Strindberg: A Dream Play

A Dream Play

Based on the play by August Strindberg

Direction & Puppet Design by Joseph Jonah Therrien

Studio Mobius Theatre

March 24 – April 3, 2011

Review: Edmond Chibeau

The Joseph Jonah Therrien production of Strindberg’s, A Dream Play is a work of genius. It is very hard for me to go out on a limb to write that, so I had to say it up front. I went to see the play because I like Strindberg in general and A Dream Play in particular. I had never heard of director Joseph Jonah Therrien but I am now an admirer.

In this production puppets, actors, movement and text carry equal narrative weight. The themes are carried seamlessly across different media. Imagine a stage play as a symphony and the director as the conductor. Although a composer might develop a theme in the strings then move it to the woodwinds and then the brass, it is the conductor’s job to make sure that the voicing, feel, and interpretation is coherent across those different sections of the orchestra. The unity of the interpretation rests in the skill and sensitivity of the conductor, or in the case of a stage play, the director.

In A Dream Play, Therrien takes themes of angst, compassion, enlightenment, or irony, and moves them across media, from words to movement, to puppet, to set piece, to puppet handlers. Not only does each of these elements do a good job and exist in the same space as the others, but each is an integrated part of the other. Imagine members of a family so close that they can finish each other’s sentences and each can express what the other means to say. That is how the parts work together in this production.

One of the dangers of this kind of production is that the piece becomes all surface, and the deeper human meanings are sacrificed for facile effect.

In this Dream Play the different elements serve the larger meaning of the work. But the meaning is closer to the meaning of a piece of music then to the meaning of a newspaper report.

The attitude of this presentation is early 21^st Century Goth, not early 20^th Century Expressionism.

Strindberg calls for a door with “an air-hole shaped like a four-leaf clover.” Someone familiar with the play might wonder why there is no air-hole in the door that plays such an important part in the play.

Large sections of the text of Strindberg’s play have been removed and the wordings of different translations have been adjusted by the director-adaptor. But the production is true to Strindberg’s sense of awe before the cosmos and sorrowful compassion for the vanities and conceits of humankind.

The movement of the performers and the many different kinds and sizes of puppets are fluid and extended to the fullest the reach.

The stylized movements of Bryan Swormstedt (The Lawyer) and Tom Foran (The Poet) are especially articulate and compelling.

David Regan (whose work can be seen often on New England stages) plays the author Strindberg. Regan finds the right tone and disposition to lead us into the mood of the play at the beginning, and to round off the corners and bring us back to earth at the end.

Mandy Weiss (Indra’s Daughter) is the motivating force of the story. If she is not pitch perfect the whole work suffers. She nails it. Bam!

Miron Gusso (Doorman) and Desmont Thorne as (The Officer) understand their respective roles and work well with the rest of the production.

Costume designer, Matthew Charles Peoples has created unbalanced Goth-post-Punk-anti-fashion statements that work as part of the action of the play. The left leg and foot of many of the performers is different from the right. The costumes contribute to the character.

Sound designer, Steven Magro reinforces the sound and drops in little changes in the presence of the voices without imposing his interpretation on the performance.

Lighting designer, Kwame Tucker keeps the playing areas clearly lit while maintaining the dark mood of the piece.

At the end of the play there are no curtain calls. A glaring work-light comes on over the audience for a short while and then the houselights come up. The audience is left thinking about what has just transpired on stage. There is no warm self-congratulatory group hug that usually takes place during the curtain call for most theatricals.

No smiling actors, no hugs, just think about it yo.

Dada & Futurism

Dada Lunch

Under the Supervision of David Pellegrini

13 October 2010

Student Center Theatre, ECSU

Saw a good collection of Dada and Futurist plays and performance pieces Directed by David Pellegrini. “Gas Heart” and several others with a narration giving the background of Futurism and Dada. The jperformance presented a nice sense of what Dada and Futurism, were, and might have been. The Futurists, who I have always despised, had a great alternative sensibility. They were influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Fascism. I love their speed and energy. Hate their love of war and Fascism. The production by Pellegrini was easy to watch and still brought out the difficulties in the texts and contexts of Futurism. Le Coeur a Gaz “The Gas Heart” aka “The Gas Powered Heart” by Tristan Tzara was excellent. We often read or hear about the performance works of Dada but we rarely get to see them.

Perhaps the retrospective and re-mounting of performance works by Marina Abramovic in Spring of 2010 The The Museum of Modern Art in New York made it acceptable to re-produce performance works of the past. Indeed they should not only be re-produced but re-interpreted. The Dada, Futurist and Surrealist performances of the early 20^th Century have something to give us even in the 21 Century. Epater le bourgeois may have been a concept we learned from the French Decadent poets of the 1890s but it is carried forward by Dada.

I would write more but what’s the use, and besides, it is time for my absinthe.

Brecht Ain't Aristotle

Brecht Ain’t Aristotle
By Edmond Chibeau

Three Penny Opera
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Directed by Dave Dalton
Connecticut Repertory Theatre
At Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre
24 April – 3 May 2008

Hegemony is derived from the Greek word for power. But in a Brechtian context it means more than simply having power, it means having such complete and unquestioned power that it seems to be the only way things can be. Hegemony is when the oppressor has so thoroughly colonized the mind of the oppressed that they believe their powerlessness is in the very nature of things. When they believe change is impossible. Brecht took up the cudgel, or rather the pen, in an attempt to help us throw off the yoke of capitalist hegemony. His struggle was a brave one but he did not emerge victorious.

A key to any production of The Three Penny Opera is that the audience should question the situation that gave rise to the world where these things take place. The music and the lyrics both carry a biting irony that make the listener not smile indulgently, but think through the causes of the economic injustice that is imposed at the top and trickles down to the lowest stratum of society.

Brecht suggests a state of anomie among the beggars, but in fact he sets up an alternate morality that is a mirror image of the morality of the world of the police chief and his employers. The robbers embrace the morality of the robber barons.

In the first act when Mr. Peacham is told that Polly has eloped with Mack the Knife he runs to her bedroom and soon returns carrying a teddy bear and bemoaning the loss of his daughter. He and his wife hold the bear between them and sing. The bear is an index of Polly who cannot be there with them. The bear touches our hearts and makes palpable the sense of loss felt by the mother and father who have lost their daughter. The king of beggars is outraged that his daughter should fall in love with a thief and pimp.

The CRT Three Penny Opera captures the essence of the 1920s German expressionist aesthetic without imitating it or offering us a historical reconstruction. It offers a 21st Century dystopian expressionism that traces back through Rent, Chorus Line, Cats, and a host of other influences both domestic and international.

The elements of this production work together. Director Dave Dalton has synchronized the costume, sets, music, lights, and movement. He coaxes them into working together to create an artistic whole that is appropriate for the company he was working with and the performance space they are in. The production is not an amalgam of theatre tropes but a rich Gesamtkunstwerk. (Richard Wagner used the word Gesamtkunstwerk to suggest the integration of production elements for a significantly different kind of opera.) This show wisely uses the 1954 Mark Blitzstein translation which is a masterpiece and has not been equaled in the past half century.

In this production the rigging is exposed to the audience and at various times when sets or curtains are to be flown in they are hoisted by actors stepping into the wings and unfurling the counterweighted ropes that fly scenery in and out.

In one scene the moon is lowered on a rope and serves as a backdrop for a romantic love song. One cannot help but smile at the way the artificiality of the moon is used to estrange the audience from the sentimentality of the lyrics.

The device of projecting slogans onto cards held by the actors has recently found popularity and is used here to good effect. (The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha comes to mind.)

In the wedding scene we first see Polly playing with a doll house and dolls. As the other characters approach her they are given dolls dressed in tuxedos. As they offer gifts and congratulations to the wedding couple they extend their dolls toward the person with whom they are speaking, just the way children handle dolls and speak for them when they play together. This bit of puppetry works like a charm.

Movement, voicing, sets, and costumes all have a similar hitch, stagger, or lurch that is a theme carried throughout the production. Director Dalton is able to move a theme across different elements of a production the way a composer or conductor is able to bring a motif or tempo out of: first the strings, then the brass, and then the woodwinds. In this case an abstract idea or feeling was initiated by the set, then the costumes, then the movement of an actor, and then transferred to several voices.

Although Polly intones with coquettish innocence that, “Love is rosier than a tanned bottom,” there is an interesting lack of sexuality in the prostitutes working for J. J. Peachum. They indicate salacious sexuality but they do not engender it. Many of these actresses have been seen in other CRT productions and have emanated an almost palpable sensuousness, but here each becomes a neutral place holder that indicates the corrupt sensuality of indentured sexworkers in the capitalist system. Was it really the intention of the director to estrange us from the warm sexiness that we have come to expect of prostitutes on stage and to force us to confront the economic realities of the wage slave? Or was it a cumulative side effect of the costumes, make-up, sets, lights and stylized gesture that served to reveal the socio-economic message of the Brecht/Weil text?

Christopher Hirsh as J.J. Peachchum is the fulcrum on which the whole play swings. Hirsh is a powerful presence who always works within the context of the scene he is in, and the ensemble he is with. Michael Daly is a sinuous and confident Macheath. He will mature into a compelling actor. Hillary Parker has a chance as Jenny to work in a different register than she is usually asked to portray. She carries it off with her usual aplomb. Rachel Leigh Rosado has a stage presence that demands our attention and then rewards us with a verbally precise and emotionally articulate performance.

The costumes by Dragana Vucetic were ecstatic, eclectic and effective. As a designer Vucetic has her own voice that is uniquely itself yet collaborates harmoniously with the larger goals of the production. There is a note in the playbill that tells us that the costume designs by Vucetic fulfill the requirements for her thesis production and that her advisor is Professor Laura Crow. Crow’s designs in other productions are quite different in tone from Vucetic’s. Crow must be an interesting advisor indeed to be able to elicit such competence and creativity from her advisee without leading her into the trap of imitation.

Emily Tritsch’s sound design is subtle and understated; it does not impose itself but becomes an invisible support for both the actors and the audience.

In The Three Penny Opera we are invited to dispassionately evaluate the situation of the poor living in a society that allows, and in fact requires, there to be a starving underclass. We are caught up in the passionate relationships of the characters. We are given a production philosophy that springs from German expressionism of the early Twentieth Century. But there is a production history that was strongly influenced by Soviet Realism.

Brecht purports to rationally expose the contradictions of capitalism, but in doing so he becomes enmeshed in the contradictions of Soviet Communism. Dalton does a fine job of cultivating those contradictions in a talented and well directed company.

Arabian Nights: Baghdad, City of Peace and Poets

The Arabian Nights by Mary Zimmerman
Director Dale AJ Rose
Connecticut Repertory Theatre at the Nate Katter Theatre
4 - 14 October 2007

Director Dale AJ Rose’s mounting of Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of The Arabian Nights doesn’t shy away from the erotic nature of these tales. The music of Jamal Mohammed, the flowing costumes by Katarina Urosevic and sensuous dances by Monica Willding support the earthy themes of the production.

Every sort of transgression is alluded to in the collection we call The Arabian Nights. These stories originated as Persian folktales and were added to in Arabic over a 500 year period. They expressed a secular revolt against the more conservative Islamic tradition that allowed only religious scientific and historical texts. The tales were banned in Egypt as recently as 1989

The story is told through a “frame tale” that has the other stories embedded within it. A frame tale is returned to time and again throughout a story to reorient the listener and set up the next episode.

The selection of narratives offered to us by Zimmerman seem drawn mostly from the later tales of the Arabian nights. These later stories were written in Cairo 11th through 14th centuries but they often attributed themselves to the earlier golden age of the caliphate of Haroun al-Rashid in Bagdad.

Mary Zimmerman weaves a text that is ready for collaboration. There are places in the text where improvisation by the actors is specifically called for. Sometimes several different stories are being acted out simultaneously. There are cues and suggestions for sets and props, music and dance; but one of the elements of her genius is the ability to elicit, and to leave room for, collaboration. Zimmerman’s adaptation of these tales is written with a director’s eye and she leaves room, not only for any other director who might undertake this project, but all the other contributing members of the production team.

This is myth not realism. If the play is to work the actors must be flexible in their transitions from one character to another.

Director Dale AJ Rose does a great job of weaving the various collaborators and the various elements of a complex production into a Persian tapestry of theatre arts.

The director’s hand is clear and palpable. The actors are supple in their transitions. In a strong cast Luke Daniel stands out as Caliph Shahryar. He is a handsome and imposing stage presence. Lauretta Pope is suggestive, seductive, intelligent and humorous as the myth weaver Scheherazade. Heddy Lahmann listens with such attentiveness that her listening creates a dialogue with the actor who is speaking. Wayne Pyle is a stabilizing presence in the shifting sands of Scheherazade’s stories; his voice is clear and true. Hillary Leigh Parker remains exquisite in her radiant stillness and sparing use of gesture.

The sinuous original compositions by Jamal Mohammed played by Nikolai Ruskin and Fugan Dineen transport us to a world of exotic fantasy. An ensemble production lives and dies on its transitions. If they don’t work then the play doesn’t work. The Middle Eastern music, performed live, is a spine that helps hold the various elements together.

While audience members often hum the tunes of a musical as they leave the theatre, it is not often that they attempt the choreography of a show during the intermission. The dances by Monica Willding are piercing. She has only brief moments to evoke a mood and help establish the next scene yet each short dance is epigrammatic. It finds its own center and helps to center us for the next episode of Scheherazade’s ongoing tale

The lights by Jen Rock contribute to the fluid character of the evening as does the multi-level stage by Isaac Ramsey. Ramsey’s Persian rugs that cover the stage and Rose’s ensemble production techniques are reminiscent of, but not derivative of, Peter Brook’s Conference of the Birds

The costumes by Urosevic are a sensuous splash of texture and color; she knows her way in the world of fabrics.

The CRT production of Arabian Nights sings; it dances; it performs.

Catch it if you can.