This theatre column appears occasionally in Das Boot. It contains reviews of stage productions of all kinds, observations and the occasional rant on various theatre related topics.

Public Theater

Directed by Michael Greif

Closes

Suzan-Lori Parks has been good for the Public Theater, and vice versa. With Fucking A, her latest contribution (after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Top Dog?) to the New York Theater scene, the happy streak may come to an end. This play, which lifts the "A," a few themes, but little else from Hawthorne, is an unpleasant, gory for the sake of goriness, overloaded thesis play which in the end fails to make much of a point, except perhaps that abortion is abominable and ultimately really infanticide, no matter what the women's movement may have said about choice all these many years.

This equation is perhaps as much the director, Michael Greif's contribution, it is not possible to tell how much of the mis-en-scène is his and how much the playwright's.

S. Epatha Merkerson, clearly a remarkable actress whose considerable talents, while in evidence, are insufficient to overcome the (un) holy mess of this play, here portrays Heather Smith, a mother, who's son has been imprisoned since childhood. Rather than to fall into abject poverty, the illiterate Heather becomes an abortionist. Set in a mythological country in an undefined time (though references to slavery suggest the American south), this choice of work, while permitted, forces her to suffer the branding of the letter "A" onto her chest. A window in her dress keeps the "A" always visible, and we are told that it bleeds whenever a woman approaches to have a child aborted. After each abortion (mercifully those are performed off-stage), Heather lights a candle - this is not explained, but to me it suggests a gesture of contrition and grief - and hoses down her implements on stage (in a scenic bow to Far Away by Caryl Churchill, which may have served as an inspiration here in more than one way, and is, at any rate, a far more enigmatic and truly powerful parable about dehumanization). Thanks to her earnings in this stigmatized profession and with the help of the concubine of the town's mayor she works toward buying the freedom of her son, who's sentence keeps being prolonged year after year. When he finally escapes his mother is told he died in prison. During his brief time of freedom he impregnates the up-to-now childless wife of the mayor, a woman who, then a child herself, was responsible for his incarceration in the first place. Heather Smith, full of rage over the supposed death of her son, engineers the kidnapping of the mayor's wife to revenge herself by aborting her child. this done, her son arrives on the scene, seeking a hiding place from a vicious gang of bounty hunters. Rather than have her son caught and tortured, she decides to help him to a quick and painless death by slitting his throat.

This summary leaves out large parts of this play, which is all plot and gore, with little exploration of character and motive. In the misguided attempt to sell this jumble of motives as a kind of Brecht-style parable, Ms. Parks has added some eight or ten songs to the piece, which lighten the mood while slowing the proceedings to a crawl.

Out of the jumble of stylistic elements and the many ideas, any one of which might be the core notion of a decent play, a skilful dramaturg and director might have extracted something worth putting on a stage. Michael Greif, of Rent fame and an artist with a long association with the Public, was clearly not up to the task. E.Vogel, March 3, 2003

Lincoln Center Theater

by Frank McGuinness
Directed by Nicholas Martin
Closes April 13

At a time when the United States is about to go to war in Iraq, it is good to look at war not from a historic or ideological point of view, but from the very personal one. This play offers such a view.

Eight young men from the Northern Irish province of Ulster have volunteered to join the British Army to fight on the side of the allies against Germany. Observe the Sons? opens with the only one of the eight who survived, now an old man, haunted still by his memories and still railing at his god for not letting him forget. It then goes back to the meeting of these eight soldiers, their bonding in the trenches near the Somme in Northern France, followed by a brief furlough they visit, in four pairs, places that are dear to them in Ireland, and where their fears and hidden longings are revealed in moving, brief vignettes; then the return to the trenches in France, and their start into the battle, in which all but one will perish with the roughly 20,000 others who died that day.

No play can get near to a truthful depiction of the brutality and senselessness of war, and while this one, with its episodic structure fails to create strong drama, it does take us through variations of personal searches for faith and meaning of life, friendship, mutual understanding, patriotism, and facing death. McGuinness creates along the way some humorous scenes, particularly in the first act when the eight young men meet in a barracks. The central character, edgily portrayed by John Theroux, is the only one who joined not out of patriotic motives but as an act of nihilistic defiance against his upper-class family, but also as a dare against god and his own sense of life. His survival of the war turns out to be as much a punishment as a gift, the losses he experienced, after he finally is fully accepted by the other men leave him with torturing memories.

Ultimately the play fails as drama - as it is almost bound to do, because the antagonist here is war and remain abstract, no matter how much set, costumes, sound and the dirt-smeared faces of the actors in act two want to remind us where this takes place. The vignettes, which allow each of the eight characters to develop and present their individual nature are, if not touching the sentimental, of little consequence dramatically. But the play leaves one with the strong sense that it is no ones right to subject another human being to this experience, and that the casualties reach far beyond those left on the battlefield.
E Vogel, March 3, 2003

Harvey Theatre, BAM

Adaptation by Brian Friel, Directed by Sam Mendes

The February 12 presentation of the Donmar Warehouse's production of Uncle Vanya ended with a surprise: Director Sam Mendes was called to the stage to be presented with three Olivier Awards (the British "Tony"): for best direction, best revival of a classic and a special Award for his ten year tenure as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in London.

It almost seems stingy not to join such approval, particularly since the production offered at BAM (together with Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which I will report on next week) is really quite good, a worthwhile evening in the theatre with a cast of very competent actors. And it would be easy to give this production a more enthusiastic review, if we did not, currently, have a conceptually superior production on the boards (at the Jean Cocteau Theatre, reviewed below).

For those who are not familiar with Uncle Vanya: It follows a family on a country estate in late nineteenth century Russia through a summer. Vanya's brother-in-law, a retired art professor has moved there with his much younger and rather attractive wife Yelena, with whom both Vanya and their country doctor friend Astrov fall in love; their presence upsets the balance of life up to a crisis point, when the professor suggests that the estate be sold to allow him to live, once again, in the city.

The stage at the BAM Harvey Theatre is divided in two areas: an upstage area, covered with knee-high grass, which is used only for a couple of crosses of minor characters but otherwise not part of the playing area, and a downstage area, covered with Persian rugs - reminiscent of the set for Peter Brook's Cherry Orchard. A long table dominates this downstage area, extending over two thirds of the proscenium in width. A small upstage side table and simple bentwood chairs complete the set. The long table has become a cliché for this play, it was the dominating visual element in Peter Stein's production of Uncle Vanya in Rome, a production of which Sam Mendes must be aware, and has made an appearance in Three Sisters just a few months ago.

The grassland upstage, complete, at least in act two, with lazy afternoon cricket sounds but then visually completed with the back-wall of the theatre may be meant to emphasize that this is a play which is rooted in a kind of simple realism, of truth which is not heightened or interfered by artifice and stagy symbolism, or meaningful abstractions. This design, beautifully lit by Hugh Vanstone, with costumes styled to suggest the late nineteenth century, and complemented by live music by George Stiles (unfortunately over-amplified, it would have been just as effective to use recorded music), adds nothing unexpected to the interpretation of the play.

The adaptation by Brian Friel offers Chekhov's play more help crossing the linguistic borders than it really requires. As much as Sam Mendes tries to keep the play in its time period and in Russia, Friel pulls it across the waters and, with a wee Irish accent, it could be Uncle Johnny from County Mayo, and much closer in time to ours. In the process the dialogue trades in its Russian terseness for Irish gift of gab, a trade which adds jokes and reduces Chekhov's brilliantly economic writing.

Mendes choice to invest all his effort in the actors leads to some wonderful moments. Helen McCrory's Yelena shows the barely suppressed desire and flirtatiousness struggling against her commitment to a husband who no longer satisfies her. Simon Russell Beale's Vanya is perhaps more self-debasing in his love to Yelena than necessary. Emily Watson has played simplemindedness perhaps once too often, here it renders her Sonya mercilessly wooden and two-dimensional. The overall lack of conceptual daring on the part of Mendes becomes most apparent in the last act of the play, when he lets the actors drown in the endless departures, confirming the worst clichés of Chekhovian ennui, but also undercutting the potentially powerful conclusion of the play.
E.Vogel, February 2003

Ontological-Hysteric Theater St. Mark in the Bowery, NYC

By Richard Foreman

Until April 13, 2003

Panic (How to be Happy), one of Richard Foreman's annual contributions to the theatre of the absurd, is like a happy and sometimes rather irritating walk through a garbage dump of cultural images, some of recent, others of quite ancient vintage.  The good news is, it does not smell, and the procession of repetitive moments of behavior and actions can be amusing - on the night when I saw this play, there always seemed to be single audience members who responded with isolated laughs, punctuating the performance much as Foreman's bells and breaking glass (a cast-off from the David Letterman show?).  The bad news is that once one realizes that no narrative of any interest will be offered, the repeated sentences lose their novelty, and the lights which shine on the audience are truly irritating.  I recommend a baseball cap with a deep visor… 

There are two principal ways in which to watch this theatre: one gives in to the addiction to make sense of the flood of images, sounds and actions on stage, and the result is a certain tension, a grappling with the elusive connections of those elements.  And doing so eventually give over to the frustration which this futile struggle generates.  Or one can resign oneself to the fact that nothing here makes sense beyond what it is at any given moment, and enjoy the rich fabric of images, symbols, letters, moving things and actors who do things to each other and with each other, or who, as a kind of ritualistic stage-hand-chorus element, set up the next sequence.  What is shown here is quotation: aural (the sound effects), visual, linguistic, and even the actions of the actors; but also the sentences announced over speakers, or spoken by the actors with intonations which seem to imply some emotional connection or meaning which is otherwise obscure.  There are quotations of violent acts, sexual acts, of games, of rituals whose meaning has been lost.  The actors move through these moments with intensity, perform the senseless, if not idiotic rituals like children who believe that what the adults have told them to do must be important, empty and senseless though it appears. 

In the end this play is a visually rich collage which, to my perception, does not add up to much.  The quotations eventually cancel each other out, the visual world becomes more and more cluttered; the only recognizable organizing principle seems to be Mr. Foreman's whim, and the spoken lines become slogans which eventually lose their novelty interest.  One walks away from this like from a feast which stuffed and starved one all at once, sick and overfed and yet hungry. 
E. Vogel, January 2003

William Shakespeare Classic Stage Company

Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Director Gordon Edelstein does not quite succeed to present the odd piece called "The Winter's Tale," one of Shakespeare's more confusing plays, in a manner which reveals its mysteries or - as the audience is entitled to expect in a modern-dress production - make it relevant or at least resonant to our times.  Shakespeare, in "The Winter's Tale" revisits themes from earlier plays: jealousy directed at an innocent wife from Othello, young lovers who act against parental (or here - paternal) wishes from Romeo & Juliet.  But rather than spinning these themes to a tragic ending, they culminate here in an extended coda of forgiveness and reconciliation, in a scene in which the believed-to-have-died Hermione is presented to Leontes, whose jealousy caused her "death," in form of a statue which, in a final "miracle," comes to life thanks to the magic of art and music.

This is a play with some wonderful language on justice, on dictatorial arbitrariness, on art and on nature.  It also contains the most maddening array of coincidences, of new expository material offered as late as in the last few minutes of the play, and of questionable plot devices - like the apparent death and resurrection of Hermione after sixteen years of - what, coma?  life in hiding?  And, to complicate matters, the story of the young lovers (Hermione's lost daughter Perdita, now a seeming shepherdess and Florizel, son to Polixiness, King of Bohemia) is told inside an extended Pastorale with lengthy and, from today's point of view, rather unfunny clown bits.

The Classic Stage Company's production lacks neither in stylish presentation, making the best use of the impressive space this theatre occupies, nor in a wealth of potentially interesting ideas.  Opening the play with an elegant party, a pianist playing in the corner, and using the instrument to develop the relationship of Leontes (David Strathhairn) to his young son by having Leontes accompany his son, who is playing a miniature piano.  Unfortunately, over the course of the play the piano is mostly used for "sound effects," and no longer integrated into the play.  This characterizes the whole undertaking:  many good ideas, which do not contribute to the whole play, and some which evoke unintended associations, such as representing the answer of the "Oracle" which Leontes consults for guidance about his wife's guilt or innocence by a reel to reel tape recorder, which immediately brings to mind the mission impossible TV show, or the unfortunate casting of the single African American in the production in the role of the of the cut-purse and con-man Autolycos, thus appealing to the familiar prejudice.  Ultimately Edelstein cannot decide whether he wants to produce this play straight, taking its story at face value, or as an ironic contemplation of its themes.  The result is a production without clear commitments.

Uncle Vanya

Cocteau Theatre (Bowery and 2nd Street).

Directed by Eve Adamson

Chekhov's great plays are famous for their length, lack of events and their characters' endless complaints about boredom and how they'll never get to Moscow. As the current production at the Cocteau shows, there is much more to this writer than his and our boredom. The new production of Uncle Vanya (with Harris Berlinsky in the title role) moves fast, is filled with humor, is beautifully designed in a "classical" approach for the costumes and with a simple, abstract set which presents the actors well without ever imposing more than a hint of symbolism (empty picture frames seem to refer to the Professor's empty writings on art, black lacquer surfaces occasionally offer reflections of characters who are engaged in intensive self-examination).

This play about misdirected and unrequited love, which examines beautifully the dependencies between members of an extended family on a Russian country estate at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century (the play was first performed in 1898, six years before Chekhov's death) is Chekhov's most intimate comedy. Not since the film "Vanya on 42nd Street" have I seen a production of this play as rewarding, as right in its subtle emotional layering, in its careful laying bare of the souls of its characters as this one.
E.Vogel, January, 2003

Blue/Orange

The Atlantic Theatre Company on 20th Street

by Joe Penhall, directed by Neil Pepe.

Two psychiatrists battle each other over their diagnosis of a young African patient. This play offers three intense performances by actors Glenn Fitzgerald, Harold Perrineau, Jr. and Zeljko Ivanek, and is well worth attending just to see these three actors. The play itself is ultimately perhaps not so important in its "no exit" like dynamic, where a mentor betrays his mentee, where a patient may be profoundly mentally ill or just a bit poorly adjusted and suffering from a general sense of alienation, where a diagnosis may be the result of careful psychiatric observation or of covert racism. If the hidden enemy here, the British public health system, makes the play appear less pertinent to an American, then the smaller, internal themes of rivalry (and survival) in a hostile system and of the uncertain ground of psychiatric diagnosis make this a thought-provoking evening. Like other productions I have seen at this company, it is beautifully designed and produced.
E.Vogel, January, 2003