Back to The Bacchae

"Euripides, I'll rippa dose!" Local girls get ready to tear some human flesh in The Bacchae.

To me, Greek tragedy always feels a bit like semaphore, transmitted across an ocean of time and space. We get the harrowing gist of the communication, but the fullness of the original experience - even its true form - remains elusive; we have to construct much of its theatrical context from scraps and hints and academic guesswork. Even the names of the characters remain open to debate.

But even if we were to identify its format precisely, Greek drama would still present a unique problem in terms of accessibility. Indeed, even to call it "drama" is something of a misnomer, because we've come to realize it's an elaborate synthesis of drama with something like opera and something like dance - all crossed with a Mass. We don't have a form like that. So any attempt to replicate it accurately would underline its strangeness to our sensibility, when it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to the Greeks.

Still, even as semaphore, these plays have enormous power, not because they limn "tragic flaws" but because they evoke so brutally the contradictions of human experience. Oedipus, for instance, tells us bluntly that we are unknowing conspirators in our own downfalls - and that the highest among us are actually guilty of the greatest sins. Euripides's The Bacchae has a similarly paradoxical edge: it both warns the ego against suppression of the id, while revealing just how horrifyingly far the id can go if it isn't contained.

To get at these ancient truths in the absence of the form that embodied them, most modern interpreters have settled on a set of conventions which the Whistler in the Dark production at the BCA largely follows, even if the group is presenting a new translation, by Francis Blessington. The design is simple but evocative; the movement modern-dance-y, accompanied by percussion (here inspired by Steve Reich's "Drumming," from Boston Ballet's recent "Black and White;" amusingly enough, my review is what drew director Meg Taintor to that ballet). The god Dionysos is played by each of the actors in turn, who make the transition by donning a golden mask - a nice genuflection to the idea that, like some pagan antecedent of the Holy Spirit, the god of orgiastic abandon can "descend" upon any one of his followers and possess them.

Unfortunately, the production falls, then rises in pretty much the same reverse arc that every production I've ever seen has: the opening evocations of the feminine bacchanals plaguing Thebes are blurry and loud, without being particularly unsettling (an understandable feminist bias often leads productions, I think, to sympathize too far with the madness of the bacchantes). But once the inexperienced Pentheus makes his fateful decision to join the crazed celebrants in female disguise, the proceedings are suddenly gripping, and often intensely so. This despite the fact that as Pentheus, young actor Phil Crumrine lacks the technique to suggest the internal conflict driving his repression of the irrational (and the feminine).

But here Euripides comes to Whistler's rescue: shifting from that problematic nexus of dance and song, the playwright delivers pithy scenes of almost unbelievable horror - including a mother who rends her own son limb from limb - which the new translation gives fresh life (it was hard for me to judge its earlier scenes due to all the drumming and shouting). And actors Curt Klump and Jennifer O'Connor (both at left) do justice to this intense material - particularly moving was O'Connor's sudden realization that she was toying with her own son's severed head (here that golden mask again, only this time drenched in blood). In O'Connor's quiet pathos, suddenly the deep meaning of this ancient semaphore came all too clear.

Pirates of the corporation

After the surprising success of Dark Play, I was eager to check out the Apollinaire Theatre's current offering, Men of Tortuga, a new drama by Jason Wells which was developed at Steppenwolf. But alas, I'm duty-bound to report that neither the script nor the cast (above left) of Tortuga has the confident sheen of the earlier piece. Still, the show has its moments, and fans of legal thrillers may find it a satisfying-enough evening out.

To me, however, just about everything about Tortuga is a little too familiar, even though it's been capably constructed by Wells, who manages several deft twists in his last act. The trouble with this kind of writing, however, is that by now we expect several twists in the last act, even if we can't predict precisely what they're going to be; unexpected variations on the formula can't transcend its inherent lack of surprise. And the playwright's take on capitalism - that corporate raiders, like pirates (which I assume is the reference intended by the title; perhaps "Men of Grand Cayman" sounded too much like a calendar) aren't above simply murdering their opponents to get what they want - hardly counts as a new angle, either.

Wells clearly is attempting a minor variation on, say, Glengarry Glen Ross, only this time in the inner sanctum of some nameless corporation or law office. The suits the author assembles in this marble interior (which looks a bit more like a lobby than a boardroom, although its trompe-l'oeil effect is convincing) never give away exactly what threat they're trying to eliminate (or why), but it's clear that murder is what they have in mind; there's even a hot-headed weapons expert on hand to goose them along toward the best, and most cold-blooded, options available.

The first half or so of the play is intended, I suppose, as coldly "outrageous" black comedy, but we feel throughout that we're well ahead of the playwright's tactics. Wells gets a bit more traction from the inevitable introduction of a possible traitor into this corporate clique, and swings a compelling little debate over the Biblical account of Judas. But even here the playwright doesn't quite have the Mamet- or Pinter-like chops to limn anything new in the way of moral or metaphysical speculation from these developments. Still, the "surprises" keep coming from then on, and we watch with interest till the finish, just to see how it all turns out. So Wells may have promise, although I worry that he looks rather like the male answer to Theresa Rebeck, i.e. a craftsman who can smoothly re-purpose film and TV material for the stage.

At the Apollinaire, the actors are all the right ages, and have some skill, but generally can't project the sense of deep disguise that might give the goings-on a little more sense of mystery. Alain Groene Pieters as the weapons specialist has the most presence, but eventually begins to chew the scenery; meanwhile castmate Tom Giordano seems at first on the right track as the innocent in this crowd, but needs to grow up quite a bit faster once he understands exactly what's at stake. Danielle Fauteux Jacques directs crisply, but perhaps a bit naïvely. But then these days it's tough to be more jaded than your audience.

Crocodiles on Brookline Street

One of the "tailors" from Street of Crocodiles.

Few would argue that Street of Crocodiles, by the Brothers Quay (a.k.a. identical twins Stephen and Timothy) is one of the greatest stop-motion films of all time; some argue that it's one of the greatest films of all time, period. I'd certainly rate it among the most haunting, and one of the few that seems to somehow emanate from its physical design - that eerie street of decrepit arcades and cabinets through which its puppet-hero wanders in search of meaning and connection. And even though the Coolidge Corner's celebration of the talented pair concluded last week, you can still see the actual décors from Crocodiles and their other films at the Fourth Wall Project, 132 Brookline St. (near Fenway Park) through May 21. The sets prove even more magical "in person" than you might imagine - lovely and strange and heartbreaking in their detail. Highly recommended.

Class act

The KKK get their kicks in Jerry Springer: The Opera.

I have a friend with an interesting theory about the dreadful tradition of "blackface" - he feels the form, or at least its basic impulses, didn't actually disappear once racism was forced from the cultural stage; it simply re-surfaced as "whiteface," a new cultural mode in which classism replaced racism, and white trash and the trailer park became the newly-legitimized objects of happy, patronizing ridicule. It's an interesting idea, and one that came to mind repeatedly as I watched Jerry Springer: The Opera, the notorious high-low cultural mashup now in its New England premiere at SpeakEasy Stage.

For if anyone brought "whiteface" to full flower, it was Jerry Springer, the liberal Jew (his parents survived the Holocaust) whose "talk show" somehow morphed into an elaborate take-down of the dregs of white Christian conservatism. Indeed, over the course of the 90's and on into the millennium (it's actually still on in many markets), The Jerry Springer Show delivered image after image of an on-going cultural crack-up. Day after day, pathetic denizens of the Rust or Corn Belt would reveal that they were infected with precisely the same moral relativism that their own milieu loathed in the liberal elites: they were gay, or "cheaters," or were transvestites or had sex fetishes; or, even worse, they harbored the historic, but now-unmentionable, hatreds of their class, anti-Semitism and racism. Their families or relationships then seemed to fall apart as we watched; fights routinely broke out on stage, egged on by a crowd that all but seethed with angry condemnation. For this was the beauty of Springer's formula: it fed the righteous anger of conservative white trash while simultaneously revealing that said white trash was guilty of the very sins they were condemning. In a word, it was like watching the thrashing death throes of a whole subculture.

The mystery, of course, was why, exactly, so many troubled people came on to Jerry Springer to face the abuse. At first the conventional wisdom was that they were pathetic pop-cultural moths, lured by the klieg lights of celebrity, however brief or degraded; but gradually word leaked out that much of the show, like "pro" wrestling and other lower-class entertainments, was staged. Several guests have come forward over the years to describe partying weekends funded by the show in exchange for a half-hour of coached fights on-set. So just as Amos'n'Andy were played by whites, the promiscuous crackers on Jerry Springer were enacted by bemused parties performing semi-scripted roles. There were certainly cases in which the "reality" of the show was indeed all too grimly real (a murder closely followed one taping), but it gradually came clear that Jerry Springer was, indeed, the ringmaster of a circus of his own carefully orchestrated design.

But all this seems lost on the creators of Jerry Springer: The Opera, who ironically enough take the show's blasphemies on faith. Lyricist Stewart Lee and composer Richard Thomas keep the focus on Jerry's guests, whom they portray as crass but guileless, and driven to somehow validate themselves via humiliation on national TV. In a word, these strippers and she-males just wanna be loved, and is that so wrong? Well, no, I don't think so; if folks want to pole-dance or wear diapers, or pole-dance while wearing diapers, that's ok by me. But it's not very interesting.

What's more interesting is Jerry himself, and how he limned the cultural and economic fissures creeping under the working class, and then managed to tease it into melting down on live television - all while idolizing him, and making him a multi-millionaire. For while the guests may have been more faux than real, the audience was always definitely fo' real, and Jerry's relationship with them was the true subject of his show. But Lee and Thomas have almost nothing to say about our erstwhile host, or his strange symbiosis with the crowd; despite travails that include taking a bullet and a sojourn in Hell (below), he remains a cipher to the very end. We don't even get to see much of his sexual entanglements with porn stars, or his checkered business relationships (we do hear about the time he actually paid a working girl with a check). Indeed, we feel we know precisely as much about Jerry when the curtain falls as we did when it first rose.


Timothy John Smith heats up Jerry Springer. Photo(s) by Stratton McCrady.

And as a result, the show's a little dull. Oh, it's "shocking" all right - if you're the type that might have actually been in the audience of Jerry Springer: there are dancing Klansmen and double-timing transsexuals and a guy who gets off on poop. But these sad cases are all caricatures, not characters; they're not so much poster children for dysfunction as actual posters. And I'm afraid I didn't care how often they sang out for my sympathy, nor did I care that "everything that lives is holy," as Blake once said, and the musical reminds us (although is even the KKK holy?). Because while everything that lives may be holy, much of what lives is just plain silly, and that's basically what Jerry Springer: The Opera is. For it secretly wants to emulate the technique of the show itself, then chastise us for our reactions to its machinations; only didn't the real Jerry do that already, just much more effectively? In a word,The Opera is a pretty pale replacement for The Show.

Things might be a different if its vaunted mash-up of pop and opera worked the way we sort of imagine it should - that is, by giving these silly poseurs some sort of tragic stature. But alas, the music itself can't carry this much artistic weight: the pop writing is serviceable, and sometimes punchy, but the operatic writing is pretty lame - there are echoes of Bach and Handel in this stuff, but beyond said echoes the "arias" are often little better than recitative pushed up an octave (and the joke of having sopranos warble "What the fuck???" gets a little old). SpeakEasy has found voices that can hit the high notes, although sometimes they get a little shrieky or strained; probably the best singing comes from tenor Luke Grooms. Meanwhile Michael Fennimore makes a physically convincing but disappointingly blank Jerry - even within the limited confines of the script - but SpeakEasy stalwarts Timothy John Smith, Kerry A. Dowling, and Amelia Broome all do entertaining double or triple duty in various roles (Broome in particular covers an astounding amount of caricatured ground), and there are solid turns from John Porell and Joelle Lurie. Director Paul Daigneault keeps things moving, although somehow hasn't managed to conjure much real transgressive electricity from the material, and the dangerous anger of that all-important crowd is missing from his staging (he mixes actual audience members in with the cast, which sounds like a good idea, but probably helps dissipates that energy). Still, at least the design is top-notch (as usual for SpeakEasy): Julian Crouch's set and animations precisely conjure both Jerry's mid-90's look and its tacky equivalent in Hell.

And of course some sort of bouquet should be thrown to those innocent Bostonians who appeared outside the theater to protest the production (below). Where would we be without these folks to simulate a sense of controversy? They were enraged by some silly stuff in the second act (Jesus in a diaper, etc.) that wants a bit desperately to shock, but instead comes off as satirically toothless filler. You sort of wonder if these types realize that they are themselves merely playing an assigned role in a kind of larger, meta-version of Jerry's show - proof positive that Jerry's vision is still relevant; if only Jerry Springer: The Opera had the insight or chops to do it justice.


Jerry goes meta: the protestors at SpeakEasy seemed to be direct from central casting. Photo by Mark L. Saperstein.

What happens when a faux street artist meets a real one?

I have to hand it to Shepard Fairey - the content of his work may be banal, but the marketing of that work, and the imposition of it on the city by the ICA and its comrades-in-arms, has proved to be the cultural gift that keeps on giving. Indeed, I think as unconscious self-critique it's almost unparalleled; few cultural events have revealed the hypocrisy of the presumptively hip in such a harsh, unsparing light. Above is what happened to one of Fairey's murals installed in Providence (hat tip to Greg Cook). Could the unknown street artist in question have made a more succinct comment? What's most wonderful about the added graffiti is that it doesn't really spoil the design of the (plagiarized) original, but instead frames it in a richer, more truthful cultural context. I'd say we have an early front runner for next year's Foster Prize. That is if the ICA has any sense of humor.

Wilde card

This is just a quick post-mortem on a truly bizarre Importance of Being Earnest down at Trinity Rep (which I caught with a group of mortified IRNE critics last week). The general response to the show among our merry band was, "What were they thinking?," although to my mind it was rather obvious what they were thinking: make 'em laugh! Which isn't a bad policy in general, of course, and the audience did laugh, although this was mostly due to the fact that everything was played as broadly as possible. Of course to keep up some sense of their own sophistication, the actors played the broadness in self-aware "air quotes." There were also, for reasons unknown, interpolated bits from the music hall (and I think G&S), a strange movement solo that looked like something from Cats, and various little parodies of leaps of joy, etc. But wait, there's more: the set, by Michael McGarty, for other reasons unknown, leaned toward the post-modern autumnal (complete with a self-conscious proscenium), while William Lane's costumes ran toward pant suits and turbans. The whole thing played as a weird, contradictory pastiche of current suburban and theatre-school notions about the Victorians; but about Wilde or his aesthetic it had nothing to do at all. So I guess mission accomplished; at least at a meta level the production played as paradox, although, alas, a slightly crass one.

To be fair, director Beth Milles was not working with an ideal cast; indeed, the show reminded one of the limits of the repertory system (i.e., having to squeeze actors into roles that aren't quite right for them). The usually reliable Mauro Hantmann seemed quite wrong for Jack Worthing, and Angela Brazil chewed the scenery with gusto as Gwendolyn; meanwhile Janice Duclos made a fairly mediocre Lady Bracknell (even flubbing a few of the most famous lines in the play). There was better, or at any rate fresher, work from newcomers Karl Gregory (Algernon) and Rebecca Gibel (Cecily, with Gregory above left), but they could hardly triumph over the director's heavy, indicative hand. Well, at least it's over, I suppose.

Still cookin' at 81

This is just a quick note to say that, incredibly, Barbara Cook (left) is still casting her magical vocal spells at age 81, as evidenced by last week's stint with the Boston Pops. Like musical theatre queens of a certain age everywhere, the partner unit was in line for tickets the minute he heard she'd be in town - and to speak true, I'm always happy to worship at Barbara's altar with him. By now, of course, it can't be denied that the top of her register has thinned, and sounded a bit weak against the backing of the full Pops (she sounded fine, however, against her own combo, who were also on hand). But her middle range is as honeyed as ever. And though I suppose I should say that her marvelous phrasing remains intact, does the term "phrasing" really go far enough? What Cook does is what Sinatra did - somehow project personality as musical atmosphere. The romantic aura this 81-year-old emanates absolutely defies explanation, and yet I've seen her do it over and over again; she always does it, and it doesn't matter if the room is as small as the Cafe Carlyle, or as big as Symphony Hall; she could probably pull off the same trick in Fenway Park. Needless to say, the Pops audience sat rapt throughout the performance, and while most of the material was familiar to her die-hard fans, she did pull one surprise out of her trademark black caftan: Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin." Incredibly, this was the first Porter cover Cook had ever done, and she turned it into one of her exquisite cameos of wistful rue. After just a few bars, Barbara Cook was once more under our skin.