Category Archives: Modernism

Fire and Air Neither Burns Nor Soars

It was written by a playwright of extraordinary gifts. Its director has a track record of creating magical moments on stage. It has an impeccable cast. It has a fascinating subject. Yet, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. And what should have been a compelling evening of theatre rarely engages the attention of its audience.

Terrence McNally’s Fire and Air, currently playing at the Classic Stage Company, should have entranced its audience with an urgent tale of the power and necessity of art. Centering on the Ballets Russe and its impresario Sergei Diaghilev (David Hodge) as the company and leader strove to create new, dangerous, and innovative performances in the Modernist vein in the crucible of war-torn and revolution-torn Europe of the early twentieth century. It is a drama rife with possibilities. But McNally – who has effectively dramatized the power of opera in Master Class and The Lisbon Traviata – fails to make the third time to charm with the ballet. The production moves quickly through the years with little context or sense of how the cataclysmic events of the time are impacting the art.

The intended portrait of Diaghilev as visionary and genius fails to connect. We are told that he is  brilliant, but we are never shown that he is. He comes across as a child, alternating between fits of privilege or fear, rather than as someone who grasps the elemental potential of dance. His sexual domination in the first act of Nijinsky (James Cusatsi-Moyer) and in the second act of Massine (Jay Armstrong Johnson) communicates not so much as the idiosyncratic but ultimately benign behavior of a mentor and genius, but, in this age of #metoo, but as abusive practices that remind one far too much of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. We recoil, especially as Nijinsky seems (it is really not clear) to have spiraled into madness.

The cast is game, but they are given little to do. Veteran thespians John Glover, Marsha Mason, and Marin Mazzie round out the supporting cast, but they have little impact upon the narrative momentum of the show. They observe, comment, and support Diaghilev (though, again, it is unclear as to why). The night I attended, Mazzie’s role (Misia) was performed by an understudy. Usually, that is a source of disappointment, but I do not think Mazzie would have impacted the play any more than Glover or Mason did. Hodge, the night I attended, struggled with his diction, and that was not conducive providing clarity for what was already a muddle.

The two younger performers fared better. Cusatsi-Moyer has a magnetic presence, but he seemed to be constrained by writing that demanded he only serve as enigmatic temptation. There seemed to be a fuller three-dimensional life going on behind his eyes, and it would have benefitted the production if he had been given free reign to explore that. Johnson constantly offered much-needed vitality with fresh and original choices that gave him more nuance than perhaps was intended for the boy toy du jour role.

At the end of the day, all of the talent on stage and in the production could not animate what should have been an extraordinary theatrical event.

Neva: Must See Theatre at The Public

The following is a review I wrote on Neva, a new play currently in production for the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theatre. The review appeared in nytheatre.com (Welcome to nytheatre.com)

The American stage needs more plays like Neva.

Written and directed by Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón and translated by Andrea Thome, the production is a part of the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theatre. Calderón sets his play in St. Petersburg, Russia on January 2, 1905. This infamous date is significant because striking workers, protesting peacefully, were gunned down by Tsarist troops; that day, known as Bloody Sunday, would become the impetus for violent revolution a decade later. Meanwhile, Olga Knipper (a fantastic Bianca Amato), Anton Chekhov’s widow, rehearses for a production of The Cherry Orchard in an empty theater. She is joined by two members of the acting company: Masha (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and Aleko (Luke Robertson). Together they muse and argue about art and revolution and the intersections thereof.

Neva stands as an excellent example of a Modernist text fully realized as both an intellectually intense and emotionally exciting night at the theatre. Calderon incorporates a number of different elements in order to breathe life into his work while nonetheless creating something new and true to his own vision. Most important of these elements is the one pertaining to Chekhov that incorporates the playwright’s artistry and biography; it revolves around The Cherry Orchard. In Chekhov’s last play, we know that change is coming to and for Russia. But what shape will that change take? Will it be that of the coarse and low-born merchant Lopakhin, or that of the idealistic and reform-minded student Trofimov? Chekhov did not know the answer –the play premiered a year before Bloody Sunday and Chekhov died during the summer in between – though he does tip the scales in favor of Lopakhin. Had he lived to see Bloody Summer, his estimation might have – nay, would have – been different. Calderón sets his play crucially when one such road to the future would be closed (or at least put on hold for several decades). Suddenly, we are in a world that Chekhov would no longer recognize, and yet his presence still dominates the lives of these characters, especially Olga’s.

As director, Calderón confines the action to a very tight space – a small dais, little more than an island awash in the darkness of the Anspacher – and provides only a single practical for lighting. He utilizes a blending of styles including Chekhovian, Brechtian, and Absurdist.

The effect of such a construction is to raise the stakes appreciably for the audience. Yes, the work is historical but not the sort of history where we are privileged with a point of “objective” observation. Rather, the history here more closely fits the German notion of Geschichte wherein political forces are in continual process from past to present in order to give form to the future. It is that conversation between past and present with which Calderón engages his audience. Neva is as much about the playwright’s native Chile – and the shadow that the Pinochet regime still casts – and the contemporary United States (a society currently in a state of transition) as it is about Russia of a century ago. True to the Modernist paradigm, he reimagines forms and ideas from the past to speak urgently of the now.

Here, Calderón follows in the tradition of two of his nation’s foremost authors. First, like Pablo Neruda, he investigates the moment where love (and a gentle eroticism) elides with the revolutionary spirit. Unlike Neruda, whose style was often one of elegiac romanticism, Calderón’s voice is a raw, primal, visceral howl. (NB: Neruda and Calderón bookend the Pinochet regime as the former died suspiciously of heart failure three days after the start of the military coup.) Second, like Vicente Huidobro, he is on a quest for authenticity in writing (here playwriting instead of poetry). But unlike Huidobro, he finds history not a burden but a source of freedom. Added to this mix is a post-colonial rejection of hegemonic cultural dominance, represented by Olga’s belief in the superiority of the German over all else.

These components make for compelling theatre indeed. Calderón anchors his play, beginning and end, with two monologues that demonstrate his virtuosity as an artist. The first, Olga’s, appears on the surface to be an egotistical actor’s rant, but beneath lurks the contradictions and paradoxes of the life in the theatre. The last, Masha’s, also exposes the many conflicting factors that contribute to a revolutionary’s state-of-mind, and Bernstine mines the role of Masha for her glorious complications and nuances. The third member of the cast, Robertson, fully embodies the role of Aleko, who must, at Olga’s bidding, constantly reenact Chekhov’s death in a mockery of a realist theatre’s catharsis. Most poignant is the scene where Chekov does not die and witnesses Lenin’s return at Finland Station and the launch of Sputnik. Aleko, the aristocrat turned actor, serves as a bridge between Olga and Masha as his politics are closer to Tolstoy’s than Trotsky’s.

I cannot say enough about this excellent, exciting, and necessary play. I am not familiar with Calderón’s other works, but now I want to be.