Category: Theater

On difficulty

A post at Via Negativa on John Ashbery and other things points to one by Reginald Shepherd on the degrees of difficulty in poetry, and a lot of the post works for other art forms as well.

Semantic difficulty can in turn be broken down into difficulty of explication and difficulty of interpretation. Some poems present both kinds of difficulty, some only one or the other. In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem: “What is this poem saying?” One encounters this in Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb,” and he wrote an extensive explication of the poem for Harriet Monroe, then editor of Poetry. In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashbery’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, “Why am I being told/shown this?”

It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, “I don’t understand this poem.”

In theater, this translates to the comment one hears in the lobby at intermission, “I wish they would put something in the program to tell us what this play is about.” It’s perfectly clear what, say, Waiting for Godot is “about,” what the story is: two hoboes hanging out by a withered tree expecting to meet someone who doesn’t show up. But the bemused audience member wants to know why he’s being told this particular story. (Of course, my perennial frustration is with audience members who, when presented with the fence of a difficult play, balk and refuse to jump it, even with the carrot of a program note suggesting an interpretation.)

And as well:

Formal difficulty is a particular case of what George Steiner, cited by Shetley, calls modal difficulty…. In the case of modal difficulty, a reader asks, “What makes this a poem?”

Some of the experimental work of the 1960s might fall into this category.

Orson’s Shadow

This imagined reconstruction of the unlikely collaboration of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier on a 1960 production of Rhinoceros amuses, but fails to excite. To be sure, two egos as large as those of Olivier and Welles have not collided on a Bethesda stage since Shakespeare, Moses, and Joe Papp several seasons ago, and two more colorfully neurotic artists in eclipse (Welles’s truimphant Citizen Kane already nearly two decades in the past, Olivier on the verge of dropping his second wife, the forlorn Vivien Leigh) would be hard to find. But how much spark can a play generate when its first act climax is a hiring decision?

Wilbur Edwin Henry is particularly effective at capturing the bear at bay that was Orson Welles at mid-career.

  • Orson’s Shadow, by Austin Pendleton, conceived by Judith Auberjonois, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Vigils

“Plants grow and die at the same time each year, and that makes them easier to love.” So says one character in Woolly’s current offering by Noah Haidle, a bittersweet fantasy about love, death, and letting go; the play’s theatrical construction has hints of Tony Kushner and Craig Wright.

Widow (all character names are anonymized to role names) has spent the last two years of her life mourning the death of her firefighter husband. Her clinging to the past takes on physical form, as she keeps his Soul (the surprising Michael Russotto) locked in a box at the foot of her bed. Widow (the always-strong Naomi Jacobson) and Soul replay and replay scenes from their less-than-happy life together—their marriage was forced by an unplanned pregnancy, which subsequently ended in a miscarriage— in sort of a Truly, Madly, Deeply meets Groundhog Day mashup. Unable to control their memories, Soul and WIdow replay scenes of pain more often than those of happiness, and although each would like to utter the words that would undo the pain, each scene repeats as in the past. Soul’s replays are carried out in part by Body (hunky Matthew Montelongo) because Soul is now blind, as he waits out the time on earth before Widow can release him to the afterlife. (The significance and theatrical effectiveness of Soul’s blindness is, unfortunately, lost on me.)

The three are almost overmatched by the perfect J. Fred Shiffman as the adenoidal Wooer, a fireman friend of the family. Shiffman’s Wooer is an amiable dork, awkward at small talk, who simply loves Widow and wants her to move on with her life.

Lest it be thought a heavy show, the play is still a comedy, and fantasy elements keep the mood light. A show-stopping set piece at a high school reunion calls for the four principals to line-dance to an old Britney Spears song, just because. Alas, the Foy flying apparatus for Soul and Widow, however effective, is still a bit obtrusive.

It’s an interesting twist that Wooer can interact, to a limited degree, with Soul. Haidle, young but already skilled in the art of putting a play together, says in a playbill interview,

To write the things I am trying to write, you have to establish the rules very quickly and the audience will give you their time. They’ll go with you for about eight minutes. And in those eight minutes you can do anything, but you have to show them that they’re in a world that has rules. You establish those rules, and most importantly I think, and I don’t know how you do this, but I think you have to tell them when they get to go home.

  • Vigils, by Noah Haidle, directed by Colette Searls, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Wireless, not wireless

More Stoppard—why the heck not? Via ArtsJournal, Mark Lawson looks at updating the text of plays set in previous decades when they’re revived.

One major Stoppard play has never been revived: Night and Day (1978). Its plot depends on the need for British journalists in Africa to find a house with a telex machine. Now that reporters have satellite phones, the play is more or less incomprehensible.

Sing out, Louise

Andrew Lloyd Webber wrings his hands over an impending auction of wireless spectrum, according to a story reported by Stephen Beard. If a cell phone company were to win the bidding,

… he warns the sound in the seven West End theatres he owns could become inaudible. The wireless mics his productions rely on could get too expensive to run.

I suppose he could do something radical, like write music that doesn’t require mics to sound good. Maybe not.

The Skriker

Nanna Ingvarsson executes a star turn in the title role of one of Caryl Churchill’s more demanding texts, The Skriker. The Skriker is “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged,” and she is accompanied by all manner of denizens from the underworld of British folk tales—spriggans, kelpies, brownies—in this story set in modern England, originally produced in 1994. The Skriker carries off one, perhaps two, young working-class women (the effective Katie Atkinson and Lindsay Haynes) to the deeps below a no-longer green and pleasant Britain. The narrative, although ultimately unsatisfying in its perfunctory conclusion, carries echoes of the Persephone myth as well.

The Skriker speaks a slippery, allusive, punning speech with a logic of its own that brings to mind Monty Python’s Word Association Football sketch rewritten by James Joyce, and Ingvarsson and director Kathleen Akerley deserve high marks for making the words, at times impenetrable on the page, meaningful and accessible. Here’s a fragment from the punishing opening monologue:

Out of her pinkle lippety loppety, out of her mouthtrap, out came my secreted garden flower of my youth and beauty and the beast is six six six o’clock in the morning becomes electric stormy petrel bomb.

If the no-frills production doesn’t always manage the scene transitions well, it should be credited with finding a use for the Warehouse’s door to the back parking lot (a kind of Hades itself) that opens directly into the auditorium. Many of the folklore characters will be unknown to American audiences (who, at best, might know who the Green Man is), so it’s too bad that Churchill doesn’t give us more time and text to get to know the excellently-named demon Rawheadandbloodybones.

  • The Skriker, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Kathleen Akerley, Forum Theatre & Dance, Warehouse Theater, Washington

The Little Prince

RHT brings a gentle touch to the theatrical elements of this adaption of the short novel by Saint-Exupéry, the wide-eyed fairy tale well-known to tenth-grade French students nationwide. The Snake first appears behind a scrim, then fully lit but still in pantomime, manipulated by a puppeteer, before finally appearing in the form of a human actor; the various “big men” that the Little Prince meets in his fall to earth appear in a circus wagon-sized frame.

But the text of the production is faithful to the words and drawings of the novel, at times slavishly so, as when Craig Wallace (the aviator-narrator of the story) speaks to us exactly what he’s thinking. On the other hand, something we miss from Saint-Ex is the Little Prince’s jaunty cutaway royal gown: to accommodate the exuberant physicality of Jamie Kassel’s characterization, perhaps, the Prince wears some sort of bedraggled nightshirt. Kassel fully commits herself in her playing, but two shows in a row in Bethesda that feature principals with squeaky voices is a little too much to ask of us.

In the second half, as the Fox, Wallace has more scenery to chew, and he does so endearingly. The episode of the taming of the Fox is managed as a manic dance to Jacques Brel’s “La valse à mille temps,” and it’s a show-stopper.

  • The Little Prince, by Rick Cummins and John Scoullar, based on the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, directed by Eric Ting, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

The thrill when you get it right in public

Daphne Merkin covers a lot of the usual ground in her profile of Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler. (The piece accompanies the opening of The Coast of Utopia in New York.) But, towards the close of the article, an insight glimmers:

The longer I ponder the Stoppard legend—the difficult beginnings and then the smooth ascent, with nary a glitch to be seen—the more I find myself wondering at the gaps in his history, at how much he has discarded along the road…. Stoppard may in fact be that rare creature, an untortured creative artist for whom art is not an escape from trauma but rather an extension of his intellectual largess. Or he may be someone stuck in his own characterization, playing out the upside of an absurdist existential situation…

Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis

Woolly’s American premiere of Jones’s comedy set in Bolton, in the north of England, may not knock it for six, but the solid production does score a run. The signature Woolly Mammoth theatrical elements are present: a dominatrix mom considering retirement; her two daughters, one of them a bit thick in the head; her shiny-pated client, proprietor of a local dry-cleaning establishment; an Irish cleaning woman with OCD; a neophyte Elvis impersonator from somewhere in the Far East, who has all the singer’s looks but is still learning the words to the songs; and those all-important fur-lined handcuffs. These are enough to keep the punchlines bouncing around the two-level half-timbered set, while themes of reconciliation and costuming and concealment play out.

Sarah Marshall’s natural comic rhythms are sometimes at odds with the dialect called for by her Martha, but she has a lovely, heartfelt second-act monologue that gives her character the opportunity to explain herself.

  • Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis, by Charlotte Jones, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Catalyst Theater Company brings Bertolt Brecht’s chilling satire of the early career of Adolf Hitler to the friendly confines of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Written in exile from Germany while World War II still burned, Arturo Ui imagines Hitler as a comical gangster who sets out to organize the vegetable-sellers’ rackets in Chicago. With a thick Bronx accent, Arturo Ui and his henchmen are figures of fun out of a bad Jimmy Cagney movie—at least until the death toll begins to mount and Ui invades neighboring Austria (or Cicero, as the play would have it).

Scot McKenzie’s inhabiting of Ui is at its most frightening when he pauses in a climactic monologue and just stares us down. This before launching a stunning Hitlerian tirade that swamps the black box theater and the handful of cast members who provide background applause.

The evenly-matched ensemble cast of eight executes multiple duties, serving as scene shifters, lighting operators, and a three-piece orchestra. Some of the scene shifts take longer than we would like, but most transitions are covered by slide-show projections that establish the connection between events in the play and those in 1930’s Germany. Standouts include Grady Weatherford’s sotted Fish, scapegoated for the play’s Reichstag Fire stand-in; as well as Scott McCormick and his robust baritone, placed in the service of Butcher, Giri, and other roles, and a brisk second-act opening song.

  • The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Christopher Gallu, Catalyst Theater Company, Washington

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Plays that trade on the theme of Marilyn Monroe (Oates’s Miss Golden Dreams, Russell’s Blood Brothers) are rarely successful, though I can’t articulate why. Perhaps they mistake icon for import. Simon Bent’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany likewise fails to impress.

Despite some highly theatrical technical elements—a flying actor; basketballs dropping from the sky; and an overwhelming set piece in the third act that involves revealing the back wall of the theater, painted as the Stars and Stripes three stories high while Vietnam War dead are delivered home by forklift—Irving’s black comedy of faith leaves us wondering why this story had to be told. It is the story of diminutive Owen, a “boy with a wrecked voice” who has premonitions of his own death and a heroic sacrifice. In a setting of New England grotesques out of Thornton Wilder, and told in tightly cued overlapping scenes, preternaturally spiritual Owen takes on the role of a wise child. The trouble is that Irving, Bent, director Blake Robison, and actor Matthew Detmer have given Owen a comically squeaky voice more appropriate to Burr Tillstom and Fran Allison’s clown puppet Ollie. Owen’s pronouncements of wisdom against the tradition-bound clerics of his hometown are flat and trite; he comes off as a grating smartass more at home on Saturday morning television. Maybe the idea worked better in the book.

The play picks up some momentum in the third act with an unsettling visitation by Lenny Bruce and Owen goes off to war. Too little, too late.

  • A Prayer for Owen Meany, novel by John Irving, adapted by Simon Bent, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Yes and no

Washington Theater Review interviews Washington Post critic Peter Marks:

WTR: Do you feel like the popularity of movie reviewers such as Siskel & Ebert has made people view critics and criticism as more of a “thumbs up/thumbs down” concept?

PM: There’s a sea change in what the world expects, not only because of Siskel & Ebert, but because of the internet, the bloggers. There’s a thumbs up/thumbs down mentality in this country but it goes beyond criticism. We are that way about people’s careers, their lives. It’s who’s up and who’s down. We make lists about everything. Who’s hot this year; who’s not. You’re in, you’re out. And if you’re in now, you are going to be out. You can’t stay in. We are constantly metering everything that way. So the natural thing is it’s going to bleed over into the arts.

When critics have to thumbs up/thumbs down — and the marketing departments of movies, theaters, and art museums all use those measures as well — it certainly dampens down the amount of nuance and subtlety in criticism. People want to know yes or no.

Most of the time the answer isn’t yes or no, most of the time it’s ‘OK’ or ‘Well, I don’t know if I would spend the money,’ or ‘That was sort of interesting in the second act.’ Those issues are hard to balance with the demands an audience has for yes or no. By some measure, the audience does want nuance and subtlety. I try and fight against the thumbs up/thumbs down mentality as much as I can. With some critics you’ll read a review, and you can’t tell what a person thinks. That’s not good either. Even if it’s 60% in favor, you have to leave a person with an impression of whether or not this is worthwhile. I work at a newspaper. I’m not at the ‘Journal of Internal Technical Lighting Skills’ or something like that. I am at a newspaper, and I have to abide by that service aspect.