Jon Fosse's Nobel Prize

The Nobel Committee recently announced it was awarding the world's top honor for literature to Norwegian playwright and novelist Jon Fosse.

Though Fosse is sometimes compared to the most famous of Norwegian dramatists, Henrik Ibsen, their work has very little in common. Of course, Ibsen never won the Nobel prize, which in 1903 went to his rival Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Instead, Fosse's work is closer to the Symbolists who were awarded Nobel prizes for literature in the 1910s, including Maurice Maeterlinck and Rabindranath Tagore, and even closer to more recent Absurdist authors who have won the prize, such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

I saw Fosse's play A Summer Day when Rattlestick Playwrights Theater produced it at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2012. It follows the life of a woman, portrayed by two actresses onstage, one younger and one older, as she looks out a window. The younger version of the character is waiting for her husband to return from a trip out on his boat. The older version continues to stare out the window, though she knows he will never return.

What made the play interesting was the way the character embraced her grief, letting go of hope in a way that was almost joyful. Perhaps there's something about glorying in depression that seems particularly Scandinavian.

The Immigrant

This afternoon I went to see James Gray's new film The Immigrant, which I heartily recommend, in part because it gives a tantalizing glimpse glimpse into the world of burlesque in New York in the early 1920s, and in part because it features two remarkable stage actors I've had the pleasure to work with in the past.

The Immigrant tells the story of Ewa, a young Polish woman who arrives at Ellis Island with her sister, only to find that her sister must be quarantined for lung disease--and that she herself could be deported because of rumors that she is an immoral woman (a charge that is flatly untrue, as we later learn). She finds both an exploiter and a protector in the form of a shady showman, Bruno Weiss, who brings her into his act featuring the Beauties of the World. Ewa becomes "Miss Liberty" in the act, complete with candle-lit torch.

Scenes in the seedy theater do a great job of showing the reality of popular entertainment during that period, including the encroachments of new technologies, like moving pictures, which were threatening the stage at the time, both legitimate and not-so-much. The movie also shows how in an industry that routinely exploited women, certain women sometimes also rose to positions of power.

Dagmara Dominczyk plays Belva, a Polish woman who shares a flat with Ewa, and who also harbors feelings for the slimy burlesque manager Bruno. I know Dagmara from my days at Carnegie Mellon, where I worked with her on my play Betty Thorpe in the Theater Lab class. Dagmara has appeared quite a bit on the New York stage, for me, most memorably in Heidi Schreck's play There Are No More Big Secrets at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Closer to my heart, though, is Maja Wampuszyc, who plays Ewa's Aunt Bistricky in The Immigrant. Aunt Bistricky tries to take Ewa in, only to watch in horror as her husband cruelly throws the young woman out the next day. Her character returns toward the end of the film in another very emotional scene.

Maja played the young Uzbek woman Marina in my play Foggy Bottom at the Abingdon Theatre Company in 2006. The sexy, dynamite-wielding terrorist in Foggy Bottom was a far cry from the conflicted aunt in The Immigrant, but Maja has a tremendous amount of range. She is perhaps most famous for playing Ida Haller in the Broadway production of Irena's Vow by Dan Gordan.

The Immigrant opened this month in the U.S. If it's showing at a theater near you, definitely go! There are wonderful performances, wonderful costumes, and a wonderful recreation of a New York City of a different era.

Row After Row

Last year, when I saw Jessica Dickey's play Charles Ives Take Me Home at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, I noticed her bio said she was working on a play about Civil War re-enactors. That sounded fascinating, and I made a mental note to try to see that show if it played in New York.

Today, I got my chance to do that. Women's Project is currently producing Dickey's new play, Row After Row, at City Center. Daniella Topol, who directed Charles Ives Take me Home, returned to direct this production. Both plays feature three actors and deal both with history and with the present, and both move fluidly back and forth across time. There were other parallels as well.

Both of these works start off promising something very ambitious. They will be asking the big questions. In the case of Charles Ives Take Me Home: What is art? How does one define beauty? In the case of Row After Row: Who truly holds power? Where are we going as a country?

In my opinion, neither play fully addressed these ambitious themes, but they both did something else instead. They told very human stories about interpersonal relationships, and these stories were handled with honesty and compassion. So beautiful were Dickey's portraits of human beings, I did not mind that some of these larger issues fell by the wayside.

Row After Row tells the story of two veteran re-enactors, Cal and Tom, who find that their customary table at a local pub in Gettysburg is occupied by a young farb named Leah.

Don't know what a farb is? Don't worry. It's explained in the play, and far be it from me to point out your ignorance of re-enactment lingo. (Or of schottisches.)

Erik Lochtefeld, seen last year in the magnificent Tamar of the River, plays Tom, a Union re-enactor who must decide in real life whether to support his teacher's union or to break lines and accept a cut in pay from the superintendent. His buddy Cal, played by PJ Sosko, is a Confederate general on the field, but in real life has been dumped by his girlfriend and works a dead-end job.

The newcomer is Leah, played by Rosie Benton. She is dismissive and insulting to the men, but her hostility masks her own fears and insecurities. Tom plays the peacemaker, but Leah is ultimately more interested in Cal, whose aggression matches he own. Much of the fun of the play comes from the way the audience's sympathies shift among the three characters throughout the play. Just when you think you want to write one of them off, that person comes back to display an unexpected side.

Further complicating and enriching the play is the fact that the actors periodically become corresponding characters from 1863. The final monologue, delivered by Sosko, could very well be given both by Cal and by the general he portrays.

If you want to see the show, you'd better hurry, as it closes on February 16th. For more information go here:

Women's Project

http://wptheater.org/show/row-after-row/

Juarez

On Thursday, I got to see Theater Mitu's production of Juarez: A Documentary Mythology at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. The play, conceived and directed by Ruben Polendo, was put together from a series of interviews in and around the city of Juarez, Mexico.

The documentary style, which included some text from interviews being sung by members of the cast, was reminiscent of work by The Civilians, and in fact one cast member, Aysan Celik, is also an associate artist with The Civilians. (I recognized her from Paris Commune, a wonderful piece The Civilians did a few years ago.)

Of course, this production did not benefit from having the music of Michael Friedman, who always does such a good job scoring the shows for The Civilians. Still, Theater Mitu did an impressive job, particularly in integrating footage from home movies shot by the Polendo's father when the director was only a young boy. These films underscored just how much Juarez has changed, from being a proud, family-centered town to being the so-called "murder capital of the world."

At the beginning of the show, a cast member points out that while Juarez has been devastated by crime, just across the river is El Paso, which dubs itself "the safest city in America." It is unquestionable, the cast member said, that twenty years from now everyplace will look like El Paso and Juarez.

Ummm.... no. I question that. I very much question that. How on earth can El Paso possibly remain safe with so much crime so close by? How do we know that twenty years from now, the entire world won't just look like Juarez? Or, conversely, that Juarez might be able to bring its crime rate down? In fact, the end of the play acknowledges that in the past couple of years, crime has indeed gone down dramatically in Juarez, though it is still unconscionably high. I don't know what the world will look like in twenty years, and I highly doubt the performer does, either.

That opening comment colored the play for me in a negative way. I kept feeling like the show was pushing an agenda rather than actually documenting what is going on in Juarez.

That's a shame, since there was a lot in the play to like. Images of men standing on people's chests, bodies being stuffed into suitcases, women being covered in sheets that are then lit as if they are on fire, these were moments of directorial brilliance. I just wish that some of the direct address by the performers had been less heavy handed.

Most of the text is verbatim from interviews, which was great, but when the performers spoke in their own voices, I found them highly suspect, and their apology at the opening of the show for their own "privilege" in being white made me trust them less, not more.

There is much about this production that is quite good, and if you want to see it, you'll have to catch it before it closes on January 19th. For more information, go here:

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

http://www.rattlestick.org/theatermitu/