Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – The World’s Most Famous Censored Playwright… Performed With Marionettes!
Theresa Linnihan and Vit Horejs in Audience (Photo: Jonathan Slaff)
by Michael Dale
This week…
Václav Havel’s Audience, adapted by Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre at La MaMa through February 19. Tickets $30, Students/Seniors $25.
Endgame at Irish Rep through March 12. Tickets $50/$70/$95.
Inexpensive and recommended…
Modern Swimwear at The Tank through February 12. Tickets $25/$35/$50.
I’ll readily admit that when I told friends I was seeing a Vaclav Havel marionette show at La MaMa…
…it probably sounded like a punch line from a Will & Grace episode. But hey, the Off-Off Broadway landmark founded by Ellen Stewart has spent over 60 years establishing itself as the theatre in New York to see the weird stuff.
But as weird as Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s production sounds, in the end translator/director Vit Horejs’ charming bit of protest theatre disguised as whimsey makes perfect sense.
In case anyone needs a reminder, the show begins with a short film explaining how Czechoslovakia’s first democratically-elected president was once a playwright who, after his work was banned from being performed in his home country, took a job at the Krakonoš brewery. Audience, which was illegally performed in apartments when first penned in 1975, was the first of his three plays featuring a character named Ferdinand Vaněk, a thinly-veiled stand-in for the author.
The veil is even thinner when Horejs himself appears on stage wearing a wig identical to the hairstyle Havel wore in a photo from the filmed prologue, taken during his brewery days. He enters literally rolling out a barrel onto the stage and splits it open to not only reveal designer Alan Barnes Netherton‘s multileveled puppet theatre, but also his co-star, Theresa Linnihan.
A video camera offers closeup views of the marionettes handled by the pair and suggests the constant surveillance taking place in the workspace as Linnihan, playing a convivial brewmaster tasked by the government to keep a careful watch for subversive activities by his intellectual employee, tries engaging Vaněk in beer-fueled conversation that promises advancement and a softer workload in exchange for making his boss appear successful to his superiors. As the dynamics between the two change, so does the style and size of the puppets they manipulate.
Inspired to have our own beer-fueled conversation, my buddy and I strolled around the corner for $6 PBRs at Fish Bar, a cozy inexpensive watering hole that proudly displays an 8x10 of Abe Vigoda at the bar. In our corner table we discussed the phenomenon of artists who become presidents of their countries and debated as to whether or not Ronald Reagan counts as an artist
I’m very much of the opinion that you don’t have to understand a play to enjoy it. It’s a handy philosophy to have as long as theatre companies keep producing Samuel Beckett…
I recall a 1950s episode of What’s My Line?, where Bert Lahr was the mystery guest shortly after he appeared on Broadway in Waiting For Godot and panelist Bennett Cerf asked, “Did you know what it was all about?”
“Did you?,” countered Lahr.
“No, sir.”
“Then we’re even.”
I trust director Ciaran O’Reilly has firmer grasp on the subtextual niceties of Beckett’s absurdist piece, Endgame, as evidenced by his marvelous production headed by Bill Irwin and John Douglas Thompson at Irish Rep.
While set designer Charlie Corcoran places the play in a dilapidated apartment that brought me back to Avenue C, circa 1985, his visuals, combined with Orla Long’s costumes and Michael Gottlieb’s lights, depict the squalor with a soft elegance resembling an oil painting, giving a lovely dignity that frames the performances its inhabitants.
Bill Irwin and John Douglas Thompson in Endgame (Photo: Carol Rosegg)
Thompson is center stage as the blind and chairbound Hamm, who spends his days following a dystopian disaster in fragile majesty, commanding orders to his longtime servant, Clov, played by Irwin with dutiful reverence and a pronounced limp. The great clown Irwin, evoking pathos more than humor, supplies the play’s only movement while Thompson’s classically enriched vocals dominate the soundscape.
There’s brief, but potent, business with Hamm’s legless parents who live in neighboring trash cans. Joe Grifasi and Patrice Johnson Chevannes play the role with crack vaudevillian give and take.
When Endgame premiered in the 1950s, audiences were no doubt reminded of the fresh possibility of nuclear devastation. Today, viewers might be thinking more of the effects of global warming, or of the consequences of information gathered by a spy balloon.
Or, like me, you can just sit in dazzled wonderment to be witness to such gorgeous and glorious acting.
Curtain Line…
If George Santos had any guts he’d say he wrote the darn thing.