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Whew! Theater marathon this weekend, and some good stuff!
November 24 – “Have you ever seen anything of double nature? When the sun’s standing high at noon and the world seems to be going up in flames, I’ve heard a terrible voice talking to me.” I’ve always loved Georg Büchner’s amazing, influential expressionist play
Woyzeck, jaggedly composed and not quite finished when he died in 1837 of typhoid fever at the age of 23. (I used that quote as the epigraph for my Sam Shepard biography.) So I was psyched to see the much-acclaimed production by London’s Gate Theatre at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, adapted and directed by Daniel Kramer, a young American director who’s already gotten a lot of attention in London for his productions of
Bent, Hair, and Through the Leaves, among others. It is an inventively staged and extremely beautifully designed show that makes the best use of St. Ann’s space I’ve ever seen. David Howe’s lighting is practically the star of the show and is the primary factor in one gorgeous visual landscape after another. Kramer and Neil Irish, who designed the set and costumes, clearly collaborated on many striking images, beginning with Woyzeck’s first appearance in a tight dead-white spotlight, crunching on peas, and riding a tricycle around the stage with a dark figure looming behind him. A prominent clock without hands and various objects suspended in mid-air helped create the environment inside the mind of a working-class soldier dealing with the place where external and internal madness meet and dissolve into one another. A huge shadowy cross introduced an element of religious faith/guilt that hadn’t previously registered with me. The problem with the production, and it’s a big one, is the acting, which is all extremely caricatured, School of Funny Voices, a complete avoidance of emotional reality. Even though it’s a philosophically and psychologically fractured world that Büchner depicts, it’s a loss to feel nothing for Woyzeck and Marie, the woman he loves. Edward Hogg worked his ASS off, and I appreciated his ability to switch between stillness and high energy, but it was still too much laborious Acting. I didn’t exactly mind having a jukebox in the corner fueling the production with bizarre bursts of Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, but I’m not sure what it really adds to the play, aside from bringing it into this historical moment in a recognizably deconstructionist way. The production is worth seeing for its sheer visual beauty, but it didn’t displace any of the good memories I have of previous versions, which include the Met’s still superb rendition of the Berg opera, JoAnne Akalaitis’s production during her brief reign as artistic director of the Public Theater, and – best of all – Richard Foreman’s exquisite staging at the Hartford Stage Company starring the great David Patrick Kelly.
November 25 – Seeing the first play, Voyage, of the trilogy
The Coast of Utopia, I realize that Tom Stoppard is the gold standard against which I judge all living playwrights (as Sondheim is the standard for musical theater composers). God, he’s great, and he’s very well served by Jack O’Brien’s production at Lincoln Center Theater. He loves people AND he loves ideas, and his plays delight in the struggle to let each embody the other. And more so than any other playwright I can think of, including Shaw and Shakespeare, he is a master at getting you to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. That said, there are many ambitious new horizons he undertakes in
Utopia, not the least of which is tackling a story that requires every bit of three full-length plays to accomplish. I’m not going to do justice to the play in this cursory posting – suffice it to say that he’s dramatizing the search for freedom in the modern world, sprung from the American and French Revolutions, looking forward to the Russian Revolution, from the point of view of the Russian intellectual class during the 19th century. Philosophy, politics, literature, and romance flow through Voyage in smart intellectual conversations but also Chekhovian character studies and family interactions, as well as fleet bits of poetic theatricality, images that flash by or haunt the mind (like the field of peasants that utter genius Bob Crowley has sculpted to hang out in the background throughout the show). The three hours fly by, and yet we’ve still only begun to be introduced to the gigantic cast of characters: Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke, in a performance that’s suitably big and showy but not impressive to me), Alexander Herzen (Brian F. O’Byrne), Nicholas Stankevich (David Harbour), Ivan Tugenev (Jason Butler Harner), and Vissarion Belinsky (Billy Crudup, who overplays his first scene annoyingly but eventually won me over, playing a difficult character who wins your attention despite his annoying personality). Josh Hamilton has only a cameo in this play, as Nicholas Ogarev; I think he’s central to later plays. The Bakunin family is uniformly terrific: Richard Easton as Michael’s father, Amy Irving as his mother (relentlessly beating servants), and the actresses playing his Four Sisters (“To Moscow!”), especially Martha Plimpton (I see her becoming her generation’s Dana Ivey – smart, comic, skilled) and Jennifer Ehle (who again conjures Meryl Streep as much as she does her mother, Rosemary Harris). I walked out thrilled, wishing that I could see part 2 the next day and part 3 the following day.
November 26 – Instead I saw Company, which I adored. I’d never seen it onstage before – not being a fan of either Boyd Gaines or director Scott Ellis, I skipped the Roundabout’s 1995 revival – so even though I knew the entire score, a lot of the play was a revelation to me. And John Doyle’s staging, with all the actors doubling as the orchestra (a la his
Sweeney Todd), is magnificent in focusing simply, intelligently, relentlessly on the moment-by-moment drama of George Furth’s play (really funny and smart and deep in its exploration of everything that goes on emotionally inside relationships) and Sondheim’s music. Repeatedly throughout, the music (sublimely arranged by Mary-Mitchell Campbell) trumps the spectacle, leads the drama, surprises and unearths emotions. If the 1970 original cast album is emblazoned on your brain (with its brassy orchestrations, which now sound dated and shrill), you will have many enjoyable surprises. (I don’t have much interest in playing the recording of the
Sweeney Todd revival, but I can’t wait for the cast album from this production.) Having the girlfriends of Bobby actually play saxophones rather than just imitate them in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” is wonderfully witty, and the arrangement of “Someone Is Waiting” with guitar, violin, oboe, and flute makes you swoon. I can’t enumerate all the moments, the show overruns with them. It was a revelation to me to discover the dramatic context of Sondheim classics like “Another Hundred People” and even “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Barbara Walsh has a tough challenge to step into Elaine Stritch’s size-10 shoes, but in my estimation she pulls off the role of Joanne by making fully convincing (rather than grotesque or dream-on-lady) the erotic potential between her and Bobby. And Raul Esparza absolutely owns Bobby, top to bottom. Great singer, wonderful actor – he could own Broadway if he wants to. It’s another treacherous role, the cipher, the man who repeatedly steps back from engagement, and yet he’s so handsome and compelling to look at that you stay with him, and so when he steps into this production’s ensemble metaphor and actually sits down to play the piano and sing “Being Alive,” everything clicks into place. By the way, I’m in awe of Doyle’s ability to stage even this show full of knockout show-stoppers in such a way that the audience doesn’t necessarily applaud at the end. Barbara Walsh is probably not too crazy about sacrificing her ovation at the end of “The Ladies Who Lunch.” But the point of the scene is not “Everybody rise!” – it’s the exchange that follows where she says, “I can take care of you,” and Bobby says, “Who will I take care of?” And this staging makes that point beautifully. Really a triumph. I must say, I felt incredibly grateful that I got to sit in the sixth row center – for this production, it was pretty close to sitting in nirvana.
November 27 – I admire David Hare tremendously, though I like some of his plays better than others. Generally, I prefer his big thick dense political dramas
(Plenty, A Map of the World, Fanshen, Stuff Happens) to his small-cast character studies
(Skylight, The Blue Room, Amy’s View). His new play, The Vertical
Hour, falls in the latter category. At the center of it is an interesting character, a former war correspondent turned academic political scientist named Nadia Blye (Julianne Moore, making her Broadway debut). She describes herself as a feminist and fights the good fight against lazy-minded students and politically ignorant friends and colleagues; after a short scene at Yale, where she teaches, most of the play shows her going with her physical therapist boyfriend Philip (a thankless cardboard role played by Andrew Scott) to visit his doctor father Oliver (Bill Nighy) at his house on the Welsh border. A salient point about Nadia is that she accepted an invitation to the White House to brief the president before the invasion of Iraq, for which she has taken considerable flak in professional circles; a salient point about Oliver is that “he killed a woman once,” meaning that he was driving his mistress home from an assignation when his car was broadsided by a befuddled 80-year-old. Much conversation flows around a doctor and his duties, a patriot and his/her duties, a journalist/citizen and his/her duties. The play is simultaneously elliptical, in a studiedly Chekhovian way, and sketchy, in a distinctly unsatisfying way. You keep thinking there’s going to be a big smart debate on Iraq, but Hare doesn’t go there entirely, because it would be too easy and obvious to just bash Bush. The play zigs and zags and pulls the characters around through various romantic flirtations, toying with the audience and our expectations, but never quite feeding us. I found it thin, the production annoyingly staged by Sam Mendes, Bill Nighy especially mannered as the father. I liked Julianne Moore – what’s not to like about an intelligent, passionate, beautiful actress who slouches through her curtain call like a sheepish rock star? – even though she’s playing one of Hare’s typically enigmatic heroines, a la Vanessa Redgrave in
Wetherby, the main character in Plenty, all the characters Blair Brown (Hare’s ex-girlfriend) played in his movies and plays. I just re-read my review of Hare’s 1975 rock’n’roll play
Teeth ‘n’ Smiles and see that this is a figure that he’s been intrigued with for a very long time. I’ll look forward to reading the reviews; maybe they’ll explain to me something I missed about
The Vertical Hour.
see previous entry here
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