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.
Tag Archives: The Public Theater
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.
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.