Benjamin Walker in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research,” asserting that they seek to “speak directly to the mainstream audience continually ignored by the American theater,” rejecting “the shy music, seamless dramaturgy, and muted performance style of the 20th century in favor of the anarchic, the rude, the juvenile, the spectacle.”

All of which is to say that, led by artistic director Alex Timbers, Les Frères has created a series of shows that are akin to live-action South Park episodes with avant-hipster cred. In 2006 alone, (the year I first became aware of the company) they mounted Heddatron (written by Elizabeth Meriwether), in which a Michigan housewife is kidnapped by robots and forced to repeatedly perform Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Hell House, their version of the infamous haunted house-style spectacles staged by Evangelical churches throughout the United States; and A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, a deadpan musical satire (written and composed by Kyle Jarrow) featuring a cast of eight to twelve-year-olds celebrating the life and work of L. Ron Hubbard.

Les Frère’s shows are marked by clever writing, strong performances, confident direction, and a subversive sense of humor, but they also tend to be marred by an undertone of smug self-satisfaction, rarely achieving in performance the political sophistication and intellectual rigor suggested by their publicity materials. While it has often been said that the company plays its irony straight, never winking at the audience, the truth is that Timbers tends to set up structures and situations that have so much irony built into them that it is impossible to read them in a nuanced way. Even Hell House, which was conceived as reconstruction rather than parody, could not be taken seriously when mounted in one of the city’s hippest theatres, with skilled actors pretending to be amateur actors and an audience made up almost entirely of NYU students giggling at every reference to heaven or hell.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, currently enjoying a twice-extended run at the Public Theater, re-imagines our seventh president as a post-punk, emo pop-rock star whose emotional scars drive him both to greatness and to genocide. There’s a touch of genius in framing Jackson as an emotional adolescent who overcompensates for both his own insecurities and his distrust of authority by adopting a swaggering, hypersexual confidence. As played by the ridiculously sexy Benjamin Walker, this Jackson wears skin-tight jeans and form-clinging long-sleeved t-shirts, brandishing his pain (and a holstered revolver) as a rallying cry against “Washington elites” as he rides his war-hero status and his populist rhetoric all the way to the White House. He wears black eyeliner, he massacres the Creek and Seminole tribes, he cuts his arm in the manner of a bipolar teen, he balances the budget, and he sings power ballads.

The tone of the show, and the brand of postmodernism it employs, are summed up nicely in its signature song, “Populism, Yea, Yea!”

Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school?
You always went out with those guys, who
thought they were so cool.
And I was nobody to you, nobody to you, nobody to you
But it’s the early nineteenth century
And we’re gonna take this country back
For people like us who don’t just think about things
People who make things happen
Sometimes with guns, sometimes with speeches too.
And also other things.
Populism, yea, yea! This is the age of Jackson.

The link between populism and anti-intellectualism is made even more explicit in the song’s second verse, sung not by Jackson but by a couple of his adoring constituents:

Take a stand against the elite
They don’t care anything for us
And we will eat sweet democracy, let them eat our dust
‘Cause it’s the early nineteenth century
We’ll take the land back from the Indians
We’ll take the land back from the French and Spanish
And other people in other European countries
And other countries too, and also other places
I’m pretty sure it’s our land anyway
Populism, yea, yea! This is the age of Jackson.

The song encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of BBAJ nicely. The lyrics and music, by Michael Friedman, are catchy enough, and allow the performers to jump head-first into the sentiments of their characters, even while forcing the audience to maintain an ironic, critical distance. And, frankly, the show is fun, entertaining in a way that theatre—particularly theatre with a political bent—too seldom is.

Unfortunately, though, BBAJ is also a little smug, a little glib, and a little pat. While it pretends to challenge viewers to reexamine their preconceptions, it is actually designed to elicit self-congratulatory laughs and knowing nods from an audience that already shares its point of view. Its humor is almost entirely derisive and dismissive, particularly (but not only) when directed against Jackson and his admirers. Jackson is presented as without redeeming qualities, not only anti-intellectual but downright stupid. His persuasiveness and charisma are reduced to, and dismissed as, a result of the fit of his jeans and the cut of his pecs, a genuinely amusing conceit that cuts off any possibility of real engagement with the strength and appeal of his persona and his rhetoric. The show’s vision of Jackson also leads to a certain amount of musical confusion, conflating emo with cock rock, and emo fans with frat boys. Neither of these genres is executed particularly well; some of the songs are catchy, but the ridiculousness, the intentional badness, is painted on in thick layers.

There is a pressing need for theatre and other art forms to engage with American populism and anti-intellectualism in the age of both Obama and the tea party movement, and Les Freres should be praised for taking up that gauntlet. However, while the show has played to cheering audiences and received rave reviews in both New York and LA, it’s difficult to imagine bringing BBAJ to, for example, Jackson’s home state of South Carolina. Americans continue to vote more for those with whom they identify than those who show signs of being able to govern effectively; given this, the greater challenge for a piece of political theatre is not to mock those who identify with Jackson, or W., or Palin (or Obama), but to try to engage with, relate to, and THEN deconstruct that sense of identification.

That said: the show really is fun. Go check it out if you can get a discount.

•  •  •

Toshiki Okada, one of Japan’s most fascinating young playwrights, writes dialogue so vernacular, so hyper-realistic, that it comes to feel stylized. Sentences circle back on themselves in aborted attempts to articulate unfinished ideas. His characters are smart but largely inarticulate and without ambition, disenfranchised slackers who came of age during Japan’s “lost decade” and have since been unable or unwilling to join in the country’s subsequent resurgence.

Enjoy, which is just finishing its English-language premiere in a production by the Play Company, follows a handful of temp workers at a manga café as they drift through their lives, careers, and relationships. They over-think the trivial in order to distract themselves from more pressing matters, including the identity crisis brought on by entering one’s thirties while working part time in a manga café.

Aya Ogawa’s remarkable translation seems to capture Okada’s tone perfectly (think Waiting for Godot meets Clerks or Slackers, only in Tokyo.) This is a very Japanese play, but American generations X and Y will find much to relate to if they allow themselves to relax into the show’s static pacing. Director Dan Rothenberg (of Pig Iron) directs a solid, occasionally extraordinary cast with a deft hand. Okada’s work is poised to take on a higher profile in New York’s experimental scene (his 5 Days in March, which Okada’s company presented at the Japan Society last year, is about to open in English at LaMama); consider this your chance to know about him before all your friends do.

Also: it’s worth noting that this is the fifth of Okada’s plays to be translated into English by Ogawa. I can think of a couple of presses who should be publishing these plays post-haste. Anyone listening?

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, written and directed by Alex Timbers; music and lyrics by Michael Friedman; sets by Donyale Werle; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by Justin Townsend; sound by Bart Fasbender choreography by Danny Mefford; fight director, Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum. With: River Aguirre, James Barry, Michael Crane, Michael Dunn, Greg Hildreth, Jeff Hiller, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, Maria Elena Ramirez, Kate Cullen Roberts, Ben Steinfeld, Benjamin Walker, Colleen Werthmann, and Emily Young. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street. Through May 30.

Enjoy by Toshiki Okada. Translated by Aya Ogawa; directed by Dan Rothenberg; set by Mimi Lien; lighting by James Clotfelter. With Jessica Almasy, Steven Boyer, Frank Harts, Kris Kling, Joshua Koehn, Mary McCool, Joseph Midyett, Kira Sternbach, Alex Torra, and Stacey Yen. At 59e59, through May 1.

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Kevin Mambo in “Fela!”

it’s an ecstatic phenomenon.” Critics for New York magazine, while acknowledging that the musical glosses over some of its subject’s more problematic facets, goes on to say “But seriously, who cares? As an evening’s entertainment, Fela! is without peer.”

All of this sounded like a bit much, but I was hearing similar reports from friends who had seen the show. When it came time to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I gave her choices of a few different Broadway musicals, hoping she would choose Fela!, and she did. And damned if it wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve seen on Broadway, probably ever.

Fela! is named for its title character, Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician, activist, and night club owner who died in 1997 but whose legend has grown in the ensuing couple of decades. The play is set in the Shrine, the club where Kuti holds court. The conceit is that the audience members of the show are attending a concert at the club. Most of the book is made up of Kuti’s pointed banter with his audience and his band, though the structure is kept fluid enough to allow for some flashbacks and other dramatic devices as parts of Fela’s history are unfolded for the audience’s edification. Some of these scenes work powerfully, while others fall a little flat, but the point of this show, really, is the infectious, groove-based Afrobeat music. Oh, and the dancing: the most astonishingly athletic, committed, sensual, full-bodied dancing I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre.

The title role is played at alternate performances by Sahr Ngaujah, who starred in Fela!’s downtown run at the Public last year, and Kevin Mambo, who performed in the show I saw.  The actor of this role is given no choice but to shoot for a tour-de-force performance and Mambo, thankfully, succeeds. Fela jokes, teases, rages, sings, and weeps, dancing the whole time. He also leads the onstage band and the show’s extraordinary ensemble, who take many of their cues from him. The actor only pretends to play the saxophone (astute spectators will notice that the band’s sax player is upstage wailing while the show’s lead struts about miming the solos), but he has to be a real band leader in order for the show to work. A lot of actors have tried and failed to own the stage in the same way a rock star does, but Mambo’s Fela holds court convincingly.

The quality and energy of the ensemble can’t be overstated. The group dance numbers, from overtly sexual hip grinding to a spectacular variation on a Yoruba egungen ritual, are the heart of this show. Director and choregrapher Bill T. Jones has put together an ensemble that rules the stage with grace, power, and spectacular athleticism. As for the singing, Kuti’s songs only occasionally give the lead actor the opportunity to show off his pipes in an American Idol sort of way, but Lillias White, as Kuti’s mother Funmilayo, and Saycon Sengbloh, as the American woman who introduces him to the notion of “black power,” more than make up for it.  Fela!’s design team also impresses, particularly Lighting Designer Roebert Wierzel and projection Designer Peter Nigrini, who each know when to use their virtuosity to dazzle and when to use it in support of the action on stage, helping to make the show as immersive as possible given the venue.

Despite a generally celebratory tone, history and politics play a part in the show, as does Kuti’s complex, devoted relationship to his feminist mother, who was harassed and tortured by police. While some of these sections drag a little, they also manage to leave you wanting more. Fela-as-legend is fun, but Fela-as-flesh-and-blood-activist-and-gadfly is a richer story. One riff describing Europeans and Americans as once-admired guests who have overstayed their welcome (they seemed nice at first, but then things started to go missing: soap, towels, petroleum, people…) is both funny and barbed, and makes you wish the show as a whole had more teeth. A documentary-theatre scene in which actors recite reports of police atrocities while the pictures of the people they are playing are projected onto an upstage screen was profoundly moving and served as a powerful reminder of what it was Kuti was protesting against. I also wish Kuti’s less appealing moments (he famously declared that wearing condoms was “un-African,” and eventually died of AIDS) were included at least in passing.

Politics aside, Fela!’s greatest failing is born of its successes. The show is designed to make us want to dance (indeed, early on Kuti orders the audience to their feet and teaches them some rudimentary pelvis thrusts), but Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill theatre is designed to keep us in our seats. Despite some nods toward audience participation, some dancing in the aisles, and bars that remain open throughout the show (a zombie and two bottles of water cost me $22), this just isn’t a space that encourages movement and interaction. Still, at the end of every song, the audience (my mother included) gave rock concert-worthy ovations, hooting and hollering with an energy rarely felt on the (all too-seldom) Great (all too)-White Way.

Reviews of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, as directed by Joe Mantello at MCC’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, haven’t been quite as ecstatic as those for Fela! (Brantley had decidedly mixed feelings about it), but there has still been a distinct buzz around the play. This is in part the result of very smart publicity about Campbell and, even more so, about the cast of young Brits who are widely (and rightly) considered rising stars. Oddly, though, the buzz has also centered on the politics of visibility. This season’s off-Broadway offerings (largely a reflection of last year’s London season), seem rife with “serious” plays about gay men and their pre-Stonewall struggles (as well as what will likely come to be called their pre-marriage struggles).

It’s strange to think that the presence of gay (mostly white) men on New York’s stages should be cause for celebration, consternation, or even much notice, but from The Pride, to The Temperamentals (an historical drama about Harry Hay’s political and sexual awakening), to Yank! (a musical about gay soldiers in World War II)—to name just a few—this season seems to have become what Charles Isherwood called “the city’s unofficial spring festival of gay theater.”

What’s striking about these new plays by relatively young writers is how old-fashioned, and even conservative, most of them are. The Pride is no exception. Set in that mythical version of England where rail-thin Brits with perfect posture spout witty, perfectly formed sentences at a mile a minute, without ever having to pause to search for the right word, Campbell’s play feels like a museum piece laced with just enough profanity and sex to titillate. It is an unapologetically middlebrow play, competently crafted and aimed squarely at an audience of aging, well-off gays who still bear the scars of their formative years and who consider the depiction of that struggle in a well-appointed mainstream piece of theatre to be one more step of bringing their culture out of the closet.

The play is set in 1958 and 2008, the actors playing alternate-reality versions of the same characters caught up in two different kinds of love triangles. In 1958, Philip (Hugh Dancy) is married to Sylvia (Andrew Riseborough) but has secret desires that are awakened by his wife’s new boss Oliver (Ben Wishaw), who longs to be able to love openly. In 2008, Philip has left Oliver after a year and a half live-in relationship in which Oliver has failed to overcome his addiction to sex with strangers (the more menacing—and well-hung—the better), while Sylvia, Philip’s best friend and confidant, struggles to balance the neediness of her pet gay with the demands of her own love life.

Elegantly directed and beautifully acted, The Pride is at turns moving and funny, but it is also puzzling and ultimately disappointing on a number of levels. The dual-decade structure cries out to be read as a statement on the state of gay culture, but whatever message Campbell has in mind is muddled. Is he saying that public, anonymous sex is something to stand up and fight for like the rejection of the closet was fifty years ago? Is he saying that our struggle for sexual openness or equality has arguably taken us a step too far (even as it is not yet finished?) Is he saying that today’s young gays still bear the scars of the struggles of an earlier generation? This last is the most likely, and most reasonable, of course, but the play’s politics are difficult to read. Political inscrutability is not always a liability, but in this case it doesn’t seem to be the result of complexity or individuality or even just disregard for identity politics; it seems rather to be a play that is trying to say something specific but can’t quite get its message across.

A description of a pride parade in one of the 2008 scenes comes closest to clearing things up: “It’s a demonstration, a celebration, and a fashion show, in that order.” Whatever its flaws, The Pride has clearly struck a nerve with its audience, earning an extended run of sold-out houses largely on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity. More than a century ago, Shaw famously claimed that “problem plays,” plays that engage directly with social issues can only hold an audience’s attention for as long as the controversies they’re addressing remain relevant. When there’s no longer a “problem,” the problem play is forgotten. Based on the success of The Pride and its brethren, then, the closet door hasn’t been blown off its hinges quite yet. In the context of true equality, and true acceptance, there would be little need for assertions of “pride.”

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Medea and its Double

Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center

On paper, there are so many points of contact, so many similarities between Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts’s Medea and Its Double and International WOW Company’s Auto Da Fe that constructing a double review around them should be easy. Both were written by East Asian playwrights; both rely heavily on “physical theatre” techniques of the Western avant-garde, ranging from Viewpoints to Grotowski; both are based on or inspired by material from classical Greece; and both were directed by Columbia graduates. When I ordered my tickets for these shows, this article was already very much on my mind. Perhaps the review would begin with an interrogation of why so many theatre artists, even those half a world away, have engaged with Greek antiquity in recent years. Perhaps it would focus on one of the two obvious differences in the pieces, contrasts evident in press releases and publicity material: Medea and Its Double is a Korean production, here on tour, while Auto Da Fe has been translated into English and directed by an American; Auto Da Fe has a specific political point of view, while Medea and Its Double is an exploration of passion and violence, both psychological
and physical.

In performance, however, these two productions are such different experiences that the only real connection between them is that each needs to be taken on its own terms to be understood. Each also serves as a reminder that, however much theatre you’ve seen, and however skilled you imagine yourself to be at reading publicity material, it’s impossible to know when you buy a ticket just what you’ve
gotten yourself into.

The concept of Medea and Its Double is to split the title character literally into two parts: the (jealous) lover and the (loving) mother, thus physicalizing Medea’s internal struggle and making the narrative more about her anguish than her crimes. Director Hyoung-Taek Limb adapted the story from Euripides, but only kept a fraction of the original text. In keeping with his company’s mission, Limb and his cast incorporate elements of Viewpoints and Grotowski techniques (which he picked up while an MFA student at Columbia) as well as elements from “traditional” Korean forms ranging from martial arts to p’ansori to masked forms like t’alch’um and ogwang-dae.

I had some qualms about the show as I entered the theatre, fearing the pitfalls that might arise from what seems to me an overly simplified psychological approach. I was also concerned about the likely stylistic result of merging the various forms and techniques at play in the show. I think directors should draw on whatever tools are available to them, but this kind of cultural pastiche too often results in a watered down “universal” aesthetic that neither serves its constituent influences nor adds up to much of anything new. Finally, the title gave me pause: Why Medea and Its Double instead of Medea and Her Double?

The only reason I could think of was a play on The Theatre and Its Double, a seminal book by theatre theorist and director Antonin Artaud; as important as Artaud’s work has been for contemporary theatre, artists who go out of their way to pay homage to Artaud tend to produce theatre that is self-righteous and pretentious in the manner of a trust-fund kid turned flower child. (I will owe apologies to several friends if they read this.) Thankfully, though, most of my concerns proved unfounded. While Medea and Its Double doesn’t shed much new light on its source material, it is a moving and idiosyncratic re-envisioning of the Medea tale that draws on the specific strengths of a terrific ensemble cast.

While Medea and Its Double was advertised as a performance in Korean with English supertitles, the only text that appears in this production—the title, followed by a brief and somewhat awkward bit of exposition—is projected onto the set’s upstage scrim/wall at the very beginning of the show. The fragmented dialogue, which is indeed in Korean throughout, is untranslated. Once the text has faded, though, and the performers have taken over, cerebral objections to the production’s approach seem petty in comparison to the grace, beauty, and commitment of
this company.

A children’s game accompanied by a sing-song chant serves as a thematic and aural motif. The game sets the stage for flirtation and then seduction, as children become adolescents, and then adults. A martial-arts-like ritual signifies Medea and Jason’s first sex; their children, represented by two puppets, soon appear. Jason’s negligence and infidelity splits an enraged Medea in two, eventually leading to tragedy. The children are ultimately reduced to fragile paper cutouts, unable to withstand their mother’s rage. Candles floating peacefully on two shallow pools embedded into the stage are suddenly full of menace as the “children” are torn asunder and exposed
to the elements.

Throughout, the melody from the game reasserts itself, reminding us that the seeds of all of this—the laughter, the sex, the resentment, the murder—were planted by a deceptively playful ring of dancing, singing children. Throughout, passages of chanted narration performed p’ansori style by a singer seated behind the upstage scrim, add another layer to the onstage soundscape.

It’s impossible for me to judge the quality of Limb’s textual adaptation, but it seems clear that his work with the performers is his real accomplishment here. While the staging is reminiscent of work from Joseph Chaiken, Anne Bogart, and other luminaries of the Western avant-garde, this Medea, ultimately, is one that could only have been created by this company. That specificity, that commitment to growing a piece of theatre from the bodies and personalities of the performers rather than mapping it on to them, is what renders Medea and Its Double more than the sum of its parts.

•  •  •

International WOW’s Auto Da Fe also seeks a kind of theatrical synergy, but there are so many parts that the whole simply can’t keep up. This isn’t to say that there is no value in the production, only that Josh Fox, who directed with assistance from Paul Bargetto, sometimes blurs the line between artistic ambition and artistic hubris, and the grander the statement he’s trying to make, the less coherent he is.

Masataka Matsuda’s dense, difficult play is a meditation on history as an act of erasure, of creative forgetting. Set outside of time in a place called the “History Processing Center,” the play finds Odysseus (or a version of him) abandoning the battlefield and seeking a kind of peace. While publicity materials summarize the plot as Odysseus’s “return home,” Auto Da Fe doesn’t depict a return so much as a kind of retirement. To transform war into history, workers at the Processing Center shuffle papers, bathe soldiers, write articles, sing ballads, cart files, and tell stories. Little by little, the present recedes, trauma becomes mythology, and entire cultures are erased in the service of a grand narrative.

Fox and his collaborators have pulled out all the stops in their attempt to theatricalize Matsuda’s very abstract text. The cavernous Performing Arts Center at Baruch plays right into Fox’s penchant for epic stagings. Ushered into the theatre a few at a time, the audience is confronted, even assaulted, by the sheer size of the experience and the number of cast members making their way from point to point. A woman perched high above the stage lip-synchs an aria; half a dozen performers push carts and boxes along an imaginary grid, trying to keep up with the pointing fingers and shouted instructions of their supervisors. Little by little, the war theme emerges, as the audience realizes that a pile of downstage rubbish is made up of military uniforms, and that there may be bodies living and dead writhing within. All of this takes place before Odysseus has even entered the space.

My audience-mates at Auto Da Fe, which I saw on a Saturday afternoon, were nonplussed and confused. Several older people fell asleep only to be awakened by a particularly loud moment in the sound design, while the younger women to my left kept whispering things along the lines of “I don’t know what the hell this is.” This is not an unusual response to Fox, who belongs to that strain of the avant-garde that preaches populist politics and aesthetics but paradoxically creates relatively inaccessible work with a high barrier to entry. Critical response has been mixed, ranging from fawning praise to lukewarm befuddlement to righteous indignation.

My own response was a mixture of admiration and frustration. International WOW’s aesthetic ambition and political engagement remain worthy of praise, but their work remains intellectually and emotionally muddled, the result of a lack of conceptual and intellectual rigor. Fox clearly has a knack for eliciting incredible commitment from a large cast but, thirteen years after the company’s debut, and nine years since they garnered attention with one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11, his work doesn’t seem to have developed much beyond its initial
(considerable) promise. 

Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Production Manager: Soo-Mi You; Lighting Designer: Tae-Jin Chung; Cast: Min-Jung Kim, Kyoung Lee, See-Yeon Koo; Do-Yup Lee, Su-Yeon Lee, Kyu-Hwa Choi, Da-Il Lee. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC at The First Floor Theatre at La MaMa ETC, 74 East 4th Street, NYC through January 24th.

Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Lighting Designers: Charles Foster and Jeremy Cunningham; Set Designer: Nate Lemoine; Sound Designer: Julian Mesri; Costume Designer: Cait O’Connor; Dramaturg: Heather Denyer. Cast: Lydia Blaisdell, Adam Boncz, Mike Callaghan, Melissa Chambers, Stefani Charitou, Lisa Clair, Herbie Go, Sara Gozalo, Beth Griffith, Ikuko Ikari, Georgia X. Lifsher, Joanna Lu, Tommy Mcginn, Mary Notari,Jennifer Oda, Blaire O’leary, Martina Potratz, Brent Reams, Iracel Rivero, Pedro Rafael Rodriguez, Robert Saietta, Kristina Siapkara, Brandon Smith, Carlton Tanis, Evan True, Aya Tucker, Michael Villastrigo, Deborah Wallace, and Folami William. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, NYC through January 24th.

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At 29 years old, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney has been crowned “a major new voice” by enough critics, directors, dramaturgs, and producers that there is already something of a backlash in the works. The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli recently dismissed McCraney’s success as that of “a lucky guy,” calling his work “precious,” “naïve,” and “affect[ed],” while Erik Haagensen, in Backstage, acknowledged that there is “much to admire” in McCraney’s work but continued to assert that the wunderkind’s dramaturgy is too often “ham-fisted,” “trite,” “emotionally distancing.”

As much as it would be fun to play iconoclast, however, I’m afraid that in this case I have to side with the kingmakers: Tarell Alvin McCraney is the real deal.

His plays are neither flawless nor universal (though I suspect this latter adjective will be employed far too often in discussions of his work); they are too ambitious to be perfect, or to please everyone in every audience. These are challenging texts, in need of strong directors and skilled actors, and I have little doubt that some disappointing productions of McCraney’s plays will make their way around the regional and university theatre circuits in the coming years. Despite what some may say, however, needing a strong director does not lessen the value of a work. The text alone is not theatre. And, for all their carefully crafted use of language, these plays are not intended to be read; the poetry they strive for is poetry in four dimensions, embodied and in motion.

The Brother/Sister Plays, now playing in repertory at the Public Theater, is a series of three plays all set in the fictional town of San Pere, Louisiana. Each play is meant to stand on its own, but the three together amplify one another, revisiting characters and families and viewing them from different angles, at different times, in different combinations. The first play in the trilogy, In the Red and Brown Water, is presented as Part I, while plays two and three, The Brothers Size and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet are presented together as Part II. Each evening lasts about two hours on its own, or you can see all three plays (i.e., both “parts”) together in a “marathon” performance.

The aesthetic and narrative strategy of the plays is to marry the stories of a rural, lower and working class African-American community with the storytelling traditions that the playwright clearly believes to be at the root of the theatrical impulse. More specifically in this case, McCraney has woven into his plays a number of references to Yoruba mythology; many of the characters in the play are named for deities (Oya, Ogun, Oshoosi, Elegba, Egungen, etc.), their character traits and actions resonating with the myths referenced by their names.

In the Red and Brown Water introduces us to the people of San Pere and to the “Distant Present” in which McCraney has set the plays. Oya (Kianné Mischett), a promising high school track star, is torn between accepting a college scholarship or staying home to be with her ailing mother. She is courted by the cocky, sometimes cruel Shango (Sterling K. Brown) and by the sweet and stuttering Ogun (Marc Damon Johnson), and eventually finds herself pregnant, orphaned, and struggling to hold her world together. Along the way, we meet the mischievous, dangerously charming Elegba (André Holland), a trickster whose dreams may hold deeper meanings, as well as Ogun’s Aunt Elegua (Kimberly Hébert Gregory) and a number of tertiary characters who help flesh out the shape and feel of the community.

Water is directed by Tina Landau, who co-wrote The Viewpoints Book with SITI Company founder Anne Bogart. Viewpoints is a method of teaching movement and improvisation for actors and dancers, and has famously reinvigorated physical approaches to theatre in the West. Some of the techniques employed in Viewpoints training have become so commonplace as to result in clichéd sequences of gestures and poses that any educated actor recognizes as the products of a classroom exercise. At its best, though, Viewpoints provides actors with a common vocabulary that allows them to carve space with their bodies and shape the rhythm of a performance with their breath.

Water is among the best uses of Viewpoints-derived staging I’ve seen; it’s also the most successful work I’ve seen from Landau, whose productions have sometimes disappointed. The actors, most of whom are visible throughout the performance, become a (usually nonverbal) chorus when their respective characters are not the focus of the action. They breathe and pose and dance together, punctuating and underscoring the poetry and prose of the text and providing a supportive, communal backdrop for the work of their castmates.

All of this ties in nicely to McCraney’s vision of theatre as a part of a longer oral tradition, a sharing of stories true and false, of histories and myths, memoirs and allegories, of mourning and celebration.

Assured by the Public’s Web site that the plays need not be seen in order, I saw Part II before Part I. While this meant I failed to catch a reference to previous events from time to time, it is probably the order I would recommend seeing the parts in, if only because Tina Landau’s gorgeous staging of In the Red and Brown Water is a hard act to follow. This is not to say, though, that The Brothers Size and Marcus are not successful stagings.

Director Robert O’Hara, an accomplished playwright in his own right (and one who was also once saddled with labels like “prodigy”) elicits athletic, disciplined performances from the actors, foregrounding the rhythmic muscularity of McCraney’s text. This is especially true of The Brothers Size, the most compact, and perhaps the best written, of the three plays. Brothers focuses on Ogun, older now, who has taken in his recently paroled younger brother Oshoosi (Brian Tyree Henry) and is trying to keep him out of trouble. Trouble is inevitable, though, with trickster/messenger Elegba also out of prison.

Marcus jumps ahead a generation to introduce us to its title character (Holland), who bears a striking resemblance to his father Elegba. In addition to the physical similarities, Marcus shares his father’s prescient dreams and some of his sexual appetites.

The acting, for the most part, admirably balances precision and passion. The performers are faced with no small task, as McCraney’s text demands that they step into, out of, and around their characters from moment to moment and the two directors have envisioned the three plays with a number of different acting styles. McCraney often has his characters speak their own stage directions as if they were asides, not so much to distance us from the action as to reinforce the idea that the actor is always also a storyteller, and that narrative is at the heart of what theatre is. These actor-storytellers are more than up to the task, and it seems almost unfair to the top-notch ensemble to single out Henry’s furious, infectious energy, Holland’s dangerously vulnerable charm, or Gregory’s masterful timing and tone.

The deceptively minimal design work is first-rate as well, particularly Lindsay Jones’s sound and Peter Kaczorowski’s lights. Both of these elements pull focus when they are required to do so, but more often subtly support the work of the actors, gently and generously amplifying the directors’ visions of performer-driven productions.

As I’ve already hinted, these shows are not without their flaws. Water’s second act does not quite live up to the promise of its first, while Marcus fails to shed enough new light on the stock coming-of-age tropes upon which it relies too heavily. Despite these and other shortcomings, though, it seems clear that The Brother/Sister Plays will be remembered as a highlight of the 2009–2010 theatre season. McCraney’s efforts to marry the quotidian with the mythic and the gritty with the cosmic will be criticized by some as pretentious, but I never felt he was trying to inflate the importance of these very personal stories so much as he was reminding us that mythology is personal too, that the telling of stories, whatever their scope or provenance, is always less about connecting us to our invented gods than it is about connecting us to one another.

The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Part I: In the Red and Brown Water, directed by Tina Landau. Part II: The Brothers Size and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet, directed by Robert O’Hara. Sets by James Schuette; costumes by Karen Perry; lights by Peter Jaczorowski; sound by Lindsay Jones; vocal arrangements by Zane Mark. With Sterling K. Brown, Kimberly Hébert Gregory, Brian Tyree Henry, André Holland, Marc Damn Johnson, Royce Johnson, Vanessa A. Jones, Kevin Kelly, Sean Allan Krill, Angela Lewis, Nikkiya Mathis, Kianné Muschett, Hubert Point-Dejour, and Heather Alicia Simms. Running in repertory through Dec. 13th at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Avenue. Tickets $60 ($25 student tickets available in person at the box office). www.publictheater.org

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Colman Domingo in A BOY AND HIS SOUL — a new play written and performed by Colman Domingo

County of Kings. Written and performed by Lemon Andersen. At the Public Theater.

A Boy and His Soul. Written and performed by Colman Domingo. At the Vineyard Theater.

I recently showed my students some clips of documentary and political theatre, including Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project and Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. One of the discussion-prompting questions I asked was about the function of Smith’s solo format. Why play all of those characters yourself instead of bringing other actors in? I was hoping for answers to go in two directions: first, the economic advantages of a solo show. Single performers and modest production demands have helped monologists carve a niche for themselves in US commercial and not-for-profit theatre programming, and artistic directors love solo performers; there’s very little overhead, they can easily perform in small spaces, and there are very few people who need to be paid.

The other thread of conversation I was hoping for had to do with Brecht’s idea of “alienation,” which I have written about here before, and which my class had been introduced to a couple of sessions prior to our “political theatre” discussion. In Smith’s work, the format highlights both the performer’s virtuosity (she plays many characters) and the origin of the content (generated from interviews with a variety of subjects). This focus on the process of theatre making is, arguably, a distancing technique, a way to constantly remind the audience that there is an intelligence and an agenda behind the work they are seeing. This kind of awareness, ideally, encourages active engagement with the material rather than a passive, “entertain me” attitude.

With a little prompting, both of these benefits of Smith’s solo work came up, raising the participation grades of a couple of students and allowing me a mental pat on the back. One student, however, asserted that the one-woman format seemed narcissistic, particularly in a show with many characters. While some argued that Smith might have felt that it was more practical to maintain direct control of the characterizations of her subjects, other felt that the format screamed “Look at me! Look at how great I am! Look at what important work I’m doing!” I don’t find that characterization to be fair, but it does raise some interesting questions about the motivations and insecurities of solo performers, and about the ways they are perceived by audiences and potential audiences.

While it’s no great revelation that ego and narcissism are often part of the mix of motivations that drives performers, the comments of my students were on my mind as I read the playbill for Lemon Andersen’s County of Kings, now playing at the Public Theater. Andersen’s bio describes him as “a critically acclaimed and award-winning renaissance artist,” and waxes rhapsodic about “rave reviews,” “sold out shows,” “standing ovations,” and “stellar performance[s].” A couple of days later, when I saw Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul at the Vineyard Theatre, I noticed that, according to his bio, he had never just “appeared” in anything; he had always “starred”; every role Domingo has ever had, it seems, has been a “starring role.”

Such language in actor bios probably doesn’t strike most audience members as strange or significant, but that’s because most audience members don’t realize that actors generally submit these bios themselves. If it’s a publicist-embellished bio, it’s because that’s what the actor wanted. If someone is blowing smoke up the actor’s ass, it’s usually the actor himself.

None of which means anything. Vanity and a love of the spotlight, whether brought about by a surplus of confidence or by masked insecurities, are not universal among artists, but they’re pretty common. It should come as no surprise that most performers want to be stars, that they want your applause and admiration. Whether applying their craft to the task of transforming themselves or to the task of revealing themselves, a performer should want to be on stage. Why ask hundreds of people to spend their time and money sitting in the dark watching you talk if you don’t believe, or at least want to believe, that you are worth it. The figure of the humble genius is largely a myth.

I don’t know that I would call either Lemon Andersen or Colman Domingo a genius, but when each is at his best, he is a star indeed.

An HBO special waiting to happen, County of Kings is long stretches of pretty good punctuated by moments of brilliance. Andersen is familiar to fans of Def Comedy Jam as the performer with the most appearances on the broadcast version of that show. Drawing on that background, Kings is a hybrid of a spoken-word and more conventional memoir-style solo performance, and it is clear that Andersen is more comfortable with the former. The show’s undeniable high points are when he is spitting and rhyming, exhibiting the angry bravado and hip-hop inflected energy associated with spoken word. During the more conventionally dramatic passages, the acting sometimes feels forced, as if the performer is struggling to convey the emotion he feels his story deserves.

The story itself is a traumatic coming-of-age tale that is often harrowing, if not entirely unfamiliar. A light-skinned Latino with a complicated family tree, Andersen grew up in Brooklyn with a loving but heroin-addicted mother who died of AIDS; his mother’s boyfriend, who taught him how to break into cars to steal parts; and an older brother who wouldn’t let him come along on graffiti-tagging adventures. Eventually, Lemon impregnated his too-young girlfriend, began to deal drugs, and landed in prison not once, but twice. Along the way he came into contact with the seeds of his future career as a performer: being cheered on by a crowd at Coney Island who watched him dance to disco outside an amusement park ride, a brief stint taking ballet classes with an outreach program run by Eliot Feld, the discovery of books, politics, and storytelling while he was in prison.

Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul begins as Domingo visits his childhood home, which is about to be sold. He discovers a box of records and, shocked that his parents would leave them behind, relives a series of memories linked to the songs he remembers best. Reminiscing about these songs and the memories they conjure, he paints a picture of the west Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up, of his tight-knit but frequently at-each-other’s-throats family, and of the challenges of growing up gay (and fem) in hypermasculine black America.

Domingo is a warm and generous presence on stage, and blends equal parts skill and charisma to keep his tale engaging. There are slack passages here and there, when the story becomes too internal—he almost seems to shut the audience out as he reminisces. Other moments have begun to take on the rote, slightly forced feeling of a show long in development, as if some of the monologues have lost their power over Domingo and he is now delivering simply because it is his job to do so, and no longer because they are personal to him. This would likely not have been noticeable were it not for a fortuitous technical problem that forced the performer to banter with the audience while his microphone was being replaced. The full force of Domingo’s personality and spontaneity flooded the theatre like oxygen for those couple of minutes before he returned to the good, but not-quite–as–good delivery of his written text.

Neither Andersen’s story nor Domingo’s is entirely unfamiliar. Looking over my descriptions above I see how mere plot descriptions are almost irrelevant. The power of these stories is in how personal they are for the performers, and for segments of the audience. At each show, audience members here and there would laugh or shout out with recognition when the performer mentioned a place they knew from their own childhoods, or a personality that could have been their uncle or, most powerfully, a song that had always made them want to dance. Both of these remarkable performers are valuable in part because they bring distinctive talents and perspectives to the often too-homogenous stages of New York’s institutional theatres. They are also valuable because they attract to these theatres the kinds of audiences whom are not normally accustomed to seeing themselves reflected on stage. My favorite moments in these shows were those to which I couldn’t relate, but to which many of the people around me obviously could.

After each of the performances, I saw audience members texting and calling friends and family members to tell them what they’d seen. And during the intermission for County of Kings the women behind me talked about buying their nephew a ticket to the show. “He should see this. He could do this.” And if there is some vanity that comes along with that, if these actors allow themselves to love the spotlight a little too much, I say that is only their due.

County of Kings. Written and performed by Lemon Andersen; developed and directed by Elise Thoron; sets by Peter Ksander and Douglas Stein; lighting by Jane Cox and Lily Fossner; sound by Rob Kaplowitz and Matt Stein. Presented by Spike Lee, Culture Project, Steve Colman, Jayson Jackson and Tom Wirtshafter, in association with the Public Theater at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street through November 8. Tickets: $25–$50, 212–967-7555, or www.publictheater.org

A Boy and His Soul. Written and performed by Colman Domingo; directed by Tony Kelly; choreographed by Ken Roberson; sets by Rachel Hauck; costumes by Toni-Leslie James; lighting by Marcus Doshi; sound by Tom Morse. At the Vineyard Theatre, 108 East 15th Street, through November 1st. Tickets $20 to $55, 212.353.0303, or www.vineyardtheatre.org

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It wasn’t.

JoAnne Akalaitis’s baffling and deeply unsatisfying production of The Bacchae in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater this summer misfired in almost every possible way. For weeks, I watched the Facebook status updates of friend after friend change from excitement and anticipation when they landed tickets to confusion and disappointment once they had seen the show. As word spread that the production was a clunker, tickets became easier to come by, and more and more of my friends and colleagues twittered their enthusiasm in the morning and their frustration in the evening. Instead of debating whether the production was any good, Graduate Center theatre students and faculty argued over what aspect of the production had failed most profoundly, and what the fundamental cause of the failure might have been.
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Arguably the greatest theoretical and practical debate surrounding Western theatre in the second half of the twentieth century centered on the clash between the ideas of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). The two serve up a lot of convenient binaries: a surrealist from France and an expressionist from Germany, both broke from the movements that nurtured their early careers, but for rather different reasons. Brecht’s work became more and more aggressively political as he embraced Marxism, while Artaud was alienated from the Surrealists, in part, because of his refusal to join the Communist Party.

These biographical contrasts between Artaud and Brecht hint at the more central reasons for their place in theatre history, and the way in which they have come to represent two seemingly opposed points of view regarding what theatre is, what it should be, and what role it should play in the larger culture. As Brecht’s political views came increasingly into focus, his ideas about aesthetics and emotions developed in tandem, leading to his notion of a dialectical “Epic Theatre,” and his trademark “alienation effect.” Artaud’s work, on the other hand, remained aggressively, defiantly, apolitical. While Brecht sought to separate the elements of theatre, to disrupt emotional involvement, and to encourage the audience to be aware of themselves and their capacity to change the course of events, Artaud wanted the audience to lose themselves completely in a multi-sensory spectacle that would cleanse and even obliterate them.

These seemingly opposing poles of theatre aesthetics echo theories and practices from throughout theatre history, recalling rituals of possession and exercises of civic engagement in a variety of cultures. Friedrich Nietzsche famously asserted that both of these aspects of theatre, which he termed the Apollonian and the Dionysian, are essential to tragedy, claiming that the latter is too often overshadowed in a theatre that has become overly rational.

If ever a play demanded the presence of the Dionysian, it’s Euripides’s tragedy about Dionysus himself. Indeed, The Bacchae can be read as a warning against denying and suppressing Dionysian impulses. Unfortunately, JoAnne Akalaitis did not heed this warning. Nor did composer Philip Glass, who has been collaborating with the director (the two were also married at one point) since before either of them was famous. Oddly enough, in a publicity interview given to the New York Times before the show opened, Akalaitis and Glass both seem to understand what the show requires. They talk about the show needing to make sense “in your body” more than “in your head,” that the play “defies rationality and defies explanation.”

And yet this blood-soaked play of lust and drunkenness received a chaste and bloodless production that somehow felt too rational even as it made very little sense. Glass’s music is a major component of this failure, his famously Buddhist brand of postmodern minimalism at stark odds with choral lyrics about ecstasy and abandon. The formidable Karen Kandel (Chorus Leader) struggled valiantly to bring some fire to the chorus but she and her compatriots were unable to break out of the stupor-inducing pulse of Glass’s music. Choreographer David Neumann clearly tried to infuse the dance sequences with a sense of ritual, but was hampered by both the music and by costume designer Kate Voice’s orange-pink jumpsuits that looked like something MC Hammer might have worn on a trip to Indonesia, or to a screening of Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon (Michael Schultz, 1985).

Jonathan Groff, both miscast and misdirected as Dionysus, was less wine than wine cooler. Akalaitis’s decision to direct her young star to play a petulant adolescent plotting revenge for a perceived slight may have seemed clever at first, but the pouty teen never gave way to the vengeful god. Groff, who exploded onto the theatre scene in back-to-back roles in Spring Awakening and Hair, is a charming and heart-throb pretty performer, but was out of his depth here. The audience was never given a glimpse of Dionysus’s power, the presence and influence that had supposedly driven all of the city’s women into a days-long fit of drunken passion. Groff was not alone in his struggle. Accomplished actors from André de Shields (Teiresias) and Anthony Mackie (Pentheus) to Joan Mackintosh (Agave), all turned in lackluster performances in roles that should have allowed them to shine.

One actor did manage to escape the shackles of this failed production. As the messenger who has to deliver the news of Pentheus’s horrific death, Sisto gave the evening’s only memorable performance, a precisely calibrated monologue that communicated both the character’s anguish and the actor’s prowess. It is not coincidental that there was no music underscoring this scene. After Sisto’s monologue, the show had to pause to allow for enthusiastic applause. The audience was grateful that, for a few minutes, the director and her design team had gotten out of the way and let the actor and the text do their job.
•••
To Akalaitis’s credit, The Bacchae was not overlong.

At about ninety minutes, the production was only slightly longer than it would take to read the text of the play aloud. The same cannot be said for Peter Sellars’s four hour-plus Othello now playing at NYU’s Skirball Center. I was fortunate enough to receive free tickets to the show’s dress rehearsal so I can’t write a full review (the press opening isn’t until well after the deadline for this article) but because the show has been in development for so long (it enjoyed a brief run in Vienna this past June) I doubt it will change much before the review embargo is lifted.

Ponderous, self-indulgent, and too long by half, this production unfortunately obscures its several good ideas by drowning the action in lethargic, navel-gazing pauses that simply don’t work for an uncut Shakespeare text. Elizabethan plays had lots of words. A pause, a silence, should be a big deal, and carry a great deal of weight. In this production, however, there are so many weighty sighs and silences between and within lines that the genuinely important pauses, those that might shed some light on Sellars’s take on the play, are lost in the shuffle.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, who almost always brings a little too much Eeyore to his stage roles, is particularly lethargic as a depressive and insecure Iago (a vision of the character that could have been interesting but is mostly boring here). John Ortiz is a strong and intriguing Othello, but too often seems as if he is trying to carry the show by himself, spurring his scene partners to pick up the pace. This is too bad, because Sellars successfully complicates the race and gender issues of the play in a way that could have been genuinely provocative if there were some sustained energy at work. Often accused of over-conceptualizing and politicizing his productions, Sellars is relatively subtle here, perhaps too much so. The hinted-at connections between geopolitics and identity politics, between sexual jealousy and professional jealousy, are intriguing but underdeveloped. The couple of scenes that do sparkle stand in stark contrast to those that drag unnecessarily.

The Public Theater, which coproduced Othello with LABrynth Theater Company (the Public also produced The Bacchae) normally has a generous student ticket policy. Student discounts for Othello, however, are only available to NYU students. If you have a friend at NYU who can get you a reasonably priced seat, that’s great. If you’re going to have to pay full price, don’t bother.

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The Bacchae (closed) by Euripides, translated by Nicholas Rudall. Directed by JoAnne Akalaitis; original music by Philip Glass; sets by John Conklin; costumes by Kaye Voyce; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; sound by Acme Sound Partners; soundscape by Darron L. West; dramaturg, James Leverett. With: George Bartenieff, Sullivan Corey, André de Shields, Jonathan Groff, Karen Kandel, Joan MacIntosh, Anthony Mackie, Steven Rishard, and Rocco Sisto.
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Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Peter Sellars; set by Gregor Holzinger; costumes by Mimi O’Donnel; lighting by James F. Ingalls; music and sound by Robert J. Castro. With: Julian Acosta, Gaius Charles, Jessica Chastain, Liza Colon-Zayas, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Leroy McClain, and John Ortiz. September 12–October 4, 2009. NYU Skirball Center (586 LaGuardia Place). Call 212–352-3101 or visit publictheater.org

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The instruction manual to the widely praised video game Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, 2007) makes explicit comparison between control of the game’s avatar and the manipulation of puppets. A subsection of the manual titled “Contextual Puppeteering Controls” explains that “[e]ach body part is linked to a button (head…, weapon hand…, empty hand…, and legs).” While this conceit is intended largely to reinforce the game’s meta-virtual conceit (the player plays as a contemporary character who in turn controls an “ancestor” via video-game like controls), it is far from the first time that the connection between puppets and avatars has been made. While there is very little scholarly work on video games and virtual worlds, a considerable subsection of what has been published employs the avatars-as-puppets metaphor (though, to be sure, there are articles that dispute the comparison as well).

Some articles attempt to legitimize video games as a site of scholarly exploration by linking them to an existing discourse; others view puppetry as one way to theorize the forms and functions of a field that no one is entirely sure how to frame. There is some irony to both of these threads, as scholars and practitioners of puppetry have themselves long sought to achieve both an aura of cultural legitimacy and a system of productive theoretical frameworks. A few articles propose the puppet metaphor as a lens through which to envision new models of pedagogically useful games for children. There is some irony in this as well, since children aren’t the ones who need a meat-based metaphor to understand the appeal of video games.

There is a certain appeal and possible usefulness to the idea that there is a connection between digital avatars and puppets. The idea of “digital puppetry” has been around for some time, and can be summed up as the manipulation of computer-animated avatars in real time, rather than in pre-rendered sequences. These virtual objects, like real-world puppets, respond to the performer/player whether the actions are scripted and rehearsed or completely improvisational. The rise of console gaming, particularly large-scale “sandbox” games in which the player/performer can move freely around a sprawling environment and interact with largely non-linear storyline (Assassin’s Creed¸ the Grand Theft Auto series [Rockstar Games, 1997– ], the forthcoming Infamous [Sony, 2009], etc.), has moved the puppet/avatar metaphor to the mainstream, building on the considerable success of “massively multiplayer” game experiences like Second Life (Linden Research 2003– ) and World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004– ). Second Life has proven particularly intriguing to performing arts scholars and practitioners, as virtual theatre festivals, dance companies, and improvisatory performances have sprung up and, in some cases, begun to develop followings. Games like Little Big Planet (Sony, 2008) and Rag Doll Kung Fu (Valve, 2005; Sony, 2009) evoke puppet theatre as well, by employing doll-like characters and ragdoll physics.

Still, it must be acknowledged that modifying “puppetry” with “digital” results is a fundamental change. I was recently interviewed by filmmaker David Soll, who is working on a documentary about the current New York puppet-theatre scene. Since the late 1990s, there has been an oft-observed proliferation of both puppet-based theatre and the use of puppets in actor-based theatre. One of the questions Soll wants to ask in his film is: why now? In part, the answer is a matter of logistical circumstance. Funding and workshopping opportunities from national and local not-for-profits, increased exposure to puppet traditions from around the world, and the option to study puppetry within the academy have all played a part. Soll seems to suspect that there is something more at play, however.

When I mentioned the connection between puppets and video games, Soll acknowledged that there are some interesting conversations going on around that idea, but added that he thinks the link is a false one. He explained that he experiences video games and virtual worlds in a completely different way than he experiences puppet performances, and considers them parts of very different spheres. More specifically, he argues that the tactile, analog nature of puppetry is a big part of what sets it apart from other forms, and that the enthusiasm for puppet forms among a small but growing segment of the performing arts community has everything to do with this.

Soll’s argument was very much on my mind when I attended Drama of Works’s Puppet Kafka at Here Arts Center. DoW’s work, which I’ve followed since 2002’s The Ballad of Phineas Gage, frequently foregrounds highly physical relationship between puppet and puppeteer. In Puppet Kafka, Markus Maurette and Meghan Williams’s set is scaled appropriately for the marionettes (designed by Miroslav Trejtnar) but the actor-puppeteers inhabit the same space, and are forced to crouch and crawl and bump awkwardly into doorways and furniture. Some such moments were certainly accidents, but Van Lente and her team seem to have created the awkward situation intentionally.

The awkwardness has everything to do with the story material, of course. Excerpts and plot points from Kafka’s most famous fiction are juxtaposed and interwoven with biographical material both documented and speculative. The uncomfortable stage setting is meant to evoke the discomforting impact of Kafka’s prose. If the actors are the imagination, the conscience, the animating force of the puppets, the cramped quarters reflect how uncomfortable and stifled these characters feel in their own skin. In keeping with this notion, the actors manipulate their puppets as if they are playing with dolls. Their hands are all over them, all the time. There is no attempt at illusion, no attempt to distract the audience from the bodies of the performers. The physical, tactile, analog nature of puppetry is on full display.

While the “stars” of the production are ostensibly the marionettes (beautifully carved by Miroslav Trejtnar), the variety of puppet forms on display is impressive both in terms of craft and ingenuity (as it so often is in contemporary puppet theatre). Kafka is represented in one scene by the marionette and in the next by a “K” carved out of wood. When he is emotionally wounded and feels small, the “K” falls to the ground and is replaced by a “k.” Shadows are projected through one “wall” and onto another. The famous dung-beetle from The Metamorphosis is represented by a hand-puppet stitched together from bread baskets, feathers, and pipe cleaners.

All in all, Puppet Kafka is not my favorite DoW show. The play is difficult to follow if it’s been a while since you’ve read The Trial, etc., and the psychology underlying the overall conceit is a little simplistic, despite being masked by formal complexity. The rough edges I have often praised in DoW’s work, are sometimes a little too rough here, as actors visibly struggle to remember their lines and bump their heads on doorframes as they enter the stage.

And yet, the show still fascinates. These bodies and objects in space, just a few feet from the audience, dance in close quarters and maintain constant contact with one another. The puppets, which were carved, stitched, and glued into creation, now move not independently of, but in conjunction with the bodies of flesh-and-blood performers. The individual performances are hybrid performances; when a puppeteer moves from one puppet to the next, she becomes a different performer, representing a different character. The deeply personal connection between performer and object ironically helps the production as a whole to become a study in alienation.

This process probably has more to do with cyborg theory than with video games, but the cyborg metaphor doesn’t quite work either. The magic of these puppets is in no small part their reliance on “craft” in a quite literal sense of the word. All of the narrative and aesthetic sophistication and complexity begins with a block of wood, a carving knife, and a dancing body. 

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“Solidarity” from Billy Elliot

“I don’t know how you do it, Frank. Every time I look out at the theatre scene in this city, all I see is a lot of crap.” This statement was part of an email I received last summer while trying to decide what I would write about for an upcoming article. When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors confessed to the class that he had long ago stopped seeing theatre because it was so often a disappointment and he found it personally painful to see bad theatre. I myself have gone through long stretches when I’ve questioned my chosen field of study, not so much because of the terrible shows, but because of the mediocre shows. These most deadly of productions showcase bland competence and workmanlike professionalism that garner respectful applause from an audience that won’t remember the details of what they saw even a week later.

But then there are seasons like this one. Show after show, week after week, I’m reminded why I study theatre and why I live in New York. The past month has taken me from DUMBO to Broadway, SoHo to the East Village, with ticket prices ranging from $15 to $125. I generally avoid describing anything as “exuberantly theatrical,” a phrase frequently employed by critics who want to make sure they’re quoted in a theatre’s publicity material. That’s precisely what most of the performances I’ve seen recently have exhibited, though: an exuberant theatricality that rewards fans and students of the theatre but doesn’t punish novices, that celebrates the medium of the theatre without denigrating other media, that challenges the audience while also being sure to reward them. Following then, are brief responses to the four shows I’ve seen most recently, in the order in which I saw them.

Mabou Mines’ DollHouse, a radical adaptation (directed by Lee Breuer, adapted by Breuer and Maude Mitchell) of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous play, debuted at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2003 and has spent the last several years touring the world to near-unanimous acclaim. Last month, the show returned to St. Ann’s to complete the final leg of its tour. Famously, all of the men in the production are less than five feet tall, while all of the women are over six feet tall. The set (designed by Narelle Sissons), a foldable, doll house-like structure that renders the play’s title literal, is scaled to be a comfortable fit for the men and the children while the women in the play are forced to crouch and contort themselves to pass through doors or sit on furniture.

While the little people are the hook that most press releases and reviews focus on, this high-concept visual gimmick is only the beginning of director Lee Breuer’s inspired theatrical madness. Red velvet curtains descend to envelop the space, enclosing the audience in a 19th-century melodrama, or perhaps a faded opera house. Nightmare sequences featuring stilt walkers, giant puppets (designed by Jane Catherine Shaw), and lascivious musicians interrupt the narrative from time to time. Ibsen’s experiments in naturalism are gleefully tossed aside and replaced with Breuer’s experiment in melodramatic excess. A portrait of Ibsen’s rival, playwright August Strindberg, hangs on the wall of the doll house. The final scene exchanges melodrama for opera, as Nora (brilliantly played by Mitchell) is transformed into a Wagnerian valkyrie cum Rapunzel who towers over the entire set, singing a triumphant farewell aria while a chorus of puppets bicker and wail, trapped in their stifling, emotionally violent marriages. What saves the show from collapsing under the weight of its pretensions is a mischievous, relentless sense of humor that invites the audience to be in on the joke even as they gape in disbelief at the sheer spectacle of it all.

While Broadway musicals are often thought of as lavish and spectacular, Billy Elliot is subdued and visually conservative in comparison to Breuer’s DollHouse. Written by Lee Hall, directed by Stephen Daldry, and featuring music by Elton John, the new musical was adapted from the 2000 film of the same name (which was also written by Hall and directed by Daldry). Set against the backdrop of Britain’s devastating 1984 mineworkers’ strike, Billy Elliot is the story of a boy who discovers, much to his surprise, that he has a talent for, and a love of, dancing. Like blue-collar dance tales from Footloose to Flashdance, this one is a feel-good tale at heart, the poverty and oppressive moral code of the community serving primarily as a foil for the hopes and ambitions of the protagonist. Unlike those others, though, this show succeeds in keeping its class issues relatively front-and-center, and even in maintaining some political bite. “Solidarity,” a major production number half-way through the first act, takes pains to dramatize (and choreograph) the strike, while the second act opens with “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher,” a song in which the miners cheerfully wish for their prime minister’s death.

It is tempting for many to claim that its politics are what sets Billy Elliot apart from other shows, but this is hardly the first high-profile musical to tackle such issues. Canonical musical theatre fare–from Showboat, to South Pacific, to Oklahoma!, to West Side Story, to Hair among others–has confronted class, race, and other such topical matters again and again, with varying degrees of success. Each time, the show in question is heralded as a surprise, an exception to what we imagine to be the vapid musical norm.

What really sets Billy Elliot apart from so much other Broadway fare is the palpable commitment of its cast, the infectious joy that they exude while performing. Also unusual for a musical is that the music itself is mostly forgettable; I don’t imagine that a great many cast recordings are going to be sold in the theatre lobby. This is in part because the young actors performing in the title role (Kiril Kulish, who starred when I attended the show, is one of three boys who play Billy in rotation) were cast more for their dancing than for their singing. Kulish can carry a tune, but he doesn’t own the stage until he starts to dance. The entire team seems aware of where the show’s strengths lie, though, and they play those strengths for all they’re worth. Daldry’s direction, Ian MacNeil’s elegantly effective set, and even John’s music are all designed to take a back seat to Billy and his friends when they begin to pirouette. (My mother, who was my guest at the performance, would be greatly disappointed if I did not at least mention show-stopper David Bologna, who plays Billy’s flaming best friend Michael with charisma, confidence, and showmanship that are as effective as they are calculated, and who presides over the production’s single most memorable song, a celebration of cross-dressing and individuality called “Expressing Yourself”).

Show-stopping dance numbers were ostensibly anathema to the Chautauqua lecture circuit that flourished in the rural United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A pro-science, pro-temperance alternative to religious revivals and vaudeville acts, the lectures were education-as-entertainment, and were extremely popular while they lasted. The ironically named National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA) has put together their own Chautauqua! event, an evening of lectures and entertainments that features guest speakers, slide-shows, historical reenactments, and the kind of song-and-dance diversions that eventually crept into the popular lecture circuit as it became more and more of a codified business model. In some ways a meditation on the tension between art and commerce, entertainment and enlightenment, Chautauqua! is primarily an extension of NTUSA’s ongoing project to make theatre inspired by paratheatrical events, and to demonstrate that the avant garde need be neither self-serious nor inaccessible.

While theatre is often seen as opposed to, and marginalized by, newer media, a generation of video-game playing, comic-book reading genre geeks has emerged in the downtown theatre scene and exploded the highbrow-lowbrow binary that ostensibly separates the performing arts from mass culture. At the epicenter of this scene-within-a-scene are Vampire Cowboys, a young company devoted to stage combat and genre mash-ups. VC’s most recent concoction, Soul Samurai, is Kill Bill meets The Warriors, a collision of martial arts and blaxploitation tropes that features post-apocalyptic kung-fu vampires, homeless puppets, and boundless energy. Full of winking references to countless movies, TV shows, and collectible action figures, and featuring one extended action sequence after another, Soul Samurai nevertheless manages to showcase some really good acting at almost every turn. (Paco Tolson, as samurai sidekick Cert, is particularly winning). The 5 members of the cast play 19 roles over the course of 100 breathless minutes, managing to win the hearts of the audience even as they juggle whirlwind costume changes, funny voices, and an array of movement styles ranging from Tae Kwon Do to Capoeira. Playwright / fight director Qui Nguyen and director Robert Ross Parker have produced a smart, unapologetically funny show that lays claim to story material from movies and comic books even as it celebrates theatricality and the inimitable thrill of live acting.

None of these shows is perfect. DollHouse sometimes shows signs of Breuer’s hubristic self-satisfaction; Billy Elliot, an exorbitantly expensive show about poverty, occasionally sacrifices narrative coherency for aggressive pacing, Chautauqua! drags in places and is often rough around the edges; and Soul Samurai doesn’t always maintain its high-wire balance of parody, tribute, and post-identity politics to which it aspires. Each of them, though, is a part of a season that has made me excited to go to the theatre again. I’ve got tickets coming up to La Didone, the Wooster Group’s new sci-fi deconstruction of a baroque opera, and Rambo Solo, a popcorn-fueled show about a guy who sets out to re-enact First Blood in his studio apartment.

I can hardly wait.

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A few days before Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment opened at The Kitchen last month, the playwright/director’s Facebook status read, “Young Jean needs to figure out how to get black audiences to The Shipment.” Five days later, she wrote “Young Jean can comp you to The Shipment if you are black,” and gave instructions on how to contact her. A few days after that, she updated, “Young Jean wants to put reserved signs that say ‘Black Person’ in prime locations in the theatre where we put critics and presenters. Too much?”

Before long, enthusiastic reviews appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others, and Lee’s status updates became warnings to friends and fans that the show was quickly selling out, then that it had sold out, then that there was going to be a one-week extension, and finally that the extension had sold out as well. I attended the night before the show closed and it was clear that the buzz had spread. Lincoln Center Artistic Director Andre Bishop sat in the row in front of me; Stephen Sondheim sat in the row in front of Bishop. The rest of the audience was made up largely of the usual Kitchen hipsters (whites and Asians with geeky glasses, skinny jeans, artfully messy hair, and the occasional ironic facial hair), but sprinkled with some older Philharmonic types and even a few of the sought-after African Americans. (Reports from previous performances indicate that the The Shipment enjoyed varied and diverse audiences over the course of its run.)

Why this focus on audience demographics? As with her previous plays, Lee began by asking herself what was the least comfortable idea for a show she could think of. What sounded like a terrible idea? What did she absolutely not want to do? When she has asked herself these questions previously, the results have included Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, an exploration of Asian-American identity politics, and Church, an on-stage Christian church service incorporating song, dance, and sermon while confronting issues of faith and doubt, individuality and community. When Lee asked herself what sounded like a terrible idea this time around, she decided that a play about African-American identity politics, written by a Korean-American woman, was probably a bad idea. So she started writing.

The result is angry, funny, probing, and deeply uncomfortable. This discomfort is very much the heart of The Shipment. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Lee observed that audiences began “laughing more enthusiastically [after] the positive reviews [were] published, and it’s so painful sometimes. I know that’s unfair of me because I wrote it to be funny, and the performers are funny, but I feel there is so much in there that people should not laugh at. Part of me would rather have them sit there in silent uneasiness.” Indeed, on the night I attended, there seemed to be some disagreement in the audience as to which bits were funny, and where it was appropriate to laugh. Mr. Sondheim, for example, laughed more than anyone else in the audience, particularly at any moment that crossed the lines of political correctness to stage stereotypes of blacks and whites alike. Others never recovered from the slap they received early on when a comedian character veered from comedic confrontation to undisguised hurt and anger, to scatology, and back again. Parts of this scene were Def Comedy-like, and received Def Comedy-like laughs, but most of the audience was smart enough to know when the guy on stage was attacking them and meaning it. So they got quiet.

The Shipment opens with two wordless sequences that evoke minstrelsy and hip hop, respectively, and are stylized in such a way to indicate that the show will be about the performance of blackness, the representation of blackness, and the perception of blackness. These high-energy sequences also serve to set the stage for the comedian scene already mentioned.

The second half of the play is made up of two acts that could stand on their own as fully playable short pieces, though they would of course lose the context of the larger show, which provides much of the thematic and political complexity. First comes the story of a young black man who dreams of being a rap star but can’t afford to enter a hip hop festival or contest so gets talked into dealing drugs by his nefarious friend. In prison, he discovers Islam and finds his rapping voice. Once he achieves fame and fortune, he finds them both hollow. That it is so easy to imagine this plot as a Hollywood film is the whole point of the sequence. The characters are played in an intentionally stilted, even wooden style that points to the creakiness of the stereotypes presented.

The final scene finds the all-black cast playing white characters, though this is not immediately evident. Pesceveganism, late twenties crises, parlor games, body-image issues, and cocaine are just a few of the elements that make up this eviscerating lampoon of the anxieties of middle-class, educated whites who are unable or unwilling to see the extent of their own privilege and self-indulgence. Several of the elements of this scene recall things that were said by the comedian as he made fun of white people.

No one moment in, or aspect of, The Shipment can be singled out as exemplary of the entire project. Lee is intent on confronting her audience, and herself, with aspects of themselves and their culture that make them uncomfortable, but she is also interested in exploring how these same tensions are interwoven into the material we consume for entertainment. Finally, she acknowledges that she and her audience also want to be entertained, and that this kind of material runs the risk of encouraging self-satisfaction from those who like to congratulate themselves for their liberalism, their open-mindedness, and their occasional feelings of guilt.

I have two quibbles with this production, though both might be considered frivolous. The first is that the cast, while listed in the program, are in no way linked to the roles that they play. In other words, unless you have access to press photos, there is no way to check your program for the name of an actor who made a particularly strong impression. There are reasons for this: the play is complex, and the actors play multiple characters, creating a logistical obstacle. Also, the show is an “ensemble piece,” with no one actor foregrounded, the kind of show that often just lists the performers alphabetically in order to avoid placing them in any kind of hierarchy. (In this case, they seem to be listed in order of appearance, which might be useful if it were noted.)

My objection to this admittedly minor slight, is that this is very much a performer-driven play. It’s clear that Lee is a major talent as both actor and director, but her success relies on collaboration with a skilled, disciplined, talented, and enthusiastic cast that also had considerable input into the structuring of the play itself. The performances navigate levels of stylization and realism, empathy and alienation, that go a long way towards making the play as complex as it is. For a show written and directed by Young Jean Lee, and produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company to make it difficult to identify any one actor reinforces the genius/auteur mythology that dominates so much theatrical analysis. (For the record, I was particularly impressed by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, whose offbeat performance was simultaneously charming and distancing, familiar and strange. In a show largely about stereotypes, Jennings created characters that were recognizable as such, and that still felt like something I had never seen before.)

Another possible objection to the show is that, in pedagogical terms, it is a lecture, not a seminar. Lee and her team maintain absolute control over everything except for the degree to which the audience might laugh or not. The production opened and closed with a dramatic, absolute blackout, a clear signal that it was time to pay attention and listen to what Lee had to say. When a show is designed in no small part to attack the assumptions of the audience, it might be argued that the audience should have some opportunity to defend themselves. A playwright whose work occasionally screams “Fuck you!” might consider giving her fans a chance to scream it right back. Lee’s impressive degree of control over her production is a part of why I enjoyed it, but it also makes the experience of watching the show a rather passive one, despite all the techniques she employs to keep us off balance and alert.

Regardless of these quibbles, which should be read more as queries than complaints, Young Jean Lee has further solidified her place as one of the most notable theatre artists working today. The Shipment is a remarkable piece of work that made me squirm and laugh in equal measure. A first-rate cast and design team, a smart and challenging text, and Lee’s ongoing experiment to challenge herself in uncomfortable ways have clearly paid off. Lee’s next project is an adaptation of King Lear that, as she writes in her blog, she wants “to make a hard-core, old-school, Aristotelian pity-and-fear tragedy that will work on today’s jaded audiences in the way I like to imagine the Greek tragedies worked on the Greeks.” Sounds like a terrible idea; it’ll probably be great. 

The Shipment (closed), written and directed by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Douglas Scott Streater, Prentice Onayemi, Okierete Onaodowan, and Amelia Workman. With Foteos Macrides and Joseph John. Sets by David Evans Morris. Costumes by Roxana Ramseur. Lights by Mark Barton. Sound by Matthew Tierney. Choreography by Faye Driscoll. Fight Choreography by Jason McDowell Green. Produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street. January 8 –31, 2009.

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Black Watch. Written by Gregory Burke. Directed by John Tiffany.

Publicity materials for the The International WOW company’s Surrender, which closed in November but will return for a one-week engagement in January, point out that “99.5 percent of all Americans will not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. The divide between soldier and civilian has never been greater in American history.” This fact serves as the potential audience’s “invitation to get some first-hand experience” which concludes: “Don’t pass it up.”

Surrender is an interactive evening of theatre co-created by International WOW artistic director Josh Fox and Iraq War veteran Jason Christopher Hartley, whose wartime blog (www.recognizant.com/myiraq) was published as the memoir Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq. The first act of the piece begins when the audience enters the theatre. After signing waivers stating that they are physically sound, men and women are herded into separate dressing areas and handed army fatigues, boots, and a plastic bag in which to place their civilian clothes and any other belongings they brought with them. Once everyone is changed, their laces and buttons properly fastened, the audience is divided into squads, handed replica rifles, and assigned sergeants who will lead them through a series of combat training exercises under the direction of Hartley himself.

Basic marching commands—keeping rifles at “low ready” with safeties on; raising rifles to “high ready,” and firing; entering and clearing a room in cooperation with other squad members; searching the dead; carrying the wounded—are conveyed with extraordinary efficiency by Hartley, whose military experience and professionalism are evident in his every utterance. The squad leaders, actors who presumably do not have real military experience, were trained by Hartley when International WOW was working on their film Memorial Day and, for the most part, perform admirably. Conducting training exercises with more than fifty people in the relatively confined space of a downtown theatre could have been a logistical train wreck. Despite some mild verbal abuse and the occasional audience member forced to drop and do push-ups as punishment for one error or another, Surrender is, among other things, an impressive feat of social engineering and traffic management.

In the second act, the “squads” are asked to put their new training to the test in a haunted house-like maze meant to simulate a combat mission in Iraq. Speakers overhead blast the soundtrack of war: bullets, planes, helicopters. Squad leaders shout instructions to confused participants, who rush to clear rooms, search bodies, and carry the wounded as best they can. The regimented, rational order drilled into them in the first act inevitably breaks down as things begin to go wrong. It also becomes clear that these rules, even as they break down, are what keep soldiers alive.

While engaging and productively frustrating, Act II does not succeed quite as strongly as Act I does. This is, in part, because the training exercises never pretend to be something other than what they are. Hartley refers again and again to the fact that he’s conducting theses drills not with recruits in basic training but with a bunch of theatre fags in SoHo. This transparency, along with Hartley’s authoritative presentation, lend Surrender’s opening sequence an authenticity it doesn’t quite maintain once the “bullets” start to fly. As with haunted houses, the very knowledge that things are about to get “scary” makes it very difficult to actually be frightened by anything that happens. Nevertheless, Act II is a largely successful exercise in interactive theatre that gives at least a hint of the ethical and logistical confusion that confronts soldiers when they apply lessons learned in training to actual combat situations.

After the second act, during which one audience member has been “killed” and many others have found themselves far less focused and cool-under-pressure than they would have liked to believe, it is announced that the squads will be flying home. Cheap beer is poured. Scantily clad, star-spangled women dance provocatively to classic rock and hip-hop while the soldiers cheer them on. This intermission of sorts serves as a segue into the third act of the performance.

Act III is intended to be an expressionistic montage of scenes representing a soldier’s post-traumatic reintegration into society. Unfortunately, it is a conceptual mess, with too many scenes, too many obvious images, and too few insights. Adding to the muddle are moments of “dramatic karaoke” during which audience members are called forward to participate in scenes, reading their lines from a screen while actors play the other parts. These scenes were uncomfortable on a number of levels, but not in the ways that Fox and company intended.

Despite the failings of its third act, Surrender is a uniquely worthwhile experience that finds theatre practitioners and audiences thirsty for engagement with, and relevance in, the world around them. The show’s many successes and admirable ambition go a long way towards making up for its lapses into pretention and self-satisfaction.

* * *

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore memorably mocks the “coalition of the willing” that aided the United States in our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Over stereotypical, arguably racist, footage from Costa Rica, Palau, Romania, and other coalition nations, Moore makes the oft-stated point that the great majority of the fighting in Iraq has been, and continues to be, done by US troops. Indeed, in our news coverage of the war, it is unusual (though not unheard of) to come across any reports focused on the achievements and struggles of our allies, even the British, who have committed, and lost, considerable numbers. The National Theatre of Scotland’s breathtaking Black Watch, which is currently enjoying an encore engagement at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, serves as a potent reminder that it is not only the United States military that has suffered loss of life, dignity, and reputation as a result of the Iraq War. The Black Watch is Scotland’s oldest and most prestigious military unit. The brigade’s long history and many honors are passed on to new recruits as a point of pride, as something to protect and preserve. When New York Times critic Ben Brantley (among others) declared Black Watch the theatrical event of 2006, and called it “one of the most richly human works of art to have emerged from this long-lived war,” that initial run of the production quickly sold out. While I was grateful when it was announced that the show would return to Brooklyn for its final engagement, I was also skeptical that any evening of theatre could live up to the adulation that had been heaped upon Black Watch.

In some ways, I was right. The text itself, written by the respected playwright Gregory Burke, is unremarkable. A solid but unexceptional docudrama built around interviews with and anecdotes from regiment soldiers, Black Watch reads like any one of a dozen recent war plays. The text, though, is not the show. What render this production so extraordinary are its exuberant theatricality and the quality of its ensemble.

Two sequences in particular stand out as unforgettable: One which recounts the history of the regiment through a flurry of tightly choreographed and athletically performed on-stage costume changes; and the final scene, in which the ensemble marches in parade formation but finds itself collapsing as various individuals stumble and are rescued by their compatriots. It’s a thrilling and devastating sequence that cannot adequately be described by either stage directions or the words of a reviewer.

While it would indicate a kind of historical amnesia to suggest that the current war in Iraq is the only unjust and incomprehensible one in which the British have engaged, there is an unmistakable disillusionment permeating the stories told by these Black Watch soldiers, a disillusionment born of wounded pride, traumatic memories, and the funerals of too many friends. Ultimately, Black Watch is about the seductive dual tragedies of masculinity and nationalism, two of the forces that have driven so many generations of men to their graves in the name of causes that have not been adequately explained, but which they are expected to take on faith and to defend with their lives. 

Surrender. Conceived and directed by Josh Fox. Written by Josh Fox and Jason Christopher Hartley. Created and performed by the International WOW Company. “Dramatic Karaoke” by Sanford Wintersberger. Lights by Charles Foster and Scott Needham. Sets by Nicolas Locke. Choreography by Hettie Barnhill. Reviewed at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street (closed; ran October 29–November 16 at the Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street. One week encore engagement: January 7–12, Wednesday–Saturday at 7pm. Sun at 4pm, Monday at 5pm and 7:30pm. Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk Street. Tickets: $20. See www.wowsurrender.org for further details.

Black Watch. Written by Gregory Burke. Directed by John Tiffany. Sets by Laura Hopkins. Sound by Gareth Fry. Lights by Colin Grenfell. Costumes by Jessica Brettle. Video Design by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer. Featuring: David Colvin, Ali Craig, Emun Elliott, Ryan Fletcher, Jack Fortune, Paul Higgins, Henry Pettigrew, Nabil Stuart, Paul Rattray, Jordan Young. Produced by The National Theatre of Scotland. At St. Ann’s Warehouse, 138 Water Street, Brooklyn. October 9 through December 21. Wednesday–Saturday at 8pm. Friday at 3pm. Sunday at 2pm and 7pm. Tickets: $55. See www.stannswarehouse.org for further details.

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