In 1960, I was among a handful of college students who volunteered at the 125th Street offices of “The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South.” The sit-ins had started, southern sheriffs were brutalizing protesters, and King had been arrested and would be released on the intervention of President Kennedy. The committee had been organized in Harry Belafonte’s New York apartment and was run by Bayard Rustin, a pacifist and King‘s leading strategist. One of the “older” activist volunteers was Michael Harrington, 33, a writer who used his pen to help the campaign. Rustin was also the lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, which I attended.
Delicious surreal theatrical games are featured in Tennessee Williams‘ Southern Gothic drama of brother and sister actors of a failed theater company where the characters in a play-within-a-play mirror the duo‘s real-life desperation.
Williams, the famous chronicler of Southern psychological disintegration, goes one better by giving the neurotic pair, Clare (Amanda Plummer) and Felice (Brad Dourif), a life as absurd as in the interior play. The actors are brilliant in the expression of their characters‘ neuroses.
Tiny white figures move over projected scenes on the high perpendicular wall of a former factory. The figures appear to catch and throw boxes from a conveyer belt. The video changes from the factory to a prison to a road with speeding cars that seem to run over the curious shapes.
The music is clanging, electronic, repetitive, sometimes with an Asian or African feel. The white forms scamper over the wall, sometimes appearing to be at 90-degree angles to the ground. We can see thin black ropes that keep the spectacular gymnastic dancers defying gravity.
The Gerald Clayton Sextet suffused the sultry Nice air with cool melodic jazz. Logan Richardson on sax did trills, and Thomas Crane on drums hit cymbals that matched Clayton‘s piano‘s high notes. Joe Sanders‘ bass maintained the mood.
This was classic jazz, a bit of swing, and everything had a resolution. The musicians are sophisticated New Yorkers. There were no screeches or wails to assault the ears or the senses.
I haven‘t seen such a clever, funny, outrageous satirical play in years as this work by Nell Benjamin! It‘s London in 1879. A very stodgy club of naturalists and explorers is having its annual meeting in a Victorian townhouse whose every inch of wood-paneled walls is decorated with tusks and stuffed animal heads and paintings of illustrious members. At the back, center, is a bar. (The explorer-spoofing set is by Donyale Werle.)
This rather conventional play by J.B. Priestley (famous for “An Inspector Calls”) occurs and premiered in London in 1935, a period of economic crisis. It’s not brilliant, but it is engrossing. Briggs and Murrison, a London dealer in aluminum, is going through a rough patch. Trade is devastated by the conflict in Europe. A cable from the company man in Ottawa says embargo is certain on everything but low-grade sheet metal. Murrison has gone into the country seeking orders to save the company from collapse. Jim Cornelius (Alan Cox) is in the office trying to stave off the creditors.
Susan Sontag was a precocious, smart, self-involved writer whose literary canvas was herself. Let me add the word “pretentious,” which seems best expressed by the white streak in her dark hair which in this dramatic memoir directed by Marianne Weems is exaggerated to a thick snowy patch.
The play, based on her diaries and edited by her son David Rief, is essentially the young Sontag (Moe Angelos) conversing with older one (also Angelos) projected on a large screen. (The various projections by Austin Switser are brilliantly done.) The play is fascinating as a psychological if not a literary portrait.
Imagine a Shakespeare play set to 1940s big band swing. What could go wrong?
Daniel Sullivan‘s production of “The Comedy of Errors” at the Delacorte is a smashing, charming, cool, jazzy production that leaves the story a bit in the dust.
One wonders what happens when some of Shakespeare‘s less significant works are produced without emphasis on the poetry of the iambic pentameters. In this case, the abbreviated (cut to 90 minutes) story of twins lost in a shipwreck and then reunited seems to disappear. The fun is in the 40s jazz and mafiosi characters. That is not to be minimized. This show is a delight.
Dan Gordon‘s bittersweet memoir about a Belfast shipyard comes alive through the stunning performances of Gordon and Michael Condron as two pals and workers, Davy and Geordie.
Gordon and Condron also create numerous other characters, laborers and bosses, in a play inspired by Gordon‘s father‘s years after World War II building ships at the huge Harland and Wolff plant.
Sue Mengers (Bette Midler) was the kind of person who sucked up to those above her and had contempt for those below. A perfect fit for Hollywood, where the title, “I‘ll Eat You Last,” refers to an affectionate comment by a cannibal, in, as she describes it, “a cannibal love story.” Think about it.
Her story, in fact, shows how those whose careers she helped dropped her when it was convenient. But they were all playing the same game, so you can‘t really feel sorry for her.
“The Last Cyclist” is fascinating in its conception and existence as a satirical political cabaret put on in 1944 by prisoners of the Theresienstadt concentration camp 40 miles from Prague. While suffering from unspeakable hunger, grueling forced labor and other horrors, inmates presented original plays for their fellows to see late nights in building attics.
Bertolt Brecht‘s 1944 play with music – almost a chamber opera – is an ironic parody about selflessness and greed. As the narrator puts it, “Terrible is the temptation to do good.” Classic Stage director Brian Kulick helms a strong production laced with Brecht‘s irony, colored by caricatures and riven by strong performances. In his conception, the plays begins at the turn of the last century and ends with the collapse of Soviet communism.
Sometimes Tina Packer‘s “Women of Will” seems like a bravura performance by a very talented actress. Other times it is a university course by a master teacher. In fact, it is both, an artistically and intellectually stimulating event. I delighted in Packer‘s ability to shift seamlessly from characters, who are in turn supine, ingratiating, furious and sultry. At the same time I was fascinated by her revelation of how Shakespeare changed in his development of major women characters.
There is a fake character in Nora Ephron‘s “Lucky Guy.” She is a foul-mouthed Newsday reporter, a woman whose cursing outdoes all the men. Such a female reporter didn‘t exist. Quite the reverse: some male reporters at Newsday were so obscenely abusive to the women, that they protested, and the paper‘s editor intervened. How could Ephron get this part of her story so wrong?
George W. Bush’s victory over Texas Governor Ann Richards was a tragedy of national dimensions. We know the Bush presidential disaster that stepping stone led to. But this production focuses on what Texas lost when Richards left office. Not only did she have better politics, but she was a superior human being. She made it on her own, without a “silver foot” in her mouth. And she cared about ordinary people, not the 1%.
Old time clowns are modern again. At least when they are as sophisticated and clever as Bill Irwin and David Shiner. There‘s a lot about “Old Hats” that seems pretty new. The techno projections, for example. Top-hatted Irwin and Shiner appear confused as they wander in a tunnel, smoke swirling around them. We see it on video. It‘s telling us that technology will be a theme of their very witty performance– sometimes technology gone wrong. Or misunderstood.
A hit Broadway musical in favor of intellectualism and rebellion, that‘s a welcome surprise in New York where this season‘s best new musicals about people who challenged the system – “Chaplin” and “Scandalous” (about Aimee Semple McPherson) — had short runs. Though of course, this production comes from London and it‘s a fantasy, not about real events. Well, not about overtly political events. But it‘s about stultifying intellectual repression. From the point of view of children! If you have kids, take them. And if you don‘t, go anyway. It’s a play for adults, too.
It‘s uncanny how Shakespeare could describe coup politics in modern-day Africa. Of course, what director Gregory Doran shows in this brilliant Royal Shakespeare Company production is that ambition, demagoguery, the manipulation of masses and betrayal of ones comrades haven‘t changed much since the era of Julius Caesar 2000 years ago or the treachery of kings and rivals closer to the Bard‘s time. Doran ingeniously sets the play in another continent prone to violent political upheavals.
It was the worst of times. Lillian Hellman aptly called it “Scoundrel Time.” It was the early 1950s. Joe Gilford‘s play dramatizes the attack on free thought and free speech orchestrated by ruthless politicians who built careers by destroying the lives of actors, writers, directors and their families. It‘s based on what happened to his parents, Jack and Madeleine Lee Gilford, victimized by the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC).
Lanford Wilson‘s play is a sharp, funny, charming look at romance, with a bitter-sweet sauce. Its hero leaps over barriers of religion, age, and economic and social status. Just what New York theater-goers want. It‘s one of the best revivals of the season, directed by Michael Wilson with just right mix of humor and nostalgia.
To be brilliant at playing a human is one thing, but to pull off a tour de force portraying a speaking animal is quite another feat. Kathryn Hunter is an extraordinary actress, and her performance in Kafka‘s Monkey will be remembered as one of the best of this and many seasons.
Jesse Eisenberg‘s play about the importance of family to which a holocaust survivor clings takes life through the fine, transformative acting of Vanessa Redgrave. The story itself is a pas de deux, or better, a psychological duel between Maria (Redgrave), who was 4 years old when the holocaust in Poland took her parents and siblings, and David (Eisenberg), a not terribly successful New York writer who comes to visit his second cousin in a Polish town near the north coast. Director Kip Fagan makes us believe that the most unlikely events we see really happened.
A charmer and good fun, albeit dated, Anita Loos ˜ 1946 play tracks the lives of the denizens of a bar in Newark, NJ. It centers around the transformation of Addie Bemis (a very charming Mary Bacon), who starts out as a rather tight prudish young woman, and ends up singing on the bar. The magic ingredient, of course, is love.
I met Benazir Bhutto in 1987 when she was leading the Pakistan People‘s Party in a national parliamentary campaign. I traveled with her on a motorcade in Sailkot, in the Punjab, northern Pakistan, where she was mobbed by supporters. From the top of the reporters’ minivan in front of hers, I could see crowds along the way shouting, chanting, some holding photos of her, young men dancing to loud piped music in front of the crawling vehicles, flags waving. Women were watching from atop one and two-story buildings along the route. It took hours instead of 20 minutes to get to a stadium where she addressed a mass rally.
David Ives is a master of subtle intellectual comedy. We saw that most recently in “Venus in Fur,” a feminist reimagining/twisting of the Sacher-Masoch classic, and a few years back in “Is He Dead?,” adapted from a Mark Twain story about an artist who fakes death to elevate the price of his paintings. But earlier, he had written a series of one-acts that were presented twenty years ago and that we are lucky to see again. John Rando‘s direction is spot-on, letting no grass grow between the laughs. The actors are an ensemble and connect as if they were used to finishing each other’s sentences.
