By Hap Erstein
Need a reminder that life has no meaning? You could either turn on the news or head to Palm Beach Dramaworks and catch the company’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs.
Ionesco, a major figure of the Theater of the Absurd movement, took a dim view of human existence, but at least he did so with a wry sense of humor. Consider, for instance, his 1952 “tragic farce” about that meaninglessness, as well as our inability to communicate with each other.
To illustrate his point, he presents an elderly couple -- Old Man (Dan Leonard) and Old Woman (Barbara Bradshaw) -- who busy themselves by dragging onstage dozens of wooden chairs. They are preparing for the arrival of an Orator, a man only slightly more prompt than Samuel Beckett’s Godot, who will present the Old Man’s philosophy of life. Until then, the couple has its hands full greeting and conversing with their arriving, invisible, probably imaginary guests.
As if that premise were not absurd enough, it was given an additional comic spin by British playwright Martin Crimp, whose adaptation of The Chairs was showered with Tony nominations when it arrived on Broadway last year. Reports of that production suggest that the play became a proverbial “laugh riot,” whereas the Dramaworks version, staged by resident director J. Barry Lewis, seems more intent on establishing a melancholic mood with only occasional outbreaks of comedy.
Much of the humor comes from Pekinese-coiffed Bradshaw, one of the few area actors who can induce giggles by shuffling her feet. In the course of the compact, 80-minute evening, she adds a comically provocative tushy twitch, a risible crying jag and her tour de force, a fast-forward chair-lugging ballet which owes much to theatrical sleight-of-hand.
Leonard is a cut below Bradshaw, but he will do, notably when asked by her to do February and he launches into an endearing impersonation of Stan Laurel. If that is not a definition of absurdism, what is?
The two actors ping-pong dialogue to one another, reminiscing and bemoaning their pasts, which they recall quite differently. Much of it is defies logic and is repetitive, but if you let your mind detach from the expectations of rational sense, it has a satisfying poetic quality.
Michael Amico does his usual first-rate job with the scenic design, a room with enough doors and floor-to-ceiling windows to suggest the farcical potential in the play. Todd Wren’s lighting sets the autumnal mood and conveys a few of the script’s specified special effects, at least by Dramaworks’ standards.
Eventually The Orator (Shel Shanak) does show up, outfitted for Italian commedia del’arte by way of Elvis Presley. But if you are still expecting to hear wisdom from him by that point, you have not been paying attention to Ionesco’s comic pessimism.
THE CHAIRS, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach, continuing to Feb. 1. Tickets: $40-$42, Call: (561) 514-4042.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Commentary: Bad News Ahead for Broadway, and Maybe the Rest of the Theater World
By Hap Erstein
T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month. It is January, at least when it comes to the Broadway theater. Normally a tough month for the survival of marginally successful shows, next month is going to be disastrous for the New York commercial theater in the economy we are currently suffering through.
Eleven shows, from long-running hit musicals to a marginal drama, will close this January -- fully one-third of the productions on Broadway. It could be expected that Irving Berlin’s White Christmas would pack it in on Jan. 4, since it was always designed as a seasonal item for a limited run, but three best musical Tony Award winners -- Hairspray, Monty Python’s Spamalot and Spring Awakening -- will also close their doors next month, clearly responding to slowed ticket sales in hard times.
Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, a sub-par stage adaptation of his first-rate movie from 1974, will also close on Jan. 4. It never reported its weekly box office grosses for the year it was open, so we’ll probably never know how many millions it lost overall. Also shuttering on the 4th will be the Tony-winning revival of Boeing-Boeing, Grease, a short-lived musical called 13 and an off-Broadway transfer of a Horton Foote play, Dividing the Estate.
The Tony-winning musical revival of Gypsy, starring Patti LuPone, just announced it will close a month and a half earlier than expected -- on Jan. 11 -- “due to these uncertain financial times.” Also folding that day is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the production that was critically panned, but limped along thanks to the star-casting of Mrs. Tom Cruise, a/k/a Katie Holmes.
No, I’m not going to tell you that the theater is dying. Surely Broadway will rebound when the economy rebounds. But a disturbing study by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests a more pervasive and perhaps permanent decline for non-musicals. Since 1992, the audience for plays in the United States fell from 25 million to 21 million this year, and high ticket prices are not the primary factor. Instead, it seems, we have lost our taste for plays, with the supply of them outstripping current demand.
It is a bit depressing, but signs point to the fact that the theater’s problems are not strictly economic.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Theater review: "Mezzulah, 1946," Post-War Adjustment Challenge for One Rosie the Riveter
By Hap Erstein
The year is 1946. World War II is over and the residents of Monroe, Washington are eager to move on with their lives.
Except for teenage tomboy Mezzulah Steiner, who is intent on holding onto her wartime “Rosie the Riveter” job on the assembly floor of the local Boeing aircraft plant. The other women in town dutifully head back to their kitchens or resume making babies, but spunky Mezzulah not only clings to her job, she yearns to help design the planes that she has become proficient building.
The title character of Michele Lowe’s new play, Mezzulah, 1946, now on at Florida Stage through Jan. 18, may be small in stature, but she is the sort of larger-than-life lass that seems to leap straight out of a musical, and not just because she usually has a vintage pop song on her lips.
She is an iconic young feminist, ahead of her time, adamant about her right to do a job that others think should go to a war veteran instead. Worse yet, her employment could cost the Boeing plant some lucrative, job-adding contracts. No wonder the rest of Monroe wants her to give in and give up, for the good of the town, the company and, perhaps, the country.
If this sounds like it adds up to a strident play of social politics, that is not what playwright Lowe -- who penned the intricate, multi-threaded String of Pearls, seen in Manalapan three years ago -- has in mind at all. Instead, she creates a world on whimsy and occasional fantasy, as she sketches in the townsfolk surrounding Mezzulah, including the ghost of her father, a mythic war widow who travels from cemetery to cemetery in search of her lost spouse, and Mezzulah’s aunt, preoccupied with raising money for a memorial to Monroe’s war dead, even though there is only one casualty.
At times, these tangential characters threaten to pull focus away from Mezzulah, but gradually they form a patchwork community worth caring about, with concerns and struggles not that different from those we face today.
Still, Mezzulah is the heart of the play, largely because of the winsome Theo Allyn, who originated the role last year at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre. She manages to make the character very appealing, while also suggesting what an annoying pain she can be. Also standing out in the large cast -- well, by Florida Stage’s standards -- is Deborah Hazlett (The Count) as Mezzulah’s mom, struggling with allowing herself to find romance again after 20 years, James Denvil as the object of her tentative affections and Scott Borish (End Days) as Mezzulah’s chess-playing spectral father.
Director Louis Tyrrell renders this world with affection, glossing over some of its potentially cloying elements, and moving it along effectively on Richard Crowell’s slide-out sets, decorated with bits of the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci -- Mezzulah’s inspiration.
Although it loses a few points for neatness, Mezzulah, 1946 eventually coalesces into an evening worth savoring.
MEZZULAH, 1946, Florida Stage, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan. Through Jan. 18. Tickets: $42-$45. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.
The year is 1946. World War II is over and the residents of Monroe, Washington are eager to move on with their lives.
Except for teenage tomboy Mezzulah Steiner, who is intent on holding onto her wartime “Rosie the Riveter” job on the assembly floor of the local Boeing aircraft plant. The other women in town dutifully head back to their kitchens or resume making babies, but spunky Mezzulah not only clings to her job, she yearns to help design the planes that she has become proficient building.
The title character of Michele Lowe’s new play, Mezzulah, 1946, now on at Florida Stage through Jan. 18, may be small in stature, but she is the sort of larger-than-life lass that seems to leap straight out of a musical, and not just because she usually has a vintage pop song on her lips.
She is an iconic young feminist, ahead of her time, adamant about her right to do a job that others think should go to a war veteran instead. Worse yet, her employment could cost the Boeing plant some lucrative, job-adding contracts. No wonder the rest of Monroe wants her to give in and give up, for the good of the town, the company and, perhaps, the country.
If this sounds like it adds up to a strident play of social politics, that is not what playwright Lowe -- who penned the intricate, multi-threaded String of Pearls, seen in Manalapan three years ago -- has in mind at all. Instead, she creates a world on whimsy and occasional fantasy, as she sketches in the townsfolk surrounding Mezzulah, including the ghost of her father, a mythic war widow who travels from cemetery to cemetery in search of her lost spouse, and Mezzulah’s aunt, preoccupied with raising money for a memorial to Monroe’s war dead, even though there is only one casualty.
At times, these tangential characters threaten to pull focus away from Mezzulah, but gradually they form a patchwork community worth caring about, with concerns and struggles not that different from those we face today.
Still, Mezzulah is the heart of the play, largely because of the winsome Theo Allyn, who originated the role last year at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre. She manages to make the character very appealing, while also suggesting what an annoying pain she can be. Also standing out in the large cast -- well, by Florida Stage’s standards -- is Deborah Hazlett (The Count) as Mezzulah’s mom, struggling with allowing herself to find romance again after 20 years, James Denvil as the object of her tentative affections and Scott Borish (End Days) as Mezzulah’s chess-playing spectral father.
Director Louis Tyrrell renders this world with affection, glossing over some of its potentially cloying elements, and moving it along effectively on Richard Crowell’s slide-out sets, decorated with bits of the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci -- Mezzulah’s inspiration.
Although it loses a few points for neatness, Mezzulah, 1946 eventually coalesces into an evening worth savoring.
MEZZULAH, 1946, Florida Stage, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan. Through Jan. 18. Tickets: $42-$45. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Film: "Frost/Nixon": A Knockout Political Sparring Match
By Hap Erstein
Ron Howard has already made a boxing film (Cinderella Man), but it pales next to the verbal sparring match he conjures up in Frost/Nixon, a crafty, visceral and cerebral adaptation of Peter Morgan’s stage play on the taped television interviews between surface-slick British talk show host David Frost and disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon.
Morgan is probably best known for writing 2006's The Queen, a similar combination of meticulous research and out-and-out conjecture over a more delicate clash between Queen Elizabeth II and England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, soon after the death of Princess Diana. Both works are set in what Morgan calls “the twilight between historical fact and fiction,” a zone that breathes unexpected life into otherwise dramatically dry material.
Morgan’s screenplay for Frost/Nixon is a textbook example of opening up a clastrophobic theater piece, giving the story just enough cinematic mobility, using the storytelling techniques of documentary films, while keeping intact the knock-down-drag-out power of the interview sessions.
Both Frost and Nixon have a great deal at stake. Frost has not only bankrolled the interviews himself, without major sponsors or network commitment, he is betting his waning reputation that he can draw from Nixon the confession of involvement in the Watergate cover-up he had yet to utter. For Nixon, it is a highly visible opportunity to reframe his presidential legacy, with an interviewer known for lobbing celebrity soft balls.
Although the movie’s title suggests a two-character story, it is anything but that, being populated with the coaches and trainers for each “fighter.” For Nixon, there is his fiercely loyal chief of staff, Marine Lt. Col. Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon). For Frost, there is producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen), veteran TV journalist Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and most especially idealistic, hot-headed academic James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell).
Their prep sessions, post-interview analyses and critiques, all leading up to the climactic final showdown on Watergate, form much of the film’s preoccupation. Having lived through the Nixon administration and having had my share of uncooperative interview subjects, I may be more naturally drawn to this subject than many younger moviegoers, but Frost/Nixon is anything but a dry, uninvolving exercise.
Adding substantially to the interest level are the performances of Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, both of whom originated these roles on the London stage, before bringing them to New York two seasons ago. That longterm familiarity with these characters and with each other pays off on-screen, aided further by the use of extreme close-ups.
Langella is particularly agile as the naturally stiff Nixon, employing all the stoop-shouldered gestures and shifty looks, without drifting into caricature. Whether it was Morgan’s intention, Langella’s portrayal of Nixon is so human and fragile, it ultimately earns our sympathy for the man. Having already won the Tony Award for playing Nixon, this deepened performance is surely destined for an Oscar nomination as well.
As is The Queen, where he played Blair, Sheen is again up against an inherently more interesting character and, as a result, takes a back seat in the acting department, regardless of the outcome in the story. Still, he radiates a rakish charisma and gets us rooting for Frost in this far-fetched undertaking.
Together, they carry the film, notably in an eleventh-hour scene in which an inebriated Nixon calls Frost to test his mental state just before the final interview. It, like the rest of the film, is wordy, but it plays with all the tension of an action sequence.
Frost/Nixon captures and dramatizes a crucial moment in our nation’s history, getting inside the head of the only president to resign from office, wrestling him to the ground, but not quite pinning him.
Ron Howard has already made a boxing film (Cinderella Man), but it pales next to the verbal sparring match he conjures up in Frost/Nixon, a crafty, visceral and cerebral adaptation of Peter Morgan’s stage play on the taped television interviews between surface-slick British talk show host David Frost and disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon.
Morgan is probably best known for writing 2006's The Queen, a similar combination of meticulous research and out-and-out conjecture over a more delicate clash between Queen Elizabeth II and England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, soon after the death of Princess Diana. Both works are set in what Morgan calls “the twilight between historical fact and fiction,” a zone that breathes unexpected life into otherwise dramatically dry material.
Morgan’s screenplay for Frost/Nixon is a textbook example of opening up a clastrophobic theater piece, giving the story just enough cinematic mobility, using the storytelling techniques of documentary films, while keeping intact the knock-down-drag-out power of the interview sessions.
Both Frost and Nixon have a great deal at stake. Frost has not only bankrolled the interviews himself, without major sponsors or network commitment, he is betting his waning reputation that he can draw from Nixon the confession of involvement in the Watergate cover-up he had yet to utter. For Nixon, it is a highly visible opportunity to reframe his presidential legacy, with an interviewer known for lobbing celebrity soft balls.
Although the movie’s title suggests a two-character story, it is anything but that, being populated with the coaches and trainers for each “fighter.” For Nixon, there is his fiercely loyal chief of staff, Marine Lt. Col. Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon). For Frost, there is producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen), veteran TV journalist Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and most especially idealistic, hot-headed academic James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell).
Their prep sessions, post-interview analyses and critiques, all leading up to the climactic final showdown on Watergate, form much of the film’s preoccupation. Having lived through the Nixon administration and having had my share of uncooperative interview subjects, I may be more naturally drawn to this subject than many younger moviegoers, but Frost/Nixon is anything but a dry, uninvolving exercise.
Adding substantially to the interest level are the performances of Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, both of whom originated these roles on the London stage, before bringing them to New York two seasons ago. That longterm familiarity with these characters and with each other pays off on-screen, aided further by the use of extreme close-ups.
Langella is particularly agile as the naturally stiff Nixon, employing all the stoop-shouldered gestures and shifty looks, without drifting into caricature. Whether it was Morgan’s intention, Langella’s portrayal of Nixon is so human and fragile, it ultimately earns our sympathy for the man. Having already won the Tony Award for playing Nixon, this deepened performance is surely destined for an Oscar nomination as well.
As is The Queen, where he played Blair, Sheen is again up against an inherently more interesting character and, as a result, takes a back seat in the acting department, regardless of the outcome in the story. Still, he radiates a rakish charisma and gets us rooting for Frost in this far-fetched undertaking.
Together, they carry the film, notably in an eleventh-hour scene in which an inebriated Nixon calls Frost to test his mental state just before the final interview. It, like the rest of the film, is wordy, but it plays with all the tension of an action sequence.
Frost/Nixon captures and dramatizes a crucial moment in our nation’s history, getting inside the head of the only president to resign from office, wrestling him to the ground, but not quite pinning him.
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