Archive: Theater
Audiences accustomed to thinking of a Pinteresque evening as family members getting at each other's throats, unleashing hidden spite and anger, may be surprised by the current Theatre Royal Bath Productions incarnation of The Caretaker. The play speaks in quieter tones, its muted pitch matched by the stage setting, in which grays and browns, ochres and tarnished beiges predominate. That isn't to say that there's no slow-burning rage or testosterone in evidence. In Harold Pinter's work, emotional violence is always only a note away; it may emerge suddenly, in what you may otherwise see as a casual conversation, or idle joking. A fatal mistake, as this play illustrates. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alan Cox, Alex Hassell, BAM Harvey Theater, Graham Greene, Harold Pinter, Homecoming, Jonathan Pryce, No Man's Land, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Brighton Rock, The Caretaker
No Comments »
The most dramatic thing that happens in playwright Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles occurs at the beginning of the play. That's when 21-year-old Leo, all grimy from a cross-country bike ride, arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the night at the door of his 91-year-old grandmother's apartment in Greenwich Village. But with the series of incisive scenes that follow, both funny and moving, Herzog has written one of the best new plays of the season. She charts an unconventional intergenerational friendship between grandmother and grandson; Leo is dealing with the recent loss of his best friend in a biking accident while Vera is coping with the annoyances of getting old. Herzog's writing is surefooted and quietly brilliant. She's equally comfortable writing dialogue for characters that are more than half a century apart and suggests complex lives for even the supporting and off-stage characters. At 33, she has the grace and insights of a mature writer.
4000 Miles has been given an impeccably calibrated production at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (through June 17), directed by Daniel Aukin and featuring the Tony and Drama Desk award-winning actress Mary Louise Wilson, as Vera, the nonagenarian grandmother and Gabriel Ebert as her grandson. Wilson, best known for Grey Gardens and Full Gallop, and the relative newcomer Ebert give memorable performances providing perfect foil for each other; the production is also enhanced by Greta Lee and Zoë Winters in the supporting roles and by Lauren Helpern's evocative set design.
Herzog first gained attention in New York in 2010 with After the Revolution, an epic, semi-autobiographical family drama which spans three generations of an American communist family in New York and Boston. Vera, the matriarch of family, is a recurring character in both After the Revolution and 4000 Miles. The House recently caught up with Herzog to chat about her work. Continue Reading »
Tags: 4000 Miles, After the Revolution, Amy Herzog, Annie Baker, Arthur Herzog, Belleville, Billie Holliday, Daniel Aukin, Full Gallop, Gabriel Ebert, Greta Lee, Grey Gardens, Mary Louise Wilson, Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Sam Gold, The Great God Pan, Zoë Winters
No Comments »
by Jon Magaril on April 6th, 2012 at 8:50 am in Theater
Broadway openings are like yellow-rumped warblers. They avoid the city in winter and summer, come swooping back at the start of spring—and they feather their nests with debris. Putting an ear to this theatrical season, one hears—over the occasional chirp of a distinctive voice—the producers' incessant call to revise, revive, recycle. Thirty or so productions are looking to land on New York stages before May. Most are based on old material. In preparation, it's only fitting to look back at the season so far. We'll see how the clutter of the past can either stifle life or, like our flying friends' housekeeping habits, help sustain it.
The best of the fall offerings was Follies, which moves to Los Angeles next month. The third revival in a decade proved the charm by lucidly exposing the derangement of, ironically enough, revivalism. Eric Schaeffer's production, like star Bernadette Peters's performance, lacked buoyancy. But their laser-like focus cut to the quick of the show's hard truths.
The setting is the farewell party for an old theater palace on the eve of its demolition. From her entrance, Peters's former chorus girl Sally makes it clear she's come to win back her old flame, Ben (the hearty Ron Raines), and she doesn't care who knows it—not his wife, fellow ex-chorine, Phyllis (a blistering Jan Maxwell), nor Sally's husband, Buddy (Danny Burstein, so ingratiating you want to bring him home to mama). The blinding obviousness of her mania—"I'm going to live forever with the man I love"—spotlights the insanity in every character's illusions. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Magic Flute, Bernadette Peters, Blood and Gifts, Calixto Bieito, Camino Real, carrie, Chinglish, Follies, Harry Connick Jr., Hugh Dancy, Julie Taymor, Merrily We Roll Along, Michael John LaChiusa, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Peter Brook, Sons of the Prophet, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Stephen Sondheim, Stick Fly, Tennessee Williams, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, The Blue Flower, The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, Venus in Fur
No Comments »
New York Theatre Workshop's raw space could be the envy of any nightclub owner or movie star-cum-restauranteur in the city. The company also happens to make fantastic use of it in its current production of An Iliad, directed by Lisa Petereson, leaving it unadorned, except for a few simple props such as table, chair, some stage lights, lined up like tin soldiers stage right, and an iron staircase stage left. The time is now, or perhaps it isn't; perhaps there is no time.
Such is the mood when the play's only character, the Poet, walks on stage. Don't expect an ancient toga draped across his shoulder; he isn't the glorious Homer, but someone vaguely like him. A weary traveler, with a bottle of strong stuff in his suitcase, and the gift of gab to chase away boredom. His background story is one of the goriest epics in the Western canon. Set during the 10-year siege of the ancient city of Troy by the Greeks, it tells of fearsome warriors, petty squabbles, and valorous slaughter. And then there are the gods, who interfere and sometimes switch sides. Continue Reading »
Tags: An Iliad, Denis O'Hare, Homer, Lisa Petereson, New York Theatre Workshop, Robert Fagles, The Iliad, Trojan War, Troy
No Comments »
Edward Albee's artistic dominion lies somewhere between the bruising psychological dramas of Eugene O'Neill and the films of Ingmar Bergman, and the absurdist theater of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. For over 50 years he's proved his staying power as a playwright, at times forced to defend his work against acrimonious critics or puzzled audiences. His comeback production of Three Tall Women in 1994 won him his third Pulitzer; he had written it after his mother's death, and had stated in its introduction that, although they "had managed to make each other very unhappy," he was proud to have translated a "fact into fiction," without "the distortive folly of 'interpretation.'" And yet, the play, as any of his works, wasn't a simple matter of fact-taking. It revolved around the question of consciousness: the limitations of what and how we know; the epistemic value of one's life; the pleasures and consolations, if any, that we may derive from it. "My adoptive mother," Albee wrote in the intro, "whom I knew from my infancy…and who, perhaps, knew me as well. Perhaps." Continue Reading »
Tags: Cries and Whispers, David Esbjonson, Edward Albee, Endgame, Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Ingmar Bergman, Jane Alexander, Laila Robins, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Peter Francis James, Samuel Beckett, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia, The Lady from Dubuque, The Signature Theatre, Three Tall Women
No Comments »
My first impression of the set of Hurt Village, the new play by Katori Hall at the Signature Theatre, was its Kienholz look. As in the work of the American installation artist, the eclectically assembled furnishings—an oversized plastic-wrapped sofa, blood-red kitchen, chain-link fences, graffiti, a solitary lamppost—evoked realism in loose, expressive brushstrokes, with a touch of the sinister.
The set befitted the play, which grapples with recognizable themes in bold and vigorous, if not always new, ways. Cookie, a 13-year-old rapper, is a resident of the Hurt Village project in Memphis that's about to be bulldozed to clear space for new condominiums. Cookie's precocious linguistic gifts clash poignantly with her at times shaky grammar. From the start, she's the play's anchor—no small feat, considering how seamlessly a relative newcomer to the professional stage, Joaquina Kalukango, balances Cookie's childish schoolgirl angst, her bedwetting and sexual curio, with learning to hold her own, in a brutally adult world. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Raisin in the Sun, Bertolt Brecht, Corey Hawkins, Hurt Village, Joaquina Kalukango, Katori Hall, Lorraine Hansberry, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Martin Luther King, OBIE Awards, Patricia McGregor, Signature Theatre, The Mountaintop, The Tempest, The Wire, Tonya Pinkins, William Shakespeare
No Comments »
The artistic vision of the experimental theater ensemble the Wooster Group has been so consistently distinct over the years that, if you happen to be a fan, it seems nearly impossible to see it in action, and to come away unsatisfied, at least on some level. Unfortunately, the group's latest show is an unhappy anomaly: a Wooster Group presentation that hasn't been directed by the company's enfant terrible and réalisateur extraordinaire, Elizabeth LeCompte. The reigns for Early Plays by Eugene O'Neill have instead been handed over to Richard Maxwell, who has observed in his interview with Zachary Woolfe of The New York Observer, that he and LeCompte "do not really share an aesthetic, but there is a rigor underneath what we do." Continue Reading »
Tags: Aki Kaurismäki, Early Plays, Elizabeth LeCompte, Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare
1 Comment »
Belleville, a new play in its debut run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is most provocatively a conversation of objects—most of them of the innocuous, household variety. A baby monitor is broken apart by a frazzled woman who mistakes the cries it emits as those of her unborn niece. A man makes a meager peace offering to his reasonably fed-up landlord with a half-filled hash pipe; later, he forces a buttery pastry into his unwilling, not to mention hung over, wife's face out of desperation, though not until after she's performed impromptu surgery on a broken toenail with a large butcher's knife. A stemless wine glass, the bottom stained with at least two-day-old cheap red residue, sits on a dining table stage right throughout the drama's duration as a kind of emblem of the collegiate ex-pat fantasy. (This puerile reverie is further filled out within the single set—a small Parisian apartment—by postcards pegged tackily onto the wall, what look like pre-furnished, faux-Arabic throw pillows on a neutral gray couch, and a row of funny little chimneys sprouting off of the roof.) And in perhaps the most devastating example, a guarded cell phone becomes an objective correlative through which issues of miscommunication, betrayal, and manipulation are finally thrown into the intimidating deep end of verbalization. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amy Herzog, Belleville, Gilbert Owuor, Greg Keller, Maria Dizzia, Yale Repertory Theatre
No Comments »
David Henry Hwang's new Broadway play, Chinglish, begins with an American sign manufacturer talking about his experiences in China, offering his insights about doing business in that country. Just how well he has succeeded in understanding his partners and business practices in a foreign culture becomes clear as the play progresses. The insightful and witty comedy, written in both English and Mandarin (translated very effectively with subtitles projected onto the set) is the latest from the author of the 1988 Tony and Drama Desk award-winning play M. Butterfly, and is currently playing at the Longacre Theater. Chinglish offers a lively and thought-provoking look at a cross-cultural exchange that is likely to continue to figure prominently in the first half of this century.
Hwang made his mark as a playwright with FOB (an Asian-American derogative term for new immigrants who arrive in in the U.S. "Fresh Off the Boat" from Asia) which was produced in New York at the Public Theater in 1980. In the intervening years, the California-born playwright, now 54, has become one of the preeminent Asian-American voices in the theater. He achieved international recognition with M. Butterfly, which is loosely based on a true story about a French diplomat who fell in love with a Peking Opera star, who also happened to be a Chinese government spy, allegedly without realizing that "she" was really a man. In addition to his plays, Hwang work includes librettos for music theater works by Philip Glass, several screenplays and the books for the Disney musicals Aida and Tarzan. He was nominated for a Tony in 1998 for his second play on Broadway, Golden Child, which is inspired by stories about his ancestors related to him by his Chinese maternal grandmother. After a decade's absence, he returned to the New York stage in 2007 with Yellow Face, a comedy in which he examined his own evolving feelings regarding the controversy in the early nineties caused by the casting of a Caucasian actor as the male lead in Miss Saigon. The Obie-winning play, also a finalist that year for the Pulitzer, was staged at the Public Theater under the direction of Leigh Silverman, who also directed Chinglish. Hwang talked recently to The House Next Door about his new work. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aida, Candace Chong, Chinglish, David Henry Hwang, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, FOB, Glengarry Glen Ross, Golden Child, Leigh Silverman, Longacre Theater, M. Butterfly, Miss Saigon, Philip Glass, Public Theater, Pulitzer Prize, Tarzan, Tsai Chin, Yellow Face
No Comments »
by Carl Kelsch on October 13th, 2011 at 9:49 am in Theater
Every Halloween season, a handful of boutique haunted houses turn shuttered storefronts into temporary funhouses for giddy friends looking for an unusual night out—and willing to fork over around $30 and up for a ticket. Blackout Haunted House, situated on a drab block in midtown, is not that night out.
If fear were a drug, Blackout would rate as some pharmaceutical-grade stuff. The producers have been tinkering with volatile ingredients over the past few years, trying each October to concoct the perfect recipe of shocks to rattle even the most jaded New Yorker.
The first scare is the daunting waiver you're required to sign upon arrival. Patrons are also presented with a list of rules that rivals those of Fight Club. The first rule: "You must walk through alone."
"If you want, you can leave your glasses here," suggested one of hosts as I waited my turn to enter through a slit in a black plastic tarp. It was hard to imagine why my spectacles would pose a problem. Surely they accommodate for eyewear! Continue Reading »
Tags: Blackout Haunted House, David Fincher, Fight Club, Hostel, The Game
No Comments »
Cabaret, drag, and performance artist, Joey Arias is a potent experience all by himself. Add a Twist—that's master puppeteer Basil Twist—to the mix and you get the heady enchantment that is Arias with a Twist. Arias and Twist's striking collaboration is now playing on the Lower East Side at the Abrons Arts Center, in a nearly century-old theater, the original venue of the Neighborhood Playhouse. It seems fitting that the delightfully zany, visually jaw-dropping, ribald fantasy has berthed at the theater that, in the 1920s, was home to the popular vaudeville spoof, The Grand Street Follies. The current grand folly, Arias with a Twist (playing through October 16) is a series of tableaus, sketches, songs, and theatrical effects strung together to showcase the unique talents of its star and designer.
Arias with a Twist Deluxe, as it is now billed, is a return engagement of the show that became a cult favorite during its eight-month-long run at Soho's HERE theater in 2008, scaled up to fit into a larger stage. Enhanced with a couple of new songs and more elaborate video effects, it still retains the joyously scrappy quality of the original, and continues to surprise and delight with its theatrical magic. Arias, dressed in costumes by Thierry Mugler, holds his own amid Twist's stage creations, which are ably manipulated by a near invisible team of six puppeteers. The very loose plot has the sexually polymorphous character Joey abducted by aliens, duly probed and then dropped back into a lush jungle on this planet; after a mushroom-induced side trip to Hell, a larger-than-life Joey returns to Manhattan to perform in a retro nightclub accompanied by a four-piece puppet orchestra; the act comes complete with a chorus line and a Busby Berkley-inspired finale. Continue Reading »
Tags: Abrons Arts Center, Alex Gifford, Ann Magnuson, Arias with a Twist, Arias with a Twist Deluxe, Bar d'O, Basil Twist, Billie Holliday, Busby Berkley, Cirque du Soleil, Debbie Harry, Fiorucci, HERE, Jackie 60, Joey Arias, Klaus Nomi, Klaus Sperber, Led Zeppelin, Materials for the Arts, Symphonie Fantastique, The Addams Family, The Grand Street Follies, The Neighborhood Playhouse, The Pee-wee Herman Show, Thierry Mugler, You've Changed, Zumanity
No Comments »
by Lauren Wissot on September 26th, 2011 at 1:58 pm in Theater
Sprung from the mind of Jeffrey Hatcher, the writer behind the underrated play-turned-film Stage Beauty, the Arizona Theatre Company's 45th-anniversary season opener Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club is a fun theatrical mash-up that drops the characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes realm into an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club. I caught this world premiere helmed by ATC's artistic director David Ira Goldstein at the Temple of Music and Art, the company's cozy home base and a civilized oasis in the heart of downtown Tucson. There isn't a bad seat in the roomy house, and you can peruse the upstairs art gallery or take your time enjoying gourmet food, a glass of wine, or a cup of locally roasted coffee from the adjoining Temple Lounge before the show, then grab a refill and take it into the theater with you—a far cry from the tourist cattle call-feel of leisure-lacking Broadway these days. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arizona Theatre Company, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeffrey Hatcher, Remi Sandri, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club, Stage Beauty, The Suicide Club
No Comments »
Nothing is quite what it seems in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Invasion! If audiences at the Play Company's production of this delightfully subversive comedy feel a tad uncomfortable during the performance, well, that's how the playwright likes it. Produced by the Play Company, which focuses on a global program of adventurous new plays, Invasion! received its American debut last winter, garnering for Khemiri a 2011 Village Voice OBIE award for playwriting. A remount of the PlayCo production is currently playing at the Flea Theater in Tribeca.
Prior to Invasion!, Khemiri, a Stockholm native of Tunisian and Swedish parentage, was best known as a prose writer, acclaimed in Sweden for his first novel, One Eye Red in 2003. He received a prize for best Swedish novel for his next book, published in the United States this year under the title Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger. The novel is an inventive linguistic balancing act which relates the story of the life of a Tunisian immigrant in Sweden from frequently contradictory perspectives.
Shifting perspectives and a duplicity of language are also the hallmarks of Invasion!, which marked Khemiri's debut as a playwright. In Khemiri's play, a single word—"Abulkasem"—keeps morphing and changing its meaning, in the process moving some characters forward while ensnaring others in an all too familiar net of fear and paranoia. In seven fast-paced scenes, expertly calibrated by director Erica Schmidt, a versatile cast of four (Francis Benhamou, Nick Choksi, Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, and Bobby Moreno) tackle 19 different roles, change personalities and ethnicity on a dime, and always keep the audience on edge. Aided by a deft English translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles, Invasion! stays funny and playful while touching on contemporary politically charged issues that are anything but light-hearted. We spoke recently with the 32-year-old playwright, who was in New York to attend the remount of Invasion!, which opened a few days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Continue Reading »
Tags: 9/11, Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, Bobby Moreno, Erica Schmidt, Folkteatern, Francis Benhamou, Invasion!, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Lars Norén, Ledig House, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, Nick Choksi, OBIE Awards, One Eye Red, Rachel Willson-Broyles, Stockholm City Theatre, The Flea Theater, The Play Company, The Village Voice, University of Wisconsin, World Trade Center
No Comments »
With Labor Day, summer vacations, and weekend getaways behind us, it's time again to tune into the city's arts and culture vibe. The House checked out the wide variety of theater offerings for Broadway and beyond this fall and made a few selections to put on your calendar:
New Plays
This season is notable for the number of women playwrights with new plays on Broadway. One of them is 29-year-old Katori Hall, who makes her Broadway debut with The Mountaintop (from September 22 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater). In her fictional account, which takes place in 1968, on the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in her own home town of Memphis, the playwright imagines a late-night encounter between King and a mysterious woman. Movie and television star Samuel L. Jackson plays the great civil rights leader and Angela Bassett the nocturnal visitor. The production is directed by Kenny Leon, who received a Tony nomination last year for directing Fences. Leon also helms the production of Stick Fly (from November 18 at the Cort Theater), which marks the Broadway debut of another African American female playwright, Lydia R. Diamond. Stick Fly is a comedy of manners about an affluent black family spending a summer weekend at their home in Martha's Vineyard.
Adam Rapp is well-known for not pulling his punches, so brace yourself for his latest, Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling (starts September 13 at CSC), a surreal play that promises to "lift the veil on the lives of two wealthy American families" in Connecticut. The Atlantic Theater Company production features a dream cast which includes Christine Lahti, Cotter Smith, Katherine Waterston, and the incomparable Reed Birney. Continue Reading »
Tags: Adam Rapp, Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Jay Lerner, Angela Bassett, Ascunsion, Audra McDonald, Burton Lane, Chinglish, David Henry Hwang, David Ives, Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling, Follies, Harry Connick Jr., Hugh Dancy, James Goldman, Jesse Eisenberg, Joanna Gleason, Katori Hall, Kim Catrall, Krapp's Last Tape, Lydia R. Diamond, Man and Boy, Maple and Vine, Neighborhood Watch, Noël Coward, Norm Lewis, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Other Desert Cities, Peter Parnell, Private Lives, Rachel Weisz, Samuel L. Jackson, Sons of the Prophet, Stephen Karam, Stephen Sondheim, Stick Fly, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, The Mountaintop, Venus in Fur, We Live Here, Zoe Kazan
1 Comment »
David Greenspan sets the tone for a delightful evening of theater magic by jumping onto a jewel-box stage set at the start of The Patsy. There are no doorways on this set, nor is there a ceiling; it's a three-walled cube tastefully decorated with wallpaper and a few sticks of period furniture and props. In the nonstop 75-minute solo performance that follows, Greenspan resurrects a drawing-room comedy from the 1920s—three acts of family drama, witty banter, and romance, complete with a cast of eight characters. First presented on Broadway in 1925, the play, written by Barry Conners, centers on the Harringtons, a quarrelsome middle-class family. The father is a weary travelling salesman, the mother a social-climbing complainer, the elder daughter has just snagged a rich suitor, and the younger, bookish and disregarded by the others, harbors a secret passion for her sister's former, now discarded, lover. Without ever leaving the stage, Greenspan gleefully impersonates all the characters, which includes the girls' two young beaus and two walk-ons, charting their comings and goings and their emotional ups and downs, and setting the scene as needed by reading occasional stage directions as well.
A multiple OBIE winner and Drama Desk nominee, Greenspan is a frequent and distinctive presence on the New York stage. It's not exactly a surprise to see him turn out a bravura performance. Looking back at some of his career highlights, one doesn't easily forget his over the top Other Mother in Coraline, a musical he co-wrote with composer/lyricist Stephin Merritt; his exquisitely stylized portrayal of the acerbic Harold in the 1996 revival of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band; or the exasperating drag queen who delivers a moving rendition of "Over the Rainbow" on the eve of the Stonewall uprising in Terrence McNally's Some Men. Going even further back in time, you might also recall his one-of-a-kind turn as a neurotic artist obsessively channeling Streisand in the 1992 Public Theater production of his own The Home Show Pieces. No stranger to multiple roles, he has also breezed singlehandedly through his own The Myopia, a 25-character cavalcade extravagantly subtitled "an epic burlesque of tragic proportion," which was revived in January last year. Continue Reading »
Tags: Aristophanes, Barry Conners, Coraline, David Greenspan, Drama Desk Awards, Hello Again, Jack Cummings III, Jonas, Kristina Corcoran Williams, Lysistrata Jones, Marie Dressler, Marion Davies, Mart Crowley, OBIE Awards, Over the Rainbow, Public Theater, Some Men, Stephin Merritt, Terrence McNally, The Boys in the Band, The Home Show Pieces, The Myopia, The Patsy, The Royal Family, Transport Group
No Comments »
Recent Comments:
The Conversations: Michael Haneke
by Ed Howard
Links for the Day: The Yankee Comandante, Dunces Maybe Finds Its Ignatius, Michael Haneke on Amour, The Great Gatsby Trailer, & More
by shootthecritic
February House Composer Gabriel Kahane and Book Writer Seth Bockley Talk Communal Music
by David Ehrenstein
A Movie a Day, Day 83: Andrei Rublev
by murtazaali
Critical Distance: The Artist
by DRush76