Critic New York

Holy Crap

2011-06-07T12:10:00.001-07:00

Last month, LaMaMa presented We Couldn’t Call it what we Wanted to Call it, so we Called it Holy Crap!! – by Iñigo Ramírez de Haro. The archbishop of Madrid demanded that the Spanish production of the play be banned, and it incited demonstrations there. As it had such impeccable qualifications, I couldn’t miss it.

This is a virtuoso solo performance by Stephen Mo Hanan. Much to his credit, he betrays no embarrassment at the behaviors he’s called upon to execute. These include complaining about constipation while sitting on toilet seats, bouncing between the characters of Everyman (sort of) and God in silly repartee, and simulating buggary.

It starts with the toilets. Then our nameless hero regresses to childhood and proceeds to present psychological abuse by the Church and physical abuse by a priest. The latter being a metaphor for the first, there’s an indisputable moral here.

Still, the play’s seering accusation can’t justify its considerable vulgarity. WCCIWWWTCISWCIHC doesn’t explore abuse, it merely stages it.

As New York audiences, we’ve seen everything. It’s an indication of off-off-Broadway’s vitality that we’re jaded to this stuff. By our standards, de Haro has merely latched on to a hot topic thinking he'll write a hot play.

The production suggests an interesting solution to the problem of changing sets on an OOB budget. There are sheets of plastic side-to-side and top-to-bottom of our field of view. The second is upstage of the first, concealed by it, and so on. Hana rips them away as the scenes change, revealing a new set with each rip. Clever.

Kashu-juku Noh Theater

2011-06-07T11:25:00.001-07:00

From time to time the Japan Society, NYC, graces New York with a production of Noh – traditional Japanese theatre. The Noh plays were coupled with a kyogen.

The first play was brief, a mai-bayashi, a form of Noh presenting a solo performer without mask or costume.

The kyogen followed, comedy suggesting commedia dell’arte. Kyogen is traditionally presented with Noh. It’s concerned with the routine trivia of life. This play presented to servants trying to get at their master’s saki, as countless characters have schemed for wine in European farces.

Unlike kyogen, Noh is musical; the delicate music is incomparable to western tonality. Actors wear gorgeous, elaborate costume, prints and plaids. Magnificantly artificial, Noh addresses transcendent issues. In this production the play was Lady Aoi, about a virtuous women hunted by a ghost sent by a spiteful rival. The culmination is a fight between the demon and a Buddhist priest, essentially a battle between good and evil. The two glide fro and back across the stage wordlessly, to the eerie music of the traditional Noh instruments. The succuba intermittently stamps her foot, and the sound personifies the anarchic intent of the Evil One. Stunning.

No dates from the 14th century. In this tradition skills are passed from one generation to the next; the actor begins training in childhood. In performance, he uses about 25 stylized gestures variously combined. This company was Kashu-juku Noh Theater, comprised of prominent Noh actors. Its mission includes outreach to audiences unfamiliar with the Noh.

We applaud the Japan Society for their marvelous contribution to New York theatre, and we’re looking forward to the next touring Japanese company.

Thunderbird American Indian Dancers

2011-02-05T18:40:00.001-08:00

The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers performed at the Theatre for the New City last month. It’s impossible not to admire them; their mission is to preserve the dances of native Americans

They presented 13 dances – the Caribou Dance from Alaska, the Buffalo Dance from the Southwest, the Smoke Dance from the Iroquois, the Shawl Dance from the Plains Indians, et al. Happily, we were guided through the program by the troupe’s artistic director, Louis Mofsie, who clarified each dance.

Some of the movements, he explained, have objective referents. In the Men’s Dance, crouching refers to stalking the enemy; pointing to the ground refers to following their footsteps.

Other movements once had a function. The Stomp Dance smoothed the grass to make a path and the movement of the Iriquois Smoke Dance purportedly created a draft to move smoke up through the smoke hole.

The audience participated in the Round Dance from the plains, and it was great to see the barrier between performers and audience broken. Dance is the most participatory of the arts.

It was evident in this dance, and in others, what a great difference it makes in our perception if the dancers do not face us. These dances were created as ceremonies, not entertainment. When the dancers form a circle without front, it abandons the element of show for a higher purpose.

Glorious, colorful costumes were a major element in the show, featuring the magnificent headdresses on the men. The jingles on the costumes are an inspired accoutrement, a wholly integrated percussion created by the dance itself.

The dances were accompanied by songs, each specific to the dance. It’s the musicians, not the dancers, who sing. Although some native songs are sung in a language, all the songs of this evening were in vocables, non-lexical phonemes. But they’re not improvised, like scat. When there are multiple singers, they all sing the same syllables, memorized. The singing was at its best when they sang a repetitive, hypnotic motif.

The other instruments accompanying accompany the dances were essentially drums and rattles, although other instruments might have integrated. Only twice or twice did the bear accelerate as the dance progressed, suggesting the power drums can have.

As entertaining as the troupe is, we have reservations. We’re told that the dancers come from many different tribes, although some are clearly not native.

The skill of the dancers is uneven. One young boy, perhaps ten years old, is terrific. The adults, happily, were of a range of ages, but some didn’t match the young man’s standard.

Story-telling was integrated into the evening, and while it was intriguing to hear a soft rattling backstage as out barefoot raconteur spoke, the stories lacked the pith of myth.

Be that as it may. This was the troupe's 36th annual performance at TNC, and we hope to see them for many years more.

Watt at The Public Theater

2011-01-30T21:35:00.000-08:00

As part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, Barry McGovern has brought his solo performance Watt to New York from Dublin, produced by The Gate Theatre and directed by Tom Creed. The monologue is adapted from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, in which the title character slugs his way through the trivia of a spell as a butler.

McGowen starts off with the book’s opening line “The only way to speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something.” He wraps it up in less than an hour. He’s had to be very selective in developing the script, and the result is marvelous, a drop of Becket with the taste of all his poetic nihilism.

I’ve always found Beckett’s novels unreadable, but coming from this actor the prose is not only accessible, it’s actually fun. Its melody in McGovern’s refined Irish English expresses its humor, its subtlety, and its lonely pathos.

McGowen never works for effect, but disappears behind the text by an interpretive sleight of hand. When Beckett employs repetition, which he does often, and the rhythm of McGovern’s speech gives it shape and content.

More denotatively, Beckett’s words express his contempt for the Irish by mocking their words. In this dialect, third and fourth become turd and fart.

Except for two chairs and a coat rack, the stage is barren, appropriate for Beckett’s impoverished universe.

All in all, this exquisite piece expresses Beckett’s stunned disappointment with the nature of life.

Although there’s no book in sight, this performance is essentially a reading, and we’d do well to note McGovern’s technique. He’s almost always addressing the audience, but when he quotes a character he turns to the imaginary person he’s addressing. He takes on no affectation of characterization, but he acknowledges that reading in the first person demands an adjustment. The audience inevitably sees the reader as the character speaking, and the reader needs to acknowledge this.

The Belarus Free Theatre

2011-01-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

Discussing society is what theatre does better than any other art form; it is our unique mission. The Belarus Free Theatre is one of the most important companies on earth; since 2005 they’ve been a focus of the Belarusian political resistance. The website of the European Theatre Convention gives the company’s address as “Underground in Belarus”. Surprisingly, the company has travelled extensively, and New York was excited to see their work recently.

Company members participated last month in the political demonstrations in Minsk. One was arrested. The two founder/producers, Natalia Kolyadan and Nikolay Khalezin, were forced into hiding until they left Belarus clandestinely, along with their actors, to present as part of The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival.

The piece the company performed, Being Harold Pinter, incorporates Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech, parts of six of Pinter’s plays, and letters from Belarusian political prisoners. It uses minimalist techniques, the set being made up of four chairs, a bench, and four apples, the latter two elements being largely unused. The text segues from the interpersonal or political violence of Pinter’s dialogue to the voices of those who were the victims of real-life repression and imprisonment.

Many of the evening's striking images leave an indelible imprint; actors imprisoned beneath a transparent tarpaulin; a prisoner on a leash; a horrible castration by torch. In one moment, the cast rubs the rims of glasses with their fingers. The pure ringing gives a transcendent sense of mystery to a piece that is otherwise largely denotative.

The execution is meticulous, flawless, each detail sharpened as the edge of a razor. The sheer skill of the company, like its courage, is above argument.

The power of this work is undeniable. The problem, common to protest theatre, is that we become inured to the violence. Instead of sensitizing us, the play numbs us. Theatre of this sort would do well to intersperse the shocking with contrasting tones. A piece of government propaganda, for example, would be an effective contrast. In Being Harold Pinter, even the subtle moments of Pinter’s plays are delivered heavily, although they could offer relief from the overt aggression.

However, a Manhattan audience is not a Belarusian audience, and I have no doubt that the company’s performances have a different effect in Minsk than here.

I had the opportunity to talk with Natalia Kolyadan before a performance at La MaMA. I asked if the company’s other productions were in the same style as Being Harold Pinter. “All of them are minimalistic in terms of the staging,” she answered.

Although the theatre is repressed in Belarus, it manages to perform nonetheless – largely in private apartments. “It’s an absolutely wonderful dialogue we have with the Belarusian audience,” she said. When a performance is announced, tickets are sold out within an hour.

The company never has the opportunity to perform for audiences that don’t agree with its position, but Ms. Kolyadan told me “I would love to.”

I spoke with her a few days after she had met with Hillary Clinton’s reps and Senate staff in DC to discuss the Belarus government repression of the Belarusian people. She told me that was very pleased with the reception she had received. “We discussed in detail what it is necessary to do,” she said. “It looks like they are doing an absolutely great job, because two days before it was announced that if political prisoners are not released in Belarus, the United States would start sanctions.”

Although the company is identified as presenting some of the world's most important political theatre, Natalia told me that she did not consider the company’s work to be political first. She explained that a play that discusses drug addiction and suicide becomes political in a country where the government denies that drug addiction or suicide exists. She was referring to the company’s first production, 4.48 Psychosis, a play by Sarah Kane.

The Belarus Free Theatre has, and deserves, the support of the theatre community around the world. It shames companies that have more freedom and less commitment.

January 2011

Pinter, Pinter

2010-11-24T19:56:00.001-08:00

Harold Pinter’s reputation was established by an early play, The Caretaker, which appeared in 1960. Two years later, he wrote The Collection. This play exhibits the signature Pinter themes: latent danger, the ambiguity of meaning, perspectivism.

It’s this third motif that's dominant here. Two couples are involved, one gay, one straight. One of the gays may have spent the night with the young lady in question – or he may not have. Even the two involved change their stories, he at a whim, as if even the individual can’t be sure of a memory. They use their recollections as weapons or enticements, and their veracity is of no importance. Even the degree of vagary is carefully measured for effect.

The fellow’s lover (the older gentleman who’s keeping him) has his suspicions; his young partner gets an anonymous phone call and a similar visitor. He responds with a lie of his own, exonerating himself from the responsibility of responding to his boy’s possible infidelity. It’s like the end of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the action is resolved by a lie. This difference is that in this play, it’s just one lie among many. If truth exists, it’s beyond our ken.

The Atlantic Theatre is producing the play on its second stage, impeccably. The clipped British English has the sharpness of the knife the two rivals use in a mock duel. When they turn their heads, it’s with a snap, like a switchblade flicked open. The direction is brisk, without dwelling on Pinteresque pauses. The actors modulate their performances marvelously, always keeping a characteristic guardedness.

The Collection, in its one-act simplicity, is a prototype of Pinter; indeed, it’s nearly generic Pinter. The second one-act on the Atlantic’s double bill is more intriguing. A Kind of Alaska was written 20 years after The Collection, in a period when Pinter was particularly concerned with memory.

A Kind of Alaska springs from Oliver Sach’s book Awakenings, which chronicles this doctor’s work with victims of sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica). The disease swept the world in a pandemic between 1915 and 1925. Its victims lay in a sleep-like stupor.

Pinter uses the fact of the disease as his conceit. The central character, Deborah, “fell asleep” quite suddenly, standing up, when she was 16 years old. The play is set in her hospital room 29 years later, on the day she wakes. Knowing no better, of course, she still believes she’s 16. She has no memory of the 29 years, and the onus of explanation falls on her doctor and her sister.

The themes of memory and time are obvious. Moreover, since this is Pinter, the other two characters lie or not as they see fit. But the play's deepest level is revealed when Deborah describes her consciousness in her sleep. She talks about “interior windows masquerading as walls… glass reflects glass forever and ever.” It’s a spot-on metaphor for consciousness with nothing to be conscious of. Consciousness itself - without object.

The role of Deborah is played by a superb actress, Lisa Emery. The stage is her playground. She has the physical life of a teenager; her emotional life flows effortlessly. There’s no drama in the play to speak of; Madame Emery keeps us engrossed as she externalizes the parade of thoughts running through Deborah’s confused mind. This is, after all, a bravura piece.

Larry Bryggman (who plays the elder gay in the first piece), plays her doctor, so proud that he can barely control his delight. He loves his patient (who is his one-time sister-in-law), but she is nonetheless an object to him.

Walt Spangler designed both sets. The first is a handsome split stage, as Pinter specifies. For A Kind of Alaska, he’s kept to stark sterility: white walls, white bed clothes, and a mute white radiator.

Home Sweet Home

2010-11-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

Photo by Bobae Kim
The Scandinavian American Theater Company (SATC) is a new project with the mission to bring Scandinavian theatre to the US. The founders are ex-pats, the playwrights and directors borrowed Scandinavians.

Their American premiere is a production of a play by Andreas Garfield, Home Sweet Home. In this play, a young couple have (has?) a friend to dinner, the fellow’s old army buddy (his name is Carsten). He’s just returned from Iraq (the Danes fought in Iraq with the “American-led coalition”). It’s a vivid portrait of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Carsten gradually reveals the effects that his experiences have had on him. In the process, he exposes the fatuous smugness of his hosts’ domesticity.

Iben, the woman (her name is Iben), is a dove (in 60's jargon), and she’s tactless enough to speak her mind. At one level, the play is a discussion of the war, or, more precisely, of the polarized opinions of the war. The dialogue could be about any war. One point of mounting the Danish production here is that it translates literally into the American experience. It succeeds in being simultaneously specific and universal.

Iben’s candidness naturally sets off a breakdown on the part of the soldier-guest (Carsten). The actor playing him has a Danish accent, while the other two do not, and it stresses the guest’s being the other. He ultimately drops the courtesy and explodes, attacking their attitudes and experiences. At its deepest level, the script discusses the complacency of comfort.

And so the play works on several levels. But its structure is flawed. It develops in fits and starts, its arc intermittently broken. Instead of progressing steadily toward its fate, it stalls and then jumps ahead as if to compensate. It goes off on an inexplicable tangent when Iben and Carsten flirt with each other. They may be doing it to tease her husband, but the have no reason to. Indeed, they dislike each other.

Christopher Berdal’s direction is crystalline. By the same token, it’s too pointed, sans subtlety. The acting is committed and often very effective, but generalized: we don’t see that the characters have a history together. The set is very nice, the walls defined by identical cardboard boxes (the pair is moving into the new house); we do indeed believe there are rooms behind them.

One of these rooms is the bathroom, to which Carsten withdraws on occasion. His solitary scenes back there are projected on to the wall of boxes. I never find this sort of media-rich production satisfying. Something in the play wants to be a movie.

And so we wish luck for the SATC. Its promise outweighs it flaws, and we’re looking forward to more work from them.

Political Dreams

2010-10-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

Mother's Return - Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Jean-Claude van Itallie’s play America Hurrah (actually three short plays) was first presented at La MaMa in 1965. It was one of the productions constituting the rush of talent that led to the “avant garde” theatre of off-off Broadway. It’s a measure of how pressurized theatre – and society – had become that the movement broke with nearly all with convention, and burst upon New York.

The piece is iconic. America Hurrah lacked consistent characters, motivation, place, et al. Audiences may have been puzzled, but they welcomed it. They could see that the point of this dramatic confusion was political. In Motel, the best known of the three playlets, overgrown dolls/actors trashed a motel room for no reason. That was in 1965, when the U.S. was trashing – also for no reason – a certain Asian country.

Van Itallie is as iconoclastic as Hugo or Strindberg. But while those two produced identifiable dramatic genres (romanticism and expressionism, respectively), van Itallie has not. In his theatre, there are no genres: every play creates its own form. Such is Modernism.

Two plays of America Hurrah, Interview and Motel, are being produced once again at La MaMa, giving New York a golden opportunity. Audiences need to see these as much as they do A Dream Play.

I asked the playwright himself how an audience can accept a play that it’s not prepared for, with conventions that it’s never known.

JV: “As the creator of a play, you have to be very clear as to what your rules of the game are. You have to be quite sure of what you’re doing. If you’re presenting something which doesn’t have a clear form to you, there’s no hope that the audience is going to understand it, particularly if it’s an unconventional form.

“So, although plays always pose questions, they shouldn’t pose a question about the form that they are. You’ve got to set up a game – which every play is – which at least is clear to you.”

I asked him to tell me about the first productions of Interview and Motel, in the first production of America Hurrah!

JV: “I was 30. I had been in the avant-garde. I wanted to see if I could have a successful play and be a playwright in the world, which went much against the grain of the culture that I was in – the culture of the artists in Greenwich Village. You were not supposed to want a commercial success. More than that, I wanted it on my own terms. I thought “Well, I’ll do the best I can, and they’ll like it or they won’t.” But secretly, a part of me thought they wouldn’t.

“As we rehearsed the plays, there was constantly a refining of form. Joe Chaikin was directing the first play, Interview. He kept insisting that I rewrite this part and that part, monologues and so forth. And he kept refining his staging, so that a few days before we opened, the staging was still not fixed. That was his way.

“Joe had a clear vision of how he wanted that staging to be. And the rhythm of the piece only became clearer. It was always, to my mind, a fugue – with the questions and answers in the employment agency to begin with, accumulating in number, and then the monologues.

“Motel was conceived in 1962. The dolls were constructed by Robert Wilson - it was his first job in the theatre. There, the problem was that the dolls kept falling apart and we had to constantly retape them!

“I had tuned into some collective dream at the right time. You can’t calculate that intellectually. I had managed to tap into my unconscious in some way which is a state of grace for a playwright.

“A playwright is as successful as he or she is able to lower the bucket into the unconscious and come up with a dream which is not only personally significant, but which signifies for the general. That metaphor, Motel, talked about the destructiveness of America in Vietnam. It talked about our materialism. It talked about how the left hand wouldn’t acknowledge what the right hand was doing. And I didn’t plan to write a play about that.

“You don’t lead with your intellect. If you can be in that state of grace, you lower the bucket into the unconscious and, as carefully as you can, you use your craft to make clear the result. If you’re sure of your form, there’s a good chance that the audience will get it.”

The current La MaMa production adds to the two Hurrah playlets a third, new, play by van Itallie, The Mother’s Return, a dream play. While it owes much to Strindberg dream in terms of dramatic freedom, the Swede’s vision turned inward. Van Itallie’s looks outward to society. The politics in Return is sometimes explicit: “High up seated at the desk, he gives the order. Children are killed.” More often, it’s metaphorical: “I become the secretary, but the notebook is already scribbled in.”

I asked Jean-Claude how this production, with its odd mix of old and new material, came about.

JV: “I have the greatest respect for dreams. I've been writing down my own, on and off, since I was nineteen. In the last ten years, I've been analyzing dreams (a painful process) in order to make friends with my unconscious. Recently I've writing down dreams as poems.

This summer when the director Josh Adler [who directs the current production] came up to Shantigar Foundation, the old farm where I live in Western Massachusetts, to take the Acting and Being workshop, he told me: "Something needs to be handed on. I'd like to direct America Hurrah with my theater company, rehearsing at Shantigar. Will you help us?" I said I'd prefer to work with him on a new piece based on my political dreams. Josh replied, "We'll do both." Thus the current production at LaMaMa of part of America Hurrah and The Mother's Return, a dream play.”

America Hurrah revisited and The Mother’s Return, a dream play runs through October 24th on East Fourth Street, a run too short.

A Delight in Bali

2010-10-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

Colin McPhee was a Canadian musician and composer, one of those who initiated the probe into world music. In 1929, he reportedly heard a recording of a gamelan – i.e., the traditional Balinese musical ensemble. He took himself off to Bali where he spent, over the course of three trips, about five years, documenting the music and having all sorts of adventures. He spent some time there with none other than Margaret Meade.

Evan Ziporyn, who has himself spent time working in the island, has taken McPhee’s story and used it as the basis of his opera A House in Bali, recently produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The set piece, representing the house McPhee builds, occupies the right side of the stage. The left side is populated with the musical ensemble, from New York’s Bang on a Can All-Stars, and another ensemble from Bali.

In the first scene, the All-Stars are playing contemporary atonal music. Then, when the scene shifts to Bali, the music morphs into the music of the gamelan, itself nearly cacophonous. McPhee calls it:
the confusion of sounds,
jangled dissonance,
merging to form
constantly surprising harmonies
in this absolute music.

Just before our man sets sail, when the All-Stars are playing in a style current to us, he sings:
I go to concerts
Listen with restlessness to the new music
I once delighted in.

The “new music” is just what we’re listening to, and we discover the marvels of live gamelan when he does.

The libretto is largely taken from the writings of McPhee, Meade, and another expat in Bali with them, Walter Spies. It’s projected in supertitles, although the opera is almost entirely in English. It’s also printed in the program, like W.S. Gilbert’s librettos. The Balinese-language lines are sometimes translated, sometimes not.

Peter Tantsits manages the grueling leading role with his indefatigable bright tenor voice, and with grace.

There’s a formalistic theme running through this production. A cameraman is onstage. He’s close to the characters and they’re aware of him. He’s often downstage of actor, obstructing our view. As he videos, the shots are shown live on a screen above the set. The intimacy of video is very seductive. I like it far less than a living stage picture, but I felt myself drawn to it.

Upstage, as well, video is projected on the wall behind the entire stage, low contrast, soft and pale.

Director Jay Shelb is playing around a lot here, and we love it. His single weakness is in staging one link of story is difficult to discern when the house bathtub, inexplicably, represents a river.

The production was altogether marvelous, wonderful, another gift from BAM.

Interrogations: Words of Zen Masters

2010-10-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

Photo: William Irwin

Interrogations: Words of Zen Masters is a solo show from Yoshi Oida. The title refers to Oida’s questions to the audience: What is the meaning of life? When a man has climbed to the top of a pole, how can he climb higher? Et al. He’s a Zen master questioning his students.

Some of the audience members throw out answers in answers to these koans. The master, of course, shoots down each one with a marvelously sarcastic wit.

A great deal of the performance is silence, during which Oida keeps the audience enrapt with his calm, commanding presence. I've seen few performers who could command his audience silently, as this master does. There’s silence as he waits for us to respond to his last opaque riddle and as he ruminates before his next. There are also passages of silence as he executes abstract movements. Pure movement usually leaves me cold, but Oida performs one set balancing a pole horizontally on his head.

This show manages to make the opaque profundity of Zen comic, while remaining respectful. When was the last time Buddhism made you laugh?

Accompanying the master sporadically is the music Dieter Trüstedt, an experimental German musician. The state is strewn with instruments, some of which he invented. The music is marvelous when it suggests the gentle sounds of nature, like traditional Japanese music. It’s less successful when it merely translates Oida’s movement into sound. It’s like writing the word “fish” next to a picture of a fish.

And Trüstedt’s presence on the stage is incongruous. The master is lean and bare-chested under a pale jacket; Trüstedt is wearing street clothes.

Oida introduced Interrogations at the Avignon festival in 1979. It was recently presented in New York by the Japan Society, which continues to bring us some of the most novel and rewarding theatre we have.

Fuerza Bruta

2010-10-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

Fuerza Bruta is staged in a gutted bank (the Daryl Roth Theatre). It produces a series of striking visual, auditory and tactile images impressions. The audience stands in the large space (it’s a gutted bank) with plenty of room to walk through the crowd for a new perspective. Sometimes they’re herded about to make way for one of some enormous, short-lived installation.

At one point, a actor runs on a treadmill that spans the breadth of the space. This nameless character in the white suit and the serious expression has extraordinary single-mindedness. He bats aside the furniture that rides toward him on the rubber surface, determined to get somewhere he’s not going. He’s floats soars through the air, his legs in running mode, when a wall obstructs him, he bursts through it.
We’re never told what’s on the other side of the metaphor, but we can guess.

At another point, a transparent ceiling is lowered. It’s covered with water (i.e. on the top). Actresses swim/crawl on it, clinging to it, peering at us, as we are at them. It seems we’re both oddities. We put up out hands to touch the transparency, mirroring the forms of their hands pressed against it.

There are intermittent bursts of paper showers – and sometimes water showers – on the cast and us.

What with this environmental deluge, the exciting music, and the dramatic lighting that fills the space/building, by the show’s close the audience is in free-form movement, dancing like in a rave.

Fuerza Bruta engages us in a way that film and television never can. And so it points the way to a theatre for our century. Our theatre mustn’t try to rival the prosaic realism of media. This show stresses its presence, and so ours.

Fuerza Bruta (Look Up) was developed by Diqui James, in Buenos Aries, where it’s running simultaneously. It’s been playing in New York for two years, and we hope it will continue for at least as long.

Songs of the Soul

2010-08-30T18:21:00.000-07:00

Sri Chinmoy was born Chinmoy Ghose; Sri is an Indian title of respect, from the Sanskrit for radiance. He was born in Bengal and entered an ashram at the age of 12. He immigrated to the US, to teach, in 1964, at the age of 33. He became a celebrity guru, an internationally influential teacher with celebrity followers (and not without his detractors). He passed on in 2007, in New York.

Sri Chinmoy delivered a message of peace and tolerance through writing, drawings, and music, and he’s credited with an astounding output. He was one of the inspirations of new age music, performing hundreds of Peace Concerts around the world. This year, a free concert called Songs of the Soul: Celebrating the Music of Sri Chinmoy is on tour, and it was just presented in NYC. Singers and instrumentalists from around the world presented "classical and modern arrangements" of Sri Chinmoy’s songs, many sung in Bengali. One song, a paean to Sri Chinmoy, was written by Leonard Bernstein.

The program opened with a commanding call from three conch shells, and the enormous mantra word Om. The Achenbach String Trio (parents and daughter, apparently Austrian), with a cello and two violins, gave the songs a baroque sound unique to the evening. Eight women, billed as A Capella Singers, isolated the melodic lines.

A group led by Tapan Modak and Santanu Bhowmick gave the songs more complexity than the other musicians. They played with two strings, a woodwind, drums, piano and vibes - and a sort of shruti box (like a flat accordion). The drummer used both ends of his drumsticks, alternately, covered with what looked like fabric of different thicknesses. The drum made a dull, primal thudding sound, giving the songs a force eschewed by the other groups. I’m not partial to the sound of a shruti box (or, for that matter, the sound of an accordion), but it can create a low drone that’s a marvelous constant under the changing pitches. At times Santanu (I think it was Santanu) broke into a sort of Sanskrit scat.

Other groups included Vedic Fire, who sang in Sanskrit, and The Sri Chinmoy Bhajan Singers, a women’s ensemble.

How does a fellow write about this music? It was written to be firstly a spiritual experience, the musical expression of peace, its musical harmonies reflecting devotional harmonies. It escorts us gently to a meditative place, and we’re thankful for Sri Chinmoy’s contribution. But without any tensions whatever, these songs become bland after preliminary listening. Without dissonance, they neither reflect nor transcend human suffering; they ignore it.

- Steve Capra
August 2010

The Secret Life of Robots

2010-07-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

photo: Stephanie Berger

Lincoln Center is presenting, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Teorema. The script is adapted from the Pasolini film (in turn adapted from his novel) by the show’s Flemish director, Ivo van Hove. The company is Toneelgroep Amsterdam, performing in Dutch with English supertitles provided.

The characters in Teorema almost always talk not exactly to us or to themselves, but out loud, for our sake. They almost never talk to one another. Sometimes they speak in third person, occasionally in the first. Occasionally they speak in the third person and then repeat the line in the first person. Sometimes they don’t speak at all, and a heavy silence lingers on the stage.

Indeed, this is the ultimate in verfremdungseffekt. The characters speak into microphones, so that even the acting is deconstructed.

Usually they tell us what they’re doing while they’re physically doing something else, or while they’re doing nothing but wandering the stage. However, sometimes they tell us what they’re doing while they’re doing it. “I clench my hand in a fist,” she says, while clenching her hand in a fist. Hearing an actor describe what she’s doing while she’s doing it is repulsive.

The script is a cross between a soap opera and a Dumas novel. We’re subjected to lines like “Your love was a consolation, but now you’re pushing me closer to the abyss,” and “I know your sadness is inconsolable and does not even want consolation.” There’s never a let-up to this pretentiousness, so we become inured to any effect the overblown prose might have.

There’s no through line in this play, only episodes. Nameless man visits a smug bourgeois family, seduces everyone, leaves. The family members are in one emotion at a time, and they always share the same emotion. They only have three – longing, lust, and loss. The handsome, dark-skinned guest is lust himself.

Minimalist, the script, actors and director give us no more than they must to make their sharp, scathing point. The characters are without motivation; they execute the action of the play like somnambulists, or robots. They are as James Joyce wrote of the Artist as a Young Man: “Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust.”

The set is broad and wide and flat, grey on grey, with angles – no curves - dull and tense and loveless, like its occupants. The characters trash it after the nameless demonic leaves.

Only one character survives the loss intact. In a magnificent, searing moment, he throws off his body mike and comes alive with a defiant scream.

Van Hove’s work is bold, stunning, flawlessly executed, and directors would do well to note some of these techniques. But he directs like an ideologue, so committed to his intellectual premise that he takes us somewhere we don’t want to go. The trip’s too difficult.

A marvelous string quarter called Blindman! [new strings] sits on stage and plays beautiful, lugubrious classical music. Sometimes they run the turntables that are on stage for no reason.

The play is staged in a repurposed warehouse on Governor’s Island, in New York Harbor. We had to take a short ferry ride to get the island, and then we walked for 20 minutes to the venue (on the hottest day since the Big Bang). Now, Lincoln Center can afford a shuttle bus. If they made us walk, it’s because they want to give the production a distance from our ordinary lives (as if there weren’t enough distance in the script). They want to put the production in bold face by making us invest in it. But that’s no excuse. The play would be better served by a parlor reading than a production in this expansive space.

- Steve Capra
July 2010

Other reviews:
New York Times

New York Post

Samurai at Lincoln Center

2010-07-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

photo: Takahiro Watanabe

One of the international entrants in the Lincoln Center Festival this summer is a Japanese production of a play written by Hisashi Inoue, directed by Yukio Ninagawa. It’s a response to a Japanese myth about a fight between two samurai – Musashi being the victor. The one-to-one battle forms the brief prelude to the contemporary play, Musashi spoken in Japanese with English supertitles.

After the introductory fight, there’s a blackout, and then the new play begins. The opening is a delight. Trees glide down the stage and the modules of a wooden temple slide into place. A gorgeous set - and a rare moment of kinetic beauty as the foliage wanders and then finds its place. The set remains for the rest of the play, and when the occasion demands, those trees tremble and rustle - it’s marvelous. All of nature is party to the drama.

The action is set 2,200 days after the classic fight. We find Musashi and a small group of Buddhists about devote themselves to a three-day retreat at the temple – as we so often take ourselves off to the woods for re-creation. Musashi’s rival shows up, and the two foes agree to settle the old score in three days – on Genji Hill.

They both stay for the retreat, vowing to keep away from each other for the duration. The story revolves around the attempts the other retreatants make to deflect the fight. Finally the supernatural is revealed, and we learn why the trees have been rustling.

There are references throughout to the Noh, Japan’s classical drama. One character is a Noh playwright who sings the Noh when he’s excited, and another sings a Noh song that might come out of one of its 14th-century scripts.

The acting is meticulously kept in a mode between realism and classic Noh stylization. When the moment is right, the actors take on traditional gestures and poses. They combine the two established styles and create a style specific to the play. The balance is maintained with knife-point precision. It’s brilliant, a superb, transparent application of modernism.

But one piece of action doesn’t lead to another and form a plot in this script. At three-and-a-half hours, Musashi is beautiful but dull.

Sometimes a wonderful flute et al back up the visuals unobtrusively, but then the world of the play is violated by a tango played on an accordion. An accordion, thank you! Whatever effect this music has on Japanese audiences, for us it breaks the mesmerizing stylistic spell. As the retreatants would say, “Buddha preserve us!”

- Steve Capra
July 2010

Other reviews:
New York Times
The Village Voice
New York Post
Back Stage

Majestic Violence: Festival Flamenco de Cordoba

2010-07-03T19:18:00.000-07:00

Flamenco is magnificent, mysterious, subversive. Festival Flamenco de Cordoba performed at NYC’s Town Hall recently for three nights (presented by Centerline Talent). Their performances were mesmerizing, riveting. The troupe is from Spain, 66 years old, and this is its first American appearance. It's comprised of six dancers, including one man, and five singers/instrumentalists, including one woman. The instruments are guitars, with one box drum called a cajon, on which the drummer sits.

Its maestro is Merengue de Cordoba (two of the dancers are his daughters), who opened with splendid guitar. His genre is flamenco puro – the second word meaning both “pure” and “antique”.

The first baritone flamenco wail strident and insistent, like an adhan, the Islamic call to prayer.

The women danced in gorgeous dresses – white, black, red, or print. Sometimes they held up their trains and dance as if with partners; sometimes they kicked the trains behind them in a step that was the recurring accent of the piece. Sometimes they wore shawls with tassles half again the width of the main cloth. They danced with their arms and hands, sometimes tossing their heads abruptly, insolently. In fact, this work had an emotional intensity nearly violent.

In the first dance, I was surprised to see the women begin and end the dance sitting. In another, the three women tossed their fans to the floor with a snap.

The single male dancer, Antonio Alcazar, was no less powerful. He crossed the stage virtually running, and spun with the alacrity of a skater, and with more grace. In one piece, he danced a cappella (do dancers dance a cappella?), accompanying himself with the incomparable tap of flamenco shoes.

Like many jazz groups, they ended with a solo from each dancer, and eight company members clapped out the flamenco’s complex rhythm. This is the sound of 16 hands clapping.

This work is powerful in a way rare in dance. We’re eager for the company’s next visit to NYC!

- Steve Capra

New Islands Archipelago

2010-05-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

Photo: Darien Bates

The Talking Band, a company with a considerable credits, has just opened a new production, New Islands Archipelago, at 3LD Art & Technology Center, way downtown. It’s written and directed by one of the group’s founders, Paul Zimet. (The three founders, by the way, are alums of Open Theatre, which closed in 1973.)

The conceit is that we’re passengers on a cruise ship. Our “cruise director” even takes photos of us before the show with an ocean backdrop. The idea is never extended; we never participate, and we’re seated conventionally, not among the actors.

This is a interdisciplinary company, and the characters' dreams are projected in video upstage. I'm generally not comfortable with video on stage; I find that it creates a dissonance with the life of the actors. But using it in dream sequences is intriging. Letting us enter their dream lives this way is a promising idea, and might be fruitful if only it were staged with more commitment, extended.

The aforementioned dissonance does exist when Zimet uses recorded music. After all, he has two talented musicians stageside who play, from time to time, great music by Ellen Maddow, another founder of the company.

The title refers to a real estate deal a charlatan is offering, but the theme is never expanded satisfactorily. The plot, such as it is, has something to do with mothers and their lost children. We don’t care about these characters. Indeed, we hardly get to know them.

I grant you, the script doesn’t purport to engage us with plot, but with a procession of images, and some of these are striking. The shuffleboard court shrinks whenever the luckless young lady sends her biscuit, and our man’s handball returns invariably fly out a porthole that certainly was not there before. There’s something very strange going on here on this cruise - but we never learn what it is.

And there’s something about balloons. The actors stuff them under their costumes. If there’s a meaning in this, it evades us. It isn’t avant-garde; it’s just silly. And so the production’s intriguing concepts are left undeveloped - and we’re left unsatisfied.

The show is saved by the disciplined, precise performances from the actors. Steven Rattazzi, the company’s third founder, leads, playing the cruise ship's captain. He may be off-Broadway’s most artistic buffoon since the late Charles Ludlum.

- Steve Capra
May 2010

Donmar Warehouse: Creditors

2010-05-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

August Strindberg wrote Creditors while he was married to Siri Von Essen. It's said that she played the barrel organ and taunted her husband by suggesting that their daughter may not be his child. Charming.

Mdme Siri had divorced her first husband, a baron, to marry Strindberg, and the playwright had some reservations about this. In Creditors he writes about a woman and her second husband who says of her “She was fully formed when I met her”. We see the intruding ghost of Siri's baron here.

But enough contextualism.

The young man is led to doubt her fidelity by a new friend, an older man, a Strinbergian Iago. Strindberg makes it clear that he’s dramatizing the doubt within the young fellow when his new buddy tells him “I do not exist. Only you do”.

The Donmar Warehouse production of Creditors has come to BAM from London “in a new version by David Grieg”. It’s brilliant, with acting as intense as Strindberg’s emotional tempest. Anna Chancellor in the bravura role of the wife is stunning in her command of technique an emotional grounding. She can act with subtle subtext or, when the occasion demands, abandon. Between the three characters there’s an excruciating series of emotions culminating in a resolution of brutal intensity. No one matches Strindberg when it comes to staging emotions as conflicting characters. They argue the way Shavian characters do, but instead of tossing around intellectual issues, they explore emotional ones.

Ben Stones’ set is a wonder itself, colorless with waves of light, far from realism. It has the sparsity we associate with asylums for the insane, where objects are minimal so people don’t do themselves harm, and it’s chilling. The boards show on the whitewashed walls that seem to get dirty as the play progresses. The grand skylights expose only rain outside. Not a ray of sunshine here.

Director Alan Rickman has put all this intense acting in the same key and kept the whole show crystal clear and precise. He’s put humor into Strindberg through careful details of line-delivery and blocking, and he wisely knocks it off after the first half of the play. The premise is that Strindberg intended the humor, but it’s difficult to believe this is what he had in mind when the play appeared in 1889. Does this laughter come from the script? Or does it reflect our distance from melodrama, our condescension to it?

But then, it’s impossible for us to experience the play the way Strindberg’s audience did. Richman’s choices are probably as true as the somber interpretations of Strindberg we’re accustomed to.

April 2010

Karen Finley: The Jackie Look

2010-05-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

Karen Finley was one of the NEA Four – the four performance artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were cancelled in 1990 over issues of “content” – ie, “decency”. The then Senator Jesse Helms took exception to one of her acts – specifically, she had stood on stage in her panties and covered herself with chocolate (delicious!).

The issue became a cause célèbre. Because the other three were gay, the press usually spoke of “Karen Finley and four mainstream (or alternative) artists”, and her name became the most strongly associated with the issue.

The NEA Four appealed to the Supreme Court, and in 1999 lost the appeal. Finley was blacklisted by New York’s Whitney Museum and other organizations.

But she's been back. Early in her most recent one-woman show, she alludes to the matter. The projection behind Finley shows us a webpage - jfk.org - and she says of the site “I certainly hope there’s no funding from the NEA.” If there were, you see, the organization would be in danger of losing its funding, being associated with her and all.

The show is “The Jackie Look” in which Finley appears as Jackie Onassis. She’s dressed like Jackie O., but there’s no suggestion of impersonation. Indeed, she’s barely in character at all. To make it clear that this isn’t representational theatre, Mdme. O. tells us tells us: “I’m going to be giving a talk on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue” – that is, at the venue where we’re sitting.

She keeps her voice, for the most part, very soft, but late in the show, for a moment, she brays. This is the moment of unladylike anger we’ve come to expect in her work.

She’s eschewed the striking visuals of her earlier work, and become more literary. The monologue is dense, meandering and impossible to follow. And so we stay with it in the present moment. We appreciate her telling us “Life is more important than art but life is meaningless without it,” even though we can’t put it into a context.

Its chief theme is Finley’s signature concern, the commoditization of women, woman as icon. She reminds us “A women can’t be too perfect.” She refers to the recent first ladies, particularly to “Michelle”, as well as to Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, and the Mona Lisa. “Please release me from your gaze,” she pleads, but later she moves on to “Thank you for looking at me.” She ends telling us “I don’t have to pose for every shot. That is something women have to learn.”

Her speech is a combination of poetry, humor, blather, and symbolism. Speaking of our current First Lady’s wardrobe, Jackie tells us smugly “I showed my arms during the cold war.” But speaking of the dress stained with JFK’s blood, she tells us “I never took the dress off.”

She discusses, in parallel, the quality of being public, another characteristic theme. There are overtones of the NEA deal – that is, of Finley herself – here as well. When I interviewed her, in 1999, she said Helms “could only deal with me personally, even though it was public. There was a voyeurism – a publicness in the relationship.”

As always, much of her delivery is half-memorized text with much improvisation and errors of speech. She once told me “The whole notion of memorization and character is very dated in theatre… I’m interested in presenting real time, the struggle...”
But when she reads from her script, the speaks the text nimbly and precisely.

This is a terrific piece. On the whole, Finley’s work has been uneven. That dicey quality is entirely in her genre of experiment. She told me “I don’t like to have the work guaranteed.” She’s one of America’s important contributions to the theatre, as original as anything we’ve produced in our generation.

April 2010

Yamamoto Kyogen Company

2010-05-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

New York’s Japan Society continues to present some of the most interesting stagework in the city. It recently presented Japan’s Yamamoto Kyogen Company.

Kyogen is a tradition Japanese form associated with the noh. They were often performed together, collectively known as nogaku. The noh was a serious form, and the kyogen contrasted, addressing human foibles and scenes from daily life.

Kyogen’s costumes are simpler than the noh’s elaborate designs, but its nobles still wear those wonderful overlong pants. Its backdrop, the only element of set, is a painting of a pine and, as the noh, actors enter UR.

Kyogen actors (they’re always men) speak with a sound like growling, like throat singing. Their speech is so stylized that I’m told young Japanese find it difficult to understand. Their singing, while identifiable, is only marginally different.

The stage conventions are important, as they offer us an alternative, non-representational stage language. The acting is stilted, almost somnambulistic. Actors face each other at the beginning of a conversation, then face us, then turn back at the last line. Turning to us is sometimes indicative of stress.

They use fans as cups and vocalize the sound of pouring. They may be non-mimetic, but an actor coughs when necessary in an isolated bit of verisimilitude. I was surprised to see that when the occasion demands, two characters talk at once; one is talking to us.

To indicate a horse walking and a man beside him, both may be still – we’ve been told they’re traveling – or the human may be still while the horse walks. The man playing the horse horse walks on feet and hands without putting his knees on the floor.

The kyogen has some laughs, but it’s comedy more in the sense that we associate with Chekhov – ie, trivial. And like Chekhov, it can be moving through its triviality. In the second piece, Moon-Viewing Blind Man, a fellow plays a mean trick on a blind man he’s befriended. The blind man has just sung “Take pity on this blind man”, and we’re told “Sanity moves out of reach”.

Let’s hope that he Japan Society keeps importing this wonderful sort of work.

March 2010