Personal Theatrical Musings on Performances

Thursday, January 24, 2008

"Miss Julie" by The Hypocrites on January 24, 2008

Members of the Hypocrites joke that they do two kinds of plays: talkie plays and walkie plays. Talkie plays, as you might guess, have a lot of dialogue. Last season, they did an extraordinary production of Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano." It didn't feel very talkie but I suppose it was. This production of August Strindberg's 1888 play is a walkie play. One walks around the set to view the play. Whether a walkie or a talkie play, one can usually count on seeing plays with extraordinary scripts done with intelligent interpretations of those scripts. Sean Graney, the artistic director of the company, directs the majority of the productions and his understanding and translations of the plays to the stage are among the smartest I ever encounter.

Strindberg is considered the father or modern theater. With "Miss Julie," he set out to ignite a revolution in theater by writing a naturalistic play. These days, though, naturalism is the status quo in theater and Graney, who directed this production, is interested in igniting his own revolution by shifting us away from it. His admiration for the writing, though, leads him to present very careful and smart interpretations of the plays. In a way, a director always co-authors a play when producing it, by cutting scenes or adding dialogue, making certain design choices, or emphasizing certain points of view in the script over others. In this production, Graney seems to do that even more than is typical and it is fun to witness it. In a way, this production is a deconstruction (and I'm not using that word when I should be saying analysis) of theater and a lesson in theater history. I don't know enough about Strindberg to know if he had intended to do the same with his play 120 years ago. As a modernist, that might very well have been the case.

"Miss Julie" is about an aristocratic woman who gives in to her lust for a servant and causes an upheaval of the roles of the aristocracy and the servants. When the play opens, Miss Julie has used her father's absence as an opportunity to dance with the servants. As she plays with her father's coachman, Jean, making him kiss her feet, her hands, and dance with her, he gets aroused and eventually they have sex. Miss Julie becomes somewhat melodramatic, wanting Jean to assure her that he loves her (although they both know that neither of them loves the other). Jean at first tries to protect himself by convincing her that what she is doing is unseemly but once he realizes he's unable to stop her, he uses the situation to make life better for himself: he tries to get her to finance a new hotel that he would start and eventually leads her to kill herself. He knows that as long as the master calls, he'll have to say "Yes, sir" and go to him and tries to escape that life and then just to save his job. The third character, Kristin, is the cook and Jean's betrothed. She wants to keep things they way they are, with the aristocracy out of reach and something to admire. She knows that they know too little because they never work but she believes that social order must be kept. Thus, while Miss Julie and Jean are crossing boundaries, Kristin is trying to maintain them.

Graney deconstructs the play through the audience's physical experience of it. He adds a singing chorus of sorts, and they sing about what is happening in the play and guide us through the space. In the middle of the room is a large box with wooden paneling. Each of the four sides says 4th, as in 4th wall. The audience walks to the farthest side from the entrance for the first act and the wall opens up to reveal a kitchen, where the first scene will unfold. We then move to another side, where Miss Julie opens a wall and the bar is inside. Eventually, the entire box is opened and the audience is invited to sit within it to watch the final act. I was less than two feet from the actors at certain points. The costumes early in the play were fairly contemporary. By the final scene, we've moved backward in theater history and the costumes look like those that might have been used in an 1888 production or a contemporary production that chose to set it in 1888. They also all match; they're the same style, fabric, and shade of green. When in that final scene Kristin tell Jean that his clothes look ridiculous, it's a funny joke about theater productions. His clothes look ridiculous because he's no longer wearing jeans but is now in a coachman's outfit from 1888 and because it's green and matches her dress. The production also begins with a contemporary setting of the play, bringing Strindberg's script up to 2008, but as it moves ahead, it moves backward in time and ends in an 1888 production. As a concept, it's by far one of the most clever sets I've seen. 

When the play isn't being referential, it's less of a success for me but I'm not certain why. The script is dense and dense scripts are difficult because if your mind wanders for a minute you lose something important. Still, I feel like I "got" the story. Maybe the performances weren't always clear. The timing of the dialogue was steady and fast and the actor who played Jean wasn't always convincing within those constraints. There were times when he was excellent but not in all scenes. Both women were compelling and maintaining such intensity must be difficult to pull off when you're in such close proximity to the audience. Unlike "Mud," another walkie play that was unsurpassed, the stylized acting didn't manage to breakthrough to have an emotional impact on me. When Jean drips blood on Miss Julie's neck, telling us about the suicide about to come, I loved it for it's referential nature but was not moved to be sad for what was about to happen. 

I, for one, do believe that theater artists are creating new forms of theater, with "Hey, Girl" as an excellent example, even if the mainstream theater companies like the Goodman and Steppenwolf are not producing them. The Hypocrites are going in a different direction. They still focus on conventional scripts and create new things out of them. It's some of the very best theater in Chicago and is something to be seen. 




Sunday, January 20, 2008

"Hey Girl" by Societas Raffaello Sanzalo on January 18, 2008 at the Museum of Contemporry Art

"Hey Girl" is the kind of piece that performance art groups strive to achieve. It is a true combination of theater and visual art, with non-narrative movement through time and technically dazzling design elements that work together to create a coherent piece. At a time when experimental theater is striving to break away from realism and art is a mixture of media, the Italian theater company Societas Raffaelo Sanzlo achieves what others are experimenting with. 

One walks into a theater that is humid and foggy and dark. The lights come up to show a table with a large blob of melting flesh in which one recognizes a foot hanging off the side of the metal table and a woman's head on top. With loud, arresting music that seems to be announcing the arrival of something while also marking the passing of time, the flesh-colored blob melts and falls off the table, revealing the naked body of woman who slowly sits up on the table and slowly walks up stage, her back to us. Upon getting off the table, the female figure still has no head but slowly a hear appears, then hair.  She looks at herself in a mirror and stumbles across the stage where she bangs on a drum and puts on some clothes. We witness her birth, rising out of a primordial blob, and see her develop into a recognizable human being. The image is fascinating, a technical feat (what is that blob made out of, one wonders), and meaningful (we recognize what is happening). It is an artifact (the blob is sculpture) and a performance (the birth of this creature).

The rest of the performance is no less astounding. Some of my favorite images include an attack upon the girl when a couple dozen young men, mostly in black, attack the girl with black pillows. The stage is dark and the lighting and sound design are such that it almost seems like a video piece. Another is of a naked and headless black woman with metallic paint on her body (creating the image of an armor) walking through broken glass with high heels wielding a large sword, an oversized girlish head with blond hair that once once her head, now upside down on the floor as though it's been lopped off.

There is no story here. No narrative about what has happened to this girl, raised up out of a primordial blob. But we witness a series of tableaus/images as she develops as a being and a person, learning about and reacting to the world, experiencing conflict and taking up her own coat of arms as a response. It manages to cohere, as successful art does. It is a combination of art forms and none at the same time. As a viewer, we are compelled by the way the piece works. We take in the beautiful images and we also work to create meaning. In the scene of the black woman walking among the shattered glass in high heels, a kind of armor on, wielding a sword, we are presented with a collection of visually and conceptually striking images and we are work hard, are compelled even, to make sense of it. We have images of Joan of Arc, the danger of walking on broken glass, the protection of high heels but also their counter-feminist associations, the presence of a black female body in itself trying to hide itself, etc. They somehow seem related and we have to bring our associations and imagination to make meaning of it. The piece is given to us but means more when we, as audience members, work to make something of it, using associations borne out of history and our own ideas to complete it as a thought piece. It's an amazing accomplishment.

Maybe this is where theater and art are right now, or at least one of the places. It takes some of its shape from the visual arts (painting, sculpture, and video) and theater and literature, each contributing what its discipline has traditionally offered but interacting with us in a way that none of the disciplines have accomplished in their individual histories.


Thursday, January 17, 2008

"Saint Joan" by Shaw Festival of Canada on January 16, 2008 - Chicago, IL



The Chicago Shakespeare Theater presents a series call World Stage in which they present some of the best international theater. This series is incredibly important to Chicago because it provides us an opportunity to see incredibly high quality and innovative work. To give you a sense of the range, last year I saw an all male production of "Twelfth Knight" in Russian that was the best production of Shakespeare I've ever seen and a musical about apartheid by a South African company. Tonight, I saw a more straightforward production of George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan."

This play is a bit of an outlier in the series, I'd say, in that the production isn't as innovative as is typical. However, it makes some sense to include, largely because this is a difficult play by a great playwright and one rarely gets to see a good production of it. As someone with an amateur interest in theater history, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to see this production. Most of the attention surrounding the production, though, say the importance of this production is that it deals with themes that are relevant to our times. They speak of Shaw as prescient, as if he anticipated the issues of our times. If that is so, I'm actually less interested.

This is a philosophical play and a fascinating one at that. It's concerned with the relationship among nationalism, the church, and the individual. Or rather, it examines tension as it related to the authority of the state, the church, and the individual. St. Joan believes that she's making war, against England but maybe also among the noblemen of France, in the name of God. God speaks to her through the saints. Eventually, the church, which is to say the leaders of the Catholic church, come to believe that she is a heretic because she believes God speaks to her directly, rather than through the church, which is to say the leaders of the Catholic church. The English hate her because she's defeating them but the more philosophical British seem to hate her because she believes that a king should hold the highest place in a country and not just be a leader. This means that all land would ultimately belong to the king, and not to the lords and noblemen, and this is a threat. Eventually, everyone wants her dead or silenced for their own reasons.

As a philosophical play, this is interesting. As a sign of the times, I find it less interesting, or rather, less satisfying. That argument goes something like this: Joan believes that God speaks directly to her and not through the church. Once this thought catches on, we have folks born of the Middle East listening to their own private Gods and blowing themselves and others up. A similar argument could be made about people in America. For me, that's a less interesting way to look at the play simply because it's then actually less relevant. I believe that arguments should be addressed to the audience. If a play is going to make an argument that will complicate my world view, I want it to complicate MY world view more so than help me make sense of the world view of others. The latter is certainly important but it can also seem a bit too easy.

A quick note on the production. The production design was beautiful. Expensive, glittery sets prevail today but they are rarely as poetic as this set. The acting was "acting." I was always aware that the people on stage were actors in a play. This kind of stylized acting is commonplace and, as in the case of Tara Rosling in this production, it can still very moving. When such stylization doesn't contribute to the theme of the play, though, I tend to find it annoying. And I also felt some of that here.

Monday, January 14, 2008

"Good Boys and True" - Steppenwolf Theatre - January 11, 2008 - Chicago

For those of you who are planning to see the show here are things you might like to know: it's a traditional narrative; part of it deals with homosexuality; the acting is wonderful (Martha Levy, as usual, is fantastic and the young Stephen Louis Grosh is a treat to watch); and, it's smart enough to keep your attention but traditional enough to not turn anyone off.  Now I'm going to give away the plot so stop reading.

The protagonist, a very popular and cute senior at a fancy prep school where he is captain of the football team, has two secrets. One he's willing to let be known although it might mean being kicked out of school or at least the football team, having his admission revoked from the Ivy League college of his choice, having all his schoolmates know he's done something despicable to a young woman, and being dragged through the mud in the local media, to name a few. The other he refuses to have known. If the former secrets gets out, he could lose the life he's on track to lead. If the second secret gets out, it won't have any lasting consequences (apart from losing some friends he knows are losers anyway). Why then, would he choose the hide the second and not the first?

The first act of the play is incredibly tense; I felt like I was wound up tight as a fist and getting tighter all the time. As we learn that he's seduced an unsuspecting girl, videotaped her without her consent, and circulated it to his football buddies (the first secret), we also learn that he's gay and in love with his best friend (the second secret). The shock of the first act, and to me the power of it, is learning that he'd rather have the first secret be known in order to cover up the second. We realize that being considered a near rapist and losing the privileges that his life affords him are better than acknowledging that he's gay.

The second act complicates and extends the themes. The protagonist's mother, a very decent woman who recognizes that her sons has exploited a young woman and robbed her of her dignity, tries to understand his motivation. She doesn't believe that he would do this just because he felt like it and refuses to let it drop until he acknowledges his reason for doing it. We learn that he had tried to tell his father that he was gay and that the guys on the football team suspected it and that it was his father who advised him to do this. For a while one thinks that the father's sin is one that is commonplace in the United States: he's absent.  But we learn that it's worse than that -- this doctor who is in the third world providing free medical care for the poor authors his son's crime, oppresses his son by refusing to accept his homosexuality, and, uses the institutions of privilege (in this case the old boys' network at the fancy prep school where he had also once been the captain of the football team) to perpetrate this despicable act. As if that weren't enough, we learn that the mother, who loves her son very much, knew his was gay and never encouraged him to acknowledge it. In the first conversation between them, she asks her son "We don't have any secrets, do we?" but never encouraged openness about that. While she did not author this act, she could have prevented it.

Almost as much as the theme and the script, I loved the depiction of adolescence in the play and Stephen Louis Grusch is perfect. He's less handsome than cute, a quality that is more likely to get you the girls in high school. He is largely removed from what is happening around him throughout much of the play and his speech is slow and his face blank as he tries to bide his time. In a very adolescent way, he doesn't believe that the worst could happen to him and he's perfectly willing to perpetrate a horrible sin in order to hide something that would embarrass him, believing that in time something will work out. The restraint of his acting pays off when he finally tells his mother that he's gay, that's she's known but not acknowledged it, and that his father told him to do this thing. He bursts into tears. Martha Levy draws him to her and puts her forehead against his. It's the most beautiful moment in the play.

There are some things that didn't work for me. The girl who had been seduced and videotaped is a bit too wise and her purpose in the script is to point out the complexities of the motivations of the mother and the son. The boyfriend is maybe just a tad too comfortable with his homosexuality and a bit too wise for me to find him completely believable. And, the playwright, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, explains himself in the second act more than I would like. Those are minor things, though, considering what the play and the production accomplish.

The play ends with a flashback to the boys' first year in high school, when they first met in the locker room. The play presents a series of dualities and this scene is a perfect representation. We read the scene with the weight of the things we'd already learned but also with the nostalgia of seeing a representation of the past. We see that they are gay and immediately drawn to each other, that they came from different places and were heading different places (football vs. track), and that they both loved the Hardy Boys (also a sign of their homosexuality) and that while one acknowledges it but the other will deny it to his friends. There is such innocence and such hope in the scene and we feel two things simultaneously. We know that this hope will be smashed but also that it can be restored. The innocence is forever gone but it can be replaced with promise. It's a far different feeling than the tight fist of the first act and the playwright's suggestion is that we must throw off the privilege of inheritance to salvage a future of pain and oppression that might very well be written into our futures. We are trapped with our past writing our futures and yet we have hope that if we tackle the thing hed on, we might see some success


Sunday, January 13, 2008

"Macbeth" by the Metropoitan Opera - Century 12 Theaters - January, 12, 2008 - Evanston, IL

In general, I'm not a fan of opera. Every now and then I see one that I love but mostly I sit and pray for them to be over. In hopes of growing an audience for opera, the Met has been broadcasting operas at movie theaters live in HD and I've been meaning to check them out. Largely, I wanted to see what it would be like and who would show up.

I walked into the theater 15 minutes before curtain. My first surprise was that the house was packed. I had to sit in the second row from the back. To my left was a man who had come alone and to my right were two chatty women who had attended together. I never spoke to the man but learned all about the women. They both subscribe to the Lyric Opera and one had seen some productions of Chicago Opera Theater. They see a lot of theater, at both small and large theater companies. And they both attend these broadcasts regularly.

The opera was nearly 4 hours long with scene changes and intermission and, miraculously, I stayed the whole time. When I go to a live opera, I look to see how many people leave during each intermission. By the end of the opera, it seems as if a third of the audience has typically left. Half if it's a 2oth century opera and more than that if it's "Dr. Atomic." This doesn't bode well for 21st century operas, I suppose. Anyway, as far as I could tell, no one left during intermission. In fact, I think we gained audience members as some folks who had left other movies came into our theater toward the end of the opera. 

I am not qualified to comment on the music. According to the conductor, James Levine, the music isn't as complex as Verdi's later work but I found myself deeply engaged. My favorite song was a sad song sung by McDuff, a nobleman/soldier whose family was needlessly slaughtered by Macbeth and who helps defeat him in the show's final act. Pathos always gets me.

As theater, it was more engaging than almost any opera I've seen. The new general manager of the Met, the guy who started this program, created a campaign that suggests that great opera is great theater and a director from the Royal Shakespeare Company directed this production. That may have meant better acting from the performers. Also, with cameras you can see close-ups of the performers' faces and that also helps.

As for Verdi's treatment of Shakespeare, a couple things struck me. In my viewings of the play, Macbeth always seems torn by what he's doing. The misses is usually to blame. The opera starts out that way but by the end of the third act Macbeth no longer needs his wife's prodding; his murdering rampage is fueled by his desire to hold on to power and allowed by the numbness he's developed from the earlier murders. Verdi's opera also places the murders in political context. As a result of Macbeth's murdering rampage and the flight of the country's leaders into hiding, the people suffer. Fear, oppression, and poverty dominate; it's not just the murdered foes who suffer but the entire country. 

The commentary during the breaks were less interesting than I'd hoped for (too many interviews with actors and not enough thoughtful questions from the interviewer) and I'd expected a more diverse audience. Of course, I was watching it in the suburbs and particularly a suburb where the younger adults are all married and have young children. Next time, I will go see it at one of the two locations in the city. Coming up are "Manon Lescaut" on Febraury 16th, "Peter Grimes" on March 15th, " "Tristane and Isadole" on March 22nd, and "La Boheme" on April 5th, and what I think will be a brand new production of "La Fille du Regiment" on April 26th. I'm planning to go to each of them and I think you should check them out. I'm especially interested in "La Fille du Regiment."

"Fluke" by Radiohole at On the Boards in Seattle - January 10, 2008



I was in Seattle and looking for something to take my nieces, a junior in high school and a junior in college, to see. I went to http://www.seattleperforms.com/ and looked at the performances for that evening. Among my options were "Breach," a play at Seattle Rep about Hurricane Katrina, and "Fluke," by Radiohole, at On the Boards. I decided to go with the more experimental fare.


Radiohole, I learned that night, performs in Europe a lot but this was to be their first performance in an Amertican city outside of New York. A performance group that's big in Eurpoe but underappreciated at home can only mean one thing: the piece was going to be complete nonsense. And that it was but in a good way.


Sadly, American audiences usually don't know what to do with nonsense. We think that art, especially theater, is supposed to tell a story and we forget that art's primary concern should be to evoke an emotion. Telling an ordered story is certainly one way of evoking emotion but it's not the only way and it was certainly not Radiohole's way. The piece, "Fluke," was of course a rif on "Moby Dick," a novel that I happen to love. If you love a piece of literature, you better not be invested in it maintaining its form if you go see other artists work with it. A number of years back Laurie Anderson did a performance piece called "Songs from Moby Dick" that interpreted the novel through sound. This performance seemed less intent on interpreting its plot and instead chose to create impressions related to the novel.


The piece opened with a woman in a red dress and her dark hair rolled on top of her head strapped in above the audience, leaning forward, quietly reading the weather report. She was striking, largely because she was pretty and peculiar in that side show kind of way at the same time. The whispering of her voice was like a day on the calm sea with a promise of romance or maybe even love. At some point, though, you begin to suspect you're being teased more than romanced. A figure loomed on a video monitor above stage left, his presence heavy and oppressive. At first I got the sense that he could be Ahab to the seamen, then Moby Dick to Ahab, then eventually just the feeling of a painful obsession. About halfway through the piece, the three performers on stage closed thier eyes and painted a second pair of eyes on their eyelids and mostly kept their eyes shut for the rest of the performance. This was fascinating and creepy, like a twisted cartoon. There were beautiful video images made from drawings, some seriously loud and fun rock-n-roll numbers, lots of driving around in little boats, and by the end, dozens of little fish skimming the surface of the stage with lights for eyes.


As you can see, what I'm largely left with are impressions. The dialogue was enigmatic. I couldn't string it together to make sense of it but I laughed out loud at parts. I liked it most when the woman was reading the weather report, which she did periodically throughout the play, and when the big guy sang. For the first 20 minutes I was afraid to look at my nieces, afraid they were bewildered and hating it. However, I began to hear laughs coming from them and eventually I saw that they were enjoying the performance as it was: a series of impressions -- some funny, some moving, some magical, some downright confusing. When the piece ended and the audiences did their curtain call, the figure on the monitor was naked. While we had seen only his face throughout the performance, we got to see his torso during the curtain call. I guess if one is to take a bow, one has to show more than one's face. And if you're going to be backstage the whole time, why not be naked? Maybe this sums up the piece - unexpected, titillating, and it makes sense in a way.


As a spectacle, the piece was too contained or too small for the On the Boards space. The theater, which seemed to have about 300 seats, was packed that night, which speaks well of Seattle. But the style of the theater did not do the piece justice. In New York, it had been performed at PS122 and I can imagine what it would have been like there. The audeince would have felt more like they were inside the piece, proximity to the actors would have been much closer, allowing the audience to feel more involved, and the visuals would have been far more striking. Sittting near the back of the theater, I had the sense that I was watching a piece rather than experiencing it. And with a piece like this, experiencing it is the way to go.