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.
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| 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.
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