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Manifesto
MANIFESTO is an installation by Julian Rosefeldt of 13 short films in simultaneous play in the darkened space of the Park Avenue Armory. More than one, but never all, of the screens are visible from a given point. Cate Blanchett, playing different roles in each film, delivers lines taken from some 55 manifestos (most artistic,…
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Sense & Sensibility
To put Jane Austen on stage is to make sensible the implicit theatricality of her novels. To be Kate Hamill, adapting Sense and Sensibilty as SENSE & SENSIBILITY, and acting its principal role, is to layer it further. To be Bedlam doing it at The Gym at Judson, with a flair for double-casting and Shakespearean…
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Makbet
The Theatre Group Dzieci is a Grotowski-inspired art and service collective that has lived for a decade with Shakespeare’s Scottish play and is only now presenting it, as MAKBET, in a theatrical run. They charge you nothing to see it, but pay the hat (you should) and accept from them a “piece of paper” that…
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Then She Fell
I wonder if anyone has called in an anonymous tip about 195 Maujer Street in Williamsburg. The century-old building must be disconcerting to walk past for the uninitiated, not because it is abandoned but because there are signs that it might not be. The blacked-out windows, with wire mesh embedded in the glass, lower overhead,…
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Murder Ballad
The transition into theatrical time is seamlessly accomplished at the start of MURDER BALLAD. I was taking in the scene, watching the couples at the tables, the bartender cleaning off the counter, the waiters circulating, when I suddenly noticed in one of the pre-show photos that I was snapping that someone was sitting on the…
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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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These Seven Sicknesses
Green tea is served during the dinner and dessert breaks of the Flea Theater’s production of Sean Graney’s THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES, which telescopes the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles into a single play. The cast mingles with the audience during the intervals – the gentleman at the serving cart plays the warrior Ajax a few…
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Sleep No More
I was one of those lining up on Memorial Day night to see Punchdrunk’s SLEEP NO MORE in the Chelsea gallery district. The Scottish play as nightmare is an old trope, well founded in the text. So to deconstruct it as a sort of haunted house theme park and fragment its episodes in the manner…
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Lincoln Center Festival
Two from this year’s LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL: I saw Les Éphémères in two parts on Saturday and Sunday at Park Avenue Armory. There’s a lot I could write about it (of the French genius for extracting poetry from the quotidian, of the remarkable way in which the production cinematizes the stage, of the festival atmosphere…