It‘s uncanny how Shakespeare could describe coup politics in modern-day Africa. Of course, what director Gregory Doran shows in this brilliant Royal Shakespeare Company production is that ambition, demagoguery, the manipulation of masses and betrayal of ones comrades haven‘t changed much since the era of Julius Caesar 2000 years ago or the treachery of kings and rivals closer to the Bard‘s time. Doran ingeniously sets the play in another continent prone to violent political upheavals.
It was the worst of times. Lillian Hellman aptly called it “Scoundrel Time.” It was the early 1950s. Joe Gilford‘s play dramatizes the attack on free thought and free speech orchestrated by ruthless politicians who built careers by destroying the lives of actors, writers, directors and their families. It‘s based on what happened to his parents, Jack and Madeleine Lee Gilford, victimized by the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC).
Lanford Wilson‘s play is a sharp, funny, charming look at romance, with a bitter-sweet sauce. Its hero leaps over barriers of religion, age, and economic and social status. Just what New York theater-goers want. It‘s one of the best revivals of the season, directed by Michael Wilson with just right mix of humor and nostalgia.
April 8, 2013 – Amidst the wide-ranging hagiographic praise of film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week, I can add a remembrance of another type. I knew Roger from National Student Association conferences of the 1960s. I liked him. In 1970, he invited me and a friend, Nanette Rainone, both of us strong feminists, to appear at a Russ Meyer Film Festival at Yale Law School. We accepted partly as a lark, partly because we thought that Yale Law students might seriously consider our views.
To be brilliant at playing a human is one thing, but to pull off a tour de force portraying a speaking animal is quite another feat. Kathryn Hunter is an extraordinary actress, and her performance in Kafka‘s Monkey will be remembered as one of the best of this and many seasons.
Betty Friedan’s parting words: We didn’t challenge the system enough. She helped start the women’s revolution but came to realize–along with many of us–that the problem everyone faced was economic predators. It’s a point to note on the fiftieth anniversary of her groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique.
It was Labor Day weekend 2005 at the Sag Harbor, Long Island, cottage of Betty Friedan five months before her death. I’d met Friedan in mid-1969 at a small gathering of the National Organization for Women (NOW) at the Upper West Side apartment of Dolores Alexander, a reporter for Newsday. (At that time, all gatherings of NOW were small!)
Friedan was the national president of NOW and one of its founders. When she discovered I was a journalist, she asked me to be NOW’s public relations vice president. A major NOW focus was ending discrimination against women in employment. I thought that was central to changing the status of women. So I agreed.
Jesse Eisenberg‘s play about the importance of family to which a holocaust survivor clings takes life through the fine, transformative acting of Vanessa Redgrave. The story itself is a pas de deux, or better, a psychological duel between Maria (Redgrave), who was 4 years old when the holocaust in Poland took her parents and siblings, and David (Eisenberg), a not terribly successful New York writer who comes to visit his second cousin in a Polish town near the north coast. Director Kip Fagan makes us believe that the most unlikely events we see really happened.
A charmer and good fun, albeit dated, Anita Loos ˜ 1946 play tracks the lives of the denizens of a bar in Newark, NJ. It centers around the transformation of Addie Bemis (a very charming Mary Bacon), who starts out as a rather tight prudish young woman, and ends up singing on the bar. The magic ingredient, of course, is love.
I met Benazir Bhutto in 1987 when she was leading the Pakistan People‘s Party in a national parliamentary campaign. I traveled with her on a motorcade in Sailkot, in the Punjab, northern Pakistan, where she was mobbed by supporters. From the top of the reporters’ minivan in front of hers, I could see crowds along the way shouting, chanting, some holding photos of her, young men dancing to loud piped music in front of the crawling vehicles, flags waving. Women were watching from atop one and two-story buildings along the route. It took hours instead of 20 minutes to get to a stadium where she addressed a mass rally.
David Ives is a master of subtle intellectual comedy. We saw that most recently in “Venus in Fur,” a feminist reimagining/twisting of the Sacher-Masoch classic, and a few years back in “Is He Dead?,” adapted from a Mark Twain story about an artist who fakes death to elevate the price of his paintings. But earlier, he had written a series of one-acts that were presented twenty years ago and that we are lucky to see again. John Rando‘s direction is spot-on, letting no grass grow between the laughs. The actors are an ensemble and connect as if they were used to finishing each other’s sentences.
It‘s rural Ireland in 1936. The house is comfortably lower middle class, with a lace-covered table and a fireplace mantle topped with old photos. It‘s a picture of the times. And so are the personal relations. This feminist work by Teresa Deevy, an Irish playwright who wrote in the 1930s, is about a spunky young woman whose only way out was to marry an older man. Director Jonathan Bank stages it as if it were an old movie, with no modern lens.
A.R. Gurney wrote this play in 1991, when the issue of AIDS was a hot button. The story takes off when Sam (Peter Rini), a State Department undersecretary of state for political affairs, returns to his prep-school to give a commencement address. Now in his early 40s, he had been the “old boy” of a younger student named Perry, charged with showing the new boy the rounds.
This is a children‘s story that cuts to the quick and speaks to the heart, that fascinates and shocks with its creativity and is definitely for adults. Besides that, it‘s a musical, with country and blues sounds and songs about woe, jazz and modern dancing, punning wit and horrific metaphors. There‘s even a classical painting that comes alive.
Interesting how misogynistic this 1955 melodrama feels in 2013. In Tennessee Williams‘ view, the men are victims and the women are perpetrators. That fits into Williams‘ theme about Brick (Benjamin Walker), the former school football star, being a victim of homophobia. Except, in a curious turnaround, the wound is self-inflicted when his wife Maggie (Scarlett Johansson), forces Brick and his college buddy to confront their relationship or maybe just their unspoken desires.
Sharr White‘s play is a wrenching psychological mystery where the audience is kept in the dark until slowly clues emerge. Joe Mantello directs coolly and subtly so you see everything through the eyes of the protagonist until you don‘t.
This may be the most original play of the season. It‘s a Chaplinesque melodrama in the style of a silent film, done in black and white, with titles and live piano music. There‘s even a sense of the flicker of the old silents.
Attending Barry Manilow‘s new show is a nostalgic visit to the 1960s and 70s. The overwhelming mood is sentimentality. But it‘s hard to criticize this when Manilow engages in such marvelous self-parody, viz a video of foaming waves crashing on boulders.
If this play were written today, you‘d expect it to end with a murder or at least some physical brutality. The confrontation between George (Tracy Letts) and Martha (Amy Morton) in Edward Albee‘s riveting, iconic play pursues another kind of violence. Each of those expertly drawn characters, forcefully directed by Pam MacKinnon, commits sizzling, psychological mayhem on the other. It‘s a shock to discover that this college professor and his wife have been married for 23 years and haven‘t yet done each other in.
by Lucy Komisar If you are in Berlin in mid-July, do not miss the city’s best party of the year! A baritone in a straw hat sat in a rowboat in a pond surrounded by shrubs and trees. He sang opera and lieder to the delight of the dozens of people who stood at the […]
Known for delectable parody, this version of “Forbidden Broadway” starts out as a parody of itself. The talented cast of four belts out, “Forbidden Broadway is alive and kicking. Like Jesus and Judy Garland, we‘re resurrected again.” Signs declare “Bring back Mandy and Ricky Martin!”
This production of the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber biopic of Eva Perón is “Evita” lite, stripped of politics. Director Michael Grandage doesn‘t convey the corruption and brutality of the government of Argentina during Juan Perón‘s three terms in the 1940s, 50s and 70s. While Perón sought to improve the economic and social position of the working class, he also stepped hard on the opposition.
Clifford Odets‘ stylized naturalism combined with sometimes faux poetics often edges close to melodrama in his 1937 play about the conflict between art and money. The dialogue doesn‘t wear well with time and might seem almost ridiculous on stage today. But director Bartlett Sher makes it all believable with a strong and respectful staging. This production is still a powerful moment in theater and one of the best plays by an historically significant American playwright. And the politics of the play still matters.
Christopher Durang, always clever and inventive, has taken four characters from different Chekhov plays and transported them to the countryside of Bucks County, PA. Durang‘s comic remix of Chekhov is amusing and gets laughs, even if it doesn‘t always quite hit the mark.
