More is Company
I approach a musical much as I approach a play. I don’t see it as musical theatre performers versus legitimate performers. I want us all in the same playground at the same time. Then we ask the audience to join us, too—to really listen. That’s something modern audiences are not very often asked to do. Everything is pushed at them rather than, “Come in! Come ’round our fireside.”
That’s John Doyle (the innovative director who fuses stage and orchestra pit by having actors double as cellists) addressing the schism that has grown between plays in which people talk and plays in which people sing as much as talk. Admirably, and with the credibility of an accomplished artist, he wants to bypass conventions that have kept musical theater the most conservative of the performing arts. He wants a performance to be more than a series of carnival acts that keep an audience distracted. He wants the world of a play to emerge from the unified efforts of an ensemble rather a blend of stars, eye-grabbing sets and gorgeous costumes. In short, he wants a radical break with tradition, and wants to bring audiences with him. This might not be unwelcome, but he faces a major obstacle: The books of most musicals are obstinately light-weight.
A case in point is Doyle’s recent move to strip Stephen Sondheim’s Company down to a raw, beating core. Courageous, perhaps, but dissecting one of the hollow, translucent cubes that occupy the stage might have yielded as much. After thirty-six years, George Furth’s book remains a series of half-amusing vignettes that adequately stitch Sondheim’s far wittier, harmonically lustrous songs and the confused yearning they capture. Furth’s scenes are inoffensive when played with punch and gotten through quickly. But Doyle wants more from them. His actors speak at a deliberative, savouring pace, as if every line were pregnant with Chekhovian understatement. Since they aren’t, the scenes feel lethargic, their dated hipness seems all the more strained, and the songs have to launch entirely on their own.
I say this with unbated admiration for Doyle’s aesthetic. Having his cast create the music is more than a gimmick, and of a piece with his ridding the stage of everything but a few metaphorically resonant set pieces. It’s a commitment to making actor and text the center of a performance, and to eliminate all barriers to an audience’s encounter with them.
But if Doyle wants audiences to more actively engage with his work, a form conceived first and foremost as a happy distraction may not be consistently fertile enough to seem worth their concentrated effort. Last year’s Doyle-directed Sweeney Todd notwithstanding, it’s a reality even Sondheim can’t usually escape from.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at 11:37 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Good-bye Eve
Eve Adamson, founder of Jean Cocteau Repertory and one of Off-Off Broadway’s most gifted stalwarts, passed away over the weekend. I was lucky enough to work with her at one point and witness the perfectionism that drove more than three decades of consistently brilliant and visually stunning theater. With Eve, artistry always came first. She had every opportunity to compromise in her career, and because she wouldn’t, her audiences trusted her and kept coming back. By her own admission, she wasn’t what they call “an actors’ director,” but actors trusted her too, and some of the best actors in this city devoted their lives to helping her build up a theater company that never promised them a living. Hundreds of theater artists passed through that woman’s life, and I’m confident there are many in New York and elsewhere who, like me, will be feeling surges of melancholy this week.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at 6:22 AM Link this | Comments (0)
Note from the AD
So why is Handcart doing Yeats? It’s because his work recognizes and calls upon the full resources of the theater. Unlike most great playwrights, he constructed his plays not as watertight masterpieces that could be boarded by company after company while retaining their essential appearance, but as loose-fitting apparel needing to be filled by music, dance, and imaginative staging equal to the power of his words. Among twentieth century dramatists, Bertolt Brecht perhaps most fully realized that aspect of Yeats’s vision in Mother Courage, Galileo, and other plays whose bold scenic demands required inventive solutions from their performers. As a Marxist, however, Brecht saw theater as relevant only insofar as it addressed those matters of politics and power that he believed governed the human condition. (He began to modify this view late in his career.)
Yeats had faith in enduring myths as a source of wisdom and narrative power. Like Brecht, Yeats had an agenda, which was in his case the cultural and political renewal of Ireland. The bulk of his plays draw specifically from Irish myth and legend, and it’s perhaps because of this exclusivity that they haven’t yet commanded a vast audience outside their native country. In his finest plays—and I believe Cat & the Moon and Only Jealousy of Emer are among them—the Irish cultural specificity both richly informs them and recedes before their universality in treating matters like childlike faith and noble self-sacrifice.
Yeats’s material is very demanding of its interpreters, and to see a group of committed artists join their talents to make these performances possible has been immensely satisfying. I hope you’ll not only come and enjoy, but share your thoughts with us as well.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at 3:03 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Two Yeats Plays in two weeks!
Plans are coming along nicely for our next production. It opens in less than two weeks!
As far as publicity goes, we got an email off this morning, have sent off advertisements to the Irish Echo, mailed off postcards, putting up posters, partnering with Irish and poetical organizations, etc. But the real story is in rehearsals. We’re getting back to our roots. This one’s going to be good, folks. Of course, there’s Yeats himself. But the great actors, our wonderful director, the good music Nathan’s providing, and much more. Too much to mention in a quick message. It’s all looking great — including a very, very large ball.
Sign up to our mailing list if you haven’t already, and we hope to see you at the Independent Theater!
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 10:28 AM Link this | Comments (0)
Pinter in winter
Before he took up full-time America-hectoring (and awful poetry), Harold Pinter was the greatest playwright of his time. Buried in his speech to the Swedes last month is a hint at how he succeeded in the first phase of his public life:
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
Most plays, including great ones, are steeped in context. Even for today’s audiences it’s something of a contractual given that, when characters are introduced, clear backgrounds and objectives usually follow (however gradually). Pinter generally does the opposite. His characters are introduced with about as much information as you’re likely to get, and from there they become murkier. They discourse on random subjects, they make brazenly implausible statements, and they contradict themselves. But his plays are popular, not obscure, and this is because they pulse with conflict. In them, someone is always trying to subordinate someone else, and the games, deceits and taunts deployed to that end have an inventiveness and surprise that could probably only be achieved through the free association that Pinter describes. In the post-Ibsen era, it takes a kind of aesthetic courage to set out writing a play whose object isn’t necessarily to make a point.
And sometimes, art that doesn’t try to make a point can say the most. I just read Old Times. Its endless non-sequiturs veer nearly into Dada at times; yet the wallop at the end, where a jolting revelation is made through the turning of someone’s back against the sound of piercing sobs, is as eloquent a statement of loss as anything a Kushner or David Hare might spend paragraphs of dialogue on. There have been intimations that the Nobel Committee wanted a slate of anti-Americans on the awards roster this year (you’d think that from the screed that takes up 90% of Pinter’s Nobel address). That may be partly true. But in Pinter’s case, art is still the winner.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at 4:07 PM Link this | Comments (1)
Success and struggles, on a shoestring
One of my favorite articles about the theater in a while appeared in Sunday’s Post. We meet a few D.C. theater stalwarts who to the outsider may appear to be struggling, but to most indie theater types will more correctly appear to have achieved a lot of success. Three theater companies who have grown from nothing to a combined budget of $500,000 — that’s some real success, even if still a ‘shoestring’ budget by some standards.
The types of shows they’re putting on sound great, too: “an experimental twist on a classic, a resurrection of an obscure, centuries-old play or the first American presentation of a modern work by a foreign writer.”
It’s a good article, but it’s not all rosy. We’ll see, for example, if their speculation on whether the theater scene is saturated proves true. In any case, put me on your mailing lists, Catalyst, Rorschach and Theater Alliance, and keep up the good work!
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 9:17 PM Link this | Comments (1)
Op-ed of bad ideas
In Sunday’s New York Times is an op-ed piece that pleads for tax breaks and other steps to save theater. No, to save the Broadway show. Playgoer dissects this piece well. In short, these ideas may or may not help the world of Dance of the Vampires, Mamma Mia! and such insignificant fare, but they will not help any ernest and interesting theater. Thanks, Playgoer, for setting things straight. We hope people read your rebuttal.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 10:33 AM Link this | Comments (0)
Tomorrow’s audience
The Christian Science Monitor, Boston’s best newspaper, has an article today about getting new audiences to the theater, specifically young audiences. One point is that students perceive the prices to be high, but I constantly see big student discounts to everything. Students of the world: Go to theater. Go to the symphony. Go to museums. Go, and go now because it will never be cheaper for you. The advertised price may be $90, but you can get in for just $15, you lucky dogs.
I note that this article highlights a recent promo at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, a place fond to me because I’m working there right now.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 8:41 AM Link this | Comments (0)
Props to Pinter
We pause to congratulate Harold Pinter on the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Congratulations, Mr Pinter.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 9:54 AM Link this | Comments (0)
Add this blog to your list
Actors’ Shakespeare Project is a new, notable theater group in Boston. They’re well-connected and well-funded, all things considered, and they put on excellent productions. You should go to any of their shows if you can.
You should also check out their new blog. The blog is remarkable because not many theater companies are blogging. And though the individual entries are not gripping, nor do they reveal keys to the rehearsal process that you’ve never thought of, overall the blog does offer an interesting glimpse into the process that went into their current, celebrated production of King Lear. Go A.S.P!
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 11:27 AM Link this | Comments (1)
Reviews, powerless and otherwise
Over at BBC News, I just found an article about Ben Brantley, the influential New York Times critic. A good read, largely dealing with big-budget Broadway shows. But he also says this:
For real creative vitality, you have to look in some of the darker side streets of Manhattan these days… Often the most satisfying theatre is the sparsest. You get the inventiveness… For those smaller, more independent ventures, if you [the critic] are very encouraging about a production — you can certainly help it get grants, if not audiences.
We know! We invite you to our next production, Mr Brantley.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 12:35 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Gridley strikes again
Steven Gridley has created another short, compelling piece of theater. We care because he worked with Handcart Ensemble a couple of times. And Still-Life (with runner) includes in the cast Erin Treadway, another former Handcarter. The review of the piece on nytheatre.com sounds compelling: “I’ve never seen a mind so vividly or viscerally laid bare on stage.”
There are six performances left. It’s in DUMBO. It’s free. Go Gridley!
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 4:47 PM Link this | Comments (0)
‘Mamma Mia!’ copycats perhaps to dwindle
The Beeb says it’s lights out on the tribute musical — maybe. Let’s ignore the maybe part and say, “Good riddance! Be gone, ye iffy tributes to dead and dying rockers.” Actual theater now, please.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 9:52 PM Link this | Comments (0)
The poetic land of Lorca
We like to hear about theater companies with similar goals and visions to ours. One such company is Greasy Joan and Co. of that great theater town, Chicago. They re-imagine classic plays, promote new adaptations and translations, and seek for visually compelling elements. (They’ve been around longer than Handcart, but I promise we did not steal our mission statement from them.)
In the last year or two we’ve had some serious internal discussions about putting on a couple of Spanish plays. Lorca, of course, was one of the playwrights in discussion. He comes naturally to mind when one mentions Spanish plays. And when I write of Lorca, I think of his Granada, and a wonderful recital of songs set to Lorca texts I stumbled across when I visited Andalucía in 1998.
Anyway, the Sun-Times tells us Greasy Joan is staging a new adaptation of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. I wish I were there to see it. Go Greasy Joan!
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 12:29 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Theater revival
We worry about growth and money. We consider Shakespeare and what American theater is and should be. We, therefore, read with related interest about an effort to revive the storied American Shakespeare Theatre in the other Stratford (Connecticut). The $20 and $50 million dollar figures, however — these we do not relate to.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 12:52 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Clear Channel moving on, kinda sorta
It’s easy to see ways in which we don’t like the effect Clear Channel has had on theater. They’ve been part of dumbing down, escapism, a climate where smaller groups trying to get started struggle more than ever, etc. Some unclear and tentative news in the Post indicates Clear Channel is getting out of Broadway. This well could be good news, but it’s hard to say what will really change. We will definitely be staying tuned, though it’s unlikely it will have much direct impact on high-quality, smaller-budget, meaningful theater.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 12:15 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Checking in on our favorite Arkansan theater
The Arkansas Repertory Theatre has just started its 30th season. We care because the general manager there used to be the managing director of Handcart Ensemble. We like and miss Mike McCurdy, keep tabs with him, appreciate his feedback from time to time. So we’re just checking in by posting a link to this pleasant review of Steel Magnolias (subscription required). Have a great season, Mike!
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 3:37 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Love’s ‘Labour’ not a lost cause in Kabul
In the Christian Science Monitor, an article about theater in Afghanistan. Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, to be precise. That troubled land wants comedies — but translated into Persian and adapted to omit mention of Russians. (“A mess of Russians left us but of late.”)
Love, however, requires no translation and “the traditional rules of Elizabethan England about love and modesty are very similar to the strict ban on affection in modern Afghanistan.” And problems with papparazzi are similar there, too, as the young star of Osama is finding out.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 11:00 PM Link this | Comments (0)
Roundup
The season’s major awards in New York and several other cities are compiled nicely for us in the latest issue of American Theatre magazine. Thanks, TCG! I’ve seen so very few, alas. Maybe three winning productions. For me, this is a list of should-have’s, not memories.
Must get more money. Must get more time. Must spend them at the theater.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 11:01 PM Link this | Comments (0)
August Wilson is dying
Sadly, August Wilson has only a few months to live. His attitude is interesting and commendable: “It’s not like poker, you can’t throw your hand in. I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.” The announcement was made in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — a fitting paper to tell, given the locale of his plays. Somehow, I’ve seen only one of his plays, and though disappointed a little in it, have wanted to see his earlier ones.
Posted by Kevin Ashworth at 3:44 PM Link this | Comments (1)
