Posts Tagged ‘theater’
1Here I am, covered in dried sweat and someone else’s body glitter, nursing aching feet, with a glass of $4 Coke still sizzling my gut. However I am no longer in my black tights and silvery-gold lamé miniskirt (PJs being more suitable for blogging). Clearly, I just got back from the theater.
What they say about A.R.T.’s latest production, “The Donkey Show,” is mostly true. Yes, it’s an attempt at revitalizing its naughty experimental side. Yes, it blurs the lines between theater and clubbing. Yes, it’s loud and unusual and “nothing you’ve ever seen before.” And yes, there is sexiness by the bucketful.
Aurélia’s Oratorio re-opens July 22 at the A.R.T. Yang and I saw it last December with our families, but in the end-of-year hustle and bustle, I forgot to write about it. So now that it’s coming back, I’ll take this opportunity to make up for the blog post that never was.
First impressions: it was a strange, strange event, like none I’d ever seen before. (Unusual even for the daring A.R.T. =)) In this show that was a mashup of vaudeville, dance, comedic skits, stage illusionry, and a smidge of Cirque de Soleil-esque acrobatics, there was a lot of velvet, a lot of lace, a lot of antique toys and furniture. The feeling conveyed is decidedly a rich, sweet, nostalgic, lost-in-time kind of Romanticism.
(There is no Part 1, unfortunately. Part 1 would have been about the ART’s production of Mamet’s Romance, but I neither liked it nor had much of a reaction to it. I know, that’s like the worst thing you can say about any work of art, but it just… didn’t touch me in any way at all.)
Part 2, on the other hand, was fantabulous! Yang and I went last Sunday to see the opening night showing of The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. They were performed at the Zero Arrow Theatre (where the ART’s more “experimental” stuff is shown), which on that night was transformed, a la Symphony Hall on Pops nights, into a classy cafe/lounge setting with chairs and diminuative tables and waiters serving drinks throughout the performances.
Tonight we (the hausmates + I) saw the A.R.T.’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, a play that is both meta and hysterical to the extreme. Fortunately, both aspects were tempered with a healthy dose of self-awareness (so it was even kinda meta-meta), and therefore it was completely worthwhile, if a little exhausting.
The play starts with a play-within-a-play. A precocious but decidedly misunderstood young playwright tries to put on a play to impress his egotistical actress-mother and to win the heart of his leggy true love. The play goes on to involve these characters and other countryside families/acquaintances in the most geometrically complex of love polygons, resulting in 150 hardcore minutes of screaming, feelings-declaring, angst-wracked writhing, suitcase-launching, shooting, and also, at one point, air-guitaring to Guns ‘n Roses Sweet Child of Mine. Oh, and puddles. Splashing through, kneeling in, dragging selves across, and lying fetal-style in puddles—a wonderful continuation of A.R.T.’s tradition of having fantastic set designs. (Remember that car from Julius Caesar?)
At the end of the 2.5 hours, we were were all mentally and physically spent. It was the kind of play that tests your endurance. The melodramatic theater fluff was definitely masterfully executed. Especially Karen MacDonald—as of this play I have now seen her play 2 tragically delusional middle-aged femme fatales to perfection. So at first it was easy to find the humor in the clichés and satirical portrayal of 19th century popular theater. But slowly, as the plot drew you in and you slowly realized these characters aren’t going to find any sort of redemption whatsoever, it was just kind of… crushing, actually. In the end, no one finds true love. No one realizes their artistic hopes. No one ends up living the life they hoped for (except for Nina. Maybe. But it was actually kind of hard to read her character because the actress had a kind of flat, Emma-Thompson, Angels in America way of intoning everything). Nearly everyone ends up spiritually alone, resigned to brutal reality, and/or dead. And everyone ended up soaked.
You’re probably not supposed to care that much about the plot or the characters, but instead you’re supposed to look at the entire play as a tentatively Symbolist experiment concocted at a time when theater was trying to reconfigure itself and “find new forms.” But from my standpoint that’s kind of impossible. Right as the proverbial curtains were drawn and we stood up to leave, Jess said to me, “Man, now I never want to be an artist.” According to this play, if you want to be groundbreaking, you’re only going to end up emotionally strangled/creatively stifled/unrequited/unforgiven/alone/ultimately shot. Sure, you’ll be the only one in mid-19th-century Russia with a Macbook Pro, but I mean… doesn’t seem worth it, yeah?
It was a good theatrical experience nonetheless. (Yang is slowly collecting all of the A.R.T. program booklets in his jacket pocket. So far we’ve got 3… A.R.T. has been nothing short of awesome so far, so we’re hoping for more.)
Afterwards we went to Charlie’s and shared 2 plates of waffle fries, a plate of buffalo wings, and a plate of mozzarella sticks. It was the most disgustingly gratifying dinner I ever had. Mmm, bar snaxxxx, chased down with [root] beer (hey, it can be an effective social lubricant) and loud yelling over the music. Late-night bar-going is fun in moderation. I think this was my first time, honestly, out past 11 at a bar, but it was pretty much what I thought it would be. Wouldn’t do it everyday, but I now see why people enjoy it so.
My company has a lovely holiday tradition of taking the whole gang (it’s a pretty small company) and their locally-stationed loved ones out for dinner and a show. Dinner is always at Fire+Ice (ahh, the high school memories), the show is the annual traditional song- and dance-filled performance called the Christmas Revels, and my boss’ name is Carol.
This was the first year I have been able to actually go, and Yang was also there. I had never seen a Revels performance before, though I’d been hearing about it extensively, as my company has had a very close relationship with them and designed a lot of stuff for them in the past. (I even got to do a logo comp for the Revels SummersDay festival, back in my internship days.) I was very excited to finally get to see them performing.
Revels is a tradition-inspired song, dance, and story performance company. They are nationally based, but have a pretty big presence in Boston. Their work is largely focused on celebrating the seasons through joyful family-oriented events/shows, and they take cues from a variety of different ethnic traditions. The Christmas Revels in particular seems to be focused on European traditions, which makes sense as it’s Christmas. Every year the Christmas Revels has a different theme, but there are some unifying recurring elements such as a Mummer’s Play and a Lord of the Dance audience-participation dance. Last year was a spectacular Balkan theme, which Carol says was absolutely stunning and soul-stirring but apparently not very well-received because it was too “esoteric.” (Yeah… what??) So this year they really toned it down. The theme/plot was a loose rendition of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, which is essentially a love story, but Revels adapted it to be more of a portrait of a traditional English village celebration of Christmas.
The performance was centered on one of the themes of the book, the dichotomy of tradition/past and innovation/future. Though I found the heavily-accented dialogue hard to understand (costume beards too thick? ^^;) I managed to gather that the light plot was about the arrival of a new harmonium (a symbol of progressive technology at the time) at this little quaint village, and there was an altogether spirited outcry by the townspeople against it replacing the charming old quire and boisterous caroling/mumming tradition. In the end, cherished tradition won over of course, and the children got their parade, and there was much caroling and dancing both joyful and somber.
It was a charming performance through and through, and though I knew close to nothing about English villages and old-school carols, I found myself belting out the lyrics to Donna Nobis Pacem next to a very expertly harmonizing Yang (and, on my other side, co-worker John, who was mumble-singing for all he was worth). Unlike any of the other holiday-season shows I’ve seen in my entire life (and I think I’ve seen a fair share), this one was truly “toned down” in many ways. The costumes were not fabulous by any means, nor where there awesome displays of stage pyrotechnics (there was some snow and dry ice, though), nor dazzling displays of virtuosic skill. There was just good, solid charm, and some beautifully rich singing voices. And, after you walk out of there, you realize you don’t need any of the showy fabulous to really feel fabulous about the season and all it entails.
Additionally, I think the show raises an interesting and forever relevant question: that we should all carefully consider, as the relentless march of time continues, what things we should keep and preserve for posterity. We should question whether new things can rightfully replace the old just by virtue of being the “latest and greatest.” The answer that Revels proposes is a resounding “no.” That there are traditions that bind together and warm hearts, like songs requiring a crowd’s unified voice to sing, and dances that remind us of the rigors and challenges that humanity has overcome, and all that good stuff, that we should definitely keep. And I think, after seeing Christmas Revels, they are right to believe so.
Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice, 2008 world… here’s to hoping 2009 is just as songful, danceful, and joyful for all… if not more.
