[Last 2 July, I published Kirk Woodward’s “Eugene
Ionesco,” a consideration of the Absurdist playwright that’s based on Kirk's notes
from a lecture given by the writer in 1988.
In the profile, Kirk mentions that I had previously posted a report on a
performance of Ionesco’s best-known play, Rhinoceros, on ROT (15 October 2012). Among my pre-ROT archives, I also have
reports on three of his better-known one-acts, icons of the Theater of the
absurd. Two of the plays, The Bald
Soprano (Ionesco’s first play, 1950) and The Lesson (1951), were
presented on a single bill by the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea from 19
September to 17 October 2004. The third,
The Chairs (1952), was staged as part of the 2004 Next Wave Festival at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Fort Greene between 1 and 4 December 2004. As you’ll read, the two productions, which I
happened to see six weeks apart during the fall of 2004, differed greatly in
success in my estimation. ~Rick]
The Bald Soprano & The Lesson
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
4 October 2004
Diana Multare, my frequent theater partner,
and I decided to subscribe this year to the Atlantic Theater Company (which is in
Chelsea only a few blocks from my apartment) and their first production is
a two-play bill of Ionesco one-acts, The
Bald Soprano and The
Lesson. The texts are a new translation by playwright Tina
Howe (Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Pride’s Crossing)
and the director was Carl Forsman, the artistic director of an Off-Off-Broadway
company called the Keen Company. (I saw a production of their revival of
P. G. Wodehouse’s 1927 comedy, Good
Morning, Bill, which Forsman directed also. It was an amusing
bit of fluff—fun but meaningless. Well enough done, though.) [I’ve subsequently seen two shows directed by
Forsman, both for the Keen Company at the Harold Clurman Theatre and both
reported on ROT: Heroes by Gérald Sibleyras (26 March 2009) and Tina Howe’s Painting Churches (14 April 2012).]
Overall,
this is probably the best Ionesco production I’ve seen [until the Rhinoceros noted above], and certainly
the best work of the Atlantic Theater I’ve seen over the several years I’ve
gone there on and off. Ionesco’s not for everyone—or, maybe, not even
most people—so the plays may not appeal to one and all, but the presentation is
excellent. (The Lesson
is particularly grim.
I think Ionesco does call it a comedy—but that doesn’t keep it from being
grim.)
The acting is top-notch all around, but the ensemble work of Soprano and the individual
performance of Steven Skybell as the Professor in The Lesson are really examples for acting
students. I imagine that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but the work is that
good here. Clean, clear, solid—all the things that make good lessons for
students while at the same time being wonderful experiences for an
audience. It’s like a painting that’s a perfect example of a particular
style and at the same time is stunning, moving, and evocative piece of
art. (The nice thing here for a class is that there’s a wonderful example
of an ensemble working together to produce delightful group work and another of
a single performance that stands out without being selfish.)
(One
of the Soprano
ensemble is Michael Countryman, who plays Mr. Smith. I’ve seen him many
times over the years, and he’s a character actor who always does excellent
work. He’s one of those actors who works all the time and is always good,
but has never gotten famous outside the business—though he used to do many,
many commercials at one point several years ago. Whatever he’s done, I’ve
noticed him. Mrs. Smith is Jan Maxwell, the wife of a long-time actor
friend of mine, Rob Lunney—formerly Rob Emmet. She’s done quite a lot of
high-profile work, including Broadway and TV, but Rob was in my productions of
both The Gift—he
was John Wilkes Booth—and Comes
the Happy Hour!—he was the lead, the young patient. Rob also
acted with me in two shows at the Process Studio: Macbeth and Much Ado. I always felt he deserved a
better career.)
The
ensemble work in Soprano
is rendered even better when you consider how hard it must be to maintain the
kind of connection this cast manages with dialogue that is so completely
absurd. I’m sure most theater people know the text of Soprano at least a
little—haven’t we all read it at one time or another?—so they probably remember
that most lines are non-sequiturs, and even the ones that aren’t are nearly
illogical outside the world of the play. Plus, the characters’
relationships keep shifting unpredictably, so the actors not only have to
remember cues pretty much technically, but they have to reestablish their
connections to one another every few lines without ever showing that they’ve
shifted gears. I’d guess that the cast, regardless of how they were
trained, must all have to do this play entirely technically, but they make it
seem as if they are living in a real world. Not the same as our real world, but real
in their diegetic existence. (It starts, of course, with the famous 17
clock chimes to which Mrs. Smith responds by saying, quite matter-of-factly, “Oh,
it’s nine o’clock.” Doesn’t everyone’s clock chime 17 times for 9 o’clock?)
When the Martins (Robert Stanton and Seana Kofoed) arrive, and the relationship
not only between the two couples (and even between Mr. and Mrs. Martin) but
with the constantly shifting “facts” of the scene (they’ve eaten, they haven’t
eaten; they know one another, they don’t know one another) careers from one set
of truths to another, the quality of the ensemble acting really starts to
show. I think this was a preview performance—there was still an
occasional tentativeness with some lines—and I kept waiting for it all to break
down, even if only for a second. But it never did. Of course, a
great deal of this feat is down to the director—first of all, for casting these
actors to start with.
The
set (by Loy Arcenas, who designed both sets) for Soprano was particularly . . . well, absurd,
I guess. It was, of course, the Smiths’ living room, but the wallpaper
was flowered, the rug was flowered, and the upholstery was flowered. But
all different
flower patterns. It was like the Queer
Eye guys went a little nuts!
I
must also compliment Tina Howe on her translations—they were clear and direct
without being either stiff or false to the originals. She had a little
insert in the program in which she writes about the difficulties with
translation and I skimmed it, but I already know that translating plays,
especially French plays for some reason, is always a holding action. You
have a choice of staying true to the original’s language and vocabulary, or
trying to judge the author’s intent and being freer with the English to get
there. The first gets stiff and artificial, better for reading off the
page than acting on the stage; the second strays from the original’s feel and
style and can sound too colloquial and idiomatic. Howe seemed to have
managed to tread a line here, making the text sound both conversational in
English (that’s probably not the best word for this dynamic) and artificial,
in the sense that Ionesco was deliberately writing artificial French.
(This is esp. true in Soprano
because his inspiration was the French and English of a phrase book.) Samuel
Beckett didn’t have this problem so much because he not only did his own
translations from French to English, but he pretty much rewrote his
plays for the English versions. They were really two originals—one
French and one English; Waiting
for Godot, for instance, is a different play from En attendant Godot and
there are things in one version that aren’t in the other. (I compared
them once.) Howe only very occasionally writes a line that sounds a
little too much like 21st-century American, and when she does, it sticks out a
bit—but it’s not often enough to be harmful.
After
the universal disappointments of the 2003-04 theater season in New York City,
this was a terrific season-starter. I was seriously beginning to fear
that I had become one of those theatergoers who never likes anything—that
maybe the season wasn’t so bad last year, that it was just me. I hope this
proves it isn’t.
I’ll
note here that New York
Times critic Charles Isherwood had complaints about
both Howe’s texts and the production’s acting. [Isherwood’s notice is
on-line at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/theater/reviews/20bald.html.] He felt the translations were a little too
contemporary, but I only felt that in passing once or twice, and only because
of a word or expression now and then. The reviewer also felt,
particularly in Soprano,
that the actors had gotten too psychologically embedded in their roles and
situations, too much like Stanislavsky Realism. I don’t agree, however; I
think he was wrong (or had seen an earlier preview or something).
* *
* *
The Chairs
Pick Up Performance
Company (David Gordon)
Harvey Theater, BAM
13 December
2004
[The report on The Chairs below was part of a longer one that also covered
the performance of Woody Allen’s A
Second Hand Memory at ATC (22 November 2004-23 January 2005). For
this publication on ROT, I’ve excised
the discussion of the other production, though some references still remain.]
I saw two shows over the past two weeks, and I have
confirmed two things from the experiences—one bad and one . . . well,
interesting.
First,
the bad: The 2004-05 season, after a promising start with the two
Ionescos at the Atlantic [coincidentally, published above], has gone downhill
precipitously. The John Jesurun FAUST/How I Rose (Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, 16-20 November 2004) may have been the
low point, but nothing has been very good even by contrast. (The German Nora, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz Berlin’s
adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House at
the Harvey, 9-13 November, was, at least, interesting, but there were a lot of
serious problems with that, too.) If the criterion is whether or not I
would have been sorry not to have seen the play, then none of the performances
since the Ionescos has measured up.
The
second thing I’ve discovered is that Charles Isherwood has been consistently
writing reviews of the plays I’ve seen that almost exactly express my
opinion. (His reviews, that is, not the plays.) If I’ve disagreed
with his review of a show now and then at all, it’s been over a minor point (as
in this last show) or over his harshness or generosity in stating his opinion
on one point or another. What I mean by this latter is that he and I may
agree on some aspect of the performance, but he’ll say it more or less
forcefully than I would have. I’m beginning to find this very
strange. Like I said in a recent message, maybe I ought to give up
writing my own reports and just copy Isherwood’s reviews—maybe with a few
choice comments. [Veteran ROTters will know that this hasn’t
continued to hold true quite so consistently in more recent seasons.]
With
respect to this last remark, I really ought to just download Isherwood’s review
of The Chairs I saw at BAM Friday two weeks ago [posted on the New York Times’ website at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/03/theater/reviews/03chai.html].
Like the Jesurun, I have no idea what this performance was all about.
Like Jesurun’s FAUST, it wasn’t just a translation of Ionesco and a
straightforward attempt to stage his play (if ‘straightforward’ is even a
concept you can use vis à vis Ionesco—but leave that aside). It was
another personal take, an idiosyncratic adaptation. David Gordon—of whom
I’d never heard before, but who is apparently known—is primarily a
choreographer and he has a thing for chairs, especially metal folding chairs.
Several of his dance and movement pieces have featured chairs as the
principal—even only—prop and set piece. I can’t begin to tell you why
Gordon has this obsession or what it means in terms of his performances—film of
bits of several of which were featured as a sort of prologue to The Chairs—but
I suppose it explains in part why he glommed onto this play. What he
thinks Ionesco’s play means, or what he tried to make it mean, was
undecipherable to me. This is the second play I’ve seen this season which
I can’t even begin to interpret—the other being Jesurun’s FAUST—which makes it hard to report on them.
I
can sum up my experience with this performance—ironically by quoting
Isherwood: it was “self-indulgent and largely ineffective.” I missed the
Théâtre de Complicité’s recent production here (John Golden Theatre, 1 April-13
June 1998) which was so well received, and Isherwood compares it to Gordon’s
version to the detriment of the latter. I can’t tell you what Gordon was
up to, but I can tell you that he removed all the darkness and bleakness as he
almost giddily careened around the stage moving the chairs from one
configuration to another, carrying them, climbing on them, balancing on the
back of one, ramming them into one another, shoving them in whole rows about
the stage, as he rambled versions of Ionesco’s words almost gleefully at
times. (By the second half of the performance, Gordon was handed
pages of the “script” from which he “read” his lines— Isherwood thought he was
really reading and hadn’t learned the lines, but I’m not convinced that was
so—and then tossed the pages on the stage, which ended up littered with pieces
of paper. I don’t know what this meant.) I had trouble focusing on
what was going on a lot of the time, so I fazed in and out of attention, but to
the best of my perception, Gordon had no Orator (there were several assistants
who functioned like stage attendants, moving the rolling door frames—the only
other set pieces aside from the chairs—from one location to another as if the
entrances to the “room” were unfixed in space) and he and his wife, his
principal dancer and actress who played the Old Woman, never jumped out of the
window at the end (as far as I could interpret what they were
doing—though there was no window for them to jump from anyway, so I guess I can
say this with some assurance). Whatever else Gordon may have done, this
sort of takes the guts out of Ionesco’s play, doesn’t it? Without the
deaf-mute Orator who is supposed to pass on the Old Man’s wisdom and without
their defenestration, the futility of communication, of life itself—Ionesco’s
main point, I believe—is entirely lost. Turning the bleak and pessimistic
dynamic of Ionesco into an antic rant (or a rantic ant) is further
counterproductive. (Gordon even sang bits of “You Are My Sunshine” and “I’m
Always Chasing Rainbows,” just to further subvert the darkness of Ionesco’s
play.)
I
don’t know what else to tell you—and, like my Jesurun “report,” this seems
terribly inadequate. Those two productions also make me question the
perspicacity of the BAM producers in selecting them for presentation—a sense I
had after the Nora, too.
[Both these
performance accounts, which predate my more formal play reports, were
originally e-mails to a friend and didn’t include many of the elements that I
later included in the versions I created for my out-of-town friends after 2005
and then, more recently and conscientiously, for ROT. I’ve
edited these slightly to amend my off-hand mentions of events and people the
intended recipient would have recognized or which refer to details from earlier
messages. I’ve made an effort to fill in
the names of the artists I didn’t identify originally, but for things like the
press response to these productions, I’ll let curious readers look up the
reviews themselves this time.]
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