Cry You One (Mondo Bizarro and ArtSpot)

Fear not, street theatre and political performance is live and well.  A collaborative project by Mondo Bizarro and Artspot, "Cry You One" seeks to entertain, educate, enrage its audience. The subject: the devastation of cultures and wetlands in Louisiana by levees and petroleum/chemical industries. Through storytelling, music, and dance, the small audience groups are led through the Malty Lakes district.
These outdoor performances pieces tend to be one of the best parts of Arts and Ideas.  Though this wasn't one of my favorite ones, I'm glad we went. 

About Elly (Asghar Farhadi)

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (2011) ranks among my favorite films. When The Past appeared in the US two years later, we were not disappointed.  Finally, Farhadi's 2009 film, About Elly, was released this spring, and we made certain not to miss it.  Our efforts were supremely rewarded.
The film features a 8 or so minute seaside episode featuring small children and a young schoolteacher that is one of the most excruciating scenes I've ever witnessed on film.  The rest of the film carefully parses that scene, revealing small lies, one by one, until compounded they create a story that can no longer be sustained.  More broadly, it is an allegory of living in a restricted regime.

Highly recommended.  Should not be missed.

Dan Zanes and Moona Luna (Arts and Ideas Festival)

Lively, energetic performance to family audiences on the Green got EVERYONE dancing and tickling one another.
Preceded by the Connecticut Mariachi Academy: authentic!

Magmanus (Arts and Ideas Festival)

 This Swedish juggling and acrobatic duo grabs its audience in two ways. First, the two work hard to charm the audience with winks and tomfoolery; the percentage of the show spent on acrobatics or juggling is rather small.  Second, they incorporate a member of the audience.  In the show we saw, "Kim" was an extraordinarily good sport. And because the find half hour of the show depended on her good-nature cooperation, they must have a keen for selecting the right person who will neither protest too much or try to upstage their antics. 

Recommend

Roz Chast (Arts & Ideas Festival)

Roz Chast's warm, humane talk opened up this year's Arts and Ideas Festival. 

Recommend.

Midsummer (from Shakespeare's MSND)

Energetic re-imagining of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.

Love and Mercy (Bill Pohlad)

I'm not a connoisseur of popular music (or culture, for that matter). Having owned fewer than a dozen rock albums, I haven't listened to side B over and over, studied liner notes, or deconstructed the cover design. Instead, I came to rock and soul and country music in the most plebeian way, the radio.  Though I know decades of top 40s music, often I cannot match music with musicians or place them within the right decade. There are enormous gaps in my knowledge, and I'm not bothered by that fact.

My ignorance is compensated by Mike's fascination and knowledge.  One room in our home is given over the cider-block-and-board shelves that have held his albums for forty years and several addresses.  It's his interest and curiosity that takes us to biopics like Love and Mercy, a sympathetic portrayal of the dangerous dance between Brian Wilson's creativity and his mental illness.  Sometimes it's so sympathetic that the lines harden: the bad guys--his father and his therapist--are really bad, and the good guys--the studio musicians and his future wife--are really good. 

The sound design was more than Beach Boys music playing in the background. For both Mike and me, the film's best parts were set in the studio while Pet Sounds was being recorded. 

Recommend

Good People (David Lindsay-Abaire)

Set in South Boston, Good People deals with class issues that most of us want to ignore: why do some people get out of Southie and why are others stuck there?  The play, with good humor (that is never condescending or mean) carefully examines each reason or justification that we might carelessly toss out as an answer.  Turning over the excuses, turning them inside out, and bringing the hidden into focus, it forces us to rethink easy platitudes and self-righteousness. 

TheaterWorks' director Rob Ruggiero began with a strong script, and he didn't let it down.  His excellent cast delivered us with characters and a story that was pitch perfect and perfectly timed.  Erika Rolfrud as Margaret, the single mother who cannot even hold down a cashier's job at the local dollar store, is by turns infuriating and selfless.

It's productions such as this that make us subscribers to this fine local theater.

Highly recommended.

A Human Being Died That Night (Nicholas Wright)

I admit that I was late coming to more than a passing interest in the anti-apartheid movement and the ANC, not really becoming aware of what was happening in South Africa until Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990.  In many ways, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established later that decade should have included non-South Africans like me who, for whatever reason, failed to prevent human rights violations.  Because it dealt with a collective guilt that included my own, I found the TRC fascinating and therapeutic from afar.

Nicholas Wright based his play on a book by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist who served on the TRC.  It spans several years of interviews she conducted with Eugene de Kock, known in the South African press as Prime Evil, while he served two life sentences plus 212 years in Pretoria Central Prison for crimes committed when he was head of a police unit charged with covertly countering terroism (aka ANC). 

As presented in the play, de Kock's imprisonment gave him a freedom to speak the truth that those who sought amnesty or forgiveness were unable to quite grasp.  Beyond regretting the atrocities committed by himself and under his leadership, he spoke of the guilt of others who never fully admitted the truth of their complicity.

Neither maudlin nor glib, the performances by Noma Dumezweni and Matthew Marsh are impeccable in their timing and subtle.

Must see, highly recommended.

Kiss Me, Kate (Cole Porter)

Shakespeare + Cole Porter + Darko Tresnjak = a surprisingly delightful evening.

Recommend

Alejandro Escovedo with Warren Hood

A surprising evening from musicians associated with cowpunk and Chicano rock. 

Highly recommended

The Connection (Cédric Jimenez)

The Connection continues the crime drama The French Connection in Marseilles rather than New York City, and in doing so it becomes the American film’s antithesis.  Set between 1975 and the early 1980s, the 135-minute film has none of the heart-thumping car chases of William Friedkin’s 1971 action film. Instead, it is almost flat, not in a bad way, but in the way life generally is: we go about our daily lives, never really knowing what will come of our decisions or chances; only in retrospect do we realize that our successes were really failures, our disappointments carved out opportunities, the end of the film brings us back to the beginning.  The betrayals in this film are numerous and the double-crosses heartbreaking.  Even the protagonist (the magistrate Pierre Michel) and his antagonist (the crime boss Tany Zamba) lead lives that oddly parallel and mirror one other.  The magistrate’s family suffers from and resent his single-minded efforts to clean up his city, while the drug lord’s family adore him and relish the privileges his cash-happy work provides.  

Recommend

Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Vinterberg)

I've read most of Thomas Hardy's novels, including (I thought) Far From the Madding Crowd. I find his plot twists excruciating, but they pull me along in my desire for a happy resolution that never materializes.  Imagine my surprise when Far From the Madding Crowd closes with a happy ending--and the plot summary in my handy Oxford companion confirms it's not a Hollywood fabrication. Happy, that is, if you're Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, and not poor Boldwood.

Lovely to watch. Carey Mulligan was very fine, and the men in her life conveyed their thoughts and feelings with ever so subtle glances and twitches. 

The subdued and restrained musical score was much welcomed.

Highly recommend.

The Liar (David Ives)

David Ives' verse "transadaptation" of Pierre Corneille's 17th romp is pitch perfect.  Coupled with the cast's impeccable timing and dynamic performance, the play was all we could have hoped for a Friday evening's reprieve after a particularly difficult week. I groaned when I realized it would be in rhyme, but I should have known that Ives' rhyming would not get tedious; instead, he uses it to set up unexpected relationships, combining, for instance,  "pont neuf," "e-neuf [enough]," and "leuf [love]" to create humor and pointed commentary.  The valet, Cliton, sets the tone with his witty and dynamic opening meta-commentary that provides just the right amount of exposition to get the play off to a rollicking start. Excellent direction by Penny Metropulos and scenic design by Kristen Robinson.

Highly recommended

Elevada (Sheila Callaghan)

A terrific romantic comedy about cancer and love, that steers away from sentimentality and veers clear of moralizing. And it's funny!


We were particularly impressed with the way the frequent scene changes were handled.  Bravo to the set, lighting, and sound designers!

Recommend.

Preston Montfort: An American Tragedy (Ryan Campbell)

The third installment of this year's Carlotta Festival of New Plays, Campbell's play appropriates the Greek heroic tragedy--there were nods to Euripedes' Herakles and Sophocles' Ajax--and its conventions--most pointedly the doomed hero and the chorus of naive citizens--to comment on the US's repeated global military intrusions to preserve the American way of life while destroying the lives of innocents abroad and the lives of the soldiers it sends. 

The opening monologue and the closing dialogue between Preston and his buddy, Chris, are the most powerful segments of the play. Though the lines are sometimes leaden and off key, some are lyrical: "I'm a breathing gun, a walking bomb, a knife that slithers in the night."  (Scenes involving Preston's brother Edward are tedious; his character and his scenes could be eliminated without crippling the play in any way.)

It is an ambitious play, and we look forward to seeing more of Campbell's work.

Recommended.

The Children (Phillip Howze)

The second installment of the 2015 Carlotta Festival is a musical based on a community of homeless LGBTQ young people in NYC.  Intriguing book. Because we're not fans of musicals, I'll won't comment further. 

Deer and the Lovers (Emily Zemba)

It's that time of year again: Yale's Carlotta Festival of New Plays is in full swing. Tonight, we saw the first of three and were very impressed.

The program notes were limited to a Frida Kahlo quotation and her self-portrait as a St Sebastian- arrow-pierced, antlered deer. Together, they set up expectations for a theatrical piece of feminist surrealism, expectations immediately defied by the pedestrian stage sets. Of course, the sets misled us, and Frida spoke to the heart of the matter.

Seventh-inning stretch: scene change during intermission performed by animal-masked grounds keepers

Zemba's comedy depends upon apparently absurd situations that are explained away with seemingly plausible reasons---until the rational sides is twisted into further absurdity.  Her use of language places her squarely in the school of Will Eno, with the linguistic ground constantly shifting about us. Zemba has a good ear for language, and I look forward to seeing her future work.

The first act was stronger than the second, when the timing was off and the play attempted a bit too much.

Recommend

'Tis Pity She's a Whore (John Ford)

Red Bull Theater’s production of John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore presented a clear exposition and interpretation of this memorable (but seldom performed) Jacobin revenge tale of sibling incest and atheism.  This play does not explore the causes and consequences of accidental incest, that unfortunate mistake resulting when identity is misplaced and family lost through catastrophe or carelessness.  Instead, as the play makes clear from the first scene, Giovanni and Annabella move from siblings to lovers knowingly. In fact, Giovanni has already sought sanction from his confession. Rather than abandon his desires for his sister, as admonished by the friar, he forsakes his religious beliefs and accepts the mantle of the atheist.  

In this way, the way seems to be more about atheism than incest.  With many parallels to rightwing arguments made in today’s single-sex marriage debates, the play speaks forcefully about the consequences of ignoring Christianity’s bedrock principles; without the grounding of religious faith, the play threatens us with the specter of all sorts of despicable practices becoming the norm.  

Frequently, Giovanni takes on the heroic cast of Stanley Fish’s version of Milton’s Satan: the hero sent to test our values.  Just how much do we find ourselves sympathizing with the incestuous lovers? With whom are we more upset, Annabella pregnant with her brother’s child or the cuckolded husband who beats her? 

Jesse Berger’s production spreads out these issues for the audience, and there is no turning away from their brutal reality.  It's good to see his Red Bull productions moving uptown to Broadway.

A final note. Perhaps this production sees camp as another point of intersection between the Jacobian and the contemporary; otherwise, the costuming was baffling and absolutely off-putting.

Recommended. The caveats should be obvious. 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare)

A few years back, we made a mad dash to New York, landing in a small off-off-Broadway venue—perhaps a former bank lobby turned performance area.  Mike had managed to snag two of the season’s hottest tickets, Fiasco Theater’s 7-actor production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.  Because I hadn’t read the reviews, I expect some sort of corny, madcap confusion closer to Shakespeare, Reduced than serious theater.  Instead, we encountered the most lucid and most moving full-production of the Shakespearean romance we had ever seen.

Fiasco’s newest production, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, originated at Washington D.C.’s Folger Theater, and it is now at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Center in Brooklyn.  Our expectations were very high, and Fiasco exceeded them. No exceptions.

From that spectacular production, I will mention a few notable moments: Julia’s tearing up of Proteus’ love letter and then piecing it back together (her delivery was a pitch perfect blend of comedy and realism); Zachary Fine’s embodiment of Crab the dog (so much work done with a black clown nose, his barely parted lips, and lively eyes); Emily Young’s saucy and justly righteous Sylvia; Valentine's closing forgiveness of Proteus (unironic and deeply plausible); and the 60+ minute talkback wherein the actors showed themselves to be as thoughtful and articulate as the production itself.