Ethan reads 2015

[ethan]

and a whole, whole lot of plays......

 

Penelope - Enda Walsh
The Philadelphia theatre world is in some kind of amazing boom, new companies springing up faster than I can keep track of, all with an ambitious or classical bent. InisNua devotes itself to overlooked (in the US at least) contemporary Irish, English and Scottish plays. Walsh, who did the screenplay to Hunger, re-tells the suitor story in The Odyssey. Only four of the suitors are left, encamped in an empty swimming pool, Penelope (from above) watching their pleas recorded by a video camera. Walsh has been compared to Beckett. I didn't detect much of that even with an absurdist setting and some effectively comic wordplay. A real sense of doom (Odysseus is due back soon) but also a lot of male self-pity.

The Shadow of a Gunman - Sean O'Casey
The Irish Heritage Theater is doing the entire trilogy, finishing in the fall and next spring. Performed in a small black box, on a weeknight, only 10 in the audience, 13 in the cast. That creates an unusual vibe, but the enthusiasm of the actors and their obvious love of the work compensates. It's a short, terrifying and quite beautiful play. I'm looking forward to Juno and the Paycock next.

Ragtime - Terrence McNally(book) Flaherty/Ahrens(songs)
I'm trying to learn to appreciate musicals. I seem to be tone deaf to anything other than Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loew, a couple of others from that period. I love the Doctorow novel and they crammed just about the whole of its plot into three hours. Coalhouse and Sarah were beautifully performed but I wearied of how desperate the makers were to keep us entertained, always straining to impress, never a quiet moment. A full Broadway type version, enormous cast, the audience ate it up, and I can't say I regretted attending.

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
A creaky, old chestnut with some groan inducing lines. To cover the lapses, the cast played it in an exaggerated 1930s Noel Cowardish manner. And the situation itself is compelling, characters killed off one by one by an unseen killer. The mystery is, as usual, better than the solution, but luckily the killer was played by one of the best actors in the area, and he pulled off the surprise climax effectively,

Uncanny Valley - Thomas Gibbons
The first act was an interesting depiction of artificial intelligence (in the near future) being fine-tuned to approximate human emotion. In the second act the playwright either got bored with the idea, or worried the audience would, so he succumbed to "sociology" and relevance with a long static conversation on the problem of parents' estrangement from their children.

She Stoops To Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith
A farce from the 1700s performed in a row house in the historic Society Hill district dating from that era. Now a museum, originally owned by the mayor of Philadelphia, a ballroom where George and Martha Washington celebrated a wedding anniversary used for the stage. I don't know what to call this type of theater with natural light, limited props, the audience feeling as if they are part of the play - guerrilla theater, termite art? Whatever it is, I'm becoming addicted to it, more so than to the large conventional venues with lots of everything, except maybe soul. This company had plenty of that, so some spotty performances (there were good ones too) seemed beside the point.

The Fair Maid of the West - Thomas Heywood
I thought this play was Restoration era but it is considered to date back to the 1590s, Shakespeare's time, and there is a bit of the Pericles genre, but with some very broad comedy, a play for clowns to strut their stuff. The cast came out in costume as the audience was seated, mingling with it, everyone seemed to know each other (except for me). Then they gathered to sing a rollicking sea chanty and the fun never flagged thereafter. I see from the production history that the RSC revived it some years ago. It's deserving.

The Hairy Ape - Eugene O'Neill
This company performed a magnificent, very expressionistic Stairs To the Roof earlier in the season and The Ape lends itself to that treatment, coming from O'Neill's early non-naturalistic period. But I thought at times they went a bit overboard, especially with a cage motif, the Park Avenue ingenue seen throughout the second act in a trance behind bars at the back of the set. A charismatic, energetic performance by Matteo Scammel as Yank holds it all together, channeling the dance like movements of Jimmy Cagney while echoing the bluster of Edward G. Robinson and Popeye, all his own in the haunting finale "Where do I fit in?"

In Washington, I saw a good production of Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov  that meshed the sentiment, comedy and (near) tragedy well, with a marvelous Sophia.

Carousel (also in DC) has some of Richard Rodgers most gorgeous music, turns very dark in the second half, leading to the rousing You'll Never Walk Alone finale. The actor who had been playing Billy Bigelow left the production for a Broadway show and this was his replacement's (fresh from a year long tour as the Phantom of the Opera) opening night. I would have never guessed, he was very impressive, especially in Billy's famous nine minute musical soliloquy. Carousel was Rodger's favorite (Steven Sondheim's too) of his work, and I can see it becoming mine as well, I still have a few more Rodgers and Hammerstein's  to go.

In tick, tick.... BOOM David Auburn expanded a musical monologue that Jonathan Larsen (Rent) performed while he was struggling to succeed, adding two characters while keeping all the songs. I thoroughly disliked Rent, but this more intimate piece worked better for me, some of the pop-rock songs were pretty good even with an abundance of woe-is-me.

To the Moon (Jennifer Childs) is a brand new play about a Jackie Gleason wannabe, who lives a Ralph Kramden-like life, a struggling actor with a long suffering wife and a goofy best friend/neighbor. I don't know if Gleason is known outside the US, but like most of my generation, and some after, I grew up on the "golden 39" episodes of The Honeymooners. Moon is the best contemporary comedy I've seen in years, hopefully other regional theaters pick it up if they can find the right actor to portray Gleason. Scott Greer, a gifted comic actor, picked up all the nuances without resorting to impersonation, he even looks like Gleason.

I went to my first college show in a long time, the University of the Arts extravagant production of The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. I had never seen this before and was unprepared for the craziness, including Wooly mammoths and dinosaurs. It's a long, long way from Our Town (on second thought, maybe not that far). Two great roles - Sabina (Tallulah Bankhead in the original cast) and the son Henry (Montgomery Clift, years before his movie career), and these enthusiastic college actors were up to the task. Great fun.

I don't deny that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf can be powerful and emotionally draining, but each time I see it the stuff about the baby seems more and more an awkwardly sentimental device. The guests can be problematic as well - who would stay more than ten minutes, no less an entire night, with such a gruesome, sadistic couple. Are George and Martha monsters? Albee insists otherwise with moments of tenderness amid the carnage. Certainly the most comically bitchy dialogue ever written (the first half is truly extraordinary), and I have to admit I left the battlefield once again emotionally drained.

For the first time I went to a reading of a new play, by a local playwright, a comedy called The Last Monogomous Man in America. I found it generic and sitcom-ish but with some good jokes. What was interesting was the talk-back which extended to 45 minutes, the audience encouraged to give criticism, some fellow playwrights who were present had perceptive comments, and I gained insight into the process of how new plays are developed.

The production of A Midsummer Nights Dream I saw adopted an Indian/Jodhpur design which I found more strange than magical. It's difficult to mess up Dream though, and Helena and Bottom and the boys were as hilarious as ever.

The Three Musketeers was performed on a large stage in-the-round, with some of the most expert sword fights I've seen, spilling over into the aisles. Dumas came out to give a prologue and stuck around to provide acerbic narration. Thirteen actors, some doubling so seamlessly that I couldn't match them up until I studied the playbill back home.

 

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Edited May 7, 2015 by ethan

[ethan]

Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts - Robert M. Dowling
I'm always hesitant to read biographies of artists whose work I admire as often they were not very good human beings - O'Neill a vicious drunk, an abusive husband, a terrible father. Yet his demons led to enduring art. Dowling practically rubs our noses in the legendary binges, but he is strong on production histories which most interest me. I hadn't realized what a sensation O'Neill was (world-wide) while he was very young. He won the Nobel Prize and then wrote The Iceman Cometh, A Moon For the Misbegotten, A Touch of the Poet and Long Day's Journey Into Night. He could have won a second Nobel! O'Neill was frustrated that he couldn't write good prose, he would rather have been a novelist, and considered much of his work (which could run to 3-5 hours) an experiment in combining the two forms. He said that his plays are better read than performed. I snatched the O'Neill Library of America edition with all the plays from the library to put that to the test.

 

The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare

I hope to see this at a summer festival in the Berkshires, one of the twelve plays of Shakespeare I've yet to see performed. It has some challenging staging what with two sets of identical twins. I'm anxious to see what the director comes up with, she staged an amazing college production locally of The Skin of Our Teeth.

 

saw a couple of plays......

 

All In the Timing - David Ives
Ives' earlier Lives of the Saints is the laugh-out-loud funniest time I've ever had at the theatre. This five segmented collection isn't far behind. The last piece is truly inspired - Leon Trotsky with a mountain climbers pick axe stuck in his skull, (he had dreams that an ice pick would be his undoing and had them banned from his house) caught in some kind of limbo, coming to terms with his death,  while his ghostly wife reads him the wikipedia account of his assassination. "But, still, some hope, I lived on for one more day!"  

King Hedley II - August Wilson
This is the second of Wilson's ten-play cycle of black American life throughout the 20th century I've seen. So far, at least, I find him a bit heavy-handed and humorless. The dominant mode is a 60-ish anger, still sadly relevant given recent events in Baltimore and Ferguson. He does write some powerful dramatic moments that actors can sink their teeth into, Hedley's soaring monologue before intermission was electrifying.

The production had the dubious distinction of the most cell-phone rings and text messaging/internet scanning during a performance in my experience. People silence their phones but then think it's ok to turn them on for other purposes. One man at the end of my aisle lit up every few minutes. The addiction has become an epidemic. There was a hot ticket show in NYC, Hamilton, that all the celebrities just had to see, in which Madonna, sitting up front in a small theater, reportedly texted throughout. The lead actor/writer of the piece (soon to transfer to Broadway) tweeted that it was the first time he refused entry to a celebrity post-performance for congratulations.

 

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Edited May 14, 2015 by ethan