Archive for the 'Theater Reviews' Category
The Year the War Came Home
Inter Press Service (IPS), May 14, 2008
On this 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that for the United States was the apogee of opposition to the war in Vietnam, two new Off Broadway plays explore divergent ways that U.S. citizens protested — and ponder the best way to contest a senseless war.
“The Conscientious Objector” by Michael Murphy describes the personal and political conflict faced by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. over his decision to speak out publicly against the war.
“Something You Did” by Willy Holtzman examines the decision of a stand-in for Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, to “bring the war home” by participating in a violent action that left a bystander dead.
The Houswife’s Lament
Inter Press Service (IPS) April 22, 2008
Since the 1950s, views in the United States have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women — or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages.
Four Broadway plays spanning those decades show one prominent downside: marriage as a smoldering cauldron of unfulfilled sexual desire or betrayal.
The U.S. works are about small-town Middle America: the Midwest, Mississippi, Oklahoma. They are William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba”, Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County”. The British revival is Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming”, about working class London.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Inter Press Service (IPS), March 19, 2008
It’s not surprising that ethics — or more precisely, a lack thereof — has taken centre stage during this New York theatre season. Playwrights have trained their sights on the morally challenged West, hoping perhaps to get theatregoers to muse on the connections between public and private evil.
Broadway dissects corporate ethics in “The Farnsworth Invention”, political wrongdoing in “November” and personal morals in “The Seafarer”.
Anyone who has watched television would be fascinated by the story of its creation by Philo Farnsworth, a genius inventor who grew up in Idaho in the 1920s — and of its theft by David Sarnoff, the President of NBC.
Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll” dissects political morality and the politics of fighting repression
March 4, 2008
In 1986 I went to Prague to report on the dissident movement. Among the leaders I wanted to see was Jiri Dienstbier, who had been a reform Communist and radio journalist and commentator during the 1968 “Prague Spring.” He’d lost his job, because he spoke out on the air against the Soviet military intervention. After he helped found the human rights group, Charter 77, he’d spent three years in prison and then worked as a boiler technician in the subway.
He had been hard to reach. The phone company the month before had informed him half-apologetically that the city needed his line “in the public interest.” I left a note under his door, and he phoned that evening, asking if I wanted to go to an outdoor rock concert. We spent the next afternoon in the surreal setting 
of a sculptor’s rock quarry that had been lent to a dissident jazz club.
It all came back to me when I saw Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll,” on Broadway, directed by Trevor Nunn, about Czech dissidents and the government officials who repressed them. Jan (Rufus Sewell) protests a crackdown against rock musicians, is jailed and then spends a dozen years working in a bakery.
Play Shows West’s Moral Failures in Rwanda
Inter Press Service (IPS), Dec 14, 2007
As the 1994 genocide in Rwanda slips into the dark hole of history, the U.S. playwright J.T. Rogers’ “The Overwhelming” reminds one how it happened and how both the “moral”, the complicit and the cynical in the West were present in the killing fields. 
In Rogers’ fictional story, a U.S. family visits Rwanda in 1994. Jack, a professor, accompanied by wife Linda and son Geoffrey, is researching a book about grassroots activists and comes to interview his old college roommate, Joseph, a Tutsi who runs a children’s AIDS clinic. But Joseph has disappeared.
African conflicts simmer and explode on NY Stages
Plays show western complicity in Nigeria and Rwanda violence.
Dec 1, 2007
Murderous conflicts in Africa are dramatized in two American plays off-Broadway that vividly call up the clashes in the oil region of Nigeria and the Rwanda genocide of over a decade ago. In both cases playwrights show inter-communal violence heightened by western interests’ actions or neglect.
The one-man “Tings dey happen” by Dan Hoyle is most successful in presenting the characters of the Niger Delta, from militants demanding their share of oil wealth to the self-serving American ambassador and expatriates. “The Overwhelming,” by J.T. Rogers, also uses the “American visitor” device, though the personal stories seem trivial in the context of events.
Strong Women Storm Broadway
Inter Press Service (IPS), Nov 15, 2007
New York stages are filled with strong women asserting themselves forcefully in musicals and classic comedy — forms that speak to the popular culture. 
Five current hit plays that depict strong women are “Legally Blonde”, “Avenue Q”, “Xanadu”, George Bernard Shaw’s classic, “Pygmalion” and “Curtains”.
Let’s start with the young college girls in “Legally Blonde”, a stage remake of a popular 2001 film that was part of the post-feminist “girl power” movement, when young women were fighting a “men are what matter” backlash that threatened their chances for career and independence.
Palestinian Martyrs and Traitors
Inter Press Service (IPS), Sept 13, 2007
In a new play by a Palestinian-American woman, two characters say in unison: “Oppression is like a coin maker. You put in human beings, press the right buttons and watch them get squeezed, shrunk, flattened till they take the slim shape of a two-faced coin, one side is a martyr, the other a traitor. All the possibilities of a life get reduced to those paltry two.”
In a strange coincidence — or maybe not so strange — that is also the theme of a play written in 1990 by an Israeli man. Both were commenting on the murderous violence that had engulfed Palestinians. Betty Shamieh wrote “The Black Eyed” after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre. Ilan Hatsor wrote “The Masked” a decade earlier during the first intifada. Both plays have made their way to off-Broadway in New York.
Million-Dollar Media Yields Cheap Thrills
Inter Press Service (IPS), Aug 10, 2007
Two Broadway plays, “Frost/Nixon” and “Talk Radio,” expose how the media and its stars, at both the high and the low end, manipulate politics to turn news stories into emotional confrontations.
The goal in each case, of course, is to reach the highest entertainment level — and the biggest buck.
“Frost/Nixon” by British playwright Peter Morgan takes place in 1977. British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen), trying desperately for a comeback, wheedles and bribes disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) to submit to hours of interviews whose high-spot turns out to be a confession to the crimes of Watergate.
Politics and psychology are a profitable combination. We see them again in Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio,” where Barry Champlain (Liev Schreiber) is the host of the call-in show, Night Talk.
Class Dismissed? Not by These Playwrights
IPS (Inter Press Service), July 5, 2007
The United States is famous as a country that denies the validity of class. But you’d get a different idea at theaters across New York, where two new plays and a revival look head-on at the way wealth, status and power affect people’s lives.
The new original works are “Radio Golf” and “In The Heights,” while the revival is “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” They’re either on Broadway or moving there shortly.
“A Moon for the Misbegotten” evokes 1920s rural poverty
Eugene O’Neill’s play is a sharp political commentary about class, poverty and gender. That overlays what director Howard Davies projects as a story of personal relationships, a male-female pas de deux, with an interfering father thrown in.
It is 1923. The 30-ish Josie Hogan (an assertive, moving, dignified Eve Best) is helping her self-involved father Paul (played by Colm Meaney with a sense of true male entitlement) scrape survival out of a hard scrabble Connecticut farm.
Josie and Paul see their “way out” as Jim Tyrone (Kevin Spacey), a rich, alcoholic, third-rate actor whose inheritance makes him the Hogans’ landlord.
But the cards are really held by T. Stedman Harder (Billy Carter), the owner of a neighboring estate, who is defined by his pretentious first initial and his position as an executive with Standard Oil.
“Inherit the Wind”: Making a Monkey of U.S. Fundamentalists
Inter Press Service (IPS) - May 25, 2007
The international focus on fundamentalist Islam might obscure the fact that western nations have their own experiences with fundamentalist religion — among them the country whose government has most targeted radical Islam, the United States.
As recently as 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete the teaching of evolution from the state’s science curriculum.
A sense of continuing conflict — not to mention the hardly-veiled contempt many educated people here have for the fundamentalists — is palpable among the New York audiences filling the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway to see a riveting star-studded production of “Inherit the Wind”. The production is a revival of the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that tells the story of what came to be known as “The Scopes Monkey Trial”.
In the play, science teacher Bert Cates (Benjamin Walker) is jailed for the crime of explaining evolution to his students. Help comes quickly from a Baltimore newspaper which hires “Henry Drummond” (portrayed by Christopher Plummer as a wry, sophisticated lawyer) to defend the young man. To chronicle the story, it dispatches its prize reporter, smartly played by Denis O’Hare as a sarcastic, fast-talking cynic.
Revivals Take on Wars Past and Present
Inter Press Service (IPS), May 10, 2007
Conflict historically has aroused playwrights’ passions — think Aristophanes’ famous “War and Peace” trilogy written more than 2,000 years ago.
In that tradition, New York stage voices are being raised against war in two revivals that clearly retain their relevance today.
“Journey’s End”, a gripping play about World War I written in the 1920s, is spare and direct, unsettling the audience with the prosaic waiting game of war. And “The Brig” details the numbing banality of military cruelty as the Living Theatre revives its famous gritty production of the 1960s.
“The Brig” details numbing banality of military cruelty
Kenneth Brown’s play “The Brig,” staged by The Living Theatre, is a numbing expression of the banality of cruelty institutionalized by the U.S. military.
A cell with five double-decker bunks is enclosed by a chain-link fence, and the area outside, concrete floor or gravel exercise yard, is separated from the audience by barbed wire. Ten men, who have committed unknown, apparently minor infractions, are confined for up to 30 days to suffer dehumanizing treatment at the hands of guards who punctuate their disapproval with punches to the stomach.
The guards turn basic minutiae of life – dressing, showering, shaving, smoking – into opportunities for control and humiliation. There is a Nazi sort of order, efficiency and gratuitous cruelty. The spectacle is a macabre dance, a cacophony of voices, repetition, and tension that sears and stuns audiences.
“Journey’s End” is gripping WWI play of the 20s
It’s the ordinariness that at the end is so unsettling. This is not a Hollywood-style swagger tale about intrepid fighter pilots or its 70’s version of pot-smoking infantrymen. No glamour or anti-glamour here.
Director David Grindley stages a story of prosaic people caught up in the military aspect of a political game whose purpose is far beyond them. These British soldiers – superbly portrayed by a uniformly excellent cast — just focus on staying warm and alive and carrying out orders. It is a powerful and often poetic production.
“The Coast of Utopia” — Stoppard contemplates 19th century Russian radicals
Details of personal lives overwhelm epic of politics and action
Tom Stoppard’s theater trilogy about Russian radicals and reformers of the 19th century is a drawing room drama of the upper class overlaid with the revolutionary ideas that set the stage for the Russian revolution. The content is disappointing, a Russian history “lite” that seems to want to make viewers feel as if they are getting to know the shapers of history without being forced to concentrate too seriously or for too long on their actions and ideas.
Characters are placed and moved through stylized vignettes as if in a diorama, in tableaux. The pageants are beautiful, but sometime they lack substance. Often there are pronouncements instead of dialogue. In spite of purporting to present to us the ideas and history of the figures he depicts, Stoppard appears fascinated primarily by the personal and especially love lives of the famous.
The best part of the production is the stunning staging by director Jack O’Brien. While the “revolutionaries” are prancing around declaiming about life, illusion and art and how they will save the downtrodden, behind a gauzy curtain we see lines of people immobile, dressed in sepia shrouds, like spirits. The serfs remain a silent backdrop.
“Howard Katz” is the male “Devil Wore Prada”
In this play by Patrick Marber, London talent agent Howard Katz (Alfred Molina) is clever and nasty, a combination as familiar in the entertainment world as on Seventh Avenue. “Du té, du café?” is the pretentious invitation to a visitor. 
The command that dismisses his assistant is “Exit!”
It’s a fascinating tale, and Doug Hughes’ direction engrosses us even if we might predict the ending. Flashbacks show the path of anger and despair to self-destruction.
Billionaires for Bush, targets of NYC spying, are dangerous critics of Bush greed and war
March 25, 2007
In view of the news that Billionaires for Bush were among those targeted by spies run by NYC Mayor Bloomberg and his Police in the months up to the 2004 Republican Convention, here’s a reminder of the Billionaires’ dangerous tactics.
What would you choose for the opening music of a play about Dick Cheney and George Bush? “Money makes the world go around…” from “Cabaret,” of course. In the tradition of good satire, this tongue-in-cheek play-length musical skit by The Billionaire Follies, the performing wing of Billionaires for Bush, is witty political commentary and enormously entertaining. This is “Dick Cheney’s Holiday Spectacular 2006!”
“Adrift in Macao” is witty musical parody of 1950s film noir
Durang spoofs stock Chinese character, bar singers and man on the run.
Christopher Durang’s clever, witty and marvelously staged musical parody of film noir, set in Macao, circa 1952, gathers the requisite long lanky blonde in slinky purple gown, the slightly seedy but good-looking bar owner, the deposed former club singer, who fights gamely for her job, a “scrutable” Chinese factotum called Tempura because he’s been battered by life and – well, you get the idea.
“Translations” is moving tale of politics of language
Brian Friel’s play examines how Brits used English language to dominate the Irish. The Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play ”Translations” is a stunning and moody production that examines the use of language to bond and to divide in both a personal and a political sense. It also becomes a symbol of patriotism and conscience as it plays into the conflicts and connections among the occupied and the occupiers in Ireland in 1833.
Setting his tale in the imaginary Irish village of Ballybeg, (itself renamed from the Gaelic, Baile Beag) in a hardscrabble dirt-floored school house in a mud-walled old barn, Friel presents a ”conquered” people who may be dirt poor and no match for British military power, but who are literate and thoughtful.
“A Spanish Play” on Actors’ Culture Mixes Trite & Trendy
The subject could be sitcom. It involves a family of women. The mother Pilar (Zoe Caldwell) is a widow who has just found a younger lover. Her daughters, both actresses, Aurelia (Linda Emond) and Nuria (Katherine Borowitz), are excruciatingly jealous of each other.
As this is by French playwright Yazmina Reza, it’s not sitcom, but cultural commentary. But the attempts at commentary are slight. If her apercus had sharp edges in France, they were worn down crossing the Atlantic.
“The Clean House” a quirky satire about social class
It’s a telenovela! declares Mathilde (Vanessa Aspillaga), the 
Brazilian maid, in Sarah Ruhl’s riff on the roles and status ascribed by social class. Part fantasy, part deftly devised social commentary, and part a passel of good jokes, the play unfolds in a delightful zig zag of unexpected turns.
The insouciant housekeeper, Mathilde, doesn’t like to clean houses. “When I was a child,” she recalls, “I thought, if the floor is dirty, look at the ceiling.” She spends her time inventing good jokes (which we hear in Portuguese) and dreaming about her parents, who had a very good time dancing, making love and telling jokes.
“The Apple Tree” cute musical spoof of love, jealousy, celebrity
Adam and Eve – men and women — through the ages turn love into self-love. 
This is a cute, quirky spoof about male-female relations, jealousy and power, and the celebrity culture of Hollywood. It starts out with Adam and Eve and progresses to love, which turns out to be lethally self-involved. The movie star piece is a good finish, since the celebrity world represents the apotheosis of self-love. The three vignettes, in which the central characters are all women – all Kristin Chenoweth — might be considered sexist, except for the fact that men don’t come out looking so good, either.
“The Vertical Hour” is pretentious political theater
Bill Nighy a standout in a flawed play about liberals and morality. 
David Hare has written some very good political plays, among them “Stuff Happens,” which follows the Bush Administration decision-making that led to the invasion of Iraq.
He appears to have dashed off “The Vertical Hour” as a comment on the American character, particularly the character of American liberals in the light of that war. He should have written an Op Ed.
“Company” a surreal, sophisticated view of marriage game
Artists tend to have signatures styles and so do playwrights, so why not directors? 
Following on the success of his production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeny Todd” last year, John Doyle has staged Sondheim’s “Company” with the same artifice of having the players double as musicians, reverting to their flutes and cellos after delivering their lines.
The device gives a surreal tinge to both plays. Surreal made sense in “Sweeny Todd,” a tale about murder. But surreal for the marriage game, where a bunch of New Yorkers are trying to get their single friend, Robert (Raúl Esparza), to wed? Well, yes, it works in “Company,” too. It’s a way of taking vignettes that might seem sitcom and turning them into artistic riffs about life. George Furth, who did the book, somehow manages to touch all the stereotypical bases without seeming clichéd.
BCCI and the Bushes
Lucy Komisar writes about the criminal offshore bank BCCI and the way it connected the Bushes, the Saudis, Saddam and Osama bin Laden 
in her chapter, “BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad,” in ”A Game As Old As Empire.”
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