Soaring Shakespeare
RALEIGH, N.C.: In a Shakespeare play, it’s expected that there will be things flying: usually dialogue, hearts and swords. Rarely is it that the characters themselves are flying, though, which makes the upcoming production Henry V (On Trapeze) one for the birds. Literally.
Burning Coal Theatre Company, in tandem with NYC-based Fight or Flight Aerial Theater Company, has adapted Shakespeare for the trapeze in a collaborative production playing Dec. 1-18 in Raleigh, N.C. In the history play, King Henry, previously Prince Hal in Henry IV, goes to war against France. This version has characters acting on the ground and in the air—or, to be more specific, four feet from the ground and higher, on a low-flying trapeze. Fight or Flight had previously given the same airy treatment to Richard II.
Steven Cole Hughes, director and co-artistic director of Fight or Flight, has re-imagined Henry V as a meta-theatrical experience in order to accommodate the flying. The chorus in the play is now “a bunch of young people getting together,” Hughes says. “It’s going to be a big party. I have Jessica Jackson composing techno-dance music. The characters are going to fly around and celebrate being English.”
Jerome Davis, artistic director of Burning Coal, chose Henry V as the play for this collaboration—for him, the traditionally “jingoist” quality of the work is undercut because the youths it depicts live in an England that has long passed its heyday. It’s a setting that is likely to seem familiar to today’s young adults.
“The economic malaise that our country’s in is something that made me immediately respond to Steven’s idea,” Davis explains. “If you’re doing a play, you’re doing it now, and if you’re not addressing the moment in which we’re living, you’re not fulfilling your roles as artists.”
Henry V (On Trapeze) takes place on a bare stage, and it is up to the cast of eight (six company members from Burning Coal and two from Fight or Flight) to act out the political intrigues and the battles. This requires actors playing multiple roles and physical training for those who had never maneuvered a trapeze before.
But, as with any Shakespeare play, the focus is on the story. While the aerial work requires a suspension (no pun intended) of disbelief from the audience, for Hughes that mental act is necessary for any production, wire or not.
“I’ve always been interested in what makes theatre theatre,” Hughes allows. “When I found the trapeze, I thought, ‘This is it—this is what can keep theatre alive!’”
—Diep Tran
This Time It’s Personal
BOSTON: Since his riveting trial in Israel 50 years ago, Adolf Eichmann has been seared into the minds of millions as the Nazi in the glass booth—a defiant war criminal inside a bulletproof chamber, insisting that he was only following orders in helping to mastermind the Holocaust.
But when Evan Wiener set out to write Captors, he zeroed in on the little-known specifics of Eichmann’s 1960 abduction in Buenos Aires by a team of Mossad agents, who had to hole up for 10 days in a safe house before they could smuggle Eichmann out of Argentina.
Wiener’s fast-paced play, debuting at Huntington Theatre Company in Boston through Dec. 11 (before an anticipated New York run), is based on former Mossad agent Peter Malkin’s 1990 memoir Eichmann in My Hands. The book recounts Malkin’s dramatic attempt, as Eichmann’s guard, to extract a signed consent from the Nazi agreeing to stand trial in Israel.
“Everybody thinks they know Eichmann. They’re using that name almost as a cultural shorthand. But there’s a story here that I felt hadn’t really been told yet in a compelling way. I wanted to explore the details of what it was like to be so close to Eichmann, who was responsible for this unimaginable horror perpetrated on millions—including members of Malkin’s own family,” says Wiener.
The play becomes a thrilling clash of wills between two polar opposites. Eichmann (played at Huntington by Michael Cristofer) was controlled and calculated, while Malkin (Louis Cancelmi) was an unconventional agent who questioned orders and had an artistic sensibility. Malkin was not supposed to talk to Eichmann, but he ended up fostering a rapport with the Nazi, which he later turned to his advantage.
Wiener wrote Captors before the killing of Osama Bin Laden, but there are eerie echoes of that event in the story of Eichmann’s apprehension, and in the questions Wiener believes it raises. “How do you do the right thing when you’re really dealing in moral quicksand?” he wonders. “The crimes are incredibly clear. The response to those crimes is where it really gets difficult, and it gets more difficult when we humanize the figure and he comes out of the box of his own iconography.”
—Christopher Wallenberg
Doing Time
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Playwright and performer Lauren Weedman—perhaps best known for her appearances as a correspondent on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”—doesn’t do anything without thinking, “Maybe this’ll be a story.” But when it came time to pen a new play, her L.A. surroundings proved less than inspirational. “My day,” she jokes, “is basically career and weight loss.” Still, she managed to find the foreign in the immediate. After volunteering at a women’s unit the L.A. County Jail she realized, “There’s a whole other land in our own city.” The result is Bust, a semi-autobiographical solo show headlining Washington D.C.’s Studio Theatre Dec. 1-18. Developed with director Allison Narver at Seattle’s now-defunct Empty Space Theatre and presented around the country, Bust will present new shadings for D.C. audiences. “The characters have changed tremendously,” says Weedman. “That’s the great thing about solo theatre—it can evolve with you.”
—Harrison Hill
The Darnedest Things
CHICAGO: Perhaps Barrel of Monkeys founders Erica Halverson and Halena Kays heard a little too much Carpenters growing up. They’ve set out to challenge Karen’s lament in “Bless the Beasts and the Children” that “in this world, they have no voice.” Or perhaps they just fancied the notion of completely inverted children’s theatre. Whatever their inspiration, the duo hit on a winning strategy for bolstering creative expression, self-esteem and confidence among underserved Chicago public school students. Since 1997, Barrel of Monkeys’ growing company of actor-educators has helped elementary school kids develop their original stories into scripts that are then staged by grown-up professional actors. In 2001, the company began performing these stories for the public under the title That’s Weird, Grandma. Ten years later, the show still runs every Monday night at the Neo-Futurarium.
“What has given TWG its lasting appeal is the high quality of talent performing the work, the audience participation and the excellent source material,” says BOM artistic director Molly Brennan. The show’s volunteer performers, who have logged time at prestigious Chicago theatres, never know what acting challenges await them in a fresh batch of TWG scripts.
“Our first agreement when we enter a classroom is ‘every idea is a good idea,’” Brennan explains. “From tales of talking globes to autobiographical accounts of gang violence, BOM is in the business of putting kids’ ideas and experiences first.” The holiday edition, she adds, features “such gems as Santa and the Muscle Bound and The Time I Ate a Christmas Ball.”
—Homer Marrs
Conjuring Dickens Back to Life
NEW YORK CITY: Occasionally the concept of a new work strikes one as a self-inflicted slap on the forehead: Why didn’t anybody think of that before?!? Visionary theatre artist Reid Farrington elicits just such a response with his latest creation—a spookily appropriate incarnation of Charles Dickens’s ubiquitous holiday classic A Christmas Carol, fittingly titled Reid Farrington’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ or DICKENS: THE UNPARALLELED NECROMANCER. The show plays at Abrons Arts Center, Dec. 1-18, just in time to enliven the holiday season’s stale roll call of moralizing pageants.
Farrington, who cut his teeth as a video designer in the world-renowned Wooster Group, marshals his signature blend of projected media and live performers (The Passion Project; Gin & “It”) into a Victorian magic show of the “black arts.” Given that Dickens’s tale is one of haunting specters, Farrington’s treatment is a magical marriage of form and content. The “ghosts” in Farrington’s piece are made of clips from more than 70 Christmas Carol films, mined from 100 years of cinema history.
Farrington has edited together a mash-up of clips and images of the seasonal staple (including Muppets and animated iterations). Through precise choreography and coordinated video projection, live actors manipulate screens, scrims, cutouts and set pieces that embody, silhouette and channel the characters and apparitions of these many Carols past.
Rather than arbitrary experimentalism, this take on Dickens’s cultural touchstone feels like a necessary innovation. By making the narrative’s pervasiveness the subtext and its past versions the characters, Farrington’s Carol revives the meaning of Dickens’s enduring message, jolting the familiar audience member back to the edge of his seat while creating a singular piece of wonder for the uninitiated. For all the disappearing acts in the play, we see it again as if for the first time.
—Frank Boudreaux
Femme at the Top
CHICAGO: “I pray to God you never get hold of my life and place it at the mercy of your pen,” says Elizabeth I to William Shakespeare in Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex. Having no fear of the Tower, Findley created a historical fantasia in which Elizabeth spends the eve of Ash Wednesday 1601 in the company of Shakespeare’s players, who have just performed Much Ado About Nothing for the court. As she steels herself for the incipient execution of the Earl of Essex, her much-younger lover who conspired against her, the queen forms a feint-and-parry alliance with actor Ned Lowenscroft, who plays the mature female roles for Shakespeare’s troupe (including Beatrice) and who is facing his own demise from syphilis.
Ned—a man with arguably little left to lose—accepts the queen’s challenge: “If you teach me how to be a woman, I will teach you how to be a man.” Over the course of the long evening, they use the artifice of theatre to expose raw emotional truths.
It’s not surprising that this story of a dynamic woman would appeal to Chicago Shakespeare Theater artistic director Barbara Gaines, who over 25 years has taken her company from the humble rooftop of an English-style pub to a glorious two-venue facility on bustling Navy Pier, garnering the 2008 regional Tony Award in the process. The production will run through Jan. 22.
For Gaines, when she saw the inaugural Stratford Festival production of Elizabeth Rex in 2000, “it didn’t resonate with me.” But on re-reading it a couple of years ago, she reevaluated her first impression—though she says, “I realized that I would want to make some adjustments to it.” With the blessings of Findley’s estate (the playwright, known as “Tiff,” died in 2002), Chicago Shakespeare’s version trims “some of the excess” of the original.
What remains, according to Gaines, “is a phenomenally intimate portrait of the queen. She becomes emotionally naked. Women and power make a very interesting combination. How much of your femininity can you retain and be in the power position?”
—Kerry Reid
Alamanac
130 Years Ago (1881)
The Ring Theatre in Vienna, Austria, catches fire, claiming at least 620 lives. Prior to the opera Les Contes d’Hoffman, a stagehand aiming for the gas lamps accidentally brushes several prop clouds with a flame. Chaos ensues when stage management extinguishes the theatre’s lighting system, the fire curtain sits undeployed and water hoses are not promptly used.
30 Years Ago (1981)
Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre is founded by Ron Clark, Jody Hovland and Bruce Wheaton. The Riverside will produce mostly contemporary work, as well as the Riverside Theatre Shakespeare Festival every summer.
15 Years Ago (1996)
On December 29, playwright Lanford Wilson memorializes New York Times theatre critic Walter Kerr, who had died in October. In his piece, Wilson writes: “It isn’t just that [Kerr is] the writer who gets people up from the breakfast table and headed to the phone….You want him to like your play because when he doesn’t like it, it makes him so sad.”
10 Years Ago (2001)
New York City’s Drama Book Shop moves to its current location on West 40th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. The book store had previously resided at the Drama League offices, and on 52nd and 48th Streets. The enterprise will go on to win a 2011 Tony Award for Excellence in the Theatre.
