was one year old. They fought bitterly over custody, and she won.
My father had me on weekends. He lived on the Lower East Side -- East 7th Street, between C
and D -- and she lived on West 162nd Street in Washington Heights, more recently rated the
top crack block in the city by Giuliani. I don't know what's happened to it since. Now
probably Disney owns it."
In stumbling onto Ben Franklin, Josh also stumbled into what's called an epiphany.
"His autobiography is the best-selling autobiography in history, believe it or not. Two
things immediately intrigued me about it.
"First, that it begins 'Dear Son.' Well, I'm a son and the father of a son: What does a
father pass along to his son, I wondered.
"But even more interesting, the autobiography is written in two parts. The 'Dear Son' first
part is dated 1771. Then there's a break, and it doesn't resume until 1784, which is 13 years
later. The second part is no longer addressed to 'Dear Son,' and in fact only contains very
perfunctory references to that son."
Who must have by then been a 13-year-old brat?
"You'd think so. I was a very bad student in college -- was at Princeton four years but
didn't write a senior thesis and never graduated -- and I don't like footnotes. But in a
footnote I discovered that William Franklin, the son of Benjamin Franklin, wasn't a
13-year-old brat in 1784. He was in fact a 40-year-old in 1771, when his father started the
autobiography, and not only that, but was the royalist Governor of New Jersey.
"Now, think of the timing. Immediately my mind asked: What happened? Why no longer 'Dear
Son'? Well, 1771 was five years before the American Revolution. And William, Ben's
[illegitimate] son, turns out not to have been just a royalist but the most
extreme royalist.
"Suddenly all my obsessions are in one place. Revolution. Fathers and sons. It's all there.
And autobiography is what I do for a living. It's like my whole life and its problems are
encapsulated right before my eyes."
Those eyes -- Kornbluth's eyes -- almost blaze with excitement as he speaks the foregoing
sentences with mounting intensity.
"The answer," he says, leaning forward, again acting it out, his hands twirling, "is not
on the page. It's on the edge of the page."
And, now, on the stage.
BANQUET OF THE BEHEADED
"He [the Executioner] was young and very very tall," she remembers -- her severed head
remembers. "He asked me to present my hands. I protested that I didn't want my hands tied,
that they hadn't done that to the King. But, brutally, he [Sanson] seized my hands and tied
them tight behind my back. Then he lifted me by my hood and cut my hair
"I thought they were going to kill me in the dungeon. It was 11 o'clock and time to go. I
suddenly had an urgent need that required them to untie my hands and let me go to an obscure
place called the Mousetrap. After that, I offered my hands one more time and they were tied
again. Sanson took the other end of the rope as if to lead me like a dog, an Austrian bitch."
They put her in a cart and conveyed her through the howling mob to the guillotine in the
Plaza of the Revolution. "Finally, around noon . . . it was all over . . . I hurried to
Death. In my haste I stepped on the foot of the [Executioner]. My last words? 'Pardon me, I
didn't meam to do that.' "
The head that is speaking these words -- actually the head of an actress named Alice King --
is one of 12 such toppings served up on 12 platters from one end to the other of a long
dining table, in a setup rather resembling "The Last Supper."
But this is a play, or a performance piece, not a painting. It is called "The Banquet of the
Beheaded," and, speaking of heads, it is the brainchild of an artist and colorful woman who
goes by the name of Nicola L. It's just had a nice run at at La MaMa E.T.C.
The 11 other beheadeds, gathered (like Marie Antoinette) from history, headlines, or legend,
were, with the actors who'd played them: Charlotte Corday (Jannie Wolff), Robespierre (Tom
Bozell), John the Baptist (Stuart Rudin), Anne Boleyn (Maureen Campbell), serial murderer
Henri Landru Desire (James Lurie), serial murderer Eugene Weidman (Kurt Williams), Goliath
(Roger Michaelson), Holofernes (Robert Jiminez), Medusa (Edith Meeks), Jayne Mansfield (Maria
Bunina), and Princess Misha, a 19-year-old Iranian beheaded in 1977 for adultery (Nadia
Steinitz).
Michael Warren Powell, director of the show, appeared in it as the French romantic painter
Theodore Gericault, born 1791, right at the start of the Terror by guillotine of the French
Revolution. He sets the scene for Theodora (actress Susan Cella), a modern-day artist and
filmmaker who, in amazing conjunction with Nicola L., had dreamed up this whole decapitated
revelry.
"I was born in Morocco of French parents," says Chelsea resident Nicola L., a dynamic figure
all done up in brown and black from beret to boots, her eyes and much of the rest of her face
masked behind huge tan-rimmed dark glasses.
"My father? A diplomat, kind of, but mostly a horseman. When I was 8, just after the war, we
went to Germany, I went to every lycee possible between Morocco and Germany, and when I was
15, 16, we went to France and I entered the Universite des Beaux Arts at 19, on a grant."
She was first brought to the United States in 1968 by La MaMa's Ellen Stewart, who had seen
Nicola's "The Cylinder" in Paris, and had her replicate it here. Then in 1979 Nicola L.
returned to the States to seek a distributor for her film "Eva Forest," about a heroine of
the Basque E.T.A. This time it was for good. She's still seeking a U.S. distributor for "Eva
Forest," incidentally.
Among her other films is the 1979 "My Name Is Abbie . . . Orphan in America," a half-hour
documentary shot under interesting circumstances.
"I wanted to make a movie about the '60s, and I started interviewing people like Noam Chomsky
and William Kunstler. Abbie I couldn't find anywhere. He was underground, hiding. Then one
day out of nowhere I got a phone call at 8 in the morning." She imitates the deep, hoarse
voice. " 'It's me -- Abbie.' "
He gave her an address on East 34th Street. She threw on some clothes, jumped in a cab, and
rushed over to where Abbie was staying with a girlfriend.
"There were two facing sofas. He threw my coat on one sofa, said: 'If you don't mind,' and
stretched out with his head on my lap."
Was he making a pass?
"I don't know. Just having fun, I think. I interviewed him like that, without a camera. He
said: 'If you want to film me, come back tomorrow, because after that I'll be in jail.' I
went back the next day; there were all these TV trucks outside. Abbie had become a media
superstar."
But she did get her own footage. The assistant cameraman on the job was her son Christophe
Lanzenberg, "who is now a big cameraman in Los Angeles." Of Christophe's father she says
nothing more than "he was a fellow student with me at Beaux Arts, and he's now an art
dealer."
One of the antecedents of "Banquet of the Beheaded" is her 1977 film "The Heads Are Still on
the Island," the island being Ibiza, the heads being huge semi-mythic gold sculptures buried
there somewhere.
Another feed was "Nine Femmes Fatales in Their Own Words," a piece she did at La MaMa three
years ago. The femmes were such as Emma Bovary, Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Mona Lisa,
Cleopatra, Billie Holida, Jeanne d'Arc, Ulrike Meinoff, conceptual artist Eva S.
In researching that project, she came across this femme and that femme who had been beheaded.
One thing leads to another. And did you know, by the way, that Charlotte Corday (1768-1793),
who assassinated Marat and paid for it with her neck, was the granddaughter of Pierre
Corneille (1606-1684), France's greatest tragic playright?
"Absolute truth," says Nicola L., who has kept her head while those all about her are losing
theirs.
[Tallmer]
DIVA WORSHIP AT CARNEGIE HALL
A classically sculpted "Adelaide," by Ludwig van Beethoven, was Heppner and
Rutenberg's opening offering. Impassioned accounts of Franz Liszt's Tre
Sonetti di Petrarca, exploring love's torments and rewards, followed. In a
group of Richard Strauss lieder, the singer lent baritonal timbre to an
intense, sometimes turbulent "Ruhe, meine Seele" ("Peace, my soul") and smooth
half-voice and legato to the sentimental "Morgen" ("Tomorrow"). Heppner made
of "Cacilie" ("Cecily") an impetuous outburst--capped with a ringing top
tone--that might have poured forth from Richard Wagner's Siegmund.
An emotionally driven selection of Sergei Rachmaninoff songs included "Oni
otvechali" ("They answered"), punctuated by some skillful, quiet mixed-voice
head tones, and the Borodin-like "Ne poy, krasavitsa, pri mne" ("Do not sing,
my beauty, to me"), its sinuous Eastern strains scarcely fazing the tenor.
The formal program concluded with what Heppner aptly described as the "schmalz
brothers" section, unabashedly saccharine parlor songs, such as "Homing" and
"The house on the hill," on which tenor and pianist lavished full musical
respect. Best was "Let my song fill your heart," an airy waltz.
Encores, mostly arias, began with Heppner's triumphantly swelling "Prize
Song," from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Then came his no less
fluent "Come un bel di di maggio," from Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chenier,
and, returning to schmalz, "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz," from Franz Lehar's Das
Land des Lachelns (The Land of Smiles), with a final verse in English as "You
are my heart's delight," the sort of thing we're not likely to hear him sing
at the Met. A sensitive "Oh, Danny Boy" ended the evening.
[Gelbert]
Which is not to say that Little By Little doesn't have its amusing moments, most of them provided by Noll, who manages to infuse her character with a warmth and vulnerability that generally eludes her colleagues. The party scene, in which Noll's character becomes progressively soused on Scotch and Sprite ("Whatever you're having," she recklessly tells the host) while trying to follow a long list of dos and don'ts, is great fun. So is a scene near the end, where the three estranged friends, meeting by chance in a movie theater, reestablish a wary rapport over a shared container of popcorn. [Hammond]
CROYDEN'S CORNER
However, the director, David Leveaux, not contented to let the
play speak for itself has, according to his program notes, drawn
analogies to the tragedy in Bosnia. Apparently he hoped to render
a contemporary lesson that hatred, vengeance, retribution and
inter-family violence lead to a never ending cycle of brutality.
To make the point, his designer, Johan Engels set the play not
in the King's castle in Greece but on a dirt and rubble filled
stage signifying no man's land. Center stage is a slab of white
wood covered by a dirty sheet to signify a bed, a coffin, a
platform (or what?). This becomes a prop for Electra to caress,
to talk to, and jump on. Wearing (and sometimes dragging), her
father's oversized soldier's coat reminiscent of World War I,
Zoe Wanamaker as Electra is particularly odd looking. With her
dyed punk haircut and its bald spots tinged with dry blood stains
(has she pulled out her hair in desperatiion?), she marches
around barefoot, climbs on ladders, digs hands and feet into the
dirt floor, throws herself to the ground, lies prostrate in the
dirt, climbs onto the slab, or slouches in as odd shaped wreck of
a chair. For an hour and a half, she carries on; she argues,
screams, scorns, scolds, spits and incessantly repeats her
rationale for vengeance, which she mistakes for justice.
Into this dreary scene comes Clytemnestra (Claire Bloom),
carefully walking on the dirt ground. She is dressed in an all
too obvious blood red gown and a brilliant red velvet cape.
Around her neck are jewels. Her hair is badly cut and her dress,
ill fitting and unbecoming. No great Queen here. The chorus is
made up of three women, two of whom never speak and one (Pat
Carroll)looking like a peasant, speaks for all of them.
This ambiance--its mixed clothing, tawdry surroundings, and no
man's-land setting--dissipates the play's grandeur and underlying
tragedy: the demise of the House of Atreus. It reduces a great
myth to a domestic drama of a dysfunctional family with a mad and
maddening daughter as its centerpiece. The bitter fruits of the
Trojan Wars, where Agamemnon, at the bequest of the Gods,
sacrificed his younger daughter, Iphigenia, to conquer the
Trojans--the single act that precipitated these terrible
consequences--seems to be lost in the verbiage of this
production.
To be sure, the tragedy of the war is part of the exposition in
the play, and that makes it difficult for the company to create
excitement, or conflict. The action is primarily verbal, until
the final predictable killings. The main focus is on Electra's
incessant hatred--the starting point and the finishing point of
the evening. Electra begins her diatribe against her mother at
the very beginning of the play and continues in the same vein
throughout the hour and a half. This continual hammering is one
of the weaknesses of the production. True, the fault may lie in
the writing and adaptation of the play, but the actors are
obliged to overcome this repetition else the evening becomes
boring.
Zoe Wanamaker in the role of Electra, for which she has been
acclaimed both in London and by some New York critics, gives an
uneven performance. She is clearly a brave technician with a
powerful voice and great vocal range that she depends on and uses
to excess. She is clearly at home on stage moving rapidly and
gracefully. Jumping, running, and falling, she uses her body in
imaginative ways. Her emotions stretch from outrage to sadness,
to fury and frustration, to despair and melancholy, even
sarcastic comic asides expressed in growls, grunts, and
gutturals, in shouts, cries, and snivels, and in a variety of
voice patterns. But a genuine inner life is missing. And for all
her emotional diatribes, Ms. Wanamaker's performance is strangely
cold and unmoving. She is not a seamless performer. One sees
technique in every move; she is an actress acting the role, being
sincere, being angry, being emotional, screaming one minute,
whispering another, but clearly she is acting and one becomes
fascinated with the performance, not because it is moving or
memorable but because it is cunning and theatrical, but not
great. And that is a pity. More simplicity would have helped,
even silence at times. The steady litany of venom, produces not
sympathy for the character but only a curious disbelief--even
disinterest.
The counterpoint to Electra's ravings is Chrysothemis, her
sister, played by Marin Hinkle, who is somewhat ineffectual in
this role. She tries to reason with Electra's obsession to kill
the mother, but the actress is unconvincing; her voice is weak
and almost inaudible; besides she is overpowered by Ms.
Wanamaker's actressey presence.
The rest of the cast is adequate. Claire Bloom, doesn't do too
much with her role although she tries to be simple at least.
One is reminded of the great Martha Graham who danced the role of
Clytemnestra in her stunning ballet depicting the murder of
Agamemnon. It is interesting to remember that Martha Graham's
costumes, and simple, but grand setting, with its giant rolled
out red carpet, captured the essence of the myth in a fraction of
a second. And this she did without uttering a word.
Nevertheless, that a great classical play has reached Broadway,
despite its weaknesses, is a good thing. But it would be more of
a triumph if the director had not tampered with the environment.
Audiences can draw its own meaning; it is un-nessesary to inject
a contemporary analogy into the production which, by the way,
may not be evident to the audience, despite the director's notes
in the program.
[Croyden]
Wehle's World
This one is three- dimensional and animated; it
includes sounds of crickets, birds chirping, and the wind whistling on this
barren hill. Here, the young crippled woman, played by Beth Kurkjian, drags
herself painfully toward the house. She seems eager to get to a balloon
floating across the sky behind the house but she only gets so far. An
airplane flying overhead distracts her; stops her in her tracks as it were.
In fact, planes taking off; planes, large and small, flying with the help of
manipulators, Bunraku style, or suggested by sounds of plane engines revving
up for take off or flying overhead, are very much an integral part of Count's
latest enterprise, the first part of a trilogy he has been working on for some
time.
Unlike previous GAle GAtes' productions [Wine-Blue-Open-Water, in 1997 and
Field of Mars in 1998] in which audiences circulated throughout the show,
picking and choosing the scenes they wanted to watch, creating their own
theater piece as it were, for Tilly Losch the audience remains seated while
the action takes place on a Proscenium Stage that opens up at times onto other
proscenium arched playing areas.
Tilly Losch is not a play; it is a "panoramic performance/installation"
interweaving three themes : Tilly Losch, the assemblage or glass-fronted box
created by American sculptor Joseph Cornell in which a young 19th century
woman travels in a balloon over a mountainous landscape; scenes from the film
Casablanca, [the final parting of Ilsa and Rick; "Play it Again Sam," and
other moments in Rick's cafe] and Christina's World.
The piece takes the form of a series of movements or moving tableaux. The
first opens against a mural reminiscent of the mosaic patterns of Maurice
Prendergast's paintings which on closer observation become ladies and
gentleman strolling in New York parks. Here splashes of rusts, reds and ocher
turn into a group of Arabs in lush, colorful robes.
A figure looking like a Dervish with fez and balloon dress enters stage right.
Holding a little red light that makes an amusing dong sound whenever it
blinks, he makes his way across the stage with the jerks and starts of a
pecking bird. A telephone rings incessantly. The figure looks, listens, sneaks
about on tip toe. Soon joined by an identical Dervish, they repeat the same
bird like pecking movements. The back wall opens; a light blinds us - a
tunnel opens up, smoke/fog, sounds of an airplane taking off. Two men in
uniform are seated at a table sipping their coffee and playing chess. Foreign
Legionnaires no doubt. Edith Piaf sings "La Vie en Rose." The phone continues
to ring. No words are spoken.
Thus the stage is set for a reenactment of scenes from Casablanca.
Rick, Ilsa, Victor Laslo and Louis now enter. It's nostalgia time: "Here's
looking at you Kid" and "Round up the usual suspects." The actors, wearing
perfect reproductions of those 40s outfits we know so well, lip- synch the
lines from the film's sound track. We are duly amused as well as moved. As
expected, they soon disappear into the fog.
In the distance, stage rear, a row of theater seats moves by on a conveyor
belt. Rick, Ilsa, and Victor, eating popcorn, sit facing the audience,
watching a movie; as the platform moves on, they reappear in different seats
and different configurations. A chandelier moves by; Louis walks in front of
the seats; a woman in a long black dress plays the violin. The music swells as
Ilsa [Michelle Stern] suddenly flies by in front of the seats. We hear loud
applause. The clapping resounds throughout the theater as Christina's World
moves into play with its sounds of crickets and crows cawing. The crickets'
chirping grows louder; lights go on in the house, a cock crows. It is
daylight. Christina picks up a rose and crawls up the landscape towards the
balloon dragging her legs. Loud sounds of an airplane going overhead. She
turns her gaze skyward and hums a tune.
Another tableau masterfully reproduces the outside of an apartment building
next to New York City's Met Life building with its landmark clock, a part of
which we see ticking away the hours. The colors, a mixture of pale green and
tan, are comforting. It is dusk; time for city workers to return home. New
York's familiar sounds of cars honking and police sirens add to make a perfect
cityscape. Our gaze focusses on the windows of the apartment building. We
watch a woman move about, thumb through a magazine, light a cigarette, open
and shut the blinds - banal activities of an evening at home. The pace is
moderato, the atmosphere, serene. A man comes in, they talk but we hear none
of their conversation. The hands of the clock move on. Next door, a man comes
home, turns on the light, puts on a record, lights a candle and sits and looks
out the window. On either side of the stage, there are two openings, one with
a man, the other a woman. They seem to be looking at themselves in mirrors.
The couple closes their blinds. We hear the sound of an airplane overhead.
They look up.
Ultimately we return to Rick's cafe - December 1941, in Casablanca, where Rick
is drinking and Sam is playing. Ilsa in the opening stage right mournfully
sings "Love me or Leave me " as Tilly Losch comes to a close.
Just as Christina's World lends itself to multiple interpretations, Count's
Tilly Losch hints at possible meanings but gives no clear answers. The
premise is intriguing; the images are splendid and beautifully executed as
always. Counts is a master image-maker. But what does it all mean?
Of course we are free to invent meaning and we normally welcome that
opportunity but here one feels a need for guidance to fit the pieces of the
puzzle together. Certainly the issue of flight is significant to our world but
how does this relate to 19th century ballooning or 20th century life in a New
York city apartment? In what way does Casablanca inform Christina's World or
vice versa? Why do the characters from Casablanca watch a movie facing the
audience? and so on. The possibilities of interpretation are challenging but
in the final analysis, we are left with too many questions
[Wehle]
The photo was flashed around the world and won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Kevin Carter, the fellow who had taken it. Two months after accepting the Pulitzer on the steps of Columbia University's Low Memorial Library, 33-year-old Kevin Carter ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe into the cab of his red pickup truck and, parked in Johannesburg near a small river where he used to play as a child, sat there in the vehicle until he was dead.
"The Sudan . . . I don't even know where it is. That's disgusting," says Lydia, herself an up-and-coming photographer, to Buzz, her own personal buzzard, in a play called "The Moment of Aha" -- a fierce and funny work with a crisp, clean, fresh voice all its own.
"I should know where [the Sudan] is," says Lydia. "If things like this are happening, I should at least know where it is. Instead I'm sitting here on my fat ass drinking Slimfast, throwing away half my food, and looking at this in The New York Times. How close do you think he had to be to get that?"
"He was close," Buzz says,
"[D]id he even try to help this little girl? She can't even stand up . . . [T]his Kevin Carter guy. Just shooting away. He could probably sell his motor drive and feed her for a year. Two even. I bet he didn't interfere . . . "
"He did," says Buzz.
The new voice that speaks to us through "The Moment of Aha" is that of Leslie Nipkow, an actress (and now playwright) who is far too all-American good-loooking for the cop roles she often finds herself playing in films and on TV.
This, her first full-length drama, had a recent three-week run at the Ohio Theatre, directed by Richard Caliban. A shorter piece, "Guarding Erica," performed by actress/writer Nipkow and telling of her adventures in landing a prison-guard's role on soap's "All My Children," wowed viewers a couple of months ago at the Solo Arts Group on West 17th Street.
"The Moment of Aha" scours broader horizons and deeper interiors. Its Lydia Small is not just a photographer, she's young woman with a Mom problem, a Dad problem, an appetite problem, a career problem, a troubles-of-the-world problem, and, of course, a man problem. This particular man, a no-goodnik named Mark, hands her yet another problem:
MARK: I've been wanting to kiss you. I can't believe I said that . . .
LYDIA: Is it my teeth?
MARK: I have a wife . . .
. . . and the wife is Frieda, a vengeful "aging stew" about whom you can say one nice thing and that's all: Peter Jennings once tried to date her.
As a 16-year-old in junior high, the Lydia of the play had a pretty big dating problem of her own. "Aha" cuts back intermittently, with rich dry humor, to show Lydia at that age calling up one boy after another ("Uh, hi Jeremy. This is Lydia. Jen's friend. From the pool?") in a resolute butterflies-in-the-belly effort to hit upon some male to accompany her to the school prom.
"Oh well, she's me," says Leslie Nipkow, a tall, strong (but not too tall, not too strong) young woman with green eyes, short black hair that's a mass of little curls, a healthy complexion, apple cheeks, a winning smile, and dimples to die for. Think Jennifer Jones -- not the saintly one, the naughty one.
"Yeah, you're right, Lydia never gives up," says Lydia's creator and alter ego -- or, rather, her original. "I had to call 25 guys before I got a date to my prom."
That was in 1980 at St. Paul's School for Girls, an Episcopalian institution in Baltimore.
"I ended up with the son of one of my dad's [medical] colleagues. I'd been in school plays with a boy named Bryan, but I was afraid to ask him, so I asked his friend Paul. We all went out together that night as two couples, but halfway through the prom Bryan kissed me. We never mentioned it again. And my date, Paul, today is married and has three kids."
And Mark? The stiff in the play with the wife named Frieda? The real Mark?
"I was involved with somebody who was married," says our Jennifer Jones after a bit. "But in the writing I extrapolated a lot. And I didn't want to go into his head -- into his side of it," she says, flashing that smile, "until an actor started asking questions. Then I started rewriting.
"I've never met the real Mark's wife. I had to make her up. But the Peter Jennings thing is real. At least I was told that." Pause. "It's ruined Peter Jennings for me."
LYDIA: I want to be like everybody else. Thin and pretty and dancing under a mirror ball . . .
MOM: You aren't like everybody else, honey. Don't you know that? . . . They just don't see you for who you are. You're a beautiful girl.
LYDIA: I don't want to be beautiful, I want to be pretty.
* * *
MARK (over candlelit dinner chez Lydia): With cooking like this, how come you're not taken?
LYDIA: Cause I'm big, scary, and intimidating.
feel different, and she said that when she was 10 years old she was already 5/10 going on 6 feet tall.
"It's the same issue: Whatever makes you feel different makes you feel different. I'm not really writing about society and size."
(The rest of the Ohio cast: Frank S. Palmer as Mark, Sean Runnette as Buzz the buzzard, Kathryn Rossetter as Mom, Robert O'Gorman as Dad, Ruth Bauers as Frieda.)
The playwright says that the father in the play is not based on her own father, "except that my father" -- surgeon Hans Nipkow -- "was quiet, and loved taking photographs. He died 16 years ago, when I was in college. In fact I'm writing a play about my father."
The mother in the play is not her mother either -- Barbara Nipkow, a nurse in Baltimore. Leslie's sister Lisa, to complete the circle, is a resident at University of Maryland Hospital.
But Leslie, who got her BFA from Syracuse in the same class as Vanessa Williams and Aaron Sorkin (writer-to-be of "A Few Good Men"), went out and became an actress.
In addition to Guard No. 1 (keeping watch over Erica Kane, i.e., Susan Lucci) on "All My Children," she's been a CSU (Crime Scene Unit) Tech on three segments of "Law and Order"; a racist cop in "a really ugly scene" in Nick Gomez's "New Jersey Drive"; and was left on the cutting-room floor -- "as a cop, of course" -- in the "Muskrat Love" scene between Patricia Arquette and Ben Stiller in "Flirting With Disaster."
On the living stage she's been in Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal" and Craig Carnelia's "Three Postcards," and loved it.
The writing began in a class at New Georges, on 17th Street -- "because I knew if I was in a class I'd have to write" -- where Leslie's teacher was Diana Son, herself a playwright.
"Diana was writing 'Stop Kiss' " -- the terrific play now at the Public -- "while I was writing this one. And she said I was a writer, the first time anybody said that since second grade." Pause. "But I was an actress -- and thought that if I did anything else I'd be diluting my purpose, or giving up, or something."
And now?
"Now I feel so fulfilled. I didn't realize when I was writing this play that I was on the same journey as Lydia. I feel fine. It's sort of like the play has happened to me."
It actually began for her the day she first saw Kevin Carter's photo in The Times.
"And it just stayed with me. Then I had this image in my mind of a family photograph being taken, and all of a sudden the buzzard from the Sudan walked in, literally walked in" -- as Lydia's skeptical, practical inner self -- "and from there I just kept writing forward."
So what does "The Moment of Aha" have to do with anything?
"It's a term I use inwardly as an actress. It's that moment in in rehearsal when everything clicks and everything becomes clear."
A toss of the curly black locks, a smile, a turn of the padlock, and she's buzzing off on her trusty, rusty Raleigh bicycle, no buzzard anywhere in view.
[Tallmer]
FRANNY, ISADORA & THE ANGELS
It was in the Donnell branch of the New York Public Library, across the street from the Museum of Modern Art, that William Hunt a year and a half ago noticed a book with a title that interested him: "Franny, the Queen of Provincetown."
Franny, when Hunt started reading, turned out to be "this guy from Boston -- an outrageous transvestite -- who in the late 1970s goes up to Provincetown, where at first the local people dislike him and ignore him, but he's so sweet that that they begin to like him. He picks up Isadora, a black queen -- just buddies, not lovers. This was before AIDS ever happened -- just before."
The "Franny" book -- which, in the words of its author, John Preston, had been "one of the first gay male novels to present itself as such" -- was published by St. Martin's in 1983. Preston had started work on a post-AIDS -- or, rather, AIDS-era -- sequel, and had in fact signed a contract for the old novel and the new to appear together in one clothbound volume when, on April 28, 1994, one week after the signing, with only 37 draft pages of the new work put to paper, he himself died of AIDS.
It is these 37 pages, edited by Michael Denneny and Michael Lowenthal and brought out by St. Martin's as an addendum to the reissued original novel, that have now become a theater piece, "Franny, Isadora & the Angels," which William E. Hunt ("I hate the E, but Equity requires it") has put together and directed for a recent run at the Sanford Meisner Theater, on Eleventh Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets.
In Preston's 37 scattered pages Franny and Isadora and a few other friends have turned Franny's Provincetown guest house into a hospice for the stricken. The details are quite graphic. "I did not do it because it was a charity!" Frannie exclaims. "There is nothing charitable about watching someone die . . . It is an honor. It is the greatest honor you can have, to be with someone who is dying."
The intensity, the passion, is religious as much as anything. On mama's lap down South, Isadora was inculcated with "Amazing Grace." And Franny? "I knew all about God when I was growing up. I was born Irish Catholic. I had no choice. The man was always in my face. The thing is, when I came out and became a queen I learned I could talk back."
Franny tootles around on his shopping days in a deep-purple electric cart topped by a lavender canopy from which two rainbow flags are flying -- "a political statement [maneuvering] its way through the crowded streets of Provincetown."
He refuses to show emotion in front of the dying. He drives the cart out to Herring Cove, at dawn, and sits there, when no one's around -- "sits in the cart, whether it rains or no," Isadora informs us, "and he cries. He cleanses the grief from himself for a while. Then he comes home."
Bill Hunt, a white-haired pixie in a mauve sweater, collapses in a chair in New York and says: "Dress rehearsals were horrible, but last night -- opening night -- was brilliant." He had nothing but warm praise for his actors: Michael Lipton as Frannie, Judd Jones as Isadora, Ron Bagden as a visiting lawyer named Alan, Mike Rogers and Doug Wirth in support.
"I can't tell you how long it took me to get the rights," Hunt says. "The fact is, I know almost nothing about John Preston."
He himself, he adds ironically, has "been to Provincetown once in my life -- on an elder hostel trip in the spring, two years ago. A very quiet scene, not flaming. We went to see whales and birds and things, not transvestites."
You know, Bill, outrageous transvestites were not so unusual in Provincetown long before the 1970s.
Hunt cracks a laugh. "It depends on how outrageous they were," he says.
The nervy Off-Broadway and Long Island director of the 1950s into the '70s has become quite the senior traveler of the 1990s.
"Usually I'm only the gay person on the hostel trip," he says. "I was a wonderful one for three weeks last year: one week each in Israel, Greece, and Egypt."
William Evans Hunt was born in Manhattan's Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital on Jan. 25, 1923, brought up by his schoolteacher mother and salesman stepfather in Brooklyn.
"When we were rich I went to the Ethical Culture School for a while, and when we weren't I went to Erasmus and Poly Prep Country Day School."
In his third year at Johns Hopkins he was offered a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse, back here in New York, and split from Hopkins to do that. He became a protege of Jack Landau, the teacher and director who years later was murdered.
As a young graduate of the Playhouse, Hunt the actor got into two Broadway shows, "Hickory Stick," by Murray Burnett (co-author of "Everybody Comes to Rick's," the play that became the movie "Casablanca"), and "Men to the Sea," by Herbert Kubly.
"Then I went on a USO tour of 'What a Life,' the Henry Aldrich comedy -- the only legitimate theater company that ever went to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands."
By 1947, after a stint with the Actors' Lab, he'd decided he didn't want to be an actor, did want to be a director/producer. He started a summer theater -- "You know: 'Let's put on a show' " -- and in 1955, just as Off-Broadway was bursting into flower, Hunt opened the tiny Theatre East across from Bloomingdale's on 60th Street.
There he presented such interesting achievements as Moliere's "The Misanthrope" in the Richard Wilbur translation, with Stephen Porter directing "an absolutely unknown cast" -- Sada Thompson, Ellis Rabb, William Ball, Jacqueline Brooks, Dino Narrizano -- all of whom were soon to be rather far from unknown. "Everybody loved it except The Times, which had the nerve to say 'The Misanthrope' was 'dated, fluffy, and prolix.' "
The Irish Players were also at Theatre East for several years, doing John Millington Synge & Co. Jean Genet's "Deathwatch" had a memorable production there. Barnard Hughes made his debut in an Irish play which flopped.
"Our last show was 'Tobias and the Angel' -- that drew four people. I ran the theater for four or five years, but with only 125 seats, I couldn't make it pay."
Hunt went out to Long Island, both to live and to run the Red Barn Playhouse in Northport for 15 years.
From time to time he would return to Manhattan to direct Off-Broadway shows that included some useful premieres and reaped some awards. Among these was a sparkling little "Green Julia" that introduced to the world Fred Granby, an actor who subsequently became a conservative Congressman from Iowa, and James Woods, an actor who subssequently became the remarkable movie star you don't have to be told about.
More recently Hunt has been on the board of Merry Enterprises, a producing body run by his old friend -- and this writer's onetime Perry Street landlady -- Lily Turner.
"Anybody who did a play anywhere near the Village knew Lily. She's now 91 and still feisty, I think that's the word," said Bill Hunt.
He's not exactly unfeisty himself. "We have to close Oct. 25 becuase they've got another booking at the Meisner. If I can raise $50,000 we'll move it," he said. Blithely -- I think that's the word. [Tallmer]
FRANNY, ISADORA & THE ANGELS was presented through Oct. 25 at the Sanford Meisner Theater, 164 Eleventh Ave., between 22nd and 23rd Streets.
Denise Stoklos, the Brazilian performance solo artist, did not have a
play to dramatize, but since it is her 30th anniversary in professional
theater she decided to perform one anyway. Stoklos's "Civil
Disobedience" is subtitled "Morning is when I am awake and there is an
aurora in me." It interprets for the stage Henry David Thoreau's
glowing account of his incarceration, which immortalized his
protest and influenced people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in later
years. Stoklos throws in additional text from a Brazilian philosopher, Paolo
Friere, and a garbled trouncing of Gertrude Stein. To underline the essential
nostalgia of the enterprise, Stoklos actually pulls out books by Thoreau,
Stein, et. al., at several points in the play, and reads from the pages aloud.
Stoklos's unregenerate, entertaining performance piece reveals a hilarious,
irreverent, earthy engagement with transcendental values and spiritual
matters. She is overflowing with optimism and knowing grace. The Annex,
normally used for its dark cave-like recesses, has been flattened out in
Gringo Cardia's white-gallery-like set (set realization by Jun
Maeda). With eight television screens flanked in the air and a circle of
huge ropes hanging down (to represent Thoreau's prison), the strikingly
antiseptic environment, rather like the sci-fi anomie of Stanley Kubrick's
"2001," is meant to evoke the austere infinity of a technological and
digitalized future. If Cardia doubles as Thoreau's forest, this is a jungle
bathed in light. But it is an ambivalent metaphor of arcadia, blindingly
hopeful but forbiddingly self-conscious.
This metaphoric ambivalence also marks Stoklos's performative technique.
Stoklos is an unceasingly playful mime performer and witty caricaturist, and
her modus operandi is to disrupt and subvert Thoreau's text through
impersonation and digression. She performs scenes in which she explodes small
performative bombs within the text she reads out, alternately improvising and
making the words and ideas her own while exposing the anachronistic tendencies
of idealized sentiments that can still stir us by the urgency of the author's
love for freedom and experimental. For instance, she intentionally garbles the
elegant, enigmatic words of Gertrude Stein's prose to expose how her apparent
simplicity hides a radical individualism. Stoklos free-associates with
Thoreau's inordinate pursuit of simplicity by making fun of a woman's
frivolous pursuit of beauty and style. As she tries to pull herself together
by putting on makeup and nice looking clothes (all mimed of course), she
constantly falls down to the floor in a heap.
These pratfalls make for surprising acts of bodily disobedience, but
accumulatively they don't sum up to an integrated whole. In the symposium on
solo performance and experimental theater which came after the November 27
performance (in which this critic was invited as a speaker), Stoklos says she
consciously keeps her performance pieces open, that she consciously refuses
for the work to seem finished. This is quite admirable and refreshing, and the
concomitant effect is to make "Civil Disobedience" reflect Stoklos's open-
ended journey in which the spirit of performance avoids a life of quiet
desperation. But "Civil Disobedience" depicts frisson without quite going deep
enough. She makes no attempt to penetrate, for instance, how the act of
protest was in no way original with Thoreau, and how Thoreau never thought of
himself as a reformer but merely a student of nature. Stoklos merely
luxuriates in the attractive aura of Thoreau's philosophies. And she purveys
the same misunderstanding which Thoreau fans have committed over the years,
which is to overemphasize and overromanticize the nature of Thoreau's
political life. She also relies too heavily on the millennial fever to create
friction where there really is no drama. Millennialism is a fake concept that
skews a true discernment of time and history. It is also employed as an
astrological crutch by those who truly have nothing new and interesting to
say. (For another example, note the millennial tragedy of "The Mysteries of
Eleusis" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) Still, Stoklos is a rose whose
optimism flowers exuberantly, and her inordinate love with ideas and
tradition, combined with a passionate belief in performance as the appropriate
vessel for spiritual exploration, makes her kind of theater not only essential
but also experimental.
Denise Stoklos's new show "Civil Disobedience" performs at The Annex at La
MaMa E.T.C., 74A East Fourth Street through December 13. Call (212)
475-7710.
Speaking of utopian enterprises, Shakespeare's "The Taming of the
Shrew" may seem to be the oddest choice for a late-20th century revival,
particularly when you consider that feminism has pretty much woken us up from
the illusion of male attempts to tame women in marriage and love. So the
Romanian director Andre Serban unearths the story of a drunkard
Christopher Sly in his La MaMa E.T.C. production whose contours was taken from
a similar production staged at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. Sly is
duped by a troupe of players who perform Shakespeare's comic play-within-a-
play. When Sly wakes up and asserts several times, "I know now how to tame a
shrew!" this passionate declaration is actually subverted by the fact that
everything that he remembers is actually a dream.
This dream element opens up the way for the young acting students from
Columbia University to go completely agog and full-throttle with Serban's
Roman-comedy style of presentation. Serban delightfully mixes musical theater
techniques and commedia dell'arte and acrobatic physicalization to give
"Taming of the Shrew" a sprightly kick. Of course, I saw the "official and
approved" version of the production, and what's interesting about Serban's
energized production is how it moves fast and bright and quick and how it
constantly surprises the eye. This has the effect of helping out the acting
students whose tongues don't flow freely in Bard poetry. There's always
something interesting and fun to see, so even when the actors tumble a bit
it's no problem. It's all part of the anachronistic fun.
And what fun! Food is flung. A boxing match is staged. At points, the cast
erupts in musical numbers straight out of "Kiss Me Kate." There's a
pulse-pounding fashion show in which Kate leers over the clothes. Even a trip
from one town to another becomes an enchanting adventure. And what's at stake?
Well, bounteous love, of course, as raunchily outsized as the nipples sticking
out of the pink heart-shaped pillows. And the entire Columbia acting class
performs with quite aplomb. These actors are so very lucky to work with a
director of Serban's stature and endless invention. They are so fortunate, in
fact, that at the end of the show, when Christopher Sly wakes up to realize
that it was all a dream, I begun to wonder how soon these young actors will
wake up in their Serban dream and enter the real, gritty world of the theater.
Will they still perform with such exuberance? Will they still exhibit the same
let's-have-it-all-hang-out innocence? Has Serban tamed these young artists
enough that they are ready to be unleashed on their own in the terrible,
tawdry and untamed world of the theater?
How, you ask, terrible, tawdry and awful could the real world of the theater
be? Try the noisy, clanging monstrosity of Brian Kulick's "Pericles,"
the first production of the 1998-1999 season at the Joseph Papp Public
Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. Not only is the steel Rubik's cube
set unfriendly to emotive actors, the production seems to have been staged by
a rube and a boob. This "Pericles" is so awful that the only writer who could
possibly have liked it is a megalomaniac like Ron Rosenbaum who is so
pleased with himself that he uses his New York Observer column to hype up his
essay in the Stagebill program. Talk about journalistic incest.
Gleaning from Rosenbaum's Stagebill essay, his Observer column, his interview
with Kulick, and in the "Pericles" production itself, it becomes clear what's
deadly wrong here. There's too much undigested insights and masturbatory
intellectualism being flouted about by Bardic blowhards--and too few really
good dramatic ones which were realized on the stage, where it all
really matters. Like Kulick's "Timon of Athens" and "A Dybbuk," this
"Pericles" is a sturm and drum production on wheels and shifty foundation. The
steel set heaves and clangs without apparent sense, making Shakespeare's
fable-like Late Romance about storm-tossed misfortune and magical recognition
look like a noisy construction site. Everything is made outsized and
outrageously big. A gigantic fish is flopped on a steep steel incline. A huge
ship inside a glass case is twirled about. A circle floating in the air
suggest a yellow sun and is brought down to become a whirling table. Even the
costumes are brought to stark contrasts: blue versus gold, red versus blue,
leather versus off-white gauze, yellow versus blue.
What's good about this fish-out-of-water production is that it manages to tell
the story anyway clearly and lucidly in spite of the messy shenanigans. What's
sad is that it turns out to be a truly slender tale filled with magic, loss
and love, all the aspects that are completely thrown out into the sea. In the
second act of the play, some of this is brought back in when the set is
finally put out to pasture, but it's mostly because Shakespeare's text
requires this to happen. Otherwise, Kulick has his bewildering way with the
text, and even manages to insert that hoariest of all concepts: a leather/S&M
depiction of a brothel where Marina is stranded. The only actor who seems to
know what he's doing and tries to inject some humanity into this cold, inhuman
production is Jay Goede, who delightfully plays Pericles by throwing in
some aw-shucks maneuvers and fish-out-of-water naivete.
What's doubly ironic is that Shakespeare's magical fable keeps intruding into
Kulick's bloated production, particularly when Diana resurrects Pericles's
dead wife back to life. It's as if Shakespeare uses magical powers of
storytelling to say, "Hey, Brian, this is a slender play about the adventures
of a noble prince who is later reunited with his family." But, like the
dramaturg-wannabe Rosenbaum, Kulick completely turns a deaf ear to Shakespeare
and subjects "Pericles" to a savage immolation.
In "Reclaiming the Canon: Essays on Philosophy, Poetry and History" (Yale
University Press, 1998), Herman L. Sinaiko gives a thoughtful reading of
Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and revealingly dissects how the novel's
handling of dramatic moments takes on depth and luminosity. "Each of these
chapters, or dramatic moments, has the character of a complete and unified
whole, even if it portrays only a portion of an event or conversation that
extends over several such chapters," Sinaiko writes. "These dramatic moments
are the building blocks of the novel. Tolstoy so arranges them that they form
clusters or groups, each of which constitutes a larger episode in the
development of the action. The larger episodes are themselves grouped together
into the eight major parts of the work." So given the dramatic intensity of
the novel, it makes perfect sense that the Shared Experience Theatre,
an international theatre company based in England, has attempted to
theatricalize Tolstoy's epic novel. It was recently presented at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music.
Adapted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Nancy Meckler, this
sprawling stage adaptation is without question pure theatrical tour de force.
Using only eight actors, the Shared Experience Theatre holds nothing back in
the use of body, movement and voice to suggest a teeming, swarming metropolis,
full of amorous couplings, mimed eroticism, raucous social gatherings,
stylized depiction of race course scenes, and domestic rituals. What Shared
Experience has done here is to reclaim the novel from its previous
incarnations as film and television adaptations. On stage, the double
narrative of Anna and Levin gets its full emotional due and translates for the
stage the thematic unity of Tolstoy's novel. Meckler's direction buoys the
narrative with a vigorous athleticism. The mix of naturalized and stylized
movements makes for an exciting interplay that reveals the complexity of the
novel.
But while the novel is not diminished, perhaps there's just no getting around
the essentially moralistic and bodice-ripping elements of Tolstoy's novel. In
fact, Sinaiko himself concedes that the simple moralism lies dormant in the
novel, and that amid the profusion and tempestuous chaos of events swirling in
the novel, this Russian moralistic view provides an anchor for the readers.
But on stage, Tolstoy's omniscient view about aristocratic decay from within
side by side the rise of the noble proletariat is shown up for what it
essentially is: a parable that reflects the black and white dialectics of the
revolutionary era in which Tolstoy lived.
Perhaps it is time we stopped taking Paul Rudnick too seriously. This
playwrights shoots one-liners the way cowboys fires bullets, but he's not
exactly Sister Wendy. He's no fount of deep philosophical musings. While we
don't really mind his films treading lightly on serious matters, his plays
continually assert serious and dramatic aspects which truly run counter to the
flippant, facile entertainment which is his Aristophanic forte.
This has never been clearer than in "The Most Fabulous Story Ever
Told," which recently opened at the New York Theatre Workshop. It
is the most entertaining piece of utter nonsense since, well, "The Greatest
Story Ever Told." The first act is a twistedly funny account of the
creation story from the book of Genesis, but seen from the perspective of two
homosexual couples, Adam and Steve, and Mabel and Jane. It depicts an
uproariously funny alternate reality that aggressively fantasizes the first
gay kiss, the first anal sex, and the first stirrings of phallic pleasure. In
both the satiric dramaturgy and the anachronistic one-liners, Rudnick seems to
have composed the play with all the fervor of a shopper with a demented
grocery list. He checks off every piece of hysterical biblical allusion and
pop culture reference that could possibly be conceived. Nobody is spared, not
Buddha, Jesus or Calista Flockhart. All of this leads to an overlong
and draggy second act in which he attempts to deal with domestic issues like
gay marriage and lesbians having babies. in effect, he's written a rompish
curtain raiser followed by an anti-Christmas one-act play that questions the
existence of God.
Still, the production is not a complete waste of time. Joanna Adler, Becky
Ann Baker, Jenny Bacon and Lisa Kron are all completely delightful.
Amy Sedaris is completely underutilized. And the penises of Alan
Tudyk and Juan Carlos Hernandez look completely delectable.
Whatever the play is ultimately about, and I can only speculate from the
hilarious confusion Rudnick has laid out, "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told"
is not only a satire about God, Christmas and moist towelettes but also a
slyly cynical expression of religious agnosticism. Basically he's saying that
yes lesbians can be mothers, and that gay men who have HIV can live happily
with gay men without HIV, but no God does not exist because if he does he
would have stopped the plague already. The problem is that Rudnick hasn't
earned his right to say any of this, because essentially the first act is a
fantasy about an edenic past long gone and the naturalistic second act deals
with sobering realities of 1990s gay life which the first act completely
sidesteps and avoids from addressing in the first place. If being queer was
ever a wild, rollicking force of nature, "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told"
depicts how it's being tamed by spiritual beliefs. And how as a comic
playwright Rudnick has become a kind of Merchant of Greenwich (Village).
Underneath the bright sheen and uproarious laughter (and it is funny)
there lies a really dark and truly nihilistic subtext that basically implies
that God is an autocratic stage manager who ran off in a taxi cab because he
couldn't give a flying fuck about the physical suffering and psychic anguish
of human beings.
[Gener]
Dance Review The story concerns a young Baron named Cosimo who, fleeing his whimsical and overbearing mother and the demands of society, takes up residence in the treetops, where he communes with the local wildlife and produces a Constitution for an Ideal State in the Trees. The narrative, however, was not the main point of the exercise, and it often seemed to be given only glancing treatment; this was, after all, basically a dance piece, and Striar, as La Generalessa, Cosimo's mother, went full out¯tottering crazily about or popping her eyes out at some bizarre provocation, she was a sight not to be missed. The rest of the cast was fine, too, notably Patti Bradshaw, a dancer I'm always pleased to see, and Frank Schneider, who also shows considerable comic talent. Britt Whitton, though clearly no child, was engaging as the arboreal Baron. The simple but clever set design was by Walter Martinelli; costumes were by Leslie Chilton and Striar. The lighting design, at a theater where "across the footlights" is no mere figure of speech, was by Kay Albright.
As the show begins, we see Bradshaw and Schneider framing themselves, holding a pair of ornate picture frames. These are the distinguished Ancestors whose portraits adorn the palace, but they are hardly content to hang mutely on the walls. "Stop snoring!" "Who are you?" "He's senile." "Who is she?" and so forth escape their presumably painted lips. This is fun if a bit confusing, since the Ancestors don't have much to do with the story, existing only to be torn from their frames and smashed in one of Cosimo's fits of vandalism. This bad behavior has been provoked, it seems, by La Generalessa, who comes fluttering in, her uniform bedecked with medals, swaying feverishly back and forth somewhat like a child's top--a large and seriously demented one, to be sure. As she oscillates wildly around the floor or takes the delinquent Cosimo over her knee, her eyes seem about to pop right out of her head. I've never seen anything quite like this delightful cartoon of a character; one might be reminded of the mad queens and duchesses of Lewis Carroll. Another chance to shine comes in a zany duet for Striar and Bradshaw that apparently depicts Cosimo's dream picture of adults, danced to what sounds like Indonesian music. Striar twitters and mugs as they slap each other and crawl about, squeaking. Given this view of the adult state, it's no wonder Cosimo heads for the trees, despite mother's attempt to entice him down with a nice, heaping plate of snails. "How can you be a Baron if you don't eat snails?" she asks, sensibly enough.
The plot plays out to the story's end, including a particularly fetching bit by Bradshaw as the love of Cosimo's life, but after La Generalessa's demise the piece begins to hang a bit limply. It is in its comic dances that the piece finds its real life. I am told that the piece may have yet more evolution in store for it. Let us hope that a new incarnation will treat at even greater length of the joys of dysfunctional motherhood.
[Baumgartner]
Obie-winner Ernest Abuba has one of the most resonant voices on the
American stage. At its best, he speaks with poetic clarity and sheer
eloquence. However, at its least effective, his emotive voice can be
relentlessly one-note. Unfortunately, Abuba is grating to the ear most of the
time in his fascistic interpretation of "King Lear." This is not simply
bad acting. He is a victim of bad dramaturgy. His conception of Lear is an
atrociously insular revisionism of Shakespeare's tragic king. Not to mention,
completely unsympathetic. Abuba's King Lear is a ruinous tyrant. His vanity
and pride cause a holocaust that, in the terms of the production, is
comparable the historical horrors of Sarajevo, Armenia, Khmer Rouge, Tibet and
Warsaw Ghetto. (Whew!) Anyway, despotism does not exactly leave a lot of room
for emotional development. Abuba's Lear is verbally abusive and completely
condescending. He screams at everyone at the top of his voice. So when his
daughters collude against Abuba's Lear, the first words that came to mind was,
"You go, girls!"
Is it important to note that every other character in this production was
physically taller than the dictator-king? Indeed, if this adaptation, which
was presented at La MaMa E.T.C., had been replete with scatology, you'd
be forgiven if you mistook it for a post-Jarry version of "Abuba Roi." But the
production, which is co-directed by Abuba and Shigeko Suga, insists on
confounding us by calling itself a version of Shakespeare. It wasn't until I
read the press release after I'd seen the production that I could even
begin to understand how sharp the interpretive scalpel used here.
According to the release, Abuba's millennial thoughts on Shakespeare issued
from Gloucester's doomy predictions in the first part of the play about
mutinies, discord, palatial treason and the emotional breakdown between
fathers and daughters. So he imagined a fascistic society, set in the near
future, where "the breakdown of society and regression to primitivity is
indicated by the warrior's use of camouflage paint, warpaints and tattoos."
Now while I did see warriors smearing themselves with dirt, it was not clear
while seeing this misguided production that this was the intent.
Further, it's not clear why a Second Fool would videotape the goings-on in
front of us and project harrowing images on the dark walls. The first Fool was
abominable enough. A generous reading might suggest that the Second Fool
represents a kind of all-seeing, technocratic correlative to the symbolically
blind Lear. Perhaps it represents the subversive effect of television on the
outcome of the Vietnam War and other modern horrors. But that's like giving
the camcorder too much credit. (Besides, how are we to address the fact that
during Desert Storm the media actively colluded with the military-industrial
complex?) It's even harder to find compelling any of the choreographic
movements which the release has the audacious gall to describe as a blend of
Butoh, flamenco and West African dance. When the p.r. release alludes to
"Apocalypse Now," "Lier Rex" begins to bend over backwards in its attempt to
reach out and find relevance.
Perhaps it would have helped if Abuba & Co. simply printed the press release
in the program. Then again, a press release does not an artistic statement
make. And a host of allusions not theatrically realized signify nothing. (I
won't even touch the confusion of accents.) "Lier Rex" is not only a case of
too many ideas spoiling the brew. It is a mass of undigested matter. Which is
a damn shame because Kaori Akazawa's disturbing set design suggests a
haunting minefield of splintered bodies and exploded parts. And the superb
musicality by Yoshi Shimada who performs on percussion and flamenco guitar,
kept my eye and ears piqued throughout what in less gifted hands would quickly
devolve into an interminable evening. Jodi Lin's Cordelia is soulful
and beautiful presence. (Also good were Michael O'Connel as Kent and
Doug O'Lear as Edmund.) As for the rest, better luck next time.
Uta Hagen struck me as mannered and hideous as the gorgon in "Mrs.
Klein," directed by William Carden. So when she won awards and
great critical acclaim for her performance in that play, they felt undeserved;
now this was an example, I thought, of one of those legendary actresses simply
coasting on the glory of her past. You know, like Arthur Miller.
All of these thoughts and qualms got quickly banished when I saw her in Donald
Margulies's "Collected Stories," a Pulitzer Prize finalist from last
season when the same role was performed by a severely miscast Maria
Tucci at the Manhattan Theatre Club. First of all, Hagen actually
convinces us that her Ruth is Jewish. (In Maria Tucci's hands, this was never
so, and Ruth looked like a stern piece of hardened artery.) But that's not
all. Hagen performs with such generosity of spirit that she actually hands
over the first half of the play to Lorca Simon's Lisa, Ruth's young
protégé. Of course, in a way, Hagen has no choice, for Ruth merely spars
verbally with Lisa, and it isn't until the last part of the first act (when
Ruth remembers her relationship with Delmore Schwartz) that Hagen a
full-fledged monologue. Like a cat ready to pounce, Hagen waits for her
moment, and then flies.
There is also more warmth and heart in Hagen's Ruth. And not just because
she's older than Tucci, though that helps. In contrast to Simons, who is
endearing and funny but scratchy in part and gratingly hard-edged in others,
Hagen exudes a soft vulnerability. And it breaks through even when Ruth is
meant to be a formidable creature.
On second viewing, "Collected Stories" seems more and more like Margulies's
humanistic answer to David Mamet's "Oleanna." Both plays are certainly
structured similarly: the relationship between a teacher and her pupil, over a
period of time, erupts into hate and rivalry. This is Margulies's most obvious
attempt to write the kind of commercial play that can easily be mounted in
regional theaters all over the country. And by writing about the literary
world, he lends the play a veneer of thought-provoking ideas and high class;
we can, therefore, be assured that the talk will be interesting, and we're not
watching some stupid play featuring foul-mouthed characters with IQ's below
sea level. Further, Margulies wins points by dropping names, too. When Ruth
cracks a joke that "Life is too short to read The New Yorker," she gets a huge
laugh, particularly from urban audiences whose laughter acknowledges that they
are, well, "in the know."
Is "Collected Stories" a great play? Not really. But it's certainly an utterly
satisfying entertainment. (Margulies has certainly written greater plays in
"Sight Unseen," "The Loman Family Picnic," and the towering
masterpiece, "The Model Apartment," the latter of which, if you ask me,
should have won the Pulitzer.) Still, what in lesser acting hands would seem
merely intriguingly smart "Collected Stories" vaults into the stratosphere of
compelling in the magisterial persona of Uta Hagen. Who knew that she could
infuse this well-crafted play with so much emotion and unbearably beauty?
Hagen never fails to deliver a sterling, ineluctably moving performance. Don't
miss "Collected Stories" with Uta Hagen, for this is as close to the divine as
we mortals are allowed in our lifetime.
"Collected Stories" plays Tuesday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m.,
Wednesday and Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00 p.m. at the Lucille
Lortell Theatre (121 Christopher Street). Tickets are on sale through January
3. Call Telecharge at 239-6200. Prices are $37.50 and $49.50.
At the Here Theater in Soho, The Threshold Theater Company's third
annual "Caught in the Act" festival proved, as usual, to be a lot of
fun. The festival's three rotating programs (of which I saw two programs)
employ about 10 directors, 10 designers, and a cast of 30 actors. Even when a
couple of the productions falter somewhat or drag on too long, the Threshold
production values are nevertheless imaginatively high, the choice of plays
consistently Euro-smart, the translations mostly actable, and the performances
mostly engaging, when the actors don't dally with the dialogue. Fifteen
international one-act plays from 1905 to 1983 by authors like Emilio
Carballido, Valerii Briusov, Slawomir Morzek, and Dario Fo and his
wife Franca Rame were placed on the diversity menu.
Since the series has garnered a host of hosannas for being an outlet for
European dramatic literature, it is with some chagrin to report that the
Threshold festival makes huge missteps in its one and only Asian foray.
Directed by Elizabeth Swain, "Hanjo" (Japan, 1955) by Yukio
Mishima suffers from a stilted adaptation by Donald Keene and a severe
case of miscasting. Stripped of its elegant Noh trappings, the play comes
across as an overwrought mystery tale about the search for lost love--and
ultimately a sad, pathetic one about unrequired lesbian love. Still, the
production begins promisingly enough, with a ritualized dance involving an
exchange of fans between Hanako (Kim Ima), a geisha, and Yoshio (Masa
Sakamaki), the man she loves. The play takes a wrong turn when the narrative
actually starts: long after the two have separated and Hanako's contract has
been purchased by Jutsiko (Suzi Takahashi), the play comes off as a prosaic
and badly acted battle-of-wills over the possession of Hanako. When Yoshio
shows up, the performances collapse into unnatural squirmings all over the
floor and hectic quarreling.
"A Sunny Morning" by Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez-Quintero
(Spain, 1905), translated from the Spanish by Lucretia Xavier Floyd, is the
best-known play by two Spanish brothers who specialized in comedies of
Andalusian manners. It's a sweet, lovely, very memorable play about re-
discovered love. Doña Laura (Jacqueline Brookes) and Don Gonzalo (James
Stevenson) meet on a park bench in Madrid (or Central Park today), one sunny
morning, and slowly realize that, when they were young, they had been former
lovers whom circumstances had fated not to meet. The frisson occurs when the
two don't tell each other that they recognize the other's identity.
Unfortunately, while the production has moments of good humor and grace, the
precious quality of the nostalgic tale is marred by the snail-like pace and
draggy performances of Brookes and Stevenson, particularly the latter actor
who seemed to be struggling to remember a couple of his lines.
Similarly, "The Curve," a 1960 German play by Tankred Dorst,
breaks the backbone of gothic horror and amorality that is supposed to keep
the slender sinister tale on its toes. The naturalistic performances do not
quite gibe with the absurdism of the grotesque tale in which two brothers send
letters to the city government regarding a dangerous curve that has killed
many people. The twist is that it is ultimately revealed that their actual
intent (to keep the road unsafe) counters their apparent intent (to fix the
road), for it is only when the road continues to cause deaths that the two
brothers can find some sort of livelihood (they fix up the beat-up cars or
sell it off for money). Anyway, the translation is overlong and draggy.
Also draggy in a semi-serious, seriously unfunny manner is "Orison," a
play by Fernando Arrabal, in which he attempts to deconstruct the
nature of goodness and stand it on its head. For the most part, the play makes
fun of the improbability of biblical injunctions on what it means to be good,
with the man suggesting Adam and the woman suggesting an inquisitive Eve.
Indeed, the most delightful parts of the Threshold festival were the one-act
plays that knew enough to keep it short. So kudos to Daniel C. Gerould whose
translations of the short-short-short selections from "The Little Theater
of the Green Goose" (Poland, 1946 to 1953) were fast spritzes of hilarious
non-sense. Particularly funny in the absurdist manner were "The Peculiar
Waiter," the quick repartee in "Hamlet and the Waitress," and the hotdogs in
"He Couldn't Wait It Out!" Also delightful was "The Mirror," a 1957
play by the Mexican playwright Emilio Carballido. This one flirts with
farcical realism and high-style absurdity. A posh room becomes stripped of its
romantic trappings as an adulterous affair gets deliriously exposed.
"Edward and Agrippina," a 1961 French play by Rene de Obaldia,
and "The Wayfarer," a 1910 Russian play by Valerii Briusove,
were particularly interesting to watch because the women in them (Joan
Sheppard and Francesca Di Mauro, respectively) turned in very, very good
performances. "Edward and Agrippina" is a sort of backhanded murder story in
which Sheppard's insufferably yakking Agrippina gets killed off when an
intruder busts into the bedroom. "The Wayfarer" also concerns an unknown man
entering a closed room, but because he is mute, the play is virtually a long
monologue by Di Mauro who expertly takes us from here to there--and gives us
more. The work of both Sheppard and Di Mauro represent the high standards of
acting one often sees in Threshold performances.
But the most blessedly riotous performances were by Tom Mardirosian and
Frederica Meister in Dario Fo and Franca Rame's "The Open
Couple." These two bulbous creatures lock horns as their married
characters experiment on having an open relationship. What's superb here is
that the performances, an orgy of anger and revenge and jealousy, verge on
performance art. Although it might have been a treat to Italians to have seen
the original Fo and Rame perform this play themselves, it's unlikely that
Americans will feel gypped by these two actors working at the top of their
form. Bravo!
The title, "Sonata Da Camera Obscura," sounds mightily high-falutin'
and its descriptive intent (to focus on "the counterpoint between
homosexuality and music" and "the concept of how we appropriate specfici
songs, lyrics, and musical genres to help capture and express our thoughts,
emotions, and desires") was not so much dramatized as performed. But Nintzel
wonderfully delivers the goods. There are five movements to Nintzel's
exploration. The first, "A Piano Bar (Allegro)," is essentially a revue of the
first refrains of show tunes. Nintzel sits behind a piano as several men, all
holding many different colored wine glasses, gather around to sing everything
from "Some Enchanted Evening" to "Wonderful Guy." The main point is to
introduce a hunky sailor, whose presence or absence constitutes "the
narrative" that binds the evening together. "Torch Song (Adagio)" features a
superb performance by Dan Thaler whose sweet, supple operatic voice is the
highlight of the entire evening; this is a singer to watch. "Opera Queen
(Baroque Scherzo)" follows the death of the sailor. This is the wildest, most
grotesque, sensationally absurd moment of the evening in which the Nintzel
dresses up in mounrful Victorian drag bursts forth from a cinema screen and
onto the stage. The whole moment recalls "The Piano" in a rage of
psychological storm, with tissue papers flying, and grotesque wailings, and a
picture of the dead sailor hanging on a pole.
"Torch Song (Adagio)", the fourth movement of the evening, is meant to be a
mournful, passionate hymn of grief by the pianist/widow. Because Nintzel can't
sing, it's the weakest moment of the evening. And because he chooses to remain
withdrawn and pallid thoughout the song, it is also least dramatic. (For a
more effective example of the same dramaturgy, see Sally Bowles's breakdown in
the second act of "Cabaret.") "A Discotheque (Allegro con Coda)" is the most
Felliniesque of the entire evening. The entire cast gyrates in wild abandon
and in glittery costumes all night at a disco; the moment is meant to be an
explosion of revelry in which the pianist goes back into the fold of decadent
revelry. But the evening ends on a haunting, superearthly note, as the ghost
of the sailor returns to discover the remains of the all-night party.
"Sonata Da Camera Obscura" is a marvelously conceived and touchingly brought-
off meditation on life and death in the gay world. It deserves a longer life.
The nature of appropriation of commercial images is also the subject of
Anne Bogart's latest creation, "The Culture of Desire," at
New York Theatre Workshop. Her main contribution here is to bring
Warhol into a Dantesque consumerist hell. The first part of the evening
delights: an assorted bevy of underground superstars wheel around shopping
carts and sing hymns of grocery lists. And the writing is very good. Every so
often Diana Vreeland pauses to deliver chilling art criticism on Warhol's
silkscreens. Tthe rest of the evening devolves into the benumbed state of
Warhol's psyche, after he got shot by Valrie Solanas.
There's nothing inherently repugnant about the production, which has been
universally put down. The lighting and design are first rate and the emotional
tones swings to and from coldly intellectual, brightly parodic and
relentlessly ironic. The problem is that Bogart has decided to deal with a
subject on a supremely untimely manner. She's turned in a Warhol-piece about
30 years too late--long after everybody else, fans and detractors alike, has
said just about everything that could be possibly said on the subject. In
"Culture of Desire," Bogart practically redefines procrastination. Even the
Warhol Foundation at Pittsburgh had to trump up Warhol's connection with
fashion in order to mount a recent Whitney retrospective.
When I spoke to Bogart several months ago, she made it clear to me that she's
interested in creating a repertory of theatrical pieces for the Saratoga
International Theatre Institute (SITI) Company which would function much like
the pieces in a dance company's repertoire. The culture of her desire is to
have several of works performing simultaneously at various places in the
country. This, in part, explains why most of her pieces have involved cultural
personages: Marshall McLuhan, Bob Wilson, the movie stars of the
American silents, and now Warhol. (Who's next? Noam Chomsky?) Basically what
she's doing here is to create theatrical pieces that both inform and summarize
their various contributions. In terms of stage biography, these pieces are
indisputably smart. Whatever their emotional coldness, a Bogart creation is a
stylishly done retrospective portrait that manages to both capture the
cultural persona as well as comment on it. So it is massively unfortunate that
there is nothing original about her ideas on Warhol. Perhaps these productions
would be of some educational value to universities and art colleges, but as
cultural events the effect is becoming virtually nil.
Now I know I am screwing up another opportunity to ever be given a chance to
interview Bogart in person again. I bear no ill will toward her, and frankly I
only wish the best and brightest for the SITI Company in the future. But what
is utterly distasteful about "Culture of Desire" is the massive egotism
behind the production.
Let me explain. Now most directors are known to be authoritarians who throw
their huge egos around. It would be a shock if they were not. But there is a
whiff of status-grabbing desperation in what Bogart & Company have done here,
and it's not in the production--it's in the center of the program which
presents "A Culture of Desire Timeline: Dante, Warhol, Bogart, and NYTW."
At first glance this timeline seems to give us a quick survey on important
events in Warhol's career as an artist and Dante's career as a poet. But as
the timeline moves from 1265 to 1998, it becomes clear that Bogart manages, in
all seriousness, to somehow intervene herself into the narrative so that the
effect is to place her on equal footing with Dante and Warhol and NYTW as
artistic creators.
The crucial leap happens from 1987 when Warhol dies to 1992 when SITI is
founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki "to redefine and revitalize
contemporary theater in the United States through an emphasis on international
cultural exchange and collaboration." Now while individually these items are
factual enough, the connection between them is just about as uninsightful and
negligible as any of the serial connections made in the timeline. If Bogart
were sharing to us the time when she met Warhol face to face and had a
meaningful encounter, that would be one thing. But to put non-events in a
timeline and make them pose, without a discernible trace of irony, as
significant milestones?
Is it really such a landmark event in the long history of the American theater
that Bogart first set foot in the Andy Warhol Museum in 1996? Let's set aside
the fact that hundreds of writers and artists have explored Dante's Hell as
metaphor years ahead of Bogart. But is it really important for all the world
to know that Bogart discovered the Inferno as "a metaphor for America's
absoption by consumerism" in early 1997?
If so, I would like to publicly declare several important milestones in the
history of American theater and art. (1) I, "the great Randy Gener," first
took a dump in the men's restroom of the Andy Warhol Museum in early 1997. (2)
I also feel compelled to reveal that Dante revealed himself to me in a sex
dream in one morning in 1998 and took off his dentures and gave me the best
blowjob I have ever received in my life, without the benefit of a cigar?
Quick, alert the editors of "Cambridge Guide to World Theatre"!
Well, you get the picture. [Gener]
For one Martin Short (though a competent and talented comic) in
the leading role that Caesar created is no Sid Caesar. Two,
Faith Prince as Belle, both as a young girl and an older one, is
sadly miscast. Lacking charm and youth, a bit overweight, she is
unconvincing as the silly "riff raff" Belle who, through luck,
sex appeal and manipulation rises to the top. The satire is so
over laden with corny jokes and obvious shtick that any
semblance to the sophisticated Patrick Dennis tale, adapted by
Neil Simon, is sadly lost. Simon was a master comic writer but now his jokes
are tired, dated, too borscht belt oriented and very much old
vaudeville style without its nostalgic charm.
The gimmick in this show is Martin Short's playing all the men --
eight parts--who are all part of Belle's life: her first lover, her
ex-lover, her benefactor, her army husband, her French lover and
so forth. But Short's rapid exiting and entering, his quick
costume and makeup changes become a dizzying, tiresome affair
that once seen and endlessly repeated, loses its kick. Yet Short goes on and on. The result is distracting for the audience,
who constantly wonders how it's all done. But the gimmick
doesn't work: costume changes alone do not create characters.
Then there is Faith Prince. In a blonde (fright) wig, a
grotesque, gaudy, vulgar costume that emphasizes her bosom and is
intended to satirize her most important feature, poor Ms. Prince
looks awful. She seems ill at ease on stage and sometimes is even
clumsy. Most of all, she lacks charm. And that is a most
important aspect to this role.
The rest of the company is typical of the Broadway musical. They
dance well, the choreography is sometimes very good, if
predictable and the boys and girls are handsomely costumed (why Ms.
Prince is not is a mystery). The youthful ensemble does liven
things up a bit, but not enough to hold the audience's attention.
Directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall with music by Cy
Coleman, the numbers are loud, Ms. Prince is off key most of the
time and the mikes make everyone sound nasal. None of the songs
are memorable though Cy Coleman is an accomplished composer
having won his share of Tonys; lyricist Carolyn Leigh is also
skilled in the business. But sadly, neither the songs, the
lyrics, or the book are first class. And with Mr. Short running
around the stage all night long--that in itself is enough to give
one a headache.
An end to these revivals, please. Some new material is needed.
And some new blood.
[Croyden]
For, Mr. Patinkin is of no help there. He sings each song in
exactly the same manner. Either he is shouting, whining, or self-
pitying. He never renders the meaning of the song; he is too busy
rendering himself. Every number is overdone, overstated,
overplayed, or forced. Nothing is simple, nothing is quiet--no
silences here, and certainly no nuances. Overwhelmingly
sentimental, whiny, schmaltzy, the songs--almost a caricature of
Jewish sensibility--are the more regrettable features of the
evening. Patinkin depicts Jews as self-pitying victims,
nostalgically dreaming of the "old country". What nostalgia, one
wonders? Did the Jewish immigrant long for the pogroms, or the
didactic rabbis, or the general poverty and hardship of ghetto
life? In singing of the newly arrived immigrant to America,
Patinkin drags in an obnoxious version of "God Bless America" in
Yiddish, no less, flanked by a huge American flag. This is
followed by a Yiddish version of "Take Me out to the Ballgame,"
a sholck allusion to the long forgotten Borscht Belt comics,
whose style and wit are plainly absent here.
Patinkin's overall portrayal of Jews, coupled with his
uncontrollable narcissism, vitiated the sweetness and charm of
some of the songs. His rendition of "Ofyn Pripetshik", a simple
song about a rabbi teaching his students the elemental Hebrew
alphabet is an example. Does he sing that song simply? No, he
dramatizes it as though it were a great tragedy. Similarly with
his "Rozhinkes Mit Mandlen," another recognizable lullaby that he
instills with pseudo sadness.
Though talented, Mandy Patinkin's forte is not subtlety.
Excessively conscious of himself, he is always acting (over-
acting) and is never believable--especially when he exhibits his
main trick--using his lower register, a basso voice, and quickly
switching to his soprano voice. Repeatedly showing off with this
technique, Mr. Patinkin gives the impression that he thinks he is
some kind of unique singer, but the effect is the opposite. By
repeating this showy "trick" throughout the evening, he only
succeeds in calling attention to himself. Which makes the evening
particularly tiresome.
One good point, however, is the appearance of a charming young
Japanese violinist, Saeka Matsuyama who, at times, accompanies
Patinkin's songs. And this breaks up a very monotonous evening.
[Croyden]
A Striking "Crucible"
The DiCapo Opera Theatre, performing in the basement of the Church of
Saint-Jean Baptiste, on the Upper East Side, closed its season in April with
a persuasive account of "The Crucible," composer Robert Ward and librettist
Bernard Stambler's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1961 operatic version of Arthur
Miller's 1951 play, set during the witch-hunt hysteria in Salem,
Massachusetts in 1692 and inspired by the insidious purges conducted by
Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the
1950s. I caught "The Crucible" on April 17, the second in a run of six
performances. Conductor Michael Recchiuti guided the orchestra and singers in
this striking revival. Company general director Michael Capasso devised
staging in which an especially gripping third act courtroom scene stood out.
Basic settings were by John Farrell and aptly somber costumes by artistic
director Diane Martindale.
"The Crucible" by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler
Dicapo Opera Theatre
April 16, 17, 23 & 24 at 8 p.m., 18 & 25, 1999, at 3 p.m.
Tickets $33 at box office at 184 East 76th Street
phone 212-288-9438.The Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse
68th Street between Park and Lexington Avenue
212-772-4448
March 18-March 28,1999
Reviewed March 22,1999 by Margaret CroydenMASTER MIME MARCEL MARCEAU
MARCEL MARCEAU; 50 YEARS OF GENIUS
Marcel Marceau and Bip have come and gone. They gave a solo performance at
the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse for nearly two weeks, March 18 through
28. Bip, of course, as anyone who has ever seen Marceau in person or on TV
knows, is Marceau’s created character—like Charlie Chaplin’s “the tramp.”
One might say that Bip is Marceau’s altar ego, the everyman who deals with
life’s vicisitudes and petty anxieties for better or worse. The character
has served us all well for over 50 years, for while we laugh at his
predicaments, more importantly, we smile and shake our heads in recognition
and agreement: “Yes, that’s the way it is!”
The Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse (Hunter College)
March 18 through 28 (closed)
by Perry A. Bialor March 24, 27, 1999Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan,
back-to-back with Jean-Claude van ItallieTopsy on the Boardwalk
at La MaMa, E.T.C. (74A East Fourth Street)
March 25 to April 11, Thursday through Saturdays at 8 pm; Sundays at 3:30
and 8 pm
Tickets $12/tdf
at La MaMa, E.T.C. (74A East Fourth Street)
March 18 to April 3, Thursday through Saturday at 10 pm (closed)
I am reviewing these two presentations together, not because I saw them on
the same evening (I did), not because they are both being presented at La
MaMa (they were) and not for the similarities (virtuoso-style by one or two
performers) but because of the differences, given the aforementioned
similarities.
TALLMER ON THE TOWN
by Jerry Tallmer
Gordon Craig, who outlived her by nearly 40 years, never forgot the
first moment he ever set eyes on Isadora Duncan.
Neodanza from Caracas, Venezuela with world premiere of "Carne en doce escenábolo," choreographed by Alexey Taran.
February 18 to 28 (closed)
La MaMa E.T.C. (Annex Theater), 74A East Fourth Street
Presented by La MaMa E.T.C.
reviewed by Perry Bialor February 16
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
With a Song in My Heart: the Music of Richard Rodgers.
Inaugurated in February with a tribute to Harold Arlen, Lincoln Center’s new
American Songbook series, under the artistic direction of Jonathan Schwartz,
continued in March by celebrating the music of Richard Rodgers. A stellar
array of performing artists offered Rodgers’s songs, from the sophisticated to
the homespun, with lyrics by Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and the
composer himself in a program, at Alice Tully Hall, billed as "With a
Song in My Heart" and led by music director Eric Stern.
Lincoln Center’s
American Songbook at Alice Tully Hall
March 5, 1999.
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
Symphony Number 8 in G major ("Le Soir") by Franz Joseph Haydn
Music of Franz Joseph Haydn, Benjamin Britten and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart made
up a refined program presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the
baton of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, at Avery Fisher Hall on March 12,
as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series of concerts.
Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings by Benjamin Britten
Mass in C minor
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Angeles Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall,
Lincoln Center Great Performers series
March 12, 1999.
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
Lizzie Borden (new production) by Jack Beeson, Kenward Elmslie and Richard
Plant.
"Lizzie Borden took an ax,
New York City Opera at New York State Theater, March 6, 1999.
Also
March 10 at 7:30 pm, 13 at 8 pm, 18 at 7:30 pm, 21 at 1:30 pm, and 24 (PBS
telecast) at 8 pm.
Tickets $20-90 at New York State Theater box office at
Lincoln Center, 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue
phone 212-870-5570.
And gave her father 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her mother 41."
by Melinda Given Guttmann
A BILINGUAL "SOPRANO"
Debut production of Ubu Repertory's Bi-Lingual Ensemble
UBU REPERTORY THEATER has achieved phenomenal success in presenting French modern
classics and contemporary theatre to American audiences since 1982. The
French government acknowledged this extraordinary cultural contribution in
1997 by bestowing its highest honor, the Legion D'Honneur, on UBU'S Artistic
Director, Françoise Kourilsky. This year, Ms. Kourilsky made a daring change in her company's structure. She left her own theatre on 28th
St. for offices on Wall Street from where she is widening her audience by
producing in a variety of venues and has succeeded in creating a
unique Bi-Lingual company whose first production, Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano,"
was a wild success at packed houses at The Alliance Françaises's Florence
Gould Hall. The amazing actors performed the play first in French; then
English with a ten-minute break.
directed by Françoise Kourilsky
Performed in tandem in French and English by
Genvieve Shartner, Louise-Marie Mennier, Simon Fortin, Isabelle Cyr, Marc
Forget, and Michel Moinot.
Presented by Ubu Repertory Theater as part of the 1999 UBU @ FIAF program.
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street
March 4-6 (closed)Electra by Sophocles (adapted by FranK McGuinness)
So many superlatives have been written about the adaptation Sophocles' Electra by Frank McGuiness, now in an extended run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and the performances, which one reviewer characterized as "flawless ensemble" acting, that it seems churlish to write this dissent so late in the day. Let me say right off that after a lackluster start (the brief scene with the Servant, Orestes and Pylades), once Zoe Wanamaker took the stage---by entering through a small window high up on the palace wall and descending, insectlike, the vertical ladder clipped to it---and never left the stage thereafter, I was entranced through most of the play, that is, until the later entrance of Orestes' servant. Nevertheless, my observations are not exactly niggling criticisms.
Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.
Presented by McCarter Theatre/Donmar Warehouse and Duncan C. Weldon
Tues.-Fri. at 8, Sat. 2 & 8, Sun. at 3; until March 21
Telecharge (212) 239-6200/ (800) 432-7250
by Perry A. Bialor
Music of Henry Purcell.
The end of February brought the welcome return of Les Arts Florissants to
Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of the BAM Opera series, for a program of
music by Henry Purcell. Les Arts Florissants, the distinguished French
ensemble, specializing in music of the 17th and 18th centuries and founded by
American conductor William Christie, is now 20 years old. Entitled "Odes
and Anniversary Songs," the concert at BAM consisted of "Come ye
sons of Art, away!" an ode for the birthday of Queen Mary, and
"Hail! Bright Cecilia," an ode for St. Cecilia’s Day. The
outstanding virtue, as always, of this ensemble of polished lyric voices and
players, under Christie, was its refreshing, vital approach to music too long
considered, at best, precious and, at worst, bloodless.
Les Arts Florissants at Brooklyn Academy of Music
February 28, 1999.
reviewed by Bruce Michael GelbertCLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEWS BY BRUCE-MICHAEL GELBERT
The Singer’s Art, a Celebration of the Beauty of Song, with Håkan
Hagegård, Elizabeth Futral, and Elisabeth Boström, at the 92nd
Street Y, March 4, 1999.
Early in March, baritone Håkan Hagegård—boyish Papageno of Ingmar
Bergman’s film of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and, later,
creator of worldly playwright-composer Beaumarchais in John Corigliano and
William M. Hoffman’s "The Ghosts of Versailles" at the Metropolitan
Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago—and soprano Elizabeth Futral—once New York
City Opera’s Gilda and Lakmé and, recently, first Stella in
André Previn and Philip Littell’s A Streetcar Named Desire, after
Tennessee Williams, in San Francisco, and Lucia di Lammermoor at the
Met—joined forces with pianist Elisabeth Boström for a most
unconventional evening, billed as "The Singer’s Art, a Celebration of the
Beauty of Song," at the 92nd Street Y. Eschewing the expected
chronological ordering of a song recital for this semi-staged evening, these
accomplished artists instead used their selections to limn the ups and downs
of a relationship and explore the emotional changes the participants undergo.
By Bruce-Michael Gelbert
I Masnadieri byGiuseppe Verdi.
The Opera Orchestra of New York, led by music director Eve Queler, began its
season of opera-in-concert, at Carnegie Hall, on March 7, with a rousing
revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s I Masnadieri (The Robbers), after Friedrich
Schiller’s play. Queler’s taut, fast-paced performance of this early Verdi
blood-and-thunder melodrama also served as operatic debut with the orchestra
of Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, as well as his initial local
appearance in a complete Italian opera, and a sensational showing his was.
Opera Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall
Reviewed by Bruce-Miuchael Gelbert March 7, 1999.
by Philippa Wehle
uses live action, video
and computer animation
by Margaret CroydenBlue Room Blues
"The Blue Room" A Shocker--Not
The much-hyped "The Blue Room," David Hare's adaptation of Arthur
Schnitzler's "La Ronde," a play about sexual relations, has
finally opened after its successful run in London. It stars the
movie actress Nicole Kidman whose so called famous nude scene has
had New Yorkers breathing heavily in anticipation. That the play
has been promoted (and sold out) with this sort of titillation,
exaggerated in the press and gossip columns, not only
demonstrates the low level of culture on Broadway, but the power
of the marketing experts who even managed to get Ms. Kidman on
the cover of Newsweek, a magazine capable of tabloid journalism.
For all its publicity "The Blue Room" turns out to be a prurient
adventure--and a boring one--despite its spicy subject.
The Cort Theater
138 West 48th Street
239-6200
Opening December 13, 1998
Reviewed December 15, 1998 by Margaret Croyden
TALLMER ON THE TOWN
MOST OF RICHARD HOEHLER
He sits on a ladder outside a store on 14th Street, reeling off the bargains of the day --
"Hi-Dri Paper Towels, 39 cents; Dove Body Wash, 10 ounces, $2.99; Robitusson, 4 ounces,
Pediatric, $3.49; Marcal Toilet Tisue, five for a dollar . . . " -- but his own life is very
far from a bargain, in fact it's a mess on the road to a tragedy. And the boss, the owner of
the store, makes a threatening face every time the nearby pay phone on the sidewalk rings.
TALLMER ON THE TOWN
by Jerry Tallmer
Oh, the tragedy of it. An operation has left Harry Horner impotent. "A man unfit for women .
. . a mere eunuch."
Were Georg Buchner to be reborn today, he might be a little astonished.
CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEWS BY BRUCE-MICHAEL GELBERT
Vera Galupe-Borszkh (Ira Siff), The Thirteenth Annual Farewell Recitals, with Francesco Folinari-Soave-Coglioni (Ross Barentyne), at the Triad Theatre, 158 West 72nd Street, February 23, 1999. Also March 2 & 9 at 8 pm. Tickets $20 + $10 food or drink minimum. Reservations 212-799-4599.
Delightful monsterdiva of the riotous, notorious travesti troupe La Gran Scena Opera, the soprano Mme Vera Galupe-Borszkh-who is, in another life, tenor and voice teacher Ira Siff-embarked on yet another of her innumerable, but invariably memorable farewell recital tours recently. Patient and faithful Maestro Francesco Folinari-Soave-Coglioni, also known as Ross Barentyne, was at the piano for the "schreifest" (as we've heard Mme Vera call such efforts), which took place on February 23 at the Triad Theatre on the Upper West Side.
CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEWS BY BRUCE-MICHAEL GELBERT
Ned Rorem Hosts. Spring Music, The Auden Poems, Anna la Bonne,
String Quartet Number 3 by Ned Rorem, 92nd Street Y, February
18.
Ned Rorem, eminent dean of the American art song and pithy diarist, now 75, is
hosting three programs celebrating the contemporary composer at the 92nd
Street Y. The first, last December, honored John Corigliano on his 60th
birthday and the third, on April 25, fêtes André Previn on the
occasion of his
70th. The centerpiece of the series, on February 18, focused on music of
Rorem himself. CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEWS BY BRUCE-MICHAEL GELBERT
Margaret Lattimore, mezzo-soprano, & Brian Zeger, pianist,
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, February 5, 1999
The conclusion of the 20th century finds the coloratura mezzo-soprano fully
flourishing as
the mantle of Marilyn Horne, Janet Baker, Teresa Berganza, Shirley Verrett,
and the late
Tatiana Troyanos passes to Cecilia Bartoli, Jennifer Larmore, Lorraine Hunt
and others,
some eclipsing even their soprano colleagues. Destined, no doubt, to join this
pantheon
someday is up-and-coming Metropolitan Opera mezzo Margaret Lattimore.
"Bravo, NY!" by Dominic Orlando
No Pants Theater Company’s latest production essays to present a slice of New York life on June 21, 1998, the centennial of the incorporation of New York, Brooklyn, and surrounding suburbs as the City of Greater New York. Although the show is billed as a comedy and the title might reasonably expect a show with this title to celebrate life in the Big Apple, nearly every character has some horrible experience or comes to a bad end as a direct result of living in New York.
Originally produced at Synchronicity Space last June
Samuel Beckett Theater on Theatre Row through February 28.
Directed by Karin Bowersock, with choreography by by Lisa Bleyer.
by Jerry TallmerJosh Kornbluth's Franklin, Banquet of the Beheaded
By JERRY TALLMER
On an October morning in Paris in 1793, Henri Sanson the Executioner enters the cell of Marie
Antoinette -- she who, 23 years earlier, at age 14, had been sent for from Austria to marry
the Dauphin and become Queen of France.
Opportunities arose, late in January, at Carnegie Hall, to revel in exceptionally exciting
vocal music making and indulge, as well, in some diva worship.
On January 26, the Philadelphia Orchestra's Symphony Number 5 of Jean Sibelius and Act Two of
Jenufa by Leos Janacek, forcefully and seamlessly led by Sir Simon Rattle, contender
for the music directorship of the "Fabulous Philadelphians," featured, in the latter, Anja
Silja, a scorching powerhouse of a Kostelnicka.
Her movements few but telling, in the 1960s Bayreuth tradition, Silja was all stern, wounded
pride as she dealt out "tough love" to Jenufa and wrenching as she humbled herself,
desperately determined to salvage her foster daughter's future at any cost, first to Jenufa's
cousin Steva, whose ill-fated illegitimate child the young woman bore, and, when that failed,
to Steva's half-brother, Laca, who had slashed Jenufa's face with his knife. Though signs of
wear and tear are not absent, Silja's soprano still rang out brightly and formidably in this
no-holds-barred portrayal of the Moravian sexton's widow, who drowns her ward's baby, fit to
set beside the no less cathartic one served up by the late Leonie Rysanek, heard here in 1988
and at the Metropolitan Opera in 1992, where she and Silja shared the role.
Roberta Alexander, a Met Jenufa of the mid-1980s, made a suitably vulnerable foil to Silja's
ruthless stepmother, though her soprano sounded brittle and not fully focused. The aptly
contrasting tenors were Gordon Gietz, lyrical as the dreamer Steva, and Clifton Forbis, a
stalwart Laca. The opera was sung in the original Czech, with English supertitles projected
above the stage.
In her Carnegie Hall debut recital the next night, beloved soprano Renee Fleming, ably
assisted at the piano by Steven Blier (replacing an indisposed James Levine) strove both to
educate and entertain by giving listeners a chance to compare settings of texts by or
associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and heroines Suleika, Gretchen (from
Faust), and Mignon. Lavishing creamy sound on the lieder, but unafraid to
descend to a dusky chest voice to haunting effect, Fleming offered Mignon's "Kennst du das
Land" in Hugo Wolf's familiar, driven version and a rare, expansive one by Franz Liszt;
"Gretchen am Spinnrade," coursing lyrically but inexorably in Franz Schubert's
well-known setting, abutting one by Mikhail Glinka that hewed conservatively closely to
German and Austrian song style; and Schubert's peaceful "Suleika I," soon followed by Felix
Mendelssohn's classically ebullient take on these verses. A true tour de force was Fleming's
"Szene aus Faust," by Schubert, in which she differentiated her tone to elucidate
lines of the quailing Gretchen, menacing "evil spirit," and chorus chanting "Dies
irae." The thought came mischievously to mind that a comparable feat might find the diva
tackling Marguerite, Mephistopheles, and the offstage chorus all by herself in the
church scene from Charles Gounod's opera Faust.
Fleming took refreshingly matter-of-fact zesty or sorrowful approaches, by turn, to Claude
Debussy Ariettes oubliees, to Paul Verlaine's poetry, pieces too often treated with
preciousness and evanescent sound. She brought full feeling to a group of Richard Strauss
songs that included a nostalgic "Morgen" and passionate "Ich liebe
dich."
For the encores, Fleming and Blier began by getting down with earthy renditions of George
Gershwin's "Someone to Watch over Me" and "Fascinating Rhythm," continued with soaring,
incandescent accounts of "Sogno di Doretta" from Giacomo Puccini's La Rondine
and the Song to the Moon from Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka, and, champions of contemporary
American music both, aired Ricky Ian Gordon's moving "Will There Really Be a Morning?" to
Emily Dickinson's words, and Andrew Thomas and Gene Scheer's hilarious "Another New Voice
Teacher," the gush of a gullible voice student.
[Gelbert]
CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEWS BY BRUCE-MICHAEL GELBERT
Leading Wagner tenor Ben Heppner, a burly bear of a man from Canada and a
mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera for much of the decade, made a striking New
York recital debut at Carnegie Hall at the end of January, with Craig
Rutenberg at the piano. If Heppner's upper range took a time to warm up, the
rest of his instrument proved clean and solid from the start and, by the end
of the first half of the evening, his high notes rang out impressively as
well.
"Little By Little"
More an elaborate song cycle than a fully developed musical drama, York Theatre Company's Little By Little, which opened January 21 in the Theater at St. Peter's Church, Citicorp Center, follows three close friends from their first moment of adolescent sexual awareness through young adulthood. As teenagers, both girls fall for the boy (Darrin Baker) but he responds to only one of them (Liz Larsen), while the second (Christiane Noll) is relegated to the somewhat frustrating role of best friend. When the boy, by now a young man, needs a date for an important, career-boosting social function and his girlfriend can't make it, the best friend (Noll) steps in to pose as his fiancée; during the evening, he becomes aware of just how attractive she is. Eventually each of the three feels betrayed by the others.
York Theatre Co. at St. Peter's Church, Citicorp Ctr.
Lexington Ave. at 54th St.
212-935-5820
W-Sa at 8, Su at 7; mats W, Sa & Su at 2:30
$35.00
Opened 1/21/99
Reviewed by John Hammond
by Margaret Croyden "Electra"by Sophocles: A Modern Version: Does it Work?
One of the problems doing classics on Broadway is that producers
and directors try to make them contemporary--sort of. So they
arrange the staging and the setting in peculiar ways. Sophocles'
"Electra," written thousands of years ago, takes place in Greece
in the midst of a coup d'etat. Agamemnon, the king, has been
murdered and an usurper has taken the throne. Moreover, the king
has been murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover,
Aegisthus. Electra, the daughter, swears to avenge her father's
murder and convinces her brother, Orestes, to kill their mother
and her lover. This famous myth, first dramatized in the
"Orestia," a trilogy by Aeschylus, and taken up later by
Sophocles, has been one of the great myths in the cannon of
Western literature and Western civilization. Its influence has
been profound, beginning with Homer's "Iliad" and stretching
thousands of years to Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes
Electra," not to speak of the so-called Electra syndrome--a
daughter's abnormal love for the father--a phenomenon analyzed by
Freud himself. So it an extraordinary event for this work to be
presented on Broadway.
adapted by Frank McGuinness
Ethel Barrymore Theater
243 West 47th Street
212-239-6200
by Philippa Wehle
Tilly Losch, written, designed and directed by Michael Counts and performed by
members of GAle GAtes et al.
Andrew Wyeth's famous painting Christina's World inevitably
sets one to musing about the reasons for this young woman's presence in the
grass. Why is she looking up at the house on the hill? Is the house
threatening to her in some mysterious way? why is she in this austere rural
landscape? Who is she? In one of the scenes in Tilly Losch, Michael Counts'
latest creation at his company's wonderful 40,000 sq ft space in DUMBO,
Brooklyn, a greatly enlarged replica of Christina's World appears against the
rear wall of Count's stage.
Produced by Michelle Stern
Presented by GAle GAtes et Al
Reviewed by Philippa Wehle, December 4th 1998
Extended December 29 to January 16
37 Main Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn
Tel [718] 522-4597
Tallmer on the Town
by Jerry Tallmer
On March 26, 1993, The New York Times ran a front-page photograph of a buzzard contemplating a tiny girl who was starving to death somewhere in bush country in the Sudan.
by Jerry Tallmer
WITH RANDY GENERCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: Denise Stoklos discovers Henry David Thoreau.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW: Andre Serban stages a whirligig dream.
PERICLES: Brian Kulick's noisy, clanging monstrosity.
ANNA KARENINA: Making Tolstoy's novel a Shared Experience for the
stage.
THE MOST FABULOUS STORY EVER TOLD: Paul Rudnick depicts a taming of the
queer.
by Henry Baumgartner
Mom Goes Mad at La MaMa
Comic dance is notoriously different to pull off, and in fact not many on the downtown scene make the effort. But Valerie Striar revealed remarkable abilities in this line in her recent Il Barone Rampante at La MaMa. This dance-theater piece, inspired by Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees and conceived, directed, and choreographed by Striar, was staged at La MaMa's First Street branch after a lengthy period of gestation (bits and pieces of it had been showing up as works-in-progress for some time).
Valerie Striar's "Il Barone Rampante (The Baron in the Trees)"
La MaMa E.T.C.
November 19 - 22, 1998
Reviewed 11/22 by Henry F. BaumgartnerLIER REX: The (royal) devil in paramilitary dress, or a case of "Abuba
Roi"?
COLLECTED STORIES: Has Uta Hagen ever looked so unbearably beautiful?
CAUGHT IN THE ACT 98: Around the world in 13 plays.
SONATA DA CAMERA OBSCURA: Ken Nintzel's ontological take on the gay
life
Ken Nintzel is the queerest of the batch of new directors at Richard
Foreman's Ontological Theatre at St. Mark's. "Pansy Acts of Practicing
Homosexuals" was a docu-pastiche about gays in the theater (from Mae West
to "Boys in the Band"), and his direction of Tennessee Williams's
"Auto-Da-Fe" received some good notices. This is my first experience of
Nintzel's theatrical revelry. And whatever its longeurs, it was wonderfully
imaginative, and a good time was had by all.
CULTURE OF DESIRE: Anne Bogart beats the dead horse of Andy Warhol and
discovers, well, more Brillo boxes
"Little Me," Yet Again
The first thing that one must say about "Little Me" that opened
November 19, 1998 at the Roundabout Theater is that we have had
enough of these awful revivals. "Little Me" may have been
wonderful fifty years ago when a genius like Sid Caesar took the
main role, but now at the dawn of the millennium this kind of
show will simply not do. "Little Me" is based on Patrick Dennis'
best seller book in 1961, and a spoof on the rise of a celebrity,
Belle Poitrine, from poverty and anonymity. It was written for Sid
Caesar in 1962 with an emphasis on the men in Belle's life who
helped her achieve fame and Caesar played all her suitors. At the
time, this was a tour de force for the great comic. Revised in
1982, it flopped miserably; nevertheless, the show is now in its
third reincarnation. The Roundabout theater have selected this
for their second production of the season. And what a mistake.
Roundabout Theater Company
1530 Broadway, New York, N. Y.
719-9393
Opened November 12, 1998
Reviewed November 16, 1998 by Margaret Croyden Mandy Patinkin
In Concert "Mamaloshen"
Mandy Patinkin in his solo concert "Mamaloshen" (Mother Tongue)
at the Belasco theater should stop carrying on. He should even
stop singing. His falsettos are irritating, his rhythm is off,
and he is uncharming--an essential trait if one wants to be a
cabaret singer. Furthermore, his rendition of Yiddish is a big
mistake. Few people in the audience understand him, and those who
presumably speak, or have spoken Yiddish in their youth (as I
have), cannot follow him either. So "Mamaloshen," billed as a
Yiddish experience, should present us with titles. That would at
least make the songs clear.
Belasco Theater
111 West 44th Street New York, N. Y.
212- 19-4099 The New York Film Festival -- A Look At Some New Films
September 25-October 11, 1998.
Alice Tulley Hall, Lincoln Center, New York.
Reviewed by Margaret Croyden
[1] "Celebrity," written and directed by Woody Allen
[2] "Gods and Monsters," written and directed by Bill Condon
[3] "The Dreamlife of Angels," written and directed by Erick Zonca
"Celebrity"
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
A Miramax Films Release
The New York Film Festival, which closed October 11, usually generates a good deal of interest notwithstanding the caliber of the films. Though this year was not a particularly spectacular event--some films lacked drive and purpose, or were surprisingly banal--nevertheless, it is worth noting that the New York Film Festival always creates a buzz, which began opening night with Woody Allen's eagerly awaited film "Celebrity." Ironically, in attendance at the premiere were all the celebs with whom Woody Allen has a love-hate relationship.
These days, Woody Allen is hard to take, buzz or no buzz. Here he is again in "Celebrity," whining, complaining, and agonizing. But this time he does not appear in the movie (thank God), but the noted British actor Kenneth Branagh stands in for Woody in the role of the anti-hero writer, and does an incredible job of imitating Allen in gesture, behavior, intonation, and rhythm.
Once again the protagonist is the stumbling, bumbling, agonizing schlemiel of a writer dying to make it in a world of decadent celebrities. Here again is the spineless loser trying to seduce famous women, fall in love, and/or write a successful screen play. Here is the measly mouthed, two bit opportunist running after spoiled, irresponsible, hedonistic, narcissists in the nightmare world of celebrities--the naughty superstars, the violent rock stars, the depraved fashion models, the avaricious plastic surgeons, the television mavens,--all salivating for their fifteen minutes of fame. And here, in one the most vulgar scenes in the movie, is the hero's divorced wife, anxious to satisfy her new boyfriend, taking instructions from a hooker who, using a banana, demonstrates how to perform oral sex. In the absence of real imagination and ingenuity, a certain ribald crudity, intended to be hilarious, is not new to the movie industry, and apparently Woody Allen has not risen above this cheap coarseness.
One wonders who Woody Allen really admires. In his depiction of the so called little people, this time an Italian family, he is patronizing and superior, similar to his contempt for Jews in "Deconstructing Harry." When his hero-writer attends a high school reunion, he becomes disgusted at the sight of his former classmates whom he regards as old, fat, ugly nobodies. Woody Allen doesn't love celebrities either, at least not the ones he depicts. In attempting to trash them he, nevertheless, seems to enjoy their hangouts, their restaurants, their parties, and their lively life style. Perhaps he had intended to criticize society's choice of celebrities, but don't expect any profound intellectual statements. Or even much originality. Even when an alternative life style is suggested by the hero's ex- wife--a school teacher, who gives up her job, changes her appearance, becomes a TV interviewer, and marries the boss--the sequence is vitiated by its silliness and implausibility.
Ridiculing celebrities is not new to the movies. Remember the great Frederico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita?" In fact, Allen's black and white film, with its airplane stint in the opening and closing shot, is an obvious steal from Fellini's Jesus Christ image also hanging from a plane. But somehow Fellini's genuine sadness and regret toward his hero, who is ruined by his infatuation with fame and fortune, captures the true tragic fate of the protagonist. Allen only captures the sordidness of the people without any counterbalance. Besides, everything in Woody Allen's world is geared to the joke and to shock value--and these shocks have been seen before: celebs sniffing cocaine, group sex, lesbianism, massive egotism, and more sex. And the jokes--Woody Allen's forte--are few and far between. A certain tired deja vu wraps itself around the viewer and we are reduced to a weary boredom.
In the Woody Allen role, Kenneth Branagh is tiresome. His imitation of Allen is perfect, Brooklyn accent and all, but it is a major distraction, and compounds the weak, loser, schlemiel image. Judy Davis, as the school teacher turned television personality, is the typical Woody Allen hysterical female screamer. She, too, imitates Allen's mumbling speech patterns. A later day Diana Keaton, she comes across as a dittzy dope. The supermodel, (Charize Theron) is the essence of sexual depravity. She has a gorgeous figure and uses it as a contortionist to indicate her overwrought sexuality. Joe Montegna is the "good" TV producer who falls in love with the Judy Davis character. It is hard to fathom why; he is really out of this film. Winona Ryder plays an opportunist female predator who cannot be faithful to any man, though she tries. Her portrayal of an actress on the make is common enough; she is the quintessential nasty, self serving, ambitious young woman--a common Woody Allen type.
Perhaps one of the high points (or low points) of the film is Leonardo DiCaprio's hyped up rock star. In a hotel room, he beats up his lover, wrecks the furniture, is almost arrested, but his lady refuses to press charges and, instead, takes him back to bed-- perhaps, the film's most obscene sequence. DiCaprio's dialogue is composed completely of four letter words, and the violent beating of the young woman, followed by their group fornication, makes one wonder what the youthful fans of Di Caprio will think of their hero.
Finally, can Woody Allen make a film about other things besides himself and the New York scene? We know his problems, what he thinks about almost everything: women, sex, ethnic groups, movies, stars, infidelity, shrinks, and various small crimes and misdemeanors. We understand his life. But we say enough already. Change the subject.
"Gods and Monsters"
Written and Directed by Bill Condon
Starring Ian McKellen
A Lion Gates Film
Though it has not have created the buzz of a Woody Allen film, one of the more interesting showings at the New York Film Festival was "Gods and Monsters," starring the brilliant British actor Ian McKellen. Based on the true story of the life of James Whale, director of the original "Frankenstein" movies, the film details the homosexual ambiance of Hollywood of the 1930s and assumes the idea that inside all of us is the Monster that Frankenstein created. Another idea in the film is the power of friendship and the understanding that can arise between two people from different worlds who recognize their inner monstrosities.
The story is simple: James Whale has retired from film making and lives in a lush California house replete with swimming pool, gardens, and a trusted housekeeper, who is played beautifully by Lynn Regrave. But he lives in a world of bitter memories. He has lost his lover in World war I (the film takes place in the early 30's) as well as his place in Hollywood. He has also suffered a stroke, which makes his behavior unpredictable and forces him to recall his troubled past. Apparently, he is unable to forget his lover who died in the war and, in his mind's eye, sees him everywhere. But what he has not lost is his roving eye for the male flesh. Nor has he lost his power to be cunning, selfish, acerbic and nasty. He cleverly convinces a young hulk, who cuts his grass, to sit as a model for his sometimes painting sprees. The model is straight and suspicious, but agrees to be his sitter. A peculiar friendship ensues. But unfortunately this relationship is a familiar one and its violent end is all too predicable, so that the film loses some of its suspense. However Ian McKellen as the homosexual film director and the young man (Brandan Fraser), are superbly matched. They manage to create a plausible situation: lonely, frustrated people can be drawn to each other no matter what the sexual differences.
Ian McKellen is a commanding presence, though he plays the part with too much evil intent. He is too obvious in his compulsive, unsavory drive for seducing young boys. Very often McKellen's acting is a caricature of an old "queen," and that weakens what seems to be the film's more serious message. Nevertheless, McKellen is a master technician and his every move is sketched in amazing detail. He knows how to lift an eyebrow, smile and smirk, and play with utmost confidence. But he fails to bring some deep emotional force to the role; he is too self dramatizing, too consumed with self-pity, and this coupled with a repetitive sly acerbity, makes the character somewhat unsympathetic. However, the young man he desires (Brendon Fraser) is a good foil for McKellen. Naive to the point of ignorance, he is a heterosexual who is fascinated by the famous man's obvious homosexuality, which on one hand he despises, on the other is intrigued.
The movie is beautifully photographed and directed with a certain intensity and drive by Bill Condon, who adapted the story from Christopher Bram's novel, "Father of Frankenstein." Though the plot has an all too familiar ring, one takes pleasure from watching a grand actor like Ian McKellen go through his paces. See this film when it is released.
"The Dreamlife of Angels"
Written and directed by Erick Zonca
French with English titles
A Sony Pictures Classic Release
The Festival ended with one of its better films, "The Dreamlife
of Angels" by Erick Zonca, a young Frenchman with very little
experience in the film world. This is his first full length
feature and evidently his work so impressed the Festival that he
was given the closing night place--equal, it seems, to opening
night.
"The Dreamlife of Angels" has two very distinct advantages: two gifted actresses who play the leads--actresses whose nuances, and subtleties are extraordinary in their moment to moment complex relationship to each other, and to the various people and events in the story. This is a film about the inner life of the characters so that the plot line is comparatively simple. One of the women, Isa, (Elodie Bouchez), wanders around in the unappealing city of Lille with no possessions except a knapsack on her back. Completely broke and without any apparent education, ambition, or training, she lives by scrounging. Finally, she finds a job operating a sewing machine in a factory. Totally inept, she gets fired but, luckily, she meets another employee whom she befriends--the brooding, mysterious, introverted Marie (Natacha Regnier). The two complement each other; Isa is dark and physically unattractive, tom-boyish, with short cropped unruly hair, large expressive eyes and an engaging smile that charms us from the very beginning. Marie is a natural beauty, blond, thin, doe-eyed, long-limbed and perfect without makeup. The two become close friends and share an apartment which Marie guards for a woman lying comatose in hospital after a car accident.
At first, the two girls are emotionally bound together. They develop strong loyalties and become close confidants and inseparable companions. They are fun loving (especially Isa), full of childish pranks and, as they stroll around town, seem unafraid to challenge men and accept whatever situation they encounter. Both women seem to be social outcasts--idlers, losers, untrained for anything and with little ambition to pursue anything. Isa is the more affable of the two; despite her situation, she has a sweet, open disposition.
More earthy and unaffected, Isa has a light touch, unlike her friend, Marie, who is sullen and arrogant, with an bitter view of men and the workplace. Maria refuses all menial jobs and seems to be waiting for something else. She finds this something else in an affair with a rich, ruthless philanderer who, as the saying goes, does her in. Nevertheless, she is infatuated with him to the point of obsessional madness. Apparently, the more he treats her to rough sex, the more she enjoys him and longs for more. In the meantime, she has dropped a nice, fat hulk of a man who genuinely cares for her; in the process, has become estranged from her devoted friend, Isa.
Isa has found the dying women's diary in the apartment, reads it, and becomes so intrigued with the young woman's life that she visits the hospital daily. The story goes on to its bitter end which would not be sporting of me to reveal, but the film is so constructed that the end is a forgone conclusion. Which is, by the way, the film's main weakness.
The characters, while giving beautiful performances, become redundant because the plot becomes redundant; the shots of the Marie and her lover in violent, steamy sex scenes are excessively photographed and the story gets bogged down. Maria's intense drive to hold onto this man becomes the central issue in the story: a young woman comes alive through nasty, rough sex. Not a new idea.
Meanwhile Isa develops a sense of goodness. Her connection to the dying young girl in the hospital humanizes her and slowly, her character changes into something fine. One presumes she may have achieved a state of grace. Or at least a way to face life in a more rational manner.
Though the film is beautiful to look at and the leading actresses are marvelous to look as well, one wonders if the lives of confused young people and their attitudes toward sex, work, and friendship are enough to make a lasting impact on the viewer. Women from the working class, women without work, women with adolescent dreams are important problems, to be sure, but the film lacks something concrete, something more than striking images. One wants to know who these women really are, why they are the way they are and what the dreamlife of (these) angels are really dreaming about.
Still, the work of the leading actresses is astonishing, and that fact alone carries the film and makes it worth seeing. [Croyden]
WITH RANDY GENER
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NG CHUNG YIN (A HONG KONG STORY): Yangtze Rep's Mok Chiu-Yu remembers an old comrade.
One of the special functions of the drama is the recovery of lost history. If this takes the form of narrative docudrama, as in "The Life and Times of Ng Chung Yin" or "Combustion," the theater becomes the site where personal remembrance intersects with political testimony. If this function takes the form of a semi-autobiographical one-person show ("Sakina's Restaurant"), an imaginative revision of mythic events ("Oedipus"), a renewal with an old friendship ("Eclipse"), or a relentlessly wacky take on a historical character ("Marco Polo Sings A Solo"), the theater is a site of an encounter with the past, too, though fictional elements dominate. In either cases the drama keep it alive. Even for just a short time, audiences reconnect with lost lives and lost stories. The drama's sense of the present is a connective tissue that links the past with the future.Let's start: Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America deserves a medal for bringing "The Life and Times of Ng Chung Yin" to New York's Theater for the New City from October 22 to November 1. It was an all-too-brief run but a hugely rewarding encounter with the the politically committed human being whom we would never have met in any other media context. The play honors the plight of a simple man who struggled for causes that vitally mattered. Ng Chung Yin was a journalist and political activist; he was deeply involved in the issues of social justice and human rights in China and Hong Kong from the rebellious student activism of the 1960s until his death of liver cancer in 1994. Unlike traditional heroes, the witty and very Marxist Ng was not exactly a man of action. And he was certainly not perfect. There were moments in his life when he disappointed his comrades. For instance, he was accused of cowardice and hypocrisy. "On the 7th of July, 27 years ago," recalls the Storyteller, "21 students and young workers were arrested for defending Chinese sovereignty over the Daioyutai Islands and fighting for human rights." During this bloody occasion, Ng was nowhere to be found; he was in Paris falling in love. Arrested in 1980 during one of his many visits to China, Ng colluded with the Chinese authorities: they released him and in return he would be a spy. Of course, he claimed to have only released false information. Yet this effectively caused him to be expelled from the Revolutionary Marxist League.
So why is Ng's memory being eulogized by his old friend Mok Chiu-Yu? Because the larger trajectory of his anti-establishment life proved that he was, despite his all too human faults, a radical who fought for democracy and the overthrow of the colonial capitalist system. If some of his actions had been deemed problematic by some of his friends and colleagues, he never stopped expressing his political beliefs. In an essay he wrote near the end of his life, he called for the release of dissidents Wei Jingshing, Hong Kong journalist Chi Yang, and all prisoners of conscience in China. Here's an excerpt from the play:
"Today's Chinese government still rules with an iron hand. The Communist party
considers everything, whether big or small, as its 'state secrets.' The idea
is to shut people out from governmental affairs. They've throttled the freedom
of the press, warning the Hong Kong news media that 'the water of the river
must not be allowed to trespass on the water in the well.' They've implied
that unless the media behave themselves after 1997, there will be serious
consequences. And the way they treated Wei Jingsheng shows plainly their
attempts to eliminate dissidents and to trample any opposition. This kind of
retrogression can only be effective as long as they were able to keep their
iron grip on power. But they are digging their own graves and hastening their
demise.
"In 1981, Liu Shanqing was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for his support
of the democracy movement in China. In those days, the people of Hong Kong,
including the so-called 'Democrats,' just sat idle. They seemed uninterested.
Now 1997 is getting closer. Because of the June 4th Tiananmen Massacre,
everyone can see the picture for themselves. I'm tired and exhausted by this
damning illness, but I'll be mustering the last ounce of my remaining
strength to speak up. And I call on every sector of the community to mobilize,
to criticize and to demand the immediate release of Chi Yang and Wei Jingsheng
and all the prisnoners of conscience in China!'"
Given the all-too-real repressive climate, these are powerful words. As Mok told me in an interview: "The situation in Hong Kong has not changed significantly after the July 1 handover, especially when it comes to freedom of expression. The Chinese government is still clamping down demonstrators and are more ready than ever to arrest people with different views and cook up charges."
"The Life and Times of Ng Chung Yin" stirred controversial waters when it was performed in Hong Kong during the final days of the July 1 handover last year. If this drama lacks a bit of punch in performance, it is not because its themes do not stir the emotions (they do) but because the narrative form playwright Mok has chosen is rather discursive and digressive. This is not the sort of biodrama that reaches all the way back to childhood. Entertainingly Mok combines public events with Ng's private life without digging into his psychology. At times Mok acknowledges that he was slightly removed from Ng's sphere of existence. If it were not for three mimes, the play would probably count as one-person show. Winningly and with little artifice, Mok plays the roles of Ng, Ng's girlfriend, the Storyteller, and his white-haired self. He is credited to have conceived, dramaturged and directed the Cantonese version of "The Life and Times of Ng Chung Yin," which is the performance I saw. (In the English version, Lawrence Wong performed Mok's role and was co-directed by Yangtze founder Joanna Chan.) Note I did not say "written by Mok." In an interview, Mok told me that the play was devised collectively by members of the Asian People's Theatre Festival Society. Inspired by a collection of writings by Ng, the company of 10 met at the foot of the Himalayas to re-enact stories from Ng's life using a variety of theatre techniques to establish group dynamics, do improv and theater exercises. Based on the Filipino model of BITAW, Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, and Playback Theatre, the techniques, Mok says, sought "to use cultural action to express ideas artistically." "The Life and Times of Ng Chung Yin" is political theatre at its most gently lyric and biodrama at its most warmly elegiac.
OEDIPUS: Dare Clubb's ambitious four-hour reappraisal of the myth of Oedipus loses its nerve
Playwright/director Dare Clubb should have talked to Ellen Stewart before launching into "Oedipus," his ambitious yet failed investigation of the Oedipus myth, recently produced by Blue Light Theater Company starring Frances McDormand, Billy Crudup, Johanna Day and Jon De Vries. You see, both Clubb's "Oedipus" and Stewart's "Mythos Oedipus," which was performed at La MaMa E.T.C., reimagine the events that lead up to Sophocles's "Oedipus." In Stewart's stunning version, based on her extensive research and travels in Greece, a homosexual liaison involving King Creon was involved in the myth of Oedipus, a subject which, Stewart told me, the Greeks tried to keep under wraps. At the very least, Stewart's version provides rhyme and reason to the tragic events at Thebes. By contrast, Dare Clubb's version bravely imagines everything that might have happened prior to Oedipus's arrival in Thebes but then loses its nerve and goes kerflooey in the final and third act in which Oedipus is crucified in the hills, a blind adult left to die in the elements.
Yes, Virginia, I sat through Dare Clubb's entire four hour version. Since I went to the gym and had a refreshing swim before seeing the play, my mind and senses and body were alert and open to what Clubb and the Blue Light actors had to offer. I didn't squirm in my seat, like John Simon of New York Magazine did; his condemnatory review leaves it to the imagination as to whether he actually stayed through the entire play (Simon often leaves plays during intermission); but his revelation that his butt did indeed squirm is something I can only attribute to a probable bad case of hemorrhoids. Anyway, Dare Clubb's writing in "Oedipus" is lyrical and witty and darkly humorous. Daringly and imaginatively he makes a serious case for his imaginative rendering of Oedipal hamartia in which the tragic mistake lies in believing the gods too literally. Though he is an extraordinary character, his failure results from an overly rational interpretation of the Delphic oracle. Clubb's play is informed a very solid idea notion of the tragic: the tearing away of the self. In the first act, Merope (McDormand) and Periboea (Day) bitterly argue that awful words must not be said; when awful and lustful thoughts get aired, the airing creates a reality that becomes permanent; it can never be taken back. Speaking constitutes action which rips apart identity. Once once identity is torn asunder, particularly in the eyes of others, it can never be restored and repaired. (That's why Merope's epithet against Periboea as "attorney!" makes for cutting wit; Merope is ruled by roiling emotions, Periboea by a rationality verging on the technical.)
Clubb's "Oedipus" is a sardonic revisionism of "Oedipus." Formally speaking, what he's done here is firmly in keeping with the classical tradition of screwing around with the original Greek myths. In fact, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes, whose extant dramas we revere to the point of suffocating them, were revisionist takes on the original myths which were passed by oral tradition. But the central mistake in Clubb's "Oedipus" is to forget the audience. It's difficult, in retrospect, to glean the urgency of the play. What does a revisionism of the Oedipus myth have to convey to us today? Without posing that question, there is no reason to rewrite the myth. Certainly much of the dirt that has been flung against "Oedipus" stems from the play's inability to justify its raison d'etre.
That's why it becomes all the more deeply disappointing when Oedipus does finally get to Thebes and confront his real parents. Here, Clubb moves into the same narrative territory as Sophocles, but the plot gets obfuscating at best. The digression in Act Two, in which Oedipus meets a rowdy band of soldiers who kill each other before they get to face the enemy, was pointlessly long enough. Structurally speaking, is the point here that death follows Oedipus everywhere he goes? (The two soliders slitting each other's throat immediately follows another scene in which Oedipus's analysis of another man's Delphic oracle results in a suicide.) Or is the more relevant point here that believing in Delphic oracles causes pointless death? It's hard to know.
Before reaching Thebes, Oedipus kills his foster father (and beds Merope whom he thinks is his mother). Later his neglect of his best friend during their journey in search of Laon causes the latter's death. In Act Three, Oedipus meets Laos (wonderful Jonathan Fried) who basically throws him out of the house (again) upon learning that Oedipus is his son. (Laos is either a deadbeat father or just trying to avert the oracle that claimed his son will kill him.) But before Oedipus is left out in the wilderness, there is a long and moving and smartly written debate between Jocasta and Oedipus in which Jocasta basically tries to stop Oedipus from raping her through intelligence. In a play so full of misogynism, Jocasta is the only woman who comes off smelling like perfume. (Note that the Sphinx was played by a McDormand, a female.) Jocasta is thus the only woman smart enough to defeat Oedipus on the same level playing field: reason.
The other central mistake is Oedipus himself. Billy Crudup does exciting things with the role, but he can only go with the role so far. The scene in which he analyzes an oracle by flipping his fingers over his quizzical mouth brilliantly underscores what makes Oedipus an extraordinary character: he's a computer brain, and he acts swiftly as soon as he makes up his mind that he is right. But finally Oedipus is a deadbeat character. Despite a constant and blind will to fulfill oracular destiny, Clubb's Oedipus does not seem grounded in experience. Neither does he seem to learn from it. The overall plot in which he is caught (he must sleep with his real mother) is not only ridiculous, it also conveys absolutely no symbolic or allegorical message to modern audiences. Recall Bernard Knox in "Oedipus at Thebes" (Yale University Press, 1985): "Sophocles's Oedipus is more than an individual tragic hero. It is characteristic of the Greek attitude towards man to see him not only as an individual but also as an individual in society, a political being as well as a private man." In short, Oedipus is a reflection of the Athenian contemporary figure. What is Clubb's Oedipus a reflection of exactly? I would be seriously interested in a dialogue with Dare Clubb in which he addresses my remarks here within the context of my argument. Otherwise, my admiration for his poetic writing and for his chutzpah is tempered only by a nagging suspicion that Clubb had wasted four hours of my precious time, four hours which he stole from my life and which, like a thief that got away, can never be returned to me again. I ask; I don't know.
ECLIPSE: In which Zingaro asks: "They show off horses, don't they?"
Horses have a long and distinguished history as dramatic actors. Since way before the Greeks, they have galloped a thespian trail as nervous, sensitive and expressive as any show-offy two-legged performer. On bended knees or sitting on haunches, horses straddle between humility and grace. Backing up or walking sideways, they trot from quick revulsion to emotional wariness. Cantering at the water's edge, they evince romantic melancholy and alienation. They're pretty acrobatic, too; in a heart-stopping moment, these wild creatures leap into the air, all four hooves running off the ground, signifying glory and physical prowess. When they're not ornery and difficult, like a diva, they're ingratiating schmoozers; they can charm your pants off.
Did I forget to say that horses are natural dancers, too? In "Eclipse," the lyrical and operatic show by the Paris-based Zingaro Equestrian Theater, the horses hold up a mirror to the nature not by executing feats of strenuous labor but by exerting balletic control over human beings. In one of the more profound yet unprepared moments, a rider straddles two horses, like a human bridge--but one of the horses simply refuses to leap over the women on the ground. No matter how the rider allays the horse's fears to accomplish the difficult maneuver, the horse considers safety first. His refusal says as much about what makes humans beastly as what makes beasts seems more like humans.
Evocative, fanciful, magical, "Eclipse" transcends the circus form because it is much more than a parade-like display of exhibitionist skill and horsy obsessions. Using costumes, guttural pansori music from Korea, and black-and- white dramatic lighting, it offers a mysterious communion between human and beast, or perhaps an illusion of it. Strong, bare-chested gymnasts do flips and leaps and perform feats of strength as dazzling as the horses. In an age of decentralized technology and fragmented cyberspace, "Eclipse" evokes themes of mystical interaction and spiritual relationship. There is never any sense of competition, stress or pressure. Human and horse mirror each other's gestures, feelings and actions. In one of the most beautiful sequences, the dancers rub their bodies and limbs on the arctic-white sand and then form a circle. A horse eventually moves in the middle; his looming presence exerts as much power and significance as the humans do. Then he rubs his body and limbs on the sand.
The stark beauty of "Eclipse," recently presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, lies in the simplicity of minimalist vibrations and striking purity of rhythmic gestures. Under the anti-spectacular aegis of Zingaro founder Bartabas, "Eclipse" dramatizes--note: dramatizes--the affinities and sacred links between human and nature, which a blind belief in technology and ruthless progress have cut and severed. It's a contemplative adventure that seeks to repair the psychic damage caused by the human/nature split.
COMBUSTION: Dealing with garbage and making a big stink
Watching Kathryn Dickinson's "Combustion," a highly illuminating and
engaging docudrama about the very real struggle and the controversial politics
surrounding the proposal for the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator, I was
reminded of these fateful lament by Bill McKibben in "The End of
Nature" (Anchor Books, $9.95):
"We live at the end of nature, the moment when the essential character of the
world we've known since we stopped swinging from our tails is suddnely
changing. I'm not intrisically attracted to radical ideas anymore. I have a
house, and a bank account, and I'd like my life, all other things being equal,
to continue in its current course. But all other things are not equal--we live
at an odd moment in human history when the most basic elements of our lives
are changing. I love the trees outside my window; they are part of my life. I
don't want to see them shrivel in the heat, nor sprout in perfect cloned rows.
The damager we have done to the planet, and the damage we seem set to do in a
genetically engineered business-as-sual future, make me wonder if there isn't
some other way. If there isn't a humbler alternative--one that would let us
hew closer to what remains of nature, and give it room to recover, if it can.
An alternative that would involve changing not only the way we act but also
the way we think."
Though McKibben's book concerns itself with the greenhouse effect and not on "Combustion's" topic (solid waste management), McKibben's words rang in my mind because what he's suggesting is a radical and fundamental re-thinking of how we must come to grips with our relationship to the environment. Dickinson's documentary play suggests as much. In retelling of an actual political event that fired the citizens of Brooklyn, it inspires and provokes us to seriously find alternatives to dealing with our garbage. Developed and performed in the Anna Deavere Smith manner, "Combustion" places in a theatrical context interviews, excerpts from printed materials and found texts concerning a wide variety of heated issues surrounding the construction of incinerators which purport to turn waste into energy while dealing with the millions of garbage that we produce. Along with engineers, scientists, city employees, and community activists, the play includes real-life figures like public advocate Mark Green, former sanitation commissioner Norman Steisel, Brooklyn leaders Luis Garden Acosta and the Rev. Mark Taylor of Church of the Open Door. Their words, however, are shaped as soliloquys or speeches in an ongoing debate; the play takes the form of a townhall discussion.
Dickinson takes enormous pains to be fair to the parties both con and pro the incinerators. On the economic front, it raises the issues of how to come to grips with costs, real and intangible. How are we to put a cost figure, for instance, to the suffering of real people who are affected? On the health front, the play discusses the statistics and figures volleyed to and fro regarding what the diseases and cancer which the smoke from the incinerators cause. On the racial front, the play raises the thorny, painful issues of environmental racism. On the social front, it asks the crucial discussion of what consitutes envionmental justice. On the political front, it recounts the exploitation of the issue by politicians who only desire to be elected, At the same time, the play underscores how difficult it is to serve as a public servant nowadays; if a politican attempts to make real inroads into the crisis, the efforts could be stymied by opposing lobbyists with their own agenda, or by lack of accurate and reliable information, or by the exigencies of the political process itself.
Produced by Whitebird Productions and presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from November 4 through November 7, "Combustion" is an important, insightful and instructive use of theater; it teaches and reveals the terrible implications of our callous disregard of the environment. This is the kind of theater that deserves a longer life; at the very least it should tour the four boroughs of New York, particularly Staten Island and the Bronx, endangered urban areas that are currently dealing with their own waste management issues.
SAKINA'S RESTAURANT: Aasif Mandvi serves up the curried complexities of the immigrant experience.
What's amazing about Aasif Mandvi's "Sakina's Restaurant" is that it works for all the reasons that it ought not to. Everybody can recognize its familiar contours. Alternately, it is a one-person showcase for an actor's talent for mimickry, a seven-character study of the South Asian immigrant experience, a wistful comedy about the clash of cultures, and an affectionately mocking look at East Indian cultural stereotypes. In other words, "Sakina's Restaurant" is made up of everyday ingredients that seem different (how many South Asian plays have you seen lately?) and yet is conventional enough to fit in established genres. Somewhere at its core is the desire to naturalize difference; it aims to make Americans (read: white) relate to the universality of the immigrant's plight. And yet...and yet...and yet..."Sakina's Restaurant" is an absolutely fragrant stew, a terrifically winning concoction that is all the more scrumptious for its curried complexities.
You're going to have to see it to believe it. Performed in an engagingly whirligig style, "Sakina's Restaurant" is by turns smart, funny, serious and poignant. Mandvi's alternating performances of Hakim, Sakina, Ali, Farrida and Azgi, all of whom are the fictional characters in an East Indian demimonde, verge on the satiric and self-critical. It's a postcard from the South Asian edge. Each character gets to bitch about his or her present condition while relating how they maintain dignity and personal identity as they struggle against the irreversible currents of assimilation. Their various stories are linked through punchy little sayings and wise proverbs, adding a piquant and mystical tang to the grinding realities of surviving as a perpetual outsider in America.
If the play serves up familiar South Asian types, the plot manages to give each one their due as recognizably flawed people. If the culture clash themes are not exactly undiscovered country, the play deftly grounds it in the sort of hard-scrabble realism that understands that in life there are no easy solutions. If the play seems a little dutiful and overly self-conscious as it moves from one character to the next, each one detailing a different variation on the theme of lost innocence, the play succeeds as a glowing and memorable group portrait. And Mandvi, the actor who captures the tender snapshots (under the liminal directing of Kim Hughes) wins you over; he's a winsome performer with indubitable resources. Performance matters in "Sakina's Restaurant." It persuades us that it is more than a tandoori twist on the same old chicken dish.
"Sakina's Restaurant" performs at the American Place Theatre (111 West 46th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues) on Monday, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. tickets are $30. Indian families get a group rate of 25 percent off. Call (212) 239-6200.
MARCO POLO SINGS A SOLO: You think Chris Durang will to agree to be employed as John Guare's dramaturg?
John Guare is this year's turkey in Signature Theatre's seasonal Thanksgiving bounty to (established) American playwrights. What's interesting to note is that of all the playwrights Signature has stuck in the oven, Guare is the least serious fowl. (Finally after years of overimportant drama Signature gets a funny bone!) And even though the original 1977 Public Theater production with Joel Grey, Madeline Kahn and Chris Sarandon was picked apart by the critics, John Guare and his longtime director Mel Shapiro want to prove that they're not chicken. No, they are very brave creatures indeed. They don't mind serving up the same dish in order to convince us that that we had neglected its virtues the first time around.
"Marco Polo Sings A Solo" is all skin and meat but very little stuffing. It's a ferocious pile of brittle, scorched flesh but without the moist, mushy food at the center to make it a tasty treat. It's obsessive, sprawling, relentless, goofy, crazy and jarring. Ceaselessly it throws up jokes, medical references, incredible plot twists, play allusions to Chekhov and Ibsen, and words, words, words until the whole megillah simply explodes in our face. The pace and design take on a pell mell grace. Its main aim is simply to refuse to be pinned down as anything recognizably absurdist or farcical, and yet it manages to draw out some laughs anyway. Written in the 1970s yet set in the future, it's filled with references to videocassettes, Middle East crises, sex scandals in the White House, sex change operations and plastic surgery, all of it make it seem millenial and contemporary, if not exactly prophetic. But it is also an exploded mess; if you want to know what happens when you stick an overdone turkey in the oven and fire a shotgun at it, this is it. It's all about overcooking and overload. None of it makes sense. You laugh at the sheer stupidity.
Thought set in an iceberg near Norway in 1999, "Marco Polo's" plot is overheated. Stony McBride is an astronaut floating in outerspace, and he's recalling the days of yore when he was making a moving about Marco Polo in which his father is making a comeback. His mother (the superb and very moving Polly Holliday) smokes pot and reveals that she was once a he. Stony's wife, Diane, is a pianist who openly has an affair with a politician lover, Tom, who just won the Nobel Peace Price and discovered the cure for cancer. There's more, but why bother going through it all when Guare has already flung it all himself, as if drama were just another kind of droll food fight?
Having gone all out in the first act, Guare goes ballistic in the second. He reverses the narrative course by demolishing everything into smithereens. Basically he authorially takes back what's been overgenerously doled out in the first half. Why? Because he can. Because he's the John Guare. Because maybe on the off chance it'll get funnier. And because he wrote the entire goddamn play while in an airplane waiting for it to land and wondering if he'll ever write another play after all his incredible success. Therefore: Stony regresses into a baby. Diane loses her beau. Tom loses the paper where the cure for cancer is inscribed....and so on and so forth. You get the picture. What does it all mean? Beats the shit out of me. At best, it reads like a farce about an obsessive fear of success. (In The New Yorker, John Lahr wanks Guare's little junior by interpolating that "Marco Polo" is some sort of Veblenesque comment on American ambition and optimism. Let's get real here, toots. Has Lahr ever talked about any play that does not ultimately regress into being a Veblenesque comment on American ambition and optimism?)
You think it's too late for Christopher Durang to be hired as Guare's dramaturg? [Gener]
Annie Sprinkle's "Herstory: Reel to Real"
Performance Space 122
150 First Avenue, New York 10009
Oct 14-18, 21-25, 28-Nov 1 at 8:30 (Closed)
212/477-5288
reviewed by Ed Rubin opening night
Five years ago at the Sanford Meisner Theater Annie Sprinkle, in the process of a career change from screen porn star to theatrical performance artist, stood near naked at the edge of the stage, cheerfully relating, with much sincerity and total lack of guile, the trajectory of her life. Using slides, stories about past boyfriends, tricks and friends who died of AIDS, Annie took us from her early days of selling popcorn in a California porn palace, under her real name of Ellen Steinberg, to becoming a national love/lust object in over two hundreds porn films made during the '70s, '80s and '90s. Somewhere within these personal narratives, Sprinkle sat down, emptied her bladder, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited the entire audience to come forward and examine her cervix. At intermission the audience, at five dollars a pop, was given a Polaroid photo op: the memento Annie Sprinkle's breasts resting on your head. Of course I couldn't resist either, and I found myself waiting to be part of her act.
I had gone to see Annie with one of my closest friends, then in her late fifties, who intuitively sensed Annie's warmth and honesty. Though my friend was too embarrassed to head toward the stage (she is from the generation that still doesn't even look at her own cervix), and certainly had no pressing need to have Sprinkle's large, pendulous breasts resting on her head, she instantly liked Sprinkle. At the time, I thought (I still do) that this was mostly a man's thing. Suffice to say I enjoyed the evening and I certainly appreciated Annie's bravery. I thought it took guts for her to bear it all in this confessional manner. I also recognized that this was an educational opportunity... how many men, forgetting their dicks, hands, or perhaps even a straying tongue or two, get anywhere near examining the G spot in such a leisurely, non-threatening manner!
I was very pleased that the often-curmudgeonly John Simon, very much the gentleman, gave Sprinkle a respectful and supportive review. It was a kind of official sanction, allowing the lady to ply her trade in New York. Perhaps he realized the enormous personal risk that Sprinkle was taking. As to be expected the dailies stayed away.
Well, the good news is, The Queen of Pop Porn is back with a daring, new, one-woman show, Annie Sprinkle's "Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real." The bad news is, unless things change quickly, "Herstory" will be history as it is scheduled to close November 1. A three-week run, at Performance Space 122 is hardly enough time for all Sprinkle lovers - men, women and others -- to see Annie. It would be nice to see a commercial run followed by a college circuit tour, though I can't think of any college that would have the guts to sponsor this show. Too bad for U.S. and thank God we still have venues like Performance Space 122 that are out there taking the risks. If it were up to Mayor Giuliani Sprinkle would not get to sparkle anywhere.
This time around, Sprinkle, using clips from her countless porno films, and period costume changes to indicate the passing of decades and generations, examines her amazingly long (in this industry) career with many unscripted off the cuff comments, in a kind of show and tell. "Herstory" reminds me of the movie, "Forrest Gump"(without the highly slanderous anti 60s propaganda posing as an innocent and random selection of historical moments), as it documents our own loss of innocence during roughly the same years.
With a very perky Disney-like Annie, who effects a cross between Glenda the Good Witch and Belle, from "Beauty and The Beast," the audience is transported from the early seventies right through the AIDS strewn landscape of the 80s and 90s, all the way to the 44 year old Sprinkle's most recent new age porno, Teen Age Mermaid Fanta-Sea; described by Sprinkle as "a training film to show how people can make their own porn." Here we are treated to a very colorful and artsy new-age film, reminiscent of Jack Smith's, "Flaming Creatures."
The movie clips start off in black and white and work their way to color. The plots of the early films are simple and politically incorrect (read misogynistic). The actors in the films, perhaps due to the newness of their profession, not knowing exactly where to stand or what to do, other than to have sex, appear to be waiting for direction. One is reminded of scenes from "Boogie Nights."
With Annie Sprinkle, as our guide, "Reel to Real" also reminds me of "Miss Margarita's Way," an early Joe Papp production in which Estelle Parsons, as the teacher and the audience as her class, ever so subtly, passes on the tenets of a fascist dictatorship. Though the subject differs here (Annie is imparting a kind of contemporary history of sex), both plays are about subtext; what is happening off stage, beneath the words, beneath the visuals.
In viewing Annie's compilation, twenty-five years of her porno film clips filled with explicit sexual acts of all types (faithfully saved by one of her fans), we are trenchantly reminded by default what is and what is not happening in our own beds, in our sex lives. Pushing the ongoing local anti-sex crusades of Mayor Giuliani aside, we are also reminded of a nationally connected legal, political and religious system which tends to spend an inordinate amount of time, energy and money trying to control, direct and enforce sexual behavior. We are reminded of the Karen Finley vs Jesse Helms and all of the NEA battles, Monica Lewinsky on her knees, the devastating effect that AIDS has had on our lives, the carte blanche it has given to authorities to monitor our lives, and the harm it is doing to the very idea of personal privacy. Yes, it's a lot to swallow.
Though it appears nowhere in print "Reel to Real," by its very nature, nightly changing, is a work- in-progress and as such needs work, primarily in the directing area, to progress to a higher plane. The film clips are perfect. It's Sprinkle's hit or miss, oft time throwaway patter, and her tentative, ill-planned, stage movements, as she comments on the film's action, that does not do the material justice.
I can understand the dilemma. How can you present such raw and at times uncomfortable material in a meaningful, entertaining and interest-holding manner. That's the rub. First one must trust the material. In this case the material, to a large extent is Sprinkle's life, and the mixing of public and private is a daunting new genre for the performer as well as the audience. Do we laugh, cry, cringe or sit impassively. What about gasping. Of course, as it should be, like life itself, it is an admixture of everything. But just how does one present everything. How do you juggle the material, balance seriousness with camp. Sprinkle needs direction. Some rethinking and reworking, of this somewhat improvised evening, by director and actress, is called for. Having always played herself, rather straightforwardly it is apparently difficult for Sprinkle, as the play requires, to jump back and forth, from screen to audience (from self to character), while changing costumes, and still comment cogently on the projected happenings.
As evidenced by the film's passing parade of bodies Annie -- unlike real life for most of us, where the wrong color hair or eye color or height is apt turn us off -- is an equal opportunity employer. Paying tribute to their sexuality, if not humanity, Sprinkle couples, trebles and quadruples with everyone, men and women of all colors, amputees and midgets. As all shapes, sizes and colors pass by, our minds start to wander. We think science, history and culture. Images as diverse as Todd Browning's "Freaks," early ""National Geographic"magazine spreads, old nature films of animals mating, pictures of Thom Thumb, the Elephant Man, medical photographs of Siamese twins, even Christopher Reeve, are brought to mind. Annie's acts force us to examine the very nature of the sexual drive and the myriad ways in which it is sated. At times, the evening takes on a sociological/scientific/exploratory bent in the vein of say, Kinsey or Kraft-Ebbing.
Opening night, party-like, was filled to the brim with a young, highly mixed (singles, couples, straights and gays), enthusiastically attentive, 20s-40s audience. There was a heavy sprinkling of artists, writers, filmmakers, sex-industry workers and hard core fans. We were visually treated, sometimes painfully, sometimes embarrassingly, sometimes humorously, to close-ups of throbbing cocks, gaping vaginas, willing assholes, fist fucking, rimming and countless other sexual pleasures and practices. Mostly missing was the traditional missionary position. Despite the variety of the scenes and sexual positions, save for one ultra sizzling clip in which Annie makes a point in telling us that she and her partner were very much in love, which certainly comes across, the evening is more instructional, educational and fun than erotic.
The highlight of the evening, presumably Annie's calling card (the one that gave her her name... in the industry it is called The Money Shot), was Sprinkle's Sprinkle. Though usually reserved for the male performers, the camera catches an extremely rare, vaginal cum shot. This shockingly wondrous close-up of the flowering Sprinkle, presented in Disney-like fashion (remember those time-sequenced shots of beautiful flowers opening), was an amazing eye opener. Pure fireworks. Most of us had never seen anything like it. Regardless of whether you think Sprinkle is an exhibitionist, this entire evening of double exposure, in film and in person, before a live audience, is a celebration. It is Annie's gift to us. [RUBIN]
"Culture of Desire"
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East 4th Street, N.Y., 10003
through October 18
212/780-9037
reviewed by Ed Rubin
The idea for "Culture of Desire," Anne Bogart’s most recent
production at The New York Theatre Workshop, was triggered by a
visit to K-Mart. From an “irresistible desire to buy everything in the
store,” it was a logical progression, for the innovative experimental
director, to mount a theatrical production, using Andy Warhol and his
contemporaries to investigate, “what it does to a person to be raised and
educated as a consumer rather than citizen.” Warhol, and the culture
that created our constant desire for objects, lifestyles, wealth and fame,
according to Bogart, “was our access to this arena. He fetishized our
culture and our desire and generated remarkable work from it.”
The structure of Culture of Desire loosely follows Dante’s journey in, The Inferno, Warhol is Dante, Diana Vreeland is Virgil his guide, and Hell is the American consumer culture. To help with our education, a cleverly costumed, wonderfully athletic cast, in the guise of Warhol and his cronies, Edie Sedgewick, Ultra Violet, Henry Geldzahler and Billy Name, all drawn from Bogart’s own company of actors, The Saratoga International Theatre Institute, dance, sing, speechify and cavort, sometimes hilariously, pushing the ubiquitous shopping cart around the stage, often to the music of The Velvet Underground. Making cameo appearances are Elvis, Marilyn and Jackie O; Warhol’s silkscreens from the 60s come alive.
Unlike Bogart’s last play Bob, a truly brilliant artistic creation, in which the words of experimental director Robert Wilson are judiciously culled, edited, shaped and brought to autobiographical life by the near- genius performance of Will Bond, Culture of Desire, ambitious to a fault, is scattershot in its effect. Based on interviews with Warhol and Company and exposes on consumer culture and advertisements, the production, part vaudeville, part circus and way camp, never quite pulls itself together as we are whisked, idiosyncratically, from canto to canto, circle to circle, scene to scene. What starts out as clever enumeration of foods and advertising phrases ends up as didactic harangues wrapped around quasi-academic pronouncements, with the audience subject to countless listings of Warhol’s paintings, films and the many museums that house his legend.
Kelly Maurer, as Warhol the lost child, is the soft and sentimental center of this confection. As the play’s only realistically portrayed character, we harbor tender thoughts toward Warhol (something rarely held when he was alive) as he speaks about his fear of intimacy, perhaps intimating a deep-seated loneliness.
The script does sport a number of witty and poignant observations that sets one to thinking about their own lives. In many ways we become Warhol caught in a set of circumstances called life. I couldn’t help laughing when Ultra Violet, as the consummate shopper explaining her purchasing behavior, warbles, “I can imagine it, therefore I want it. I want it, therefore I should have it. Because I should have, I need it. Because I need it, I deserve it. Because I deserve it, I will do anything necessary to get it.”
Diana Vreeland’s sagacious take on advertising snapped me to attention. “Although advertising cannot create desire, it can channel it. And what is drawn down that channel, what travels with the commercial, is our culture. Adculture has its greatest power in determining what travels with the commercial. For what is carried in and with advertising is what we know, what we share, what we believe in. It is who we are. It is us. “ Has anything really changed since the sixties. As Warhol might say, Yes! Everything has become even more so. [Rubin]
CROYDEN'S CORNER
by Margaret Croyden
At the House of La MaMa
"A Sudden Draught,"
Written and Directed by
Guy Shelley (closed)
"The Taming of the Shrew"
by William Shakespeare,
directed by Andre Serban (through November 15)
La MaMa etc. 74A East Fourth Street
New York, N. Y. 10003
212-475-7710
Reviewed by Margaret Croyden
After thirty-six glorious years, Ellen Stewart's La MaMa is still functioning and still presenting unique theater pieces unavailable any other place. Not only has Ms. Stewart traveled the world over to find important artists, but she herself has directed and produced various theatrical works in the third world, in central Europe, and in Asia, and in remote places that few companies have played, more less traveled. Cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity are inherent in Ms. Stewart's esthetic. And she has never faltered in her beliefs. In October, she presented two extraordinary works, "A Sudden Draught" written and directed by Guy Shelley, director of "Theatre Espace Acteur" in Paris, and Andre Serban's version of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" (running until the middle of November), with actors from Columbia University's Theater department of which Mr. Serban is a leading acting teacher.
These two pieces, are in direct contrast to each other. The work of Guy Shelley, whose play was co-directed by Dora Petrova, is in the French classical mode, though it is presented in English (translation by Arlette Barbary and Jeremy Drake) while Serban's "Shrew" is the opposite: his is a rowdy, wild, crazy satire that could only be directed by Serban who has the nerve, the wit, and the imagination to carry it off.
Let me begin with "A Sudden Draught," a play of ideas. Two actors dominate the stage. One is a dancer who is trying to rehearse his steps; the other, a cripple who has spied him through a window, and intrudes into the dancer's studio, and subsequently into his life. They have several psychological and philosophical exchanges about art and creativity, as well as the meaning of loneliness in a loveless world. In lively but sometimes esoteric discussions, both men quarrel and challenge each other's attitudes. The dancer defends his compulsive, rigid habits in perfecting his art; the other, relishes life's sensuality, despite his physical handicap. Eventually, the men are drawn together in friendship and sympathy and, in the end, come to understand and find comfort in each other.
The strength of this production depends on the relationship between the two performers, Olivier Raynal and Christopher Goodman (American actors living and working in Paris) and their ability to hold the stage despite the verbal marathon. With a minimum of action, each actor carefully develops his character by adding specific details to convey the differences between the two men. Skillfully, they infuse the evening with a certain tension and intrigue--a difficult job in a play that depends so much on talk. But the unique quality of the production is its ability to capture one's attention despite its loquaciousness that paradoxically produces an inner quietitude. One such moment is a scene in which the men imagine they are swimming, the climax of their relationship. It is played in total silence, but the body work of the actors is so superb that the scene became a totally emotional moment. The original music by Jean-Marc Pasquer and the recorded music by Stevie Wonder added to the essential intrigue and mystery of the play.
One of the fascinating aspects of this production is its experimental quality. The production is scheduled to play in Bulgaria, with two Bulgarian actors; in Japan, with two Japanese actors; and in Paris with two French actors. The different casts will explore the different possibilities in the play and each will interpret the piece from his point of view. The American version at La MaMa was the first phase of this experiment. It is interesting to note that only at La MaMa can such an enterprise be presented and encouraged. But this is typical of Ellen Stewart.
The first thing that can be said about "Taming of the Shrew" is that it is daring. And a stunning surprise from the director who just recently presented us with a pristine "Cymbeline" in the park. From the almost classical staging of Shakespeare's "Cymbeline," to this wild and witty "Shrew," Serban demonstrates an amazing versatility. Only a brilliant director like Andre Serban could have dreamed this up. For he throws all caution to the wind and gives vent to a hilarious, inventive deconstruction of the "Shrew" without ruining Shakespeare's intent. Serban uses every device at his command: buffoonery, cartoon characters, farcical stereotypes, Marx Brothers zaniness, cross dressing, cross gender casting, contemporary references, surrealist and pop images and even Cole Porter's music from "Kiss Me Kate." To his credit, he has a wonderfully skilled company of young people, his students from Columbia University Theater department. It is indeed hard to image that this superb cast are students; many of them, will surely have splendid professional carers.
The work is full of sophisticated detail, complicated body work, and endless comments on the idiocy of the characters and their lusts, desires, and foolishness. Katherine (Alanna Medlock), dressed in a devil's outfit--red leggings, red top hat, carries a whip, and marches around screaming insults. Bianca (Maha Chehlaoui) is a simpering fool at the start and a nasty bitch at the end. Petruchio (Eliot Angle) is a cross between Harrison Ford and Sam Shepard in looks and sexiness. He and Kate engage in a fierce battle staged in a prize fighting ring; Petruchio wears a rubber suit that exaggerates his body parts--a la superman-- while Katherine carries her ever present whip. Engaging in a fierce body battle, the actors show off their amazing physical prowess.
Since "Taming of the Shew" is considered a problem play, Serban had a problem. Not wanting to do the play, written in the 1500's, in a conventional manner, he chose to upgrade the work for contemporary audiences. How to do this and carry it off? One way is to use every modern device at his disposal: cell phones, video camera, trucks, rock music, kinky costuming, comic strips, and countless other images and props that he hoped would be meaningful metaphors to convey what he considered to be the play's intention. In a program note, he claimed that "Kate undergoes a painful journey in 'Shrew'" which purges her of unnecessary anger and vitriol which, in Serban's judgment is necessary for "a new kind of marriage and union." Plainly, this is a novel approach to the play, and whether this concept works is in the eye of the viewer.
The night I saw the piece, the audience was enthralled, loved the crazy antics, and seemed not to care about, or notice any underlying philosophical notions that Serban postulates. It was a good show, funny, carefree, and crazy, full of the magic of the theater--the work of a truly gifted director, and a cast of young people equally gifted. The audience was plainly enchanted. Especially was it a pleasure to watch young people so full of energy and life, and to see them give new meaning to an old story. Serban and his cast must be given full credit for reinterpreting this old chestnut so brilliantly. Hats off to him and his students! And to Ellen Stewart--the La MaMa who makes such evenings possible. [Croyden]
"NO EXIT" BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AT JEAN COCTEAU REP
"No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre, adapted from the French by Paul Bowles, directed by David Travis. Presented by Jean Cocteau Repertory, Bouwerie Lane Theatre, 330 Bowery (Bond/Second Street). Previews August 7, 8, opens August 9. Plays August 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, September 3 (7:00 pm), 4, 5, 6, 9 (7:00 pm), 10, 11, 12 (3:00 and 8:00 pm), 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, October 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 pm (except where noted), Sundays at 3:00 pm, some Wednesdays at 8:00 pm; Admission $30 Fri & Sat 8:00 pm and Sun 3:00 pm, $24 other times, $21 seniors, $12 students, TDF accepted. Preview performances $24 general admission. Discount ticket packages available: $105/five admissions (traditional series or flexible pass). Box office (212) 677-0060.
By Jerry TallmerThe other day, in midsummer heat, and not for the first but maybe the thousandth time, to a standee on a jam-packed bus for some 20 blocks, the idea of murdering every single seated passenger became a very clear desirability. Don't tell me the same fantasy hasn't ever crossed your mind. It's a good thing they don't issue guns with MetroCards . . .
"Anyone who's ever been stuck on the subway," says Giles Hogya --to move the situation appropriately underground -- "knows that Hell is other people."
Hogya, the Dean of Fine Arts at Victoria College, British Columbia, in 1987 directed a Jean Cocteau Repertory off-Broadway production of "No Exit" ("Huis Clos"), the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre drama that had thrust into human awareness precisely that concept, voiced by the play's Garcin as he looks around at the two other late unlamented figures, Inez and Estelle, with whom he finds himself locked unto eternity in a tawdry Second Empire hotel room:
So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone? . . . Old wives' tales! There's no need for red- hot pokers. Hell is -- other people!
That same Giles Hogya is the fellow who's done the sets and lighting of the "No Exit," directed by David Travis, which has just opened the 1988-99 season at the Cocteau Rep's Bouwerie Lane Theatre, on the Bowery at Bond Street.
When the two men who run Cocteau Rep -- Robert Hupp and Scott Shattuck -- seven months ago suggested "No Exit" as a play for David Travis to mount there, the going-on-25-year-old Travis figured he'd better re-read it. "I didn't even know that Giles Hogya had once directed it for the Cocteau," Travis says, "or that Eve Adamson, who founded Cocteau Rep, had directed it there 10 years before that. I only recently learned all this."
He characterizes his first few weeks of working on the project as a labor of love -- "more yet, a labor to love. Because in my first two readings, it really took me a while to embrace this play. "Why? Because of its lack of subtlety. Because of the fact that it [life eternal in that hotel room] didn't seem so hellish. A big question there: Was Sartre really trying to contrast the hideousness of that room with the Judeo-Christian concept of hell? "Then I realized that Sartre never believed in that [the Judeo-Christian] hell. His hell is deprivation of choice -- and thus, of freedom." (Sartre was writing "No Exit," of course, under the boot of the Nazi Occupation of France.) The three people -- or former people -- locked in that room are Garcin, a revolutionary who ran away and was shot to death for cowardice; Estelle, a spoiled, totally self-involved nymphomaniac who caused a young lover to commit suicide; and Inez, a caustic, avaricious lesbian. It is Inez who delivers an even more crucial line of Sartre's:
"You always die too soon or too late. And at that moment your life is complete. The line is drawn. The figures are all there; they must be added up. What are you if not your life?"
[Paul Bowles translation that Travis is using at the Cocteau]
What better definition -- or elucidation -- of Existentialism?
"Yes," says Travis in agreement, "that's the crux of Sartre's argument right there, and we're staging it as the final face-off. The way it's blocked it highlights the two characters, Garcin [actor Charles Parnell] and Inez [Elise Stone] who understand that argument. The third character, Estelle [Tracy Atkins], doesn't understand at all. Her response is to say to Garcin: 'Come and kiss me.' "
Travis is glad to have Elise Stone -- "an amazingly talented actress" -- back in the role she created for this same company 10 years ago.
It was when the Cocteau's Shattuck, this past January, went to the Connelly Theatre on East 4th Street to see a Chain Lightning production of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Pulitzer-winner, "Beyond the Horizon," that he knew he must invite the show's director, Travis, whom he'd never heard of, to direct something, anything, at the Cocteau.
"What I found at the Connelly," Shattuck writes in "The Skinny," a column he conducts on the Cocteau Rep Website, "was simply the best off-off-Broadway production I have ever seen" by "one of the most remarkable young directors I've encountered."
That "Beyond the Horizon" assignment had fallen to Travis upon the death in November of his Chain Lightning mentor, Kricker James --who, stricken with cancer, had asked Travis to come in as assistant director, just in case.
"So I got the Cocteau job through the Chain Lightning job -- that is, through a tragedy of sorts."
David Travis, born Feb. 19, 1973, in Providence, R.I., raised in Newton, Mass., a 1995 graduate of Harvard, returned to the United States after a very fruitful theatrical year in Great Britain (as assistant director, for one thing, of the road company of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia") to start a Synapse theater company with a young woman then his roommate, now his fiancee -- a Leicestershire-and-London daughter of John Bull.
As soon as "No Exit" is well launched, he and Ginevra Bull, Gin for short, will kiss their 6th-floor East Village walkup so-long and depart for Australia on the first leg of a world tour that is to end with their marriage in England next June.
Meanwhile, "No Exit."
"It's funny," Travis says, "the play's a staple of the canon, yet if you look in the Lincoln Center clippings file, it's never been reviewed enthusiastically. People walk away saying it's static and gloomy.
"I've come to realize that the stasis and circularity were later picked up by Beckett and Ionesco, and that it must have seemed like a very new idea in the 1940s. What I like most about 'No Exit' is what it says -- especially for us here in New York -- about the lack of privacy, and what happens where you're in the middle of image-obsessed people.
"What this play does is incrementally deconstruct and demolish those facades. Its philosophical aspects are very subtle," says the young man who had originally found the work wanting in subtlety, "but these aspects are sort of eclipsed by the far-fetched emotional hoops he makes the characters jump through."
Tall, lanky, long-jawed David Travis doesn't always talk like that. His voice lifted and his eyes lit up as he proclaimed, with the irony of hooplah: "It is a fascinating play and has been shaping up into a Very Fun and Rollickingly Furious Show, very fast and full of passion."
A few changes from the traditional. The hideosity of the hotel room is, in Giles Hogya's set, no longer Second Empire French. "Contemporary American audiences don't associate with that." The three couches, one for each character (not counting the deus-ex-machina valet played by Tim Deak) are now "benches too short to lie on."
And that vulgar bronze on the mantelpiece that everybody keeps talking about?.
It's not there. In its place, center stage, is the statue of a three-bladed rotating electric fan. One blade for Garcin, one for Inez, one for Estelle.
No subway goes directly to the Bouwerie Lane. The 103 Lexington Avenue/Park Row bus does. Think nothing but good thoughts about your fellow men and women on the way down. [Tallmer]
This article was originally published in The Villager. Reprinted with permission.
In performance, the Italian performance artist wins you over because he is so
irreverent; he bends over backwards to make sure his productions are fully
understood by English-speaking audiences. Their subject matter is challenging
in the literal sense, too. Whatever the artifice he has chosen to draw
inspiration from (Sam Beckett, Shakespeare's Richard III), the plays never
waver from the core of their concern: the plight of real people with mental
disabilities.
So if you consider that D'Ambrosi has been reconnoitering this terrain in
Italy since 1979 and that his plays have been presented at La MaMa for 18
years now, it's pretty fair to say that his interest in living and working and
collaborating with the mentally disabled goes beyond insanity. His theater is
a form of social realism that is also an idee fixe. With unusual openness and
frankness,, his theatrical aesthetic openly embraces the extremity of their
forms, emotions and ideas, and it is, thus, called teatro patologico.
D'Ambrosi's latest presentation, "The Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan
Maldetto" is firmly in keeping with his yearly theatrical obsessions at La
MaMa. Remarkably, it is his shortest, most daring, and his bravest. For one,
some of the cast members are literally Italians with mental disabilities. Ten
of the ensemble performers in the cast are members of an Italian voluntary
center in Rome called "The White Horse (Il Cavallo Bianco)" which, the program
says, is "created by and for young people with and without mental
disabilities."
Before Arlene Croce's ilk can claim "victim art," D'Ambrosi subverts
sensationalism or unseemliness by deploying one hilarious piece of irony: no
character is more perverted or more insane than D'Ambrosi himself in the role
of Capitan Maldetto. How insane is he? How perverted? When D'Ambrosi first
enters the stage, lording over the innocent children (played by the mentally
disabled Italians) from the top of his stoop, a pirate refers to him as
"Capitan Pedophilia."
Indeed, while "The Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan Maldetto" might
seem like yet another tired version of J. M. Barrie famous classic (didn't
Mabou Mines just perform "Peter & Wendy" at Yale Rep?), D'Ambrosi gives the
myth one more surge of electrical shock and brings it to subversive life.
Capitan Maldetto terrorizes the kids every chance he can get. He paws their
bare open legs. He delights in the shape of their buttocks. He films them with
his movie camera obsessively, even when they are not doing anything
particularly interesting. In fact, the image of D'Ambrosi totting a video
camera around may just be one of the most pointed symbols of the culture of
child molesting and abuse. Wearing a black-coat and a Nazi-like swastika
armband, Capitan Maldetto represents the fascism of adulthood. Licking a
lollipop and playing with toys, he is depicted with grim humor and bitter
irony; he personifies how modern society eroticizes empty innocence through
the media, how children are both fetish objects and innocent victims of an
unbelievable and relentless scrutiny by the capitalist-consumerist-industrial
structure.
In D'Ambrosi's version, which is informed by a zany mixture of pantomime and
commedia dell'arte, Peter Pan flies by walking on stilts. At the moment of
greatest terror, he saves the day by sprinkling magic dust on Tinker Bell who
then metastasizes into the ticking crocodile. Though Peter Pan is an archetype
of infantilism, he is more than a perfect nemesis to Capitan Maldetto. In a
turn-of-plot thematically echoing "My Kingdom for a Horse" (1996) in which
Richard III is a schizo fetus trapped in an internal dialogue with his
unloving mother, D'Ambrosi's Capitan Maldetto eventually regresses into
childhood himself. He sucks on his hook arm the way a baby sucks a thumb. The
suggestion here is that of arrested development. He may have been abused
himself as a child. Certainly he is revealed to be unable to love.
Smart enough to know that the Peter Pan myth is well traveled terrain,
D'Ambrosi does not sustain his theatrical version for more than an hour. And
the result is that, despite the terrifying subject matter of child
molestation, he actually manages to throw in a delightful waltz. After the
Freudian regression of Capitan Maldetto's into a heartless inner child,
D'Ambrosi provides happy and vivacious relief. Looking back, the rational side
of me is not quite sure if the euphoric ending makes logical sense. But as
performance-art that serves the purposes of actors with mental disabilities,
it's certainly their special prerogative to end on a high note.
While dealing defiantly and shrewdly with a controversial subject matter, "The
Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan Maldetto" features a stunning, scarily
suggestive darkly woodsy Never-Neverland set by designer Jun Maeda and a
boisterous musical band (percussion by Genji Ito, piano by Kenneth Laufer,
violin by Yuliya Ziskec). Compared to D'Ambrosi's past La MaMa shows, "The
Dis-Adventures" is sprightlier, livelier and bracingly unexploitative.
Paradoxically enough, it's also the most utterly charming of D'Ambrosi's
allegorical explorations of the irrational. You'd be a fool to miss it. [Gener]
THE DIS-ADVENTURES OF PETER PAN vs.
They are lost boys, in Never-Never Land. The Never-Never Land, not of Peter and Wendy, but of a mental institution.
"My mother loved me more than your mothers loved you," says one of these boys. "She came more than once to try to take me back . . . but it was Daddy who didn't want to take me back home. How I'd like Cinderella to be my mother."
"All that I remember about my mother," says a second boy, "is that she often used to say to Daddy: 'Oh, how I'd like to have a checkbook all for myself.' I don't know what a checkbook is," says the boy, "but I'd like to give one to my mother. Actually I'd like to give her a bank card."
"Who knows," says a third boy, "if in the real story, the witch ever gave Cinderella any pills."
"Or maybe she tried to give her an electroshock?" says yet another. "The witch in Cinderella is like Captain Pedophile."
Enter Captain Pedophile, with a hook where his right hand should be. The hook holds a moviemaker's light meter.
Captain Pedophile, child pornographer, also known as Capitan Maledetto ("Bad Guy"), is about to shoot one of his XXX-rated films, creating circumstances considerably uglier for these boys who have to star in it than anything blustered by dear old Captain Hook in the James M. Barrie classic.
But in the end, just like Hook, Pedophile the pirate has to face an avenging Peter Pan -- a Pedophile high overhead on his movie dolly, a Peter Pan on stilts.
"For me," said Dario D'Ambrosi in his admirably achieved English, "is incredible step. A year ago these boys, the ten I bring with me from Rome for La MaMa, they can't talk. Now they talk." He means it literally.
In Rome, last December, when D'Ambrosi premiered his "Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan Maledetto" at the Teatro Valle, "we have 25 ill children from 18 years to 35" in the cast.
"In Italy, a very big moment, on television and everything, because now in Italy we have this very big problem about pedophile. I don't know why. Maybe because of the Internet or something."
The "Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan," which played through Sunday, October 18, at La MaMa's Annex, 66 E. 4th St., is, by D'Ambrosi's reckoning, the 16th show he's done at La MaMa since the first one, "Tuti non ci sono" ("Everybody's Not Here"), 19 years ago.
It is also 19 years, or a bit more, that onetime professional soccer hero Dario D'Ambrosi, survivor of a rough, difficult boyhood in working-class Naples, has been working with young (and less young) mental patients.
What had started him off was wanting to find out what the violence of some of his buddies -- the paranoia and schizophrenia of the streets -- was all about.
To this end, the rugged 20-year-old soccer player had put himself for some months of watching and learning into Rome's Santa Maria de la Pieta psychiatric clinic. At the same time he'd founded his own theater company, the Gruppo Teatrale Dario D'Ambrosi (since renamed Teatro Patalogical). Later, in New York, D'Ambrosi spent further study hours in Bellevue's mental wards.
The marriage of theater with pathology has keynoted his astonishing accomplishment ever since, not least the 1996 "Un regno per il meio cavallo" ("My Kingdom for a Horse"), in which D'Ambrosi, solo, became a schizophrenic Richard III in fetus, raving from his mother's womb.
And yes, D'Ambrosi said now, there is indeed much pathologically in common between today's "Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan" and the late Pier Paolo Pasolini's ultra-controversial 1975 shocker, "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," with its enslaved, degraded teenagers writhing around the floor in pornographic obeisance before their Fascist overmasters.
"Oh yeah," D'Ambrosi said. "Absolutely. You're right, you just touched something. So strong the connection. Many relations between that film and this show."
The Peter Pan of the piece at La MaMa was Gianluigi Capone, the Tinker Bell is Stefano Amati, the Wendy was "a man, a very old man, well, not very old, in his 40s, a singer" named Elio Cesary, other leading roles were taken by Paolo Porto, Paolo Sansone, and Antonella Zocca, while among the many supporting players -- pirates, and the like -- were five hospital attendants who have accompanied the 10 patients from Rome.
There is music in the show, of course -- by John La Barbera -- but. writer/director D'Ambrosi acknowledged with a sheepish forgive-me shrug, no Nana, the beloved sheepdog/nurse.
And the Captain Hook, or Captain Pedophile, or Capitan [STET] Maledetto?
Smiling broadly, big, tanned, oval-faced, bald-as-an-egg Dario D'Ambrosi pointed to his own chest.
"Wait till you see," he said, "when this Pedophile, this Captain Hook, unscrews the hook of his hand, so it shows -- how you say? -- that thing of a baby bottle . . . yes, the nipple. And sucks from it the milk. And says: 'I am angry at the world because I never had milk from my mother.' "
No, D'Ambrosi says, he himself did not read or know about "Peter Pan" as a kid. "It was bad, violent, my infance. But now I have the two girls" -- daughters Michela, 8, and Maria Grazia, 6, their mother being his set-designer wife, Loredana D'Ambrosi -- "and so now I can love, with them, the incredible stuff I missed in my infance."
And that's how he at long last caught up with "Peter Pan" in the 1953 Disney version. "Was magic. Really magic."
The long-ago soccer ace -- "offence, the guy who puts the ball inside" -- still plays from time to time. "No team. Just friends, you know."
After a pause: "For me, soccer is really something in my heart. With theater I did something worth in my life. My destiny is theater. But my heart is in soccer."
Peter Pan, the boy who never grew older, the boy without a shadow, would have understood that. [Tallmer]
THE DIS-ADVENTURES OF PETER PAN vs. CAPITAN MALDETTO, written and directed by Dario D'Ambrosi, was presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in its Annex Theater, 66 E. 4th St., through October 18.
Obie-winner Ernest Abuba has one of the most resonant voices on the
American stage. At its best, he speaks with poetic clarity and sheer
eloquence. However, at its least effective, his emotive voice can be
relentlessly one-note. Unfortunately, Abuba is grating to the ear most of the
time in his fascistic interpretation of "King Lear." This is not simply
bad acting. He is a victim of bad dramaturgy. His conception of Lear is an
atrociously insular revisionism of Shakespeare's tragic king. Not to mention,
completely unsympathetic. Abuba's King Lear is a ruinous tyrant. His vanity
and pride cause a holocaust that, in the terms of the production, is
comparable the historical horrors of Sarajevo, Armenia, Khmer Rouge, Tibet and
Warsaw Ghetto. (Whew!) Anyway, despotism does not exactly leave a lot of room
for emotional development. Abuba's Lear is verbally abusive and completely
condescending. He screams at everyone at the top of his voice. So when his
daughters collude against Abuba's Lear, the first words that came to mind was,
"You go, girls!"
Is it important to note that every other character in this production was
physically taller than the dictator-king? Indeed, if this adaptation, which
was presented at La MaMa E.T.C., had been replete with scatology, you'd
be forgiven if you mistook it for a post-Jarry version of "Abuba Roi." But the
production, which is co-directed by Abuba and Shigeko Suga, insists on
confounding us by calling itself a version of Shakespeare. It wasn't until I
read the press release after I'd seen the production that I could even
begin to understand how sharp the interpretive scalpel used here.
According to the release, Abuba's millennial thoughts on Shakespeare issued
from Gloucester's doomy predictions in the first part of the play about
mutinies, discord, palatial treason and the emotional breakdown between
fathers and daughters. So he imagined a fascistic society, set in the near
future, where "the breakdown of society and regression to primitivity is
indicated by the warrior's use of camouflage paint, warpaints and tattoos."
Now while I did see warriors smearing themselves with dirt, it was not clear
while seeing this misguided production that this was the intent.
Further, it's not clear why a Second Fool would videotape the goings-on in
front of us and project harrowing images on the dark walls. The first Fool was
abominable enough. A generous reading might suggest that the Second Fool
represents a kind of all-seeing, technocratic correlative to the symbolically
blind Lear. Perhaps it represents the subversive effect of television on the
outcome of the Vietnam War and other modern horrors. But that's like giving
the camcorder too much credit. (Besides, how are we to address the fact that
during Desert Storm the media actively colluded with the military-industrial
complex?) It's even harder to find compelling any of the choreographic
movements which the release has the audacious gall to describe as a blend of
Butoh, flamenco and West African dance. When the p.r. release alludes to
"Apocalypse Now," "Lier Rex" begins to bend over backwards in its attempt to
reach out and find relevance.
Perhaps it would have helped if Abuba & Co. simply printed the press release
in the program. Then again, a press release does not an artistic statement
make. And a host of allusions not theatrically realized signify nothing. (I
won't even touch the confusion of accents.) "Lier Rex" is not only a case of
too many ideas spoiling the brew. It is a mass of undigested matter. Which is
a damn shame because Kaori Akazawa's disturbing set design suggests a
haunting minefield of splintered bodies and exploded parts. And the superb
musicality by Yoshi Shimada who performs on percussion and flamenco guitar,
kept my eye and ears piqued throughout what in less gifted hands would quickly
devolve into an interminable evening. Jodi Lin's Cordelia is soulful
and beautiful presence. (Also good were Michael O'Connel as Kent and
Doug O'Lear as Edmund.) As for the rest, better luck next time.
Uta Hagen struck me as mannered and hideous as the gorgon in "Mrs.
Klein," directed by William Carden. So when she won awards and
great critical acclaim for her performance in that play, they felt undeserved;
now this was an example, I thought, of one of those legendary actresses simply
coasting on the glory of her past. You know, like Arthur Miller.
All of these thoughts and qualms got quickly banished when I saw her in Donald
Margulies's "Collected Stories," a Pulitzer Prize finalist from last
season when the same role was performed by a severely miscast Maria
Tucci at the Manhattan Theatre Club. First of all, Hagen actually
convinces us that her Ruth is Jewish. (In Maria Tucci's hands, this was never
so, and Ruth looked like a stern piece of hardened artery.) But that's not
all. Hagen performs with such generosity of spirit that she actually hands
over the first half of the play to Lorca Simon's Lisa, Ruth's young
protégé. Of course, in a way, Hagen has no choice, for Ruth merely spars
verbally with Lisa, and it isn't until the last part of the first act (when
Ruth remembers her relationship with Delmore Schwartz) that Hagen a
full-fledged monologue. Like a cat ready to pounce, Hagen waits for her
moment, and then flies.
There is also more warmth and heart in Hagen's Ruth. And not just because
she's older than Tucci, though that helps. In contrast to Simons, who is
endearing and funny but scratchy in part and gratingly hard-edged in others,
Hagen exudes a soft vulnerability. And it breaks through even when Ruth is
meant to be a formidable creature.
On second viewing, "Collected Stories" seems more and more like Margulies's
humanistic answer to David Mamet's "Oleanna." Both plays are certainly
structured similarly: the relationship between a teacher and her pupil, over a
period of time, erupts into hate and rivalry. This is Margulies's most obvious
attempt to write the kind of commercial play that can easily be mounted in
regional theaters all over the country. And by writing about the literary
world, he lends the play a veneer of thought-provoking ideas and high class;
we can, therefore, be assured that the talk will be interesting, and we're not
watching some stupid play featuring foul-mouthed characters with IQ's below
sea level. Further, Margulies wins points by dropping names, too. When Ruth
cracks a joke that "Life is too short to read The New Yorker," she gets a huge
laugh, particularly from urban audiences whose laughter acknowledges that they
are, well, "in the know."
Is "Collected Stories" a great play? Not really. But it's certainly an utterly
satisfying entertainment. (Margulies has certainly written greater plays in
"Sight Unseen," "The Loman Family Picnic," and the towering
masterpiece, "The Model Apartment," the latter of which, if you ask me,
should have won the Pulitzer.) Still, what in lesser acting hands would seem
merely intriguingly smart "Collected Stories" vaults into the stratosphere of
compelling in the magisterial persona of Uta Hagen. Who knew that she could
infuse this well-crafted play with so much emotion and unbearably beauty?
Hagen never fails to deliver a sterling, ineluctably moving performance. Don't
miss "Collected Stories" with Uta Hagen, for this is as close to the divine as
we mortals are allowed in our lifetime.
"Collected Stories" plays Tuesday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m.,
Wednesday and Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00 p.m. at the Lucille
Lortell Theatre (121 Christopher Street). Tickets are on sale through January
3. Call Telecharge at 239-6200. Prices are $37.50 and $49.50.
At the Here Theater in Soho, The Threshold Theater Company's third
annual "Caught in the Act" festival proved, as usual, to be a lot of
fun. The festival's three rotating programs (of which I saw two programs)
employ about 10 directors, 10 designers, and a cast of 30 actors. Even when a
couple of the productions falter somewhat or drag on too long, the Threshold
production values are nevertheless imaginatively high, the choice of plays
consistently Euro-smart, the translations mostly actable, and the performances
mostly engaging, when the actors don't dally with the dialogue. Fifteen
international one-act plays from 1905 to 1983 by authors like Emilio
Carballido, Valerii Briusov, Slawomir Morzek, and Dario Fo and his
wife Franca Rame were placed on the diversity menu.
Since the series has garnered a host of hosannas for being an outlet for
European dramatic literature, it is with some chagrin to report that the
Threshold festival makes huge missteps in its one and only Asian foray.
Directed by Elizabeth Swain, "Hanjo" (Japan, 1955) by Yukio
Mishima suffers from a stilted adaptation by Donald Keene and a severe
case of miscasting. Stripped of its elegant Noh trappings, the play comes
across as an overwrought mystery tale about the search for lost love--and
ultimately a sad, pathetic one about unrequired lesbian love. Still, the
production begins promisingly enough, with a ritualized dance involving an
exchange of fans between Hanako (Kim Ima), a geisha, and Yoshio (Masa
Sakamaki), the man she loves. The play takes a wrong turn when the narrative
actually starts: long after the two have separated and Hanako's contract has
been purchased by Jutsiko (Suzi Takahashi), the play comes off as a prosaic
and badly acted battle-of-wills over the possession of Hanako. When Yoshio
shows up, the performances collapse into unnatural squirmings all over the
floor and hectic quarreling.
"A Sunny Morning" by Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez-Quintero
(Spain, 1905), translated from the Spanish by Lucretia Xavier Floyd, is the
best-known play by two Spanish brothers who specialized in comedies of
Andalusian manners. It's a sweet, lovely, very memorable play about re-
discovered love. Doña Laura (Jacqueline Brookes) and Don Gonzalo (James
Stevenson) meet on a park bench in Madrid (or Central Park today), one sunny
morning, and slowly realize that, when they were young, they had been former
lovers whom circumstances had fated not to meet. The frisson occurs when the
two don't tell each other that they recognize the other's identity.
Unfortunately, while the production has moments of good humor and grace, the
precious quality of the nostalgic tale is marred by the snail-like pace and
draggy performances of Brookes and Stevenson, particularly the latter actor
who seemed to be struggling to remember a couple of his lines.
Similarly, "The Curve," a 1960 German play by Tankred Dorst,
breaks the backbone of gothic horror and amorality that is supposed to keep
the slender sinister tale on its toes. The naturalistic performances do not
quite gibe with the absurdism of the grotesque tale in which two brothers send
letters to the city government regarding a dangerous curve that has killed
many people. The twist is that it is ultimately revealed that their actual
intent (to keep the road unsafe) counters their apparent intent (to fix the
road), for it is only when the road continues to cause deaths that the two
brothers can find some sort of livelihood (they fix up the beat-up cars or
sell it off for money). Anyway, the translation is overlong and draggy.
Also draggy in a semi-serious, seriously unfunny manner is "Orison," a
play by Fernando Arrabal, in which he attempts to deconstruct the
nature of goodness and stand it on its head. For the most part, the play makes
fun of the improbability of biblical injunctions on what it means to be good,
with the man suggesting Adam and the woman suggesting an inquisitive Eve.
Indeed, the most delightful parts of the Threshold festival were the one-act
plays that knew enough to keep it short. So kudos to Daniel C. Gerould whose
translations of the short-short-short selections from "The Little Theater
of the Green Goose" (Poland, 1946 to 1953) were fast spritzes of hilarious
non-sense. Particularly funny in the absurdist manner were "The Peculiar
Waiter," the quick repartee in "Hamlet and the Waitress," and the hotdogs in
"He Couldn't Wait It Out!" Also delightful was "The Mirror," a 1957
play by the Mexican playwright Emilio Carballido. This one flirts with
farcical realism and high-style absurdity. A posh room becomes stripped of its
romantic trappings as an adulterous affair gets deliriously exposed.
"Edward and Agrippina," a 1961 French play by Rene de Obaldia,
and "The Wayfarer," a 1910 Russian play by Valerii Briusove,
were particularly interesting to watch because the women in them (Joan
Sheppard and Francesca Di Mauro, respectively) turned in very, very good
performances. "Edward and Agrippina" is a sort of backhanded murder story in
which Sheppard's insufferably yakking Agrippina gets killed off when an
intruder busts into the bedroom. "The Wayfarer" also concerns an unknown man
entering a closed room, but because he is mute, the play is virtually a long
monologue by Di Mauro who expertly takes us from here to there--and gives us
more. The work of both Sheppard and Di Mauro represent the high standards of
acting one often sees in Threshold performances.
But the most blessedly riotous performances were by Tom Mardirosian and
Frederica Meister in Dario Fo and Franca Rame's "The Open
Couple." These two bulbous creatures lock horns as their married
characters experiment on having an open relationship. What's superb here is
that the performances, an orgy of anger and revenge and jealousy, verge on
performance art. Although it might have been a treat to Italians to have seen
the original Fo and Rame perform this play themselves, it's unlikely that
Americans will feel gypped by these two actors working at the top of their
form. Bravo!
Ken Nintzel is the queerest of the batch of new directors at Richard
Foreman's Ontological Theatre at St. Mark's. "Pansy Acts of Practicing
Homosexuals" was a docu-pastiche about gays in the theater (from Mae West
to "Boys in the Band"), and his direction of Tennessee Williams's
"Auto-Da-Fe" received some good notices. This is my first experience of
Nintzel's theatrical revelry. And whatever its longeurs, it was wonderfully
imaginative, and a good time was had by all.
The title, "Sonata Da Camera Obscura," sounds mightily high-falutin'
and its descriptive intent (to focus on "the counterpoint between
homosexuality and music" and "the concept of how we appropriate specfici
songs, lyrics, and musical genres to help capture and express our thoughts,
emotions, and desires") was not so much dramatized as performed. But Nintzel
wonderfully delivers the goods. There are five movements to Nintzel's
exploration. The first, "A Piano Bar (Allegro)," is essentially a revue of the
first refrains of show tunes. Nintzel sits behind a piano as several men, all
holding many different colored wine glasses, gather around to sing everything
from "Some Enchanted Evening" to "Wonderful Guy." The main point is to
introduce a hunky sailor, whose presence or absence constitutes "the
narrative" that binds the evening together. "Torch Song (Adagio)" features a
superb performance by Dan Thaler whose sweet, supple operatic voice is the
highlight of the entire evening; this is a singer to watch. "Opera Queen
(Baroque Scherzo)" follows the death of the sailor. This is the wildest, most
grotesque, sensationally absurd moment of the evening in which the Nintzel
dresses up in mounrful Victorian drag bursts forth from a cinema screen and
onto the stage. The whole moment recalls "The Piano" in a rage of
psychological storm, with tissue papers flying, and grotesque wailings, and a
picture of the dead sailor hanging on a pole.
"Torch Song (Adagio)", the fourth movement of the evening, is meant to be a
mournful, passionate hymn of grief by the pianist/widow. Because Nintzel can't
sing, it's the weakest moment of the evening. And because he chooses to remain
withdrawn and pallid thoughout the song, it is also least dramatic. (For a
more effective example of the same dramaturgy, see Sally Bowles's breakdown in
the second act of "Cabaret.") "A Discotheque (Allegro con Coda)" is the most
Felliniesque of the entire evening. The entire cast gyrates in wild abandon
and in glittery costumes all night at a disco; the moment is meant to be an
explosion of revelry in which the pianist goes back into the fold of decadent
revelry. But the evening ends on a haunting, superearthly note, as the ghost
of the sailor returns to discover the remains of the all-night party.
"Sonata Da Camera Obscura" is a marvelously conceived and touchingly brought-
off meditation on life and death in the gay world. It deserves a longer life.
The nature of appropriation of commercial images is also the subject of
Anne Bogart's latest creation, "The Culture of Desire," at
New York Theatre Workshop. Her main contribution here is to bring
Warhol into a Dantesque consumerist hell. The first part of the evening
delights: an assorted bevy of underground superstars wheel around shopping
carts and sing hymns of grocery lists. And the writing is very good. Every so
often Diana Vreeland pauses to deliver chilling art criticism on Warhol's
silkscreens. Tthe rest of the evening devolves into the benumbed state of
Warhol's psyche, after he got shot by Valrie Solanas.
There's nothing inherently repugnant about the production, which has been
universally put down. The lighting and design are first rate and the emotional
tones swings to and from coldly intellectual, brightly parodic and
relentlessly ironic. The problem is that Bogart has decided to deal with a
subject on a supremely untimely manner. She's turned in a Warhol-piece about
30 years too late--long after everybody else, fans and detractors alike, has
said just about everything that could be possibly said on the subject. In
"Culture of Desire," Bogart practically redefines procrastination. Even the
Warhol Foundation at Pittsburgh had to trump up Warhol's connection with
fashion in order to mount a recent Whitney retrospective.
When I spoke to Bogart several months ago, she made it clear to me that she's
interested in creating a repertory of theatrical pieces for the Saratoga
International Theatre Institute (SITI) Company which would function much like
the pieces in a dance company's repertoire. The culture of her desire is to
have several of works performing simultaneously at various places in the
country. This, in part, explains why most of her pieces have involved cultural
personages: Marshall McLuhan, Bob Wilson, the movie stars of the
American silents, and now Warhol. (Who's next? Noam Chomsky?) Basically what
she's doing here is to create theatrical pieces that both inform and summarize
their various contributions. In terms of stage biography, these pieces are
indisputably smart. Whatever their emotional coldness, a Bogart creation is a
stylishly done retrospective portrait that manages to both capture the
cultural persona as well as comment on it. So it is massively unfortunate that
there is nothing original about her ideas on Warhol. Perhaps these productions
would be of some educational value to universities and art colleges, but as
cultural events the effect is becoming virtually nil.
Now I know I am screwing up another opportunity to ever be given a chance to
interview Bogart in person again. I bear no ill will toward her, and frankly I
only wish the best and brightest for the SITI Company in the future. But what
is utterly distasteful about "Culture of Desire" is the massive egotism
behind the production.
Let me explain. Now most directors are known to be authoritarians who throw
their huge egos around. It would be a shock if they were not. But there is a
whiff of status-grabbing desperation in what Bogart & Company have done here,
and it's not in the production--it's in the center of the program which
presents "A Culture of Desire Timeline: Dante, Warhol, Bogart, and NYTW."
At first glance this timeline seems to give us a quick survey on important
events in Warhol's career as an artist and Dante's career as a poet. But as
the timeline moves from 1265 to 1998, it becomes clear that Bogart manages, in
all seriousness, to somehow intervene herself into the narrative so that the
effect is to place her on equal footing with Dante and Warhol and NYTW as
artistic creators.
The crucial leap happens from 1987 when Warhol dies to 1992 when SITI is
founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki "to redefine and revitalize
contemporary theater in the United States through an emphasis on international
cultural exchange and collaboration." Now while individually these items are
factual enough, the connection between them is just about as uninsightful and
negligible as any of the serial connections made in the timeline. If Bogart
were sharing to us the time when she met Warhol face to face and had a
meaningful encounter, that would be one thing. But to put non-events in a
timeline and make them pose, without a discernible trace of irony, as
significant milestones?
Is it really such a landmark event in the long history of the American theater
that Bogart first set foot in the Andy Warhol Museum in 1996? Let's set aside
the fact that hundreds of writers and artists have explored Dante's Hell as
metaphor years ahead of Bogart. But is it really important for all the world
to know that Bogart discovered the Inferno as "a metaphor for America's
absoption by consumerism" in early 1997?
If so, I would like to publicly declare several important milestones in the
history of American theater and art. (1) I, "the great Randy Gener," first
took a dump in the men's restroom of the Andy Warhol Museum in early 1997. (2)
I also feel compelled to reveal that Dante revealed himself to me in a sex
dream in one morning in 1998 and took off his dentures and gave me the best
blowjob I have ever received in my life, without the benefit of a cigar?
Quick, alert the editors of "Cambridge Guide to World Theatre"!
Well, you get the picture. [Gener]
FOUND-OBJECT THEATER: W. David Hancock's "The Race of the Ark Tattoo"
Mr. P. Foster (splendid Matthew Maher) in "Race of the Ark Tattoo," for
instance, uses a flea-market setting to sell the collected artifacts of his
deceased foster father, Mr. Homey Phinney, who himself has kept a flea-market
out of his garage in Cape Cod. Foster's unnerving tales are as much painful
stories of loss, alienation and dismay as they are a complexly layered account
of a severed relationship. Like the clutter of meaningless objects that fill
the tiny gallery space on the 9th street side of P.S. 122, the various
anecdotes mean to frustrate us. Though they seem to overflow with symbolic
weight and poetic insight, both the objects and the anecodotes that accompany
them make connecting the narrative dots a little difficult. Billed in the
posters as a "flea market followed by a lecture," Hancock's ingenious play
deliberately takes a winding route: the order of Foster's stories are subject
to chance. And since audience members must choose objects from Foster's "story
arc" (actually a toy-sized Winnebago with a shoulder strap), the order of the
stories is subject to random behavior; this reliance on chance effectively
insures that the narrative associations an audience collectively takes away
from the performance in one night would easily differ from those gathered by
the next batch of audience members during a different night. All this
(postmodern) discontinuity is greatly intensified by Maher himself, a hairy
hoary hairlip of a depressive wreck whose "crude performance" (brilliant
performance of crudity?) is characterized by occasional blackouts and serious
memory lapses. At one point, the actor Maher forgets his lines; he goes blank.
When the absent-minded stage manager ruffles the pages of script, desperately
seeking for the right place in the script, Maher breathes angry mutters
because the noise she kept making had made it even more difficult for him to
get on with his story on his own. All through out "Race of the Ark Tattoo,"
members of the audience would occasionally giggle or titter; I guess they're
hoping that their laughter would give them a sense of emotional comfort. Yes,
we're in on the ironic joke, their laughter implied. But the undercurrent of
rage, menace, and alienation that flows through and pervades the hour-long
solo play effectively demolishes any sense of comfort, ease or emotional
relief. Along with Melanie Joseph's liminal direction, Hancock persuades us of
the authenticity of his hoax-like puzzle plays through the sheer bulk of
discarded ephemera and exotic accumualtion--and then compels us to accept the
whole megillah as ontological mystery. And it is precisely because the core of
the play emerges from the dark, rusty crevices of a disintegrating memory that
makes "Race of the Ark Tattoo" a haunting journey. At the end of the riveting
evening, when the programs are handed out to the audience on their way out the
door, Hancock makes a last-minute admission that the flea-market event we've
just seen is actually made up: It's only a play, folks. But this act of
pulling a rabbit out of a magician's hat only deepens the terrible ambiguity
which underscores Hancock's twisted dissection of the nature of theatrical
character and the authenticity of identity.
LAZY SUSAN: Joshua Sobol's "Village"
From its "Our Town-like" opening scene, where Yossi introduces all the
characters from their graves, Sobol's "Village" effectively draws a cheerfully
idyllic tall tale, set in a time before the state of Israel was proclaimed.
Though the play runs for three hours, the pace is kept fast, the tone is
pithed light-heartedly, and the spirit is fanciful. It's a play about the
Holocaust all right, but it's the sort where a barnyard turkey talks and a
dead goat comes back from the grave to become the close confidante of a
gravedigger (Yossi) who never sees combat and so resolutely fails to
understand the fatal implications of the war. In staging "Village's" pastoral
world, director Yevgeny Arye literally spins this farcical yarn about small-
town life, set in the years leading to Israel's independence in 1948, on a
moving carousel set, a lazy susan that whirls the characters into each new
scene. It's as if the whole megillah free floats in a deliriously happy dream
state--to be occasionally interrupted by sudden bouts of faraway violence and
unseen warfare. In this way, Sobol keeps intimations of evil serenyl at bay.
What puts the dizzy mysticism to earthly relief are the very prosaic depiction
of everyday life in an Israeli settlement of Jewish pioneers. (At one point, a
Jewish farmer and an Arab merchant haggle over the price and quality of
manure; later, when the Holocaust breaks out, Sobol treats us to a roundelay
of trysts, drinking, and moviegoing.) Without succumbing to saccharine
sentimentality, "Village" plays like a coming-of-age conceit. It pivots on the
irony of hisory seen through the eyes of a cipher: a gamine gravedigger who
comes to grief only when the war shatters his idyllic world. When Yossi's own
beloved brother (a soldier) gets killed in the war, Yossi's angel wings gets
rudely clipped, and his blithe spirit comes crashing down to the ground.
NEGLECTED PLAYWRIGHT: Jim Grimsley's "The Lizard of Tarsus"
Set within the clinical confines of a white-walled prison cell, "The Lizard of
Tarsus" dramatizes what-if: What would happen if Christ's Second Coming had
finally arrived? According to Grimsley's play, if the Messiah did come, we
would replay history, throw him in jail and crucify for a second time. He
would be imprisoned by Paul (Saul of Tarsus), the acolyte responsible for
spreading the gospel of Christ after the Pentecost. There's a brittle
Santayana-like irony to this theological dilemma. For haven't those who claim
to have spoken and acted in the hallowed name of Christ been themselves some
of the worst, most un-Christlike citizens on the planet? Paul's complicity
stems from being the head of a company of priests, ministers and elite who,
like the biblical Pharisees, couldn't imagine that the Messiah would come in
tattered, swaddling clothes. Instead they felt that the Saviour would come in
a blaze of pomp and circumstance, with chariots descending from the clouds to
save Israel.
In "The Lizard of Tarsus," Paul is exposed as a pseudo-mystic in Machiavellian
garb. With J. in prison, Paul attempts to keep the mobs at bay and ascertain
for himself, through insistent questioning in the guise of a deposition, that
J. is, in fact, the biblical Christ. Paul boldly asks J. to show off his
superearthly talent for pulling miracles in order to prove his divinity. What
results is a comic war of wills, made all the more pointed by Grimsley's
anachronistic mixture of contemporary references and biblical twists. J. does
pull off a miracle (making the blind see), but Paul is denied the experience
of seeing this miracle, just as he was apparently denied the first time around
on the road to Damascus. Looking bewildered and hungover, this J. mercilessly
offers that Paul's mystical visitation was an accident, some sci-fi-sounding
cosmic blunder that became a prelude to megalomania and murder. (Grimsley's
highly circuitous anachronism display his literary roots as a sci-fi fantasy
writer. But as a dramatist, the elliptical poetry of his absurdist play
shatters the ornate reflection of organized religion.) In "The Second Coming,"
Paul confronts his past for the delusion that it was, a tall tale built on the
edifice of lies. The Roman Catholic Church's first bishop, Paul becomes
responsible for J.'s eventual crucifixition. He repeats history. With J. dead
again, Paul plans to exploit J. as a figure around which Paul can consolidate
his own power and spiritual status among the masses. In retaliation, J.
frustrates Paul by being unhelpful and unaccomodating: he himself is a teller
of perplexing parables. And the significant parable that J. tells P., in
retrospect, foreshadows the play's outcome: Grimsley's J. tells of a lizard, a
reptile who he describes as "the Son of God, born of the Outcast in the desert
heat...who has come to die for the sins of the world." J's backhanded
suggestion is that those who call themselves sons of Paul may actually be
deeply misled. The omnipotent God whom Paul erected is, according to J., is
such a huge sham that Christians might as well be eternally crucifying a
lizard.
LIVING-ROOM SWEDE: August Strindberg's "Playing With Fire"
MENAGE A CYBER: Craig Lucas's "The Dying Gaul"
I'm afraid, however, that the overly literal-minded may call into question
several of "The Dying Gaul's" plot complications and find them clunky or
clumsy (they are not). How, for instance, did Elaine know the identity of
Robert's psychiatrist, enough to break into his office and steal Robert's
personal files? How "realistic" are the cyberfantasy scenes between Robert
and Elaine in which Elaine poses as Robert's dead lover, Malcolm? How could
Robert actually believe that the dead Malcolm has been born again in
cyberspace and send him regular email from the Great Beyond? And how exactly
did that rare plant laced with deadly poison just suddenly appear at the
precise moment that Robert's world crumbles into tragedy when he learns that
Elaine fucked with his disturbed mind by creating a cyberversion of herself as
Malcolm? How many eleven o'clock songs can you stand before you say you've
just had it with all the manipulation?
All existence is solitary, and one of the signs of alienation, anxiety and
solitude in the modern age is psychic suffering. So when the number of gay men
who died of AIDS and other related diseases grew to epidemic proportions, AIDS
plays became hugely popular in the 1980s because they ritualistically took the
tolls of the extent of the physical suffering and the psychic pain. AIDS plays
dramatize how sympathy is possible in the case of moral and psychical
suffering. Though AIDS certainly hangs over "The Dying Gaul," Lucas hasn't
written an AIDS play, as such. Neither is it what some ridiculously call "a
post-AIDS play." "The Dying Gaul" is a darkly poetical, emotionally ruthless
and psychologically freighted group portrait that depicts adult betrayal and
modern anomie. Under the sleek direction of Mark Brokaw, Lucas spins a shiny
urbane foray in the form of a psychological thriller: it is to 1990s what
Antonioni's "L'Avventura" was in the 1960s: a brightly persiflaged drama that
nevertheless burrows into the nightmarish and soulless heart of sexual
betrayal, terrible grief, Faustian ambitions, and personal cruelty. Like Tony
Kushner, Larry Kramer, Christopher Durang, David Drake, Nicky Silver and other
contemporaries, Lucas insists on the tragedian dramatist's right to address
social issues, like AIDS. But Lucas doesn't want to get caught in the
formalistic traps of problem plays either; he doesn't want to explore black
and white areas but instead displays the gray zones of complexity. So "The
Dying Gaul" consciously breaks form with the cause-and-effect social-issue
dialectic of the so-called white gay male AIDS drama.
The so-called clumsy complications are, in fact, dramatically necessary if the
tragedy at heart of "The Dying Gaul" would be played out with terrible power
and moral outrage. Lucas takes a fierce, harsh picture of the spiritual anomie
and modern urban savagery which underlie casual, callous behavior and sexual
infidelity. The play's professed villain, Jeffrey, is a bisexual Hollywood
producer who signs up the gay screenwriter Robert who is mourning over his
dead lover Malcolm. As we might expect, it's a Faustian bargain. When Jeffrey
tells Robert that he must, in effect, straighten up the gay film he wrote
about his relationship with Malcolm (the film's title directly refers to "The
Dying Gaul," the sculpture of a dying Gaelic soldier in a classical frieze of
death and defeat), Robert clearly doesn't untangle himself from a highly
compromising position with the film producer. The two men fall into passionate
embrace. Meanwhile, Elaine has always suspected that Jeffrey has been
unfaithful. Because of their children and because she feels comfortable in the
Hollywood world of money and prestige, what she is not willing to do, however,
is to actually have sex with another man. In a world full of diseases, that
would be dangerous. So Elaine practices her own form of "safe sex": she surfs
the chat rooms on America Online, posing as a gay man. By so doing, she
explores the mysterious world of anonymous liaisons and adult infidelity, but
rationalizes to herself that she's not being unfaithful to Jeffrey because sex
in cyberspace is virtual. On the Internet, bodies don't touch, bodies don't
matter. What Hollywood is to Jeffrey, the Internet is to Elaine: an artificial
format that offers godlike pleasures and almost limitless narrative
possibilities. Elaine spins an identity on the web with same force,
determination, and veracity that Jeffrey, the Hollywood producer, spins his
own form of control over Robert's screenplay. Thus, Linda Edmond's tight-
lipped performance splendidly matches Tony Goldwyn's insidious Jeffrey (in the
revival, Cotter Smith will take over the role); Elaine and Jeffrey make for a
perfect match. Both are masters of the way their systems work and the way in
which their participation shapes their experience. Cyberspace, like Hollywood,
is a realm in which we easily imagine ourselves to be omniscient.
What Elaine does not know, however, is that Jeffrey is having an affair with
another man--Robert. At first, Elaine is genuinely attracted to Robert and
poses as his dead lover, Malcolm, in order to get to know him. But then "The
Dying Gaul" spirals into deceit the further she gets into the self-absorbed,
illusory world of alternate reality and digital environments. Thinking that
the computer has given her a unique opportunity to take control of life, she
so buries herself into the world of the Internet that when she finds out that
Jeffrey and Robert have been, in fact, lovers and have been doing it behind
her back, she snaps, and the fragile world the Craig Lucas has carefully
decked in front of us completely and tragically falls apart.
In "Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace" (MIT Press,
1998, 324 pages), Janet H. Murray argues that "all the representational arts
can be considered dangerously delusional, and the more entrancing they are,
the more disturbing. The powerful new storytelling technologies of the
twentieth century have brought on an intensification of these fears." Although
Murray ultimately argues forthe interactive medium of the computer, Lucas's
dystopian view in "The Dying Gaul" offers that the Internet is as much an
illusory environment as film. Drama, by contrast, is more vital. In Hollywood
as well as in the Internet, artificial universes seem as real as the reality
or perhaps even more real than reality. Formally speaking, Lucas's "The Dying
Gaul" is experimental in that it comes to grips with how new media affects the
realm of drama. But it is also traditional in that Lucas has written a
powerful, stunning, terrifying, compelling and thoroughly relevant tragedy
where new entertainment technologies, like the movies and the Internet, become
the high-tech means by which human beings cause serious harm against one
another. Like Alduous Huxley's "Brave New World" and Ray Bradbury's
"Fahrenheit 451", "The Dying Gaul" disturbs not only because it caustically
depicts how entertainment technologies debase humanity through galvanic,
illusory means of arousal and stimulation (sex, money, power, chat rooms) but
also because we are shown adulterous people behaving in a state of abject
bestiality. But herein lies the difference: Unlike Huxley and Bradbury, Lucas
offers no simple remake of new media nightmares. The suicidal Robert turns out
to be no mere victim, no mere fallen soldier who gets pummeled to the dirt.
Robert may be the titular "dying gaul," but in keeping with the classical
tradition of tragedy, he is a seriously flawed protagonist. At the brink of
collapse, he fights back and turns against his aggressors. And the Buddhist
meditation that he prays at the end of "The Dying Gaul" is his way of living
up to death. His final soliloquy is all the more poignant because, word for
word, breath by breath, he attempts to completely unburden himself of
resentment, guilt, terror, bitterness, hostility, and hurt without regret,
without pleading for sympathy. A terrible tragedy of psychological and moral
paralysis, "The Dying Gaul" is a masterpiece.
AN AMERICAN MUSICAL: Basil Twist's "Symphonie Fantastique" As one of the lucky few who got to see "Symphonie Fantastique" in its early
previews, I must confess to being somewhat disappointed by the elating result.
Mostly because as a musical interpretation "Symphonie Fantastique" lags in the
middle and left a lot of visual blandness which don't quite match the moody
ominous harmonies of Berlioz's composition. Certainly it's much more assured,
more visually descriptive, and less reductive than the narrative-driven
synchronization of, say, "Fantasia." But as visual abstraction, Twist's
presentation loses much of its novelty once we've figured out what he's up to.
Mercifully, "Symphonie Fantastique" is a brief exercise, but it lacks the
aesthetic elegance and imagistic complexity of, say, one of Ping Chong's
creations. A certain monotony sets in parts. Plus it gets a bit tiring,
following how Twist synchronizes movements to Berlioz's notes and melodies and
tone shifts. And the final movement of "Symphonie Fantastique," where all the
different pieces of cloth and feathers and things (which we've seen in parts)
get all combined in various variations, lacks imaginative oomph. All these
cavils aside, "Symphonie Fantastique" floats by like a lovely little reverie
that could give Busby Berkeley, if he were alive today, a run for his money.
"Symphonie Fantastique" performs Tuesdays through Fridays at 7 p.m.; Saturdays
at 2 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.; and Sundays at 5 p.m. Tickets are $25 ($15 for
children age 12 and under). HERE is located at 145 Avenue of the Americas, one
block south of Spring Street. Box office number is 212-647-0202.
THREE TALL PHILISTINES: Why is Yasmina Reza's "Art" a Broadway hit?
I say this because in our country, celebrity culture easily throws a
glittering veil over even the most mediocre works a glint of status. When
people found out that no less than Sean Connery put up his own money to put up
the play on Broadway, the market value of the play suddenly rose. (In this
sense, the theater world parallels the aspirations of the art world.) And in a
country where the taxpayers refuse to give up public money in support of
cultural art, Reza's "Art," which has very little of meaning to say about men
and certainly even less to say about art, proposes a safe and predictable
forum by which those who freely profess that they don't know much about art
can mock and ridicule those who value art altogether too much. Basically
Reza's "Art" is a one-set comedy about how three men variously respond (or for
that matter, fail to respond) to an all-white painting. The whole arc of the
narrative starts from the acquisition of the said offending painting to the
various responses to it (from hostile to indifferent to approving) and ends
with how the three philistine men pick up the pieces of their splintered
friendship. In between, Reza shows good craft, sleek style, wonderful
dialogue, and a delightful sense of humor. The most dramatic moment happens
when the all-white painting gets vandalized; this act produces a loud, audible
gasp in the audience, primarily because most of what the play's insights about
art concerns money: how expensive the all-white painting costs. And if there
is anything in America with which people are most super-aware about it is
money; it is scandalous to see the mutilation of anything which costs a
considerable amount of money. (Consider, for instance, how owners of
secondhand cars get angry when they see new scratches on an automobile.)
Indeed, much of the humor in the play (and it is funny) issues from the
stunningly ridiculous disparity between how much the paintings costs and how
modest it looks. Let's put this another way: any notion of Minimalism or
Conceptual art is lost on everybody involved, including the playwright, the
characters and (apparently) the people who gave it Tony and Olivier Awards. If
it says nothing about the history of art, "Art" has even less to say about
male friendship. It's not clear that anything signficant is really at stake in
the play except for bruised male egos. When the three men are not insulting
each other with regard to the painting, the play takes pains to show us that
there doesn't really seem that they have much of a friendship. The most
"revealing" moment happens when all three men get tired of squabbling and just
sit there around a table, quietly eating olives.
So why, you ask, is "Art" a hit? Because in an essential way it successfully
dramatizes how even our closest friends become the most distant strangers when
they profess tastes and predilections in art that completely confound our own
personal sense of aesthetics. Though it is a very slim hook to hang an entire
play on, "Art" makes comic hay over an ornery question: "How could you
possibly like that piece of shit?" Reza makes an very entertaining case for
this very real, very cantankerous, and very puzzling dilemma. For haven't we
all been stunned at what our closest friends consider worthy of attention?
Haven't we all split hairs over a controversial movie, a popular play, a
museum painting, or Madonna's new look? Contrary to art's ability to forge
common ground and contrary to the belief that art aspires toward universal
recognition, one of the most basic, most fundamental and most unacknowledged
functions of art is that it draws fine distinctions between people and their
tastes. Art is the one realm of creative human endeavor that pulls its punches
by its ability to make us disagree with one another. Even at the end of a
millennium that has famously proclaimed the end of art, art isn't truly Art if
it cannot divide (and, thus, conquer).
In the next "On the Razzle With Randy Gener," the topic of discussion will be:
the state of contemporary Greek classical drama in America; and a historic
opening of the La MaMa Annex with Ping Chong's new creation. [Gener]
Based on Lafcadio Hearn's translations of Japanese ghost stories, Ping Chong's
Kwaidan is an exquisite puppet theater work. Chong's delicate artistry, the
simplicity of his elegant staging with always just the right touches of color,
movement, light and sound infused the three distinctly different stories with
the mystery and magic the material demands.
Played against a black fabric wall, with three circular windows cut into the
fabric and a small high central window, each story proceeds through a
combination of narration, image and puppetry; from tiny puppets and giant
close-up figures to live actors, shadow figures and shoulder-to-head puppets.
As the narrator begins to tell the first tale, Jikininki, Muso, an itinerant
priest is seen as a miniature puppet, wandering, lost, along a mountainside of
pine trees. The cawing of a crow and sounds of a rippling stream complete the
enchanting scene. This soon fades into a closeup of Muso's face [a large head-
to-shoulder puppet] as the priest discovers a hut where he asks for shelter.
Because the old priest who lives in the hut refuses, Muso must stay in the
village at a house where a dead man awaits burial. In the small center window
we see a beautiful full moon with a cloud slowly passing in front of it. Once
the cloud disappears, the moon becomes blood red, a foreshadowing of the
horror to come. During the night a demon appears several times in the center
window, covering the corpse. We hear the sounds of gluttonous eating and bones
cracking. Each time he leaves there is less and less of the corpse. Later,
Muso retraces his steps to the hut in the mountains the priest confesses that
he is the demon, a Jikininki, or flesh eating goblin who devoured the dead
man. He begs Muso to release him from his curse through prayer. Muso obliges
and the final scene shows Muso praying in front of a tomb, the tomb of the old
priest who has been dead for years.
The second story, Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi, is the tale of a blind musician named
Hoichi who lives in a Buddhist temple which was built specifically to appease
the Heike clan's restless dead, victims of a battle with the Genji clan. The
set recreates the temple's interior through a combination of visual and aural
elements: luscious hues of blues and reds, shiny gongs and brass candle
holders. Sounds of waves and seagull's calls accompany the fluttering of
mating fireflies.
In this tale, Chong uses a live actor to play Hoichi [Chong actually played
this role himself in an earlier presentation]. One night, a strange man asks
Hoichi to perform for an august assembly who asks him to sing about the battle
at Dan-no-ura. Hoichi plays each night for the emperor and his followers.
Fearing that Hoichi is in great danger, however, the priest writes holy
scriptures over his entire body and tells him not to move or speak when the
Heiki spirits approach him. This he does but the priest had forgotten to cover
his ears. The Heiki spirit takes his ears so that from that day on, he was
known as Mimi-nashi-Hoichi: Hoichi-the-Earless.
This is the most frightening of the three ghost stories; a pair of huge evil
eyes follows Hoichi's every move, doors and windows slam shut automatically
and ultimately it is revealed that the blind minstrel had been singing before
an assembly of ghosts.
The third story is a love story, the Story of O-Tei, a tragic tale of love and
loss that nonetheless ends on a happy note. The piece begins with one of
Chong's "select views of earthlings"[the subtitle of his Nuit blanche]. At
first the earth is seen from a far away galaxy; then we slowly move to a map
of the world, then to a closeup of a map of Japan and finally to the town of
Niigata where we discover Nagao, a large head-to-shoulder puppet, reading a
book. We learn that he is engaged to marry O-Tei. Just before Nagao learns
that O-Tei is dying of consumption, Chong treats us to a a delightful moment,
familiar to all of us. A fly buzzes around Nagao; his doll eyes follow the
annoying creature. No doubt he is ready to pounce on it when his father enters
to break the tragic news. It is just such moments that make these stories so
human, so close to home. Now we see images of spattered blood and hear O-Tei's
deathly wheezing. On her death bed, she tells Nagao that they are destined to
meet again and marry in a different time and a different world. Many years go
by before the prophecy is fulfilled.
Chong suggests the passage of time
through a montage of projected images alternating from window to window: a
caterpillar becomes a butterfly; a young movie star grows old; a great
building explodes; winter becomes summer and low and behold a McDonald's sign
appears in the small upper center window. Nagao, now a sad and broken man
makes his way into the fast food restaurant where contemporary figures -
shoulder-to-head puppets - order chicken McNuggets and Big Macs. Nagao too
places his order, then looks up to discover that his waitress is the very
image of O-Tei. The mundane suddenly becomes magical. All the windows
change to blue and O-Tei reveals herself to her former fiance. After a
blackout, lights fade up in the center window and we see the happy couple side
by side on a hill looking out over Tokyo which ressembles the Emerald City,
according to press notes.
Although all three tales evoke ancient worlds that are far removed from ours,
Ping Chong's concerns are very much our own. As he says in a program note,
these stories are "a reminder of what we have sacrificed in a world of
commodification." Yet even in this world of fast food and bullet trains; even
in our present-day bustling, busy, explosive lives, Chong seems to suggest, we
can find serenity and beauty if we only make the effort. [Wehle]
Scenic elegance has always been one of the characteristic principles of the
multi-genre stage poetry of Ping Chong. With a painterly eye for precise
imagery and visual montage, the Toronto-born author of "Deshima,"
"Chinoserie," and "After Sorrow" fuses theater, dance, video, projection art,
performance, installation, spoken-word text and puppetry to construct some of
the most captivating sights on the American stage. And certainly "Kwaidan," a
100-minute adaptation of three Japanese ghost stories which reopened LaMaMa's
Annex Theater after a season of renovation, is a zone-poem for the eye and
mind.
Exquisite fluidity is another defining element. The stage functions like a
vast canvas for the auteur, and diverse elements sweep across it, often in a
non-sequential manner, with each layer of referential imagery and resonant
detail moving fluently and dreamily, like lyrical cross-currents in a tranquil
river flowing in a series of oneiric or froo easy to slap it with the phrase
"spectacular."
But while the theater of Ping Chong does inspire awe and surprise, something
about "Kwaidan" simply resists the spectacular; something about it runs
counter to vulgar displays of appreciation. It's almost as if the piece has a
stake against cheering loud "ooh's" and "aah's" or even clapping your hands.
At the precise moment you may feel the urge to cheer, something about
"Kwaidan" hushes you up. The visual elegance and sense of purity are so
striking you feel a little afraid to disturb the thick silence and evocative
atmosphere. You can practically cut it with a knife.
This is not to imply that "Kwaidan" is the sort of rarefied high-art theater
that rewards only the cultured. That would be to employ an "emperor-has-no-
clothes" stereotype on Chong's work that not only misses the sincerity of his
art but also employs the kind of anti-artist rhetoric that debases it and
makes it seem all too exotic. As Chong says in the program: "To me, 'Kwaidan'
is a gift from another time and another world. In the context of the madly
restless and confusing world we live in, these simply and very pure tales
serve as a respite and a reminder of what we have sacrificed in a world of
commodification at the end of the 20th century." To which, I'd like to add,
that we live in a culture of special effects, a technologically rarefied
modernity that indulges easy impulses and rewards immediate gratification. And
for those who crave lavishness and excess, Ping Chong's theater, visually
striking though it is, may seem all too undramatic or benign or perhaps not
especially compelling.
In "Kwaidan," Chong's startling imagism takes his characteristic long view of
the human condition. Chong's first full-scale puppet show, this magical stage
piece transports us to turn-of-the-century Japan, using three fantastical
stories from the American journalist Lafcadio Hearn's collection of ghost
stories, which bears the same title. The three stories are: "The Story of a
Jikininki," "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi," and "The Story of O-Tei."
Though the three pieces adumbrate Buddhist insights and metaphysical themes,
"Kwaidan" works completely and absolutely as magnificent entertainment. There
is pure and unalloyed pleasure in its fluid, adept use of stage techniques to
tell three straightforward narratives in a cinematic style. Mitsuru Ishii's
transformative set and lighting design moves hand in hand with Jon Ludwig's
beautiful puppetry to employ jump cuts, extreme close-up, perspectival
changes, and views from omniscient heights.
The effect is breathtakingly theatrical: In search of a hermitage, a puppet of
a small traveler, wearing a conical hat, climbs a mountain, disappears for a
moment, and reappears in human size. Giant eyes peer through the walls and
send chills through our spines. A gold inlaid black box set trembles at the
sides to reveal a Buddhist temple. A stage-within-a-stage of male and fmeale
puppets capsizes to reveal a graveyard underneath. A huge panorama shot of
Central Park comes to the fore, revealing an array of skyscrapers on the
horizon. The central design involves a triptych of circular windows which
often reveal the same scene from three different perspectives: the shadow of a
man behind a rice screen, a from-on-high view of the room from the ceiling,
and a huge close-up of carved faces. (Is it too early to proclaim the
theatrical tour-de-force of the season?)
What binds all the three Japanese ghost stories together? According to Ping
Chong, the three stories in "Kwaidan" appealed to him "because of the
profoundly human themes embodied in them: the longing for redemption, the
inability to surrender the pain and loss of the past, love lost and regained,
the consequences of time wrought upon human existence." Which is true enough.
"The Story of a Jikininki" tells the terrifying tale of a priest whose
heartless performance of his sacred duties and selfish consumption of material
gain condemn him for all eternity to live in isolation in the hills and to
subsist on human flesh for survival. (A Jikininki is a cannibalistic goblin.)
"The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi" is the famous parable about a blind boy,
named Hoichi, who becomes an innocent pawn in a thoughtless struggle between
the living and the dead. Bewitched by the malevolent spirits of Heiki warriors
who got died during their vicious war against the Geiji clan 700 years ago,
Hoichi is the artist who must perform an epic saga until the two servants,
sent by a a concerned priest in the temple, tries to wrench him from the power
of the Heiki ghosts. When the priest attempts to ward off the Heiki ghosts by
drawing calligraphy all over Hoichi's body, Hoichi becomes the legendary
victim of evil spirits who cut off his ears. And "The Story of O-Tei" speaks
of love and reincarnation; it's about a man and a woman who become separated
by death during the Edo era. They transcend death by meeting each other again
in a McDonald's fast food restaurant in modern-day Tokyo, though they do not
recall their previous existence.
In other words, the overriding theme that binds "Kwaidan" is the fragility of
existence. And the frission that occurs between Chong and Company's
spectacular puppetry work and the delicate, finely spun, storytelling
atmosphere sharply heightens our understanding--no, our consciousness of
life's acute ephemerality, its unbearable lightness. Our bodies are not
impregnable. Like the bodies of puppets, our human forms are capable of
grappling with life's deepest issues, but they are essentially vessels for the
intangible, the fundamental and (some say) the divine. "Kwaidan" may be
theater of the marvelous, but it is also haunted and possessed by the pain and
terrors of living.
And that's why it's difficult to applaud while "Kwaidan" bewitchingly unravels
before us, why we wait at the end of each of the three stories--and until the
very end of the evening--to express our appreciation and satisfaction: Because
to clap is to acknowledge finality, to succumb to a kind of death. And frankly
"Kwaidan" is so endlessly surprising that we would like its loveliness to just
go on and on. We loathe for beauty to stop. "Kwaidan's" ineffable drama lies
in its spooky balancing act between life and afterlife, love and grief, pain
and joy, earthly grace and superearthly concerns. "Kwaidan" is Chong's
exquisitely eerie meditation of time's unutterable woes: we exist, and
therefore, we are hexed. [Gener]
"Cymbeline" is not one of Shakespeare's great plays. In fact, it
is mostly a bore--a work that repeats almost every plot found in
in the Shakespeare cannon: a tyrant king, Cymbeline, who
disapproves of daughter Imogene's husband, Posthumus, and exiles
him; a wicked stepmother who plots to marry her son to the
Princess to secure the throne; a vain husband who accepts a
challenge from a villain, Iachimo's, to test his wife's chastity;
a plot to kill the princess when the husband is convinced of her
infidelity. And then there are disguises, lost heirs, mistaken
identities, and wars between the Brits and the Romans. Finally ,
all's well that ends well: the wicked step-mother is dead, the
Brits have won; the King is all forgiving and frees his Roman
prisoners, and the disparate plots and people are reconciled.
Haven't we seen all this before? We have, but in Andrei Serban's
hands, it works.
What makes this rather prosaic play so alluring is Serban's
esthetic sense of beauty: his exquisite taste and ability to
project rich, imaginative images on stage. A feeling for beauty
is scarce these days when kitchen-sink dramas dominate the
theater, and Shakespeare is often rendered colorless and dingy.
In this production, the visual--its tone and quality--captures
the imagination of the viewer and overshadows the story's
weaknesses.
The park itself is part of the beauty. So is the night air, the
moon, and the simplicity of the setting. (designed by Mark
Wendland) Running along the side of the stage is an intriguing
stream of water; in front, is a large blanket of very green
grass, and a group of trees majestically arranged; center stage
is a circle of white sand, perhaps a magic playing area. The
water is the demarcation between the outside world and
Cymbeline's kingdom-- solders wade in it, people enter and exit
through it; servants splash around in it and, in one scene, a
white slab is stretched across it to depict the boudoir of the
sleeping Imogene.
Even the lighting (designed by Michael Chybowski), flickering
against the tress, adds a poetic and mysterious sense to the
atmosphere. So do the ravishing exotic costumes by Marina
Draghici. The King and Queen are dressed in luscious silks,
embroidery, startling colors, intricate Japanese style designs
and, in one scene, the Queen wears a cloak of gorgeous feathers
making her look like a ravishing, wicked bird. The King's
household staff and personal servants' clothes express a Persian
influence while the Romans' uniforms are a shocking, blood red.
Only Imogene wears simple white unadorned garments. Particularly
effective are the plain slabs of wood used for doors and scene
changes (white for the Brits, and the same blood red for the
Romans).
Serban gathered together an unusual cast--an ensemble of actors
speaking perfect English verse; no accents, no inaudible
dialects, no Mid-Western twangs, no affected British, just simple
uniform American English spoken clearly and distinctly .
In the leading role of Imogene, Stephanie Roth Haberle
performance is unique. Seven months pregnant, her Imogene is not
the usual bland, sweet ingenue common to Shakespearean heroines,
but a real person with an individuality and inner life that
shines through despite the rather banal dialogue and uninspired
verse. She is amusing, she is exuberant, she is charming and she
is in every sense a young woman in love. With plenty of spunk and
daring, this Imogene is a lively, high spirited woman capable of
fending off seducers and tyrannical fathers. What is so
interesting about Ms. Haberle's performance is her movement.
Pregnant or not, she is agile, light, swift and graceful.
Moreover she has a certain ineffable beauty unmarked by
callowness or theatrical superficiality, and appears to be
unaffected and completely winning.
It is difficult to single out all the members of the cast but one
in particular deserves attention. The villain Iachimo (Liev
Schreiber) who tries to incriminate Imogene, is a dark character
indeed. Dressed entirely in black throughout the play (except for
his doubling as Jupiter), he plays a scoundrel with such
intensity of purpose that watching him one feels a chilling sense
of anxiety. When he sneaks into the princess' bedroom--a white
slab stretched across the stream--and is poised to seduce the
sleeping Imogene, his eroticism is fierce and passionate yet he
is without a hint of lewdness. When he lifts her nightgown to
examine a birthmark, his sexuality and wild desire are so
compelling--and complex--that his psychological contradictions
are plainly revealed: his lust mixes with love, hatred with
sorrow, ambivalence with apprehension, and that most dangerous of
all emotions--desire-- almost overtakes him. But not quite. This
is not your ordinary villain but a really imaginative portrayal
by a superb actor.
Serban directed the production with humor and irony. The role of
the queen's son (Robert Stanton) who wants to marry Imogene, is
portrayed as the perfect fool who, as the comic relief, wears a
carrot colored fright wig, and offers to battle everyone, despite
his makeup, demeanor, and slight figure that belies his so called
valor. The banished husband (Michael Hall), is an ironic and
somewhat distasteful character. Similar to Claudio in "Much Ado
About Nothing" who, on contrived evidence, believes his betrothed
unfaithful, and tries to destroy her, so does this self-righteous
husband believe the same of Imogene and plots her death. In a
hilarious speech ranting about women's behavior, Serban has him
moving into the audience, searching out the women, and delivering
his tantrum straight to their face. A very cleaver piece of
directing.
The production is full of these touches. Elizabeth Swadoes' music
appropriately enhances the plot, underscoring the high points in
her own inimitable way that contributes to the over all effect.
So does a young child actor, Jacob Smith, who carries a book
throughout the play as he watches, reacts, and moves with the
action, but never speaks until the end. A charming invention---
the fairly tale aspect of the play.
Finally, what is the true meaning of "Cymbeline?" Serban, in a
published interview says that the play is like a fairy tale about
"an inner spiritual journey; it's about the temptation of the
soul," he said. "It is about trying to face one's own
vanity...It's like a King Arthur story; the hero has to go
through the quest for the holy grail in order to find again what
he has lost--in this case, sacred marriage, both physical and
spiritual. "
While these ideas may have attracted Serban to this play and may
have been in the back of his mind, they don't really manifest
themselves on stage. The hero is Imogene not her husband who, as
played, is a stupid macho who does not deserve his wife. True, he
suffers for his mistake in testing her fidelity, but that is
hardly a man searching for any holy grail. What makes this
production unique is not Serban's intellectual interpretation of
the play, but his ability to direct a three and a half hour story
that riveted the audience's attention. A good story brilliantly
told by a master director is just that--a good story and it is
indeed rare enough. To be sure, spiritual journeys and inner
searches are fascination subjects, but can be difficult to render
in concrete theatrical terms.
One hopes
that after the brilliance of this production, Serban will be back
with us soon. Men of talent like Serban should not be overlooked
or ignored. The theater needs such directors.
[Croyden]
With two alternating casts of singers; a chorus of more than a
dozen people doubling as actors; two conductors, maestro Claudio
Abbado sharing the podium with his twenty-two year old protege,
Daniel Harding; and the Mahler Youth orchestra, a young chamber
group, created by Maestro Abbado, himself, much was riding on
this combination of talent. A new Festival director, Stephane
Lissner, formerly of the Chatelet theater in Paris and now also
manager of Brook's own Theatre des Bouffes du Norde, was
determined to reestablish this Festival as a primary event in the
music world. To this end, he rebuilt the grand open air theater
in the courtyard of the old Archbishop's palace in Aix, reduced
the number of house seats, cut out the balcony, and garnered the
financial support from major cultural and government institutions
of Aix and Paris. To invigorate the rejuvenated festival he chose
the Peter Brook production of "Don Giovanni." Which proved to be
an extraordinary artistic experience.
Once again Brook had defied tradition. And as usual he created
not only the excitement of the Festival but the controversies as
well. Brook staged a minimalist production of "Don Giovanni",
with youthful abandonment in its various manifestations as the
main theme of the work. In rethinking the opera and staging it in
his own way, Brook had the confidence and support of Lissner and
Claudio Abbado and the talents of a young company, so that a true
ensemble of actors, singers, chorus, conductors, and musicians
was created whose work coincided with, and clearly expressed,
Brook's singular vision. Brook's concept involved an attempt to
tackle the Don Juan myth in relation to contemporary
sensibilities, and to the human qualities of the opera as he saw
them. Whether he was thought to have succeeded depended upon
one's ability to receive the work without preconceived notions.
The notices were mixed: some reviewers thought the production
brilliant, others were dismayed at the non-traditionalist
approach.
The first shock was Claudio Abbado conducting (on the second
night) dressed in an ordinary open shirt --no white tie, no black
tie--no tie at all. Not a typical opera night here. As the
overture began, a group of actors entered and took their seats on
ordinary benches around the stage, waiting for the action to
begin. The stage was virtually bare except for the original
stone facade of the palace with its regal emblem engraved on the
stone; the impression was that of old Europe if not exactly
Spain. The only scenery was a set of tall, free standing green,
blue, and red poles that could be inserted into some low benches.
These objects were placed asymmetrically around the stage,
presumably to divide up the rather large space. The benches
(with the poles attached to them) were used for seating
arrangements during arias and duets, and around the poles
(phallic symbols?), where the Don played out his seduction
scenes and much of the action took place. Like kids on a merry-
go-round, Don Giovanni and his servant, Leporello, had a lot of
fun with the poles: they detached them, mounted them, held them,
carried them, stroked them, and at one point used them as lances-
-all of which suggested the wild freedom of young people
cavorting in a street of a provincial town. In fact, the program
referred to the set not as scenery but as "scenic elements," a
clue to what Brook had in mind: to indicate, to allude, to
suggest by using an abstract set of modules that elicited an
environment--perhaps an ordinary playground or fun place in
which the Don and his cohorts gather. Playing on and around with
these "elements," singers moved quickly and gracefully around the
stage as one scene segued into the other (there was no curtain or
blackouts), and throughout the action the singers managed to
retain a sense of outlandish youthfulness.
The cast was dressed in a curious mix of contemporary clothes.
The men wore tee shirts. The women wore ill-fitting,
unattractive, mismatched, colored outfits that suggested class
distinctions: a tacky looking flowered dress for Zerlina, an
assortment of nondescript clothes for the peasant-like chorus,
and for the aristocratic Donna Anna a sleek, black taffeta dress.
Don Giovanni alone was patently stylish in a well-cut, casual,
beige linen summer suit and a distinctive rakish Panama hat. With
Claudio Abbado conducting in his shirt sleeves, the actors in
plain outfits, and the stage free of scenery, Brook's concept was
apparent from the start. No grand opera here.
This concept was reflected as well in a pared down orchestra.
Daniel Harding, who conducted on the first night said, "The
orchestra in Mozart's time was small. The orchestra we used in
Don Giovanni is exactly the one that was in common use at the
time....But our ideas on the size of a Mozartian orchestra have
evolved considerably over the past ten years.
Claudio Abbado agreed: "... The orchestral writing in "Don
Giovanni" was conceived with a chamber orchestra in mind, he
said. "We therefore reduced our forces to a minimum, using
baroque strings, brass and percussion. And even where Mozart uses
trombones, you have to keep things as light as possible...."
And indeed, lightness and simplicity were all. Brook made no
attempt to embellish the production with theatrical effects or
colorful decor. But the stage was neither dark, or dismal; the
over all atmosphere was lively, full of youthful vitality and
fun. After the initial shock of seeing the Don in ordinary
clothes without a trace of the caballero from Seville, or of the
grandeur associated with opera, one became intrigued with Brook's
ideas. The key was the use of one's imagination to experience
the implications of the production rather than depending on the
usual explicit (and often simplistic) rendering of plot and
character.
The Don Giovanni here is portrayed like a famous pop star, or a
superstar movie idol--macho, of course, but with a charming and
compelling personality; not really a villain, but too self-
obsessed to be aware of others. He knows he is attractive to
women, and he relishes his adventures, not only for sexual
gratification but for the power that comes with conquest, and for
the fulfillment of his insatiable drive for adventure and high
living. This Don Giovanni, moving at a rapid pace, is always
calculating never examining. Despite his being a "lady killer"
and the actual killer of Donna Anna's father, his villainy until
the end is played down. And by that time, he had created the
image of a delightful bad boy--an image difficult to dislike.
These contradictions and nuances subtly integrated into Brook's
concept (and in the actor-singer's portrayal) is what made this
rendition of the myth psychologically clear.
"Don Giovanni is not a great sinner," Brook says. "He is a man
who plays the moment and who, as we see him before us, lives each
moment with incredible verve. He doesn't give a damn about the
consequences, rather like the great gangsters you can see at the
cinema. They are often heroes. They kill right and left, before
dying themselves at the end of the film. But they are not
presented as examples of men who are evil incarnate....It seems
to me that there is something in Don Giovanni's character that
aroused a feeling of sympathy
Brook doesn't deny the Don's machismo but, "in the end Don
Giovanni arrives at real purity in his need for liberty," he
said. "Without forcing the comparison too far, he incarnates the
reason why Sartre called Genet a saint. The Don goes right to
the end with such insistence that he becomes a curious sort of
saint. This rebel has his own purity."
The most important feature of this production is that Brook
directed it as he would a play, perhaps a play by Chekhov, to
whom he referred in a published interview. Clearly, he wanted the
singers to create an intimacy that would define the complexity of
the characters; they acted and sang as though they were in a
simple conversational mode without posturing or self-dramatizing.
This was combined with the singers' physical actions wherein the
agility of the youthful cast was helpful. They ran, jumped, and
moved quickly from one spot to another, all the while singing the
complicated Mozartian music. Brook wanted the words, the story,
the physical actions to be as important as the music. In many
cases the attempt worked, but some singers had difficulties; some
were better actors than others, and some never looked at the
conductor for their cues and integrated their singing with their
acting extraordinarily well.
Roberto Scaltriti, the Don Giovanni the night I saw it, succeeded
the most. Tall, blonde, with a fine figure and a commanding
baritone voice, he had an apt combination of sexual energy and
high spirits. His Don was a man of extreme confidence and
attractiveness, a free wheeling, fun-loving womanizer. Mr.
Scaltriti came with plenty of experience having sung Mozart
operas, including "Don Giovanni," with renowned opera companies
in Europe. He was in total command of the music, his phrasing and
enunciation were remarkably clear, and he was appropriately
seductive and rakish.
An original and moving performance was Veronique Gens's Donna
Elvira, who stopped the show with her famous aria. She sang with
great sadness and introspection as well as vocal beauty, as she
realizes the nature of her obsession for Don Giovanni. The
American singer, Kenneth Tarver, as Don Ottavio was also very
appealing with an exceptionally sweet voice to which the audience
responded with pleasure. All the singers had a formidable task.
Brook's focus on the characters' human qualities, on what he
called "the complications of life" put a lot of pressure on the
cast's acting abilities.
Speaking about these complications in "Don Giovanni" and the
twists and turns in the music, Brook commented, "Mozart is
somewhat like Chekhov. Chekhov loathed the falsity of over-
charged sentiment. He himself was a man of deep feeling.
Whenever a character becomes overemotional, he immediately
introduces a comic effect in order to break up this emotion. This
device is to be found in all his plays. But when it seems that
the comical atmosphere is about to become permanent, Chekhov
introduces a moment of truth, an emotional truth which takes your
breath away." And Mozart, Brook implied, did the same. Mozart did
not brood too long on the sadness of things but injected his
opera with humor, fun, and lightheartedness as counterpoints to
issues of life and death.
As usual in a Peter Brook production, the singers rehearsed for
more than two months working on improvisations and on acting
problems besides the music. That the singers and the musicians
were so very young helped. Not only did they have the physical
dexterity that Brook's concept demanded, but they had the time to
work with him and with the musical conductors. Contrary to the
usual conditions in grand opera, no one in the company flew in
the last moment and stepped into the part, and no divas were
present to make extraordinary demands.
Claudio Abbado applauded the company's enthusiasm in preparing
their work: "In our collaboration with each other and in the
harmony we achieved at every level--something which is far from
easy when you have two casts. We did all our preparation
together, we did our gymnastic movements together, we breathed
together, we talked to each other and we had the same enthusiasm
and the same emotions. ...Everything Brook says about the staging
and about the music is absolutely right. I particularly
appreciate his refusal to accept established habits and his
readiness to distance himself from what has already been done
with the opera. Some aspects of the performance are bound up with
the history of the work's interpretation, but others are entirely
spontaneous. Of course, the music is endowed with the same
spontaneity and the sane feeling of naturalness, together with
complete fluidity.
Brook's original plan, he told me, was to stage the work in a
small theater using the elements of the opera in an
improvisational manner so that the human relationships would be a
dominant factor. But the vast stage in the Archbishop's palace,
which even after its presumed remodeling, still proved to be too
large. What Brook had in mind was therefore somewhat lost.
The Festival audiences did not help either, Brook said. "They
were too bourgeois and the tickets too expensive." He was
accustomed to lower prices, as in his own theater, and to a young
audience that would most likely appreciate what he was doing.
"Of course, we did try to give several free performances and the
audience then was young," he said. "Our appeal was supposedly to
the young who had no preconceptions of the opera, and when we
played to that kind of audience, they loved it."
Was this experience worthwhile? "It was 50% positive and 50%
negative" he said. "When I worked with Micheline Rozan,
When asked why the singers must tour for so long--the company
will play 48 performances in four different cities and then
return next summer to Aix again--which would seem to limit his
casting choices, he replied, "This is a break from the old
conventions of opera when a star flies in and performs for one
night," Brook said. "Placido Domingo learns his part by TV film
and then flies into New York, does it, and he is finished. Here a
company is formed; there are two casts traveling together,
improvising together, and playing as an ensemble. It is hardly
worthwhile to spend months on an opera, play it for five
performances, and move on. Opera in that way has become a
showcase for agents and performers. There is no collaborative
process. ..." He despised that way of doing opera. Only when he
was promised two months of rehearsal did he accept the job.
"I chose 'Don Giovanni' because frankly I like few operas, and
this was one of the few. And those I like, I have done. I came
back to opera because I wanted to taste something again. It is
like when I saw Stephane Lissner smoking small cigars, I
remembered that in the past I, too, had smoked those cigars. And
I asked him for one, just to taste it again. I did taste it, and
I didn't like it any more than when I gave it up.... O. K., I
tasted opera. I will not taste it again."
Nonetheless the opera has been a great success judging from the
audience response and the sold out performances. On most nights,
the audience was on its feet, clapping, shouting, and stamping,
as the French do when they appreciate something. Although the
Festival ended on July 31st, next year's program is already in
the works.
Brook, being Brook, is on to other projects. He had wanted to
film "Je Suis un Phenomene," which had played in the Bouffes du
Norde in the Spring. Originally planned as a film but postponed
for lack of money, the money has materialized and Brook must
decide whether to do it. Then there is a possible trip to Africa
for another project. One of the exciting things he has in mind is
an international experimental workshop at the Bouffes du Norde,
during the year 2000.
Knowing Peter Brook he may do all those things, or he may do six
other things. His vitality, his brilliance, and particularly his
conversations are the same as they have always been --
stimulating, informative, provocative. The famous blue eyes are
still clear and deeply penetrating, and his energy stronger than
ever--so strong it spills over to a visitor and makes one feel
unusually alive. Peter Brook is one of the remarkable men of the
theater. Few people who have ever known him, or worked with him,
or spoken to him, can deny his originality and fearlessness. Or
his presence. Whether he directs plays, films, or operas, or
writes books, or gives lectures, whether his projects succeed or
fail, he leaves an indelible mark-- one that has had a
transforming effect not only on the theater and on his
collaborators, but on ordinary people who have crossed his path.
[Croyden]
Forget the Titanic. Forget the floods, the fires, the global warming, the asteroid that's going to wipe us all out. This is an artist so outgoing, so giving, so powerful, so sultry, so thermodynamic, as to put your piddling little global warming to shame.
"Gra-a-a-a-nd to see your face, feel your touch, hear your voice," she sang as she swept for an opener into "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," with that "Gra-a-a-a-nd" a quick welcoming shot of adrenaline into the blood streams of her listeners, followed in due course by a small girl's sweet piping soprano (Lainie is not a small girl), a lioness's breathy growl, a woman's pain, a woman's aching passion, and -- to wrap that number and burst the gate wide for 20 more -- a final "I know what time it is NOW," with the "NOW" bit off sharp, like the head of some fool who has tormented the lion in its cage.
Each song gathered strength and variety, and to each what she brought was fire, belief, hunger. To resort to utter cliche, you haven't ever really heard "Embraceable You," for instance, until you've heard it sung with all the slow, augmenting sexuality and heat of Lainie Kazan. She shares, with the great ones like Sinatra and Billie Holiday, some extraordinary distillation of the sense and sound of orgasm that threads its way into almost any of the deepest, "biggest" works at her command.
Yes, you've heard Judy sing Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen's "The Man That Got Away," a song that no one else in this world should ever sing -- except Lainie Kazan, who will make you, not (God help you) forget Judy Garland, but find yourself forced to admit that the same God put on earth one other female who has the right, and the talent, and the force, to sing those blues.
It is in fact the great black blues singers -- and the great white torch singers of 60 and more years ago, Helen Morgan, Libby Holman, Ruth Etting & Co. -- from whom this Brooklyn-born lady in her black silk sheath and gold hoop earrings and tiny diamond-and-ruby hearts in her hair has drawn her heritage. And Sophie Tucker, the Last of the Red Hot Mommas.
Last but one.
There's a touch of Mae West there too. Indeed, she cut the tension of all those high-powered emotional songs (a "Little Girl Blue," for one, that might break even Kenneth Starr apart) with a couple of wicked and wickedly risque Mae West spots.
"Oh, Miss Kazan," drummer Eddie Caccavate chirped -- he's also her music director, the other musicians being Bob Kaye on piano, Conrad Korsch on bass -- "Oh, Miss Kazan, there are 10 men waiting in your dressing room. What'll I tell them?"
"Tell 'em I'm tired. Send one away."
"Welcome to one of the finest of art forms," Algonquin cabaret manager Arthur Pomposello announced at the top of the show. "Cabaret -- where the performers bear their hearts three or four feet from your table."
"You know," said a smiling, laughing Lainie Kazan at the climax of the show, having bared her heart four feet from us for almost two hours -- to several standing ovations -- "you know, we [performers] never stop getting nervous . . . I've played every room in this city," she said, "and they're all closed: The Living Room, Basin Street East, where Woody Allen opened for me, the Plaza, the Waldorf, the Rainbow Grill, and then my own room, and Rainbow & Stars. Now I'm here."
Yes, she is -- through August 22. Lainie Kazan, force of nature. The works, the whole thing, the Full Monty.
[Tallmer]
Once again , this writer is alarmed and apprehensive by another campy irreverent piece involving Pacific Island mysticism, this time the Maori from New Zealand. Original Maori chants were used in "Hamatsa" at La Mama recently. Performed by John Katipa, Toby Leach and Scott Macky, "Hamatsa" was a mythological comic quest by a fierce Maori warrior, a raunchy and cunning court fool and earthy but devoted Franciscan monk for the heart of the god Hamatsa.
The name "Hamatsa" comes from the cannibal dance of the sacred winter ceremonials of the Kwakiuti Indians of New Zealand's Pacific Northwest. In its original form, the ritual involved improvised costume, body painting and piercing, songs of ridicule, speeches, invocations, myth-telling, homilies and occasional bursts of competitive dialogue.
This fascinating troupe are grads from the prestigious Toi Whakaari, New Zealand Drama School. Their performance piece is energetic and amusing. Nate Harvey of New York saw the work in progress while visiting New Zealand. He collaborated with the trio and brought the ensemble to La Mama in New York.
Most interesting in "Hamatsa" was the incorporation of the Maori dance movements and chants. According to the producers, native New Zealander Katipa, having discussed with tribal elders, was very careful with the "tapu" sacred purity of the original chants. A spiritual song and canoe paddling piece of the Tangata Whenua tribe were used as well as the traditional Maori the challenging war dance, "Haka."
"Hamatsa" was a wanton disciplined performance with stupendous philosophical inclinations concealed in the Tangata Whenua chants. With the rivers of sweat, bare asses, rubber inner tubes, and a wonderful rhythmic cadence on horseback, the creators of "Hamatsa" painted their bodies, rallied and railed the divine, embraced the myth and had a whole lotta fun. Having survived New York, "Hamatsa" is slated to New Zealand and may be part of the Melbourne Comedy Festival in Australia.
[Abalos]
“A HYPERTEXT PUNK TRAGEDY” FOR THE AUDIENCE
This collection of unintelligible sentences generously peppered with “cunt”
and “fuck” in the way most other works are bountiful with “the” and “a,”
defies interpretation. That this production supposedly played in Providence,
Rhode Island, for four weeks to packed houses is reason enough to declare that
city an intellectual disaster area and for President Clinton to send in
troops.
Now with foresight, the playwright felt he had to include a note in the
playbill to explain what he was trying to do. This is an excerpt of his
elucidation: “By hypertext, I mean nonsequential writing. Text that branches
and allows interpretive narrative choices. A text composed of blocks of
text—what Barthes terms a lexia—and the electronic links that join them.
Thereby creating a monster entity, or ‘Creature,’ that is experienced as
nonlinear, or, more properly, as a multilinear or multisequential. . . .
“I have structured ‘ . . . Shining Creature’ so that, in the words of Roland
Barthes in ‘S/Z’ ‘it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it
by several entrances, none of which can authoritatively declared to be the
main one.”
In Iran, common people have had their hands chopped off for less.
This play is purely masturbatory exhibitionism. It’s like watching someone
tripping on acid declare, “I have discovered the meaning of life.” And you ask
kindly, “What then pray tell is the meaning of live?” He replies slowly with a
smile, “Chocolate pudding on my toe.” Where’s Sartre when you need him?
The story here, and I hope I’m not insulting Mr. Oakes by saying that there is
a story, deals with a family: Dad (Mark Poppleton), Mom (Tammy Lang), and
Child (Jessica Wood). They’re not a happy bunch. It appears the trio is
battling the nasty DeGuzman (Jeff Eyres) who has two penises growing from his
forehead and The Cutting Ball (Jay Oakes) who struts about in a kilt with
bleeding eyes. One of them eventually kills the Child who refuses to stay
dead.
There are 42 scenes, or “screens” as the playwright prefers, which according
to the press release “capture different stories of sex, death, rebirth and
conflicts with other-worldly forces.” This is once case where the press
release is better written than the play it's pushing. “There are leitmotifs of
the Oedipus myth, alien abduction, bible stories, the furies’ pursuit of
Orestes for matricide and the shining possibility of newborn children.” Who I
am to argue? This dismal drama could arguably be about Hershey’s Cocoa and the
CIA.
The visual high point is when Dad spouts a vagina and a hand from his back and
has the honor of experiencing cunnilingus performed on his newborn orifice.
And for the real soft core fans out there, there’s is an awful lot of make-
believe copulation on stage, both straight and gay.
There is, however, no conversational high points. Sample snippets of dialogue:
“We have pets in my house: an alive kitty and an already dead kitty.” “I’m
going to fuck your dead nigger cunt.” “I’m feeling upset every two or three
minutes.” “He pissed my asshole out of his cunt.” “Can I get something else to
drink? There’s a man coming out of my head.” “The refrigerator told me on keep
on fucking him.”
Surprisingly an able cast makes this garbage much more palatable than they
have the moral right to, especially Mr. Poppleton, Ms. Lang and Mr. Jay Oakes.
Jeremy Woodward’s Latex and foam objects also deserve a splattering of
applause. [Judell]
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"The Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan Maledetto"
It takes a degree of fearlessness to attend a Dario D'Ambrosi production--and
a touch of madness. At least, that's what it might seem like on the surface
since his plays are performed mostly in Italian. But intrepid theatergoers who
probe into "The Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan Maldetto" will find
the experience greatly rewarding and perversely entertaining.
Adapted and directed by Dario D' Ambrosi,
Composed by John La Barbera,
Set Design by Jun Maeda,
Sound Design by Tim Schellenbaum,
Light design by Danilo Facco
Cast: Dario D'Ambrosi, Gianluigi Capone, Elio Cesari, Stefano Amati, Paolo
Porto, Paolo Sansone, Antonella Zucca, Elena Di Feliceantonia, Sebastiano
Alfei, Giovanni Sasone, Giuseppe De Falco, Zishan Ugurlu, Gaia Carletti,
Antonella Altocecci, Fortunato Caristo.
LaMaMa E.T.C. Annex Theater, 74A East Fourth Street
Thursdays through Sundays at 7:30 p.m. plus Sunday matinees at 3:00 p.m.
$15 TDF (212) 475-7710
Reviewed by Randy Gener October 11, 1998
CAPITAN MALDETTO
by Jerry Tallmer
WITH RANDY GENERLIER REX: The (royal) devil in paramilitary dress, or a case of "Abuba
Roi"?
COLLECTED STORIES: Has Uta Hagen ever looked so unbearably beautiful?
CAUGHT IN THE ACT 98: Around the world in 13 plays.
SONATA DA CAMERA OBSCURA: Ken Nintzel's ontological take on the gay
life
CULTURE OF DESIRE: Anne Bogart beats the dead horse of Andy Warhol and
discovers, well, more Brillo boxes
WITH RANDY GENER
Long after it's over, W. David Hancock's "The Race of the Ark Tattoo" lingers
like a painfully deepening blister in the memory. And the wonder is that
despite its grim view of the world, a witty sense of humor manages to register
at all. Hancock suffuses his ephemera-laden aesthetic with a sad, bitter
despondency. In the guise of a small exhibit ("Conventions of Cartography"), a
blighted performance of "The Tempest" ("Deviant Craft") or a flea-market
lecture ("Race of the Ark Tattoo"), Hancock's plays are metaphysical detective
tales which slowly unveil the melancholic life of crazies, weirdos, prisoners,
eccentrics and completely unreliable characters who, nevertheless, offer up a
whole gallery of bric-a-bracs and cheap-looking detritus as authentic
evidence. These found-objects are not the private property but the personal
effects and doo-dad clutter of the dead, the missing or the hidden identities
who in some terrible way are related to these wacko protagonists who
fetishistically collect them. These found-objects are also necessary props to
Hancock's treacherous theatricks. Though the found-objects trigger scattered
memories, wild digressions and even wilder stories which then propel forward
Hancock's plays, we have to assemble in our minds the exact nature of the
human mystery being circuitously dramatized before us.
The persistence of death and the inscrutability of memory are also the themes
of Joshua Sobol's "Village," presented by the Gesher Theater of Israel (a
seven-year-old company founded by Russian Israelis) as part of Lincoln Center
Festival '98 last June. The difference, however, is that "Race of the Ark
Tattoo" tastes like a bitter pill while the felicitously quirky "Village"
tastes like sugar. It is a theater of the marvelous, with the shadow of death
and pain of memory played out in high spirits and magical flair. "Memory, true
memory, as opposed to false mythologized memory, is always personal, always
individual," the Israeli Sobol once wrote in a defense of "Ghetto" (presented
in 1989 at Circle in the Square). Sobol's childlike Yossi, played winningly by
Israel (Sasha) Demidov, is an naive gravedigger who doesn't realize that he
is, in fact, dead, that his spirit travels round and round, like a carousel.
Move over, Terrence McNally. For true cynical bile on Biblical topics,
Atlanta-based playwright Jim Grimsley's "The Lizard of Tarsus" last June cuts
the subversive cake. Recently published in new collection of Grimsley plays,
"Mr Universe And Other Plays" (published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill),
"Lizard," as Reynolds Price says in his introduction to the play, dramatizes
an imagined confrontation between Jesus and Paul of Tarsus, also known as
Saul: "No writer known to me has poised that battle on an actual stage and
turned it so many ways to the light," says Price. "I'd give a good deal to see
and hear 'The Lizard of Tarsus' in a vivid production by a brave diretor of
ferocious taste and with the three great actors required by Grimsley's arctic
words and burning strength of judgment and mercy." Heeding that call, I ran to
the Church of Holy Trinity's Triangle Theatre Company to see the last
performance of "The Lizard of Tarsus," as directed by Joseph Megel of Harland
Productions. (It's the same company that brought to New York Grimsley's "Math
and Aftermath" in 1995.) And while the production was not quite the Road-to-
Damascus journey that I was hoping for, Megel's production does tough-mindedly
draw out the strange, peculiar power of Grimsley's allegorical play.
In a highly actable and vastly entertaining new translation from the Swedish
by Ulrika Brandt, August Strindberg's 1892 comedy in one-act "Playing With
Fire" fictionalizes the early stages of his relationship with Siri von Essen,
then married to her first husband Baron Carl Gustaf Wrangel. The play, as
Richard Gilman points out in "The Making of Modern Drama," may be one of the
more durable plays Strindberg wrote in the early 1890s when his marriage to
Siri had dissolved and when he turned to more expressionistic, more surreally
themed plays which began with "To Damascus." Set in a summer cottage, the play
is a domestic comedy about a mysterious friend (Paul Megna) who derails the
marriage between a seemingly happy couple (the Son played by Robert Alexander
and the Wife, played by Paul Mcgonagle). Some comedy is wrought from the
comings-and-goings of other characters--a mother, a father, and a cousin, all
of whom stay in the cottage. But the mordant funnybone in Brandt's translation
(which she directed herself as part of the Directing Cabaret at The American
Living Room Series in association with Lincoln Center Theater) lies in the
menage: the play draws an incisively cutting portrait of adultery, sexual
ambivalence and personal chaos; the Son is so cynical that his nonchalance
with regard to his wife, virtually ensures that she will stray; through his
disregard and immaturity, he basically hands over his wife to the mysterious
and passionate suitor.
Adulterous love is also one of the troubling themes in "The Dying Gaul," Craig
Lucas's powerful, Strindbergian vivisection of a menage a trois made in
Hollywood and cyberspace. The play is being revived after it opened last
spring at the Vineyard Theatre (108 East 15th Street, 212-353-3874, all
tickets are $40, except Friday and Saturdays nights when tickets are $45); the
show was almost killed by a wrongheaded review by Peter Marks in The New York
Times. Performances resume from September 18 to October 25. And if there is
any justice in the world, I predict a runaway hit.
While it is true that Basil Twist's chamber-musical ballet "Symphonie
Fantastique" is the first puppet program to be completely underwater, it is
not the first to employ scarves to expressive abstraction. For the latter,
Twist will have to tip his hat to puppeteer Hanne Tierney who once presented a
radical version of Chekhov's "The Seagull" using differently colored
scarves--and only scarves. The brilliance of Tierney's "Seagull" was that she
was able to portray all the drama of Chekhov's text without the use of actors,
and in her case, she didn't even get that much help. (Tierney manipulated the
scraves using a complex set of pulleys and recorded tapes on her own.) What's
magnificent about "Symphonie Fantastique," in fact, happens at the end of the
evening, when Twist's fellow puppeteers take their bow. The moment is stunning
because for nearly an hour we have been seeing feathers, streamers, mirrors,
bubbles, and flashes of light, all submerged in 500 gallons of water, all
darting, swriling, drifting and floating in continuous motion, all performed
to Hector Berlioz's Romantic composition by way of an old Philadelphia
Orchestra recording led by Eugene Ormandy. As puppetry, it's an enthralling,
undulating picture of a floating world. And by now critics and reviewers have
heaped a hosanna of praise over the piece and have spilled considerable ink
trying to put into words what is essentially an inexpressibly beautiful one-
of-a-kind experience. So given that as a nominating judge for last year's
Drama Desk Awards I helped give Twist nab a nomination and fought to have his
name stay on the list for the duration of the season (despite the
protestations of several know-nothing critics), I hope Basil Twist won't be
upset if I express a couple of cavils. Meanwhile, if you're one of the few who
still haven't seen this superb show, read my lips: Drag the kids and go!
Starting the month of September, British actors Brian Cox, Henry Goodman and
David Haig will take over the roles of Marc, Serge, and Yvan in Yasmina Reza's
1998 Tony Award-winning/1997 Olivier Award-winning play "Art" which has been
adapted from the French by Christopher Hampton. And now that more popular
actors like Alan Alda and Alfred Molina are gone, perhaps it's possible to see
throw the smoke screen of celebrity and view the play clearly for what it
really is: an intermittently funny not-bad one-act comedy about friendship.
Ping Chong's "Kwaidan" -- Three Japanese Ghost Stories, Parables for our Time
September 15-26 (Closed)
Kwaidan, Three Japanese Ghost Stories, conceived and directed by Ping Chong
with puppetry by Jon Ludwig and sets and decor by Mitsuru Ishii, was one of
the most beautiful offerings of the Jim Henson Foundation's International
Festival of Puppet Theater which recently enchanted New Yorkers with its many
extraordinary puppet groups from around the world.
La MaMa E.T.C. (Annex Theater), 74A East Fourth Street
Presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in association with The Center for Puppetry Arts, Atlanta, as part of the International Festival of Puppet Theater presented by the Jim Henson Foundation
KWAIDAN
Three Japanese Ghost Stories
Conceived, written and directed by Ping Chong
Puppetry coordinated by Jon Ludwig
Art direction and production design by Mitsuri Ishii
Based on the book by Lafcadio Hearn
Sound design by David Meschter
Projection design by Jan Hartley
Lighting design by Liz Lee
Performed by David Ige, Pamella O'Connor, Lee Randall, Fred C. Riley III, and
Don Smith
Presented by La MaMa E.T.C. and Ping Chong and Company
74A East Fourth Street, East Village
Through September 26, 1998Ping Chong's KWAIDAN Premieres at La MaMa's Newly Renovated Annex Theater:
Is It Too Early To Proclaim the Theatrical Tour-De-Force of the Season?
A Fresh Look at "Cymbeline"
"Cymbeline" by William Shakespeare
At long last a production of Shakespeare has arrived at the New
York Shakespeare Festival in the park that is a pleasure to
listen to, a pleasure to see, and a pleasure to understand. No
updating here, no crazy costuming, no dull acting, no cross
dressing, no politically correct casting. In a word, Andrei
Serban's production of "Cymbeline" in Central Park, has finally
delivered the finest Shakespeare by an all American cast that I
have seen in New York. In fact, it may even be the best
Shakespeare that the Festival has produced for a long time.
The New York Shakespeare Festival
Free in Central park
Reviewed August 23, 1998 by Margaret Croyden Peter Brook's Return to Opera
Mozart's "Don Giovanni"
The great theater director Peter Brook, famous for his masterly
productions--the "Marat-Sade," "The Midsummer Night's Dream,"
"The Tragedy of Carmen" "The Mahabharata," and numerous other
works in his thirty years in the theater--has now returned to
opera. He had long ago sworn off directing opera, which after
his unconventional "Salome" at Covent Garden in the 1940's, he
once described as a nightmare. This past July, at the age of
seventy-three, he returned to the genre that few believed he would
ever tackle again. He undertook the challenging task of directing
Mozart's greatest opera, "Don Giovanni," a production that was
part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Aix-en-
Provence Music Festival.
Aix-En-Provence Music Festival
July 9-31, 1998 (closed)
Reviewed by Margaret Croyden
Lainie Kazan at the Oak Room
Lainie Kazan at The Oak Room
Tuesday night a tornado tore into New York, all in black and gold. Well, it really tore into the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, and its name is Lainie Kazan. Blew the room away.
The Algonquin, 59 W. 44th St.
through Aug. 22
9 p.m. Tues., Wed., Thurs., 9 and 11 p.m., Fri., Sat.
$40 music charge
reservations, (212) 840-6800.
reviewed by Jerry Tallmer August 4 HAMATSA AT LA MAMA
June 18 to 28, La MaMa E.T.C., 74A East Fourth Street (Special Event)
A few years ago a bunch of Filipino American actors got together and put on a show at La Mama Club called "A Little Hula Hell." It was a campy irreverent piece about volcanoes, virgin sacrifice and Spanish galleons. All this writer could think of at the time was the curse that might befall these performers for their participation in this audacious impiety. Almost a decade later, the director has had hip surgery, an actor with HIV died of AIDs, the other actors have not done any significant work lately, and only the bouncer in the LaMama seems to have survived perhaps because she did not perform on stage.
Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 pm; Sundays at 3:00 pm and 7:30 pm
$12/tdf; (212) 475-7710
“All Spoken by a Shining Creature: A Hypertext Punk Tragedy”
It has been proposed in the past that if you place enough chimpanzees in front
of enough computers, it’s mathematically feasible that after a few decades one
will wind up typing a work on the caliber of Shakespeare’s. Though that’s hard
to swallow, it’s also as hard to anticipate any ape fingering out a play as
bad as Kevin Oakes’ “All Spoken by a Shining Creature: A Hypertext Punk
Tragedy.”
July 9 to July 25, The Piano Store, 158 Ludlow Street
Presented by Floating Sky Productions and Todo Con Nada
8:00 pm Thurs-Sun.
$12/TDF
(212)420-1466
runs 1-1/2 hours without intermission
reviewed by Brandon Judell, July 17, 1998 
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