Thoughts and Critiques

A blog about theater and the arts

Theater, Other

Everyone Has Their Reasons

by Lisa on posted in

I have a sneaking feeling that the Cambridge audience at the ART’s stellar production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros should perhaps have found it more disturbing than they did.

It’s not that they weren’t disturbed by the striking move Ionesco makes from farce to horror, but it can be a bit too easy to see the fable as one that depicts how other people—certainly not us!—conform and adapt to a new political and social reality.

To back up, in case you haven’t read or seen Rhinoceros lately: Ionesco, one of the great practitioners of the French Theater of the Absurd, wrote the play in 1959, drawing on his experience of the growth of fascism in the 1930s as well as on the French intellectual embrace of Stalinism in the 1950s.

The play begins like a bit of drawing-room comedy, or better (it is French, after all), as a café comedy. Friends Jean and Berenger (Paul Giamatti and John Turturro, both outstanding) meet for a drink at a café in the center of their provincial small town. As the buttoned-up Jean berates his disheveled friend, they are interrupted by a rhinoceros running through town. Then another. Or was it the same one, coming back from the opposite direction? Did the first have one horn and the second two horns, and does that mean the one is African and the other Asiatic? Or the other way around?

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King Lear at Hudson Valley Shakespeare

by Lisa on posted in

The new theater at Hudson Valley Shakespeare has changed the way I think about theatrical space.

I’d heard about the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival for years, but it was only after reading in the New York Times about its new outdoor performance space that I decided I would go to this year’s two Shakespeare productions, King Lear and As You Like It.

For decades, the company has performed in a tent, but they have now built for themselves a permanent open-sided structure. A roof that looks like a turtle shell covers the audience and stage space, while leaving open a breathtaking view to the north that serves as backdrop to the action.

I’ve been to other outdoor theaters. All of them, even the theaters of ancient Greece, framed the action against some architectural backdrop. What makes this one distinctive is this lack of enclosure behind the stage.

And here’s what makes that design so remarkable. An outdoor space bounded behind the actors suggests that even if the world behind the audience might extend indefinitely, the action we are watching is contained in a particular playing area. At Hudson Valley, by contrast, the audience is limited to the seats under the turtle shell; it’s the playing space that suggests it could run to infinity.

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Does Tosca Have Anything New to Say to Us?

by Lisa on posted in

Louisa Proske’s dark, unsparing production at the Glimmerglass Festival this summer convinced me that it does, her radical staging offering a fresh perspective on the fragility of freedom in our own time.

Proske, a young German director, had already caught my eye with a revelatory staging of Handel’s Rinaldo two years ago. Her take on that baroque plot reimagined the tale as the fantasy of a young boy (the stellar Anthony Roth Costanzo) confined to a hospital bed. It became a deeply moving story about imagination’s power to transform the tragedy of a premature death.

Her Rinaldo was uplifting, her Tosca anything but. Where her Handel staging suggested how the power of imagination could redeem tragedy, her Tosca takes an already bleak story and makes it still more devastating. Tosca is also a story about imagination—think of the lovers singing ecstatically about their life together after what they think will be a mock execution—but we can’t help but feel the senselessness of their deaths by the end of this production.

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“Could Even a Little of It Have Been Mine?” Nannerl Mozart and the Loss of a Woman’s Voice

by Lisa on posted in

“Nobody saved my letters. There was nothing interesting in them,” laments Nannerl Mozart, as imagined by Sylvia Milo in her remarkable performance piece, The Other Mozart, recently performed at Next Stage in Putney.

Maria Anna Mozart, known as Nannerl to her family, was four years older than her brother Wolfgang and similarly gifted as a performer. Their father, Leopold, took them on tour through the great music capitals of Europe while they were both still children, and contemporary notices often spoke of her brilliance on the keyboard. Though Leopold himself once called her one of the most skillful pianists in Europe, that did not prevent him from insisting that she end her public performances once she reached marriageable age. Wolfgang would go on performing, composing, and auditioning for a court position. Nannerl was to stay home, attract a good husband, and perhaps supplement the family’s income through teaching.

Milo herself plays Nannerl in a show where costume and set are one and the same. Covering the entire stage is a voluminous dress whose center rests on a metallic corset. She begins this one-woman show in period undergarments, traversing the enormous dress, finding letters and other objets de mémoire in its folds. The dress becomes, in effect, a kind of embodied archive of her life.

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Oliver Twist and the Richness of Disability-Conscious Casting

by Lisa on posted in

Race-blind, gender-blind, disability-blind casting. All have become increasingly commonplace in theater and don’t normally merit comment. Conscious casting of minorities is another matter. I find it an increasingly interesting choice since it demands that we pay attention to, rather than ignore, the race or gender or disability of an actor. It brings the unexpected to the fore and make us rethink our initial ideas about a work.

Miranda Cromwell and Marianne Elliott’s reimagining of Death of a Salesman as the story of a Black family is perhaps the most prominent and exciting recent example. A recent production of Oliver Twist (now available to stream on NT at Home) also shows how powerful conscious casting can be. This new adaptation of the familiar story was developed by Leeds Playhouse in conjunction with Ramps on the Moon, a collaborative group whose stated aim is “to enrich the stories we tell and the way we tell them by normalising the presence of deaf and disabled people both on and off stage.”

Photo by Anthony Robling

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The Meaning of Falling Snow: Experiencing Chekhov in France

by Lisa on posted in

I had not expected a two-week vacation in southern France to get me thinking about Chekhov. But then I had not expected to find a theater in Uzès, the small market town where I was relaxing with friends.

Regardez la neige qui tombe: Une promenade dans la vie et l’œuvre de Tchekhov is a lovely exploration of the life and work of Chekhov. A two-person show originally produced at the Festival Off in Avignon, it’s now touring France and played Uzès for one night.

Regarder la neige qui tombe © Philippe Mangenot

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