At Large The Wooster Group in LA
posted by on February 8 at 12:07 PM
Sorry I’ve not been slogging much—I’m in Los Angeles, at an NEA theater critics’ conference, which is fine and all, but involves a lot of sitting in rooms, watching things or talking about things, when all anyone wants to do is stroll around in the sunshine.
The good news: those of you who are hacked off about not being able to see the Wooster Group’s Hamlet aren’t missing much. They perform the show against a backdrop of Richard Burton’s 1964 production, but don’t do terribly much with it. They all seem shackled inside it instead of playing with it. An odd formal experiment, but not revelatory. One wants more matter, as Gertrude says, with less art.
(The Burton production has a good story. Apparently he and Peter O’Toole proposed a coin toss when they were filming Becket. The deal was that one of them would play Hamlet in London, directed by Laurence Olivier, and one would play Hamlet in New York, directed by John Gielgud. They were probably wasted. They flipped, Burton went to New York, and performed what would become the American Hamlet.)
That’s Scott Shepherd, as Hamlet, the same guy who played Nick Carraway in Gatz at On the Boards. That seven-hour word-for-word performance of The Great Gatsby was also a funny formal experiment, but was richer, more elegant, more rewarding.
Oprah Winfrey Presents the Color Purple: The Musical About Love is as long and dumb as its title: a cavalcade of brutality set to adult-contemporary music. Consider yourselves lucky.
Theater: I watch it so you don’t have to.
Kiley's turning into a rabbit-shootin' John Lahr.
Who gives a rusty f---? What does this have to do with politics? Politics is ALL THAT MATTERS right now!
I respectfully disagree with Mr. Kiley's assessment of " ... The Color Purple ... " When I saw it on a discounted ticket in New York City, I fully expected it to be dull and filled with stock music. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how moving and beautiful it is. I hope that it will come to Seattle on some future tour, or - better yet - that a local company will mount an original production when rights are available.
I saw the Wooster Group's Hamlet at the Public Theater in NY and have to agree to a certain extent. While the concept is interesting and it is executed with a precision and rigor that is worth seeing, I came away from it cold. The concept did nothing to enlighten, expose, re-image or any of the other verbs that get associated with deconstructing theatre, the play. The concept is played out well before intermission and just when Shakespeare gets revved up, these guys have nowhere to go.
Where they really missed the boat in my opinion is as the play progresses, characters on the screen start being edited out, leaving only the live performer. Yet even when freed of their on-screen counterpart, they didn't seem to explore their own take on the character and when the digital image came back they were still faithfully tied to it.
Scott Shepherd is charismatic and evokes a feeling of complete control of the evening and watching him dance with the technical aspects of the show was the best part of the evening for me.
The link below goes to some longer ruminations on the play.
on a side note, Mike Daisey's piece in the Stranger this week is BRILLIANT.
You're right, politics are all that matters. Fortunately all art is politic in some way. Therefore, art matters.
Daisey's piece in The Stranger was fine. His performance, however, was luminous. You lose, Mr. Kiley. Please retire from this position. Now. I would prefer to have someone who cares in your place.
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