So, on this bitter note, the third year of Superfluities comes to a close. Hard to believe it's been so long. Ironically, I begin a month-long hiatus just at the beginning of the new theatre season, but I'm sure it'll get along without me very well, at least for the month of September.
I will return to the blogosphere on Monday, October 1, 2007: in a new location, within a new Web site. It will also be farewell to Blogger, which has been a fair host, but I do miss the added control I have with (and the simplicity of) the software that started it all. Until October, then, a fond au revoir.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
100 Saints You Should Know
100 Saints You Should Know. The world premiere of a new play by Kate Fodor. Directed by Ethan McSweeny. Scenic design: Rachel Hauck; costume design: Mimi O'Donnell; lighting design: Jane Cox; sound design: Matt Hubbs; and something called "Director of Development": Jill Garland. With Janel Moloney (Theresa), Jeremy Shamos (Matthew), Zoe Kazan (Abby), Lois Smith (Colleen) and Will Rogers (Garrett). One intermission. Runs August 24-September 30, 2007; reviewed at the August 28, 2007 performance. Production: Playwrights Horizons (Tim Sanford, artistic director). Tickets and schedule information here.
Poor Theresa; we first find her scrubbing a toilet in a rectory; little do we know that watching faithhealers on television has led her to a spiritual crisis. Poor Father Matthew; he wanders into the rectory bathroom to find Theresa there; little do we know that an unfortunate combination of The Dark Night of the Soul and the erotic photographs of George Platt Lynes have led him to his own sexual and spiritual crisis. Poor Abby, Theresa's daughter; she's only one step away from delinquency. Poor Colleen, Matthew's mother; saddled with an Irish back-country lingo and faith-and-begorrah brogue so thick it led me to my own spiritual crisis (the only thing missing from her dialogue was a teary reference to the "Auld Sod") -- if there is a God and He cares for this earth, would He allow one of His creation to speak and act so stereotypically?
Well, ultimately, poor us. 100 Saints You Should Know, a play which can only be described as earth-shatteringly mediocre, opens the Playwrights Horizons 2007-2008 season; one can only call it "a meditation on spiritual life in 21st century America" because, like ill-disciplined meditation, it meanders and hews left-to-right, its dialogue as naturalistically drab as any that has come out of an MFA playwriting program and new play development workshop. There's some kind of a story here about those in doubt gathering rather unbelievably together (speaking of belief) in a small American town to sort out their doubts, but the tropes -- the possibly-gay Catholic priest (are there any others in the American theatre?), the tired single mom with a hole at the center of her life (are there any others in the American theatre?), the awkward young gay man (are there any others etc. etc.) stuck in a provincial American town and driven to secret drinking -- are all so hopelessly predictable that spending time with them is like spending time with wet tissue.
One could lay this at the door of the playwright, Kate Fodor, a recipient of lots of prizes and commissions, but in a "Playwright's Perspective" essay included in the program notes (which I wouldn't ordinarily cite as it's outside of the experience of the play itself, but its inclusion in the program -- also a part of the theatregoing experience -- makes it fair game), and to be fair, she denies responsibility for it. "Plays often know things that playwrights don't know they know," she concludes, urging that readers take the 250 interpretive words that come before "with a grain of salt." The essay itself is as tortured as the dialogue (not to mention a tedious pseudo-lyrical monologue delivered by the priest towards the end of the 75 minute first act); the play's self-conscious references to the definition of simile and metaphor, and the old Irishwoman's reference to "allegory," suggest that copies of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, my old high-school grammar textbook, are as readily available as Gideon Bibles. Even in the Auld Sod, dontcha-know.
The rotating set by Rachel Hauck and effective lighting by Jane Cox only confirm that there's a lot of design talent in New York to dress up minor plays with expensive good looks (would that the play itself moved and illuminated its issues with the same imagination and alacrity); given the two-dimensional characters it's hard to say much of interest about the performers, except that apparently somebody told Will Rogers, who plays the young man, to invest his performance with a series of bizarre vocal and facial tics that seem to render his character semi-retarded.
The annual churlish slog through the "What's Wrong with Play Development in American Theatre" question is going on over at Isaac Butler's blog, as predictably as the turning of the leaves in the fall (enter at your own peril); there, somebody's holding up God's Ear, a much better play than 100 Saints, as indicative of its failures. At least Jenny Schwartz has a distinctive, individual voice, though, an instinct for the patterning of human speech that allows her to manipulate it. (One also wonders why Sheila Callaghan's fine Dead City, which was originally commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, ended up downtown in the off-off-Broadway hinterlands, where New Georges rescued the play and gave it the production and careful treatment it deserved, and not on the off-Broadway mainstage here. What's in the water over there at Playwrights Horizons?) I only note here that 100 Saints has been through the development mill, too -- developed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and workshopped at the Chautauqua Theater Company before arriving at Playwrights Horizons.
Poor 100 Saints, perhaps -- workshopped within an inch of its well-intentioned but pale, weak life. I left at intermission, I'm afraid, not compelled to return by the tree-injury ex machina that closes the first act, but since Ms. Fodor, the director, the cast and Playwrights Horizons are producing a play that knows more about itself than the playwright or any of the creative team, I hope nobody will take the above words personally. Or with a grain of salt.
Poor Theresa; we first find her scrubbing a toilet in a rectory; little do we know that watching faithhealers on television has led her to a spiritual crisis. Poor Father Matthew; he wanders into the rectory bathroom to find Theresa there; little do we know that an unfortunate combination of The Dark Night of the Soul and the erotic photographs of George Platt Lynes have led him to his own sexual and spiritual crisis. Poor Abby, Theresa's daughter; she's only one step away from delinquency. Poor Colleen, Matthew's mother; saddled with an Irish back-country lingo and faith-and-begorrah brogue so thick it led me to my own spiritual crisis (the only thing missing from her dialogue was a teary reference to the "Auld Sod") -- if there is a God and He cares for this earth, would He allow one of His creation to speak and act so stereotypically?
Well, ultimately, poor us. 100 Saints You Should Know, a play which can only be described as earth-shatteringly mediocre, opens the Playwrights Horizons 2007-2008 season; one can only call it "a meditation on spiritual life in 21st century America" because, like ill-disciplined meditation, it meanders and hews left-to-right, its dialogue as naturalistically drab as any that has come out of an MFA playwriting program and new play development workshop. There's some kind of a story here about those in doubt gathering rather unbelievably together (speaking of belief) in a small American town to sort out their doubts, but the tropes -- the possibly-gay Catholic priest (are there any others in the American theatre?), the tired single mom with a hole at the center of her life (are there any others in the American theatre?), the awkward young gay man (are there any others etc. etc.) stuck in a provincial American town and driven to secret drinking -- are all so hopelessly predictable that spending time with them is like spending time with wet tissue.
One could lay this at the door of the playwright, Kate Fodor, a recipient of lots of prizes and commissions, but in a "Playwright's Perspective" essay included in the program notes (which I wouldn't ordinarily cite as it's outside of the experience of the play itself, but its inclusion in the program -- also a part of the theatregoing experience -- makes it fair game), and to be fair, she denies responsibility for it. "Plays often know things that playwrights don't know they know," she concludes, urging that readers take the 250 interpretive words that come before "with a grain of salt." The essay itself is as tortured as the dialogue (not to mention a tedious pseudo-lyrical monologue delivered by the priest towards the end of the 75 minute first act); the play's self-conscious references to the definition of simile and metaphor, and the old Irishwoman's reference to "allegory," suggest that copies of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, my old high-school grammar textbook, are as readily available as Gideon Bibles. Even in the Auld Sod, dontcha-know.
The rotating set by Rachel Hauck and effective lighting by Jane Cox only confirm that there's a lot of design talent in New York to dress up minor plays with expensive good looks (would that the play itself moved and illuminated its issues with the same imagination and alacrity); given the two-dimensional characters it's hard to say much of interest about the performers, except that apparently somebody told Will Rogers, who plays the young man, to invest his performance with a series of bizarre vocal and facial tics that seem to render his character semi-retarded.
The annual churlish slog through the "What's Wrong with Play Development in American Theatre" question is going on over at Isaac Butler's blog, as predictably as the turning of the leaves in the fall (enter at your own peril); there, somebody's holding up God's Ear, a much better play than 100 Saints, as indicative of its failures. At least Jenny Schwartz has a distinctive, individual voice, though, an instinct for the patterning of human speech that allows her to manipulate it. (One also wonders why Sheila Callaghan's fine Dead City, which was originally commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, ended up downtown in the off-off-Broadway hinterlands, where New Georges rescued the play and gave it the production and careful treatment it deserved, and not on the off-Broadway mainstage here. What's in the water over there at Playwrights Horizons?) I only note here that 100 Saints has been through the development mill, too -- developed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and workshopped at the Chautauqua Theater Company before arriving at Playwrights Horizons.
Poor 100 Saints, perhaps -- workshopped within an inch of its well-intentioned but pale, weak life. I left at intermission, I'm afraid, not compelled to return by the tree-injury ex machina that closes the first act, but since Ms. Fodor, the director, the cast and Playwrights Horizons are producing a play that knows more about itself than the playwright or any of the creative team, I hope nobody will take the above words personally. Or with a grain of salt.
Friday, August 24, 2007
More Openings, Albee-Style
On the heels of Alison's fine, insightful review of a Melbourne production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? comes more news about Edward Albee: The 2007-2008 season will be peppered with Albee plays here in New York, as the playwright approaches his 80th birthday in March 2008. In addition to the afore-mentioned Peter and Jerry, there is this (per a press release), which was also reported in the New York Times yesterday:
Me, Myself and I, directed by Emily Mann, January 11 to February 17, 2008, at McCarter Theatre (91 University Place) in Princeton, NJ. A world-premiere comedy about identical twin brothers and their mother, who can't tell them apart, even in their adulthood.
The American Dream and The Sandbox, March 4 to April 12, 2008, at the Cherry Lane Theatre (38 Commerce St.). F. Murray Abraham will head the cast of these seminal Albee plays, being produced at the same theatre in which they debuted in 1961 and 1962.
Occupant, May 6 to June 29, 2008, at the Signature Theatre Company (555 W. 42 St.) Occupant is a portrait of acclaimed sculptor Louise Nevelson and a quest to capture a charismatic and complex artist and persona. What is the relationship between creator and creation?
Me, Myself and I, directed by Emily Mann, January 11 to February 17, 2008, at McCarter Theatre (91 University Place) in Princeton, NJ. A world-premiere comedy about identical twin brothers and their mother, who can't tell them apart, even in their adulthood.
The American Dream and The Sandbox, March 4 to April 12, 2008, at the Cherry Lane Theatre (38 Commerce St.). F. Murray Abraham will head the cast of these seminal Albee plays, being produced at the same theatre in which they debuted in 1961 and 1962.
Occupant, May 6 to June 29, 2008, at the Signature Theatre Company (555 W. 42 St.) Occupant is a portrait of acclaimed sculptor Louise Nevelson and a quest to capture a charismatic and complex artist and persona. What is the relationship between creator and creation?
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Get Out Your Calendars
UPDATE, August 23, 2007: See Ken Urban's "secret word" below.
Two more upcoming openings, both with special deals just for you, dear Superfluities reader.
The first is for 100 Saints You Should Know, Kate Fodor's new play about faith and common ground which will open the 2007-2008 Playwrights Horizons season. Lois Smith and Janel Moloney are featured in the cast; the play will be directed by Ethan McSweeny and begins performances tomorrow night, August 24. Playwrights Horizons is offering a special blogreaders' admission price for all performances of Fodor's play: $40 (regular $65) for performances August 24-September 2; $50 (regular $65) for performances September 4-September 30. To take advantage of this offer, get your tickets online here or here and use the discount code SABL; mention the same code when you call Ticket Central to make your reservations (212.279.4200); or just tell the box office staff at 416 West 42nd Street the same code, and viola! Discount tickets are yours. Don't forget to mention Superfluities as well.
Secondly, you'll want to put Ken Urban's new play for The Committee Theatre Company in your dayplanner too. The Private Lives of Eskimos (or 16 Words for Snow) will run September 8-October 1. Directed by Dylan McCullough, Urban's latest work is about a man who loses his cellphone and gains ... well, chaos. Tickets and schedule information through Theatermania here; to follow the cast and director through their process, visit the company's blog here. And your secret admirer from The Committee says: "Say the secret code 'ESKIMOS' when you book in advance on Theatermania and that gets you $15 tickets on performances on Saturday, September 8th; Sunday, September 9th; Monday, September 10; and Friday, September 14 (not available at the door)."
Two more upcoming openings, both with special deals just for you, dear Superfluities reader.
The first is for 100 Saints You Should Know, Kate Fodor's new play about faith and common ground which will open the 2007-2008 Playwrights Horizons season. Lois Smith and Janel Moloney are featured in the cast; the play will be directed by Ethan McSweeny and begins performances tomorrow night, August 24. Playwrights Horizons is offering a special blogreaders' admission price for all performances of Fodor's play: $40 (regular $65) for performances August 24-September 2; $50 (regular $65) for performances September 4-September 30. To take advantage of this offer, get your tickets online here or here and use the discount code SABL; mention the same code when you call Ticket Central to make your reservations (212.279.4200); or just tell the box office staff at 416 West 42nd Street the same code, and viola! Discount tickets are yours. Don't forget to mention Superfluities as well.
Secondly, you'll want to put Ken Urban's new play for The Committee Theatre Company in your dayplanner too. The Private Lives of Eskimos (or 16 Words for Snow) will run September 8-October 1. Directed by Dylan McCullough, Urban's latest work is about a man who loses his cellphone and gains ... well, chaos. Tickets and schedule information through Theatermania here; to follow the cast and director through their process, visit the company's blog here. And your secret admirer from The Committee says: "Say the secret code 'ESKIMOS' when you book in advance on Theatermania and that gets you $15 tickets on performances on Saturday, September 8th; Sunday, September 9th; Monday, September 10; and Friday, September 14 (not available at the door)."
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Mabou Mines' Song for New York
Ruth Maleczech and Mabou Mines will be offering free public performances of their latest production, Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting, at the Gantry Plaza State Park in Long Island City, Queens, starting next Friday, August 31. The five-part production, which brings together live music, singing, dance, choral speech, visual art and the performance site itself in the signature Mabou Mines style, will celebrate each of New York's five boroughs from a barge moored at the park's waterfront.
The company commissioned new work from five New York City writers (Migdalia Cruz, Maggie Dubris, Patricia Spears Jones, Karen Kandel and Imelda O'Reilly), their texts then set to music by The Klezmatics' Lisa Gutkin. The extravaganza also involved cooperation from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; the U.S. Coast Guard; and Miller's Launch. Said director Maleczech in a press release: "I do really celebrate New York. I love what the city has meant to Mabou Mines. I don't think we could have made the works we've made anywhere but here. Song for New York is a way to give something back, to say thanks."
Recent Mabou Mines productions have included the critically-acclaimed Gospel at Colonus, Mabou Mines DollHouse and Mabou Mines Lear from Lee Breuer; over the years they've also proven to be among the most innovative interpreters of Samuel Beckett's work, especially in their adaptations of the prose works Company and Imagination Dead Imagine (with Beckett's approval, I might add); the company's David Warrilow, who died in 1995, was one of Beckett's favorite actors.
Song for New York will be a unique experience. The August 31 performance will celebrate Brooklyn; other performances will take place September 4 (celebrating Staten Island), September 6 (the Bronx), September 7 (Queens) and September 9 (Manhattan). More information soon at the Mabou Mines Web site; in the meantime, further details can be found at American Theater Web.
The company commissioned new work from five New York City writers (Migdalia Cruz, Maggie Dubris, Patricia Spears Jones, Karen Kandel and Imelda O'Reilly), their texts then set to music by The Klezmatics' Lisa Gutkin. The extravaganza also involved cooperation from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; the U.S. Coast Guard; and Miller's Launch. Said director Maleczech in a press release: "I do really celebrate New York. I love what the city has meant to Mabou Mines. I don't think we could have made the works we've made anywhere but here. Song for New York is a way to give something back, to say thanks."
Recent Mabou Mines productions have included the critically-acclaimed Gospel at Colonus, Mabou Mines DollHouse and Mabou Mines Lear from Lee Breuer; over the years they've also proven to be among the most innovative interpreters of Samuel Beckett's work, especially in their adaptations of the prose works Company and Imagination Dead Imagine (with Beckett's approval, I might add); the company's David Warrilow, who died in 1995, was one of Beckett's favorite actors.
Song for New York will be a unique experience. The August 31 performance will celebrate Brooklyn; other performances will take place September 4 (celebrating Staten Island), September 6 (the Bronx), September 7 (Queens) and September 9 (Manhattan). More information soon at the Mabou Mines Web site; in the meantime, further details can be found at American Theater Web.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
New York City Opera's "Opera-for-All"
All 2,755 seats of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center will be going for only $25 each during the New York City Opera's "Opera-for-All" Festival opening weekend, which runs September 6-8. The Festival will run through the season, with 50 front-orchestra seats for each performance set aside at the same price.The Festival opener kicks off with a concert on Thursday, September 6, followed by a party to be held on the State Theater's promenade, featuring performances by the East Village Opera Company. Those who prefer their operas full and uncut have the option of attending the 8:00pm performance of Puccini's La Bohème on Friday, September 7, or the 8:00pm performance of Mozart's masterpiece Don Giovanni on Saturday, September 8, for the same $25.00.
With the "Opera-for-All" weekend and festival, the NYC Opera hopes to reconnect to the "City Opera's founding mission of innovative opera at accessible prices." The City Opera's 2007-2008 season also includes a new production of Margaret Garner, an opera by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison based upon events that inspired Morrison's Beloved, and Henry Purcell's King Arthur.
Ticket and schedule information about the NYC Opera and the Opera-for-All Festival is available at the Opera's Web site.
Elitist and inaccessible? Moi?
Monday, August 20, 2007
Upcoming: The Wooster Group
In yesterday's post about upcoming productions, I neglected to mention The Wooster Group's upcoming Manhattan opening at the Public Theater of their Hamlet, which had a short run at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse earlier this year. It opens at the Public in October.
If you need a Wooster fix before then, it's a short Metroliner trip away: The Group will bring their production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones to this year's Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe festival, which runs from August 31 through September 15. Philadelphia readers should drop by; ticket and performance schedule information here.
Below is a short piece I wrote for a podcast about The Group's Emperor Jones when it was revived in the spring of 2006 in Brooklyn. (That's Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos, left to right, in the production photograph above by Paula Court.)
***
I don't talk about individual performers much on Superfluities. Most of the time I self-servingly blather on about drama, or form versus content, or aesthetics, or what have you. So sometimes I forget that the soul of theater is in the performers onstage, and I shouldn't do that. In a small way today I hope to make amends by talking about a woman who may be one of the finest actresses working in New York today, and she works almost exclusively in the theater, with one company, the Wooster Group. Her name is Kate Valk, and she's playing the title role in the revival of the Group's production of The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill, now at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.
Ms. Valk has been with the Wooster Group since 1981, and I first saw her in their controversial L.S.D., a deconstruction and reconstruction of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, in 1984. In that production she played Tituba, a black slave accused of schooling a New England town's women and children into the mysteries of witchcraft: Ms. Valk, a smallish very pale woman in real life, played a black woman, and she brought a bizarre minstrelsy to the role. No type-casting here. Since then, her roles with the group have included Racine's Phaedra, all of the roles in Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, and a narrator and other roles in Chekhov's Three Sisters.
I think I first became truly appreciative and enamored of Ms. Valk with her performance in last year's House/Lights, based on the Gertrude Stein play and a cheap soft-core porn film. In that performance, she spoke the entire text of the Stein play, and never have you heard Stein so musical, so sensible, than when it comes through Kate Valk. Her performance embodied not only the words of the play, but its peculiar and idiosyncratic grammar as well, a physical performance composed mostly of small gestures as Stein's language depends on the recognition of small shifts of vocabulary, of pause, of sentence structure.
Stein's language came through Ms. Valk as echoes of an interior perspective, consciousness of a world construction made visible and audible: all process, little graspable product. Much different from her performance last night, in the very different The Emperor Jones, but then, O'Neill is not Stein by any stretch, regardless of the fact that they're contemporaries.
Stein is silences and atoms of language: O'Neill is all noise and bluster, endless floods of words rather than a mist of language, and in plays like this and All God's Chillun Got Wings, there's also that awful, terrible dialect, black American English filtered through a writer too much enamored of turn-of-the-century moralistic melodrama. Valk's performance of this language is entirely different–Stein's work eases through her. With O'Neill, she grabs the language hungrily, embracing it with all its embarrassing overstatement, pours it through her and spills it out again, flooding the stage with its passion. But in this overstatement of hers she also finds the human heart of O'Neill's drama, a heart that O'Neill could be accused of burying under all that awful, cloddish posturing of his language.
And in a way, she finds it and exhibits it in the smallest but most remarkably effective of physical gestures. For though in blackface, Ms. Valk leaves her arms and legs untouched: quite white. So when they become visible underneath the heavy, overwrought, Kabuki-inspired costumes, Ms. Valk becomes the vulnerable, marginalized, tragic figure that O'Neill envisioned, but more: as a white woman playacting as a black man, she embodies the vulnerability of all humanity somehow. Those late scenes of the play, in which Jones reenacts a sketchy racial memory of torture and a slave auction, therefore echo the grotesque sadism and possessiveness of the entire species. More than O'Neill intended, I'm sure, and even a profound parody and satire of O'Neill's excesses, it's found there, elicited by director Elizabeth LeCompte from Valk's extraordinary personation.
What performers like Kate Valk impersonate when they're on the stage is not a character, but soul: not a two-dimensional creation of a playwright's fervid imagination, but the rhythms of human experience that are expressed through the deliberate spoken word. Which is why actors and actresses are creative artists, blurring the distinction between the creative and the interpretive process. I doubt that Ms. Valk would be able to give the powerful performances that she gives in plays by writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Eugene O'Neill if it weren't that their languages pulse through her body, her breath and her gestures as she makes their rhetoric her own. It's a conscious decision to absorb and echo these voices, that enter her as the creation of others, but emerge as her own expression, a part of her own soul, and a part of ours.
It's a rare gift. I've been privileged not only to see this sublime quality of the speaking human body on stage with Ms. Valk, but with a few other actors and actresses of my acquaintance, a few of them in my own plays. Though I can't say that I have written many plays with individual actors or actresses in mind, I'm starting to do so more and more as I recognize, as I grow older, the freedom of body and expression that these artists have devoted their lives to. In the New York Times profile of her published a few weeks ago, it was mentioned, for some reason, that Ms. Valk recently turned fifty, and I'm finding that the actors and actresses I admire most bear in them that memory and shaping of experience that come only with age, that bring beauty and texture. I'm 44. I hope that, in thinking about these performers as I write, I can share in some of this beauty and texture that they bring into my own life and career. So I delight in Ms. Valk, for she does display that soul, so rarely seen on the New York stage, but the true ineluctable delight and meaning of theater.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Upcoming
I won't be repeating my stint at the New York Times of last September, when I crunched press releases from high and low to produce their Theatre Season Preview; I pass along here, though, a few recommendations for the upcoming season.
October 19-December 9, 2007: Peter and Jerry by Edward Albee, at the Second Stage Theatre. Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, is coupled with a more recent work featuring one of the characters from that play, Homelife. With Bill Pullman, Johanna Day and Douglas Roberts; directed by Pam MacKinnon.
October 25-November 17, 2007: Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, by the 17th-century Japanese dramatist Monzaemon Chikamatsu, a Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf production at HERE, directed by Brooke O'Harra. The New York premiere of the 2HC's latest epic, in which punk rock meets Kabuki in a 1940s milieu.
October 30-December 2, 2007: A Hard Heart by Howard Barker, at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row. Kathleen Chalfant leads the cast in the Epic Theatre Ensemble production of Barker's play about a country facing a catastrophic invasion. Will Pomerantz directs.
November 23, 2007-April 13, 2008: The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, at the Cort Theatre. One of Pinter's most accomplished works marks its 40th anniversary with a Broadway revival starring Ian McShane, Michael McKean and Raul Esparza. Directed by Daniel Sullivan.
December 2007-January 2008: Beckett Shorts, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, at the New York Theatre Workshop. Akalaitis directs Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Neumann, among others, in Samuel Beckett's short plays Acts Without Words I and II, Eh Joe and Rough for Theatre.
Winter 2008: Two Thousand Years, by Mike Leigh, at The New Group. Scott Elliott directs Leigh's most recent play, about the repercussions that occur when the son in an assimilated Jewish family suddenly becomes seriously devout.
January 2008: Richard Foreman's new play, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (A Richard Foreman Theater Machine), opens at the Ontological-Hysteric.
March 2008: Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner's opera, opens at the Metropolitan Opera in a production by Dieter Dorn and featuring Deborah Voigt (Isolde), Ben Heppner (Tristan) and Matti Salminen (King Marke), conducted by James Levine. A highly-anticipated (by me, at least) production of one of the great achievements of the modern human imagination (for more, see Bryan Magee's fine The Tristan Chord). Tickets on sale today; with that cast -- possibly at the peak of their powers -- and Levine at the podium, you'd better get them now.
Spring 2008: A new production from theatre minima, specifics to be announced.
And in recognition of seasons past, I suggest a visit to Garrett Eisler's Playgoer, where Garrett is featuring digital reproductions of American and international theatre posters from the recent (and less recent) history of the art.
October 19-December 9, 2007: Peter and Jerry by Edward Albee, at the Second Stage Theatre. Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, is coupled with a more recent work featuring one of the characters from that play, Homelife. With Bill Pullman, Johanna Day and Douglas Roberts; directed by Pam MacKinnon.
October 25-November 17, 2007: Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, by the 17th-century Japanese dramatist Monzaemon Chikamatsu, a Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf production at HERE, directed by Brooke O'Harra. The New York premiere of the 2HC's latest epic, in which punk rock meets Kabuki in a 1940s milieu.
October 30-December 2, 2007: A Hard Heart by Howard Barker, at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row. Kathleen Chalfant leads the cast in the Epic Theatre Ensemble production of Barker's play about a country facing a catastrophic invasion. Will Pomerantz directs.
November 23, 2007-April 13, 2008: The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, at the Cort Theatre. One of Pinter's most accomplished works marks its 40th anniversary with a Broadway revival starring Ian McShane, Michael McKean and Raul Esparza. Directed by Daniel Sullivan.
December 2007-January 2008: Beckett Shorts, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, at the New York Theatre Workshop. Akalaitis directs Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Neumann, among others, in Samuel Beckett's short plays Acts Without Words I and II, Eh Joe and Rough for Theatre.
Winter 2008: Two Thousand Years, by Mike Leigh, at The New Group. Scott Elliott directs Leigh's most recent play, about the repercussions that occur when the son in an assimilated Jewish family suddenly becomes seriously devout.
January 2008: Richard Foreman's new play, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (A Richard Foreman Theater Machine), opens at the Ontological-Hysteric.
March 2008: Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner's opera, opens at the Metropolitan Opera in a production by Dieter Dorn and featuring Deborah Voigt (Isolde), Ben Heppner (Tristan) and Matti Salminen (King Marke), conducted by James Levine. A highly-anticipated (by me, at least) production of one of the great achievements of the modern human imagination (for more, see Bryan Magee's fine The Tristan Chord). Tickets on sale today; with that cast -- possibly at the peak of their powers -- and Levine at the podium, you'd better get them now.
Spring 2008: A new production from theatre minima, specifics to be announced.
And in recognition of seasons past, I suggest a visit to Garrett Eisler's Playgoer, where Garrett is featuring digital reproductions of American and international theatre posters from the recent (and less recent) history of the art.
Liturgies of Amorality
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. -- John 1:1
A theatre based in ritual is accompanied by its playscripts, each dramatist composing a liturgy for a world abandoned by (or divorced from, or finally liberated from) gods (both in the singular and the plural sense of the term): after Nietzsche, amoral; after Adorno and Bataille, in opposition to mass secular culture and its denigration of both body and spirit. The description of theatre that David Ian Rabey provides in his essay on Shakespearean dramaturgy also describes the sacred space:
"... any art, but particularly dramatic art, externalises inner life [what Bataille might call, in the title of one of his most evocative works, "Inner Experience"] in a way which might justly be termed pretentious, in that it bids to manifest an unusual and unconventional (if not always enviable) sensitivity to something, expanding the narrow vocabulary of being which is afforded by literal description of objectified facts."
The same can be said of the words and gestures of worship. Art is artifice, as is the ritual, not real life but a laserlike concentration of darkness (before the death of God, light) upon the artificial event in the attempt for an epiphany. (The fourth wall not a mirror but a lens for the concentration of individual consciousness upon the artificial object, the performance.) Theatre is profoundly calculated as an arena of difference. As incense and music serve as sensual opiates to prepare the worshipper for that epiphany in the church, so do costume and music prepare the spectator for the dramatic epiphany. The theatre does not reflect the street, or life, or the audience; in Rabey's construction, the deliberate aesthetic act is an act not of reflection but of consecration; in the theatre, the consecration of the speaking body. Its transfigurations are, like the transfiguration of bread into flesh, wine into blood, simultaneously literal and metaphorical, acts of metaphysical and alchemical conjuration for the spectator. The externalisation of inner life is a making-manifest of the dynamic between consciousness and the body in which that consciousness is trapped, through which that consciousness explores the world in search of autonomous freedom and awareness.
So the play is ritual, having space (the stage) and time (8:00pm Tuesday-Sunday, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) allotted for its repeated celebration. Ritual was the basis of theatre, its content sacred, in the Greek theatre. Its trivialisation into boulevard entertainment strips the theatrical event of its spiritual possibilities, indeed ridicules them, as unnecessary, spurious and ultimately irrelevant. But this is not true; it's a secular cultural prejudice that denies power and significance to the pregnant, transformative possibilities of the theatrical event.
I've been examining the texts (the liturgies) of those rituals known as Richard III and especially Oedipus recently. In his introduction to the Arden second series edition of the play, Antony Hammond makes clear the relationship of Richard III to the morality plays of the early English theatre (in the play, he notes, "the violence and treachery which had been the ruling characteristics of the country since the accession of Henry VI are expiated in ritual acts of retribution and reconciliation" [p.98]); and one sees the ritual acts of violence and expiation similarly in the Oedipus of both Sophocles and Seneca. Ultimately, despite the application of Christian and Greek theology to the original creation of these plays, time has wrested these liturgies from these desiccated dogmas to the more secular 21st-century world. But this does not strip these liturgies from their roots in spirit or ritual. They would not speak to us otherwise.
There comes the question, in relation to Rabey's conception of the Shakespearean dramatist, of space: cathedral or chapel. Ritual is conducted in both; in our small black-box theatres, we have chapels dedicated to the intensification of bodied consciousness. It is not a question of scope or size, but of practice and genre, and especially discipline and choice. "The genius of Shakespeare's drama," Rabey writes, "might aptly be said to reside in the incompleteness of its prescriptions [its disavowal of definitive meaning or interpretation]: hence its challenging power and infinitely renewing fascination. I would add: that the 'necessary choice' of the dramatist, like that of the performer, also excludes, yet somehow simultaneously illuminates, others." This choice is inclusive of the choice of gesture, of tone.
The ritual is reenactment of the dynamics of the spirit, in the Christian church the story of the crucifixion is told and retold, on the Greek stage the stories of the gods' and the fates' manipulation of well-known men and women. So Christ and God are dead, as are the gods and fates, leaving us with what? The body and consciousness, and a terrible freedom -- an obligation -- to explore. We are left to interiorise the dynamics of the crucifixion, of the gods and the fates, and to take responsibility for them. The stage for this interior movement can be as broad and peopled as that of the Globe, or as constrained as that of the profoundly, painfully constricted playing area of the late Beckett plays, populated by the single fragmented body or even body part (head, mouth). The first cathedral, the second chapel.
Narrative is an organisational principle for this exploration; its performance can be various, leading us to new questions, new avenues. In King Richard III: how responsible was he for his evil, if fated to act as he did? This exploration colors the story, the performance of the ritual. And I am thinking of Jocasta, lately, rendering Oedipus still a detective story, but from a different perspective: What did Jocasta know; what was the nature of her physical, sensual desire for her son and husband; and when did she know it? Have we been neglecting the exploration of her role?
LINK: David Ian Rabey is also a playwright and the artistic director of the Lurking Truth company, based in Wales.
A theatre based in ritual is accompanied by its playscripts, each dramatist composing a liturgy for a world abandoned by (or divorced from, or finally liberated from) gods (both in the singular and the plural sense of the term): after Nietzsche, amoral; after Adorno and Bataille, in opposition to mass secular culture and its denigration of both body and spirit. The description of theatre that David Ian Rabey provides in his essay on Shakespearean dramaturgy also describes the sacred space:
"... any art, but particularly dramatic art, externalises inner life [what Bataille might call, in the title of one of his most evocative works, "Inner Experience"] in a way which might justly be termed pretentious, in that it bids to manifest an unusual and unconventional (if not always enviable) sensitivity to something, expanding the narrow vocabulary of being which is afforded by literal description of objectified facts."
The same can be said of the words and gestures of worship. Art is artifice, as is the ritual, not real life but a laserlike concentration of darkness (before the death of God, light) upon the artificial event in the attempt for an epiphany. (The fourth wall not a mirror but a lens for the concentration of individual consciousness upon the artificial object, the performance.) Theatre is profoundly calculated as an arena of difference. As incense and music serve as sensual opiates to prepare the worshipper for that epiphany in the church, so do costume and music prepare the spectator for the dramatic epiphany. The theatre does not reflect the street, or life, or the audience; in Rabey's construction, the deliberate aesthetic act is an act not of reflection but of consecration; in the theatre, the consecration of the speaking body. Its transfigurations are, like the transfiguration of bread into flesh, wine into blood, simultaneously literal and metaphorical, acts of metaphysical and alchemical conjuration for the spectator. The externalisation of inner life is a making-manifest of the dynamic between consciousness and the body in which that consciousness is trapped, through which that consciousness explores the world in search of autonomous freedom and awareness.
So the play is ritual, having space (the stage) and time (8:00pm Tuesday-Sunday, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) allotted for its repeated celebration. Ritual was the basis of theatre, its content sacred, in the Greek theatre. Its trivialisation into boulevard entertainment strips the theatrical event of its spiritual possibilities, indeed ridicules them, as unnecessary, spurious and ultimately irrelevant. But this is not true; it's a secular cultural prejudice that denies power and significance to the pregnant, transformative possibilities of the theatrical event.
I've been examining the texts (the liturgies) of those rituals known as Richard III and especially Oedipus recently. In his introduction to the Arden second series edition of the play, Antony Hammond makes clear the relationship of Richard III to the morality plays of the early English theatre (in the play, he notes, "the violence and treachery which had been the ruling characteristics of the country since the accession of Henry VI are expiated in ritual acts of retribution and reconciliation" [p.98]); and one sees the ritual acts of violence and expiation similarly in the Oedipus of both Sophocles and Seneca. Ultimately, despite the application of Christian and Greek theology to the original creation of these plays, time has wrested these liturgies from these desiccated dogmas to the more secular 21st-century world. But this does not strip these liturgies from their roots in spirit or ritual. They would not speak to us otherwise.
There comes the question, in relation to Rabey's conception of the Shakespearean dramatist, of space: cathedral or chapel. Ritual is conducted in both; in our small black-box theatres, we have chapels dedicated to the intensification of bodied consciousness. It is not a question of scope or size, but of practice and genre, and especially discipline and choice. "The genius of Shakespeare's drama," Rabey writes, "might aptly be said to reside in the incompleteness of its prescriptions [its disavowal of definitive meaning or interpretation]: hence its challenging power and infinitely renewing fascination. I would add: that the 'necessary choice' of the dramatist, like that of the performer, also excludes, yet somehow simultaneously illuminates, others." This choice is inclusive of the choice of gesture, of tone.
The ritual is reenactment of the dynamics of the spirit, in the Christian church the story of the crucifixion is told and retold, on the Greek stage the stories of the gods' and the fates' manipulation of well-known men and women. So Christ and God are dead, as are the gods and fates, leaving us with what? The body and consciousness, and a terrible freedom -- an obligation -- to explore. We are left to interiorise the dynamics of the crucifixion, of the gods and the fates, and to take responsibility for them. The stage for this interior movement can be as broad and peopled as that of the Globe, or as constrained as that of the profoundly, painfully constricted playing area of the late Beckett plays, populated by the single fragmented body or even body part (head, mouth). The first cathedral, the second chapel.
Narrative is an organisational principle for this exploration; its performance can be various, leading us to new questions, new avenues. In King Richard III: how responsible was he for his evil, if fated to act as he did? This exploration colors the story, the performance of the ritual. And I am thinking of Jocasta, lately, rendering Oedipus still a detective story, but from a different perspective: What did Jocasta know; what was the nature of her physical, sensual desire for her son and husband; and when did she know it? Have we been neglecting the exploration of her role?
LINK: David Ian Rabey is also a playwright and the artistic director of the Lurking Truth company, based in Wales.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Suggested Reading
In lieu of a more substantive post this week, I offer this link to David Ian Rabey's "On Being a Shakespearean Dramatist," his 2001 essay on his own personal approach to the art of theatrical tragedy, which appears on the Theatre in Wales Web site. I will have more to say about this soon, but want to recommend his reading of King Lear (really, a re-visioning of the play in Rabey's own The Back of Beyond), and offer as samples these short excerpts from the introduction and close of the essay, which seem to me pertinent to several issues currently in the air regarding politics, drama, the audience, community, and tragedy itself:
... You may think, or even object, that even to harbour the temerity to consider the ambition of being a Shakespearian dramatist is arrogant, hubristic and pretentious. I would counter as follows: it is not arrogant to admit, or even to proclaim, a profound influence and inspiration; and that the identification of that influence does not propose an equality or even a similarity but points to a dialogue which invites further negotiation by others, and thus strives to transcend a potentially disastrous isolation. And any art, but particularly dramatic art, externalises inner life in a way which might justly be termed pretentious, in that it bids to manifest an unusual and unconventional (if not always enviable) sensitivity to something, attempting to identify transcendent things in the everyday, expanding the narrow vocabulary of being which is afforded by literal description of objectified facts. The question is, how well it realizes its pretentions by challenging imaginatively a dominant discourse of sterile presumption. The theatre is not a place for false modesty, nor a monument to pseudo-egalitarian functionalism: it is always being specifically artificial, and I would even suggest that this is what human beings do best. ...
So, having said all this, what do I mean by my coinage and application, in this context, of the term "Shakespearian dramatist"? I mean it as an identification of a dramatist who attempts a deliberately startling and consciously interrogatory re-animation of some pre-existing story or play; who leapfrogs early twentieth-century prescriptions of naturalism and concomitant notions of social determinism, in order to present a drama which manifests a fully poetic, and consciously poeticized, range of the most visceral emotions; and who considers the potential consequences of their expression, through action, as the pragmatics of power. A dramatist who works not in a spirit of documentary realism or towards so-called "contemporary immediacy" – the platitudinous jostling of familiar because commercially-defined fashionable surfaces – but who rather attempts to expose the struggle for the soul (or unlived life) of a nation state through the invocation of its dream-life and the contradictory animations of its spectres, in a theatrical arena where historical determinism can be challenged by existentially transformative action, which manifests the force of resistance behind every attempted maintenance; the incompleteness of every prescription; and indeed the incompleteness of every thing: its potential for terrible and beautiful new life; the disclosure of a further vocabulary of being. ...
It would be absurdly slavish to write plays which mimicked the style of this least slavish and most subversive of dramatists, seeking "to write Shakespearian plays." But "being" a dramatist who operates in what I feel to be a Shakespearian seriousness and playfulness is another matter, and a properly difficult endeavour for a writer/director. As Russell Jackson characterizes British Shakespeare performance at the hinge of the millennium: "On a good night, the audience may leave with the feeling that they have actively participated in something that engaged them directly, with a mind full of new arguments from old matter, and an appetite for more." The more of that effect, the better. And: "Let us admit the consequences."
Again, the entire essay is available online here.
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