Stage Voices

SHELAGH DELANEY: ‘A TASTE OF HONEY’ (EXTENDED TO OCT. 30--REVIEW FROM NEW YORK)

When Shelagh Delaney was 18, in 1958, she wrote A Taste Honey, now running at the Pearl Theatre, extended until October 30.  The play, an act of adolescent rebellion, integrates disparate issues and themes, from mothers to race; men to sex and motherhood to gays and abortion; from Shakespeare (“he said everything, didn’t he?) to theatre and movies (“mauling and muttering, can’t hear what they’re saying half the time. . . . ”). She had failed her 11-plus exams four times and spent her Saturdays at the movies, where she may have seen films like the ones mentioned or referred to in her play:  I was a Teenage Werewolf, The Ten Commandments, The Wizard of Oz, and Desire Under the Elms.  When the legendary director Joan Littlewood, who championed English working-class plays and Brechtian technique, read this “slice of life” (in a positive review, Harold Clurman used that descriptor), she said, “Delaney knows what she is angry about”—which was probably everything. But she is also comparing the author to John Osborne and the angry young men of British theatre.  Graham Green weighed in on this count, too, saying that A Taste of Honey has “all the freshness of Mr. Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and a greater maturity.”  

“A northern [English] sense of humor, lack of sentimentality, and robust approach” is how actress Lesley Sharp, who starred in the play in 2014, extemporizes on A Taste of Honey.  Professor Nadine Holdsworth, from the University of Warwick, calls the language: “quick, sharp, witty banter.”  When looking at footage or photos of Delaney, during this period, she seems knowing and well-mannered but slightly mischievous, too, impatient, or “restless,” as she would probably describe herself. She’s a large-eyed, soft-voiced perfect storm for a director like Austin Pendleton, who leads the current New York production of A Taste of Honey, because, on the page, she’s all sass and spunk and her lines move so fast. She forces Pendleton to keep up with her in his staging, the opinionated eighteen-year-old whose memory is like the NSA, and the actor’s director, with a penchant for British theatre.  They both win.

Delaney did not often allow her first play to be produced (she died in 2011) and her daughter had never seen a staged version until she was an adult. This may have helped the unsentimental drama become sentimentalized over the years, after having been a play in the UK and the U.S., a movie, and fodder for a musical standard:  Tony Richardson directed the New York production, as well as the classic, Bafta-winning film (for the movie, its screenplay, and the actresses), and he co-wrote the hit song, from which he never recouped royalties (he did not share credit; Bobby Scot and Ric Marlow did).  Many artists have recorded A Taste of Honey, including The Beatles, ​Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, and Herb Alpert (who uses a quick tempo similar to the one heard at the Pearl, where the tune is played onstage by a Beat Trilby-wearing jazz trio who remain on stage (they are guitarist Phil Faconti, trumpeter Max Boiko, with mute, and bassist Walter Stinson.  The lyrics to the song probably do not allude to Jo’s point of view, in ways that other popular songs, based on British dramatic material, did during the sixties and seventies, such as "Somewhere My Love" (Dr. Zhivago), "It Was a Good Time" (Ryan's Daughter), or Engelbert Humperdinck’s "Too Beautiful to Last" (Nicholas and Alexandra).  The repeated line in the song, "I will return," comes from and refers to the sailor who leaves Jo, the eighteen-year-old girl, and the young man on the boat is an enduring image from the film. The misty longing is momentary, though, and there is no serious consideration of his coming back—or for Jo to run after him.

The Brechtian impulse was lost as the play transitioned to New York and the screen, too. Richardson felt that Littlewood’s “policy of mixing working-class drama with pub vitality and vaudeville songs” did not integrate well in A Taste of Honey—he thought they made the play seem “coarse and forcedly jolly.”  He also believed that film could only be a realistic medium. The black-and-white film that emerged, despite its lower-class milieu, is an example of Free Style Cinema, and is expertly photographed by its founder, Walter Lassally, with “a minimum of equipment, real locations, and a natural, unmade-up look." Casting became immediately critical.  Rita Tushingham won the part of Jo, playing against the formidable Dora Bryan, and she was the right age; Joan Plowright, who starred in the role on Broadway, and won a Tony Award for it, was a world-renowned actress—but was thirty-one years old.  No need to feel bad for Plowright, though. Interestingly, Austin Pendleton, would write a comedy about her, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Kenneth Tynan, and Vivian Leigh, set while A Taste of Honey was entering popular culture.  The play is Orson's Shadow (2003). Welcome to the 1960s.

Delaney had written about what would matter to Americans during that decade, even though there wasn’t much chance to salvage Jo’s life in Manchester (Harry Feiner’s scenic design, at the Pearl, shows the roofs of the tenements in the city, as well as the dirty interior the two women inhabit).  Some might compare A Taste of Honey to another Broadway show, which premiered in 1959, also set along the fringes of show business, with a domineering mother and her new boyfriend, as well as a daughter who runs off with a young man. A Taste of Honey, however, is no Gypsy, even though it prefigures the Kander and Ebb musical (such as Cabaret), because Jo will never be able to beat the English social system. In fact, Delaney barely could get out herself and remained a Marxist.  Not that one producer didn’t try to fix the play’s structure, which actually is a problem with the work.  According to Tony Richardson, in his autobiography The Long-Distance Runner, Darryl Zanuck “was interested in me directing it . . . on one condition: ‘a happy ending’.  It has a happy ending—Jo is happy waiting for her baby to be born.” Zanuck: “That’s the point—the baby’s gotta die, and Mother and girl go off to a better life.”  Richardson said no, thank you.

Jo is encased in her class, and her happy ending would be a dubious one in The United States.  She does realize that there might be more elsewhere, but she makes fun of the book about her namesake when she says that her guide on having a baby sounds like Little Women.   Delaney also may be making a reference to A Member of the Wedding when she talks about going on her mother’s honeymoon: “Can’t I come with you?” Delaney regains her senses against the pipe dream of becoming an artist, like Louisa May Alcott or Carson McCullers.  She doesn’t allow the flower bulbs she has kept to blossom, and she won’t let Jo go to school to become an artist.  The audience sees the similarities between the mother, a “semi-whore” and daughter, and both are cynical (a quality of those who live in Salford, according to Delaney) and fatalistic: “Don’t think.  It doesn’t do you any good.” 

 

At the Pearl, Rachel Botchan, as Helen, is ready to dance, and Delaney provides her with asides, direct addresses to the audience, and songs.  When she retakes her rooms at the end of the play, however, she has become a destroyer and, we see how her daughter deserves to hate her.  Botchan deploys dainty savagery--and, even for those who know the play, this can seem unexpected. Impressive also is Rebekah Brockman, who gives us Jo’s poignant side, which would be expected.  However, despite the weight of the milieu, she allows Delaney’s wicked humor to come through in a way that lets theatregoers laugh out loud.  Brockman plays a scene with her gay roommate, Geoffrey (John Evans Reese, who does not rely on stereotypes), which centers on the idea that Jo’s father may have been unintelligent.  This is funny, suddenly, and it also shows how Delaney looks at issues from many angles, typically working from many tentative points of view. Bradford Cover plays Helen’s younger lover, a small-time Romeo ready to fly at a moment’s notice, a thin man starting a pot belly.  Jimmy, the sailor, is played by Ade Otukoya, who, at one point, is placed downstage center and seated, the action spinning around him.  He allows us to see what young love is—he may not be faithful, or truthful, but no one can say that Jo should not have become involved with him.

Alan Brien, writing in The Spectator, in the ‘50s, saw in A Taste of Honey “an adolescent contempt for logic or form or practicability upon a stage.” What he didn’t see was the challenge of putting a young woman’s gritty aesthetic on the stage, one that can make a very good contemporary play like Bachelorette, by Leslye Headland, recently seen at Walkerspace, in a good production, seem much more degenerate than A Taste of Honey (which is actually something Headland might agree with). Of course, the plays present two different worlds—postwar Britain and present-day, corporatized America, but many of the issues are the same, if not universal, and the feminism that Jo needed, seems to have been let down or erroneously redirected, if it is judged by Headland’s work. The screwed up, narcissistic young wedding-party crashers in Bachelorette are takers; Jo is a giver: “Blessings light upon you. If I had half a crown a day, I’d gladly give it to you.” This does not mean that Jo is naïve, which is how the women in Bachelorette might size her up. Actually, she is clear about her own mind. Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey in two weeks, in 1958, because she was angered by the insidious lives of those portrayed in drawing room comedies, specifically one by Terence Rattigan. She felt she could do better. May contemporary theatre find a Shelagh Delaney to do better for us and may her kind of anger continue to force the issue.

Highly Recommended.

Visit the Pearl Theatre at: http://www.pearltheatre.org/

© 2016 by Bob Shuman. All rights reserved.

Photos from the Pearl Theatre production.

Press: John Wyszniewski and Rachael Shearer at Blake Zidell & Associates.

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

‘MEASURE FOR MEASURE’ FROM THE DRILLING COMPANY (ONLY UNTIL 9/17)/ 'TROILUS AND CRESSIDA’ AT SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK)

   

Of all playwrights, Shakespeare is the one most associated with outdoor stages, ​and, perhaps, this has aided his survival for four hundred years.  American playwrights ​don’t typically think to commune outside like him, on pitch-black nights—they’re working too hard to get in theatres. Central Park, Riverside Park, Inwood Hill Park, Brooklyn's Carroll Park, Battery Park, Carl Schurz Park, and Brooklyn Bridge Park--and others inside and outside of the city--offer performance space, often overlooked to show work, Elizabethan or otherwise; yet, there can be magic in using these settings.

In late July, on a day when thunderstorms are forecast, a young man and his wife were eating off the kiosk on a bench in Central Park, and the weather had become cool. “Shakespeare in the Park doesn’t get any better than this," the husband said, diving into his pasta—and he was right; the rain never appeared. For anyone still dreaming of that perfect night with the Bard, there are still chances to see his work this summer, before his, and most theatre, returns to its hothouses and boilercookers of intensity and compression. One festive example, set in New Orleans, during the jazz age, is the Drilling Company’s free production of Measure for Measure, which continues to play at Bryant Park through September 17.

You’ll hear a banjo and brass giving renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Poor Butterfly” (when is the last time you’ve heard that one?), and you’ll see the endeavor as an ornament to the night, like the lights on Christmas trees in winter. The story follows a young novice, Isabella, who must decide whether to trade her chastity to save her brother’s life—but retelling more than that is inessential. Street theatre and Shakespeare in the Park can often be like picking up parts of conversations, like overhearing the guy on the park bench. Plot only has to make sense in the moment—much of the story and dialogue is allowed to get by you, because the evening’s randomness is filling in the rest.  

 

This theatre is broad and the characters immediately recognizable—sheriffs and hookers and old-fashioned ladies, who have just had their hair done. They can be played by either sex—and they can make you laugh. Whether we are watching circus or a form of commedia dell’arte really doesn’t matter because the art is in letting us have it all: a cacophony of sounds--southern dialects, Jamaican accents, German pronunciations, sirens, and radio signals. Hamilton Clancy’s direction embraces the lights coming on, behind the bare-bones set, at the New York Public Library, and he sees this problem play as essentially comic. The unpremeditated night may require that because, unlike many outside theatres, there is no bandstand or shell to work with—the company, who include Emmanuel Elpenord, Eric Paterniani, Lukas Raphael, and Ivory Aquino, are especially exposed. For a staging more consistent in tone, Desmond Davis’s production, starring Kate Nelligan, might be considered. But how would that play under the stars? 

Outdoor theatre has to make trade-offs. Is the vision of the director strong enough to overtake the evening’s unpredictability or can it live side by side with it, without petering out or becoming too fragmentary? One of the best examples of taking over the darkness, piercing it, is Daniel Sullivan’s now-departed Troilus and Cressida, which played at the Delacorte in Central Park from July 19 to August 24. A point of embarrassment in our theatrical period is the way American theatre-makers have looked the other way regarding U.S. involvement in its Mid-East wars, whether because of lack of knowledge or interest. Whatever the cause, if we choose to really believe that the stage can have an impact on society, then the American conversation on Iraq and Afghanistan has been let down through its theatre (this reviewer knows the issue firsthand, having co-edited a volume of antiwar plays that has garnered little interest and performed negligibly). That is why Shakespeare’s dark contemporariness concerning battling Greeks and Trojans in Troilus and Cressida has been so needed and why this unabashed production is so noteworthy. Sullivan, additionally, very plainly goes after and realizes the gay themes in the work. His Achilles can be muscled, and into leather, and mean and rough voiced—and for a military man, his bisexuality is unapologetic. Themes of war and sexuality, so disgracefully marginalized elsewhere, have been brought to light. Yes, out of the darkness.

Troilus and Cressida’s cast includes: Zach Appelman, Tala Ashe, Connor Bond, Alex Breaux, Andrew Burnap, Louis Cancelmi, Max Casella, Andrew Chaffee, Michael Bradley Cohen, Sanjit De Silva, Paul Deo Jr., John Glover, Jin Ha, Bill Heck, Hunter Hoffman, Nicholas Hoge, Edward James Hyland, Keilyn Durrel Jones, Maurice Jones, Forrest Malloy, Ismenia Mendes, Nneka Okafor, Tom Pecinka, Kario Pereira-Bailey, Miguel Perez, Grace Rao, Corey Stoll, John Douglas Thompson.

Visit the Drilling Company/Shakespeare in the Parking Lot: 

http://shakespeareintheparkinglot.com/

Visit the Public Theater: http://publictheater.org/

Press: John Wyszniewski, Rachel Shearer, Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell& Associates.

Essay and photo (c) 2016 by Bob Shuman. All rights reserved. Photo of Troilus and Cressida:  Sara Krulwich/The New York Times. 

CHRISTOPHER CHEN: ‘CAUGHT’--EXTENDED THROUGH SEPTEMBER 24 AT LA MAMA (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK)

 

Americans can’t get China right in Christopher Chen’s Caught, now being produced by the Play Company at La Mama and directed cleanly by Lee Sunday Evans in a white downstairs studio. The author’s four loosely connected playlets are comic and subversive, cerebral exercises on the culture wars in the U.S., as well as in China.  We are reminded of the lapses in judgment of Mike Daisey and James Frey—and their lashings in the media--as well as the enormous prices Chinese artists have had to pay regarding freedom of speech. The playwright’s technique is reminiscent of that in Dadaism, and one of his early impulses may have been to draw mustaches on capitalistic artists who, although working on socially relevant subjects, are, in reality, more interested in personal success (“tasting a peach to understand an apple”).  Slyly, Chen plants tares in with his dramaturgical wheat, and these one acts become about rooting them out, as, ultimately, little jokes sprout into lies.  The characters are intellectuals, wannabe artists, editors, and professors—people who seem more drawn to the dangerous art of packaging and interpreting. They are examining the infrastructure and cultural paradigms of a China critically misinterpreted in the West—and come up dumbfounded or physically ill:  One of Chen’s strong abilities in these works is to destabilize an audience, finding intellectual soft spots and toying with illusion vs. reality. Nevertheless, whether Chen is just being playful or proud of his heritage or both, he appears to be saying that those from China have more cultural dimension, more understanding of life than Americans or even Chinese-Americans, portrayed here scarfing down fast food.

 

STRINDBERG: ‘THE FATHER’ AT THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE—REVIEW FROM NEW YORK

 

Arin Arbus’s production of Strindberg’s The Father is a slap in the face of the great Swedish playwright, but her misinterpretation shall be rationalized as part of an artist’s creative freedom. The rendering will be defended, like other productions that have similarly overstretched artistic bounds, such as the Foundry Theater’s and Taylor Mack’s LGBTQ Good Person of Szechwan (the author, Margarete Steffin, was writing about herself, a woman, and alter-ego of Bertolt Brecht) and Diane Paulus’s The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, which dispensed with credit for the story and lyrics by DuBose Heyward (Stephen Sondheim sounded off on that one to The New York Times, in 2011, where he believed the work was good enough as written, and could be left intact).

What Arbus has done is to contradict Strindberg’s central thesis—that a father can never know if he is the actual sire of his children (Strindberg wrote the play in 1887, which is why my own wording sounds old fashioned). To do this, the director has formed her cast from only two races, mostly white (so we can’t view the play in terms of the audience being color blind). It's an emperor's new clothes moment when we see a biracial child (the parents are one black and one white): Shouldn't it be obvious that the black father would be able to tell whether he is related or not? Arbus wants to glean maximum comedy from this tormented tragedy, too, which throws John Douglas Thompson into declamation mode, instead of his fine, deeper acting. Neither he nor Maggie Lacey, as the wife, Laura, have to wrestle with ambiguity in front of us, and David Greig’s translation sounds too contemporary, only adding to the feeling of a lost context (much more impressive is his work on Creditors). Greig brings up aliens, for example, which, I believe Strindberg, would have discussed differently, according to other translations I’ve heard (most recently on the BBC in 2013, using Laurie Slade’s brutally compelling version).

It’s not unpopular to disavow Strindberg, but Arbus verges on unconscious disdain. Strindberg has his own raging logic and the right, most convincing director would be someone who can understand it, even in our world of DNA testing.  To come up with a production team with the metal not to want to gang up on the playwright is what's germinal.

At the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Theatre for a New Audience (down the street from BAM)

Visit Theater for a New Audience: http://www.tfana.org/

(2016 by Bob Shuman; all rights reserved)

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

SHAKESPEARE AND IRONDALE ENSEMBLE: ‘1599’ (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK--ONLY THROUGH MAY 28)

Irondale Ensemble’s marking of the Shakespeare anniversary (his death was 400 years ago) is exciting and original—with a completely avant-garde American pulse.  Six actors play four works by the Bard in a cavernous, two-level space in an historic Brooklyn church, during a painless four plus hours—where there are also breaks and a picnic (provided by caterer Naturally Delicious).  The rationale for bringing together Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet is that they were all written during one year, 1599, as scholar James Shapiro has illuminated in his book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005). Finding that fact inspirational, Irondale then spent six years sculpting their evening, with a mostly spare design, using rigorous and sensitive editing of the texts by, and according to the concept of, co-founder and director Jim Niesen.

Of course, it’s all insane—these sound like Russian artists, or downtown bohemians of yesterday, not Americans tackling the star system now (Irondale has been in existence since 1983). Philosophically, the plays raise the question of whether America needs this kind of theater, no matter how idealistic the concerns of the troupe. Even in several years where Shakespeare is getting special attention; even in a time where everyone talks about acting and appearing on YouTube videos, the play is not the thing—packaging, marketing, and promotions typically are.  What are the cumulative advantages of knowing about the works of Shakespeare, anyway?  Does it matter that his breakthroughs in soliloquies are based on English texts following the essay writing of Montaigne or that As You Like It changed the way love could be portrayed on stage by making it more complex?  Is it worth comparing the issue of censorship in Julius Caesar to IRS targeting of conservatives during the Obama years or seeing Shakespeare’s depiction of war in Henry V as commenting not only on Ireland in his time, but also on America’s wars in this and the last century (or all wars, for that matter)?  A crucial insight about Shakespeare today is not that he has allowed a celebration of his plays, but that we might quietly be disallowing or disavowing his work by not listening to and understanding the depth of his thoughts.

 

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: ‘ORPHEUS DESCENDING’ (REVIEW FROM NY—ONLY UNTIL 5/14)

Tennessee Williams’s rarely performed Orpheus Descending is being produced at St. John’s Lutheran Church in the West Village, directed by Austin Pendleton.  The challenge is not a simple one—especially since the director is trying to cram a large-scale work into a chancel.  The author-director meet-up is a flawed attraction to begin with—which also best describes the lust story at the center of the text.  Harold Clurman, who directed the 1957 drama on Broadway, with Maureen Stapleton and Cliff Robertson, wondered what kind of love this was.  Williams then implied that the lead male, Val (Todd d’Amour), was only casually interested in the heroine, Lady (Irene Glezos).  This takes nothing away from Williams’s point that human beings are starkly alone, but it garners little sympathy for the characters, despite the role of Lady having been written for a force of nature: Anna Magnani.  Williams apparently also wrote the play (a recasting of his early work, a bomb in Boston, called Battle of Angels) with Elvis Presley in mind as the guitar-strumming Val.  After A Streetcar Named Desire, the writer wanted Brando to play the lead (Brando is in the 1960 movie version, The Fugitive Kind, a dark, hot, and sweaty retelling).

Where Williams and Pendleton noticeably overlap is in the improvisational nature of their work. Perhaps some of the problems with the late plays of Williams are that he is less rigid with his structuring than in, for example, A Streetcar Named Desire. Elia Kazan, of course, wanted Williams to change the ending of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which he did) and Baby Doll (which he didn’t, and they fought about).  Orpheus Descending reinforces Williams’s experimentalism—a transitional play that finds its own course in its own way. Viewers may sympathize with Todd d’Amour, as Val, because the machismo he is trying to relay is outmoded. D’Amour is in good physical condition,  and he is up for the method acting, but his muttering and laughing to himself and eye blinking and eyebrow raising, may be more attuned for a larger space, as well as a different era.  His depth of technique can remind of De Niro, but the work and William’s theme make him into the ultimate 50s loner—which only makes the play seem more remote for today.  Both leads, of course, are taking on celebrity persona roles, as opposed to purely human ones. The scorched earth mother role of Lady can be beautiful and is, perhaps miswritten:  Clurman noted that Lady is not actually Italian, like Anna Magnani, but Italian-American. Irene Glezos plays William’s Italian accent with sweat on her upper lip and around her eyes—pointing to the heat of the South and the character’s emotionality. Playing this relationship—a woman who cannot find love in a loveless world—awkwardly allows operatic heights.  Ultimately, the audience is watching alienation, which is not grand enough for tragedy.

SHAKESPEARE/FLETCHER/THEOBALD: 'DOUBLE FALSEHOOD' FROM LETTER OF MARQUE THEATRE COMPANY (REVIEW FROM NY)

 

Only through April 9 . . . rarely produced Shakespeare play Double Falsehood at Irondale, Brooklyn (easy to get to, near BAM) . . . Theatre company: Letter of Marque . . . Never heard of them or the play? That’s about to change . . . Word is getting out:  Friday audience made up of those from Fiasco Theatre, whose recent The Two Gentlemen of Verona was a hit with press and public at the Polonsky (Theatre for a New Audience) . . . The two plays are bookends: Two Gents, written at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career; Double Falsehood, probably at the end . . . The latter has only recently entered the canon (earlier it was thought to be a fake); Two Gentlemen (circa 1589), never thought to be the Bard’s finest hour, was given charming, legit feminist take by Fiasco with informality and folk music; now Letter of Marque--also using unsuspected musical styles and clever, informal devices--makes a case for Falsehood, darker, deeper than the earlier text; both still have problems with their endings—but never mind . . . What’s in common? Dumb, young men on their way to life at court, pining lovers, love letters, a woman disguised as a man . . . and rape. Falsehood grapples more fully with the latter subject, with traumatized young heroine, Violante, a Spanish peasant girl—source for the play is Cervantes’s Don Quixote . . . Poppy Liu, plays the role with surgical precision—theatregoers, please take notice: Good Woman of Szechuan, Caucasion Chalk Circle, cannot be far behind . . . Adam Huff, in a prodigal sonlike role, very emotive, committed to the moment . . . Zach Libresco and Montana Lampert Hoover, no slacker juvenilia . . . working hard, complete interpretations . . . Welland H. Scripps, stealth part, creeping up on the proceedings, owning them by evening’s end . . . All around, very clean, very clear work . . . clowns and character roles: Nolan Kennedy, Ariel Estrada, Scarlet Maressa Rivera, Tom Giordano, all in order . . . classical acting with purity of conviction and technique, up very close to the audience for those who want Shakespeare comedy beyond the laffs . . . all in a church in Brooklyn (drinks are served) . . . interesting moment: Line: “These sirens lure us to destruction,” after hearing live sirens outside . . . Think about it:  Where else and when exactly are you going to get a chance to see this play again? ...Great action sword fight, sudden slow-mo with in-sync sound effects (fight director, Michael C. Toomey) . . . mod Louis XIV gowns: Claire Townsend and reconfiguring set: Steven Brenman . . . Director Andrew Borthwick-Leslie: creative staging, fun, as well as thought-provoking: a very palpable hit. Welland H. Scripps asked me what time it was at the start of the show: Time to celebrate.

‘PERICLES’ AT THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE/POLONSKY SHAKESPEARE CENTER (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK)

 

Trevor Nunn is having fun, falling in love with the American ‘50s look, casting nubile blondes in his spacious Pericles, currently playing--and extended through April 10--at Theatre for a New Audience/Polonsky Shakespeare Center. The strange, dark play (circa 1607) isn’t a tragedy, yet it incorporates sickening moments of Shakespearean horror (incest and cannibalism). What the work reminds most of is a pageant or picaresque adventure, with a familial reunion reminiscent of one used as far back as The Comedy of Errors, as well as the late masterwork The Winter’s Tale. Choosing dizzy, light counterbalance with his casting, Nunn’s rhythm for the piece is steady, as if guiding a ship through a storm (the play itself is largely set on the lands and waters of the crashing Aegean). Nevertheless, the pacing does take away from the build to the emotionality of the final recognitions. Cia Crovatin, in jiggling Marilyn Monroe mode, along with her nutty, prosperous father, Earl Baker Jr., joins Lilly Englert, as the virgin/whore Marina, surely one of the most contradictory of characters in the canon. Englert is something of a contradiction herself, the most easily misunderstood of actresses, sounding perennially as if she has a sore throat—she is clearer in her diction here than in her role as Hermia in Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  There are other actresses to watch in this production as well (even more so than the men, actually): Patrice Jonson plays a no-nonsense madam with a stripped-out voice, beyond rage—some will recall her steely conviction in Tamburlaine, also at the Polansky. Another actress to watch is Sam Morales, who plays two smaller roles, yet who focuses attention. The men’s parts are not as affecting, despite the quality of acting. Christian Camargo can be a rather offbeat Shakespearean, for those who have seen his Ariel in The Tempest, which was part of the Bridge Project at BAM  in 2010. There he was wildly iconoclastic: part alien or Goth.  Pericles seems not to have stirred his imagination to the same degree of creativity (and maybe it can’t--Shakespeare loses sight of the role in the latter part of the play to concentrate on Marina).  The actor looks a bit thin, if somehow translucent, in a part that, after Ariel, doesn’t give him, or us, much to invest in.  The other men, including Will Swenson and Raphael Nash Thompson, can’t color outside of the lines: their parts come to us more from fairy tales and fables, not warring personality inconsistencies. Nunn’s Pericles, is a first-rate minimalistic production (which can remind of Fosse's Pippin, 1972; the design is by Robert Jones and may owe something to the work of Tony Walton) of a play that seems more epic theatre than psychological---a perverse fairy tale for grownups, staged, with music, as if it might be for children.  

Visit Theatre for a New Audience tickets: http://www.tfana.org/season-2016/pericles/overview

© 2016 by Bob Shuman. All rights reserved.

Press: Bruce Cohen.  

‘THE COMEDY OF ERRORS’ AT THE PUBLIC THEATER--ONLY THROUGH 11/22 (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK)

 

The Comedy of Errors, now playing at the Public Theater, fresh from a tour of city churches and correction facilities, is fun, compact, and in your face—just the right package to take on the road.  If the show never settles into an interpretation beyond spirited street theatre, this may have to do with the play itself (thought to be one of Shakespeare’s earliest), as well as the fear that Shakespeare can be boring.  Kwame Kwei-Armah, the director, might have a deeper notion of the work in mind, however. He uses provocative, cultural totems, setting the play at the border between Syracuse and Ephesus, with American military guards on patrol and hacky-sack playing actors using Southern accents. There is little follow-up on his imaginative reference to illegal immigration, one of the most dividing issues in the U.S. today—or in the world, for that matter. The love of physical theatre, as well as the abilities of raucous, talented actors take over, which may be enough for a chance to see Shakespeare, even if one wishes for further reverberation.  The roles of the two sets of twins are consolidated into single actors, using different hats—rap music and stereotypes abound, from pimps to Southerners to hookers to nuns. Ultimately, you may feel that the director teasingly did what he could with an, at times, sophomoric script, which prefigures Twelfth Night and Pericles, among others.  Kwei-Armah banks on the energy of his cast, instead of making a larger artistic point about civics in this Comedy of Errors—but who would deport that?

Visit the Public Theater: http://publictheater.org/

Featuring Matthew Citron, Bernardo Cubria, Flor De Liz Perez, Christina Pumariega, Lucas Caleb Rooney, David Ryan Smith, and Zuzanna Szadkowski

Mobile Shakespeare Unit
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Written By William Shakespeare
Directed By Kwame Kwei-Armah

Scenic and Costume Design Moria Sine Clinton

Composer Shane Rettig

Press  Laura Rigby, Public Theater 

© 2015 by Bob Shuman.  All rights reserved. 

Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected].

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: ‘BABY DOLL’ AT PRINCETON'S MCCARTER THEATRE (REVIEW--ONLY UNTIL 10/11)

 

Baby Doll, opening the 2015 season at McCarter Theatre, is a well-tailored refurbishing of Tennessee Williams’s 1956 screenplay of the same name—it shows the finely stitched, tightly plotted quality of Williams’s work, which the author often felt powerless to defend against alteration (notably with regard to the director Elia Kazan).  This slice of Southern fried Americana does show its age, primarily in the mores and sexual stereotypes, pre-‘60s. Williams--a gay man examining heteros here, without his shocking, telltale homosexual undercurrents, only made worse by the censorship of the studio system in the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), for example--portrays his 20-year-old title heroine as “too lazy to think” and men as wolf-whistling louts. Actually, this may be Williams’s William Inge moment, recalling Picnic (1953 play; 1955 movie), and Baby Doll is also about as close to what could be material for a primary-colored musical as Williams ever concocted—viewers may be reminded of the Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt 110 in the Shade, based on N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker (1954).  The deeper psychologies of Williams’s most memorable characters, such as Blanche, Stanley, and the Wingfields, among others, are missing(although Mildred Dunnock, as a cast-aside aunt in the film is haunting and unforgettable).  Patricia Conolly plays the same role on stage in a more comic tone, and Baby Doll should probably best be remembered as a roseate comedy, even if it is a whisker away from tragedy.

Susannah Hoffman, in the title role, doesn’t give the character much time for pause or silence—and we can’t see her acknowledgment of her life’s continuing entrapment. The villain of the piece—her husband (Robert Joy), with whom she has never slept--actually becomes the most sympathetic of the play’s characters, despite Williams’s piling on of negative sexual and racial qualities.  Joy, nevertheless, finds the desperate laborer within a character who has lost his business, future,  and even his furniture—yet sustains an inherited family during his downward spiral.  His antagonist, Dylan McDermott, with a life which can be rebuilt, is vital, virile, and too  easily a winner.  Baby Doll, popular Williams, finds the author in probably as buoyant a mood as you'll ever see him, and like a favorite toy at bedtime, his play should be held close.

Directed by Emily Mann.  

Baby Doll by Tennessee Williams

Adapted for the Stage by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann

with

Patricia Conolly (Aunt Rose Comfort), Susannah Hoffman (Baby Doll), Robert Joy (Archie Lee), Brian McCann (Sheriff), and Dylan McDermott (Silva Vacarro)

Press: Tom Miller

Visit McCarter Theatre: 

http://www.mccarter.org/home.aspx?page_id=1

© 2015 by Bob Shuman.  All rights reserved.

Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015: // www.stagesvoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected].