Thoughts and Critiques

A blog about theater and the arts

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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Norma is ready for her closeup in this Sunset Boulevard

by Lisa on posted in

In Jamie Lloyd’s dazzling new adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it’s not just Norma Desmond who’s ready for her closeup. Onstage cameras stalk Norma, projecting her image onto the vertiginously slanted, gargantuan screen at the back of the stage. But they also follow the doomed screenwriter Joe, his love interest Betty, Norma’s faithful factotum Max—all the principals are given the full screen treatment in this production.

Former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls Nicole Scherzinger makes a spectacular Broadway debut as the fading icon of the screen. The gorgeous Scherzinger may seem young for the role, but I found it quite a brilliant stroke to feature this fading celebrity who’s “only” 45 to portray the forgotten Norma Desmond. Scherzinger, after all, has been largely relegated to judging television talent shows since the Pussycat Dolls broke up in 2010.

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An Intriguing Exhibit at the Clark—and a Curatorial Problem

by Lisa on posted in

Have you ever heard of Guillaume Lethière? I didn’t think so. Nor had I, though this neo-classical French painter has been hiding in plain sight for the past century. Two of his massive historical paintings have been hanging in the Louvre all this time—but well up out of sight in a room that sells knick-knacks once you’ve finished looking at the Mona Lisa.

Now the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has teamed up with the Louvre to present the first solo exhibit of this once well-known, now nearly forgotten, painter.

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An Ibsen for Our Time

by Lisa on posted in

It should come as no surprise that Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is having a moment, with new adaptations currently playing in both New York and London. Written over a hundred years ago, the play explores an issue of profound relevance, the potentially fatal consequences when townspeople willfully reject a scientific discovery that threatens their economic interests and entrenched beliefs.

Unlike the disappointingly generic Uncle Vanya also playing now in New York, this production of An Enemy of the People is clearly set in the past, in 19th century Norway, and, just as clearly, gives room for us to imagine its contemporary resonance. 

A few of the things I loved about this new production at Circle in the Square:

  • Jeremy Strong, leaving behind his persona as anxious, power-driven Kendall Roy to become something closer to Anthony Fauci—a naïve doctor unable to imagine the political forces that will rise up against him.
  • Michael Imperioli, no longer the impulsive Christopher Moltisanti of The Sopranos, but the savvy and menacing mayor of the town who engineers the doctor’s downfall.
  • Amy Herzog’s brisk and thoughtful new adaptation.
  • The atmospheric Norwegian folk music played by actors and extras during scene changes, as well as the wonderfully specific Norwegian set, complete with rosemaling and nearly a dozen oil lamps casting a cozy light.
  • And not least, the bar that magically descends to the stage during the brief interval, along with an invitation to audience members to come join the cast for a shot of aquavit. 

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Uncle Vanya at Lincoln Center: Is Steve Carell up to the Task?

by Lisa on posted in

In a word, no.

The new Broadway production of Uncle Vanya is still in previews and has a few weeks to work things out. But Carell’s lackluster Vanya is just one of several fundamental problems it may not be able to resolve.

With desultory furniture scattered across the thrust stage of the Vivian Beaumont, the play never really feels as though it inhabits the space. A moody backdrop of birch trees is lovely but also a bit puzzling. Where are we? Not in Chekhov’s Russia. The language and costuming are contemporary American but no more specific than that. (Astrov’s use of the word “freaks” in place of the usual “cranks” calls to mind hippies of the 1960s, but nothing else supports that idea.)

This lack of specificity drains the play of its emotional roots. The story may be one of universal disappointment, but it’s the specificity of this particular disappointment that draws us in, whether it takes place in Russia before the revolution or, as in Andrew Scott’s recent Vanya, in modern Ireland.

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