UStheater, Opera, and Performance

Monday, May 20, 2013

LIST OF WORKS INCLUDED

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Douglas Messerli | "The Unfortunate Truth of My Situtation" (on Richard Foreman's Old-Fashioned Prostitutes)

the unfortunate truth of my situation

By Douglas Messerli

Richard Foreman Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) / The Public Theater, New York, the performance I attended was on Saturday, May 4, 2013

After years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). Like most of his works, this play is set upon a stage decked out with numerous alphabetical configurations, portraits of “significant” people, numerous odd props, and the strings that outline the horizontal shell of the stage, a kind of mix between a metaphorical representation of string theory and an eruv, the defining territory of the traditional Jewish community that outlines the boundaries through which certain objects can be moved or carried on holy days. The effect, no matter what Foreman’s precise purposes, is to draw a line between what occurs on “stage” and the audience. Above all else, Foreman’s plays are definitely not narrative representations that draw their audiences into the “romance” of the story, but are purposefully puzzling brain twisters that demand the audience think about what is being said and done within the author’s domain.

Even Foreman’s title is enigmatic: what are “old fashioned prostitutes?” And how can a romance, usually defined as a form dedicated to idealism and a preoccupation with idealized love, be “true?” In fact, the central character of Foreman’s new work, Samuel (theater veteran Rocco Sisto), never once has sex with the prostitutes he encounters, and although the central figure, Suzie (Alenka Kraigher) invites Samuel to her room and even spikes his gin, no love occurs—unless one speaks of the love of language and philosophical speculation. The only physical contact that Samuel has with anyone is a sudden hug between Samuel and the mysterious “pimp-like” figure accompanying the two “prostitutes,” Alfredo (David Skeist).

(Alfredo, Samuel hug)

ALFREDO

Careful

SAMUEL

I do — beg of you, friend Alfredo ALFREDO

(He grabs Alfredo's lapels) Careful.

— Convince beautiful Suzie

That when I speak to her directly

This is always the unfortunate truth of my situation

Suzie and Gabriella are not women of love as much as they are women who flirt, “coquettes,” as Samuel describes them, whose major activities include “sipping afternoon alcohol under the roar of distant traffic” and attempting to catch the gaze of passing men.

As Suzie convincingly argues, she is more a “teacher” than a lover, a woman who shows men the way. And she spends most of her time in this play grappling with Samuel’s attempt to come to terms with what “reality” is, what is the self, and what does it all mean in every day experience.

There is never a clear set of answers or even a set of codified speculations to precisely what Foreman is arguing for or against in his provocative plays, but there are often clues to the animus behind them. In this case Samuel expresses it quite early in the work:

But perhaps, ladies and gentleman,

it is best never to speak openly about

such things

But it did happen

That travelling these streets

In bright sunlight

An old man with white hair

Shabbily dressed, trudging slowly

In the direction opposite to the one

In which I was traveling

Carrying a large, soiled cardboard box

with what personal belongings

I could not guess

But — whispered hoarsely under his breath

"Go to Berkeley, make film".

I did not respond.

But I frowned

And a few seconds later

turned to watch him proceed, slowly

Down the street (girls giggle)

Later in the day SUZIE & GABRIELLA

Lying on the bed in my hotel room Ooo

I wondered -- I wondered should I have approached him

To ask for clarification.

Was he speaking to me

Or to himself

— yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns

And my possible

Future

GABRIELLA

Go to Berkeley, my friend

Make film.

Which could have meant, not the city in sun drenched

California

SUZIE

But possibly the long dead Irish GABRIELLA

philosopher of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley himself, Oooo.

whose view of reality might be poetically re-imagined

as a vision of the world in which experience

itself was but a thin film, spread in illusionary fashion

upon human consciousness.

SAMUEL

So that

"Go to Berkeley, make film", could have meant, go

deeper into the notion of the world as

a transparent surface only —

depending upon the impress of a mental apparatus —

snapping the world into apparent being only —

Accordingly, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes does serve as a kind of “thin film” exploring the “illusionary” experience of consciousness, a bit like Proust (and the mysterious city in which Samuel exists reminds me of Paris) steeped in sensual appreciation. Even now and then a voice cries out “hold,” reminding us a bit of a film command. But of course it also suggests that the audience might “hold” that idea a bit longer in the mind.

Samuel, obviously, is also Samuel Beckett, and Foreman’s seemingly personal memories are often channeled through the great author, vaguely paralleling, in particular, works such as “First Love” and, at play’s end, “Imagine Dead Imagine.” It is not that this play’s story is even similar to Beckett’s first love; there are simply associated threads between the character of the Beckett story who meets a woman, “Lulu,” upon a park bench, a woman just as determined as Suzie to bring home her man. Unlike Suzie, the fat Lulu does eventually lure the narrator of Beckett’s tale into her home, but the two sleep in separate rooms, yet as in Foreman’s play her coquetry (numerous visits to the same park bench) results in very little “love” and ends with some of the same questions about reality and experience that Foreman’s Samuel poses. Similar to many of Beckett’s characters, Foreman’s Samuel cannot even move when he is asked to follow Suzie home, his legs being suddenly frozen in space, wrapped in the production in a gunny sack.

Since, in Berkeley’s “film of consciousness,” however, nothing is precisely determinable even the memory of such experiences and the identity of self comes into question. If Beckett may lie under Foreman’s Samuel, so too does Foreman’s own persona, Rainer Thompson, recently appearing in his autobiographical film, I Am Rainer Thompson, and I Have Lost It Completely, which lies behind this play’s character, as Samuel suddenly declares he is Rainer. And in this sense—although it seems preposterous to claim this in a oeuvre that has always been highly personal and autobiographical—Old-Fashioned Prostitutes seems to be one of Foreman’s most intimate works, a kind of strange memory play made up of his own and other writer’s intellectual detritus.

In the end, however, it is nearly pure Beckett in the final words of a play which has struggled with self-knowing and reality, with illusion and consciousness:

Emptiness is here

(all to wall, then pause, then back: Music)

VOICE

Imagine no world but this world

Imagine no world but this world (THUD)

End of play. (THUD)

End of play.

Despite the play’s declaration of “emptiness,” Foreman, like Beckett, has embraced this world with his hundreds of questions and speculations over the course of his career, surely representing a “true romance” with “this world” with which we have such a difficult relationship.

New York-Los Angeles, May 5-May 13, 2013

Friday, May 10, 2013

Douglas Messerli | "Loud and Quiet" (on Kelly's and Minchin's Matilda)

loud and quiet

by Douglas Messerli

Dennis Kelly (book), Tim Minchin (music and lyrics) Matilda / New York, Sam S. Schubert Theatre, the performance I attended as a matinee on May 5, 2013

The most surprising theatrical experience of this year was provided by the British musical Matilda, based on Roald Dahl’s children’s book. Long before the musical opened and was heaped with praise from New York Times reviewer, Ben Bratley, I had ordered tickets and was looking forward to enjoying it. Along with Kinky Boots it has garnered since the highest number of Tony nominations.

The set, consisting of a series of lettered blocks cascading across the stage and into the audience space, was quite innovative, and all the technical aspects of this work, particularly the lighting, was wall done. And who wouldn’t love the ridiculously mean child-hater, Miss Trunchbull (played in drag by the excellent Bertie Carvel), the absurdly mindless Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood (Leslie Margherita and Gabriel Ebert) and their brain dead son, Michael (Taylor Trensch). The choruses of urchin dancers put their collective talents in high gear through singing and dancing, and little Oona Lawrence (playing the role Mitilda) was charmingly able and cute. The audience, filled with overweight girls whose parents think it their responsibility to stock each of them with sacks of candies to be crunched throughout the play, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I?

Was I turning and old curmudgeon, I pondered mid-way through the first act, the likes of which I’ve always promised myself I would never become. At the intermission, however, the couple next to me, seasoned theater-goers so I had discerned from our pre-curtain discussions, quietly asked me what I thought about the work. I paused, not wanting to staunch anyone’s joy of the performance. “We don’t like it all,” she quietly confided. “I even thought we should go home during intermission” added her husband. And I admitted, for the first time in my life, that I to had just resisted doing the same myself. So began the second act, which continued much as the first—for me an utterly joyless and rote playing out of the ridiculous fairytale about a little girl who is punished for being smart.

Part of the problem was simply the mumbling of the mostly British cast (Bratley did warn of this). It was often simply hard to understand the lyrics of the basically tuneless songs. Having perceived that, perhaps, the director apparently attempted to turn up the volume, as if we were all hard of hearing. In fact in the 7^th song of act one, the singers note that issue precisely in the number “Loud,” and in the final act Matilda herself observes that suddenly, momentarily at least, things have grown “Quiet,” the third song from the last.

Accompanying these “loud” pastiches, all of which sound, like so much contemporary theater music, as if they were created by a machine programmed to connect the dots, are the well-intentioned dances which both children and adults perform as if they have been robotized. While they certainly leap about with great energy, there seems to be no joy in their gyrations. Only the Wormwoods, she with her dancing partner Rudolpho (Phillip Spaeth), he in his rubbery legged motions within striped lime-green pants, seem to have any “choreographical” fun.

Matilda, whether she is telling “loudly voiced” (at times even shouted) stories to her local librarian or suffering the attacks of Miss Trunchbull and her own family members, almost gets abused out of existence. The only moment, until the musical lurches to its end, that she is allowed to express any joy is when the tender Miss Honey asks to be her friend, to which she responds with a big hug. Otherwise she is just a figurehead, a brilliant young girl at whom nearly everyone else yells in derision. Even poor Annie, of the musical of that name, got more love and attention from her evil headmistress, than does Matilda.

It is not, however, that Matilda, as its makers have argued, is a “dark” work, as much as it is empty. While Annie, at least, had “tomorrow” to look forward, Matilda is amazingly unflappable, committed to her reading and thinking as mindlessly as Miss Trunchbull is committed to her hate. Despite their thoughtless machinations, I think I’d prefer to live with the Wormwoods than with the fantasy-spinning, slightly aloof Matilda. But, obviously, there is no living with anyone in this tale, since each character is nothing more than a cardboard, cartoonish type. Even the gentle Miss Honey lives out life in a shed instead of a house, as if her whole world has been miniaturized and flattened. Only Miss Trunchbull, ensconced her in ill-gotten mansion, has any “bulk,” and she’s more fun than everyone else put together.

Indeed, despite the work’s pretense of siding with the small and quiet Matilda, this musical advocates the loud and large, which is perhaps why all the girls both in front and back of me sat throughout with their sacks of candy on their laps.

So desperate to be loved was Dennis Kelly’s and Tim Minchin’s work, that at one moment near the end, the stage suddenly burst—apparently in response to the downfall of Miss Trunchbull—into a shower of strobe lights, while green lasers shot out across the ceiling of the uncomfortable Schubert balcony. “Awesome,” shouted out a child in the audience. It was at that point I had to admit that this was simply not a work created for the likes of me—nor for my two dazed neighbors, who together with me made our way grumpily back into the crowded mid-town streets.

“Why do you think,” asked the wife, “this got such remarkably positive reviews?” “I don’t know,” I responded, “but it might have something to do with the fact that this has not been a particularly stellar season. Reviewers have to like something.”

Los Angeles, May 9, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position

UStheater, Opera, and Performance

Monday, May 20, 2013

LIST OF WORKS INCLUDED

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Douglas Messerli | "The Unfortunate Truth of My Situtation" (on Richard Foreman's Old-Fashioned Prostitutes)

Friday, May 10, 2013

Douglas Messerli | "Loud and Quiet" (on Kelly's and Minchin's Matilda)

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