Harold Pinter liked to play games in his plays, teasing the audience, suggesting facts and realities that might or might not be true. He does this in “No Man‘s Land,” written in 1974. It is an acerbic commentary on human nature, with a particular aim at the jugular of the literary set. Pinter‘s prickly style is well served by director Sean Mathias and finely acted by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, with well-honed support from Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley. If you like intellectual diversions and mysteries, this play is for you.
The setting is a villa, in a strange living room enclosed in round walls of gray squares, almost like a tomb, unusually bare except for a silver bar, a blue/gray rug, a few chairs. Spooner (Ian McKellen) and Hirst (Patrick Stewart), men in their sixties, are getting drunk.
Beckett‘s metaphor for the human condition, of people clutching to each other in the face of man‘s inhumanity to man, turns absurdity into tragedy and occasionally black comedy. Director Sean Mathias has staged, almost choreographed, a dazzling cast in a haunting performance of a poignant, classic play.
Gogo, diminutive of Estragon – that‘s French for tarragon — with bulbous nose and scraggly hair, is portrayed by the excellent Ian McKellen with a Lancashire accent. His jerky, unsteady motions show a man in physical decay.
Didi, diminutive of Vladimir, with a worn suit jacket that may reflect a lost self-image, is played with subtlety by Patrick Stewart, still more in charge of himself, still aware of the irony of their situation. He tells Gogo, “You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited.”
A woman is trapped in a system, caught in a machine (machinal, from the French of or pertaining to machines), that turns her into a victim any way she looks, whether she accepts her plight or fights it. Sophie Treadwell‘s powerful and inventive play is a feminist treatise about women forced into marriage and then self-destruction, because they have no alternatives. It‘s a stunning drama, given a rich, subtle, moving performance by British actor Rebecca Hall in this Roundabout Theatre Company revival.
Treadwell, who most of us haven‘t heard of (why not?), an extraordinary sophisticated woman for her time or any time, wrote this play in 1928, and it was produced at the time in New York to rave reviews and not seen since on Broadway. It was inspired by the execution that year of Ruth Snyder for the murder of her husband. Treadwell, a journalist who covered murder trials and was also a playwright, wonders and imagines why.
This early Brecht play, first staged in 1926, is disappointing. It presages some of the elements of his later works, especially the Mother Courage character who here is Widow Begbick (the good Justin Vivian Bond as a modern red head with a sinful low voice), who owns a beer wagon that follows the soldiers to serve up brew and herself.
And there are the soldiers, victims of imperialism, which has turned them into mindless fighting machines.
But though the elements are often engaging, due in large part to the colorful staging by Brian Kulick and the talent of the actors, the play somehow doesn‘t hold together.
The nuggets of Brecht‘s ideas, opposition to war and the stupidity and brutality of the imperialist military, are there. But it doesn‘t have the wit and sharpness of his later productions. It seemed forced and lacks subtlety.
I don‘t like modern pop/rock music; it lacks musicality. But this hip-schmaltzy staging of work that Burt Bacharach wrote from the late 1950s through the 1980s makes one take another look at the new inflections.
It features multi-talented 20- and 30-something performers playing, singing and circulating in a production that is infectious and charming.
This political circus is quite out of the ordinary. It is in the tradition of the great political clown, Charlie Chaplin. “Cirkopolis,” by Cirque Éloize of Montreal, is a commentary on the metropolis that is filled with political symbolism. Call it a circus for our times.
The twelve performers are acrobats, contortionists and jugglers, but instead of familiar circus space, they inhabit offices and factories. The decorative themes are gray clothes and cogs and wheels representing the soul-destroying place of modern work. We see Greek statues — uplifting culture — and, behind them, the cogs and wheels of a factory — dreary reality.
Let‘s start with saying that rock and roll was never my style, which favors jazz. That said, Mary Bridget Davies does an excellent job of channeling Janis Joplin who became a rock star in the late 1960s.
She begins remembering her childhood in Fort Arthur, Texas, in an era where rock and roll, blues, R&B were flourishing, and takes us through her musical development, especially playing tribute to the singers who influenced her, Odetta, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, who are played by four black singers. (Interesting that the influences on this southern white women were all black.)
If you haven‘t seen Mark Rylance glide across the floor in fast tiny steps which, if it isn‘t a dancer‘s couru, makes you think he is on wheels, you have missed the funniest bit of stage business I can readily recall.
The exceptional Rylance, playing Olivia in this all-male production of Shakespeare‘s comedy of mistaken identities, gives a bravura performance, petulantly regal and flirtatious, a lady truly overwhelmed by love. You will never see the show without remembering him in the role. Though you don‘t for a minute believe that Rylance is a real woman. The casting makes the play a bit hokey, but still a lot of fun.
Mark Rylance‘s portrayal of the malevolent Richard III is a complex and original psychological study. Let‘s take this beyond what was expected of power seekers in Elizabethan times, that they might be rapacious and without morals. (Plus ça change, as they say.) Shakespeare doesn‘t just assume the pathology of 15th-century English politics, but wonders what is wrong with a man who plots to kill everyone, including family members, that stand between him and the throne.
Jack O‘Brien‘s staging of “Macbeth” at Lincoln Center puts the emphasis on “stage.” The physical production is minimal and stunning, with high backdrop curtains painted with noble shields and lighting aimed like lasers at key figures or diffused to bathe actors in shadows. There is fine pageantry and music.
Unfortunately, Ethan Hawke, as the ruthless, power-hungry noble who seeks the throne of Scotland, forgets he is on a stage, where one needs presence, and not in the movies, where it‘s okay to be laid-back. Hawke speaks too low and too fast, and sometimes even mumbles. He appears timid, frightened, even distraught, with the demeanor of a drug addict.
Julie Taymor‘s extravagant sets and staging gloriously overwhelm this production. A billowing sheet the size of the stage is lowered, and the brilliant Kathryn Hunter, who plays a red-headed Puck, drops through a middle opening. Scampering woodland animals – deer and foxes – wear heads that made one think, “Lion King!”
Fairy Queen Titania (a charming Tina Benko) descends from the ceiling in white and glittery wings, complete with lights that make her truly ethereal. Candles flicker, jewels sparkle; there‘s never been a Fairy Queen who looked like this.
Harold Pinter‘s play of modern sexual mores shows men and women betraying each other with casual composure, as if they were discussing a love match at a tennis game instead of the love game in their lives.
The play discourses on the civilized trappings of personal infidelity. The triangle is a writer, his wife and the writer‘s literary agent. Three friends — members of the literary-artistic intelligentsia — engage in sexual unfaithfulness with such sang froid, that they ask after lovers’ spouses and children, and one has lunch with the friend he is cuckolding, while suggesting that any other behavior would be downright uncivilized.
Fiona Shaw is one of the grand actors of our time who could pull drama out of reading a phone directory. Her “Medea” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2002 was at once elevating and chilling.
Her latest appearance at BAM marries the same artistry and fancy to tell a story about a mariner‘s shooting of an albatross and its awful effect on the boat and its crew. Her text is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by the early 19th-century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
My ancestors have been in America since the early seventeenth century. And for the first two hundred and forty-four years we never had a problem finding a job, he says with pointed irony. But since 1863 it’s been hell.
So begins August Wilson‘s elegant, tough, poetic memoir of his life in America. It is smartly created by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who knew Wilson and acted in many of his plays.
This projection/play by the Canadians Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon is fascinating as an artistic piece, gorgeous as staging and projection. Unfortunately, the plot and text are rather silly. Perhaps it should have been done as a dance theater piece, without voices.
Think of the fall as the prelude to the end of life, the difficult bumbling interval preceding finality and death. It‘s a time that presents more misery than joy in Samuel Beckett‘s “All That Fall,” a 1957 BBC radio play being staged with exquisite tenderness by Trevor Nunn at 59E59 Theater. But there‘s also a quirky and bizarre sense that makes you marvel for a moment at peoples‘ ability to hang on and assert themselves even as their physical beings are failing. “Fall” here is the verb.
This production is anchored in brilliant performances by Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, among Britain‘s best actors, as the frail married couple who retain just enough energy to flail and thrash at each other. Old life is passing, new life is budding, or is it nipped in the bud?
This is a play for which the word “riveting” was invented. It’s got action, history and ideas, stimulating on all accounts. It‘s the early 1980s in Mississippi. Two low-life whites, whose prime amusements are drink and drugs, have raped a 10-year-old black girl they came upon carrying groceries on a lonely rural road. They leave her for dead. But in the hospital, she identifies them, and they are arrested.
John Grisham graduated from the University of Mississippi Law School in 1983 and practiced criminal law as a trial lawyer for about a decade. The play, based on his 1989 novel, was inspired when he was at a courthouse where a 12-year-old told a jury how she had been beaten and raped.
Terrence Rattigan‘s “The Winslow Boy” is a British period piece that is still eminently satisfying. Written in 1946 and set in 1912 to 14, it is based on a true story. A father in an upper class household – at least upper class enough to afford a full-time servant – gets a letter informing him that his son has been accused of purloining a five-pound postal order from another boy at the Royal Naval College. He believes the son that the accusation is unjust and must immediately make a moral choice that could risk the family‘s financial status.
Cherry Jones is acknowledged as one of the best actresses on the American stage today. I first saw her in 1998 in “Pride‘s Crossing” at Lincoln Center where she played a woman from childhood to dotage with no change in make-up, making you believe the age of the characters with the expressions and twists of her face and the angles and rhythms of her body and walk.
She dominates this play in a portrayal of a character who she makes at once sympathetic, annoying and absurd.
Dee Dee Bridgewater is an accomplished jazz singer who recreates Billie Holliday so expertly you‘d swear she had channeled her. Musically. But the play written and directed by Stephen Stahl is so hokey and histrionic that it gets in the way of the artistry. Stahl has been working on this production and trying to bring it to New York for years, decades. But perhaps his emotional connection overwhelmed his artistic sense.
The play shows Billie in London where her manager (a too-laid-back David Ayers) is trying to steer her sober as she rehearses with a band for a bet-the-house performance to salvage her reputation so she can return to work in New York.
I think the Elevator Repair Service could dramatize the telephone book.
I went to its performance of “Arguendo” — it‘s the legal term for the sake of argument – with a soupçon of curiosity leavened with “ok, show me.” After all, the play text was the transcript of the Supreme Court arguments in the 1991 case of Barnes v. Glen Theatre. It was a challenge to the Indiana law that banned nude dancing in clubs. The law said dancers had to wear pasties and G-strings.
Horton Foote‘s “The Old Friends” reminds one of a Tennessee Williams play or a Faulkner novel. Director Michael Wilson in fact is a Williams scholar. Wilson knows how to direct Foote‘s dysfunctional Southern family yarn to make it engrossing and keep it from descending into soap opera.
This 1897 play about marriage and the relations between the sexes is a fluffy confection. It‘s part of a group called the “Pleasant Plays.” It skewers male chauvinism, social snobbery and even rigid feminist ideology which falls before true love.
Gripping, disturbing, unsettling, this picture of Robert Mugabe, the despotic president of Zimbabwe, depicts a psychopath who is haunted by the spirit of a man he killed, a fellow fighter in the armed movement of the 1970s to oust the white minority that ruled Rhodesia.
The play was written by British writer Fraser Grace, who was inspired by newspaper accounts that Mugabe, depressed, had sought treatment from a white psychiatrist.
The musical Annie is based on the comic strip by Harold Gray, a reactionary who opposed unions, welfare and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But book writer Thomas Meehan has turned a right-wing cartoon into a pro-New Deal musical where FDR has a cameo role. Gray would be turning in his grave.
