A Dream Opening for TFANA's New Home

All the superlatives have been used up on Julie Taymor’s various productions over the years, so I’ll try to refrain.  That’s not easy, however, in light of this scrumptious presentation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a fitting inaugural production of the new permanent home of Theatre for a New Audience:  the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a delectable feast for language lovers, comedy and romance lovers.  This production is imaginative, light, sprightly, clever, funny, well designed, well acted….superlatives rain down.

After the debacle that was Ms. Taymor’s film version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, my faith is restored by this staging of Midsummer.  Here, Ms. Taymor uses a hodgepodge of technology and arts available to theatre and circus, and blends them to a euphoric wholeness that never overwhelms the words Shakespeare gave us (and the actors) in this beloved play. 

Once we’ve gasped at the beauty and cleverness of the active scenic design — very active — we are enthralled by Puck, in white face, chalky like a sloppy jester, played by the extraordinary Kathryn Hunter.  Hers is a highly intelligent, impish and athletic Puck, doing aerial acrobatics and leading all the players, human and fairy, between Athens and the magical wood “a league without the town.”

You may have heard that the stage is filled with children.  That’s true, playing the sprites and fairies of the forest, singing, swooping, creating the mist and the skies, almost flying.  These images are helped along by the organic choreography by Brian Brooks.  Musicians Jonathan Mastro and Wilson Torres carry the children and us to the fairyland to meet Titania, Oberon, Mustardseed and the rest on waves of music by Elliot Goldenthal. All the designers combined in this production created a wonderland for us, including Es Devlin (Scenic), Constance Hoffman (Costume), Donald Holder (Lighting), Matt Tierney (Sound), and Sven Ortel (Projection Design).

The stage, the balconies, the edges and tops and bottoms and sides are all well used — characters disappear into trap doors, up to the heavens, backward and forward, and the trap doors provide still more levels for the actors to play in.  From the lovers to the mechanicals, this ¾ stage and above production afforded space and angles and highs and lows.

Tina Benko as Titania

Tina Benko’s towering Titania (children playing fairies aids in this image) has ivory skin and a musical voice making for a sensual and funny and extremely pale embodiment of fair Titania. In stark contrast to Titania’s whiteness was the darker than deep brown of David Harewood’s Oberon, his magnificent voice commanding then cooing and wooing.  Shakespeare’s verse flows trippingly on the tongues of these two well-matched artists.

David Harewood as Oberon, Kathryn Hunter as Puck at right

Back in Athens, Egeus is well played by the always reliable TFANA stalwart, Robert Langdon Lloyd.  Okwui Okpokwasili and Roger Clark were well suited to each other and their roles as Hippolyta and Theseus.  The four lovers were quite delightful, passionate, lithe, limber, enjoying a fine pillow fight abetted by the fairies.  Those disguised children even play the magical forest, putting obstacles in the way of the benighted and bewitched lovers lost in the woods.  It was all very clever fun.  Good work by the mix-and-match lovers, Mandi Masden as Helena, LillyEnglert as Hermia, Zach Appelman as Demetrius, and Jake Horowitz as Lysander.

Zach Appelman as Demetrius, Lilly Englert as Hermia, and Jake Horowitz as Lysander

The Mechanicals are a motley crew, led by a charmingly gauche Joe Grifasi as Peter Quince; a haplessly huge Brendan Averett as Snug the Joiner, the frightened lion; a sweet-voiced Zachary Infante as Francis Flute and a femininely feisty Thisbe; William Youmans as Robin Starveling, an easily affronted Moonshine; Jacob Ming-Trent as Tom Snout, or The Wall; all mastered by the remarkable Max Casella as Nick Bottom, the (dream) weaver.  The edits in the script were made with a light precise touch, nothing was missed, least of all Philostrate’s prattling about the various offerings for entertainment at the Duke’s nuptials.  As played by Puck, who knows how to entertain a crowd, Philostrate passes by the hemming and hawing about what play was to be presented — we want Pyramus and Thisbe, and we are not disappointed.

The only flaw in the TFANA’s brand new Polonsky Shakespeare Center is that the central section of the orchestra is not adequately raked — from my second row seat, I could not see action just left of center especially when the actors were lying or rolling or otherwise on the ground, as fairies and imps and lovers are wont to be.  Bits in that spot garnered laughs, but not from me – and the fellow in front of me was not inordinately tall 

Midsummer Night’s and Bottom’s Dreams are many-leveled, quite literally, as Ms. Taymor likes to lift and swing her sets and her actors into the heavens and down to the ground (thanks and praises to Airealistic for the aerial design and flight), starting with Puck in the opening scene.  The stage starts off spare and grows to the limits of imagination and a midsummer night’s dream.  This production happily runs to January 12.  Start your new year off right!

~ Molly Matera, signing off to re-read the play, and check the savings account to see if she can afford to go again. 

Kafka Story Takes On New Life In The Theatre — Again?

Kafka’s Monkey is distressing, fascinating, and riveting because Kathryn Hunter subsumes her human self and becomes an ape. She is dressed in white tie and tails and can do a sweet soft shoe, but she is an ape, with her gamboled gait and swinging arms that bend back and off kilter. When she speaks her voice and intonation are not quite … human.  For Kathryn Hunter enters the stage, crouched and dragging a suitcase and cane, as “Red Peter,” a male chimpanzee from the Gold Coast who was shot and captured by Europeans.  This ape in man’s clothing has learned that, while freedom is impossible, he can find his way out of total captivity by emulating man.  He learns to drink alcohol and spit to be a man, and even learns to speak and swear.  So completely humanized has he become that Red Peter has a pretty silver flask that fits neatly into his jacket pocket, just like a Jazz Age swell.

This sort of piece is not merely imagined and written.  No open call discovered Ms. Hunter.  This is a joint creation developed by theatrical colleagues.  Colin Teevan adapted Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” to create — along with director Walter Meierjohann and Ms. Hunter — this unusual bit o’ theatre.  It is one miserable story magnificently enacted at the Baryshnikov Arts Center where Theatre for a New Audience is presenting The Young Vic’s production.  Walter Meierjohann directs Ms. Hunter, who worked closely with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s movement director Ilan Reichel as the ape in Kafka’s story, who is specifically a chimpanzee in Ms. Hunter’s interpretation.

Kathryn Hunter as Red Peter with his Baby picture.  Photo (c) 2013 Keith Pattison.

A massive photograph of a baby ape’s face dominates the stage. There is a stool, two bananas, and a lectern.  Otherwise the theatre space is just that — a space with lights and ladders and poles and pulleys. Kafka’s Monkey needs no more.  Its point is funny and sad, and its audience must laugh as well as weep. It is the story of a chimp abducted and tamed and trained for various purposes— a European zoo, perhaps a laboratory.  Eventually, Red Peter says, he chose life on the stage instead of captivity in a zoo and has become a renowned music hall variety star, come this evening to address a scientific academy — and an adventurous theatrical audience. Kafka’s Monkey is an indictment of humanity for its acts against all life.

For all my rapt attention and shame at being human, Kafka’s Monkey did not feel precisely like a play.  Not because it lacks a beginning-middle-and-end, but rather because we wait while Kathryn Hunter struts her hour on the stage, we wait for the story to go … somewhere else.  Eventually, just as the Ape says there is, in fact, no way out despite his “accomplishments,” he spies the Exit sign, and goes out.  Terrific story.  But a play?

Kathryn Hunter in Kafka's Monkey.  Photo (c) 2013 Keith Pattison.

Ms. Hunter as Red Peter stares down members of the audience as any animal would.  Watching Red Peter interact with members of the audience, grooming a man’s hair as he would a fellow ape, and eating the nits found there, is a delight.  He also kindly shares a banana with another member of the audience. Red Peter’s speech patterns go from cultured European gentleman to chimp chatter and shrieks to an angry man.  Er, ape.  He hangs from ladders and twists and turns and contorts his body till we wince. He gazes at us, forcing us to look into his eyes and see ourselves.

Kathryn Hunter is amazing.  Her 50-odd year old body does everything she requires of it, which is an enormous amount.  She embodies Red Peter entirely.  Messrs. Teevan and Meierjohann and Reichel are brilliantly and bravely creative.  Still, it’s a story not a play.  In the same breath with which I say, “This is not a play,” I shout, “This is thought-provoking theatre.”

After the fact, I recalled a scene in Cabaret in which the Emcee dances with an ape in a flowered hat and a frilly skirt, singing “If you could see her through my eyes….she wouldn’t look Jewish at all!”  I wondered, was that Kafka’s monkey?  The short story was first published in 1917, and has been discussed and critiqued for decades as to all its possible meanings — including the assimilation of Jews into Christian society — and the cabaret scene of Weimar Germany combined various forms of high and low culture.  Or perhaps it was just the cleverness of Kander and Ebb.  In how many other places, references, had I already experienced pieces of Kafka’s story without having read it, and without knowing? 

Run don’t lope to the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Jerome Robbins Theater on 37^th Street between 9^th and 10^th Avenues to see this limited engagement (April 3-17).  Luckily for us, the remarkable Kathryn Hunter will return the following week for another short run in Fragments, from the texts of Samuel Beckett, as directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne.  She is a performer worth traveling to see.

~ Molly Matera, signing off.  So much to read and see, so little time…..