Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Anna Deavere Smith Photo: Joan Marcus

I graduated from Miami University in Ohio in the spring of 1990. Before I left, I was in the final seminar taught by Linda Singer, a philosopher, author, and for me, hugely influential intellectual force. (Her final work Erotic Welfare was published posthumously in 1993 after being edited by her friend and colleague Judith Butler.) Singer’s work on sexual theory and politics was informed by the traditions of post-structuralist/post-colonial theory and she could be a daunting figure on many levels. She did not tolerate fools easily and I can remember her bringing more than one philosophy graduate student to tears over A Thousand Plateaus. She heavily shaped my distaste for humanism and pluralism. My time as one of her students was also marked by the fact that she was dying. It was widely known she was being treated for cancer and throughout the many weeks the small seminar met, we watched her continue to physically deteriorate. She was a small woman to begin with and looked thin and grey by the end of the course. I recall seminars where she would drift off asleep in the middle of a forceful soliloquy on Foucault or Derrida. We students would look at each other with concern, but she would snap back to and carry on without missing a beat. Her illness was never spoken of. It seemed inappropriate and she never gave off any signals to indicate that she cared to discuss it with us, so it was left aside despite our knowing what was happening. Of the many things she said, one that I still carry to this day was a response to the consternation of a philosophy grad student who inquired in disbelief that there must be some things we have in common by simple fact of our humanity. Singer rejected this idea outright. “We share nothing,” she said, “except perhaps death. And even that we don’t experience in similar ways.”

She didn’t expound on this, but her words have haunted me. I still think of them as immensely brave. And I thought of them again last night while watching the powerful and ground-shaking Let Me Down Easy, the 2008 work from dramatist Anna Deavere Smith. The show is travelling the west coast and has arrived at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica this week. Let Me Down Easy is quintessential Smith, a single act consisting of her re-creations of verbatim dialog from a number of different people she interviewed as part of her research for the project. The names and subtitles of each vignette are projected above the stage on a screen, which is helpful for the sake of clarity. Ostensibly the show is about the American medical care system, but that isn’t really the case. It’s about death. And in particular, it’s about the way we think about death in the everyday sense. Her interviews with doctors, clergy, everyday people, and celebrities cover many topics, but they always come back to the kinds of death the great majority of us (at least in the West) will experience. This is not about being murdered, or dying in combat or a car accident. These are deaths from cancer, renal failure, and infectious disease - the kinds of things that lead people into the medical care system and eventually their own ends.

Let Me Down Easy is not all doom and gloom, however. It is very funny at several times. This is particularly true of the handful of celebrities Smith channels in the show including Lance Armstrong and Lauren Hutton. Her portrayal of the sharp wit of Ann Richards during cancer treatment is particularly hysterical. But in perhaps the most humanizing of ways, there is no escaping the uninvited guest in the room. Whether the subjects are cancer patients, their doctors, or people who have survived life-threatening illnesses, Let Me Down Easy always comes back around to what we all must come back around to. The last few monologues in the show are perhaps the most moving. One is from Smith’s own elderly aunt, Lorraine Coleman about the death of her own mother, and the other is from an interview from the recently deceased Rev. Peter J. Gomes. It’s impossible to watch this through anything but tears.

Smith’s recreations of these 20 some characters are flawless. She’s as amazing to watch now as she has ever been. As she moves through the show she takes and then abandons a variety of props to represent each one. Soon the stage is littered with coats, trays, and glasses like some party instantly abandoned by all the guests. But what I admire most about Smith isn’t simply her accents or the masterful physical mimicry of her subjects, it’s her keen eye as a curator. Smith is able to cull through hundreds of interviews to find material that works together in a beautiful and dramatic way. Some of these interchanges, like that of Hutton’s, on the surface seem banal and unengaged. There is no great anecdote here, but Smith sees the conversation in a much larger context and shows us the meaning in it by its relation to the other pieces around it. I can’t recommend the show (running through July 30) highly enough. Smith and her characters provide a powerfully moving case for what Linda Singer suspected might be true: the one thing we humans may have most in common is our certain, yet unknown end.

Labels: Broad Stage 10/11, LA Theater Reviews

F. Murray Abraham and Melissa Miller and Jessica Photo: Gerry Goodstein/TFANA

Perhaps one of the most respected theater companies in New York, the Theater for a New Audience has spent three decades producing forward-thinking revivals of Shakespeare and other playwrights both off-Broadway and around the world. The company has collaborated with some of the biggest names in today’s theater world, so it’s quite exciting to have them in Los Angles as part of their current tour at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, one of the few venues left in the city willing and able to present this kind of work to local audiences. So hurray for the Broad and hurray for this production of The Merchant of Venice directed by Darko Tresnjak. Following its premiere in 2007, this modern dress staging of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic of problem plays has garnered great reviews everywhere it’s been. In this case, you can believe what you read. Tresnjak updates the action of the play to the “near future” where the world of 14th-century Italian commerce is re-envisioned as the corporate world of Wall Street with its HD monitors, business suits, and frosted glass. There are smart phones and gadgets at every turn. The production relies on a rather simple set that is dominated by little more than three monitors and three Apple laptop computers that serve as Portia’s caskets. But it’s a good looking show that makes the few props that are used, a glittering knife, a plexiglass chair, pop in contrast to their surroundings.

Of course this is Merchant so the matter of who plays Shylock is of utmost importance. It’s catnip for the greatest actors, and Oscar-winner F Murray Abraham is one of the biggest draws in the show. His is a Shylock devoid of some of the physical and vocal trappings used by others to connote Shylock’s ethnic heritage. Which has the effect of making some of the more jarring racial epitaphs used by other characters in the story all the more unsettling by making this world seem exceptionally familiar to our own. Abraham’s Shylock is a more deliberative and argumentative than a purely angry or rageful one. The other pole in this play is Portia, the young woman who wins the Merchant’s life and humiliates Shylock though having never met him before. Kate MacCluggage gives a lovely performance as Portia’s rage blossoms out of the whirlwind romance she has embarked upon. There are many other solid performances in the cast, like Jacob Ming-Trent’s assured and funny Launcelot Gobbo, and a heartbreaking Melissa Miller as Jessica, Shylock's daughter.

Tresnjak does go for a strategy similar to the one that Daniel Sullivan recently used in the Public Theater’s The Merchant of Venice seen in New York last Fall and Winter. By shifting the focus to Portia and portraying the events of the play as ultimately a betrayal of her trust in Bassanio, Tresnjak creates a believable balance between the romantic comedy and the jarring anti-Semitism expressed by characters in the play. Tresnjak doesn’t quite carry this line of thought out as far as Sullivan does, and this Merchant still has a happy ending that is a little outside of the believable for a modern audience with the play’s three central couples dancing off into the sunset. Tresnjak is also somewhat more ambivalent about Portia’s higher moral virtues particularly in the first two acts. On the other hand though, this production is a little more blunt about the homosexual subtext of the relationship between Bassanio and Antonio, the Merchant, when the former plants a kiss on his beloved confidant in the climactic trial scene. It’s not enough to seem out of context, but certainly makes a sharp point about another of the work’s subtexts. And any production of The Merchant of Venice that communicates this much complexity and does it so well is worth seeing. This is a great chance to see the highest quality New York theater right here in Los Angeles, so hurry up and don’t miss this show before it ends next Sunday.

Labels: Broad Stage 10/11

Serena Evans, Christopher Benjamin and Sarah Woodward Photo: John Tramper

On Friday, I headed over to Santa Monica for the opening of Merry Wives of Windsor in a 2008 production from Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, which was kicking off its US and UK tour this year at the Broad Stage. We here in Los Angeles have been blessed with regular visits from the 13-year-old company for many years now, starting in its days under the direction of Mark Rylance when the troupe appeared as part of the now defunct UCLA Live International Theater Festival. These days, the Globe actors and crew have set up shop at the more inviting Broad Stage where they appeared last year in Love’s Labour’s Lost and their return in this most unproblematic of Shakespeare’s comedies is certainly one of the highlights of this year’s Broad season. It’s a lovely, simple, and very funny production, well received in London during it premiere in 2008 and again in revival there this past summer. It deserves to be a big hit here as well.

The play is most known for its central character and primary fool, Sir John Falstaff. His nearly delusional beliefs about his prowess and magnetism drive what is essentially a family comedy. It’s easy to understand why Verdi was drawn to this material, incorporating most of it in his appropriately titled opera, Falstaff. But the Globe players under original director Christopher Luscombe, have refocused the attention here on the two married couples, the Fords and the Pages, whose insecurities and good humor provide most of the laughs. The press around this production has invited audiences to think about Merry Wives as a precursor to the modern day sitcom. And while there is definitely an Ethel and Lucy vibe to the interactions between Alice Ford and Meg Page, this comparison may be too dismissive of not only the play's quality, but the gentle beauty of this staging. The set on this stop of the tour consists of little more than a circular stage with a rotating center and outer perimeter. There is a short wooden tower wall that is rotated to signify changes in scene from interior to exterior and which acts as a platform for the musical ensemble that accompanies the cast periodically. The beautiful Elizabethan costumes are nicely set off by the straightforward set.

The Globe Theater casts are typically excellent, and I was very impressed with the women at the crux of this one. Serena Evans and Sarah Woodward play Mrs. Page and Ford respectively with complete glee and impishness. Christopher Benjamin’s Falstaff was engaging, but subtle enough not to overwhelm the domestic comedy at the play’s heart. And while it’s not the Elizabethan Globe Theater, the Broad is an excellent site for this show given its warmth and intimacy. You should go. It runs through October 24 before it leaves for New York.

Labels: Broad Stage 10/11, LA Theater Reviews