No ‘Doll’s House,’ please
Brian Kulick, the new artistic director at Classic Stage Company, is on to something. Here’s what he said in Friday’s Times: “The canon has shrunk. We’re being fed a steady diet of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov. How many ‘Twelfth Nights’ can we see? We need something different.” It’s a genuine problem. The thirty-odd plays that lord over the classical stage are making it virtually synonymous with “safe and familiar.” Tartuffe gets yanked from the mothballs in dozens of predictable, powdered-wig productions a year while Volpone languishes in a deepening obscurity that makes it increasingly difficult to sell to subscribers. Classical NYC companies like the Pearl and Jean Cocteau Rep will typically couch a Nathan the Wise or Lorca play in an otherwise textbook season, but Kulick’s come up with the most aggressive and creative branch-out effort I’ve yet seen. He’s starting CSC’s season with four readings of underrepresented Elizabethan plays: Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, the anonymously penned Arden of Haversham, Jonson’s Volpone and ... Richard III. I like it. For once, it’s Shakespeare who gets “included.” Having movie stars do the readings is a wise and commendable use of that CSC resource. If the celebs draw crowds and Kulick does this every fall, he might generate serious interest in neglected classics like no one in this country has before.How successful do you have to be?
After an extraordinarily successful 2002-03 season with their two hit biopics, MET looked ready to execute one of their three-show seasons without canceling the most intriguing, risky, and usually third entry on the calendar. Nope! It’s more one-person shows on Golda Meir and Hank Williams! Nothing wrong with that!
But in art, doesn’t success mean you get to at least dabble in the stuff you really want to do? And I can’t believe AD David Fishelson, whose passion is inventive Dostoyevsky adaptations, wouldn’t like to do those stagings of Dreyer and Resnais films his website has promised in the past. Then again, maybe he’s filling the coffers with more daring things in view. Robert Rodriguez had to make three Spy Kids movies before Once Upon a Time in Mexico. So here’s my vote that, once Golda’s Balcony strikes the mother lode on Broadway and Lost Highway has paid for itself nine times over, Fishelson gets down to business and gives Off-Broadway a welcome, post-recession dose of artistic boldness. Bring on Ordet, Dave. We’ll support it.