The Holocaust is never light fare for anyone, and it may be presumptuous to say, but its darkness is no more acutely felt than by those who survived it. The Congress for Jewish Culture’s production of Night Stories: Four Tales of Reanimation dramatizes the Yiddish poems of Avrom Sutzkever, widely acknowledged as the most eloquent Holocaust poet. Sutzkever’s poems, which depict the ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, under Nazi occupation, reflect the emotional roller coaster of its residents’ existence, pivoting among horror, humor, and an ambivalent desire for both death and redemption.
Playwright Jennifer Blackmer takes great pains to jazz up a history lesson in Predictor, her tribute to the unheralded woman who created the home pregnancy test, Meg Crane. The chronological account of Crane’s invention is interspersed with musical and joky skits, as well as scenes representing Crane’s thoughts or flashbacks in her life.
Molière’s Tartuffe is robustly reimagined by Lucas Hnath in a randy new version directed by Sarah Benson, turning the classic comedy of hypocrisy into a breathless, contemporary satire. With choreography by Raja Feather Kelly and a fearless cast led by Matthew Broderick and David Cross, the production unleashes ferocious wit and gleeful buffoonery.
Anna Christie,Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 Pulitzer Prize drama, has been overshadowed by his late, great behemoths: Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh are more often seen than the briefer play. Yet Thomas Kail’s enthralling production at St. Ann’s Warehouse makes a strong case for this neglected earlier work.
The 1975 Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock unfurls an atmospheric, unsettling little story of mysterious forces disturbing the titular outing, enjoyed by students at a Victoria, Australia, girls’ school circa 1900. In the movie, director Peter Weir keeps the proceedings eerie and foreboding as some of the girls on the picnic just vanish, leaving their classmates and the school personnel baffled and devastated. A well-deserved international success, Picnic at Hanging Rock grips the viewer even as not a lot happens: the film is all mood. The emotions are strong, but nothing about it screams, “I need to be sung.”
Michael Scott-Price has a lot to say. Much of it is said using four-letter words and racial slurs, making his Lynch PLAY a production not for those of a mild disposition. But American history (or history in general) is not for those with mild dispositions. Lynch PLAY makes sure that its audience is aware of this fact
Faust in Love, now playing at the Ohio Theater, is part two of Target Margin Theater's adaptation of Goethe's masterpiece. This second installment of the production's trilogy, which will be completed next year, concerns the most well-known aspect of the Faust legend: his romance with Gretchen (Eunice Wong), a young and innocent girl. As the story goes, Faust (George Hannah), aided by the demon Mephistopheles (David Greenspan), successfully woos Gretchen with gifts, sleeps with her and ruins her reputation, and then abandons her by taking a little vacation to hell. Upon his return, he discovers that his lover has gone mad and is imprisoned for murder. Faust finds himself torn between his desire to save Gretchen and Mephistopheles's insistence that he save himself. Directed by Target Margin's artistic director, David Herskovits, Faust in Love is a slick affair, with plenty of sly winks and nudges to the culturally savvy audience. The show's self-aware theatricality serves as both its most impressive and most detrimental aspect. While Herskovits's attention to production values makes Faust a visual joy to watch, the style of the show is so attention-grabbing that it sometimes distracts the audience from the story itself. The lighting is distinctive and dramatic, the sound design is playful and engaging, and the set changes are fluid and magical. But against the ever-changing backdrop of such beautifully crafted shapes and colors, the characters' conflict and desires seem bland in comparison, despite the efforts of the energetic and talented cast.
The play really shines during its scene changes, unlike most shows, which simply try to get through them as quickly as possible. Herskovits turns these transitional moments into tightly choreographed mini-scenes, during which a flurry of movement is coupled with an exciting burst of music. As the show progresses, the set evolves, gradually revealing a striking depth that dramatically portrays a variety of locations and symbolically represents the distance that develops between Faust and Gretchen. During the transitions, the audience experiences a revelation of space, and when the curtains and flys are removed, one can almost feel a collective shiver of delight rolling through the crowd.
The play's heightened sense of theatricality sometimes works to great dramatic effect, as in Gretchen's prolonged silence when she describes holding her dead sister as a baby. During this scene, the audience's attention was rapt as she wordlessly rocked her empty arms, proving that silence really can speak volumes. At other times, the directorial choices seemed overly devised and even a bit smug.
For instance, a sparkly curtain often appears to hide certain actions from the audience. At one point, someone mimes stomping on a ukulele behind the curtain, while cartoonish sound effects add a comical effect. The curtain is removed to reveal a now-broken ukulele. Although somewhat amusing, bits of business like this often seem gratuitous and out of place. It is difficult to tell whether Herskovits is attempting to make the story interesting by highlighting certain aspects of it, or whether he is simply trying to distract our attention from the boring bits by using any possible means.
The last scene of the play, in which Faust attempts to rescue Gretchen, is a welcome relief from theatrical tricks and gags. Their confrontation is played out in a straightforward manner and thus generates one of the most meaty and thought-provoking interactions of the evening. Once the tongue-in-cheek commentary is turned off, the actors are allowed to get down to the business of really responding to each other, and it is a joy to see. Although it might be nice if there were more of these moments in the play, it is satisfying that Faust ends on this emotional high note.
Herskovits stuffs a surprising amount of humor into the production, and the action proceeds at a pleasantly quick pace. He has successfully put a fresh, new spin on an old play, and the superficial elements of the production shine with style, grace, and a lot of charm. Although the characters may not inspire much empathy or interest, this is still a thoroughly engaging piece of theater, and Target Margin proves that there is more to a good play than simply a good story. In Faust in Love the set is not just an indication of where the characters are; it is the hat from which the magician pulls a rabbit. The costumes do not merely keep the actors from being naked, and the lighting creates much, much more than simply a lack of darkness.
The stage is almost too small at Jewel Box Space, where Alex DeFazio's hauntingly beautiful new play, Radium, is being produced. And this is exactly how it should be. At the opening, six actors (who play five characters) walk to and fro onstage, at times narrowly avoiding bumping into one another. The effect is one of cramped claustrophobia. The inhabitants of DeFazio's world barely have enough room to negotiate their way through life and are incapable of taking a course of action without knocking someone else off his own course. Radium follows the lives of five gay men who fall in and out of love and lust, and break each other's hearts, over the course of a year. We see three different strong relationships form and fall apart, in most cases for no real reason that the characters can understand. They cling to each other desperately but are equally quick to toss away their lovers if they don't fit into the carefully sculpted world they have devised for themselves.
The first thing we see, once the stage has been emptied of bodies bumping into one another seemingly at random, is J. (Bobby Abid) and Alexis (Nathaniel P. Claridad) loudly and graphically having sex. J. cruelly stops their lovemaking before either of them can find release and callously kicks the frail and fragile Alexis out into the night. The difference in their attitudes is as striking as the contrast in their physiques: J. looks as if he were sculpted out of stone, while a strong wind could blow Alexis over.
The human body, and a person's relationship to his physicality, is one of the main subjects of this lyrical and erotically charged play. J. can literally see only himself, and his body is
Dim the lights, hide the evidence, and slip into someone else's best clothes: it's time for rituals. Jean Genet's dark tale of fantasy and paranoia, The Maids, peers behind closed doors into the tormented lives of servants on the verge of cracking, and the masters who unwittingly live alongside them. Escapist Productions's version of this 1947 absurdist classic takes on a work by one of the most unique and defiant voices of 20th-century theater, playing it out with great ambitions though somewhat mixed results. The Maids is the story of two sisters, Solange and Claire, who serve together in the same house. Their work has pushed them to the edge of their wits, so they dream up a desperate scheme to frame their master and murder their mistress. While the mistress is out, they play at the murder, enacting it themselves. When she returns, however, and it comes to the moment to act, they bungle their carefully laid plans and cannot accomplish their revenge. The mistress escapes, suspecting nothing, but the maids' plan is already unraveling at a dangerous pace, and the two sisters are left alone again, fearing for the worst.
The Escapist production at the Chocolate Factory
The mythical Second Avenue subway has finally come into being. But the line is set to run right through the apartment of three young people living together on the outskirts of Harlem. ...A Matter of Choice chronicles the conflict that arises between the roommates as they face their inevitable eviction. The occupants of the apartment are an unlikely trio. Diggs, a white boy who grew up seven blocks from where they currently reside, is a direction-less, pot-smoking ex-messenger who endlessly defends his recent promotion to head of the mailroom. Chastity (Sarah Hayon) is a no-nonsense Latina girl and a loner (whether by choice or by circumstance is essentially the crux of her character development). Webb (Nyambi Nyambi) is an educated, gay black man involved in a tumultuous relationship with his boyfriend Michael (John Summerour).
Despite their differences, they are extremely close
In Brooklyn's refreshingly roomy St. Ann's Warehouse, the Wooster Group is remounting its 1999 creation House/Lights. The city's champion of the avant-garde has temporarily abandoned its snug Manhattan home, and, while the breathing room is welcome, one cannot shake the feeling of being dead-bolted into an asylum. A conflation of Gertrude Stein's 1938 play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and Joseph P. Mawra's 1964 "lesboitation" film Olga's House of Shame, this 75-minute multimedia trip takes the audience on a mind-searing journey through sound, space, psychology, and sex. One of the Wooster Group's founding members, Kate Valk, plays both Stein's Faustus and Mawra's Elaine in a seductively manic performance. The nimble and gorgeous actress defies age, time, and space
A deer slowly bounds across the wide-open stage and finds a spot to rest and feed. Dark, percussive music plays as the animal is spotted by a man hunting in the woods. He very slowly, silently removes an arrow from his quiver, pulls backs, and shoots. The arrow pierces the deer's chest, and it shakes and struggles in pain until it finally falls dead to the ground. The man is King Agamemnon, and little does he know that this small act will displease the gods and set off a tragic chain of events for himself and the whole of Greece. The opening of Theodora Skipitares's Iphigenia burns a powerful and haunting image into the minds of the audience. What's more remarkable is how this effect is fashioned by Bunraku puppetry, a traditional Japanese art form. The deer is carefully manipulated by three performers
Ask anyone if he or she has ever heard the story Miss Nelson Is Missing, and you will most likely be answered with a gasp of recognition followed by a wistful sigh of "I loved that book." Originally published in 1977 by Harry Allard, Miss Nelson Is Missing is a book that has been passed down from one generation to the next, and now to yet another crop of youngsters in the musical adaptation playing at the Tribeca-based Manhattan Children's Theatre. Since this story comes with a dedicated built-in audience, there is very little a theater can do wrong in the retelling of it. The remarkable thing about Manhattan Children's Theatre is just how much it manages to do right. The stage resembles a quaint, little storybook town, with a green, pink, and yellow ice cream store next to a bright pink police station. The scenery's centerpiece is the schoolhouse: a brick building with white doors that unfold into a classroom complete with a chalkboard, a map of the world, and four little desks.
While this silly, colorful story expertly caters to the toddlers in the audience, it gives more than a few winks of acknowledgement to the adults who accompany them.
For example, when the soft-voiced, rosy-cheeked, angelic elementary-school teacher, Miss Nelson, attempts to engage her unruly students in a history lesson, she is horrified that the children cannot even answer the question "What is the name of the president?" One pigtailed student guesses, "Dick Cheney?" A boy with a spitball-stuffed straw dangling from his mouth answers, "Arnold Schwarzenegger!" Just when Miss Nelson thinks the lesson cannot go any worse, a third boy cries, "Martin Sheen!"
Desperate to regain the attention of her four sweet but dizzyingly hyperactive students, Miss Nelson takes matters into her own hands and turns up "missing." In her place she sends a "substitute"
The dangers of creating a piece of theater through collaboration are as numerous as the potential rewards. When the process works, the result is an organic fusing of many different artistic voices into a single, overarching vision. As with a choir, the power and nuance of such a synthesis can be staggering. When the process fails, however, what emerges is a disastrously confused and meandering hybrid of intentions, divided and unable to stand. Unfortunately, The Astronomer's Triangle, the latest communal effort from CollaborationTown, now playing at Studio 5, runs afoul of many of the process' snares and offsets these with too few of its benefits.
Our narrator and protagonist is a prim cartographer (Jordan Seavey) who professes that things as intangible as love can be mapped. He has devoted himself to the welfare of an old friend (Geoffrey Decas), an astronomer despondent over his failure to cull from the stars clues about life's origins. In the breaks between forcing his astronomer friend to get out of bed and eat, the cartographer manages to strike up a relationship with a quirky local waitress (Boo Killebrew), who claims she communicates with her own private star.
When pressed, the cartographer learns that this star occupies not only part of her body
The West Side Theater is slightly dank and musty and not at all inviting. At one point, midway through the show, the lights in the theater suddenly go out, and the crashing sound of bombs exploding interrupts the silence. It transports you to another, much darker world. It is nighttime in Iraq. There is no water, no electricity, only candlelight. It is powerful and real. We know the politics, see the pictures, and hear the rhetoric. Americans held hostage, Iraqi protests in the street, and gunfire in Fallujah. The war in Iraq has raged in one form or another for nearly three years, leaving hundreds killed, thousands injured, homes destroyed, businesses burned, and a country liberated. We all know the story.
But what we do not know is the whole story, and it is one that needs to be told. The Six Figures Theatre Company, in adapting the "Girl Blog From Iraq"
Angela Forrest is a great performer. She is funny, expressive, and, at times, even captivating. In her one-woman show, Profile of a Saint, she portrays 10 characters and never leaves the audience guessing who is who. When she is in character
Eastern Standard
Your body is lying on a lumpy mattress in a hospital bed hooked up to loud beeping machines via various tubes. A pump breathes artificial air into your dormant lungs. Family members stand at your bedside berating themselves for not saying "I love you" enough, or fighting over your inheritance while they stare at your limp figure. Your body is in that bed, but your soul is not. You are not dead; you are not alive. You are "between worlds." Such is the fate of the characters in the Chekhov Theatre Ensemble's ethereal and intuitive production of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's tragic Between Worlds. A nearly bare set is enclosed by two walls joined to form a corner. One wall contains an exit labeled A for "accidental," and the other has a similar exit leading to Corridor D for "deliberate."
In the center is an elevator, through which enters a young man, Colin (Patrick Jones), unaware that he has just crashed into a tree at 100 miles an hour. He is greeted by two hooded assistants who don't speak but are able to tell him that he is to take up temporary residency in the "hotel." And this is just the beginning of a day or so at a place that houses people between life and death.
The Two Worlds Hotel is presided over by the elegant but icy Dr. S., played coldly but with just the right amount of tenderness by Jennifer Shirley. Other guests include the saucy cleaning lady, Jesse, portrayed in full raunchy glory by Andrea Seigel; a not-so-clairvoyant Magus played not so subtly by T. Scott Lilly; and an uptight Chairman of "the Board," portrayed by Max Evjen.
Prior to the second act, the hotel is visited by a regular guest, the innocent Laura, played by an illuminating Sara Barker. Laura has been wheelchair-bound for years and uses her trips to the hotel as a chance to escape the paralysis that has troubled her on earth. As Colin begins to understand the nature of the hotel while falling heavily for Laura, the other tenants anxiously await their fates, which will be determined by the elevator that has brought them there. When it is their time, they will be called to the elevator. If they are to survive, the elevator will bring them down to earth. If they are to die, the elevator will travel up. In the meantime, they must wait and contemplate the lives they have led.
Between Worlds tackles quite a few heavy subjects, namely death, the afterlife, destiny, depression, knowledge, sanity, and second chances. Since the play never gives any concrete answers to these questions, the audience is forced to draw their own conclusions, even regarding the outcome of Colin, who closes the play as he steps into the elevator and awaits his fate.
The play is ripe with witty and sometimes poignant one-liners, such as Colin's remark to Dr. S., "I never thought death would have such good legs," and Dr. S.'s scornful, "Using alcohol. The method [of suicide] used by cowards." The dialogue has a very natural, Mamet-esque feel to it, but the play itself is more in line with European playwrights like Heiner Muller, who use fantastical ideas and strange theatrical conventions, such as the mute assistants and the ambiguously gendered Dr. S. Director Ragnar Freidank's German background surely contributes to the avant-garde feel.
The acting is consistent and realistic across the board. The best dialogue takes place in the rushed exchange between Laura and Colin just before he is to be cornered into the elevator. He feverishly asks her simple, seemingly mundane questions about herself so that he may remember her when he is gone, and she replies just as excitedly, causing his exit to be indefinitely postponed. In fact, each time a guest enters the elevator and the doors close, there is a moment when we hold our breath to wait for the result, which is not always what we expect.
Overall, Between Worlds has a sort of unfinished feel to it, as if a small something has been lost in the translation. The play confronts death with such brazenness that you can only wish that you'll never end up a guest at the Two Worlds Hotel. Even so, the polished acting and intriguing subject matter turn the two hours into a visit worth making.
Seasoned by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Paris of the 1840s was, not unlike 80 years later, a magnet for artists, intellectuals, and radicals from across Europe. It was a decade when the world was out of balance: a crisis of the old society coincided with a crisis of the new, spawning great political and cultural ferment. Among those drawn to the city in that decade were three lions of 19th-century German history: Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and poet Heinriche Heine. Working in the tradition of such cerebral, history-minded playwrights as Michael Frayne and Tom Stoppard, American literary critic and essayist Jonathan Leaf imagines the interaction of these three men in The Germans in Paris, an intriguing though tendentious play about the dueling of men and their ideas that is based loosely on actual events.
In fact, two actual duels
Adolescence has never made for particularly pretty subject matter. On television, children usually rapidly age from cute cherub to mature teenager, somehow skipping a crucial stage in the natural aging process. One's naturally changing body only makes an occasional appearance as a subplot on the Disney Channel or WB. And filmdom's closest portrayal of puberty as metaphor remains...Teen Wolf? This is true, and one might expect to find a similar comedic metaphor in Gorilla Man, which just opened at P.S. 122. The latest play by Obie winner Kyle Jarrow is part horror show and part rock opera but all camp, and for rather lowbrow humor, director Habib Azar has assembled a high-caliber company. There aren't very many lessons to learn along the way, but ultimately it is a not much different animal from the aforementioned film and its sequel.
Jarrow (onstage as the Piano Player) narrates this musical, with Perry Silver (the Drummer) helping him reference the show's own plot devices and genre elements. Fourteen-year-old Billy (Jason Fuchs) awakens to find he has started growing immense amounts of fur on the back of his hands. When he confronts his mother (a wonderfully game Stephanie Bast), he discovers that he is actually the product of a tryst between her and the Gorilla Man (Matt Walton), a hirsute beast with a penchant for gruesome murders. Billy learns that it is his destiny to follow in that path. When she is unable to kill her son, Mother, as she is known, casts him out.
Billy runs into several interesting people in this darkly comic, Wizard of Oz-like bildungsroman. These characters include a fortuneteller, a politician, a prison guard, a truck driver, and a vagrant, all portrayed by Burl Moseley and Nell Mooney. These characters, Jarrow instructs the audience, serve to teach Billy about such topics as forgiveness, fate, fear, failure, and fatherhood.
But whether taken merely on a surface level or as metaphor, Gorilla, with its not-quite-artful song lyrics and instructional storytelling, lacks oomph in the message department. The play hits on the notion of individuality, of loving who you are and not trying to run away from it, but never delves particularly deep into that idea.
Only at play's end does Jarrow provide any kind of resolution, in arguing in favor of free will over both nature and nurture. He espouses the idea that Billy does not necessarily have to succumb to his father's murderous fate. But the play just ties a nice ribbon at the end, directly telling its audience that it believes in free will more than the formative forces of genetics and one's upbringing. It would have been more impressive had Jarrow demonstrated this theme a little more consistently throughout the show.
Additionally, while it was a smart choice to limit the production to one act
In the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, a winter solstice ritual has survived, one that has existed since before the rise of Christianity. A special meal is made consisting of 12 dishes, all meatless and dairyless, and is proffered to any human, animal, or spirit (living and dead) who wishes to join in the festivities, in the hopes that the next year will be healthy and the harvest successful. The master of the house repeats his invitation three times: "If you don't want to come and taste all our delicious dishes, if you won't come when we invite you, then don't come when we don't call you!" This ritual, along with the songs and incantations that accompany it (called koliadas), was studied by director Virlana Tkacz for the past two winters in Ukraine. The result is the Yara Arts Group's Koliada: Twelve Dishes at La MaMa. The piece integrates these traditional songs and practices with contemporary texts and theatrical techniques, generating an engaging and resonant evening of performance.
The imagery and themes of Koliada can be quite beautiful and moving. Anyone with a sense of family ritual and heritage will be taken in by the opening, during which an older woman, a matriarchal figure, prepares her meal, mutters to herself what has yet to be done, explains how she creates a dish, and sings quietly to herself the koliadas traditional to the occasion.
The design of the show, by Tkacz and Watuko Ueno, is simple and brilliant. They have taken the first-floor theater at La MaMa, a very deep space, and used it lengthwise, allowing for busy, expansive action. There is also little audience seating, making the event extremely intimate and involving. The paper-thin back wall of the set contains faint images of vegetables and grains, and also creates mysterious shadows made by company members moving behind it. A series of three long wooden tables make up the furnishings, evocative of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" (coincidentally enough, the setting of a Passover seder, the meal of the Jewish holiday that involves cooking a large amount for family and friends, as well as inviting any outsiders, along with the prophet Elijah, to partake if they wish).
The cast members then weave their way through 12 vignettes, meditations on the food, ritual, and renewal through poetry, movement, and song. The company members portray all the different figures that inhabit the ritualistic space: townspeople, spirits of animals and storms, and the recently deceased.
The staging doesn't do justice to the poetry by Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, however. Poetry is an extremely tricky art to translate to the stage, in terms of both direction and performance. The company simply doesn't give this beautiful text the reverence it deserves, which often makes it seem anachronistic and incongruous with the action. The different dimensions of the group's exploration don't mesh well in general, but this makes the poetry in particular stick out and suffer.
But the koliadas, especially when sung in the original Ukrainian, are charming and haunting. A special treat is Ukrainian musicians Ivan Zelenchuk and Dmytro Tafiychuk, who accompany the cast at times with their voices, fiddle, and an amazing mountain horn called the trembita. The two musicians, who are working to preserve and document the koliadas in their town of Kryvorivnia, are a tremendous complement to the piece.
Toward the conclusion of Koliada, the wooden tables are pushed right up to the audience, and the company welcomes you to their home. You are even invited to try some kutia, a sweet dish containing wheat, poppy seeds, and honey. This great feeling of familial belonging makes for a warm finale.
Ultimately, the traditions and ideas behind Koliada: Twelve Dishes are far more intriguing than the performance itself, but the themes and imagery that the performance conjures up make it a unique and touching theatrical experience.
There are two basic camps in the debate over art's purpose. The first, basically idealist, argues that art should enlighten. The artist's sacred duty is to present the truth of our reality, or, at the least, the truth of the artist's reality, no matter how bleak or brutal. The second camp, however, tends more toward escapism. It contends that reality in all its misery is ever-present. Why use art to deliver a second dose of it when art is the only means most people have to momentarily step out of it?
In Marc Spitz's new comedy, The Name of This Play Is Talking Heads, now playing at Under St. Marks, the two factions again take up this never-ending skirmish. The difference here, as opposed to the debates that ceaselessly appear in publications and programs devoted to the arts, is that one of the two parties has the added rejoinder of a loaded firearm.
The battlefield, appropriately enough, is the studio of a TV music channel where a typically vapid segment, called the "Top 100 Most Rockatrocious Moments in Rock History," is being taped. (Think of such watersheds of vulgarity as Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his teenaged cousin, or the revelation that Michael Jackson's penis is multicolored, to use just two of the examples Spitz himself cheerily points up.)
The idealist thrown into this escapist stronghold is Pete (Brian Reilly), a writer for Headphones magazine. Initially under the impression that he has been invited on the show to share his knowledge of music and the culture surrounding it, he is quickly disillusioned when he sees the channel's staple comedian, Frankie (Matt Higgins), being force-fed his opinions by Tom (James Eason), the show's director. However, Pete's disillusionment quickly gives way to outright rebellion
Faith is an awfully open-ended subject on which to base a play. Faith in God, faith in relationships, faith that human beings are essentially good
Stunning. Illuminating. Touching. Powerful. These are just a few of the words that come to mind when describing the experimental dance piece Skins, playing at the historic La MaMa Theatre. Even without specific characters or a linear plot, Skins tells an amazingly human and compassionate story through its unifying themes about body image, self-expression, and the societal pressures that shape and change us. This piece is based on the poetry of Elizabeth Ingraham, whose work has also inspired a series of life-sized female "skin" sculptures that can be seen hanging in La MaMa's lobby. Throughout the play, a compilation of Ingraham's poems is recited over a sound system as the words come to life onstage through music, dancing, light, and scenery.
Between poems, the dancing is underscored by hypnotically beautiful music performed live
Don Juan in Chicago begins with Don Juan in his 16th-century Spanish castle mixing potions and chanting Latin in hopes of conjuring up the Devil, until he is interrupted by his faithful servant, Leporello. Concerned about his master's well-being, Leporello attempts to convince Don Juan to give up his intellectual pursuits in favor of wining, dining, and women. But the not-yet-legendary lover harbors no concern for momentary desires of the flesh. A 30-year-old virgin, Don Juan has only one thing on his mind: immortality. With immortality, he surmises, it would be possible to discover the answers to all of life's questions, and he would take his place as the greatest of all history's thinkers.
Upon eventually succeeding in bringing Mephistopheles to the mortal plain, Don Juan declares his heart's desire, and the Devil agrees to give Don Juan (and unlucky Leporello) life eternal, with one condition: that Don Juan agrees to seduce a different woman every day before the clock strikes midnight. The deal is sealed in blood, and thus begins Don Juan's legendary sexual escapades. Comedic antics and dramatic moments ensue as four centuries of lies, love, and infidelity eventually culminate in one chaotic evening.
As the title character, Michael Poignand displays a wide range of talents as he transforms himself from the na
