(Ben Brantley’s article appeared in the New York Times, 4/22.)
Because theater is an inherently social form, most plays are date shows — capital-E events that you want to attend with someone else, so you can rehash the pleasures and problems of them afterward. But there are also those rarer plays to which you to want to go solo, works that make you savor the pleasures of being solitary.
Take “Empathy School & Love Story,” the writer and director Aaron Landsman’s engaging diptych on varieties of loneliness, which runs through Saturday at the Abrons Arts Center. Made up of two monologues (but of course), it’s an ideal single-ticket show, perfect for pondering on a quiet walk home by yourself, especially on a spring night in Manhattan that draws out those ephemeral human butterflies called New Yorkers.
Outstanding Play The Christians, Playwrights Horizons The Humans, Roundabout Theatre Company John, Signature Theatre King Charles III The Royale, Lincoln Center Theater
Outstanding Musical First Daughter Suite, Public Theater Daddy Long Legs School of Rock Shuffle Along Waitress
Outstanding Revival of a Play Cloud Nine, Atlantic Theater Company Death of a Salesman, New Yiddish Rep Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse at St. Ann’s Warehouse Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Roundabout Theatre Company A View From the Bridge Women Without Men, Mint Theater Company
Outstanding Revival of a Musical The Color Purple The Golden Bride, National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene Fiddler on the Roof She Loves Me, Roundabout Theatre Company Spring Awakening
(Gottlieb’s article appeared in the New York Review of Books, 4/7.)
What are we to make today of this famous woman who, beginning almost a century ago, has fascinated generations with her wit, flair, talent, and near genius for self-destruction? For some, what registers most strongly is her central role in the legend of the Algonquin Round Table, with its campiness of wisecracks, quips, and put-downs—a part of her life she would come to repudiate. For others, it’s the descent into alcoholism, and the sad final years holed up in Manhattan’s Volney Hotel. Pick your myth.
As for her writing, it has evoked ridiculous exaggeration from her votaries, both her contemporaries and her biographers. Vincent Sheean: “Among contemporary artists, I would put her next to Hemingway and Bill Faulkner. She wasn’t Shakespeare, but what she was, was true.” John Keats in his biography of her, You Might as Well Live (1970): “She wrote poetry that was at least as good as the best of Millay and Housman. She wrote some stories that are easily as good as some of O’Hara and Hemingway.” This is praise that manages to be inflated and qualified at the same time.
It’s hard to imagine how Richard Bean’s early play, from 1999, has come back on stage, now at 59 East 59th St Theaters (as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway festival). There is nothing but offensive, sophomoric crotch grabbing, swearing, and fist pumping, standing in for sex, with no recognizable plot. The play takes place in an outmoded, filthy bakery that should have been closed down by any kind of health inspector, but hey, these are lower-class bakers just doing their jobs, without any dignity given to them by the playwright. The set is comprised of all gray, dirty walls–from flour and used tea bags constantly being banged against them (the bags somehow always miss the over-filled, never-changed trash can). Matthew Kelly, as Nellie, leads a fine cast who have nowhere to go in this play. None of the actors seemed comfortable with their lines, nor should they be. Bean’s One Man, Two Govnors had the same problem regarding juvenile swearing. It made a US star of James Corden, but he would have been even funnier in the real Goldoni play, from 1743, which didn’t need updating to be relevant or comical. We saw a revival of the original not long before Bean’s version. Pass up Toast.
(Stephen Holden’s article appeared in The New York Times, 4/21; via Pam Green.)
To understand how singing can be dancing, you need only see Chita Riveraperform Jacques Brel’s “Carousel.” This steadily accelerating merry-go-round song, about how time seems to speed up as we age, is a great cabaret showpiece in which the performer dramatizes an entire life cycle in a matter of minutes. As the pace quickens, the excitement builds. But the momentum never hesitates, and eventually the singer runs out of stamina.
Ms. Rivera sang “Carousel” in “An Evening of My Favorite Songs,” her Tuesday night debut at Café Carlyle, in a harsh, commanding voice, but she also danced it. Lifting her arms and fluttering her fingers, she transformed her body into a madly whirling carnival ride. Eagerness gave way to a triumphant sense of mastery that morphed into anxiety and eventually into panic and finally into defeat. All of us are finally left behind.
The Canadian circus company mounts its newest acrobatic spectacle, which tells the story of a starlet choosing between love and art during Hollywood’s golden age. In previews.
Thomas Kail directs a play by Quiara Alegría Hudes, featuring Vanessa Aspillaga and Daphne Rubin-Vega, about the owner of a cheap bar in North Philly and her adopted daughter. In previews.
In a new musical by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, and Steven Levenson, directed by Michael Greif, a lonely teen-ager (Ben Platt) becomes the accidental subject of viral Internet fame. In previews. Opens May 1.
At Theatre for a New Audience, Arin Arbus directs John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in Thornton Wilder’s adaptation of the Ibsen drama, in repertory with Strindberg’s “The Father.” In previews.
Life Jacket Theatre Company presents a play written and directed by Travis Russ, covering fifty years of the illustrator’s life. Previews begin April 30. Opens May 3.
Manhattan Theatre Club stages Nick Payne’s play, which braids the stories of a pathologist who steals Einstein’s brain, a neuropsychologist beginning a new romance, and a seizure patient who loses his memory. Doug Hughes directs. In previews.
Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne, John Gallagher, Jr., and Michael Shannon play the dysfunctional Tyrone family, in the Roundabout’s revival of the Eugene O’Neill drama, directed by Jonathan Kent.Opens April 27.
(Zoe Bramley’s article appeared on History Extra 4/19; via Pam Green.)
Here, writing for History Extra, Bramley brings you seven things you probably didn’t know about the bard…
1) ‘William Shakespeare’ was ‘a weakish speller’
One of the most curious facts about William Shakespeare is that his name can be reshuffled to create the sentence ‘I am a weakish speller’. We might wish for a more heroic anagram for one of our nation’s greatest playwrights, but unfortunately ‘I am a weakish speller’ does in fact ring true when applied to Shakespeare.
It was a man named Donald L Holmes who first discovered the anagram, possibly while musing about the frivolity of early modern orthography (the art of writing words with the proper letters). Shakespeare was writing in the era before Samuel Johnson’s dictionary – which started the process of standardising English spelling – so he was rather relaxed about words. Indeed, he could not even decide how to spell his own name. Consider the following variants on his signature when he was finalising legal documents such as the mortgage deeds on property in Blackfriars, and his will: Shaksper, Shakespe, Shakespere, and Shakspeare.
(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 4/22.)
On Saturday the RSC marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a slap-up gala in Stratford-upon-Avon that will be broadcast live on BBC2 and boasts, as MGM used to say, “more stars than in the heavens”. If you are in London, you could stroll from Westminster to Tower Bridge and see a sequence of short films produced by Shakespeare’s Globe. Alternatively you could pop into a fascinating exhibition at the British Library titled Shakespeare in Ten Acts. To confirm Shakespeare’s global reach, in Dubai you could catch an immersive Romeo and Juliet staged in a vast shopping mall, and in Warsaw there’s a season of Shakespeare-inspired ballets with Polish dancers and Iranian designers.
This bombardment of Bardolatry prompts a series of questions. What is it about Shakespeare’s plays that keeps them so constantly performed and studied at a time when the idea of a western canon is in question? Is the hierarchical status given to Shakespeare’s tragedies due for urgent reassessment? And how should we stage his plays in a period of rapid social change and shifting theatrical techniques?