Holiday videos!

Welcome to San Francisco!

Happy Eastah! We're taking a break from power-blogging at the Hub Review today, but here are some Eastah-themed videos to tide you over till Monday.

First, what would Eastah be without a party? And what's a party without our friend Art Hennessey dressed as Peter Rabbit, uttering the immortal lines, "I-Party!" and "Great!"  Don't worry, Art will forgive us for posting this, and in the meantime you can savor a brush with artistic greatness:



Next - a nod to what I think should be our de facto Eastah movie. I know, I know, The Ten Commandments is fun - slow, tantric fun - but isn't Ben-Hur (below) really a whole lot better?

Yes, these are the dimensions of the original 65 mm image.

I mean this combination soap opera/sermon/boy's adventure is just as long and just as ponderous as Cecil B. DeMille's gargantuan biblical parade float, BUT you get more of Charlton Heston in a loin cloth, PLUS the Battle between the Model Ships in the Gigantic Bathtub, AND (best of all) the terrific chariot race, which I'd probably rate as the single most spectacular sequence ever recorded on film. You can watch it here; due to copyright issues I can't embed it, but I can embed the same sequence from the original 1925, silent Ben-Hur (with an added soundtrack from 1931), which is plenty amazing too - indeed in some ways is more spectacular than the 1959 remake, for which it essentially served as template.



Finally, something in a different key (a somewhat different key). Christianity is almost unique among faiths in its effort to fill just about every psychological familial niche with a primary deity (father, son, mother, etc. - no sex allowed with these gods!). Thus all the explicit erotic content of other religions is crowded into the subtext of Christianity, where it marinates into something pretty lurid; and nobody knows that better than San Francisco's Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who parody the homosexual and sado-masochistic underpinnings of the Passion story annually in their Hunky Jesus contest in Dolores Park (this may have become America's most prominent public celebration of the holiday). Now I know Jesus doesn't deserve this - we're big fans of Jesus, of course, at the Hub Review, and know we should be more like Him. But honey, Christianity deserves this - and how! Below is the 2011 edition (set your offense meters on stun - and take that, Pope Benedict!).

Bach's elusive Passion

Harry Christophers conducting soloists and orchestra in the St. Matthew Passion - photo: Kyle T. Hemingway.

I've been pondering Handel and Haydn's version of Bach's St. Matthew Passion for some time now (since last weekend), and Hub Review readers know what that means: it's hard to come to a clear decision about it.   The piece itself, of course, is a monument - really a touchstone - of Western music; the Bach family referred to it as "the great Passion," and the master himself took care to execute a definitive edition, on "the finest paper available."  So I was grateful to hear the work again; to be honest, I haven't heard it in years - it was once a staple of the H&H repertory, and these performances were partly intended as a means of reconnection to this great organization's venerable past.

But again to be honest, the St. Matthew Passion is also a bear, sprawling, multi-foliate, and perhaps even somewhat incoherent in its ambitious attempt to weave together contrasting personal, communal, and historical visions of the tale of Christ's crucifixion.  Now before you start screaming - a lot of great works of art are somewhat incoherent (people have made that argument about Hamlet, for instance); but the aesthetic gaps loom particularly wide in the St. Matthew Passion, and I'm not sure that conductor Harry Christophers (brilliant as much of his work was here), quite bridged them in these performances.


Here's why. St. Matthew basically runs along three parallel tracks - center stage is the story of the gospel, partly declaimed by an "Evangelist" (Matthew himself, we assume), and partly enacted by its various players, and always crackling with a remarkable sense of musical and emotional drama.  Mr. Christophers is one of the most naturally dramatic of our local conductors - and he was blessed with a truly riveting Evangelist in Joshua Ellicott, and a tragically self-aware Jesus in Matthew Brook; so all of this was absolutely terrific.

Then there are the familiar (and gorgeously moving) chorales, drawn from existing hymns and folk-songs, which convey the response of the community - or perhaps history - to these events.  Here a larger chorus than the core Christophers usually works with delivered slightly less than the pin-point accuracy we're used to hearing from Handel and Haydn; but after suffering through Missa Solemnis at the BSO a few weeks ago, I thought they still sounded pretty damn good (and after all, they were singing in German).  More problematic was Christophers' decision to place the smaller solos (done by chorus members) around the stage - some of these positions, it turned out, revealed unexpected acoustic quirks in Symphony Hall. ( I am happy to report, however, that the members of the Young Men's and Young Women's Choruses, grouped at the sides of the stage, sounded fine.)

But then there are the solo recitatives and arias that stud the piece, in which we essentially eavesdrop on Bach's personal response to the Easter story; and here the performance faltered, at least in its singing (the instrumentalists generally held to H&H's dazzling standards).  This is getting to be a familiar story, I'm afraid, where the H&H chorus and orchestra regularly outshine the soloists.  This time around, however, the two male leads, as I mentioned, were sterling, and the supporting tenor and baritone were strong; it was the women who were weaker - chiefly because one of them was Gillian Keith, who has a lovely voice, I admit, but who is one of the most superficial vocal actresses I can think of.  Here she was typically simpering and self-involved, though she did hit pretty, pearly tones; and I think it's worth noting that once again, she was literally under-dressed in a floor-length nightie and a hair-do out of Lulu.   Mezzo Monica Groop made a far better impression both in her fashion choices and vocals, which were particularly affecting in “Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott" (where she was exquisitely partnered by violinist Aisslinn Nosky).

But even she was sometimes just sweetly blank, and this was really too bad, because the arias are a rare key to what was intensely personal for Bach - his Christian faith, which was heartfelt, and perhaps even all-consuming; here, for once, the great composer doesn't attempt to conjure the music of the spheres, but rather his song of himself.  But Christophers seemed to grope for a cohesive approach to these meditations, and so even Groop resorted to a rather anodyne kind of sorrow, and the standard-classical-music-issue version of "beauty."  Given the intense, individualized commitments of Ellicott and Brook, you couldn't help but feel that something was missing - and the urgency of the performance seemed to flag.

Oddly, though, Christophers drew exquisite work from his orchestra in many of these passages.  The woodwinds are by now acknowledged as one of the glories of the H&H ensemble, but Stephen Hammer (oboe) seemed to outdo himself here, as did Christopher Krueger (flute) and Andrew Schwartz (bassoon).  The strings were likewise in fine shape; I noticed sparkling work from Laura Jeppesen on viola da gamba, and Guy Fishman on cello.  These moments, coupled with generally fine work from the chorus, and the stunning performances of Matthew Brook and particularly Joshua Ellicott, led in my mind to one of those classic glass-half-empty/half-full debates; but I think at its most passionate, this Passion was enough to make a Bach fan's cup runneth over.

August Wilson's bottom line

August Wilson was a playwright absorbed in his people's history; and now, of course, he himself is a part of that history (he passed away in 2005).  This melancholy fact, coupled with the knowledge that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom represents (roughly) the starting point of the playwright's life work, his ten-play saga now known as the "Century Cycle," brings a poignant emotional weight to bear on the production currently on the boards of the Huntington (but only through this weekend).

The fact that this Ma Rainey also represents the completion of the Huntington's own commitment to staging Wilson's entire cycle only seems to up the artistic ante.  Watching the close of this production is like watching the curtain of time descend on ten different plays and nearly twenty-six years of effort (the theatre staged its first Wilson play, Lloyd Richards' production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, in 1986; I remember it well, but were some of the stars of the current show even born then?).

So let's just say that watching this new version of Ma Rainey put me in mind of what my father used to call the Long View - and it also re-enforces the impression that at the end of vast artistic endeavors, you sometimes end up precisely where you started.  That is if you haven't actually lost some ground.  For has anyone come along to take up August Wilson's mantle?  Do we have a young black playwright - or a young playwright of any color or gender - of Wilson's size, scope, or sympathy?

Oh, let's be honest - we don't [although local playwright Kirsten Greenidge will take her shot next week with Luck of the Irish].  I don't mean to make exorbitant claims for Wilson; the familiar rap against him is one I agree with (in fact it's one I've helped shape): he was never much for structure, perhaps not even for story, particularly as he aged; his plays became ever more digressive and discursive; in some of the late ones, in fact, all you can count on are a few stretches of spectacular oratory.  Since Ma Rainey is at or near the beginning of this arc, it's more coherent than some of the cycle - which probably peaks in the middle  period of Joe Turner and The Piano Lesson - but you can feel here, at the very beginning, the buds of the flaws that would eventually fully flower by the cycle's end.


Still, in that mysterious way that a great dramatic voice somehow makes itself known despite its own failings, in Ma Rainey, Wilson's writing slowly coalesces into a deeply moving statement.  The play has little forward drive, it's true - it's a meandering look at a group of black musicians conjured around the real-life "Ma Rainey," (who did have a hit with the song "Black Bottom" - although she only had supporting vocals on the record - and was a notable figure in gay history as well as black history due to her open lesbianism, which Wilson treats matter-of-factly).  Ma and her long-suffering band are attempting to make a blues record for a white recording company, although this proves a daunting task, given the demands of the recording studio and Ma's own penchant for drama.  Thus the play is a tapestry of racist humiliations, large and small, as well as private conversations and debates, petty power plays and exploitations - and one shocking outburst of violence.  But remember Stephen Dedalus' conceited claim that "in the smithy of his soul" he would forge "the uncreated conscience of his race"?  Well, August Wilson seems to have gone Joyce one better, I'd argue.  For from the panoply of voices arguing in Ma Rainey, a mosaic of communal frustration and consternation does slowly emerge; a vision of a race unshackled, but still in chains, and furious at both its oppressors and itself for its desperate condition.  Yes, the title of the play is a naughty double entendre, but it's a deeper pun as well - what exactly, August Wilson asks, is the bottom line for my race, my people?

Jason Bowen in a break-out performance .

And it's here, I think, that the playwright towers over today's polemicists in the ongoing wars of identity politics.  His characters struggle not only with their victimization but also with their seeming impotence before it; they interrogate themselves as well as the power structure.  This, of course, is terribly incorrect to today's P.C. mandarins; but it's one of the means by which Wilson transcends politics and achieves the status of art instead.

I'm not sure, actually, that the current production always understands that - well, I'm sure the actors do; but director Liesl Tommy has framed the action with odd flourishes, in which rap blares from the sound system, and the cast briefly stares at us in contemporary dress.  I wasn't sure how to take these asides - but of course what leaps out at you from them is how black music - like the rest of pop music! - has collapsed catastrophically in quality, falling from the free, sweet lyricism of jazz, gospel and the blues to our current modes of squalid crudeness.  In a way, of course, Wilson predicted this; his characters muse that as racist power structures harden and age, the resulting anger from the black community will slowly poison, even strangle, our popular culture.  So perhaps Tommy intends her framing as mournful acknowledgment of Wilson's prescience - I don't know.

But I don't feel that elsewhere Tommy has cast Wilson in the best light possible - even though in its richness and maturity this production marks a return to form for the Huntington (after two recent misfires).  Still, here we feel the clunk of just about every bump in Wilson's script (when a director like Lloyd Richards might have disguised the smaller gaps - maybe Tommy's not all that great at structure either).  The director's most troubling misstep is her seeming lack of attention to the slowly burning fuse that does, eventually, ignite at the play's conclusion.  But she has drawn highly detailed performances from almost everyone in her superb cast, and she has coaxed a star turn from our own Jason Bowen, who here joins the ranks of local actors who have made the jump from local stages to the big time in a splashily convincing way (another reason why the Huntington is our leading theatre, and remains so valuable).

And those performances are reason enough to catch Ma Rainey before it closes.  Yvette Freeman makes a formidable Ma - she perfectly captures the mix of resentment, defeated realism, and diva-worthy theatrics that Wilson intends; and though she doesn't sing in quite the cadence of her historical namesake, she still lights up "Black Bottom" with a frisky, earthy joy.  (The music here, though synched to taped performances, is highly convincing.) And while Jason Bowen may provide the fireworks for the musicians' backstage scenes, he never obscures the fine detail of the performances around him, from the distinguished trio of G. Valmont Thomas, Charles Weldon, and Glenn Turner.  Newcomers Joneice Abott-Pratt and Corey Allen likewise shine as very different members of Ma's entourage - one her slinky latest squeeze, the other a stammering nephew who Ma poignantly insists (with some raw symbolism) deserves a place on her record.  Meanwhile, as the racist record producer Sturdyvant, Thomas Derrah all but disappears into his role, and made me completely forget about his recent preening in Red.  I was surprised that only Will LeBow seemed to lack specificity as Ma's manager Irvin; he was adequate, but there is, I think, far more to this role than he has yet found (at least by opening night).  But overall, there's a richness to this ensemble that you won't find anywhere else in town right now.

So if you can't tell, I left Ma Rainey's Black Bottom once again moved by August Wilson's achievement.  I certainly hope this final installment of the "Century Cycle" won't be the Huntington's farewell to this great playwright - because frankly I think we need him now more than ever.

Glenn Turner, Will LeBow, G. Valmont Thomas, Jason Bowen, and Charles Weldon await Ma Rainey.

Can you spot the Hub Review?

Ha!  I got an e-blast from a local theatre company today, listing all the critical praise for its current production.  (Nothing wrong with that, btw; indeed, more power to 'em!)

But I had to LOL when I pondered my own response to the show in question.

So . . . in the spirit of "Where's Waldo?", can you spot the Hub Review review among the following?

1. A powerful, moving production


2. A show to savor


3. One of the best performances I've seen this season.


4. A can't-be-missed production.


5. A profound, complex, well-executed piece of theater.


6. A dazzling, top-of-the-line piece of you-know-what.


(Hint: It's not #1-5.)

The Play That Wasn't There, or: Are We Pinter Yet?

Rebecca Harris, Dennis Parlato, and Jay Ben Markson in Mrs. Whitney.  Photos: Meghan Moore.

With John Kolvenbach it always seems to be "one step forward, two steps back."  This prolific playwright keeps getting produced, and so I keep getting exposed to him.  And I keep being mystified by the fact that he keeps getting produced, and that I keep getting exposed to him.

Or at least I felt that way until I saw Love Song, which Orfeo Group did last summer, and which had at least one great idea, and some sharp writing, to recommend it.   Love Song also sang with something like a theme - call it "romantic autism," or "relationship autism," if you will - that I suddenly realized had been a component of everything I'd been seeing by Kolvenbach all along.  This playwright seems obsessed with relationships that are in the end impossible because of the perceptual or emotional deficits of his characters; what made Love Song so witty was that it turned this gap on its head; the play's romantics learned to conduct the most passionate of affairs with themselves, and their own fantasies - indeed, it turned out the script's central love object wasn't even there.

So I actually began to think - you know, maybe there is something to this guy after all.

But now I've sat through Mrs. Whitney (which closes this weekend up at Merrimack Rep), and I think I'm ready to throw in the towel again on Mr. Kolvenbach, even though in some ways Mrs. W. counts technically as a step forward for him.  He does juggle more characters here than he has previously, and attempts to connect to a longer timeline, while conjuring an unstable sense of the past; he's trying to expand his range.

And yet at the same time a kind of playwriting autism seems to be afflicting him; for his superficial new accomplishments in Mrs. Whitney are all undermined by deep dramatic lacunae - that's a fancy word, btw, for voids.  As in empty spaces.  Vacuums.  We leave this play, in fact, never quite comprehending what it has been about, or whether it was even intended to be about anything at all.

Which, yes it has occurred to me, may be the larger point.  Is Mrs. Whitney actually a huge conceptual-art gambit, one whose clever surface conceals the fact that it is actually another "show about nothing"?  I often pondered this during the course of the performance at Merrimack (which seemed obsessed with actory surface, btw), and I got the feeling it had also occurred to Campbell Baird, the production designer, as he'd built a cheery winter homestead out of plastic and drapes, with fake snow on the windowpanes and holes in the walls opening onto - well - black, empty voids.  This house isn't really here, the set all but screamed, because these people aren't really here, just like their relationships aren't really here - because this play isn't really here.

So if that was your intent, Mr. Kolvenbach - to write a play that wasn't really there - then congratulations!  You have succeeded!   You have expertly shrink-wrapped a good deal of clever dialogue around absolutely nothing at all (except possibly denial).  Oh, I know there are things that seem to be here, like - well, alcoholism; and infidelity; and lost love and loneliness and despair.  But none of those things are actually there, are they.  No, I'm quite sure they're not.

The only question for me is - do you think they're there?

Ah, perhaps there's the rub.  For I'm afraid there's at least one other explanation for Mrs. Whitney.  The first is that John Kolvenbach has brought off a brilliant aesthetic illusion.  The second, however, is that he just doesn't realize he has left out everything that counts about a play.  And I admit that when I learned Mrs. Whitney was actually the second part of dramatic diptych (the first play of the duo is called Goldfish), I did begin to lose faith in that first explanation!  For in interviews Kolvenbach has actually opined that Mrs. Whitney was written to further explore the background characters of Goldfish.  And in the Merrimack program, he muses that his script "is a comedy.  About heartbreak."  Okay, but he goes on: his  plays are "scored," he explains; the empty spots in the script "serve the same purpose as the lines in the play . . . they convey information . . . the audience will only receive the play if the music is in place.  The plays should sing."

Oh, no.  Oh, shut up John Kolvenbach.  Please shut up.  Because all that makes the conceptual gambit explanation a little hard to swallow.  I mean . . . you don't really think you're some sitcom Pinter, do you?  That your gaps and lacunae operate with some sort of resonant mystery?  Oh, no.

But - oh well!! I'll go through the set-up of the drama anyway, and let people decide for themselves.  We meet the eponymous Mrs. Whitney (Dierdre Madigan, at left) just after Christmas, when she's brooding on her empty nest (her daughter is now grown, and AWOL).  We sense that we're entering the scene after some sort of crisis (Gap #1), but we've no idea what it might be (my advice is: check the script of Goldfish).

At any rate, there's a neighbor on hand, Francis (Joel Colodner) who is eager to make her less lonely, but she sets her eye instead on the former Mr. Whitney, whom she divorced for very good reasons something like two decades ago.  We have reason to doubt Mrs. Whitney's judgment on this score, of course - just as  we have some reason to doubt her judgment on everything.  We get the impression, in fact, that we may have caught her in the middle of drinking herself to death (she actually orders Francis to take the food he has brought her out of the house and leave it in the snow).  But then again - maybe not; she certainly seems to be entirely in hand, indeed, she's a model of crisp, ironic control.  Hence - Gap #2:  What's up with Mrs. Whitney?

But onward.  Mrs. W. pursues the former Mr. W. to the aforementioned cheery homestead, where the current Mrs. Whitney (Rebecca Harris) is waiting to brain her absent husband - or whoever walks through the front door - with a shot glass.  It seems that Mr. Whitney has gone missing, as he often does - indeed, it seems one key reason why all the various Mrs. Whitneys (there have been four or five, I can't quite remember exactly how many) have left this serial divorcer is that he's simply often missing. (Hmmmmm.)  Why he goes missing is unclear - although he seems to be on the wagon now, so maybe his absences have been alcoholic benders; or maybe they were meant to prevent him from going on alcoholic benders (that was Gap #3, btw, and probably Gap #4; are we Pinter yet?).

Now taken together, these various vacuoles do suggest some sort of thematic profile that (normally) a playwright might be interested in exploring.  But not Kolvenbach.  He keeps his 'action' - essentially a zillion variations on denial - humming, that's for sure - Mr. Whitney shows up, the current Mrs. Whitney walks out, the previous Mrs. Whitney moves in, etc., while Fin, a forlorn son of Whitney by some previous Whitney, tramps in and out, cracking mighty wise.  There's a short diversion with Francis, which of course comes to nothing.  There's a hint that Mrs. Whitney actually has completed her emotional mission, perhaps unawares, by connecting briefly with Fin - but if you blink, you miss this.  By now you can almost hear the clock ticking . . . will the playwright make it past 90 minutes without actually revealing anything?  Hurrah!  He does, and the script can end - with a restatement of its opening line; the whole pointless exercise has been circular - get it?

Yes, we get it.  But to answer my rhetorical question - no, we're still not Pinter.  You see, in Pinter (and Beckett, and any number of other absurdists)  the mysterious gaps around which the action revolves seem to expand as we watch; the lacunae grow in significance, because the playwright is steadily delineating their form and pressure; statements about faith, and power, and knowability are ultimately made - just indirectly.  But no such luck in Kolvenbach.  He seems to think that simple denial is theatrical subject enough.

And it ain't.

Still, you do get to enjoy some finely wrought superficiality at Merrimack; this theatre pulls in the best actors from all over, and they've wasted some fine ones on Mrs. Whitney.  I'll say this much; Kolvenbach can write banter; everybody in the play speaks with the same self-aware, sitcommy voice, but these actors make at least their jokes sing. As the heroine, Deirdre Madigan was all tart/bitter wisdom masking - well, something, but who knows what; despair?  Self-hatred?  Your guess is as good as mine, but at least she's dry as a good martini.  There was an arguably even sharper turn from Rebecca Harris as the fourth or fifth Mrs. W. - we last saw Ms. Harris being equally good in Kolvenbach's godawful Fabuloso; please, please can we see this fine actress in something other than John Kolvenbach?  Rounding out the cast, Jay Ben Markson gave a precise spin to Fin's one-liners, Joel Colodner did what he could with Francis, and Dennis Parlato remained likably, knowingly poised while revealing absolutely nothing of himself (of course) as Whitney.  I'm not sure what to make of Kyle Fabel's emotionally under-realized direction; I guess that's what the play called for, but still - that's kind of the problem, isn't it.  Sigh.  And I notice that yes, the Merrimack has programmed another John Kolvenbach for next season.  Which I think is evidence of a certain lacuna in the decision-making of this normally reliable theatre!  But who knows - perhaps the next Kolvenbach will be another Love Song.  At any rate, the mystery continues . . .

Deirdre Madigan and Jay Ben Markson actually connect, briefly, in Mrs. Whitney.

Tales from Andersen, Part 2

Confronting Andersen's lost Dryad - actually, Auguste Clésinger's "Woman Bitten by a Snake"


Where to begin with Robert LePage's The Andersen Project (which closed Sunday at ArtsEmerson)?  I've already confessed I'm a little in awe of this piece; I haven't felt this way about a new work since I saw Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide, etc. - which, come to think of it, I never got around to decoding, either, partly because of its daunting level of achievement, the sheer density of its intellectual reference.  In comparison, Andersen seems lighter on its feet, and because much of its text is composed of imagery, it's somehow easy (at first) to imagine that it's a  kind beautiful, easily understood, postmodern picture book.  It's about this guy trying to write a children's opera about Hans Christian Andersen for the Paris Opera, right?  Right.

If you ponder the piece for long, however - and begin to sense that every stage picture seems to open out into something that has come before, or will come after - then the narrative "floor" of the text seems to drop out from under you, and you realize you're grappling with what amounts to the imagistic equivalent of hypertext.   Indeed, if I had to pin down the theme of The Andersen Project at this point, I think the best I could do is something like "the isolation of the imagination in modernity."

Which of course makes the piece sound ridiculously pompous and dull, which it isn't at all - instead it's a bewitching mix of whimsy and melancholy.  Its melancholic atmosphere largely derives from the sense of lonely self-fulfillment that pervades the piece - it's about a librettist, Frédéric, writing an opera for a single voice (remember that), and his seeming twin, Arnaud, the ambitious arts administrator guiding the project through the political shoals of E.U. high culture.  Both - along with every other character in the script - are played by a single actor, the brilliant Yves Jacques (remember that), and thus, though in theory LePage's characters often meet and interact over the course of the narrative, in practical terms they never do - and hence questions of actual conflict are essentially moot.

So everyone in The Andersen Project is alone, but in a crowd - of machines, that is.  LePage sends his heroes wandering among rows of peep-show booths, rows of telephone booths, rows of computer booths - there's instrumentation available for everything, from communication to masturbation.  Everywhere the implements of fulfillment for each and every desire are calmly, silently waiting to be activated.

Hans Christian Andersen, of course, lived when this technical dream was only just dawning - or as Arnaud glibly puts it, on the cusp of the "romantic and the mechanistic;" indeed, Andersen visited Paris during the Exposition Universelle of 1867, one of the first of the great technological fairs to dazzle the world with visions of utopian advance (Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after visiting it).  And LePage is quick to seize on the resonance of this moment, and incorporate it into his Project; his Andersen (again Yves Jacques) haunts the same neighborhoods his modern heroes do, over a century later.  Indeed, in a way he prefigures them; for Andersen was famous for fairy tales in which mermaids and match girls dreamt of transformation and deliverance; and he stood on the brink of a technical revolution which promised exactly the same thing.

Between the romantic and the mechanistic.

Thus the resonance of "The Dryad," the Andersen fairy tale which Frédéric is bent on transforming into a children's opera.  It's a typical Andersen story in many ways; a powerless female presence - here a dryad (that's a tree-nymph) imprisoned in a country chestnut - dreams of escaping her prison and achieving transfiguration by wandering the streets of Paris, whose lights she can just make out on the horizon of her meadow.  And as in much of Andersen, the dryad prays so intensely for her deliverance that it is granted- but at a terrible price: once freed, she will live only for an evening.

Which is when we recall that happy endings aren't always the norm in Andersen; the Little Match Girl, the Little Mermaid, and the Steadfast Tin Soldier all come to grief; and the little girl who dons the famous Red Shoes only frees herself of them by hacking off her ankles, while the little fir who dreams of being a Christmas tree ends up chopped into kindling and burnt alive.  Again and again, in the magical realms of Andersen, the will to personal enrichment and enhancement - the core promises of modernity - lead only to punishment and repentance.

But it's only gradually, as we watch The Andersen Project, that we realize similar disappointments are in store for its characters, too.  Frédéric is in Paris basically because he has been dazzled by it (just as the dryad was), and hopes its glory will validate him - only his opera will fail to materialize, and the romance he hopes to rekindle back at home will instead die out for good in his absence.  Meanwhile the life of his double, Arnaud, all but collapses as his wife leaves him for his best friend, and he sinks into a round of obsessive wanking in the city's peep shows (his trajectory is mirrored by a second fairy tale, Andersen's eerie tale of foreboding, "The Shadow").  Indeed, Andersen himself has a modern doppelgänger in the Moroccan immigrant Rashid, a street artist who mops down the booths that Arnaud frequents (that is when he isn't spray-painting Paris with his graffiti).

The parallels and mirrors hardly stop there; we're told that Andersen dotted his writings with little crucifixes, in much the same way that Rashid tags the blank page of Paris; only it's theorized that what Andersen may have been recording was actually his daily wanks (rather like Arnaud's self-administrations, which Rashid is paid to erase?) - or are Andersen's stories themselves a form of auto-erotica - like Rashid's graffiti?  We also recall that Andersen may have died a virgin - he was never able to consummate the sexual act (rather like Frédéric? rather like Arnaud?); indeed, it's probably worth noting that in the romantic scenes LePage conjures for Andersen (above left), women are depicted by mannikins - that is, by machines . . .

You may sense at this point the referential density of LePage's design, but believe me, there's more where this came from; indeed, I'm not sure there's a single line or image in The Andersen Project that doesn't refer to or echo something (or someone) else embedded elsewhere in the text.   As I said, of contemporary playwrights, I think only Kushner may be this densely self-referential (or this ambitious) - only LePage is far more unified than Kushner; indeed, as we watch The Andersen Project, we begin to sense LePage's various gambits coalescing into a single meditation on what you might call the 'problem' of the modern imagination.  Like Andersen's characters, we now enjoy new technological powers that reach far beyond the merely mortal; but again like them, once transfigured, we find ourselves abandoned to our dreams - and demons.

And there is, of course, another dimension to LePage's work which deserves mention here: the way in which he conjures a kind of "cinema" onstage - a technique which proves far more resonant in The Andersen Project than in any of the other pieces by this director I've so far encountered.

It makes sense, of course,  if you're going to make your "text" out of imagery, that you work in film or video rather than the theatre; yet film and video famously lack the sense of live presence that theatre bears in its bones.  Indeed, film directors must work overtime (with soundtracks, lighting, camera tricks, etc.) to simulate a sophisticated kind of dream-state for the cinematic audience to participate in, to sink into - indeed, without this subtle hypnosis, this complete identification, it's difficult for a viewer to even access the thematic content of a film.  (This is why straightforward films of stage productions never convey the excitement of the theatrical event; the content hasn't been massaged yet into a kind of directed dream.)

LePage wants things both ways, however; he wants to tell his story through imagery, and yet with the immediacy of live theatre.  And in The Andersen Project, I'd argue he largely succeeds in this contradictory aim; indeed, the sense that we are moving in and out of a "screen" - which itself edges towards us now and then throughout the show - is central to the cumulative effect of the work.  The screen in question is slightly curved, so that Yves Jacques can step directly "into" it at will (below); the effect is mysteriously cinematic and theatrical simultaneously; we sense the power of the dream, even as we remain apart from it.  The technique has a further thematic resonance - for in a way LePage's characters (like his audience) are now living their lives in separate, fantasized narratives, like so many interlocking movies (or booths).  Indeed, the director pushes things perhaps even a step farther at his finale, in which Frédéric appears both before us and on screen, like a giant ghost floating within the Palais Garnier, to tell us, it seems, of his own death by fire the night before.  But has he actually perished (like the dryad)?  Or has only his dream of himself finally died?  As the flames reach the ceiling of the opera, we realize we will have to decide this one for ourselves; neither the stage nor the screen can tell us.

Alone in the culture of Culture.

Are you ready for theatrical "hacking"?

While Americans tie themselves in knots over the obnoxious practice of "tweet seats," the Canadians have taken to a whole new level the intervention of the digital world - or perhaps the critical world - into the supposedly sacred theatrical space.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has reported that a recent production at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in Montréal has been "hacked" by the Québécois theatre artist Olivier Choinière. With his company L'Activité, Choinière has already made a reputation for himself with a new theatrical genre nicknamed "podplays," in which audiences wander through a city- or land-scape, guided by a narrative delivered via headphones.

But Choinière touched off a firestorm of accusations and debate when he staged his latest podplay, Projet blanc, within the context of another theatrical event, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde's avant-garde version of Molière's School for Wives. That production, directed by Yves Desgagnés, focused on the text's supposed "terrible resonances" with pornographic and pedophiliac currents running through modern society. But Choinière's audience-within-an-audience - who were discreetly listening to headphones in the balcony - got instead a witheringly critical deconstruction from Choinière of Desgagnés' attempt at deconstruction.  And many theatrical artists aren't very happy about that; indeed, to some, this amounted to a "rape," even though Choinière was only doing to Desgagnés what Desgagnés was already doing to Molière. Actually, perhaps that's what has made the episode so frighteningly resonant for some theatre practitioners; the critic is now in the building, which makes the auteur just as vulnerable to subversion as the original author.

Meanwhile Choinière has countered that “We often have the impression that we're making art, and that we've escaped commercialization and the invasion of marketing in our artistic practice – and I think that's false."  Hmmmm.  You can read about it all here, well before the trend hits the States - if it does hit the States, that is; frankly, this strikes me above all as evidence of a far livelier theatrical culture than the one we've got here.