R&J

R&J by Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I thoroughly enjoyed this show. Really fun, great performers. Like their other shows, I didn't totally need or buy into the self-referential bits, but who cares. That guy Robert is awesome.

The show reminded me of this video.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

leary

Left baby at home and went to Soho Rep to see YJL's Lear.
Great cast, amazing design (!!), amusing bits of dialogue in some scenes, touching monologue near end. A ridiculously heightened doublet & hose (& ruff) Shakespeare universe disintegrates over the course of the meandering play until artifice is left crumpled on the ground. But not sold on the Lear (Shakespeare's) aspect of it. Felt a bit talked down to. The familial themes were not a sensational or controversial as those in her other plays which meant it had to have more substance or structure to support it.

there is no end

Last year (2009) I got married and had a baby. So I didn't much get to the theater. I just stopped wanting to be in the theater. In fact i stopped wanting to do anything that had to do with culture or literature. I could barely read a book. I read one book in 2009 and it was Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris which was pretty darned entertaining. It got a bit mushy towards the end for my taste, but I guess the world needs things to tie themselves up into a nice package. Dan R gave me the book for Christmas 2008. Although I guess he doesn't celebrate Christmas (Jew) so it was really just a friendly holiday gift. Such a sweet guy.


Anyway I did see another show after the baby popped out. It has been hard to find a way to get out of the house by myself to go to the theater -- it seems like such a luxury now. It forces me to find value even in the lousiest shows. Jeremy Wade's there is no end to more, however, was not at all a lousy show. I think I appreciated it more, now that a month has gone by since I saw it. Starring Jared Gradinger, who I saw in Constanza Macras' piece(s), this children's TV show on acid x poop + manga had some really amazing chunks of text in it -- scatological in tone which I love. The movement was nuanced and precisely executed, but I didn't really "get" into it. It was a really well made show -- like the show that the Big Arts Gourp wanted to be but couldn't.

Sensory Overload

It's been a bleak few months for me -- primarily because I continue to feel burnt out about and by theater performances, and this apathy is reinforced by terrible performances I've seen. I'm at a point where I am almost trying to avoid shows entirely. Sad.

At The Kitchen I saw a Big Art Group show for the first time and found it kind of appalling. Lots of camera/video work in bright crazy costumes and digitally manipulated backgrounds, and culminating in a crazy extravaganza of people wrapped in a million 260 balloons (used for making balloon animals) and attacking each other.... or something. I gather it was a reflection of the self-destructive non-stop mega-consumerism in our American lives on every level, with everything being indistinguishable from the zippy colorful commercial breaks, and there was some kind of allegory with people dressed up in animal costumes trying to find their way through the forest. All of this mattered little to me, though, because their in-your-face litany of screaming indecipherable language and hallucinogenic imagery never changed in dynamics from the beginning to the end of the 90 minute show. It was kind of a form of torture.

I did manage to catch Ibsen's Dollhouse by Mabou Mines at St. Ann's before the show closed forever. Though I found some parts a bit draggy, there were remarkable elements -- the womb-like red velvet-walled house/set; over-sized piano; miniaturized furniture pieces (not to mention the obvious size differences between the actresses and the actors. but most amazing was Maude Mitchell's mind-blowingly phenomenal performance as Nora. The end of the play, including Nora's stripping down to the scalp sent shivers up my spine.

Both shows were very high-concept and chockful of surprises and nuggets of invention. Without dynamics, though, it can all disappear into a wash of tedium.

the importance of keeping your mouth shut

I insist I am not biased, just because I worked on the translation.
Dan Safer is one of those people I'm really glad I met. Despite his rockstar persona, over a tall cup of tea I learned he was extremely thoughtful, generous and perceptive.
To tell the truth I wasn't sure I fully embraced his production of Mikuni Yanaihara's The Blue Bird, because it seemed like the non-stop ADD break-neck game-show-like antics of catchy dances, song/screaming and theatrical nonsequitors were more gimmick than could be held together by the structure and actual meat of the play. And I'm not sure if I was convinced otherwise -- however in the last 15 minutes of the play, with a surprisingly simple but beautiful transformation of the space with the music and the video and the images, and the sequence that followed, he caught that bird and made it fully, unapologetically, poignantly his own. Not sure how Yanaihara felt since she went to see it 2 weeks ago, but I felt fully tricked and not half-way indignant about it.

Nothing New

Went to see Jan Fabre's Orgy of Tolerance.
Imagine an evening of competitive masturbation, cock-sucking, furniture-fucking, rifle-barrel-butt-fucking, a room full of guys getting hand jobs while discussing their collection of ethnic humans, torturing people for the sake of consumerism, and a litany of 'fuck you's aimed at every single conceivably religious/ethnic/gender/sexual orientation group you can think of.
Shocking?
On the contrary. It was sophomoric, predictable, shallow and also felt terribly outdated, by like 30 years. I couldn't believe that this was the new work by the leader of the Flemish Wave -- it felt more like some college student's first self-made dance-theater piece (in fact it did remind me of the works of a few college acquaintances), except with an enormous budget.
The performers were all very talented and could obviously move, but their energies were embarrassingly wasted on a fetid work.

The jokes on you, cracker mothafucka, and look who's laughing.

Saw YJL's The Shipment.
I say without reservation that Young Jean has a remarkable capacity for and agility with words, and a unique brand of wicked American humor that is based on irony/sarcasm. She also always goes after a disarming rhythm in her plays, one that teases, caresses, then pulls the rug from out under the audience. Watching her shows is like being tickled and being force-fed sliders while also being bashed in the head at the same time.
Though performed by an astoundingly beautiful and talented cast, I don't know if this was her most successful piece. Despite the NYT, I would say that the second half of the piece (which felt me like the play she really wanted to write) didn't earn its pay-off -- it's an extended cocktail party drama in which the host pretends to poison all his inane guests. The joke is supposed to be on the audience at the end when you find out that the black actors were playing white (read: racist) characters the whole time -- but this conceit was pretty apparent from the get-go.
I always wonder why her plays are so in-your-face, like to the point of being abusive to the audience, especially white ones. It's like she's tapped deeply into the fact that white people love to have their white guilt pumped up and paraded around and shat on publicly, particularly if in the hands of a such a witty wordsmith, because then they can feel absolved yet claim to have acknowledged their deep-seeded inherent racism and elitism and be able to laugh it all off in a neat package. There's a lot of racial shock-value to be mined and she's got a mainline to it, for sure.
My favorite part of the play was a song at the center of the play that was sung incredibly beautifully by three actors. That felt like the (literal) heart of the play to me.

Kicking off 2009

Let it be a year of succinct blog posts.

I was deeply disappointed with The Seagull on Broadway, particularly the performances by MacKenzie Crooke who seemed to shout all his lines at the same pitch, and Peter Saarsgaard, who seemed just totally bored out of his mind -- and not appealing at all.

I survived Yoshiko Chuma & Shirotama Hitsujiya's X2. I continue to be astounded by their (collective) audacity.

I have now made three failed attempts to see Witness Relocation's The Blue Bird. My only remaining chance this Friday.

I saw only one show at Under the Radar this year, and that was the bizarre show by the Netherlands' Kassys called LIGA 50% Reward 50% Punishment. The opening film is delightful, tracking a backstage view as one by one, the performers of a show make their exit and greet their director to celebrate how well the show had gone. The reactions vary subtly, but the general feeling is that of relief and elation. Then the performers' parents come out of the green room and begin to slowly zup up their children in their coats and escort them home. Somwhere, we've made a transition in perception. What we at first thought were 'normal' adults have turend out to be somehow mentally/psychologically impaired (autistic?) people. Then the play begins in earnest, rewinding back to the beginning of the show. Each actor makes his/her entrance and interacts with the stage props, audience and each other. We seem to be watching at once some kind of socialization experiment, a performance made of trying to teach 'normal' 'acceptable' behavior, and a reality tv show. At the height of the chaos, one girl begins to disrobe and flaunt herself and others flail about with large cushions, vying for the audiences' attention, until the director finally intervenes and demands that the group create a cohesive event together: a BBQ party.

Though rhythmically the show falters in the middle, and I started to feel like I had been a kindergarten class for about 3 hours (exhausting!) the show was a pretty committed (if shallow) commentary on social/societal acceptance and interaction.

Contrition 2008

How much do I suck for being the lamest blogger of 2008? A lot.
The fact is, I've felt no desire to see theater, especially after the ordeal of getting oph3lia on its feet. I have, however, found myself in the theaters (and, as it happens, pretty commercial theaters for some reason) a handful of times this autumn, and before the year ends I wanted to (b)log them briefly here.


I'd never seen a production by Robert LePage so I felt almost obligated to go see his The Damnation of Faust at the Metropolitan Opera. The set consisted of 5 or so levels of scaffolding, on which both upstage and downstage there were opaque and translucent projection surfaces that sometimes were retractable. There were some acrobatic flying, big epic images (people falling into water, full stage sunset), and repetition of stage pictures (the scaffolding and partitions created a dense grid of cubicles in which the a "man at a table" could be repeated 20, 30 times. all in all, though, I was not moved or impressed.


I went to see the Builder's Association at BAM, also because I'd never seen their work before, and, from what I heard, the narrative and themes in their latest work Continuous City. Really cool technology (hydraulic? screens that pop open and closed with projections or LED or something) kind of hackneyed concept (social networking -- i.e. mediated communication -- cannot be a substitute for real interaction... or can it?), and pretty loose story that kind of didn't have a drive. Actually I might argue that the reason why it felt so flat was that so much of the acting was pre-recorded, and so the live actors, when having to interact with recorded media, were forced to flatten themselves out. But I did find the lead actor incredibly handsome. Is that a really sexist thing to say? Oh well.

Last night I went to see Billy Elliot on Broadway. Not my choice. My friend had an extra ticket. Cute story. I imagine the movie was better able to communicate the context of the story (coal-miners in England on strike in the 1980s). The young actor playing Billy that night was a technically skilled dancer... but... and I know that this is harsh or whatever and that you're not really allowed to have criticisms about someone who is still "a kid" or whatever but, I just felt that there were limitations to his emotional range, and that his dancing, although executed with finesse, rang empty.

So, what I'm really excited about is that tomorrow, I am going to see The Seagull on Broadway, starring MACKENZIE CROOK (Gareth from the BBC The Office) who I am totally in love with. I happen to love that play too, my favorite of all the Chekhovs. Hopefully I won't be (too) disappointed...

2008 was a hell of a year. I hope 2009 is a bit calmer and happier.

The Reptilian Mind

Truth be told, I have not wanted to see any theater for many many many many months. I saw a play in Madrid, that was supposed to be the hottest show in town -- based on the Chechen takeover of a Russian theater several years back. It was kind of interesting, but hard to totally buy, esp with the translation etc.

But last night I saw something that was really fulfilling -- it's playing for another week in NYC and I highly recommend it. The show is, of course, Pig Iron's Chekhov Lizardbrain. A wonderfully funny/poignant/bizarre/fascinating layering of stories and realities -- Chekhov's Three Sisters, a botanist returning to his hometown of Oswego NY and buys the house of his childhood acquaintances, and the hypnotizing "logic" of the autistic mind. It faintly reminded me of the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time but way more adventurous in imagination. The actors are fan-fucking-tastic. Catch it if you can at the OHIO.

The Fat That Makes You Stronger

So I caught the first act of Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner by Luis Alfaro at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival tonight. A fun/ny play about Minerva, a woman who is growing increasingly and uncontrollably obese and the people around her who have to deal with her -- sports-minded himself a couch potato husband, her younger very sexually active sister, and her sister's new cop boyfriend. And, oh yeah, Mee Chee, an even fatter Chinese lady whom she befriended at the fat farm. Minerva sporadically writes letters to Mee Chee inviting her to come visit, and sends little treats (ho-ho's, licorice, funions) along as well. Well, Mee Chee does show up at the end of Act One, but she is not played by an actor, as far as I could tell. She was a large shadow that appeared against a scrim, accompanied by some chinky music. When someone asks her a question, Mee Chee answers as an erhu melody. It kind of gives that Charlie Brown effect, you know when the adults talk, it's this indecipherable "hwa-hwa-hwa" sound? I wasn't entirely sure what that was supposed to signify exactly, but somehow, the appearance of the Mee Chee doppelganger is a transitional moment for Minerva, as she actually begins to FLOAT over everybody and transcends her physical reality.

Still being on East Coast time, I couldn't bring myself to stay awake through the second hour of the show, so I may never find out what spiritual epiphanies awaited Minerva, and whether her obesity was a metaphor for something else.

I am feeling a great trepidation about theater right now, I must admit.
The whole convention of it -- the perfectly timed music to cover scene changes, the theatrical writing and character development... I feel so disconnected to it when I'm watching. May be time for something else... but what?

a jump in the pool

OK OK OK! So my show is finished, I went to Japan and back, and I have very little excuse for not having gone to see more shows, except that I'm entirely burnt out and don't want to go to the theater at all. That's why I went to see Headlong Dance Theater's Hotel Pool, because it takes place, well, in and around a pool. In this case, the body of water was located near the southern tip of Manhattan in a high-end luxury condo building called Rector Square.

The show was sold-out a while back, but Banana who has some roots in Philly, had made reservations early on. We arrived quite early on a rainy Thursday, and were one of the first people in the lobby, waiting. By the time they tarted opening the house and shuffling people into the pool area, we were at the end of the line. By the time we reached the performance space, we were one of the last ones in, and had to settle for a seat on the ground, right alongside the pool. There were rolled up towels placed along the poolside, suggesting what was to come.

The piece began with what I found to be an arresting, Murakami-esque premise. A business woman checks into a hotel, but somehow gets lost on her way to her room and ends up at the hotel pool, and locking herself in(out). She makes some frantic phone calls, in an attempt to get the hotel management to get her an actual room. She needs to take her medication and pops a pill into her mouth, when she realizes that her water bottle is empty. Looking around, the only water is... in the pool. Gingerly she kneels down and takes the water up to her mouth in cupped hands. She falls asleep at the poolside. Then a troupe of mysterious water-beings begin an underwater dance that continues throughout the piece, eventually tempting the woman into their universe.

What these water-creatures are, and what they represent, is never entirely clear -- they seem to be emblematic of the spirit of love/fun/life/joy, in contrast to the woman who is coming from a cold, corporate place. Although other stretches seemed lengthy, and there was a whole scene with dialogue in the middle which I couldn't comprehend at all (sound too low, dvd player not working). Plus I got my butt SOAKING WET (like peed-in-my-pants wet --- which is really one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world). The company always manages to achieve that sense of BIG LOVE that can usually only be created by companies of artists who really love and trust each other. Some of the movement really took me places in their simplicity and repetition.

Quarterly Report

It's sad how much this blogging thing can fall to the wayside. It's also because if you miss a few entries, you begin to feel like you can't possibly catch up, and writing seems like such an impossible task.

But here I am diligently carving out the time to report to whomever might be interested.

First some context -- so I am in the thick of rehearsing for oph3lia which opens June 11. I keep a decent record of rehearsals here, so feel free to check it out. At the end of April, Tmonkey and I moved into a new apartment (this of course somehow happened miraculously while I was working all day and rehearsing all night) and then almost immediately I got on a plane to rural Oregon to work on a new piece for a few days.

The new project, entitled IfDentity, is the brainchild of the International Theater Institute's New Project Group -- or more accurately it is one of the projects dreamt up by the ceaselessly inspiring Emilya Cachapero. She'd invited me to participate in the Borges Project a few years ago which took me to Manila with a whole bunch of other crazy theater folks. While at the heart of this international collaboration project is a complete mystery of unknowns and experimentation, it also represents a deep desire and hope for the future of theater and art.

Anyway, the reason I was flown out to Oregon (Medford -- near Ashland, to be exact) is because one of the other artists on the team is in the company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I met the other artists for the first time last week -- Hana Sharif who is at Hartford Stage, and the aforementioned actor Juan Rivera Lebron. Both of whom turned out to be lovelier than I could have ever imagined.

We lived and rehearsed at Buckhorn Springs for 3-4 days where we did much of our own cooking and spent our days discussing identity and media. Here are some pix.

From the left, clockwise: Emilya, Hana, Kevin Bitterman who always makes me laugh, Liz Engelman the dramaturg (and my roommate in Manila!) and Juan.

So I'm back and rehearsing full swing. Still exhausted -- but I did manage to catch the much-talked about performance of the Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and the Fury. After being blown away by the company's Gatz, I have to say (also not having read Faulkner -- I did try once for about 10 minutes) the first act of Sound did not turn me on. In fact I fell asleep for a significant chunk of it. But honestly, that's not saying much because at my exhaustion level, I am constantly falling asleep whenever I have a moment to sit down and close my eyes.

Joan and I stayed for the second act, which was by far more invested, engaging and urgent. The performances were really nuanced and lovely, and the chaotic switches in time and narrative, compounded with the frequent switching of roles by the actors, were executed seamlessly. I thought after seeing the show I would be compelled to read the book, but in a way, this experience was so lucid and complete, I don't think I'll make it through the book.

free sandwich with your angst

Justine told me that she and Jill had driven to Philly to see this show -- and I also knew that it had been touring all the European festivals these days. And also I don't know how, but I was on their e-mail list. So when I found $10 tickets to see the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's NO DICE, I had very vague expectations of greatness, which were, I am glad to report, vaguely met. I didn't know anything specific about the show, except for the fact that you get a free sandwich at 6.30, and that the show itself was 4 hours long (in actuality, this included the 30 minutes of pre-show sandwich time).

The show seemed to be constructed from texts from real-life conversations that were recreated and performed with great intensity, verve and surprising compassion by the main cast of three incredibly weird, very intense characters in bizarre costumes and sometimes various European accents. General themes of conversations ranged from the inanity of menial office work, the desperate lives of downtown actors, the terribleness of dinner theater, the brilliance of Johnny Depp, dieting & working out, drinking problems, different film versions of Hamlet, etc. The text (which may have been fed to the performers via earphones? not sure how the earpieces figured into the execution of the piece) was essentially banal, and the performances so thickly layered with repetitive gesture sequence and facial contortions, that made me question the sincerity of the conversations at face value -- but after the first hour, the overall effect was that of capturing the sense of hopefulness (and hopelessness) and optimism (and pessimism) of a generation of young artistic Billburg-types -- i.e. the majority of the audience and the performers. With a self-referential self-conscious acknowledgment of the superficiality and irony that pervades our daily existence, this play with dancing embodied the questions that haunt my circle of friends: how do you make an impactful, meaningful life with artistic integrity out of meaningless work for little money? Or something like that.

I liked a lot of it, and at some points I was laughing so hard I thought I might explode right there in my chair and leaky cup of bad red wine. I was sandwiched between Lanners who was also laughing and crying, and Judson who was for the most part nonplussed by the self-indulgence. I didn't need 4 hours of this, nor the last 20 minutes of the play which revealed that most of the text was taken from conversations between the director and his mom, but I enjoyed the performances tremendously. If I had to draw up a top 5 for 2007, No Dice would most likely be up there.

Catching up, and the TOP 3 of 2007

YIKES! I haven't posted anything in so long, even though I've seen tons of shows and movies.

Here's a super quick run-down of some stuff:

Harry Partch's Delusion of the Fury at JS. Ambitious and interesting concept, but not really a theatrically watchable piece. Best part, besides Partch's original instruments, were John Jesurun's projections on the ceiling of the theater.


Saga Theater's Homesick at the OHIO. A physical and musical ensemble play about search for community and identity and an indictment of greed. A lot of material generated over the company's 3.5 week rehearsal process, with much more exploration and sculpting to be had.

The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee: The Second Coming at the Brick. A series of ten-minute plays loosely about Christmas and Christ-related themes, for the most part hugely ironic. I only caught the Josephs. Highlights: Joseph is a single dad looking for a wife and mother to his son Jesus, but Joseph is also afraid of sexual intercourse since it led to the death of his first wife, Sheila, during childbirth (what??). Or the play about finding out your ex-girlfriend is now a dyke, at or around Christmas time. I had a cup of the theater's rum-heavy hot cider before the show, so it was hard for me to stay awake...

Pappa Tarahumara's Ship in A View at BAM. I AM biased -- Pappa T is one of my favorite companies ever, of all time. Their combination of visceral imagination, stunning stage, light, and sound designs, unparalleled dancers and singers are something to behold. This particular piece, though, was not my favorite. It was dragging in tempo and the transformations seemed murky.




Min Tanaka at PS1. I'd never seen him live, but loved his performance in the film Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai) so I thought I'd head out to Queens. Was not crazy about this performance alone (which essentially consisted of sitting in the whipping cold attic of PS 1 while Tanaka rocked, writhed and convulsed like an Alzheimer's patient for 45 minutes); however the meal afterwards was definitely worth it.

Lulu at BAM. The Wedekind play about the life and descent of a woman who employs herself and body as a commodity. Hmm. Best thing in it was the huge white wall that started far upstage and almost unnoticed advanced incrementally throughout the play so that by the last scene, it pressed the actors practically up against the audience.



---

2007, what a wild year. All-in-all, the general level of activity was very intense. I'm feeling a bit jaded about theater. My top 3 will be pretty quick:

3. Bobby's Yudkowski Returns! (at the Brick) was a real surprise and a real joy to watch.

2. Young Jean's Church (at PS 122) -- I haven't laughed that hard in the theater in a really long time.

1. TR Warszawa's KRUM (at BAM) sincerity in the theater still exists, thank you very much. What I felt as a truthful portrayal of all the anticlimaxes of life and the fantasies needed to sustain them.

---

I did enjoy many more movies this year, and by far my favorite was the Coen Bro's No Country For Old Men. The story is framed by Tommy Lee Jones' narrator character who is an (old) man who expects the world to function according to societal consensus and order, and the antagonist murderer played by Javier Bardem who is a man who imposes his own order upon the world which he knows to be without. Thrilling to the end.

The REAL popular theater

I saw something a few weeks ago which amazed me to such an extent that even after 2 weeks I'm still not sure I can convey the complexity of the event.

My co-worker and longtime friend Nyan-nyan-chan took a few (well-deserved) days off of work. I assumed that he was just going to be holing up at home with some pornos, as is his habit, but in fact he was working on a show from Japan. He kept referring to it as 大衆演劇 "popular theater" of the worst kind, and coming from him, who most of the time LOVES the razzle-dazzle simple pleasures of spectacle in entertainment for the masses, that was saying a lot.

Let me backtrack a little bit and say that in my academic studies of theater, in the early to mid-1990s, we meticulously followed the course of popular theater across culture and throughout human history. Theater has historically been a dirty low-class business, hardly a step away from prostitution. Certain rulers, patrons and artists were able to elevate theater and promote it as an intellectual and artistic endeavor, but its populist roots were deep. And so it was in Japan. The first appearance of the seeds of traditional theater were in sarugaku, a form of song and dance. Originally women performed by the riverbanks in the outskirts of town -- but because this entertainment was so deeply tied to prostitution, women were banned from performing. Out of sarugaku arose what has come to be known as noh theater (the solemn, serious, mystical heavy slow drama, performed with droning chants and jolting percussion-heavy music, and masks) and kyogen, noh's comic cousin, much akin in form and content to commedia dell'arte. Now, after several hundred years of codification of the physical training and staging, both noh and kyogen are treated with great reverence as an irreplaceable relic and living cultural treasure. But when you think about it, hundreds of years ago, the Lords of feudal society were paying for noh and kyogen actors to entertain them.

So if noh & kyogen (and kabuki) as we know them today have tracked the trajectory of the "high" art in terms of fidelity of principal and construction, custom and systemic rituals of the form, then where has the spirit of popular theater gone?

Well not to fret, it is alive today, tottering on shaky legs, in Sawa Ryuji, The Return. Sawa Ryuji is an old school populist actor. He and his "school" of theater is precisely that of popular theater. It is about entertaining the masses, it's about spectacle and drama (laugh and cry, and catharsis). So for its value as a cultural phenomenon alone his show was worth seeing.

As for the show itself... There is no way for me to aptly describe what it was, but let me try. Imagine a showcase/revue, a sequence of vignettes, scenes, dances and songs, featuring a variety of performers playing a variety of different roles. The main actor is a middle-aged (50s?) man who's like a cross between Tammy Fae Baker and Bruce Willis. He performs ridiculously choreographed stylized sword fights in which he defeats legions of enemy without ever getting within 3 feet of them. Every time he makes an entrance, an MC on mic announces his name over the blown-out PA system, and the audience is supposed to shout his name and cheer him on. He appears in vignette after vignette, with minimal dialogue and maximum maudlin melodrama and cheap spectacle, and there is a perpetual spotlight on him, no matter where he is on stage. In the finale, he comes out in an emerald green sequined Japanese gown, and sings a song about how there's only the actor's life for him. He is sweaty, wobbling into the house (full of Americans who haven't understood a word he has said throughout the evening, and probably think this is "great exotic Japanese performance"), and full of pride. At the curtain call, he attempts to introduce some of the long-time actors in his company, but he can't remember their names. Ah, the irony, the poignancy, the heartbreak...

The mythologies of John Moran (and his neighbor Saori)

When I first ever saw a work by John Moran, it was at the Kitchen, and he had just gone through terrible heartbreak. After his long-time German (I think?) partner and girlfriend left him, he incorporated the sad event into his lush looping Goldberg Variations, weaving this beautiful wistful story of loss through seamlessly interwoven and looping soundtracks and choreography. That was the first time Saori worked with him, and whatever conflicts or dramas they might have had, together I think they are wonderful artistic collaborators.

Their latest at PS122 was not really about (as the titles of the piece suggested) what if Saori had a party? but it was instead a rather dark meditation on mortality and loss of innocence. The top of the show introduces Saori as a super-cute robotic anime-type character who lives in a bubble (think Astroboy + Teletubbies + Twiggy x a dose of acid). She is "not real" as she admits, and desires nothing more in the world than "to exist" (i.e. be real). Her companion, Mr. Computer (which is just the voice of a talking mac) informs her that today, somehow, her wish can be granted -- today is her first ever birthday. A singing telegram man shows up with a surprise birthday present -- which turns out to be a baby. Saori must then learn to take care of this baby, who fusses and cries, and repeatedly goes through a cycle of "growing up." Eventually in an effort to understand why the baby suffers, and what loss means, Saori is burst out of her bubble and experiences the suffering of life first-hand, all the way to death. It's a poignant Pinocchio story without glorious salvation or redemption. Though it never reaches the depths of grotesqueness and despair that compares to the height of its saccharine sweetness, Saori's Birthday was still a great display of Saori's phenomenal physical control and grace of movement, Katie Brook's precision and sweetness, Joseph Keckler's awesome singing voice and John's deeply emotional sound-score that spirals the audience into intimate moments of vulnerability.

Boyfriend in a coma I know, I know

I'd heard of playwright Jason Grote quite a bit so when I got a notice about his latest play 1001 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, I decided to go without even really researching what the play was about. Grote has a very ambitious play on his hands, many things that are challenging and work to varying degrees of success. From the lobby entrance to the theater, audience members are given a colored coupon and told to follow along a colored line (corresponding to the color of their coupon) taped to the floor. The lines diverge and snake along the perimeters of the theater and end up in different point of the playing space. A cute device that demonstrates very literally that divergent paths can still lead to the same center. The play itself, staged in the round (or square, as it were) follows a similar structure: several storylines (some more leading than others) intertwined, with the two protagonists finding each other in a love relationship that spans different eras, mythologies, times and spaces. They are Scheherazade and the Persian king (the framing story of Arabian Nights), they are also a contemporary young couple in New York (one an Arab and the other a Jew) who end up suspended in limbo when the next war/terrorism strikes NY and the guy gets bricked in the head and ends up in a coma. The other handful of cast members play a multitude of characters from rivaling romantic interests to Scheherazade's sister, even Gustave Flaubert and Jorge Luis Borges make appearances -- and though this smorgasbord of characters and settings seem intended to create a complex vortex of many disparate stories converging into one, there is something forced in the script and direction that makes it very apparent what the play is up to -- its edge is never quite sharp enough to really surprise or enchant. The cast is limber and versatile, and there are some very effective moments in the play. The live dj running the sound and projected text (for scene titles and once an on-line chat-love-scene) gave the production an air of hipness that didn't quite mesh -- it may have had something to do with the lead actor Matthew Rauch, who I've seen in a bunch of show -- or maybe it was just Red Bull's The Revenger’s Tragedy which for some reason I found so banal -- who is like "a very good actor" type and drives me crazy. The play actually reminded me of that movie The Fountain, in that they both were attempting to weave a timeless (or rather trans-temporal) epic love story but didn't quite keep it together. The Fountain was more beautiful, 1001 was more convincing, but both were kinda cheesy.

FOOD COMA!!!!!

Ivo Van Hove, why do you hate playwrights so much? Why do you hate Americans so much? And why do you hate actors? The Belgian director is at NYTW once again, making aping idiots of us all, with the unlikely The Misanthrope -- yes Moliere's. Much fuss has been made about Van Hove, who undoubtedly has a unique vision and great aesthetics. The designs of his shows are what are most notable -- always a stark, bold, clean canvas upon which he smears the filth of humanity. In this case, food. The original play is about Alceste, an all-or-nothing kind of guy, morally speaking. He can't accept anything less than the honest-to-God brutal truth, and abhors the convention of manners and politeness -- and yet he is in love with the most superficial socialite around. About 20 minutes into the piece, Alceste rudely interrupts his acquaintances' lunch spread from the deli by laying his body on top of the picnic. He then proceeds to drench himself in chocolate syrup, catsup, jam and anything else he can get his hands on, in a gesture meant to demonstrate in graphic terms the true disgusting animal face of mankind. It certainly effective in invoking revulsion, especially with the stench of all that food permeating the theater (later, with the flinging of sour cream and tomato sauce pretty much covers all the bases in terms of olfactory overload). Unfortunately this big mess does little to elucidate the play. Grossly miscast and with no attempt to actualize the characters the way Moliere wrote them, Van Hove's intention weighs heavily atop the actors like an old stinky rag and the dramatic structure splinters with each passing moment, despite the intricate and innovative video work and heated performances.

This Krummy Life

I wish I knew what kind of name "Krum" is in Polish. Does it feel like "Jim" or more like "Anderson"? I can only guess it feels just as it sounds, Krum -- crumb, crumble. The Polish company TR Warszawa was at BAM with New York premiere of Krum by the late Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin. When I walked into the Harvey, the set, to me, felt like a David Lynch space. Latticed wood floor, walled in perimeters with windows, heavy curtains, lush green/red/blue thick velvet fold-out train beds, a few banks of heavily cushioned theater seats and a projection screen hung in the center of the space. Combined with the incessant (I mean truly, relentless and endless) score of trancey lounge music underscoring the play, it felt, initially, as if a dancing dwarf was going to crawl out of a hole in the ground, or a voluptuous naked lady was going to writhe about in pain in the corner.

What ended up transpiring on stage, over the next near three hours, was something quite different. Somehow evoking Hamlet, Woyzek, Trainspotting, and Naked (Mike Leigh's) all at the same time, here is a story about the futility and wonder of life -- trainwreck marriages (and great ones), diseases, desire, disappointment, fantasies, mutating definitions of success, and death -- the things that humans living in society are all supposed to experience. The desire for and the impotency in rebellion against those things, in the raging attempt to "get out of here."

Krum comes home "from abroad" (though God knows where he's been) decidedly without any gifts or stories. The one thing he has accomplished, he announces proudly, is to avoid getting married. He comes home to his mother, who, like any mother, wants him to live (i.e. make some money at some job, marry a girl and produce offspring). And for the following many years that unfold, everyone around his life does just that. All of this living is happening (albeit painfully, albeit glumly) and Krum alone stands to the periphery of it all, the perpetual observer. Years pass, and his mother still implored him to get a life, but he refuses -- he is a writer, and artist, and cannot be bothered with those kinds of things, and he has just begun (finally) his new novel... and he is still chasing after some impossible fantasy.

It's hard to imagine the portrayal of such a glum existence and environment is pulled off without making the audience want to hang themselves -- but the inventive stage compositions with occasional video montages of modern-day Israel and live feed from the stage, and the rough edges, raw energy, and extreme emotional commitment of the performers, bring incredible amount of compassion and life to a play about how life is meaningless.