Postcard from New York [2]

Then She Fell, Fun Home, Neue Gallerie, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, The Tempest

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town – as the words of the song originally went, before the Production Code intervened and changed them to ‘it’s a wonderful town’ for the sanitized film version. The original words are more biting, though, and more ambivalent.

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town.

The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down.

The people ride in a hole in the groun'.

New York, New York, it's a helluva town!

New York, New York, it’s a visitor's place,

Where no one lives on account of the pace,

But seven millions are screaming for space.

New York, New York, it's a visitor's place!

New York, New York: wonderful town, helluva town; the setting for some of the most exciting theatrical experiences on my Fellowship travels, and the scene of my undoing. It’s been just over a month since I left there, and it’s going to be harder than ever to separate the strands of my cultural and personal life in what follows.

*

I didn’t get much sleep on the night train from Chicago. I hadn’t forked out for a sleeper, so I tilted back my chair and dozed as best I could as the Lake Shore Limited plunged on through the flickering darkness across Indiana and Ohio, slowing as it passed through the fading lights of Cleveland around dawn. The scenery the next day was spectacular, even through bleary eyes – especially once we reached New York State, the Catskills and the plunging shores of the Hudson between Albany and New York City. 

I arrived at my Airbnb in the achingly hip district of Williamsburg just across the bridge from the Lower East Side to discover that no one was home to let me in. Fortunately a helpful tenant downstairs let me through to the back yard where I managed to do something I’d only seen in movies and scale the fire escape (quietly congratulating myself on my last two weeks of body-mind training in Minneapolis), and was lucky enough to find an unlocked window to the apartment, which was on the third floor. It turned out I was sharing it with two young guys from Long Island, a law student and an IT consultant, who both had work placements in NYC over the summer. They were as surprised as I was when they got home from the gym and found an intruder in their apartment, as our elusive host (who lived in Paris) hadn’t informed them I was coming. It was definitely the most random Airbnb experience I’d had so far, but I took it all in my stride and settled in, despite the chaos, the heat, the absence of aircon and my tiny room. I was in New York, after all.

*

I was here for two weeks’ down-time from the training and workshop activities at the core of my Fellowship travels. I planned to see some theatre, have a couple of meetings, and do some writing of my own.

The night after my arrival I went to an immersive/site-specific dance-theatre work in a disused former hospital in nearby Brooklyn by Third Rail Projects called Then She Fell and based on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as well as Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell, the eleven-year old girl who was the inspiration for the books. Carrroll befriended and photographed her until the family mysteriously but abruptly severed contact with him a year later (the relevent pages from his diary have been tantalisingly torn out).

The show was intelligently conceived, elegantly designed and performed, and appropriately dreamlike and seductive given the ambiguity of the material and the venue itself. In fact it was impossible to tell what was introduced or ‘found’ in terms of objects, props, furniture, décor or interior architecture. The whole experience was explicitly framed as an exploration of liminality. There were only about twenty of us in the audience, and for two hours we were led from floor to floor and room to room, invited to drink various substances (most of which contained alcohol, so we had the option of declining), gradually separated from each other, and shown or invited to take part in various activities (most of which were highly choreographed but became increasingly intimate, and in the course of which we progressed from being voyeurs to active participants). The only rules were: don’t speak during the performance, and don’t open any closed doors. Otherwise we were free to explore the rooms and any objects (or people) we encountered; but mostly the experienced was carefully guided and choreographed, with a continuous music score playing throughout the building, which cleverly kept everything synchronised. 

Often I find immersive work formally interesting but a bit thin when it comes to content and execution, but this show delivered on all fronts. Afterwards I went for a drink with a few other audience-members and we shared what we’d been through, as we’d all had different experiences with different performers in different sequences. As with other successful immersive performances I’ve attended, I still felt like I was in the show when I left the bar and wandered back through the unfamilair and slightly hallucinatory environs of Williamsburg to my apartment.

This lingering sense of having passed through to the other side of the looking glass and being in a dream persisted throughout my time in New York. Indeed, it took on a nightmarish aspect when things started spiralling out of control at the end of the week.

*

The following day I took the crowded subway across to Manhattan for a meeting. Afterwards I headed uptown to the Circle in the Square theatre to see the matinee of a Broadway (formerly off-Broadway) musical called Fun Home, based on Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel about a small-town young girl who comes out as gay in her college years, while her father subsequently commits suicide after his own closet homosexuality is exposed.

I’m not a big fan of musicals but I found this one consistently involving and deeply moving, with an interesting and complex chamber score (in the sweet-sour Sondheim idiom) by Jeanine Tesorim, intelligent lyrics and book by Lisa Kron, skilful and economical staging in-the-round by Sam Gold, and superb performances, especially from Michael Cerveris as the father (a role he orginated at the Public Theatre production in 2014). The story itself packed a real emotional punch – especially the central father-daughter relationship, and the crippling impact of homophobia on an individual and his family – leavened with lighter moments related to the three children’s involvement in the family business (a funeral home) and the narrator-daughter’s discovery of her own sexuality in college (including the hilarious and touching first-love song, ‘I’m changing my major to Joan’).

Diversity is alive and well on Broadway, it seems – together with a healthy succession of works transferring from original off-Broadway seasons. Certainly I saw more evidence of this symbiotic relationship between alternative and mainstream theatre in New York than back home in Australia: how many Blue Room, La Mama or Griffin shows end up on the stages of Black Swan, the MTC or the STC, let alone commercial theatres? Perhaps in this respect there’s something to be said for the more ruthless (and comparatively underfunded) American theatre scene, which to some extent facilitates this kind of symbiosis by eliminating the sclerotic middle-ground of funded State Theatre Companies competely.

*

The following afternoon I visited the Neue Gallerie on the edge of Central Park, where a special exhibition featuring Klimt’s first portrait of Adèle Bloch-Bauer was on show to coincide with the recent release of the film The Woman In Gold. The museum houses a superb permanent collection of Viennese and German fin-de-siècle art, and has a scale and focus that reminded me of the Bergruen Museum in Berlin with its collection of classic modernist art.

The painting itself is a stunning example of Klimt’s so-called ‘golden phase’, but I was a little sceptical about the exhibition’s sensationalized and oversimplified frame-narrative of how a heroic American lawyer restored the portrait of Adèle from the Austrian State Gallery (who had acquired it after it was requisitioned by the Nazis) to her niece (who promptly sold it for a record-breaking sum) – especially when Adèle herself had requested that the painting be left to the Austrian State Gallery in her will (a request which was subsequently overlooked by her husband, who outlived her and then left all ‘his’ possessions to his descendants when he fled Vienna in 1938). To me, it suggested a more complex story from which none of the litigants emerge without blemish, and raised complex questions about art, ownership and property.

Upstairs at the Neue Gallerie was a much more interesting exhibition juxtaposing early 20^th century Russian modernist art with contemporary German early expressionist paintings by the Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists in Dresden and Munich, some of whom also exhibited in Russia, and whose work was known by their Russian counterparts; both were mutually influenced by Fauvism in France at around the same time. Once again, I had a sense of the international efflorescence of a certain phase of modernism, which was cruelly truncated by the First World War and the subsequent rise of totalitarianism in both countries.

*

Afterwards I meandered through Central Park until the lamposts lit up and dusk began to fall. Then I headed back to midtown Manhattan to see another Broadway revival of an off-Broadway musical: Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Belasco Theatre. The original star and co-writer of Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell had recently finished reprising the title role and handed it over to TV heartthrob Darren Criss (Glee); and the theatre was packed with fans of both the show and Criss. As a Hedwig-virgin (never having seen the show or the film) I knew little of what was store for me, other than that it was a neo-glam post-punk rock musical about a former East German genderqueer rock singer whose botched sex-change operation has left her the mutilated sole member of  ‘a gender of one’.

In the event, I was transported by the wit of the book and lyrics perhaps a little more than the pastiche of the music, which perhaps inevitably felt a little tired seventeen years down the track. I imagine seeing the original off-Broadway incarnation in 1998 might have had something of the impact that The Rocky Horror Show had on me when I first saw it at the converted former Channel 7 Tele-Theatre in Fitzroy in 1975 starring Max Phipps, whose vampire-like interpretation of Frank-N-Furter imprinted itself indelibly on my young and impressionable mind. Still, I was once more impressed by the appetite for sexual and gender diversity displayd by a mostly straight-looking Broadway crowd, many of whom looked like office parties or young couples on a date night. Admittedly they were probably mostly there to see Criss; you could spot the Hedheads in contrast by their dark clothes, makeup and inevitable wigs.

As an experienced musical theatre star, Criss himself was more than able to hold his own as a singer, hoofer and deliver of zinging one-liners, although he struck me as perhaps a little young, sculpted and cleancut for the role. It almost felt as if an element of ‘slumming it’ in the realm of genderqueerdom lent him added sex-appeal for the crowd, who went beserk whenever he twerked or flirted, and completely lost it when he finally stripped off the drag to expose a perfectly ripped torso for his final song as Hedwig’s alter ego and soul-mate Johnny Gnosis. I must admit I lost the plot at this point, as it all became a bit heavy and conceptual for me; I found myself pining for the simple, innocent, vacuous camp of Rocky Horror, which paradoxically felt more liberating than the normalising morality that seemed inherent in Hedwig’s final ‘acceptance of her true self’. Give me wigs and heels any day.

*

The next day I braved the crowds at MOMA to see Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971, followed by two 1950s treats in MOMA’s ongoing film program: Douglas Sirk’s glorious Techicolour melodrama Magnificent Obsession; and a rare 3D screening of John Farrow’s classic John Wayne vehicle Hondo.

If Yoko Ono’s popular celebrity has been enhanced by her association with John Lennon, her status as an artist has been unfairly eclipsed for the same reason. This two-way distortion has been intensified by politics: specifically the inherent politics of being a woman, being Japanese, being a peace activist, and having a reputation for being an obscure avant-garde conceptual and performance artist – all of which are more ‘well-known’ than the work itself. Of course, to ‘know something well’ is a form of not-knowing, ignorance, denial or even repression – all of which is directly relevant to Yoko’s work as well as her person.

The first MOMA exhibition exclusively devoted to her work takes as its point of departure her first ‘one-woman show’ at the museum in 1971 – a conceptual intervention which took the form of the artist claiming to have released flies in the museum grounds and inviting the public to track them through the city. The substance of the current exhbition is a remarkable survey of her work over the decade preceding that intervention.

In fact a consistent thread throughout Yoko’s work takes the form of invitations or instructions, along with paradoxical installations, works of participatory performance art, and the use of film (especially in extremely slow motion) to explore the difference between aesthetic and routine perception. As such, her work has more in common with Dada, Surrealism and Duchamps in particular than with her contemporaries in the Pop-Art movement (Warhol being the most obvious parallel, especially in their respective use of film). Beyond this stretches the lineage of Japanese art and thought, from the tea ceremony to the Zen koan. In short: unlike Warhol or Pop, Yoko is not interested in the social phenomena of celebrity or the mass media and their trade in images, so much as in the existential phenomenology of objects and embodiment.

Above all I was struck by the sense of an artist courageously confronting and exploring what she referred to as her own ‘shyness’ – a word that in this context has manifold implications: personal, political, psychological, cultural, sexual and gendered. Two famous performance works from 1964 reenacted or recorded this with great force. In Bag Piece, spectator-participants were invited to climb into a black cloth bag – which was fastened so that it completely enclosed them – and lie on the gallery floor, shed their clothes and move around however and for as long as they please. Meanwhile a projection on a nearby wall of Cut Piece showed a young Yoko sitting quietly on the floor onstage while audience-participants were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing with scissors (needless to say, in both works the use of the floor, clothing and silence all have distinctive Japanese cultural references).

Ironically though, given my earlier caveat about the distortion of Yoko’s reputation by her association with Lennon, perhaps the most beautiful and moving work in the exhibition for me was an extreme slow-motion film projection of John’s face gradually breaking into a smile. In part it was the sheer beauty of that face (no matter whom it belonged to); in part the revelation afforded by slow-motion of the timelessness of images, even moving ones; but undeniably also the anecdotal pathos of knowing the fate that lay in store for the man himself. What distinguishes this from comparable works by Warhol is a quality of innocence distinctive to Yoko’s oeuvre. For Warhol, mortality is something inherent in the image itself; for Yoko, slow-motion film captures an image of eternity at the heart of life.

*

The following night I was back in Central Park at the outdoor Delacorte Theatre for The Tempest, part of The Public Theatre’s annual summer season of Shakespeare in the Park (along with a forthcoming production of Cymbeline). Despite the incipient rain, there was a great sense of occasion among the 2,000-strong crowd: a mixture of paying subscribers and those determined enough to queue early and secure a free ticket – the core purpose of the season (as initiated by The Public’s founding director Joe Papp) being to make Shakespeare available to everyone regardless of income.

In the event, the production itself was like a bad school play, and featured some frankly amateur performances. The Prospero-Miranda-Ferdinand scenes were painfully awkward; the scenes with the marooned Duke and courtiers almost unwatchable; and the closing masque of Iris, Ceres and Juno staged like a kind of eisteddford, complete with excruciatingly lame choreography and musical score. The Stephano-Trinculo-Caliban comic subplot scenes were more successful; and the Prospero-Ariel scenes had real pathos, accentuated by Sam Waterston’s somewhat shaky but still forceful presence as Prospero (a part he famously played forty years ago), in which physical and emotional fragility were poignantly heightened by a deeply felt connection with the text. If both play and role can be read as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage as a playwright, here there was a sense of an ageing actor contemplating his own twilight. When he stepped forward to deliver his final quavering appeal to the audience – ‘Let your indulgence set me free’ – I had a lump in my throat. Sometimes great works speak to us even more revealingly in productions that miss the mark completely, or in actors who identify with an aspect of their character all too closely.

Later that night after I got back to my apartment in Williamsburg I wandered down to the ferry terminal a couple of blocks away. It was a Saturday night, and there was a small gathering of revellers scattered around the park benches on the lawn overlooking the jetty. I found a place to sit and gazed out across the water at the lights of Manhattan, feeling a little like Woody Allen, but without my own version of Diane Keaton sitting there beside me.

*

The next morning – it was a Sunday, the end of my first week in New York – I headed downtown to the Film Forum for another cinephilic indulgence: a marathon screening of Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu trilogy. Over six hours in total of beautifully restored black-and-white neo-realism, the films tell the story of a young boy who grows up in an Indian village, moves to the city with his family, moves to an even bigger city as a promising student, has a serendipitous marriage, finds love, and finally becomes a father, in the face of a series of increasingly devastating personal losses. Based on a famous Indian Bildungsroman, in some ways it’s more like a pilgrim’s progress, with a spiritual dimension and luminous beauty that set it apart from the Italian or French neo-realist films of Rossellini or Renoir that inspired it.

Just before the last screening began of Apu’s World, I glanced at my smartphone in the darkness of the cinema, and there was an email from my wife. I began reading it, and felt my world begin to dissolve.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Prospero says at the end of the pageant in the last scene of The Tempest.

New York, my fellowship, my sense of reality, and apparently my marriage, had melted into air.

Into thin air.

*

Humph’s third and final Postcard from New York will be posted next week.

Postcard from New York, Minneapolis and Chicago

The Sound and the Fury (Elevator Repair Service); Macbeth (Public Theatre Mobile Shakespeare Unit); Wise Blood (The Soap Factory/Walker Art Centre); Moby Dick (Looking Glass Theatre)

It’s almost six weeks since I arrived in New York to begin the fourth month of my Fellowship, after spending the first three in the UK and Europe. So much has happened since then – in my personal life as well as in terms of the performance training and research that’s been at the core of my itinerary – that I’ve had neither the time nor the mental space to write. The next few Postcards will I hope make up for my long silence, at least in terms of the theatre I’ve seen, the context in which I’ve seen it, and the reflections it’s inspired.

I initially touched down in New York for a mere two days, before continuing on to Minneapolis for a two-week workshop with physical improvisation company The Bodycartography Project. On this first brief stopover in Manhattan, I stayed in a small shared apartment on the Lower East Side overlooking 2^nd Avenue, just around corner from the heart of the Off-Broadway theatre scene. My Airbnb host was a nervy young guy who was keen to show me his business card, which declared him to be in the Bedbug Detection industry – a thriving concern in New York apparently. He then introduced me to his business partner and chief asset, a friendly and rather excitable beagle whom he’d invested a great deal of time and money in training. He insisted on demonstrating the dog’s prowess by hiding a small plastic vial of bedbugs in the living room and then encouraging her to sniff them out, but after a cursory search she seemed more interested in joining me on the sofa.

Only in New York.

*

The day after my arrival I stroll a couple of blocks across town to The Public Theatre to see a three-hour matinee performance of The Sound and the Fury: a restaging by experimental ensemble Elevator Repair Service of the first chapter of William Faulkner’s great modernist novel; the production originally premiered at The New York Theatre Workshop in 2008. The chapter in question is a stream-of-consciousness narrative recording the sensations and memories (the various strands being interwoven and often barely distinguishable) of an intellectually disabled thirty-three-year-old man with a mental age of three who belongs to a declining aristocratic Southern family which includes his hyperchondriacal mother, his two surviving but unstable brothers, and his sexually wayward sister, as well as the struggling family of black servants who support them. It’s an almost impossible task to stage it – and in a way that’s the whole point.

I’ve seen two other productions by ERS that have toured to Australia over the years: the monumental Gatz, a seven-hour verbatim rendering of The Great Gatsby, which was read aloud by one of the cast, while he and the others also took on roles in the story; and The Select, a more playful (and more play-like) staging of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The Sound and The Fury completes the company’s ‘American trilogy’, which by no means exhausts or even defines their repertoire or focus, as their work has ranged from stagings of court transcripts to original commissioned plays. If anything, I’d describe them as an ensemble company with a special interest in the suspension of disbelief – that uniquely theatrical gap between form and content that lies between what’s seen and heard onstage and what occurs in the mind’s eye of the audience. Hence their attraction to staging works of literature precisely as ‘impossible tasks’, an approach which resembles less a conventional process of adaptation than an expanded notion of verbatim theatre.

They’re led by director John Collins, formerly an associate with The Wooster Group, with whom he worked primarily as a sound designer, and whose directorial approach is primarily task-based rather than prescriptive. Productions are developed over long periods of time by allowing the cast to solve problems and generate material themselves in response to proposed texts. In other words, he creates the conditions of possibility for them to make their own performances, which he then shapes and edits in production. This permits a sense of ownership and freedom on the part of the performers which is immediately evident when watching them onstage. It’s like watching kids playing in front of your eyes, in a state of focused flow.

In the event, The Sound and The Fury is a much more demanding production (and novel) than Gatz or The Select.  If perhaps it doesn’t quite realise itself as completely or successfully as its precursors, this is arguably also true of the sprawling, incomplete and patchwork nature of Faulkner’s novel, in comparison with the gem-like perfection of Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s respective masterpieces. That said, I loved it; but then, I love the novel; and in both cases, it’s the magnificently quixotic failure of the exercise that’s an essential part of what I love about them; whereas the incredible feat of Gatz in particular was precisely the fact that it completely succeeded – and in doing so staged The Great Gatsby in a way that was far truer to the form and content of the novel than the excruciatingly sentimental and glamourized film versions.

As with Gatz, there’s no attempt with The Sound and the Fury to turn Faulkner’s novel (if it can even be described as such) into a play. A copy of the book gets passed around the stage and is sometimes read from (and sometimes not); the text is read or spoken more or less verbatim, including the words ‘he said’ or ‘she said’, which are hastily appended to lines of dialogue; actors play multiple characters, and (perhaps more confusingly) the same characters are played by multiple actors; the cast are diverse in terms of age, gender, appearance and cultural background, but there’s often a deliberate disregard and even tension between this and the characters they play. Some actors use ‘Southern’ accents, others not; costumes vary between contemporary streetclothes and makeshift signifiers of role; the set is a highly detailed, naturalistic and cluttered living room which in no way attempts to reproduce any literal setting from the novel, although the mélange of old furniture and family heirlooms evokes the echo-chamber of memory which is arguably its proper mental space; and there’s a similarly detailed use of sound (and sound effects) which resembles radio drama and is at times almost comically mimetic but at other times only tangentially related to the narrative.

Despite and even because of all this, the novel emerges for me with all the force and clarity of a hidden image in a picture-puzzle. In fact I’ve never experienced such a vivid rendition in the theatre of the imaginative process of reading itself – and reading this novel in particular. The slippages of time, place, character, memory and sensation correspond to those in Faulkner’s writing, and to Benjy’s consciousness (the title is of course a reference to Macbeth’s lines about life being ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’). No doubt, there’s a very New York tendency towards irony and intellectualisation in all this; in a way, ERS remains me of a smart, cool band like Talking Heads or Television in their heyday; but like those bands, their work is also edgy, funny, captivating and at times filled with a sharply aching sense of yearning. One would be hard pressed to find theatre of this intelligence and sophistication anywhere else; nor a genuine ensemble company like this, led by a director who knows how to throw his actors a bone and then let them go for it.

*

That night I return to The Public Theatre on impulse, to see an in-house production of Macbeth by the Public’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, which creates and tours work to prisons, shelters, recreation centers and other community-based sites. Running at about 70 minutes without an interval, it’s a lean, mean, heavily edited version of the play, which suits Shakespeare’s most episodic and randomly structured tragedy (especially in the later Acts, where whole scenes and characters can easily be cut without loss).

The production is lively and simple, and the performances have an engagingly natural sense of vernacular speech and body-language which is generally absent in Australian versions of Shakespeare, where actors often seem either trapped in a dated notion of ‘Englishness’ or equally artificial notions of ‘Australianness’, both of which are abiding symptoms of the cultural cringe that still afflicts us back home. The actor playing Macbeth is compelling, although I can’t help sensing a degree of self-involvement which gets in the way at times of the character and the verse; there’s a lot of extended pauses, eyeballing of the audience and other actors, and interpolated extra-syllabic grunts. Perhaps it reflects the intended performance context and audience for which the show was devised; or perhaps it’s flip-side of the vernacular quality I mentioned earlier – Macbeth meets On the Waterfront, so to speak. In this respect, perhaps there’s an American version of the cultural cringe, too, which manifests itself in the inverted form of a perpetual posture of rebellious defiance, as epitomised by the most famous graduates of The Actor’s Studio, from Brando and James Dean to Jack Nicholson, Pacino and De Niro. To be sure, the play is at least in part about disloyalty, but making its titular lead a rebel without a cause somewhat short-circuits the journey of his character.

In any case, something essential about Shakespeare gets lost in translation. I think it’s the heightened externalization of character, action, cosmos, and the language that expresses them – which is precisely what speaks to us across time and space. This is a play about witches and kings, ghosts and visions, heaven and hell, and ‘Pity, like a naked newborne babe, striding the blast’. If we don’t hear and see these things as if they were real, and not just the trappings of history or rhetoric, then in the end it’s all just ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

*

I left New York the next day, for two weeks in Minneapolis, where I spent my time in the workshop with Bodycartography. Here I experienced the best of ‘Minnesota nice’, staying in a charming sloping-roofed house with my delightful host and her daughter in the suburb of Longfellow, on a peaceful street lined with maples and populated by rabbits and squirrels hopping about on the front lawns and darting up and down the trees. My host lent me her bike, and I rode each day to the Tapestry Folk Dance Centre where the workshop was held. On weekends I made good use of the bike paths and greenways that traverse the city, and visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Centre, and closer to hand in Longfellow, the mighty Mississippi and Minnehaha Falls. I was in the Midwest all right.

I didn’t see any theatre – apart from an ambitious but disappointing opera based on Flannery O’Connor’s cult Southern Gothic novel Wise Blood. Actually it was more of an immersive-promenade site-specific installation-performance, co-commissioned by the Walker Art Centre and staged in the haunting environs of The Soap Factory, a rehabilitated found-venue in downtown Minneapolis.

As is often the case with site-specific theatre, the existing architecture and visual design were the outstanding features, with one of the show’s creators, Chris Larson, constructing an intricate set within the space for the audience and performers to wander through and inhabit. I was less impressed by the work of his co-creators: composer and librettist Anthony Gatto, and director Michael Sommers (who also performed in the show). The score was woefully uninteresting and (dare I say) one-note in mood and tempo (which is to say, relentlessly dirge-like, and utterly unsuited to the spiky and unpredictable nature of O’Connor’s writing); and the libretto was a clumsy attempt to foreshorten and reshuffle the structure of the novel, which lead to an incoherent Frankenstein’s monster that could satisfy neither newcomers nor afficionados. As for the direction: it failed to grapple with the elemetary challenge of immersive-promenade performance, which is both to justify and facilitate the audience having to remain on their feet while continually being herded around. 

I’ll have more to say about immersive and participatory theatre in the context of other shows I saw on my return to New York. Suffice to say that it’s become something of a craze at the moment, for reasons that I suspect have a lot to do with the influence of virtual reality and so-called reality TV (I say ‘so-called’ because of course the ‘reality’ in question is anything but real). This is not to gainsay the potential of the form; but without sufficient motivation in terms of content or craft in delivery the result can be little more than an elaborate gimmick, and this felt like the case here.

In sum: despite some outstanding work from the singers, actors, musicians and scenic artist, the creative minds behind Wise Blood left the unfortunate performers and audience high and dry – in other words, unable to connect with each other, or the story itself. Of course we all applauded dutifully at the end, with a sense of having been present at an important artistic achievement and cultural event; but I doubt whether anyone got much pleasure or enlightenment out of being there.

*

A week later, my workshop completed, I took the train back across the Midwest from Minneapolis to Chicago en route to New York, feeling a little like Nick Carraway at the end of The Great Gatsby, only in reverse. I decided to break my journey and spend a night and a day in Chicago: a city which struck me as kind of playground for architects, especially when it comes to skyscrapers from every era and in every conceivable style imaginable over the last century or so. I stayed in a hotel housed in a slender 1920s neo-gothic example sandwiched between two multistorey carparks on the Chicago River in the heart of downtown, directly opposite the glass-and-steel monstrosity of Trump Tower.

That night I went to hear Ricardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony. It was an all-Russian program: Tchaikovsky’s ‘Manfred’ Symphony preceded by Scriabin’s ‘Poem of Ecstasy’. Personally I found the Tchaikovsky a bloated and meandering work with some beautiful melodies but long stretches of uninspired histrionics, despite Muti’s best efforts to keep me focussed. The Scriabin on the other hand was wonderful: Debussy meets Richard Strauss, with a large dollop of Russian mysticism thrown in for good measure. I had a cheap seat up in the choir behind the orchestra, and the final climax (eight horns and an organ) almost blew the top of my head off (as Hemingway might have put it), as well as threatening to cause several coronary infarctions among the senior citizens of Chicago sitting alongside me.

*

The following morning I explored some of the architetural delights of the city, including the Chicago Cultural Centre (formerly the Chicago Public Library), an impressive late-19th Century neo-classical structure which is open to the community with an ongoing program of free exhibitions and concerts. Walking up the marble stairway into the vast hall where people once collected their books – surrounded by walls decorated with elaborate tiled mosaics under a huge Tiffany coloured-glass dome – was like entering the Mermaid’s Palace in Hans Andersen (or perhaps the Doge’s Palace in Venice). Upstairs was a (for me) revelatory exhibition of paintings by Jazz Age black artist Archibald Motley, who lived and worked in Chicago, Paris and finally Mexico, featuring vibrant and provocative images of street life in the black neighbourhoods of Chicago and Paris in the 1920s and 30s. They reminded me a little of the post-Expressionist ‘new objectivity’ and social caricature art of Georg Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann in Germany around the same time.

That afternoon I went to see a new stage version of Moby Dick, adapted and directed by David Caitlin for Chicago-based company Looking Glass Theatre. The performance went for about three hours, including two intervals and lots of gymnastics, aerial and trapeze work on ropes and swings, and climbing up and down a framework of curved metal scaffolding which was arched over the stage like the ribcage of a whale. Melville meets Cirque de Soleil. I wasn’t convinced. Performances from most of the cast (the men in particular) were disappointingly hammy. Much of the time, it felt like watching a Classics Illustrated comic-book version of the novel. The whales themselves were rather intriguingly represented by the women in the cast, variously singing, being hung upside down and having their long fabric dresses unwound and stripped from them like blubber (revealing the whalebone corsets beneath), and finally taking their revenge by dragging the leg-strapped Ahab offstage in a disappointingly lame climax (if you’ll pardon the pun).

It’s too bad the film of Orson Welles’s Moby Dick – Rehearsed hasn’t survived. Welles approached the adaptation of the novel as a metatheatrical exercise in representing the unrepresentable, using the framing device of an imaginary theatre company who stage the book using minimal resources (and casting himself as the Actor-Manager who takes on the role Ahab, needless to say). I can imagine seeing a compnay like Elevator Repair Service take a similar approach today.

Reflecting on the experience of seeing this and other literary adaptations on my travels, it struck me that the first thing to acknowledge about the task of putting works of literature onstage is what Freud (in relation to the work of dreams) called ‘considerations of representability’. In the case of Moby Dick, this means recognising that the whale is first and foremost a being of language – a figure of speech, so to speak – and perhaps even an instance of what Lacan would call (with no pun intended) ‘a floating signifier’. In short: the whale represents an idea in Ahab’s mind: a 'fatal image', and perhaps even an obsession, driven by what Freud called the death instinct. As such, it surely belongs offstage – a literally ‘obscene’ object of desire (from the Greek ob skene, meaning ‘off-stage’) that can’t appear or be represented directly, much like Macbeth’s ‘dagger of the mind’ (a symbolic phallus if every there was one: ‘Come, let me clutch thee; I have thee not, and yet I see thee still!’). Perhaps it's this dimension of the off-stage, the absent, the Symbolic, which makes the staging of literature (and indeed everything else, including desire itself) possible: in the theatre, in our dreams and fantasies, and even in the unconscious acting-out of our lives.

That night I boarded the train again, feeling more and more like Nick Carroway, to continue my long journey east: back to New York City, where more thrills and spills – theatrical and personal – awaited me.

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Humph’s second Postcard from New York follows next week.

Postcard from Berlin 3

Maxim Gorki Theater, Common Ground; Komische Oper, West Side Story/Moses und Aron; Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus, John Gabriel Borkman

After seeing Event for a Stage (the last work reviewed in my previous Postcard) I’m left pondering the questions it raises about being an actor, performing in front of an audience, serving a director’s vision, and the peculiar self-consciousness (or self-abnegation) all of this entails. I don’t have any answers, but I’m ready to be an audience-member again and forget myself for a while.

Common Ground is the Maxim Gorki Theater production selected for inclusion in this year’s Theatertreffen. It’s a collaborative work of documentary theatre directed by Israeli theatre-maker Yael Ronen, and co-written by her and the cast – most of whom are from former Yugoslavia, apart from one (Orit Namias) who identifies herself as Israeli (and interested in ‘conflict resolution’), and another (Niels Bormann) who identifies himself as ‘German’ (and gay). These two are the chief comic foils in the piece (and also the chief points of access for the audience), as they vainly struggle to understand the complex identity-politics that still divides the rest of the cast – from each other and more deeply within themselves.

A brief warm-up act by Orit in English – simulaneously and subsersively mistranslated by Niels into German, while alternating surtitles in both languages keep track of what’s really going on – is followed by a high-speed group flashback through the 90s during which the individual cast members relive their pre-war youth. The rest of the play reconstructs the process of how they found (or failed to find) ‘common ground’ while developing the show – primarily through a collective research-trip to post-war Bosnia.

All this might sound didatic or self-indulgent, but to my relief the script, staging and performances are refreshingly witty, physical and sexy – more so in fact than any other theatre I’ve seen so far in Berlin. The show also doesn’t avoid the complexities of its subject matter in the name of facile notions of personal, political or artistic ‘closure’: there are no happy or unhappy endings here, and tensions remain unresolved. Most importantly, the actors seem fully empowered as collaborative theatre-makers rather than mere performers executing the conceptual whims of an auteur-director (unlike the Susanne Kennedy and Castellucci versions of Fassbinder and Holderlin/Sophocles I sat through the previous week).

The most interesting and effective theatrical ‘device’ is that two of the young female actors tacitly swap roles and play each other: a young Bosnian Muslim whose father was killed in a massacre, and a young Bosnian Serb whose father supervised the same massacre (and is still an active politician in a post-war Serbian enclave). The two women meet at an audition, become best friends, eventually realise their tangled connection, and embrace at the end of the show. The role-swap isn’t explicitly acknowledged, but hinted at when one corrects the other over tiny details during the latter’s monologue about ‘her’ father’s death. It’s later confirmed for me by one of the actors in question, when I chat with her in halting German at the theatre bar after the show. We linger in the foyer for a post-show concert of ‘Balkan Soul’ sung by another female actor from Sarajevo (whom she refers to as ‘her hero’), and I think about the ironies of an Israeli director coming to Berlin to work with a cast of Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims on a play about genocide.

I remember earlier that day seeing a sheet hanging out of the upper-floor window of an apartment building in Kreuzberg, and painted with the words: ‘No border, no nation.’ Tonight in the Maxim Gorki Theatre at least, those words ring true. In a similar vein, after every performance I attend at the Theatertreffen, the actors return to the stage and read aloud from a manifesto, ‘My Right Is Your Right!’, calling for the right of asylum seekers to move and live freely within the EU and to be protected from discrimination. ‘The asylum policies in Germany and Europe have failed,’ the manifesto proclaims. ‘The processes and dealings with refugees in Berlin have shown that this city is not the open metropolis it claims to be.’ I think with shame of my own country’s current policy of ‘stopping the boats’. Old habits, it seems, die hard, in Europe as well as back home.

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The following night I’m at the Komische Oper for Barrie Kosky’s production of West Side Story. Barrie is in my opinion easily the most significant theatre and opera director to have come out of Australia in the last twenty-five years, comparable with Jim Sharman or Neil Armfield in terms of theatrical instinct, stagecraft and showmanship, but otherwise utterly different in terms of his hybrid aesthetic – which is broadly cosmopolitan, postmodernist (or perhaps more specifically post-surrealist), iconoclastically Jewish and high camp in equal measure. At its best, his work achieves a sense of delirium and even nightmare like nothing else I’ve seen onstage; I still count his productions of The Dybbuk with Gilgul Theatre and The Lost Echo with the STC Actors Company as two of the most exhilarating and terrifying nights I’ve had in the theatre or anywhere else. He also led the way for a new generation of young male Australian directors on the national and international stage that includes Benedict Andrews, Matt Lutton and Simon Stone. Since 2012 he's been the Intendant and Chief Director at the Komische Opera; after his first season, it was voted ‘Opera House of the Year’. Under his leadership the company stages equally radical versions of baroque, classical, romantic and modern operas alongside Broadway musicals and Viennese operettas. I’m equally impressed by the fact that he’s had screens installed in the back of the seats with surtitles in Turkish as well as English, German and French. His stated philosophy is not to try to please everyone, but simply to do what he loves. With houses at 85% of capacity, it seems to be working; his contract was recently extended to 2022.

Before being appointed Indendant he scored a huge success at the Komische Oper with Kiss Me Kate, and has since championed the Broadway musical as a vital offshoot of the European operatic tradition transplanted to America by the Jewish cultural diaspora (the same argument can be extended to the Hollywood film industry, as Simon Schama does in The Story of the Jews). West Side Story fits the bill perfectly, with its brilliant Bernstein score, scintillating Sondheim lyrics, ambitious original choreography by Jerome Robbins (replaced in this production with a thrilling new dance score by Otto Pichler) and book by Arthur Laurents – the whole thing inspired by Romeo and Juliet and transplanted to the youth gangs of 1950s immigrant New York (or in this production, a contemporary globalized city that could be anywhere in the world). The staging is lean and minimal (apart from a spectacular mirror-ball sequence), leaving the music and drama to speak for themselves. In fact it’s probably the least ‘interventionist’ Kosky production I’ve seen – apart from one song, the heart-rending ‘Somewhere’, whose Utopian sense of longing is heightened by the addition of an elderly couple who dance and hold hands with the two young leads (engagingly played and sung by Jasmina Sakr and Michael Pflumm).

As with Common Ground the previous night, I find the whole show an intelligent, visceral and deeply moving statement about tribalism and love. It’s an extra treat hearing Bernstein’s rhythmically biting, colouristically dazzling, melodically and harmonically ravishing score played by a full orchestra. All in all, Barrie makes a convincing case for the work as a cornerstone of the 20^th century musical-dramatic repertoire, operatic or otherwise.

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On Saturday night I return to the Festpielhaus for my final sample from the Theatertreffen: the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus production of Ibsen’s penultimate play, John Gabriel Borkman, directed by Karin Henkel.

Ibsen’s late works mark a return from the social and domestic realism of his middle period to the more psychological and symbolic landscapes of his early verse-dramas Brandt and Peer Gynt. In fact the last act of John Gabriel Borkman literally takes us out of the drawing-room and back into the wilderness, as the two main characters (and former lovers, who – as always in Ibsen – have denied themselves and each other for the sake of ‘the world’) leave the house and go out into the snowbound forest to die; the play’s successor, When We Dead Awaken, ends even more spectacularly with its lovers buried in an avalanche. These last two plays are thus as ‘literally’ unstageable as the first two – which is to not to say that they can’t be staged at all, but rather that they can’t be staged literally. In this respect, they anticipate the 'dream plays' of Strindberg and the advent of Expressionism.

Henkel’s production makes broad gestures in support of this stylistic transition: once again, all the actors wear masks (which are sporadically and to all intents and purposes randomly removed and then replaced again); Borkman’s wife Gunhild (Julia Wieninger) periodically rushes over to an organ at the side of the stage and interrupts the dialogue with a deranged hymn; Borkman himself (Josef Ostnendorf) is visible upstage from the beginning of the play lying on a slab as if prematurely emtombed (rather than being heard invisibly walking up and down in his room upstairs until Act Two); and everyone’s movements and delivery are exaggerated beyond the edge of parody (the mortally yet mysteriously ailing Ella Rentheim, in a show-stealing turn by Lina Beckmann, is given a twitching, spasmodic physicality that has the audience continually laughing out loud).

It’s all entertaining and clever enough, in a post-Brechtian pantomine kind of way, but I can’t help feeling that the play is being kept at a cerebral and mocking distance rather than being seriously engaged with. Ironically, the most successful scene theatrically is arguaby the weakest-written in the play: the melodramatic confrontation in Act Three between the estranged parents, their son Erhart (Jan-Peter Kampwirth), his English mistress Mrs Wilton (Kate Strong) and their young and willing helpmeet Frida (Gala Winter). It’s played as a camp comedy-of-manners, but completely avoids the sense of catastrophe being transmitted from one generation to the next, which is Ibsen’s obsessive preoccupation. Conversely, the transcendent Fourth Act – which concludes with Borkman’s death on a bench in the snow overlooking a fjord, while the rival twin sisters Gunhilde and Ella take hands over his corpse (‘We two shadows – over the dead man’) – is here reduced to a non-event taking place back inside the house.

One wonders, what was the point of staging it at all? For a production of a play about facing the past, the whole thing seems more like an exercise in denial. The program is replete with the usual obligatory quotes from Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud and Canetti, but the production itself has nothing to say to me – except perhaps, that if you’re going to tackle Ibsen, especially the late plays, you need to be up for the climb. As Ella says to Borkman at the start of Act Four, as they gaze out over the fjord and the mountains beyond: ‘We have often sat on this bench before, and looked out into a much further distance. It was the dreamland of our life. And now that land is buried in snow.’ As with all great plays: if you can’t go there, don’t go there. It’s as simple as that.

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I’m back at the Komische Oper on Sunday for another new Kosky production: Schönberg’s Moses Und Aron. Arguably the composer’s masterpiece, it’s rarely performed, as much because of his forbidding reputation as the work’s actual musical and dramatic challenges. The score is relentlessly demanding, and unlike most operatic music, non-figurative (although still composed of musical ‘figures’), in the sense that it doesn’t represent what’s happening onstage directly (or at least not according to the habitual connotations of tonal music) but in a rigorously codified and symbolic form, according to logic of the twelve-tone system invented by Schönberg himself. In other words: unlike the music of Wagner, Strauss or the Hollywood cinema-scores they spawned, it’s not a soundtrack providing dramatic or narrative cues but a pure language of its own, with its own grammar and syntax but free from the baggage of semantics. As such it’s an appropriate musical expression for the content of the work, which deals with the contradiction (and mutual entanglement) between pure thought and figurative language, as exemplified by the two Biblical brothers: Moses (here sung by Wagnerian baritone Robert Hayward, although his part is mostly scored as Sprechgesang or 'sung-spoken'), who experiences the thought of God directly through visions and can work miracles; and the more mellifluous Aron (tenor John Daszak), who can interpret and communicate these ‘messages’ to the masses through the medium of language, but only by reducing and betraying their content in the process.

If all this sounds abstract and schematic (and indeed is in Schönberg’s somewhat didactic libretto) Barrie’s gift for visual storytelling vividly brings it to life by linking the story and themes to the entire post-Biblical history of the Jews, and the paradoxes and paroxysms of monotheistic culture and civilization – up to and including Zionism, Broadway, Hollywood and the Holocaust (the production commemorates the 70^th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945). Moses and Aron are a pair of roadside magicians performing cheap conjuring tricks; the chorus become the gullible contemporary masses; the Dance of the Golden Calf is performed by gold-attired showgirls (male and female) from the 1920s; and the final sacrificial orgy is enacted by the entire chorus brandishing mannequins which are then torn apart and piled up to form a genocidal mass-grave, while being filmed from the wings by two figures using old-fashioned movie cameras and wearing oversized head-masks that look like Freud and Theodor Herzl. Unlike West Side Story, the action is crammed into a relatively confined space, with a low ceiling, large circular down-lights and a steep wide staircase at the back as the only entrance and exit. It looks a little like a hotel lobby or theatre foyer, unfurnished except for a motley collection of Persian rugs on the floor. Moses emerges by unrolling himself from inside one at the beginning, and covers himself again at the end.

Musically and dramatically though, the night belongs to the Komische Oper Chorus, and to Barrie’s stagecraft when it comes to mobilising them. There must be at least a hundred of them onstage and singing for practically the duration of the performance (which runs for about an hour and 45 minutes without interval); and instead of the stand-and-deliver approach which is customary for traditional opera choruses (let alone for a score as demanding as this), here they’re in a continuous state of frenzied animation, physically as well as emotionally. It’s a remarkable feat – and a compelling image of mass psychology in action. It’s also in keeping with the distinctive performance tradition of the company, whose founding director Walter Felsenstein was famous for his Bewegungsregie or ‘movement-direction’. Musically, the whole thing is held together by the masterful conducting of Vladimir Jurowski. It’s hard to believe the same orchestra was doing West Side Story here only two nights ago.

When Moses sings the last words of Act Two (literally, ‘Das Wort mich fehlen!’ –‘Words fail me!’) and covers himself again with a rug before sinking into the pile of mannequins, there’s a prolonged silence as the curtain slowly descends. Schönberg never completed the score for Act Three; but I can’t imagine anything that could possibly follow that devastating final image.

*

On my last day in Berlin, I decide to visit my grandparents. I catch the U-Bahn to Potzdamer Platz, walk to the corner of Hannah-Arendt-Strasse and thread my way through the vast field of concrete stelae until I find the steps that lead down to the underground information centre of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. I enlist the help of a young man who works there to navigate the computer touch-screens, and eventually we find two entries that seem to match: Max Bauer, born in 1875, and Regine Bauer, born in 1887; same wartime address in Vienna; same transport numbers to Theresienstadt concentration camp on 10/7/1942; same transport numbers to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on 28/10/1944. Their prisoner numbers are the same as each other's except for the final digit, for both transportations. I hope that means they travelled together, right up until the end.

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Humph’s next Postcard will be from New York.