Sunday, May 10, 2009

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.