At a time in the U.S. when most films seem made for retarded 13-year-olds, this revival of David Mamet’s 1988 Speed the Plow directed by Neil Pepe, is right on target. It’s a satire on Hollywood moguls on the make for money and success, which they see strewn along the paths of titillating sex and violence. Hey, how else to get a lunch table at the town’s favored watering hole?
Then a sweet, wide-eyed naive young woman who is working at the studio as a temp is called in to do some secretarial tasks. She ends up challenging Bobby to make a film that matters. Why should it all be garbage? she insists.
It might seem odd at first to compare them, but “Beast”, a brutal, surreal black comedy about the Iraq war, has something in common with “The Files”, a stunning, sardonic docudrama about the repression of cultural freedom by the Polish communist secret police.
They are theatres of the absurd, though in the Poles‘ case, the tales they tell are very literally true. Both plays, staged off-Broadway in New York, are attacks on criminal acts of governments.
For decades, playwrights writing realistically about the black experience in the United States could not get their works produced, black directors didn’t get jobs, and even the most successful performers were confined to roles as servants in plays about whites.
First produced in 1975, The First Breeze of Summer by Leslie Lee was one of the early U.S. theatre works about black life.
Broken dreams lie behind the grit of the elderly woman at the centre of this play about the tribulations of being black and female in the U.S. South. Gremmar — as her grandsons call her — raised three children by different fathers, none a husband, each offering a hope that was dashed on the rocks of racial prejudice or the sexual double standard.
The scene is 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria. Film projections show people racing frantically to escape the thousand troops who have surrounded and invaded Kalakuta, the communal living space and recording studio of musician-songwriter, Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
In a handful of years, Fela had become a worldwide music phenomenon and trenchant political critic of the regime.
How could the songs of one man be deemed such a political threat that the president, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, seeks to destroy him so brutally?
FELA!, a stunning U.S. musical theatre piece premiering in New York, tells the story using Fela’s own radical lyrics set to the Afrobeat he created out of jazz, African rhythms, funk and reggae. The play is a stirring musical indictment of decades of misrule by Nigeria’s thuggish military dictators
The suave hero is racing over moors, pursued by a small bi-plane, while on a hill to the side, a familiar figure watches. It is Alfred Hitchcock, who regularly shows up in his mystery thrillers. Except this isn‘t cinema, it‘s theater, and old Alfie is a tiny Indonesian-style shadow puppet. It‘s a scene from Maria Aitken‘s enormously clever production of Patrick Barlow‘s parody of Hitchcocks “The 39 Steps.” You‘ve never seen anything like it.
It is 1935, just the right year for a film noir spy drama actually made by Hitchcock in that pre-war time and centered around a devilish villain whose accent becomes more Germanic as his malevolent plot is revealed.
In a year when race is an undercurrent in America‘s presidential election, it is fitting that the smash musical of the Broadway season is “South Pacific,” a play first presented nearly 60 years ago on the theme of intolerance.
Based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener, who served in the region during World War II, the play turns on the anti-Polynesian prejudice of the heroine, young Navy nurse Nellie Forbush (a vibrant Kelli O‘Hara), who is posted to a war-time island base of the U.S. Navy.
While “South Pacific” has been celebrated around the world for its joyous, clever, entertaining musical numbers, and director Bartlett Sher‘s staging is exhilarating, it‘s worth looking at how the show presents its message.
Madame Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya returns to Russia from Paris, where her finances have been exhausted by the extravagance of her lover and life style. She is devoted to the family estate, especially the cherry orchard, and wants to save it from a threatening debt.
Fast forward about a century from Anton Chekhov to American playwright A.R. Gurney. With the help of a smooth, light-hearted production by director Mark Lamos, Gurney weaves the Chekhov story into “Buffalo Gal,” an often wry tale of Amanda (Susan Sullivan), who is drawn to her childhood home but has to deal with economic realities.
Edwina, played by de’Adre Aziza, has her eye on the Youth (Daniel Breaker).
She informs him, And after we marry and you’ve got a job in the corporate sector, you’ll buy me a sprawling two-story house fulla African sculptures from tribes we know nothing about, kente cloth couch covers, and Malcolm X commemorative plates lining the walls of our airy, peach-coloured breakfast nook?
Who says leftists don’t have a sense of humour? Welcome to Passing Strange, a witty, inventive satire on Broadway about growing up, rebellious, bourgeois and black in Los Angeles and leaving before 20 to explore the radical corners of Europe.
As Sen. Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic presidential nomination next month, Thurgood on Broadway takes audiences back to this earlier iconic and groundbreaking figure in U.S. civil rights history.
Playwright George Stevens, Jr., director Leonard Foglia, and actor Laurence Fishburne bring life to the musings of Thurgood Marshall, the first black member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
He had fears and doubts, but braved life-threatening encounters with Southern racists as he dedicated himself to overturning the legal structures of segregation in the United States.
Moving back through time, he recalls incidents that seared his conscience.
The Adding Machine (1923) and Top Girls (1983) are separated by 60 years, but both used stylised techniques to portray workers as willing slaves of capitalism. That system has destroyed them, but they haven’t the consciousness to know it. And they absorb attitudes that are racist and sexist.
Both productions are currently on stage in New York. The earlier work, written by U.S. playwright Elmer Rice, has been turned into a chamber opera by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt, and given a stunning, haunting production at an off-Broadway house. The British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, in a Broadway revival by James MacDonald, features compelling performances by major stage actors.
On this 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that for the United States was the apogee of opposition to the war in Vietnam, two new Off Broadway plays explore divergent ways that U.S. citizens protested — and ponder the best way to contest a senseless war.
The Conscientious Objector by Michael Murphy describes the personal and political conflict faced by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. over his decision to speak out publicly against the war.
Something You Did by Willy Holtzman examines the decision of a stand-in for Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, to bring the war home by participating in a violent action that left a bystander dead.
Since the 1950s, views in the United States have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women — or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages.
Four Broadway plays spanning those decades show one prominent downside: marriage as a smoldering cauldron of unfulfilled sexual desire or betrayal.
The U.S. works are about small-town Middle America: the Midwest, Mississippi, Oklahoma. They are William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County. The British revival is Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, about working class London.
It’s not surprising that ethics — or more precisely, a lack thereof — has taken centre stage during this New York theatre season. Playwrights have trained their sights on the morally challenged West, hoping perhaps to get theatregoers to muse on the connections between public and private evil.
Broadway dissects corporate ethics in The Farnsworth Invention, political wrongdoing in November and personal morals in The Seafarer.
Anyone who has watched television would be fascinated by the story of its creation by Philo Farnsworth, a genius inventor who grew up in Idaho in the 1920s — and of its theft by David Sarnoff, the President of NBC.
In 1986 I went to Prague to report on the dissident movement. Among the leaders I wanted to see was Jiri Dienstbier, who had been a reform Communist and radio journalist and commentator during the 1968 “Prague Spring.” He’d lost his job, because he spoke out on the air against the Soviet military intervention. After he helped found the human rights group, Charter 77, he‘d spent three years in prison and then worked as a boiler technician in the subway.
He had been hard to reach. The phone company the month before had informed him half-apologetically that the city needed his line “in the public interest.” I left a note under his door, and he phoned that evening, asking if I wanted to go to an outdoor rock concert. We spent the next afternoon in the surreal setting of a sculptor‘s rock quarry that had been lent to a dissident jazz club.
It all came back to me when I saw Tom Stoppard‘s “Rock ˜N‘ Roll,” on Broadway, directed by Trevor Nunn, about Czech dissidents and the government officials who repressed them. Jan (Rufus Sewell) protests a crackdown against rock musicians, is jailed and then spends a dozen years working in a bakery.
As the 1994 genocide in Rwanda slips into the dark hole of history, the U.S. playwright J.T. Rogers’ The Overwhelming reminds one how it happened and how both the moral, the complicit and the cynical in the West were present in the killing fields.
In Rogers’ fictional story, a U.S. family visits Rwanda in 1994. Jack, a professor, accompanied by wife Linda and son Geoffrey, is researching a book about grassroots activists and comes to interview his old college roommate, Joseph, a Tutsi who runs a children’s AIDS clinic. But Joseph has disappeared.
Plays show western complicity in Nigeria and Rwanda violence.
Dec 1, 2007
Murderous conflicts in Africa are dramatized in two American plays off-Broadway that vividly call up the clashes in the oil region of Nigeria and the Rwanda genocide of over a decade ago. In both cases playwrights show inter-communal violence heightened by western interests‘ actions or neglect.
The one-man “Tings dey happen” by Dan Hoyle is most successful in presenting the characters of the Niger Delta, from militants demanding their share of oil wealth to the self-serving American ambassador and expatriates. “The Overwhelming,” by J.T. Rogers, also uses the “American visitor” device, though the personal stories seem trivial in the context of events.
New York stages are filled with strong women asserting themselves forcefully in musicals and classic comedy — forms that speak to the popular culture.
Five current hit plays that depict strong women are Legally Blonde, Avenue Q, Xanadu, George Bernard Shaw’s classic, Pygmalion and Curtains.
Let’s start with the young college girls in Legally Blonde, a stage remake of a popular 2001 film that was part of the post-feminist girl power movement, when young women were fighting a men are what matter backlash that threatened their chances for career and independence.
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.
The suave hero is racing over moors, pursued by a small bi-plane, while on a hill to the side, a familiar figure watches. It is Alfred Hitchcock, who regularly shows up in his mystery thrillers. Except this isn‘t cinema, it‘s theater, and old Alfie is a tiny Indonesian-style shadow puppet. It‘s a scene from Maria Aitken‘s enormously clever production of Patrick Barlow‘s parody of Hitchcocks “The 39 Steps.” You‘ve never seen anything like it.
from Paris, where her finances have been exhausted by the extravagance of her lover and life style. She is devoted to the family estate, especially the cherry orchard, and wants to save it from a threatening debt. 
Murderous conflicts in Africa are dramatized in two American plays off-Broadway that vividly call up the clashes in the oil region of Nigeria and the Rwanda genocide of over a decade ago. In both cases playwrights show inter-communal violence heightened by western interests‘ actions or neglect.
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.
