Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘American (Tele)visions’ Review: Tune In, and Buckle Up, for Family Drama

      by

      In Victor I. Cazares’s play, Walmart is a haven for a family of undocumented Mexican immigrants, but it comes with a cost.The program for “American (Tele)visions,” which opened Thursday at the New York Theater Workshop, comes with an addendum tucked inside: a bibliography of the nearly 50 books, movies, and works of art and music that inspired the playwright, Victor I. Cazares. The wide-ranging list of titles includes works by Luis Buñuel, Haruki Murakami and the Magnetic Fields as well as Stephen Mitchell’s 2000 translation of the Bhagavad Gita.It’s a fitting way to illustrate the occasionally unwieldy yet often absorbing treasury of themes, metaphors and ’90s American cultural touchstones that is this memory play, which is set among the reflective screens of a Walmart television department.For young Erica and her family, undocumented Mexican immigrants living in a “poor but racially diverse” trailer park, Walmart is the linoleum-floored, discount-priced heaven where dreams come to life. Erica (Bianca “b” Norwood), who prefers boys’ clothes and toys, eyes racecars while her best friend, Jeremy (Ryan J. Haddad), zeros in on the pink boxes of Barbies. Erica’s father, Octavio (Raúl Castillo), stands entranced by the TVs — just like he sits for hours, in a near-catatonic state of despondency, at home. Her mother, Maria Ximena (Elia Monte-Brown), disappears to some unknown part of the store for a reason Erica knows is connected to Maria’s later abandonment of her family for a truck driver. And her brother, Alejandro, is secretly buying K-Y Jelly and condoms.But Alejandro can’t even play himself in this scrambled account of the family, because he’s already dead, Erica tells us. So Maria Ximena assigns the role to Alejandro’s best friend, Jesse (Clew), who came home with Alejandro one night and ended up staying.Though the story already has the hairpin turns of a telenovela, full of secret affairs, betrayals, familial resentments, deaths and a gasp-worthy slap, the characters — Erica in particular — are empowered to lead the narrative, changing the chronology of events, reframing and re-categorizing challenging memories. Which makes “American (Tele)visions” an acrobatic work of storytelling. It switches modes and tones so rapidly — from the living room couch to Erica and Jeremy’s imaginary detective series to Walmart’s layaway department — that the production evokes the sensation of channel-surfing.From left: Clew, Castillo, Norwood, Ryan J. Haddad and Elia Monte-Brown in the play, whose set includes four giant cubes that open to reveal micro-settings.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRubén Polendo’s direction is lively and clearsighted but also exaggerates the vulnerabilities in the script: the heightened language, repetitive and overstuffed with a few too many metaphors (Octavio is a television, Alejandro is a chain-link fence), and the length. Even though it runs just 100 minutes without an intermission, the show seems to stretch on and on like the channel guide for a premier cable TV package.Though Norwood, a nonbinary actor who uses the pronouns they/them, spends most of the play as Erica’s bright, imaginative childhood self, there are traces of adult Erica in their performance: a certain bluster and confidence, a kind of grown-up wisdom of someone who has come to terms with her trauma. As Erica’s parents, Monte-Brown is at her best when unleashing a mother’s roar of grief, and Castillo grounds his performance in a crushing, pervasive melancholy.While cast as the supporting actor in Erica’s life and fantasies, Haddad’s Jeremy comes across as a fully formed figure in his own right, delivering some of the play’s best quips, like when he calls a capitalist video-game-style villainess an “Ayn Rand erotic fantasy.” As a brilliant composite of Alejandro and Jesse, Clew, who also uses the pronouns they/them, is both strangely present and absent: As two characters, one living and one dead, they give a performance that feels fittingly transitory. They run in and out of scenes, switch characters from line to line; it’s almost as if they’re part ghost.The show, which is co-produced by Theater Mitu, which is known for its experimental mixed-media theater, has high-definition color and depth. Bretta Gerecke’s set design elicits the immersive feeling of living in a world of screens: The stage is a colossal box, inside which there are four towering cubes, two stacked on each side, that swing open to reveal micro-settings (a forest that’s been struck by a meteorite, a living room, the front exterior of a truck and a Walmart toy aisle). Animations, recorded videos and live camera footage are projected onto the surfaces of the cubes and the back and side walls of the set, helping to illustrate a breathless story that begins with the scourge of U.S. capitalism (“I want to not want,” Erica declares) and contends with immigration, citizenship, queerness, the intersection of commerce and gender roles.The lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) is as eye-catching as you’d expect in a show about electronics, from a dreamy aquamarine to the hazy twin beams of a car’s headlights in the distance. So are the intentionally tawdry specialty costumes (designed by the “Project Runway” alum Mondo Guerra), which include a pink, frilly princess dress and a mermaid-cut white-and-black bar-code dress with fringe and headpiece.“American (Tele)visions” can be a bit repetitive at times. Yet the production still manages to surprise and entertain — so don’t touch that dial.American (Tele)visionsThrough Oct. 16 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Textplay,’ Stoppard and Beckett Get Snarky, FWIW

      by

      An imaginary electronic conversation between the two playwrights falls somewhere between a ❤️ and a 🤷.The game is Guess That Play and the first round is a gimme. Among the clues one player texts the other are emojis of a skull, a goblet, crossed swords and nine tombstones. The answer is obviously “Hamlet,” but the next round isn’t as easy. What to make of a glass of milk, some trees and, yes, another tombstone?If you can solve that one, you’re probably the right kind of audience for “Textplay,” a witty two-character, no-actor sketch, conducted entirely in the world’s latest lingua franca, complete with emojis, emoticons, ellipses and erasures. (The virtual NYU Skirball presentation is available on demand through Dec. 3.) On the screen of your choice, you watch as a pair of playwrights amuse themselves electronically: teasing, bickering and generally debunking their reputations, or having them debunked.That the playwrights are Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard (it’s Stoppard’s phone we supposedly see) makes “Textplay” a somewhat Inside Theater experience, with untethered references to the two men’s works, styles and obsessions. That the credited author, Archer Eland, is clearly a pseudonym, deepens the atmosphere of esoterica.Could Stoppard himself be Eland? Anonymity might be just the kind of publicity he prefers as an amuse-bouche for his latest real-world play, the uncharacteristically personal “Leopoldstadt,” which opens on Broadway on Oct. 2. For that matter, could Eland be Beckett, so existential he seems to exist even now, an avant-gardist more than 32 years after his death?Yet neither Stoppard nor Beckett, as scripted here, seems sure of his stature, pre- or post-mortem. They complain that some playwrights, like Pinter, got the classier adjectival ending “-esque” even as they each wound up with “-ian.” (“It’s really unfair,” Stoppard whines un-Stoppardianly.) They worry more seriously that their work came to nothing, perhaps deservedly. “All we did was tart up a hole and claim it was an abyss,” Beckett types. “And NO ONE read our novels.”In compensation, they get to preen over their “genius” hair, certainly compared with Pinter’s. Beckett praises Stoppard’s as “Messy and brilliant, like your mind.” Stoppard returns the favor: “And you have those beautiful silvery rows. Like sharks.”After live theater shut down in March 2020, and in the two and a half years since then, we’ve seen lots of experiments in digital dramaturgy. Those that succeeded did so by offering apt substitutions for in-person performance or by abjuring it completely in favor of a frankly virtual experience. In the middle ground lay boredom — and the reflex, born of so much streamed television, to watch only until another show or a snack beckoned.“Textplay” might seem to fall into that middle ground; it’s both live (you can’t pause it) and unlive (the entire “conversation” is preprogrammed). Unlike “Hamlet,” it makes little claim on your soul, and unlike “Under Milk Wood” — the answer to the clue with the glass of milk and the trees — none at all on your heart.Indeed, the playwrights haunting “Textplay” aren’t Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, or even Beckett and Stoppard. Instead, I thought of Edward Albee, for the merciless wit, and Sophocles, for the Oedipal anxiety. Cutting one’s forefathers down to size is an entertaining, if dangerous, endeavor. The cleverness of the writing comes, to some extent, at the expense of honor.Still, at about 35 minutes, “Textplay” is a snack in itself. There’s even a blink-and-you-miss-it Easter egg at the end. (I missed it.)Theater types might also derive from the stunt a little encouragement about the uses of technology. Humans now send six billion text messages a day, most of which, data scientists say, are read. If the ever-dying theater could access even a fraction of an audience as large and willing as that, it might just perk up. Beckett and Stoppard and even poor, average-haired Pinter may one day be more immortal than ever. Who needs tombstone emojis?TextplayThrough Dec. 3 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 35 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      In Paris Plays, What It Would Be Like if Shakespeare Was Female

      by

      Several Paris theaters geared up to open their seasons with the most famous English playwright. How would the plays be tackled if a woman’s name were attached to them?PARIS — When the hero of Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus” likened himself to a “lonely dragon” in the early 1600s, the adjective “lonely” was still a new addition to the English language. Based on surviving records, “Coriolanus” was probably only the second time it appeared in print. The first? In “Antonius,” a 1592 translation of a French play by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.This tiny, almost insignificant detail is one of many listed in “Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?,” a 2006 book by the scholar Robin P. Williams — and now brought to the stage by the director Aurore Evain. In both, Williams and Evain argue that the little-known Sidney, an extraordinarily well-educated and high-achieving noblewoman, could have penned Shakespeare’s canon.It is a relatively new answer to the “authorship question,” as the long-running debate about the identity of the writer is known. While most Shakespeare scholars still believe that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the main author of the works published under his name, suspicion that someone used him as a cover arose in the late 18th century.His humble origins and apparent lack of advanced education are factors, because the author of the plays appeared to be versed in a number of languages as well as in aristocratic habits. Additionally, no complete original manuscript by his hand is known to have been found.Bard worship is such in theater worldwide that it’s easy to put any doubts down to gaps in Shakespeare-era historical records. Going into Evain’s “Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare,” an absorbing staged conference presented at the Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois, in the suburbs of Paris, I expected little more than a pleasantly quirky intellectual exercise.Yet over the course of two hours, with just two lecterns and a few projections, Evain, who is also a theater historian, presented such a wide range of circumstantial evidence drawn from Williams’s “Sweet Swan of Avon” — as well as potential rebuttals, with vivid help from the actress Fanny Zeller — that I started questioning my own beliefs.Fanny Zeller in “Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare.”Charline FauveauHere are a few assertions they offer. “Lonely” is one of several dozen words Sidney introduced into the English language that Shakespeare later used. She provided patronage to Pembroke’s Men, one of the early companies to perform plays that were later attributed to Shakespeare. Sidney’s extensive library included many of Shakespeare’s sources, and she was familiar with pursuits as varied as falconry, alchemy and cooking, whose vocabulary Shakespeare drew on.Shakespeare’s First Folio, published about seven years after his death, is dedicated to Sidney’s sons, William Herbert and Philip Herbert.After the performance, other audience members flocked to Evain, expressing their shock at how reasonable Sidney’s authorship suddenly sounded to them. Over the years, speculation has centered mostly on a handful of men, namely Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon.Yet, as Evain put it convincingly onstage, unlike many other contenders, Sidney had a very good reason to hide her identity: She was a woman. While Sidney ran an influential literary salon, the Wilton Circle, and published translations and original verse, it would have been considered improper at the turn of the 17th century for her to show plays of her own, let alone works with occasionally bawdy language and violent themes.And what if a woman had actually written Shakespeare’s works? Beyond the whodunit — and neither Williams nor Evain claims to have definitely solved it — the implications are fascinating, because very few women were afforded the opportunity to have careers as playwrights until far later.As several Paris theaters geared up to open their seasons with Shakespeare, I started wondering how differently the plays would be tackled if they had a woman’s name attached to them.Let’s say the Comédie-Française, France’s prestigious theater company, was presenting Sidney’s “King Lear,” in lieu of Shakespeare’s. That would certainly have turned the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s interpretation on its head: In a playbill essay, Ostermeier wrote that Shakespeare’s work was “part of a 1,000-year-old culture that ties the representation of power to the masculine,” and suggested that he had tried to go “against” Shakespeare to give the female characters greater “legitimacy.” (What this means remains to be seen: Press performances of “King Lear” were delayed because of Covid-19 protocols.)What of Sidney as the author of lonely “Coriolanus”? The idea felt comical at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which is playing host to a tacky, histrionic production by François Orsoni. This “Coriolanus” couldn’t have telegraphed more crudely its laddish credentials. As the Roman leader at the heart of the play, Alban Guyon, dressed in either leather pants or a tracksuit with a gold chain, swaggers and shouts to exhausting effect.From left, Alban Guyon, Estelle Meyer and Thomas Landbo in “Coriolanus,” directed by François Orsoni at the Théâtre de la Bastille.Vincent BérengerThe two main female characters, Volumnia and Virgilia, are combined and played by Estelle Meyer with over-the-top, vampy energy. Pascal Tagnati goes for Johnny Depp-adjacent levels of parody as a pirate version of the Volscian leader Aufidius, and the entire play takes place under “CorioLand” signs that read like advertisements for racing cars.Would this staging have seen the light of day if “Coriolanus” was known to be the work of Sidney? It’s doubtful, but then again, many would most likely also have trouble believing that this grim and bloody historical play was penned by a woman.One prolific 19th-century French writer knew the benefits of publishing under a male-sounding pseudonym: George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. While she wrote multiple plays, they are rarely performed today. Instead, this season, the director Laurent Delvert opted to adapt one of her novels, “Gabriel,” for another of the Comédie-Française’s stages, the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.While Delvert’s dark, pared-down production is workaday, with electronic sound effects that feel more like tics, it is a very welcome reintroduction to Sand. Gabriel de Bramante, her central character here, is a woman who was raised secretly as a man for reasons of inheritance; her grandfather can’t bear the idea of his title going to what he sees as a less deserving branch of the family.From left, Yoann Gasiorowski, Elisa Erka and Claire de La Rüe du Can in “Gabriel,” directed by Laurent Delvert at the Comédie-Française’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.Vincent PontetClaire de La Rüe du Can brings delightful artlessness and honesty to the character of Gabriel, who learns of the deception when she comes of age. As she sets out to make things right with her relatives, she falls in love and starts living part-time as a woman, only to fall victim to a man’s irrational jealousy.Sand’s style is exactingly clear as she weighs the ways in which gender norms shape the experience of love and moral dilemmas — something Shakespeare wasn’t too bad at, either. We may never know what some women truly achieved when they couldn’t express their talents fully, but Sidney and Sand, no longer lonely in their pursuits, make for gratifying stage company.Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare. Directed by Aurore Evain. Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois.Coriolanus. Directed by François Orsoni. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 7.Gabriel. Directed by Laurent Delvert. Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, through Oct. 30. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Rita Gardner, an Original ‘Fantasticks’ Star, Is Dead at 87

      by

      In 1960 she originated the lone female role in an Off Broadway show that became part of theater history thanks to a record-setting run.Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret and theater career earned an enduring place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in theatrical history, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 87.Claire-Frances Sullivan, her personal assistant and caretaker, said the cause was leukemia.Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks,” a romantic fable with a book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt. She had called Lore Noto, the show’s producer, before attending the audition, and he told her that though the creative team already had another actress in mind for the part, she should audition anyway.“I didn’t know Tom or Harvey or anybody,” she said in an interview for the book “The Amazing Story of ‘The Fantasticks’” (1991), by Donald C. Farber and Robert Viagas. “I came in, essentially, off the street. They didn’t know me either.”She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Schmidt heard a quality he liked.“With a lot of singers you can tell when they go from head to chest voice; it’s two different voices,” he said in an interview for the same book. “With Rita it was all one voice. Rita was like a pop singer, yet she could do these obbligato things, and it didn’t seem strange.”She got the part of Luisa (also sometimes called simply “the Girl”), the only female role in the piece. The show, whose signature number, “Try to Remember,” became a standard, opened in May 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Tickets were $3.75.In The Daily News, Charles McHarry pronounced the show “recommended without reservation.” But in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, while having kind words for the actors, thought the story lost steam. “Although it is ungrateful to say so,” he wrote, “two acts are one too many.”In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Gardner recalled that keeping the show open was touch and go until that August, when the production took time off amid the New York City summer and played in East Hampton, N.Y., for a week.“All the posh people saw it and told their friends,” she said. “Audiences started to grow.”Ms. Gardner with the other members of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” including, top row center, Jerry Orbach.PhotofestThe show ran for 42 years, closing in 2002 after more than 17,000 performances, and then reopened in 2006 and ran until 2017. Ms. Gardner stayed only until the end of 1960. (Jerry Orbach, who was also in the original cast, left at about the same time.) But she was with the show long enough to record the original cast album.In a 2001 interview with The Bradenton Herald of Florida, Ms. Gardner recalled that, about 10 years earlier, she had attended a production of “The Fantasticks” for the first time as an audience member.“I didn’t know I had been in something so good,” she said.She was in Bradenton performing a revue she had assembled called “Try to Remember: A Look at Off Broadway,” in which she sang songs from “The Fantasticks” and other shows and told stories. A few months earlier she had staged the show at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the same theater where she had originated the “Fantasticks” role 40 years earlier. There, her performance started at 10 p.m. — because “The Fantasticks” was still running in the theater’s main evening slot.Rita Schier was born on Oct. 23, 1934, in Brooklyn to Nathan and Tillie (Hack) Schier. She studied opera and dance and sang in a close-harmony group called the Honeybees; in the late 1950s she appeared in a revue called “Nightcap,” which featured songs by the then unknown Jerry Herman. In 1957 she married the playwright Herb Gardner, who would become known for “A Thousand Clowns.” Their marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Peter Cereghetti. At her death she was married to Robert Sevra, who is her only immediate survivor.Ms. Gardner left “The Fantasticks” to appear in a movie called “One Plus One” (1961), and she had small parts in other movies over the years. She also appeared on television, including in several episodes of “Law & Order,” the show that helped make Mr. Orbach an instantly recognizable star. She appeared on Broadway in “A Family Affair” (1962) as well as in the 1963 revival of “Pal Joey,” among other shows.She performed frequently on the cabaret circuit, where she employed not only her fine singing voice but also her droll sense of humor. In her show “Try to Remember,” she talked about life beyond Broadway’s bright lights.“Off Broadway is not just a location, it’s a definition,” she said. “The Actors Equity definition is a theater that has less than 300 seats, but my definition growing up Off Broadway was a little different. It was a theater that had less than 300 seats, most of them broken.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Bold Enough to Go Full-Tilt’: Gabby Beans Is Playing to the Balcony

      by

      The actress, a Tony nominee for “The Skin of Our Teeth,” is bringing her sharp eye for comedy to Atlantic Theater Company’s production of “I’m Revolting.”Onstage in Lincoln Center Theater’s maximalist revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” last spring were a giant brontosaurus puppet, a full-scale amusement park slide and a stage-spanning verdant field in full bloom. But it was the towering performance from a 5-foot-3 force of nature named Gabby Beans that made the production a must-see.Taking on the role of Sabina in this messy epic by Thornton Wilder, nebulously set between prehistory and the end of the world, is a hard enough task for any actor. And though Tallulah Bankhead, who originated the role in 1942, left big shoes to fill, Beans, in her Broadway debut, stuffed them with a gargantuan presence and a knowingly ridiculous voice, picking up a Tony nomination for lead actress in a play. (Alexis Soloski, in her review for The Times, described Beans as a “ferocious actress” whose “ample” comic gifts “come beribonned and frilled.”)While growing up, Beans said her mother, a fan of classic Hollywood actresses, would call her “Tallulah Bashula” and, because of her early comedic flashes, liken her to Lucille Ball — apt comparisons for anyone who saw Beans darting around the stage in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production, pausing to flash her expressive eyes and deliver a big, vaudevillian one-liner.Beans, with James Vincent Meredith, in “The Skin of Our Teeth.” In her review, the critic Alexis Soloski called Beans “a ferocious actress” whose ample comic gifts “come beribboned and frilled.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe later added Eartha Kitt to that list of brassy acting inspirations during an interview at a coffee shop in Chelsea a few weeks ago, before a dress rehearsal of Gracie Gardner’s “I’m Revolting.” (The Atlantic Theater Company production, currently in previews and scheduled to open Oct. 5, is Beans’s first show since “The Skin of Our Teeth” closed in May.) “She is the brightest star in my artistic constellation,” Beans said of Kitt. “She had a way of relating to the audience, and it’s really special to see someone hold everyone’s attention with their presence.”The operative word is “presence,” which Beans has plenty of. Seemingly unafraid to make bold choices, and bolstered by pure charisma and a sharp eye for comedy, hers is a type of performance that hearkens back to when theater was the only way to see personality writ large.One of her “I’m Revolting” co-stars, Patrick Vaill, put it this way: “The acting style of the time we’re in is rooted in doing less; a glance, a shift in physicality. We don’t have actors playing to the balcony, so when someone does that, it’s invigorating.”In Gardner’s dark comedy, about patients at a skin cancer clinic, Beans’s comedic chops are tighter, this time blended with the forceful compassion of the type-A older sister she plays.Beans, left, and Alicia Pilgrim as her sister in Gracie Gardner’s dark comedy “I’m Revolting,” which opens Oct. 5 at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“She understands the tone of storytelling very well and can throw herself into that, whatever it is,” the director, Knud Adams, said. “With confidence comes that transformational fearlessness where she knows what needs to be served and dives in headfirst.”Both collaborators referenced Beans’s presence, onstage and off, with Vaill noting that “the performance is happening before you even realize it’s a performance,” and Adams, who said the role was hers as soon as she expressed interest, praising Beans as seeming “boundless in what she can take on.”That limitlessness is a trait that also comes through in conversation, even if Beans is unaware of it, half-joking that she was grateful that she’d had no faith in herself for her “Skin of Our Teeth” audition.“I got the audition through Lileana, because we’d worked together quite a bit, and she’s a friend,” explained Beans, who has appeared in several Off Broadway productions directed by Blain-Cruz, including “Anatomy of a Suicide” and “Marys Seacole.” “I read the play and, I’m going to be honest with you, thought, ‘OK, this play is weird, but this part! How are they going to cast someone who’s not famous?’ It made me go into the audition with a lot of freedom, so I did the craziest version I possibly could. It empowered me to make really big choices, and I felt free in a way I’d never felt before as an actor.”Blain-Cruz said she first starting “keeping tabs” on Beans after seeing her in a non-equity showcase production of Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class” at Williamstown Theater Festival in 2017, and has since cast her in four productions.“I was excited, but not sure, about Gabby for ‘Skin,’ because it is such a particular role,” Blain-Cruz said. “But she came in and blew it out of the water. Her alacrity with language is stunning, and her moving the character between an exhausted lady-of-the-stage into this zany character voice revealed somebody who is willing and bold enough to go full-tilt.”The director noted that, along with the other productions on which they’ve collaborated (including “Girls” at Yale Repertory Theater), Beans has excelled at “existing in different realities and times.” Blain-Cruz commended her as a “dramaturgically intelligent actor” who has become her muse, and whose “humor and intensity” she believes would perfectly suit a Yorgos Lanthimos film like “The Lobster.”But before Gabby Beans became a performer, she was Gabby Beans, Army brat. Born in Georgia to a physician mother and a father who was in the military, she “kind of grew up in Northern Virginia,” also living in Louisiana and Hawaii before settling in a German ski town in the Bavarian Alps, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, for high school. She was accepted to Columbia University, which brought her back stateside to study neuroscience and theater.After three years of working at a neonatal intensive care unit and doing student plays at Columbia, she decided against medical school, instead opting for a master’s degree in classical acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, a city she fell in love with while growing up in Europe. She credits seeing Fiona Shaw in a 2009 production of “Mother Courage” at the National Theater, and Kristin Scott Thomas in the Old Vic’s 2014 production of “Electra,” as formative theatrical experiences.The actress, who opts for “a monastic life” whenever she’s working, has a passion for the city’s house and techno music scene.Desmond Picotte for The New York Times“It’s really nurturing as a young actor to be in a country whose most famous writer is a playwright,” she said. “There’s just a different sensibility around theater, an awareness of and value for the work of actors that I think is not quite true here unless you’re incredibly famous.”Though she has a deep knowledge of actors past and present, it becomes clear, listening to Beans discuss her other interests, that she has a life beyond the stage. She loves the structure and discipline required of acting — a holdover from her upbringing, she said she opts for “a monastic life” whenever working — but she lights up with an insider’s passion when describing her love for New York City’s house and techno scene.“I’m into the beep-beep-boop music,” she said, smiling. “I grew up in Germany, so how could I not be?”Back in Bavaria, she and her friends would travel to Munich for its “debaucherous” club scene. Here, it’s electronic music hot spots like Elsewhere and Nowadays in her Bushwick neighborhood, where she’s lived since 2016. What first drew her to the scene was footwork, a type of electronic music out of Chicago that she’d hear in grungy Brooklyn warehouses. But she hasn’t kept up with that scene lately, she said, because of the pandemic, her busy schedule and the effects of gentrification.“A lot of my favorite parties went away,” Beans said. “The small record labels throwing them were priced out of the spaces. There used to be all these D.I.Y. venues on Kent Avenue before they turned into the Vice offices. That was my scene: fast-paced Black electronic music in a warehouse, where the bar would be a cart table with a handle of Everclear and a bottle of Sprite. Once those places went away, I wasn’t as present in the clubs.”Warehouse parties, acting, Eartha Kitt adoration, her recent turn toward writing and directing short films with a magical realism bent: “It’s all the same, all just about being alive and feeling free,” she said. “It’s all me.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

      by

      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Singing All The Way To The Apocalypse

      by

      Writer/ director Dave Bain on new musical Last Sales Conference of the Apocalypse

      We’re always on the lookout for something different, and the one thing you can almost guarantee with fringe theatre is that something different is always one email away! Last Sales Conference of the Apocalypse caught our eye just from the title along. But then we read the blurb of how Sam has “initiated a nuclear missile countdown with his bottom” and well, you can imagine from that line alone we seriously needed to find out more.

      So, we sat down with the writer and director Dave Bain to find out how a IT startup company could cause such mayhem!

      What on earth inspired you to write a musical where the start premise is imminent global destruction?

      We like to have an immersive element to our productions.  I thought it would be fun to set up a scenario where audience members are treated like sales delegates arriving at a defence conference, and the actors would be the IT staff for that event. 

      Once I arrived at that premise, the idea of the technical team accidently triggering the launch sequence for a missile launch seemed an exciting way to launch the story (excusing the pun).

      The story then moves into Sam’s head as he imagines it is all a TV series and he is the showrunner – does this allow you to really play about with the characters in very different ways than if it was all grounded in reality?

      Definitely. We can be more playful with the scenario, in a way that you couldn’t if the action played out in the “real world”.  Sam (the lead) forces the other characters to play out “roles” he has created for them in his mind. But these roles reflect his view of their personalities. As we get deeper into the story (and thereby his subconscious), his colleagues start to push back on him – their real personalities (and issues) emerge.

      It’s a musical, is this your forte? Do you write the music as well as the script?

      I’ve written songs and performed in bands since my teens.  I’ve always loved musicals, but when I was younger I felt too scared to write one.  GAME OVER (2017), was the first show where I brought my music to the creative table. I was a bit taken back by the reactions to that show; people really connected with the material, but also loved the music. This gave me the confidence to push forward with my song writing in Dissociated (2019), and now this show.  I’m very proud of the songs in “Apocalypse”, they feel fully formed and integrated into the narrative.

      And how much more difficult is it to write a script that also has to have some rhyming couplets included?

      There is a song that closes the first act called “Join Us Instead”.  It’s is heavily narrative based, and each verse has two sections. Unfortunately, this meant the song took forever to write. There was a three week period when I wanted to metaphorically throw this song into a deep gorge and never see it again.  However, I got there in the end!

      A lot of contemporary musical songs are written with melodic wiggle room, but I’m very precise with the timing on my lyrics: they need to sit exactly on the melody. It one of the benefits of writing both the words and the music. 

      Support me from the coundtrack of Last Sales Conference of the Apocalypse

      The full soundtrack for the show is available via Soundcloud here

      When we interviewed the cast and choreographer (check out the podcast here), they talked about each character having their own musical style, can you expand on this?

      Sam, the show’s lead, imagines himself as a bit of creative.  He loves old school musicals, so that’s his style. Stats, the tech lead, is into electronic music. Aesha, the sales & marketing person, likes things a bit funky. Finally, T-Base, the DPD delivery man, likes to bring the drama – so his music is overly melodramatic and dark.

      Rehearsals started early September, does the script go through many changes during the rehearsal process or are you quite strict and stick to the final draft you’ve brought to the rehearsal room?

      One of the strengths of being the writer/director is that I can change the script during rehearsal.  When you get into the room with a bunch of people, you can quickly tell if what’s on the page is working or not.  As a director I serve the story, so if I need to cut or re-write my own lines I will.

      The downside of this approach is that it can be stressful for actors.  With GAME OVER we changed about 15% of the script during rehearsal. Dissociated (2019) was on another level – there were four rewrites of the script during the first week of the run, with about 30% changes. 

      I didn’t want anyone to have to go through that again, including me! With Apocalypse, I ran a development workshop in January to iron out any big problems. That said, I’ve done a 15% rewrite from where we were at the start of September.

      The one thing that never changes during rehearsal are the songs. Because I can record them myself, I can manage their maturation cleanly.

      As silly as the play sounds, it does also explore some serious topics of domestic violence and conversion therapy. Are these subjects you’re worked on before, and how do you balance the serious with the silly.

      I don’t think you can unpack this kind of material without creating a narrative environment that the audience has bought into. With all our shows, we ease people into the character’s world first. One of the best ways to create audience engagement is to use humour. Some comics use humour to attack others, but it can also be used to laugh at ourselves, and acknowledge our vulnerabilities.

      The cast are LGBTQ, was this important to have given you touch upon conversion therapy?

      The short answer is absolutely.  I also believe in the importance of being an Ally. Straight women have a much better track record on this than men.

      On a deeper level, I came into writing this show after doing a research MA on masculinity. It left me feeling that traditional “straight” masculinity is limited and highly restrictive in terms of finding our own expression of self.

      The musical is having a four week run, which is a long run for fringe, how nervous are you about selling those tickets? And is the fact Waterloo East Theatre have given you a four-week run a good endorsement of their trust in you and your work?

      I’ve taken nervous to a whole new level with this run, but I’m eternally grateful to Waterloo East Theatre, and its amazing director, Gerald Armin for giving us this opportunity.

      And finally, why should we all be making our way to this lovely railway arch venue in October to catch Last Sales Conference of the Apocalypse?

      If you’ve got to end of this interview and you still don’t have enough reasons.  Here’s three more in shorthand:

      i) Fifteen original – catchy – songsii) Lots of jokes, followed by some exciting drama and suspenseiii) Audio and live appearances by living legend, Marcus Bentley, playing the Voice of God from Big Brother.

      Our thanks to Dave for taking time out for rehearsals to chat to us. Last Sales of the Apocalypse plays at Waterloo East Theatre from 4 to 30 October. Further information and bookings here. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Lynn Nottage’s ‘Clyde’s’ Is the Most-Staged Play in America

      by

      An annual survey, suspended during the pandemic, resumes and finds theaters nationally doing fewer shows and torn between escapism and ambition.Theaters around America appear to be staging fewer shows than they were before the pandemic, but a lot of the work they are doing is by Lynn Nottage.An annual survey by American Theater magazine, conducted this year for the first time since the start of the pandemic, found that Nottage’s sandwich shop comedy, “Clyde’s,” will be the most-produced play in the country this season, with at least 11 productions. The survey also found that there were 24 productions of Nottage plays planned this season, which ties her with the perennial regional theater favorite Lauren Gunderson for the title of most-produced playwright in America.“Clyde’s,” which had a well-reviewed Broadway production starring Uzo Aduba that opened late last year, is peopled by characters who previously served time in prison, and its mix of laughter and social commentary, plus Nottage’s stature as a two-time Pulitzer winner, apparently appealed to those who program theater seasons. Among those staging the play are the Arden Theater Company in Philadelphia, the Arkansas Repertory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles and TheaterWorks Hartford.“‘Clyde’s’ just hit the sweet spot — it has a multiracial cast, it addresses issues of incarceration and racial tension, it’s a comedy, and it’s really smart, and it’s by a Pulitzer winner,” said Rob Weinert-Kendt, the editor in chief of American Theater and an occasional contributor to The New York Times. “It’s a comedy, but it’s not turning away from the world.”Nottage, in an email, said she was pleased the play was finding an audience.“‘Clyde’s’ is a play about people trapped in a liminal space. It is also about community, healing, creativity, mindfulness and forgiveness,” she said. “I’m really quite humbled to be back on the most-produced list with this particular play, which speaks to the moment, as it is about the process of resurrecting one’s spirit and finding grace in the simple business of living.”Lynn NottageJingyu Lin for The New York TimesThe finding that fewer productions are being mounted is troubling, though not surprising — artistic directors around the country have been saying that they were ramping back up slowly after the pandemic shutdown because audiences have not come back in prepandemic numbers. The American Theater lists are based on a survey of theaters that are members of Theater Communications Group; in the 2019-20 season, respondents reported planning to stage 2,229 full-run shows; this season, even with the first-time addition of audio and streaming shows, as well as productions on Broadway, the count is only 1,298.The survey, which counts both plays and musicals but excludes work by Shakespeare and variations on “A Christmas Carol” (because there are so many productions they would swamp everything else), finds more diversity than in the past: Seven of the 14 most-produced plays are by writers of color, and 10 of the 24 most-produced playwrights are writers of color.Notably, though composers are not tracked by the survey, work with songs by Stephen Sondheim is experiencing a spike in popularity since his death last year, with at least 19 productions planned around the country. (In New York, there are three: “Into the Woods,” which opened on Broadway this summer; “Merrily We Roll Along,” running at New York Theater Workshop this winter; and “Sweeney Todd,” coming to Broadway next spring.)After “Clyde’s,” the other most popular shows include some crowd-pleasing entertainments — the comedy “Chicken & Biscuits,” a stage adaptation of “Clue,” the musical “Once” — alongside more challenging fare, like Nottage’s play “Sweat.” After Nottage and Gunderson, the most-produced playwrights are Matthew López, August Wilson and Dominique Morisseau. The complete lists are at americantheatre.org.Update: After publishing its survey results on Friday, American Theater magazine amended its lists to reflect new information. As a result, the statistics about the season’s diversity have been updated in this story. More