Show Business features Two La MaMa Shows
Posted February 8, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Words, Words, Words
by John Rowell, Show Business
YOUR MaMa
Imagine your relationship with your mother set to music and lyrics. (Perhaps some of you already have.) You, My Mother is a chamber opera project in two parts, an elusive investigation into the ever-shifting relationships between mothers and their adult children. Created by composers Brendan Connelly and Rick Burkhardt and playwrights Karinne Keithley Syers and Kristen Kosmas, You, My Mother gets its World Premiere from the Obie-winning performance group Two-Headed Calf from February 9-20 at—appropriately enough—La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre as part of La MaMa’s 50th Anniversary season. Brooke O’Hara is the director and the music is performed by Yarn/Wire + Strings. Check it out at www.TwoHeadedCalf.org.
EXECUTIVE SWEET?
La MaMa is rocking its 50th Anniversary season this month. You could spend all of February seeing things down there! In Erosion: A Fable, a homeless woman and a mid-level office exec begin selling dirt on the street together, and calling it Love. But their best intentions take them far from where anyone would have guessed once the Dirt/Love craze goes global. A story of corporate competition, environmental catastrophe, and personal transformation, Erosion: A Fable is a production of Loom Ensemble, plying their signature palette of athletic dances, intricate vocal compositions and traditional storytelling to stage this provocative theater piece (whose dialogue echoes Occupy Wall Street.) The company members make up the collective authors of the piece, of course; Tomi Tsunoda is the director. Performances take place at La MaMa’s The Club from February 17-29. www.LoomEnsemble.com
The Past Isn’t Dead, It’s On Stage: The Kreutzer Sonata
Posted at 1:56 pm
by Ben Brantley, New York Times
Recollection and re-creations of times past are also an essential aspect of the Gate Theater’s production of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” which comes to La Mama E.T.C. in New York next month and is worth catching. Nancy Harris’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s once shocking novella, in which a man in a train car recalls what drove him to murder his wife, has a cast of three, though only one speaks.
That’s Hilton McRae as Pozdynyshev, who sustains a shivery sense of intimacy as both the narrator and protagonist of the story. The other performers are a pianist (Sophie Scott) and a violinist (Tobias Beer), who are heard and sometimes seen from behind a scrim, fading in and out of focus. Oh, and the pianist happens to be his wife, and the violinist the man he suspects is her lover.
What they are playing is the Beethoven sonata of the title, which embodies feelings, both dangerous and exalted, that Pozdynyshev can’t put into words. Directed by Natalie Abrahami, this production convincingly presents music not just as a mnemonic trigger but also as a poisonous catalyst to action.
nytheatre.com cyberinterview: You, My Mother
Posted February 6, 2012 at 3:19 pm
by nytheatre.com
Editor’s Note: This cyber interview strays a bit from the usual format. Brendan Connelly answered all the questions. All the parenthetical sections are Brooke O’Harra’s wherein she corrected/responded/amended Brendan’s responses.
This is the World Premiere of You, My Mother, a chamber opera project in two parts. Could you supply a brief synopsis and give us an idea of what audiences can expect of the evening?
This project is a meditation on mothers and (by) their (adult) children – and is partly autobiographical. Two writers, who we greatly admire, Karinne Keithley Syers and Kristen Kosmas, were given recollections (I don’t really see it as recollections — because although there is an element of looking back — our interest is in exploring how the past feels different when you are an adult — when you actually are no longer a child) of the mothers of Brooke and Brendan (and Laryssa) – the founders of the Two-headed Calf. (Some mothers never stop smother mothering — while others declare their independence and make you pack up all your stuff in the house and turn your old room into an office or yoga studio. And then they borrow money from you!!!! Or date people who are younger than your girlfriend! ) Then we paired the playwrights with two composers, Rick Burkhardt and Brendan Connelly, to create the two (one) operas. It features Beth Griffith, a longtime collaborator of John Cage and Karlheiz Stockhausen, Kate Soper -a member of the Wet Ink Composers Collective, Mike Mikos and Laryssa Husiak (both Two-headed Calf members). The musicians, the new music ensemble Yarn/Wire, are central to this project and figure prominently in the staging of the piece. (And I direct — which is complicated and much different than staging a play because opera’s really have minds of their own — the scores dictate so much of the feel and tenor or the piece. So in many ways I have to learn to let go of control. The project has taught me a lot about what I do as a director normally!)
What do you mean by “a chamber opera project in two parts”?
The two creative pairs of this piece are Karinne Keithley Syers/Brendan Connelly and Kristen Kosmas/Rick Burkhardt. The evening is a single piece, but each half is a distinct collaboration between these pairs. While this is not at all a conventional opera, both composers are using words, story and sound to create an overall composition. (It’s also one visual aesthetic — we have a great design team. The playwrights were given some staging stipulations from the onset — one being that the design involve slides and slide projectors; another being that their characters be in animal costumes. They then had to incorporate that into their “narrative” structures.)
You are the founders of Two-Headed Calf, formerly known as The Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. What was the impetus in forming this new company in 1999, what are your goals and mission, and why did you abbreviate the name?
We met at Tulane University in New Orleans and right away there was an affinity between us – an interest in dissecting and reassembling this thing called “theater”. Our early work used the ideas and words of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, the greatest Polish modernist, who really unearthed assumptions of Western performance. We still look to him as inspiration.
The idea of taking “The Theatre of “ out of our name was because more and more we are interested in performance outside the normal theater space – it probably emerged during our ongoing lesbian soap opera, Room for Cream, which was close in spirit to the punk/transgressive/hand-to-mouth performances of the East Village in the 70s (80s and 90s) –we think of John Jesurun’s Chang in a Void Moon and That’s How the Rent Gets Paid by Jeff Weiss. Good theater today is always a questioning of the nature and importance of theater. (Also we have started to imagine projects inside of the company where we shake things up and collaborate differently — like with Room for Cream which was by The Dyke Division of Two-headed Calf, we assembled a huge new team that owned the project equally. This piece, You My Mother is under the heading: The Opera Project — where the other collaborators have voices equal if not bigger than our own.)
You have added several new people working on this project including playwright Kristen Kosmas, playwright Karinne Keithley Syers and composer Rick Burkhardt. How did you become familiar with these people and what about their work and about them as artists led you to choose them?
Hmmm. Kristen Kosmas’ Hello Failure is really a great play. Karinne performed at a Salon that we used to host – and we really like how her work is defiantly not the “well-made play”: a term that is the battle-cry of Mac Wellman, a professor of both writers – The pairing of Rick and Kristen seemed perfect, right away: they both loved each other’s work. And Kristen has a melancholy air in her work that Rick can really relate to. Brendan saw Rick’s piece Great Hymn of Thanksgiving and saw that he is dealing with narrative but in the most insane, musical way – as Brooke says, he’s a genius. (I actually teach Kristen and Karinne’s plays to my students at NYU and Mt. Holyoke College. Their works have such complex forms and styles — I think to address them with my students and explore their distinct challenges – and possibly look at them in terms of gender and the female voice. It was VERY IMPORTANT to me that the librettists on this project be women.)
Your work has always been described as collaborative. How has this held up for this new project in terms of creation and, also in working with many new people?
This is the BIGGEST collaboration the Two-headed Calf has ever attempted! There are so many voices in this piece – and the process has been truly intense. What surprised both of us is that the subject matter of motherhood (the mother/adult child relationship) is EXTREMELY sensitive and has affected the rehearsal process in many ways – We actually had a playwright collaborator in mind who could not deal with the subject matter (because it felt too immediate and potent)– so she turned it down (she said it was a project she could hopefully attempt in the future). And while developing this piece, Brooke and Karinne had a baby!!! (We actually EACH had babies – there are two babies, 5 months apart — mine’s a girl, Alice, and Karinne’s is a boy, Harvey).
What is next up for the two of you individually and for the company?
Lots of living. Oh and Brooke is going to direct Uncommon Women. (Yes, I am directing Wendy Wassertein’s — at Mt. Holyoke College where the play is actually set. I teach there. Making plays is hard — and Two-headed Calf self produces. So a project like this demands a lot of recovery time. Although I am hoping that this amazing show will live on — that it can go places. That there will not be only these 11 performances and then it is forever gone. The Dyke Division is also working on publishing all 24 episodes of Room for Cream.)
Mother of All Collaborations: You, My Mother
Posted February 2, 2012 at 3:06 pm
by Jessica Del Vecchio, The Brooklyn Rail
Beth Griffith, playing Mother Ghost, sings:
I do not always remind you.
I am your mother.
I may have lost our money and sold your grandfather’s watches but.
I am your mother.
I put you in a car and took you around the entire country
because you should see a country you are born to.
I made the world better for you. READ MORE >>
Pleasure on the Fly: NY Times Review on Stopped Bridge
Posted January 31, 2012 at 2:48 pm
by Claudia La Rocco, NY Times
If Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams and William Gibson had gotten together, maybe become a little drunk, and decided to pull a literary all-nighter, the resulting collaboration might have had something of the flavor of John Jesurun’s “Stopped Bridge of Dreams.”
The 75-minute production, which is being presented by La MaMa, evokes numerous authors, and is inspired by the floating world stories of the 17th-century Japanese writer Saikaku Ihara. Yet the voice here — mad, poetic and unsettling — is entirely Mr. Jesurun’s.
To the extent that the performance situates itself anywhere beyond the unstable rush of contemporary existence, it is in a modern-day house of pleasure operating within a jet as it streaks from one port of call to the next. The audience sits lengthwise in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, flanking a spare set that is dominated by two large, rotating video screens, so that the field of action has something of the claustrophobia of a long flight. READ MORE >>
Gimpel The Fool/The Lady and The Peddler Review
Posted January 27, 2012 at 9:22 pm
by Paulanne Simmons, CurtainUp
Gimpel the Fool, now in its New York premiere at La Mama E.T.C, adapted, designed, directed and performed by Howard Rypp, is based on a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow. It is about a fool who is easily manipulated by his more cynical and sophisticated neighbors. He is tricked into marrying the town slut and accepting the children she has with various lovers as his own. He takes her abuse for many years and even mourns her after she dies. READ MORE >>
Around the World in bed – Stopped Bridge review
Posted at 9:17 pm
by Scott Stiffler, The Villager
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Like the uncertain fate of a traveler on standby, the takeaway from John Jesurun’s first production at La MaMa in a decade varies largely according to what they’ve got to offer on the particular night you decide to show up. Best, then, not to be tethered to the notion that somebody’s out to get you just because you came expecting a direct flight and ended up in a holding pattern. READ MORE >>
Martin Denton reviewed Stopped Bridge
Posted January 25, 2012 at 5:10 pm
by Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
Stopped Bridge of Dreams, the new multimedia performance written, designed and directed by John Jesurun at La MaMa, is a hallucinogenic, sense-assaulting, dreamlike hour and a quarter in the theater. The Ellen Stewart Theatre has been arranged with tennis-court-style seating, with audience against two opposite walls and the actors and action in the center between them. The set is a long table with two different cloths covering each half (they seem to be complements of one another); bisecting the table is a wall or screen. Above the table are two screens on which are projected images—sometimes live video feeds, sometimes pre-recorded monologues, and most of the time ambient background footage of the airplane we’re in flying through a night sky. At the sides of the playing space are a few items of furniture and costume pieces; a live camera operator and his equipment is visible at one end of the space. The cameraman and the actors shift location and occasionally change costume in full view of the audience; it should be a distraction but like all of the rest of the constantly shifting environment of this play (for the screens and the table are moved numerous times during the show by the actors) it is in tune with one of the main ideas of Jesurun’s work, which is to keep us constantly caught up in a mutating perspective. Nothing is absolute or certain in this world. READ MORE >>
Backstage Review on Stopped Bridge
Posted at 5:08 pm
by Nicole Villeneuve, Backstage
In the 17th century, Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku began writing stories of the pleasure seekers of modern life, hedonistic consumers of art, entertainment, beauty, and sex. The tales became known as “ukiyo zoshi” or “floating world stories,” a name that relied on a subtle play on words. The word for “floating” in Japanese sounds similar to the word for “sorrowful,” a winking reference by Saikaku to the isolating, sometimes even tragic sentiments that hid behind the comic mask of the urban circus. READ MORE >>
Stopped Bridge of Dreams Review – Lighting and Sound America
Posted at 2:12 pm
by David Barbour, lightingandsoundamerica.com
To those of you who think of projections as the cutting edge, I give you John Jeserun, who has been exploring the intersection between live performance and video for three decades. (Among other things, he’s the author of Chang in a Void Moon, a serial for the theatre, which kicked off in 1982 and now consists of 60 episodes and counting.) He’s a fearless, go-for-broke, take-it-or-leave-it artist, one of a community of theatrical iconoclasts who thrived in the ’80s and now seem scarce as hen’s teeth. Undaunted by the many cultural shifts that have unfolded since his early days, he’s still at it, currently with Stopped Bridge of Dreams. READ MORE >>
Somebody’s Done Them Wrong
Posted January 19, 2012 at 1:47 pm
By Ted Merwin, The Jewish Week
Beware a woman with a past! Such is the lesson of a double bill of plays arriving downtown from Israel this week, based on a pair of classic short stories from Jewish tradition by Nobel Prize-winning authors. In the first, a dramatization of I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” a credulous orphan is persuaded by his wife, the town prostitute, that he is the father of her children by other men. In the second, a dance-theater piece inspired by S.Y. Agnon’s “The Lady and the Peddler,” a traveling Jewish salesman moves in with a bewitching customer only to realize that she is a vampire who has devoured her previous mates. READ MORE >>
Memorial Mass for John Wessel
Posted January 18, 2012 at 12:18 pm
La MaMa’s long time Board of Directors member John Wessel passed away on December 9. There will be a Memorial Mass in Celebration of the Life of John.
Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 10:30am
Church of St. Francis Xavier
46 West 16th Street, New York City
(Between 5th and 6th Avenues)
From New York Times obituary
WESSEL–John C. John C. Wessel, formerly of NYC, died at home on December 9 in Pennsylvania from ALS. Born in St. Louis in 1941, a Graduate of the Goodman School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he spent five seasons at the St. Louis Municipal Opera and two seasons on Broadway with Phoenix Rep. He served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela 1966-68, worked for the Arts & Education Council of St. Louis, as Director of the Staten Island Council on the Arts, at the New York State Council on the Arts, and as regional representative for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977-84. In 1979, he met William C. O’Connor, his joy, strength, and love for the next 33 years. They were married in 2008. They moved to Rome, Italy in 1985 and opened the Wessel O’Connor Gallery, then relocated to New York by 1987. In addition to his husband, survived by siblings Ginger (and John) Williams of Chicago, Tom (and Susan) Wessel of Ironton, MO, Jerry (and Joan) Wessel of Poplar Bluff, MO, and Edward Jr. (and Babette) Wessel of St. Louis, by numerous nephews and nieces, and eight O’Connor siblings. Memorial Mass January 21 at St. Francis Xavier Church 46 W. 16 St., NYC at 10:30am. Donations in his honor may be made to La Mama ETC, 74A East 4th St., New York 10003
Jason Zinoman reviewed In the Solitude of Cotton Fields
Posted January 11, 2012 at 4:43 pm
A Seller and a Buyer in a Puzzling Exchange
by Jason Zinoman, NY Times
“In the Solitude of Cotton Fields,” a visceral adaptation of a French play by Bernard-Marie Koltés, portrays a high-octane, sexually charged meeting between a dealer and a client, where the goods exchanged are unclear, but the high stakes are not. On another level, this production, staged in Polish with English supertitles by Radoslaw Rychcik, is about a confrontation between theater and rock concert. The rock concert wins.
This show at La MaMa E.T.C. opens in smoky darkness as a band called the Natural Born Chillers lays down a pounding bass line while two silhouetted figures dance. The Dealer (Wojciech Niemczyk) does a ferocious, fist-punching twist, while the Client (Tomasz Nosinski) shrinks and unfolds his body in a repeated violent motion. READ MORE >>
Alexis Reviewed by Ben Brantley
Posted January 5, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Back to the Barricade, Antigone
by Ben Brantley, New York Times
The dialogues keep multiplying and echoing, contracting and expanding, blurring and zooming into focus. In the raw and resonant “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy,” one of the opening works in the Under the Radar festival of experimental theater, conversation is hardly limited to the words exchanged by the actors on the stage of the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa.
This invigorating portrait of youthful rebellion in contemporary Greece (and, by extension, around the world) by the Italian troupe Motus finds the present arguing with the past, and the past roaring back at it. Computer-generated visuals wrestle with the sort of primal, physical performance that is as old as theater itself. And art and the realities it is supposed to represent keep squaring off and wondering if they really have anything to say to one another. READ MORE >>
Holiday Hours
Posted December 22, 2011 at 6:31 pm
La MaMa office and box office will be closed from Friday, December 23rd through Monday, December 26th. We will be back on Tuesday, December 27th.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Macbeth After Shakespeare – The Worlds’ Best Theater of 2011
Posted at 11:22 am
by Randy Gener, randygenerlive.blogspot.com
NEW YORK CITY: The arts-and-culture magazine in the theater of One World announces its top-10 picks for the world’s best theater of 2011. Click here to read the article.
At the top of the hierarchical list are Radio Muezzin (Germany/Egypt), a documentary work by the Swiss director Stefan Kaegi; Macbeth After Shakespeare (Slovenia/Croatia), staged by Ivica Buljan; and David Henry Hwang’s Broadway play Chinglish, which originated at the Goodman Theatre of Chicago. READ MORE >>
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws – 10 Best Things on Stage in 2011
Posted at 11:18 am
by Benjamin Sutton, Henry Stewart, Dan Callahan and Eugene Reznik, The L Magazine
5. Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, a never-produced one-act by Tennessee Williams at La MaMa, proved to be the tastiest treat of the season, with its starry cast of cult movie stars (Mink Stole), downtown theater royalty (Everett Quinton), and downtown It Boys (Joseph Keckler and Max Steele). The unknown Williams play itself proved surprisingly muscular and absurdist, a bold step in a new direction that Williams didn’t take, and the cast was just ideal.
Being Harold Pinter – Best of 2011
Posted December 15, 2011 at 5:18 pm
From the Past, but Looking Forward
by Ben Brantley, NY Times
THIS was a year for celebrating both the enduring power of traditional theater and the creative stealth bombs that can be planted within it, for putting new and explosive life into classic vessels. “The Book of Mormon,” the year’s biggest hit, is on one level as cheerful and predictable an organic musical as anything Rodgers and Hammerstein might have come up with. But it’s also a sustained act of gleeful subversion. And while plays like “Jerusalem,” “The _______ With the Hat” and “Other Desert Cities” are anything but experimental in form, each seduces its audiences into traveling into places that they hadn’t expected (or thought they wanted) to visit. With one notable exception (the Belarus Free Theater’s galvanizing “Being Harold Pinter”) the shows listed below have the pleasingly familiar surface appearance of the Broadway of decades ago. What lurks in the hearts and minds of the original productions here (the revivals are another matter, but only just) is very much of the 21st century. READ MORE >>
Macbeth After Shakespeare – Backstage Review
Posted December 11, 2011 at 1:15 pm
by Ron Cohen, Backstage.com
There’s not much that’s bonny about Scotland in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” and the place becomes exponentially uglier in “Macbeth After Shakespeare.” A brutal adaptation of the Scottish play by the late German playwright Heiner Müller, it’s performed in Slovenian by a dynamic cast of nine directed by Ivica Buljan, whose production crackles with high-voltage evil. READ MORE >>
John Fleck Blows in With Mad Women
Posted December 8, 2011 at 4:44 pm
by Alexis Soloski, Village Voice
There are gale-force winds with less vigor than John Fleck displays in his dynamic, discursive solo show Mad Women. Though Fleck recently turned 60, he displays the same manic drive and confessional intensity that made him a popular target during the culture wars of the 1980s. As he speeds and stumbles around the small stage of the La MaMa café space, he resembles a one-man whirlwind. Slumping into a chair to catch his breath, he asks, “Don’t ya’ feel like a tornado came out here and just sucked the oxygen right out of the room?” Yes, you certainly do. READ MORE >>