Jacques Offenbach, Jules Barbier ( based on the tales of E.T. A. Hoffman) | Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 2015

love and tears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Offenbach (music), Jules Barbier (libretto, based on his and Michel Carré’s play, based on tales by E. T. A. Hoffman), Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 1881; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s HD Broadcast of January 31, 2015

 

Jacques Offenbach’s operatic repertory favorite, Le contes d’Hoffmann is a true mish-mash of musical and theatrical offerings: comic opera numbers such as "Il était une fois à la cour d'Eisenach” (a number that might have been at home in the Broadway musical Cabaret, replacing that musical’s number “Messkite”); drinking songs in the manner of Verdi and Wagner; comic novelty numbers such as Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” and the servant Frantz’s insistence on his singing, dancing talent, “Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre”; all mixed up with stunning operatic arias of love and longing such as "C’est un chanson d’amour."

     Divided into three distinct "tales," Offenbach’s work functions as a baggy monster, with the vague and often fragile interconnective link insisting that the stories all represent the poet’s failed loves; yet productions have, at times, lopped off an act or, at other times, added another. The opera, moreover, sometimes effortlessly, at other times rather clumsily, shifts between realism, fantasy, and literary autobiography while delving into the grotesque. Particularly, under Bartlett Sher’s Metropolitan Opera direction, the work seems nearly always teetering on the edge of a Kafka-like nightmare tinged with a Berlin-cabaret sexuality that borders also on camp (Sher insists his sources were Austrian, but they seem much closer, to my way of thinking, to the Berlin of the 1920s.).

      For all this, nonetheless, the Le contes d’Hoffmann survives, perhaps simply because it does encompass so much that other operas of the day might have thrown overboard. Whether conceiving as woman as an innocent, an artiste, or as a courtesan, what Offenbach’s Hoffmann reveals, in the end, is that no fulfilling liaison can be consummated as long as the writer-artist is wed to his art. Time and again Hoffmann loses his mind, at no time more evident than when he puts on Coppélius’ rose-colored glasses to become enchanted with the wind-up doll Olympia (not so very different, indeed, from Lubitsch’s “doll” described in the essay above—except that in Hoffmann’s fiction, she has no human equivalent, despite the fact that the real human Erin Morley brilliantly imitates her robotic actions. 

      Hoffmann (the charming and energetic Vittorio Grigolo) falls in love with a fellow artist, the singer Antonia (Hibla Gerzmava), only to discover that her very profession may result in her death. Like a would-be controlling fiancée (today we would describe him as unliberated sexist), Hoffmann is forced to demand, as has her father, Crespel (David Pittsinger), that she give up her career, a choice that can only leave her in such frustration that she is almost immediately tempted to challenge the men in her life by channeling the voice of her mother, a former primma dona inflicted with the same illness. Antonia can no more give up her role as an artist than can Hoffmann.

     And finally, after nearly giving up on love, the writer seeks love in the arms of a wicked courtesan, Giulietta (Christine Rice) only to lose his reflection and, almost, his soul. Hoffmann’s absurd love does end in the death of Giulietta’s equally lied-to boyfriend, Schlémil (David Crawford). And even though, in killing her lover, he obtains the key to her boudoir, he is saved by the fact that she literally leaves him in the lurch, gondolaing off without him. As the police arrive, he is, once more, saved by the only one who truly loves him—and whom he, unknowingly, truly loves, his male friend Niklausse, secretly his "female" muse. If the device of the male friend/female muse offers a slightly homoerotic tinge to the opera, in the end it truly doesn’t matter since the muse, obviously, is an aspect of his own being, just as the three women with whom he falls in love are all elements of the one woman imagines as his divine partner, the Mozart diva, Stella, who literally ignores him, and whom he, in his drunken state, no longer even recognizes. Ultimately, the opera suggests that true artists can only find satisfaction in themselves—along with copious amounts of beer and wine! But, of course, it very does matter, since these figures represent various gender opportunities to the suffering artist.

      Interestingly, Sher has skewered his production away from the simplistic Hoffmann, who, despite his fascinating tales, remains a vague actor in the stories of his own life. For Sher, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is merely a stand-in for Offenbach himself. And, from this perspective, the opera does indeed reveal a great deal about the situation of the actual artist, a German Jew, well loved by French society, but obviously made to also feel always as an outsider. The several Jewish references (at times almost anti-Semitic, particularly in the legend of Kleinzach) signify the kind of dual reality which the composer faced, wherein at one moment he laughs with his audience as he tells the story, but by work’s end tragically becomes the mocked figure himself, taking on the tallit almost as a protective garment against the taunts of his failures in love and life.

     It also helps to clarify the inexplicable evil of the four-headed villain of the piece, who appears as Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Daspertutto (all played by the noted baritone Thomas Hampson). Why, we ask are these villains, so similar in some respects, all out to steal, murder, and abuse Hoffmann’s would-be loved ones. There is no explanation of course for such evil, such seemingly in-bred hate—except perhaps for the successful insider’s detestation of all who represent something different and new to his culture. Such hate clearly leads what Nicklausse / the Muse observes as a "loss of love and tears," but it will never be able to entirely destroy true art.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2015).

Steven Sater (book and lyrics, based on a play by Frank Wedekind), Duncan Sheik (music) | Spring Awakening / 2015

an audience of the deaf and blind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steven Sater (Book and lyrics, based on a play by Frank Wedekind), Duncan Sheik (music) Spring Awakening / a production of the Deaf West Theatre, the performance Howard Fox and I attended was on May 30, 2015 at the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California

 

Just six years before Marsden Hartley’s visit to Berlin, another American-born artist, Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (better known to his German-speaking audiences as Frank Wedekind) was attending the first performance in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater of the drama he had written between 1890 and 1891, Frühlings Erwachen (best translated as Spring Awakening). A few years later, in 1917, this “children’s tragedy” was performed, although threatened by closure for immorality, in New York; finally, after a court trial, it was permitted to be performed before a limited audience for a single performance. By that time, the German-writing playwright, traveling through Europe on an American passport, had been required to obtain a German document.

     Throughout most of its existence through the rest of the 20th century, Wedekind’s homily to bourgeois society was threatened with censorship and closings. As late as 1962 the play, performed in England, was threatened with closure, and was allowed a run of only two nights in censored form. It was not until Joseph Papp’s 1978 New York production that the play actually became fully available on stage to the American public.* And it was not until the early 21st century production of a musical version in 2006, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, that the work actually received the attention it might have for over 100 years—if only the sexually terrified parents it hectored had been able to remember their own youths.

     Yet even the other day, so The New York Times reported, a high school teacher in Connecticut was fired for attempting to explain to a student the sexual meanings of an explicit poem by Allen Ginsberg, precisely what the character Melchior, punished by being sent to a reformatory institution, attempts to do for his friend Moritz. Is it any wonder that parents throughout modern history have been terrified by a story, involving young teenagers, that portrays the inability of the older generation to talk about sexuality and the younger generations’ encounters with detailed sexual explications, physical and sexual abuse (emanating from both parents and peers), incest, masturbation, rape, homosexuality, sadomasochist behavior, suicide, and abortion? Even Tennessee Williams, to my knowledge, never encompassed all of these in a single play!

 

    Wedekind’s play may be, as the august The New York Times argued in 1955, after a Provincetown Playhouse revival, an “old-fashioned sermon,” but it certainly did not feel like an outdated play of ideas in the Deaf West Theatre production Howard Fox and I attended the other day at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The work seemed as relevant to today’s hormone-charged teenagers than ever before, particularly given the fact that we all now recognize that the angst of young high-schoolers includes not only the age-old issues described above, but difficulties with gender identification and terrifying diseases such as AIDS, as well as drugs of every imaginable kind.

     Wedekind, who’d had personal experience, so his journals have since revealed, with nearly all of these “unspoken” dilemmas of youth, might also have introduced the subject of syphilis, prostitution, and pathological jealousy—all of with which he’d been involved, beside the subjects he brought up in his play—but that is not truly the issue here. Our children, whether we want to believe it or not, are daily faced with conundrums which they cannot fully comprehend and with which many adults are utterly uncomfortable with speaking about. If there was ever a significant definition of the “generational gap,” Spring Awakening speaks it and underlines it in bold strokes.

      Certainly there are problems with this play, both the original—which is often fussy and fustian both in its parent’s and teacher’s Calvinist and Lutheran pronunciamentos against anything to do with the body in word and thought—but also with the more spirited musical, which presents songs of the three-tone variety, jingles that, at times, seem more comfortable at a high-pitched commercial simplicity than in exploring either tonally or lyrically the more profound implications of the play’s and character’s problems. There are moments, surely, when Slater, as lyricist, does truly attempt to get to the deeper urges and complications of his youth’s sexual feelings, as in “The World of Your Body”

                                         O, I'm gonna be wounded

                                         O, I'm gonna be your wound

                                         O, I'm gonna bruise you

                                         O, you're gonna be my bruise

And in the openly rebellious sing-along, the students, led by their intellectually superior Melchior (a charming Austin McKenszie) speaks out:

 

                                       [MELCHIOR]

                                       There's a moment you know

                                       You're fucked

                                       Not an inch more room

                                       To self destruct

                                       No more moves, oh, yeah

                                       The dead end zone

                                       Man, you just can't call

                                       Your soul your own.

 

     Yet, for the most part, the Slater-Sheik score simply reiterates the ideals of a young people blinded by their generations’ simplistic beliefs, but also filled with the absolute openness of young people who simply cannot imagine (fortunately) all the horrors in the life ahead they will have to face:

                                      I believe

                                      I believe

                                      I believe

                                      Oh, I believe

                                      There is love in Heaven

     I suppose that in a world where you’re not permitted to believe in love on earth, Heaven is a great alternative, but it precisely that lack of imagination which resulted, as we know in hindsight, in this same generation’s terrible fates in World War I, and their children’s children’s horrible deaths in World War II. The musical ends, as I suppose such faith-inspired paeans to youth must always do, with a Hallmark card-inspired song, “The Song of Purple Summer” that might remind some older playgoers of the 1968 musical Hair’s “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In).” 

      And even in this relatively tamed expression of the testosterone-driven boys and girls, Sater and Sheik have felt the need to tone down Wedekind’s honest shrieks against bourgeois notions of correctness, shifting Melchior’s rape of his beloved Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank/voiced by Katie Boeck) to a confusing give-and-take between the sexes—behavior which, as I’ve described elsewhere, as encouraging males, at least of my generation, to close their ears to female protests.

     But the real villain of both Wedekind’s original play and this musical concoction remains the very attendees of the performance, whether we be truly parents (or, as in my own case, complacent adults who have not had to deal the terrifyingly joyful experience of parenthood). And that fact makes Wedekind’s work a kind of unbearably tearful reunion with reality, with the confusion, longings, and impossible dreams we all had as youths, now so terribly unfulfilled and forgotten. Wedekind’s play, accordingly, no matter how fully we realize its truths, can never be a truly pleasant experience for the elders who might bother to attend the theater event. These young people (even when they are a bit older than the characters they play) will always be a reminder of our own failures, a truth the Deaf West Theater performers made even more poignant, by madly signing the words they expressed to an audience that was not only deaf to their metaphorical expressions of pains, perhaps, but primarily blind to what they were trying to tell us.

 

*Even reviewers, such as Arthur Gelb, writing of an earlier production of this work characterized it as an “awkward play.”

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2015)

Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt (based on the play by Elmer Rice) | The Adding Machine / 2008

more than zero?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt (libretto), based on the play by Elmer Rice, Joshua Schmidt (music) The Adding Machine, Minetta Lane Theatre, New York, opened November 14, 2007 the performance I attended was the matinee of May 11, 2008

 

My determination expressed in my 2002 essay on Billy Wilder’s The Apartment that I would revisit Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine has stayed with me over the five years since, and when I saw that a musical version of the 1923 expressionist play had opened in New York in 2007, I seized the opportunity to attend on my May visit to the city.

      I was surprised, I must admit, by the dramatic and musical intensity of this chamber-like piece. Indeed, I found it a much more fascinating work than the blockbuster musical revivals, South Pacific and Gypsy, I revisited during the same trip. This work outshines the more predictable feel-good and block-party celebration that won the Tony for the best musical of 2008, In the Heights, but the legendary Minetta Lane Theatre is not on Broadway!

     As I had remembered the play, it is certainly a devastating portrait of the workplace; but unlike Wilder’s film, Rice’s play is not centered in the office, but focuses on the entire life of its anti-hero, Mr. Zero, who is abused and dismissed not as much by his boss—who after all does nothing more than fire him on a day Mr. Zero thought he might get a raise—but by his wife and friends, by the community outside his workplace.

     The play and musical begin in the bedroom, the musical version raising the bed to an upright position so that Mr. and Mrs. Zero are parallel to the audience itself. The uncomfortable positioning of the bed only reiterates the discomfort of its inhabitants, and particularly Mr. Zero as his wife complains loudly not only about his behavior and lack of drive (“I was a fool for marryin’ you. If I’d ‘a’ had any sense, I’d ‘a’ known what you were from the start”) but of the quality of the movies she has been attending in the afternoons. Joshua Schmidt’s music, influenced clearly by Kurt Weill and Marc Blitzstein, reiterates her sermons with sharp, staccato chords and jarring rhythms that perfectly point up the kind of assembly-line atmosphere of Zero’s entire existence.

     Indeed, we discover in the next scene at the office that Zero himself is the adding machine, a man who adds figures in his head, demanding that his assistant, Daisy, speed up her call of the numbers of each and every sale. When, after 25 years at the job, his boss asks to speak with him, Zero cannot imagine anything but that his employer has had “his eye on him,” and intends to reward his dedication.

      In fact, the boss intends to replace Zero with a mechanical adding machine. Unable to even fathom what he is being told, Zero is enveloped, in the original play, with loud noises, a swelling of music, the sound of wind, waves, the galloping of horses, a locomotive whistle, sleigh bells, an automobile siren, the crash of a glass, a peal of thunder.

      The third scene of the play, wherein all the other “numbers,” friends of Zero and his wife, have gathered at his home for a party, is one of the best of the play. With the men on one side of the room and the woman on the other, Rice treats us to a delicious parody of the prejudicial attitudes of the working class, and underlines the near impossibility of any individual act. The scene ends with his arrest, as Zero admits the murder of his employer and meekly allows the police to take him away.

      In a sense, this is the only possible way that Zero could escape his humdrum existence. In the original play, this fact is almost immediately revealed, directly after a powerful courtroom scene, in a frightening and comic graveyard. But under David Cromer's excellent direction, Zero encounters a fellow murderer—a young man who, in carving up a turkey on Sunday afternoon, applies the knife to the throat of his beloved mother instead—in his prison cell; as the two are literally forced to carry their cells with them as they move about, we recognize that even murder has allowed them little respite.

 

      The gods of the universe Rice presents seem at first more forgiving than human folk. Instead of a scene of fire and brimstone that the young murderer Shrdlu has prepared for, both he and Zero find themselves in the pleasant landscape of the Elysian Fields, where they are permitted to experience all the pleasures previously disallowed. Daisy, the young woman with whom Zero had worked, is also there, having committed suicide upon her colleague’s arrest. Together they discover their unspoken love for each other. But like Shrdlu, Zero is unprepared for the pleasures now facing him. From his completely bourgeois perspective, he can only imagine that a world which awards crimes such as his own is not one in which he can partake; he will not live in a society of “drunkards, thieves, vagabonds, blasphemers, adulterers,” a world filled with “a lot of rummies an’ loafers an’ bums.”

        Damned to mediocrity, Zero “lives out” the rest of his afterlife adding figures on a new adding machine given him by the gods.

        These “gods,” moreover, are evidently no more forgiving than the earthbound society he has left, as it is ultimately revealed that all souls are used over and over again, and that he is to be sent back to the world which he has thought he escaped. For century after century he has been returned to the living, becoming worse and worse as a vital human being each time around.

       The play closes accordingly, with the reincarnated hero, a “poor, spineless, brainless boob,” once again facing his brave new world. One can only pray that this time he may become more than a zero—even if he rises only to become a simple number in the human race.

       Both Wilder’s film and Rice’s play, accordingly, end with the possibility of transcendence, but while we surely believe that Baxter and Kubelik have escaped the world that formerly imprisoned them, we are fearful that Zero will embrace the prison of his blind ignorance once again.

 

New York City, May 12, 2008

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2008)

Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Mary Rodgers, Richard Rodgers, and Jule Styne | Side by Side by Sondheim / 2018

losing my mind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Sondheim, with additional music by Leonard Bernstein, Mary Rodgers, Richard Rodgers, and Jule Styne Side by Side by Sondheim / directed by Dan Fishbach at Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I saw with Howard Fox was the matinee on July 29, 2018

 

Yesterday, my husband Howard and I attended a performance at Los Angeles’ famed Odyssey Theatre of the 1976 Ned Sherrin musical revue (directed this time around by Dan Fishbach), featuring Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics and music, that started out in London and later transferred, with the same British cast, to Broadway, toting up, between the two, rather long runs.

      With a cast of only three singers and a narrator (here Mark D. Kaufmann), it might be described as the perfect musical theater event for smaller and community-based theaters which could feature the local talent, both dramatic (in the case of the narrator) and vocal in the case of the two female and one male singers.

 

    This small-theater production—produced in a theater that for 49 years has been known for its far more adventurous plays (everything from Beckett to Max Frisch and younger playwrights such as the American John O’Keefe)—did not disappoint. Despite the fact that I might also have attended the surely far more innovative version of Eduardo Machado’s Lyistrata Unbound, being performed in another of the Odyssey mini-theaters at the same hour, I felt that after the slog of daily political news, it might be nice to simply go back in time to Sondheim’s early career, covering the periods when he composed lyrics for other musicians (in this production represented by Leonard Bernstein, Mary Rodgers, her father Richard Rodgers, and Jule Styne) as well as several numbers from Company, Anyone Can Whistle, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A Little Night Music, and Follies, as well as lesser known works such as the lovely piece from his television musical, Primrose Evening, Pacific Overtures, and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

     Of course, when younger singers take on songs interpreted by some of the greatest of Broadway legends, even singers of talent—and these performers, Sarah Busic, Chris Kerrigan, and Rachel McLaughlan are definitely singers of talent—there will be, even if unspoken, the inevitable comparisons to Barbara Cook, Elaine Stritch, Dorothy Collins, Alexis Smith, Larry Kert, Chita Rivera—the list goes on.

     These younger stage folk have good voices and great theater pizazz, so why bother to compare them with legends? And they have the advantage in simply being fresh and young, and the ability to express Sondheim masterworks intimately in a new manner. I’ve seen most of Sondheim’s musicals on stage, but this was the first time that I could truly hear all the lyrics, which made pieces like the daffy analysis of the hero of Company by three Andrews Sister’s-like disappointed lovers, belting out “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” legible; no saxophones here, as in the 2006 Broadway revival I saw, to distract you from their piercing criticisms of Bobby.

      There was something so raw about McLaughlan’s and Busic’s tragic love duet, “A Boy Like That,” that it brought tears to my eyes. No dubbing necessary in this production. And if no one can ever match, perhaps, the exquisite shadings of Bernadette Peters’ “Send in the Clowns,” McLaughlan does a wonderful job that makes one hear that near-operatic piece all over again as if for the very first time.

      I believe Chris Kerrigan’s beautiful rendition of “Marry Me a Little” from Company easily matches Raul Esparza’s 2006 version; and who might have thought of a brawny fellow like Kerrigan singing the naughty husband-wife “splitting up” story, “Could I Leave You,” or replacing Charmian Karr’s wistful TV version of “I Remember” (sung late at night in a department store to Anthony Perkins) with a tenor-baritone voice. Both of these and other songs point up what Sondheim usually shoved under the rug, particularly given his remarkable ballads of heterosexual desire and compulsion, that he was gay man—much like the lyricist he often dismissed, Lorenz Hart—who was hiding his own attractions within various heterosexual narrative scenarios. Both these female-based songs make good sense sung by a male, as do some of the gay and lesbian suggestions played out in a quick summary of 27 other Sondheim songs near the end of the show.

     Although it might be stunning to hear the last recording of the operatic star Licia Albanese, known for her Puccini interpretations sing “Ah, Paree!” in Sondheim’s Follies in Concert, for the first time ever I comprehended the lyrics as sung by McLaughlan, who also sang a solid rendition of Follies’ “I’m Still Here” that certainly matches and, perhaps, surpasses Carol Burnett’s rather literal rendition on the DVD we own.

     I know, I promised that I was not going to compare. I’d just say, hey, these kids are “Broadway Babies,” even though they’re performing today in LA, who ought to see their names “all over Times Square.”

     I’d go back to this musical revue any day, except I can’t bear to think about hearing their wonderful singing all night long, as I did last night. I need my sleep. But you should go—and often. I will probably return as well, as soon as I can once again “lose my mind.”

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2018).

 

Nilo Cruz | Anna of the Tropics / 2019

literature stirs the emotions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nilo Cruz Anna of the Tropics / produced by Open Fist Theatre Company, performed at the Atwater Village Theater / the performance I attended was on May 5, 2019

 

The Anna of Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna of the Tropics is Tolstoy’s tragic figure Anna Karenina. Yet Cruz’s play overall seems more like a Cuban-version of a Chekov work—a sort of post-modern cut-up (Cruz studied with the great experimental Cuban-born playwright Irene Maria Fornes) of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard with a dollop of Three Sisters thrown in.

       The family business of these characters—Santiago (Steve Wilcox), his wife Ofelia (Jill Remez), their daughters Conchita (Presciliana Esparolini) and Marela (Jade Santana), along with Santiago’s angry half-brother Cheché (Antonio Jaramillo), and Conchita’s husband Palomo (Javi Mulero)—is cigar-making, the old-fashioned way, rolled by hand, a process we literarily witness several times throughout this play.

       Even from the very beginning of Cruz’s work, we cannot help but notice tensions as Santiago and Cheché bet on cockfights, with Santiago, the small factory owner, losing heavily to his half-brother, and then desperately asking for a loan with an agreement to pay it back by carving the amount and his own name into Cheché’s shoe. Cheché’s wife has previously left him, and we can guess why.

       This family, moreover, is rolling its Cuban cigars not in Havana but in the 1929 Ybor City, Florida, a neighborhood of Tampa, with the Depression, we all know, a year away. Even family members perceive that the famed cigars they are creating are losing out to cigarettes (fags) smoked now by most of the movie stars. In short there is a sense of doom already hanging over their entire enterprise. They live in a past that is no longer relevant in the decaying American climate.

     They stubbornly stick to their Cuban traditions, however, with Ofelia demanding they hire a “Lectore de Tabaqueres,” a reader who, while the workers repeat their endless manual activities, enchants and sometimes distracts them with wonderful stories. The lector she hires, Juan Julian (the excellent Byron Quiros) chooses to first read for them the great Tolstoy novel, which almost from the first page—a bit like Madame Bovary’s encounters with novels—begins to utterly change the women’s lives.

        Suddenly, the romantic heroine’s passions and liaisons leaps from the cold Russian landscape into the humid factory in which they are entrapped. As the summer in which they are working grows hotter, so to do their emotions, as the handsome reader Juan fans the flames with his story-telling skills, resulting eventually in a sexual tryst with Conchita about which her philandering husband quickly becomes aware.

        The men are suddenly less important in the mother’s and two daughter’s lives, and their macho attitudes begin to make demands on familial relationships. Santiago, somehow (we never quite know) finds enough money to pay back his debt, and tries to regain control of his small patriarchally based business by throwing a celebration, replete with rum, lanterns, and an announcement that he is creating a new blend of cigars to be called Anna Karenina, using his youngest daughter Marela, dressed in a mink coat and Russian hat, as the model for the new brand. Surely there is something slightly incestual about his sudden attentions.

        She is delighted, but her new costume and her natural beauty also attracts the disappointed and unstable Cheché, who, after desperately trying to regain control of the failing family business by introducing a machine which might take over the cigar rolling, angrily stalks away only to return and rape his half-niece.

       Marela, shocked by the experience, now becomes the frigid Anna, wearing her heavy coat even in the tropical climate in which the family must labor.

      Palomo confronts his wife Conchita about her affair, which she explains has only helped, in bringing love back into her life, to reconfirm her love for her own husband by allowing her to feel more as a sexual equal. In a strange twist of story that Cruz only hints of, Palomo demands that she describe all her feelings when she is sexually involved with Julian, suggesting a kind of obsession with his rival, which, in turn, hints at possible homosexual feelings. Even his wife wonders about his continual interest in his rival’s sexual attractions.

      All of these complex issues literally boil over, in both Chekhovian and Tolstoyian ways—meaning that they become both somewhat comical and tragic—when Cheché, late for work suddenly arrives with a gun in hand, shooting Julian dead.

      To reveal just how Chekhovian Cruz’s play is, the tragic-stricken survivors remain determined to keep their traditions. With no lector now in view, Palomo offers to continue reading Anna Karenina to the workers, thus further linking himself to Julian, finally taking over his role and perhaps his sexual allure to both the women and him.

      Director Jon Lawrence Rivera has brought this obviously ensemble-based cast to move in patterns that might even suggest a dance, entering, exiting, and returning together to work and play by using the entire Atwater Village Theater space. And scenic designer Christopher Scott Murillo has created a set that alternates between a sweat-house factory, a home, and a kind of cathedral (reinforced by the shifting colors of the lights by lighting designer Matt Richer). As for the costumes (by Mylette Nora), who can ever forget Marela in her heavy black coat in a world which the other figures dress in light whites?

      Finally, I have to salute artistic director Martha Demson and the collaborative Open Fist group for continuing to produce such innovative and challenging theater.

 

Los Angeles, May 6, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2019).