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      ‘Seagull’ Review: Blurring the Lines of Fiction

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      Elevator Repair Service’s Chekhov revival has promising ideas about art, experimentation and truth, but the production inevitably falls flat, our critic writes.If only I could find someone who loves me enough to gift me a dead bird in a brown paper bag.I jest, of course. The wounded young protagonist who delivers this confounding gift in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” communicates his thoughts and feelings through wild symbols — “new forms” of art, he says — like this particular one of the avian variety. The theater troupe Elevator Repair Service — known for its ambitious, innovative takes on classics like “The Great Gatsby” (“Gatz”) — attempts to meet that challenge in its latest work, “Seagull.”But this highly stylized contemporary production, which recently opened at NYU Skirball in a nearly three-hour production, feels like a series of ideas that never quite cohere. The beginnings of those ideas are promising, though: the toppling of the fourth wall, the meta references to the original text, the vivid tonal changes and the comic recasting of the play’s characters, each of them living through their own sad, ironic farce of a life.Let’s begin with those clowns. Konstantin (a wooden Gavin Price) wants to be a great writer but is too busy producing incomprehensible symbolist plays, at least that’s what his mother, Irina (Kate Benson, a bluster of affected melodrama), thinks. A vain actress with a vicious streak toward her son, Irina has come to stay with her sick brother at his country estate, and she’s taken along her boy toy, the famous writer Boris Trigorin (a compellingly aloof Robert M. Johanson). From the other side of the property comes Nina (Maggie Hoffman, magnetic), a young woman who wants to escape her circumstances and become an actress.One may need a map for the various romantic entanglements: Semyon (Pete Simpson) loves the depressed, coke-snorting Masha (Susie Sokol), who loves Konstantin, who loves Nina, who is enamored with Trigorin, who is attached to Irina. And Masha’s mother, Paulina (Lindsay Hockaday), is married to Ilya (Julian Fleisher) but is having an affair with the former playboy doctor Gene (a delightfully quippy Vin Knight).“Seagull,” directed by the group’s founder, John Collins, opens with a meandering curtain speech, charismatically delivered by Simpson as his real-life self, and ends in the world of Chekhov, where Simpson is now Semyon, a poor lovesick teacher. Simpson cracks jokes and rattles off (real and fictional) information about the Skirball stage, letting the audience know that the line between reality and fiction is needlepoint thin, though to what end is unclear.Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull,” directed by John Collins, not only breaks the fourth wall but also has its characters break into dance.Ian DouglasThe breaking of the fourth wall happens mostly in the first several minutes, though this play is being marketed as interactive, part “chat with the audience,” as if the entirety of the show will be meta. The production seems to want to reach toward some message about art — particularly experimental art, especially experimental theater — as when the group cheekily pokes fun at itself in Simpson’s opening speech. “If ERS is known for anything,” Simpson says, “we’re known for our livestock, wallpaper and violent dance.”I’m sorry to report that there’s no livestock or wallpaper but there is a bit of dancing (whether you’d deem it violent depends on your particular disposition). And besides a few references to the actors — not as their characters, but the real actors themselves — the production’s self-aware spoofing unfortunately falls to the wayside.The attempts to deconstruct Chekhov’s work extends to the set by Dots, the design collective. Lined up folding chairs, sat on by the cast, and a table with tech equipment are juxtaposed with a piano, where Konstantin broods, and a fraction of an old Russian dining room, just two perpendicular walls, decorated with framed paintings, a table and chairs in the center, where the characters sit to eat and play cards.And then there’s that dead bird.Dead feathered fowl! Suicide! Ruination! Unhappy marriages! Unrequited love! Festering resentment! “The Seagull” doesn’t seem like the kind of play that would tickle your funny bone, and yet Chekhov himself considered it a comedy. Most productions cast it as a tragedy (especially after the seminal Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski reinterpreted it as such in one of its first productions).Collins opts for both, going all in on comedy in the first half and making a daring turn to tragedy in the second. So Masha isn’t the cool goth pining after the dejected artist but a mopey dork in knee-high compression socks who drags herself across the stage while the sad-sack Semyon shuffles along after her. Konstantin isn’t a misunderstood virtuoso but a solipsistic hipster of an artist with serious mommy issues. In the final scene of the first act, Gene, having comforted two distraught characters in a row, comically declares, “You’re so upset! You’re all so upset!”And yet, despite its playful humor and antics, the show often falls into lulls where it’s mostly just performing a rote version of Chekhov’s piece.It’s not until partway through the second act that the show’s unforgettable shift occurs. The actors freeze, posing in an almost suffocating silence for several minutes. The set darkens and fog unfurls across the top of the stage. None of the actors speak, but we hear them reading their lines in voice-over. We see Nina slumped in a chair in the corner, Irina sitting in a commanding pose front and center, arms spread out on either side to rest on the chair backs, her legs brazenly crossed in front of her, and Ilya leaning against a pillar, head drooped to the side. The effect is haunting when paired with the disembodied voices. Instead of trying to seamlessly incorporate both the dark humor and the woe, the production calls attention to each individually.Chekhov’s play lends itself to dismantling and comic scrutiny. Take Aaron Posner’s postmodern remix, “Stupid _______ Bird,” which actually manages to pull off the balancing act that the Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull” struggles with, splitting the difference between a dutiful replication of the text (or at least parts of it) and an irreverent sendup of prevailing ideas, themes and executions of the beloved work. Posner’s ambitious, if pretentious, play manages it a bit better through an almost Spartan-level commitment to its conceit, from script to stage.“Seagull” is milder in its execution of its ideas, though it would benefit from committing more to its experimental aspirations and making its insights about art clearer. And it could further blur the line between performance and reality as it does in the opening scene, allowing the actors to speak more freely, to improvise, to share parts of themselves even as they inhabit their characters.This production may get its audience thinking about art, experimentation and truth but can’t quite see those thoughts through. In the play Konstantin declares that we need new forms. This production may have inadvertently provided the answer: Only if the artist is up to it.SeagullThrough July 31 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Du Yun Revisits Her Early Music Theater at NYU Skirball

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      A program at NYU Skirball pairs “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” youthful works from when the composer felt “like a fish out of water.”When the composer Du Yun was a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 2000s, she felt like a fish out of water.“Very much out of water,” Du Yun, 44, said in a recent interview. “It was my first time not in a conservatory setting since I was 6.”But Du Yun — now the Pulitzer Prize-winning conjurer of exhilaratingly elusive and often moving sound worlds — did have a rich community of artistic collaborators. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the group of new-music specialists started in 2001 by the flutist Claire Chase, a fellow Oberlin conservatory graduate. And when the ensemble had an opportunity to create an original work of theater, Du Yun, who was resistant to opera, instead wanted to stage a set of songs.“I just began writing stories,” she said, as an exercise. “And then I used those stories for a kind of structure.”Fanciful, allegorical and open to interpretations personal and political, they became “Zolle,” which premiered in 2005. A tale of a wandering soul in the afterlife, it was followed a few years later by a work set in what Du Yun sees as a preparational “before-life”: “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” a fable about a pregnant cockroach’s longing and plans to become human. Now, the two have been paired — an interplay that casts both in a new light — for a diptych that will be presented at NYU Skirball on Friday and Saturday.In the early months of the pandemic, Du Yun recorded “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” with the JACK Quartet, the players accompanying her narration in elevated speech. Its sense of yearning for another, freer life was freshly affecting at a time when the album could be heard only at home in isolation. (In 2021, Los Angeles Opera made a digital short called “The Zolle Suite.”)With the return of live performance, “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” and “Zolle” were staged together in October at the Lucerne Theater in Switzerland, directed by Roscha A. Säidow, who also did the surreal scenic and costume design. Du Yun acted as the narrator, and another vocalist took on the role in “Zolle” she had previously sung.That production is being adapted for Skirball, played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, with Du Yun storytelling onstage and, again, a new singer: Satomi Matsuzaki, from the rock band Deerhoof. In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Du Yun spoke about how the two works speak to each other, and to different audiences, and what it’s like to revisit them now. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What makes “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” a diptych?Before I finished “Zolle,” I just thought it was so melancholic, because it starts with this woman being dead, and it has to do with so many sorrows, and she’s stuck in her memories. And then I realized: You know what? I need to write a really funny piece — sort of like a “life before” thing.Stylistically they are quite different.There is a small musical relation, but other than that I wanted to have a contrast. In “Zolle,” the writing is very full-bodied, with a group of instruments and singers. But I wanted “Cockroach” to be simple: a string quartet that behaves like one instrument, with a narrator.I also want to tell you, I was doing horribly at Harvard with writing fugues. They were like, You have to write a Bach fugue. And I was like, Why can’t it be a Du Yun-style fugue? I grew up and memorized all this Bach; it’s in my head and it’s in my hand. But I never understood why on these tests it had to be resolved a certain way. So in “Zolle” there’s a bit of Baroque style, and that was my way of proving that I could do it, and do it my way.Kamna Gupta, right, rehearsing members of the International Contemporary Ensemble ahead of the Skirball performances.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesThese invite a lot of different interpretations. I’ve seen “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” compared to Kafka, for example, though on the surface it seems more like “Rusalka” or “The Little Mermaid.”It was much more “Little Mermaid,” right? Wanting to be human and let go of who she was, and then having that struggle. When I wrote it, I was also very frustrated with the idea of heaven — the idea of it, the betterment, the pursuit of happiness. I’ve written this before: At the time, I was living in government-subsidized housing that had a lot of cockroaches, so I became fascinated by them and learned that, you know, they can just release eggs for their entire life. It’s kind of mind-boggling.So like “Zolle” had people thinking about immigration and belonging, “Cockroach” had funny moments but hit audiences differently. You can see it as being about this female body thing, but I also have a Chinese version of it, and women in their 30s and 40s were really crying when they saw it because of lines like “I want to be pregnant out of love.”Right. For all its levity, it’s actually profound.It’s very profound.And I feel like, standing alone, each piece can be open to X and Y reading. But pairing them changes that. The “Tarantella” has so much hope and defiance, but when you follow it with the lonely afterlife of “Zolle,” it becomes devastating.Audiences connect with these however they do. But I want to mention that when we recorded the digital short of “Zolle” for LA Opera and I was narrating some of the portions, I got really, really emotional. I was thinking about Asian hate, and it really got to me because this piece was almost 20 years ago and it still rings so true. There is a line of saying something like “I am an immigrant, even in this ghost world.” Then I realized it’s something that me, you know, as an immigrant I will always carry with me. [Du Yun was born in Shanghai and moved to the United States to study at Oberlin.]What else are you feeling as you revisit these works?You know, this is the International Contemporary Ensemble’s 20th anniversary season. We feel like 100 years old, but we’re also transitioning into another era with George Lewis as the new leader.But this was the first stage production the International Contemporary Ensemble ever did. So even though they’re moving into different models and we’re bringing in Satomi — I’m a big fan of Deerhoof — this feels like a kind of homecoming. Which is fitting, because these pieces are really about homecoming. Homecoming, but also sending off as well. More

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      N.Y.U. Skirball Season Reinvigorates the Classics

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      Elevator Repair Service will premiere a show inspired by Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” and the Classical Theater of Harlem’s hip-hop-infused “Seize the King” gets an encore.Numerous high-profile Shakespeare productions will fill New York stages next year.Among them will be “Seize the King,” Will Power’s contemporary spin on “Richard III” that was staged by the Classical Theater of Harlem in Marcus Garvey Park last summer, which is likely the only production that has a courting scene in a bathtub and that sprinkles in references to birth control and eating sushi with a fork.The 95-minute, hip-hop-infused reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s classic will return from March 3 to March 13, as part of New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts’s new season, which was announced on Tuesday. Carl Cofield, who directed the summer production, will return as director.In her review of last summer’s outdoor staging, the New York Times critic Laura Collins-Hughes deemed the show a Critic’s Pick, praising its humorous reimagining of the classic characters. The production “contained multitudes of beauty,” she wrote.Before “Seize the King,” the Skirball will kick off its season with the world premiere of Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull,” inspired by Anton Chekhov’s classic drama “The Seagull” and directed by John Collins (Feb. 2-20). Elevator Repair Service, a veteran theater company known for its unconventional takes on classic literary texts, staged “Gatz,” an eight-hour reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” at the Skirball in 2019.“‘Seagull’ isn’t a marathon” like “Gatz,” Jay Wegman, Skirball’s director, said of the new production, which runs about two and a half hours. “But it’s going to be whacked out in a wonderful way.”The Skirball has also lined up the world premiere of an interactive online experience called “I Agree to the Terms” (March 25-April 3), created by the theater company Builders Association with input from “microworkers” who develop Amazon’s algorithms. Audiences will complete virtual training sessions with these workers — taking them inside a sprawling and largely unregulated industry of people who earn pennies per click while completing assignments that are repetitive, boring, maddening and sometimes disturbing.“They’ve done a few workshops, and it’s anxiety-provoking in these sessions,” said Wegman, who added that the show becomes a competition among audience members. “You’re constantly being watched and counted and manipulated by the algorithm, so it’s very timely.”Rounding out the Skirball’s season are a concert by the Spanish flamenco singer Miguel Poveda, who will make his New York City solo debut (April 7-8); the world premiere of David Dorfman Dance’s “(A)Way Out Of My Body” (April 22-23); the New York premiere of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun’s “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” presented with International Contemporary Ensemble (April 29-30); and another New York premiere, the choreographer and MacArthur fellow Eiko Otake’s “The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable” (April 14-17).A full season lineup is available at nyuskirball.org. More

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      ‘Touching the Void’ Review: Choices That Shape a Life on the Edge

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      This Bristol Old Vic production, based on the harrowing story of the British mountaineer Joe Simpson, tracks the spiral of decisions behind human exploits.Many movies, books or shows are metaphorical slogs. The play “Touching the Void” is about a literal one: the slow, agonizing crawl of the British mountaineer Joe Simpson as he tried to return to his base camp after sustaining a gruesome injury on an Andes peak.The Bristol Old Vic production, which is streaming live, then on demand, from Britain (and is presented by N.Y.U. Skirball as part of a “digital tour”), starts off with Joe’s wake in a Scottish inn. Since the show is based on the best-selling book Simpson published in 1988, three years after his ordeal, it’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that he somehow survived.The playwright David Greig came up with this narrative device mostly to introduce the character of Joe’s sister, Sarah (Fiona Hampton), who acts as the audience’s proxy. This means that Sarah needs to be told, over and over, what could possibly drive some people to risk their lives to reach mountaintops. She is angry as all get out and hates climbers, those adrenaline junkies with their “endless [expletive] stories about how they nearly died,” she tells Joe’s climbing companion, Simon Yates (Angus Yellowlees, with fetching two-tone hair). “Blah blah epic blah.”From left, Angus Yellowlees, Patrick McNamee and Fiona Hampton in the play, a Bristol Old Vic production presented by N.Y.U. Skirball.Michael WharleyMuch of the first act explores the friendship between Joe (Josh Williams) and Simon, and their ambition to make a mark by pioneering an unclimbed route, on the 20,000-foot Siula Grande in Peru. They work on the logistics of the ascent and, much more complicated, the descent.As staged by Tom Morris (the co-director of “War Horse”), the production, which premiered in 2018, remarkably evokes the physicality of scampering across rugged terrain or hanging by a thread off a snowy, freezing, windy face with just some low platforms and an apparatus halfway between a latticed scaffold and monkey bars. (This is the kind of show where the set designer Ti Green and the sound designer Jon Nicholls should be above the title on the marquee.)But as is often the case with human exploits, the most dramatically compelling parts of the story, and the play, are not so much the historical background, the practicalities of the expedition or even Simpson’s survival feat. Instead it’s the spiral of decisions, some technical and some ethical, that surround the events — just like how Jon Krakauer’s classic account of an Everest disaster, “Into Thin Air,” is made so engrossing by the human errors and the hubris. “There is always a choice,” Joe and Simon say.Williams, left, and Yellowlees on the scaffolding that represents the mountain.Michael WharleyComing down the peak, Joe falls down an ice cliff and breaks his leg (the snapping sound is especially horrifying). Simon is confronted with a terrible dilemma: stay and possibly die as well, or leave and try to at least save one life, his own.Simon leaves, thinking there is no way his friend could survive — only he does.Sarah’s heated interactions with her brother, Simon and, to a lesser degree, the comic-relief figure of the backpacker Richard (Patrick McNamee) dominate Act I, which has a genuine urgency as it deals with those pesky human issues.But after intermission, the show focuses on Joe’s journey back to safety and bogs down as he spends minutes at a time pulling himself along and yelling in excruciating pain — admittedly, streaming undercuts much of the impact those scenes likely would have in a theater, just like “War Horse” was much more effective live. The overuse of 1980s songs becomes distracting (Simpson’s real-life favorite, “This Is the Day,” plays during a scene in a crevasse and — just, no), and it eventually it starts feeling as if Greig can’t figure out how to end the show. Fortunately, real life gave him a good way out.Touching the VoidThrough May 29; on demand June 2-8; bristololdvic.org.uk More