A.R.T.

The A.R.T.’s Latest Import: Beowulf

Rick Burkhardt, Lisa Clair, Jessica Jelliffe, Jason Craig (Evgenia Eliseeva)

Rick Burkhardt, Lisa Clair, Jessica Jelliffe, Jason Craig (Evgenia Eliseeva)

The A.R.T’s most recent hip New York import is Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, now running at Oberon. The show opens with three speakers talking in a kind of broken academic cant in something that’s part book talk and part lecture. Their takes on the book are humorously weighed down by their personalities. This is reader response criticism at its highest.

One has a kind of manly fascination with Beowulf, another has an erotic fascination with the titular character, and the third is a classic feminist. It’s this third reading that the show predictably relies the most on. That take is probably fine if you never had to read Beowulf for school or if you’re a feminist who prefers the standard lines of discourse, but I find it kind of boring, reductive, and dismissive–kind of like going around saying Sir Gawain is gay, and why, and leaving it at that.

I was hoping the show might put a little more spin on things and take us beyond the conflict between the matriarchal and the patriarchal, especially since the plot isn’t all that interesting by itself if you know it. Perhaps what’s most interesting about Beowulf is its canonization–but this is taken for granted here. I’ll be fair and say that they do take on Beowulf in old age, but with jokes about how they almost skipped over it after things are wrapped up with Grendel’s mom. I think pulling from the latter part of the book, drawing Beowulf as a kind of aging rock star would have been more interesting than a typical assault on his violent machismo.

While I didn’t keel over laughing at Jason Craig (as Beowulf) gesture at his codpiece, there were some good lines of anachronistic dialog between Beowulf and Grendel (Rick Burkhardt). And Jessica Jelliffe (as Grendel’s Mom) had a cool cabaret vibe going. Much of the show had the qualities of a radio play and I might’ve had more of a soft spot for it had it been on the radio.

Props to the band, which includes a great clarinet player (Mario Maggio), a guitarist who was amazing with a slide and array of effect pedals (Sam Kulik), and a couple trombones that kick out some brass band bass. Multi-instrumentalist Brian McCorkle, who sang a few verses as King Hrothgar, had the most natural stage presence of the troupe. But behind the musicians and ridiculousness, there wasn’t enough of an interesting spin on the text for me.

The Glass Menagerie at the A.R.T

The Glass Menagerie at the A.R.T

All the pieces are in place to send the ART’s production of The Glass Menagerie to Broadway. And I mean the Broadway that still kinda matters, not the tourist traps state officials would bribe producers to have Boston become a proving ground for. There’s the gushing review from Ben Brantley, there are actors with New York and film & television credits, we have classic text just oh-so-rightly modernized, and there’s a very cinematic aesthetic element to the show–long musical interludes and things like that.

The despondence and stark realism of Williams is all there too, but director John Tiffany and set designer Bob Crowley have set the play in a surreal space, accentuating the play’s actual setting. Not in some low rent quarter of St. Louis, but deep down in the memory of our narrator/sometimes protagonist Tom. An M.C. Escher like fire escape steps upwards, making this broken family’s shabby apartment feel like its underground. In the play’s present, it’s Tom’s dungeon. And years into the future, long after he has climbed out and apparently “lived” in the world, following in the footsteps of his wayward father, Tom narrates his memories of this place as if it’s a little prison in his soul. And it looks like it. The dimly-lit set is something out of one of those movies where they go inside people’s dreams.

As Tom, Zachary Quinto is something of an incarnation of Tennessee Williams. He’s sly, poetic, and a little effeminate. As both character and narrator, his projection and commandment of the stage is extraordinary. He shifts about, like a calmly neurotic fish out of water conveying both frailty and a supreme intelligence.

The reviews I’ve read have flatteringly called Cherry Jones’ portrayal of Amanda straight. That is to say, not some grotesque parody of a beaten down Southern belle. Perhaps it’s Williams’ text seeping through, but there’s just so much madness to her machinations to marry off her daughter. She’s perfectly reasonable, somewhat loving, and often competent, but beneath every maternal act and smooth sales pitch for whatever lady’s magazine she hocks over the phone, lurks a woman sick with delusions. In many ways, she’s sicker than her daughter Laura.

Williams’ great dramatic coincidence is well played here; the Gentleman Caller (Brian J. Smith) that happens to be Laura’s high school crush. It’s painful to watch Smith and Kennan-Bolger (as Laura) build there chemistry together, as this high school hero lately humbled by warehouse work, breaks down Laura’s handicapping shyness with gentle advances. But as good as things seem to be going for Laura (and by extension, the rest of her family), we spend this whole portion of the play just knowing that everything is spiraling towards the same starkness the play began with. Yea, it’s a downer. But the cast and crew have sketched a powerful emotional arc into this visually unique production that I don’t think anyone’s going to want to miss. So go ahead and get one-up on those New Yorkers while you can.

Off with Her Head: The A.R.T.’s “Marie Antoinette”

Reading over the reviews of the ART’s Marie Antoinette, the consensus seems to be that it’s just not that good. I think there was a lot of pent up anticipation for the play based on the success, and quality, of last season’s smash hit at the Huntington, Candide. The ART here, of course, feigns to be a little more overt in its references to the current politics on inequality, but in the end, this production trades mostly on its lush imagery & costumes, sight gags, and “dance party” interludes.

Playwright David Adjmi’s Marie is a strange one. Actress Brooke Bloom slouches across the stage in a deliberately unaristocratic channeling of some contemporary celebrity who the people love to hate. She has the coarseness of Snooki’s friend Deena on Jersey Shore, the narcissism of Carrie Bradshaw, and the self-righteous silliness of Zooey Deschanel. She is both depraved and deprived; stuck in a foreign land in a sexless marriage, but unable to do little more than soak up flattery and spew insults. At times, we get the sense that there’s an intelligence lurking below Marie’s fiery and frivolous surface, as she’s taken to dropping ten dollar words and opening up her soul to her lover Axel Fersen (Jake Silberman). But, that seems just as likely an invention of her ego.

Marie Antoinette ART Yale Boston

Marie (Brooke Bloom) and Louis (Steven Rattazzi) with Teale Sperling (Joan Marcus)

In the second act, once the palace falls, and we follow Marie and her family through their imprisonment (it’s more of a delayed execution punctuated, dramatically, with false hopes of escape and rescue), she gets better. During the intermission she undergoes a character transformation into a better wife, mother, and an impressively capable woman–even as her fineries are slowly stripped away by her captors. Unfortunately, this comes off as more of a costume change than a curve of her character arc. And that’s really the rub. This incarnation of Marie Antoinette just isn’t enough to support a play. This weak plight of her as this girl raised to be a queen and sent away from her homeland at 14, only to be despised by the people of France and eventually trapped in a political turmoil she can’t comprehend is tediously drilled into us. Sure, we sympathize with her throughout her prolonged self-reflection in Act 2 (actually, that’s really all Act 2 is), but just not that much.

Does Marie need to have depth? Does she have to be some beautifully tragic figure–a punchline of history re-skinned with third wave feminism and a sympathetic eye? No, not if we were dealing with a great, witty satire. But, we’re not. The politics here are thin. There are a few lectures thrown in, one by a barber revolutionary and another by a cynical Austrian sheep, but don’t expect anything beyond a rudimentary thematic connection to the politics of the Occupy movement–one that might as well just come from the Wikipedia article on the French Revolution.

Marie Antoinette ART Boston Brooke Bloom

Marie (Brooke Bloom) and sheep (David Greenspan) (Joan Marcus)

Now, do I need to have my political buttons pushed? No. But, I would have liked to have seen more than the strange aesthetic amalgam director Rebecca Taichman has rendered on the Loeb stage. Although I did appreciate lighting designer Christopher Akerland’s sweeps of color, the lavish costumes and gravity-defying wigs by Gabriel Berry, Riccardo Hernandez’s mirrored and quietly ornate set, and even Matt Acheson’s odd little sheep puppet. Anyone would agree that the show is a triumph for everyone who works in the ART’s shops.

Kind of like a Skrillex single, the production comes off like its trying too hard to be cool, when the narrative pauses and the theater’s speakers pump with inane musical selections including Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger and a Girl Talk mashup. Of course a drag-queen dance party ensues and this Marie takes the chance to show off her ironic dance routines. Thankfully, Steven Rattazzi as Louis XVI and David Greenspan as the Sheep provide some much needed wit and character. Two things the play needs a lot more of to accomplish any of what it purports to do. Perhaps the folks in New Haven will like it when it sets up there after its run at the ART, but with the creative team and cast brought in for this one, I think everyone expected a lot more.

Marie Antoinette at ART Cambridge and Yale Rep

Marie (Brooke Bloom) and sheep (David Greenspan) again (Joan Marcus)

True Oklahoma Story: “Woody Sez” at the A.R.T.

In a seamless blend of song, narration, and brief vignettes, Woody Sez (at the ART through June 3rd) brings the life and politics of America’s greatest folk hero to the stage. A cast of four performs 28 songs that survey the Guthrie songbook and essay his life.

As much as Woody Sez is about what Woody Guthrie said in song, it’s about the source of those words. The show traces the history of Depression-era Populist politics, the Dust Bowl, and Communism, as not just a historical context for Guthrie’s songs, but the source of his voice and the lessons of his political education. This all comes in a kind of continual genesis story that divides Guthrie’s life into several distinct periods.

Generally, Woody Sez keeps things light & fun, if a little homespun, in what ends up being an enjoyable and truly immersive experience. The performers are fantastically talented musicians, particularly Darcy Deaville and Andy Teirstein on their fiddles. The band could probably use a really great folk vocalist to fill things out, but it’s clear the music has come first here. Aside from Lutken’s characterization of Guthrie, the acting is light and the production is spare. The show relies on its songs and it’s a real pleasure to hear them unamplified and on the beautiful collection of instruments they’ve assembled.

The Guthrie recordings we have today are characterized by the grittiness that’s pervasive among most historical recordings; from Robert Johnson to Pablo Casals. Alan Lomax’s Library of Congress recordings of Guthrie were made in 1940, before tape had been invented. Audio was cut directly into lacquered aluminum discs highly susceptible to degradation on their surfaces. And they did degrade, resulting in surface noise impossible to remove without removing some of Guthrie too. But it’s with all those “clicks” and “hisses” that most of us know Guthrie’s music–some contemporary folk acts even try to emulate that historical sound. I don’t know what Woody Guthrie actually sounded like. All I can say is that this grit is noticeably absent from Lutken’s performance, where the songs, although they often dwell on Guthrie’s personal tragedies, have a distinctly positive sheen. I think the comparison below shows what I mean. (Sorry for the difference in volume.)

So Long It’s Been Good to Know You from Guthrie’s 1940 Library of Congress Sessions

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Lutken’s cover of So Long It’s Been Good to Know You in Woody Sez

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This lack of grit extends to the narrative as well and how Lutken has chosen to represent Guthrie’s consciousness, political or otherwise. Take this excerpt from a 25-page stream of consciousness prose piece Woody typed out while staying on Lomax’s floor, after Lomax asked him to write a paragraph to incorporate into the “script” of their recording session.

I am writing this on Christmas paper and I think all election speeches ought to be wrapped in gift boxes with a red and green string tied around them, and that a way we would be sure at least of a Christmas package whether there was anything in it or not. No, what I’m really doing here tonight is seeing if I write better on the brown butcher paper that I wrote you on last time or this flimsy tissue paper. I didn’t buy nothing down at the butcher shop, but I bought a couple of bright coloerd shirts and got skinned pretty bad. I went out with twenty dollars and come back with two new shirts and a candidate for Congress at Large.

…this isn’t the clear accessible voice we get in Woody Sez. What we get is more the voice of the biographer, an educator trying to communicate a man’s legacy and life. Come to think of it, aside from some platforms, the set is made up of large photographs hanging from the ceiling–the kind you’d see in a sleek museum installation. I think that’s what Woody Sez is really about and it’s what it does well.

David Lutken Woody Sez

David M. Lutken (Wendy Mutz)

The A.R.T.’s Indie Rock Musical “Futurity”

The ART’s indie-rock musical, Futurity (runs through next weekend), is indicative of one trend at the Loeb/Oberon that I’m happy about. And that’s putting the ART Institute (the ART’s graduate school for theater) students on mainstage, rather than keeping them tucked away doing unpublicized shows in the Loeb blackbox, when HRDC isn’t using it. It’s an incredible pool of talent (and important, with the ART’s old company basically dismantled) that, unfortunately, tends to skip town after graduating. The ART has more or less put their students to work, featuring them regularly in The Donkey Show, as well as in recent productions like Alice vs. Wonderland and The Snow Queen–an all-Institute production that served as the ART’s family-friendly 2011 Christmas show.

And while the founding members of The Lisps, the band behind Futurity, who star in the show aren’t without stage experience, the best performances comes from the Institute students with second billing: Milia Ayache, Matthew Christian, Liza Dickinson, and Teri Gamble, who play members of the show’s hipsterfied rag-tag Civil War regiment. While the music is pretty good and the production is visually interesting (if techno-punk is your thing), the writing and lead performances are…well, what you’d expect from a band. They’ve basically taken big themes like war and science and run them through an Instagram filter. And like so many over-processed photos of sneakers and plates of pasta, the show’s intellectual penetration of its subject matter goes about as far as the pre-song banter at a pop concert.

At its core, Futurity revolves around a conflict between romance and science. Would-be inventor Julian (Cesar Alvarez) corresponds with Ada Lovelace (Sammy Tunis) about the design of a mechanical computer that, he believes, can end war. (Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on a real 19th Century mechanical computer and was, aptly, the daughter of Romantic icon Lord Byron.) Much of the play takes this epistolary form and Julian’s naïve passion begins to rub off on Lovelace, who’s portrayed here as a kind of repressed romantic.

ada lovelace futurity lisps musical

Sammy Tunis (as Ada Lovelace) (Evgenia Eliseeva)

While Julian’s fate plays out on Civil War battlefields, Lovelace faces her own battle back in England. And it’s an odd one. The Lovelace plot is a skewed version of the conventional story of an independently minded Victorian woman battling social convention. Lovelace’s mother, Lady Byron (Ann Gottlieb) encourages her daughter’s scientific pursuits rather than trying to squeeze her into a corset. But, she discourages Ada’s participation in Julian’s romantic, fanciful notions of what a mechanical computer could do. In fact, Lady Byron appears to have quite a head for numbers herself, and tries to push her daughter into convention with lines like “these equations do not balance.” A little silly, yes. There’s also a “Society of Scientists.” And the computer, dubbed the “Steam Brain,” which is a centerpiece of the set and an enclosure for, and extension of, the drum kit, is built from junk yard parts in a fanciful techno-punk aesthetic, rather than with the precision Lovelace speaks of.

lisps musical futurity steam brain

The Steam Brain (Evgenia Eliseeva)

And I suppose that’s all because Futurity takes place in a kind of surreality of selvedge heritage wear and nostalgic iPhone photo filters. A place where the idiosyncrasies of a 19th Century inventor mimic those of an (intensively creative and spacey) 21st century musician. And ideas erupt, like in stream of consciousness liner notes prose. I may have misheard some of the lyrics, but I swear I picked up references to Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity and the Big Bang.

All that said, Futurity does take an interesting angle on things. It gives the computer a romantic context by going back to a time before people really understood computers…before they were associated with cold, analytical calculation. I wonder what Julian would have thought of the computer in the great Cold War sci-fi thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, which awakes from its intended purpose as a machine of (Cold) war to not only end war, but solve all of humanity’s problems. But it only does this by making tyrannical demands with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today, we can imagine the cost of a digital peace, but for Julian, without an understanding of the technology that might deliver it, that cost is a non-issue.

While the Spencer repeating rifles in Futurity do work, Julian’s Steam Brain does not and its demise merges, quite poetically, with the the fate of Julian and his regiment on the battlefield. A tragedy yes, but peace by mechanical computer never seemed too likely in the first place.

futurity the lisps musical at oberon

Ben Simon, César Alvarez, Eric Farber (Evgenia Eliseeva)

Wild Swans at the ART: Parodying Propaganda with a Little Tragedy

The reviews agree that while the A.R.T.’s production of Wild Swans is a visual triumph of theatrical design, it comes off two dimensional; with a lack of character development and stale acting. Its tableaux shine, but the general plotting is humdrum–a quality that would have probably proven fatal if it weren’t for Wild Swans’ historical context of China’s Cultural Revolution. I haven’t read Jung Chang’s memoir (which Alexandra Wood adapted from 500 pages into this relatively short play), but it seems that this adaptation, directed by Sacha Wares, discards the epicness that’s probably crucial to the novel. Choosing instead to deliver a production of which vast sections are occupied not by efficient characterization and narrative, but by lengthy set changes (tediously removing a bamboo matting backdrop and emptying and then clearing at least six wheel-barrels worth of soil from the stage), an elaborate Red Guard pageant, and video montages depicting the modernization of the Chinese economy.

What does that leave us with? I can’t help but see Wild Swans as a satire of a Chinese propaganda play (which you may have seen, in ballet form, in the recent film Mao’s Last Dancer). All the ingredients of a propaganda play are there; a party sanctioned romance, a landowner toiling in his fields with peasants following the Civil War, flat characters, lessons in Maoist principles, and giant paper-mache vegetables symbolizing the agricultural bounty of the People’s Republic.

And everything for comic satire too. Two Red Guard members humorously court each other while working in a field, matter-of-factly divulging their sexual histories, the guy asking a girl for permission to write the party for permission to pursue a relationship. A meeting of Red Guards performing obligatory self-reflection begins with banter that’s borderline sitcom and ends with a mother being sent away for interrogation, her husband not even resisting it. There’s so much communist cant, that the actors couldn’t deliver their lines without them sounding like propaganda–so they have to be a little flat and satirical.

wild swans play

Another comic scene, where bringing your daughter and her doctor soup is wrong under Chinese communism. Notice the great mural! (Michael J. Lutch)

wild swans video

Probably the most striking video projection (Michael J. Lutch)

But of course, aside from a few comic scenes, it’s not straight-up satire. That would be far too much of an intellectual exercise for the Paulus A.R.T. And Chang’s novel, which is still banned in China, wouldn’t make very good source material for it anyways. Instead, Wild Swans takes on a satirical framework, but commits itself to a plot–a tragic dramatic reality–that’s ultimately and explicitly critical of Maoist social and economic reforms.

This plot is centered around a family that begins in the idealistic early years of the People’s Republic and ends up persecuted and separated into different communes, as Mao’s communism is slowly corrupted. The father’s resolute faith in the communist doctrine that once moved him to join the Red Guard is largely to blame for this, as he refuses to resign his idealism to the two-faced politicking that might have kept his family in a better standing through the 1960s and 70s. Even in the final moment of the play, set in the late 1970s after Mao’s death, he’s unwilling to ask a favor to give his daughter a leg up in a system he knows to be already corrupted by nepotism. Wild Swans basically inverts the communist propaganda play, letting its social ideals be corrupted, and befalling those who remain un-corrupted with tragedy rather than reward.

Enough can’t be said about the production’s excellent design. Farm tools and costumes made in China (in a good way) lend a visual realism that I wish more shows would strive for. The projections are stunning, but also wonderfully practical in their simple metaphor for Mao’s death: buses, ostensibly moving people around the county as they’re released from the communes. If only for its unique visuals and their scale, Wild Swans isn’t to be missed.

Wild Swans runs through March 11th at the A.R.T. Tickets about $50-60.

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A little bit of a cultural sampler (Michael J. Lutch)

wild swans art

(Michael J. Lutch)

Three Pianos and a Little Schubert at the A.R.T.

In a season that’s notably short on Christmas shows compared to recent years, it’s actually pretty incredible how the three polymath players behind Three Pianos have turned Schubert’s melancholy and heartbroken song cycle Winterreise into a warm and jocular testament to music, music making, and friendship. I’m glad the A.R.T. decided to import this hard to pin down show from New York, that’s not really a play or a concert or a club comedy act, but succeeds at all those things while seamlessly and compellingly weaving together different narratives. Here, the musical, the historical, the modern, and the meta all come together in what’s intended as a Schubertiade where we’re the guests.

But what’s a 19th century Viennese Schubert jam session, where we listen to songs about a recently dumped Romantic wandering through a cold desolate landscape in despair, without wine? Well, the Three Pianos has that covered with free cups served upon entering the theater and programmed wine breaks throughout the show. Nightclub wristbands and awkward mid-show wait service makes the gimmick not as cool as it might’ve been at a smaller venue or one less burdened by alcohol service laws.

But it’s not really the wine that pulls us in. Our three host-musician-actors impart so much affection for Schubert and Winterreise and provide so much back story, as well as a new story of their own, that we can’t help but feel involved. Of course, that’s what the music is supposed to do by itself, without anyone skipping songs they don’t like, doing snarky renditions, drilling in the plot, or proving MST3K like commentary. But all this stuff helps, a lot, to give Schubert’s music meaning and make it accessible and entertaining.

The show is sometimes like a lesson in music appreciation. The lyrics and music are explained and commented on with passion and sentiment, like Benjamin Zander might do before one of his concerts. There’s a brief lecture of the economics of Western music that’s mostly there to explain why Schubert was so damn poor. There’s history and biography to give Winterreise some context. And there’s even a little debate on whether all of this stuff is necessary to enjoy a song.

At other times,, the action is set in a New York apartment, where the modern counterpart of the Winterreise Wanderer is dealing with a breakup, by getting lost, not in a winter wasteland, but in his MacBook while dipping pieces of cheese into mustard. Unlike Schubert’s Romantic figure, he has his friends to help him out and talk about music, breakups, and apartment life.

And at other times the show is a Schubertiade, where Schubert’s buddies like Johann Mayrhofer (a lyricist of Schubert’s) and Moritz von Schwind (who illustrated some of Schubert’s music) drink until dawn. The party is peppered with historical fact, rumor, and anachronisms. Eventually these three threads come together and it’s no longer clear what’s what, when’s when, and who’s who, and it’s in this knot that the show really triumphs.

There’s a set–birches, dead plants, some fake snow, a little model village and graveyard–but none of it serves much of a purpose. All the action is centered around three upright pianos and a liquor cabinet, and that’s enough here. Three Pianos is about the essentials that haven’t changed much since Schubert’s day: music, friends, and booze.

Three Pianos runs at the A.R.T. through January 8th. Tickets start at $25, but generally hover around $50.

Rick Burkhardt, Dave Malloy, Alec Duffy (Ryan Jensen)

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