Broadway Diary 2: Indecent at the Cort Theatre

A week or so ago there was an article in the New York Times about Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel, two giants of contemporary American playwrighting, and both Pulitzer Prize-winners, finally making their respective Broadway debuts this spring with their latest plays: Nottage with Sweat (which has just earned her a second Pulitzer for drama), about factory workers in America's rust belt losing their jobs that has been taken up by critics as an explanation for Trump's election; and Vogel with Indecent, about a work of Yiddish theatre from the early twentieth-century that, in making its English-language transfer to Broadway in 1920, was shut down for obscenity as a result of its on-stage depiction of a love affair between two women.

I'm a fan of both playwrights and have taught their works multiple times. But having promised Richard that we'd see a couple of musicals alongside the choices for straight plays that I'd lined up, I had to decide between them. I opted for Vogel, intrigued by what I had read about the unique metatheatrical staging of the work when it played at the Vineyard Theatre off-Broadway last year, by its incorporation of live music (a three-piece klezmer band, to be precise) and a movement score into its dramaturgy, and by Vogel's collaboration with the director Rebecca Taichman (who is also currently helming Sarah Ruhl's newest play at Lincoln Centre right now). (Interesting side note: Vogel, until her recent retirement one of the top playwrighting teachers in the US, taught both Nottage and Ruhl.)

Much has already been written about how Vogel's play serves, in Trump's America, as an allegorical indictment of censorship and ideological conservatism. But, watching it yesterday during a matinee preview, what struck me most was how the play registered as a very powerful record of a potentially lost history--not just of the once vibrant Yiddish theatrical tradition, but of European Jewry more generally. For in tracing the diasporic journey of Sholem Asch's 1910 play The God of Vengeance from Warsaw to Berlin and Paris, on to first the downtown and then the uptown boards of 1920s New York, and finally to a makeshift attic stage in the Lodz Ghetto in 1943, Vogel and Taichman are also chronicling a history of anti-Semitism that, we gradually become aware over the progress of Indecent's 95 minutes, will inevitably culminate in an ending, the Holocaust, that the stage manager, Lemml (Richard Topol), is at once powerless to forestall and also, through the magic of the theatre, helps the female protagonists of the play-within-Vogel's-play transcend. This is punctuated by a simple on-stage effect (repeating something similar from the top of the show) that is heart-stopping in its power.

There is so much more I could say about this beautiful, complex production. It is certainly Vogel's most ambitious and cosmopolitan work to date, as much a love-letter to what the theatre makes it possible to (re-)imagine as it is a condemnation of those who would seek to extinguish imagination--and those who imagine otherwise--altogether. I can think of no better way to herald this important playwright's belated but so richly deserved arrival on Broadway.

P

Ruined at the Almeida

So the ending was less sentimental than I’d anticipated from reading the text—in part because the amazing Jenny Jones managed to reveal Mama Nadi’s vulnerability and pain without sacrificing any of her toughness; in part because the equally superb Lucian Msamati did not overplay Christian’s white knight qualities; and especially because director Indhu Rubasingham wisely choreographed the closing dance between the two not as a full-on, full-contact swoon, but rather as a tentative shuffle, with plenty of distance kept between the two actors on stage. Hope is contained within that space, to be sure—which was playwright Lynn Nottage’s stated intention in parting from Brecht’s epic theatrical principles (Ruined is consciously modeled on Mother Courage and Her Children). However, hope’s easy and rapid fulfillment for these two damaged souls—as, indeed, for all the victims of the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—is by no means certain. In fact, my only critique about the ending of the play is that the parrot’s final words—“Mama, Primus. Mama, Primus”—were not articulated clearly enough, and with enough of a temporal jolt, to effect what I read in the text as a return, from the anomalous display on Mama Nadi’s part of emotion and sentimentality, to the Brechtian world of commerce (Primus is the brand of beer that Mama Nadi sells to her customers at her bar/brothel).

As for the rest of the play, what I was pleased to see was how generous the play is in performance to the secondary characters. Even those with few lines in the text (such as Fortune’s fellow soldier-friend, Simon, played by recent RADA graduate Damola Adelaja) are given a chance to take centre stage and reveal their full complexity. Strikingly, the character that comes across as most cipher-like in this production is Mr. Harari, the foreign diamond merchant who, when the going gets tough and he can no longer figure out whom to bribe, absconds with Mama Nadi’s “insurance policy”—and, consequently, what Sophie (Pippa Bennett-Warner) sees as her one chance at redemption. As played by Silas Carson—no slouch as an actor—Harari doesn’t seem to have anything to do. Which is, perhaps, the whole point, Rubasingham no doubt attuned to the fact that Carson is the only white actor (though it should be pointed out that the character of Mr. Harari is actually Lebanese, which is supposed to add a bit of complexity to his take on the civil war in the DRC) amongst an otherwise all-black cast, thus visually reinforcing his character’s “unbelonging” in this world. The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, with special kudos going to Michelle Asante as Salima, whose devastating Act 2 speech about her abduction and serial rape and climactic, self-immolating gesture of defiance are even more powerful when embodied on the stage as they appear on the page. The tall and striking Kehinde Fadipe imbues the somewhat underwritten part of Josephine with memorable self-presence (especially in her Act 2, Scene 1 dance), and David Ajala makes Fortune’s lament for the wife he’s lost to the double violence of rape and the subsequent shame he himself heaped upon her seem heartfelt and sincere.

My only real complaint about the play, after seeing it in performance, is that the songs seem to get lost. I’m not sure if this was a result of the sound amplification within the relatively intimate space of the Almeida, but it was not always easy to hear the words of the songs that Sophie is given to sing. And this is a shame, because as with Brecht they offer important commentary on the action we are witnessing on stage. The reprise of “A Rare Bird” at the end, consigned as it is to the radio in this production, combined with what I identify above as the lost opportunity with the parrot, robs this otherwise excellent mounting of Nottage’s searing play of what I see as the more nuanced—although no less forceful—nature of its political and social indictment of the history of gendered violence in war.

P.

Cheese: Toronto/Vancouver

Last night my sister-in-law, Arline, and I sat beside each other on her basement couch in Oshawa and offered a blow-by-blow critique of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Arline teaches high school drama, and so knows a thing or three about basic dramaturgy. Both of us agreed that the pacing was too slow, the human-to-effects scale and bodily massings totally out of whack (especially in the forest dancing sequences, when the members of the Alberta Ballet were simply too few and far between), and the overall national narrative simply riddled with kitschy cliches.

That's what you get, I guess, when you have an Australian running the show. Not only is Quebec more or less left out of the picture (earlier talks with Cirque de Soleil, Robert Lepage, and other Quebecois performing arts icons to participate in the events broke down, apparently, over creative differences), but BC and Vancouver have to cede their own wealth of local talent to national and international interlopers. Oh, right, but that's what we have the Cultural Olympiad for...

I wonder how much representatives of the Four Host First Nations were involved in the actually planning of the proceedings. The welcome was crucial, I understand, but whether in that particular iconographic/spectacularized way is open to debate: totems, giant spirit bears, and dancing in ceremonial regalia as the athletes march in more or less covers things, I guess. And getting that over and done with early allows us to get on with the real westward expansionist narrative. Clearly no one explained the concept of Indian time to Jacques Rogge and members of the dignitaries box, the seats reserved for the chiefs of the FHFN being noticeably unoccupied during the early going.

Granted, those killer whales were pretty cool. And slam poet Shane Koyczan got in some pretty good oral/aural riffs. And k.d. lang still has the smoothest alto in the music biz, doing for Leonard Cohen what she'd previously done for Roy Orbison (though ditch the white suit, sister--black is always more slimming). But what was with the mechanical failure with the torch tower at the end? And the motorcade of the Great One to the outdoor torch at Coal Harbour was pretty anticlimactic (were all five of the final torch bearers chosen on the basis of their aquiline noses?).

Likely the pelting rain on top of the protesters on top of the earlier news of the tragic death of the Georgian luger during a training run at Whistler earlier in the day was enough to make John Furlong want to reach for the nearest whiskey bottle. No excuse, however, for not, over the course of the past seven years, at least learning a few more sentences and phrases in decently accented French.

Watching the Opening Ceremonies from Toronto felt entirely appropriate, so disconnected am I from the events now that they have actually descended on the city, and so mediatized a spectacle are the Olympics in general. Much better to leave the live theatre-going to decent fare like the two plays I saw in Toronto on Wednesday: a matinee of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, in a CanStage/Obsidian Theatre co-production, and featuring a star-making performance by Raven Dauda as Esther; and an evening performance of Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 at the Panasonic Theatre on Yonge Street, in a Mirvish Theatre production directed by Alisa Palmer (who had previously directed a much lauded remount of Top Girls in the city).

Hard to believe, in particular, that Churchill's play is more than 30 years old. Palmer played things a bit too much for belly laughs for my liking, but Churchill's gender politics are still as fresh as ever, and I was especially impressed by the performance of ex-Anne Shirley herself, Megan Follows. Indeed, after seeing this production I am more convinced than ever by the recent argument (published in the Guardian, was it?) that following Harold Pinter's death, the leading UK playwright is not David Hare or Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn or Alan Bennett, but none other than Ms. Churchill herself. What would she make of London 2012, I wonder?

P.