Pretty Penny

BROOKLYN, N.Y.: Nothing comforts the have-nots quite like a satire of the haves. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera has been thus diverting audiences since its triumphant 1928 debut, skewering the capitalist bourgeois of the Weimer Republic so soundly it was banned by the Reich. This month the Brecht-founded Berliner Ensemble’s 2007 production, directed by Robert Wilson, makes a five-performance U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Oct. 4-8.

Pursued by presenting houses worldwide, Wilson’s highly stylized interpretation has triumphed in every port. “The German ensemble’s acting abilities, physicality and musicality provide an amazing impact in telling this particular story,” says BAM executive director Joe Melillo, adding, “My own opinion is that Robert Wilson was destined to confront the superior ensemble work of the Berliner Ensemble and to wrestle with the material of Threepenny Opera.”

In this posthumous meeting of the minds, Brecht and Wilson’s theatrical visions reinforce each other. Six-time Wilson collaborator and Threepenny co-director Ann-Christin Rommen elaborates: “Brecht was for a formal, epic theatre with all the artistic elements equal to one another—much the way Bob works. Many critics have asserted that this is Threepenny as Brecht would have it.”

Bob, however, wasn’t seeking Brecht-olytes’ approval. Within the strictures of the Weill Foundation, which mandated absolute fidelity to the score, Wilson describes reaching his finished product “intuitively” through his standard three stages of development: first at his Watermill Center in eastern Long Island, N.Y., where he creates a storyboard with drawings; second in a scriptless rehearsal period during which the actors master the story through movement; and third where the play is fitted to its text and design elements and recalibrated for a final time. Despite the substantial evolution, Rommen reveals, many of the early choices can be seen in the finished work.

The enduring worth of Threepenny Opera lies in the way Weill and Brecht were able to so stylishly infuse the bleakest material with darkly comedic relief, thanks to Weill’s irreverent, chart-topping score, Brecht’s deadpan humor and the delightful insubordination of their anti-hero, Macheath, a.k.a. Mack the Knife. The famous Brechtian “alienation” effect, through which the playwright undermined facile emotionality, hammers his words into the cortex as well as the gut: “There are few things that stir men’s souls, just a few, but the trouble is that after repeated use they lose their effect”—leaving you something to chew on that outlasts curtain call. Similarly, Wilson’s visuals linger like afterimages. Anyone squeamish about a musical with numbers like “Song of the Insufficiency of Human Struggling” should rest assured: In the Madoff/Murdoch era, Mack is a lovable liar.

—Cassandra Csencsitz

Puppet Tent

SEATTLE: The fictional Edwardian mountebank who gives Seattle’s preeminent shadow-puppet troupe its name is about to embark on his most arduous journey yet. Sgt. Rigsby and His Amazing Sihouettes will stage Shadow Odyssey in conjunction with Printer’s Devil Theatre (at Theatre Off Jackson) Oct. 14-Nov. 5. Audiences will enter a tent, recline on pillows and witness a full Homeric odyssey told entirely in silhouette, shadow puppets and hand-drawn projections, accompanied by a lively soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music. The company and the production are the brainchild of playwright/puppeteer Scot Augustson, who previously teamed with Printer’s Devil on Terrible Price for Whimsy, Boy in the Beastly City and Teensploitation. 

Those titles should give a good idea of Augustson’s quirky-but-severe aesthetic—as should working titles for Shadow Odyssey, such as Are We There Yet? and the priceless Where the River Styx Meets Route 66. Sounds like a trip.

—Rob Weinert-Kendt

Not Afraid of the Big Bad Woolf

NEW YORK CITY: “Virginia Woolf’s writing was what inspired me to become a director,” says Rachel Dickstein, who developed and directs Septimus and Clarissa, Ripe Time’s stage adaptation of Woolf’s modernist classic, Mrs Dalloway. “I read The Waves my junior year in college and could only deal with my obsession with it by finding a way to make it live on stage.”

Joining her to adapt the piece is playwright Ellen McLaughlin, who also plays Clarissa Dalloway in the production that runs through Oct. 8 at Manhattan’s Baruch Performing Arts Center. “We’ve been working now for years on arriving at a theatrical language that combines music, movement and design in a complex calibration of theatrical devices,” reports McLaughlin. “This is really not a conventional production, nor has it ever been a conventional rehearsal process.”

Why take on such a complex challenge? Dickstein calls Mrs Dalloway “one of the finest antiwar novels written in the 20th century” and considers it one of the earliest novels to feature a character suffering from post-traumatic stress brought on by war. She explains, “Woolf published Mrs Dalloway nearly 10 years after the end of World War II. Now that we’ve reached the 10-year anniversary of September 11,” she continues, “this work has more relevance than ever.”

Marrying the inner life of those citizens to the vitality of Woolf’s London led Dickstein to an immersive staging to “help us experience the world of these characters from the inside out.” McLaughlin adds: “The movement language of the piece is original but highly specific. It’s a balance—you never want to risk letting it get fussy or literal. But when it gets too abstract, it can be merely vague and unsatisfying in a different way.”

Dickstein explains, “We’re trying to give people a deep and compelling portrait of characters and their conflicts, to create a dynamic sense of arc to the day, while also inviting them to appreciate the world as a landscape.” The collaborators of Ripe Time seem not only unafraid of Virginia Woolf, but eager to stage the dizzying universe she captured through a single day in London. 

—Gus Schulenburg

Finding the Lost Boy

PITTSBURGH: Pittsburgh-based playwright Tammy Ryan was at Whole Foods one day when she witnessed an encounter in the produce section: a Sudanese* man, who worked there, was feeding a white woman a piece of papaya. 

Ryan said it was the color contrasts that caught her attention. “The Sudanese are very dark, and the orange of the papaya, and the seeds were so black… If I was a painter, I would have painted it and been done,” Ryan says with a laugh. Instead she used that image—and something the man said, “In Africa, this was my favorite”—as the basis for her newest play, Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods. It premiered in 2010 as a co-production between Premiere Stages and Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey.

In the play, now running through Oct. 16 at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, a white middle-class woman becomes a mentor to a young man she meets at Whole Foods. He is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group of more than 20,000 boys who were driven from their homes during the second Sudanese Civil War. They walked a thousand miles to refugee camps; 4,000 eventually reached America.

Director Sheila McKenna thinks that the play—with its collision of cultures, including authentic Dinka words—asks important existential questions about “what we do as a privileged culture, what it means to trust and open your life up to someone.”

In writing Lost Boy, Ryan wanted to bring large-scale disasters, usually seen through an emotionally removed television screen, to a personal level. “I want people to imagine what it’s like. To be five years old and running through the jungle from a lion! It’s unimaginable to most of us.”

—Diep Tran

Riddley Me This

AUSTIN: When Russell Hoban penned his dystopian novel Riddley Walker in 1980, the personal computer was a novelty item to be found only in the wealthiest of homes. We certainly hadn’t begun to text our way into the barely literate lexicon the author prophetically used to craft his tale of post-apocalyptic England. Classified as science fiction, the work is devoid of genre-typical androids, challenging readers to consider the possibilities of a more antiquated form of human simulacra: puppets. Who better to tackle the subject than Austin’s Trouble Puppet Theater Company?

The inventive Texas troupe adapts Hoban’s ambitious novel for the stage through Oct. 16 at Salvage Vanguard Theater. “One of the things that intrigues me the most about this story is the scale of it,” says Trouble Puppet’s artistic director, Connor Hopkins, “the fact that it’s looking back over several thousand years, but takes place over the course of about four days.” The story also features a 12-year-old protagonist—small in stature, but profound in influence.

To this end, Hopkins and his comrades will experiment with scale, not only radically implementing the tabletop version of a play within a play, but incorporating shadow puppetry and puppets that serve as puppet masters. “We have three layers of depth,” Hopkins says. “It’s one of the gifts of puppetry that you can create actual physical changes of scale that you can’t do with human beings.”

Alluding as it does to the myriad failings of the “Puter Leat” (computer elite), and particularly in light of this year’s nuclear disaster in Japan, Riddley Walker is a work with new relevance. According to producing partner Kathryn Rogers, “People are coming back around to this book because it did a lot that was before its time.”

Take scholar Victoria Nelson’s belief that puppets are the embodiment of our unconscious desire for deities; marry that to E.E. Cummings’s lyrical assertion that “nothing recedes like progress;” and the resultant progeny is Riddley Walker. “Iwl yes to that,” quips Hopkins, and Rogers concedes that the two have taken to texting each other in Riddley-speak. It is further proof (as if we needed any) that the symbiotic relationship between life and art is a complicated matter, indeed.

—Stacy Alexander Evans

Price Check

NEW YORK CITY: Radha Blank was raised in Brooklyn. “But I came of age in Harlem,” she says, and she lives there still: “You can stand on one corner and see how the community is changing and fighting to maintain some of its cultural identity.” That shifting neighborhood is the setting for Blank’s play Seed, which was workshopped at last year’s Hip-Hop Theater Festival. It gets its premiere through Oct. 9, directed by Niegel Smith, in a co-production with Classical Theatre of Harlem. 

The pitfalls and possibilities inherent in gentrification are overt themes in two other scripts Blank hopes will soon be staged—HappyFlowerNail, a return to her solo-performer roots, and Casket Sharp, about gang troubles in a crumbling town. In Seed, class issues set the conditions for a moral tug-of-war over a 12-year-old child’s future.

Seed’s leading characters, ambitious social-worker Anne and Duane Reade cashier Latonya, are both black residents of Harlem, but the sole thing they seem to have in common is an interest in Latonya’s prodigiously smart son Chee-Chee. To state it lightly, the women don’t see eye to eye on what’s best for the kid. When tensions bubble up, the characters occasionally break into rhythmic cadences—a device Blank traces to Seed’s origin as a series of character monologues. At work, Latonya is snared in a staccato, repetitive loop: “Hold up! / Price check! / This is $3.49, you still want this miss?” And Anne’s remembrance of a traumatic chapter of her career accelerates into an urgent litany of numbers and rhymes. In these departures from everyday dialogue, the women’s frustrations and insecurities are revealed, suggesting that perhaps the two are more alike than they first appear.

—Nicole Estvanik Taylor

Almanac

260 Years Ago (1751)

Three days after opening its inaugural production of Richard III, Walter Murray and Thomas Kean’s Company of Comedians posts a notice in the Virginia Gazette imploring subscribers to help cover the costs of its newly constructed playhouse, the Second Theatre of Williamsburg. The Company of Comedians will sparsely produce Shakespearean tragedies at this theatre over the next decade while continuing to tour the colonies.

130 Years Ago (1881)

Tony Pastor opens his 14th Street Theater in New York City, announcing a bill “catering to the ladies, and presenting for the amusement of the cultivated and aesthetic Pure Music and Comedy, Burlesque and Farce.” By taking the variety act out of men’s saloons, Pastor reaches a wider audience, successfully transforming vaudeville into family entertainment. Despite being the most popular theatre of the 1880s, by 1908 the 14th Street Theater will become a motion-picture theatre, and Pastor will not renew his lease. 

60 Years Ago (1951)

The Interplayers of San Francisco stages its last production—Fanny’s First Play. The innovative company was formed in 1946 by a group of artists who met as detainees at Camp 56 in Oregon, where they were being held as conscientious objectors to WWII. Its founding members—Kermit Sheets, Martin Ponch, Joyce Lancaster and Adrian Wilson—are credited with contributing greatly to the San Francisco renaissance of the late 1940s and the Beat movement of the 1950s.

*An earlier version of this piece mistakenly used the word “Sunni” here.