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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…
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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…
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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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Macbeth
When Malcolm says of Macbeth’s grief after the discovery of the murdered Duncan, “To show an unfelt sorrow is an office/Which the false man does easy,” it is in contravention to the late king’s lament on the execution of the traitorous Cawdor that “There’s no art/ To find the mind’s construction in the face.” No…
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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…