Monthly Archives: March 2017

Joan of Arc Not Inspired

I take no pleasure in writing this review. I admire the work and mission of the Public and have been attending productions there since the final years of Joe Papp’s tenure. This is a company that still takes risks, that pushes envelope, that supports its artists. And sometimes the risk pays off with dividends (see Hamilton). Even their failures, such as Party People, are often noble efforts. Alas, there is nothing noble about Joan of Arc Into the Fire.

I was glad to see David Byrne’s name on this season’s roster; Byrne wrote the music, lyrics, and book for Joan of Arc. The pre-set offers great promise. Hung across the stage is a banner with Mitch McConnell’s now infamous line about Elizabeth Warren, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Then the show begins, and that promise is abandoned. Over the course of roughly 90 minutes, the entire sweep of Joan’s meteoric rise and fall is chronicled. There is great dramatic potential here as both George Bernard Shaw and Jean Anouilh have discovered; indeed there is much for a musical to dive into. For instance, Joan (Jo Lampert) is known for her visions of the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine. The structure and language of musical theatre offers a great number of possibilities here of bringing those visions fully to life and providing each figure his or her own musical theme; of course, it could be an open question as to whether Joan was imbued or insane. But that rich vein, like so many others, was left untouched.

The show often feels like an endurance test. Musically, the first 45 minutes are repetitive. Most of the songs are exposition. The production seems to be unsure of what it wants to do. Does it want to follow Brecht’s strategy and utilize the historical figure for the purposes of contemporary political commentary? Which would be great. That makes a great deal of senses. But the creators never commit to that. Instead we get tired tropes of the freedom-loving French (really?) against the tyrannical English (again, really?). Other aspects of the Joan legend are rushed over. She took an arrow at the Battle of Orleans. This should have been a momentous moment, musically epic. Instead, it was meh. She also ferreted out the Dauphin in disguise when she first arrived at court. Another opportunity for a beautiful moment — a complicated duet between the two perhaps — was just left sitting there. Imagine what a Sondheim or Miranda could have done with that. One had the sense that the events of Joan’s life – whether history or legend – did not have narrative momentum or impact but were rather just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Alex Timbers offers uninspired direction with a combination of slow-motion fight choreography under a strobe light and the Les Miz turn-table (now with stairs!). And, out of nowhere, we get Mare Winningham as Joan’s mother in the last five minutes. We are told that she is important, but it all seems so extraneous at this point. During the trial, supertitles flash onto the wall telling us that what we are about to hear is actually from the transcript at the time. We should not be told these things. Done well, musicals have the ability to make us feel what is important, to know what is important without being told.

David Byrne’s work – whether as a member of the Talking Heads or in his solo career – is something I long admired and enjoyed, but his distinctive style and voice was very much MIA throughout the proceedings. Neither his albums or films (True Stories) are strong on narrative propulsion, but they do paint intriguing vignettes and character portraits. That strength, though, was not in evidence. No doubt a separate librettist should have been hired to provide structure.

The cast performs herculean labors to overcome the deficiencies in writing and directing. Lambert, Terence Archie (as Warwick), and Sean Allan Krill (Bishop Cauchon) all resonate on stage. If there is a weak link in the cast, it is Kyle Selig as a drip of a Dauphin.

Sadly, Joan of Arc Into the Fire is simply not worth your time. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” Jefferson says in Hamilton. And so, apparently, for every Hamilton there must be a Joan of Arc.

 

“Keep going. If today doesn’t work, plow through it. If your angry, use it. There’s a revolution underway. Like it or not, you’re in it. Pow.” John Patrick Shanley

Link

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/feb/14/the-crucible-the-perfect-play-for-our-post-truth-times

“To have that concentration to act well is like lugging things up staircases in your brain. I think that’s a thing people don’t understand. It is that exhausting. If you’re doing it well, if you’re concentrating the way you need to, if your will and your concentration and emotional and imagination and emotional life are all in tune, concentrated and working together in that role, that is just like lugging weights upstairs with your head…And I don’t think that should get any easier.” Philip Seymour Hoffman

Link

This sounds incredible. Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis will be starring in a revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo at the Dorset Theater Festival this summer. Treat Williams also stars

Geoff Sobelle = Charlie Chaplin + Spalding Gray

I run hot and cold on performance art, but I found The Object Lesson — Geoff Sobelle’s art installation piece currently playing at New York Theatre Workshop — to be delightful, mostly. The   end result is more a meditation on the place of things in our lives rather than a piece with a clear linear narrative arc.

Which is fine. Different can be good. The audience walks into NYTW’s space — which has had a distinctive look each of the last five times I have visited — and is confronted by what could be best described as Miss Havisham’s attic on steroids. With no clear center as to what the playing area might be, the audience is left to wander and roam a seemingly endless array of boxes, some of which prompt conversation with one’s fellow patrons. Chairs and couches are mixed in with yoga matts and stools. What is perhaps refreshing about Sobelle’s approach is that he does value some objects; this is not an all out attack on material culture. Some items become tokens of memory, of something significant from the past, of something shared.

Sobelle reminded me of two notable, if very different, past performers. On the one hand, when he broke into monologue, he reminded me very much of Spalding Gray. I cannot really say why this should be so. There was nothing Gray-esque necessarily about his focus, but nonetheless, the tone struck a chord that reminded me of that much-missed monologist. On the other hand, there was something clearly Chaplin-esque about the performance. Like his predecessor, Sobelle imbued the inanimate objects about him with life, personality, character. Like Chaplin, Sobelle was confounded and confused by anything representing a technological advance. And like Chaplin, his physicality was extraordinary. His training at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris was very much on display, and it served the performer and his construct well.

Highlights of the performance included two vignettes that make use of circular phone conversations, a monologue about a visit to the French countryside, and a a bit with ice skates and salad (which really has to be experienced rather than described). The ending, however, was something of a let down. The final vignette really did not provide a satisfying coda for all that had transpired up until that point. What was needed was perhaps not some sort of Aristotelian sense of narrative closure — because that is not what The Object Lesson is about — but rather some sort of emotional epiphany that would have made the end of the journey more pointed.

That point of criticism aside, The Object Lesson is very much a worthwhile evening of theatre. If anything, for those of who were there, it brings up fond memories of the kind of work that used to be a staple of the downtown theatre scene. Perhaps it’s time for a large-scale return to that kind of experimentation.

Sweat Opening Soon on Broadway

Lynn Nottage’s Sweat is beginning its previews in a few days. This is play is a must-see as it explains like no other artistic work Trump America. I think it is so important that I saw it for its off-Broadway run at the Public and purchased tickets for the Broadway run. I will post a more complete analysis after I see it again, but for now my advice is this: go see this play.

Raoul Peck Has Made a Work of Essential Viewing

Let me just get this out of my system at the top: I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s exemplary documentary on James Baldwin, was robbed at the Oscars. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t see the OJ documentary, and now I really don’t want to. I think OJ mania may tell us a lot about our media-saturated culture, James Baldwin’s life, work, and vision speaks to the entirety of American culture, history, and society. Peck brings that vision to the fore and expertly demonstrates how Baldwin’s analysis of American life, which he developed in the Civil Rights Era, still has application in our post-Ferguson time.

Baldwin famously states, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” In a nation that infamously “forgets” its past — how few of my students know when Pearl Harbor occurred — Baldwin is fierce in his argument (rightly) that the history of slavery and Jim Crow still is very much part of our present. This tenant serves as Peck’s thesis.

The film builds upon Baldwin’s notes for a planned but never completed book Remember This House. It rests on a three-legged stool of Baldwin’s friendships with three very different but significant figures: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Another important relationship touched upon is his friendship with Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Peck and Baldwin both are emphasizing the importance and synthesis of culture to politics. Baldwin again cogitates on the line between witness and actor (as in someone engaged in political activity); it is a blurred but fine line. And what emerges is how necessary Baldwin was to our changing perceptions during the 1950’s and 1960’s. As much as it was about bus seats and votes and marches, it was also about where those not white fit into the culture. Speaking of a John Wayne Western, the writer has the epiphany that he was the Indians.

I was struck by a clip from The Dick Caveat Show. Baldwin is joined by a saged academic from Yale University (a philosopher I believe). This professor challenges Baldwin on race, but invoking class! Doesn’t Baldwin have more in common with a white author than a black sharecropper? Firstly, I was amazed that this man would use class prejudice as a way of mitigating racial prejudice. Secondly, he — a learned and educated man — fails to grasp the truth in front of him in 1968: race is class.

Peck masterfully employs a large dose of Baldwin’s cultural criticism — particularly as race has been portrayed in American film — as part of his narrative. Why? Because legislative achievements are one thing, but that history Baldwin speaks of lives on in our attitudes and perceptions. It is present.

Samuel L. Jackson reads a number of Baldwin’s letters and essays. I knew going in that he was doing that, but still, I did not recognize — what is his usually distinct — voice. Jackson’s work adds to the power of the documentary.

I found the film so essential that it has inspired me to create a course exclusively on James Baldwin for my university.