Passings

Today was the day my play Kew Gardens was supposed to premiere at Actors' Theatre in Santa Cruz. Alas, live performances of the play have been cancelled, just the latest casualty of 2022.

Fortunately, Actors' Theatre will be filming its 8 Tens @ 8 Festival this year, and the play should be available to view streaming sometime next month. Both Bill Peters, who is directing Kew Gardens, and Sienna Thorgusen, who is starring in the one-woman play, are okay, in spite of the Omicron surge.

Omicron has not shut down Broadway (though it has closed a number of shows), which means that last night I got to see Irene Sankoff and David Hein's musical Come From Away. Seeing a play about 9-11 has different resonances in 2022. Watching it, I certainly remembered my own experiences that day, and the loss of Carol LaPlante, who died in the Towers, but there were other feelings, too, and the memory of all the people in my life who have died of Covid, including Marge Green who passed only recently.

Then, last night, I got word of another passing. Terry Teachout, the long-time theatre critic for the Wall Street Journal, is dead at 65. For nearly 20 years, he wrote for the Journal in a way that wrote for all America. Rather than just cover theatre in New York City, he traveled across the country, reviewing regional productions that were often doing far more exciting work than what is usually seen on or off Broadway. (I invited him to come out to Michigan to review Detroit Rep's production of my play Capital, but alas, he never responded.)

Teachout was an enthusiastic supporter of Gingold Theatrical Group and Bedlam. He also loved attending shows at the Mint Theater Company, which sent out a brief memorial to him today. According to Jonathan Bank, the Mint's producing artistic director, "Terry reviewed 14 Mint productions between 2005 and 2018. His impact on the Mint, and so many other smaller companies, is profound and immeasurable."

The only time I met Teachout in person was at a Shaw conference in New York, where he argued that just as we've liberated the plays of William Shakespeare from having to always be set in the same time period, we should free the plays of Bernard Shaw and other more recent dramatists from always being staged the same way. He particularly praised Bedlam's innovative production of Saint Joan.

So many losses in the past couple of years! Let's hope for better things in the year to come.

Mrs. Warren Redux

Tonight, I participated in a lively panel discussion about the play Mrs. Warren's Profession hosted by Gingold Theatrical Group, the company currently producing the show off-Broadway on Theatre Row.

Bernard Shaw wrote the play back in 1893, but it was immediately banned in Britain and did not receive any production until 1902, when the Stage Society presented a private performance for one day only. Audience members had to nominally join a special club in order to evade censorship rules.

A production three years later in New York City resulted in the entire cast getting arrested. Shaw kept trying to get the play produced in London, periodically resubmitting it to the censor's office. Critics attacked the piece for its frank discussion of prostitution, but Shaw knew that wasn't the real reason they hated it. He wrote in 1917:

I greatly doubt whether it will ever be licensed in this country, because it has against it the huge commercial interests in prostitution.... I think a really good performance of Mrs. Warren's Profession would keep its audience out of the hands of the women of the street for a fortnight at least. And that is precisely why it encounters an opposition unknown in the case of plays which stimulate the sex illusion.

Well, it wasn't literally the commercial interests in sex work that kept the play banned, but Mrs. Warren's Profession does expose how the entire capitalist system reduces human beings to the lowest states of degradation. Because of the play's history of censorship, tonight panel included Christopher Finan, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. He warned that censorship is increasing in the United States, in spite of a recent Supreme Court decision.

Other panelists included Stephen Brown-Fried, who directed a wonderful production of Shaw's Misalliance at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Ellen Dolgin of the International Shaw Society, esteemed Shaw critic Martin Meisel, lawyer Ethan E. Litwin, Liam Prendergast, who assistant directed GTG's production of Caesar and Cleopatra, and Sarah Rose Kearns, who penned the adaptation of Persuasion recently staged by Bedlam. David Staller, who directed the current production of Mrs. Warren's Profession, moderated.

It was great to be in such distinguished company discussing such a fascinating play. If you haven't seen it yet, the production is still running until November 20th. GTG will also be doing a one-night-only staging of Shaw's delightful comedy Village Wooing on December 13th, with Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders.

Shaw in New York... in Print!

The most recent issue of The Shaw Society's publication The Shavian arrived in the mail yesterday. I was pleased to see them include my article "Bumper Year for Shaw in New York."

I knew I wanted to write something for The Shavian after I saw Bedlam's wonderful production of Pygmalion last spring. Director Eric Tucker did a wonderful job making the century-old play fiercely relevant to contemporary America.

Of course, Bedlam wasn't the only company doing Shaw in New York last year. Saint Joan returned to Broadway in a production by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Being a huge fan of Joan of Arc (and having written my own play about the Maid, Dark Night of the Soul), I knew I would be seeing that as well.

Plus, Gingold Theatrical Group always does a great job with their Project Shaw readings, and I knew they were planning a full-scale production of Heartbreak House. I pitched the idea of an article on all three to The Shavian's editor, Anne Wright. She liked the idea. The only problem was that Heartbreak House wouldn't be opening for several months. Still, she asked me to go ahead an write the article, getting in my copy as quickly as possible after Heartbreak House opened so the whole issue could be laid out, printed, and mailed by the end of the year.

Well, GTG outdid themselves, and I ended up having nothing but good things to say about their production, in spite of not knowing how good it would be when I agreed to review it. Director David Staller reset Heartbreak House as a play-within-a-play happening during the blitz in London, and the concept worked beautifully.

Incidentally, this issue of The Shavian also includes articles by Philippa Parker, Stanley Weintraub, Kenneth McConkey, and others, so I'm in good company!

Top Plays of 2018

Each December, I compile a list of the top plays I saw that opened that year in New York City. Last year, Sweeney Todd, HOME/SICK, and Julius Caesar topped the list.

This year both Roundabout Theatre Company and the Public Theater have multiple shows on my list. Playwrights William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw get multiple nods as well.

So without further ado, here’s my list:

10. Romeo and Juliet – Each year, New York Classical Theatre Company puts on free productions in the city’s parks. This summer’s production of Shakespeare’s classic tale about star-crossed lovers used innovative doubling to tell a familiar story in a memorable new way.

9. Heartbreak House – Gingold Theatrical Group makes the list this year with another innovative adaptation of a classic. This re-imagining of Shaw’s chestnut about Europe during World War I was reset as a play-within-a-play during the London Blitz, which worked quite well.

8. Love’s Labour’s Lost – This Shake & Bake production combines the Bard’s romantic comedy with a five-course tasting menu. The actors do a wonderful job creating magical moments in a pared-down production in the Meatpacking District. The food is tasty, but it’s the acting that is truly delicious.

7. Stories by Heart – So, what is this thing? That’s what John Lithgow quipped at the beginning of his one-man show about the stories his father read to him as a child. Ordinarily, I don’t go in for one person plays, but Lithgow’s mixture of personal memoir with classic storytelling won me over in the end.

6. Othello – Not everyone loved the Public Theatre’s production of Othello this summer at the Delacorte, but I found Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s direction to be superb. The relationship between Iago and Rodrigo was particularly fascinating to me, and Chukwudi Iwuji did a great job playing the title role.

5. Mother of the Maid – The Public Theatre scored another hit with Jane Anderson’s new play Mother of the Maid about the family of Joan of Arc. The piece was marketed as a vehicle for Glenn Close, who played Isabelle Arc, but Anderson’s play tells the story from an interesting perspective, and would be worth seeing even without Close’s star power.

4. Bernhardt/Hamlet – As a fan of both Sarah Bernhardt and William Shakespeare, I knew I had to see this show. This is probably Theresa Rebeck’s best play to date, and the cast was superb. Janet McTeer was deservedly praised as Bernhardt, but Dylan Baker was also wonderful as the legendary French actor Constant Coquelin, and Jason Butler gave a memorable portrayal of the playwright Edmond Rostand.

3. Pygmalion – Bedlam theatre company’s productions are sometimes hit-or-miss, but they are generally memorable even when they don’t entirely succeed. This year’s re-imagining of Shaw’s most popular play definitely qualifies as a hit, though. The immersive first act led into an exploration of not just class, but also race, ethnicity, and assimilation, all in the frantic Bedlam style in which performers play multiple characters to hilarious effect.

2. Twelfth Night – What happened to musicals this year? All of my top ten picks were straight plays this year, with the exception of Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which she co-created with director Kwame Kwei-Armah as part of the Public Works program, but came back in a new production this summer as a part of the regular Shakespeare in the Park season. Taub’s songs are inspired by Shakespeare’s text, but not usually direct settings of his poetry, in spite of the fact that Twelfth Night already contains multiple songs. Her lyrics fit in with the Bard’s play beautifully, and her performance as Feste was equally delightful.

1. Travesties – To me, the most delightful production this year, however, was Roundabout’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. As a playwright, I’ve always admired Stoppard’s skill in weaving together the stories of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara into a rollicking farce that also makes us think and feel in new ways. Perhaps because this production was directed by a fellow playwright, Patrick Marber, it was able to encompass both the profundity and goofiness of Stoppard’s writing. A cast that included Tom Hollander, Scarlett Strallen, and Sara Topham also seemed exceptionally sympathetic to Stoppard’s ambitious vision.

So that’s my list. Here’s to an even better year of New York theatre in 2019!

English Mystic Live Onstage!

Last night I saw John Wulp's play The Saintliness of Margery Kempe at the Duke on 42nd Street. The play tells the story of the medieval English mystic who dictated what is considered to be the first autobiography in the English language.

The fact Kempe holds that distinction is all the more remarkable given that she was not a canoness or nun, nor a queen or noblewoman. In fact, she had to dictate the book because she herself could neither read nor write, but was simply the wife of a town official and the owner of a brewery.

In this production directed by Austin Pendleton, Andrus Nichols portrays the remarkable Kempe. A co-founder of the Bedlam theatre company, Nichols has distinguished herself playing such roles as Gertrude in Hamlet and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. She does an equally fine job as Kempe, but the script makes her take some interesting turns with the character.

In Creature, Heidi Schreck's dramatization of Kempe's life, the mystic is portrayed as well... a mystic. A woman who really is different from other people and has visions she cannot explain. Wulp gives us a much more worldly Kempe, a woman who appears to fabricate a religious vision as an excuse to not have sex with her husband. (Kempe really did turn to a celibate marriage, but only after having 14 children, not the mere six portrayed in the play.)

At first the play seems to be making fun of Kempe, but in the second act it gets us to question whether she might be someone special after all. In a dubious miracle, she is struck by a rock and beam in a collapsing church, but when she calls out to Jesus, her pain disappears. She dresses in white and goes on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, but spends so much time weeping emotionally that the authorities ban her from Jerusalem.

Both sinner and saint, Wulp's Kempe is neither entirely admirable, nor someone we can completely condemn. While Schreck ends her play with Kempe's visit to fellow mystic Julian of Norwich, Wulp has her instead witness the canonization of Bridget of Sweden, another mystic who like Kemp was a middle-class wife and mother (though from a better family and more adept at staying out of trouble).

If you want to see The Saintliness of Margery Kempe, it's running until August 26th.

Bedlam's PYGMALION

I just got back from seeing the Bedlam theatre company's wonderful production of Pygmalion at the Sheen Center. Get your tickets soon, as it is not to be missed.

Bedlam has a knack for doing the plays of Shaw. Their production of Saint Joan was one of the best things I saw in 2013. Once again, director and Bedlam co-founder Eric Tucker has made Shaw feel contemporary and relevant to today's audiences.

The production uses an immersive technique for the first act, having the actors mingle with the audience in a space constructed to look like a London street. Tucker himself is there, playing Henry Higgins with unabashed ego and self-satisfaction. Vaishnavi Sharma plays Eliza with a strong Indian accent, requiring a few line changes, but the concept works.

After the first act, the audience is ushered into a specially constructed seating area in the Sheen Center's black box space. The rest of the play is performed in three-quarters round, with the cast of six performing multiple roles, in true Bedlam style. Actors change their accents quickly from one character to another while doffing new hats or wearing shawls to indicate a new character.

This technique has worked in a number of Bedlam shows, including Hamlet and Sense and Sensibility, but it is especially apropos here, in a play about the importance of speech. Also, watching Eliza's Indian accent disappear as she is assimilated more and more into "respectable" society adds a new element to this story of a flower girl taught to speak like a duchess.

In addition to Tucker and Sharma, the play also features Bedlam veteran Edmund Lewis, who was a memorable Laertes, but now makes an even stronger impression as Mrs. Higgins! Nigel Gore, who was a brilliant Dr. Rank in Theatre for a New Audience's A Doll's House, plays a perfect Pickering, as well as assorted other characters. Rajesh Bose is hysterical as Mr. Doolittle, and Annabel Capper does a great job going back and forth between Mrs. Higgins's maid and Clara Eynsford-Hill.

Pygmalion is only playing until April 22nd, so make sure you don't miss out. As Eliza might say, it would be a bloody shame!

Shaw Festival

I'm currently in Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Festival and the annual conference of the International Shaw Society.

My first day here in Canada, I saw Niagara Falls (IMPRESSIVE!) and then the festival's production of Androcles and the Lion.

Well, it's hard to top the Falls, but Shaw's little play can also be impressive. I was particularly struck by the Emperor claiming that he is the one being oppressed, not the Christians he is throwing to the lions. Alas, it is nothing new for those in power to practice the politics of resentment, claiming they are the ones being mistreated. (Sad.)

The production was rather... unconventional. It utilized audience interaction in ways that sometimes worked, but at times seemed unnecessary. Unfortunately, the show got panned in a review I read beforehand, so I went in with low expectations. To my surprise, though, the cast won me over, and I enjoyed the play quite a bit.

Yesterday, Tim Carroll, the new artistic director of the Shaw Festival, addressed the conference attendees. He was also the director of not just Androcles and the Lion, but also Saint Joan, which I saw that afternoon. It was a modernized, stripped-down production of the play, similar to the Bedlam production of Saint Joan I saw (and loved) a few years ago. Sara Topham played the title role, and was quite good.

We've also had a number of interesting speakers at the conference address issues in Saint Joan. Stanley Weintraub talked about how Shaw had presented a scene very similar to the play's epilogue in a short story called "The Emperor and the Little Girl." Brad Kent then spoke about Saint Joan and affect, hopefully pushing back against the appropriation of Joan of Arc's image by certain right-wing groups in France, a fact he acknowledged in his presentation. Mary Christian gave a very interesting paper on Joan as a middle-class heroine, pointing out that in the play she is neither a peasant nor a princess, but someone from the mid-level of society.

Most relevant to my own academic work on star performers, Robert Gaines spoke about the London production of Saint Joan with Sybil Thorndike. Shaw and Lewis Casson co-directed the production. Casson and Thorndike had been acting in a commercial hit by Henry Arthur Jones called The Lie but walked away from it in order to take a chance on Shaw's play. That risk paid off, and Saint Joan became an enormous success, with people lining up as early as 5 am just to get tickets.

Shaw felt that the epilogue to the play was absolutely necessary. When I first read the piece, I didn't agree, but after seeing the epilogue performed so successfully both by Bedlam and by the Shaw Festival, I can't imagine the play without it.

My own Joan of Arc play, Dark Night of the Soul, will have a reading in September. My take on the character is quite different from Shaw's, but seeing his play once again has given me renewed appreciation for what he did with the material.

Tomorrow, I give my presentation on Major Barbara. Wish me luck!

Bedlam's Sense and Sensibility

The Bedlam theatre company has attracted great attention ever since its innovative staging of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. That production, starring Bedlam co-founder Andrus Nichols as Joan of Arc, not only drew critical praise, but it was the talk of the Shaw in New York conference last year.

Bedlam's method--small casts performing multiple roles, flexible theatre spaces, innovative staging--also worked with their production of Hamlet. But now the company is tackling an adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel Sense and Sensibility. Can the same method that worked so well for Shakespeare and Shaw also serve a sprawling novel like Sense and Sensibility?

Well, let's see... yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and well, um... yes.

Kate Hamill, who also plays Marianne Dashwood, penned the adaptation, and she is to be commended for keeping the piece engaging and surprising, even for those already familiar with the story. Eric Tucker, who also directed Saint Joan and Hamlet, adds magnificent staging to Hamill's script, having actors literally roll across the stage on wheeled chairs, sofas, tables, and other set pieces, all designed by John McDermott. The result is a joyous, rollicking, fast-paced ride through the novel.

I will not say that the production never stops, because it does, but the moments when the frenetic action comes to a standstill have all the more intensity because of the contrast. When Elinor Dashwood (played by Nichols) comes face to face with a secret from Lucy Steele (played with delightful annoyingness by Laura Baranik), the sudden standstill in the action feels to us like the end of the world--as no doubt it does to poor Elinor as well.

The entire cast is excellent, but the story of course focuses on the Dashwood ladies, not just Elinor and Marianne, but also their sister Margaret (played by Jessica Frey) and their mother (played by Samantha Steinmetz, who also does a hilarious turn as Lucy Steele's ditzy sister Anne). Edmund Lewis is upstanding as Colonel Brandon, and Jason O'Connell is a charismatic Edward Ferrars when he isn't stealing the scene from himself by doubling as Edward's ridiculous younger brother Robert.

Though the production hints at the Regency period with flowing dresses and occasional snippets of music from English country dances, Bedlam makes sure not to lock the story down in any one era, throwing in occasional modern touches, such as pop music that segues into something approaching a nineteenth-century country dance at the beginning of the show. Fans of "Jane Punk" should be delighted to see the mix of periods and styles that still manages to be faithful to the spirit of Austen's novel.

If you want to see the show (and you should), it's playing in Greenwich Village at the Gym at Judson until March 6th. Tickets are liable to go quickly, so see it now! For more information go to:

BEDLAM

Shaw in New York Conference Begins

The International Shaw Society's "Shaw in New York" conference is off and running!

Last night, David Staller, artistic director of The Gingold Theatrical Group, kicked off the conference with a keynote address about his work with Project Shaw. For nine years now, GTG has been giving concert readings of the plays of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. This Monday, they will be presenting The Doctor's Dilemma at Symphony Space. I'm looking forward to it!

After the keynote, Terry Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, gave a wonderful reflection on the state of Shaw productions today. Teachout praised Theatre Bedlam's landmark production of Saint Joan, which I had the good fortune of seeing in 2013. Director Eric Tucker got four talented actors (including himself) to perform all of the parts. The production was in modern dress with an innovative set and the audience's configuration changing periodically. Teachout said the production should change the way we do Shaw.

He compared the way we see Shakespeare produced with the way we normally see Shaw's plays. Shakespeare can be set in any period, but Shaw is almost always set in vaguely Edwardian times. With Shakespeare, we expect avant-garde techniques, whereas Shaw is always done with simple, straight-forward Realism. Shakespeare's plays can be trimmed back, but Shaw's are almost always performed uncut from their published versions, even though those texts were rarely performed in their entirety during Shaw's time. We expect double-casting with Shakespeare, but require large, expensive casts for Shaw. That means while producing Shakespeare can be affordable, the economics make Shaw's plays a rare event for most theaters.

The solution, Teachout said, is to start treating Shaw's plays like Shakespeare's. Granted, directors' concepts don't always work for Hamlet, so they won't always work for Saint Joan, either. The point is we need to allow ourselves to try things. If Shakespeare's texts are not sacred, why should Shaw's be? Most of his important plays are in the public domain anyway, so there is no need to get permission from an estate. Let's start seeing Shaw liberated from a single way of producing his work, and maybe he will become as much our contemporary as Shakespeare seems to be.

Today, the conference continued, with legendary Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub introducing some of Shaw's playlets that occur outside the plays, in various essays, articles, and prefaces. Four professional actors read scenes from these playlets at the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. My favorite was a scene between Jesus and Pontius Pilate penned in 1933 for the preface to On the Rocks. Weintraub said this scene could be read as a continuation of Shaw's early Passion Play, a blank verse drama he began in 1878 but never finished.

Later that morning, Anne and Martin Wright gave a presentation of a new interactive on-line tour of Shaw's Corner, the author's home in Ayot St. Lawrence. I was fascinated by seeing in the house a design by Aubrey Beardsley that I immediately recognized as the illustration used on the poster advertising the premiere of The Land of Heart's Desire by William Butler Yeats. Originally, The Land of Heart's Desire had been done as a curtain raiser for John Todhunter's A Comedy of Sighs at the Avenue Theatre in March of 1894. What was the original artwork doing in Shaw's House?

Well the month after Yeats' play premiered, it was performed again at the Avenue Theatre, this time together with the world premiere of Shaw's Arms and the Man. It seems that the Avenue Theatre continued to use the design for other posters as well, including (apparently) Arms and the Man, though I have yet to be able to verify this.

After the Wrights' presentation, we all walked over to the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University for lunch and the afternoon sessions. I was a part of a session chaired by Jean Reynolds, which included Howard Einsohn talking about Shaw's political address to the American people given at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1933. He was followed by Virginia Costello speaking about how Dorothy Day had dealt with the challenges of charity that Shaw presented in his play Major Barbara. I gave my talk on how Shaw was influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley's play The Cenci, and Charles Del Dotto finished up the session talking about Shaw and the sublime.

After that, I attended a session on Pygmalion chaired by Ellen Dolgin. Jean Reynolds began the discussion with a paper on the play as meta-drama. She pointed out that it begins with theatergoers having just left a show and Henry Higgins being asked if the trick he does analyzing people's speech allows him to make a living in a music hall. Peter Conolly-Smith then spoke about the history of the German language version of Pygmalion, which actually premiered prior to any English production.

The play was presented for 25 performances in Vienna, then ran for 107 nights in Berlin, before it made its American premiere at the Irving Place Theatre in New York... in German! In fact, the play was also performed in unauthorized productions in Polish and Hungarian (translated from the German) before its London premiere. An American pirated version of the play even appeared in English, horribly reverse-translated from the German version, in some disreputable paper called The New York Times.

Tomorrow, the conference continues with Joseph Hassett speaking about Shaw and Yeats. Michael O'Hara will also be talking about Shaw and the Federal Theatre Project, and both Jennifer Buckley and Mark Lepitre will be speaking on Back to Methuselah. I'm looking forward to it!

Best Plays of 2013

It's that time of year when people put together their lists of the best plays they've seen over the past 12 months. I've decided to limit myself to performances in New York City that opened in 2013. (Sorry Sleep No More and Heute: Kohlhaas, but you don't qualify.)

So in reverse order, here they are:

#10 KAFKA'S MONKEY
Theatre for a New Audience clearly knew what it was doing when it brought over this one-woman show featuring Kathryn Hunter from The Young Vic in London. Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" came to life like I'd never imagined.

#9 HERAKLES
Aquila Theatre revived this ancient play by Euripides using interviews with actual war veterans in lieu of the choral numbers. Unfortunately, there were only a handful of performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March. Still, those who saw the show will not easily forget it.

#8 FIX ME JESUS
Helen Sneed's comedy about a Texas woman having a mental breakdown in the dressing room of a Neiman Marcus was surprisingly emotional. The Abingdon Theatre did a great job with this piece, which featured fine performances by Lee Roy Rogers, Polly Lee, and Lori Gardner, among others.

#7 NATASHA, PIERRE AND THE GREAT COMET OF 1812
Not everyone I've talked to has loved this show, but I find Dave Malloy's songs to be enchanting. Plus, that Tolstoy guy really knew how to tell a story! This immersive theatre experience was a triumph for the non-profit Ars Nova, and has moved on uptown with a commercial production near Times Square.

#6 THE MUTILATED
How could anyone possibly perform this outrageous late play by Tennessee Williams? By casting Penny Arcade and Mink Stole, of course. This all-too-brief run at the New Ohio Theatre deserved all of the praise it received, and then some. It's a pity the Christmas-themed show had to close before the holidays.

#5 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
As much as I enjoyed the musicalized version of Love's Labour's Lost this summer, the Public did an even better job with The Comedy of Errors, setting Shakespeare's tale of mis-matched twins in upstate New York. Hamish Linklater and Jesse Tyler Ferguson were hysterical, and Heidi Schreck made a wonderful Adriana.

#4 SAINT JOAN
Bedlam's production of the classic by George Bernard Shaw uses only four actors to tell a magnificent story. This stripped-down, bare-bones version gets to the heart of the story of Joan of Arc, and breaks the audience's heart in the process. Special praise goes to Eric Tucker, who both directs and plays Warwick. It's still running, so get your tickets now!

#3 UNLOCK'D
Sam Carner and Derek Gregor have been working for years on this musical based loosely on Alexander Pope's mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock. Though the material does not seem the most likely candidate for becoming a musical comedy, they pulled it off with panache in Prospect Theatre Company's world premier of the work this summer. Just when you think you know where the play is headed, it goes in a delightful new direction. This show deserves to be done all across the country.

#2 TAMAR OF THE RIVER
Perhaps I'm a little biased, but Marisa Michelson and Joshua H. Cohen gave this town one of the most innovative new musicals it has seen in a long time, beating out even Unlock'd. Kudos to Prospect Theatre Company for producing two of the top plays on this list! I saw Tamar three times, and enjoyed it more with each performance. I know of no immediate plans for a larger production, but some bright producer needs to bring this musical to a larger stage, though hopefully keeping most of the brilliant staging by director Daniel Goldstein.

#1 DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES
This Poulenc opera blew me away when I saw it at the Met in May. They nailed the final scene, where the nuns are guillotined one by one, and all of those voices singing "Salve Regina" go quiet, one after another, until there is only one left, and then.... The world today still faces religious oppression, and far more serious attacks than the "War on Christmas" hyped by Fox News, or the bogus pseudo-attacks on "freedom of religion" that have the American Catholic Bishops constantly crying wolf. This tale of Sister Blanche (not quite a historical figure, but there were plenty of women like her) reminds us that true Christianity calls for self-sacrifice, not constant self-aggrandizement.


So that's my list. Honorable mentions go out to Atlantic Theater Company's The Jammer, La MaMa's Iphigenia at Aulis, Roundabout's The Winslow Boy, and Signature's Cheri.

Bedlam Hamlet

While I was not as impressed with Bedlam's Hamlet as I was with the company's Saint Joan, I'm very glad I went to see it last night. The first act of the play was the highlight. Actors appeared with flashlights in various parts of the darkened theatre for the opening ghost scene, which managed to be both comedic and legitimately scary. The close of Act I was also amazing. Shakespeare has the ghost crying under the stage with the voice moving about like a mole. I've seen many directors try to get that to work, but Eric Tucker actually did it!

There was an intermission after Act I, and Acts II and III were performed together in three-quarter round. In this part, I got to see Andrus Nichols shine as Gertrude. I missed her performance as Joan of Arc the previous night, instead seeing her remarkably brilliant understudy, so I was pleased to get to see Nichols in Hamlet. She has wonderful chemistry with Tom O'Keefe, who plays Claudius, and there is constant tension onstage between herself and Hamlet, played by Tucker. The play within a play was my favorite part of this section, with each of the actors taking turns playing the prologue, poisoner, and player king and queen, then going back to being the court watching the performance.

After a second intermission, the audience returned for Acts IV and V, performed in the round. The grave diggers, played by Nichols and O'Keefe, carried on a trash bag filled with dirt which they dumped in the middle of the stage. They were hilarious, and their comedy was suitably interrupted by Edmund Lewis entering as a fanatical Laertes.

At three hours and ten minutes, the production was somewhat longer than Shakespeare's company would have taken, but the King's Men inevitably cut the text to suit a particular audience. Bedlam, having decided they would cut essentially nothing, did an admirable job. I would love to see them perform other works as well. (Perhaps my own adaptation of Moby-Dick...)

Bedlam's Saint Joan

Last night I saw Bedlam's production of Saint Joan, which I heartily recommend. It's not often you get to see this massive 1923 epic by George Bernard Shaw. Its sprawling scene and massive cast make it virtually un-produceable for today's impoverished theatre. I remember years ago the Alabama Shakespeare Festival did it in Montgomery, but they had a state-supported budget and legions of interns. How could anyone stage Saint Joan in New York?

Well, Bedlam figured it out. Get a cast a four extraordinarily talented actors, have them perform multiple roles, use modern dress and a simple but innovative set, and just tell story... uncut... using every single word Shaw wrote. The result: brilliant.

Bedlam co-founder Eric Tucker wrote in his director's note that the company was always asking, "What does the audience need in order to get this story?" Well, sometimes it was a pair of glasses to show an actor was portraying a new character. Sometimes is was a funny voice. Sometimes it was taking paint and writing the name of the town on the wall of the set. Sometimes it was the ASM walking onstage and playing a cassette tape. Whatever it was, they did it.

In addition to directing, Tucker plays Warwick, as well as bunch of other parts. The brilliantly comic Edmund Lewis and the often sinister Tom O'Keefe play at least a dozen roles each. The only performer playing a single role is the actress who portrays Joan. I saw the understudy, Samantha Steinmetz, but I don't have a single complaint. She showed Joan's journey from being just a simple country kid with a dream, to being an accomplished soldier, to being a tormented scapegoat, to finally finding peace and becoming a true saint.

Though the dress was modern and the staging unconventional, this was very much Shaw's play as he intended it--in spirit if not in visuals. The first three scenes were staged in three-quarter round with a clipped pace that constantly kept the play moving. Some of the original portrayals of characters were rather broad, but that's pretty much how Shaw wrote them. More nuanced characterization came later.

After the first three scenes, the audience takes its first intermission and is instructed to take all of their belongings outside of the theatre. When they come back, the seating is rearranged, with scene four being played right in the middle of the audience. A sheet behind the audience then comes down, and the audience turns around to watch scene five.

After a second intermission, the audience comes back in to find folding chairs on what previously had been the stage. Scene six, the trial scene, is enacted before them. Joan sits high up on a platform with a beam of light illuminating her face. The other actors move around behind the audience, calling out their lines from the darkness. As we got to Warwick's line, "Hm! I wonder!," I figured that after doing the entire text uncut, Bedlam would drop the epilogue. Nope. The audience was asked to turn their folding chairs around, and behind us was Joan, seated amidst other audience members, ready for the epilogue.

Amazingly enough, the show only runs about three hours even with the two intermissions, and it seems much less than that. The final epilogue, as unnecessary as it is, was truly moving. After seeing Bedlam's staging of Saint Joan, I don't know that I would ever want to see it done another way.

Saint Joan is running in rep with Bedlam's Hamlet at the Lynn Redgrave Theater on Bleeker Street. After seeing how they handled Shaw, I am definitely going back for the Shakespeare. You can find out more about the shows here:

Theatre Bedlam

http://www.theatrebedlam.org/