Mabou Mines

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares179 Views

    ‘Mud/Drowning’ Review: 3 Fools, 3 Kooks, 2 Bizarre Plays

    by

    A new production of two of María Irene Fornés’s short plays, “Mud” and “Drowning,” tries to accentuate the weirdness of the playwright’s worlds but too often overreaches.What absurdist work perhaps does best is map the places where our comprehension ends. The surreal reality of being human in the world is enough to lead a writer to create worlds in which, say, bestiality, petty theft and cuckoldry are just business as usual, or where odd, misshapen humanoids reflect on love.In “Mud/Drowning,” a new production of two of María Irene Fornés’s short plays, presented by Mabou Mines and Weathervane Productions at the Mabou Mines theater in Manhattan’s East Village, the director JoAnne Akalaitis tries to accentuate the weirdness of the playwright’s worlds. But too often she overreaches, obscuring the more subtle turns of the text.In “Mud” (1980), a poor woman named Mae (Wendy vanden Heuvel, a touch overzealous) works jobs ironing and goes to school on the side, learning how to read and do math. Her slovenly, illiterate companion Lloyd (a fascinating Paul Lazar, at turns crouched in a chair like a gargoyle or seated on the floor, staring off like a despondent animal) isn’t impressed. He’s mostly concerned with his erection.Mae brings home a neighbor she likes, Henry (Tony Torn, perfectly posturing), a wannabe intellectual who’s not nearly as wise as he thinks he is. Soon she, Henry and Lloyd (her adopted brother, or lover or something in between) are living together in a perverse love triangle of desire and codependence.Paul Lazar, left, and Wendy vanden Heuvel in “Mud.”Julieta CervantesAkalaitis’s self-conscious direction tries to meet the text on its own terms: The hourlong performance of “Mud” is punctuated by abrupt transitions between each of its 17 scenes; while Fornés simply called for the actors to freeze in place, this production includes cheesy, slow-motion dances and synchronized pantomimes.The physical interactions have been cut, and instead a narrator (Sifiso Mabena) reads all of the stage directions. As a result, we get Fornés’s poetic descriptions — “The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun” — but also an unnecessary additional character who gives the story a level of removal. Instead of encountering the play as is, we get descriptions and explanations that serve as barriers, not windows, into the work.The production’s treatment of “Drowning” (1986), a work of just five pages, is more on par with Fornés’s pithy play about three freakish figures who discuss life and love. “Is this why we have come to live? To love like this? And hurt like this?” asks Pea (Gregory Purnhagen), one of three sickly looking men with face sores and unnaturally bloated bodies, in neutral tan-and-brown wardrobes.He’s talking about his love for a woman whose picture he discovers in a newspaper, an object previously unknown to him — along with things as commonplace as snow. Pea and his more knowledgeable companions, Roe (Peter Stewart) and Stephen (Tomas Cruz), walk languidly through the space, mirroring one another’s movements and singing the bizarre dialogue in mesmeric operatic tones.Here “Drowning” is scored to a new “pocket opera” by Philip Glass, performed by Michael A. Ferrara, the keyboardist and musical director, and the harpist Anna Bikales. It elicits a multitude of sensations in the brief 30-minute performance: A bold, steady rhythm unexpectedly stops and restarts like a game of Red Light, Green Light; a mounting crescendo spells drama and heartbreak even when the action onstage is static.Whereas in “Mud,” the music seems like an interruption overpowering the dialogue, the music, the dialogue and the movement in “Drowning” are all on the same plane. That play also uses the minimalist sets and dramatic lighting more wisely; both sets comprise just a single table and chairs, with tiles and wallpaper in similar retro brown-and-tan patterns, along with neon-yellow strip lights set along the back wall. It’s too much for Mae and Lloyd’s modern abode, but the off-putting color palettes and Gatorade-colored lights draw out the otherworldly qualities of Pea and company.Along with Caryl Churchill and Edward Albee, Fornés made stages weird for decades before she died in 2018, influencing those eminent playwrights and many more — even though her work isn’t as widely known today as that of her peers. Her characters live in weird corners of the imagination, where uninhabited desire and grim existential queries abound. Such spaces need no introduction or justification: It should feel like an honor to be a stranger in Fornés’s strange lands.Mud/DrowningThrough Oct. 9 at Mabou Mines, Manhattan; maboumines.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      At 52, Mabou Mines Is Still Testing Boundaries

      by

      A three-day retrospective will shine a spotlight on the group’s most daring projects.The word “crazy” comes up fairly regularly when talking to people about the Mabou Mines theater company.Take one of Sharon Ann Fogarty’s early experiences with that fabled group — nine years before she became one of its co-artistic directors. It was on “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear” — not obvious back in 1990 — that was directed by Lee Breuer and starred Ruth Maleczech as the monarch.“The opening scene had dogs and all these kiddos so my job was to pick the kids up around five o’clock, drive them over, do the scene and drive them back,” Fogarty, now 65, said. “Then I would come back, and I was doing various other parts. One of them was holding down Isabell Monk while Honora Fergusson gouged her eyes out. It was kind of a crazy, crazy time,” she continued, “but it was really fun.”Starting Thursday, Mabou Mines is celebrating 50 years of theatrical experimentation with a three-day megamix, a retrospective of some of its most notorious, daring, beloved, memorable or, yes, craziest projects. (The company is actually 52 years old but the celebration was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.) The works will include live readings, concerts and films, in conjunction with a companion exhibition of archival material, at the Mabou Mines home in the 122 Community Center, in the East Village, where the group settled in 2017 after decades of a peripatetic existence.The 1990 staging of “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear,” featured, from left: Kandel, Ruth Maleczech and Greg Mehrten.Michael CooperThe performing arts, by definition, exist in the moment, so mounting a greatest-hits package — especially of an Off Off Broadway company — is a daunting task. Mabou Mines got the idea for its extended birthday party after a founding member, JoAnne Akalaitis, spearheaded a 12-hour tribute to the playwright María Irene Fornés at the Public Theater in 2018. “So when we came to talk about Mabou Mines’s 50th, JoAnne said, ‘Why don’t we just do a marathon of all the pieces?’” Fogarty recalled.This would have been more than 60 works, so they settled on 31. “Some are going to be excerpts, some are going to be full, some are just going to be the music,” Fogarty said. “Some of them are an hour, or you get 15 minutes, like a juicy scene or something.”The programs will bring former company members back to the fold, along with simpatico guests such as Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel, who will perform Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “Through the Leaves,” produced by Mabou Mines in 1984, on Thursday. The following day Akalaitis will direct David Greenspan, Ellen McLaughlin and Ellen McElduff, a former company member, in Samuel Beckett’s “Play,” which Mabou Mines staged in 1971.The time machine will travel all the way back to Mabou Mines’s first project, “The Red Horse Animation” (1970), which was conceived during a retreat in the isolated Nova Scotia town that gave the company its name. On Saturday, Akalaitis — who was in the original production — will reprise it alongside a pair of first-generation Mabou heirs: the writer, director and actress Clove Galilee, who is Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter, and the choreographer David Neumann, the son of the Mabou members Fergusson and Frederick Neumann, who died in 2012. (Akalaitis’s then-husband, Philip Glass, another founding member, wrote the music.)Tight family bonds have always been part of the Mabou Mines matrix — the group, born out of the experimentations of the 1960s, blurred the personal, the artistic and the political. Akalaitis, 84, recalls that the children of company members tagged along on tour in the 1970s and babysitters were in the line budgets for rehearsals — an afterthought for many current theaters.A still from “Moi-Même,” a movie that some of the Mabou Mines artists shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished. It will be shown this weekend as a work-in-progress backed by a live band.John Rounds“Looking back, it was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal and we all get paid the same amount of money, whether we’re working or not,” she said of the company’s precepts. “And when there was no money, there was no money — there wasn’t money for some.”Breuer, who died last year, had quickly emerged as a dominant personality, and he directed some of the troupe’s most famous shows, such as “Peter and Wendy” (the story of Peter Pan told by a solo actress and puppets, in 1997) and “Mabou Mines Dollhouse” (Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” with the men played by actors under 5 feet tall and the women by actresses who were nearly 6 feet, in 2003).At the same time the company embraced decision-making by consensus, which did not necessarily help speed things along. “Consensus building is very, very hard but I also think it’s the only way to do it,” Akalaitis said. “If you have a group of people who basically have big egos and don’t want someone else to be the boss, the only way to do it is that everyone’s the boss.”Even now, the company split leadership responsibilities among four co-artistic directors: Fogarty, Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlett and Carl Hancock Rux.The major reason Mabou Mines has endured for a half-century is that it has always drawn like-minded people who thrived on experimentation. Kandel remembered her first experience with the company, working on “Mabou Mines Lear” with Breuer and Maleczech. “There was a kind of trust that whoever was doing whatever role, you would find your way there,” Kandel, 69, said in a video conversation.Clockwise from top left, Fogarty, Rux, Kandel and Catlett. The shared leadership model, the co-founding member JoAnne Akalaitis, said, “was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal.” Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“There was the shy me and then there was the thing inside of me, and that’s what Lee wanted to see come out,” she continued. “One time I said, ‘Why am I going to climb up this telephone pole?’ Lee’s response was something like, ‘Don’t ask me those questions, that Stanislavski [expletive]. Just climb up the pole!’” (Kandel would go on to star in the Mabou hit “Peter and Wendy.”)Past and present are inextricably entwined in “Moi-Même,” a movie directed by Breuer that the artists who would go on to form Mabou Mines (except for Akalaitis and Glass) shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished.Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin retrieved the footage and during the pandemic went over all 16 hours of it with his father on Zoom — there was no script and the dialogue was never dubbed in, so Lorwin, 38, was trying to figure out some sort of through line. “I did the vast majority of the work on it after he died but it really feels like a collaboration because he gave me this stuff to work with, but he left me all this space, too,” he said. “So I’ve written a script, I decided what these things mean.”On Saturday, “Moi-Même” will be presented as a work-in-progress backed by a live band and the Foley artist Jay Peck, with Kandel voicing all the adults and Declan Kenneally all the kids.In a way, it will be a bridge between Mabou Mines’s prehistory and what may lie ahead. “The future will be, hopefully, something that still feels like us,” Kandel said, “but won’t look like us.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Under the Radar Festival Returns, Smaller but Still Funky

      by

      The experimental festival at the Public Theater will return in person with fewer shows and, for the first time, performances outside New York City.The Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual showcase for experimental theater, will return in person next year, Jan. 12-30. The event, now in its 18th year, will feature nearly two dozen artists, with performances held at the Public and Mabou Mines in Manhattan as well as a venue in upstate New York.Those who’ve attended in past years will notice a few differences: The festival will run for three weeks instead of two and include only 15 productions at the Public — all 90 minutes or less — down from the 22 at the 2020 festival.“I’m happy we have a smaller festival this year so we can really concentrate on these pieces and give them the attention they deserve,” Mark Russell, the festival director, said in a phone conversation, adding that he hadn’t yet determined whether the change would be permanent.One of the pieces that Russell said he was most excited to land was Jasmine Lee-Jones’s “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-29). Staged to critical acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater last summer, the 90-minute two-hander explores cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship and the ownership of Black bodies online and in real life.A cultural re-examination is also what Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff have planned for the New York premiere of their hourlong show “Our Country,” a meeting of mythic and modern America set in California’s marijuana country and inspired by Sophocles’ “Antigone” (Jan. 12-16, 21-23).A pair of solo shows also highlight the schedule: The playwright Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”) will perform his 90-minute, music- and poetry-filled piece “An Evening with an Immigrant,” which chronicles his journey from Nigeria to England (Jan. 18-20). Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor known for his roles in Spike Lee films, will return to the festival with his hourlong solo show “Otto Frank,” a historical account of the father of Anne Frank, who was the only immediate member of his family to survive the Holocaust (Jan. 13-16, 20-23).Rounding out the slate is a double bill of “Mud/Drowning,” two intimate works by María Irene Fornés, a Cuban American playwright and director who died in 2018, which, following a sold-out run last year, will return to the experimental theater company Mabou Mines (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-30). “Mud,” a play by Fornés, is a grim consideration of ignorance, poverty and desperation, while “Drowning,” a half-hour “pocket” opera by the composer Philip Glass, is adapted from Fornés’s five-page surreal play based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.A new initiative, “Under the Radar: On the Road,” will also bring a pair of Pascal Rambert monologues, “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” to a venue called PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham, N.Y., which sits on 100 acres of orchards, meadows and woodlands (Jan. 14-15, 22-23).Following the Under the Radar Festival, “An Evening with an Immigrant” will also be performed at Oklahoma City Repertory Theater (Jan. 22-23) and at Stanford University (Jan. 29-30), and “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” will transfer to Washington, D.C., for a three-week run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Feb. 14-March 6).“We’re acknowledging that small-scale work needs touring to survive and reach the widest audience,” Russell said.The festival will also include eight works in the “Incoming!” works-in-process series and the return of concerts by artists including Migguel Anggelo, Salty Brine and Alicia Hall Moran at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan.A full lineup is available at publictheater.org. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In Carl Hancock Rux’s ‘Vs.,’ the Jury Is Out

      by

      Where justice is virtual, crimes have no names and audience members step up to the dock to examine anonymous witnesses.Since the pandemic began, American courts have moved millions of hearings online, a development known as “virtual justice.” Carl Hancock Rux’s elliptical “Vs.” adapts virtual justice as virtual theater. In this court, the crime remains unnamed and the identity of the accused a mystery. The interrogator? That would be you. Or at least, a silhouette of you, with some mild technological wizardry superimposing someone else’s deep voice atop your blacked-out outline. Anyway, choose your Zoom background with care.At the top of “Vs.,” a digital experience directed by Mallory Catlett and produced by Mabou Mines, a court clerk gathers its participants into an online chamber. A man (David Thomson) is called as a witness. A witness to what? The interrogator — the role is divided, seemingly randomly, among audience members — asks only two questions: If the witness would like a drink and if the witness was born in November. The witness responds to each with contempt, questioning the court’s values and taste. Here’s part of his answer on the birthdate issue: “Not if we are to consider an opposition to phallogocentricism and the hegemonic ideals contained in patriarchal culture uniting theory and fantasy, challenging such discourse within the frameworks of a constitution blown up by law.” Pity the stenographer.Following this first sequence, the questioning repeats three times, with different audience members as the interrogator and other performers — Becca Blackwell, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Perry Yung — playing witnesses. The dialogue remains mostly the same, with a few variations, as though these are four musicians, each soloing on the same tune. The details never become more definite.Becca Blackwell appears in Carl Hancock Rux’s Zoom play.Onome EkehA cryptic trial pursuing a nameless crime will of course bring the works of Franz Kafka to mind. Though “Vs.” is more of a reverse Kafka, with the witnesses disdaining the court’s authority. “It’s your court,” each says. “Do as you wish. I’m not in it. I never was.” The court seems confused. Me, too, if I’m honest.Rux, a breathlessly inventive multimedia artist, made a thrilling entrance about 20 years ago with “Talk,” an impressionistic puzzle box of a play about art, race, memory and power. “Talk” took a panel discussion as its form, inhabiting and deconstructing its rituals. So there was reason to hope that “Vs.” would bring that same ingenuity to a Zoom courtroom. But the show meshes with the medium only glancingly, mostly through a manipulation of speaker view and camera feed. It hasn’t fully considered what kinds of narrative, imagery and speech inhabit this space successfully. A text this dense, spoken by performers viewed from the chest up, their faces and bodies awash in visual effects, suffers without the mutual entanglement of actors and audiences both present in the same space. Via an online platform, my ability to absorb and parse the language seemed to recede with each repetition. Engagement was virtual, not actual.I don’t take any pride in this inattention. It can represent an ugly kind of privilege. Because if your life or body or lived experience were really on the line, you wouldn’t have the luxury of distraction. But the abstraction of “Vs.” has a deadening effect. In that Zoom window, my face a void, I didn’t feel especially accountable or implicated, just anxious about whether or not any fidgeting (I’m an inveterate fidgeter) would upset the illusion.Even as live performances return, I’m eager for theater artists to experiment with digital tools, discovering new possibilities and new transmedia forms. Nevertheless, “Vs.” feels like a mistrial.Vs.Through Aug. 8; maboumines.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Lee Breuer, Adventurous Theater Director, Dies at 83

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLee Breuer, Adventurous Theater Director, Dies at 83One of the founders of Mabou Mines, he reveled in being an outsider even when his celebrated “The Gospel at Colonus” reached Broadway.Lee Breuer, the director of “Peter and Wendy,” in 1997 with two of the puppets featured in that production.Credit…Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesPublished More