Eastside Road, October 28, 2015—
|
|
| Plays seen at A Noise Within 2001: Hay Fever (Coward) 2002-03: Macbeth; The Triumph of Love (Marivaux); The Cherry Orchard (Chekov); Bus Stop (Inge); Measure for Measure; The King Stag (Gozzi) 2003-04: Coriolanus; The Miser (Moliere); The Price (Miller); Electra (Euripides); Twelfth Night; The Matchmaker (Wilder) 2004-05: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Homecoming (Pinter); A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau); Julius Caesar; The School for Wives (Molière); Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill) 2005-06: Othello; Picnic (Inge); The Master Builder (Ibsen); Ubu Roi (Jarry); Arms and the Man (Shaw); The Tempest 2006-07: Phaedra (Racine); A Touch of the Poet (O’Neill); As You Like It; Romeo and Juliet; Loot (Orton) 2007-08: The Winter’s Tale; Waiting for Godot (Beckett); Dear Brutus (Barrie); Henry IV, Part One; Don Juan (Moliere); The Night of the Iguana (Williams) 2008-09: Hamlet; The Rainmaker (Nash); Oliver Twist (Neil Bartlett); The Taming of the Shrew; Ghosts (Ibsen); The Rehearsal (Anouilh) 2009-10: Richard III; Crime & Punishment (Dostoyevsky, ad. Campell & Columbus); Noises Off (Frayn); Waiting for Godot (Beckett); Much Ado About Nothing; Awake & Sing! (Odets); The Playboy of the Western World (Synge) 2010-11: Measure for Measure; Blithe Spirit (Coward); Great Expectations (Dickens); Noises Off (Frayn); The Comedy of Errors; The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (Williams); The Chairs (Ionesco) 2011-12 (inaugural Pasadena season): Twelfth Night; Desire Under the Elms (O’Neill); Noises Off (Frayn); Anthony and Cleopatra; The Illusion (Corneille, ad. Kushner); The Bungler (Molière, ad. & tr. Wilbur) 2012-13: Cymbeline; The Doctor’s Dilemma (Shaw); The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, ad. Frank Galati); The Beaux’ Stratagem (Farquhar, ad. Wilder & Ludwig) (we did not see Eurydice (Ruhl)) 2013-14: Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Guardsman (Molnár); Endgame (Beckett); Tartuffe (Molière, tr. Richard Wilbur); Macbeth; Come Back, Little Sheba (Inge) 2014-15: The Tempest; The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde); The Dance of Death (Strindberg, ad. & tr. Conor McPherson); The Threepenny Opera (Brecht-Weill); Le Mariage de Figaro (Beaumarchais, ad. & tr. Charles Morey); Julius Caesar 2015-16: A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau, ad. & tr. David Ives); Antigone (Anouilh, ad. & tr. Robertson Dean); All My Sons (Miller). Scheduled for spring 2016: Romeo and Juliet; You Never Can Tell (Shaw); Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello, ad. & tr. Robert Brustein) |
WE BEGAN with farce. Farce: French for "stuffing," in the sense of minced food stuffed into a cooked dish. Usually that's some kind of cheap filler; and the first "farces" in the theatrical sense were in fact comedies played between the acts of a more serious drama.
A Flea in Her Ear is, I think, the quintessential French farce: fast and ironic, with a complex sex-based plot set on a cast of urbane, petty-bourgeois people driven by confusion and hypocrisy. The plot rests on a wife's belief her husband is dallying with another woman: a friend writes a letter for her, purporting to ask the husband to an assignation; the wife will be there, of course, to catch him out. (Cf. Beaumarchais: Le mariage de Figaro.)
The cast is large. Act 1: Husband, wife, husband's business partner, wife's best friend, her Spanish husband, nephew-with-speech-defect, doctor, butler, maid. Act 2 (dubious hotel): hotelkeep, his slatternly wife, his senile uncle, a drunk porter, a maid. In Act 3, of course, everyone is involved. To give an idea of the plot, here's a paragraph from the program's synopsis:
Meanwhile, Camille, the young nephew of Victor, is overjoyed to have his speech impediment corrected by a new silver palate from Dr. Finache. In celebration, he and the household cook, Antoinette, also hurry to the Frisky Puss Hotel, followed by Étienne, the jealous husband of Antoinette. Dr. Finache, also looking for a bit of fun, decides to go to the hotel in search of his own afternoon rendezvous…Mistaken identities, secret walls, runs up and down stairs, recognized handwriting, familiar fragrances, kicks in the behind. It's a very physical comedy, skillfully directed (Julia Rodriguez-Elliott), evenly cast, and played with the precision that allows improvisation that you find only in repertory companies.
For all its riotous humor — you think of the Marx Brothers — their are affecting passages, moments when aging, or uncertainty, or class distinction passes quickly across the action, like a quick cloud across the summer sun. And Feydau is particularly good, I think, at presenting the feminine point of view: there are strong parts here for actresses.
I'll introduce you to the principals with just a few adjectives; they're all great fun to watch, both for their acting and for the characters they represent:
Etienne, the butler: Alan Blumenfeld, stately and archThey're all funny; no one actor runs away with this play. What's intense is how they manage to be entertaining: with the lines and situations, of course, that's a given. But beyond that they're making fun of the French, of the subject of the play, of farce itself. When the two young women meet and begin their conniving they are so Parisienne they brought a number of Paris friends to mind. The second-act slapstick laughs at its own tradition. At the close of the play, Romain's total unawareness reveals the unimportance of everything that's happened (or, likely, ever will happen).
Camille, the nephew: Rafael Goldstein, quite hilarious
Dr. Finache, resourceful and amusing
Lucienne, the wife's friend: Jill Hill, nimble, suave, and affecting
Raymonde Chandebise, the wife: Elyse Mirto, often deep, quick, affecting
Victor Emmanuel Chandebise, the suspect husband
Geoff Elliott, solid, untiring, well-rounded
Romain, the business partner: Jonathan Bray, amusingly bland and self-involved
Don Carlos Homénidés de Histangua: Luis Fernandez-Gil, stock Spanish and very funny
Ferraillon, the hotelkeep: Jeremy Rabb, fully in character and unexpectedly funny…
All this is heightened by Fred Kinney's scenic design and Angela Colin's costumes that seem absolutely perfect. The Chandebise apartment is a marvelous portrait of the 1950s, the most recent time, Blumenfeld noted in the talkback after the performance, that the play could be set in, before the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism but recent enough to be enjoyed with a bit of nostalgia. Everything from wallpaper to candy-dish seems thoughtfully chosen to suggest both the taste and the folly of the time. And the costumes! You have to see to believe.
 |
| Lorna Raver (Nurse); Emily James (Antigone): Antigone at A Noise Within Photo: Craig Schwartz |
Anouilh's setting of the story, though, was written and even produced in occupied Paris in the early 1940s. You could see the writing and production of the play as a parallel to Sophocles' story: attention to the sacred rites, whether burial or theater at its most moral and civic, in the face of tyrannical censorship and manipulation.
This Antigone is as French as Feydau: clear, formal, neutral, cool, measured. In this adaptation it begins among the ruins of war, and Chorus — the understated Inger Tudor — summons the cast forth with her introductions, rather than identifying already present actors. Much of the quality of this production depends on a counterpoint between Chorus's narrative neutrality and emotional realism in the other major characters: Emily James's determined Antigone, Eric Curtis Johnson's bullish yet finally defeated Creon; Kyla Garcia's supporting, finally comprehending Ismene (sister of Antigone); Rafael Goldstein's simple, troubled Guard.
This production presents a new adaptation and translation, by Robertson Dean, a longtime affiliate of ANW (and an impressive actor). I haven't read the original French, but spot-checking suggests the translation (which Dean says is the first into English since the 1950s) is faithful to Anouilh, both his script and his intentions; and the scenic adaptation goes a long way to bridging a gap that might easily separate mid-century French and postmodern American audiences.
The opening tableau, for example: fragments of columns, broken furniture, toys and dolls, anonymous weapons; a tinny prewar radio console: we know we're in the ruins of war; it's vaguely of our time; but the anguish is due as much to our awareness of its timelessness and inevitability as it is to any direct impact on ourselves.
Dean's direction carefully tiptoes another discontinuity, that between drama and contemplation, exactly in parallel with Anouilh's intent, I think. Perhaps it is too careful: the audience comes away from the performance, I think, not exactly sure of what it has witnessed, or how it should respond. But as often happens, the significance of this Antigone, its moral weight and persuasion, grow in one's mind in the hours after leaving the theater.
I thought, while watching the play, how odd it was that A Flea in Her Ear should seem up-to-the-minute and crisp while Anouilh's cool Antigone seems a bit dated: fifty years ago it would have been the other way round. A few days after seeing them, I no longer consider the question. Good theater — and this borders on great theater — does that; it encourages the mind to forget about topicality, immediate relevance; to attend rather to timelessness and universality.
|
| Deborah Strang as Kate, All My Sons, A Noise Within. Photo: Craig Schwartz |
All My Sons is a fairly early play: 1947, two years before Death of a Salesman, which it often foretells. Its plot is centered on its recent history: Joe Keller owns a machine shop which provided some defective parts to the Air Force during the (Second World) war; he shifted responsibility to a partner who was imprisoned; his older son was lost in that war, and his wife clings to the belief her son will return.
Into this setting Miller introduces the younger son, Chris; his girl friend Lydia — who had been the older brother's intended — and Lydia's brother George. Thinking him guilty, Lydia has spurned her father, the falsely imprisoned partner; George has been persuaded of the facts of the case; the drama plays out to its inevitable conclusion.
It's a well-made play, even to Chekhov's familiar formula; and the rich detail of Miller's characters (I haven't mentioned lesser roles just as well fleshed out) and their middle-America small-town setting make it interesting, even absorbing. You like most of these people so much you're disturbed (as you're intended to be) by their anguish, by the hopelessness of their yearnings and evasions.
The play was directed by Geoff Elliott, who also plays the leading role, the factory owner Joe Keller. We've seen Elliott in a lot of plays: with his wife Julia Rodriguez-Elliott he founded A Noise Within, in 1992; and he's been the central lead actor in the years since. His portrayals are deep, complex, yet directly presented; they come (as do others in this repertory company) both from sympathetic and seemingly intuitive understanding of the roles and from intelligent and committed awareness of the theatrical tradition.
Opposite him was another company stalwart, Deborah Strang, whose portrait of Kate Keller, the wife and mother, was both intense and affecting. Strang is a magnificent actor; we've seen her dominate many productions — never stealing scenes, but energizing productions even when upstage and silent.
Maegan McConnell and Rafael Goldstein were just as solid, gripping even, as the young couple. (This was the third role we'd seen Goldstein play in three nights, all very different, each penetrating and endearing and intelligent.) The supporting cast were capable, but Miller, I think, depends more on a cast divided between major and minor roles than does either Feydau or Anouilh, a quality that threatens sometimes to move his theater closer to journalism than literature.
Again, the physical production was absolutely first-rate: Frederica Nascimento's scenic design, Leah Piehl's costumes, James Taylor's lighting, and the music and sound by Robert Oriol. All three of these plays were thoughtfully installed in the ANW venue, a half-thrust stage in a house offering fine sight-lines and no distant seats (though occasionally acoustically flawed).
I'd willingly go back to any of these three productions; they reach, I think, an unusually consistent level and a very high one at that.
• A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Boulevard, Pasadena, California; 626-356-3100; www.anoisewithin.org
Monday, April 13, 2015
Figaro qua, Figaro là…
| •Charles Morey: Figaro. adapted from Le mariage de Figaro, by Pierre de Beaumarchais. Directed by Michael Michetti. Seen at A Noise Within, Pasadena, California, 10 April 2015 •Mozart and da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro. Conducted by James Conlon; directed by Ian Judge. Seen at Los Angeles Opera, 9 April 2015 |
Eastside Road, April 13, 2015—
LAST WEEK ENDED in a flurry of theater: two versions of the great Marriage of Figaro; a production of Julius Caesar; a production of The Threepenny Opera. Let's begin with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, 1732-1799, whose article in Wikipedia introduces him as "a French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American)." I take the following three paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry:Born simply Pierre-Augustin Caron, the son of a watchmaker from the provinces who had apparently settled in Paris, he took early to music, but was apprenticed as a matter of course to his father. At twenty-one he invented a refinement of the escapement mechanism which greatly improved the reliability and lessened the size of watches, which brought him to the notice of the king. Two years later he married a widow with money and land, and took the name "Beaumarchais," but she died with a year, and he fell into debt.
His fortunes turned quickly, though, and he became music=teacher to the four daughters of Louis XV. (He taught them harp.) He met an older entrepreneur, Joseph Paris Duverney, who helped him in a number of business ventures, by which he became rich and gained further access to French nobility.
In 1764 Beaumarchais spent ten months in Madrid, helping a sister who had married there. His bid for consulship to Spain was rejected, and he turned increasingly to business ventures while beginning to experiment with writing plays; his first drama, Eugénie, premiered at the Comédie Française in 1767.
Beaumarchais is best known nowadays, and especially outside of France, through the first two plays of his trilogy centered on recurring characters at court of Count Almaviva, grand corrégidor of Andalusia: Le Barbier de Séville, premiered in 1775; Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), and La Mère coupable (1792).
Anyone who knows The Barber of Seville (Rossini and Sterbini) and The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart and da Ponte), the great operatic settings of the first two plays, will recognize autobiographical elements in the plots. Music teacher to nobility; factotum from the lower orders; lawsuits (Beaumarchais was engaged in several); marriages (ditto)… it has even been suggested that Figaro's name is a thin disguise of the playwright's, who was fils Caron, son of Caron.
Figaro is of course a memorable character, thanks primarily to Lorenzo da Ponte's adaptation of the second play. Da Ponte himself was a Beaumarchais-like character; the decade 1776-1786 was a heady time; the intersection of literature, populism, entrepreneurship, greatly increased travel and the sophistication that naturally follows, and of course the age of revolution all participate in the brilliance and edginess of Figaro's character. (And yet my first memory of Figaro is of the black cat hungrily gazing at the goldfish Cleo in the 1940 Disney adaptation of Pinocchio.)
ALL THAT SAID, what was to be learned from last week's exposure to The Marriage of Figaro in both its original theatrical form and da Ponte and Mozart's operatic setting? First, of course, the power of music (and particularly of Mozart's); second, the brilliance of da Ponte's libretto; but a close third, the surprising depth and richness of the play. A quick disclaimer: I don't know the original; I've never seen the play before in any language, and I haven't read the original. (Yet: the entire text is readily available at Wikisource.)
As adapted by Charles Morey and directed, wonderfully, by Michael Michetti, Figaro is completely within the tradition ranging from Commedia dell'arte through 19th-century French farce to the Marx Brothers and even, as the actors pointed out in a post-performance talkback with the audience, to such standard television fare as Seinfeld. I suspect Morey studied da Ponte carefully and did a similar job of streamlining. A couple of minor characters have been dropped (Grippe-soleil, a young shepherd; Pédrille, a message-boy to the count; and with them, probably a sub-plot or two, not to be missed in this already complicated comedy.
Now that I look at the pivotal resolution, which Mozart and da Ponte render so magnificent — the Count's plea for perdono, Contessa — I wonder at the changes Beaumarchais may have made in the original text to get it past Louis XV, who at first banned its public performance. The plot hinges on unmasking the Count's sexual immorality and exploitation; he finally has to beg forgiveness of the Countess, who of course grants it. Clearly a sitting king will not countenance such a plot, and in the text as we have it the moment is underplayed. Two years after the Paris premiere, da Ponte and Mozart elevate that moment to something exalted, transcendent. Even so, the play is clearly political, subversive, revolutionary.
Michetti's direction and the Noise Within cast conveyed all the urgency, the sharp political satire, and the philosophical complexity of the play in a fast, sometimes zany, often touching performance. In the title role, Jeremy Guskin was perfectly brilliant, easily switching from broad comedy to darker, intelligent brooding — the great monologue in Act Five, only a little revised in Morey's adaptation, was marvelous. Angela Sauer's Suzanne was up to that challenge; and if Count Almaviva is costumed ludicrously and made foolish and foppish, Andrew Ross Wynn made the concept work. Elyse Mirto was an affecting Countess, and Will Bradley was utterly persuasive as Cherubin in spite of his tall, lean stature. The rest of the cast were remarkably even, flexible, and resourceful: every nuance of the play seemed perfectly interpreted; there was never a slow moment; even the complex second-act ensemble, with characters hiding in closets and jumping out of windows, worked like, well, clockwork. The production continues in repertory through May 10, 2015, and it should certainly not be missed.
Alas, the same could not be said of Los Angeles Opera's production, or its young cast's performance, of the opera. Seen from too far away, in too big an opera house, in a musical performance that was too weighty and strove too earnestly for greatness, this Nozze di Figaro was laborious. There were some pretty voices and some successful portrayals, but I left with the feeling I'd seen an awkward attempt by a provincial company.
| •William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar. Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott •Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera. Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott Both seen at A Noise Within, Pasadena, California, 11 April 2015 |
The repertory has always included Shakespeare, usually two plays each season, set next to American classics by such playwrights as William Inge and Tennessee Williams, frequent trips into the French repertory, and occasional looks at the classic avant-garde (Ionesco; Beckett). The schedule works out in such a way that we can nearly always see all three plays of each half-season within three or four days, making it a convenient run-out from home. Every year we make this trip twice, just as every year we travel once or twice to Ashland for performances by the much wealthier Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I won't engage in comparisons here.
This year's Noise Within season had as its theme "Revolution": last November we saw three plays revolutionary in their time for style: Shakespeare'sThe Tempest , Oscar Wilde'sThe Importance of Being Earnest , and August Strindberg's The Dance of Death. Last week's plays were not only revolutionary in the style of their concept and expression, they were in fact about revolution. In addition to Figaro they were Julius Caesar and The Threepenny Opera , both shows directed by the same team and performed in the same stage design — and seen, as it turned out, on the same day.
This is the kind of intellectual and theatrical exercise A Noise Within often attempts, nearly as often successfully. The pairing of these two very different vehicles underscored profundities which are latent in the scripts and which should be obvious to any reader or onlooker, whatever the success of the production; in this event, the result was really quite powerful, really moving. I thought Threepenny suffered a bit from slow tempi, which tended to hamper the drive and bite of the play; but that flaw could be forgiven in the face of the detail, the passion, and the total authenticity of the performances.
Both plays were staged in a relatively unspecified early-twentieth-century setting, the stage occupied by stark industrial scaffolding. Both brought the audience into the piece: in Julius Caesar one felt included within the Roman rabble irresolute between Caesar's attackers and his defenders; in Threepenny one was directly confronted by the cast, intent on alienating its audience with fine Brechtian nastiness.
I thought it appropriate that we were seeing these productions in the week of Judith Malina's death — The Living Theatre, which she and Julian Beck co-founded in the 1950s to such and artistic triumph and controversy, has surely influenced these directors in these productions; and Malina would have appreciated the result, I think, though perhaps with a sardonic observation that it was high time the commercial theater fall into line.
That Living Theatre connection came to me at the beginning of The Threepenny Opera, which began indistinctly, with the cast roaming through the audience, moodily repeating isolated lines of dialogue from various moments in the play. We were eased into the play, you might say, albeit in quite an uneasy manner; there was a deliciously menacing quality to the moment, and though this was the evening performance that moment instantly threw the afternoon's Julius Caesar into yet another layer of ironic meaning.
A Noise Within has a fine website from which you'll get notes on the productions and cast lists; I won't attempt a detailed review here. I do have to mention, though, the strong Brutus of Robertson Dean; the eloquent Mark Antony of Rafael Goldstein; the engaging, complex clarity of Freddy Douglas's Cassius; which requires that I also mention Patrick O'Connell's successfully ambivalent, tragically aging Caesar. Other roles were as well conceived and performed.
In Threepenny we were impressed, my companion and I, by the quality of the singing. As Polly Peachum and Lucy Brown, Marisa Duchowny and Maegan McConnell had clear, accurate, expressive, well-focussed soprano voices; Andrew Ableson was a pleasantly reedy, sardonic, nasty Mâcheath; Stasha Surdyke captured Jenny Diver's complexity well. Geoff Elliott makes an all too credible Peachum, and Deborah Strang was quite marvelous as his Mrs., drawing the first row of the audience into the Ballad of Sexual Dependency with sarcasm and good humor that somehow coexist.
Speaking of that Ballad, though, reminds me that it was hard to get used to this translation, by Michael Feingold. It works, but seems a little stiff. I was steeped in Eric Bentley's translation, back in the middle 1950s; it seemed to me to have bite and efficiency lacking here — Bentley's "First feed the belly, then feed the mind" (as I recall it) works better than Feingold's "First comes the feeding, then the moral code." I don't know the original text; perhaps Bentley sacrificed literal accuracy to theatrical effect — but isn't that what Brecht and Weill were after?
Julius Caesar continues in repertory through May 8, 2015; The Threepenny Opera through May 9.
Details online at A Noise Within.
Details online at A Noise Within.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Recently seen…
| Citizenfour Seen at Rialto Theater, Sebastopol, Mar. 1, 2015 A Lie of the Mind, by Sam Shepard Seen at The Magic Theatre, San Francisco, Feb. 20 San Francisco Dance Festival Seen in the City Hall Rotunda, San Francisco, Feb. 20 The Nile Project Seen at Zellerbach Theater, Berkeley, Feb. 19 Candide Seen at , Walnut Creek, Feb. 13 The Mill and the Cross Seen via DVD Indian Ink, by Tom Stoppard Seen at ACT, San Francisco, Jan. 15 |
Eastside Road, March 2, 2015—
 |
| Dancers set up in San Francisco City Hall Rotunda |
INFREQUENT BLOGGING, as you may have noticed, partly because of unusual activity away from the desk. Last time I was here I told you about Rossini's Zelmira and Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann, two operas with very satisfactory performances — one by chamber forces, unstaged, but live; the other over-produced, lavish, but seen on a big screen.
There have been other recent theatrical entertainments of various kinds. Over a month ago we saw Tom Stoppard's play Indian Ink in what should have been a definitive production if one were possible: the director, Carey Perloff — also the Artistic Director of the company — encouraged Stoppard to rewrite the play a bit, particularly, apparently, its close. The characteristic Stoppard intelligence is in this play, but the issues are less cosmic, more purely character-based than seems to me usually to be the case. The idea of two parallel narratives, a couple of generations apart, pulling yes in fact the larger issues of colonialism, feminism, and free love into the romantic comedy of an Englishwoman poet in India during the Raj and an American academic who, fifty years later, tries to sleuth out the true story of her involvement with a native Indian painter — that idea is quintessentially Stoppard. But the Indian context of the play, the stifling heat it portrays, and the wide, shallow visual production at ACT all conspired to put a lid on the theatrics. The show was muffled, stifled. We saw it in preview, and the lines weren't all there yet. Two or three characters were memorably played — the leads, fortunately — but the balance hadn't yet been struck. Were I more serious, more responsible — to whom, though, ultimately? — I might have gone back later in the run to see how it had matured.
A FEW DAYS AGO we saw Sam Shepard's play A Lie of the Mind, also presumably a production with the author's approval, since Magic Theater has had an ongoing association with the playwright for just about his entire career. We saw his Buried Child here, for example, in September, 2013. I thought the production and its performance well worth the evening. A Lie of the Mind is, like Indian Ink, a play about the collision of two worlds, alternatingly holding the stage in an intrinsically dramatic manner depending on successfully resolved theatrics: and I thought Magic accomplished this more persuasively than ACT, perhaps partly owing to the greater intimacy of the house.
There's no doubt Shepard's story is intense, dramatic, powerful, even to an extent elemental; he is in a way our contemporary version of Eugene O'Neil. But how many Sam Shepard plays will we ultimately need to see? We saw A Fool for Love twice in May 2012, partly for the beguiling intensity of Brent Lindsay's performance in the lead; we saw Buried Child a year and a half ago. Now, with A Lie of the Mind, we've perhaps seen enough for a few seasons.
ONE MORE DRAMA, this one per musica: Voltaire's Candide, as turned into an operetta by Leonard Bernstein with the literary help of Lillian Hellman, James Agee, Hugh Wheeler, Richard Wilbur, John Laouche, Dorothy Parker, Stephen Sondheim, John Mauceri, and John Wells; and orchestrations by Maurice Peress and Hershy Kay (I take this information from Wikipedia).
Lillian Hellman wrote the libretto for the original version of the piece, but her book, thought to be too serious for Bernstein's view, was completely replaced by Hugh Wheeler's for subsequent versions — which, as you can imagine from the catalogue of names in my previous paragraph, are many and confusing and, I would bet, confused. The production we saw was of the 1994 "RNT" version produced by Trevor Nunn at the Royal National Theatre, with a new, third libretto by John Caird, replacing Wheeler's, by then thought too light-hearted and slimmed-down.
The production was by the San Francisco-based Gilbert-and-Sullivan specialists The Lamplighters. In costume as Voltaire, Baker Peeples conducted a small but flexible and apt orchestra on the stage, turning to narrate the action to the audience; the fine cast, also costumed in this semi-staged production, responded easily to his accompaniments.
I'd gone to see it because, oddly, I'd never seen Candide, and knew it only by its sparkling overture. Bernstein managed a small miracle in that overture, a compendium of the Mendelssohn of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Prokofiev of the Classical Symphony. It's too bad the current state, good as it apparently is, fails to remedy the essentially overworked nature of the rest of the piece. I'm glad I've seen it; I won't have to see it again. (Read the book!)
ANOTHER MUSICAL EVENING:The Nile Project at UC Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. On paper this looked very interesting: musicians from many of the East African nations through which the Nile River flows, gathered in a traveling troupe to bring attention to (among other things) the various ecological problems attendant on political decisions regarding water use. The indigenous music of these nations uses different tuning systems and is played on different kinds of instruments; it ranges from Arabic-flavored music in the north, in Egypt, to quite different sounds from Kenya to the south.
If I'd thought about it, I'd have realized the model was — as the program made clear — Yo Yo Ma's "Silk Road Project," and that the result might be a little more commercial than I'd hoped for. I'd also have reflected on the nature of the University's Zellerbach Auditorium, which is huge and acoustically compromised. We left in the middle of the second of the two sets (impelled by a dinner reservation), when the show seemed to be loosening up and coming to terms with its setting.
Much of the music was compelling, both the singing and the instrumental performances — marvelous oud and end-blown flute performances, and an alto saxophone solo that brought the extended one in EInstein on the Beach to mind. The costumes were of course rich and colorful. I'd love to see the group again in a smaller hall and with better sound treatment.
ETHNIC DANCE AND MUSIC from elsewhere marked the opening of the San Francisco Dance Festival the next day, with Gamelan Sekar Jaya setting up in the resonant rotunda of City Hall to accompany two Balinese dances: Bebonangan a processional, and Peneta traditional Balinese offering dance, with choreography by Emiko Saraswati Susilo and music by I Made Arnawa. I have no business writing about dance; I know nothing about it; but these dancers seemed incredibly graceful to me, both individually and as an ensemble. One can't help wondering the extent to which such choreography, even though highly evolved in a court setting, must originally have been spontaneous, as natural as the courtship rituals of birds, or the play of wind on forest trees or sea-waves.
I realize gamelan evolved out of doors, but this gamelan suited the resonance of the rotunda perfectly. A few years ago we heard a gamelan performance in the dome of the observatory on Mt. Hamilton, a similar acoustic. You are brought completely within the music in such a setting.
The event closed with a set of traditional Swedish dances, performed by a group from Sweden directed by Margareta and Leif Virtanen; accompanied by "folk" violinists Chris Gruber and Peter Michaelsen, who stood in the doorway, backlit by brilliant noonday sunshine. (The photo above silhouettes Leif Virtanen, warming up; it was taken well before the performances.)
The dancers entered to a Mazurka-like processional, then performed a number of contradances in four couples before opening the floor to audience members who wanted to join. As in the Balinese dance, the gracefulness and sobriety seemed to conceal a subliminal note of courtship; the dance represented — to me — a socially organized containment of individual and especially couple-expressive energies.
The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company had performed between the two "ethnic" sets, with excerpts from two dances: Times Bones and The Gate of Winds, music by Paul Dresher. Much of the performance was gripping, with brilliant solo dancing and effective ensemble choreography and performance — on an unforgiving polished stone floor!. I think this contemporary high-art form of dance does not suffer from its contrast with traditional dance from other cultures: on the contrary, its significance seems informed by it. The San Francisco Dance Festival will continue with other similar performances, the next one at noon, Friday March 20, featuring the Minoan Dancers.
FINALLY, TWO FILMS: We saw Lech Majewski's visually fascinating The Mill and the Cross a few days ago, rented from Netflix. The film, which opened in 2011, is based on — no: brings to life — the painting The Procession to Calvary (1564) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The transitions from Breughel's painting to the live action is unbelievably smooth, and the portrayal of medieval peasant Flemish life seems perfectly authentic. In spite of the primitive rustic settings the visualization is often beautiful, sumptuous even, profiting from fine color and lighting.
My own prejudices kept me from enjoying the Christian element of the film, which grows to center on the Crucifixion. But even here the film is persuasive, suggesting the inevitability of unsophisticated reliance on allegory and theology to explain the sudden cruelties of everyday life — there's a lesson for our own time here. And as an explication of painting, The Mill and the Cross is utterly convincing; even Breughel himself steps into the film to show us what he's after and how he accomplishes it.
Then, last Sunday, we finally got to a screening of Citizenfour Laura Poitras's documentary on the meetings between Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald (with Ewen MacAskill) in Hong Kong, June 2013. I think Citizenfour is an outstanding film, well deserving its many awards, on three levels:
First, of course, the subject it documents — the pervasive spying conducted by the federal government in its anti-terror mode — and the fascinating and intricate procedures by which Snowden communicated his evidence to Greenwald and MacAskill in an anodyne Hong Kong hotel room. Poitras, and her cinematographers and editor, weave this material into a suspensful, detailed, unfolding account which I find utterly persuasive — though of course I'm a liberal.
Second, the portraits here are intriguing and sympathetic. Snowden's intelligence, wry humor, and apparent nobility of purpose grow on the viewer. Greenwald's domestic life (in Rio de Janeiro), his fluency in Brazilian Portuguese, his drive to quick deadlines, all make him a very sympathetic character to this retired journalist. Even without considering the subject on which these men are focussing, the quality of their purpose and the discipline and directedness with which they approach it are extremely well captured in the film.
Third, and to me in a way most important, Citizenfour is truly a work of art. In terms of pacing, structure, rhythm, visual detail and contrast, subliminal reinforcements through both sight and sound, Poitras has achieved a thing of major beauty. I want to see this film again; I think it is a film to own.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Three plays in Pasadena: Tartuffe; Macbeth; Come Back, Little Sheba
| •Molière:Tartuffe, translated by Richard Wilbur. In repertory through May 24 •Shakespeare: Macbeth. In repertory through May 11 •William Inge: Come Back, Little Sheba In repertory through May 17 A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, California; 626.356.3100 |  |
|---|---|
| Front: Deborah Strang (Lola); Back: Jill Hill (Mrs. Coffman) in Come Back, Little Sheba at A Noise Within |
Eastside Road, April 15, 2014—
THE THREE PLAYS currently in repertory at A Noise Within, the Pasadena theater company we've attended for the last ten years or so, make a strange trifecta on paper, I think: but taken together they are probably the most consistently successful half-season we've seen here, and that's saying quite a bit.We like the company, partly for its casting, direction, and productions, partly for its enterprising choice of repertory. Shakespeare, of course, on every season, usually with two vehicles. A classic from the European theater, usually French. And a classic from the American stage, often a neglected one. New plays are rarely produced; there are plenty of other theater companies working at that.
Molière's Tartuffe isn't exactly neglected — without going out of our way, we've seen four productions in the last nine years, as I wrote on this blog back in 2010:
The country's second-favorite playOtherwise, I've written enough about the play I don't want to repeat myself here. This production is a little zany, with over-the-top costumes (though often quite elegant) and some fine comic acting (Deborah Strang's Dorine especially) interestingly balanced by the sometimes soberly befuddled Orgon (Geoff Elliott) and the very sympathetic, sensible Cléante (Stephen Rockwell).
This year? Moliere's Tartuffe, they say.
Second most frequently produced,
That is, and now its wit is loosed
On Ashland's public, and they see
That lust and greed, hypocrisy,
And false religion can be fun.
Depends on where and when they're done.
Heroic couplets, stylish sets,
Elegant costumes—no regrets
At seeing Moliere's play once more.
Trenchant satire's never a bore.
The title character was unusually sinister in Freddy Douglas's creepy impersonation of a Caravaggio sensualist, and the direction, by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, sped along with clarity and good humor.
THE SCOTTISH PLAY — twice now I've made the horrendous mistake of speaking its real title aloud in Noise Within's classy Pasadena theater — received a streamlined, effective, often gripping production, thoughtfully directed by Larry Carpenter, who explained, in a talkback after the show, that he wanted to present it as ritual, removed from its legendary setting, timeless and immediately relevant.
Apart from cuts, the only novelty was the setting of the three weird sisters on male actors, whose black featureless costumes combined with heightened gestures and vocal delivery and with effectively manipulated puppetlike props to bring a Kabukilike quality to the show. Elijah Alexander was an interesting, often powerful Macbeth, and Jules Willcox surprisingly both hypnotic and retiring as his Lady; the rest of the numerous cast were quite up to their assignments. Only Feodor Chin, as Malcolm, gave me a moment's pause; his catalog of self-deprecation interrupts the action toward the close of this play: but that's the fault of the text, which always gives editors and directors a lot to chew on.
It's a disgusting, ghastly, ghostly, powerful play. You pretty much have to believe in the existence of unmotivated Evil as a concrete presence to buy its thesis, and Shakespeare is pretty persuasive on that score. It's not a play I like to see often. But it should and must be performed, and this is one of the best productions I've ever seen.
COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA is another play that deserves a place in the repertory, though it's probably better known as the movie adapted from it lo these many years ago. It can be bleak and depressing in its treatment of a sad narrative — the lapse back into drunkenness of a reformed alcoholic, tipped past his margin when his idealized view of youth inevitably meets reality.
Geoff Elliott was really magnificent as the doomed Doc, tightly buttoning up his repressions through the first act, alarmingly releasing them in the second. The Lunt-like precision of his technique as an actor, especially his vocal technique, which can be distracting when he works with a verse play (though this was not the case in Tartuffe), was beautifully focussed on his character — both in itself, and in its relationship to his wife Lola and their roomer, the young Marie.
Whether speaking or silent, active or hesitant, Deborah Strang was a fabulous Lola. Face, voice, body, gesture — all seemed perfectly integrated in this characterization. Best of all, the role grew throughout the two hours of the play, finally overwhelming this member of the audience. It is her humanity, in its vulnerability, its insights, its hope and fear, that makes the production so telling.
I liked Maya Erskine's depiction of the flighty little Marie; Miles Gaston Villanueva did what he could as her boyfriend Turk, and Paul Culos similarly dealt with the role of her fiancé Bruce — but Inge is clearly out of his range trying to depict their affairs. Fortunately, that's not important. Perhaps it even underlines the major quality of the play, its portrait of the terribly repressed atmosphere of postwar America.
Ed Anderson, Doc's sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous, is the focus of this portrait; and Mitchell Edmonds played the part beautifully. The character is patient, sympathetic, somewhat patronizing, ultimately futile, just like the American desire to return to some kind of sheltered small-town homogenous quiet after the tumult of World War II, after learning of the dangers and desires of sex, drink, and foreign ideas.
I think Edward Albee wrote a gloss on Come Back, Little Sheba in his (currently) better-known play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. By then, though, the bittersweet innocence and the explosive loss of that innocence that Inge deals with has become utterly unthinkable. Come Back, Little Sheba, like Inge's other plays Bus Stop and Picnic — both of which Noise Within has produced recently — is pivotal in the history of 20th-century American theater, significant for its position between O'Neill, say, and Albee; but important beyond that for its accurate portrayal of what we were, where we've come from.
And, as directed by Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and performed by this admirable cast, in an evocative setting by Stephen Gifford and costumes by Leah Piehl, Come Back, Little Sheba is gripping, exciting theater. If it weren't hundreds of miles away I'd go back to see it again. Bravo to all involved!
Thursday, April 10, 2014
The Coast of Utopia
| Tom Stoppard: The Coast of Utopia. I: Voyage: through May 1. II: Shipwreck: through April 19. III: Salvage: through May 4. Shotgun Players, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, California; 510.841.6500 Marathon production of all three plays: April 26, May 4, 12 noon, 4pm, 8pm. |
That's Vissarion Belinsky talking, in a characteristically impassioned outburst in the first act of Voyage. He's a literary critic living in poverty in Moscow, way out of his depth, visiting the wealthy, complacent, cultured country estate of the Bakunin family. I have to confess to a great deal of sympathy for poor Bakunin Vissarion; I think I was similarly unsure in my youth. He doesn't know German or even French; he hasn't studied Hegel; he doesn't know how to approach the four beautiful Bakunin girls.
He could be a comic figure in a Chekhov play, but he isn't: this is the first of the three plays making up Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which follows Mikhail Bakunin, then Alexander Herzen, from the dacha to Moscow to Paris and London and finally Geneva, over a span of 35 years from 1833 to 1868, interleaving romance, marital drama, and political philosophy in an engrossing eoght hours of theater.
Among the characters in this fascinating cast: the revolutionaries Bakunin and Herzen; the poet Nicholas Ogarev, the political philosophers Karl Marx and Ernest Jones; the exiled nationalists Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Stanislaw Worcell, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Lajos Kossuth; Turgenev: wives, sisters, and mistresses; serfs and servants. Somehow Stoppard manages to juggle this huge cast, long history, and intricate conflicting and competing world views without bogging down or losing focus.
The plays are published in a handsome slipcased and hardbound edition by Grove Press, and I heartily recommend them as reading material — and especially before seeing the productions currently running in Berkeley. Some have complained, online, about losing interest during the reading; I found the texts gripping. In the theater, the plays, directed by founding Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley, seem perfectly faithful to the letter; and of course fleshed out on stage, spoken through actors in fine costume and rising generally quite to the dramatic pitch Stoppard offers, the plays are more present, more vigorous: but a prior reading helps the viewer negotiate this intricate voyage.
Stoppard's trilogy has two interwoven lines: the domestic and the political lives of his characters, and particularly of Bakunin and Herzen. Bakunin of course was the model of the impetuous 19th-century anarchist; but Herzen — the illegitimate son of a Russian mother and a German father — was the more reasoned, ultimately by far the more pragmatic. The play proceeds through conversation laced with outbursts, like Belinsky's quoted above; and, throughout, through pointed parries between the men and the women, condemned by the assumptions of their time to be as observant, intelligent, and deserving as the men, but less informed and less influential in public life.
The position of the men, endlessly comparing their readings of the great 19th-century German philosophers, is summed up in a wonderful speech given to the radical poet George Herwegh:
…being a stoic didn't mean a sort of uncomplaining putting uр with misfortune, that's only how it looks оп the outside—inside, it's alI about achieving apathy… which means: a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn't passive, it's the freedom that comes from recoginisirg new borders, a new country called Necessity… it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can't for the moment bе altered ... which реорlе find quite difficult. We've had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it's going to do. … Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that сan't-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it's bucketing down on your picnic.It isn't easy for an early 21st-century American to imagine the position of these leisured intellectual Russians in the 1840s, after the failure of the Decembrist demonstrations, all too aware of the backward, marginal position of their country in the European context. The Age of Reason had led to the French Revolution, the Divine Right of Monarchy had been questioned, republicanism had taken hold successfully in America but had failed in France; slavery had been abolished in most of Europe but not (yet) in America or Russia. The press was rigidly controlled in Russia; to have any idea of current thought in political or social philosophy one must be able to read English, French, or German and have access to banned publications in those languages.
On top of all that, there was no literature in Russian — only Pushkin. Women o the upper classes were lucky if they'd managed to learn enough French to read George Sand, who famously taught the dangerous injunction to Follow Your Heart. But if you think all this describes a situation with no relevance to our own time, consider this speech, the Slavophile Akssakov's outburst from Shipwreck:
We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It's not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie, yes, and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation. It can even be our destiny to unite the Slav nations and lead Europe back to the true path. It will be the age of Russia.Think about those lines the next time you look at Vladimir Putin's unsmiling face on the television news.
Stoppard's trilogy reminds us of the unending confusion of the 19th century, with its successions of revolutions and restorations, its civil wars, the hope of equality foundering between the intellectual shackles of Marxism and the cynical exploitation of the robber barons and railroad magnates, and the eventual plague of anarchism finally reaching its gruesome climax at Sarajevo, which precipitated a war that made the Reign of Terror look like a rehearsal. You come away from these plays reflecting that the excesses of that war, and the second world war, and all the proxy wars that followed, have been diversions, perhaps even diversionary tactics, to distract us from returning to the main problem: achieving a just society based on equality of access and sustainability of economy.
Fortunately, you also come away from these plays refreshed and entertained. They are, among other things, often very funny. The Shotgun production is well cast, on superb actors in the many lead characters; the costuming is splendid; the set modest but ingenious, the lighting and sound cues resourceful and suitable. You can't expect an opportunity to see this trilogy in one day, on an integrated cast, in a comfortable theater, at affordable prices, to return in any near future: it would be a shame to miss it now.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Three Plays in Ashland: The Cocoanuts; The Tempest; The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
Eastside Road, March 27, 2014—
FOR YEARS WE'VE SUBSCRIBED to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the impressive repertory company in Ashland, where ten or twelve plays are given over a season lasting nearly nine months. In addition to Shakespeare, the repertory these days runs through primarily American plays, including a number of new plays, a few revivals, and, recently, a musical or two.
We've been attending these plays so long we've seen the artistic direction change generations, and — getting on ourselves, and perhaps not as generous about change as we might be — I've been concerned about some of the change. I miss the international rep — Ibsen and Chekhov seem to have faded away.
I'm restless about some of the Shakespeare productions, which sacrifice the Bard's poetry too often to gimmicks apparently meant to make his substance more relevant, more accessible, to contemporary audiences. (The low point was a Troilus and Cressida set in the recent American-Iraqi war.)
Not all the new plays have seemed worth the effort to me, though some have offered interesting contemporary foils to Shakespeare — Tony Taccone's Ghost Light, for example, and Robert Schenkkan's plays on the Lyndon Johnson presidency. And some of the musicals have been sadly compromised by more of that gimmicky "updating": here the low points have been The Pirates of Penzance and My Fair Lady.
So this season we've bought tickets to only five of the eleven plays — only to find, this last week, that the first three of our choices were really very good, well worth the price of admission. If only I could find reviews I can trust of the remaining shows, I might be tempted to give them a chance!
The three plays we saw couldn't be more different. The Cocoanuts, with book by George S. Kaufman and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, was written in 1925 for the Marx Brothers, who improvised or otherwise contributed a good deal of its shtick. Any revival faces the problem of those brothers, of course: they need to be recognizably Marx, but should go beyond simply presenting impressions. This is where the tight ensemble and even talent of the OSF company can really shine, and we were more than happy with Mark Bedard, Brent Hinkley, John Tufts, and Eduardo Placer in for Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and, yes, Zeppo (the romantic lead).
The Cocoanuts is vaudeville brought to the somewhat more legitimate theater, and the musical component is fairly important. Jennie Greenberry was a fine soubrette as Polly Potter, the female lead, with a really attractive voice and sharply defined comic acting; and K.T. Vogt did well with the heavy role of her mother. Kate Mulligan and Robert Vincent Frank were just as detailed and engaging as the villains, Penelope Martin and Harvey Yates; and the rest of the cast were up to the marks as well.
The play alternates between sweetness and zaniness, and David Ivers's direction managed that alternation with apparent ease, profiting from Richard Hay's design and Meg Neville's wonderful costumes. I'd love to go back for another look at the show later in the season, to see how they keep it so fresh and funny.
The Tempest saw a fine, thoughtful production in Ashland in 2002, when Penelope Mitropoulos took the lead role, changing Prospero's gender as Prospera, and bringing new, larger resonance to Shakespeare's theme of reconciliation through understanding, patience, and forgiveness.
Then in 2007 the play suffered, I thought, from a more equivocal, tentative production centering on a lead actor who — in spite of repeated successes in other roles here over the years — seemed uneasy with his assignment and uncertain as to the play.
This year the play again hesitates with its lead. Denis Arndt is a diffident, sometimes almost playful Prospero, relying on Daniel Ostling's design, Alexander Nichol's marvelous lighting, and Kate Hurster's often powerful Ariel, rather than on his own voice and stage presence, for the brittle, mercurial force and inventiveness of his magic.
But the production really works well. Shakespeare's familiar contrasting levels of society are acted and directed thoughtfully and effectively but also dramatically, even entertainingly. The Italian nobility, the mariners, above all Stephano and Trinculo (Richard Elmore and Barzin Akhavan), all address Shakespeare's lines, the plot's requirements, and the audience's engagement.
Wayne T. Carr was a fine Caliban, I thought, his resentment sympathetic and his role ultimately reclaimed. Kate Hurster's Ariel was perhaps a bit too big in its conception, but effective and often beautiful. Like her father, Miranda (Alejandra Escalante) flirted with diffidence. In the end, though, they seem like contemporary Americans looking on as their alter egos enact this great play, bringing yet another layer of meaning to the stage.
I wish I had time, patience, skill, and scope to write about Lorraine Hansbury's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window with the insight and substance the play deserves. It's a big, important, powerful play, addressing serious issues both societal and individual. It is narrative theater at its best, I think, set on a plot with beginning, middle, and end, presented through characters who are sympathetic, understandable, now and then surprising. And while the mood is generally serious and occasionally flirts with tragedy there is humor and affection.
The play was badly received at its opening in 1964 — it was too big, too "difficult" for the commercial entertainment critics. Hansbury was already dying (pancreatic cancer); if there were any thoughts of revisions, there was no strength to achieve them. I think some judicious cutting would improve the play: a long drunk scene seems perilously like a bitter survey of postwar absurdist theater.
But Juliette Carrillo's direction makes it clear that this is a perfectly workable, stageworthy play, and the cast pretty well nailed their assignments: Ron Menzel in the title (lead) role; Sofia Jean Gomez as his wife Iris; Erica Sullivan as her brittle, aloof sister Mavis; Vivia Font in the small but pivotal role of the third sister, Gloria; Armando McClain, Danforth Comins, and Benjamin Pelteson in the significant roles of Alton the (mixed-race) friend, Wally the politician, and David the upstairs gay playwright. We saw Jack Willis as the abstract expressionist down the hall; he was just as solid, detailed, and engaged an actor as all the rest.
As you can perhaps tell by the capsule descriptions in the previous paragraph, Hansbury weaves plenty of strands into this dramatization of social issues of midcentury America. It was fascinating to come to know the play just after a reading of John Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of our Discontent, written just a few years earlier. Both writers deal with corruption; both are aware that it is an inevitable and perhaps even a necessary component of the social human condition, as the human reach for ideals always stretches beyond the grasp of the compromises without which daily life seems unbearable and impossible.
FOR YEARS WE'VE SUBSCRIBED to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the impressive repertory company in Ashland, where ten or twelve plays are given over a season lasting nearly nine months. In addition to Shakespeare, the repertory these days runs through primarily American plays, including a number of new plays, a few revivals, and, recently, a musical or two.
We've been attending these plays so long we've seen the artistic direction change generations, and — getting on ourselves, and perhaps not as generous about change as we might be — I've been concerned about some of the change. I miss the international rep — Ibsen and Chekhov seem to have faded away.
I'm restless about some of the Shakespeare productions, which sacrifice the Bard's poetry too often to gimmicks apparently meant to make his substance more relevant, more accessible, to contemporary audiences. (The low point was a Troilus and Cressida set in the recent American-Iraqi war.)
Not all the new plays have seemed worth the effort to me, though some have offered interesting contemporary foils to Shakespeare — Tony Taccone's Ghost Light, for example, and Robert Schenkkan's plays on the Lyndon Johnson presidency. And some of the musicals have been sadly compromised by more of that gimmicky "updating": here the low points have been The Pirates of Penzance and My Fair Lady.
So this season we've bought tickets to only five of the eleven plays — only to find, this last week, that the first three of our choices were really very good, well worth the price of admission. If only I could find reviews I can trust of the remaining shows, I might be tempted to give them a chance!
The three plays we saw couldn't be more different. The Cocoanuts, with book by George S. Kaufman and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, was written in 1925 for the Marx Brothers, who improvised or otherwise contributed a good deal of its shtick. Any revival faces the problem of those brothers, of course: they need to be recognizably Marx, but should go beyond simply presenting impressions. This is where the tight ensemble and even talent of the OSF company can really shine, and we were more than happy with Mark Bedard, Brent Hinkley, John Tufts, and Eduardo Placer in for Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and, yes, Zeppo (the romantic lead).
The Cocoanuts is vaudeville brought to the somewhat more legitimate theater, and the musical component is fairly important. Jennie Greenberry was a fine soubrette as Polly Potter, the female lead, with a really attractive voice and sharply defined comic acting; and K.T. Vogt did well with the heavy role of her mother. Kate Mulligan and Robert Vincent Frank were just as detailed and engaging as the villains, Penelope Martin and Harvey Yates; and the rest of the cast were up to the marks as well.
The play alternates between sweetness and zaniness, and David Ivers's direction managed that alternation with apparent ease, profiting from Richard Hay's design and Meg Neville's wonderful costumes. I'd love to go back for another look at the show later in the season, to see how they keep it so fresh and funny.
The Tempest saw a fine, thoughtful production in Ashland in 2002, when Penelope Mitropoulos took the lead role, changing Prospero's gender as Prospera, and bringing new, larger resonance to Shakespeare's theme of reconciliation through understanding, patience, and forgiveness.
Then in 2007 the play suffered, I thought, from a more equivocal, tentative production centering on a lead actor who — in spite of repeated successes in other roles here over the years — seemed uneasy with his assignment and uncertain as to the play.
This year the play again hesitates with its lead. Denis Arndt is a diffident, sometimes almost playful Prospero, relying on Daniel Ostling's design, Alexander Nichol's marvelous lighting, and Kate Hurster's often powerful Ariel, rather than on his own voice and stage presence, for the brittle, mercurial force and inventiveness of his magic.
But the production really works well. Shakespeare's familiar contrasting levels of society are acted and directed thoughtfully and effectively but also dramatically, even entertainingly. The Italian nobility, the mariners, above all Stephano and Trinculo (Richard Elmore and Barzin Akhavan), all address Shakespeare's lines, the plot's requirements, and the audience's engagement.
Wayne T. Carr was a fine Caliban, I thought, his resentment sympathetic and his role ultimately reclaimed. Kate Hurster's Ariel was perhaps a bit too big in its conception, but effective and often beautiful. Like her father, Miranda (Alejandra Escalante) flirted with diffidence. In the end, though, they seem like contemporary Americans looking on as their alter egos enact this great play, bringing yet another layer of meaning to the stage.
I wish I had time, patience, skill, and scope to write about Lorraine Hansbury's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window with the insight and substance the play deserves. It's a big, important, powerful play, addressing serious issues both societal and individual. It is narrative theater at its best, I think, set on a plot with beginning, middle, and end, presented through characters who are sympathetic, understandable, now and then surprising. And while the mood is generally serious and occasionally flirts with tragedy there is humor and affection.
The play was badly received at its opening in 1964 — it was too big, too "difficult" for the commercial entertainment critics. Hansbury was already dying (pancreatic cancer); if there were any thoughts of revisions, there was no strength to achieve them. I think some judicious cutting would improve the play: a long drunk scene seems perilously like a bitter survey of postwar absurdist theater.
But Juliette Carrillo's direction makes it clear that this is a perfectly workable, stageworthy play, and the cast pretty well nailed their assignments: Ron Menzel in the title (lead) role; Sofia Jean Gomez as his wife Iris; Erica Sullivan as her brittle, aloof sister Mavis; Vivia Font in the small but pivotal role of the third sister, Gloria; Armando McClain, Danforth Comins, and Benjamin Pelteson in the significant roles of Alton the (mixed-race) friend, Wally the politician, and David the upstairs gay playwright. We saw Jack Willis as the abstract expressionist down the hall; he was just as solid, detailed, and engaged an actor as all the rest.
As you can perhaps tell by the capsule descriptions in the previous paragraph, Hansbury weaves plenty of strands into this dramatization of social issues of midcentury America. It was fascinating to come to know the play just after a reading of John Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of our Discontent, written just a few years earlier. Both writers deal with corruption; both are aware that it is an inevitable and perhaps even a necessary component of the social human condition, as the human reach for ideals always stretches beyond the grasp of the compromises without which daily life seems unbearable and impossible.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Ubu Roi in San Francisco
| Alfred Jarry: Ubu Roi translated from the French by Rob Melrose Directed by Yury Urnov The Cutting Ball Theater 277 Taylor Street, San Francisco; 415-292-4700 Extended to March 9, 2014 |
Lew writes that theater, to reassert itself in a time of declining attendance (which I'm not sure is true in San Francisco), should undertake the following "fixes":
•To attract a young, diverse audience, present work that’s reflective of a young, diverse audience.All of this is welcome comment, and much of it is being addressed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last week we saw two plays whose theaters, productions, and acting seemed to me to address Lew's points. Perhaps the ticket prices did as well: I'm not too attentive to the prevailing costs of other kinds of entertainment. (On my fixed income, though, I must admit that our budget is strained by our theater attendance, running to a dozen or two plays in the course of a year.)
•Widen the perspectives being presented onstage.
•Place more faith in the artists.
•More funding for artists, less funding for buildings.
•Make the theater a more friendly and welcoming place.
•Make seeing theater easier on working parents.
•Lower the barrier of entry by lowering ticket prices.
I do have a problem, though, with one paragraph in his post — the one which presumably suggested the heading:
In truth theaters have a serious curatorial problem when it comes to choosing plays that a young, diverse audience can get behind. The fantastic documentary Miss Representation introduces the concept of symbolic annihilation in the media, and it applies exceedingly well to the theater. Why would young people (or people of color, or women) bother coming to the theater when they’re so rarely depicted onstage, and when they're so rarely in command of the artistic process? Is our dwindling audience truly a reflection of the educational landscape, or is it a reflection of a chronic homogeneity onstage exacerbated by an attendant homogeneity in our staffing?It seems to me this paragraph is predicated on the notion that one attends theater in order to verify one's own, or one's group's, existence. Surely one's existence is not in question, so this must stand for something else: a verification of one's relevance to one's context — social, historical, natural. I understand the contemporary anxieties that contribute to the generally felt need for this kind of verification, but I'm not sure I agree that theater companies have a curatorial responsibility to supply it.[His links]
I do think, pace Mike Lew, that "arts education" can address the problem of theatrical relevance: the problem is that we think of "education" as synonymous with "schooling"; that we've delegated education almost exclusively to the public and private schools. I often see parents with children in restaurants: these kids are being "taught" to attend restaurants, to observe social conventions concerned with dining in public, to appreciate diverse cuisines. I wish I more often saw children accompanying their parents in the theater.
It will be argued that the subtleties and references in the theater will elude them, that they won't "understand" the play. It's in the nature of childhood not to "understand"; children are used to it. I suspect they even enjoy it; I know I did: I still do. Theater is not boring or inaccessible because its literature is subtle, arcane, or referential. If it (or anything) is boring, that's the fault of an attendee who is demanding; if it (or anything) is inaccessible, that's because the means of access have not been provided.
Last week we saw two plays full of reference, both foreign, both complex, both with the added layer of difficulty that they depended, some of the time, on irony. I've already written (here) about Jerusalem, by the British playwright Jez Butterworth; the play and its production have increased in my appreciation since writing that post. (This often happens, and is one of the reasons I don't really like to be thought of as a "critic".) Let me tell you now about the second play we saw.
Over the years we've seen a number of productions of Alfred Jarry's absurdist masterpiece Ubu Roi. This is one of the best of them. The translation seemed to me to be very close, yet practical for American actors, audiences, and the stage. (I haven't re-read the play, either in French or English, for many years.) Yury Urnov's direction is inventive, consistent, always pressing forward though allowing frequent changes of pace and moments for the re-gathering of stage energy.
David Sinaiko is a marvelous Father Ubu: greedy and impetuous, childish and charming, vicious and hilarious. Ponder Goddard provides an opulent, intelligent Mother Ubu. It was she who nailed the play's references to Macbeth: one truly wants to see this pair in the Scottish Play, preferably in a similarly enterprising production.
The remaining cast — royalty, soldiers, crowds, armies, peasants, a bear, and so on — are ingeniously collapsed onto an ensemble of four: Marilet Martinez, Andrew P. Quick, Nathaniel Justiniano, and William Boynton, each and all of whom provide flashes of individuation, of articulation, of brilliance. The entire cast is completely engsging, and engaged in the play.
The function of theater, I've often thought, is to provide community — a shared understanding of shared experience in the human condition, subject to Nature, Society, History, not to mention Comedy and Romance. I think it's true that many of us make too Serious A Thing. One comment on my friend's Facebook link to Mike Lew's blogpost conveys a common response:
My pet peeve with "serious" movies, and somewhat with theater, is the makers' desire to be taken seriously, which is always fatal. I call it medicinal art — choke it down, it's good for you.Ubu Roi is "serious," but pretends to demand to be taken as pure satirical entertainment; I can't imagine anyone responding to it peevishly. Shakespeare, I think, would have loved it, and would have appreciated this production. I'd happily see it again.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Jerusalem
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem, seen last night at San Francisco Playhouse? We sat center, first row mezzanine, through the long first act; then moved back a few rows — there were only two or three other playgoers up there, though the orchestra seemed well populated — for the remaining two (long) acts. I mention this because Jerusalem is, if nothing else, talky, and depends on being understood, and between the acoustical properties of the house, and the thick accents put on with varying degrees of consistency and success, and the extent of British slang, I wasn't always able to follow just what the hell was going on.
We'll have to read the play, my companion said later. I'm not so sure I'll bother. The play is laudable in its intent: to transfer the traditional English reverence for the powers of Nature to our own time, when paganism is no longer taken seriously except as it typifies antisocial behavior. Much of the time the play reminded me of Michael Tippet's opera Midsummer Marriage, of all things, and I even wondered if the playwright might perhaps be related to another British composer, George Butterworth (1885-1916), remembered primarily for his pastoral setting of Houseman's A Shropshire Lad. The pastoral tradition runs through the English sensibility from Chaucer on, and more than once this Butterworth, in Jerusalem, seems to be glancing sidelong toward As You Like It. But it is very much of our time, bringing town council enforcers out to the woods to lean on "Rooster" Byron, a middle-aged motorcycle acrobat hanging out in a house-trailer squatting on Council land in the woods.
Here he plays host to underaged girls, drifters, and assorted social misfits who hang about for free booze and pills, entertaining them with unlikely stories, linking himself to the English mythical and Romantic tradition. "What's an English forest for?", he asks pointedly, when it's pointed out he's harboring fugitive teen-agers.
As is so often the case, the relentless back and forth of dialogue and the constant narrative imperative of the play distract me from the playwright's real purpose, which is verifying the continued vigor and relevance of this pagan interplay of Man and Nature within the political and commercial corruptions of today's society. Apart from the vocal production, this performance has a lot to be said for it: a persuasive set, enterprising costuming, good blocking, detailed though not fussy stage direction.
The cast seemed to me to wrestle with Butterworth's demands, which are considerable. Brian Dykstra has a particularly difficult role in Rooster Byron, and manages it persuasively if not commandingly. The rest of the large cast fit in well; I was particularly taken with Richard Louis James as the Professor, Ian Scott McGregor as Ginger,, and Courtney Walsh as one of the enforcers, a small but telling part.
•Jez Butterworth: Jerusalem. San Francisco Playhouse , through March 8
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Et in Arcadia ego
WELL, JUST DOWN THE ROAD from Arcadia, in Monrovia. California, not Liberia, thank Hermes. We are here to see the fall season of A Noise Within, the repertory company whose plays we've attended for ten or twelve years now — convenient, since in four days we can see three plays.
A Noise Within , 3352 E Foothill Blvd. Pasadena, California
Along the way of course we take in a few restaurant meals, which I describe at my other blog Eating Every Day; and a few museum shows — I'll get to the James Turrell and Sam Francis retrospectives in another post here.
First, though, the plays. Thursday night we saw Ferenc Molnár's The Guardsman (1910), a well-made play on the old theme of a man testing his wife's fidelity by flirting with her in disguise — a device made a tiny bit more probable since the husband is, after all, a professional actor.
This is material for farce, but in this production, translated by Frank Marcus, intelligently directged by Michael Michetti, and pointedly acted by Freddy Douglas (the Actor), Elyse Mirto (the Actress), and Robertson Dean (the Critic), the play made surprising reaches toward the speculative, sometimes philosophcal drama of a Pirandello.
Douglas opened the play acting very broadly indeed, and I expected the play to be merely broad comedy. I was struck by the care and finesse that went into the dramatic curve of the performance, which moved effortlessly, seductively, toward a conclusion that leaves the audience and even, I think, the cast) quite up in the air, unresolved. Of course you don't see this play without thinking of the Mozart-da Ponte Così fan tutte, where the disguised-lover-testing-fidelity idea is actually doubled, and Don Antonio takes the role of Molnár's Critic (and the soubrette maid gets a much richer part).
Così, too, plays to mixed response. Beethoven famously though it too immoral to be allowed a production. But the point of these plays is the equivocal nature of Ethics itself when brought to the service of Moralism. Any sting operation presents an ethical quandary, and the victim of any sting operation can plead Not-Quite-Proven simply by questioning the propriety of the enforcer having been deceitful himself. If virtue is its own reward — since to reward virtue is to bribe it — so to test virtue is to engage a procedure that inevitably punishes itself: any sting, growing out of deceit, can only falsify its own finding.
There's a second layer of complexity in The Guardsman, which is a play written for the theater. There, the other night, we saw actors play the role of actors who were playing roles; and tan ultimate question, actually investigaged aloud by the audience and cast in a talkback after the production, is, where does make-believe start, where does it stop? It's a serious squestion, because it raises the ultimate question of what Theater is, societally, for.
NEXT WE SAW a fine performance of Samuel Beckett's very hard play Endgame, with company co-artistic director Geoff Elliott directing and taking the lead role of Hamm; Jeremy Rabb as Clov, and Mitchell Edmonds and Jill Hill in the garbage cans as Nagg and Nell.
I call it a hard play because itt is, well, stony, flinty. It's not difficult to understand. As Beckett once wrote, No symbols where none intended. Hamm is blind, old, decrepit, motionless in his chair, apparently dying. Clov tends to him, as one's life must attend to its approaching end. The play can seem almost unbearably bleak: hopelessness is often thought Beckett's chief subject. And indeed he wrote Endgame partly, I think, as an externalization, on the stage and in public, of the transactions in his three great novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, novels so reductive in spite of their length and so bleak in spite of their almost decoratively Baroque word-spinning that they were found very few readers.
Endgame lacks the popularity of Waiting for Godot, which is Chaplinesque in contrast to Endgame's Keatonism. But the language is superb. At the beginning of the performance I was concerned: Elliott seemed mannered, stilted. But the play proceeded just as The Guardsman had, moving from an opening — well, an opening gambit, I suppose — quickly into a middle game of great strength and intelligence and not a little grace.
It's hard to find much to say about the play. I once loved Beckett's work, and nearly every poem, novel and play of his are still on the bookshelf in my study — way up high, since the books are arranged by author; so high as to be easily neglected. For a while Beckett seemed to have beome datedd, so logically does he proceed from the anxieties of World War II, the Bomb, Existentialism. Now, of course, in this century that threatens in so many ways to be even worse than the previous one, he demands our attention again. He's the Shakesperian Fool to today's demented despots. I wish I could see this Endgame again, and I wish our elected leaders and their assistants could be made to watch it over and over.
IWRITE THIS FRESH from seeing Noise Within's third play of the fall season, Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre — a play I'd never seen before. It's one of the four late Romances, with The Tempest, A Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline (the last-named having been produced here last season). These plays extend Shakespeare's oeuvre out of the Elizabethan renaissance toward the Baroque; I think they look forward to Corneille (whose L'Illusion was produced here a year or so ago) and further, even, toward Gozzi, for example (whose Il re cervo was done here, as King Stag, quite a few seasons back).
At the talkback one of the first questions came from a man behind me who sounded a little out of sorts: Why have you chosen to perform this play? Pericles was the most popular of Shakespeare's plays during his lifetime, but has fallen into disfavor and has rarely been performed in my lifetime. The playwright is associated with his greatest hits: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, perhaps As You Like It; A Midsummer Night's Dream; maybe Hamlet and Macbeth. Those are the Shakespeare the crowds want to see: but Shakespeare wants to be Shakespeare, and branch out, evolve, even though the result is in a direction seeminly at odds with the better-known corpus.
One objection to these late romances has been their unbelievability. They depend on sudden rages, incest, redemptions, coincidence, chance natural cataclysms. Pericles begins with a hero who discovers a father-daughter incestuous relationship, and who can believe that? Later, it shows a young virgin abducted and sold into sexual slavery, and who can believe that? Yet in recent years these stories have become commonplace. No matter how theatrical and arbitrary his plots — most of them stolen from sources much older, of course — Shakespeare seems unable to escape contemporary relevance.
Asked, after the play, how she would sum it up, the director said that she thinks of it as a man's journey toward grace. In spite of every calamity, Pericles finds resolution. Wife and daughter, each long thought dead, are returned to him. Perseverance is rewarded.
Sunday, October 06, 2013
Buried Child
| Buried Child. By Sam Shepard, directed by Loretta Greco. San Francisco: The Magic Theater; seen September 27, 2013. |
Eastside Road, October 6, 2013—
WE CLOSED OUT last week's three-play marathon in a venue we haven't visited for years, the veteran Magic Theater in San Francisco's Fort Mason. John Lion founded the company in 1967, according to the Wikipedia article I'm consulting, in the old Steppenwolf bar down on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. I remember seeing at least one of Michael McClure's "Gargoyle Cartoon" there, but Lion moved the company to San Francisco in the early 1970s, finally settling in the present location in the middle of that decade.McClure was a (or the ) resident artist at the Magic for eleven years, giving the company a unique blend of poetry, sometimes violent energy, and what I think of as an anti-intellectual philosophy. I have often wished for an opportunity to study a number of his plays, in performance of course, in a single season, but he seems to have fallen out of favor locally, and I make do with vague memories of The Blossom, or Billy the Kid; The Beard; the Gargoyle Cartoons of course; Gorf; and Josephine The Mouse Singer.
At about the time the Magic moved into its current Fort Mason digs, the already notable American playwright Sam Shepard succeeded McClure in residence. Both men were born in the midwest; both were Californians by the time they were twenty or so; both have keen ears for the vernacular and a healthy respect for the meat of human experience as well as the brain. They make a fascinating pair; come to think of it, a McClure-Shepard festival would be another fascinating experience.
(Wouldn't it be marvelous if the Bay Area's rich theater community — rich in all but money, alas — could join forces to mount such events!)
I think we have seen only one other Shepard play: Fool for Love, which was splendidly performed in May 2012 by the community Main Stage West in Sebastopol and subsequently repeated at the Imaginists in Santa Rosa. Fool for Love premiered at the Magic in 1983; Buried Child had appeared five years earlier and is, to my mind, a less successful piece — because less resolved, a result of its greater complexity and ambition.
Some of the play's irresoluteness may be the result of its writing. Shepard revised the script for its 1995 revival in Chicago, and Robert Hurwitt has stated the Magic Theater production used that revision; but the Magic itself calls this a "Legacy Revival" celebrating the playwright's 70th birthday (November 5) and Magic's own role in premiering so much of his work. I haven't read the play; I don't know if there is, or can be, a definitive state of the script.
In any case we saw Buried Child in the context of two other plays, as the previous two posts here indicate, and that context had much to do, I think, with the powerful immediacy of Shepard's script even in what seemed to me an unevenly directed production. Rod Gnapp was compelling as Dodge, the surly, bitter, authoritative, dying father of a mythically dysfunctional farm family somewhere in the American heartland. But his presence was so strong, so central to the production, that other members of the cast, capable as they were, too often moved on the margins.
Shepard invites the problem. Halie, Dodge's wife (Denise Balthrop Cassidy), enters through several minutes of lines spoken offstage. Bradley (Patrick Kelly Jones), the amputee son, spends much of his time lying on the couch, arm across his face. Tilden (James Wagner), the other son, makes his most effective contributions to the drama offstage.
By contrast, Vince (Patrick Alparone), Dodge's errant grandson, making an unforseen visit with his girl friend Shelly (Elaina Garrity), hold the center of the stage, insisting on a present reality, forcing it into the decaying monochrome of this household of suppressed emotion.
Jane Ann Crum's program notes on the play enlarge on the nature of the theatrical reality in Shepard's construct:
One of the primary differences in Shepherd's [sic] dramaturgy is what could be called tears in the fabric of reality.Other critics have commented on the Shepard esthetic as being an expression of Postmodernism: but in fact Buried Child seems to me to be a perfectly logical and foreseeable continuation of the curve of realistic drama from Ibsen and Shaw through O'Neill and Williams to Shepard and Stoppard. Yes, there are rents and tears in the fabric of reality; we have come to find these flaws more real than the imagined and manufactured reality of the fabric, which maintains its integrity only when external realities are ignored.
The arresting moments in Shepard recall those in Shakespeare, who is so fascinated by the irrational events which like Epicurus's swerves define, distort, and impel the forces and trajectories we humans so desperately want to be rational and orderly. It was profoundly shocking to be confronted with the buried child of Shepard's play, a day after having dealt with Leontes' figurative burial of his own.
Too, Vince and Shelly — quite strongly performed here — recalled Clyde and Bonnie, seen only two days before, living on a disorienting cusp of inner and external realities, torn between context and the moment. (They also recall May and Eddie, if Fool for Love. As there are only so many plots — seven, many pretend — so there are probably only a small number of characters.)
One thing is clear to me, after these three nights of theater: Shepard's work, necessarily imperfect though it may be on the stage where it is consigned to its public moment, is deep with undertones and rich in scope, a significant development in American literature and world stage.
Thursday, October 03, 2013
A Winter's Tale
| A Winter's Tale. By William Shakespeare, directed by Patricia McGregor. Orinda: California Shakespeare Theater; seen September 26, 2013. |
Eastside Road, October 3, 2013—
COMPARISONS BEING ODOROUS, as Dogberry says, I won't bring up productions of Shakespeare recently seen in Ashland here: I'm writing today about a very different order of things.A Winter's Tale, one of Shakespeare's more problematic plays, was formerly rarely given, but seems to have become popular: we've seen it now five times in the last six years. Two main difficulties may have been responsible for its long retreat from the stage: the unprompted and violent swings of mood in the principle character, Leontes; and the alternations of high tragedy and low comedy, which tend to tear the play apart in uncalibrated productions. Like Cymbeline, the play's an example of Shakespeare's idiosyncratic combination of realism and abstraction.
As so often, he examines in this play the effect of a sudden loss of reality: a rage, or a colossal error, or an unforeseen coincidence — a chance calamity that changes everything for everyone, bystanders as well as perpetrators, the innocent as well as (or even more than) the "guilty." But what are the perpetrators guilty of ? in most cases, they too are the victims of the kind of exception that follows when the natural order of things takes a sudden, inexplicable swerve. Everything in Shakespeare's world — his natural world and that of his society — is tenuous.
Patricia McGregor's direction of the play had its merits and its flaws. For me, on reflection, the flaws outweighed the merits: particularly the idea of involving the audience through direct address from the stage, even invitations to participate on the stage. As the play opened, a traveling band of players, acrobats, and fortune-tellers, looking vaguely medieval but with diction recalling Second City improv routines and accompanied by an Airstream-like camper-trailer, cajoled the audience into banter which recurred at the beginning of the second act and returned at the close. This seemed miscalculated in the outdoors amphitheater, colder than any Winter's Tale needs for its setting.
But another directorial concept worked amazingly well: the cast was collapsed onto a seven-actor ensemble with every role double-cast. This streamlined the scenes in Bohemia, which can lapse into irrelevant clowning, losing the play's drive toward its final stroke and resolution; it also very neatly underscored the schizophrenia at the heart of Shakespeare's vision.
Nowhere better than in the amazing performance of L. Peter Callender as both Leontes, who directs the abandonment of his infant daughter on a coastal rock in Bohemia, and the Shepherd who finds her and raises her as his own child. He found deep humanity in each of these roles, and nicely detailed individuality as well; but the two characters are so different it was hard to force myself to realize they were played by a single actor.
The same can be said for Omoze Idehenre, who played both the wronged queen Hermione and the lovestruck shepherdess Mopsa; and for Tristan Cunningham, both Perdita and Emilia; and Christopher Michael Rivera, who was a noble Antigonus, a conniving Autolycus. Aldo Billingslea, Margo Hall, and Tyee Tilghman round out the cast.
Most of the cast had played in a previous Cal Shakes production this season, Spunk: we didn't see that show (though it sounded promising), but apparently it too involved audience participation and an all or nearly-all black cast. It may have worked better, presenting material closer to the experience of today's audience.
On the other hand, having seen that production may have helped the audience at A Winter's Tale. I myself, knowing the play from its script and from previous more conventional productions, found the framing device irrelevant and distracting, even confusing at times. The reduced cast made it necessary to cut and collapse much of the fourth act, set in Bohemia; and to skip the first scene of the fifth act, since virtually Shakespeare's entire cast is assembled. Here again the traveling players try to explain matters to the audience; here again I find myself in a state of confusion.
I should concede that we saw the production in a preview; some production elements were clearly not completely resolved. In the last analysis, though, I think few modern adapters and presenters of Shakespeare calibrate the play-to-audience configuration better than does the Bard himself, and I wish more contemporary productions would trust his book.
But much of the time I was gripped by the rage, the jealousy, the love, the remorse, the understanding, and the forgiveness that animate this marvelous play. The reason for this is simple: the power of Shakespeare's words, and the clarity and conviction of the actors' speech. A number of moments will stay with me.
A Winter's Talecontinues at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, Orinda, through October 20, 2013.
Bonnie and Clyde
| Bonnie and Clyde. By Adam Peck, directed by Mark Jackson. Berkeley: Shotgun Players; seen September 25, 2013. |
Eastside Road, October 3, 2013—
A quick look at the calendar shows sixteen plays seen so far this year (and three operas), and recently I've been complaining a lot about what we've seen. I should make it clear, once again, that I post these notes not as serious critical reviews, merely as personal opinions. For years I worked as a critic on the staff of the Oakland Tribune, mostly on art and (concert) music but occasionally also covering theater. During that time I felt strongly that a part of a newspaper critic's responsibility is to suspend his own likes and dislikes.
I always liked Joseph Kerman's definition of criticism: "[T]he study of the meaning and the value of art works." (Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology, Harvard University Press, 1986). The newspaper employed me to do just that, but — I felt — to do it from a neutral perspective. My responses; my brain; the publisher's voice. I was paid, pretty well I thought; and I was provided with entrance to theaters, concert halls, museums; and even with entry to conversations with artists and performers I would normally never be able to meet as a private individual. The least I could do in return was to suppress my own ego and tastes, as much as possible while retaining presence.
But The Eastside View is not a newspaper: it's a personal blog, expressing my own viewpoint from here on Eastside Road, where I can read and write among my books and scores, journals and files — and, through the Internet, plenty of reference when I want it. And of course there's another matter: I'm pushing eighty; there's less time to waste; I need do and think and write only as I choose.
All that said — and it's been a lengthy and perhaps self-indulgent precede — what about last week's theater? Bonnie and Clyde, by Adam Peck, was a one-act, 90-minute scene for two actors, Megan Trout and Joe Estlack, cutting between intimate conversation between them and flashbacks and -forwards, dramatically isolated with light and sound, providing the context for the scene.
Is there anyone who doesn't know the story of Bonnie and Clyde, the small-town bank robbers who shot their way through Texas and Arkansas in Arthur Penn's movie (1967) burned them into a second generation's consciousness, and must remain for many the nearly official account of their career. When that movie came out I participated in a panel-discussion review on KQED, with David Littlejohn, Tony Boucher, and someone else. (In those days KQED was happy to give fifteen or twenty minutes of prime time to such a discussion; what a time that was!)
It was my view then that the movie was unspeakably violent; that in fact it promoted violence as beauty, and that ultimately that would not be a good thing. I still feel the cult of violence has led the American vernacular culture into a thicket, and that there can't help but be a connection between the omnipresence of violence, and of its beauty and power, in games, television, film, books, and popular music, and the gun mania, mass shootings, remote assassinations, and road rage that are so present in American life.
But the story of Bonnie and Clyde is a potent one, underneath whatever stylistic treatment it receives. And if Penn's film distracted me from that story, with its big-screen beauty and graphic final shootout, Peck’s play, in Mark Jackson’s direction for Shotgun Players, returned me to it. I was given a corrected view of its historical specificity: I kept thinking that Bonnie and Clyde were of my father’s generation, that they lived and died within a few dozen miles of his childhood home. My parents, in their twenties, undoubtedly read of Bonnie and Clyde’s exploits in the newspapers, saw the no less graphic black-and-white photos of their corpses in their pages; perhaps saw footage in the newsreels.
(Facsimiles of contemporary newspaper coverage were posted on the lobby walls at Shotgun, further enhancing this contextualization of the story.)
I came to see the story of Bonnie and Clyde as parallel to another American legend of nearly the same time, also seen recently in a theatrical version: The Grapes of Wrath. Once again I was reminded of the communitarian value essential in theater. At its best, public drama, from the time of the Greeks, exists to present, to examine, perhaps even to explicate the workings of Nature and Society for an audience often denied, by the distractions and pressures of daily life, the luxury of their own private meditations on the human condition.
I write these sentences eight days after seeing the play, and express views that have developed since leaving the theater. The performance itself was arresting — no pun intended — both for the acting and the setting. Megan Trout’s Bonnie was certainly reminiscent of Faye Dunaway’s, but it was no impersonation of that performance: it had depth and detail of its own, a wistful quality within the hardened realism enforced not only by the immediate situation but by the nature of the time and place that formed her character.
Joe Estlack was at first sight less imposing as Clyde Barrow, too diffident and meticulous to suggest the rogue murderer, and secondary to the strength of Bonnie’s role as written in the script. In retrospect, though, his enactment has grown in my mind, offering a credible complexity, revealing the (possibly misplaced) idealism and sense of failed justice that provoked his actions.
Robert Broadfoot’s set design worked fine for me: a no-fourth-wall anonymous barn, its timbers perhaps too new, isolated in a countryside that could be anywhere, spacious enough for the couple to split into individuals, claustrophobic enough to isolate them from the society that formed them and that, by rejecting, they enrich with their myth.
Ultimately it's that mythic quality of the story of Bonnie and Clyde that Adam Peck's play summarizes, in its unique crosscuts of immediate present detail with glimpses of the months-long action of the saga. Peck's play manages to hew to Aristotle's three unities (action, time, place) while tapping outside elements necessary to his contextualization, and Jackson's direction realized that aspect of the play effectively in Berkeley's Ashby Avenue theater.
Trapped in their barn, Bonnie and Clyde live in the moment, aware it is among their last moments. To my parents that moment was the present; to me it is both theirs and ours, and the figurative, metaphorical meaning of that moment is powerful and relavent to the present.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)