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The Marriage of Maria Braun
I saw the last performance of THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN on Sunday afternoon at BAM, with the memory of the Fassbinder film from many years ago still vivid in my mind. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the great naturalists of the cinema, and Braun was perhaps his most romantic work, lush and polished…
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Gezeiten
GEZEITEN is directed and choreographed by Sasha Waltz, performed in two parts, and much of it in silence. The style of this dance theater piece is at first abstract, then a sort of deconstructed Naturalism that devolves into a post-apocalyptic Absurdism born of the truth that, having survived, it is the nature of human beings…
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A Quiet Place
The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Wadsworth opera A QUIET PLACE was not well received when it premiered in 1985, but after seeing its first New York performance on Wednesday night, by the New York City Opera, I suspect that historical distance was the missing ingredient a quarter of a century ago. Alternating between the 1950s and the…
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Anton Chekhov’s The Duel
ANTON CHEKHOV’S THE DUEL captures much of the strange poetry of diffidence and indirection that makes Chekhov a great dramatist and his comic dramas so difficult to perform. Indeed, one of the film’s achievements is to reveal the extent to which the author’s prose fiction, upon which it is based, possesses so many of the…
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Ondine
The trailer for ONDINE does not even try to capture the delicacy of Neil Jordan‘s new film, which is more lyrical and poetic than suspenseful and melodramatic. Myths and fairy tales are not so much accounts of fancifully impossible events as patterns of experience that provide insight into the quotidian by seeming to defy the…
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Festival de otoño en primavera
I saw three shows at Madrid’s eccentrically named FESTIVAL DE OTOÑO EN PRIMAVERA (Fall Festival in Springtime), which brought a plethora of international theater to the Spanish capital in May and June. My listening comprehension of Spanish is what it is, so I would not pretend to have followed every thread of the multiple plots…
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Creditors • Uncle Vanya
It comes as no surprise that Alan Rickman, a mordantly arresting screen actor, would have an affinity for Strindberg, and he has directed CREDITORS with terrifying deftness. Less performed than Miss Julie, The Stronger or Dance of Death, less studied than The Father, CREDITORS, like some overlooked stepchild, has always begged the recognition that it…
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After Miss Julie
It would be nice to see a production of Miss Julie in which Strindberg’s instructions for a naturalistic setting which exists largely in the wings, and that we see only a corner of, were actually followed. There are too many boxed-in containment units that improbably and without deviation follow the exact dimensions of the stage.…