A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE REVIEW July 13, 2010

Image: Poster for the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

1. Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is yet another American classic play presented by Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre, following last year's Death of a Salesman. How does this production measure up against the 1951 film version, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, that is burned into our memories? A tough act to follow...

It is indeed a tough act to follow the Elia Kazan filmed version of this great play, however, it is a play written for the stage first and foremost, so it is a rare treat to see a production of it here in Victoria. Director Brian Richmond offers a clear and clean interpretation of the play that sticks to the essentials, which is all to the good. The set and costume designs by Patrick duWors work very well and I like this set design far more than the rather over the top one he did for Death of a Salesman last year. His design gives us a squalid wooden warehouse-like one room apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans in the 1940s. Stella and Stanley Kowalski are happily married and living together here until Stella’s sister Blanche arrives on their doorstep. Over the course of a number of months, marked by Stella’s pregnancy and childbirth, we see the tensions in this household alternately simmer and boil over. The DuBois sisters come from a dead culture, that of the plantation aristocracy in the south. Stella left the failing family home at 18 and is content with her working-class lot and her sometimes brutish but loving Polish-American husband Stanley. Blanche, on the other hand, clings in desperation to a past that no longer exists and is spiraling ever-downwards into drunkenness and delusion.

2. The character of Blanche Dubois is onstage for most of the nearly three hour running time. What did you think about Thea Gill's interpretation of the role?

Blanche’s deterioration is provoked by the hostility she develops toward her brother-in-law and how appalled she is that her sister would choose to live with such a man. Her defense system lies in the romantic memories she has of a lost time when she was a southern belle. In this way, Blanche reminds me of Amanda Wingfield in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie who also pines for a lost world in which both women grew up as spoiled and wealthy young women. Thea Gill gives a strong portrayal of Blanche that I appreciated for a particularly tough-minded interpretation of the role. This Blanche Dubois is no pushover and we see throughout the play the terrible choices and mistakes she has made over many years that have led her to penury and her sister’s door. Her monologues are especially effective for their lack of sentimentality, which is a great risk in this role that Gill manages to neatly avoid. Rather, Gill plays Blanche with her eyes wide open to the tragic death of her very young and very gay husband many years ago that was the first step on her road to devastation. Gill is a statuesque woman and not afraid to play Blanche in heels so that she has a kind of ruined majesty about her which quite compelling. Gill is well-supported by the rest of the company, especially Toronto actor Tim Campbell in the challenging “He’s good but he’s not Brando” portrayal of Stanley and by Victoria’s own Celine Stubel as a clear-eyed Stella who calmly informs her shocked sister that she’s staying in her occasionally abusive marriage because of the sex…a scene that audiences in the 1940s must have found difficult to take (although the 1947 opening night audience in New York gave a 30 minute long ovation!). Smaller roles include Jacob Richmond as Mitch, a pretty socially-challenged beau for Blanche in this portrayal, but not lacking in honest emotion, and Marci T. House and Christopher Mackie as the upstairs neighbours, the Hubbells, here presented as an interracial couple which I thought worked very well.


2. Anything in the production not working as well as it could, in your view?

I was sitting in the third row on the left-hand side of the house and found some sightline problems with the stairs on the set that are somewhat blocked for audiences in this section. Also, I’m not sure that the entrance to the apartment is placed well as actors have to negotiate a pretty tight turn to make it in and out as the door opens onto the staircase. However, these slight problems are more than offset by effective lighting design from Kerem Cetinel and a more subdued than usual sound design from John Mills-Cockell. My only other minor complaint is around projection and enunciation..I have a friend who saw the show from about halfway back in the house and complained of missing quite a bit of the text. Most Canadian actors whose work I know, with very few exceptions, would do well to work on their voices, making them more resonant as instruments and articulating each syllable of the text with clarity. Williams’ dialogue deserves no less.

3. What are your thoughts on the selection of plays that artistic director Brian Richmond is bringing to summer theatre in Victoria?

I am delighted that UVic theatre professor Richmond has brought Blue Bridge into being. Most summers in Victoria are limited to the amateur productions of the Victoria Shakespeare Festival or a light musical presented by the Belfry. It is wonderful to see classic American, British and Canadian plays onstage at the McPherson Playhouse, which has sat empty for too long. As a strong supporter of Canadian theatre, I might wish that Richmond consider a Michel Tremblay or a George F. Walker play for next year, as these two Canadian playwrights measure up well as writers of ‘classic’ modern plays, even against powerhouses like Arthur Miller, Joe Orton and Tennessee Williams. These are tough times for the arts in BC, so the fact that Blue Bridge has managed to produce a second season is something to celebrate…and to go out and support.

Blog moving back home to Victoria, BC

Please redirect your browser to my original blog at www.vicreviews.blogspot.com

I have seen a number of wonderful shows in my two years in Boston, with side trips to New York, and have many great memories as a result. However, life is leading me back to my westcoast home of Victoria, BC and I hope to be able to get up on top of posting reviews on a regular basis this summer and continuing into the new theatre season.

Have a wonderful summer, Monica

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER THEATRE REVIEWS: OTHELLO and FENCES

Top: John Beasley as Troy Maxson and Crystal Fox as Rose Maxson in Huntington Theatre's production of Fences.

Bottom: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago and John Ortiz as Othello in The Public Theater/ Labyrinth Theater production of Othello.

Two reviews to play catch-up on my poor neglected blog:

Othello is a difficult Shakespearean tragedy to make work. Unless you have a lead as good as James Earl Jones in the title role, it can be hard for the best of directors and acting companies to take the play to its almost unbearable climax as white actors in blackface is taboo (as it should be) today and the role is a tricky one given its to-our-eyes racist problematics. In Peter Sellars’ four hour (yes, you heard right, four long hours) production mounted for a short two week run in New York, actor John Ortiz gives an okay but not stellar Latino version of Othello, while Philip Seymour Hoffman offers a fantastic Iago.

Sellars, often called a bad-boy director of both theatre and opera, is apparently not well-liked by New York critics, all of whom savaged this production to some degree or other. I didn’t hate the show but neither did I feel it succeeded. I like to call theatre experiences such as this one ‘failed experiments’ in that all performances are experiments…investigations of human behaviour on the social laboratory of the stage. And any scientist will tell you that as much can be learned from a failed experiment as from a successful one. So there was a definite fascination that sustained my interest over a very long show that demanded much of its actors and audience.

Sellars stripped and condensed the play into a chamber-sized version with only eight actors, many of whom take on doubled roles. The ensemble is impressively culturally diverse: Desdemona and Iago are Anglos; Othello, Roderigo and Emilia are Latin; Cassius and all remaining characters are African-American. A nice post-color-blind cross-racial casting that works well for the most part, as does the blending of roles (although Shakespeare purists would think otherwise, I am sure!) Sellars has the actors play every moment with the highest emotional stakes possible…a kind of extended acting exercise that some critics suggested should have been done in the rehearsal hall, not on the stage. This emotional intensity led to the four hour playing time, as every…single…moment…was…held…for…its…own…sake. In Sellars’ contemporary staging, war is carried out via cell phone and everyone is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Reality is askew, as Iago and Roderigo can plot against Cassius while they stand together on stage, Iago and Roderigo circling Cassius like the predators they are, looking at him and sizing him up, while we understand that he is in another place, on guard to protect Othello and his bride, unaware of the hatred being projected at him from characters who are not literally with him, but actors who are. This is cool. I also liked some of the physical work Sellars injects into the show, and was impressed with the emotional depths every company member was able to plumb in this fractured and traumatized war-ridden world. Othello and Desdemona spend a lot of time in bed together (the only set piece onstage is a giant platform/bed made out of video screens that show continuous images that may or may not have had significant resonance with the play…I didn’t really notice). The couple may be intertwined in simulated foreplay or afterplay (no simulated intercourse, thank goodness) while other characters, especially Iago, are talking to each other or to us. This directorial approach makes very clear the deeply interconnected relations amongst these characters in a highly competitive masculine culture of dominance and conflict. It works.

Of course, I went to see Hoffman’s Iago and every moment he is onstage (and he is onstage for most of the time…watching from the sidelines, not missing a moment) I was with him, an overweight Iago in slacks and a green pullover, hands in pockets, even-tempered for the most part, frank and chillingly transparent in his plotting against his best friend, but also prone to fly into instant rages that cool off as quickly as they heat up, leaving both other characters and we in the seats singed from the blasts. Hoffman is a great actor and even in a failed experiment like this one, he is worth every moment.

The mark of failure that mars this production is a simple one: When you have played every moment through the roof for 3 hours and 40 minutes, how on earth do you play the last 20 minutes? Desdemona’s preparation for death/sleep and subsequent murder by her beloved Othello, followed by the tumbling revelations of Iago’s evil, his stabbing of his wife Emilia and being stabbed in kind by Othello, who then goes on to kill himself, comes off as anti-climactic here. There is simply nowhere for these actors to go in this culminating final act, as Sellars has had them mine every moment without mercy already. Ortiz does not reach the necessary heights called for in Othello’s final moments and he and Iago go at each other with what look like Boy Scout pocket knives (ridiculous), Othello basically squeezes Desdemona to death by hugging her too hard (even more ridiculous), and Desdemona arises from death to embrace Othello one more time (ditto). If Sellars had taken less time and emotional energy he spends on the first 80 % of this show, the final 20% might have taken us where Shakespeare wants us to go. It was not to be.

Speaking of James Earl Jones, I saw him play the lead in August Wilson’s Fences in its original Broadway run over 20 years ago. When you have had this kind of peak prior experience with a play, sometimes you can be reluctant to revisit the play in a new incarnation. Audiences archive performances in their memories, and these memories can be precious to devoted theatregoers…one is hesitant to have them replaced by a lesser outing. Luckily, the production at Boston’s Huntington Theatre was a very fine one, reminding me yet again what an important American playwright Wilson was. Fences takes us to 1960s Philadelphia and the working class Maxson family that is preparing to fall apart with the sea changes of socio-political change coming from the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution and war in Vietnam. Wilson is an unblinking critic of the flaws he sees in his own characters and the play’s protagonist, garbageman Troy Maxson is a very flawed man. Trapped in his all-too-brief glory days of youth as a Negro league baseball player, he dwells in bitterness about the subsequent disappointments of life: poverty, crime, imprisonment, low-paid back-breaking work and endless debt. Maxson pushes his son away from him, in fear of his repeating his own mistakes, but cannot undo the damage done. He pushes his loving wife away, the best thing that has ever happened to him, by taking up with another woman whom he impregnates. When this other woman dies in childbirth, his wife takes the baby girl in and raises her as her own daughter, but forever shuts her husband out of her heart and her bed. The play is so well-written, so lyrical and powerful, so deceptively simple and so brave in addressing the African-American community with such clear-eyed complexity. The Huntington production, directed by Kenny Leon, does the play justice with terrific performances from the company, especially from the leads John Beasley as Maxson and Crystal Fox as his long-suffering wife Rose. The set design, as always at the Huntington, is lavish in its attention to detail as designed by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg.

I was at a Saturday matinee with a large number of students from a private secondary school, most of whom were white. I wondered before the show how they would receive Wilson’s portrait of a world that is now over 40 years past and of people who are mostly alien to their reality. Of course, great art transcends these petty things and the students were on their feet cheering in a well-deserved standing ovation for a fine production.

Kiss Me Kate and The Savannah Disputation - September 19-20th

Images: Top, Poster for Lyric Stage's Kiss Me Kate; Bottom, Paula Plum and Carolyn Charpie in SpeakEasy Theatre's The Savannah Disputation [www.boston.com]

Here I am back in Boston, this year on a halftime basis every second month and also on the other side of the Charles in the heart of Back Bay. One can't complain when one is a stone's throw from the T, Filene's Basement, Marshall's, Copley Square and Newbury Street and a short walk to downtown or the south end. I'm calling this my Mary Tyler Moore Year and live in hopes that, like MTM, "I'm gonna make it after all." To counter the displeasure of being away from my family for these five months (as they soldier on without me back home in Canada), I seek solace in the usual dark rooms of theatres.

The new theatre season has opened in the city with a lot of variety on offer. I want to see Diane Paulus' inaugural show at ART, a remount of the hit disco party version of Midsummer Night's Dream called The Donkey Show. And even though I saw the original production of August Wilson's Fences with James Earl Jones many years ago in NYC, it would be good to catch the new production at the Huntington. But this first weekend back in town, I went for lighter fare with Lyric Stage's Kiss Me Kate, the Cole Porter musical chock-full of great show tunes and built around yet another from the Bard: The Taming of the Shrew. Lyric's production, as with Follies last season, does an amazing job mounting a full-scale musical in such a small space. Directed by AD Spiro Veloudos (who was taking tickets at the door at last Saturday's matinee!), the show offers some strong work and moves along at the necessary pace for a nearly 3 hour running time. I liked the work from most of the leads and felt the chorus was also strong. Leads Peter Davenport (Fred/Petruchio) and Amelia Broome (Lili/Katharine) carry the show with their doubled roles as a warring divorced backstage couple who are performing in Shrew. Of course, they are destined for a romantic reunion, and the scenes incorporated into the show directly from Shakespeare work as comic counterpoints to the present day plot. I found the ingenue role of Lois Lane (yes!) played by Michelle deLuca slightly less successful, although she is a capable singer and dancer, because she failed to generate that magical connection with the audience necessary for musical froth such as this: charm, a very old-fashioned quality in this postmodern world. And not a quality that can be taught in theatre school. However, there was charm to be found in the gangster characters (Neil A. Casey and J.Y. Turner) who shadow Fred, falsely believing he owes a gambling debt. They ham it up to good effect and also get the showstopper tune "Brush up Your Shakespeare". Another small role in the show, Paul (Fred's dresser, played by Kennedy Pugh), gets the plum lead in "It's Too Darn Hot", a terrific number that opens Act Two. Choreographer Ilyse Robbins does her best to create dance sequences on the pocket-sized stage and the design elements were also strong, particularly the 1940's period costumes from Rafael Jean. Although the music sounded fine, the musicians themselves were nowhere to be seen, hidden away on a platform above the stage proscenium, and I wondered for a while whether the music was actually taped as a result. Call me a traditionalist, but there's something to be said for seeing the musicians at work during a musical...I missed their presence in this otherwise enjoyable show.

The second show last weekend was the season-opener from SpeakEasy Theatre. I saw three very good productions there last year, so was looking forward to The Savannah Disputation, a comedy about religion by Evan Smith. While the play has some very amusing moments, and solid performances from its mostly-seasoned four-person cast (with the exception of relative newcomer Carolyn Charpie). Nancy E. Carroll and Paula Plum play aging Georgian Catholic spinster sisters whose lives centre around their church and their friendship with its priest who comes over for dinner most Thursday nights. However, when a young evangelical missionary--her mission is to save Catholics from the devil-worship cult she sees it as being--knocks on the door, the sisters enter into a struggle to save each other's souls. Even the priest (Timothy Crowe) gets pulled into the attempt by embittered and 'mean' younger sister Mary to 'crush' the sweet, if deeply misguided Melissa and prove to her doubting sister that the Roman Church is the One True Church.

This may not sound like typically comic material, but in the hands of AD and director Paul Daigneault, and with this crack company, we learn some Biblical scholarship and get plenty of laughs along the way. My quibble with all this is the play itself, which veers dangerously into sitcom fluff-land at times. In the hands of a more skilled playwright than Smith (although he clearly knows his Bible and the Southern culture of the setting), we would have more backstory on all four characters than we get, and more subtext as a result. It all starts to feel a bit glib, and the stakes feel too low. One moment late in this 100 minute one-act illustrates for me how the play plays it safe when it could go to deeper and darker territories without losing its comic edge. Melissa is losing her battle for the sisters' souls in her Biblical bantering with Father Murphy and her final volley is to quote Revelations and the Coming of the Beast with the predictible fundamentalist interpretation that the beast is the Pope. Charpie plays this moment with the same perky and naive quality her sincere if ignorant character has had throughout the play. What was missing for me in this moment was the pure venom of loathing and fear that is bred by ignorance such as Melissa's and those of her ilk. If she really believed the Devil himself was present in that priest as she takes him on, I wonder if she would make herself so much at home, sitting on chairs and couches, rather than remaining ever on guard, circling her perceived enemy with more care. I don't know, maybe this play has nothing more to offer but the pleasure of its company, but I could see more potential here than its playwright himself was able to deliver.

Back to Victoria Theatre Reviews for the summer!

If you wish to follow my bicoastal life, please visit www.vicreviews.blogspot.com to follow my theatre-going over the summer. I look forward to returning to Boston in September and to seeing much great theatre!

Have a wonderful and restful summer, whoever and wherever you may be...
Monica

Plays Various - April and May 2009

Images, Top to Bottom: Old Globe poster for Working; poster for Picasso at the Lapin Agile [http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/E603B/web/Brette/lapinagile.html]; poster for Jerry Springer: The Opera; portrait of Galileo.

Clearly, blogging is an activity of the leisure class, given my apparent inability to keep up with this self-imposed hobby when faced with multiple work pressures. Also, I was travelling a lot last month, which made it difficult to get to the theatre regularly, although I did manage to catch a show in San Diego!

Here follows some snapshot reviews of shows seen in the past month...

Trojan Barbie, which I saw in preview at ART last month was a huge disappointment. Someone needs to begin by explaining to me why we need a mashed-up version of Euripides' Trojan Women and Anne-Marie MacDonald's Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet in the first place. This hash of Greek tragedy and supposed contemporary drama was a failure and made me sorry to have to report that the two worst shows in ART's season this year were both written and directed by women (the other one was Communist Dracula Manifesto). I hope that Diane Paulus' new tenure as AD will change this sad state of affairs. It is not pleasant to see fine ART company member Karen MacDonald reduced to playing a befuddled doll repairer on holiday in Europe, who is dragged inexplicably into a modernized version of Euripides' masterpiece as a group of Trojan women being held in a refugee camp after the destruction of their city (echoes of Baghdad, Sarajevo, Sudan..take your horror pick). Her silly "My golly, what's going one here, this is just wrong!" encounters with Hecuba and Andromache were often squirm-inducing. While the show, directed by Carmel O'Reilly, featured some nice work (I especially liked the work of Paula Langton as Hecuba, Kaaren Briscoe as Polly X and Careena Melia as Helen..the latter two students in the ART MFA program) I left wishing fervently that Christine Evans had responded to the invitation to adapt Trojan Women by asking "Why fix what's not broken?" and that this ensemble had put their considerable collective talents to better use by creating a smashing new version of this ancient and timeless reminder of the price women pay in war.

Actor's Shakeseare Project offered a solid production of Coriolanus that made excellent use of an open space in the old Armoury building in Somerville. Robert Walsh directed an able cast in a highly physical interpretation that made use of martial arts and a soundscape performed by the company that often had our ears ringing with the rhythmic martial sounds of drums and hammers on metal. Benjamin Evett made for a clear and consistent Roman general brought down (as so many in Shakespeare) by his own pride. Bobbie Steinbach was slightly less successful in my view as his mother Volumnia, projecting this fiery woman's spunkiness well but not moving me with the depth of her rage and grief in the famous scene late in the play when she begs her son not to invade Rome after he has defected to the enemy. Volumnia is the mirror-opposite of Hecuba...she revels in her son's war wounds and longs for his glorious death in battle. Hecuba sees only the endless trail of destruction and despair that is the consequence of war. But overall this was a successful production that made very clear all the political and personal levels woven through Shakespeare's play.

The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego has a great reputation and I saw a lovely production of Twelfth Night there, in their outside space, a number of years ago. This time I saw the indoor revival of the 1978 musical Working by Stephen Schwartz (now famous for Wicked), based on Studs Terkel's book of interviews of working people, first seen in 1978. This new version is stripped-down to six performers who each play multiple roles as they tell us in monologues interspersed with songs about their working lives. I enjoyed this show very much, well-directed by Gordon Greenberg and featuring a talented company. A few new interviews have brought the musical forward the 30 years since its inception, including a funny one from a financier who cannot see the nose in front of his face and whose words are very ironic given the dire economic events of the past year. And the songs contributed to the show by James Taylor are outstanding, especially "Millworker" which had me wiping tears away with its opening notes (see this performed by Taylor at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2MQ04ESSx8). Don't be surprised if this remount makes its way to Broadway!

New Repertory Theatre has proved to be a consistently fine company this season, so I made sure to check out its version of Steve Martin's 1993 comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. The company seem to be having the requisite good time performing this rather slight but entertaining play about a fictional encounter between Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso (both well-played by Neil A. Casey and Scott Sweatt respectively) in a Paris bar in 1905. Filled with stock characters and predictable behaviour, the play amuses and offers a couple of fun surprises along the way as these two geniuses of art and science plan their domination of the 20th century. When a fictional character named Schmendiman shows up who plans exactly the same thing, based on his invention of useless commercial things, we begin to see how chance operations come into play when one person out of millions actually has the goods. Of course, when Elvis shows up as a visitor from the future late in the play, we also see that genius takes on many guises; the King's reminder to Pablo that they both owe a debt to the "Negro" in the realization of their creative powers is a rare sharp barb in an otherwise mostly pleasant and unassuming play. I enjoyed seeing two actresses I'd seen playing very heavy dramatic roles this season taking a trip onto the lighter side; Marianna Bassham who played the abuse survivor in SpeakEasy's Blackbird, and Stacy Fischer who performed May in Fool for Love, also at New Rep.

Speak Easy Theatre seems to enjoy pushing the comfort zone of Boston theatregoers, as their current production of Jerry Springer: The Opera, as with David Harrower's Blackbird, is not for the faint-of-heart. I consider myself an extremely liberal and open-minded audience member, but I doubt I have seen anything as all-out-no-holds-barred offensive as this British import, winner of everything there was to win in London 3 years ago. It's all here, folks; the profanity, the smut, the sex. Thing is, it's also an opera, albeit a 'rock-pop' opera, so creates a very strange meeting-place between high and low culture. The controversy surrounding the show, which although a huge hit in the UK has been rarely seen in the US and has not had a Broadway run, is interestingly enough around its perceived anti-religious content. Act One gives us a 'typical' Springer episode with various trailer-park trash types revealing their guilty secrets including infidelity and sexual kinkiness. The lively chorus of audience members gets us involved right off the bat with their "Jerry, Jerry, Jerry" chants and their unending insults hurled at each guest ("Fat pig", "Slut, "Chick with a Dick"...you get the idea). What keeps a high-minded elitist theatre-goer engaged through all this muck is the fact that this low-life content is delivered operatically. The quality of the music is not very high, there is not a memorable tune to be discerned throughout (as opposed to Duncan Sheik's Spring Awakening), but neither does it offend and the production features a mix of both musical theatre and opera singers. The company members all do very well in their roles, and I can only imagine what it must be like for classically trained opera singers to come into contact with songs called "What the Fuck" or "Talk to the Hand"!

Act Two shifts dramatically after Jerry is shot onstage by a disgruntled guest. His guilt-induced hallucinations take him first to Purgatory then down to Hell where a sexy red-leather clad Satan (Timothy John Smith, seen recently in Fool for Love at New Rep) tells Jerry he faces an unspeakable fate involving barbed wire and anal rape if he doesn't get Jesus to apologize for literally damning him to Hell. So a celestial version of the Springer show ensues, featuring all of the guests of Act One doubling as Jesus (in a diaper no less...don't ask!), Mary, the Angel Gabriel, Adam and Eve and finally God himself (Luke Grooms doing a great job with the song "It's Tough Being Me"). Failing in this conflict resolution effort, Jerry is about to be cast into the eternal fire when he pulls a piece of wisdom courtesy of William Blake up out of his consciousness: Everything that lives is holy. For no good reason, this placates all involved, Jerry wakes up in the real world just in time to expire and the show finishes with everyone mourning his earthly departure.

While I was immensely entertained by this show, and impressed with the polished production directed by Paul Daigneault, I left the theatre with very little to ponder on or even very much residual memory of it. The fact is, Jerry Springer is not a person of much interest for me. I consider him symbolic of the very worst of American-style commercial capitalism...if there's a buck to be made on the voyeuristic parading of the suffering of others, providing them with their pitiful 15 minutes of fame, someone's going to figure out how to exploit it. While the creators of this show may wish me to feel some overeducated liberal guilt about all this, I don't. Nor do I feel implicated as part of the 'elite' culture turning their nose up at the mostly underemployed, undereducated and totally disenfranchised people who end up on shows like Jerry Springer (or any of the endless reams of reality TV shows that have followed in its wake). At the level of delivering any kind of meaningful message I feel this show fails almost entirely, which is a shame as I think it's a missed opportunity to explore these complex issues (without losing the humor, for sure). Perhaps the problem for me was that we travel with Springer as our (anti-)protagonist, someone for whom I cannot and will never feel empathy, whereas if the opera chose to focus on and follow the journey of one or more of Jerry's guests with some real dramatic layers and deep conviction then Jerry Springer: The Opera might have something more memorable to offer.

Finally, at the end of this posting that has turned out to be far longer than expected (go figure!), I saw Brecht's Galileo produced by the Underground Railway Theatre's Catalyst Theatre Project, a science theatre collaborative with MIT (also seen this season: Einstein's Dreams). This is an exciting project, bringing together theatre artists presenting science-based plays and engaging in conversations with scientists, students and general audience members about the issues raised. The role of Galileo is one of the major male roles in drama, up there with Hamlet and Lear, and Brecht worked for nearly twenty years developing and revising this play (often with uncredited collaborators, as was Brecht's unfortunate and very politically incorrect wont!) It is not an easy play, covering as it does thirty or more years of Galileo's life, taking us from his somewhat false discovery of the telescope (presented as a stolen idea from a Dutch traveler), his formative ideas rooted in Copernicus that the Earth revolves around the sun, his writing and recantation of those ideas and his final days spent in isolation under the watchful eye of the Catholic church. Galileo as interpreted by the communist Brecht is essentially a frustrated man of the people, who publishes in Italian rather than Latin so the common man can read his work, who dreams of a science that lightens the burden of the working class, who even dreams (dangerously) about a universe that does not require a God to make sense. Along the way, he has both his students and followers and his enemies. The latter mostly are of the clergy persuasion and it they who bring Galileo to the Inquisition and press him to recant. Fascinatingly, Brecht does not show us any of the Inquisition itself, using the traditional dramatic approach (stretching all the way back to the Greeks and moving through Shakespeare along the way) of having secondary characters onstage who await (along with us) the results of his trial. The hard truth that Galileo recanted because he could not face torture reinforces Brecht's presentation of the character as somewhat a hedonist, interested in food, drink and comfort (although not sex it appears). This offers a very materialist version of events and makes Galileo's recantation understandable, bringing this giant of science off an inhuman pedestal. We also see some of the enormous contributions Galileo made to modern science including the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, sunspots and the fundamentals of classical mechanics. The latter is illustrated by Brecht ingeniously by having Galileo keep a small stone in his pocket that he often takes out and simply drops, thus confirming for himself the law of uniform acceleration.

The production is three hours long and makes many demands on a chronically ADD 21st century audience (especially in a theatre space that is kept much too cold!) as it is a play of ideas and lacks a lot of dramatic action. Much depends on the force of the central performance and luckily this show has quite a fine Galileo in Richard McElvain. He makes clear the kind of deep frustration, even rage, that geniuses who are so much out of their own time must have felt (perhaps still feel...it's hard to see genius in the present moment, as it needs the test of time in all but the rarest cases). McElvain often vocalizes his frustration with nonverbal guttural grunts and physicalizes them with stamps of his foot. The life of a man who sees so much more than those around him is made visceral in this portrayal, as is his strong sense of his work being for all people rather than his own glorification alone. His portrayal may lack somewhat in emotional levels, but Brecht was not much interested in writing that kind of drama was he? McElvain is supported well by a skilled company including a number of actors I've seen working both here at Underground Railway (Steven Barkhimer, Debra Wise, Robert Najarian) and at Actor's Shakespeare Project (Jason Bowen, James Patrick Nelson). Director David Wheeler keeps everything moving and physically interesting, making good use of various stage levels, thrust stage and multiple exit and entry points. Costumes are a bit of a mishmash of contemporary and authentic period and while I get this as a concept it gets confused and even a bit irritating at times. When an actor is dressed in a red velvet floor-length cape and we can see his pants and black sneaker style shoes underneath it just feels wrong. The problem is consistency, as some characters (Galileo's daughter for instance) are always in full authentic dress,while others are mixed. My stance is to go fully one way or the other--full-on authenticity or rehearsal clothes--but make up your mind! The set works very well, especially with the stunning enormous murals that fill the space created by designer (and mural artist) David Fichter. In sum, a strong production of a difficult but rewarding (in the ways that Picasso and Jerry Springer are not) play that reminds me what theatre is for.

FOUR PLAYS IN MARCH - ENDGAME, BLACKBIRD, FOOL FOR LOVE and TROJAN BARBIE

Photos, from Top to Bottom: Will LeBow as Hamm and Thomas Derrah as Clov in ART's Endgame; Karen MacDonald as Nell in same; Bates Wilder as Ray and Marianna Bassham as Una in SpeakEasy Theatre's production of Blackbird; ditto; Timothy John Smith as Eddie and Stacy Fischer as May in New Rep's production of Fool for Love; ART's poster for Christine Evan's new play Trojan Barbie.

Farewell to March 2009, a month that proved so busy that my beloved blog has been sorely neglected and as a result I am four plays behind! So this is playing catch-up and I will be giving short-shrift here to the plays I saw this past month.

As it turns out, only one of the 4 is really worthy of extended discussion in a critical context here, Scotland's David Harrower's Olivier-prize winning play Blackbird. So I will gloss over the other three (withholding comments on Trojan Barbie until later this week as it's currently in previews).

Of course, much has been said and thought about the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's work, including this play Endgame. I have always much preferred Waiting for Godot myself, finding the characters of Didi and Gogo much more engaging theatrical creations than the blind and overbearing (if helpless) Hamm and his servant/son-figure Clov. The post-apocalyptic room we find ourselves trapped in alongside these two, and Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell (trapped themselves in garbage cans) is claustrophobia-inducing and mind-numbing. Nothing happens in the play--well, almost nothing--and the most we are left with at the end is Clov's departure for the outside world. Devastated as this dead and denuded world must be, it is far preferable to the endless bickering and empty rhetoric that is bounced off the walls of their 'prison'. Of course, the inaction of the play is Beckett's absurdist point, and it is to the great credit of the four-member cast and their director Marcus Stern at ART that there as many laughs as there are in this production, and a highly physicalized performance of Clov from Thomas Derrah that raised my level of admittedly fairly low interest in this particular play up significantly. While all four actors play their parts with skill, and Stern directs with a fierce faithfulness to Beckett's text and stage directions (as opposed to a scandalous ART production in 1985, set in a ruined New York subway station, that the playwright himself condemned), it is Derrah's work here that stood out for me. With a comic lurch, as though one leg was shorter than another, a limp that invites a combination of both pity and laughter, Clov is the only mobile character on stage and every thought in his head is reflected fully in his body as portrayed by Derrah. LeBow declaims as Hamm, playing-up his deeply resonant voice in a way that works in the role (although I found Hamm's existential despair somewhat lacking in LeBow's portrayal) and Karen MacDonald and Remo Airaldi as Nell and Nagg do nice work, too, but Derrah literally dances around them as Clov. The repartee he engages in with Hamm has moments of bleak comic poetry that LeBow and Derrah toss-off with great skill. In the end, what does it all mean, this meaninglessness? Beckett gives us lots to ponder but no answers, as is his intent. And we, the audience, play our silent part in the witnessing of the final moments of futile and clownish humanity:

CLOV:
Why this farce, day after day?
HAMM:
Routine. One never knows.
(Pause.)
Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
CLOV:
Pah! You saw your heart.
HAMM:
No, it was living.
(Pause. Anguished.)
Clov!
CLOV:
Yes.
HAMM:
What's happening?
CLOV:
Something is taking its course.
(Pause.)
HAMM:
Clov!
CLOV (impatiently):
What is it?
HAMM:
We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV:
Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that's a good one!
HAMM:
I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being.)
Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at!
(Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.)
And without going so far as that, we ourselves...
(with emotion)
...we ourselves... at certain moments...
(Vehemently.)
To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!
[...]

CLOV:
I'll leave you.
HAMM:
No!
CLOV:
What is there to keep me here?
HAMM:
The dialogue.
[http://www.samuel-beckett.net/endgame.html]

David Harrower's Blackbird began as a Fringe production at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 and has gone on to successful productions in London and New York (the latter featuring Jeff Daniels as Ray), with shows in Toronto and Vancouver opening soon. Reflecting its humble Fringe beginnings, the play has a small cast of two (with a walk-on role in the final moments that packs a whallop), a minimal set of an office lunchroom littered with workers' lunch detritus, and a searing, provocative plot about an encounter betwwen a young woman and the man who sexually abused her as a young girl of 12. Or is it a love story? You see what I mean about provocative...

I'm sure there have been many walkouts at the moment 20 minutes or so into this one-act play when Una, now 27, lets us in on this nasty little secret that is the source of the extreme tension felt between these two from the moment Ray is confronted by this encounter with his past. He has paid the price for his sexual relationship with the child Una, 6 years in prison, and has moved on to change his name and location. But she has hunted him down and wants a reckoning. Why is never quite made clear by Harrower, why now, what for, what does she hope to gain? It is made clear, in the long and difficult (to deliver and to hear) monologues that recreate for us the undeniable pull these two felt toward each other 15 years earlier. Una is revealed as somewhat of a Lolita, filled with romanticized longing for this neighbour who makes the fatal error of responding to her pubescent flirtations. The complication of the narrative lies in the uneasy feeling we get that these two still feel something for each other, that calling what happened child sexual abuse is simplifying the more complicated, and messy, reality of human attractions and emotions.

The SpeakEasy Theatre production, directed by David R. Gammons (a busy man this year, having directed Lt. of Inishmore at New Rep and The Duchess of Malfi at Actors' Shakespeare Project, two other 'difficult' plays) features fine performances from Bates Wilder as Ray and Marianna Bassham as Una. Wilder plays Ray as a gentle sort of man, decent really, who is understandably discomfited by the sudden appearance of this shadow from his past. But his denial of responsibility begins to chafe at us over time, and when Una finally physicalizes her rage against him, it is a welcome release for the audience as well. We cannot but feel he deserves the punishment. But when that physical fight becomes a sexual embrace we are pushed again to see Ray's side of the story, that he is not a pedophile or a predator, that what happened between these two people was real passion, real love. Bassham digs very deep to play Una and does some fine work, never backing away from the damaging anger and hurt this young woman has carried around inside her for too long. And when she tells the story of how their flirtation was consummated one night in a beach hotel, followed by Ray's abandonment of her, it is almost unbearable.

My one criticism of the production is that I felt that the stage was too bare to be a believable lunchroom, containing only one chair (that gets thrown around quite a bit!) and a small locker upstage right. In pictures of the New York production, I see a table and a number of chairs, with a few pieces of lunchtime garbage left on the table. Much more real a setting for this encounter than the more stylized space given here, with so much garbage on the floor it becomes an overpowering metaphor for the dirt and stink and residue of this forbidden relationship, rather than something more subtle. But overall I found this to be a difficult yet rewarding theatre experience with sparse yet tightly-constructed dialogue and a sense of dramatic tension that was pervasive and never let up throughout. Not for the faint of heart, but it has its rewards.

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard makes a good pairing with Blackbird, being yet another play about forbidden love, this time of the incest variety. I have always felt this to be a terrific play, by a terrific playwright, with two fabulous roles in Eddie and May, the half-siblings of the same father (who watches, interacts with and comments on the prceedings throughout). The fourth character is the hapless Martin, who arrives to pick May up for a date at her motel room and comes smack dab into the middle of a passionate fight between these two. Eddie and May have been fighting with, and loving (off and on) each other for 15 years when Eddie shows up out of nowhere (yet again) to declare his undying love and to take May away from the dead-end life she's been living. He's a rodeo rider and she's a short-order cook; like most Shepard characters, they've lived hardscrabble lives and everything they think or feel is fully expressed, often physically. Not much repression in a Shepard play! Similar to Harrower's play, interestingly, is that this play ends with two extended monologues that reveal the 'heart of the matter', the truth of their past and how it literally destroyed the lives of both of their respective mothers. Even though their father, The Old Man, tries to intervene in this truth-telling session (with poor sweet Martin as witness), to deny that he abandoned two separate families to fates including murder and incest, the truth is spoken. Then Eddie leaves, as we suspect he always does, and May is left to pack her single suitcase and move on . And we also suspect that this cycle will continue, that these two will come careening and colliding back into each other's lives because they are in love...simple and horrible as that.

While I enjoyed the New Rep production, directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, for its effective physicality and some nice work from the company, I did have one major concern. The actors playing Eddie and May (Timothy John Smith and Stacy Fischer) are very young for these roles. Their youth brings the physicality to the forefront in ways that work with the text, as Eddie tosses his lasso over the bedpost and somersaults onto the bed backwards at one point. And May can also wrap herself around Eddie, drape herself over the side of the bed and hit him upside his head a few times as well. So much youthful energy! Too much for me, in the end, as what was lost in this production is the reality that these two lovers have been ground down over a long period of time, over 15 years, by the tragedy of their father's abandonment (his presence in the play is a device, a wish-fulfillment perhaps, for these two) and the murder of one of their mothers by the other one, both of whom were married to the Old Man and ignorant of his 'other' life and family. Add onto all that family history the complete and uncontrollable passion Eddie and May have felt for each other since the moment they met. It's no wonder these two are barely surviving their lives, and I feel that actors in their mid-thirties can bring another level to the play that is missing in this production. This Eddie is too vital, too positive, to sure of himself as played by Smith. And Fischer's May is sexy and lithe and nobody's doormat, but she doesn't show us the cracks enough, the deep wells of despair. When she screams into Eddie's ear that his mother shot her mother dead, she sounds like an hysterical teenager, rather than the howl of grief (which can even be whispered) that is the reason (more than their being half-siblings) that keeps her and Eddie from ever being able to stay together. Their history haunts them too much. In my mind, these characters are scarred and wrinkled, her body is not what it once was, she's been a drinker (now 'on-the-wagon' but for how long?)...she lives in a motel room fer chrissakes...He's driving from town to town across the west, from rodeo to rodeo, damaging his body, drinking too much, sleeping with dangerous women who can't prevent him from finding his way back to May. There's nothing wrong with these two actors, although I felt Fischer to be a bit disconnected and mannered from time to time, and Smith a bit too stereotypically a 'cowboy.'

To put it plainly, I want to feel these characters' pain more than I do in this production, and my only suggestion is to let these young actors live life themselves for a decade or so, learn about the kind of toll that time takes on us all, and revisit this marvellous play sometime down the road. It's certainly a play worth revisiting, for we go to the theatre as a human laboratory for the examination of scars and scar tissue, and Shepard never disappoints with offering up plenty in this regard.