"Paul" at the Gamm Theatre

“Paul,” the 2005 play by Howard Brenton about the conversion, missionary work, and final days of the early Christian apostle of the play’s title, is enjoying a spirited but specious North American premier at the Gamm Theatre. The play radically revises the story of Saul of Tarsus, the infamous persecutor of Jesus’ early followers who converted to Christianity and changed his name on the road to Damascus after he was blinded by a miraculous vision of the resurrected Jesus. Brenton undermines this foundational legend – in a way that would be unprofessional to reveal, except perhaps by noting that fans of “Scooby Doo” should be thrilled – to challenge the basis of spiritual identity and religious authority. The show is representative of the contemporary “atheist chic,” which is a sort of reverse loom that spins faith into straw. So the play clatters furiously and in the end we find ourselves amid a scattering of dried-out debris. Think about this for a moment. The author and countless well-meaning and under-compensated theatre professionals have sweated over a work that leaves the audience considering nothing more than a pile of psychological and spiritual detritus. One can almost picture Brenton slinking away from the mess he’s made, whistling through a prankster’s smirk. But the audience has paid, with currency and emotional involvement, for something more rigorous and complex than “Punk’d.” So much for putting an end to childish ways.

The play begins with Paul (Alexander Platt) in a Roman prison, and shows, in flashback, his conversion and his wide travels around the Middle East, often accompanied by his close friend Barnabas (the affable Anthony Goes). He meets James (Marc Dante Mancini), Jesus’ jealous brother; Peter (Jim O’Brien), the ambivalent disciple; and Mary (Karen Carpenter), Jesus’ wife, a diseased and disillusioned prostitute. Paul wants to disseminate the story of Jesus’ life and death; they want to guard and control it. In the end, imprisoned for their evangelism and interrogated by no less an authority than the emperor, Nero (the terrifically lascivious Kelby T. Akin), Peter and Paul are forced to reckon with the squalid and all-too-human circumstances of Paul’s conversion and fervor.

The play ends here, exactly where it should begin – his miraculous encounter exposed as a fraud, Paul starts life anew. But Brenton is too committed to his ironic deconstruction of the Paul conversion story to chart anything original in the terror of self-discovery. That Paul’s understanding dawns only in his last day is evidence that Brenton is unsure of its real consequences. The play is just a mischievous and self-fascinated hypothetical - a diverting parlor game.

It is hard to distinguish the qualities of this production from the shortcomings of the written work. Alexander Platt, who was so vivid as Hedwig in last spring’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at Perishable Theatre, is an engaging Paul, but not dangerous. His performance is more gestural than internal, more mannered than felt. Indeed, this same criticism could apply to nearly all the actors, who seem to think that the somnambulant script might be awakened by very loud shouting. Only Anthony Goes, whose Barnabas is well-meaning but limited, and Kelby Akin, powdered and eerily prescient as Nero, modulate the stage volume and action. Cedric Lilly makes a fine Jesus, but the character is such a cipher. That's the problem with Brenton’s characters, who have no inner worlds to access. Brenton’s writing lacks poetry, spark, and fear – “Brentonion” will never join “Pauline” as a literary adjective of distinction – so his characters are taxidermic: dead on the stage, they move only when pushed. If we learn nothing else from “Paul,” it’s that the dead never walk on their own.

The Gamm Theatre: "The Glass Menagerie"

My review of Tennessee Williams's breakthrough family drama, The Glass Menagerie (at the Gamm Theatre through April 4), is in this week's Motif (available in cafés around town and as a downloadable PDF at http://motifmagazine.net). Critical sentiment around this show is pretty much uniform: it's terrific (here, here, here, and here).

Amanda Wingfield, played by Wendy Overly at her most solicitous, flutters and fusses around the stage, forcing on her children the regurgitated detritus of her unmetabolized past. But they see her stories for what they are: pablum. Laura, crippled and shy, retreats from her mother's exhortations into a world of make-believe. Tom, the sympathetic center of the show, is graced with more resource: he turns his visions of escape into reality and joins the Merchant Marines. Of course, running away and breaking free are different things, and it is clear from the play - which is narrated by a much older Tom, who is played with well-lubricated charm by Sam Babbitt - that, as far as Tom has traveled, he has not managed to rid himself of his past. The play is a gesture of reconciliation for him (and, we imagine, for Williams himself): with his sister, his mother, and his younger, more impulsive, self.

Laura is played by Diana Biurski, who has proved her talent on the local stage in her performances with the Brown/Trinity Consortium and with the Gamm. With her wide eyes and long limbs, she is naturally expressive. She comes into her own in this play in the second act, when Laura enjoys the attention and encouragement of Jim O'Connor (the compelling and charismatic Kelby T. Akin), a go-getter whom Tom has brought home from his work at the shoe warehouse to satisfy his mother's dreams of gentleman callers for her lonely daughter. During this extended scene, which ripens and swells with feeling, Laura's eyes glow with admiration, and her body shakes with anxiety and anticipation. It is a long moment of suspense: like Laura, our bodies bend - achingly, warily, perilously - towards the suggestion of a fuller future. As Jim urges Laura to step beyond her perceived limits, so does Williams demand the audience do the same; he enlists our empathy in a wonderful and foolhardy enterprise. Biurski makes this a risk worth taking.

"4:48 Psychosis" Review Round-Up

The reviews of Gamm Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's "4:48 Psychosis" are in, and they are, superficially at least, unanimously positive; but they are also, it appears, deeply ambivalent.

My own review, in Motif, is short and timid. I acknowledged Kane's sense of purpose and the performers' persuasive powers, but I did not ask, "To what end?" What does "4:48 Psychosis" try to do? It has tremendous intensity (you'll see that word a lot in discussion of Kane's work) but little direction; it feels furtive. And of what do the performers intend to persuade us? That depression is a terrifying tribulation? After seeing the play, I believed it - but I didn't feel it. I had been persuaded, not convinced.

Channing Gray, in the ProJo, serves up a backhanded assessment of the script - "It reads as a long rambling poem" - before concluding that the show itself is "likely to linger in the memory for a long time." I agree, but I also wonder what sort of appraisal that is. It's safe, in that it's value-free; a lot of things linger in the memory for a long time. The comment's neutrality makes me think that Gray had reservations about the production that he didn't explore.

Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, calls it "so intense. Strident." He goes on

Drama is about maintaining the tension of conflicting needs or desires. And what could be more fraught than the either-or, no-middle-ground question of suicide? Yet, by all rights audiences could be expected to withdraw from empathy soon after entering this woman's ranting display of pain and suffering. Compassion fatigue is not a challenge dramatists often face. But thanks to the playwright's canny structure, director Tony Estrella's well-timed easing of the anguish, and Kim's every-moment focus, the center does hold, at least for us as witnesses, as the terrified woman's internal anarchy is loosed upon her world.

What does this mean? Rodriguez's frayed and tangled language seems borne of uncertainty: he doesn't know himself what he's trying to say.

The standard that Susan McDonald of the Attleboro Sun-Chronicle invokes to gauge the experience of watching "4:48 Psychosis" is comfort:

To say it pushes past the comfortable boundaries of the modern theater is an understatement. It obliterates them. It is not a comfortable show to watch but it is a compelling show, an educational show, an absolutely breath-taking hour and 12 minutes.

One wonders if the boundary through which Kane bursts isn't just comfort but pleasantness. A lot of modern theatre is intimate and cathartic; but not all modern theatre so strains the sympathy of its audience.

Dan Aucoin, in the Boston Globe, has the guts to note the clumsiness of Kane's script; "It should be said that there are some stretches of bad writing in '4:48 Psychosis,' wince-inducing lines like 'love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears,' when Kane was clearly straining to poeticize her suffering." He credits Casey Seymour Kim's performance with "astonishing intensity" and authenticity.

But he also reveals the submissiveness only euphemistically expressed by the other reviewers: he describes the audience leaving the theatre "after watching - or should that be surviving? - '4:48 Psychosis,'" as though endurance in the face of aggressive art - no matter how middling - were something to be proud of. A Theatre of Cruelty needs an Audience of Masochists. Tony Estrella, the Artistic Director of the Gamm, should be heartened to know that the audience is out there, demanding to be educated through punishment. Art about suffering does not have to make its audience suffer, too; but these practical times call for educational theatre, and there is not better educator than experience. So we suffer, but only for the sake of accuracy - or so we're brazenly told. Through her main character, Woman, Kane observes, "Some will call this self-indulgence (they are lucky not to know its truth)." What is most true, of course, may not be what makes good art; any of us can tell the truth, but the artist tells the most truthful lies. For Kane, in her last play, the truth was enough. When we are convinced that accuracy is the sole measure of artistic accomplishment, we get the theatre we deserve: authentic, I suppose, but dull.

Weekend Theatre

Once again you find yourself at the edge of a weekend. You wonder, What can I do in the next two days that will supplant the week's indignities in my memory? You say, Why don't I go to a show? There must be a show in town.

There is.

At the Black Rep, catch Charles Mulekwa's A Time of Fire, starring the ever-pyretic Raidge as a tremulous thief, Cedric Lily (from last Fall's Bug) as a thuggish soldier, and Jonathan Dent as a devout student; they meet in the middle of a civil war in an unnamed African country. It's Saturday night at 7, and Sunday--which is a pay-what-you-can matinee--at 3pm.

Trinity Rep's A Raisin in the Sun has garnered some of the highest praise of any recent show in Providence; it is all deserved. See it Friday and Saturday night at 7:30, and Sunday at 2pm and 7:30.

Trinity is also beginning previews of David Hare's The Secret Rapture. The play may be a distorted reflection of Margaret Thatcher's England, but it is also a clear-eyed and contemporary look at money and morality. Hare fits this epic subject to the scale of the quotidian--an inherited house, a small graphic design firm, a bureaucrat's ambition--and scores it with intelligent, though exquisitely imperfect, language. Performances are Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday at 7:30pm.

Perishable Theatre is hosting the world premiere of Bad Money; previews are Saturday night at 8:00 and Sunday at 3:00, and opening night is Monday the 23rd.

Meanwhile, 2nd Story Theatre's The Front Page is sold out but I suspect you can call the box office for availability. And the Gamm is quiet for the next couple of weeks before opening Grace for previews on March 12th. Its run is short--only four weekends, including previews--so get your tickets now.

Also, you can go to the movies. Cable Car's French Film Festival is in full flower this weekend.

Notes on Gamm Theatre's "Awake and Sing!"

In 1935 Clifford Odets wrote Awake and Sing!, which is about the fissures that split the Berger family as they cope with the turmoil of the Great Depression; it was a tremendous success in times not so unlike our own, but Odets's star has fallen in the decades since. On Sunday night we went to the Gamm Theatre to watch a revival of the show, considered by many to be his best work. It is a fascinating piece, demonstrating at once a virtuosic command of language and a servitude to ideology. The play reaches awesome peaks of intensity, sometimes despite itself, thanks to the cool guidance of director Fred Sullivan, Jr. and the brute muscle of the cast, especially veteran Sam Babbitt and recent Brown/Trinity Consortium alumna Diana Buirski. Babbitt plays Jacob, a rimy but resilient radical now living with his daughter and son-in-law, and their two nearly grown children, in a small New York apartment. Buirski plays his granddaughter Hennie, who is alternately feckless and fierce; her swings between resignation and rage provide the play's most interesting weather. Between one and the other, we melt or freeze. Her brother, Ralph (Marc Dante Mancini) can barely conceal his contempt for his mild father, and bridles under his mother's sanctimony and small dreams. This sort of dysfunction may be a hallmark of the American family drama, but I suspect that many audience members left, as I did, wanting to have felt more than emotional extremes; we missed the gradual hardening of resolve, the slow thaw of forgiveness, that mark the path to self-realization. What we get instead is event. The whole feels less than the sum of its parts--which is an awkward conclusion to draw from a play that ends with such pro-union fervor.

Awake and Sing! is grounded in prophecy--its title is from the Book of Isaiah, but its real energy is from Das Kapital--and Odets seems to have adopted his antecedents' priorities: like them, he is more impressed by forces than by people. Or, perhaps, he is interested in individuals only insofar as they constitute, or are swept up by, forces larger than themselves. The problem with watching Awake and Sing! today is that it is not clear what these forces are. Odets, writing in the thick of the Great Depression and just fifteen years after Eugene Debs earned over six percent of the popular vote as the Socialist candidate for President, did not have to describe the vitiating pressures of capitalism or the putative restorative powers of socialism. The evidence of the one and faith in the other were abundant. Today we have the first but we lack the second; our indignation is, or has been, directed towards unscrupulous individuals and unregulated industries, not the operating ethics of capitalism itself. We are skeptical of revolution in this country, even in a winter of discontent.

It is not beyond Odets's power to awaken in us a revolutionary anger, but a whisper directly in our ear might make a better alarm than a clarion song. As it is, much of Awake and Sing! vibrates violently and at unfamiliar frequencies. The play begins loudly and gets louder, even while the menace of the world outside the Berger's apartment remains abstract. The audience, I think, needs to be welcomed into the 1930s more warmly; we have to be seduced, or lured, with character, into a trap of conscience. There is much to admire about the play, and much to enjoy in this interpretation of it, but I hope its exclamatory title does not continually lead it towards the intemperate, or the hyperventilative. What the show needs is not to be modernized but merely modulated; the actors must stir bewilderment into their boiling anger, in part because that is what we are feeling now, about our own times (What does this mean? we ask; How long can it go on?), in part because the audience will feel more comfortable with the show's conclusion when it seems contingent (i.e., the result of personal inquiry) rather than foreordained. (We might also hear more of Odets's idiosyncratic language, which must itself feel personal rather than inevitable; Odets unleashed an irreversible force on the American stage: urban, Jewish idiom.) The struggle to reproduce the breathlessness of the 1930s is a losing one--we know too well how the rush to form a Marxist state ends; the struggle to understand the tenor of those times and the dramatic expression of their energies might be more rewarding. The performance on Sunday was just a preview, and I'm sure as the show develops through its run a different music will emerge from it. But as long as Mr. Babbitt does not lose his wistful good humor, and Ms. Buirski does not lose her inarticulate intensity, the show has a ruminative melody and a discordant descant. This counterpoint alone makes the song worth hearing.

Shows-A-Go-Go

It's another busy week of theater in and around Providence:

Today at the Gamm at 5:00, Susan Quinn, author of Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times, will be talking about the Federal Theatre Project, which, from 1935 to 1939, funded plays across the country to keep actors, directors, writers, and stage-crews busy. If the project galvanized visionary theatre--its propitious climate gave rise to literary giant Arthur Miller and just plain giant Orson Welles--it also provided a stage for Manichean melodrama: Congress, outraged by the leftist slant of the works funded by the FTP, voted to terminate funding in June 1939. (Apparently, 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe, whose plays were revived and funded by the FTP, was a Communist.) In short, the dinosaurs won this round, but the small mammals, forced to scrape by on the periphery, adapted and survived. Quinn's talk, which itself is bound to be fascinating, precedes a preview of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! The Gamm website says this evening's show is sold out, but it also encourages you to call the box offce (723-4266) to check for availability.

On Thursday of this week, Elemental Theatre brings Deca-Go-Go to Perishable Theatre. I'm not sure what to say about this, even--or especially--after looking at the show's website. If the play is as anarchically ridiculous as the promotional materials, it'll be a well-spent $15.

And next weekend, the Manton Avenue Project brings There's A Couple'A Ways This Could End: A Conflict Resolution Play to The Media Arts Center at Met Public. Written by seven kid playwrights, shaped for the stage by seven dramaturgues, and performed by nearly two dozen local actors, the show is collaborative at every level: it is the result of a partnership between MAP and The Institute for the Study and Practice of Non-Violence, and is, appropriately, about the escalation and defusing of violence. (For more information, check out the January issue of Providence Monthly; Molly Lederer's article is a great read because she sees the playwrighting experience through the wide-open eyes of one of the project participants.)

Also next week, Gamm and 2nd Story officially open their first plays of 2009. Gamm, as noted already, is putting on a Depression-era classic; 2nd Story is showing Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page. Visit their websites and purchase your tickets.

Next Week in Preview

Theater in this town is like water simmering: there it is, whispering and bubbling, until you turn away and it comes to a vigorous boil. Here is what a city's theater looks like when it's over a hot flame:

This Sunday, at 2:00PM, Perishable Theatre hosts LaVoce: Theatre That Speaks, a new company "that gives voice to works that promote social change by creating dialogue." Their first show in Providence is Madeleine George's The Most Massive Woman Wins. (This video is particularly engaging, in part for the sensitive interpretation of the lines, in part for the eerily numinous glow of the actresses in the scene's background, in part for the obvious efforts of the cinematographer not to cry.) George's biography reads like a bildungsroman in progress; it should embolden even the most reluctant theatre-goer or--better still--the most trepidant would-be writer.

On Monday the 12th, at 7:00PM, Megan Sandberg-Zakian directs a reading of Christina Anderson's new play Blacktop Sky, at the Black Rep. This is exciting for several reasons. First, it's a reading of a new play by a young artist who seems primed (not destined, but fully prepared) for something great. Second, tickets are just 5 freakin bucks--though, if you're feeling flush, you can always donate more. And third, it's a sign of the Black Rep theater's resilience. Reports of its demise were, we hope, greatly exaggerated.

Next week both 2nd Story Theatre and the Gamm Theatre begin previews for their first shows of 2009. 2nd Story is showing Ben Hecht's screwball comedy The Front Page, a scheduling change after recent events sort of took all the irreverent fun out of Death of a Salesman. (It's an artistic decision that provokes the question, When is relevant too relevant?) Previews are next Friday and Saturday evening at 8:00, and the show runs Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through February 15th.

Gamm is going ahead with Clifford Odets's depression-era classic, Awake and Sing! Odets is known as a strident voice for the underdog, but his work is also idiosyncratic and humane. Gamm previews the show next weekend (January 15th, 16th, and 17th at 8:00; Sunday, January 18th at 7:00.) and opens it officially on Thursday the 22nd. Here's the calendar of performances.

The Week That Will Be...

Trinity Rep finished previews of Adam Bock's The Receptionist last night and opens the show officially this evening. By the puckered look on audience-members' faces after the show, one suspects that it is an antidote to the plague of holiday cheer that threatens to lift our spirits and distract our thoughts from the sourness of life. I have looked at the script--briefly and superficially--and can't wait to hear Trinity's actors interpret its rich, repetitious language. (At Trinity Repertory Theater through January 11th.)

In the same neighborhood, the Brown/Trinity Consortium is performing Charles Mee's Full Circle, a re-imagining of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, which itself re-imagined an interpretation of the 14th-century Chinese play Circle of Chalk, by Li Xingdao. Mee contributes this economy of ideas by making all of his scripts available, for pleasure and for plunder, on his website. Take a look, and then see the show (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30; Saturday at 2:00 & 7:30; Sunday at 2:00 and 7:30; Monday at 6:00).

2nd Story Theatre had intended to wrap The Miracle Worker this weekend but, one hopes because of universally positive reviews, has instead extended its run through next weekend.

For something less cerebral, I suspect, but provocative in its own way, try the Gamm Theatre, where Casey Seymour Kim, savage in last season's Boston Marriage and irrepressible in the recent An Ideal Husband, stars in Miss Pixie's Cable Access Extravaganza!!, an original one-woman play. Interestingly, Miss Pixie's Cable Access Extravaganza!! is not based on Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" at the Gamm

In the world according to Oscar Wilde, life is a catalogue of afflictions: power corrupts, education curdles, wealth distracts, charm spoils, marriage entraps, facts disappoint, politics bore. In short, all the world’s a plague. This position, ostensibly harrowing, is actually comic, in the sense that misfortune distributed universally and indiscriminately loses its ability to shock or injure; tragedy is what happens when your life is worse than your neighbor’s. This worldview may also feel a little Socialist—which Wilde was, and which was anyway a less scurrilous thing to be accused of in the 1890s than it is today—in its faith that only a level playing field will allow for the most artful exercise of an individual’s freedom. Appropriately, in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband there is no calamity worse than privilege. The best that can be said about the show (at the Gamm Theatre through December 7th) is that, through it, Wilde was able to develop one of his favorite themes—the resilience of authenticity in a world clotted with fraudulence. The worst is that the play can feel not just rigged but contrived, even authoritarian—which is the antithesis of Wilde’s personal and political ideals--because it is about moral decision but plotted to circumvent moments of real consequence. The challenge for any cast performing it is to somehow communicate the very moral seriousness that Wilde ironizes, and to make Wilde’s irony seem not just freshly discovered but appropriate to the moment; his characters have to come by it honestly and express it provisionally, or the audience will feel not so much like co-conspirators in a clever subversion as subjects to an ideologue. We must sense the play’s dark undercurrent of grief and disillusionment even as we revel in the froth and babble of its humor.

Sir Robert Chiltern (Jim O’Brien) seems to have it made—he’s in parliament and pegged for great success, admired and influential beyond his dreams, and married to the loving Lady Chiltern (Casey Seymour Kim)—but there’s a problem with his ideal life: it’s built on a lie. More than twenty years before the start of the play, he had sold a state secret to a speculator; the fortune he made from this deal is the fragile foundation of his entire political career since. The funny thing about the past is that, though it never disappears, neither does it stay the same. For Chiltern, the callow behavior of his early years in politics has been justified and mollified by the good he has done since then: it has been transformed from a pitfall to a step up. An Ideal Husband begins with Chiltern being shown the quick way back down. Mrs. Cheveley (the long-limbed and caramel-voiced Jeanine Kane), a socialite-cum-adventuress living in Vienna, has returned to London with only a hook and some bait. She wants Chiltern to suppress a Cabinet report on the poor prospects of an Argentine canal so that the government will buy shares in it and her heavy investment will turn into considerable profit; should he refuse, she explains, she is prepared to go public with a note proving his involvement in the scheme of two decades before. Chiltern cannot suppress the canal report—his career in Parliament has been a model of probity and honor—but he cannot issue it either: to do so would invite public disgrace and private collapse. He would lose the public’s trust, and, even worse, his wife’s adoration. What’s an ideal husband to do?

In this case, he turns to Lord Goring (Tony Estrella), his unemployed and unambitious friend. Thank goodness for the idle rich, who, untroubled by the demands of real jobs, are available for freelance work. Goring is good-hearted and eloquent, so we don’t hold his aimlessness against him; in fact, his indifference to the blandishments of professional or societal advancement seems to have preserved his moral sensitivity. He advises Lord Chiltern to confess his indiscretion to his wife before she finds out about it from Mrs. Cheveley, and admonishes Lady Chiltern to forgive her husband’s fallibility; she must surrender her claim to an ideal and learn to love the real. (Goring, it has been noted, bears a striking resemblance to Wilde himself: both men had accomplished fathers; both had a sartorial obsession; both claimed to be two years younger than they really were; and both believed that the only virtue worth practicing is honesty. That Goring is the show’s hero, then, should not come as a surprise.) Meanwhile, Goring devises a plan to get the damning letter from Mrs. Cheveley, which would obviate the need for confession and forgiveness. There are a number of misunderstandings and a long scene in which Goring must prevent guests in his house from discovering each other behind closed doors, but in the end, and with true comedic pessimism, one marriage is restored and another begun.

An Ideal Husband is a pessimistic comedy, after all, because it concludes that the world is unchangeable; the only way to survive it is to change ourselves. For Wilde, the apotheosis of human development is the ironist, who engages in the world but recognizes the ridiculousness of his or her own commitments and pursuits. This is what both Sir and Lady Chiltern become: by the end of the play they are sadder and wiser, thus happier and more reckless. The triumph of this production is that, in spite of Wilde’s conclusion, the play does not feel detached or aloof; indeed, the performers, particularly Casey Seymour Kim as Lady Chiltern, ensure that the show is alive to, and in touch with, the real world. Kim navigates its difficult moral and emotional landscape nimbly; with her open face and a body that wheels orbitlessly about the stage—she is a tireless physical actor—she is, as she ought to be, simultaneously tragic and comic. Her performance continually reminds us that, in another play, the Chilterns’ dilemma would end very differently. What I mean is that, in some way, her performance exemplifies the very humanist irony that is Wilde’s prescription for the world’s maladies. Tony Estrella and Jim O’Brien are funny—Estrella, in particular, has a great time playing Goring’s loving and exasperated relationship with his father—but their performances are not selfless and utterly knowing, as I think Kim’s is. It does not pretend that the world is not a serious place; but it also does not pretend that we can do anything about it other than laugh.

Round Two

Now that the theatrics of the election season are over--or at least the dignified, ennobling part; the sordid coda, a dull comedy played out by a shadowy chorus of McCain aids and the spurned Sarah Palin, continues--it's time to get ready for round two of Providence's stage season.

The Gamm Theatre ends previews of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband tonight and opens the show officially Thursday night at 8:00 PM.

That same night, at 7:30, the Brown/Trinity Consortium opens Hamlet at the Pell Chaffee Theater on Empire Street. The show runs through the weekend.

And next Friday, 2nd Story Theatre begins previews of The Miracle Worker, William Gibson's dramatization of Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life. It opens officially on Thursday, November 20th at 8:00...

...the night before Trinity Rep's A Christmas Carol begins. From November 21st through New Year's Eve, there will be a Christmas Carol starting every 52 minutes. In three years of attending Trinity Shows I haven't seen this mainstay; this could be the year.

Inspired by Hilton Als's review of Peter Brook's production of The Grand Inquisitor in the Nov. 10th New Yorker and my own chance encounter with the theories of Antonin Artaud in the Brown Bookstore this weekend, I'm watching the Royal Shakespeare Company film of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade on YouTube today. Fun!

Thursday Arts Spectacular

This afternoon, José Rafael Moneo, the architect of the new Chace Center--which will serve as gallery, storage, classroom, administrative, and commercial space for RISD--spoke, with his associate, to RISD students in the Metcalf Auditorium. The house was packed; and Moneo did not disappoint. I didn't take notes so I have no documentation of his brilliance, which is generous and exacting at the same time. The building, which opens officially in an all-day celebration on Saturday, is evidence enough.

I just got back home from seeing the Gamm Theatre's Don Carlos, which, as everyone who pays attention to local theater knows by now, is a loosely adapted and severely abridged version of Friedrich Schiller's six-hour call to revolution. The play is not subtle--one doesn't think of "subtle" and Schiller in the same room--but it is surprisingly swift, and its two and a half hours pass, if not quite nimbly, than at least determinedly. That dogged adverb is appropriate, and signifies the play's only real problem: its plot is all plot and I found myself, too often, untangling its strands instead of enjoying its artistry. Credit must go to artistic director Tony Estrella for having the vision to imagine Don Carlos onstage and for respecting Schiller and his audience enough to leave its relevance to our own era implied, and to the actors for weaving something so fine and precise from material that is, for all of its processing, still rough.

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On Sunday I saw a preview of Trinity Rep's Dreams of Antigone, in several ways the sibling project of Gamm's Don Carlos. Like D.C., it is a liberally interpreted version of a formidable classic with surprising parallels to our contemporary political scene; but Dreams of Antigone (abbreviated, unfortunately, D.O.A.) has been made longer and less incisive than its source material, and the lines that connect its political reality to our own have been traced over with a dark pen. I left feeling that I had been subjected to a book report rather than a tragedy. I'll have a longer review posted soon.

Boston Marriage

Last night we went to the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket to see David Mamet’s Boston Marriage. The stage is small and no seat is very far from its edge; in dimension and intimacy it’s like a racquetball court, which is the perfect size, and a good metaphor, for this show. Mamet’s relentless verbal deconstructions privilege the well-angled over the hard-hit and the long volley over the slammed winner, and for the most part the actors play them right. The end of the play sags a little from depletion—whether it’s Mamet’s or the actors’ I’m not sure—but since it’s a three-character show with no out-of-bounds and just one intermission the onset of fatigue is easy to understand. I hope to have a real review posted before Sunday evening, which is your last opportunity to see the show.