Thoughts and Critiques

A blog about theater and the arts

John Proctor is the Villain: These Girls Would Like to Get a Word In

by Lisa on posted in

I wasn’t eager to see Kimberly Belflower’s new play John Proctor is the Villain. Though I understood and sympathized with the implied premise, it sounded a little too on the nose, perhaps a bit of feminist agitprop. (I dislike message plays, probably even more when I agree with their politics than when I don’t.)

But when the excellent reviews appeared a few days before I left for New York, I squeezed it into an already crowded schedule. (Three plays on Saturday? Why not?) And what a delightful surprise it turned out to be!

The title suggests this might be a reworking of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but it portrays a very different sort of crucible: a high school in rural Georgia in 2018, where a group of 11th grade girls are trying to form a feminism club in the wake of #MeToo.

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Slipstreams into Eternity: Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard at St. Ann’s Warehouse

by Lisa on posted in

Sometimes an imperfect show can be more memorable than a more competent but less interesting one. I didn’t find Benedict Andrews’ recent production of The Cherry Orchard to be an unqualified success, but a week later I’m still carrying around some of its most powerful moments.

No traditional stage here, just a monumental brick-colored oriental carpet stretching across the entire performance space, even climbing the back wall. The audience sat around this shared space and, sitting in the front row, I found my feet resting on the rug’s edge.

As I waited for the play to begin, I noticed a young man in bare feet seated across from me. He looked like a fairly typical Brooklyn theatergoer, but the bare feet struck me as a step too far. Then I looked more closely: it was Daniel Monks, who played Kostya in Jamie Lloyd’s Seagull. Of course: he must be playing Trofimov. Monks seems to be specializing in Chekhov’s disaffected young men.

I didn’t recognize the rest of the cast at first, dressed much like the Brooklyn audience—not even Anya and Yepikhodov seated next to me. In fact, when the buffoonish Yepikhodov made his entrance by violently knocking over his chair, I jumped, afraid an audience member had fallen.

The contemporary staging and costuming gesture toward the original while never fully embracing pre-revolutionary Russia or any other recognizable time and place. I complained a year ago about the unrootedness of Steve Carell’s Uncle Vanya. Why does it work so much better here?

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Purpose: A New Play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

by Lisa on posted in

From the moment we sit down at the intimate Hayes Theater, it’s clear that we’re in for a family drama, an emotional reckoning that will no doubt contrast with the perfect décor: a richly appointed coral-colored great room, dominated by a curving staircase up to the second floor. Upstage right is a picture window through which we will see the snowstorm that will lock all the characters in place for 24 hours.

The portraits of Martin Luther King and other Black icons hanging from the walls and the tastefully chosen African art scattered throughout ground us in a home of Black wealth and power. And most obviously, a dining table downstage right promises to give us that staple of the grand family play: an explosive confrontation over dinner that will end the first act with a bang.

This is the Chicago home of the Jasper family: aging civil rights icon Solomon Jasper and his lawyer wife Claudine. They are celebrating both Claudine’s birthday and the release from prison of son Junior, a politician convicted of embezzling campaign funds. Younger son Naz has come back for the celebration. Junior’s angry wife Morgan is also there—when she is not sulking in her room. And Aziza, a friend of Naz’s, shows up unexpectedly to stir the family soup.

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Life is in the Minding: Stoppard’s Invention of Love at the Hampstead

by Lisa on posted in

Classicists know A.E. Housman as the most brilliant Latinist of the late Victorian era. General readers—if they know of Housman at all today—know him as a poet, author of A Shropshire Lad, a set of elegiac poems about young men and missed chances.

Tom Stoppard’s moving play about Housman explores this divided self—romantic poet and scrupulous scholar—pulled between two passions: one for scholarship, the other for a more forbidden love. He does this in part by putting two versions of his protagonist on stage.

There’s the elderly Housman (“AEH”), first seen bantering with the mythical boatman Charon and then encountering his younger self as he takes an imaginative voyage across the Styx, revisiting memories as he nears the end of his life. And there’s the younger self (“Housman”), the university student passionately devoted to classical scholarship—and to his roommate Moses Jackson.

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Daniel Fish’s Elektra: Brie Larson, a paint gun and Chekhov’s Blimp

by Lisa on posted in

Whatever you may think of Daniel Fish’s bizarre staging of Sophocles’ Elektra, Brie Larson shows herself to be not just a movie star but the real deal on stage as well. In a buzzcut, Bikini Kill T-shirt and a microphone, Larson spends most of this production addressing us from downstage left, a mesmerizing standup tragedienne.

It’s a mannered but powerful performance of Anne Carson’s text, itself a mannered but powerful translation from the original Greek. The choice of “Elektra” rather than “Electra” is a conscious rejection of centuries of tradition. And I found the strangeness of this production a welcome reminder that the ancient Greeks are deeply foreign to our modern understanding.

The odd staging includes a blimp suspended above the stage, a curtain covering the back wall that rises and falls at random moments, a revolve with a stage light, a paint gun, other things I couldn’t quite identify. Much of this is incomprehensible. The paint gun gradually stains everyone’s costume with an inky black paint, suggestive of the dark desire for vengeance that drives the plot. 

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The Years: one woman’s story

by Lisa on posted in

Sheets. Sheets and a table are nearly all that five remarkable actresses need to tell the story of a woman’s life over more than sixty years, from 1940 to the early 2000s.

The Years is an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir Les Années, a memoir that is both personal and collective. While recounting details of her own life, she intersperses these personal memories with details of the social and cultural life around her, telling a collective history of women over her lifetime, one woman standing in for all of us. Ernaux herself describes the book as “a slippery narrative,” one that is “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.”

It’s not obvious how such a work can work on stage. The first brilliant stroke of the adaptor, Eline Arbo, is to hand this “slippery narrative” over to an ensemble of five women, aged 25 to 77, who will each hand the story off to the next older woman as we progress through time.

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A Pretty Wild(e) Importance of Being Earnest

by Lisa on posted in

Everyone is having a grand time on stage in Max Webster’s exuberant new production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Lyttelton Theatre (NT Live will show it in movie theaters in February).

And I enjoyed myself very much, too—if not, perhaps, quite as much as everyone on stage. The cast—all of them outstanding—has mastered a particular style of British comedy: part panto, part public school gender subversion and part, of course, Oscar Wilde.

It’s a dream cast: sexy Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, hapless Hugh Skinner as Jack, randy Ronke Adekoluejo and Eliza Scanlon as their love objects, and the incomparable Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell. Amanda Lawrence, Richard Cant and Julian Bleach provide luxury casting in the smaller roles.

Having become a bit wearied of the tendency toward minimal sets and costumes, I was delighted by the explosion of color and detail in this production. Did the National blow its entire year’s budget on this show? If so, I’m glad to have been the beneficiary of such a profusion of design talent.

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Why Should I Dance? Oedipus at the Old Vic

by Lisa on posted in

Oedipus is famous for his ability to solve riddles. I’m in need of an Oedipus to solve the riddle of this production.

The creative team (Ella Hickson has written the adaptation, Matthew Warchus and the choreographer Hofesh Shechter co-direct) has set the play in an undefined time—post-apocalyptic, or post-climate catastrophe. The plague afflicting Thebes is now a drought and a harsh sun shines over a largely empty stage. Jocasta tries to convince Oedipus to abandon Thebes for a less drought-stricken area. Technology has taken a step back: the oracle’s pronouncements are delivered via an old reel-to-reel tape recorder!

So far so good. But what might one do with the Greek chorus in such a concept? The solution chosen here is to eliminate the text of the choruses entirely and bring in Shechter’s dance company to “comment” via dance on the action.

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What Have We Here?

by Lisa on posted in

“What have we here?” is a wonderfully open question. It can be literal: what is this object before me? Or it might have a more general sense: what’s going on here? It could be prelude to an investigation, as when a detective in a police procedural asks this question upon arriving at a crime scene. Above all, it expresses some kind of curiosity, a desire to know.

All of these meanings are in play in Hew Locke’s terrific exhibition at the British Museum, what have we here?

Locke, a Guyanese-British artist, has put together a fascinating and provocative show in which he has looted (I use the term advisedly) the British Museum’s collection for the purpose of re-examining how the collection has been shaped by Britain’s imperial past.

But that makes it sound hectoring. And disturbing as the exhibition is, I found the title apt: Locke is clearly governed by curiosity and seems genuinely more interested in stimulating conversation and reflection than in lecturing his country about its moral failings.

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“Paul Mescal rides ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ to Brooklyn”

by Lisa on posted in ,

So announces the New York Times headline. Meanwhile, Vulture reports that the “Irish sad-boy hunk of Normal People and Gladiator II … is bringing the production to Brooklyn.”

It is true that Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire is transferring from London (where I saw it two years ago at the Almeida Theatre) and will open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February. And it is true that Mescal will reprise his award-winning performance as Stanley.

What bothers me about the breathless Paul Mescal coverage, though, is that he forms just a third of a remarkable ensemble of award-winning actors that includes Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Anjana Vasan as Stella. 

And good as Mescal is, this revelatory production foregrounds the relationship between Stella and Blanche, suggesting that the heart of the play lies not in the gladiatorial combat between Stanley and Blanche—exciting as that is!—but in the relationship between the two sisters.

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