This is not a children‘s game. It is a riveting, compelling, inventive dissection of slavery, the underground railroad, the civil war and racism. In fact, “riveting, compelling, inventive” is a good description of Ars Nova, which presents this play and also created “The Great Comet of 1812” just opening on Broadway.
The Underground Railroad Game comes out of the experience of Scott Sheppard, one of the two creator/performers, who in the 5th grade participated in a unit about the civil war that divided students into Union and Confederate soldiers. But this is much more. And definitely not for 5th graders. If the underground railroad gives people the sense of, “at least there was a silver lining” to slavery, this production puts the real story out, with in-your-face realism. Taibi Magar‘s powerful direction is bereft of illusions.
The protagonists sometimes scowl, smirk, sneer, scream, run with branches to represent a forest, are pushed around on roller chairs, pass through moving doorways that reflect entrances and exits, and occasionally face inches away from first-row audiences to pull them into the plot. Not quite Bedlam but you get the very idea from this troupe that believes in “the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience…collapsing aesthetic distance…[in] a kinetic experience of shared empathy.”
Peter Brook‘s “Battlefield” is an elegant, moving and sad parable about justice and war, life and death, going back in our sophisticated times to the simple way earlier societies said these truths. It is inspired by the “The Mahabarata,” a stylized ritualistic vision of war from the epic Sanskrit poem dating from 400 B.C. which director Peter Brook staged in a 9-hour performance in 1987.
Of the plays I saw during six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, these plays about justice stood out: “A Common Man: The Bridge that Tom Built,” “The Red Shed,” “Playing Maggie,” and “Undermined.”
The first play is about Thomas Paine, who fought for liberty in colonial America, was forced out for his politics, and spent time in London and also as a member of the Convention in revolutionary France, before having to flee. His story is not well enough known in America. The other three, addressing issues in the Paine tradition, deal a few centuries later with British politics and particularly the miners‘ strike of 1984-5, which still reverberates in Brits’ psyches.
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are three about the people the system chews up: “Diary of a Madman,” “Trainspotting” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are two about the system‘s corruption: “The Trial” and “Enron.” It’s quite fascinating to see surreal plays about systemic corruption a century apart. Franz Kafka was ahead of his time in describing the nature of the evil of modern society. His 1915 story “The Trial,” adapted in Edinburgh as a play, shows the evil of a government bureaucracy that grinds up a banker for no particular reason. Then look at Lucy Prebble‘s “Enron,” still surreal, where the bureaucrats are now corporate officials, but are still presented, like the Kafka play, as if this were a weird vaudeville.
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are several about war and its fallout: Angel, Glasgow Girls and Hess.
The Americans had to be kept in the dark, out of the loop, not told anything about the secret Oslo talks between Israelis and Palestinians. Because the Americans’ big-power arrogance would derail them.
That is a provocative note in “Oslo,” J.T. Rogers‘ play about the back channel negotiations that led to a ground-breaking Israeli-PLO agreement signed at the Clinton White House in 1993. It would create the Palestinian Authority, with limited government over the West Bank and Gaza and agreement for both sides to continue negotiations.
Hades of course is hell. And singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell‘s script and music, directed by Rachel Chavkin, is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who journeys to Hades in order to find his love, the nymph Eurydice, who has been killed by a poisonous snake.
Here Orpheus is a minstrel. His wonderful music persuades the King of the Dead to let him take Eurydice home as long as he does not turn around to look at her until they reach the upper world. They have to trust each other. But….
It‘s charming but also hokey: the story of black producers and performers struggling in the early twenties to put a show on Broadway. It‘s 1920 and they are Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, a comedy duo who meet at Fisk, the black college in Nashville.
Arthur Miller‘s brilliant parable of the Sen. Joseph McCarthy attack on American liberties, allowed by the U.S. Congress till it became too obscene for even cowardly politicians to stomach, is brilliantly staged by Ivo Van Hove, a Dutchman who understands and communicates Miller‘s political message (see also his “A View From the Bridge”) in a theatrical manner that makes politics into art. Using a metaphor of real events some 260 years earlier, it tells of accusations without evidence that were used to damn the innocent. They occurred during the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1692-93.
Laura Benanti is stunning and luminous as Amalia, a smart, assertive clerk in an upscale perfume shop in 1934 Budapest. Her trilling soprano shimmers.
The story itself is corny, schmaltzy. The slow start makes you think sit com, but it gets better. Its light fluff is underpinned by some serious commentary about the economic condition of workers and the way men treat women.
Think of Philip Ridley‘s play as a Gulliver‘s modest proposal for furnishing your home. Nothing like what Martha Stewart might recommend. It‘s a very smart macabre satirical over-the-top sci fi allegory, a modern deal with the devil, and in case you weren‘t sure about what counts, director David Mercatali opens the play with Madonna‘s “Material Girl” and the Beatles‘ “Money.”
This 1974 Alan Ayckbourn play, seen for the first time in the U.S., is a master class in how to use theatrical devices. In five one-act plays with the same superb ensemble cast, it uses absurd farce, irony and slapstick to show how people miscommunicate as their needs and desires collide.
From Jessica Lange‘s remarkable dissolution as the drug addicted Mary, reaching her nadir (and theatrical heights) in her mad scene, to Michael Shannon‘s stunning drunk, you are blown away by Jonathan Kent‘s staging of Eugene O‘Neill‘s “Long Day‘s Journey Into Night.” It is autobiographical. His father was a famous dramatic actor and O‘Neill as a youth traveled with his parents. The younger son, Edmund, stands in for O‘Neill.
If you like bluegrass and feminist stories, you will love this Steve Martin-Edie Brickell show, as I did. Carmen Cusack is a dulcet-toned charmer as the heroine. Martin and Brickell did the story and music together; Martin wrote the book and Brickell the lyrics.
The fascination of Florian Zeller‘s play about a man suffering from Alzheimer‘s is that it is told from the point of view of the sufferer. I noted early on a very beautiful French desk, and then not long after, it wasn‘t there. Hmm, I thought. What happened to the desk? Then other items of furniture in his apartment weren‘t there.
Or was it his apartment? It seems that his daughter was married and living in London. But no, he was living in her Paris flat, and she was married to someone else. Or was that the case?
Workers solidarity, a labor union, caring about each other may appear a bit old fashioned in this neoliberal era, but Dominique Morisseau shows vividly how that is a lifeline for four people facing the loss of the jobs at a Detroit auto plant in 2008. At a time when the corporate 1% thinks nothing of what closing factories does to workers.
That of course was the year that bankster fraud almost brought down the world financial system and caused business failures that threw millions of people out of work.
Danai Gurira‘s stunning, naturalistic play is about the horror of war with no horror shown, only talked about. It takes place in Liberia during the civil war of the 1990s and 2000s. There is something surreal there. Three women who have been taken as sex slaves by a military commanding officer are so dehumanized, they have no names. They call each other Wife #1, Wife #2, Wife #3, as their only identities.
Yet, there is some solidarity. The older one (Saycon Sengbloh) there 25 years – since she was 12 or 13 — seems beyond outrage; she cares for other girls. Wife #2 (Zainab Jah), about 19, escapes to get a gun and join the army so she can kill men who attack her. She declares, “With a gun, no man can touch you.” Wife #3 (Pascale Armand) is pregnant, naïve, cried at the rape, but sees no way out.
Surprise that a play about a famous homosexual starts with a man and woman cavorting in bed. We see them waist up, she is nude. But we discover that they are just hotel servants, not the main attraction, who is gay and upper class in his tastes. That‘s Oscar Wilde, the playwright whose sense of entitlement probably helped blind him to the dangers of challenging the British upper class hypocrisy that, riven with homosexuality itself, just didn‘t like it displayed so openly. Not in 1895. So, in some ways, David Hare‘s very strong play is as much about class as about sexual choice. Class, of course, plays a role in other Hare plays.
This is one of those emotionally riveting plays that suddenly flips you over as you realize that everything you took for granted is not so. You are quite sure that David Harrower‘s story fits in with your beliefs about men‘s sexual abuse of young girl, until maybe it doesn‘t. Strongly acted by Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels. (Williams is so much better than her bland performance in “Cabaret,” that you don‘t think it‘s the same person.)
In Richard Bean‘s affecting “Toast,” workers in a British bread factory stick together to combat fatigue, danger, insecurity. Bean wrote the play out of his experiences working at a bread factory in Yorkshire when he was 18.
The men work with old machinery that might break down and cause the owner, who is doing no maintenance, to shift production elsewhere. Yet, they endure stoically the danger of getting hurt – someone‘s arm got crushed — because they need the work. We come to see that they also need each other.
“Echoes” is a powerful and intense play that explores the imperialist mindset as it compares the experiences of two women who lived 175 years apart in Ipswich, England, and were each swept up in the murderous rampage of godly imperialist killers. It won a Spirit of the Fringe award in Edinburgh last year and transferred to London.
A little weird, but Sherlock Holmes stories always are. A guy who wants a young employee to cut her hair. And to wear blue. He lives in a castle, of course. Maybe his wife is a lunatic. So the plot thickens. It‘s “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”
