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There’s something odd about the Berkshire Theatre
Festival producing David Mamet’s American Buffalo, which
critiques our economic system of free enterprise, and having to load up
the playbill with advertisements and courtesy photos of season donors.
It’s like an anti-weapons protest funded by the US Department of
Defense. But what’s a fine theatre like the Berkshire to do here in
America, where public money for the arts is next to nothing? Well, a
theatre solicits help from individuals and businesses and in so doing
has to become reticent about treating theatre as an instrument of social
commentary and economic analysis. The safe way is to treat theatre as an
instrument of entertainment, as in: “Oh, isn’t David Mamet funny?” I
mean, how can you seriously bite the hand that feeds you? You can only
pretend bite, perhaps while kissing.
Tina Packer,
artistic director over at Shakespeare and Company, also in the
Berkshires, while likewise depending upon corporate support, somehow
manages to claim the high ground, if only because she’s holding to
Shakespeare. This season she took on directing King John. What a
rare and timely choice! The play turns out to ring with tones of here
and now, full as it is of political manipulation and clergy interference
in politics. I loved Ms. Packer’s use of live rock music to accompany
the battles staged in slow motion. It made them forceful and raucous
where in the small summer theatre they could have seemed simply small.
Foundation
funding assures the existence of the expensive enterprise that is New
York City’s Lincoln Center Festival. But the theatre I saw there this
summer eminently trumped the idea of an arts organization being beholden
to people with money. Honestly, my hat is off and my head is bowed to
Lincoln Center for bringing in who they did, three of the four most
creative directors alive on earth: Robert Wilson of the United States;
Adrienne Mnouchkine of France; and Yukio Ninagawa of Japan. Only Peter
Brook was missing. These directors, more than skillful stage crafters,
more than consummate interpreters, are the innovators, those who open
the theatre to unforeseen, unpredictable possibilities. They are the
insightful visionaries, and their work, while innately theatrical,
presents our world as it is. They are also radically different in style,
one from another.
My first
encounter with Robert Wilson was the revival of Einstein on the Beach
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in1992. I remember becoming restless
during the hours of performance, though other people seemed to withstand
restlessness. But certain pictures he made with movement, set design,
light, sound, everything, stay with me to this day. I later saw other
Wilson pieces and though each was in someway wonderful, none surpassed
the minimalist majesty of Einstein. Then, no more than three
summers ago, when I was as usual in the Berkshires, I went with Joseph
Chaikin and his dramaturge over the Mohawk Trail to the great MASS MOCA
gallery to take in an exhibit of Wilson’s “14 Stations” artwork. Our
dramaturge friend dared to suggest, as others had hinted, that Robert
Wilson’s day as a theatre artist may have come and gone. But apparently
no one mentioned it to Mr. Wilson or he wasn’t paying any mind, because
not too long ago he went to Indonesia and eventually returned to Lincoln
Center with I La Galigo – his finest achievement since
Einstein, and its polar opposite. Where Einstein
was rarified and aristocratic, a postmodernist dream with watery waves
of Philip Glass music, I La Galigo is earthy and rural, dense
with percussion, a folk story based on an Indonesian creation myth.
Fifty Indonesian actors, dancers and acrobats perform the action. An
authentic Bissu transvestite priest is seated downstage observing the
play and sometimes narrating. Singers accompanied by musicians chant the
entire script. The content is a departure for Wilson. I La Galigo
features sexual love; and moreover, since we are at the beginning of
time, there is incestuous desire between a twin brother and sister who
fall in love within the womb. I La Galigo exudes images that
could never have appeared in the meta-sexual Einstein; and still
the production, while offering ancient happenings and traditional
sounds, bears a modernist existential heart. I La Galigo
ultimately reveals how the middle world, our plane of existence, came to
be. In a time past any intervention from the gods, we gained our
non-dependence and simultaneously our alienation. We became free and we
became bereft, and what we have left in the middle world is each other
and we grow old.
In 1996, I flew
to Montréal for my first taste of an Adrienne Mnouchkine production: a
rendition of Iphigenia and the Orestia, called Les
Atrides, performed by her talented Theatre du Soleil actors and
infused with elements of Asian theatre including the look of Indian
Kathakali. On the Mnouchkine stage, we encounter people or beings we’re
unlikely to meet at home or pass on the street. In Les Atrides we
are hounded by the indomitable Furies of Aeschylus, costumed like
massive lion/dogs, and they scare us. In Le Dernier Caravnserail (Odyssees),
as produced by the Festival at Lincoln Center, we follow the fate of
refugees from Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan and Iran, and their
woeful dilemma pains us. Mnouchkine’s is theatre that transports. It’s
epic and does much with stagecraft and ensemble to evoke pity and
terror. In the opening sequence of Caravanserail, a rope and
pulley are stretched horizontally across the stage. A massive rolling
river of grayish silk being blown by heavy fans and made to rage by
stagehands whipping the fabric from within consumes the stage below. A
rattan box, for smuggling people across the river, hangs from the rope.
There is the sound of tempestuous wind overpowering the shouts, cries
and wails of those attempting to employ the smugglers and escape
oppression. Some fall in the water and disappear in the waves, some are
nearly pushed in, and some make it over in the basket or by hand over
hand. They are people fleeing their countries; and as the river reveals,
there is danger in the crossing and there is more danger in the landing.
Strangely, the cloth-water with which they contend appears more real and
fearsome than does water in any movie. It is as if Mnouchkine is using
theatrical artifice to reclaim the truth of theatre, by taking reality
back from the camera. But making the river real is not simply a terrific
stage effect. It stands for the meaning of Caravanserail. All 42
scenes of the two-part, six-hour play, performed by 36 actors, reflect
the tenuous nature of existence: the near-impossibility of escape from
peril and the great loss attendant upon escape. My heart was hurting as
I saw men, women and children, over and over again, trying to make it to
some other side. In Caravanserail Mnouchkine gives us
contemporary (not Ancient Greek) wanderers, who seek asylum in a world
offering little shelter and much war. In meeting the wanderers --
suspended above a river or hanging from a helicopter -- we meet
ourselves, clinging to the illusion of safety, and we have pity.
I first
experienced Yukio Ninagawa’s theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
It was Macbeth and for the final battle Ninagawa created a
holocaust. Macbeth and Macduff fought as samurai using swords and
martial arts, set to the reverberation of a Bach organ, with red
streamers flying until the earth itself was drowning in blood. Ninagawa
is priceless and peerless for creating startling or shocking and at the
same time gorgeous effects. This summer he brought three of Yukio
Mishima’s adaptations of classic Japanese Noh plays to Lincoln Center.
In Sotoba Komachi, the first of the three, pretty (plastic)
camellia petals fall from the skies, one by one, throughout the action,
each one landing with a “tok” sound (reminiscent of the drum sound of
Noh – “tok, tok”). All the while, an unspeakably hideous old woman, who
was once the lovely poetess Komachi, struggles with an attractive young
poet over the notion of love. In the third play, Yoroboshi, a
contentious, difficult, alienated, gorgeous young blind man is asked by
an arbiter to decide between two sets of parents, his birth parents and
adoptive parents, and he rejects both. At the end, abandoned in the
arbitration room, he envisions a conflagration as the stage is engulfed
in light, glare and siren sound. And then there arises the voice of
Yukio Mishima as it was recorded in 1970 when he seized control of
military headquarters in Tokyo, attempting to rouse the nation to
pre-war nationalistic idealism. But Mishima took his own life, then and
there, by means of seppuku, the samurai’s traditional and
excruciating way of ritual death that is essentially disembowelment via
a short sword. So in the play as we are hearing the last exclamations of
the playwright, the young man on stage is witnessing in his mind’s eye
some unmitigated horror, which may be a Hiroshima or Nagasaki vision,
but surely an apocalyptic one. Born in 1935, Ninagawa would have lived
through the World War II incineration visited upon Japan. His beautiful
work more than anyone else’s makes art of our human tendency, our
capacity, for annihilating each other.
They are great
ones, these three directors, and if you come across their work, no
matter who is funding and sponsoring the productions, I would say, be
there. |
