(Teachout’s review appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 9/11.)
One of the British writer’s most unpopular plays, about a family of haute-bourgeoisie eccentrics who refuse to respond to the crumbling world around them, gets a much-needed tightening in this unique staging.
New York
David Staller is best known as the artistic director of Project Shaw, a series of semistaged concert readings of the 60-odd plays of George Bernard Shaw that he has presented monthly in Manhattan since 2006. But he has also directed fully staged off-Broadway versions of several Shaw plays, including the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2012 revival of “Man and Superman” and a 2016 production of “Widower’s Houses” mounted in collaboration with the now-defunct, lamented TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, both of which were not merely excellent but exceptionally memorable. Now Mr. Staller has taken on “Heartbreak House,” one of Shaw’s most challenging plays, with altogether extraordinary results.
Maria Shclover and Irina Shabshis, Cherry Orchard Festival co-founders and producers, have announced that Israel’s celebrated Gesher Theatre will return to New York City in early October with its two leading productions The Dybbuk and In the Tunnelat The Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College (524 West 59 Street). Founded in 1991 in Tel Aviv by director Yevgeny Arye, these Gesher Theatre productions are being presented as part of a North American tour, which includes performances in Toronto and Pittsburgh. Performances are October 3 and 4 for The Dybbuk and October 6 and 7 for In the Tunnel.
The company begins its New York City engagement with a new production inspired by The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds by S. Ansky in a modern version written by Roy Chen, Gesher Theatre chief dramaturge. The Dybbuk, written in 1913 and arguably the most iconic play of the entire canon of Jewish drama, tells the story of a young Hasidic woman who became possessed on the eve of her wedding by the dead spirit of her beloved, a young scholar whom her parents forbade her to marry. The esteemed Gesher Artistic Director Yevgeny Arye directs the cast of 25. There will be performances, October 3 and 4 at 8 PM.
The Dybbuk will be followed by the political satire In the Tunnel, also by Mr. Chen, inspired by the Best Foreign Language Oscar-winning film No Man’s Land by Danis Tanovic. Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinians are trapped in a tunnel dug by Hamas between Gaza and Israel. Enemies snared in a mousetrap, they try to find their way out. Should they kill or save each other? Meanwhile, above ground, a political and media circus is attempting to capture and cover the event. The cast of nine is directed by award-winner Irad Rubenstein. | There will be two performances, October 6 at 8 PM and October 7 at 2 PM.
The Dybbuk and In the Tunnel will be performed in Hebrew with English and Russian supertitles.
These performances had been made possible with the generous support of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Genesis Philanthropy Group.
Tickets for The Dybbuk and In the Tunnel at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College (524 W. 59th Street) are priced at $55. – $125. and are available online at CherryOrchardFestival.org.
Premium VIP and Artist Reception tickets, located in the center of the orchestra, are available at $250 and include an exclusive Post-Show Cocktail Reception with the Gesher Theatre cast, featuring hors-d’oeuvres and an open bar. For group sales, please contact the Cherry Orchard Festival Foundation directly 800.349.0021 or by emailing info@cherryorchardfestival.org
Free Screening and Panel on Dibukim
On Tuesday, October 2, from 7 to 9 pm, the public is invited to a free screening and panel at the New York Public Library, 18 W. 53rd Street, on the making of Dibukim, a 60-minute film by Ram Loevy, winner of the honorable mention at the Haifa International Film Festival, which documents the production process of The Dybbuk and follows the creative team and actors during rehearsals. The screening will be followed by a 30-minute question and answer session with director Yevgeny Arye and the cast. With English subtitles. More info & trailer.
(Neil Genzlinger’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/9.)
Wakako Yamauchi, whose plays exploring the Japanese-American experience drew on her own life of relocation, rootlessness, assimilation and internment during World War II, died on Aug. 16 at her home in Gardena, Calif. She was 93.
The death was confirmed by her granddaughter, Alyctra Matsushita.
Ms. Yamauchi’s plays were produced frequently, especially by the Asian-American troupe East West Players in Los Angeles. She was best known for “And the Soul Shall Dance,” a work she adapted from her own short story. East West Players staged it in 1977, a time when Asian-American voices, especially female ones, were rarely heard in the theater. The next year a film version was made for PBS.
(Claire Brennan’s article appeared in the Observer, 9/9.)
It’s 1972. To the Oxford college rooms of the poet WH Auden comes an unexpected visitor, the composer Benjamin Britten, who is preparing an opera on the novella Death in Venice by Auden’s father-in-law, Thomas Mann. The two great artists have not met for 30 years. Also to the rooms (though not all at the same time) come two cleaners, a rent boy and a BBC interviewer, Humphrey Carpenter (subsequently to become biographer to both men), who narrates the encounter. Sound artsy-fartsy? It’s not. Alan Bennett sidesteps clever-clogsy-ness by presenting the action of his 2009 drama as a play within a play. The result is a take on life, sexuality, death and everything, that is witty, moving, laugh-aloud funny and understatedly profound.
(Emily Manthei’s article appeared in the Daily Beast, 9/7; via the Drudge Report.)
The city’s reputation as an epicenter for fetish and fantasy is part of what draws more than 12 million tourists per year; but locals know that hedonism is only the beginning.
Frederic Schweizer
Like most first-time visitors to Berlin, I came to the German capital in search of a party. Conjuring the Weimar spirit, an art-nouveau flyer for Boheme Sauvage led me to a pillared playhouse and group of flappers and dandies armed with a secret code. Inside was an evening of vaudeville, complete with cabaret piano man, an absinthe fairy serving green spirits, and a va-va-va-voom burlesque dancer removing layer after layer of costumed extravagance onstage until all that remained were be-tasseled pasties.
Berliners don’t party in half measures. They love costumes, historical and histrionic.
The city’s reputation as a European epicenter for fetish and fantasy is part of what draws more than 12 million tourists per year; but locals know that hedonism is only the beginning. Party performances like drag and burlesque are as political as they are entertaining, thanks to a culture of subcultures that champions queer, minority, women, and gender-non-conforming performers on safe stages and in party zones tightly controlled by discerning (or, some might say, discriminatory) bouncers. In this environment, anyone can feel empowered to express themselves.
(Yulia Gorbunova’s article appeared in The Moscow Times, 9/7.)
Many of those who follow news from Russia have been counting down the days this summer with a sinking feeling. Now , autumn is here, bringing even closer the very real possibility that Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian filmmaker on hunger strike in a Russian prison since May, may die there.
Today is day 117 of Sentsov’s hunger strike. The condition of someone existing without food for that long is horrifying to imagine. 117 is also the number of days that Anatoly Marchenko, a Soviet dissident, spent on a hunger strike in 1986 to demand the release of all political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Marchenko was force-fed during most of his hunger strike through a tube in his stomach, an experience he described in his letters as pure torture. He died from heart failure a little under two weeks after he ended the hunger strike.
Many believe that Marchenko’s death was a decisive factor in pushing Mikhail Gorbachev to start releasing Soviet prisoners held on politically motivated charges.
Sentsov was sentenced by a Russian court to 20 years in prison in an unfair, politicized trial in 2015. An outspoken critic of Russia’s actions in Crimea, he was arrested on bogus terrorism charges in late spring of 2014, three months after Russian soldiers descended upon the peninsula. He is serving his sentence in a penal colony in Russia’s far north, above the Arctic circle. He is 42. He has two young children, who live in Crimea with his mother.
Sentsov started his hunger strike one month before the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Russia in June and July. He is calling on the Russian authorities to release over 60 Ukrainians held in Russia and Crimea on politically motivated charges. He is not asking for his own release.
(Fionola Meredith’s article appeared in The Irish Times, 9/6.)
GOOD VIBRATIONS
Lyric Theatre, Belfast ★★★★
This stage version of Terri Hooley’s story makes the transition from film with style
When you hear the words “stage musical” you don’t tend to imagine a posse of young punks belting out a song so fiercely that the floorboards shake. But that’s what happens on Wednesday night at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, at the opening performance of Good Vibrations. It is a glorious moment.
Adapted from the award-winning film, Good Vibrations is the story of Terri Hooley, who, with a mixture of reckless abandon and unquenchable hope, opened a record shop on “the most bombed half-mile in Europe”, Great Victoria Street in Belfast, in the 1970s. There he discovered the underground punk scene and its joyous, anarchic ability to transcend tribal boundaries and bring people together, even as the city burned. Hooley became an unlikely impresario, putting on gigs and producing records in defiance of the bombers, the police and the snooty attitude of the mainstream music industry in London.
(Laura Collins-Hughes’s article appeared in The New York Times, 8/31.)
Halftime was ticking down at a marathon performance of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” when the guys in front of me returned to their seats and I fell a little in love with them. Riffling through plot points and names of characters they vaguely remembered were coming up (“Who’s Edmund? Or am I thinking of ‘King Lear’?”), they were like soap opera fans preparing to dive back into an engrossing serial.
That’s the kind of hold that the National Asian American Theater Company exerts on spectators with its oxygenated “Henry VI” at A.R.T./New York Theaters. It’s a production that asks nearly six hours from your life (yes, you can see its two parts on different days), but it repays you handsomely.
Fast-paced and gripping, this is an unusually lucid staging of a bloody history play, whose surfeit of schemes and villainy could make a daytime-drama writer blush. Yet for all the battles and beheadings in Stephen Brown-Fried’s handsomely designed production, never does it take death lightly. That’s one of the remarkable things about it.
(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/2.)
Caryl Churchill at 80: theatre’s great disruptor
She has made every theatre trip an adventure into the unknown, with a relentless urge
Caryl Churchill, who will be 80 on 3 September, was once compared by a fellow writer to Pablo Picasso. At first, it seems a bizarre coupling: a bull-like Spanish painter-sculptor and an intellectual British dramatist. But, as you think about it, the comparison makes sense. Like Picasso, Churchill has an active political conscience, has had a big influence on succeeding generations and is a restless experimenter with form. That last quality is, for me, the key to an extraordinary career that has yielded close to 40 plays and made Churchill an iconic figurehead.
Given the surge in plays by women in recent years, one forgets just how isolated Churchill must have felt when she set out. She began writing at Oxford but, while raising a family in the 1960s, focused exclusively on short plays for radio. She had her first stage play, Owners, put on at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1972 at a time when there were scarcely any role-models for women dramatists. Ann Jellicoe, another experimental dramatist, was the only major woman writer to have emerged from the Court’s chauvinist culture, Shelagh Delaney had flared like a rocket with one hit and then fizzled out and Agatha Christie had her secure niche in the West End. Otherwise, that was just about it. To whom was a young woman dramatist to turn for inspiration?
(Alexandria Neason’s article appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, 8/31; via the Drudge Report.)
THE VILLAGE VOICE IS SUSPENDING ALL EDITORIAL CONTENT and will lay off half its staff effective immediately, according to a member of the staff.
Peter Barbey, who bought the famed alt-weekly from Voice Media Group in 2015, announced the decision today in a conference call. CJR acquired audio of the call from a Voice staff member.
“Today is kind of a sucky day. Due to the business realities, we are going to stop publishing Village Voice new material,” said Barbey on the call. “About half the staff, it’ll be last day today. About half the staff staying on to wind things down and to work on the archive project.”
