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      Great Stage Acting Shines Through, Even From a Laptop Screen

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewGreat Stage Acting Shines Through, Even From a Laptop ScreenThe Lessingtage theater festival, held online this year because of the pandemic, shows some of Europe’s finest performers, in classic plays by Brecht, Schiller, Ibsen and others.In “Mary Stuart,” which premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October, eight cast members perform from isolated pink cubes in Judith Oswald’s corona-friendly set.Credit…Arno DeclairJan. 28, 2021MUNICH — When it comes to recorded theater, great acting translates to video much better than elaborate productions with complex concepts or intricate sets. So when the Thalia Theater, in Hamburg, Germany, asked 10 European playhouses to send their best shows for an online edition of the Lessingtage, an international festival held every January, by and large the theaters privileged accomplished performances over virtuosic stagecraft.The result, “Lessingtage 2021 Digital: Stories from Europe,” is a wide-ranging survey of contemporary European theater that casts a spotlight on some of the continent’s finest stage actors. At a time when few people are allowed to travel — and even fewer theaters to open — the chance to discover new and recent stage works from the Iberian Peninsula to Russia feels particularly vital.While a few of the “Lessingtage Digital” productions debuted during the pandemic, the majority of the work on offer is already several seasons old, giving online viewers the opportunity to discover productions whose live runs may have already ended.One of the newest, and best, of the bunch is Anne Lenk’s stylish and focused staging of “Mary Stuart,” which premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October. Throughout the evening, the eight cast members perform from isolated pink cubes in Judith Oswald’s corona-friendly set. Yet there is nothing stilted or fussily formal about Lenk’s interpretation of Schiller’s historical tragedy.The cast, clad in Sibylle Wallum’s flamboyant costumes, is uniformly superb, alive to the emotional and political turmoil of the drama, and how they intersect. This holds particularly true for the production’s incandescent stars, Franziska Machens as Mary, fighting from her prison cell to stay alive, and Julia Windischbauer as her proud yet conflicted rival, Elizabeth.The two queens come face-to-face only once, in a climactic 10-minute showdown in which Mary, refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth’s superior rank, blows her one chance at salvation to savor a moment of triumph. In a production where great acting tumbled forth in an endless stream, this confrontation stood out for its raw, electric charge.Lenk’s flat aesthetic is also kind to the high-definition cameras, which capture the seething performances with unobtrusive directness.“Antigone in Molenbeek/Tiresias” combines performers from the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Danel Quartet, a French musical ensemble.Credit…Kurt van der ElstI was also impressed with how well another production, “Antigone in Molenbeek/Tiresias,” translated to the screen. This absorbing diptych of mythically inspired dramatic monologues for actresses — one old, one young — premiered around the same time as “Mary Stuart.” Directed by Guy Cassiers, the artistic director of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Belgium, the two parts of the evening are unified by the French musical ensemble the Danel Quartet performing Shostakovich string quartets via video feed.In “Antigone,” the author Stefan Hertmans transposes Sophocles’ tragedy to contemporary Belgium, where a law student, Nouria (Ikram Aoulad), embarks on a futile quest to retrieve the mortal remains of her brother, an ISIS fighter, from a forensics lab. Addressing the audience, Aoulad conveys her character’s pain and resolute sense of justice with both elegance and quaking rage.In “Tiresias,” the actress Katelijne Damen recites a blistering, dizzying poem by the young British poet Kae Tempest, a subversive retelling of the myth of the blind, gender-fluid prophet. Damen’s rendition of the virtuosic text is shot through with grace and wit. Especially impressive was how the Toneelhuis’ wide-screen camerawork (shot by Charlotte Bouckaert, who is also responsible for the set) succeeded in capturing the power of chamber theater.Stefanie Reinsperger, left, in the Berliner Ensemble’s production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”Credit…Matthias HornThere was a similar intimacy to the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The theatrical miracle of Michael Thalheimer’s fine-grained staging can be boiled down to two words: Stefanie Reinsperger.The young Austrian actress has been a member of the theater’s acting ensemble since 2017, and Grusha Vashnadze, the fierce survival artist at the center of Brecht’s late drama, was one of the first roles she stepped into at the house. As the peasant girl protecting an abandoned infant amid the horrors of war, Reinsperger pleads, howls and fights for herself with an intensity and pathos that is almost hard to bear. I was almost glad to have that raw experience mediated for me by a screen: Live in the theater, up close and personal, I don’t know if I’d have been able to take it.Eszter Onodi, left, in the Katona Jozsef Theatre’s produciton of “Nora — Christmas at the Helmers.”Credit…Horvath JuditOn the other hand, Eszter Onodi’s mesmerizing performance in “Nora — Christmas at the Helmers,” an update of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” made me feel as though I were sitting in the audience of Budapest’s Jozsef Katona Theater, rather than watching alone from my living room. In her deceptively simple performance, Onodi strips away the character’s artifice to reveal unsuspected depths. The production’s young director Kriszta Szekely brings the protofeminist heroine crashing into the present day in a faithful reworking that hammers home the contemporary relevance of Nora’s plight, 150 years after the play’s scandalous premiere.In ensemble productions from Italy and Sweden, single virtuosic performances were less important than the symbiotic energy generated from large casts that brought their plays to life collectively.The most nail-bitingly exciting production of the festival was “Right You Are (If You Think So),” Luigi Pirandello’s 1917 farce, staged by Filippo Dini at the Teatro Stabile in Turin, about a group of villagers trying to learn the truth about a mysterious new neighbor.In Dini’s staging, the townspeople lounge around a grand, if decaying, apartment with moldings on the high ceilings and sheets covering the furniture. The 12-person cast forms a tight and dynamic unit and they get the tone and comic timing just right.Mattias Andersson’s production of “The Idiot” from the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm.Credit…Roger StenbergMattias Andersson’s starkly contemporary production of “The Idiot” from the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm, one of the festival’s co-producers, boasts an even larger cast than the Pirandello staging. This one of two stage versions of Dostoevsky’s novel at the festival: The other is a largely wordless expressionist pantomime for four physical actors from the Theater of Nations in Moscow, is the event’s wild card.The epic Swedish show is anchored by David Dencik’s fragile and fearless performance as Prince Myshkin, who finds himself hounded by the denizens of Russian society, high and low, after his release from a Swiss sanitarium.Even though the props look like they’re from Ikea and the large cast sits idly onstage for much of the evening, this production manages to paint a vast societal canvas populated with damaged and emotionally fraught characters who speak to us across centuries and languages.When the festival lineup was announced, I was struck at how many works by canonical authors had been selected — far more than is common at European theater festivals these days. After soaking up the Lessingtage’s 10 productions, I wondered why this should have come as any surprise.Schiller, Ibsen, Brecht and Pirandello created some of the stage’s richest and most complex characters. What greater pleasure could there possibly be than watching some of Europe’s finest stage actors breathe fresh life into them — even from the remove of our computer screens?Lessingtage 2021 Digital: Stories from EuropeStreaming online through Jan. 31; thalia-theater.de.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Gunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGunnel Lindblom, Familiar Face in Bergman Films, Dies at 89She appeared in early classics like “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Virgin Spring” and devoted much of her long career to the stage.Gunnel Lindblom and Gunnar Björnstrand in Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film “The Seventh Seal.” She appeared in several of his early films. Credit…Svensk Filmindustri, via PhotofestJan. 27, 2021, 5:04 p.m. ETGunnel Lindblom, a Swedish actress who worked with Ingmar Bergman in his early classic films and on decades of stage productions, died on Sunday in Brottby, Sweden, a small community north of Stockholm. She was 89.The death was announced by her family.In “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Bergman’s portrait of a knight (played by Max von Sydow) returning from the Crusades to find his village devastated by plague, Ms. Lindblom was an unnamed mute girl. At the film’s end, her character finally speaks, announcing biblically, “It is finished.”In “Wild Strawberries” (1957), about an elderly professor reflecting on life and loneliness, she was the man’s beautiful and kind sister in turn-of-the-century flashbacks.In “The Virgin Spring” (1960), Bergman’s tale of Christianity and revenge in medieval Sweden, Ms. Lindblom was a young, sullen, accidentally pregnant, Odin-worshiping servant girl of a wealthy landowner (also played by Mr. von Sydow). She witnesses the rape and brutal murder of his daughter, her spoiled but naïve teenage mistress.Ms. Lindblom’s professional relationship with Bergman, who died in 2007, continued and evolved. After “The Virgin Spring,” she appeared in two parts of his film trilogy about religion and faith: In “Winter Light” (1963), her character was a depressed fisherman’s wife; in “The Silence” (1964) she was a woman isolated with her dying sister in an unfamiliar foreign country.A decade later she had a supporting role in “Scenes From a Marriage,” Bergman’s Scandinavian mini-series, which starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and was released internationally as a feature film in 1974. Her character, Eva, is an attractive work colleague of the leading man.One of Ms. Lindblom’s seven screen directing credits was “Paradistorg,” a drama about a family getaway. When it was released in the United States in 1978 as “Summer Paradise,” Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times summed up the characters’ middle-class crises: “The women are lonely, the men are weaklings, and the children are growing up without proper supervision.”When Bergman directed “Ghost Sonata,” August Strindberg’s 1908 modernist play, at Dramaten in Stockholm at the turn of the millennium, Ms. Lindblom was cast as the Captain’s Wife, a beautiful woman who becomes a mummy.Strindberg, although he died in 1912, was perhaps the second most influential Swedish artist in her career; in recapping it, in fact, the first credit that some European obituaries mentioned was her title performance in a 1965 BBC production of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” his story of a wealthy young woman’s attraction to a servant. Ms. Lindblom received an honorary Guldbagge, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, for lifetime achievement in 2002.Ms. Lindblom in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the 2009 Swedish film version of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel. It was her last high-profile movie role.Credit…AlamyGunnel Martha Ingegard Lindblom was born on Dec. 18, 1931, in Gothenburg (Goteborg), Sweden, and studied acting at the Gothenburg City Theater in the early 1950s.She made her film debut in Gustaf Molander’s “Karlek” (the English title was “Love”), a 1952 drama about a young priest, and collaborated frequently with Bergman at Malmo City Theater, where he had become artistic director.She had a busy six-decade theater career, most notably with the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, and played close to 60 screen roles — including Aunt Julie in “Hedda Gabler” (1993), the professor’s wife in “Uncle Vanya” (1967) and the ex-wife of a guilty choreographer in Susan Sontag’s “Brother Carl” (1971).She appeared in three recent film shorts (the last, “Bergman’s Reliquarium,” in 2018) and made a guest appearance on “The Inspector and the Sea,” a Swedish crime-drama series, in 2011. But her last high-profile screen role was in the Swedish film version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2009), based on Stieg Larsson’s best seller. (Two years later, an American version, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, was released.)In the Swedish film “Millennium” and in the 2010 American mini-series inspired by it, Ms. Lindblom played Isabella Vanger, the mother of the serial-killer antagonist. Isabella knew for years that her children were being sexually abused and said nothing.Ms. Lindblom and Sture Helander, a Swedish physician, married in 1960, had three children and divorced in 1970. In 1981, she married Frederik Dessau, the Danish film director and writer, and they divorced in 1986.No information on survivors was immediately available, but Ms. Lindblom had two sons, Thomas Helander and Jan Helander, and a daughter, Jessica Helander.Much of Ms. Lindblom’s career was devoted to theater, but she gladly acknowledged her love of filmmaking — sometimes just for the joy of shooting outdoors rather than being cooped up inside a theater, she said. And she had a particular appreciation for period films, partly because some managed to convey true timelessness.Watching contemporary films of the past, “you say, ‘Oh, that was made in the ’50s,’ ” she reflected in a 21st-century video interview. “But in a period film, if it’s well done, you don’t see when it’s made.”After all, the human condition itself is timeless.“I don’t think people have changed very much,” Ms. Lindblom said in the same interview, alluding to her medieval character in “The Virgin Spring.” “The feelings are very much the same. So you have to go for the truth.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Little Island Announces Resident Artists

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      @media (pointer: coarse) { .at-home-nav__outerContainer { overflow-x: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; } } .at-home-nav__outerContainer { position: relative; display: flex; align-items: center; /* Fixes IE */ overflow-x: auto; box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); padding: 10px 1.25em 10px; transition: all 250ms; margin-bottom: 20px; -ms-overflow-style: none; /* IE 10+ */ […] More

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      Review: Road-Tripping with Frankenstein’s Monster in ‘Maery S.’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: Road-Tripping with Frankenstein’s Monster in ‘Maery S.’Sibyl Kempson’s unruly audio play takes Mary Shelley and her famed creation from old England to contemporary America. Bigfoot shows up, too.Dee Dorcas Beasnael provides the voice of Mary Shelley, among other characters, in the audio play “The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.”Credit…via Abrons Arts CenterJan. 26, 2021In a monster throwdown, I’ll always rep Count Dracula over Frankenstein’s creature. But that’s not to say I don’t give Mary Shelley props for her creation; she turned a horror story into a philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence, the monkey’s paw of scientific discovery and the consequences of playing God. Her monster may not have fangs, but he’s more frightful for the ways he mirrors the dark nature of humanity.In Sibyl Kempson’s “The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.,” an experimental, four-part radio play presented by the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf. Co., the woman often called the mother of horror and science fiction is resurrected and transmuted in a rambling epic that is conceptually unique but too often wearyingly opaque.“Maery S.,” which was commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and the Chocolate Factory Theater, begins with a scholarly presentation: a rummaging through Shelley’s keepsakes — yes, “securely conferred” and “vouchsafed” — and a discussion of various definitions of “gothic” in literature, architecture, music.Then, via diary entries, we hear from Shelley (Dee Dorcas Beasnael, who also voices Shelley’s half sister Fanny and stepsister Clarie) — a freewheeling young woman ready to embark on a vagrant life of camping, travel and reprehensible gallivanting with a young married poet named Percy.That part is true, but “Maery S.” unravels its own fictions, strung through with anachronisms and modern language. Faster than you can say “Frankenstein,” the play transports Shelley to other places and times, including America between the 1970s and 2000s, where she road-trips in a pickup truck with the monster she dreamed up in her 1818 novel.That’s not all: Her Bill-and-Ted-esque excellent adventure is interspersed with accounts of sightings of Bigfoot and Sasquatch, voiced by Victor Morales and Crystal Wei with the fearful solemnity of a campfire story.“I’m juggling a lot right now, OK? Everything’s mixed up,” Shelley concedes at one point. Well said.A collage of images that inspired Kempson’s purposefully anachronistic production.Credit…Sibyl KempsonKempson, who wrote and directed, is no stranger to wildly postmodern, genre-defying work, and here her Shelley is prismatic, existing, as she says, in the “space between known and unknown.”So she recalls how Natasha Richardson played her in a 1986 psychological thriller, and speaks as a historical figure, a contemporary scholar and a sexually liberated witch-goddess (Hecate, Iris, Medusa and others are named).Kempson’s feminist politics are provocative, as is the way the play’s structure enacts a central theme of “Frankenstein” itself. Dr. Frankenstein created the monster, Shelley created Frankenstein, and Kempson re-creates Shelley out of a mishmash of details, some real, but many fictional.Traveling with the monster (a world-weary Brian Mendes), this Shelley proclaims how she “makes and unmakes” the world. Such moments of feminist self-actualization are riveting; for me they recall the slippery identities of the women in the work of Adrienne Kennedy and the bold declarations of the female characters in Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Wives.”But all of the juggling is tiring; nearly four hours long, “Maery S.” gets to feel like a chore (Beasnael’s self-conscious voice performance is no help). Kempson’s idiosyncratic shifts in setting and tone (and even accents; the male Romantic writers get especially dandified affects) help keep things lively, but only when they don’t function as belabored diversions.Case in point: the songs by Graham Reynolds, which range from sleepy folk-rock to campy pop, go on for too long. However, Chris Giarmo’s sound design, especially in the first two parts, beautifully complements the gothic themes: a feverish cascade of notes on a piano, and the feral groaning and blubbering of an unnatural creature among the chirping crickets on a dark night.Shelley wrote a monster of a novel, and Kempson has followed with a monster of a play, large and lumbering. It’s an ambitious act, but in the electric moment of a project coming to life, something sputters and flounders, perhaps even coming apart at the seams. Just ask Dr. Frankenstein — and the woman who birthed him.The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.Through May 15; abronsartscenter.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and Hollywood

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The Times‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and HollywoodJan. 25, 2021Updated 2:45 p.m. ETAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.When the writer and director Mike Nichols was young, he had an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccine. The result was a complete and lifelong inability to grow hair. One way to read Mark Harris’s crisp new biography, “Mike Nichols: A Life,” is as a tender comedy about a man and his wigs.He got his first set (hair, eyebrows) before he went to college. It was dismal. Nichols attended the University of Chicago, where Susan Sontag was also a student. One reason they didn’t date, Harris writes, is that “she was thrown off by his wig.”Nichols moved to Manhattan to make it as a comedian. A friend said that she would enter his tiny apartment and “the smell of acetone” — wig-glue remover — “would just hit you in the face.”Nichols found fame in his mid-20s. His improvisational comedy routines with Elaine May, whom he’d met in Chicago, were fresh and irresistible. They took their act to Broadway in 1960, where Nichols met Richard Burton. Through Burton, he would get to know Elizabeth Taylor.On the set of “Cleopatra,” Taylor asked the production’s hairstyle designer, “Do you do personal wigs? Because I have a dear friend who’s a comic in New York, and he wears one of the worst wigs I’ve ever seen.” Before long, Nichols’s toupees were unrivaled.“It takes me three hours every morning to become Mike Nichols,” he told the actor George Segal. He had a sense of humor about it all. He would tell how his son, Max, crawled into bed beside him and, seeing only the back of his head, screamed, “Where’s Daddy’s face?”I’ve gone on too long about hair and the lack of it. But growing up bald was, Nichols’s brother said, “the defining aspect of his childhood.”Nichols’s gift as a director was his ability to locate and lightly tug on the details that make a character. If he’d made a movie of his own life, the wig scenes would have been superb — satirical and melancholy. He might have set a bathroom-mirror montage to the Beatles’ early cover of “Lend Me Your Comb.”His awkwardness made him watchful. He became a student of human behavior. When he finally got the chance to direct, it was as if he’d been preparing to do so his entire life.Nichols’s first two films were “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate” — the first furious, daring and adult, the second zeitgeist-defining. He directed four consecutive hit plays at nearly the same moment. Oscars, Tony Awards and a landslide of wealth followed.He made up for his time as an outsider with a vengeance. He collected Arabian horses and Picassos and began friendships with Jacqueline Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein and Richard Avedon. He was a cocky princeling who became a master of what Kenneth Clark liked to call the “swimgloat,” a way of moving through elite society as if on a barge made of silver and silk.Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky (or Igor Michael, it’s unclear) in Berlin in 1931. His father, a doctor, was a Russian Jew who changed the family name to Nichols after the family emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. The family had some money, and Nichols’s father’s patients in New York included the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Nichols attended good schools in Manhattan, including Dalton.Mark Harris, whose new book is “Mike Nichols: A Life.”Credit…David A. HarrisAt the University of Chicago he became an omnivorous reader and watcher of films. His wit was withering; people were terrified of him. May’s wit was even more devastating. They were made for each other. They were never really a romantic couple, Harris writes, though early on they may have slept together once or twice.Harris is the author of two previous books, “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” and “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.” He’s also a longtime entertainment reporter with a gift for scene-setting.He’s at his best in “Mike Nichols: A Life” when he takes you inside a production. His chapters on the making of three films in particular — “The Graduate,” “Silkwood” and “Angels in America” — are miraculous: shrewd, tight, intimate and funny. You sense he could turn each one into a book.Nichols was an actor’s director. He was avuncular, a charmer, wide in his human sympathies. He tried to find what an actor needed and to provide it. He could place a well-buffed fingernail on a tick that wanted to be a tock. But he had a steely side.He fired Gene Hackman during week one on “The Graduate.” Hackman was playing Mr. Robinson and it wasn’t working, in part because, at 37, he looked too young for the role.Sacrificing someone early could be a motivator for the remaining cast, he learned. He fired Mandy Patinkin early in the filming of “Heartburn,” and brought in Jack Nicholson to play Meryl Streep’s faithless husband.One reason the chapter on Nichols’s film of Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” is so rich is that Harris, who is married to Kushner, had access to the playwright’s diary.Nichols turned to projects like “Angels in America” to shore up his serious side. But in everything he did, he found the funny. He knew instinctively that tragedy appeals mainly to the emotions while comedy taps the mind.Nichols presided over a lot of muck, expensive flops like “The Day of the Dolphin,” with George C. Scott; “The Fortune,” with Nicholson and Warren Beatty; and “What Planet Are You From?” with Garry Shandling. Reading Harris’s accounts of making these films is like watching a cook strain his stock down the disposal.Nichols’s Broadway flops included a production of “Waiting for Godot” with Steve Martin and Robin Williams. His failures rattled him. He battled depression (one of his vanity license plates read “ANOMIE”) and had suicidal urges after being placed on Halcion, a benzodiazepine. He had, Harris writes, “an almost punitive need to prove his detractors wrong.”He had a manic side. He snorted his share of cocaine and, for a while in the 1980s, used crack. You imagine him on the latter, racing back and forth from film set to Broadway as if through a set of constantly swinging cat doors.Harris details his subject’s many collaborations with Streep, and with Nora Ephron. Nichols was married four times. His final marriage, to Diane Sawyer, was the one that lasted.Nichols was a hard man to get to know, and I’m not sure we understand him much better at the end of “Mike Nichols: A Life.” He was a man in perpetual motion, and Harris chases him with patience, clarity and care.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      When Theatermakers Long for the Stage, Playfully

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhen Theatermakers Long for the Stage, PlayfullyTwo short films that find pandemic-sidelined performers grappling with Beckett are a highlight of the annual Exponential Festival.Lucy Kaminsky in “The Puzzlers 2: Black Box.”Credit…via The Exponential FestivalJan. 25, 2021“These films were made by theater people.”It’s just one line of text on the Exponential Festival website, explaining the provenance of a pair of video shorts in the lineup: zestfully odd and playful mash-ups of the first piece in Samuel Beckett’s doom-laden prose collection “Texts for Nothing,” from a company called Accent Wall Productions.Yet that simple declarative statement gets to the crux of the matter, which is that the experimental artists behind “The Puzzlers” and “The Puzzlers 2: Black Box” — notably including Jess Barbagallo and Emily Davis — know who they are, which shut-down art form they miss with a piercing longing and which different kind of work they’re making in the meantime.And they’re channeling into it a heightened, deadpan loopiness that elicits belly laughs.These two are the best of the handful of shows I watched at this year’s free, online festival.In “The Puzzlers,” an actor named Jay (Barbagallo, who shares the writing credit for both scripts with Beckett) is at home in Brooklyn with his acting coach (Lucy Kaminsky) and his dog (Bluet), struggling to memorize a section of “Texts for Nothing.” His grown daughter (Davis) interrupts, scandalized that he spent $7.49 on a little tub of almond pesto.“I’m an artist. I’m not a professional grocery shopper,” Jay says, attacked. “I’m just a guy, trying to learn a monologue, because it’s been a really long time since he applied himself to anything.”However unobtrusively, this is clearly a pandemic piece. On the festival website, Accent Wall Productions describes itself as “a survival-based art collective formed between four friends and a dog in March 2020.” The fourth human member of the group, André Callot, is credited as the editor of “The Puzzlers 2,” in which he also delivers a wonderfully atmospheric voice-over monologue. (“How long have I been here, what a question, I’ve often wondered.” And so on.)Joey Truman, left, and Tina Satter as characters who appear on Davis’s laptop in “The Puzzlers.”Credit…via The Exponential FestivalThe second short is at least as friendly as the first but far more aching. Told in flashback, it achieves something I had not seen in all the deluge of video that has come in these past 10 months. Largely through black-and-white rehearsal stills of Barbagallo, Davis and Kaminsky, shot at The Brick in Brooklyn, it captures what theater feels like — the everyday incantation of it, and how unreachably far away that seems now.These two “Puzzlers” pieces are the start of a projected series that will adapt all of “Texts for Nothing.” Yes, please. We need some more.Elsewhere at the festival, the Fringe and Fur show “Madge Love” is billed as “an interactive theater-film hybrid.”The thing about theater, though, is that once you take away the live acting and live audience, shoot the performance on video with tight frames and fast intercuts, then layer in voice-overs and a score, what you have is a film, not a hybrid.Written and directed by Genee Coreno, with cinematography, animation and video editing by Dena Kopolovich, “Madge Love” is the story of Sissy (Arden Winant) and Madge (Lilja Owsley), teenagers with the kind of romantic streak that makes them love speaking bad French together.Lilja Owsley as the teenage title character in “Madge Love.”Credit…via The Exponential FestivalThey also have a fondness for the very creepy Catherine Deneuve movie “Belle de Jour.” Their moody passion for each other is all mixed up in what they’ve already learned about the connection between sex, violence and female suffering at the hands of men.This is a good-looking production, beautifully lit by Marika Kent. The low-fi set (by Kent and Emily Greco) is the production’s most obvious remnant of theater: a metal truss standing in for a tree, a rippling blue tarp for water. We see painted cinder block walls, and the actors’ body mics. (The sound design and composition are by Coco Walsh.)One disappointment: The interactivity turns out to be minimal.“Animal Empire,” a digital mini-musical written, directed and produced by Yeujia Low, gestures not at all toward the stage. The story of an uprising against humans fomented by creatures of the farm and forest, it’s both strident and twee, and it makes the tactical error of opening on an off-putting note, with a character (represented, like most of the others, by an emoji head) doing bad vocal exercises.It does, however, have very amusing singing cameos by a snail (Low) and a sloth (Jason Pu), who can be counted on to be late for everything. There is also a winningly intimidating boar (Patrick Sweeney).A look at the script suggests that this version of “Animal Empire” is one draft of a more ambitious work in progress. For now, the best part is the rebellion itself, vividly animated like a music video, with animals fighting back everywhere.It’s a little weird right now to delight at insurrection, but this one involves fish and geese and deer. And, hey, they are unarmed.The Puzzlers + The Puzzlers 2: Black BoxStreaming at theexponentialfestival.org/thepuzzlersreturntentatively.Madge LoveStreaming at video.eko.com/v/Ap6aRL.Animal EmpireThrough Feb. 28; theexponentialfestival.org/animalempire.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Approach’ Review: Three Women and the Men Who Define Them

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Approach’ Review: Three Women and the Men Who Define ThemMark O’Rowe’s intricate, beautifully acted play begs for debate. To start: Why don’t its protagonists have full lives of their own?Derbhle Crotty, left, and Cathy Belton in “The Approach.’Credit…via St. Ann’s WarehousePublished More