-
This is Me Eating
This is Me Eating, performed by Et Alia Theater, was uncommonly elegant. The soft gray gowns worn by the women of the company had the flow of classical statuary, and the grace of the wearers recalled the Living Pictures of the 19th century, the Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, Lily Bart in The House of Mirth,…
-
MAC BETH
In Red Bull Theater’s MAC BETH, seven young women play schoolgirls acting out Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their uniforms look Scottish; a pocket insignia can’t be read from the house, but the mind fills in a Scots name. The stockings and pleated skirts evoke kilts, and so, despite the tragedy, the cross-dressing women of comedies like As…
-
Hurricane Sleep
I hesitate to say that HURRICANE SLEEP comes on like an approaching storm, but that, in truth, is what happens. Andrea Goldman’s play (co-directed by Julia Watt) starts slow, builds, and sweeps through in bands, with an eye at the center. There’s the first band, when we’re introduced to Ome (Neysa Lozano), holed up in…
-
Last Life
It is particularly true of Shakespeare that his individual works both feed off and nourish an entire body-of-work. Hamlet is the richer for Macbeth, Twelfth Night for King Lear, the comedies for the tragedies, Falstaff for Toby Belch, Viola for Sonnet 121 and even for Iago. In LAST LIFE: A Shakespeare Play by Sara Fay…
-
The Bedbug
The rambunctious intelligence of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s THE BEDBUG is matched by that of the nine actors at the Medicine Show Theatre who play what were originally some 90 parts spread over a 50-year leap in time. Being able to see this early Soviet-era Futurist play is astounding enough, that it holds the stage with such…
-
Yerma
Billie Piper deserves all the praise she gets as “Her” in Simon Stone’s YERMA, the Young Vic production now playing at the Park Avenue Armory. By the end she brings herself to a place of so much pain that empathy itself is taxed, and the curtain call feels, her face still trembling with emotion, like…
-
Platonov
Penned at great length when the writer was just 18, Chekhov’s Platonov (never formally titled) was rejected by the actress for which it was written and not produced or published in the author’s lifetime. Yet it prefigures the themes and characters of the later plays, a poetic amalgam of fumbled suicides, frustrated loves, threatened estates,…
-
The Hairy Ape
The first image you see at Eugene O’Neill’s THE HAIRY APE at the Park Avenue Armory are rows and rows of seats, ready to absorb the arriving audience into a yellow, Borg-like mass. The implication is that, once we are seated, the play will redound on us with its expressionistic theme: society as a machine…
-
Simon Starling: At Twilight
SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh drama to break with Naturalism and realist art in general. Ultimate reality was, to a Symbolist like Yeats, immaterial but accessible…
-
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord‘s LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, now at the Lincoln Center Festival, matches high style with a ragamuffin disdain for it. Molière’s send-up of social snobbery under the reign of Louis XIV, in which the petit bourgeois M. Jourdain aspires to aristocratic status, veers from mannered satire to a savage buffoonery. All manner…