Category Archives: Play

Rutherford & Son

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  • Rutherford & Son, 6/15/19 (Sat), National Theatre

Revival of a 1912 show written, unusually for the times, by a female playwright, Githa Sowerby (adapted here by Polly Findlay). I had automatically assumed this would be a feminist tract, but that proved untrue: all here are trapped under the thumb of the domineering father and their own insecurities, their fates portrayed honestly if pitilessly. The show is less interested in grand themes than presenting an unflinching portrait of the destruction of a family.

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Sweat

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  • Sweat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), West End

This searing 2015 work by Lynn Nottage, making its London premiere, is an extraordinarily powerful portrait of the devastation wrought by globalization, represented here by NAFTA, on small-town America. It opens (and closes) wearily with an unnecessary framework of two former friends speaking separately with a parole officer, making me think we were in for a didactic all-talk-no-show show. But it quickly gets into gear once the drama proper gets going and never looks back.

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The Lehman Trilogy

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  • The Lehman Trilogy, West End

From Anatevka to Alabama: by sheer coincidence, my matinee show Fiddler on the Roof ended with European Jews emigrating for America, while the evening show featured European Jewish immigrants arriving in America. The Lehman Trilogy, written by Hebrew-speaking Italian playwright Stefano Massini (adapted and translated by Ben Power), is a phenomenal history of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers over a 150-year period, taking on the history of capitalism in the West and gradual erosion of the titular family’s life as Jews since its immigration from Germany in the 19th century – a continuation of Fiddler in its way. The fictional musical explored the gradual breakdown of tradition in the lives of individual families. This epic drama looks at where that leads.

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Orpheus Descending

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  • Orpheus Descending

6/9/19 (Sun), London Menier Chocolate Factory

Revival of an infrequently produced and much-rewritten Tennessee Williams play of 1957. A hunky 30-year-old wanderer and troubadour named Val finds his way into a general store run by the hard-minded Lady, a woman trapped in a small-minded Southern town and a loveless marriage. She is haunted by the death of her father, an Italian immigrant, at the hands of racist townsmen twenty years earlier, who set fire to his beloved establishment after he served black customers. Something inside of her having died as well, Lady has remained in the town unemotionally running the store with her callous husband. The husband is now dying of cancer, and Lady, though wary of the young Val, agrees to hire him to help mind the store. His presence reawakens her repressed passion, as things go in these plays, and her feelings are sharpened further by the revelation that it was her husband who led the riot against her father that caused his death. Lady, with a new life literally growing inside her (after an apparent night of fun), asks Val to take her away. The result is not pretty.

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Bitter Wheat

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  • Bitter Wheat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), London West End

O, Mamet, where is thy sting? A show satirizing the Harvey Weinstein affair should be a breeze for the ever-caustic playwright David Mamet, who has had plenty of experience skewering Hollywood on stage (Speed the Plow), page (Bambi vs. Godzilla) and screen (Wag the Dog) and has presumably dealt with Weinstein himself at some point. So what happened?

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The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

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  • The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

5/6/19 (Mon), Tokyo

Who knew dystopian theater could be so much fun? A rundown tenement somewhere in what looks like pre-war Europe (the creators call their group 1927, so I’ll go with that) becomes increasingly unmanageable, and the deprived children are becoming dangerously restless. A well-meaning mother brings her daughter to the area in the belief that all the kids really need is art classes and pasta sculptures. She gradually gets caught up in reality as the situation worsens and her daughter is kidnapped. The kids go a step too far when they kidnap the mayor’s cat, prompting authorities to turn to, let’s say, chemical means to quell the problem.

What could be a depressingly heavy-handed story is presented in a subversively light-hearted manner that makes its point much more subtly. Continue reading →

Le Marie-Vison (毛皮のマリー )

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  • 毛皮のマリー (Le Marie-Vison)

4/2/19 (Tues), Tokyo New National Theatre

This is one of four Tokyo productions in recent months of Terayama Shuji’s classic underground work from the late 1960s. This production stars Miwa Akihiro, the cross-dressing television and singing personality who was the inspiration for the show and its original star back when he was young and cute. He was so impossibly campy in Mishima’s Black Lizard a few years back that I walked out, but given his close association with this role, I figured I’d give him another chance. The direction follows that of the original hippie-era production. The Japanese and French titles (taken from a song popularized by Yves Montand) translate to something like “Marie in Mink”.

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Taira Jo: Puppet Salome

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  • Taira Jo: Puppet Salome (たいらじょう「サロメ」)

1/20/19 (Sun), Tokyo

Salome was the final show in Taira’s trilogy of puppets and classical music after Medea (2014) and Hamlet (2016) – he seems to have something for crazy women. He was performing as in that latter piece with the wonderful young cellist Miyata Dai, who arranged the music and led a four-man group with harp, contrabass and oboe/English horn.

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Yerma (National Theatre Live)

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  • Yerma (National Theatre Live)

9/30/18 (Sun), Tokyo

A liberal adaptation of the famed Lorca play of 1934. A woman who waited too long to have a child (she aborted one at 23 to her then-boyfriend’s sorrow) is now feeling the biological clock, and her unsuccessful efforts to make her body do her bidding make her increasingly obsessed. She gets battier and battier until she is finally utterly deranged. And that pretty much sums it up.

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A Christmas Carol (2018 play)

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  • A Christmas Carol (2018 play)

11/30/18 (Fri), Los Angeles

A one-man version of the evergreen classic by the protean actor Jefferson Mays, directed by Michael Arden (Once On This Island revival). May is something of a specialist in playing multiple roles after notable performances in I Am My Own Wife and A Gentleman’s Guide…, both of which I loved. So my expectations were high.

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“Boys” → “Angels” → “Inheritance”

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Boys in the Band → Angels in America → The Inheritance

10/16/18 (Tues)

I’m glad to see that The Inheritance has moved deservedly from the Young Vic to an open-ended West End run, winning rave reviews in the process. It’s especially interesting to look back on this play in the context of two other powerhouse NY-based gay-themed shows that have been revived in NY and London in recent months, Boys in the Band and Angels in America.

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The Damned (play)

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  • The Damned

7/21/18 (Sat), New York

An overwrought stage version of the Visconti film by man-of-the-hour Ivo van Hove, the busy avant-garde Belgian director. He’s best known for his minimalist productions, as in the interesting View from the Bridge, but here he’s taken a sharp turn to maximalist.

The saga, which broadly follows the movie plot, revolves around a rich steel manufacturer who has chosen unwisely to deal with the Nazis just as they are coming to power. The intricate story involves betrayal, greed, murder, suicide, political brutality, incest and other pleasantries, only to result in the end in the loss of the family’s steel plants to Hitler’s regime as the nation marches inexorably toward war.

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