Robert Wilson’s Shakespearean "Cabaret"

The Brooklyn Academy of Music and Robert Wilson have had a long and storied history. The cross pollination has been benefit to both. Wilson’s particular brand of modernism, a mixture of dance and surrealist esthetics, a tableau vivant of hyperbolic morphology that sometimes looks like a Magritte come to life has left it’s brand  on the Gilman opera house and the whole BAM enterprise and naturally Wilson has become an almost mythic presence in the world of performance art. He visited Freud (The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud), Stalin (The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin), Einstein (Einstein on the Beach) and most recently in collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble began to employ his pataphysics on a classic of the modern theater, in a memorably post-modern Threepenny Opera. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Wilson has rejoined the Berliner Ensemble in bringing Shakespeare to BAM in the form of a production of the sonnets--originally staged in 2009. Here the androgynous homoerotic nature of the poetry is fully vented with all the female roles played by men. Rylancing could be the term applied to this approach to Shakespeare, which was, incidentally,  the way the Elizabethans did it. Jurgen Holtz who appeared in Threepenny presides over the current production as a Queen Elizabeth who bears a keen resemblance to Bert Lahr's cowardly lion. Wilson starts with Sonnet 43, "When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,” which would have segued beautifully into his obsession with the senses (a la Deafman Glance). But the production is more Catholic in spirit loading on the Shakespearean conceits to the point where they are in direct conflict with the director’s esthetic. While the mind is being stimulated by the complexity of the word play, Wilson employs his signature technique of slowing down the action. It’s like oil and water with the actual Shakespeare ultimately functioning merely as lyrics for Rufus Wainwright’s music—which, in this context, devolves into an acquired taste. The Berliner Ensemble actors in drag singing Shakespeare with Brechtian mannerisms end up creating a distinctly Weimar effect. Wilson’s intention may have been to tackle classics like Sonnet 29, "When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s Eyes,” but he’s ended up with something that’s reminiscent of Cabaret.

A Doll’s House at BAM

What about that baby in Carrie Cracknell’s Young Vic production of A Doll’s House at BAM? You don’t see too many live babies on stage these days and this one was remarkably well behaved. However besides the baby, the production has much to commend it including Hattie Morahan in what can only be defined as a phenomenological interpretation of the character of Nora, to the extent that it doesn’t address her femininity or lack thereof, but the confines of her being. Actually the current production centers around both Morahan’s Nora and the family friend, Dr. Rank (Steve Toussaint). There are three key scenes in this regard. In the first Nora reveals her big secret to an old childhood crony, Kristine (Caroline Martin), a widow left with “not even grief for a sense of loss to nurture." For the sake of present happiness Nora's mortgaged her future. In plain terms she’s signed a fraudulent loan to accommodate a yearlong trip to Italy. Whether she's making a sacrifice for Torvald (Dominic Rowan) who has been ill or merely using his illness as an excuse is ambiguous. Supposedly it’s her husband who treats her like a child addressing her as his “hamster,” his “skylark,” his “humming bird,” his “most treasured possession,” but her actions are plainly impulsive and childish and a reflection of her own ability to quell her appetites. Ingmar Bergman’s production of A Doll’s House, which played at BAM a number of years ago emphasized the notion of self-realization. The Bergman Nora could have been a man as well as a woman. But the brilliance of this Nora is the way it’s influenced by Hedda Gabler, introducing the death instinct in its exploration of the feminine mystique. The two scenes exploring Rank’s being both occur with Nora. In the first he talks about life as fulfilling the need “to continue feeling tormented.” In the second he unveils another layer of the onion. He’s consumed with love and is critically ill. While Nora is lying, Rank is dying. These two leitmotifs say more about the play then the famous denouement when Nora walks out--which considering the modernity of the interpretations provided seems almost anticlimactic. Yes, Torvald’s narcissism and selfishness are revealed. Nora is just a piece of the puzzle. But so what? Is Nora any less directorial and narcissistic in her machinations. The revelation is almost Newtonian in a production that’s well situated in the world of relativity. The rotating set is like an old vinyl record revolving on a turntable and the feeling it creates is one of synchronicity. Rather than a succession of epiphanic moments, the varying scenes unfold complete and complex lives. The circularity is mirrored in Morahan’s rendition of the play’s famed tarantella which foreshadows her so-called liberation. The current A Doll’s House, with its emphasis on subjectivity and intention, is a brilliant and out of the box approach to the Ibsen classic.

Julius Caesar at BAM

        photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Saul Bellow once raised eyebrows in the multi-cultural wars by asking “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” (“Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89,” NYT, 4/6/05).  The Royal Shakespeare production of Julius Caesar, which just completed a run at BAM, could have been a great riposte, if one inserted Shakespeare in the place of Tolstoy. If only it had taken the bull by the horns. Why not employ the Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary approach? What about doing what The Royal Shakespeare Company did when they collaborated with the Wooster Group on Troilus and Cressida? What if Chinua Achebe had written an adaptation? As it stands, the production is weighted heavily towards a straight rendition of Shakespeare set against a generalized view of African culture and history that's lacking in any specific referents. Why insert an African setting if you are not going to do anything with it? The production notes actually remark “You could be forgiven for thinking that William Shakespeare and Nelson Mandela have absolutely nothing in common” and go on to mention the fact that The Complete Works of William Shakespeare were smuggled to Mandela in prison and that one of the passages that spoke to him famously uttered by Caesar himself that begins,  “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once. ” Apart from this allusion to the tortured history of South Africa in the playbill, it’s disappointing that the current production fails to employ Shakespeare’s study of tyranny in the service of say the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo—as one iconic example of Congolese history that's ripe for interpretation. The great lines “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, But in ourselves,” “et tu, Brute?--Then fall Caesar!” are all perfectly rendered. However, Gregory Duran’s directorial concept actually ends up obfuscating the otherwise powerful performances by Jeffery Kissoon (Julius Caesar), Paterson Joseph, (Marcus Brutus), Ray Fearon (Mark Anthony) and Cyril Nri (Caius Cassius).

Three Sisters at BAM

Photo: Victor Vasiliev

Chekhov probably wouldn’t have been too interested in Yoga instructors and other spiritual gurus who urge their followers to live in the now. In fact, the brilliant Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s production of Three Sisters currently playing at BAM presents Chekhov's world of nostalgia and anticipation, with a fervor characteristic of a whole different brand of Russian thinker, the l9th century anarchist and revolutionary.The audience’s relation to Alexander Borovosky’s design, a house behind which most of the action takes place is very much like that of the three sisters, Olga (Irina Tychinina), Masha (Elena Kalinina) and Irina’s (Ekaterina Tarasova) relation to reality. It also recalls Plato’s cave allegory. “There can be no happiness for us. We can only dream it.” “In two or three hundred years maybe a new happy life will dawn.” “What does it all mean? It’s snowing. What does it mean?” The great lines are all there, along with the tautologies which are the equations of the Chekhovian universe. If something is near it cannot be far away and if it’s far away it cannot be near is a typical locution. It’s a logic of annihilation in which the past is a taunting illusion that can neither be undone nor recaptured and the future exists only to diminish the present. Lev Dodin directs his cast with an almost evangelical stoicism; his blocking evokes a funeral procession of mourners and pallbearers, the living dead. Irina cannot bring herself to tell the Baron (Sergei Kuryshev) anything, still less that she loves him, and yet in the touching moments before the famous shot rings out, she momentarily tastes the manna of an elusive present. Is this what Heidegger meant by “being there?

Krapp's Last CD

“Went down to BAM to see Krapp. Heard box 3 spool 5. And just because it’s high art doesn’t mean that it’s not  crap. (sighs) Spool, stool, they’re all emetics. Quiddity refers to 'the real nature of a thing; the essence?' I said again that it made no sense continuing and she who was sitting next to me in the car assented particularly since we’d stopped for a red light at the corner of Ashland Place. Because of two headlights shining, she was squinting. Perhaps it isn’t a wonderful life and I lost the one opportunity I had, but I don’t want any ot it, for reasons I can’t disclose. I knew it was all going to be like silent film, man stripped down to the basics, a tramp slipping on a banana peel, our tramp (whose stage business was written by a one-time graduate of Trinity College, Dublin) making it crystal clear 'this is just a play and I’m just an actor since notice I refuse to step out of the limelight.' Like modern art, a painting’s just paint, an actor just mouths words and consciousness is disemBODIED, the supposedly integrated personality we presume to recognize in the mirror simply a delusion. John Hurt cradling that tape deck is holding on to what brains Krapp has left. Lucky Krapp has a tape to do the remembering for him, but why not a CD? Should be called Krapp’s Last Sound Byte or digital something or other. By the by, on the way to BAM I realized that Marina Abramovic and Robert Wilson must both have been deeply influenced by Krapp even before either had heard of it. Why? What are you saying? Because silence is not merely punctuation? Lucky I brought a banana.”

Cries and Whispers at BAM

Last summer Carey Mulligan starred in what amounted to a staged reading of the Bergman script Through a Glass Darkly. The Flemish director’s Ivo van Hove’s Cries and Whispers is as much a transformation of Bergman as say Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was of Shakespeare. Bergman was firmly the artist in control of his characters in his original movie. In van Hove’s adaptation his dying character is the artist, creating in this case a multi-media (video and painting) rendition of her own death. Where Cries and Whispers might have recalled Chekhov’s Three Sisters in the powerful relationships created, van Hove’s work is reminiscent of the artist Hannah Wilke’s documentation of her own demise. Pictures are constantly being generated and remind us that we are a culture of image collectors. The collecting of the images takes the place of memory and even contains an element of wishful thinking. If we are too busy recording ourselves will there be no time to die? What are we humans going to do with all the pictures we ceaselessly take? That is not a question van Hove is asking, but it’s a good question to ask in a digital age in which pictures are so facilely rendered that there will never be enough hours in anyone’s life to see them all. The first half of the current production is literally disembodied even as the dying Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) is figuratively disemboweled. But the further away it drifts from Bergman’s narrative the closer it comes to the spirit of the great master and there is one scene between Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Helena Reijn) which has the dramatic power of Persona. Bergman's Cries and Whispers employed intense colors (in particular red, white and black) and to that extent was a product of its time. The narcissistic self recording which characterizes van Hove's Cries and Whispers is what makes the current production timely. Be prepared besides an Alice in Wonderland set composed of projections and silhouettes this Cries and Whispers features a soundtrack highlighted by Janis Joplin singing Cry Baby.

Stonewalled III: Post Modernist Sexuality

Sexuality is a biological drive, but it is also a figment of the imagination. If consciousness is ever separated from the body, with our species preserved as pixels of intelligence migrating through cyberspace, then the very notion of what it means to be male and female will revert to being a fiction.  Our present culture is obsessed with pornography, which has become infinitely ubiquitous and is still looked at as a virus which distracts unwary minds from a more innocent sexuality—which they might be more prone to undertake had they not become so infected. But is there reason to believe that pornography has become the fuel for migrating consciousnesses that are increasingly separated from the mother ship? We are still men and women, made of flesh and blood and hormones, but increasingly we find our functions usurped by technology. No wonder radically fundamentalist religions are so intent on shielding their followers from the influences of modernity. Enlightenment ideals of reason and equanimity have no  place amidst the brute inequities of biology. It’s no wonder that there is so much sexual dysfunction in the battered and defeated armies of heterosexual culture.  However, there is a hope. Once mankind has totally done away with its dependence on the body—Ray Kurzweil’s idea of immortality coming in the form of organs made from microprocesssors is only one of a number of possible outcomes—then sex will take its rightful place as one of a number of cultural institutions for which tickets are purchased say like for Lincoln Center or BAM.

The Threepenny Opera

Brecht cut against his own intrinsic sentimentality by constantly breaking down the fourth wall and reminding us that all was fake, all was artifice, and the human condition was far too complex to tolerate the idealizations of catharsis. This is what is known as the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. Robert Wilson out-Verfremdungseffekts even Brecht in his current production of The Threepenny Opera at BAM. Firstly, it’s Wilson, so everything is slowed down. Secondly, the production is a virtual iconography party, from the scratching sounds of an old phonograph to Chaplinesque vaudevillian touches and sound effects that evoke the themes of ingestion and regurgitation that are so intrinsic to Brecht’s characterization of man as beast. The world is poor and man is shit. Food is the first thing. Morals follow. The words evoke the classic Brechtian theme of man as a thinking animal. The famed Theater de Lys production with Lotte Lenya that became a Manhattan institution spawned an LP that many baby boomers grew up listening to. One may question the extravagance of Wilson’s direction, which almost seems in competition with earlier interpretations, like the one at the de Lys, with their more intimate cacophonies. At the same time there are two things that really bring the crème to the surface. One is the performance by the Berliner Ensemble, which Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded. The other is Wilson’s mastery at creating a spectacle out of human consciousness. There is nothing like hearing The Threepenny Opera in German. Mack the Knife becomes Mackie Messer, and Stefan Kurt will probably turn out to be one of the great Macheaths.

John Gabriel Borkman

One could have joked that there was some sort of structural damage to BAM’s Harvey Theater, and that the damage became the set for the Abbey Theater’s production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. The snow and ice that New Yorkers have seen quite a bit of lately was as ubiquitous on the stage as it was outside, particularly in Brooklyn. Blinding snow is indeed a fitting image for the agon that is described between the title character (Alan Rickman), who excuses the financial transactions that have destroyed so many lives by saying that he wanted to achieve the power to make other people happy, and the universe. Borkman, according to the woman he has thrown off, Ella Rentheim (Lindsay Duncan), is guilty of another crime, “the murder of love in a human being,” in that he has sacrificed her love, given her up for the sake of his ambition. The play begins with Borkman’s wife Gunhilde (Fiona Shaw) saying, “People like us have no time for happiness.” And happiness becomes the lingua franca of the play. When Borkman’s son Erhart (Marty Rea) brings it up as the goal to which he aspires, his mother mockingly asks him where he thinks he will find this so called happiness (the burden of parental wishes is yet another theme of the play). And what is the relationship of happiness to aspiration? In late Ibsen plays, imagination is always juxtaposed to reality. In The Master Builder, Solness’s muse Hilda pushes him to make “castles in the sky.” Isn’t the imperfect nature of reality always at odds with the perfect world that the imagination creates? The start of John Gabriel Borkman presents a compelling metaphor: imagination held prisoner. Borkman, convicted of his crimes, sentenced and now released and in exile in his own home, walks back and forth in his room as the clock ticks. Ibsen introduces us to his character through the sound of his footsteps. Ibsen’s characters could be artists or dictators in the monomaniacal way they subsume humanity to ideas. Both Strindberg and Ibsen influenced Bergman, and one is reminded of the harrowing picture of the artist in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, sacrificing the sanity of his abandoned children to his ambition for greatness.