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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
Beth Leavel in the title role offers the only bright witty moments By Lucy Komisar “The characters are two dimensional and the plot is well worn,” says “the man in the chair” (Bob Martin). He‘s got it right. The nervous laughter from the audience is the kind that is elicited by TV sitcoms aimed at […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brandishing sticks topped with round brushes, the chimney sweeps do a tap dance atop a London row house, and audience spirits rise as high as that roof. When life-size toys in opera voices menace children who‘ve thrown a temper tantrum, one again sees vintage Matthew Bourne, co-director and co-choreographer of “Mary Poppins,” the new musical on Broadway. Alas, most of the production numbers don‘t reach those heights. (The co-choreographer is Stephen Mear.)
Not to say they aren‘t engaging. A dull park turns bright green with painted flowers. Statues come to life and dance (more Bourne). And officious bank officials in black morning coats bob and weave against a backdrop of columns and domed ceiling. That is all fine for Broadway, just not what we‘ve come to expect of subtly witty Bourne. Think entertainment, not artistry.
Tennessee Williams‘ play about corrupt power gets stunning performance.
The set is like a jungle: a New Orleans courtyard with large palms and an overhead trellis dripping with vines and blood-red flowers, and on the ground, poinsettias. In the middle of the garden is a Venus fly trap under glass. The genteel Violet Venable (Blythe Danner) used to feed it fruit flies that her son Sebastian ordered from a supplier in Florida. It is a metaphor for Violet and her son, who would consume and destroy people, and for the terrible eerily parallel vengeance their actions let loose. She shows it off casually when a visitor arrives.
Story is played out by inhabitants of a mental asylum.
In this gem of a play, thing are not what they seem, and what appears normal shares defining characteristics with what appears odd and eccentric. It shows how dissembling can be what middle and working class appearances communicate to onlookers.
Funny one-liners adorn thin plot about mounting of subversive play.
There‘s a new genre of plays that has appeared in the past few years. A combination of political theater and theater of the absurd, they are, for want of a better term, the Bush-Cheney plays. Among them currently are “Bush is Bad,” a musical parody, and “The Dick Cheney Holiday Spectacular,” a revue by the inimitable “Billionaires for Bush.” Add to that A.R. Gurney‘s shaggy dog comedy, “Post Mortem.”
Nathan Lane brings intensity to a Simon Gray revival.
This dark, well-made character study of a nasty, self-hating closet-gay British professor, takes place in 1971, the year Simon Gray‘s play was first produced in London. The theme fits into one of Gray‘s traditional subjects, the crises faced by middle-aged male intellectuals.
There‘s little to like about Butley (Nathan Lane), the man. He sloughs off his work and dismisses students who arrive for tutorials. He speaks in doggerel, showing his contempt for intelligence. He reserves his energy for envying those who‘ve made something of their talents. He is a miserable alcoholic. Lane‘s intensity aptly captures a man whose energies have no productive place to go.
Feminist or camp, the musical serves up wit, imagination and panache
The fascination of “Grey Gardens” is in its depiction of what happens when rich people lose their wealth. Wealthy eccentrics are cosseted while poor relatives are held in contempt. Edith Bouvier Beale (a stunning Christine Ebersole) is flakey but monied, and elegantly garbed. We find her amusing. When Ebersole plays her daughter, Edie Beale, some thirty years later, she is an oddball who bulges unattractively out of bag-lady garments, an object of ridicule and pity.
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.
In that tradition, New York stage voices are being raised against war in two revivals that clearly retain their relevance today.
The command that dismisses his assistant is Exit!
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. 
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.
When life-size toys in opera voices menace children who‘ve thrown a temper tantrum, one again sees vintage Matthew Bourne, co-director and co-choreographer of “Mary Poppins,” the new musical on Broadway. Alas, most of the production numbers don‘t reach those heights. (The co-choreographer is Stephen Mear.)
