Some Plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from the Archive

 

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
by Robert Wilson
(based on Gustave Flaubert)
2004 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
21 October 2004 

My first show in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave season this year was Robert Wilson’s gospel-inspired version of The Temptation of St. Anthony on 19 October [2004].  Wilson’s piece, presented in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, is based on a Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) novel (La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874) of the spiritual torment of Saint Anthony the Great (251-356), but Wilson tells his version virtually without spoken dialogue at all, having turned the story into a gospel-music revival.  

Flaubert’s novel, written in the form of a play script (and itself inspired by a ca. 1557 painting of the same title attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1525-30 – 1569), details one night in the life of Saint Anthony who begins to question his years of self-imposed solitude and asceticism.  The devil tempts him with both physical pleasures—luscious food, a shower of gold, a beautiful woman (The Queen of Sheba) and man (Adonis)—and many different non-Christian beliefs and philosophies.   

(The painting referenced above as the inspiration for Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony was cited in the Wikipedia entry for the novel.  It was originally attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but has since been ascribed to one of his followers.  

(There were, however, at least two other canvases with the same title by painters in Bruegel’s family, including one painted by his younger son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568-1625, in 1594, and another by his elder son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1564-1638, in ca. 1600.  [After 1559, Pieter the Elder dropped the h from his family name; his relatives continued to use Brueghel.] 

(The French Wikipedia page for the Flaubert attributes the inspiration to the version from Pieter Brueghel the Younger.  Unless Flaubert left something in writing to attest to his stimulus, I don’t know how scholars can be sure.)

Anthony’s desert retreat is visited by a phantasmagorical array of evil characters and visions.  He struggles, but he prevails.  Along the path, he’s questioned and challenged by his disciple, Hilarion. 

In Wilson’s more austere adaptation, gone are the wild delusions of diabolical temptations.  Many are represented by the gospel hymns (gluttony in “Table Is Spread”; lust in “God Is Love”).  The director’s spare style is punctuated by sections of vibrant dance (choreographed by Christalyn Wright) and spiritual Christian revelry.

As usual with Wilson, the piece is short on drama, but long on theatrical spectacle.  The music is glorious of course (more on this later), but the visual images Wilson evoked are stunning, whether enhanced by the movement (the movement coach is Valerie Winborne), set, or costumes (designed by Geoffrey Holder, a certified theatrical genius to be sure). 

I suppose that if you’re susceptible to being touched by the story of Saint Anthony, the hermit saint who went in search of the true faith by living alone in the Egyptian desert, the play (if that’s what you can call Wilson’s piece) may move you—but since I don’t have a dog in this race, I was taken by the spectacle alone.  Over a brief, intermissionless hour and forty minutes, that was enough sustenance.

Since the music is the center of this piece, I should say something about that up front.  In contrast to a musical I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown this summer, which was inspired by the clash of musical cultures in Texas (so the playwright/director said) but had no one working on it who had any background in Mexican, Latin, or Tejano music (or country-western, either), Wilson did this absolutely right.  [The play at CATF was The Rose of Corazon by Keith Glover.  I reported on it on Rick On Theater on 8 July 2015.]  

Wilson collaborated with Bernice Johnson Reagon, about as much an expert in gospel music as you can find.  She not only knows the music as an academic who has studied the background and origins, but she just retired from her own gospel group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Now, I’m not a great fan of gospel music especially, but the vocal harmonies are gorgeous, and the music—which carried all the verbal element of Temptation—is superb. 

Reagon used existing songs, some of which she adjusted to fit the Saint Anthony story, and composed some original pieces.  All of them are wonderfully executed by Wilson’s cast.  (There’s a tinge of African rhythms in some of the pieces, and some of the costumes also bear African elements, but that may be embedded in the gospel tradition.  In any case, it does nothing but enhance the performance.) 

As I indicated, there’s no real spoken dialogue—except for the songs, the only other words are recitative or chants.  It makes the whole thing seem like a church pageant.  (As you might have imagined, Wilson’s Temptation was compared some to Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus.  Gospel did, by the way, have something of a life after BAM in 1983: it was shown on PBS’s Great Performances in November 1985, which is where I saw it, and went to Broadway in 1988.  It appeared in the repertoires of several regional theaters in the years afterward, too, but it’s popularity may have faded substantially by now.)

The base set, designed and lit by Wilson, is a unit which never changes—a square room with windows on the side walls and arched alcoves in the rear, flanked by doors at right and left.  The floor is essentially bare except for thin, wooden benches parallel to the side walls, one on each side of the stage.  (As usual with Wilson, the floor lights up in various colors, and there are constant washes of light from above that change the color of the set and costumes.) 

The side walls are directly perpendicular to the proscenium so they’re all but invisible from the center of the house, and the alcoves up stage resemble nothing so much as a pair of tablets for the Ten Commandments, making the space remind me of a simple synagogue, the alcoves representing the Torah ark.  This may be Wilson’s intent—to evoke the First Temple in Jerusalem, say—or I may have been the only spectator to find this resemblance.

The set’s occasionally enhanced by movable additions as the narrative calls for them.  These, of course, are seldom realistic.  In the instance that impressed me the most, a mountain flows out and one of the deities Anthony encounters descends. 

The deity first appears as a small puppet at the top of the mountain, rounds the first peak, and disappears briefly between the parts of the mountain.  When the deity emerges around another peak, it’s a larger puppet identical to the first except for its size.  Rounding another peak and disappearing again, it emerges, this time as a live actor, dressed the same as the two puppets.  Accompanied by one of Reagon’s songs, it’s a simple, but effective and delightful effect.

Holder’s costumes are mostly brightly colored and richly decorated robes but often topped by very elaborate (and, to my eyes, African-inspired) headdresses.  The women also have highly styled (and styled high) wigs of different shapes. 

Only Saint Anthony (Carl Hancock Rux) and his student Hilarion (Helga Davis) are individually cast; the rest of the characters are played by members of the ensemble while, for the most part, the rest serve as a chorus.  (According to a note in the program, most of the members of this all-African-American cast have known and worked with each other for years.)  They often weave intricate patterns, moving around the stage as they sing.  The robes are floor length and this makes the actors look like they’re gliding on wheels rather than walking.  It’s wonderfully ethereal. 

Like I said, with Wilson, often the spectacle is all.  In this case, it was enough.  Sometimes, beauty for its own sake is sufficient.

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by William Shakespeare
Watermill Theatre production by Propeller (London)
17 March 2004 

I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night [Tuesday, 16 March 2004], in the production by Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company from London, presented in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, the former Majestic which had been recovered for Peter Brook’s Mahabharata back in the ’80s.  I didn’t know the company previously, though they’ve been around for seven years; they’ve done other Shakespeare (Henry V), but I don’t know if they do other writers or periods [apparently not—Shakespeare is their turf]. 

For the first time that I can remember, Diana, my frequent theater partner, liked a show that I didn’t; if we disagree, it’s usually the other way around.  (She said she liked the “energy” of the performers.  That didn’t do it for me, and I didn’t question her because I didn’t want to spoil her enjoyment.) 

I guess the actors do a good enough job (especially the rude mechanicals: Tony Bell as Bottom the Weaver, Vincent Leigh as Snout the Tinker, Jonathan McGuinness as Snug the Joiner, Chris Myles as Peter Quince the Carpenter, and Jules Werner as Flute the Bellows-mender), but I just don’t see the reason to do this with all men.  It struck me as a gimmick—Hamlet on roller skates; if there’s anything more to it, it went past me. 

It’s not really Elizabethan—these actors aren’t boys, they’re men.  They don’t impersonate women, though they wear women’s clothes: there are no wigs, the actors don’t do “female” voices, or otherwise try to present feminine characters.  (Think Jamie Farr’s Klinger from MASH.  I’d add the Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo, but that’s a deliberate travesty; this isn’t supposed to be.) 

As far as I can tell, the casting of men in all the roles doesn’t add anything to the play except one more layer of humor—but I don’t see that that addition is appropriate.  There are essentially three kinds of humor in this production: 1) the jokes Shakespeare wrote into the play; 2) the physical comedy added by the director and actors; and 3) humor that arises because men are saying lines intended for female characters.  1) and 2) strike me as perfectly legitimate, but 3) strikes me as gratuitous. 

The laughs don’t come from the writing or the acting—just the casting.  It’s not clever; it’s just opportunistic.  And I don’t see how it illuminates the play or its themes (not that Midsummer’s themes are so deep they need much illuminating). 

In the program, director Hall is quoted as saying that the all-male casting “is about ‘trying to give the plays back to the actors, so that they can really tell the story in a more one-on-one way with the audience.’”  I can’t imagine how that statement even makes sense.  It sounds like he’s saying women actors can’t tell the story or work one-on-one with the audience (if that’s even an important accomplishment). 

The whole thing—which runs two hours and 40 minutes—just didn’t work for me at all.  I thought it was silly—not funny.  It even qualifies as pretentious, considering Hall’s statement.

*  *  *  *

THE WILD DUCK
by Henrik Ibsen
National Theatre of Norway (Oslo)
2006 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
1 November 2006 

My theater companion, Diana, and I went over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday evening, 26 October, to see the National Theatre of Norway’s production of Ibsen’s Wild Duck.  Like most non-musical productions at BAM, this was at the Harvey Theater.  I’m always curious to see how the natives interpret their own playwrights.  It always strikes me as sort of like going back to the source. 

Also, those national companies are usually excellent; I don’t believe I’ve seen the Norwegian company before, but I’ve seen the Swedish counterpart (with Bergman often at the helm), and they’re superb.

(I was telling my mother about this show and it made me recall two other national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s director, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin.  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

(And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  I think The Square, which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts—which may have morphed into the Lincoln Center Festival, but I’m not sure—may have had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  Fifteen years later, and I still remember it. 

(Retro, which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 [see my report on this international theater festival, 10 November 2014], didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely clear that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening.  The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. 

(Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A tape of that performance would have been a perfect training film for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 15 and 20 years afterwards says something.)

The Wild Duck isn’t one of Ibsen’s well-known, frequently-staged plays—at least, not in the U.S.; it’s apparently popular and even beloved in Norway—so I’ll give a short synopsis of the plot:

Hjalmar Ekdal (Gard Eidsvold) is a photographer, but he lets his wife, Gina (Agot Sendstad), and daughter, Hedvig (Birgitte Larsen), run his studio while he devotes his time to loftier pursuits: supposedly working on a “great invention,” which he never identifies.  He spends most of his time hunting rabbits in the loft with his elderly father (Kai Remlov)—who’d been imprisoned for corruption and suffers from moral and financial bankruptcy. 

The Ekdals only get by thanks to the wealthy Haaken Werle (Bjorn Skagestad)—Old Ekdal’s former business partner who’d managed to escape the charges that had condemned Old Ekdal.  Without Hjalmar knowing it, Werle has been giving money to Gina. 

One day, Gregers Werle (Eindride Eidsvold), Haaken’s son and Hjalmar’s oldest friend, returns to his hometown following a self-imposed exile.  In his search for the truth about the two families, Gregers makes discoveries that jeopardize the happiness of the entire family and have tragic consequences.

This Wild Duck, an offering of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival, is a kind of trimmed-down version—not an adaptation, but it only runs two hours (without intermission) and the cast has been cut to just the nine most prominent characters.  The set reflects this slimming process as well: there are only a table and about ten chairs (all Scandinavian-modern design—very stark) and an odd wood-textured wall, about six feet tall, across the back of the space. 

Director Eirik Stubø moved the action up to the late ’50s or early ’60s—at one point Ekdal plays Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” on his flute and spins Gina around as he sings a few bars—though the text isn’t altered as far as I could tell from the supertitles.  (The translation for the titles is credited to Judith Messick and Katherine Hanson, but it looks a lot like the Rolf Fjelde rendition published by Signet that I own.  I looked up a couple of things after I got home, and the wording looks awfully close; I even spotted several exact phrases as I skimmed for what I was looking for.)

It’s an entirely minor quibble, I admit, but the juxtaposition of the 19th-century text (Wild Duck was written in 1884) and the mid-20th-century look is occasionally jarring.  Two instances that I noted in passing include an exchange between Hjalmar Ekdal and his wife regarding cutting the pages of some of his reference books and a mention of “freshly-churned butter.”  Unless Norway was way behind the rest of the Western world in the ’50s and ’60s, we pretty much stopped selling books with uncut pages and getting butter fresh from a churn, as opposed to a grocery store’s fridge, was relegated to farms. 

More of a problem for me is the total ambiguity of the setting—and especially that back wall.  The script says the first act is in the Werle house, and the other four acts are in Ekdal’s photography studio.  In the published translation, the studio is described as completely furnished, not spartan, so Stubø (and his designer Kari Gravklev) are making a stylistic decision beyond the period of the action—to make a Symbolically minimalist environment for the (essentially) Realistic acting.  I can only say that I had a hard time imagining where the people are in real space—and maybe that’s my failing. 

I don’t think it’s my failing, however, that I was bothered by the constant need for the cast to reset the table and chairs, including moving the table on and off stage and adding or subtracting chairs.  (There are only three chairs and no table when we first arrive at Ekdal’s house in act two.  There are no act breaks, except that needed to reset the stage—accomplished by the actors themselves with the lights up.) 

There’s also a lot of action devoted to setting and adjusting the table (which has extension leaves, stored under the table top, that are taken out and put in as the needs of the scene demand).  I remember seeing a production of The Duchess of Malfi (by Cheek by Jowl) at BAM in 1995, and it became a play about moving chairs.  (There was a staging of The Brothers Karamazov—not the acrobatic clowns—at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in 1994 that devolved into the same thing.)  This production almost becomes a play about moving the table!

Now, that wall.  It’s just a plain, blondish wood-pattern expanse that extends from stage right to stage left, about six feet high—just over head height.  It looks to be about six to eight inches wide—wide enough for Hedvig to walk or crawl along.  But, what the hell is it?  I mean, we know that the studio is indoors—it’s described in the text as a loft, suggesting that it’s above ground level.  (I always pictured it as a sort of attic space, in fact.) 

Except for the fact that this looks like wood, it otherwise seems like a garden wall of some kind, and seems, from the action, to separate the “indoor” area (that is, the studio) from the “outdoor” area (where the rabbits Old Ekdal shoots and the wild duck of the title live).  There are no door and no windows in the wall, so when someone goes into the area on the other side (which we can’t see), he climbs over, often using a tall, wooden step ladder he brings from off stage. 

When people look over the wall, they usually climb on chairs (which are either already placed against the wall on “our” side or are moved into position for the purpose of peering over the wall’s top.  As I said, Hedvig walks along the top of the wall once and crawls along it another time.  I’m sorry, but if all this is symbolic, I didn’t get it.  (I cop to not being good with Symbolism.  I guess I’m just too literal-minded.) 

If it isn’t symbolic, I can’t figure out how that wall works (along, of course, with the rest of the space).  I’m going on about this because it occupied my focus so much of the time I was watching, trying to understand what I was looking at, that it became a distraction.  (And, believe me, what with having to look up at the supertitles and then back down at the actors, an additional distraction is totally unnecessary!)   

I’m not sure I can articulate this, but using the chairs that way and carrying an actual ladder from off stage seems to make the wall real—it’s an actual wall.  But, then, what’s it doing there?  What kind of space has a tall wooden wall with no doors or windows like that?  If it’s a garden wall, it wouldn’t be wood (unlike, say, a fence).  If it’s a room wall, it’d have windows or doors. 

But if it’s symbolic, not “real,” it seems you shouldn’t have to use real, practical things to negotiate it.  Does that make sense?  Maybe I’m way off—as I said, I’m not good with Symbolism.  If I were designing a symbolic wall, I’d have made it low enough to look over without aids, or I’d make it a scrim or a latticework painted like a wall; I’m sure someone more imaginative than I, especially in stage design, would come up with more and better ideas.  The problem I see with most of my ideas is that if the director of Wild Duck deliberately wanted the area on the other side of the wall to be invisible to the audience, these wouldn’t work.

I’ve said on several occasions that I find trying to turn Ibsen’s Realistic plays into some other style, Symbolism among them, is a usually disastrous directorial decision.  I allow that Wild Duck is partway to Ibsen’s more Symbolistic period at the end of his career—according to director Stubø’s program note, Ibsen wrote his publisher: “This new play has in certain ways its own place in my dramatic production; its dramatic progress is in many ways different from my previous ones”—but it’s not there yet.  Maybe I am too literal minded to buy such a shift.  Maybe I only think it doesn’t work—but in reality, I just don’t like it.  I don’t think that’s the case, but would I know? 

It’s not that I mind a minimalist set, a suggested set without all the 19th-century trappings.  I did that myself in an adaptation of a Chekhov story—and I believe it worked.  I don’t even mind up-dating the look of a play; I did that, too, with an Oscar Wilde play I reset in the 1920s.  But when the director moves into an alien style, then I think the balance gets tipped.  Finally, if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then almost nothing else really matters—it’s just not working.  In my humble opinion, of course.

The acting all seemed fine, except that it was all on a rather even keel for the most part.  There are a few highs and lows—and some long silences while the cast takes care of tasks like setting that table and putting in or taking out leaves (I joked that maybe Stubø is trying to rip off Pinter, but it’s not much of a corollary.) 

I mean, Ibsen’s plays lean toward melodrama by today’s standards—there’s lots of emotion and psychological drama.  These folks are all moderated and even-tempered an awful lot of the time.  Now, maybe that’s a Norwegian character trait, I don’t know, but it struck me as odd, given the circumstances. 

The casting of Hedvig was also a little peculiar.  Ibsen says she’s 14—Juliet’s age—but the actress in this production, Birgitte Larsen, plays in her later teens (and, I’m sure, the actress is actually older than that [it turns out she was 25]).  She’s much more precociously sexual than I figure Hedvig is intended to be, though I’m not convinced Larsen is playing it that way.  She just looks more like a woman than a girl. 

Diana thought she was and that the others actors, especially the men (and her father in particular), were responding.  (Diana felt that Stubø might have been suggesting the daughter is starting to take after her mother.  That might not even be contrary to Ibsen’s creed, which held that the moral corruption of the parent is inherited by the children.  That’s why Nora couldn’t stay with her children or take them with her in Doll House.)  I didn’t get that impression, however—though perhaps I just missed it.

Finally, I’ve decided I don’t like supertitles.  I’ve had a series of bad experiences with this translation device—they’re badly located on the stage so that I can’t read them and watch the actors or they’re too small or distant so I just plain can’t read them.  In this instance, the screen isn’t too high above the actors, and it isn’t too small, but I found myself bobbing my head up and down so much and trying to catch the longer phrases fast enough to get back to the stage before the next text is projected that I was losing far too much of the theater for the logistics. 

When BAM used the infrared earphones, I used to keep the volume down low so I could just hear the translators and still hear the actors’ actual speech, even if I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t have to bop back and forth between a text and the action—I didn’t have to choose where to look at a given moment—and I didn’t have to worry about reading a line or two of text instead of listening and watching. 

I’m sure paying live translators every night, maintaining the transmission system, and keeping track of those earphones was both more cumbersome and more costly than the projection system, but it was a lot easier on me.

I guess I have to come down on the side of disappointed with this experience.  It isn’t bad—say, like Nora, the German up-date of Doll House a few seasons back at BAM [see my report on ROT, 18 June 2016]—but I didn’t really enjoy it or get much out of it.  It certainly didn’t reveal anything new about Ibsen or the play for me.  Charles Isherwood had a pretty decent review (a “stark but perceptive production”) in the New York Times on Friday, 27 October, the day after we saw the show, but I can’t say I saw the benefits he did.