He's Evil, He's Evil, He's Evil

We're not exactly talking "subtle" here . . .

Oh Richard, you bloated spider, you humpbacked scene-stealer you.  When will you ever be part of a play, and not a star turn?

Sigh. Judging by the production currently running at BAM?  Never.

As with every other Dicky Three-Eyes I have ever seen, with the exception of Olivier's movie, if you take away the lead actor from this Bridge Project production, everything falls apart. If a good play is a mountain range, then this is a single mountain towering over a collection of little hills.  A great mountain, but still a mountain, with nothing to contrast itself against.  A one-man show, in other words. 

The beauty of that? You get to see Kevin Spacey go to town. And it's a great town, complete with incredible physical contortions a la Mark Rylance in Jerusalem.  Who’da thunk that the two most memorable male performances on stage in the last year would be a couple of autumn chickens pretzeling their bodies for our enjoyment?  In Spacey’s case, he really makes himself into a human spider, twisting his leg and using a cane to scuttle-walk back and forth across the stage--and then, delightfully, scuttle-march to the beat of kettle drums.   

The major flaw? Because Spacey’s Richard is so blatantly over-the-top evil, everybody else on stage look blind or brain-damaged--so instead of saying to yourself, “Look what he’s getting away with,” you say, “Why are they letting him get away with this?” Which, when you’re doing a three-hour play, is like riding a roller coaster backwards, slowly but surely bringing you further and further away from the fun and excitement, until you’re so distant from the ride that all you can see is the architecture. Plus your back hurts a lot.  (Thank you, Harvey Theatre seats.) 

There are a couple of brilliant first-half multimedia moments, but sadly these are undercut by the interpretation of Richard as an obvious villain. Even the dumbest politico in America knows that you do NOT show rage or frustration on camera. It may get a “look what he’s doing now” laugh, but it’s a laugh that takes you out of the play. But then there isn’t really a play here. Especially in the second half, where even the comic shadings of the first two hours disappear and Spacey does nothing but give a lesson on how to vary your yells over three octaves and 65 minutes.

For the Shakespearean purists at this blog (cough), director Sam Mendes didn't cut a whole hell of a lot, so for the first time ever I actually got to see a couple of the women scenes that usually never get done when this play gets produced.  And now I know why.  And have to ask myself, "Did that EVER WORK?  Even in 1594? Really?  You had four boy actors who were THAT GOOD in 1594 that you wrote a lo-o-o-o-ong scene for them?  Wow, Bill.  Cocky in your thirties, weren't you?”

This is also the final Bridge Project presentation, which is odd for two reasons: because the last two projects have had two plays in repertory, and because those plays have had more than one star.  Or more than one  mountain (See above).  But it’s not up to the level of the last two, and not least because it feels like the bus and truck Richard (or as we used to say, referring to Transylvania, the angry peasant and pitchfork tour).

Bottom line: it  makes me want to live long enough to see someone play Richard like a male femme fatale. 

 Wait--

The Cold Icy Hand of the Well-Made Play

Brr!

There’s a reason why you don’t see Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman performed that often. It’s because the way the play is constructed--it all takes place on a single night--makes it look like a parody of the well-made play. Here’s a guy who embezzled money, went to jail for five years, and has lived upstairs from his wife for eight years and never once laid eyes on her--except for tonight, when he finally comes downstairs. And why does it happen tonight? Because that’s what happens in a well-made play, it all has to happen tonight. Which is ridiculous. Eight years pacing back and forth upstairs? Really? Why not ten? Why not twelve?

The thematic answer--because Ibsen is rather obviously showing how people get frozen into repetitive or self-destructive behavior--is the one answer which is totally undermined by the play’s construction. It’s like Ibsen had a twentieth-century idea which he could only express using nineteenth-century tools. It'd make a great movie, especially given the Madoff-relevance of the title character's crime. But as a play, it feels like a Dickens novel with its head and legs cut off to fit a theatrical bed; and because it’s compressed into three hours, it looks about as silly as Bleak House would look if you staged it as a series of cross-examinations in Chancery.

There’s an entire romantic subplot too. Because Borkman’s wife Gunhild has a twin sister Ella whom Borkman really loved but he gave her up to a colleague who was crazy about her so that the colleague would give him the bank job which Borkman used to embezzle money from his clients, and then when the twin sister rejected the colleague, the colleague dropped a dime on Borkman’s embezzling, which was the real reason he went to jail--and the reason why Borkman has been spending the last eight years waiting to be vindicated and restored to his former position of power. Got all that? (Good--now explain it to me, could ya?)

And wait--there’s more! Not only does everyone in the play wallow in the past like hogs in a temporal pigsty, they all look to Borkman Junior to save themselves, even as Young Borkman is keeping company with a cradle-robbing neighbor of dubious marital history. Gunhild wants Junior to redeem the Borkman name, and never leave her side (cough) Freud (cough), Borkman wants him to be his companion in his climb from the bottom to the heights (cough) redemption (cough), and Ella wants him to be her surrogate son in her final years, which are actually her final couple of months (cough) cough (cough).

All of which requires acrobatics at a Cirque de Soleil level from a troupe of actors, said acrobatics (just like in Cirque de Soleil) being the prime reason to go see this show. Fiona Shaw proves yet again that she is so talented that she can build an entirely believable character out of one adjective (peevish). Lindsay Duncan plays weary so well that when she finally erupts, it’s both shocking and embarrassing. And Alan Rickman slaloms through his long speeches, swallowing some words and pausing over others, like a man who has been down this mountain so many times he knows exactly where the slippery spots are. True, they bounce off the script more than they bounce off each other, but if you ever want to see how talented actors can carry the weight of a heavy play on their shoulders and make it look like dancing, you’ve got three prime examples here.

I just wish their performances were warmer. But it’s not a warm play. And you get that the second you walk into the Harvey--the set looks like an unplowed side-street in Brooklyn, which becomes a wind-blown unplowed main street in Staten Island by the final act. There’s no warmth between the characters either; just the cold ashes of dead fires. In which, if you sift through them, you will find the remains of a particular species of well-made play as a delivery system for a story that spans 15 to 20 years. Other types will live on (All My Sons, anybody?) but watching this production, you get the sense that it’s not just Borkman who succumbs to a cold hand of iron at the end, like a dinosaur killed by climate change--it’s this style of drama.

Well no WONDER As You Like It was so depressing

From The Daily Mail on the Sam Mendes/Kate Winslet split:

A source close to Mendes explained the break-up by saying: 'He became bored working on his latest theatrical project, and he took that boredom home with him. And that led to the spark being taken out of their marriage.'

The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance

The Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare play. It’s the play that made me fall in love with Shakespeare, which means it’s right up there with all the other things that made me fall in love: Seven Samurai (Japanese movies), Sasha and Digweed’s Communication (techno), Maverick, Cheyenne and Sugarfoot (westerns), Myrna Loy (Myrna Loy) and Sheila Tagrin (girls). It's also the play I directed, in the dark backward and abysm of time, when I was a senior in high school. As I have so often had occasion to remark these days, boy, do I have a great future behind me.

I know the script of this play the way I know a Beatles song -- I may not be able to recite all the words on my own, but I will be word perfect once the song starts playing. Which is why it’s impossible for me not to be annoyed when Argiers becomes Algiers, the still-vexed Bermoothes turn into the still-vexed Bermudas, the line “Oh what a blow was there given!” is missing its punchline (“An it had not fallen flatlong.”) and my favorite WTF line in all of Shakespeare, “And most chirurgeonly,” is nowhere to be found. This is also why it’s impossible for me to be objective about this play, so what follows is not so much a review as a collection of thoughts about the experience of this particular production.

First thought: nice opening. The play begins with a shipwreck scene, but the production begins with Prospero, who’s sitting stage left reading a book from the moment the house opens. It's a great conceit: here's somebody with his head in a book all the time; no wonder he lost his dukedom. And that was 12 years ago. Guy hasn't changed a bit. Only when he’s ready does he don his magic robe, put on his belt of power (shades of Wonder Woman and her magic belt), take up his staff, and conjure up the storm which will cause that opening shipwreck scene. At which point we’re reminded that Sam Mendes is directing this play, since the shipwreck scene is marred by the same annoying effect that marred last year’s Winter’s Tale: any time there’s an aside, the actors all freeze, the stage goes dark, and a spotlight hits the commenting actor. Then the action starts up again, only to stop with the next comment; and then it begins yet again only to grind to a halt with the next aside. It’s so jerky and frustrating that it’s impossible not to believe that the single most formative experience of Sam Mendes’ life is his struggle to drive stick.


The next, oh, 20 minutes is the longest single exposition scene in Shakespeare. The story is, he wrote it to win a bet with Ben Jonson, who kept making fun of the fact that Shakespeare never stuck to the Aristotelian unities of place and time.

JONSON: If you wrote the Agamemnon, you would have staged everything from Aulis to the Trojan Horse before getting to the homecoming. You and your mouldy tales. You put Father Time in Winter’s Tale, and Pericles takes place over what, twenty years? Man, you couldn’t do single set and real time if your life depended on it.
SHAKESPEARE: Oh yeah? Here; read this. It’s called The Tempest.
JONSON: Oh my God! The second scene is nothing but exposition! And not even interesting exposition.
SHAKESPEARE: Yeah. See how boring single set and real time are?

And that’s the challenge when doing this play: how to sugar the long Prospero speeches so that they don’t put everybody to sleep. (And it’s not like Shakespeare is unaware of what he’s doing, either; Miranda’s line “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness,” could be spoken by anybody in the audience.) So what does Mendes have Prospero do? Blindfold his daughter so that, in effect, he is just a disembodied voice, and then rattle on while she sits there like a prisoner waiting for the firing squad to arrive. I’m still trying to figure out the whole blindfolding motif, and it is a motif -- Prospero covers Miranda’s eyes a couple of times in this production, like he’s protecting her from something. But what? I can understand covering her eyes when Caliban shows up, but when you’re giving the premise?

PROSPERO: I’ve led a rather interesting life; would you like to hear about it? Good; let me blindfold you.
MIRANDA: Whatever, Dad.

All I can think of is that it's about two things: his magic, and the fact that this particular Prospero has no idea how to deal with real people. As far as the magic goes, I can buy that Prospero creates the shipwreck. But if you’re going to set him up as somebody who can control not just the winds but the other characters on stage, if you're going to make the man a puppeteer, then you have to be very precise about (a) who the puppets are, (b) when and if they can ever act on their own, and (c) why the puppeteer is manipulating them. That clarity is missing here. Lenane’s Prospero appears to be manipulating everybody, including the bad guys. I mean, Antonio and Sebastian are natural plotters; it’s only natural for Prospero to use his arts to make sure their plotting fails. What is not natural is for Ariel to hand both of them daggers so they can attempt to commit murders which will then be prevented. It’s beautifully staged; Ariel walks past them and the daggers he hands them look like they have always been in their hands. But it’s troublesome when you think of the puppeteer angle. It’s one thing to say, “I know you will try to commit murder, but I am going to prevent you,” and quite another to say, “Here’s a couple of daggers so you can try to commit murder so I can prevent you.” It makes the game look rigged from the start. I mean, if Prospero can control everybody to this extent, then you’re watching an argument against the existence of free will, not a play. Or an argument about an all-powerful figure who makes people commit sins so that he can indulge himself in not just preventing them but in forgiving the sinners. After, y'know, an appropriate amount of spiritual torture. I don't know about you, but to me this is both dramatically and theologically unsound.

I used to do the "You are three men of sin" speech as an audition piece,

so don't get me started on this guy's Ariel.

It’s also untrue of this production, which is about vengeance and forgiveness. Almost everyone who’s not being tested or manipulated in a center ring of sand sits on chairs in an upstage pool of water and waits their turn to go onstage, staring off into space while they wonder if the Equity healthcare plan covers the kind of pruney foot rot that infected half the grunts in ‘Nam. The constant presence of actors waiting to go on gives the impression that Mendes is staging a Brechtian exercise in presentational ethics, where everything has a pointed moral and everyone has a lesson to learn. Especially Prospero. Judging the production backwards, the naturalism of Stephen Dillane’s underplaying, once the opportunity to forgive has been presented to his character, stands in stark relief to the shouting hand-waving over-emphasizing hammyness of his early scenes. I kept asking myself “Why is he over-acting like this?” and of course, by the end of the play I understood exactly why: to make a contrast between Prospero the avenger and Prospero the forgiver. The problem I had with it is that shouting is a technique, not a character revelation. When he's observing -- like Jacques -- Dillane's Prospero is in his element, speaking naturally and pointedly. But when he's talking to other people, he's a completely different person, and unfortunately it looks like he's a completely different actor as well. It's a valid and fascinating choice to make Prospero the socially inept twin brother of Jacques, but I feel like I'm making an after-the-fact excuse by thinking of Dillane's performance this way, because while watching it, I didn't know what to make of it. It's like he was playing an acting version of vengeance versus forgiveness: the rarer action is in underplaying than in hamming it up.

But like I say, it’s impossible for me to be objective about this play. Or to see it fresh, for that matter. Even the moment that made people gasp -- Caliban’s first entrance -- reminded me of the same entrance, done in exactly the same way, from the 1974 Public Theatre Tempest with Sam Waterston as Prospero, Carol Kane as Miranda, and Randy Duk Kim as the best Trinculo I have ever seen. (And God, what a weird production THAT was.)

But I will say this. If everything Dillane did as an actor was designed to make his delivery of the epilogue poignant, simple, and profound, then he totally succeeded.

Homeless man helps color-coordinated ingenues find true love.

Welcome to the Green Gray World

There's actually more color in this picture than there is in the set.

If you were to ask me for a two-sentence review of The Bridge Project's As You Like It at BAM, then I would tell you to prepare to hear the words "There is no reason on earth for a fucking water-boarding scene to be within five miles of this comedy." Which brilliantly sets up the second sentence: "But of course, we are not watching a comedy, and Sam Mendes is not about to let us forget it."


So what are we watching? A production in which scene changes are done to sad violin music and the mournful notes in the script have become the entire symphony. A lot of acting that feels slight instead of light. And a play in which the city and the country are about as different as two cubicles in the same dreary office. This is supposed to be a comedy about contrasting worlds, and while there's a valid point in answering a cheery cry of "Let's run away to the forest!" with the harsh reality of "Fine, but how we will live there?" the only contrast here is between "stark and cold" and "slightly less stark and a tad bit warmer." And yes, the word "desert" is spoken as much in the first two acts of As You Like It as it is in all of Lawrence of Arabia, but that does not mean you bring camels into Arden. (I exaggerate; there are no camels in this production, mostly because camels are not colorless.)

Jacques in Oklahoma.

Which is not to say that you can't infuse a Shakespearean comedy with languid melancholy; the Watteau-inspired Much Ado with Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack did it brilliantly, mostly by showing how foreign Benedick and Beatrice were to the general mood around them. The only foreigner in this production is Stephen Dillane's chipper, low-key (and occasionally inaudible) Jacques; and the fact that I can, without any irony at all, use the word "chipper" to describe a character the script keeps calling "melancholy" pretty much nails how low the Glum Bar has been set in this production.


As for the Fun Bar, the evening has its moments, but they are just that: moments -- like flashes of sunlight in a forest, they illuminate but do not warm. Because the production feels heavy and weightless at the same time, there's a flatness to everything, which makes the jokes stick out like muffins on a baking pan. As for the acting, the supporting characters generally fare better than the leads. This is that rare production of As You Like It in which Celia is more lively than Rosalinde, Phoebe feels more intriguing than Jacques, and Silvius gets as many laughs as Touchstone.


This is also that rare production in which, instead of the usual question everyone asks about the play ("What in the name of God does Rosalinde see in Orlando anyway?") you find yourself saying "What does Orlando see in this girl again?" Juliet Rylance, looking for all the world like Geneva Carr crossed with Ellen Degeneres, spends so much time dashing back and forth onstage that it's a comment on the way she's playing Rosalinde: she never really inhabits the part, she just keeps approaching and retreating, approaching and retreating. And Christian Carmago's Orlando has pretty much one look, one tone of voice, and one manner throughout. Can't wait to see his Ariel. (Note to director: if you are crazy enough to have Orlando kiss Rosalinde while she's pretending to be a guy, then the characters have to actually deal with the moment for like, y'know, a moment, okay?) (Better yet: don't have them kiss in the first place.)

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that there's a hint of Beckett to this production, like Mendes decided to direct Waiting For Rosalinde. But that's probably just me. For instance: I can't see a guy in a bowler hat without thinking of either Beckett, Magritte, or Lena Olin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. They get all mixed up in my mind. Just like a bunch of things seemed to have gotten mixed up in Sam Mendes' mind. It's obvious that a certain amount of thought has been brought to the script, and a certain amount of thought to the interpretation, but they're neither compatible nor consistent. Unless I'm missing something, there's not one single prism that you can look through to see this As You Like It whole. Instead, you wind up looking at everything through a pair of blurry bifocals.

So no, can't say I liked it much, though it had its moments. Silly me. I went to BAM expecting to see a comedy about love. Word to the wise: don't make my mistake. Go to BAM expecting to see Measure for Measure, and I bet you walk out pleasantly surprised. Because this is not a comedy about love. It's not a comedy about anything. And Sam Mendes is not about to let you forget it. (And technically it's not a water-boarding either, it's just a guy shoving another guy's head into a bucket of water until he starts to drown, and then yanking his head out. And then doing it all over again. To which I can only say: in As You Like It? Really??? WTF, Sam?)

Forest? Forest?!? This isn't a "forest"!

Now that's a forest!

Five reasons why the New York Times will rave about Winter’s Tale

1. Rebecca Hall. She’s pretty, she’s talented, she has a great voice, she’s British theatre royalty, and I cannot stand her. I didn’t like her Rosalinde in As You Like It, and she does the same things in this that bugged me then: treats the verse like, uhm, prose, so that a simple line like “I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until/ You have drawn oaths from him not to stay.” becomes “I had [let me think of what I did now] thought, [what do I call him again?] sir, to have [how to describe it?] held my [sing the vowel, girl] peace until [touch my pregnant belly because I’m talking to the father of my child] you have [pretend there’s a set of parentheses around the next two words] drawn oaths from him [make the next word two syllables long] not to [make the next word two syllables long] stay.” There are people who love this kind of acting. Ben Brantley is one of them. (I can’t wait to see his review of her Hedda Gabler. Which I will only go to see because Hedda kills herself at the end, and I’ll be rooting for that to happen from the opening line.)

2 It’s a very thoughtful production. Critics love it when plays tell us what to think. It brings them back to those college papers they had to write about how the light at the end of the dock symbolizes hope in The Great Gatsby. It says Director’s Message in big bold letters. In this production of Winter’s Tale, the message is “Isn’t Jealousy awful?” Something we can all agree on, right? Yes, but. And the But is, the play is not written to make you stop and think. It starts with blind jealousy that hits the road at 60MPH and accelerates from there. It doesn’t pause at every rest stop to consider what it’s doing, because it’s blind jealousy, not sighted jealousy. And if you don’t floor the gas pedal and never let up until you run out of gas, then the audience will start wondering why you didn’t take that exit marked “Hey stupid -– if your wife supposedly slept with your best friend, when were they ever alone together? And why isn’t your idiot wife asking this question, huh?” So instead of getting caught up in the moment, we are asked to reflect upon the moment, which brings us to the biggest reason why this will get raves:

3. It’s a very British production. Meaning distanced, meaning polite, meaning cool and un-sweaty –- meaning, in a very real sense, that it’s all about the acting. On one level this play is a fairy tale, not a drawing room piece. But drawing room is what Sam Mendes knows and does, and that’s what we get here: private moments of suffering, instead of hyper-realized moments of passion. Moments like Simon Russell Beale’s Leontes walking around barefoot or dressed in rags to SHOW that he’s suffering, to SHOW that he feels like the victim. All his soliloquies done with special lighting, (spotlight on Beale, darkness on the rest of the stage) no matter whether they’re forty lines long or four words long. Which just throws another level of distance at the audience, because it takes you out of the character’s actions and focuses you on the actor. But that’s what the Brits do. It’s not about disappearing into the part, it’s about playing the part, it’s about saying “Simon Russell Beale’s Leontes” instead of “Leontes,” it’s about seeing how the engine works instead of feeling how the car rides, it’s about appreciating what the actor does instead of getting caught up in what the character is doing -- which is why Meryl Streep is the most British actress we have in this country.

4. Ethan Hawke as Autolycus steals the show. He doesn’t, really –- he comes very close -- but you’ll still hear the phrase “steals the show” because (a) he plays a thief; (b) his performance jump starts the second act; and (c) he’s getting laughs, which (because everything is so fucking polite) are few and far between here. He doesn’t get as many laughs as he could, which may change by the end of the run –- there are bits of business that could have been done better, and probably will be in time –- but he’s like a breath of fresh air after all the “look at me acting” in the first half of the play. Plus he plays the part like a cross between Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, which is just as delightful as it sounds.

5. "It is required you do awake your faith." The last scene of this play is total fantasy, it comes out of nowhere, it makes no logical sense at all, and no matter who’s doing it or how poorly it’s done, I always bawl like a baby whenever I see it, just the way I always laugh like a hyena whenever I see the Pyramus and Thisbe part of Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is where the play gets quiet for real, which in a production filled with quiet moments is like hearing a twentieth whisper in a row instead of a single whisper after nineteen shouts. No matter; it still works, which makes me forgive a lot. Especially the last moment, which highlights the fact that Leontes and Hermione never exchange a single word (she has only one speech, and that for her long-lost daughter), and if that final stage picture makes me think of the fabulous ending of Trevor Nunn’s fabulous All’s Well, then that, too, pardons much. Which, in a play about forgiveness, is as it should be.

Translations: part 1 of 2

Translation is cultural kidnapping –- cultural because the act of turning a foreign word into a domestic word is like painting, with shades and colors and contrasts, and every language has its own palette; and kidnapping because the bad ones always end with the victim’s escape from your clutches, while the good ones always end in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome marriage. Even the best translation can’t help but substitute a value for every word, what Noam Chomsky would probably call the myth behind the language. Which is why, in much the same way that every Hollywood movie about Ancient Rome becomes a replay of the American myth -- the war of freedom and democracy against tyranny and dictatorship -- every British translation of Chekhov is about the English character: class snobbery and repressed emotions.

(And it's not just Chekhov. Check out Night Creatures, the Hammer version of the Dr Syn story starring Peter Cushing, and compare it to Disney's Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. In Night Creatures, the Robin Hood figure is an ex-pirate who must pay for his past sins with his life. In Scarecrow, the Robin Hood figure is anti-tyranny ["There's a new spirit in the world, Mipps. Men can't beat armies. But ideas can."] and risks his neck to save a proto-Son-Of-Liberty from the gallows. Or to put it another way -- in England: repressed emotions; in America: a secret identity.)

And in Chekhov? It depends on the translation. There's a lot of repressed emotion and blindness in Tom Stoppard’s new Bridge Project version of The Cherry Orchard, which is currently playing at BAM. There's also a lot of comedy, which is not a tree that is usually found in most Orchards, despite Chekhov's insistence that comedy describes the play perfectly. But then most translations of the good doctor's plays go for the wistful over the wacka-wacka-wacka; it's only in the one-acts, the obvious farces, that you're given a clear and consistent presentation of the over-the-top craziness that is Chekhov deliberately going for a laugh. Of course, if you listened to Anton talk about his own work, every page of his plays has laughs galore. But since an author's blindness to his own work is not limited to modern writers whose program notes have no relationship at all to what's on the stage, you have to take Chekhov's self-professed label as a comedian with not just a grain of salt, but a lemon and a shot of tequila.

The laughs in this version are more Stoppard than Chekhov, which is at the same time a plus and a minus. It’s no secret that, because English is Stoppard’s second language, he has a wider brush when it comes to wordplay. His émigré status is also the reason why there’s a continental feel to even his most British pieces -- the sense that they’re not taking place in London but in Schnitzler’s Vienna, where any ill-considered word could provoke pistols at dawn. In Chekhov it’s exactly the opposite; in Chekhov there are nothing but ill-considered words, which (when they are not deliberately ignored) provoke the distant sound of sleighs and carriages as much as they do gunshots. The best translations of his plays show people verbally stepping on each other’s toes, and meanwhile hiding a wince when their own little piggies get trod on.


Is Stoppard's that kind of translation? No. But then I don't think there's a translation in English that reproduces this aspect of Chekhov's writing. I don't even know if it can be done without tearing the plays apart and re-inventing them as American fables. And even then. Setting Cherry Orchard in Virginia circa 1900 and turning Lopakhin into the son of one of the plantation's slaves would be the only comparable analogy to what Lopakhin represents as the son of a Russian serf, but the American representation comes with its own unique cultural baggage which (a) warps the role of "servant" into something so culturally charged that (b) in essence you've got a totally new play, not about repressed emotions but a repressed race of people. (I'm putting it on my project list right under the 1950's version of Hedda Gabler. Oh wait--Cate Blanchett already did that one.)

Next: so if it's impossible, why do it? or, The Everest Effect.

The Cherry Orchard at BAM

The very tall
Rebecca Hall
Thinks plummy vowels equal sense

While Simon Beale
Will never kneel
To anything but excellence.

There is something very British about Tom Stoppard’s new Bridge Project version of The Cherry Orchard, which is currently playing at BAM. As directed by Sam Mendes, in a style which deliberately tries to build a bridge between Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett (hence the project name?), the show is one part willful blindness, one part class warfare, and a dash of despair served in a mug of repressed emotion, which adds up to a portrait of the British character more than an unblinking look at Russian landowners. But those qualities are always the ones which have attracted the Brits to Chekhov. There is no vodka sweat in their productions of Chekhov, just the bright perspiration of teatime. Which is not a complaint, mind you; translations are tricky businesses (and the subject of a later post) but this one seems more innately British than most.

Possible reason why? It's not really a translation, but a revisal. Stoppard said earlier this year that he wanted to treat this Cherry Orchard as a working play, not a rote exercise in word substitution, and in that he's succeeded. There's a loose vernacular feel to the script; it's so fresh in places that, if you're familiar with the play, it makes you misremember things. Is Yasha's part really so small? (If it is, as a friend of mine remarked, then Josh Hamilton is getting gypped.) Does the dialogue between Trofimov and Ranevskaya really go on that long? And is Varya secretly in love with Trofimov -- is that why she's always sniping at him? The last question was one of a number of little revelations this new version provides. By opening up the script to the kind of working rewrites he'd do for his own work, Stoppard is stretching familiar characters into unfamiliar places. For that alone, you should see it. But the main reason to see it, of course, is for the acting.

Sinead Cusack
Still has the knack
Of making women who are blind

To their own flaws
Look sweet because
At heart they're basically kind.

The Bridge Project is a British/American joint venture (heavy on the Brit side) which will be doing this play in repertory with Winter's Tale at BAM through March and around the world for the next year. It is also a master class in acting, with the Brits as teachers. While there's a certain anti-Colonies bias in the casting (the Yanks play the cad, the schlemiel, and the perpetual student) , everyone is in the same play (how rare that is), there are no fake British accents from the Americans (no Peter Sarsgaards in this production, thank God), and everybody brings game whenever a Yank and a Brit have a scene together.

The direction by Sam Mendes is a solid mix of drawing-room intimacy and impressionistic stage pictures. There are a series of triptychs, three people looking out into the audience as if through three bay windows, that reminded me of the opening of Olivier's Three Sisters. (Homage? I'd have to see the Olivier film again; I only saw it the once, when it came out 30-odd years ago, but I still have vivid memories of Alan Bates and Joan Plowright in it.) And the end is straight out of Samuel Beckett -- the old man in bare feet and a nightgown, falling to the stage and lying there in the bright white lights of a room empty of everything except for a child's chair.

Give Ethan Hawke
A chance to talk?
There's nothing he won't give tongue to.

He'll race the course
A little horse
(And so's his voice by sentence two).

There are a great many directorial brilliances in this show (Beale's Lopakhin running amok at dinner being the brightest), and only one mis-step that I can think of. [Spoiler alert] There's a point in Act Three where Lopakhin kneels beside Ranevskaya and leans in to kiss her. It's a brilliant touch (if Lopakhin is in love with anyone, it's the mother, not the daughter), but it makes hash of the Act Four moment when Ranevskaya plays Dolly Levi and sends her daughter Varya to Lopakhin so he can propose to her. It says something either stupid or nasty about her character that she wants to see her daughter married to someone who so obviously wants her instead. (Sinead Cusack goes the willful ignorance route; there's a lot of Mother Lord from The Philadelphia Story in her performance, especially the Mother Lord of the second half, where the once-sharp matron seems to have lost half her wits upon the return of her errant husband.)

Picky picky picky, right? Still, it's the rare revival where you find yourself seeing a play and its characters with fresh eyes, and this is one of them. If you saw The Seagull that was just on Broadway and liked it, then you'll love this. And if you hated the Broadway Seagull, then you owe it to yourself to see this, if only to cleanse your Chekhovian palate.

And while we're doing poetry, here's the play in six lines:

The servant's son
is Number One --
He buys the house (including tax).

Proposal? Nope.
Regret trumps hope
And puts the orchard to the axe.


Next: some thoughts about translations, or, The Myths Behind Language . . .

Remnick/Stoppard Part 1

As part of BAM’s Artist Talk series, David Remnick interviewed Tom Stoppard for an hour last night. Stoppard’s new version of The Cherry Orchard is being directed by Sam Mendes and will be performed at BAM next year in repertory with A Winter’s Tale. What follows is a reconstruction from the notes I took while the two men were talking, notes which can barely approximate the offhand precision of Stoppard's conversation, which was at all times elegant, clever, and grammatically correct.


REMNICK: I’d like to start off by talking about the art of translations. You’ve done several of them – Schnitzler, other Chekhov plays – and like Vladimir Nabokov you have an enormous interest in translation. As a matter of fact, you share a number of similarities with Nabokov -- verbal magic, that throbbing feeling within, --

STOPPARD: The fact that he’s dead. [LAUGHTER] But still protesting.

REMNICK: Nabokov himself supervised his own translations and spent years himself translating Eugene Onegin, which we should probably talk about later, but what I want to ask you now is, you have a very full plate. You write plays, you write screenplays and radio dramas. So why translations? There are many translations of Chekhov out there; what do you get from doing one?

STOPPARD: Well, number one, by the very nature of translation, and more acutely in the case of a great writer like Chekhov, there is no terminus to the event. The Cherry Orchard exists somewhere around the intersection of innumerable translations, but none of them can really account for the play, not can they ever hope to. And the second thing is, a translation that appears to have its optimum realization also has a built-in obsolescence. It may be perfect for its time, but in five years it will seem dated. What seems right for one now, always seems wrong a few years later. Plus there’s a third thing. I haven’t discussed this yet with Sam Mendes, but it also seems to me that directors like to have a new text to work with because the text is essentially unsettled. It is only when the play is performed and the script is published that the text becomes settled. And yes, of course, there are several translations of The Cherry Orchard by a number of writers which are quite good. Michael Frayn’s, for instance -- which has the added value of being written by the only one of us who also reads Russian. You would think that would have taken care of the problem for everyone else. But when the script is being worked on by directors and actors during rehearsal, there is still the sense of a writer composing in English and not the original language. (One of the problems with having me as an interviewee is that I can go on and on like a toy. [LAUGHTER] This is not a tribute to your question so much as it is a tribute to my nature. [LAUGHTER]) As I was saying, having the text not settled is a pleasure and a benefit, but it means that the task of translation is always an open-ended one.

REMNICK: What qualities would you put in your translation that you weren’t getting in Frayn’s? What do you want your Chekhov to have more of? What is Tom Stoppard’s Chekhov?

STOPPARD: I don’t see it in those terms. One must remember that theatre is an event, as it were, and not a text. The text is fulfilled in performance. And when one is working on a translation, one writes for actors, one sounds out the lines, pretending to be an actor while saying them. It’s a different type of storytelling. But all storytelling is an art form, and an Anton Chekhov story is told in what is even now a slightly idiosyncratic -- and at the time quite revolutionary -- manner. The fact is that in a Chekhov play there is a macro-story and a micro-story, like a palimpsest of several maps layered one upon the other, where two different scales of action are taking place. A great deal of internal things are going on while a character speaks two lines and takes a drink. There’s a story that when he finished his first play -- he was 27, and it took him two weeks, ten days actually -- he wrote a letter to his brother and he said “I have written no villains and no angels.” So he had some sense of what he was achieving, the revolutionary nature of it, even now, that one can write with total moral neutrality. And it didn’t come out of nowhere -– one can point to Turgenev and a Month In The Country which was written 50 years before. But it was revolutionary. I just thought of a strange analogy. It would be equivalent to someone saying seventy years ago, “What the hell is this with New Yorker stories? They don’t seem to finish, they just stop.” [LAUGHTER] Of course people now are taking that in stride. One does not judge modern stories by how much they are like an O Henry story. By the way, I would like to come back to Eugene Onegin at the half past nine mark. [LAUGHTER]

REMNICK: When Constance Garnett translated Dostoevsky and Tolstoy into English, it was their introduction into the English language culture. I interviewed Joseph Brodsky once, and he said, “Your problem as English-speaking readers is, they sound the same to you. Oh, maybe Dostoevsky is a little darker, and Tolstoy is a little lighter, but they’re essentially the same. You don’t understand. Dostoevsky is a hilarious writer.” That’s a word you don’t usually hear to describe Dostoevsky. “Hilarious.” So my question is, do you think translation a tonal thing as well as a verbal thing?

STOPPARD: Tonal as well, yes. One comes back to the proposition that theater is an event. Chekhov was always seeing tonal problems in the performance of his plays. He would complain that the actors were always too emotive with his words, while the actors were shocked and surprised that he would describe Cherry Orchard as a comedy. But the more one sees Chekhov in performance, and working with him, as it were, in translating his play, one understands the meaning of the term comedy as he meant it, which can be stated very glibly. “In what sense is Cherry Orchard a comedy? Well, in what sense is life a comedy?” His plays contain genuine, authentic reflections on what people are. His refusal to judge them is stated explicitly in Ivanov, where a character says, “I don’t understand you, you don’t understand me, and neither of us understand ourselves.” He is totally neutral on the issue of morality, he has no judgment on how we behave with each other, and yet even a toddler knows what is good behavior and what isn’t. But Chekhov resisted the easy categorization of credit and blame.

REMNICK: Did you ever study Russian?

STOPPARD: For about a fortnight. I was very keen on a girl once who went to Russian lessons. But she gave it up after two weeks, so I saw no point in continuing it. [LAUGHTER]

REMNICK: So you base your version of the play on a word for word translation written by someone else.

STOPPARD: Yes. Of course, one would not want to see a production of Chekhov written by a linguist. [LAUGHTER] My assistant, Helen Rappaport, provides not only a word-for-word translation, but she also suggests alternate words, she notes topical and historical references, allusions, that sort of thing. Plus there are all these other versions up there on the shelf. I ended up taking down an anonymous one, which was accurate and faithful, which meant that it was also a little stilted in its conversation.

REMNICK: Robert Lowell wrote a series of poems he called Imitations, based on various poets, which were not so much translations as stylistic echoes. But they all ended up sounding like Robert Lowell. Do you want your Chekhov to sound like Tom Stoppard?

STOPPARD: Oh no. Although there have been moments. When I was working on translating a Schnitzler play, there was a particular line, I can’t remember what it is now, but I could not see my way through it. And that was like a revelation, because that was the point where I realized that as a translator I was there to serve the purpose, and not the text. Having said that, however, I have done horrible things to other people’s plays; --

REMNICK: For instance. [LAUGHTER]

STOPPARD: If I may finish what I was about to say after the semi-colon, “which I would have to have done with mine.” [LAUGHTER] For instance, in this production of Ivanov I just finished working on -- I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else -- I killed a character that Chekhov unaccountably failed to kill off. [LAUGHTER] I gave him a heart attack. Chekhov wrote the play in ten days but he wasn’t satisfied with it, he was never satisfied with it, as a matter of fact, which I felt was an opening for me, although not a wide-opened door. [LAUGHTER] So there was a monologue which an actress gives, and she’s essentially saying things she’d said before, but I didn’t want to cut it, so I gave another character a heart attack while she was delivering it. Two things happening at the same time. And Chekhov had the last laugh, because no one even noticed. [LAUGHTER]

[Continued here]

Signifying Nothing

What's slower than the G Train, full of Stalinist visuals and Hermann-esque "You are ordered to FEEL now" music, and engrossing without actually being exciting? (Or to quote Spice World, excellent, without actually being any good at all?) What else could it be but the Patrick Stewart Macbeth at BAM. It's sold out, it gets a standing ovation, and it is the perfect example of Peter Brook's Deadly Theatre in living (sic) action.

This production takes the cake, bakes it at 125 for 9 hours,

sings a Russian folk song over it, lights the candles by rubbing

two sticks together, and then sings "Happy Birthday" at 16 RPM.

What’s Deadly Theatre? It's people with embalming fluid in their veins, which makes it the polar opposite of Immediate Theatre, which has people with real blood in them. It’s where the stage is filled with animated statues rather than human beings, or actors who are always Acting with a capital A in a production that has been Directed with a capital D to present a Poem Untrivial with a capital PU. And shouting. A lot of shouting. Which is what British casts do when they perform a play in Americuh. To quote Ava:

I was delighted with Rock and Roll, apart from some jaw-dropping scenery-chewing. I asked Ester, "Do you think they always do it like that or is it just for here?""Here," she said.

[Heaving a huge sigh] Yes, here. Talk to my friend DJ about Ian McKellen's Richard III and you'll hear the same thing. As for me, when I saw Amy's View in London, it made me feel like I was sitting up on stage with Judi Dench going through what she was going through; but when I saw it on 45th Street, it made me feel like I was sitting in a theatre watching a bunch of incredibly subtle comedians tell nothing but dick jokes. That's what happens when the Brits play here. It's the rare transfer that doesn't shout itself hoarse to the second balcony.

So that's part of the problem here: the show is Deadly because that's perceived to be the only way to perform a play in front of Americans. And Deadly is not only shouting, it's pauses. Truckloads of pauses. A caution of pauses, to coin a phrase. In this production? There were about 10 minutes of pauses per hour, so by the end of the night about 25 minutes of the 2 hour 45 minute running time was dead silence. Operative word being dead. For example -- here's how Stewart delivered the "Tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquoy:

Tomorrow (five second pause)
and tomorrow (five second pause)
[oh yeah] and tomorrow (five second pause)
[This concept totally surprises me] creep (pause)
[Isn't it amazing?] in this petty place (pause)

from day (pause)

to day (pause)
dow-ow-own (pause)
to the last "Sill Uh Bull" [I just LOVE saying it that way]
of re- (beat)
corded (beat)

time. (Really long pause to signify Time passing; audience eats it up)

Here's the production in a nutshell. It's also the perfect example of the difference between Deadly Theatre and Immediate Theatre. There’s a working sink on stage. In Immediate Theatre, somebody with blood on his hands will go to the sink, turn on the water, and wash the blood off. In Deadly Theatre, someone with blood on his hands will go to the sink, stand there with his hands held in front of him, and talk about crap. Then his wife will come on stage with blood up to her elbows and a big old splash of it on her nice green gown, and she’ll join him at the sink with her hands held in front of her, and unlike any actual human female on earth she will not even clean the blood from her dress, never mind the blood from her hands. She'll just stand there and talk about crap.

It's a fucking sink! Use it!!!

Sound? Check. Fury? Check. Signifying nothing? Check and double check. Talk about tales told by an idiot . . .

Au Revoir, Parapluie

Ever wonder what Buster Keaton would have created if he'd been a choreographer?

Then go see Au Revoir, Parapluie at BAM before it closes on December 16th.

And yes, it's heretical to mention Keaton because choreographer/star James Thiérrée is actually the grandson of Charlie Chaplin. But watching him force his feet to walk or try to put on a jacket (okay, the jacket bit is pure WC Fields) is like watching an outtake from The General or Sherlock Junior.

Everyone in this piece is fantastic, the mood switches from slapstick to tenderness at the drop of a shuttlecock, and at times the visuals make you think you're watching the live-action version of a Miyazaki movie.

Seriously, I can't recommend this highly enough, and will probably try to see it again before it closes.