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An Octoroon
As dramaturgy alone, AN OCTOROON is exhilarating, but its pleasures – for such they are – run deeper. The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the director Sarah Benson have restored, recast, retooled, and revived Dion Boucicault‘s THE OCTOROON with a mimetic deftness that reifies and exposes the racialist assumptions and stereotypes that animate, indeed dramatize, the…
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Wild Tales
Damián Szifron’s movie WILD TALES opens with a prologue in which the laughs come at you like Roman slaves claiming to be Spartacus, one after another. It’s the first, and shortest, of six revenge comedies in a mordant Argentinian anthology that keeps one guessing at the violence to come while making sure we always know,…
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Havana Rakatan
After the intermission, HAVANA RAKATAN moves inside, from the streets and waterfront locations evoked in the first act to a scenography of nightclubs and theatrical shows. It seems, suddenly and counter-intuitively, more authentic than it did before. Colorfully dressed farmers and urban workers, dancing in celebration of weddings, harvests, fiestas, might seem, on the surface,…
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A Month in The Country
Taylor Schilling has as thin a theatrical resumé as anyone in A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY, but she dominates the first half of the Classic Stage Company’s production of Turgenev’s pre-Chekhovian comic drama. She is imposing in stature and resonant as a bell, with a focus astute and un-rattled by the peculiarities of the material.…
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New Combinations
NEW COMBINATIONS is a program of three stylistically similar ballets, one just premiered, another that was new last fall, and a third dating from 2000. They work remarkably well in juxtaposition, with their emphasis on historical allusion and reconsideration, a marked sensitivity to the interaction of color and choreography, and a deep appropriateness for a…
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Cinderella
There was, I thought as I listened to Valery Gergiev conduct Prokofiev’s music to the ballet of CINDERELLA, something radical about it. It seems actively to resist Romanticism, despite the fairy tale it depicts, and to veer full scale into the abstraction and self-consciousness of Modernism. It is only at the moments of literal romance…
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Tristan and Yseult
The story of Tristan and Isolde shares with Romeo and Juliet a special status among the archetypes of love, which for the Romantics was a thing so strong that it doomed its feelers, its sublimity fulfilled only through the greater sublimity of death. But I am convinced, having seen TRISTAN AND YSEULT, which revives the…
