Hello, friends. Lately I have had theatre on my mind. Part of that is because I’m still deep in rehearsals for “Max Understood” for the New York Musical Festival. It’s the first professional production I’ve ever worked on in New York, and it has been quite the experience. I still plan on giving you a detailed account of the whole ordeal, just as soon as I change the names of all those involved. In the meantime, it would seem that the fall theatre season has begun in New York, and I’m generally unimpressed by this season’s lineup.
There seems to be a lot of “Bye Bye, Birdie” and “Finian’s Rainbow” coming our way. Those are two musicals that I have no desire to see, nor do I suspect anyone else desires to see either. Oh wait. Did I say “Bye Bye Birdie?” Nevermind. Tourists, idiots, tweens, and Stamos fans (see idiots), will have that covered. I smell a hit, Roundabout.
Likewise, in the world of straight drama there is a slough of revivals that I’m struggling to get excited for. Top of that list is David Mamet’s “Oleanna” with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles. One of Mamet’s weaker plays, I can’t imagine how this small and dated piece will play in a big Broadway house. This is a production that was recently mounted in LA, where it received mixed to negative reviews. Also on Broadway, one of the most exciting stage directors working today, David Cromer (Our Town, Bug, Adding Machine) is directing alternating revivals in rep of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound.” As revolutionary and abstract as Cromer can get, I just don’t know how you can make these traditional Neil Simon plays feel fresh or new in any way.
We also have another production of “Hamlet” coming our way, I believe our third major New York production in as many years. This one stars Jude Law, so that should ensure a crowded theatre, but even though I hear it’s quite good, if not great, I just feel like I’ve seen so many Hamlets in the last few years that I don’t think I can sit through another, no matter how good or dreamy.
The play I’m looking forward to the most is “Superior Donuts” by Tracy Lettes. After the shockingly huge success of “August: Osasge County,” a new Lettes play was destined to get a much buzzed about run, but any fan of his previous plays “Killer Joe” and “Bug” knows that Lettes doesn’t go to the same place twice. I have no idea what to expect from “Superior Donuts” and that’s what makes me so excited.
I’m also quite eager to see the revival of “Ragtime,” which was the first play I ever saw on “Broadway.” E.L. Doctorow’s book is one of my favorites and it has successfully been adapted twice, as a film and as a musical. Aside from some stellar performances and a perfect score, I had some problems with the original Broadway production of the play. It was a little too large in scale with some lackluster direction. However the play itself is quite beautiful and powerful and I’m hoping this new production improves on the original.
Further downtown, The Public Theater will be doing a new play written and directed by Richard Foreman, and starring Willem Dafoe. Richard Foreman is one of the strangest, scariest, and most brilliant directors of all time. There’s very little middle ground when it comes to his plays. You either love them or hate them. Designed to be experiences of sensory overload, some of his trademarks include bright lights shining in the eyes of the audience, loud crashes, glass and tight strings separating the audience and the actors, and plays containing almost no dialogue, except for the occasional repeated phrase such as “Let’s all join… the misfit club!” He has been putting on plays for over thirty years in the attic of the St. Marks Church. While he has worked in large venues many times before, this will be the first epic piece of his I’ll see and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with, even if it becomes an exercise in trying to keep in awkward laughter, so as not to get an angry scowl from Foreman, who always runs the sound and lights for his show from the audience. Wild, scary stuff.
So there are some productions that we have to look forward to and others that we have to dread. This week I kicked off my own theatre season by seeing two new productions. One of them was one of the most anticipated and hottest tickets in town. The other I think you can see in exchange for a pack of gum. Seriously, they’re papering the house.
OTHELLO
“Othello” is the last collaboration between The Public Theater and LAByrinth, who have been producing together for the past three years. Some of their productions, such as “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” and “A View From 151st Street” have been triumphs. Others, such as “Guinea Pig Solo” and “The Little Flower of East Orange” have fallen under the “interesting failures” umbrella. Running at over four hours, “Othello” is long enough to land into both categories.
Director Peter Sellars has brought us a stark, scaled down, naked “Othello.” Using a cast of only eight people and having them perform on a nearly bare stage, (save for one major set piece, but more on that later), it can seem like a lot of empty space is surrounding the actors, which is accentuated by the massive stage at the NYU Skirball Center. This probably would have been perfect in one of the smaller spaces at the Public Theater, but with Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Iago, you know the show is certain to be a hot ticket so why not sell as many as possible?
In order to fill that large space with sound, microphones are used to enhance the actors’ voices. When the mics work, the surround sound can be very off-putting. With some healthy projection, unaltered voices could easily fill the massive theatre, but that wouldn’t allow for all the whispers and soft voices, so beloved of some of these actors.
The usually superb John Ortiz takes quite a while to truly establish his Othello. Though he rarely leaves the stage, he spends so much of the first hour of the play cuddling up with Desdemona in his underwear, that it takes a bit too long for him to feel like Othello, rather than just Desdemona’s boyfriend. It doesn’t help that Othello’s lengthy monologue about how he wooed Desdemona is delivered entirely to his cell phone, complete with fuzzy phone voice. But once Othello makes his journey to Cyprus, both he and Ortiz begin to command authority.
Hoffman’s Iago is quite a unique creation. Never have I seen an actor so resistant to all the laughs that Iago can so easily pull out of the audience. Hoffman’s Iago is not the snidely evil guy, with a crooked half-grin and a curled up lip that we’re used to. Hoffman plays him as an angry, frustrated, incredibly depressed man, who can’t even discuss his hatred of the Moore without breaking down into tears. He’s more thankful than ever for the lucky breaks he gets, since we’re not sure that he’ll be able to have the ability to complete his plan without them. The scene in which he musters the courage to finally plant the seeds of jealousy into Othello’s ear is the most thrilling moment of the show, because we’re seduced not just by the fear of his plan succeeding, but by the notion that Iago’s lack of nerve could allow it to fail. Watching these two actors play against each other for that scene is a thrilling experience and even those well versed in the play will be curious as to what will happen next.
However there’s one character who always seems to know what will happen next, and that’s Desdemona. If Hoffman’s Iago lacks confidence, Jessica Chastain’s Desdemona has it in spades. Chastain seems so calm and centered at all times, it almost feels like she knows the end of the story, knows and has accepted her fate, and I never fully understood what this added to her character, aside from making her less interesting. This approach continues through the very last scene, which is a fairly disappointing climax due to Desdemona’s apparent indifference to her own impending death.
Liza Colon-Zayas is effective as Emilia, playing her as subservient and miserable, but a potentially interesting take on her relationship with Othello is given too brief a moment to really pack the punch it wants to. The smaller roles are doubled up in sometimes bizarre ways, with Bianca also taking a beating, and attempted rape, from Cassio, in the Montano role. But with so much dialogue suggesting conflicting emotions and actions, the conceit doesn’t really work. Much better is Gaius Charles, (Smash from “Friday Night Lights!”) in the usually thankless role of The Duke. He rules with such grace and charm, and the flag pin he wears seems to confirm, that he easily passes as a young Obama.
The most distracting thing in the whole play though, is also its coolest contrivance. The sole set piece on the stage is a giant bed for the lovers to lie on, made of 45 television screens, which produce various images throughout the play. The real benefit of this, (aside from the potential to watch “City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold” 45 times, all at once), is the ability to enhance the lighting design of the play by matching the mood and actions of the story with complimenting images and colors. This had the potential of being really overused and distracting, but instead it’s underused and distracting. More often than not, one can’t really tell what images the screens are actually showing, and you find yourself squinting and trying to solve what looks like a Magic Eye puzzle. Just to make it clear, I did have quite a good seat, and all I could really make out on those screens was a candle flame and some kind of building(?).
Even with all its problems, and its four hour running time, “Othello” never felt boring to me. Ortiz and Hoffman are mesmerizing together, and are able to drive up the intensity whenever they’re on stage. When they’re not on stage, I was still captivated by this wonderful play, which doesn’t seem to sacrifice a single word in this otherwise scaled back production. I wish I could say that this production was as perfect as the play itself. It’s not, but it is a fascinating attempt. I urge everyone to see “Othello.” If you’re only able to catch it here, at The Public Theater, then take what you can get, but hope for something a bit better next time.
THE RETRIBUTIONISTS
For all of you out there who found “Inglourious Basterds” to be too entertaining, exciting, and fun, then you might enjoy “The Retributionists.” It tells the “true” story, of a group of Jewish fighters, who after World War II, attempted to kill thousands of Nazi prisoners in Nuremberg prison by poisoning their bread with arsenic. While that sounds like a fun tale of intrigue, worthy of an eye-patched Tom Cruise, I assure you that there is very little joy to be found here, though plenty of unintentional laughs.
Poisoning Nazis already seems complicated enough, but the majority of the story centers on a love tri… uh, or would it be a squa… hmmmm. Make that a love pentagon. A boring love pentagon. Sigh. Ok. I’m going to try to summarize the plot. Bear with me here.
During the war, Anika, Dov, and Dinchka were living in the forest, holding big guns, and having the occasional bout of three-way sex. They were kind of like that Jewish resistance group of Ewoks from that movie “Defiance,” only I don’t remember Daniel Craig and Jamie Belle ever getting it on just to stay warm. Anyways, when Anika wasn’t bedding Dov and Dinchka, she was also sleeping with Jascha, a fellow soldier with an accent straight of a “Rocky” movie. Everybody loves that girl! After the war, she recruits Jascha to infiltrate Nuremberg’s bakery to poison the bread, and if he is successful, she promises she will marry him, though she is also engaged to Dov. Alright. That’s enough of that.
While this real life situation was probably deadly serious, it’s treated with a light touch in this play. While justice and revenge is brought up from time to time, most of the characters seem to be motivated purely by the desire to fuck and eat cookies. Oh. Real cookies, in case you were wondering. Sex is frequently used as a negotiating tactic, and we end up hearing lines such as “I want to make you pregnant, tonight, on this train into Germany.”
Once the action shifts to the bakery, the tone of the play suddenly invokes that of a sitcom, with a very Lavern and Shirley-esque couple of wisecracking ladies. At this most pivotal and heavy moment in the plan, it just makes the play all the more difficult to take seriously. The tension was too much for the audience to take, and during the final scene they couldn’t hold back anymore, as bottled up laughs finally began to erupt out of them, as the playwright, Daniel Goldfarb, unleashed some basic dramatic irony, worthy of an episode of an episode of “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.”
As awful as “The Retributionists” is, and it certainly is one of the worst plays I’ve ever seen, I still found many things in it to hold my attention. For example, there is a character who is missing a few fingers, and I must admit that I stared at his glove for several minutes, wondering just how the actor had taped down his digits. I hope nobody said anything important while I was doing that. My mind was also racing after I heard this exchange: “’…back when I still had my fingers.’ ‘You’re still hung up on that?’” How long does it take to get over the forcible loss of ones fingers? At least I can’t accuse this play of not making me think.
