Studio's newest space is a comfortable black box without the black: audience seating on risers and exposed brick walls and duct work. The acoustics can be challenging for actors with smaller voices.

posted: 7:01:16 PM  

Mark Jackson's biography of Vsevolod Meyerhold, follower of Stanislavski and political revolutionary, presents a fine balance between content in form. Written for 12 actors and a slide projector, it follows 40 years in the career of this theatrical innovator up to his execution by Stalin in 1940.

Meyerhold, in reaction to Stanislavski's naturalistic way of playing, devised a stylized method of movement that suggests Bob Fosse in its precision. We're tempted with a glimpse of that style, especially in Act 1. At the same time, Jackson's own theatricality can be compared to that of Tony Kushner: Jackson and director Rick Simas keep the cast in constant movement, realizing three dozen named characters. The production isn't afraid to let the wires show, with a banged-together set of exposed lumber without masking.

There are two more unsettling theatrical moments in the first act. First, a glib "interview" between two of the cast, one of them playing Jackson the playwright, that serves to get some of the exposition out of the way. (Does anyone except Matthew Broderick really say "Wowsa"?) Second, a staged "breaking of the fourth wall," in which Meyerhold addresses the audience; yet the imaginary barrier still separates us.

Perhaps the most effective bit of staging comes in the third act: a brutal murder lit only by a candle and two flashlights.

Becky Peters shines in her realization of the actor Maria Babanova, especially in her recreation of Babanova's audition, a two-minute comic pantomime that recpitulates Hamlet. And Scott Kerns's over-wound Dmitri Shostakovich is a stitch; trapped on a raised platform with no way to exit (at least according to the conventions of theater), he simply drops and lowers himself out of the scene.

posted: 6:58:33 PM  

Wow, in the photo that accompanies our Henry V review, I almost look genuinely threatening.

(Thanks to The Flibbertigibbet.)

posted: 2:02:48 PM  

Thrift store paintings, remixed.

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

posted: 2:02:47 PM