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By Kathryn Osenlund
The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the concurrent Philly Fringerun through Sept 18. Within the Live Arts section, The Spotlight Show Series focuses special attention on cutting edge performance. For complete information on all shows and venues go to their website: www.livearts-fringe.org There are many dance performances, and the Producing Director of the joined festivals, Nick Stuccio, is a dancer.
I will be sampling a few offerings among the Spotlight features, Live Arts, and Philly Fringe. With entries dated, and the most recent added to the top of previous ones.
September 13, 2004.Pig Iron Theatre Company's Hell Meets Henry Halfway is unusual and quite unpleasant and it seems to be old, although it is new. The late thirties feel of Hell Meets Henry Halfway is a credit to playwright Adriano Shaplin, who adapted Witold Gombrowicz's 1939 serialized novel Possessed for this production. The play is distasteful by design, with off-putting characters, unfunny funny bits, and negative epithets that are almost poetry mixed with nihilistic dialogue. For example: "It was fun to watch your idiot appraisal of life's value ", and "Was I put on this earth to be profoundly disappointed?"
An obviously ailing doctor (Geoff Sobelle)comes to treat the old prince (E. Delpech-Ramsey), whom Henry (D. van Reigersberg), the centerpiece of the story, serves as a secretary. Henry's wife, the bored, hostile Maya (Sarah Sanford) continually insults her new tennis coach, Marian (Quinn Bauriedel) with whom eventually she will share a humorous, disaffected embrace. The Ballboy (James Sugg) is the exception to the general malaise. While the first act is slow and tedious, the second is actively hostile and full of invective. The play's wit lies more in the shaping and stringing out of situations than in individual lines. The action takes place on a bleak stage where there are ingenious entrances through a large wardrobe. The well-done sound design, while original and suitable, has the charm of a dripping faucet. This is a well structured, deliberately disgusting play-- an acquired taste.
September 13, 2004. Be All My Sins Remembered<. Gertrude to her son, Hamlet: "Hamlet, pumpkin, please change out of all this black!"
The Cardboard Box Collaborative and the Royale Fakespeare Players served up a scrambled Hamlet on a patch of graveyard grass at Christ Church Burial Ground. Take two Hamlets, two Horatios, two sets of Rosencrantzs and Guildensterns, and one each of the others, and start at the end with Hamlet dead.
According to the program, Mindy a. beers' script intends a message for our time, for the traditional Hamlet to alter the course of the modern Hamlet. It is not made clear exactly how this is a message for our time. One has to be pretty well acquainted with Hamlet to understand what is going on, because the play is taken out of sequence, and doubles back. The Hamlets are both marvelous (Don Holdren and Harry Wright). Whereas the melancholy Dane was tormented by uncertainty and inaction, these Hamlets are quite decisive and prone to action. Much credit must go to all the young actors. They handle Elizabethan as well as modern English exceedingly well in their enthusiastic, well directed and well rehearsed performance.
September 13, 2004. The Lives of Bosie comes to the Philly Fringe direct from a run at the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, PA . With an excellent pace and a kind of cool energy, it is part apologia for Lord Alfred Douglas, and part Alfred's regret and denial. Lord Alfred has been held accountable all these years for what happened to Oscar Wilde. Now evidence, which was suppressed for years, sheds new light on the treatment of Wilde by Bosie. Alfred (Austin Pendleton) is visited by Bosie (Tobias Segal), his younger self. Both actors deliver fine-tuned performances. However, the central device of young Bosie informing the audience, in the guise of telling his older self, Lord Alfred Douglas, of past events which Alfred knows intimately is hard to reconcile -- even as we benefit from the entertaining conversation. Although there is a great deal of talking, there is also some showing: Alfred and to a lesser extent, Bosie assume the parts of people in the past. The play suggests that Wilde's catastrophic downfall wasn't Bosie's fault. At the same time it shows how in later years Alfred condemned Wilde as a force of evil who extended a diabolical influence over him, and regretted that he ever met the man. The thrust of the play is, thus, somewhat ambiguous. Not glittering, but solid. . . too detailed and intricate for non-insiders. . . but quite delicious for aficionados.
September 12, 2004 Un-American is reviewed in detail as it has a regular run at St. Stephen's Theater from Sept 3 to Oct 3 as well as being part of the Philly Fringe. To read the reviews go here.
September 5, 2004
Among the Spotlight performances is Headlong Dance Theater's Hotel Pool. It's as if an Alice with a cell phone as her white rabbit falls down a swimming hole and into a very moist alternate reality, where rather than fear its lurking inhabitants, she longs for inclusion. Neither synchronized swimming nor water ballet, this is a Swim-u-drama of the first water, very unusual dance drama of movement, dialogue, music, light, color, and pattern. The shape and tone of the choreography in partnership with the design (visual environment, lighting, sound, costume, fabric), original music, and text creates a magical atmosphere-- fluid, still, deep, bouyant, and splashy. This is a superb performance. Dancers: David Brick (co-director), Olase Freeman, Lorin Lyle, Heather Murphy, Amy Smith (co-director), Kate Watson-Wallace, Mark Lord.
Also of great interest among the Spotlight performers is Shen Wei, who founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in NYC in 2001. His work fuses movement, theatre, art, and Chinese Opera. Rites of Spring and Behind Resonance will take place in the Kimmel Center on Sept 16 and 18. Also of interest is Akira Kasai's Pollen Revolution, a "dance of consciousness." Sept 9 and 12 at the Painted Bride Arts Center.
For a Philly Fringe sampling I started at the Triangle Theatre for Random Acts of Theatre's Skewed Shakespeare, billed as "No tights, no fancy shirts, no bad English dialects." Scenes performed in modern dress strain for modern nuance and colloquial attitudes. The actors work hard to explicate the text and nudge the audience to "get it." Going by my experience, I have found that modern dress-and-sensibilities productions of Shakespeare, no matter how clever, suffer from one problem: It's not modern. We just don't talk like that. And it is certainly possible to get down to brass tacks in tights, where the language and get-up match. Modernization may need to accomplish more, either by being more ambiguous or more ironic. However, fine individual performances delight in several selections, notably in Hamlet (Dennis Smeltzer), Macbeth(Bob Schmidt), and The Taming of the Shrew (Michael Brumbaugh, Aisha Goss). There is a rather lame Disco-Sonnets section, which, except for its last line, I wouldn't miss if it were jettisoned. In the closing scene a preacher in the mold of Martin Luther King delivers the most unusual "Once more unto the breach" speech from Henry V that I have ever heard. The suggestion of a relationship between King's non-violence and Hank Cinq's call to battle is odd, but actor Franklin Ojeda Smith carries it off, preaching from a very emotional place. Sept 12, 17, 18.
Retold by Tina Packer of Shakespeare & Co. Click image to buy.
Our Review
Mendes at the Donmar
Our Review
At This Theater
Leonard Maltin's 2003 Movie and Video Guide
Ridiculous!The Theatrical Life & Times of Charles Ludlam
6, 500 Comparative Phrases including 800 Shakespearean Metaphors by CurtainUp's editor.
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