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Mies Julie
Yael Faber’s MIES JULIE, which adapts the Strindberg play to what is bitterly described as “the new South Africa”, is a raw, explicit, and sanguinary baring of a national soul. The white Julie, whose class has ostensibly been defeated, still has her sexual encounter with John (the “Jean” of the original), whose class – and…
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The Roman Tragedies
I would say that last night I sat through six hours of Shakespeare’s three historically-based Roman tragedies – in Dutch, but in fact I did what I was invited to do and milled about. I lounged center-stage on a couch for the first scenes of Coriolanus, at one point dodging a flurry of papers tossed…
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Donka
DONKA: A LETTER TO CHEKHOV is penned and posted in the language of circus. Jugglers, clowns, aerialists, and acrobats are its author. In their writing of it, the director Daniele Finzi Pasca tells us in the program, they “give shape to the silences” in Chekhov’s notes, diaries, and letters. This is not, in other words,…
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Elsewhere
My first foray at BAM’s new Fishman Space was ELSEWHERE. Described as an opera for cello, it was the sort of living artwork that washes over you, its individual elements inseparable from general sensation, even with one of them, the cello, plainly at the core. The cellist Maya Beiser cut an imposing figure vocally and…
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The Heiress
What Jessica Chastain conveys with great success in THE HEIRESS is a young woman on the cusp of a change in manners. She is ill-at-ease in the 19th century of calling cards and formal visits, with its peculiar conventions of courtship and parental approbation, but with a certain cluelessness about what will replace it, and…
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4 Prepared Dreams
Hypnotism and the theater have a long and well-known relationship, beginning with the public demonstrations by the imitators of Dr. Mesmer in the 19th century and proceeding to the present. I still remember the acts that came through the parts of the country where I grew up, in which ordinary people, at least ostensibly, were…
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Rhinoceros
What makes me the most glad to have seen the Théâtre de la Ville revival of Ionesco’s RHINOCEROS were the faces of the rhinoceri hovering in the air, with their beautiful sad eyes, sweet and brutish at the same time, animal yet with a germ of sympathy for the human. In the possible world of…
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Habit
Think of those situations when you find yourself looking through windows at the private lives of other people. Walks through small towns or suburban neighborhoods at night or in the evenings, when the lights are on in the homes you pass but the curtains are undrawn; certain units in apartment buildings right across the way…
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Heartless
In the mid-’80s I ventured to say in a published review of Sam Shepard’s True West that we were in a presence of a new dramatic genre, which I dubbed “the situation tragedy.” This notion was consistent, in retrospect, with a recognition on the part of Raymond Williams and others that circumstance had replaced action…
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The Three Sisters
There were numerous Russian speakers in the audience for THE THREE SISTERS on Friday night at BAM, and a comment I heard on the way out was that people were laughing in the wrong places because the supertitles were not well synchronized with the dialogue. This comment intersected in my mind with another I had…