Category Archives: Theatre

With Prodigal Son, Shanley is Our James Joyce

There comes a moment in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus, the author’s alter ego states, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The novel chronicles how a young man creates himself both as an individual and as an artist. As he authors himself, he walks through the fires large — nationalism, religion — and small — the struggles of adolescence, a dysfunctional family. Last  month when I saw Prodigal Son, I came to the conclusion as the lights came up for the curtain call that, at last in John Patrick Shanley, we had our American Joyce.

Much can and has been said about Prodigal Son, but I want to here focus on that Joyce connection. Shanley, as with Joyce, has brought his adolescent self to life through words — through poetry and prose, through philosophy and theology — to be reconsidered, reexamined, to undergo catharsis as much for the audience as no doubt himself. His avatar, Jim, is truly a remarkable creation. And I should add that in Timothée Chalamet (famous for Homeland and Interstellar) Shanley has found the ideal collaborator. Actor and author do not shy away from Jim’s darkness — he says and does the stupid things teenagers often do as they wrestle with the twin tensions of childhood and adulthood — his brilliant narcissism, or his self-destructive impulses. He is not likable the way teenagers on television sit-coms are often likable. But he is engaging and endearing. His darkness is understandable, his pain a source of empathy, his yearning to connect with an world of ideas that he cannot yet quite touch remarkable. The play is no better than when Shanley lets Chalamet tear into a monologue, trip the light fantastic in a way that has the raw magic of stream-of-consciousness to find truths (human truths, perhaps, if not universal truths) in the most Joycean, or given the play’s setting in the 1960’s, Kerouacian way. The actor opens up to show us both the wonder and pain within.

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Stanley is at his most powerful when his flawed characters wrestle with faith and doubt (in reference to his perhaps most famous work). What intrigues here for Jim is the same that intrigues for Stephen: the temptation for sin he finds within and not from without. He recognizes the darkness in himself — the darkness that dwells within all of us — but he is intelligent enough (brave enough? foolish enough?) to address it and not ignore it as most do. What will win inside him? Will what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” eventually hold sway? Jim does not know. He wants to find the answer, though perhaps it too scares him.

Louise, the headmaster’s wife, tells him, “I think James Quinn is a fine outline, and it’s up to you to fill it in.” Shanley, I think bravely, undertakes the return to his tumultuous past (for the nation, for himself) to try and unlock the puzzle of his earlier life. Kudos to him for not giving us pat answers — for still not truly knowing what the answers are yet, though he surely has a better grasp of the questions.

Shanley, for me, became the American Joyce the day he decided to put Prodigal Son on stage. Here is the kicker. I do not believe he set out to do that. If he had, his work would have been derivative, pretentious, blah. He just sat out to write the most searingly honest play he could. In so doing, he stumbled onto something unintended and rare: a work uniquely specific and uniquely universal. Joyce writes of Stephen, “He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.” Shapely could write the same of Jim.

Fugard’s New Play is Canonical

I had the opportunity this past weekend to see Athol Fugard’s new play The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek at the Signature Theater in New York. Fugard has added a nuanced and multi-layered work to his canon. The fact that he is closing in on 83 and still able to grow as a playwright speaks to the power of his voice and to the great well of the stories he still needs to tell.

The play is set in two time periods: 1981 (apartheid era) and 2003 (post-apartheid era). The beginning is deceptively simple. Nukhain (Leon Addison Brown), a worker on a ranch in Mpumalanga Province, spends what little free time he has from his labors to paint rocks (what he refers to as his “flowers”) on the side of a desolate hill. Not many people see them, but this project provides an outlet for his artistic self. But this day is unlike the rest. He faces a giant boulder, the last rock to be painted on the hill. Instead of turning it into a massive flower, he uses it instead as a canvas to tell his own story, to provide his own history. At the same time, he has taken a young worker Bokkie (Caleb McLaughlin) a young worker under his wing. What he has painted frightens and excites both of them. It is unlike anything that he has ever done. However, the mistress of the farm Elmarie (Bianca Amato) shows up and is at first puzzled and then disturbed by this new work. She wants Nukhain to remove it and go back to painting one of his flowers. Bokkie objects, but Nukhain agrees.

The second act jumps ahead over 20 years. Bokkie has now grown up and is a teacher, Jonathan (Sahr Ngaujah). His mission is to restore Nukhain’s painting. After a tug-of-war with Elmarie, he at last has permission to do so.

The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is a wrenching work. Fugard proves again that he is a master of the genre in that he essentially sneaks up behind the audience at about the 40-minute mark in Act One and hits it in back of the head with a two-by-four (metaphorically speaking). Fugard conveys the complexities of a nation torn apart by years of strife and racial animosity. His great gift of weaving tales of the downtrodden with lyricism and empathy is, of course, present. Here, though, he examines culture, and the threat that black culture posed to the apartheid regime.

So long as Nukhain painted flowers on rocks, it was fine. Beautiful, yes, but with no significance whatsoever. Once, though, he tries to tell his story – which is not particularly political, but because this is South Africa is de facto political – then his work becomes dangerous and must be destroyed. Though physical violence is implied throughout, none is perpetuated on stage. And yet, Elmarie’s determination to remove the painting (which, by the way, appears as an extraordinary piece of African Art) is the greatest violence of them all.

 

That Fugard is able to convey all the horrors of the apartheid regime in this one understated moment speaks volumes about his talents as an artist. And let us not be mistaken. Though the actions of the play are specific to South Africa, the work speaks as much to any nation where a ruling class seeks to erase the culture of a disenfranchised group. It is a play that needs to be seen, should be seen – it also needs to be a play that is forever cemented in the canon.

All You Need is a Man with a Rhyme

Last night, I had the good fortune of seeing A Sucker Emcee at the Labyrinth Theatre.  Craig muMs Grant — rap artist, poet, playwright, actor (Oz) — performs a rap/poetry/dramatic monologue. Rich Medina provides key support as a DJ; though silent throughout, he creates conversation with muMs and serves as chorus to the play. A Sucker Emcee is at once very new and very old. And it is because it very much dwells in this paradox that it is an extremely powerful, honest, and wrenching evening of theatre.

I consciously used the term “chorus” above because muMs and his director Jenny Koons craft something very elemental here. Before Thespis stepped before an audience as something other than himself, theatre was a poet and a musician weaving a tale on stage. The music is hip-hop; the theatricality is elemental, primal, old when the Dionysia. If you don’t think that such an old form has relevance to the modern theatrical sensibility, go to Labyrinth and be amazed.

muMs tells the story of his life, his artistic life, how he came to be a poet, a rapper, an emcee. It is a life of triumphs and tragedies, mistakes comic and painful, good times turned bad and bad times turned good — because it is a life. The poet came of age in the Bronx in the late 70’s and 80’s. He touches on how his youth intersected with the birth of hip-hop. In so doing, he fits very much into that vein of American poetry that finds its home at that intersection of the personal and the political, the historic sweep of a nation or community and the closely observed moment of the individual. Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and James Baldwin would welcome muMs into their clubhouse with open arms.

It is the great paradox — its magic, its genius, its madness — that the more specific a work is, the more universal it is. James Joyce’s Ulysses testifies to that wonder. When you sit in the dark and are caught in the rhythm and rhyme of the performance, you cannot help but be carried away to a place of emotional truth caught floating on the rushing current of the elegance and rawness of his verse. muMs’ family is not your family, muMs’ struggles are not your struggles — and yet you recognize your family, your struggles in the frenzy of his poetry. It is a supremely human moment that only theatre can provide. What hits home is the extreme humanity of this gifted compassionate man who wrestled with his fears and became the artist of authenticity that he wanted to be.

Go. Be amazed.

 

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My adaptation of Jack London’s “A Thousand Deaths” is currently performing at this year’s NYC International Fringe Festival. Here is a link to a review from IndieTheaterNow.com:

http://nytheaternow.com/Content/Article/a-thousand-deaths

Some Quick Thoughts on HBO’s The Normal Heart

After much trepidation, I finally got around to seeing HBO’s The Normal Heart. I started working in NYC theatre in the early 1990’s, at the end of the great wave of the epidemic the play explores. At that time, there were many ghosts, and there were some still suffering, still dying. I remember my supervisor at my Broadway internship. He was HIV-positive which later developed into AIDS. He died a little while later. His family — strict Irish Catholics from Boston — did not attend, would not attend his funeral. So it goes.

I’m going to get into trouble for this, but here goes. The Normal Heart is not a good play, at least not in the traditional sense. It is half screed, half narrative. It is angry, and it is right in its anger. It has all of the power of the theatre, not in the aesthetic sense but in the political one. It lacks the eloquence, the poetry, the imagination of Angels in America, but it is necessary nonetheless. Mark Ruffalo is quite the fine actor, but, perhaps counter-intuitively, he brought too much talent to the role, too much nuance. Ned Weeks is more a figure of agitprop than a fully rounded character. He needs to be angry. He needs to be always angry. He needs to be a very hot knife cutting through a butter of apathy, hypocrisy, and cruelty. Ruffalo was…too nice. Much attention has (rightly) been paid to Matt Bomer’s performance. I would also point out the excellent work Jim Parsons in a not very flashy role did. A flawed adaption of a tough play. Still glad HBO committed to it. It’s important.

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My article on the importance of Shakespeare to the Chartist Movement was recently published by Monograf. You can find that article by following this link:

http://www.monografjournal.com/files/pennino.pdf

The Empire Strikes Back

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at The Public Theater (co-produced by GableStage and the RSC in collaboration with OSU). I have a great fondness for the Bard’s Roman plays, and this one is no exception — though it does not get performed much. I am happy to report that this production is as vital, passionate, and relevant a presentation of the work as one is likely to get. And having sat through a few museum performances of what is supposed to be an emotionally-charged narrative, I am glad to see Antony and Cleopatra brought back to life.

Firstly, this is a funny interpretation. The humor is by no means gratuitous. It comes out of the situation that these exceedingly brilliant but exceedingly flawed people are very much in love but also not exactly compatible either.  The director, Tarrell Alvin McCraney, manages to evoke empathy for both Cleopatra and Antony when the other is behaving unreasonably (this happens often). Additionally, McCraney finds the Monty Python-like absurdity in the situation, such as when Antony, who has tried to commit suicide and failed for the death of Cleopatra, discovers that she is in fact not dead. Rather than blunt the emotional impact, this choice instead heightens it. On the stage of the Public, they are so wonderfully, messily, completely human that it was a joy to be with them. Much more enthralling than being in the room with two beings who behave as if they are gods.

Secondly, the production embraces a post-colonial theme. The Tempest remains the go-to work in the canon for collisions of culture, but there is more than enough textual evidence in Antony and Cleopatra to support a similar reading here. The setting has been moved to the late 18th century. Rome is represented by the England of this period, at the genesis of its worldwide expansion. Egypt is represented as a Caribbean island. McRaney utilizes both Caribbean and African music, dance, and ritual in the telling of his story.  Santería plays a prominent role. Caesar, who is meant to be an exemplary figure, morphs into something less heroic when costumed as a Regency Era Sea Lord.

Thirdly, the small acting company performs the Herculean task of conveying  the epic sweep of the work. Jonathan Cake (Antony) and Joaquina Kalukango (Cleopatra) turn in nuance performances of two people who are addicted to one another and yet clearly do not belong together. Of particular note are Chivas Michael (as the Soothsayer and Eros) and Chukwudi Iwuji (as Enobarbus). The edits here placed Enobarbus as narrator and made him much more central to the runaway storyline. Iwuji becomes the voice of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is through his eyes that we witness the tragedy unfold. So his loss is as great as that of the two leads.

Productions of Shakespeare walk a very fine line. If they are too traditional, they risk becoming the theatrical  equivalent  of Miss Havisham, doomed to wander alone in a rotting house overrun by dust and cobwebs neither touching nor being touched. If they try to be too modern for the kids — hey, let’s set Taming of a Shrew on the Space Station Mir — they run the risk of becoming parodies of themselves and losing all relevance. This Antony and Cleopatra gets the balance just right. Special kudos to dramaturg James Shapiro (full disclosure: he was my mentor back during my Columbia days) for helping ground the emotional life and the world of the play.

I highly recommend this production. It fulfills the prescription for art of another Roman, Horace; it both educates and entertains.

Williams is Out of the Museum

As a teenager newly discovering theatre, I thought Tennessee Williams was, as the kids say, the bomb. I enjoyed the psychologically compelling dramas, the larger-than-life Southern characters, and baroque poetry of it all. The film adaptations of his work helped sell the package. When you have a Marlon Brando or a Paul Newman portraying your protagonists, you  must be doing something right. But as I got older, I drifted away from Williams. The psychology started to feel forced, the characters more Southern fried, and the language a little too precious. Eugene O’Neill became more prominent in my pantheon. And I started to find British playwrights tackling grittier, more dangerous, more political material. Williams, it seemed to me, belonged in a museum.

And I felt that way for a long time. This summer has changed my thinking for the better. First, I saw Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic in London. This production was fairly straightforward. But it wasn’t clunky. It felt vital and relevant and, well, not tired. Kim Catrall was a good Alexandra Del Lago. Her reading was a bit too modern perhaps, and, Geraldine Page is a hard act to follow. But Seth Numrich hit it out of the park as Chance Wayne. I had seen Numrich in New York earlier in the year in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy. Numrich is fast earning a reputation as THE next Broadway dramatic leading man, and it is a well-deserved reputation. In both plays, he made the material alive, vital, dangerous while still remaining true to the intentions of the material.

The second part of this journey stands as the most important. I caught an early preview of The Glass Menagerie now on Broadway (it had started at A.R.T. in Boston). This production is one of those transformative ones you see in your life. I had a very similar experience when I saw Jason Robards perform as Hickey in the 1986 The Iceman Cometh. Director John Tiffany fully invested in what the idea of a memory play means. We feel these characters are disconnected from the world, a notion ably assisted by a fantastic design concept that has the Wingfield family floating both at sea and amongst the stars.

When I was younger and directed this play back at university, I always imagined Tom as the hero. Perhaps it is because I am now middle-aged, but Cherry Jones established Amanda as the hero of this piece. Past Amandas had always been a little too Blanche DuBois, a little too flighty and flakey and too in love with the grand charms of a now extinct South. Here, Jones puts on the Southern coquette as a mask; it is part of a long game she plays to get Amanda married. And for the first time I could hear, really hear, certain lines that had always been there. Amanda, at the end of the day, is a very practical individual. She either wants Laura to get a job OR to get married. The either/or is important here. It is only when the job path no longer becomes viable that she puts all of her attention on marriage. Nor does she flirt with Jim, the Gentleman Caller. There are many reasons to go see this production. If you only have to pick one, then Cherry Jones is it.

The rest of the cast do fine work as well. Celia Keenan-Bolger as Laura and Brian J. Smith as Jim invest their scene — the play’s longest — with both whimsy and dread. The audience cannot help but feel fully in the moment. Keenan-Bolger and Zachary Quinto as Tom give a full back story to the sibling relationship that is often missing. Quinto too shines. Williams’s sexuality is well-documented, and Quinto has been quite candid in public about his own. Quinto and the production team seemed to own Tom Wingfield’s sexuality rather than try to play a game of three-card monty. This move added new layers of depth to his feeling of being trapped and give new dimension to when he disappears at night.

These two productions, the second in particular, gave me a new lease on Williams’s world. It has been a long time since I have wandered the plantations and New Orleans neighborhoods of his work. I am glad to be back.

Amen Baldwin

During my recent trip to London, I had the opportunity to see James Baldwin’s Amen Corner at the Royal National Theatre (best theatre in the world, in my humble opinion). I had been familiar with Baldwin’s novels and essays but never his work for the stage. So this was an opportunity to dive into what was for me an unknown corner of the Baldwin canon.

Benefitting a show at the National, the production was magnificent. Both the gospel choir and jazz trumpet provided texture as well as counterpoint to the drama enacted on stage. Marianne Jean-Baptiste (of Secrets and Lies fame) was a revelation as Margaret Alexander, the pastor of a corner church up in Harlem in the 1950’s. Director Rufus Norris recreated Harlem of that era magnificently.

But what I went for was the play. And did I get a play. Written in 1954 after the author had completed his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Amen Corner distinguishes itself for the beauty of its language (this is Baldwin after all) and the complexity of emotions that inform that language. There isn’t a Caucasian character on stage and white America is rarely mentioned, but the audience can feel its presence. Those who attend and lead the church are, for the most part, domestics and servants. Church provides for them an escape but also an opportunity, even if one day a week or late at night, to take charge of their destinies. At the center of the drama are four very strong women who to one degree or another must negotiate the city and life on their own. There are no clear heroes or villains here. Even Sister Moore as she tries to undermine Margaret’s authority is often more tolerant of other people’s life choices than her pastor is.

Margaret is faced with a series of crises in the play. Her wayward husband, Luke (a jazz musician), returns home after a number of years. He is the opposite of everything Margaret in her role as pastor stands for. Luke, however, is dying and wishes to spend his final days with his family. Her son, David, does not wish to continue playing piano for the church, but instead wishes to be a jazz musician like his father. And then there is the rebellion led by Sister Boxer and Sister Moore. What unfolds are the myriad reasons — personal, emotional, intellectual, spontaneous, revelatory — that brought Margaret to a life serving God. Baldwin expertly intertwines all of these reasons to create a full-blooded three-dimensional character. If at that end, we still cannot fully embrace Margaret, we have a thorough understanding and respect of her. We know from Baldwin’s biography that he had a difficult time with organized religion, but he has the compassion to compose a thoughtful and well-balanced portrait.

Of course, as I sat in the theatre in London, I could not help but ask myself, “Why isn’t this play being done in America?” This is an important and vital work — more alive and less musty than other plays from this period we venerate — and tells an important story, like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, about both the African-American experience and women’s experiences. So, theatre producers, find a way to put this provocative important beautiful play on stage here in the States. It deserves to be seen.

Brave New Malabar

The last show I had the chance to see while in London was Footsbarn Theatre’s Indian-style production of The Tempest at the Globe Theatre. In other words, a French company dedicated to employing circus and clown techniques was performing a Shakespeare play (at the theatre that recreates the Bard’s working space) utilizing Indian performance style while speaking in Hindi, English, French, and Dutch. If all that sounds quite dizzying or should at least qualify audience members for posts at UNESCO, you’d be quite right. But this Tempest — referred to by The Globe as The Indian Tempest — is a magical evening of theatre. If Footsbarn should call at your community, take time to see their production (whatever it is).

It is difficult to know how audience members not familiar with the play would react to this production. But as someone who is quite familiar with Shakespeare’s last text, I found it mesmerizing. The experience of seeing something at The Globe too certainly added to my enjoyment. We were groundlings that night, the air was cool, and St. Paul’s across the Thames was lit in splendor.

Reghoothaman Domodaran Pillai, speaking in a mix of Hindi and English, dominated as Prospero. He found the appropriate balance between sternness and softness. Gopalakrishnan Kundamkumarath as Ariel had the same language blend, and I often thought that he was more Puck than Ariel. But his very physical performance helped convey his character’s motivations if the mix of languages could not.

Footsbarn punctuated the evening with sitar music performed live on stage. The company recreated — by necessity, quite abbreviated — an Indian marriage ceremony for the wedding of Ferdinand (who, by the way, spoke French exclusively) and Miranda. Indian design dominated throughout.

Going in, I have to admit that I was a little hesitant about these choices. Frantz Fanon and Edward Said have both pointed to the importance of this play in the post-colonial canon. In brief, by using this lens, the Tempest dramatizes the colonizer/colonized dynamic as represented by Prospero, the European interloper, and Ariel and Caliban, the native residents. Footsbarn, though, nicely turned that relationship on its head. Here, an Indian Prospero was the master, and an English Caliban (played in cockney glory by Paddy Hayter) was the servant. A production can reveal a great deal about a play — especially a familiar one — by upending the world it depicts. And in doing so, this was the one Tempest that did what no other production has ever done for me — it brought the island alive, it became a character too. It was specific, mysterious — glorious.

The wonderful thing about theatre is (and what drives producers mad) — that a great theatrical evening comes together due to a very unique set of circumstances that are near impossible to recreate. So to write a review of Footsbarn’s production of The Tempest at the Globe may be a bit of a fool’s errand. But given the production, the performance, and the place, I had an evening of enchantment.