Monthly Archives: February 2013

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: ‘DOCTOR FAUSTUS’ (REVIEW PICK, UK) ·

(Lyn Gardner’s article appeared in the Guardian, 2/28.)

Hell isn't just other people: it's backstage in this new version of the story of the scholar who sold his soul to the devil. Here, the third and fourth acts of Christopher Marlowe's 16th-century play – long suspected not to have been written by Marlowe – are replaced by new scenes written by Colin Teevan, which update the satire and place Faustus in our own world of avarice and celebrity. Faustus isn't the only one selling his soul: bankers and media moguls casually sign on

Times are certainly changing at West Yorkshire Playhouse, where this co-production with the Citizens theatre in Glasgow heralds the start of James Brining's influence as artistic director. There is so much that is distinctive and interesting in Dominic Hill's Faustus that you are prepared to forgive the moments when it drags (particularly in the first half), or the unevenness of a production that still displays signs of uncertainty in some of its performances and stagecraft.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/feb/28/doctor-faustus-review

ANN COULTER GOES AFTER KAREN FINLEY . . . AGAIN ·

 

(I can appreciate both of these writers—but I do think that Ann Coulter is not seeing how good Karen Finley is as a performance artist.  Can we start a fund to send Ann to one of Karen’s shows?

article from Human Events, 2/27.)

Having given up on trying to persuade Americans that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens
will reduce the murder rate, Democrats have turned to their usual prohibitionary argument: “Why does anyone need (an assault weapon, a 30-round magazine, a semiautomatic, etc., etc.)?”

Phony conservative Joe Manchin, who won his U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia with an ad showing
him shooting a gun, said, “I don’t know anyone (who) needs 30 rounds in a clip.”

CNN’s Don Lemon, who does not fit the usual profile of the avid hunter and outdoorsman, demanded,
“Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting?”

Fantasist Dan Rather said, “There is no need to have these high-powered assault weapons.”

And prissy Brit Piers Morgan thought he’d hit on a real showstopper with, “I don’t know why anyone needs an assault rifle.” Of course, where he comes from, policemen carry wooden sticks.

Since when do Americans have to give the government an explanation for why they “need” omething? If that’s the test, I can think of a whole list of things I don’t know why anyone needs.

I don’t know why anyone needs to burn an American flag at a protest. The point could be made
just as well verbally.

I don’t know why anyone needs to read about the private lives of celebrities. Why can’t we shut
down the gossip rags?

I don’t know why anyone needs to vote. One vote has never made a difference in any federal
election.

I don’t know why anyone needs to bicycle in a city.

I don’t know why anyone needs to have anal sex at a bathhouse. I won’t stop them, but I don’t know why anyone needs to do that.

I don’t know why anyone needs to go hiking in national parks, where they’re constantly falling off cliffs, being buried in avalanches and getting lost — all requiring taxpayer-funded rescue missions. 

I don’t know why Karen Finley needs to smear herself with chocolate while reading poems about
“love.” But not only do Democrats allow that, they made us pay for it through the National Endowment for the Arts.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/27/why-does-anyone-need-to-read-about-celebrities/

‘NEW YORKER’ THEATRE LISTINGS, 3/4 PLAYDECK ·

 

Openings and Previews

Event: Ann

Venue: Vivian
Beaumont Theatre

Holland Taylor wrote and stars in this one-woman play, about Ann Richards . . .

Get Tickets

Event: As You Like It

Venue: New Victory Theatre

At the New Victory, the Acting Company presents the Shakespeare comedy, directed . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Belleville

Venue: New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop presents this play by Amy Herzog, directed by . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Venue: Cort Theatre

Sean Mathias directs Richard Greenberg’s new play, adapted from the Truman Capote . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Detroit ‘67

Venue: Public Theatre

The Public, in association with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and the . . .

Get Tickets

Continue reading

STEFFIN/BRECHT/BERLAU: ‘GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN’ (REVIEW–ONLY THROUGH 2/24) ·

 

According to scholar John Fuegi, The Good Woman of Setzuan “shouts the agony” of Margarete Steffin, the play’s unacknowledged principle author who, for most of her career, wore a male disguise, signing her name as Bertolt Brecht.   As Fuegi explains in his book Brecht & Co., Shen Te (the drama’s female protagonist) loves a man who uses her and takes her money.  Intrepidly, however, she puts him to work, running her factory, “providing jobs for the helpless and homeless. He works for her because he believes the boss is not really the female Shen Te, for whom he is consistently contemptuous, but rather the tough male Shui Ta, to whom he is consistently fawning.”

After seeing a production of Good Person of Szechwan, now playing at La Mama until February 24 (the play uses John Willet’s translation and is directed by Lear deBesseonet) audiences will get to see a drag artist play a version of Steffin.  It’s a proposition that the Foundry Theatre renders with jubilation.  However, I wonder if Steffin would think her work highjacked yet again (besides her not receiving writing credit on the play, it was dedicated to Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel.  The actress was deemed perfect for the title role—actually, she would not play it, as its WWII premier was in Switzerland, and she was a refugee in America at the time.  Ruth Berlau is today seen as another collaborator on the text.).  I also wonder if Steffin, along with Brecht himself, would think the new production gives proper estimation of yin and yang, whether the writers would believe the drama has been softened without the sting of traditional, perhaps anachronistic or even archaic, gender roles and role playing in a male-dominated society.   

Harold Clurman, writing in 1963, found Brecht’s work (he may not have known much about the contributions of Steffin and Berlau, not to mention Elisabeth Hauptmann) more than didactic, rising above politics “through a subtle artistry which always says something more than, and different from, their presumed ‘lesson’. That is why they have never been wholly accepted as effective Communist propaganda.” (We must also ask, in the La Mama production, if the play is effective for proponents of a post-genderized world?) Are Shen Ta and Wang being defanged by subverting their relationship’s dynamic and leaving Steffin cries unchampioned?  Isn’t what the play is saying that, circa late 1930s, there are no social solutions and that gender is intrinsic and part of an insoluble problem?  Brecht, the theorist, wants us to “think” and here the question seems very close to:  How can humans be good in a world where societal forces and constructs conspire to make that impossible? DeBessonet seems to be simplifying and universalizing for the 2000s, but, ultimately, she frames the question from one-side:  How can a man be good in a world where goodness is impossible?  

Continue reading

‘NEW YORKER’ THEATRE LISTINGS, 2/25 PLAYDECK ·

Openings and Previews 

Event: Ann

Venue: Vivian Beaumont Theatre

Holland Taylor wrote and stars in this one-woman play, about Ann Richards . . .

Get Tickets

 

Event: Belleville

Venue: New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop presents this play by Amy Herzog, directed by . . .

Get Tickets

 

Event: The Dance and the Railroad

Venue: Signature Theater Company

May Adrales directs an early play by David Henry Hwang, about two . . .

Get Tickets

 

Event: Detroit ‘67

Venue: Public Theatre

The Public, in association with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and the . . .

Get Tickets

Continue reading

MARGARET HEFFERNAN: ‘MRS UPDIKE’ (LISTEN NOW ON BBC RADIO 3 UNTIL 2/17) ·

MRS UPDIKE 

Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes

First broadcast:  Sunday 10 February 2013

Eileen Atkins and Charles Edwards star in this new play by Margaret Heffernan about the tempestuous relationship between one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century, John Updike, and his mother.
When John Updike's mother was asked whether she was proud of her son's acclaim, she replied, "I'd rather it had been me."

Listen at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qkvv0

Updike said that one of his earliest memories was seeing his mother at her writing desk. He wrote many stories about his mother and mothers in general, almost all isolated by their intelligence and sensitivity, which their sons both love and fear. Replete with tension, they mirror the journey all children must make from love to separation to attempts at coexistence and back to love. But the stories are always about the son's journey, as though the mother has gone nowhere. But what of Mrs. Updike's journey?

This play brings Updike and his mother together as Updike struggles with another failed marriage.

He comes home to his mother, expecting support and sympathy, to discover for the first time that his mother is a person too, with hopes and fears and disappointments he had never seen. His mother challenges him: can he love anyone whom he does not see merely as an extension of himself?
And, if he can't, what kind of writer, what kind of man, does that make him?

Mrs Updike … Eileen Atkins
John Updike … Charles Edwards
Young John Updike … Josef Lindsay
Wesley … Stuart Milligan
Springer … Garrick Hagon
Interviewer … Joseph May
Lara … Lorelei King

The writer, Margaret Heffernan has written three plays for radio, including a pair of plays about Enron

 

LYLE KESSLER: ‘COLLISION’ (REVIEW) ·

There have got to be more critics from the right who can give established dramatists, like Lyle Kessler (Orphans), the resistance needed to move beyond acceptable liberal fantasy and produce art.  Here is a writer who understands the mechanics of coercion, peer pressure, and social control. Yet, in Collision, now playing at the Rattlestick through February 17, he only delivers a simplistic position paper on gun control.  Kessler is literary and is interested in formal construction, as well as the elements of language theatre (listen to the skill with which he writes his monologues). You might see him as an existentialist and compare his writing to that of Beckett’s and Pinter’s. But for all this playwright’s knowledge of the stage, psychology, and behavior, he has written obvious downtown theatre, a utopian cautionary tale, not a serious indictment of gun culture at all.

Collision is a retro story and its sound is stilted, its plot implausible (tell me again how those guns got past security into the dorm room?).  You won’t be able to confuse it with streaming news, ‘60s reality, or any other.  The bonding of a group of students–and their teacher–who produce a violent act is not the stern lecture we need on Newtown, Connecticut; it’s not backup to chip away at the Second Amendment.  Taken without its final minutes, it might add up to a perceptive investigation of power, but it’s PR Theatre, opportunism, right for a meeting with suits on box office. These characters aren’t up to mass bloodshed in public spaces—they’re not especially desperate, they’re not especially motivated.  They don’t especially fit the profile: They’re not crazy.  They’re eggheads with a weapon.   

The Amoralists are one troupe we could expect to take us into pretty deranged areas and maybe tell a Manson or Lord of the Flies story.  But they don’t; they’re earnest, and well-meaning, and fastidiously interpreting the script—for once, they seem interchangeable with other actors on the scene.  Of course, their roles aren’t written to be case studies in the mentally ill; the characters don’t seem to be especially disruptive in their classes, they aren’t taking dangerous pharmaceuticals.  It is sometimes pointed out that Ibsen can ask for a radical jump of logic at the end of his plays—but Kessler wants a leap of unjustifiable faith.  

Some might think work like this dilutes the very issue of early detection and getting psychopaths hospitalization. It implies that the general population is like the mentally ill who commit such crimes.  In the wake of a tragedy of the likes of Newtown, that is an unhelpful metaphor. It's trouble when playwrights want to control people in society as if they were their characters.  

Directed by David Fofi

with Michael Cullen, Craig ‘muMs’ Grant, James Kautz, Nick Lawson, and Anna Stromberg 

© 2013 by Bob Shuman.  All rights reserved.

Visit Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (224 Waverly Place): http://www.rattlestick.org/2012/12/10/collision-on-sale-now/

RICHARD III SKELETON FOUND ·

 

(from BBC News 2/4/13.)

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III.

Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch's family.

Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, told a press conference to applause: "Beyond reasonable doubt it's Richard."

Richard, killed in battle in 1485, will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882

‘NEW YORKER’ THEATRE LISTINGS, 2/11 and 2/18 PLAYDECK ·

 

Openings and Previews

Event: All in the Timing

Venue: 59E59 Theatres

Primary Stages presents a revival of this series of one-acts by David . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Ann

Venue: Vivian Beaumont Theatre

Holland Taylor wrote and stars in this one-woman play, about Ann Richards . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Belleville

Venue: New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop presents this play by Amy Herzog, directed by . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Clive

Venue: Acorn

The New Group presents a new play by Jonathan Marc Sherman, about . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Dance and the Railroad

Venue: Signature Theater Company

May Adrales directs an early play by David Henry Hwang, about two . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Flick

Venue: Playwrights Horizons

Sam Gold directs a new play by Annie Baker, centered on three . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Good Person of Szechwan

Venue: La Mama Ellen Stewart Theatre

The Foundry Theatre presents the play by Bertolt Brecht, about a good-hearted . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Henry IV, Part I

Venue: Pearl Theatre

The Pearl presents a revival of William Shakespeare’s history play, directed by . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Katie Roche

Venue: Mint Theater

Teresa Deevy wrote this play, from 1936, about a young servant who . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Laramie Project Cycle

Venue: BAM—Harvey Theatre

BAM presents Tectonic Theatre Project’s production of “The Laramie Project: Ten Years . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Luck of the Irish

Venue: Claire Tow

LCT3 presents this drama by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Rebecca Taichman, about . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Madrid

Venue: City Center, Stage I

Edie Falco stars in a new play by Liz Flahive, about a . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Much Ado About Nothing

Venue: The Duke on 42nd Street

Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake star in Arin Arbus’s version of Shakespeare’s . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The North Pool

Venue: Vineyard Theatre

The Vineyard presents a new play by Rajiv Joseph, in which a . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Old Boy

Venue: Clurman Theatre

Jonathan Silverstein directs this Keen Company production of a play by A . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Old Hats

Venue: Signature Theater Company

Bill Irwin and David Shiner reunite for the first time since “Fool . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Passion

Venue: Classic Stage Company

John Doyle directs the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, starring . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Pilo Family Circus

Venue: New Ohio Theatre

Matt Pelfrey adapted Will Elliott’s novel for this play, directed by Joe . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Really Really

Venue: MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theater

MCC presents a play by Paul Downs Colaizzo, about the damaging effects . . .

Get Tickets

Event: The Revisionist

Venue: Cherry Lane Theatre

Kip Fagan directs a play by Jesse Eisenberg, who also stars, about . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella

Venue: Broadway Theatre

Mark Brokaw directs the Broadway première of this musical, with music by . . .

Get Tickets

Event: Talley’s Folly

Venue: Laura Pels Theatre

Danny Burstein and Sarah Paulson star in the 1979 comedy by Lanford . . .

Get Tickets

Event: This Clement World

Venue: St. Ann's Warehouse

Cynthia Hopkins combines music and documentary footage in her comment on climate . . .

Get Tickets

INGO SWANN, REST IN PEACE (1933-2013) ·

 

Ingo Swann, renowned artist, author, researcher of PSI–and of the fuller extent of human perceptions, abilities, and powers–passed away February 1. For those of us who were lucky enough to have known him, he will be deeply missed.  For everyone, his work and contributions to the world will be remembered.   

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/