Tag: Play-Per-View

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Best Of theatre

Best of 2020 – Theatre/Opera/Dance

“Are you even here? You’re a relic of a dying empire. The ghost of a glorious future that never came.” 

-Sarah Gancher, Russian Troll Farm

Salt given me at Under The Radar’s Salt

Live:

I was lucky to see about 15 shows – almost all outstanding – before doors started slamming shut. These 8 grabbed me hard and wouldn’t let go. Their memories are still burned into my brain this many months later. Photos are taken from press either given directly to me or on the company/creator’s official website.

  • Salt by Selina Thompson, directed by Dawn Walton (01/11/2020 – Public Theatre, Under the Radar, NYC) – Sometimes – and this might be my favorite part of seeing theatre and especially my favorite part of Under the Radar, I see work by a playwright who’s new to me and the voice alone burns a layer of skin off me and makes me feel both more and differently. Selina Thompson’s personal-historical-poetic dive into the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Salt, masterfully acted by Rochelle Rose, did that to me this year. I walked out babbling and as hungry for more of her work as any writing of the last decade.
  • Body Comes Apart by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith (01/12/2020 – New York Live Arts, NYC) – This vivisection of expectations, trauma, and freedom balanced an unsparing dedication to truth with a supernova love for the world. Body Comes Apart was a physical hour of dance, and acting was a whirlwind from which I couldn’t look away. It avoided platitudes and simplification but burned with a clarity that made its unanswered questions cut even deeper. I could have seen this three times and still tried to grasp it. 
  • Medea by Simon Stone after Euripides, directed by Simon Stone (01/12/2020 – BAM, NYC) – I’m a sucker for the Greeks and I’d never seen Bobby Cannavale on stage. Something felt very fitting about seeing Stone’s ferocious, knives-out take on Euripides here in the same theatre I saw my favorite Hedda Gabler. The adaptations to the play were interesting, aided by vibrant video. My brain pinballed between the remarkable acting – Cannavale, Rose Byrne, Dylan Baker – and the wrenching image of ash falling on that pristine white stage, both stuck with me well after the next day’s flight home.
The Motherfucker With the Hat, photo by Nick Lingnofski
  • Or by Liz Duffy Adams, directed by Rowan Winterwood (01/17/2020 – Actors Theatre) – Actors Theatre’s relationship with MadLab for smaller-scale indoor plays continued to bear fruit this year, even as they had to cancel what looked like an exciting outdoor season. Or was a delightful drawing room sex romp around the fascinating historical character Aphra Behn (played brilliantly by Michelle Weiser) with crackling support from Andy Woodmansee and McLane Nagy as the other legs of the triangle. Winterwood’s sizzling direction made this a hot, funny winter diversion when I needed it most.
  • The Motherfucker With the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Chari Arespacochaga (01/23/2020 – Short North Stage) – Short North Stage doesn’t always get enough credit for their dark, low-to-the-ground plays in the Green Room. Their Motherfucker With the Hat was another triumph in that lane. Arespacochaga directed it with the right mix of Greek tragedy and cage match, a stellar cast orbited around a volcanic Raphael Ellenberg.
  • The Bridge Called My Ass by Miguel Gutierrez (01/25/2020 – presented by the Wexner Center) – Gutierrez’s bilingual piece mixed puns, everyday action, and flights of fancy into something I’d never seen before. I didn’t always understand it but I was always enraptured.
The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, photo by Jeff Busby
  • A Doll’s House Part 2 by Lucas Hnath, directed by Michael Garrett Herring (01/30/2020 – Red Herring Theater) – There have been a few times I’ve seen a Columbus production I felt improved on New York, and this was the most recent example. Herring stripped away the ba-dum-bum sitcom rhythm that sank the Broadway version of this for me the night I saw it and made Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen glow like a bruise. All stellar performances, especially Sonda Staley’s for-the-ages take on Nora.
  • The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes by Back to Back Theater (02/13/2020 – presented by the Wexner Center) – One of my favorite previews I’ve ever written. I was so glad I held off, skipping this at Under The Radar so I could go into it cold when it played my town. A more complicated bit of metatheatre than the first work of theirs I loved, Ganesh Vs The Third Reich, but brillant and arresting. A look at how much “acting” we all do in making our voices heard and how much marginalized people have to work past just to get their voices heard, to not be seen as a monolithic interest. If this was the last live performance I saw, I went out high.

Online:

We Need Your Listening, screenshot from stream and edited

Theatre feels like a circuit between the stage and the audience, even more than music, to me. But for me, this immediate, physical art reaped the greatest rewards as companies tried to find ways to make work that still felt like theater while wholly embracing the new media. I deeply hope many of us can find ways to continue to make things accessible after we can all gather in a room again. 

It would be a true shame for these opportunities for people with disabilities or other reasons not to be part of the physical exchange of energy, to finally get a wider range of options and then have them taken away.

Things that moved and inspired me with virtual theatre:

Zoom readings run by local stalwarts Krista Lively Stauffer and Tim Browning with their Virtual Theatre Project gave me the chance to catch Douglas Whaley’s phenomenal The Turkey Men (I missed its premiere run when I was in Italy last year), revisit the terrific Red Herring two-hander Thicker Than Water, and dip into remarkable work from our astounding pool of talent.

Established companies pivoted with aplomb and grace: 

Abbey Theatre’s The Sissy Chronicles, photo provided by Joe Bishara
  • Short North Stage revisited shows they’d loved and couldn’t find space for in their schedule previously like the moving early Andrew Lippa John & Jen and the delightfully raunchy Off-Broadway hit by Howard Crabtree and Mark Waldrop When Pigs Fly. They also used their connections to get new material for these revivals while also building new work like Quarantine With the Clauses. 
  • New CATCO Artistic Director Leda Hoffmann met the challenge of her first season in town coinciding with the pandemic and excelled with marvelous Idris Goodwin shorts, Plays For an Antiracist Tomorrow, bringing in legacy CATCO artists as well as fresh blood, then acclaimed Julienna Gonzalez adapted her Detroit Christmas Carol into a Columbus version under Hoffmann’s direction.
  • Joe Bishara came into his own with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre giving life to exciting pieces from artists like Mark Schwamberger and Nikki Davis.
  • Red Herring provided astounding social dramas and made steps toward a hybrid experience.

The plethora of archival work was an embarrassment of riches, from American Conservatory Theatre’s take on Lydia Diamond’s Toni Stone to the Goodman’s hilarious and heartbreaking Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls or The African Mean Girls Play.

The Elaborate Entry of Chad Deity, screenshot taken from stream and edited

The New Group, Play-Per-View, and more presented riveting reunion readings, giving new life to great plays from past seasons. I especially loved Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian, Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entry of Chad Deity, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.

I was in awe of groups that created new work from tools not intended for this purpose. Magic came from relatively straightforward narrative work like Mona Mansour’s The Beginning Days of True Jubilation, Theatre of War’s Antigone in Ferguson, and Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm. to more ephemeral work like We Need Your Listening by Velani Dibba, Ilana Khanin, Elizagrace Madrone, Stephen Charles Smith, Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane’s Come Together Revisited, and Theatre Mitu’s </remnant>.

Antigone in Ferguson, screenshot taken from stream and edited

Even in the dark times, there was still joy if you looked, and I am as grateful as ever people took on these burdens to bring it to us.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – August 17, 2020

Screenshots from the broadcast of Antigone in Ferguson

Theater: Antigone in Ferguson by Sophocles, translated and directed by Bryan Doerries with music by Phil Woodmore, presented by Theater of War.

Theater of War uses classical plays to essay contemporary social issues and their adaptation, by artistic director Bryan Doerries in collaboration with Phil Woodmore and a diverse choir, of one of the great tragedies of systemic power unchecked, Antigone in Ferguson had been on my radar for a while but this Zoom version was my first chance to see it as part of the moved-online 6th annual Michael Brown Memorial Weekend.

A stellar cast, led by Oscar Isaac as Creon and Tracie Thoms as Antigone, burn through this excellent take on Sophocles, modern enough without feeling like, as Anne summed it up, “You’re rapping to the kids about Shakespeare.” The production also made beautiful use of the contemporary choir, with soaring, earworm songs, in the place of the Greek choir.

Bokanté, screenshot from SFJAZZ Broadcast

Music: Bokanté, presented by SF JAZZ as part of their Fridays at Five Archival Series.

For me, getting glimpses into institutions, scenes, locales I either can’t visit or can’t visit as often as I’d like has been one of the few but big silver linings of this pandemic. High on that list is San Francisco’s SF JAZZ Center dipping into their recorded programming to present slices of their monumental work to the world at large for an extremely reasonable subscription fee.

Maybe my favorite of these end-of-the-work-week shows aired this week with the electrifying, joyous, and mysterious band Bokanté. Fronted by Guadaloupean by way of Montreal singer-songwriter Malika Tirolien with a crack band put together by Snarky Puppy’s Michael League, these hooky, dynamic songs highlighted the promise and glory of mixing elements with the song itself as your guiding light.

Roosevelt Collier’s snarling, sparkling lap steel guitar and a trio of percussionists including Jamey Haddad and Weedie Braimah were the main second voices throughout songs, weaving around and punctuating Tirolien’s French and Creole lyrics with thick grooves supplied by League and the Snarky Puppy guitarists. None of these felt like experiments or a cobbled-together mishmash. Everything hung together with beautiful tension and unity.

Screenshot from the broadcast of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

Theater: The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity written and directed by Kristoffer Diaz, presented by Play-Per-View.

Obviously no one can keep up with every single thing, even in art forms we feel like we specialize in but I was extra chagrined that this 2010 Pulitzer shortlisted play had missed me so completely. But going in cold, with just that knowledge and the reputation of Play-Per-View who have been a lifeline and a guiding light for high-quality theatre translated to this new virtual time, added to my unbridled delight.

Diaz’s play takes on the promise and limitations of America, art, and the grinding terror of late-stage capitalism through the lens of professional wrestling. It features crackling performances, most of whom were involved in the Chicago premiere or the New York run. 

The work orbits around an astonishing, hilarious and heartbreaking Desmin Borges (You’re the Worst) as Macedonio Guerra, a true-believer wrestling fan who can’t seem to rise above the jobber level until he finally gets the chance as part of a racist double-team where his character is turned into “Che Chavez Castro,” sombrero and all, with fellow Brooklyn native VP (Usman Ally, full of crackling, witty energy) recast as “The Fundamentalist,” and given a shot against the reigning champ of the title (Terence Archie, with a perfect blend of self-awareness and ego run amok).

Two hours passed like nothing as I was completely enraptured by this smart, intense play, that keeps getting more relevant as safety nets get ripped away and inequality gets harder and harder to look away from.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging This Week – July 13, 2020

The Few, Gideon Glick (l), Michael Laurence (r), taken from the Rattlestick website

Theatre: The Few written and directed by Samuel D. Hunter, Play-Per-View in conjunction with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Play-Per-View has jumped to the front of the line providing electifying readings of acclaimed Off-Broadway plays for one night. This past Saturday they reunited the original 2014 cast of Samuel Hunter’s The Few with proceeds going to its original company Rattlestick. This was on my radar but the timing didn’t work and I was overjoyed to catch up with it here.

Bryan (Michael Laurence) washes up at the offices of the newspaper for truckers he helped found with QZ (Tasha Lawrence) and left her holding the bag years ago two days after the funeral of their third founder and best friend. In the intervening years, QZ turned the paper into a legitimate news source and even (marginally) profitable.

The triangle’s completed by the paper’s newer employee Matthew (Gideon Glick), a true believer on the run from a toxic homelife and broken in ways QZ and Michael know all too well. The Few is the kind of cry into the void I’m a particular sucker for. A paean and a ritual for human connection even in the face of all the pain tied up with it.

It’s beautifully acted: Laurence’s increasingly desperate pleas that “It’s all bullshit” and the anguish at what his old friend was capable of. QZ’s simmering rage at the disrespect she faces at doing the best she could and being played over and over. And Matthew’s youthful hope that he can use this paper to mean what it meant to him as a lonely kid. The writing is finely honed and lived in, with recordings of personal ads used as punctuation.

I’m glad when anyone makes theatre in the face of the requirement to stay apart from one another and I’m glad to see productions given new life in a way that doesn’t turn into the devalued nature of the sea of streaming.

Live Music: Nief-Norf Virtual Marathon 2020

I first became acquainted with Nief-Norf through their partnership with fellow Knoxville New Music institution The Big Ears Festival. Taking a page from similarly hiatused summer festival Bang on a Can, they threw a remarkable party drawing together composers, instrumentalists, alumni, performing new and classic work.

The charming interviews didn’t just add context, they reminded the audience of the role community plays in any art scene. The most crucial thing that’s in danger of being lost if funds dry up and institutions (from university programs to the bar down the street that hosts a jam session every Tuesday) go out of business are these connections, these memories, the sense that new generations want to be involved because it’s fun and fulfilling.

And the music, the main course, was astonishing. Highlights in the three hours I was able to catch included cellist Ashley Walters’ rolling, crackling tensions in her riveting take on Nicholas Deyoe’s Another Anxiety; Andrea Lodge’s meditative, warm reading of Annea Lockwood’s Red Mesa; and Joshua Weinberg and Philip Snyder’s glittering look at Flutronix’s Brown Squares.