Tag: theatre

The play that never was

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Three old friends and a neighbor. A summer of afternoons in the backyard. Lingering sunshine and inevitable darkness.

Caryl Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest living playwrights, returns to BAM for the first time in 15 years with this by-turns hilarious and unsettling daydream. Directed by Churchill’s frequent collaborator James Macdonald (Cloud Nine; Love and Information; John Gabriel Borkman, Spring 2011), with startling performances from Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham, and June Watson, Escaped Alone is doomsday in a teapot, a calmly revolutionary vision of looming collapse.

No, doomsday in a teapot was not meant to be that Saturday evening. The play had already begun and Mrs Jarrett – played by the courageous Mrs Linda Bassett – had already joined the three other ladies in the garden that sat behind the fence. But, as the conversation picked up, Mrs Bassett stood up and walked off stage, calmly, naturally as if it was part of the play. Only Mrs Bassett had been feeling unwell that day but had decided to go on with the show hoping she would manage to make it through. She didn’t, despite her strong will and professionalism; Mrs Bassett could not go on. And neither could the show.

The management offered refunds or rebookings to one of the following days and the play went ahead as scheduled. We missed it only because of a planned trip, our first away from the City since the day we arrived.

Escaped Alone, BAM
February 18th, 2017

Last Work

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What we didn’t want to miss that night was the latest work by Batsheva Dance Company, choreographed by Ohad Naharin, making its NY premiere in BAM. I was prepared to be impressed and I was – by the dancer at the back of the stage running on a treadmill for the entire duration of the show! According to reviews, and as you can see below, it was supposed to be a woman (dressed in blue) but on the evening we watched she had been replaced by a man. Still standing, drenched in sweat at the end of the performance, he deserved – and received – a warm round of applause. The work itself was a barrage of beautiful, intense moves and ideas, so much so that the audience was left with no breathing space; no chance to absorb and truly appreciate the scenes. On the way out, we agreed that Last Work was aesthetically stimulating, but bringing so many elements and people on the stage together, all at the same time, resulted in cancelling out emotions it was supposed to evoke. Indeed sometimes, there can be too much of a good thing.

Images courtesy of Batsheva Dance Company

February 4th, 2017

Beauty queens

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The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a black comedy by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh was premiered by the Druid Theatre Company in Galway, Ireland in 1996.

20+ years later, Druid made its BAM debut with this first in the trilogy of plays set in the rural village of Leenane where forty-year-old Maureen Folan, a single and lonely woman lives with her mother Mag, trapped in a dry, loveless relationship. Until Mag interferes with her daughter’s first – and probably last – romance. Her cruel interference sets in motion a chain of events simultaneously funny and horrible, a narrative that leads to a tragicomic climax and leaves the audience with a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers long after the curtain comes down.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, about to begin:

And the Beauty Queen of Solitaire, patiently killing time:

Aisling O’Sullivan played Maureen, the daughter.
Marie Mullen, was the devious mother; most interestingly, Ms. Mullen played Maureen back in 1996, as if to confirm Maureen’s realisation when she exclaimed: Oh Gosh, I’ve turned into my mother!
Marty Rea was Pato Dooley, Maureen’s first and possibly last lover.

BAM Harvey Theater

January 14th, 2017

The Present

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For our New Year’s Eve.

Any suspicion this would be a one-woman show, was proven wrong; the Aussies know a thing or two about team work. But what a delight to watch Cate Blanchett live on stage! If nothing else, to reaffirm what a phenomenal actress she is – being the heart and soul of the play yet a convincing member of the team.  Albeit a leading one.

Playbill excerpt : ”Variously known as Platonov, Wild Honey, Fatherlessness, and The Disinherited, Chekhov’s first play was not discovered until 1920, some 16 years after the playwright’s death. Upton’s adaptation, according to press notes, is set “post-Perestroika in the mid-1990s at an old country house where friends gather to celebrate the birthday of the independent but compromised widow Anna Petrovna (Blanchett). At the center is the acerbic and witty Platonov (Roxburgh) with his wife, his former students and friends and their partners. They may appear comfortable, but boiling away inside is a mess of unfinished, unresolved relationships, fueled by twenty years of denial, regret and thwarted desire.”

There were certainly fireworks during the play. And gunshots. And aggravation and awkwardness. The full friend & family real-life drama that is an integral part of a Russian soul.

Matched only with the end-of-year Times Square closure-for-the-festivities drama, because of which at least a quarter of the theatre-goers kept arriving well into the play.

The Sydney Theatre Company performed ”The Present” by Anton Chekhov in a new adaptation by Andrew Upton.

Barrymore Theatre, Broadway

December 31st, 2016

Love, Love, Love

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An off-Broadway play by Mike Bartlett in three acts, staged by Roundabout Theatre Company.

A small, perfectly placed cast performing the roles of Kenneth (Richard Armitage), Henry (Alex Hurt), Sandra (Amy Ryan), Jamie (Ben Rosenfield) and Rose (Zoe Kazan).

A life. A play about reaching maturity without ever wanting to grow-up. About starting a family, because that’s what everyone does, without ever wanting to part with your juvenile selfishness.

A clash. Of care-free youthfulness against duty-laden responsible mid life. Of generations. Of egocentric, self-absorbed characters.

It begins in 1967.
Sandra, Henry’s smart and witty girlfriend meets his brother Kenneth, a party-going, pot-smoking, life-loving young lad; it is June 25th and the entire world is watching the historic, first ever live satellite programme in which the Beatles performed ”All you need is love”.

Sandra and Kenneth sing along; they dance; they fall in love.

1990.
Married. Two kids. Financially secure. High profile jobs. No time to waste. Not least for two needy, self-conscious, egotistic teenagers.

2011.
Parents retired. Affluent. Kids are now adults; Jamie resigned, Rose angry, both still lost deep in the generations chasm, unable to accept the world they inherited.

Rose: I want you to buy me a house.
Sandra: smiles.
Kenneth: laughs.
Sandra : A house?
Kenneth: laughs some more.
Kenneth: You’ve got a house.
Rose: I’m renting.

….

Kenneth: What’s the matter love
Sandra: Something’s wrong, isn’t it? I can tell.
Rose: laughs.

…

Rose: I’m thirty seven

…

Rose: So… my birthday. I had a little thing in a bar in Clapham, hired out this little bar, and all my friends came, and two days before I didn’t tell you this, but two days before my birthday I broke up with Andy.
Kenneth: You didn’t… oh… you’re not with.
Rose: No.
Kenneth: You didn’t say.
Rose: You never asked.
Sandra: You don’t like us asking.
Rose: Yeah so I’d already booked this bar, and I went ahead with it anyway even though I was quite… lonely… you know.
Sandra: Oh baby.
Rose: And everyone turned up and some of them with kids and stuff and we had a bit of a dance you know, kept the smiles going but then suddenly I found I was sat on a chair at the side of the room, all on my own, at my own party, and I was crying.
Sandra: Were you drinking gin?
Rose: No.
Sandra: Gin can do that.
Rose: I wasn’t drinking at all Mum but I found I was crying, and it was because I realised as I was sat there, I realised I’d completely fucked it up.

…

Sandra: It’s not too late, you’re not even forty.
Rose: At my age you had a house, half paid off, two kids, holidays, money.
Kenneth: It was different then.

…

Rose: Look at you… ”If you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there”. What a smug fucking little thing to say. You didn’t change the world, you bought it. Privatised it. What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the fuck you wanted.

…

Kenneth: It’s your life Rosie.
It has to be.
He drinks from the wine.
We love you.
But you can’t blame us.
You want us to give up our retirement, our independence, our holidays, our security as we get older, you want to take all of that away from us and just give you a house.
Rose: It’s not fair.
Kenneth: Life isn’t.

And on and on and on it goes – such is the multifarious process that’s life.

Laura Pels Theatre at the Howard and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre

November 25th, 2016 (ran through December 18, 2016)

Initiation ~

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~ to the wonderful world of Broadway.

A quiet start, none of the big musical productions of which I am not a big fan anyway, but with The Humans; a play that has now completed two very successful rounds off- and on Broadway, so much so that a national tour has been announced for November 2017.

It is about a family from Pennsylvania, visiting their younger daughter and her boyfriend on Thanksgiving Day. The kids live in an old semi-basement apartment in Lower Manhattan, complete with loud neighbours, weird noises, electricity and plumping systems that had seen better days – long time ago.

Most of us have been involved in similar situations (minus the Lower Manhattan apartment) some time in our lives, with a family drama unfolding within a few hours around a dinner table. Perhaps that’s what makes this play so successful, besides the beautiful playwriting (by Stephen Karam), excellent staging (by Joe Mantello) and fine performances by the entire cast: the fact that we can all relate to any number of people, funny or awkward situations, acidic conversations, emotional reconciliations, fragile human relations, at any given point during the play.

Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th Street
New York

November 9th, 2016