The mystery of Samuel Beckett’s play about two down-at-the-heels hobos who watch an overbearing master abuse a pathetic slave is the division of the audience into those who laugh and those who don‘t.
Simon Cato (Gavin Lawrence) in his gold and purple stripes is cheeky, witty, a charmer as a jockey. Step back. This is 1861 and he is black; cheeky translates to impudent, (a challenge to power). A witty black man probably had no translation. Colonel Wiley Johnson (Chris Mulkey), who has hired Simon to ride his racing horse, pleads, Will you try and behave like a slave for just a few minutes!
August Wilson’s powerful, moving play conjures up a mood that is both poetic and surreal, though on the face of it, it is completely naturalistic. Perhaps it’s the distance of time, nearly a century ago, 1911, when blacks, only 50 years away from the start of the Civil War, were living on the border between slavery and freedom. Or it could be the ethereal staging by director Bartlett Sher, who excellently follows Wilson’s intent to turn the characters into symbols of their kind as well as real people. Sher starts that by showing the characters first in silhouette.
Exit the King is Ionesco’s witty satire on the corruption of those in power, given a tongue-in-cheek staging by Neil Armfield with a bravura performance by Geoffrey Rush as King Beringer, the man with only 90 minutes to live. Berenger loves parties. Well, the party’s over. Or about to be. The party, of course, is life.
I have never seen anything like the three acrobatic contortionists who twisted and bent to the sound of Indian music under the Cirque de Soleil tent on Randall’s Island. Their movements created living sculptures that shifted and held and then moved to another pose. Clad in colorful, patterned skin-tight leotards (costumes by Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt), they were stunning. Memorable.
What moves the creative and intellectual mind? Where does beauty lie? Those questions animate “33 Variations,” the provocative play written and directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring Jane Fonda. The production doesn‘t quite reach the level of intellectual stimulation to which it aspires, but it deserves plaudits for dealing with ideas as well as sentiments.
How can you satirize torture and torturers? If you’re comically stinging playwright Christopher Durang, you stick pretty close to the truth till weirdness and absurdity overtakes the brutality. In this brilliantly funny play, Durang blunts the edge of what might appear to be gruesomely violent by turning reality into farce. He gets a lot of help from director Nicholas Martin who transforms right-wing psychopaths into figures of comedy.
Stanley (Hunter Foster) was an investment banker, a master of leveraged buyouts. As Foster tells it in song and dance, he was an overachiever of insider trading, moving a step up the ladder of legalized crime. Then, at 42, he had a massive heart attack. And died.
Now he’s the conductor on the train in this whimsical pastiche by John Weidman (often clever lyrics by Michael Korie, tuneful music by Scott Frankel) about people on the way to the netherworld – via a New York subway car with silvery benches — instructed to remember the best moments of their lives. It’s where they will spend eternity.
Take an environmentalist attacked by thug hired by a corrupt New Jersey mayor and thrown into a vat of that state’s famous pollutants so that he comes out dripping with green sludge. Add a blind librarian who, when she return books to the shelf, lets go in mid-air so that they fall to the floor. She also writes porn, samples of which we hear. Nothing’s better than a clever political satire, and The Toxic Avenger is the funniest I have seen in many a year.
Tina Howe’s bittersweet look at a tough, smart, legally blind and aging painter railing at the indignities of being warehoused in a Riverdale nursing home is sensitive and often funny. Jane Alexander shines as the painter, Catherine Sargent, who feels suffocated, blocked from her past life and surrounded by people who’ve gone senile.
Above her bed is a print of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, the Édouard Manet painting of a nude women having a picnic with two fully clothed men. Sargent explains to the family of her new roommate, the spirited but slightly dotty Rennie Waltzer (Lynn Cohen), that putting a naked woman in public place in 1863 sounded a call for artistic freedom and paved the way for modern art.
The Classic Stage Company’s bold mounting of three Greek playwrights’ visions of one of the most famous ancient myths lurches from melodrama to vaudeville and gives audiences some diverting hours in the modern theater.
Three directors have taken on the task, Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas staging Agamemnon and Elekra and Paul Lazar helming Orestes. The contemporary translation and adaptation is by Anne Carson. A mostly expert cast moves through the dramas, with special praise deserved by Stephanie Roth Haberle for an in-your-face Klytaimestra, Steve Mellor as the to-the-manor born Agamemnon and then his brother Menelaos, and an astonishing Annika Boras as Elektra, who asserts a daughter’s revenge with studied passion.
A central theme of Arthur Miller‘s plays is morality, often personal morality in difficult times. All My Sons, produced in 1947, excoriated a man who sold faulty aviation equipment to the military during the war. The Crucible, staged in 1953, was his Salem witch trials commentary on McCarthyism. And a decade later, Miller was back to the theme with Incident at Vichy, a 1964 chilling and depressing look into peoples‘ psyches and morality in the time of the Holocaust. In each succeeding play, the times got tougher, moral choices more difficult.
Three men at a French home for World War I veterans are a wistful, sad lot living in a boring present and (some of them) fearing or hoping for a fanciful future. A little imagination goes a long way. Gérald Sibieyras‘ play, translated from the French by Tom Stoppard, has a slight plot but meaty characterizations by the excellent cast of this Keen Company production. Director Carl Foreman succeeds in warding off excessive sentimentality.
The score carries this sprightly if not perfect production of the classic 1950 musical comedy about a Salvation Army missionary who reforms a couple of hard-boiled but appealing gamblers. The book by Jo Swerling & Abe Burrows was based on The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown and Blood Pressure, two short stories by Damon Runyon, who gets stage credit via the opening scene of a writer typing Broadway Stories on an old Remington.
Sarah Brown, the engaging Kate Jennings Grant, is out to save some souls. Nathan Detroit (Oliver Platt) is committed to finding a place to run his floating crap game for the night. This is a show where a lot of joy washes over the audience in spite of the fact that the songs are over-miked and the talk scenes between the numbers don’t sparkle as much.
Lynn Nottage‘s tense, intense thriller about the horrors of rape in the Congo is guaranteed to leave a knot in your stomach. If you‘ve avoided reading the newspaper stories, you can catch up right here. The play aspires to be a modern version of Brecht‘s “Mother Courage.” “Plus ça change, plus c‘est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Could there be love under so much mean-spiritedness and cruelty? Was there something about this corner of rural Ireland that left so many inhabitants so bereft of human kindness? In Martin McDonagh’s first rate dark comedy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Aaron Monaghan gives a bravura performance as Cripple Billy, who desperately wants to be valued for himself and not by his infirmity.
But he must navigate the shoals of a town where most of those around him lack civility, much less compassion.
The mood is surreal in Richard Greenberg’s fast-paced, sharply acted, quirky drama of love twisted into domination. The setting is naturalistic enough – a wood dock back-dropped by cedars at a summer home across the lake from a Catskills hotel. But the witchy, controlling Eva Adler (a biting Mercedes Ruehl), who presides over the scene, could blot out the sun as she does the life of her daughter and her chances with young men who deign to wander over from the hotel. Ruehl as Mother Eva makes Mama Rose (Gypsy) look like a wimp.
A revival of this impressive dance-theater piece first presented in 1984, is a powerful, sensual, emotional evocation of man‘s trajectory from heaven to hell, from the innocence of joy to repression and brutality. The eleven dancers of the company are notably talented, able to bend their bodies to gracefully walk doubled over as animals or pre-humans in the scene of origins, to move and twist with grace, to fly upside-down on wires, to present faces as expressive as their bodies as they show the pinched and frightened visages of people under repression. It‘s a performance you will not forget.
As U.S. workers are fired by corporate executives who take multi-million-dollar bonuses, “Billy Elliot, The Musical” seems made to order for the current American stage. It is a call for solidarity against those in power. It‘s a very British class-conscious play, with workers raising their fists to a giant puppet of 1980‘s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It also tells a universal truth that political struggles must also defend personal freedom.
Tom Stoppard‘s adaptation of Chekov‘s “The Cherry Orchard” is the perfect companion piece to his 2002 Russian trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia.” The trilogy told about the formation and early activities of the 19th- century Russian revolutionaries who fought the aristocratic class headed by the Czar. Chekov‘s 1904 play describes the frivolous, aristocratic leisure class which hasn‘t a clue that it is being swept away by embryonic capitalists, while downtrodden workers and peasants wait in the background, ready to join up with Stoppard‘s radicals.
This is yet another Forbidden Broadway production in which the numbers are sometimes better than the musicals they satirize. And they are always on target about the shows and the theatrical culture. The performers, Christina Bianco, Jared Bradshaw, Gina Kreiezmar and Michael West, start out by introducing themselves and declaring, “We‘ll do twelve steps the Fosse way!” Here are some of my nutty favorites. Alas, you can‘t really get a sense of it without the music. (Check out the show‘s website for some songs.)
Con men make good anti-heroes. At a time when the country is focused on a spectacular one that cheated people of billions, it’s instructive to take a look at the genre. Pal Joey, the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart 1940 musical given a moody revival by director Joe Mantello at the Roundabout Theatre, is about a sleazy character on the make for money and success. Joey’s take was a lot smaller than Bernard Madoff’s, but the essential immorality of the character – and the con man’s ability to charm and persuade — is the same. The new book is by Richard Greenberg, based on the original by John O’Hara.
Personal demons rooted in a childhood traumatized by religion and repressed sexuality move this powerful play by Peter Shaffer, first staged in 1973. It is vividly directed by Thea Sharrock who brings an emotional intensity to the mysterious tale.
A troubled 17-year-old youth, Alan Strang (Daniel Radcliffe) is brought by a judge (Kate Mulgew) to the office of an overworked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital in southern England. He has blinded a stable of six horses. Slowly, through importuning, bribes of small gifts and even hypnotism, the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Richard Griffiths) gets him to see through his nightmares and tell what brought him to commit this horror.
Dec 31, 2008
Arthur Miller’s play about corporate corruption never goes out of fashion. As a theater device, he focused on a small factory owned by one man, but you can take this as a representation of what went on and what goes on when anything goes in business. Profits trump morals. The victims are all of us, which is what the title means. Simon McBurney’s production is smooth and riveting, with a cast that acts with the fluidity of an ensemble.
Dec 25, 2008
British playwright Harold Pinter died last night. He was a man committed to political freedom and did his part to promote it.
In 1990, I visited Turkey and learned about a dinner in his honor given by the U.S. ambassador in 1985 that left the host quite out of joint.
Pinter had gotten into a heated argument with one of the guests about torture in Turkey. U.S. Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé declared that such free discussion proved there was democracy in Turkey.
There can be lot of opinions about anything, he later remarked over coffee.
Not if you’ve got an electric wire hooked to your testicles, riposted Pinter.
