Category Archives: ‘ACTS OF WAR’ REVIEWS

‘9 CIRCLES’ REVIEW – UNFLINCHING APPRAISAL OF A WARTIME ATROCITY · Jul 2nd

(Miriam Gillinson’s article appeared in the Guardian, 7/1.)

 Park theatre, London
Joshua Collins is magnetic as a US soldier awaiting trial for murder in this hard-hitting drama hamstrung by its loose grip on reality

The title is a riff on Dante’s Inferno but there aren’t enough circles in hell for the horror contained in Bill Cain’s upsetting play. The names have been changed but this is essentially a feverish re-examination of the life, trial and death of US soldier Steven Dale Green, who was convicted in 2009 for killing an Iraqi family and raping the 14-year-old daughter. It’s a really tough watch – not without merit but difficult to sit through and with some serious flaws in its composition.

There’s a heated intensity to Guy Masterson’s tightly calibrated production,held together by Jack Arnold’s humming battlecry of a soundscape which slowly engulfs us as the trial approaches. Duncan Henderson’s neatly symbolic set frames the action inside a pair of glowing red circles: from the fury of Baghdad to the loneliness of the holding cell, this is the story of a soldier’s life that has always, on some level, felt like a kind of imprisonment.

As the soldier, Daniel E Reeves, meets with attorneys and lawyers, a seriously creepy pastor and shockingly incompetent army psychiatrists (all played with an eerie sense of disassociation by Samara Neely-Cohen, Daniel Bowerbank and David Calvitto), we start to suspect they might all be a product of Reeves’s deeply disturbed psyche. This fuzzy hold on reality makes for a powerful atmosphere but a confusing play. Cain seems to be making an argument about the hypocrisy of war and the culpability of those in authority but it’s hard to know which bits to take seriously in a play that’s neither fact nor fiction.

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TO UNDERSTAND AFGHANISTAN TODAY, REMEMBER THE WAR ON TERROR THEN–IN ‘ACTS OF WAR’ · Aug 16th

“Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays”
A book edited by Karen Malpede, Michael Messina and Bob Shuman

The plays included in this collection are: Guantanamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo; American Tet by Lydia Stryk; The Vertical Hour by David Hare; Prophecy by Karen Malpede; 9 Circles by Bill Cain; No Such Cold Thing by Naomi Wallace; and A Canopy of Stars by Simon Stephens.

View ‘Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays’ at Amazon

COSMIN CHIVU ON TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: THE DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT THE LATE PLAYS: ‘A RECLUSE AND HIS GUEST’ AND ‘THE REMARKABLE ROOMING-HOUSE OF MME. LE MONDE’–AND HOW FINALLY, NOW, YOU CAN SEE THEM AT ‘TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 1982’, FEBRUARY 14–MARCH 13 · Feb 13th

Cosmin_chivu

Cosmin Chivu (director) is a Romanian-born theater artist, currently based in New York City, with an international career of award-winning productions. He has directed over 50 professional and university productions in America, Austria, England, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania and Thailand, most recently Beautiful Province by Clarence Coo (LCT3), winner of the 2012 Yale New Drama Series, Something Cloudy Something Clear by Tennessee Williams at The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, a staged reading of Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek at The Temple Emanu-El, Skirball Center, and the Off Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Mutilated starring Mink Stole and Penny Arcade, which was nominated for a Drama League Award for Best Revival in 2013. Chivu is a lifetime member of the Actors Studio, a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, an alumnus of the Old Globe's Jack O’Brien fellowship and the founder of InterArt Theatre Group. Chivu is currently the Head of B.A. Acting/Directing Program, International Performance Ensemble at Pace University Performing Arts in New York City. He holds a Masters in Directing from the Actors Studio Drama School, New School University, NYC and a B.A. in Acting from the G. Enescu Art Academy, Romania. Visit cosminchivu.com to learn more.

 

Cosmin Chivu Gives an Exclusive Interview with

SV's Bob Shuman

Tennessee Williams’s longtime agent Audrey Wood thought the late work was less powerful than the early plays. Do you agree?

CC: I’m a big fan of the late work. It lives in the present. It is raw, filled with free, profound imagery, less conventional, sexual, playful, hilarious and highly political. But Williams’s new, creative phase needed to be even more widely appreciated—and treated with gentility.

Actually, it’s my understanding that Audrey Wood did not disapprove of the late work—according to another Williams agent, Mitch Douglas, she never stopped supporting Williams, even behind the scenes.

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NORMAN/RUSSELL/WILLIS/BRAY: ‘THE COLOR PURPLE’ (SV PICK, NY) · Dec 12th

 

(Ben Brantley’s article appeared in The New York Times, 12/10.) 

Give thanks this morning, children of Broadway, and throw in a hearty hallelujah. “The Color Purple” has been born again, and its conversion is a glory to behold. 

The heart-clutching, gospel-flavored musical that opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on Thursday night — in a production led by an incandescent new star named Cynthia Erivo and, in her Broadway debut, an enchanting Jennifer Hudson — share a title, the same characters, the same source of inspiration (Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) and most of the same songs with “The Color Purple” seen on Broadway a decade ago. But, oh, what a difference there is between them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/theater/review-the-color-purple-on-broadway-stripped-to-its-essence.html

BOOK: ‘ACTS OF WAR: IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN IN SEVEN PLAYS’ (FIRST REVIEW BY JEAN RANDICH FOR TRUTHDIG–“A VIGOROUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE POLITICAL AND ETHICAL DEBATE . . . POWERFUL.”) · Sep 3rd

(Randich’s article appeared 9/1.)

“Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays”
A book edited by Karen Malpede, Michael Messina and Bob Shuman

“War is neither glorious nor noble,” Chris Hedges states in his trenchant foreword to “Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays,” a powerful new collection of American and British plays. War marks those who battle, those who stay home and those caught in the crossfire in ways we can barely articulate. Given the cultural, political and religious taboos against discussing the actual human cost of warfare, Karen Malpede, Michael Messina and Bob Shuman, in editing this anthology, have made a vigorous contribution to the political and ethical debate.

These plays step into the moral vacuum left by politicians, corporations and religious leaders, and reveal war as something other than an unequivocal victory. They explore how theater can intervene in the discourse of war, rather than let it be hijacked by politicians, warmongers, war profiteers and others. They raise the necessary question: What are the responsibilities of civilians during wartime? Hedges opines that war is always about betrayal: “of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics, and of solders and Marines by politicians.” In these plays, we hear the voices of the betrayers and the betrayed. We are even startled to discover those voices dueling within one individual’s own private hell.

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/iraq_and_afghanistan_on_stage_20110901/

View ACTS OF WAR at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0810127326/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=stagvoic-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0810127326&adid=1K4GZPE8XWER9XHMJ7CD&