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 several about war and its fallout: Angel, Glasgow Girls and Hess.
The Americans had to be kept in the dark, out of the loop, not told anything about the secret Oslo talks between Israelis and Palestinians. Because the Americans’ big-power arrogance would derail them.
That is a provocative note in “Oslo,” J.T. Rogers‘ play about the back channel negotiations that led to a ground-breaking Israeli-PLO agreement signed at the Clinton White House in 1993. It would create the Palestinian Authority, with limited government over the West Bank and Gaza and agreement for both sides to continue negotiations.
Hades of course is hell. And singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell‘s script and music, directed by Rachel Chavkin, is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who journeys to Hades in order to find his love, the nymph Eurydice, who has been killed by a poisonous snake.
Here Orpheus is a minstrel. His wonderful music persuades the King of the Dead to let him take Eurydice home as long as he does not turn around to look at her until they reach the upper world. They have to trust each other. But….
It‘s charming but also hokey: the story of black producers and performers struggling in the early twenties to put a show on Broadway. It‘s 1920 and they are Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, a comedy duo who meet at Fisk, the black college in Nashville.
Arthur Miller‘s brilliant parable of the Sen. Joseph McCarthy attack on American liberties, allowed by the U.S. Congress till it became too obscene for even cowardly politicians to stomach, is brilliantly staged by Ivo Van Hove, a Dutchman who understands and communicates Miller‘s political message (see also his “A View From the Bridge”) in a theatrical manner that makes politics into art. Using a metaphor of real events some 260 years earlier, it tells of accusations without evidence that were used to damn the innocent. They occurred during the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1692-93.
Laura Benanti is stunning and luminous as Amalia, a smart, assertive clerk in an upscale perfume shop in 1934 Budapest. Her trilling soprano shimmers.
The story itself is corny, schmaltzy. The slow start makes you think sit com, but it gets better. Its light fluff is underpinned by some serious commentary about the economic condition of workers and the way men treat women.
Think of Philip Ridley‘s play as a Gulliver‘s modest proposal for furnishing your home. Nothing like what Martha Stewart might recommend. It‘s a very smart macabre satirical over-the-top sci fi allegory, a modern deal with the devil, and in case you weren‘t sure about what counts, director David Mercatali opens the play with Madonna‘s “Material Girl” and the Beatles‘ “Money.”
This 1974 Alan Ayckbourn play, seen for the first time in the U.S., is a master class in how to use theatrical devices. In five one-act plays with the same superb ensemble cast, it uses absurd farce, irony and slapstick to show how people miscommunicate as their needs and desires collide.
From Jessica Lange‘s remarkable dissolution as the drug addicted Mary, reaching her nadir (and theatrical heights) in her mad scene, to Michael Shannon‘s stunning drunk, you are blown away by Jonathan Kent‘s staging of Eugene O‘Neill‘s “Long Day‘s Journey Into Night.” It is autobiographical. His father was a famous dramatic actor and O‘Neill as a youth traveled with his parents. The younger son, Edmund, stands in for O‘Neill.
If you like bluegrass and feminist stories, you will love this Steve Martin-Edie Brickell show, as I did. Carmen Cusack is a dulcet-toned charmer as the heroine. Martin and Brickell did the story and music together; Martin wrote the book and Brickell the lyrics.
The fascination of Florian Zeller‘s play about a man suffering from Alzheimer‘s is that it is told from the point of view of the sufferer. I noted early on a very beautiful French desk, and then not long after, it wasn‘t there. Hmm, I thought. What happened to the desk? Then other items of furniture in his apartment weren‘t there.
Or was it his apartment? It seems that his daughter was married and living in London. But no, he was living in her Paris flat, and she was married to someone else. Or was that the case?
Workers solidarity, a labor union, caring about each other may appear a bit old fashioned in this neoliberal era, but Dominique Morisseau shows vividly how that is a lifeline for four people facing the loss of the jobs at a Detroit auto plant in 2008. At a time when the corporate 1% thinks nothing of what closing factories does to workers.
That of course was the year that bankster fraud almost brought down the world financial system and caused business failures that threw millions of people out of work.
Danai Gurira‘s stunning, naturalistic play is about the horror of war with no horror shown, only talked about. It takes place in Liberia during the civil war of the 1990s and 2000s. There is something surreal there. Three women who have been taken as sex slaves by a military commanding officer are so dehumanized, they have no names. They call each other Wife #1, Wife #2, Wife #3, as their only identities.
Yet, there is some solidarity. The older one (Saycon Sengbloh) there 25 years – since she was 12 or 13 — seems beyond outrage; she cares for other girls. Wife #2 (Zainab Jah), about 19, escapes to get a gun and join the army so she can kill men who attack her. She declares, “With a gun, no man can touch you.” Wife #3 (Pascale Armand) is pregnant, naïve, cried at the rape, but sees no way out.
Surprise that a play about a famous homosexual starts with a man and woman cavorting in bed. We see them waist up, she is nude. But we discover that they are just hotel servants, not the main attraction, who is gay and upper class in his tastes. That‘s Oscar Wilde, the playwright whose sense of entitlement probably helped blind him to the dangers of challenging the British upper class hypocrisy that, riven with homosexuality itself, just didn‘t like it displayed so openly. Not in 1895. So, in some ways, David Hare‘s very strong play is as much about class as about sexual choice. Class, of course, plays a role in other Hare plays.
This is one of those emotionally riveting plays that suddenly flips you over as you realize that everything you took for granted is not so. You are quite sure that David Harrower‘s story fits in with your beliefs about men‘s sexual abuse of young girl, until maybe it doesn‘t. Strongly acted by Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels. (Williams is so much better than her bland performance in “Cabaret,” that you don‘t think it‘s the same person.)
In Richard Bean‘s affecting “Toast,” workers in a British bread factory stick together to combat fatigue, danger, insecurity. Bean wrote the play out of his experiences working at a bread factory in Yorkshire when he was 18.
The men work with old machinery that might break down and cause the owner, who is doing no maintenance, to shift production elsewhere. Yet, they endure stoically the danger of getting hurt – someone‘s arm got crushed — because they need the work. We come to see that they also need each other.
“Echoes” is a powerful and intense play that explores the imperialist mindset as it compares the experiences of two women who lived 175 years apart in Ipswich, England, and were each swept up in the murderous rampage of godly imperialist killers. It won a Spirit of the Fringe award in Edinburgh last year and transferred to London.
A little weird, but Sherlock Holmes stories always are. A guy who wants a young employee to cut her hair. And to wear blue. He lives in a castle, of course. Maybe his wife is a lunatic. So the plot thickens. It‘s “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”
Alfred Uhry‘s 1995 play “The Robber Bridegroom” is a hokey, campy amusing fantasy complete with an evil stepmother, a naïve father, and a two-faced hero/villain, Jamie Lockhart (Steven Pasquale) who has, we must believe, a different face when he wears a small marker that indicates a berry stain. All done to the fine and lively sounds of invigorating country music. (Music by Robert Waldman.) And Connor Gallagher‘s very good down-home choreography.
George Bernard Shaw‘s first play, given a first rate performance by The Actors Company Theatre directed by David Staller, establishes the theme of personal morality vs business corruption that would be a signature of his works through the years. He wrote it in 1892. Shaw from the start liked to skewer snobbery. Harry Trench (a naïve but likable Jeremy Beck) and Billy, more formally William De Burgh Cokane, (the unctuous Jonathan Hadley) are British tourists at a hotel on the Rhine. Pretentious Billy flavors his speech with French, and we enjoy the fact that his accent and grammar are dreadful.
In the canon of arts that are little known because they weren‘t created by white men, add an 18th century baroque opera composed by Joseph Bologne, born 1745 in Guadeloupe, the son of a French plantation owner and a slave.
It‘s a charming confection that was designed as a chamber piece, to be performed privately, because the Paris Opera would not accept “a mulatto.”
His father brought him to France at 7 years old to be educated. He was brilliant. And an accomplished fencer, which made him at 16 a chevalier and eased his way into society. At 17 he read in Rousseau‘s “Social Contract” that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” which challenged the existence of slavery.
Think of Jonathan Swift‘s “A Modest Proposal” as if it were designed by corporate consultants figuring out how to dispose of large numbers of people unlucky enough to have contracted a very deadly virus about to go global. Then move to Aaron Loeb’s engrossing bizarre, dark play which posits a related idea that couldn’t be real. Or could it, in principle? Or the lack of it.
For secret project Senna, the major rules would be 1. No power point, 2. Assume the worst, and 3. No N-word. No, it‘s not that N-word, it‘s the other N-word. Consider the system diagram for Collection, Containment, Liquidation and Disposal.
This play is a period piece. The time is close enough to the present that it‘s fascinating but also a little irritating for a feminist. It was written by Hazel Ellis, an Irish actress and playwright in the 1930s. She performed at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and had success with several plays there.
A smart but rebellious kid gets suspended from a Catholic high school in New York City for saying he doesn‘t believe in God. He ends up at the Thomas Moore Preparatory School in Keene, NH, a small boarding school where he will continue to argue about ideas and also still get into fights and scrapes. John Patrick Shanley, the author of this engaging autobiographical play, presents a charming, vivid look back at how a precocious youth, who would become a major playwright, had to navigate the shoals of rigid school thinking and a run-in with a closeted gay teacher who came on to him. (There‘s also a mystery about a student who tried to kill himself.)
Feb 4, 2016 – Art as politics reaches new intensities in the Whitney Museum‘s disturbing and powerful new exhibit of film maker Laura Poitras‘ selection of videos and documents to define the U.S. government‘s threats to liberty after 9/11. The exhibit opens in New York Feb 5 and continues till May 1, 2016.
