The Burnt City and The Glass Menagerie

 

The Burnt City

Four years ago in New York City, I had an open evening and wanted to see something a little less conventional than what was showing on the big Broadway marquees. An old high school friend who now lived in the city and worked around the business suggested I buy a ticket to experience Sleep No More. I say experience rather than see because Sleep No More was an immersive theatrical presentation of the Scottish play over four stories of a building in Chelsea that had been transformed into the fictitious 30's noir McKittrick Hotel. It was my first encounter with Punchdrunk, the company that created Sleep No More. I have never had a theatrical experience like it. That is until this past Wednesday night when I attended Punchdrunk's newest production in London, titled The Burnt City. This experience trades Scotland for Troy, diving into the mythology of the Peloponnesian Ward and the fall of Troy to the Greek army. 

My prior experience with Sleep No More taught me to follow particular players to new scenes and revelations. In doing so I was pulled aside into a room where I painted a flower and was given a feather plucked from the player's back to protect. Another time I was invited under a "car" whose underside revealed a labyrinth with a minotaur. It was as weird and wonderful as it sounds.

I spent 3 hours and the only thing that I saw repeated was the core scene of Agamemnon confronting Queen Hecuba and her daughters, which by my count got played out 3 different times (one of those I was in a different room watching two characters impacted by what was happening in the main space). Before leaving the theater I enjoyed a French 75 cocktail in the bar and then made my way out into the night.

As I walked toward the underground station, I searched frantically for the feather that was entrusted to me. I couldn't find it and didn't know what could have happened to it. I stopped for a pint and a small bite to eat and looked up to see actors from the company enjoying post-show camaraderie. There was the actor who had given me the feather. I told him how upset I was that I couldn't find it. "I told you to keep it safe," he said. Magically, when I got back to the room and emptied my pockets, the feather materialized to confirm all that I had encountered in The Burnt City.

The Glass Menagerie

It's nearly impossible to be conversant in 20th pop culture without knowing Marlon Brando calling out, "Stella!" from the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. As a kid who went to plenty of speech meets in high school, I was familiar with scenes from Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. But while I knew of The Glass Menagerie and had even heard allusions to some of its characters, I didn't know the story. I might not have gone to see it except for the fact that my old friend turned movie star, Amy Adams, was making her West End debut in the play. Amy did a fine job creating the source of conflict in the play as the overbearing mother whose unrealistic expectations raise the stakes on something as simple as having a friend from work over for dinner, a Gentleman Caller. The real highlight of the production was the actress playing Laura, the daughter. Mention is made of the daughter's liability. Amy shared with me when we went to say "hello" afterward,  that the actress herself has cerebral palsy.  The play itself is simple, but was so well-acted that the devastation of it was profound. Seeing Amy after was so nice. She was kind and gracious and I'm glad we got to see her.

My first show with Ms. Adams. A Chorus Line at Boulder's Dinner Theater in 1994

Friday was spent at the British Museum. Museums and ADHD aren't a great combination, so we didn't plan to be there too terribly long. Even so, Yared got quite upset that I wanted to look at the Ethiopian wall (a pittance next to floors of Egyptian artifacts). The mummies are fascinating, but as Yared observed, it feels like there is something wrong about all these things that come from other countries being held at the British Museum. He has a point, and I'm glad he's thinking about things like that.

Home, Juliet, and Mockingbird

 

Home

After a few days in Dublin with Grace- where I saw Rob Bell, got a hot towel shave, and visited the Book of Kells at Trinity University- we returned to Galway, where the girls and I took in the show Home at the Galway festival. I knew next to nothing about what we were there to see beyond what I'd read when I bought the tickets. The show's creator, which I later re-read, is an illusionist. This makes sense in hindsight as the opening several minutes of the show were a series of magic illusions in which the leading actor was replaced by other actors who would create the piece. A wooden frame with semi-transparent mylar stapled to it (shades of the Black Monk- aaaaarrgh) went up and when it was moved a bed and door frame appeared on stage. The actor laid down on the bed, covered himself with the sheet, and only to have a young girl uncover herself where he had been.  Once this convention was established the main set-piece was built; a house... that would become a home. As it was put together various actors re-created the daily rhythms of a home from bedtime, to rising, showering, toileting, etc. Yes, there was full undress, in the unflinching way we undress in the privacy of our homes. This rhythm of movement built into a crescendo of life events- a dinner party, turned graduation/wedding celebration, turned into New Year's Eve with audience members (myself included) pulled onto stage and directed by the actors to continue the ongoing spectacle. I danced in the conga line, dealt cards, and did what they said. Then we witnessed a body laid out on the table like a funeral, and finally, as it wound down, watched the actors deal with moving out, or a fire, or whatever else lead to one leaving a home they have lived in. The cumulative effect of it all was moving. It did not have the same impact on my girls who have left home and have yet to truly create homes of their own. We emerged from the theater to rain and took a taxi home.

Juliet

Yared and my first night in London we took in the jukebox musical &Juliet. I entered that day's lottery for Cabaret but didn't win tickets for that. So we went to this instead. What a delight! The strength of this jukebox musical is its premise. On the opening night of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the bard's wife Anne Hathaway travels from Stratford to see it. When Will reveals the double suicide of the star-crossed lovers, his wife suggests a happier ending- one in which, instead of taking her life, Juliet gets on with her life instead. This alternate ending becomes the source of a whole new play interspersed with pop hits from the past 25 years, from Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and more. The show was pure joy, and a day later Yared talked about it as "brilliant." I don't know that I'd go quite that far, but it was REALLY entertaining. We both left with big smiles on our faces. The young woman in the lead was an understudy and she slayed. I only wonder how much better the main actress would have been.

Mockingbird

Last night we got the chance to see Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of the Harper Lee classic To Kill a Mockingbird. I tried very hard to temper my expectations. I have loved much of what Aaron Sorkin has created and was eager to see what he would do with this, especially after listening to him and Jeff Daniels talk about it on Marc Maron's podcast. The challenge is that I have a very emotional connection to the novel. I remember reading it in high school and have seen the movie a couple of times. But when Miranda was in middle school, we read it together. I understood it from a much different place and wept at the end. No, really. I can't ever remember sobbing while reading a book, but I did reading this one. 

Some of the actors managed their Alabama accents better than others, but overall it worked to fine effect. The actor playing Atticus reminded me of Jason Sudekis, in a good way. His was a much different take on the energy of the character than Gregory Peck. Some portrayals are hard to get away from. That said, his courtroom scenes felt a little overplayed, but that may have been the Peck effect. He was clearly directed, or allowed to play it that large, so who can say.

What I knew from the Sorkin interview is that he shifted the focus of the story away from Scout's arc to Atticus' arc, how he was changed by the case of Tom Robinson and the attending fallout. It becomes a story less about how a child comes to see her father in a particular way, and more about how a man comes to see his neighbors in a different way and to see how treating everyone with respect can feel disrespectful to those who are harmed and threatened by those who are afforded respect. The subplot moment with Dill and Atticus was poignant, and overall I'm glad to have seen it, even if it's always hard to experience familiar stories with fresh eyes.

True West

 

Of all of Sam Shepherd's plays, True West may be his best-known work. A case could be made for Fool For Love or Buried Child, but part of the lore around True West comes from the Steppenwolf production 37 years ago with John Malkovitch and Laurie Metcalf directed by Gary Sinise. The original staging in New York hadn't been particularly well-received, but the Steppenwolf production gave both the theater company and the play considerable attention. The staging that Y and I saw in Galway was also a Steppenwolf production, this time with two black actors in the lead roles of Austin and his brother Lee. While originally written and produced with white actors, the use of black actors gives some aspects of the play new power. Early on there is talk of Lee breaking into homes and stealing. A comment is made about him prowling a neighborhood like their mothers'. Given the stereotypes and stories of black men seen as suspicious, these lines take on additional weight. There is also something added to the dynamic of Lee hustling the producer Saul on the golf course and the assumptions about who can and can't play golf. 

The most gratifying part of our experience was sharing it with Y. He's been to a couple of plays with me now. He really like this one, even if he didn't quite understand the ending. To be fair, I'm not sure I quite understand it. 

Then yesterday I came to Dublin with Grace and got the chance to see Rob Bell. The theater didn't have A/C and it was one of the hottest days on record, still, it was interesting to see Rob in person. There was far less production value to this talk than Introduction to Joy, but I always appreciate hearing him think and apply what it means to say that Everything is Spiritual. Everything- thoughts, feelings, cells, even stars, and planets rise and then fade away. To step back and observe this without letting it control us is to embrace the spiritual truth of an eternal kind of seeking in the I-ness, now-ness, and here-ness of our lived experience.

I wonder how Lee and Austin's story might have looked different if they'd been able to step back from what both of them seem to want.

The Black Monk, Road to Burnout, Sherlock Holmes and The Grapes of Wrath

 

Staged in the courtyard of Avignon's Papal Palace with a curtain time of 10 PM to account for the light, The Black Monk was a spectacle of multimedia, creative set design, and imaginative interpretation. None of which could save it from Checkov's source material about a young man's madness, its cure, and the question of what inspires artistic genius. The artistic mind and temperament frequently flirt with or draw from what used to be called madness. Nowadays we call it mental illness, and as such, it takes a far less romantic and far more clinical approach to this particular human condition. I've seen any number of creative works of art that have madness as their subject matter, from Marat/Sade to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Clearly, there is an audience fascinated with the descent from what we might call a "right mind" to one that is manic and/or delusional. Church work, particularly urban ministry, often puts me close to people struggling with mental illness, some of which are treated by a self-medicating form of addiction.  The story depicted takes us from an ordinary visit to the country to the destruction of a family and the loss of a garden (is this a call-back to Genesis?) that is filled with the destructive pain caused by mental illness. To go through it four times in four variations over 2 hours and 40 minutes and well past midnight wasn't anything I'd like to experience again. But I could appreciate the vision behind the staging and the skill of the performers, even if the result wasn't very enjoyable.

The next day we went in a totally different direction. The girls and I went to see a one-man show in a small black box theater. We chose it because it was advertised as being in English. The two big shows had been sub-titled in English, but that is very much the exception. Our performer, Greg, seemed like a decent guy making pretty cliched observations about office work. I give him an A for the effort of doing his show in English. I wonder if it plays better in French. I think he is Belgian. In terms of production value this 'Off' offering was a long way from Iphigenia and Black Monk. Two days later I took in a Sherlock Holmes piece staged by actual British actors speaking English. God help anyone who hoped to read the French subtitles which were badly and blurrily projected on the wall. The actors were okay, although the Holmes tended to chew the scenery. The actual story was pretty boilerplate and more than a little hokey. Beyond the performance itself, the audience arrived for a 4 PM show on a hot afternoon in southern France. The body odor from a couple of my fellow patrons was powerful. ICK!

Finally, I was intrigued to see an adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath on offer. I knew it would be in French, and I'm not sufficiently familiar with the book to know what was being said. But the piece itself was impressive. Led by a gifted actor who effectively told the whole story using shifting physicality to convey the different characters. Also on stage were three musicians who would occasionally offer a song in the Americana style of the material to great effect. The songs were all in English and they made it an enjoyable experience, even if I wish there had been subtitles to allow me to enjoy the production more. The piece itself is something I would eagerly see in translation if it could be done with someone as talented as the man I saw perform it in French. The space itself looked like some kind of old church. So much more interesting than the black boxes of the other 'Off" festival offerings I saw. However, it did put me off taking in anything else performed solely in French. Just frustrating not to understand. Something to think about.

Iphigenia

 

Was supposed to see this on Thursday night, but we missed the train and the chance to see the performance I was ticketed to see. But there was a single ticket available for tonight's performance and it was an interesting telling of an old, old story. In that respect, it falls right into the wheelhouse of this sabbatical. 

The face of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, but ships can only launch if there is wind. Agamemnon, his brother Menelaus (whose honor is made synonymous with Greek honor in making war on Troy for Helen's abduction/escape), and Ulysses agree that a sacrifice is required to summon the wind. The sacrifice is Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia. As the story begins on stage, the chorus speaks of it as a story remembered, a story that is told with anger because of how it ends. It always ends badly. But as the characters enter they occasionally challenge the chorus' remembered tale. Menelaus refuses to cry as the chorus suggests. Clytemnestra won't fall to her knees. More significantly, Agamemnon attempts to abort the sacrifice altogether. But as his wife Clytemnestra arrives with their daughter, events take on an inevitability, even as the characters struggle to find a way out.

Is sacrifice ever justified? Can it be made right to legitimize a questionable war over a questionable woman? 

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac pre-dates the plays by Euripides that tell the story of Iphigenia, but both are saved from death by the substitution of an animal in their stead. At the end of the play Clytemnestra asks, "if my daughter is saved, where is she?" She then raises the question, are the stories we tell of divine intervention just tales meant to make us feel better about what really happened? That is the question, isn't it? Are all of our stories about divinity simply a poorly disguised wish projection? Or do they point to something deeper in the human condition that cannot be named any other way?

COVID 22

Yes. I know it's COVID 19, but I didn't contract the virus until June 30 of 2022. Two vaccine regimen, with a booster of both Moderna AND Pfizer. That last booster came just a month before I was exposed, but was powerless to stop the latest sneaky omicron variant from slipping under its defenses. So instead of reveling in the beautiful weather and the sites of Paris with the fam, I got stuck in the Air BnB for 5 days. Well, four, but who's counting? The CDC? I did follow the guidelines and mask when I went out. And fortuitously, Marie booked an Air BnB with a separate bedroom that allowed me to isolate myself from the family.

As illness goes, this was pretty mild. A few days of body/headache, a slight cough occasionally. One REALLY gross glob of something nasty hacked up from my lungs and that's it. It's the isolation and mask that are tiresome. I kept my distance (for the most part) for two years. Maybe that made a difference. I'm keenly aware that keeping my distance from my family is imperative to keeping them healthy. I am praying it stops with me. So I caught up on some TV and failed to learn the Footloose dance from Umbrella Academy.

Miranda has joined us and is moving on from her adventure in au pairing. We are five again, so we'll see how it goes. Today we travel to Avignon where it is going to be VERY hot.

post-script: Travel was a disaster. Missed the train, rented a car for a 7-hour car trip, then M.E. caught my COVID. Things can only get better. Right?