It is 1939 in London. Garry, 57 going on 37, lives in a stylish duplex apartment furnished with lots of modern art, books, a baby grand piano and a very idiosyncratic staff, including a dry, sardonic secretary, a dour Swedish cook and a laid-back butler. He is cosseted by his ex-wife, who helps manage his theatrical affairs, and he is targeted by women, whose advances he deplores and enjoys.
Drawing on the crises of the Middle East, London playwright Henry Naylor has produced two powerful, insightful plays about women who struggle to defeat the machismo that incites Islamic militants. And which is hardly limited to the Islamic world. Naylor, 51, is a man with a strong feminist sensibility and a keen eye for drama. He shows in works that are political as well as theatrical how the domination and abuse of women is part of the psyche of political repression.
You might never see a more powerful, stunning production of Eugene O‘Neill‘s “The Hairy Ape” than this one directed by Richard Jones and starring Bobby Cannavale at the Park Avenue Armory. It‘s a very early O‘Neill work, first produced in 1922, a time of radical ferment in the U.S., and it is imbued with the young man‘s poetic and fierce attack on capitalist exploitation of workers and the inequality that engenders. Which makes it a very modern play as well.
This play is a charmer. I didn‘t expect to say that. I thought a story about the passengers who force-landed in Gander, Newfoundland, because airspace in the U.S. was closed on 9/11 and who were welcomed by the locals, would be hokey and sentimental. It is not.
Glenn Close is masterful in Norma Desmond‘s final mad scene. Suddenly camp becomes real drama, tragedy of the Shakespearean sort. Till then the has-been silent film star, the grande dame who flounces around in glittery gold and silver sweeping gowns and capes, is hard to take too seriously. The camp is exaggerated by butler/major-domo Max (Fred Johanson), whose dark mood and piercing eyes could have come out of a Mel Brooks Frankenstein spoof. “Goulish” is a word to describe them both, and the haunted house they live in.
Macabre and whimsical, dark and comic at the same time, a clever satiric pen pointed at self-absorbed aristocrats of the early 1900s, Katherine Rundell‘s “Life According to Saki” is a delicious evening of theater.
You can feel the humanity pulsating and striving through the drab surroundings of the car service office in “Jitney” by the great American playwright August Wilson, who died in 2005. The protagonists, moving in an orbit around the solid Becker (a resolute, moving John Douglas Thompson), who set up the cooperative 18 years ago, are working class guys with jobs, if you want to include the numbers guy, Shealy (Harvy Blanks).
It‘s a knock off of “West Side Story,” here Italians vs blacks, and very hokey, but “A Bronx Tale” has a certain charm and pizazz nonetheless. The place is Bedford Avenue, tenements with fire escapes and pushcarts. And kids singing doo-wop. They are working class Italians, circa 1960.
This immersive, hokey, utterly engaging production is one of the memorable plays to see this season. In fact, it almost feels as if you don‘t just see it, you are in it. The audience is dispersed around a gorgeous set, seated at rows and tables, some on the stage, backed by red drapes and paintings, as actors move through the aisles and on risers. Sometimes lighted chandeliers descend or disco lights flash. Everything seems red, white and black.
Nathan Lane is superb as the over-the-top newspaper editor Walter Burns in this near 90-year-old noirish comedy that has some political nuggets hidden in its hokey scenario. It‘s given a fine, only slightly tongue in cheek, reprise by director Jack O‘Brien. Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had been Chicago reporters, and the action takes place in the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building. The courts building shares the gallows courtyard with the county jail. Then anarchist Earl Williams (John Magaro), who is accused of killing a policeman and is going to be hanged, escapes.
An Egyptian police band, the grandly named Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, in 1996 is supposed to play at an Arab cultural center in Israel, but gets the town‘s name wrong at the bus station and ends up in an Israeli backwater.
Haled (Ari‘el Stachel), a trumpet player who loves Chet Baker, sings “My funny valentine” to female soldiers at the bus station. But the diversion plus imperfect English turns Petah Tikva, the city with the Arab cultural center, into Bet Hatikva. And so hangs the tale, and a charming, moving, slightly sentimental gem of a play.
I seem to be using the word a lot lately: hokey. Chandeliers with lit candles descend to sounds of operatic “ah ah” and pretentious violins. The story is based on a French epistolary novel written in 1782, and meant as a satire. But with the direction by Josie Rourke, you get the feeling that audiences are invited to enjoy the sex stuff. It‘s basically about a guy putting notches on his bedpost. (“Sex in the 18th-century French City”?)
The anti-hero Valmont (Lev Schreiber) is conspicuously charming. His former lover the Marquise, played by a take-no-prisoners Janet McTeer, wants revenge against her former lover Jacour, who has announced that he is going to marry a rich young girl. And Valmont wants to seduce married women known for their high morals.
It‘s light fluff, but if you love 40s music, as I do, just forget the silly plot. Besides, the production and the actors are charming. And there is 40s scat. Also jazzy music, dance kicks, swing and tap. The show is based on a 1942 movie, but a lot of the songs have been added.
Simon McBurney, founder and artistic director of the British theater company Complicite (a French word here pretentiously spelled without the acute accent on the e) has produced a hokey often loopy and generally pompous conceit under the pretext of an anthropological mission to the Amazon.
He pretends to be the photographer Loren McIntyre in 1969. But the visual, as it would appear to an audience viewing the stage, is not enough. You get earphones to enjoy surround sound and sense that you are partaking of McIntyre‘s adventures and dangers. Something blows in your ear, a noise comes from behind and you want to turn. You hear the crashes and echoes of the jungle. Think radio show sound effects.
When can it be more relevant to look at the politics of theater? In this year of bizarre reaction, “Fiddler” continues to be the quintessential representation of popular struggle. This is a brilliant production by Bartlett Sherr. Lucky to see it with Danny Bernstein and Jessica Hecht, major actors of our time. They are supported by an excellent ensemble cast. In Russia of the early 1900s, a Jewish community in Russia is confronting the challenges of social modernization and the political threat of the Czar.
Is David Hare‘s play “Plenty” about the personal or the political? A confusing muddle.
We first see our heroine Susan (the very fine Rachel Weisz) at 17 in occupied France where her job is to work with other resistance fighters to divert Germans from the front. In a black cap and trench coat, she is waiting for a drop. But an unexpected “drop” is Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett), a British pilot who has bailed out. She weeps to him about how she is replacing an agent who was captured and taken to Buchenwald. Then the war ends.
This is not a children‘s game. It is a riveting, compelling, inventive dissection of slavery, the underground railroad, the civil war and racism. In fact, “riveting, compelling, inventive” is a good description of Ars Nova, which presents this play and also created “The Great Comet of 1812” just opening on Broadway.
The Underground Railroad Game comes out of the experience of Scott Sheppard, one of the two creator/performers, who in the 5th grade participated in a unit about the civil war that divided students into Union and Confederate soldiers. But this is much more. And definitely not for 5th graders. If the underground railroad gives people the sense of, “at least there was a silver lining” to slavery, this production puts the real story out, with in-your-face realism. Taibi Magar‘s powerful direction is bereft of illusions.
The protagonists sometimes scowl, smirk, sneer, scream, run with branches to represent a forest, are pushed around on roller chairs, pass through moving doorways that reflect entrances and exits, and occasionally face inches away from first-row audiences to pull them into the plot. Not quite Bedlam but you get the very idea from this troupe that believes in “the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience…collapsing aesthetic distance…[in] a kinetic experience of shared empathy.”
Peter Brook‘s “Battlefield” is an elegant, moving and sad parable about justice and war, life and death, going back in our sophisticated times to the simple way earlier societies said these truths. It is inspired by the “The Mahabarata,” a stylized ritualistic vision of war from the epic Sanskrit poem dating from 400 B.C. which director Peter Brook staged in a 9-hour performance in 1987.
Of the plays I saw during six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, these plays about justice stood out: “A Common Man: The Bridge that Tom Built,” “The Red Shed,” “Playing Maggie,” and “Undermined.”
The first play is about Thomas Paine, who fought for liberty in colonial America, was forced out for his politics, and spent time in London and also as a member of the Convention in revolutionary France, before having to flee. His story is not well enough known in America. The other three, addressing issues in the Paine tradition, deal a few centuries later with British politics and particularly the miners‘ strike of 1984-5, which still reverberates in Brits’ psyches.
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are three about the people the system chews up: “Diary of a Madman,” “Trainspotting” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
I spent six days in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world‘s largest arts festival. Out of the hundreds of plays presented, I sought out those about politics. I‘ve divided the best by their themes. Here are two about the system‘s corruption: “The Trial” and “Enron.” It’s quite fascinating to see surreal plays about systemic corruption a century apart. Franz Kafka was ahead of his time in describing the nature of the evil of modern society. His 1915 story “The Trial,” adapted in Edinburgh as a play, shows the evil of a government bureaucracy that grinds up a banker for no particular reason. Then look at Lucy Prebble‘s “Enron,” still surreal, where the bureaucrats are now corporate officials, but are still presented, like the Kafka play, as if this were a weird vaudeville.
