It’s a start, but where do you go from here? How do you review a play when the only adequate response is silent wonder? When analysis feels like a scalpel applied to a living thing, a rare specimen of the purest form of theatre—the Holy?

But you have to write something. So you describe your favorite scenes: the doomed survivors swaying and singing softly in the guts of Greek galleys, or the mother uttering strangled cries as she pours a libation into her daughter’s cupped hands, or the victim tumbling down the green-lit ramp in slow motion like a floating corpse drifting down a sickly stream. You praise the blend of musical styles and musical languages—Greek, Latin, Nahuatl, Navajo. You applaud the dedicated international ensemble, director Andrei Serban and composer Elizabeth Swados for creating this extraordinary work, La MaMa for producing it and keeping it running worldwide since its 1974 premiere.

Or you wax theoretical, go on about the unnerving duality of spectator as playgoer and conquered Trojan, about how the production immerses the audience in the tragedy almost to the point of complicity. Or maybe you use the play as a springboard for an erudite thesis: The Birth of Modern Tragedy from the Spirit of International Cooperation; The Paradox of Euripides as Proto-Feminist Playwright Writing for an Audience of Men; The Theater of Dionysus as the Birthplace of Empathy for the Conquered.

In the end you might even take a subjective turn and tell of the audience member who nearly fainted and had to be walked out. Or describe how it felt to be crammed in an elevator with a group of giggling children dressed as if for an Easter pageant, only to hear them hissing demonically at a funeral pyre an hour later.

But as an accurate account of what we saw and felt tonight, all of this is somehow inadequate. And as I reread what I’ve written and compare it to the vast wonder of “The Trojan Women,” I feel as if I’ve played the part of the learned astronomer in Walt Whitman’s poem:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

If nothing else, maybe my review will compel someone to rise and go see this work of cosmic proportions before it closes December 15th. And that would be a good and useful thing. Because to see it is to be reminded that the theatre is not dying. Troy is fallen, but tragedy lives on. Attic Greek is no dead language as long as there are people alive to speak it onstage. And the message of empathy for the conquered is a timeless one that echoes through the ages.

“The Trojan Women” is playing at La MaMa through December 15th. For more information visit lamama.org.

The post La MaMa’s “Trojan Women” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

Max: The culinary link is obvious in what is billed an “immersive performance dinner party,” but less so in the case of “Infinite Wrench.” Really only the menu structure is food-related. You consult a menu of two-minute plays and shout the number you wish to see performed. With any luck you are heard over the crowd. And the crowd is large.

Kirill (consulting menu): Don’t forget number 27. “We will stop the clock and read out the digits of pi while dancing to Cotton Eyed Joe on a loop until someone in the audience uses this dollar to buy Katie a $1 pizza slice from the place around the corner on 2nd ave between E 4 and E 5 streets.” If we had reacted faster we could have won that whole pizza.

Max: I preferred watching them dance and listening to make sure they weren’t faking the digits of pi.

Kirill: How could you tell?

Max: I know pi when I hear it. In any case, I was in no mood for pizza at “Infinite Wrench.” My appetite was gone from the cold hotdog I was served in “Now Serving.” Or perhaps it was when our hostesses poured ranch dressing all over their faces. A strong image, but not exactly appetizing.

Kirill: The moment before was my favorite, when the frog shouted “SALAD!” and wheeled in a machine that sprayed the audience with rucola.

Max: Was it the frog or the pig? Either way, I loved the useless machines. Like the conveyor belt that carried dirty plates down the middle of the table and dumped them in a filthy pile. The machines I suppose are the link to pataphysics. Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even” comes to mind.

Kirill: There were thematic links also. But we should decide which play to review first. We can’t very well bounce between them like this or the reader will be confused.

Max: Both plays are essentially controlled confusion. The review should reflect that. As a whole, “Infinite Wrench” did a better job of keeping things confusing. Only for the “message” pieces did the insanity grind to a halt. And then the message was so sane I felt I was being hit on the head with Ubu’s debraining spoon.

Kirill: I thought you, with your radical politics, would like those plays. For example, the one where Michaela Farrell pours water into a glass to Greta Thunberg’s UN speech until it overflows onto the floor. That was clever. And Michaela looked so much like Greta…

Max: There is a time and place for serious messages. A UN summit is one. An absurdist play[s] is not. How are we to laugh at the meaninglessness of life one instant and care about our extinction the next? I need time to care about anything, even global warming. Certainly more than the ten seconds between plays.

Kirill: I disagree. To me the contrast is an excellent jarring device. A wrench in the machine, so to speak. Even when I question the message, I welcome the change in tone.

Max: Your seriousness is your least pataphysical quality.

Kirill: Oh, and what is my most?

Max: Your nonexistence. And this is where “Wrench” parts ways with pataphysics, which programatically refuses to exist or take anything seriously, including itself. It’s where the show reveals itself to be pataphysics with no apostrophe rather than ‘pataphysics proper. It’s an American Alfred Jarry sobering up on Sundays rather than drinking ether nonstop in a Parisian shack on stilts.

Kirill: I doubt many readers will know what you’re talking about. As usual I’ll do the actual work of explaining. ‘Pataphysics is the science of exceptions, an imaginary science founded by French Symbolist Alfred Jarry and conceived as being as far from metaphysics as metaphysics is from physics. The apostrophe in front of the P is generally taken to signify the science pursued deliberately, as by Marcel Duchamp, a Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique.

Max: That was a serious explanation, and therefore wrong. Readers are better off confused than thinking they understand something which by definition cannot be understood.

Kirill: In any case, not all the serious plays in “Wrench” had obvious messages. Yael Haskal showed surprising depth as a young woman simply trying communicate with her mother. And there was a play about M&M’s that fit the overall style yet still made a point about marketing and corporations.

Max: True, that one did work. My favorite though was the five ages of a king as portrayed by a green apple. The homage to Magritte was clear, and the stabbing of the apple recalled Macbeth, which of course inspired Ubu Roi.

Kirill: You’re really reaching with your references, Max. And besides, I think “Now Serving” is closer in spirit to Jarry and ‘pataphysics. The useless machines, the ubuesque fat man with a pig snout, the banal small talk recalling Ionesco, Grand Satrap of the Collège.

Max: You saw all this coming, which is why you brought your Dr. Faustroll.

Kirill: I admit, I wanted to brush up for our review. And at some point in the dinner party the book got splattered with some kind of blue goo. At first I was upset, but then I realized that nothing could be more pataphysical, as when Duchamp’s “Bride” cracked in transit and he accepted the cracks as part of the piece. The book is now complete. Or rather, its incompleteness is complete.

Max: The culinary link is also more clear in “Now Serving.” Certain audience members sit at a long table and are served a feast of “haute vaginal cuisine” while their servers make pointless small talk into microphones. From our seats in the gallery the diners looked somewhat uncomfortable, don’t you think? Both with being watched and with what they were eating. Especially during the long periods of silence.

Kirill: Discomfort was probably the point, but I have to agree about the silence. I imagine it had something to do with the diners taking longer than the writers expected. Still, there were some fine ideas. The Wonder Bread dropping from the ceiling. The phone booth as a loudspeaker. The wine from IV bags. And I did enjoy the complimentary Junior Mints.

Max: You forget the large cigarettes and other props drawn on white paper. Very Jarryesque. They say he once went to the opera in a paper shirt with a tie drawn on it.

Kirill: Yes, I told you that. The sets, props, and costumes do belong in the Musée Patamécanique. But I must say I thought the piece lacked an arc of any kind. Most of the fun came at the beginning, when all was new and surprising. Why not build those excellent elements into a story of some sort, even a simple one? Otherwise the last dish is served and the night simply ends.

Max: Story is the most overrated dish on the menu. What do I care about the fate of imaginary people? It’s hard enough to care about real ones. And besides, Kirill, this spirit of radical experimentation is exactly what drove our Berlin Schreiereien and what we started Reviews from Underground to promote. And while we are on the subject: I have to say our editor has been far too lavish lately in his praise of the straightforward and conventional. And I dare him not to cut that statement [Dare accepted – Ed.].

Kirill: He should probably cut something, as we’ve gone on far too long, even for a long-form review. Even the name tag they gave me at “Infinite Wrench” says so. How did they know?

“The Infinite Wrench” runs every weekend except the last two in December at the Kraine Theatre. Visit nyneofuturists.org for more. “Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses” ran from November 2-16 at The Collapsable Hole. Learn more at radiohole.com. For an introduction to ‘pataphysics, check out ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide.

The post Appetite for Deconstruction or A Culinary Guide to ‘Pataphysics: Max and Kirill Review “Now Serving” and “The Infinite Wrench” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

“Why?” It’s a question familiar to anyone who has ever schlepped a set through the subway or spent food money on costumes and rent money on rehearsal space. It’s a question that plagues us when our show closes and nothing survives but a few online reviews and a grainy video. When we see our colleagues in film and television landing distribution deals. “Why?” Or better yet, “What on earth are we thinking?”

Why do we give our lives to the theatre?
Do we ‘give’ our lives to the theatre?
Isn’t it the theatre that gives us our life?
Haven’t we a need to be touched by something that gives life a deeper meaning?

These lines, passed like juggling pins between masterful actors Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Marcello Magni to evocative piano music by Laurie Blundell, are probably the closest the play ever comes to answering its own question. Clearly, Brook and Estienne want us to answer it for ourselves.

And so, rather than simply write a review, I decided the best way to capture the spirit of Why? was to interview two writer/director/actors who also attended the play: Coleen Shirin MacPherson, whose stage adaptation of Szymborska’s poetry just closed at La MaMa, and Joshua Crone, editor of Reviews from Underground.

Despite the minimalist set and small cast, Why? is strongly visual. What’s an image that sticks with you? And what did you take from it?

CM: The image of Meyerhold’s coat is the most striking for me. Meyerhold was imprisoned in the sinister Burtiky in 1939, and a fur-lined coat miraculously arrives for him. After the verdict comes that Meyerhold has been a traitor to the party, after we learn there was a trial with no lawyer, but only accusations and more accusations, he is sentenced to death. There is this image of the ice-cold morning in the prison courtyard, and Meyerhold is brought out wearing his warm coat. He is shot once in the neck. The actors tell us that: “The coat is kept but the corpse is thrown into the communal grave.” This was such a strong moment for me, in that we just witnessed three actors, simply putting on and taking off an over-sized coat while telling the story of Meyerhold’s martyrdom. Are we to believe that the actors in front of us, here today, are all symbolically wearing Meyerhold’s coat?

JC: I have to agree. The strongest image was the one at the end, of Meyerhold’s execution. The actors paint it in words first: the cold courtyard, the warm coat, the cold barrel at the back of the neck. Then they sit there in silence, three actors in three chairs, looking at the audience and wondering why. It seemed like ages before someone in the back finally started clapping. On a theatrical level I was impressed by the sincerity of the actors. There was no forced pathos, no phony gravitas, just genuine consternation, a sincere desire to understand why, to make sense of that brilliant career in the theatre and its miserable end. Why is the theatre worth living and even dying for? On a personal level it made me ask the same question.

The text ranges all over, from the seventh day of creation to the day of Meyerhold’s execution. Which line or passage spoke to you directly? What did it tell you?

CM: After the play I found myself recalling the line: “Art is to reality as wine is to grapes.” For me, as a theatre-maker and an idealist, I connect to this idea that reality needs to be re-imagined through art in order for us to live with it, wrestle with it, and ultimately, transform it. We focus on Meyerhold’s revolutionary theatre—a theatre that rejected the old ways and magnified life in order for us to see it, a legacy of the theatre we see today. There was a line from Charles Dullin’s reaction to seeing Meyerhold’s play performed in Paris that struck me: “My attention was drawn toward the stage the way a believer in a cathedral is drawn towards the choir.” This reverential quality that Meyerhold’s theatre had, outside of religion and yet reaching for a spiritual dimension, is something I believe we must hold onto, what Brooks calls holy theatre.

JC: One line that really spoke to me came from Meyerhold: “The path to simplicity is not easy.” Historically speaking it was part of an abject apology to the Russian people. He’d been accused of formalism, a grave accusation at a time when social realism was state dogma. His revolutionary experiments may have been welcome in a time of revolution, but now the Party wanted stability and simplicity. Historical irony aside, I think there’s a great lesson in that line. As artists we progress from naive simplicity to self-conscious complexity and—with luck and hard work—back to a simplicity enriched by technique. I think that’s what Picasso meant when he said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

Meyerhold said “Theatre is a very dangerous weapon.” Is that still true today? What’s the most “dangerous” play you’ve seen lately? And what can be done to increase the danger?

JC: Meyerhold’s theatre was literally dangerous. It contributed to the revolution and, by extension, to the death of tens of millions. I think that needs to be kept in mind when portraying him as a martyr. It’s a point the play never makes explicitly: When a supporter of the Reign of Terror ends up on the guillotine, who’s to blame? In any case, I don’t think the theatre is politically dangerous today. It preaches to the choir. Plays like In the Penal Colony, A Strange Loop, and Skylar would be dangerous if they played to a mixed audience across the political spectrum. But when would that ever happen? Personally, I’m more interested in the theatre’s ability to incite an inner revolution, to change the way we see ourselves and each other. The most dangerous play I’ve seen lately in that sense is Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me. To increase the danger we need only step outside our ideological comfort zones and meet the “other” in no man’s land. Or we can bunker down and try to be dangerous in the Meyerholdian sense. Why? shows where that can lead.

CM: I think theatre does have the potential to be a very dangerous weapon—but, this rarely happens. I think theatres are under a lot of pressure and the creative process is often so compounded for time, that real risks rarely happen in the rehearsal room. The need to make money is a dangerous thing in itself as it leaves artists and theatres complacent and at the mercy of the financial department.

But setting this aside, I do think theatre can be a dangerous weapon today, and many artists and theatres transcend the barriers by speaking about the present moment in new and daring ways. I think Belarus Free Theatre’s Counting Sheep, which I saw at the Vault Festival in London last year, elicited danger. What made this dangerous was the fact that we were immersed directly in the revolution itself—the audience was divided between “protesters” and “observers” during the Kiev uprising of 2014. You eat, you waltz, you create barricades and wave flags, you carry the dead, all while seeing images of Putin and troops encasing Ukraine even further. And this is happening today. This revelation of the present moment is what makes it dangerous and real and alive for an audience.

Another play that I recall would be Ophelia’s Zimmer, written by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell at the Royal Court (co-created at the Berliner Ensemble). This was a re-writing of Hamlet, so that the audience focused solely on Ophelia throughout the landscape of the play. She sits, she stares out, she throws the flowers away, repeating gestures, while the men appear in a box upstage and are revealed through sound (Foley) until the final moment when she slits her throat in an act of revolt and the stage fills with water and with her blood. A revelation towards a woman’s world.

How can the theatre be more dangerous? I would tell artists to create for the current moment. Take risks not for their own sake but with vision and a personal connection to the subject. Create with your whole self.

In his classic book The Empty Space, Brook divides theatre into four categories: the deadly, the holy, the rough, and the immediate. Which do you aspire to and why?

CM: The holy theatre. I feel the closest to the kind of theatre that makes the invisible visible, revealing hidden truths about humanity—a visual and visceral theatre, a metaphoric space that launches the audience’s imagination. I definitely don’t see theatre working that tries to represent reality exactly as it is. Realism can be a real trap; can we actually represent reality anyways? For me, the theatre’s power is in its ability to help us dream and imagine, and in a room full of strangers at that.

At the Lecoq school we would work through improvisation every day. Through movement we search for a truthful moment, a truthful emotion on stage and develop our acuteness to observe the world around us for inspiration and to observe what we see on stage. If what we see in the improvisation is “true” then the act of theatre creation was actually unfolding before our eyes. This “true” is a kind of poetic transposition, for the theatre space is always lifted. These are the moments we all yearn for in the theatre in order to put a pause on life.

We all live, we all die, we all experience loss and love and pain and heartache of all kinds, and I think this is what excites me about the theatre and how it brings people together no matter who you are or where you are from. It allows us to see with clearer vision.

JC: I’d like to reach the holy, but through the rough. Drama began with a bunch of dancing drunks with leather phalluses and from there it made a beeline for the sublime. I think the sweet spot is somewhere in between. Or, since stasis is the death of drama, it’s in bouncing back and forth between heaven and earth. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what Brooks has in mind with his “immediate” theatre, and Why? is a prime example. My upcoming play The Journey is half comedy, half ayahuasca ceremony, so it bounces up and down like a wacky ball. The guiding principle in alchemy is “As above, so below.” I try to apply that to my work, to reach the divine through the mundane.

Why do you do theatre?

JC: I wish I knew. Maybe it’s a higher calling, or a substitute for religion, or a pointless compulsion. Maybe it’s better not to know. All I can say for certain is: I’m miserable when I don’t do theatre.

CM: Today I took part in a ritual at the beginning of a new rehearsal process of a play here at Toronto’s Factory Theatre (Trout Stanley by Claudia Dey, directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu). We were asked to bring in an object that reminded us of why we do theatre. These objects would then be part of an altar in the rehearsal room and later the objects would find their way into the set as a constant reminder of our journey as theatre-makers. A ritual set off by playwright Djanet Sears. My object: a thuya wood box from Morocco with a secret compartment. I feel this box encompasses my “Why” because it is so mysterious. What is in the box? What is hidden? Can it open? Within the box are: a stone from Cairo, a bookmark from Prince Edward Island, a coin from Iran and a perfume bottle from my Grandmother’s drawers full of trinkets.

I could tell you what these objects are, their hidden stories, but perhaps this is a play in itself. The stories themselves are the answer to why I make theatre. But more: I make theatre because I want to ask difficult questions and confront the incomprehensible, because I want to connect the present to the past, because I want to give life to the invisible, to speak to ghosts, to resurrect buried truths and to find a truth hidden deep within myself.

There is not an easy answer to this and there isn’t only one, and maybe this is why Peter Brook, at the age of 94, full of years of wisdom, full of years of creating theatre with pure storytelling, does not want to answer this question. Why? puts the question onto the audience, it makes us pause and wonder. It is the question, the constant “I don’t know,” as the poet Wisława Szymborska would say, that keeps us on this journey.

Why? is running at Theatre for a New Audience through October 6. For tickets and information visit tfana.org. You can follow Coleen Shirin and her company Open Heart Surgery on Instagram at @coleenshirin and @OHsurgerytheatre.

The post Why? appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

But nothing is what it seems in Open Heart Surgery’s “This Is Why We Live,” at La Mama through September 29. A random squiggle like an inadvertent screen saver resolves into a portrait of the poet. A rocky outcrop sheltering virtuoso cellist Dobrochna Zubek all but screams reverence and romanticism, flanked as it is by sprawling bodies like washed up corpses. But are those onions at her feet? And when Zubek’s soulful playing fades and bright lights come up on Lecoq-trained Alaine Hutton and Elodie Monteau, now alive and hilariously animated, it becomes clear that director Coleen MacPherson is aware of our expectations and skilled at subverting them.

Of course it helps that the poetry itself is deliciously subversive. Szymborska’s pen bursts the glistening, lumbering soap bubbles of Big Ideas, preferring instead to scratch the surface of the seemingly mundane and find layer after layer of deeper meaning. Her poem in celebration of an onion is a prime example: “Our skin is just a cover-up / In an onion there’s only onion.” Hutton and Monteau inject so much joie de vivre into their halves of the onion, their French and English renditions, that when the halves and languages come together at the poem’s climax, it’s as if a new life is conceived.

Another fine moment is Monteau’s “Conversation with a Stone,” performed in French with English supertitles. Not only does Monteau make the proverbial stone speak to comic effect, but she projects onto it a personality so believable that the interaction ultimately transcends comedy, leaving the audience to reflect on the loneliness inherent in the division between subject and object—arguably the poem’s whole point. Szymborska would approve.

The range of voices and moods in her poetry is broad, and MacPherson does an exemplary job of balancing contrasting elements and creating, if not a narrative through-line, then at least a satisfying sense of beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes the contrast is jarring, as when Hutton devours a piece of chocolate cake to the Brechtian title card “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Myself” and Monteau immediately follows with “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo,” as if to illustrate Chuck Palahniuk’s maxim: “A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.” But the thread doesn’t end there; in an inspired repurposing, the cake crumbs eventually reappear as handfuls of dirt tossed on a grave in “Funeral II,” an amusing, incisive pastiche of characters, postures, and one-liners delivered with rapid-fire precision.

“This Is Why We Live” has sailed the globe, and it shows—in the confident performances, the layers of meaning, the economy of means. It’s a tight ship in no need of further tightening. However, there are a few moments that would benefit from slackening, from relaxing the focus on outward effect and allowing the actors to experience inwardly. This was especially true of “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo,” where the narrator’s suffering seems more indicated than felt. But even here, Szymborska’s words and Zubek’s music ensure that the spell remains unbroken.

All in all, a highly successful experiment proving poetry’s ability to transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries—and even make the leap from page to stage. The staging works so well, in fact, that I was surprised and disappointed to learn that unlike her contemporary Tadeusz Różewicz Szymborska never wrote for the stage. Toronto-based Open Heart Surgery does a great job of filling that gap in her résumé.

“This Is Why We Live” is running through September 29 at La Mama. For tickets and information visit lamama.org/why-we-live.

The post Looking Through a Glass Onion: A Review of “This Is Why We Live” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

Max: First of all, what is a Sicarius? The term kept coming up, but did they define it?

Kirill: The Sicarii are the zealots, the ones who want to end the siege of Jerusalem and fight the Romans. They burned down the food stores to make the Jews fight…

Max: I remember all that, but what does it have to do with the price of tea in Judea? Seriously, Kirill, whether the sale of a piece of land is valid if bought from a Sicarius?

Kirill: We’ll get to that, Max. Though I think it’s a case of text as pretext. When Kung Fu masters fight, what matters is the dance, not why they are dancing. And this is a dance worth watching. With lines from the Talmud instead of lyrics. On a floor like a checkerboard. Between white veils like columns.

Max: Or like the veil of the temple. I think that was mentioned, how Titus cut the veil and laid a whore on a Torah scroll in the Holy of Holies.

Kirill: That you remember.

Max: Of course. It was visceral. Like the part about Jesus boiling in excrement.

Kirill: There’s some debate about that passage, whether it refers to Jesus of Nazareth. There are several “Yeshus” in the Talmud.

Max: Either way, the veils were good, how they projected Hebrew onto them, and live video, and dragged them up and downstage. It was aggressive. And I like that the video was soft, so it felt more like holograms than movies. Fuzzy images, the kind your mind makes in the background when you try to imagine how something looks from another angle. Especially the overhead shots.

Kirill: Or when they spoke to the camera and gave us first and third person perspective simultaneously—an interesting montage effect.

Max: But what was it about?

Kirill: The mishna deals with property law. Can a property confiscated in war be purchased legally from the confiscator, or does the previous owner have rights to it? Think of Holocaust reparations, and you’ll see the question is as relevant today as it was in 70 B.C. Though this connection is never made. And the argument goes unexplained. I confess, if I hadn’t read the passages beforehand I would be quite as lost as you. And even then it’s unclear in parts. The Gemara, for example, seems to suggest the Sicarii were gentiles. But clearly…

Max: The stories at least were clear. The ones from the siege of Jerusalem. The shoe that wouldn’t come off. The messenger smuggled in a coffin. These were interesting in themselves and performed with a good balance of narrative, dialog, and karate chops. And Eli M. Schoenfeld is razor sharp as Bar Kamtza, the character who starts the war.

Kirill: The stand-out for me was Lucie Allouche, and for a brief, mesmerizing interlude, Lu Liu on the pipa. But all five were excellent, a brilliant ensemble that never drops a line or misses a step—as far as I could tell.

Max: Is that what the Chinese guitar is called? The pipa? Leave it to you to know.

Kirill: The recorded music worked, too, by Avi Amon. It set some powerful rhythms that drove the text. And director Jesse Freedman should be applauded for even attempting a show like this, much less succeeding. Because it really works. It’s entertaining, engrossing, surprising, though I must say it’s too focused on form to be truly thought-provoking.

Max: I agree it’s worth recommending. But what didn’t work for me was the drawn-out ending. The play takes us to hell to talk with the spirits of the dead. This, to my mind, is the climax. To go from this to another fifteen minutes of property law with no narrative or characters is frustrating.

Kirill: It helps to know the material. The pace is so rapid that, as I said, you’re better off doing your homework. I did send you a link.

Max: I got as far as the first mention of Sicarius. And besides, a play should stand on its own.

Kirill: No work of art stands on its own, Max. It’s always part of a cultural context, a tradition. And in this case the tradition is especially long.

Max: How long is it, Kirill?

Kirill: Depends on which rabbi you ask. You know the saying: two Jews, three opinions.

“The Talmud” is running at Target Margin Theater through September 28. For more information, visit meta-physed.com. To do your homework, go to sefaria.org.

The post Two Critics, Three Opinions: A Review of “The Talmud” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

Who were those children, and what were they to each other, to their parents? German playwright Dea Loher’s At Black Lake circles this question hungrily, like the biting kind of fly.

As Johnny, Darrell Stokes stews expertly in his own juices and hauls water in the proverbial sieve to quell the fiery outbursts of his wife Else, played with clenched intensity by Heather Benton. The pair lost their daughter Nina to a suicide pact with Fritz, the teenage son of April Sweeney’s sweetly evasive Cleo and Chris J. Cancel-Pomales’s blithe Eddie. Trauma binds the couples together despite clear antipathies, and mutual recriminations are never far behind. “They didn’t like Nina,” runs one bitter refrain in a text ably translated by Daniel Brunet that relies heavily on repetition as both a distancing device and a linguistic mirror of the obsessive thought patterns characteristic of trauma victims.

But far from inviting us to see these four as victims, Loher’s verse play presents them in a stark, unflattering light, made starker still by set and lighting designer Krista Smith’s inspired use of the reflective floor as a gigantic bounce. Lit menacingly from below, the couples stare into the imagined waters at the fading light of their sinking hopes—when they aren’t busy menacing or seducing each other.

Narrative structures heave briefly and collapse like feeble waves on the shores of the lake. Sometimes the story of their children gets passed around like a joint. Sometimes it wells up in their throats in the midst of banal conversation. But mostly it goads them like a gadfly. In the end they are slipping on water and blood while the others look on. They are copulating in an amorphous pile of animal misery. They are talking blankly about tomorrow.

For a German audience these are familiar waters. This kind of post-dramatic theatre has flourished on Central Europe’s national stages for so long that its conventions have coalesced into a kind of theatrical Esperanto. And director Ashley Tata is clearly a fluent speaker. Her formalized blocking bends actors’ bodies into eloquent ideograms. Her enforced rhythms reject complacent realism. Her punctuating blackouts defy naturalistic continuity. The very presence of foil on the ground augers blood as surely as a shotgun on the wall in the first act once foreshadowed gunshots in the last.

On the one hand, it’s refreshing and encouraging to see this language spoken on an American stage. On the other, it’s a reminder that the language is a purely theoretical construct. As such, it conveys abstract ideas with precision and clarity, but falls short when expressing emotion. In matters of the heart, it’s a poem in Esperanto.

Which raises the question why Loher and Tata chose this approach for a story so emotional and intimate. Distancing effects were originally developed as a means of getting theatergoers to think, to achieve class consciousness, historical perspective. But what is there to think about here? Two couples have lost their children through no fault of their own, a fate that could meet anyone of any class at any time in history. The story invites empathy and identification, not reflection. Yet we are systematically prevented from identifying. To what end?

There are moments when feeling breaks the bonds of formalism, such as when Benton’s dripping-wet Else sings a heartrending, rhymeless ballad. And moments when the formalism reaches such a peak of abstraction that it collapses under its own weight, the best example being Else’s frantic analysis of whether “It’s not nice here” in the children’s suicide note should be understood to emphasize “it’s” or “here.” Is the levee of formalism built precisely to break? Are the floodgates of Black Lake only closed so as to burst open dramatically at key moments? We can only speculate.

For At Black Lake, and the post-dramatic/-traumatic school of thought it represents, is demanding, provocative, question-inducing by design. This kind of work needs to be seen this side of the Atlantic, its abstract vocabulary integrated into the vernacular of America’s overly colloquial theatre. So I applaud The Tank and Necessary Digression for bringing us the results of Loher and Tata’s intensive collaboration, even if despite a decade of immersion abroad I left the theater feeling I had missed the point.

For more information visit: www.thetanknyc.org

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