Faux Musings

A Burial at Thebes

Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, South Carolina

Every age selects the lens through which it views the world. Another more literal era may have gravitated toward Shakespeare as its prism; ours seems to have found resonance in the range and tenor of Greek tragedy if the frequency and quality of literary adaptations and staged interpretations over that past decade is any gauge, every director taking their shot at interpreting a tragedy, every poet their turn in a new translation of epic poetry or the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. Perhaps it’s the interpretative freedom Greek drama affords, a balm for the literalism of religious fundamentalism and for wounds yet healed from the culture wars.

What better mirror for our narcissistic age than Greek tragedy; contingent vessels into which we can pour all our deepest fears, our worst nightmares, each adaptation invested with the translator’s trace, tailor-made parables for a multivalent era. The yoke of historical authenticity removed, the question has become what’s lost, what’s gained, what’s gamed in each translation. For years the translations of Greene, Lattimore, Arrowsmith and Knox defined accepted practice in America; however, as those translations have passed well into middle age, a new generation has emerged, voices as diverse as Wendy Doniger, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, David Slavitt, and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney has tried his hand at translating from the Greek before, authoring a version of Sophocles' tragedy Philoctetes in 1990 under the title The Cure at Troy. With The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, Heaney once again shifts the emphasis away from the central character to tackle the moral questions at the heart of all of Sophocles’ plays—the relationship between individual and society, family and state.

There was a time in the tradition of American alternative theater when Antigone was emblematic of the era, a heroic character, her rebellious voice rising up against authority, her noble, but naïve act, a parable of courage in the face of injustice and a touchstone for the idealistic hopes of a youthful, entitled generation. Today, however, Creon takes center stage. Perhaps we take solace in Creon’s realization of the limits of his own power, the inability of men to alter the laws of the gods, even if that realization ultimately arrives too late.

It’s hard not to interpret Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’ tragedy as anything other than a thinly veiled critique of George Bush’s failed foreign policies. After all, it was the aftermath of 9/11 and events of recent years that inspired him to take up the challenge at the request of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Likewise, in the midst of an election year what American audience would not interpret the words and actions of Creon, Antigone, or Ismene through the lens of Bush, Cheney, Clinton, or Obama, or associate Antigone’s punishment with the extrajudicial plight of “enemy combatants” exiled to Guantanamo? “Flush them out. They’re either with us or against us,” Creon exclaims. 

The words send a murmur through the audience seated at the outdoor stage, the sound of cicadas and the buzz of mosquitoes in the hot, moist air of a Charleston summer evening. The Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company, led by Paul Bentall as Creon and Catherine Hamilton as Antigone, and including an ensemble cast of Cymon Allen, Peter Basham, Beatrice Curnew, Richard Evans, Maxwell Hutcheon, Joan Moon, and Matthew Rixon, all delivered excellent performances. Each garbed in simple gray togas, all transitioning comfortably from principal speaking roles to members of the chorus to solo instrumentalists on tambour, cello, violin, oboes, or lute in a fluid and effective staging of Sophocles' timeless tragedy. Mick Sands composed the music for the choral odes and served as musical director; Lucy Pitman-Wallace directed the production.

Hey Girl!

Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois

A room filled with the acrid scent and taste of smoke, darkness, and an alluring sonic landscape. A birth, a nude female form slowly, tentatively emerging out of dripping Latex, another inanimate form, a face, an arm dissolving away like melting taffy, under the faint illumination of a sputtering fluorescent light. A young woman (Silvia Costa) emerges, rises, and crawls naked upstage toward a wall, standing on a pile of carefully folded blankets, swaddling cloth, holding up a hand-mirror in her left hand, hanging the mirror on the wall, and gazing into it. A Lacanian gaze of recognition, a childlike sense of self-awareness, an alignment of a diagonal beam of light with the mirror and an arm raised in outstretched gesture; the first of many compelling gestures in Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s fascinating new performance piece.

Nicholas Ridout has called the work of director Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio “an archive of gestures retrieved, reanimated, displayed in public.” Since 1981 Societas Raffaello Sanzio has created a body of work based upon the gesture, the visual, the metaphor, a largely wordless theater in the tradition of what German critic Hans-Thies Lehmann has labeled post-dramatic theater. I’ve always had a problem with Lehmann’s label, since there’s still plenty of drama in this theater: post-literary perhaps, but not post-dramatic. A theater of images freed from the constraints of the literary text, and where image and sound play a crucial role in constructing meaning.

Crawling toward a large bass drum, pounding on the drum with two mallets like a small, naked child, the sound of the drum, processed, reverberating throughout the space, a tin drum, a crying child, a protesting child. She stops. She cries, her back to the audience. She dresses. Jeans and a plain white T-shirt. A prepubescent girl; her drum becomes a sword, an iron, lipstick, nail polish, perfume, the mark of the sword/iron burnt into the cloth like a cross on a shroud. Symbols. The emergence of language, simple words projected.

Adolescence arrives. Right, left, red, white. Pulling, tugging, creaking, groaning, heaving, oppressive sounds press against our ears, and sculpt the space, the hard edges interrupting our gaze, yanking our attention, and her head, to and fro, back and forth. The sound overwhelms everything, even the light. She reemerges in mask, matured. Others peer through the glass lens at her: the voyeurs. She has become the object of their gaze, their savagery, the mob descends upon her, the strobe light and darkness obscuring the beating, the sound and the music still oppressive, threatening to explode the space.

The sound pauses, the mob stands in silhouette. Slowly, she emerges, waves a flag and calls for darkness. And her cry goes unheeded. She waves the flag, the sound of the cloth, amplified, like sails billowing in the wind, every pass of the flag further dimming the lights until all we see is the darkness and all we hear is the sound of the flag rustling in the dark. The sound of crying, and the sight of the crowd: she finds herself (Sonia Beltran Napoles), wearing a larger mask, amidst the crowd and takes her by the hand. She begins to undress her. She is a woman now. Full breasts, wide hips, long, wavy hair, not the androgynous shape of her youth. She is the other confronting herself: black and white.

A man in tails and top hat appears. Four circles of glass, lenses, descend, suspended vertically above the stage, again a strong diagonal receding from downstage left to center-stage. The projected text becomes more expansive, the sources more diverse. The man spreads straw upon the floor and lays out chains, the chains of slave chattel. The young girl leads her to be chained. She offers her; she becomes the voyeur; she walks away. The glass shatters into a thousand pieces.

She removes the chains that shackle her hands and covers her naked body in silver paint. She gives her the sword. She transforms into symbol, backdrop, Joan of Arc, dancing, gyrating to the pulsating onslaught of the music, her severed head on the floor in front of her.

The young girl walks downstage center, the silver paint sheathing her hands like glistening boxing gloves. She stops. A flash of light, a rush of projected words behind her, and a brilliant red beam of laser light and squeal of sound intermittently piercing the air, the strong diagonal shaft of light hitting her face like an industrial band-saw. That diagonal once again, this time a beam of light descending from above like some divine intervention. The sound assaults our ears. And all the while Joan of Arc dances in high-heels, wielding a sword, in silhouette.

The assault stops, and the familiar opening musical theme returns and lingers. Both women recede into the darkness and disappear upstage behind a wall. A crash, and the stage lights fade up to reveal a three-meter-square image of painting, Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, upside down and askew center-stage. The two women stand beside one other, holding each other with their backs to us, gazing at the painting. The lights fade to darkness once again.

Director Castellucci has called Hey Girl! an examination of the issues of slavery, violence, and servitude, an archeology of the feminine form. Societas Raffaello Sanzio was last seen here a few years ago with their performance of Giulio Cesare (1997). Since then, they’ve gone on to achieve some notoriety with their more recent pieces Genesi: from the Museum of Sleep (1999) and Tragedia Endogonidia (2002-04). 

Scott Gibbons’ music sculpts time and space exquisitely, the hard edges, the metallic sounds, the sudden shifts in volume and timbre belying the carefully-composed musical language recalling Tristan Murail or Iannis Xenakis at their best. Gibbons, a Chicago-based composer, has provided the sonic landscapes for Societas Raffaello Sanzio for the past ten years. It would seem an unlikely trans-continental collaboration, but one that has come to define the theatrical language of Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Giacomo Gorini and Luciano Trebbi designed the tightly choreographed lighting, Federico Lepri the sparse, but effective, stage design.

Photos by Francesco Raffaelli, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Passion Play

Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois

Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play: a cycle in three parts currently at the Goodman, is a sprawling, sometimes unsuccessful, but always engaging work of theater that tries to tackle big ideas on a broad canvas in this three and a half hour visual extravaganza. Religion, politics, identity, community, and sexuality: all come under examination in Ms. Ruhl's three-part reflection on the passion play. Still I'm left at the end wanting more. There's no brillant wit in these words, no elegant dramatic structure, no breathtaking realization in store for us. Ms. Ruhl may open Pandora's box but she does not illuminate it with insight. For me, that calls into question what we look for in theater, and expect of our playwrights. Words of wisdom? The encapsulation of a moment? To recognize ourselves on stage? Or to be given a window into another world we might never experience? What Sara Ruhl and director Mark Wing-Davey give us is a series of engaging vignettes of varying depth that only hint at the possibilities.

Passion Play is set in three time periods, the passion play serves as pretext for an examination of each era. In that way, I'm reminded of how art forgeries are imbued with the mannerisms of their time as much as the attributes of the original. Act One is set in a small English town in 1575. Queen Elizabeth, in the midst of prohibiting the enactment of passion plays, exerts her control over all religious expression. The play within a play unfolds, sometimes with fits and starts, the intertwining threads of three parallel narratives, both secular and sacred, bumping into each other. Mary (Kristen Bush) becomes a prize in this game, in turn courted by Jesus (Joaquin Torres), Mary Magdalene (Nicole Wiesner) and the fish-monger Pontius (Brian Sgambati). Polly Noonan is superb as the village idiot.

In each successive act Ruhl casts the same archetypes in a different era. Act Two is set in Oberammergau, Germany in 1934 during the swift rise to power of the Nazi party in post-Wiemar Bavaria. Once again the passion play unfolds, but this time with weightier overtones. The aura of Wagner and Bayreuth hangs over this play, the musical transitions grow louder, and the heavy hand of Hitler, not Queen Elizabeth, intercedes to stifle all political thought not in alignment with authority. This time the story seems all too pat, the language too direct, and the direction awkward.

The soliloquy of Ronald Reagan that opens Act Three represents a different kind of repression, one cloaked in the cloth of patriotism and national identify. Reagan's co-option of media as a tool of political propaganda would have made der Führer envious. The medium and tenor of the message may have changed, but the limits on expression did not. "Gorbachev tear down this wall," Reagan extols in the preamble to this final act; it was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who chose a new path and had the courage to refute intractable historical positions. Set in Spearfish, South Dakota and alternating between Nixon's fortress America of 1969 and Reagan's reborn America of the early 80s, Act Three also brings a different dynamic into play: a deconstruction and re-contextualization of what's come before. Lines from previous acts surface once again, repeated verbatim but voiced in new contexts or by different characters. The plot, the play within the play, the actors, the war, the theater, the director: all become subject and object in this meta-critical farce, one grand intertextual deus ex machina.

In the end I can't help but feel that Passion Play might have fared better in the hands of a more gifted director. Then again, I'd take the awkward production that takes big risks over the safe, well-made play any day. Not all theater works, but sometimes it may still succeed in spite of itself.

Photos, copyright Liz Lauren, courtesy of the Goodman Theatre.

Mirror of the Invisible World

Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois

For nearly twenty years, I've watched director Mary Zimmerman shape a body of stories from around the world for the stage: stories plucked from unlikely sources as well as traditions until very recently neglected in the Western theatre. As a fellow Chicago director also drawn to adapting oral traditions and obscure literary arcana to the stage, discovering Zimmerman's work with Lookingglass Theatre Company was like meeting another member of a support group: perhaps I wasn't so crazy after all, or if I was, at least there were two of us crazies now.

However, over the years my perceptions of Zimmerman's work have changed. Experiencing an artist's work over an extended period of time brings into sharp relief the mannerisms that form their trace upon the material. And so, I've become progressively disinterested and numb to Zimmerman's familiar theatrical conceits.

For me what at first appeared to be a bold re-envisioning of diverse traditions for the Western stage now reveals itself as a single, unwavering style lacking the capacity for nuanced interpretation. Zimmerman's theater, like Robert Wilson or Julie Taymor, relies upon the arresting visual image as much as text to relay story, but whereas Wilson or Taymor use images to expand an audience’s reading of a text, Zimmerman chooses to merely illustrate the narrative. Emotion is related not experienced, meaning didactic not multivalent: the theatrical equivalent of the illustrated pop-up book, at once instantly alluring, but ultimately lacking the depth to warrant repeated readings.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in Zimmerman’s choice of voice: the narrator, not the actor, is central to Zimmerman’s aesthetic. Actors function as props to illustrate the action instead of creating character through their actions. Zimmerman’s third-person voice creates a distance that separates actors from action, audience from actor, and theater from life, an analytical detachment that prevents the audience from ever entering the play, a pervasive ironic posture that closes off the play to readerly reinterpretation.

I first saw Zimmerman stage her Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci in the old Goodman studio theater in 1993, a captivating production imbued by the actors with a sense of wonder and discovery, as if happening upon an old steamer trunk in the attic filled to the brim with miscellanea, the actors had spontaneously decided to put on a performance, an elaborate show-and-tell presentation, weaving stories around each incongruous item or costume revealed.

Mirror of the Invisible World, Zimmerman's adaptation of the medieval Persian poet Nezami's epic romance Haft Paykar, played on that same small stage at the old Goodman Theatre in 1997. A tiny proscenium space with a stage barely twenty feet wide and no more than half and half again that deep, the production took on all the qualities of a performance by a traveling troupe conjuring up magic through pure theatrical chicanery without aid of sophisticated technical machinery. 

In contrast, Zimmerman's restaging of Mirror of the Invisible World now playing at the Goodman Theatre this summer, makes good use of almost every manner of theatrical apparatus in an effort to translate this simple story to a much larger stage. What's lost in translation is the intimacy that made the previous production so enrapturing, like a delicate Indian Marwar miniature painting writ large upon an enormous abstract expressionist canvas.

Several actors have returned to reprise their roles from a decade ago: Anjali Bhimani as the Indian Princess, Lisa Jejero as the Chinese princess, and Faran Tahir as King Bahram. They are joined by Nicole Shalhoub (Persian princess), Sofia Jean Gomez (Russian princess), Atley Loughridge (Greek princess), Charlette Speigner (Moorish princess), and Stacey Yen (Turkish princess) in this new production.

Musicians Ronnie Malley, Gary Kalar and Eve Monzingo, seated downstage left, make excellent use of a range of musical instruments and traditions from around the globe to create incidental musical accompaniment from neither here nor there but connotative of almost everywhere. Mara Blumenfeld designed the sumptuous costumes, Daniel Ostling the wonderfully evocative sets.

Photos, copyright Liz Lauren, courtesy of the Goodman Theatre. Above: Atley S. Loughridge (Greek Princess) and Faran Tahir (King Bahram) with Charlette Speigner (Moorish Princess) in the background. Below: Sofia Jean Gomez (Russian Princess).

August: Osage County

Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago, Illinois

America, like all sovereign nation states, is a nation borne of violence. Our collective struggle as a nation, founded on an idea and a shared mythology, forged through our mutual history of oppression, subjugation, division, and rapprochement, forms our collective id, a fractured inheritance that binds us together as family.

In the twentieth century modernism gave us form to examine that struggle, and the American artist gave it voice. Our external focus on conquest became supplanted by the need to understand our collective selves, and one could argue that ever since the Second World War, American literary and dramatic arts have been concerned with discovering self amidst an ocean of societal dysfunction and abuse more than charting new territory. After all, at heart wasn't Ahab in search of himself, not a whale?

Tracy Letts' new play August: Osage County currently playing at Steppenwolf Theatre Company is an examination of the legacy of abuse, and the story of how abuse traverses generations to leave its trail of violence across a family.

August: Osage County is directed by Anna D. Shapiro and features an incredible ensemble cast of Deanna Dunagan (Violet Weston), Dennis Letts (Beverly Weston), Amy Morton (Barbara Fordham), Mariann Mayberry (Karen Weston), Rick Snyder (Steve Heidebrecht), Rondi Reed (Mattie Fae Aiken), Francis Guinan (Charlie Aiken), Ian Barford (Little Charles), and Sally Murphy (Ivy Weston). Chicago-based scenic designer Todd Rosenthal designed the set.

The Oedipus Complex

The Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois

"How terrible it is to have the knowledge, that does the one who knows it no good at all." – Teiresias.

Oedipus Rex has always appealed to me most of all Sophocles’ Theban plays. The paradoxical conflict at the center of the play: that only through knowing the truth can Oedipus hope to right the wrongs of the past, but once discovering that awful truth, he chooses to blind himself in protest to the gods. A king once blinded by belief in divine destiny comes to see his life as the sum of his own actions, not the gods' preordained plan. Oedipus’ predicament is our predicament: knowledge has the power to illuminate but also to blind. Oedipus demands that Teiresias reveal the truth, but Teiresias refuses to comply. "Be careful those who seek to understand their true nature," Teiresias says, "for you may not like the answer."

The Oedipus Complex, Frank Galati's adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, currently playing at the Goodman Theatre, attempts to reexamine these questions through the lens of Sigmund Freud's writings. It was after all the idea of Oedipus—the king who kills his own father and comes to sleep with his mother—that  became the defining metaphor for the pursuit of self-knowledge in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. So, Galati brings the story full circle. He makes the Greek king Oedipus the subject of his examination, fashioning Freud's writings into a clinical examination interspersed between each of the scenes in Sophocles' drama.

All contemporary directors must navigate their own course through the wealth of formal structure and historical conventions inherent in Greek tragedy. Galati has chosen to stage his interpretation on the meanings of Oedipus in an early 20th Century surgical theater, the Greek chorus seated like doctors, audience members, witnessing the drama unfold. This theatrical conceit works to varying degress, heightening the formal divisions inherent in the work. The taut structure of Sophocles' drama inspired later artists to rediscover beauty and balance in the "classic" forms of Greek tragedy. Early symphonic form owes a debt of gratitude to Greek tragedy, and Oedipus Rex especially, with its alternating structure of ode, duet, ode, trio, ode in seriatim. Galati's own interpretation may share more affinities with the stoic quality of classical music than contemporary theater.

Yet, as theater, Oedipus Rex unfolds with full force, the unwavering teleology of Oedipus' quest to unearth the truth hurtling Sophocles' protagonist down a path of no return. The eventual realization by Oedipus of what has transpired comes after Teiresias, Jocasta, the chorus, and the audience have all come to know the improbable turn of events. Only Creon and Oedipus are left to confront the truth anew.

Ben Viccellio, weak at first but building gradually in the intensity of his performance, plays the part of the tortured king Oedipus. Jeffrey Baumgartner, seen last year in Bob Fall's production of Lear, delivers an excellent performance as Teiresias. Roderick Peeples plays the part of Creon, Susan Hart, Jocasta, and Bradley Armacost, the shepherd. James Schuette designed the set, Mara Blumenfeld the costumes, and Todd Barton the incidental music for the play.

All photos copyright Liz Lauren, courtesy of the Goodman Theatre.   

The Adding Machine

Next Theatre Company, Evanston, Illinois

The Adding Machine appears to hold a fascination for Chicago area theater companies. This pointed critique of the rise of industrial automation and the emergence of Taylorism at the start of the 20th Century clearly resonates with Chicago audiences. Hystopolis Productions staged a wonderful interpretation using puppets and masks a few years back that captured beautifully the American expressionistic qualities like an Edward Hopper painting brought to life.

This year Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois selected the 1923 Elmer Rice play as the basis of a multimedia production, and now Evanston based Next Theatre Company brings us this taut 95-minute musical penned by composer Joshua Schmidt to a libretto by the composer and Next artistic director Jason Loewith and directed by David Cromer.

Rice is perhaps best known as the author of Street Scene a play he wrote six years later and which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1929. Fifteen years hence Kurt Weill adapted Rice's play as an American opera/musical Street Scene with a libretto by Langston Hughes and Rice. Now Schmidt has given us an American opera/musical version of The Adding Machine every bit as strong as Weill's Street Scene, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, or Adam Guettel's Floyd Collins.

Schmidt has worked almost exclusively as a sound designer and composer in theater for the past ten years, so it’s no surprise that he’s developed a keen sense for drama as well as a wonderful ear for melody. Schmidt’s musical interpretation of this haunting work succeeds—where few opera composers do—in sustaining the tension inherent in dialogue. His music, oft times contrapuntal, allows the voice of each actor to come through confidently, developing musical leitmotifs at once lyrical yet contrasting, elegantly encapsulating the emotional motivation within each character.

Scenic designer Matthew York does a wonderful job of creating a set on a matchbox stage that allows for 95 minutes of uninterrupted action, each scene flowing into the next—a stack of boxes, to bedroom, to office, to parlor, to jail, to courtroom, and finally the Elysian field—through an imaginative series of transformations.

Joel Hatch and Cyrilla Baer admirably fulfill their roles as Mr. and Mrs. Zero with a singing style sharing more affinity to the American musical than opera; Amy Warren sang the part of Miss Devore. All three were excellent, and Mr. Hatch especially outstanding in his portrayal of Mr. Zero, the tortured soul rendered obsolete by the invention of the adding machine.

All photos copyright Michael Brosilow, courtesy Next Theatre Company.

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

The Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois

From the opening moments of director JoAnne Akalaitis’ production of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Goodman Theatre, it’s clear the audience is in for a bold, revisionist perspective on this Jacobean tragedy. Akalaitis, along with director Lee Brewer and composer Philip Glass, one of the founders of the New York theater collective Mabou Mines, has divided her attention of late between the development of new work and an expansive, sometimes idiosyncratic reinterpretation of the repertoire: last year brought a new production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to the Public Theater, more recently an evocative and imaginative staging of Jean Genet’s epic The Screens at the Guthrie. Similarities among the three plays are legion: each work penned late in life by playwrights who set viscerally erotic, ill-fated romances at the core of their stories, each with women—The Mother and Leila in The Screens, Imogen in Cymbeline, and Annabella in ’Tis Pity—caught in often violent struggles with sons, fathers, brothers, and lovers.

In ’Tis Pity, Giovanni (Jesse Borrego), a brilliant student, hopelessly in love with his sister Annabella (Lauren Tom), uses his learning to justify his love to an appalled confessor Friar Bonaventure (Steve Pickering). When he confronts Annabella with his passion, to his delight she consents, and their secret, incestuous relationship soon flourishes. Their father Florio (David Darlow) urges Annabella to marry her suitor the nobleman Soranzo (Don Cheadle) whose entreats Annabella refuses. However, after finding herself pregnant by her brother, Annabella gives in to Soranzo’s proposal. Hippolita (Barbara Robertson), the spiteful former lover of Soranzo, resolves that Annabella’s marriage will never be consummated, and to that end plots to poison Soranzo at their wedding feast. However, betrayed by her confidante and Soranzo’s loyal servant Vasques (Erick Avari), Hippolita instead finds herself the victim of her own scheming and dies still cursing the newlyweds. Upon discovering that his new wife is pregnant, Soranzo beats Annabella in an effort to make her divulge the name of her lover. Vasques implores Soranzo to stop and let him use his wiles on Annabella’s attendant Putana (Joan Cusack) to ascertain the name of the father. The name extracted, Vasques orders Putana’s eyes put out at once. Incensed and sickened by the revelation, Soranzo plots to expose and murder Giovanni at a banquet, but Giovanni sensing his impending end, first kills Annabella, then Soranzo, before finally killing himself.

Akalaitis sets this lurid and violent tale in the Italy of the 1930s when “futurism in the art world and fascism in the political world attempted to revitalize the country.” Like the critique of Thatcherism found in Peter Greenaway’s Jacobean tragedy The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Akalaitis uses Italian fascism as a context for the misogynist, amoral excesses, and anti-heroic qualities of Ford’s tragedy. In this world a woman’s fate is a sorry fate indeed; beaten, poisoned, their eyes stabbed out, or burnt to ashes; their male par amours finding safe harbor under protection of the church or banished from Italy. “’Tis a boy and, therefore glory, sir,” Annabella offers as she attempts to placate Soranzo upon learning she is with child.

Akalaitis and set designer John Conklin fashion a boldly expressionistic world where art historical and political references imbue a scenic landscape with ideological critique: busts of Mussolini, a baby’s head, Futurist manifestos, Surrealist's paintings, and fragments of Roman architecture and sculpture become free-floating signifiers of paternalism and fascism. Akalaitis also deftly juxtaposes projected images and rear-lit scenes played upstage of the scrim with principal action downstage to great effect. Several dramatic devices she has used before—for example, the extreme, slow motion, whispering advance of the entire cast that she also used to open The Screens—find their way into ’Tis Pity as well.

Akalaitis creates an orgy of political, social, and sexual taboos in the final banquet scene that concludes the play, the carcass of a horse heaped high upon the dining table, the guests engrossed in consuming pornographic films, as the bloody fratricide unfolds. Mussolini could not have envisioned a more lurid climax.

This review originally appeared in High Performance.
 

The Mahabharata

Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, New York

Probably the most important aspect of Peter Brook’s eagerly awaited production of The Mahabharata in New York this fall was that it happened. For Brook to successfully bring this monumental and timeless tale to the Western stage would be reward enough; that it is done well is a joy. Any attempt at the adaptation to the stage of a work as indigenously important to a people’s culture as the Mahabharata is to a greater part of South and Southeast Asia has to be both admired and gauged against the difficulties inherent in such a venture.  What criticisms that could be leveled against any attempt are, in many ways, directed at problems implicit in the process of translation and adaptation of a work of epic stature. Such an immense and multi-faceted saga as is the Mahabharata means that by its very nature one person’s Mahabharata may be altogether different from the next’s. Peter Brook’s Mahabharata is a Mahabharata based as much in pageantry as drama, a Mahabharata of ocre and earthen hues at once visually evocative yet stripped to its barest essentials. It is a Mahabharata that is carefully composed, tightly directed and superbly produced with exquisite costuming and superb ephemeral sets. Yet, it is a Mahabharata that chronicles more than questions, that relates more than examines, that, at times, shies away from its true dramatic potential. It is a Mahabharata that is story-telling at its best. That this ancient epic still speaks to us with an immediacy and urgency appropos to our times is due in great measure to the efforts of Peter Brook.

The Mahabharata remains to this day, as much as ever, an essential element of the social fabric of a greater part of the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia, yet this classic work has remained curiously absent from the Western stage. Upon closer inspection, the reasons for this absence become obvious. Foremost among these obstacles is the sheer size of the epic—some 120,000 verses, or roughly fifteen times the length of the Old and New Testaments combined. Although the complete and unabridged epic appeared translated into English from the original Sanskrit as early as the late nineteenth century (Ganguli, 1883-1896 and Dutt, 1885-1905), these first translations of the Mahabharata—massive tomes filled with spurious Victorianisms and careless editing—seldom leave the library shelves. More recent attempts at translating the entire opus have met with different fates. Van Buitenen’s (1973-1979) erudite prose translation of the great Hindu tale remains unfinished to this day due to his untimely death after the completion of five of the eighteen volumes that comprise the monumental poem. Another attempt, the beautiful “transcreation” of the ancient Sanskrit epic by the Bengali writer P. Lal (1968-1987), nears completion only today. Conversely, abridgements emphasizing the central narrative of the epic—the rivalry and resulting warfare between two groups of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, over rightful succession to the throne—have proliferated in recent years; the summaries of Lal (1980) and Buck (1973) are excellent condensations in this regard.

Those who know the Mahabharata, its characters, its wondrous tales, its ethereal poetic verse, and range of feeling expressed therein, also know that the Mahabharata poses additional obstacles to the would-be playwright apart from its foreboding size;  it is a patch-work collection of myths and legends all tenuously strung upon a central thread through literary plot contrivances, penned in countless hands and numerous styles, the culmination of over seven hundred years of authorship. Even ascertaining the essential turns and twists of the main narrative is no easy task. The sheer job of remembering the alternate names and genealogical relationships of the main characters of the epic is enough to put off all but the most stalwart student of the Mahabharata. While more recent translations of the epic have benefited from the availability of the Poona-Bhandarkar critical edition of the text prepared by an esteemed team of Sanskrit scholars during the first half of this century, some of the more endearing peripheral tales were left out of this impressive work of scholarship. Some like Lal chose to diverge from what scholarship has established as authoritative in order to include what popular tradition dictates as part of the epic. Additionally, the Mahabharata is more than a mere chronicle of the rivalry between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, but rather a compendium of philosophical, moral, and religious teachings that forms the very foundation of Indian culture, even today. In this respect, sections of the Mahabharata, like the Bhagavad Gita, have been rendered into English in numerous incarnations.

On the stage, minor stories from the epic provided the basis for two small one-act opera by the noted composer and amateur Sanskrit scholar Gustav Holst in the first part of this century. More recently, the American composer Philip Glass employed the Sanskrit verse of the Bhagavad Gita as the libretto for his opera, Satyagraha, based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Never, however, to my knowledge, has the stirring Indian tale been adapted in its entirety to the Western stage...until now.

It was partly this lack of knowledge of the Mahabharata in the West that first attracted Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carriere to the formidable task of adapting the work to the stage. It is also what gives the work its unique power within a Western theatrical context. Upon first hearing tales from the epic told to them by friend and Sanskrit scholar Philippe Lavastine in 1975, Brook and Carriere were at once compelled to to stage the Mahabharata in the West; the depth and beauty of the immense saga was instantly alluring, the dramatic possibilities expansive. What followed—in appropriately epic dimensions—was five years of regular meetings and story-telling sessions between the three of them and almost four more years of writing before Carriere put the finishing touches on the original French adaptation in 1984. The initial production was debuted at the Avignon Festival in 1985 and, subsequently, went on tour throughout Europe culminating in a sold-out run in Paris in 1986. The present English language version of the work (translated from the French by Peter Brook), debuted in Zurich in August of 1987. Then, after a brief run in Los Angeles, The Mahabharata made its way to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for a three month, twenty-five performance run as part of the fifth annual Next Wave festival.

Carriere and Brook’s decision to attempt to encompass the entire breadth and richness of the Mahabharata in a succinct—if we can refer to a ten hour production as succinct—manner is admirable. If anything, Brook and Carriere could be, and have been, criticized for attempting too much. In an effort to recount the entire chronicle of the Pandavas and Kauravas most of the opening third of the production is relegated to the exposition of background material on the central characters of the epic—as if the telling of the life of Christ began with the flight of the Jews out of Egypt. The opening material at times feels like a list of events that simply have to be gotten out of the way before the real action can begin. Yet, in many ways, this criticism, and others like it, is evidence of the problematic nature of adapting the Mahabharata to the stage—paramount among these, the problems of the epic’s size and non-linear organization.

To deal with the problem of the Mahabharata’s colossal proportions, Brook and Carriere settled on both a style of language and direction that cuts the Mahabharata to its very bone. Although at first I found the brevity of Carriere’s adaptation disturbing I quickly began to appreciate it for the directness and contemporary tone it lends this two thousand year old Sanskrit epic. What the adaptation lacks in beauty when compared against other more verbose—most notably P. Lal’s—translations, it makes up for in its clarity. Ultimately, it succeeds better in summarizing the epic tale than any other existing literary condensation of the principal narrative. Brook’s English translation of the original French script, likewise, reads smoothly. How ironic that the first production of this ancient Sanskrit epic on the English stage arrives to us translated from the French! 

In an effort to obviate the organizational problems inherent in the Mahabharata, Brook and Carriere strongly focus the action of the play upon the central narrative and divide the tale into three acts of almost equal length entitled “The Game of Dice,” “Exile in the Forest,” and “The War.”   The introduction of a pedagogical dialogue between the wandering mystic Vyasa, both composer of and participant in this vast saga, and an adolescent boy provides the formal device for the unfolding of the epic. Their seamless entry into and commenting upon the tale as it evolves works wonderfully to structure flashbacks or bridge what would otherwise be awkward transitions in the story. While at times the central thread of the narrative is broken to allow a peripheral tale to unfold, for the most part the action rarely swerves far from the principal story. Rather than being excessively Western-centric in its focus upon the central legend, as some have cautioned, the resulting form shares its roots with other Asian dramatic forms—for example, Javanese shadow puppetry (Becker, 1976);  In its most basic form, the formal motif found therein—an initial court scene, a forest journey, and concluding battle--stems from the material of both Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and, in turn, has informed the structure of a myriad of Asian dramatic forms. What is in evidence in this production is as much certain conventions shared with Asian dramatic forms in the transmutation of the “epic Mahabharata” to the “dramatic Mahabharata” as it is the adaptation of an epic to a “non-epic” culture.

The production of The Mahabharata at BAM was presented both in a series of one act evening performances and in special “marathon” performances of approximately ten hours in length. Although the overall performance “gestalt” was markedly different between the two forms of presentation, both the “marathon” and series performance formats displayed advantages and disadvantages. The three consecutive evening performances allowed the audience to develop a familiarity with the epic at a comfortable pace within a traditional theatrical framework; The availability of the script in book form (Carriere, 1987) published simultaneously with Peter Brook’s new book (1987)—which dissapointingly has little to say on the production of The Mahabharata—certainly helped in this regard. What began as an audience lost in the complexity of the story on the first night became one deeply involved in the motivational forces of the characters by the third night. In contrast, to approach any of the marathon performances as conventional Western theatre would be a mistake. Rather, audiences attending these performances, and especially the Halloween all-night performance, were in for a journey of gargantuan proportions befitting of the epic tale to be told. Encouragingly, audiences at the marathon performances displayed an intensity and tenacity that I have rarely witnessed either in the Western theatre or in Asia.

Like many of Brook’s previous productions, The Mahabharata is staged with an international cast. However, it does not always work to the benefit of the play.  Where Carriere’s script could be a forceful tool in the hands of a polished ensemble, the varying abilities of the cast of the Mahabharata to act in English, makes for an uneven range of performances that seriously hampers the inertia of the play. Twelve of the twenty four member cast act in English for the first time! Yoshi Oida, well cast as Drona, and Sotigui Kouyate visually stunning as Bhishma, are never able to convincingly deliver the impassioned pleas for peace and reason amidst the internecine conflict of the Pandavas and Kauravas. Instead, each struggles in his own way with the English. Despite this, some like Polish born Ryszard Cieslak as Dhritarashtra and Andrezej Seweryn as Yudishthira turn in outstanding performances that will remain truly memorable. Likewise, Vittorio Mezzogiorno as Arjuna, Georges Corraface as Duryodhana and Jeffrey Kisson as Karna are equally affective in their own contrasting ways.

Perhaps what is most striking about Peter Brook’s Mahabharata is it’s purposeful abstention from psychological drama. This is a Mahabharata where our attention is focused more upon the tale told than the moral and emotional dilemmas facing the story’s main characters. Unfortunately, it does not always work. At times, due to the narrative “ground” to be covered, sections of the production become almost a ceaseless parade of patriarchs and warring offspring whom we seldom get to know past the initial—always stunning—visual first impressions. Not until the final scene of the first act does the emotional drama of the play reach a pitch on par with the expansive scale of the story. Only in the third act, is the emotional intensity of Bhishma’s, Drona’s and Karna’s split loyalties between warring camps brought to the foreground.

Moreover, if Brook has intended to produce a Mahabharata free of the sometimes pedantic qualities inherent in the philosophical and moral teachings of the epic, he comes dangerously close to cutting away at the very essence of the epic. Surely, Brook and Carriere’s decision to reduce Krishna’s words of wisdom to Arjuna on the battlefield of the Bhagavad Gita to nothing more than a few utterances whispered out of ear-shot of the audience, must be questioned. The portrayal of Krishna reduces him to a character whose cause for reverence by the other characters seems incongruous amidst his opportunistic actions and Machiavellian consul he offers the Pandawas. By contrast, the short inquisition of Yudishthira by the gods succeeds remarkably well in evoking both the aphoristic wisdom and humour to be found within the Mahabharata.

However, if the dramatic effect of Brook’s Mahabharata is sometimes wanting, the staging is certainly not. This is a Mahabharata that conjurs up its magic with little more than an empty sand covered stage, two small pools of water, cloth and bamboo. The scant but well chosen use of props and fabrics set against the brick red facade of the back stage wall, provides a stunning backdrop for the epic tale to unfold. The costuming, designed by Chloe Obolensky and fabricated in India, lends a luxurious feeling to an otherwise sparse setting. Some scenes such as the grand entrance of the bride-to-be Gandhari or the formal court scenes that close the first two acts are magnificent. 

Likewise, the music for the production is well conceived, expertly executed and successfully incorporated within the action of the play. Toshi Tsuchitori, along with a small multi-talented ensemble of musicians, employ a plethora of instruments from around the world, to evoke and heighten moods within the play with uncommon success. Positioned on the stage left apron for most of the play—much as in kabuki—the musicians at times leave their position to become part of the action, blending into processionals, or entertaining the royalty within the formal court scenes.

In successfully staging The Mahabharata, a production of such sheer magnitude, complexity and international importance that is perhaps only outdone by Robert Wilson’s still as yet unstaged The CIVIL warS:a tree is best measured when it is down, Peter Brook is to be commended. Despite its scale, Brook directs with an economy of means that infuses every aspect of the production with a litheness that allows it to breath when it might otherwise die under its own immense weight.  Peter Brook has succeeded in producing a Mahabharata that at once brings to mind the visually lush films of Kurosawa and Bertolucci but is executed with an austerity that would allow it to be produced on a desert plain.

This review originally appeared in Asian Theatre Journal.