A NYC Reflection

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in New York, a city with which I am engaged in a long term love/hate relationship.  I tend to love it more on a glorious fall day or on one of those delicious December afternoons as snow begins to fall.  And I tend to hate it most in July.  Miserably hot and rancid with the smell of rotting garbage, New York is no place for to spend the summer.  But I usually wind up making a couple of visits for casting.

This trip was for EDUCATING RITA.  The play is going to be directed by one of my favorite American directors, Eleanor Holdridge (Triad Stage:  ART; NOISES OFF; THE BLONDE, THE BRUNETTE, AND THE VENGEFUL REDHEAD), but I always like to be at our New York casting sessions.

For those of you who don’t know, we do a variety of casting sessions for the theater.  A couple of times a year, we hold General Auditions, open to anyone who wants to come do a monologue.  For each individual show, we have Equity Professional Auditions locally where we see Equity actors from the region.  These auditions are also monologue based.  We also have local auditions where we see any actors that we know may be of interest to the theater.  Our final round of auditions is always in New York (some shows don’t have New York auditions-- PROVIDENCE GAP and OLEANNA, for instance were shows that were programmed for specific actors and so offers were made to those actors without auditions).

Our New York auditions are run by our New York casting director, Cindi Rush.  I’ve been working with Cindi since last century when we first collaborated on the Dallas Theater Center production of THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA that I directed.  I consider her to be an important member of the Triad Stage family and greatly enjoy the process of putting together a company of actors with her.

Now, loving/hating New York as I do, I wish it wasn’t still almost  a necessity for  actors who want to work regionally throughout the US to have to live there.  Our country’s most exciting theater is now no longer being exclusively produced in New York.  Broadway is an overpriced theme park of movies remade as musicals, overblown revivals and the occasional quality piece from the Brits as long as it doesn’t too seriously challenge the lightweight critical capacity of the daily papers and has a star name to justify the outrageous ticket expense.  Off-Broadway seems to be Broadway for gays and off-off-Broadway is MIA too much of the time.

But the reality is that theaters from all across the country come to New York for casting, so if you are an actor and want to be seen by a regional theater in California, one in North Carolina and one in Indiana, New York is the place to be.  And that is one of the main reasons, I shifted from acting to directing.  Even in the 1990’s the New York theater scene was no longer the heart of the American theater and I didn’t like the indignities of living in a city that heaps indignities on those without trust funds or more secure professions than theater.

New York also remains a center for theatrical designers, so this trip included a wonderful meeting with  Anya Klepikov who is doing the set for THE GLASS MENAGERIE.   Anya is one of my new favorite designers.  I first met her through Eleanor who asked her to design costumes and scenery for THE BLONDE, THE BRUNETTE, AND THE VENGEFUL REDHEAD.  I am so thrilled by the direction we are taking MENAGERIE and can’t wait to share more about that process later.

Another reason for the trip was to see my dear friend and wonderful actor Mark Dold (Triad Stage:  MIRANDOLINA, HEDDA GABLER) in the New York debut of Mark St. Germain’s two hander FREUD’S LAST SESSION.  Mark’s been telling me about the play for several years and I really wanted to catch a performance at Barrington Stage Company last year.  The play concerns itself with an imagined meeting between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud at the beginning of WWII.  It was a great evening that included reconnecting with some dear friends.  But the high point was the superb performances by Mark and Martin Rayner.  I don’t tend to love the two hander play about historical characters, but this play is a provocative discussion about religion, faith and life.  And the actors made Freud and Lewis vividly alive.

I was also able to catch two of the performances at The Lincoln Center Festival.  Part of the love in the love/hate relationship with New York is getting to see international theater either at BAM, the Lincoln Center Festival  or one of the other festivals held in the city.

Up first was the UK’s Complicite’s production of A DISSAPPEARING NUMBER, conceived and directed by Simon McBurney.  I have somehow managed to never see a Complicite piece and after reading about them for years I was eager to get a chance to see their unique blend of multimedia and live action on stage.  I was less excited about a play that seemed to be about math.  Although I come from a family with more than its fair share of mathematicians (my father was a math professor at Appalachian State until his recent retirement, my mother majored in math, my great uncle-- whom I was named after-- wrote the article on plane geometry (whatever that is) in the ancient Encyclopedia of Britannica I grew up with).  I nearly failed Algebra 2 and go into a panic when I am required to do much more than simple addition or subtraction.  My mind doesn’t handle numbers.  But enough friends told me the play wasn’t really about math, so off I went, slightly dubious that higher mathematics could enteratain me for two intermissionless hours.

I can’t begin to explain the math at the heart of the play.  In part inspired by G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology and partially concerned with Indian clerk turned  mathematician Srinvasa Ramaujan, A DISAPPEARING NUMBER was about math, but also about love and loss and passion.  It was an extraordinary mix of outstanding performances, stunning video projection and live music that occaissionally exploded into Indian dance.  By the end, my math phobia had been forgotten as I lost myself not only in the story, but also in the spectacle. 

I use the word spectacle with caution.  This was not Broadway super musical spectacle--  no flying cars, helicopters, crashing chandeliers.  This was theater that blended technology with storytelling to make a highly theatrical world-- we were reminded from the beginning we were watching a play, the artifice was explained, the expectation of reality dismissed and yet I found myself drawn into the world Complicite created in a way that the conventional box sets of conventional realism can rarely achieve.  The play washed over me, submerging me in its magic and by the end I was so moved I found it hard to leave the theater.

I hope that the wonderful arts festival that is emerging in Greensboro, Artbeat, will eventually be able to include an international component.  It would be such a terrific opportunity to share the revolutionary work that is happening in theaters around the world with our audiences in the Triad.  The Performing Arts Series at UNC provides a couple of opportunities ever year to see some of the world’s best theater, but I dream of a day when we can bring such performances straight to the Triad.  Of course, the future of such revolutionary theater is somewhat in doubt in the UK as the misguided coalition government threatens not only a return to recession but a devastating period of cutbacks for British arts.  Complicite’s international reputation may spare them the worst of the pain, but the next generation of Simon McBurney’s will surely suffer greatly in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat’s  short-sighted and economically suspect austerity budget.

The next evening I met Elizabeth down at the Governor’s Island ferry to see Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s production of TEOREMA, directed by the always challenging, always inspiring and always provocative Flemish director Ivo van Hove.  Based on the novel and film by Pasolini, TEOREMA was a mixed bag as far as the critics were concerned.  I’m afraid van Hove may have worn out his welcome with New York critics.  These overpaid anointers of the flavor of the month tend to pick favorites and then turn on them as familiarity breeds contempt.  I remain surprised to remain such an admirer of van Hove’s work.  I didn’t expect to be as inspired and provoked by him as I have been since the first of his shows that I saw at New York Theater Workshop.  He deconstructs, uses technology, and generally runs wild.  I still remember the thrill of the massive food fight in THE MISANTHROPE.  To describe it makes it seem like a cheap theatrical trick, but seeing it seemed so very perfect.  I expected to hate it, but knew I was seeing an idiosyncratic genius perfectly capture something in Moliere’s comedy that I had never suspected lurked there.

I think the thing I admire so much about van Hove is that he is faithful to the text in a way that so many who would call themselves avant garde are not.  Now, this faithfulness is not at all the way we Americans raised on a steady diet of small plays and small acting think of being faithful.  But every choice van Hove makes is based in the text.  And he collaborates with his actors to develop a style that seems to me to be truly extreme realism.  My last trip to Governor’s Island (as cold a winter day as the journey to TEORAMA was hot) was to see THE HUMAN VOICE.  I still tremble to think of the power of that extraordinary performance by a solo actor behind a glass wall. 

I did have quibbles with TEOREMA.  At times the distancing technique of narration was perhaps too distant and the explosion of destruction perhaps too neat.  But in the days since seeing it, I’ve wondered if that wasn’t van Hove’s intention.  We have seen him destroy sets with passion and violence that threatened to shatter our sense of safety, was this not perhaps a new direction, a comment on what had come before.  I don’t know.  I only know that I never see a show directed by van Hove without leaving elated about the future of the theater.

Comments

[justin bieber supras]

let's join our hands together to stop this kind of wrong doings. It may risk lives in the future if we just let them continue.

[arele]

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