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July 5 – John Tiffany’s production of The Bacchae
at Lincoln Center Festival contains two very entertaining ideas: Alan Cumming plays Dionysus, which is good casting – his impy androgyny completely suits the character Euripides wrote; and the title characters, the chorus of Maenads that follow Dionysus around, are nine youngish black women in red dresses whose odes are pop-soul numbers arranged to sound like
the girl-group backups for Laura
Nyro. Tiffany, who staged the snazzy National Theatre of Scotland production
The Black Watch at St. Ann’s last season, knows how to feed the audience regular jolts of theatricality, starting with Dionysus’ entrance from the heavens head-first and butt-bared. (Cumming weirdly spends the rest of the night tugging his awkward-looking gold skirt down to keep his genitals out of sight.) A bare stage stands in for all locations, with a smoking grate that represents the grave of Semele, Dionysus’ mother – with a wave of his hand, a bouquet of poppies flies from the sky and stabs into the ground. When he wants to divert the attention of Pentheus by burning down his castle, suddenly the stage is ablaze with 10 seconds of real fire that blasts a wave of high temperature out into the air-conditioned house. These coups de theatre are diverting…but somehow they don’t add up to a very deep understanding of an admittedly deceptive, difficult play. Is Euripides prizing sexual freedom over law and order? Is he seriously making that an either-or proposition? Is he upholding adherence to the law of sacrifices and paying homage to the gods – or is he, like Epicurus, making fun of that whole idea and showing the cruelty and heedlessness that follows from taking seriously the mythology of Greek deities? This production doesn’t exactly engage any of that – the first half is kicky and amusing, the second half is attenuated and grotesque. Pentheus is a stick figure, so is Agave, his crazed mother. I sat behind Josh White and Alice Playten, who said that the production whetted her appetite for a revival of
The Gospel at
Colonus. I agree. Josh, the creator of the famously trippy psychedelic Joshua Light Show, told me that he’ll be doing a gig at
Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors accompanying the American concert premiere of Manuel Göttsching’s famous electronic composition E2-E4 Friday August 15.
July 6 – My international crew of video salonistas gathered at Judy’s house and watched Fatih Akin’s grim, beautiful
The Edge of
Heaven, fantastic tragedy set in Bremen, Germany, and Istanbul.
Hannah Schygulla plays a key role. You can see a snippet
of it here.
see previous entry here
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