Unnatural Acts, a new play at the Classic Stage Company, takes us back to period of intolerance that is hopefully unthinkable today. It focuses on events from nearly a century ago, when, in 1920, a panel of administrators at Harvard University embarked on campus-wide investigation aimed at exposing and then expelling homosexuals in the student body. Triggered by the suicide of a student off-campus, the inquiry resulted in another's on campus a few weeks later, and 14 convictions. All evidence of the so-called "Secret Court" was subsequently covered up and it was not until 80 years later that the transcripts of the unprecedented proceedings came to light when Amit Paley, a student reporter for The Harvard Crimson, stumbled upon a reference to it in the university archives. He gained access to some 500 pages of documents in the buried files and broke the story in 2002. Since then, the story of the gay witch hunt at the Ivy League institution has become the subject of a 2005 book-length study by William Bright, a 2009 movie, Perkins 28, in which Harvard undergraduates reenact the student testimonies, and Veritas, a play by Stan Richardson presented at last year's New York International Fringe Festival. Unnatural Acts, which compellingly portrays the young men whose lives were deeply affected by investigations, is collectively written by members of a new ensemble company Plastic Theatre. Associate artistic director at the CSC, Tony Speciale, who conceived and directed this project, spoke recently with the House about the production. Continue Reading »
The House Next Door
Archive: Theater
Labors of Love: An Interview with Moisés Kaufman
by Gerard Raymond on June 12th, 2011 at 12:59 pm in Interviews, Theater
The great Tennessee Williams, unsurpassed poet of the theater and incisive chronicler of the human soul, was born 100 years ago this March. No surprise then that we are likely to see a slew of his work produced on our stages in his centenary year. In New York, we've already had productions of his lesser known Vieux Carré and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Now we have a particularly unusual offering in the New Group and Tectonic Theater Project's production of One Arm, based on an unproduced Williams screenplay. The production, currently playing at Theater Row, is adapted and directed by Moisés Kaufman, who's best known for the plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Laramie Project, and the Tony-nominated 33 Variations. Kaufman also recently directed Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, currently playing on Broadway. The Venezuelan born director/playwright talked to The House recently about his labor of love, bringing this little known Williams work to the stage.
Gerard Raymond: How did you get interested in One Arm?
Moisés Kaufman: I found it in a collection of screenplays about 10 years ago and I remember being immediately struck by its frankness. When Williams is depicting gay life in the '40s, '50s, or '60s, for obvious reasons, his gay characters always end up very badly: Blanche DuBois's boyfriend commits suicide off-stage [A Streetcar Named Desire], Paul Newman ends up married to Elizabeth Taylor [the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], and in Suddenly Last Summer, Sebastian ends up being eaten by cannibals. This screenplay is really about the kind of homosexual underground in which Tennessee Williams lived. The story is based, supposedly, on a hustler, who had one arm, who he knew in New Orleans, who was incredibly beautiful and who resembled the statue of Apollo. Obviously it was autobiographical because he met this hustler, but it was also personal because toward the end of his life most of his sexual encounters were with hustlers. It was the frankest portrayal of that world that I had seen from Williams. I was very moved and very excited by that.
GR: Didn't he write it originally as a short story? Continue Reading »
Cliffs Notes Bergman: The Atlantic Theater Company's Through a Glass Darkly
by Joseph Pisano on June 6th, 2011 at 11:46 am in Theater
If you've never seen the film Through a Glass Darkly, then there's a fighting chance you might like Jenny Worton's stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpiece, the great director's starting point in a trilogy of soul-wrenching 1960s films that tackle God's relationship—or lack thereof—to humanity. But if you have set eyes and ears on Bergman's carefully crafted images and words, then experiencing Worton's ham-fisted take on the original is as emotionally satisfying as reading a Cliffs Notes version of Moby Dick.
Which is not to say that adapting Through a Glass Darkly for the stage was a bad idea; in bringing to the screen what was essentially a psychologically fraught chamber play, Bergman, who also wrote the film, always acknowledged a creative debt to the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. Certainly, taking Bergman's minimal characters and haunting island setting from celluloid to three dimensions was not a ready-made feat, but with some clever tweaking it could have been a worthwhile effort. Unfortunately, however, Worton and director David Leveaux fall far short of worthwhile, instead achieving an undesirable sort of artistic alchemy, where they turn movie gold into theatrical straw. Continue Reading »
Suspended Cirque's Subterranea: An Urban Fairytale at the Connelly Theater
by Lauren Wissot on April 30th, 2011 at 10:01 pm in Theater
Developed from their earlier Urbanopolis, which ran at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Subterranea: An Urban Fairytale is the latest production from underappreciated aerial troupe extraordinaire Suspended Cirque. Opening with Joshua Dean's futuristic hobo Pan making small, uh, "talk" (Pan uses nonsense-speak) with the incoming audience, Subterranea can best be described as Dr. Seuss gone cyber. As a synthesized voice welcomes us to our visit to this strange land, Pan helpfully pantomimes the consequences of cell phone use and photography during the performance before the curtains part to reveal three amorphous bundles dangling in midair. Bathed in red lighting against the blackness of the stage, chandeliers crafted from empty, upside-down water bottles hanging from hoops come into focus. As the purple fabric begins to writhe, the cocoons conjure up an Alien creepiness. After slowly unfolding from their aerial wombs, which morph into sturdy strips, a trio of gothic female extraterrestrials (the troupe's tall blonds Angela Jones and Kristin Olness as Prima and Hecate, and its petite brunette Michelle Dortignac as Echo) perform an alluring modern dance in midair. They're trying to entice our protagonist, The Man, played by Suspended Cirque's lanky vaudevillian straight man Ben Franklin, who has just descended—via a white fabric strip—into their dark underworld. Continue Reading »
The Normal Heart on Broadway and Larry Kramer's Legacy of Provocation
by Ed Gonzalez on April 27th, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
Following showings of the new Broadway revival of The Normal Heart, audiences are handed a letter written by the play's author, Larry Kramer. Titled "Please Know," this epistle is, like the play itself, a provocation—a cutting indictment of the bureaucratic greed, political self-interest, and apathy within the gay community that continues to stand in the way of AIDS research and education. Why is The Normal Heart still relevant? Because Kramer, in his own words, has "never seen such wrongs as this plague, in all its guises, represents, and continues to say about us all."
The subject of this remarkable play isn't only AIDS and what it says about us all, from gays and our friends to politicos and Big Pharma; like Kramer's brilliant Faggots, a hilarious, fiercely intelligent, stinging, heartbreaking account of gay life in post-Stonewall New York City, it's also about Kramer's brutalizing anger and how he righteously turned it into a call to action. The play's lead, writer and activist Ned Weeks, is a stand-in for Kramer, just as the nameless organization he founds, and from which he's removed on the eve of finally getting face time with the city's mayor, is the Gay Men's Health Crisis. He isn't the play's hero exactly, but his volcanic, justified rage is very much heroic, and it fuels the text's most devastating, customarily articulate, takedowns of the people and organizations—Koch, Reagan, The New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control, even the very gays Faggots helped to liberate—that allowed AIDS to happen. Continue Reading »
The Little Chaos Is a Charming Brechtian Mashup
by Lauren Wissot on April 24th, 2011 at 9:39 pm in Theater
Though The Little Chaos takes its title from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1966 short, it's primarily a deconstruction of the director's first feature, the deconstructionist Love Is Colder Than Death. Using text not only from Fassbinder's films, but also from Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, even a postmodernist novel called The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme, the play is a heady Brechtian mashup that surprisingly charms rather than ironically alienates. Continue Reading »
Sleep No More Haunts Chelsea Warehouse
by Carl Kelsch on April 14th, 2011 at 3:24 pm in Theater
One of the season's biggest theatrical spectacles is not on Broadway. Sleep No More marks the New York City debut of Punchdrunk, a British company known for its immersive theater productions. Filling up a six-floor Chelsea warehouse space with their heady concoction of scenic design and wordless performance, they've managed to turn Macbeth inside out. "The Scottish play" is certainly having a New York moment: two Off-Broadway productions, Throne of Blood at Film Forum this weekend. Punchdrunk's loose adaptation ups the ante, making the audience uniquely complicit in this tale of madness, upheaval, and revenge.
While "interactive" performances like Fuerza Bruta take their inspiration from the club scene, Punchdrunk has adopted the atmosphere of a haunted house—or in this case, a hotel. They've replaced cheap scares with the genuine ghastliness of the source material, Shakespeare's most macabre play. Sleep No More's primary setting is the McKittrick Hotel. With its noirish early-1930s trappings, this hotel functions as a time warp as well. Continue Reading »
Lost and Found in Translation: An Interview with Playwright Rajiv Joseph
by Gerard Raymond on April 3rd, 2011 at 11:11 am in Interviews, Theater
Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which opened March 31 on Broadway, heralds the arrival of compelling new voice in the American theater. And it's not just because the production has snagged A-list comedian Robin Williams to play the title role, or because the play was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. This surrealistic dark comedy, set in the early months of the U.S. occupation of Iraq's capital city, is a bold and vividly theatrical take on issues and concerns that face Americans in the 21st century. The buzz about the 36-year-old Ohio-born writer has been building for some years now. His first play, Huck and Holden, debuted off-Broadway in 2005. Numerous awards and grants, as well as productions of his plays in theaters across the country, followed. Bengal Tiger, his most powerful play to date, has been given a gripping and imaginative production, directed by Moisés Kaufman, twice in Los Angeles and now in New York at the Richard Rodgers Theater. I spoke with Joseph last month, when the play was still in previews. Continue Reading »
War Hoarse: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Clifford Chase's Winkie
by Jason Clark on March 31st, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
War is hell, but it has never left any modern writer dry for material, and with the endless, twisted, labyrinthine wars that continue to prop up all over the world, it provides enough mileage for keyboard-tappers everywhere. Both Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Clifford Chase's Winkie offer skewered takes on global matters and are firmly a product of our grey, cynical times; it's almost as if Jon Stewart were lurking somewhere in the background, ready to pounce if the right amount of canted slyness didn't present itself. Oh, there's lotsa yelling for effect too. Lots of it. Continue Reading »
There Ain't No Shelley Long Here: Hello Again
by Jason Clark on March 20th, 2011 at 8:00 pm in Theater
Okay, the gripes are gonna come out first: The loft space at 52 Mercer Street used for Transport Group's glorious redo of Michael John LaChiusa's La Ronde takeoff Hello Again seemed about 20 degrees too warm on the press night I attended, and my ass was as sore as a whore's from the cushion-less seating around the large banquet tables. Oh, and the considerable presence of actress Elizabeth Stanley (Company, Cry-Baby) is somewhat underutilized. But that's pretty much all that isn't stirring about this production, given an arresting, fresh, downtown-chic pulse by director Jack Cummings III (who similarly staged The Boys in the Band last year, hauntingly, in an actual NYC apartment), and featuring a truly brave, fully charged ensemble that never pushes the sexually voracious vignettes into prurient wank territory. Continue Reading »
Iranian Theater Festival: Something Something Über Alles
by Lauren Wissot on March 6th, 2011 at 10:32 am in Theater
Though Iranian cinema has been all the rage among cinephiles for as long as the Khomeini regime has been cracking down on its filmmakers, the country's vibrant ex-pat theater practitioners across the U.S. have gone virtually unnoticed. Enter the Brick Theater in Williamsburg to remedy the discrepancy. From now until March 26th you can catch a vast array of productions that reflect the diversity of Persian culture itself: political protests and surreal comedies, live actors and shadow puppets, dance and video (and yes, even a couple of films) are all represented at this year's Iranian Theater Festival. Continue Reading »
Down and Out in Southie: Frances McDormand in Good People at the Friedman Theatre
by Jason Clark on March 3rd, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
Only David Lindsay-Abaire could write scenes of downtrodden Southie (South Boston, or "Bah-ston" as its citizens might say) women talkin' shit at a church bingo night without it being patently insulting. As sensitive a modern playwright as can be heard these days, the setups for the scenes in his grandly entertaining Good People—his best work to date—sound like doomed-to-fail, ivory tower-slanted scenarios: a minimum-wage employee being fired for dismal work, an uneasy meeting of old flames (one of which has a spouse of a different race), the needs of a child with a major disability. But Lindsay-Abaire is after something bigger than trite blue-vs.-white-collar advantages and disadvantages. Instead of holding up the play's lead character Margaret (Frances McDormand) as a victim of hard luck, the playwright shrewdly uses her as an example of how choices can make or break us, and the smallest twists of fate determine our path. Continue Reading »
Adam Rapp's The Hallway Trilogy at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
by Jason Clark on February 24th, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
"What would we do without drama?," asks a highly educated city worker (Louis Cancelmi) in the first segment of Adam Rapp's The Hallway Trilogy, an energizing, delightfully anarchic kick in the pants to a rather sleepy theater season—and you wonder if Rapp included such a line so that he was able to answer it himself through this triptych of plays, each seemingly from a slightly different hemisphere in his whirling psyche. Examining a Lower East Side apartment floor through the years 1953, 2003, and eventually 2053, and how social mores and deviant behavior modify their way through the decades, it's likely to become Rapp's crowning achievement, not simply in how beautifully his already-patented vision weaves with his blessedly talented new collaborators, but in how you can see his push-pull feelings of love and discontentment with societal tides of change immersing themselves in the enticingly confining spaces of the Rattlestick, which has been stunningly reconfigured into a large rectangular tenement floor. Continue Reading »
Imitation of Life: The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church
by Lauren Wissot on January 17th, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
"What are you writing there? Are you reviewing? You're a bit late!" Daniel Kitson teased a young man seated in the audience scribbling away at the January 16th matinee of The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church, Kitson's one-man show that opened at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO 10 days earlier as part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival. (For the record, this mile-a-minute monologue that made audiences swoon at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival plays through the end of the month, having outrun the UTR festival. And also for the record, this critic has a good excuse for tardiness, having just arrived back in NYC from Europe.) "You review away," the bearded and bubbly, disarmingly charming standup comedian and actor continued. "But the critics have spoken. And it's a hit!" Continue Reading »
Blood from a Stone at Theatre Row
by Jason Clark on January 12th, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Theater
You can't swing a cat in this town without hitting a theater with a dysfunctional family drama, and this one even has the kitty to prove it. Blood from a Stone, the writing debut of sometime-actor Tommy Nohilly (who I'll confess up front was the sensitive, appropriately badass security guard in my college dorm), is the kind of maximum opus that former latchkey kids anxiously hope to write someday. And this one has it all: full-frontal female nudity, broken windows, broken limbs, profane verbal digs, even a toppling Christmas tree. Thankfully, it also has the New Group to shape it, and under Scott Elliott's typically understated direction, with an accent on hushed exchanges (you'd better pray there's no emphysemic coughers at your performance), the long haul (the break for intermission doesn't arrive until almost the two-hour mark) is worth your while.
Travis (Ethan Hawke, in his most soulful slacker role to date) returns home for the holidays with designs on hightailing it to Cali and leaving behind his family's stunted Connecticut roots. Margaret (Ann Dowd), his hard-bitten mother, has a bad hip and even badder mouth and despises the sight of husband Bill (Gordon Clapp), an anger-fueled bundle of nerves with an odd penchant for doing the right thing when called for. He also has a sister, Sarah (Natasha Lyonne), a practical health-care worker with a baby on the way, and a brother Matt (Thomas Guiry), a gambling addict who's become the family black sheep due to his incessant lies. And then there's the Latina MILF next door (Daphne Rubin-Vega, in full va-va-va voom mode) whom Travis has carried on an affair with for years, and continues to right in his parents' house, as if he were a teenager again. Continue Reading »
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